Saturday Sundries

Posted on October 14, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

Every festive season needs a traditional story. Autumn is no exception to this rule, so here’s the annual retelling of It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket…”

“Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”

50 Short Rules for a Better Life (From the Stoics)

Focus on what you can control.
You control how you respond to things.
Ask yourself, “Is this essential?”
Meditate on your mortality every day.
Value time more than money/possessions.
You are the product of your habits.
Remember you have the power to have no opinion.
Own the morning.
Put yourself up for review (Interrogate yourself).
Don’t suffer imagined troubles.
Try to see the good in people.
Never be overheard complaining…even to yourself.
Two ears, one mouth…for a reason (Zeno)
There is always something you can do.
Don’t compare yourself to others.
Live as if you’ve died and come back (every minute is bonus time).
“The best revenge is not to be like that.” Marcus Aurelius
Be strict with yourself and tolerant with others.
Put every impression, emotion, to the test before acting on it.
Learn something from everyone.
Focus on process, not outcomes.
Define what success means to you.
Find a way to love everything that happens (Amor fati).
Seek out challenges.
Don’t follow the mob.
Grab the “smooth handle.”
Every person is an opportunity for kindness (Seneca)
Say no (a lot).
Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Find one thing that makes you wiser every day.
What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee (Marcus Aurelius)
Don’t judge other people.
Study the lives of the greats.
Forgive, forgive, forgive.
Make a little progress each day.
Journal.
Prepare for life’s inevitable setbacks (premeditatio malorum)
Look for the poetry in ordinary things.
To do wrong to one, is to do wrong to yourself. (sympatheia)
Always choose “Alive Time.”
Associate only with people that make you better.
If someone offends you, realize you are complicit in taking offense.
Fate behaves as she pleases…do not forget this.
Possessions are yours only in trust.
Don’t make your problems worse by bemoaning them.
Accept success without arrogance, handle failure with indifference.
Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. (Always).
The obstacle is the way.
Ego is the enemy.
Stillness is the key.

Found here.

 

 

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” I wish the world were ending tomorrow. “

Posted on October 13, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

Franz Kafka // I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep…and say: ‘Come with me…we are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.’ Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”

“Lo que de veras fue, no se pierde; la intensidad es una forma de eternidad.”

“What really was, is not lost; intensity is a form of eternity.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Ensayo dedicado a Las Coplas de Jorge Manrique.

Frida Kahlo // “Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.”

Gilles Deleuze // “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say… What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing…the thing that might be worth saying.”

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy // “The system will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling…their ideas, their version of history, their wars…their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We may be many and they be few… Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Albert Camus // “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

 

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A library implies an act of faith

Posted on October 12, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

Opened in 1897 as the Chicago Public Library, the Chicago Cultural Center is housed in a beautiful Beaux-Arts building designed by George Foster Shepley, and opened in 1897. While the center is famous for its stunning Tiffany stained-glass domes, it also features a series of wonderful mosaic murals.

The mosaics are located in the staircase that leads from the Preston Bradley Hall – the site of the world’s largest Tiffany stained-glass dome. This historic hall was originally the place where people picked up the books they had requested from the Chicago Public Library.

 

 

 

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I don’t need anything from here.

Posted on October 11, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

“I Don’t Need Anything from Here”

by

László Krasznahorkai

translated by Ottilie Mulzet

I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquillity, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here.

via

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The Invention of Fantasy

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

The Man Who Invented Fantasy

All those wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens in the bookstore? You have Lester del Rey to thank.

by Dan Sinykin

Lester del Rey wore 1950s-style horn-rimmed glasses, an unruly billy-goat beard, and his silver hair brushed back above a big forehead. He liberally dispensed cards that said: Lester del Rey, Expert. He sometimes said his full name was Ramón Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes. He was in fact born Leonard Knapp, son of Wright Knapp, in 1915 in rural southeastern Minnesota, subject to the Minnesotan fever—Jay Gatz, Prince Rogers Nelson, Robert Zimmerman—for reinventing oneself. In 1977, del Rey, then in his 60s, turned his proclivity for fabulism to profit: He invented fantasy fiction as we know it.

I always thought fantasy had existed forever. Elves and wizards were old. Stories about them must have been, too, drawn from deep history, passed from generation to generation, just as my dad read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to me when I was 6. Part of the magic of these tales is the sense that they have always been this way; it’s thanks to that continuity with the past that we’re able to touch the enchanted premodern world, a place that hasn’t yet been rationalized by capitalism and science. With C.S. Lewis’s Lucy, I, too, walked through the wardrobe to Narnia. By middle school in the mid-1990s, I was ripping through the books of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, with its basilisks and ogres, which were by then regularly landing on the New York Times bestseller list.

But it turns out that fantasy, as an enduring publishing genre, is hardly older than I am. All sorts of things had to go right—and wrong—to make it happen.

READ MORE

Source: Slate
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Global Poster Art

Posted on October 9, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

I was today years old when I learned that London Transport has been commissioning poster art since 1908. Now, the London Transport Museum’s new Global Poster Gallery will offer visitors a deep dive into the relationship between art and the Underground. Opening on October 20th, the inaugural exhibition is all about commissioning. How to Make a Poster will explore the poster-making process in the pre-digital age with more than 110 artworks from London Transport Museum’s huge archive.

By the 1920s and 1930s, London Transport was commissioning artists and designers from more modern artists. At the new Global Poster Gallery, audiences can expect to see work by Man Ray, Abram Games, Hans Unger, Edward McKnight Kauffer and Dora M Batty, among many others.

For more Info

www.ltmuseum.co.uk/visit/museum-guide/global-poster-gallery

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thinking about burning the bookstore down

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

In the Bookstore

By: Julia Vinograd

I went down to the bookstore this evening
and found myself in the poetry section.
But for every thin book of poems
there was a thick biography of the poet
and an even thicker book
by someone who’s supposed to know
explaining what the poet
is supposed to’ve said and why he didn’t.
So you don’t have to waste your time
on the best the writer could do,
the words he fought the darkness and himself for,
the unequal battle with beauty.
Instead you can read comfortably
about the worst the writer could do:
the mess he made of his life,
how he fought with his family,
cheated on his lovers, didn’t pay his debts
and not only drank too much
but all the stupid things
he ever said to the bartender
just before getting 86’d will be printed for you
and they’re just as stupid
as the things everyone says just before getting 86’d.
The books explaining the poet
are themselves inexplicable.
The students who have to read them
cheat.
I left the poetry section
thinking about burning the bookstore down.
Some of a poet’s work comes from his life, ok.
But most of a poet’s work comes
in spite of his life, in spite of everything,
even in spite of bookstores.
So I went to the next section
and bought a murder mystery but I haven’t read it yet.
I find I don’t want to know who done it
and why;
I want to do it myself.

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Forthcoming memoir

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

 

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NYC Runs on Coffee

Posted on October 6, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

It’s no secret that I am obsessed with coffee. I love drinking it, I love roasting coffee beans, and I love learning about all things coffee. So, I was delighted to discover that the amazing New York Coffee Festival is back this year in Manhattan. Celebrating its seventh year in NYC, the New York Coffee Festival is running from October 6 through the 8th at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

New York’s premier coffee event brings together more than 100 exhibitors for tastings, workshops, talks, and interactive demonstrations. One of the annual highlights is the Roasters Village where some of the world’s leading coffee roasters share their expertise along with the best new beans.

Best of all, this year’s profits are being donated to New York City-based nonprofit Charity:Water, which works to provide drinking water to people in developing nations across Africa, Central America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. So far, the coffee festivals have been able to raise around $290,000 to Charity:Water. This year’s goal is to raise more than $50,000.

Details :

When: Friday, Oct. 6 to Sunday, Oct. 8, 2023, 9:30 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Where: Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011

Website: www.newyorkcoffeefestival.com

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An Audacious Throwback

Posted on October 5, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

I only gave up my print subscription to the New York Times last year replacing it with the newspaper’s excellent digital version. But I still miss that satisfying feel of a big, foldable broadside edition. Now the new County Highway, which boldly describes itself as “America’s Only Newspaper,” is offering a throwback to the golden era of America’s ink-stained broadsheets. The bi-monthly paper is a love letter to the joys of reading in print, presenting itself up as a 19th-century newspaper.

County Highway daringly eschews the digital age—it won’t have an internet edition. Its online footprint will be limited to select articles for subscribers and a narrow social media presence. Designed by the legendary team at Pentagram, the visual identity of County Highway demonstrates its commitment to print culture. Its typography pays homage to 19th-century newspapers, while headlines echo the clipped cadence of vintage journalism. Pentagram worked closely with County Highway’s co-founder and editor, David Samuels, to develop the look and feel of the publication. Samuels wanted to appeal to and cultivate an audience that is not afraid of a long read, and County Highway is really a magazine in the form of a newspaper. It has an outsider persona that is anti-digital and a nostalgia for the golden days of the newspaper.

According to co-founder and editor David Samuels (via the Guardian), the paper achieved its targets for year-three subscriptions and sales within the first three weeks of its launch in the summer, despite there being no advertising. Instead, copies of the first issue were simply displayed in bookstores and record shops in the US and Canada, relying on recognition and word of mouth.

 

 

 

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