A couple of atypically colorful logbook pages from the Bengal of Salem, Massachusetts, housed at the Providence Public Library. The ship sailed around the Pacific Ocean from 1832 to 1835 © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Today's Document
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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noise dept.
RMH
🪼

oozey mess
Xuebing Du
Misplaced Lens Cap

izzy's playlists!
sheepfilms
cherry valley forever
Three Goblin Art
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Stranger Things

pixel skylines

JVL

#extradirty
Claire Keane

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@harveymorrell
A couple of atypically colorful logbook pages from the Bengal of Salem, Massachusetts, housed at the Providence Public Library. The ship sailed around the Pacific Ocean from 1832 to 1835 © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
If you were one of the twenty subscribers who received a free galley of The Mind Reels, please read it!
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
—Carl Sagan, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (via)
Saw this wonderful exhibit when I was in Munich last month for my aunt's funeral. The video has English subtitles.
Be Kind
We are always askedto understandthe other person’s viewpointno matter how out-datedfoolish or obnoxious.One is askedto viewtheir total errortheir life-wastewith kindliness,especially if they are aged.But age is the total ofour doing.They have aged badlybecause they have livedout of focus,they have refused to see.Not their fault?Whose fault?Mine?I am asked to hidemy viewpoint from themfor fear of…
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From Peter St. Andre's, One Small Voice:
What can one person do in the face of acts that so fundamentally violate all human norms and ideals? Aside from speaking out and providing assistance from afar, I see one possibility: more deeply committing oneself to the qualities and practices that make us not the worst but the best of living things. At root, it is only by building up a culture of human fulfillment, both individually and cooperatively, that we can overcome this kind of savagery. Not once and for all, because that is impossible, but here in our own world. The task is ours and the time is now.
"Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say."
Clive James
Ideology wants to convince you that its truth is absolute. A novel shows you that everything is relative. The more ideological our century becomes, the more anachronistic is the novel. But the more anachronistic it gets, the more we need it.
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera 1929-2023 RIP
Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.
- W.B. Yeats
This is the quote from W.B. Yeats as a painted sign on the wall as you enter the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
Strangers always found a welcome at Shakespeare and Company, where they could browse untroubled for hours, especially if they were aspiring writers themselves; and a few – well, a very few – of them may indeed have turned out to be angels, or at least angelic.
The original Shakespeare and Company shop was started in 1921 in the Rue de l’Odéon by Sylvia Beach, the daughter of a US Presbyterian minister. The first writer to patronise the shop was Gertrude Stein, but she fell out with Beach when she took up with James Joyce, whom Stein hated.
Beach published Joyce’s Ulysses when no established publisher would touch it, performing the arduous labour of love of proofreading it. Ernest Hemingway discovered the shop soon after his arrival in Paris, and wrote about it lovingly decades later in A Moveable Feast. When the Germans occupied Paris, Beach refused to sell a signed copy of Finnegans Wake to an invading officer. He said he would return for it the next day. So she moved all the books out and closed the shop. It was “liberated” by Hemingway himself in 1944. However, Beach didn’t have the heart to start again.
In 1948, after a wandering youth and war service, George Whitman came to Paris on the GI Bill, and in 1951 opened an English-language bookshop which he called Le Mistral. A few years later, he moved to the Rue de la Bûcherie, but didn’t rename the shop until after Beach’s death in 1961. He had been too shy to ask her if he could use the name, although they were friends and she used to come to readings at Le Mistral.
Whitman ran his shop as a species of anarchic democracy, even though in some respects he was a benevolent dictator. Anyone who called himself a writer could find a bed there, if there was one free, and stay as long as he liked or until Whitman got tired of him. The only rule for residents was that they must read a book a day and serve in the shop for an hour. One poet, or self-styled poet, who broke the second rule and lay in bed all day reading detective novels was ejected; but his chief offence was his choice of literature rather than his idleness.
The bookshop has its regulars, residents in Paris, not all of them English-speakers by any means, who use it as a sort of club and drop in for conversation and coffee.
Stock control has always been on the casual side. It’s not unknown for someone to lift a book from the shelves, slip it into his pocket, read it and return to sell it for the secondhand shelves the following day.
Inevitably, Shakespeare and Company has long been on the tourist trail, recommended in all the guides. This is just as well, because without their custom it’s hard to see how the shop could have survived. Many are in search of a copy of A Moveable Feast. This is not always on offer because, for some reason which I can’t remember, Whitman took a scunner to Hemingway. The tourists also toss coins into the well in the shop, and it’s not unusual to see an indigent young person lying on the floor and fishing for euros.
On occasion I drop in because the lure of its history is too much even if there are other good independent book stores nearby. Visitors to Paris always want me to take them there and I oblige them even if I feel its lost some of its past glory. Still, I always buy a few books because it’s the best way to support independent book stores in this age of Amazon, as every independent book store needs all the help it can get.
ChatGPT
In playing around with ChatGPT (and who isn't these days?) I asked it for instructions on using LibGuides CMS to create a web page. It did a pretty decent job with my cryptic request:
To create a website in LibGuides CMS, follow these steps:
Log in to your LibGuides CMS account and navigate to the dashboard.
Click on the "Create New Guide" button, which is located on the top right of the page.
Choose the type of guide you want to create. LibGuides CMS offers different guide types, such as course guides, subject guides, and general guides. Select the one that best suits your needs.
Customize the appearance of your guide. You can choose a template and theme, and you can also add a header image and logo.
Create the pages of your guide. You can add new pages by clicking on the "Add New Page" button, and you can edit existing pages by clicking on the "Edit" button.
Add content to your pages. You can add text, images, videos, and other types of media to your pages.
Organize your guide's content by creating a table of contents. You can do this by adding a table of contents page and linking to the different pages of your guide.
Preview your guide and make any necessary changes. LibGuides CMS allows you to preview your guide before publishing it, so make sure to check that everything looks good and works correctly.
Publish your guide. Once you're happy with your guide, click on the "Publish" button to make it available to your audience.
That's it! With these steps, you can create a website in LibGuides CMS. Remember that LibGuides CMS also offers many advanced features, such as user management, analytics, and integrations with other tools, so feel free to explore those as well.
Savannah was fun and I learned a lot. https://www.instagram.com/p/CnLEf04MfE-/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Last book of 2022 or first one of 2023? #cormackmccarthy #anchorsteamchistmasale (at Lutherville - Timonium) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm2kKkTMSvy/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Went to Longwood Gardens (Pa) to see the Bruce Munro Light Exhibition. It also happened to be during the Chrysanthemum Festival, so we had a two-fer. (at Longwood Gardens) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkYKJj8rlGs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Spending some time with an old friend. #wislavaszymborska #poetryislife (at Baltimore, Maryland) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkN3sz-rWDq/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=