Ban This Book book actually banned

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Who could have imagined that an award winning children’s book titled Ban This Book would actually be banned and in the state of Florida of all places.

The Indian River County School Board voted to remove “Ban This Book” by Alan Gratz from its shelves in a meeting last month, overruling its own district book-review committee’s decision to keep it. The children’s novel follows a fictional fourth grader who creates a secret banned books locker library after her school board pulled a multitude of titles off the shelves. Indian River County School Board members said they disliked how it referenced other books that had been removed from schools and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school board authority,” as described in the formal motion to oust it.

From the author’s website:

It all started the day Amy Anne Ollinger tried to check out her favorite book in the whole world, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, from the school library. That’s when Mrs. Jones, the librarian, told her the bad news: her favorite book was banned! All because a classmate’s mom thought the book wasn’t appropriate for kids to read.

Amy Anne decides to fight back by starting a secret banned book library out of her locker. But soon things get out of hand, and Amy Anne finds herself on the front line of an unexpected battle over book banning, censorship, and who has the right to decide what she and her fellow students can read. In the end, her only recourse might be to try to beat the book banners at their own game. Because after all, once you ban one book, you can ban them all…

 

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Data Poetry

Posted on June 12, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Traditional rooftops
slope like the backs of resting camels.

Forests play fortresses;
secrets held in whistling pine needles.

Serene valleys echo
a painter’s lost blues and greens.

Mountains order the sky, no less,
wearing casts of gray ruggedness.

Although I am a frequent critic of AI projects, like all good hypocrites, I’m also fascinated by the subject. The poem above was generated by an experimental program based on the photo above of Bergun, Switzerland, and a brief prompt from me.

The Data Poets:  is an intriguing project by Gaston Welisch. The website offers users the opportunity to upload an image of a place that’s important to them, along with some text prompts about where it is and why it’s special to them; the site will then generated a brief poem to accompany the image. This is all done by AI (image recognition and then LLM-ing the verse).

Give it a spin.

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Every Rejection Stings

Posted on June 11, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

In October 1895, a surprising announcement appeared in The Lark,  a popular literary magazine then based in San Francisco. It called for submissions for the first-ever edition of Le Petit Journal des Refusées (The Little Journal of Rejects), which advertised itself as “the smallest and most extraordinary magazine in existence”. The ad claimed to offer rates of $10 per page of poetry and $5 per page of prose (around $400 and $200 in today’s money), “one hundred free copies of the number in which [the contributor’s] article appears”, and included the commitment that “No manuscripts will be refused”. There was, however, one caveat to acceptance: The manuscript had to have been rejected from a “leading magazine”, and be accompanied by the rejection slip to prove it.

The announcement was intended as a humorous prank aimed at satirizing the many self-important literary journals that had been launched in the late-19th century. The ad was created by The Lark’s editor-in-chief, Gelett Burgess, who was an important literary figure in America at the time.

Surprisingly, the joke turned into reality and Le Petit Journal des Refusées actually launched  a year later, and its first, and only, issue was published. The opportunity to skewer the pretentious literary journals was too good to pass up. The result was a sixteen-page chapbook, printed using woodcuts on wallpaper.

The little zine opens with an introductory note from the editor, a fictional “James Marrion”. What follows is a collection of poetry and prose works that have been “ruthlessly rejected by less large-hearted and appreciative editors but which now witness the light of day . . . for the first and last time.” The published works were likely also penned by Burgess, but all bear the names of unknown women writers.  The pieces in Le Petit Journal des Refusées were representative of the literary styles in vogue at the time: a Symbolist prose piece, an experimentally typeset poem, a short story written in dialect.

What began as a little joke may have turned into the first American parody zine. I imagine that any editor or publisher who attempted this today would probably end up with a string of lawsuits.

 

 

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Life is stranger than fiction

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Forgive the pun, but in this case life is truly stranger than the fictional book above. A fascinating handwritten manuscript of the French novel  L’Étranger translated as The Outsider/The Stranger by Albert Camus has sold for €500,000 ($544,000) at auction in Paris.

There is little doubt that Camus himself faked the 104-page draft sold by French auction house Tajan in 1944, backdating it to April 1940 two years before it was first published.  According to Tajan: “As the war dragged on and he sought a solution to his financial difficulties, Camus took advantage of the intellectual craze for L’Étranger, his first novel published in France, to compose this bibliophilic work – in 1944, according to [his wife] Francine Camus. In these years of struggle, the young author needed money and remained combative: he understood the interest of responding to the admiration of bibliophiles for his work, and perceived the market value of his manuscript. ”

It seems that Camus  hand copied out his own book in black pen using two separate nibs before signing and dating it, adding a range of marginalia including unpublished remarks, erasures, additions, doodles including several suns and guillotines, and a sprinkling of arrows. Tajan suggest that the slight browning on one page is a deliberate cigarette mark, and various other light water stains could well be intentional. It’s not known to whom Camus entrusted the work.

It has previously been sold at auction in 1958 and 1991. The identity of the buyer has not been revealed.

 

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It’s always nineteen eighty-four somewhere

Posted on June 9, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

George Orwell’s seminal novel turns seventy-five this week. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell posed a frightening question: could people be conditioned to actually believe (rather than just pretend to believe) the lies they are told ?

Here we are 75 years later in a digital era where we are drowning in the information technologies that already do much to control our thoughts and beliefs. While simultaneously there is a terrifying resurgence of authoritarianism. The novel’s brilliant response to the threat of propaganda overload is as topical as it has ever been.

Nineteen Eighty-Four remains timeless in its message of the power of language to shape our world. George Orwell’s iconic book seems more than ever to be chilling prophecy. His dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than we could have imagined.

 

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Stumbling Through Saturday Around the Interwebs

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

I am not embarrassed at all to admit that I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about things in the Lord of the Rings universe such as : who is in charge of trash collection; and what are the tax rates; and who collects the taxes and decides how the revenue is spent. Well, I recently stumbled on an enlightening article online at Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization titled “The Moral Economy of the Shire.” It’s a surprisingly good read even if you are not a LOTR fanatic.

Like many a curious adolescent, my introduction to the writing of Vladimir Nabokov was by way of his controversial novel Lolita . Much later, I got around to reading some of his other less salacious works such as Transparent Things and Ada or Ardor. By far my favorite (other than Lolita) has always been Pale Fire, but to be honest, I found it to be somewhat confusing. The excellent article at UnHerd by the novelist Mary Gaitskill titled “Don’t be terrified of Pale Fire Nabokov’s masterpiece has a complex but huge heart” helps to unravel the intricate plotting of the book.

Who could possibly resist an article titled “What Frida Kahlo Kept in Her Bathroom” ?After artist Frida Kahlo’s death in 1954, her husband, painter Diego Rivera, blocked off two bathrooms in their home, La Casa Azul, on the condition that they not be opened until at least 15 years after his death.

In 2005, La Casa Azul, now part of Museo Frida Kahlo, invited fellow legendary Mexican artist Graciela Iturbide to photograph the space and the belongings inside.

You see for yourself right here.

I am not an artist, but I live with one, so I am constantly exposed to art supplies and materials of all sorts. The marvelous video below from Business Insider’s series Still Standing, is an endearing look at La Maison du Pastel, a 300-year-old Parisian company that makes pastels for artists by hand. Back in its golden age, the company supplied the likes of Monet & Degas but fell into neglect near the end of the 20th century. The newest generation of ownership has restored the company and they now offer over 1,900 different pastel colors.

What could possibly be more fun than a Dutch bicycle orchestra riding on a summer’s day in the Netherlands.

 

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A 1000 Suns

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Regular visitors to Travel Between The Pages will be well aware of my proclivity for all things Sci-Fi. My interests in the genre are wide-ranging and include everything from classic space operas to Black Mirroresque streamers. So, I was chuffed when I stumbled upon the online mini-anthology A Thousand Suns.

Described as “a mind-bending sci-fi anthology series that explores visions of humanity’s past, present and future.” The trailer says, “In the vastness of time, many stories weave into one under the light of the thousand suns.”

The series comes from filmmaker who goes by the name Macgregor, and it’s produced by a company called Blackmilk Studio. Macgregor gathered a team of team of filmmakers together to make “films that serve as a gateway to our hopes, dreams… and nightmares.”

There are a total of six anthology episodes released and the titles include Episode 1 – Ice; Episode 2 – Red; Episode 3 – Exodus; Episode 4 – Deal; Episode 5 – Bug; and Episode 6 – Tomorrow.

Here’s Episode 1 (below) and the link to the free site to see the entire webseries.

 

 

 

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You CAN get there from here

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Usually you see a railway map from a local or regional perspective because it’s meant to show how you get from point A to point B. As an experiment, Zhaoxu Sui mapped major railways worldwide. It’s not comprehensive but still interesting to think about, in case you’re trying to get to China from Europe by train.

You can grab the full PDF version here.

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Wise Thoughts For Everyday

Posted on June 5, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Like many folks who were introduced to the writings of Leo Tolstoy through his novel War and Peace, I was, and remain, ambivalent about the Russian author. I found War and Peace a bit of a slog. However, I found Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich much more approachable. I recently ran across the fascinating recording below that was made at the author’s home in Yasnaya Polyana on October 31, 1909, when he was 81 years old. He died just over a year later. In the remarkable series of recordings Tolstoy reads a passage from his book, Wise Thoughts for Every Day, in four languages: English, German, French and Russian. Tolstoy apparently translated the passage himself. The English version sounds a bit stilted. The words are hard to make out in the recording, but he says:

That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?

 

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Have a summer reading adventure

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

To celebrate 75 years of the National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation has launched the Summer Reading Adventure for adults 18 and older “to lean into the nostalgic, prize-filled fun of summer reading.”

Reading activities include visiting a local bookstore or library and asking for a recommendation; re-reading a favorite book from childhood; listening to an audiobook; reading a book in an unfamiliar genre; attending a literary event in person or online; and more.

Participants who complete any of the activities will be entered to win books, hats, ice cream, reusable water bottles, and more. Participants who complete all the activities will be entered to win the grand prize–a trip to New York to the National Book Awards ceremony November 20 with airfare, hotel, and two tickets included. Everyone who submits the Adventure online or via mail by August 31 will receive Bookshop.org and Libro.fm discount codes.

Information is available online in English, Spanish, and Mandarin as well as available in person at some New York Public Library branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The Foundation will share participants’ adventures on its social platforms, with most of the action on Instagram @nationalbookfoundation.

 

 

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