Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

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In 1974, Saturday Review magazine asked some of the world’s leading thinkers (Isaac Asimov, Jacques Cousteau, Andrei Sakharov, etc.) what the world of 2024 would look like. Here’s what they got right (internet) and wrong (factories on the Moon)

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

The photo above includes a rental library inside a general Store. A rental library (also know as lending library ) was a commercially operated library that lent books at a fixed charge per book per day.  In 1923, of 1,100 cities in the US, only 200 had free public libraries. Rental Libraries were a popular solution and they changed bookselling. The now defunct chain Waldenbooks started as a Rental Library chain in 1933 by Lawrence W. Holt and Melvin T. Kafka. By 1948, they had 250 rental libraries doing a brisk business, as well as many leased book departments in stores selling books. In 1962 the first “Walden Book Store” was launched and by the late 1989 there were over 1200 stores across the county.

The air pressure forces the molecules to go tiny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Heaven’s Gate

Posted on August 25, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

“A Society of Scoundrels”

by

Franz Kafka

Translated by Michael Hofmann

There was once a society of scoundrels, or rather not scoundrels per se, just ordinary, average people. They always stuck together. When one of them had perpetrated some rascally act, or rather, nothing really rascally, just averagely bad, he would confess it to the others, and they investigated it, condemned it, imposed penalties, forgave him, etc. This wasn’t corrupt — the interests of the individual and the society were kept in balance and the confessor received the punishment he asked for. So they always stuck together, and even after their death they didn’t abandon their society, but ascended to heaven in a troop. It was a sight of childlike innocence to see them flying. But since everything at heaven’s gate is broken up into its component parts, they plunged down like so many rocks.

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Bibliolyte, destroyer of books

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

In The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton identifies five types of “persons who meddle with books”:

  • “A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book.”
  • “A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.”
  • “A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy.”
  • “A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure.”
  • “A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass cases.”

These groups seem to have been proposed by French librarian Jean Joseph Rive. Bibliographer Gabriel Peignot added four more:

  • bibliolyte, a destroyer of books
  • bibliologue, one who discourses about books
  • bibliotacte, a classifier of books
  • bibliopée, “‘l’art d’écrire ou de composer des livres,’ or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author.”
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It was a dark and stormy night

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

“She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.” 2024 Grand Prize Winner

Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. 

The BLFC was the brainchild of Professor Scott Rice. Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. Best known for The Last Days of Pompeii, his novel Paul Clifford began with the famous opener that has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle, Snoopy.

Crime & Detective

Winner

She was poured into the red latex dress like Jello poured into a balloon, almost bursting at the seams, and her zaftig shape was awesome to behold, but I knew from the look on her face and the .45 she held pointing at me, that this was no standard client of my detective agency, but a new collection agency tactic to get me to pay my long-overdue phone bill.

You can find all of this year’s groaners, I mean winners, right here.

 

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Tension for Tears

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

As I have previously mentioned, the novels and short stories of Ray Bradbury played an important role in my early love of reading. I recently ran across this marvelous brief video of Bradbury from fifty years ago discussing the importance of art and literature in our lives, as well as a bit about his personal creative process.

 

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when you got to go, you got to go

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

During a recent visit to New York City, I became hyper aware of the disappearance of public restrooms. There’s no polite way to put this: going to the bathroom in New York is a big hassle. Public restrooms in the city are hard to find and are often either out of order or require you to buy something at a store or café to be able to use. The problem is so bad that individuals have created their own resources for finding public restrooms.

A new Google Maps layer introduced by the city attempts to tackle this issue. As part of a new program called “Ur in Luck,” the city has introduced a Maps view dotted with 1,000 public restrooms across the five boroughs. Users can view the map on their phones and locate the closest restroom that’s accessible to the public. It’s sounds good, but a recent WNYC public radio show revealed that more than 100 of the advertised facilities is out of order on any given day. And, at least 100 more are only open part of the day and closed on weekends.

The new map will be somewhat helpful, but it’s a drop in the bucket of need.. One thousand bathrooms for 8 million New Yorkers is woefully insufficient. Not to mention the 62 million annual visitors to the city.

Still, if you’re planning a visit, check out the video below on the project:

 

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Summer Reads

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

It has become an annual tradition each summer for former President Barack Obama to share his summer reading list on social media. As usual, the list showcases his mix of fiction and nonfiction, and it shows off an interest in both books that have been popular and some that are lesser-known. His 2024 list is one of the longer reading lists in recent years.

 

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Through Thick and Thin

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

I don’t think that I’ve read Chaucer since high school, but I was still fascinated when I ran across an article on the many commonly used English phrases that he  coined (or popularized) a lot of phrases that we still regularly use today, and the folks at Medievalists.net assembled 35 of them! They include …

  • Through Thick and Thin — Found in The Canterbury Tales: “And forth with wehee, thurgh thikke and thurgh thenne.”
  • To Wet One’s Whistle — Found in The Canterbury Tales: “So was hir joly whistle wel ywet.”
  • Piping Hot — Found in The Canterbury Tales: “And wafres, pipyng hot out of the gleede.”
  • To Hang in the Balance — Found in the short poem Womanly Noblesse: “Considryng eke how I hange in balaunce.”

Go check out the rest; cool beans.

 

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Respect the law of consequences

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

Those of you who stop by TBTP on a regular basis know that I am an evangelist for the work of Octavia E. Butler . The first widely read Black science fiction author and Afro-Futurist pioneer was also a perspicacious social critic. Her brilliant essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” published in 2000 for Essence magazine, was recently republished  by Chronicle Books, featuring exciting futurist collages by Manzel Bowman.

Butler’s essay was written in respondence to a student’s question, “Do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” The question referred to Butler’s warnings about increasing drug addiction, illiteracy, global warming and untold seeds of doomsday scenarios. “I didn’t make up the problems,” she noted, “all I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

Queried if there was a solution to the problems, Butler replied there is not one, but many—and “the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”

 

 

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The Mark on the Wall

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Brian D. Butler

 

“The Mark On The Wall” is based on Virginia Woolf’s short story of the same name, which opens with the mysterious line—”Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.”— before sinking into a stream-of-consciousness style monologue of speculation and intrigue. The film by Anderson Wright emulates Woolf’s signature form as the narrator visualizes all the joyful, harrowing, and disturbing possibilities that caused a dark spot to appear within her home. Spoiler alert: It’s not what she thinks.

Watch “The Mark On The Wall” on Vimeo, where you can find more of Wright’s films.

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