from the department of everyday backyard miracles

(re-blogged from last year. and even though it bloomed before in May 2012, it still is amazing in a new way each time. natural art.)

J is for Juxtaposition + Jupiter, Uranus

inspired by the A-Z Blogging Challenge i started to revisit my published works... today is J. J like June, joy, jet, junk, jive, just, journey... and J like Juxtaposition and Jupiter

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Jupiter, Uranus

If her week had been a painting, it would have been a Miro. A black figuration in the centre of things, a red spot in the right corner, a yellow triangle sailing along the bottom. Hours spent in transit, a thought that blinked in her mind like a telephone message waiting to be noticed, while she had been away, to visit friends. Now she was back but her sense of orientation had gone, had turned into a curved line, without distinct direction.

The names of the days had fallen to the floor in between Tuesday and Thursday. If someone had asked her she wouldn't have been able to define the season. Somewhere close to summer it was. A touch of autumn, a slice of spring. The day before she had been in a t-shirt and barefoot. Now she was wearing a sweater.

In the afternoon, she went jogging. On the way back the sun appeared, burning a hole in the sky. Later, on the sofa, she fell asleep while the little people who lived in her TV were discussing long-term effects of globalization on individualization. When she woke up again time felt like syrup, unstable but sweeter than before.

Sunday morning she was up early, despite the fact that there really was no point to it. Outside, it was all dark still. No stars, no moon. He had been there in the evening, huge and almost full, hanging there in the sky, at the spot the sun left. The other day, someone had told her about the planets that were visible at the moment. Jupiter and Uranus. She scanned the sky once more, determined to spot them, yet the only things glowing outside were street lamps.

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J-Notes

"Juxtaposition" - an invader-moment from Paris, submitted to the Juxtaposition of F-Train. didn't get published, though, but there wasn't any published "J"-image. 

"Jupiter, Uranus" is a story that was first published in Rumble Magazine, which sadly isn't online anymore. 

 **

  A to Z Links

• A is for Alpha + August
• B is for Berlin + Butterflies
• C is for Crow Woman + Con Text
• D is for Deduction
• E is for (R)Evolution
• F is for Fountain Lights and Fragments of Flavour
• G is for Geometry + Generation Effect
• H is for Homage + Headed
• I... is for I forgot I and instead blogged J....
  I to follow next week. 
• my A-Z plan + theme: AtoZ Blogging Challenge upcoming 
• List of all participating A-Z blogs
• and some statistics: from 14 publications i revisted so far, 7 are still online, 7 magazines went offline.

a collage of now, a road map, and things that change the world

this weekend, the first rose opened in the garden. in the rain. at least it wasn't snow - there's arctic cold messing up the season here in Europe, moving temperatures back to March weather.

but the weekend also brought sun - and some road driving time. now, for a road map for the next days and weeks, i thought. while temperatures are limping, the rest of the things moved to a kind of overdrive - those days when you sketch a plan for the day, and then the day takes over.

in between all, i made a little discovery: e-book readers can neatly look for a word in all e-books they have in their files. i looked for "Korea", thinking it would directly lead to a quote i hazily remembered. and then a  whole list of books with bookmarks came up. the magic of technology.

and a link: this weekend, the Eurovision song contest was broadcasted all over Europe -- by the way: the Eurovision song contest, it was one of the measures that were created to prevent another war in Europe, following the idea that you are less likely to go and kill the people across your border when you listened to their songs and sang along with them.... -- so the Eurovision song contest, a book blogger picked up on it, and looked for fitting books.. which made me put a blog post together over at the blueprint book blog. below it is in a post about how self-publishing has changed the books world. i'm still waiting for a post that tries to capture how self-publishing and blogging has changed our lives. it makes a difference, to take note, to share, to look closer. and to be able to revisit things that happened a month ago, a year ago.

i guess there never was as much diary-writing in the world as now, only that it is called blogging now.

and talking about time: blueprintreview is turning 8 tomorrow. i am glad it is still around and growing. for a while, it felt it came to an end.

also, as part of the road map for the next days, i will try and get the "7 continents reading challenge" back on track. learning for the future: things work better with fixed dates and deadline.

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and beyond all, a part of me is still out there, on the island. wondering. and wandering.

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PS: in my next life, can i be a bird with blog?

Finding books by country: helpful links + resources

How to find books set in particular countries? 
And more so, preferably books that are written by an author who is coming from the country, or who has lived in it for a while? There are so many book lists and blogs out there, yet many are focusing on sales figures or author names or genre. But there are also some lists that focus on the country:

Wikipedia + Goodreads
Both Goodreads and Wikipedia have feature pages that lead to many subpages:

• Wikipedia: literature by country (overview)
• Goodreads: Cultural Books (with many subpages + lists)
• there also is: Goodreads/Places (based on book description)

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Nobel Prize & Man Asia Prize 

And of course, there is the Nobel Prize in Literature, with countries noted: 

• Nobel Prize in Literature

Specifically for noteworthy current Asian literature, the Man Asian Literary Prize offers longlists and shortlists of nominated books, each entry with book descriptions and author bios:

• Man Asian Liteary Prize 

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Magazine Issues
There are also some liteary magazines that have issues with a special focus on one country, which probably is a good way to explore various authors and the current atmosphere:

• Words Without Borders: Banned Chinese Writers (2012)
• Granta country / continent anthologies, here's the archive link, and some selected issues: Granta 121: Brazil, Granta 119: Britain,  Granta 113: Spain&Latin America, Granta 112: Pakistan 

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Blog lists / links
Reading around the whole world in books and blogging or writing about it - that's where the following links are from:

• A year of reading the world - book list  (almost complete)
• Africa Reading & Caribbean Reading by Geoff Wisner
• Reading the world (68 countries so far, focus Europe / Middle East / Northern Asia)
• Lonely Planet travel forum - reading list (temporarily down, here's an archive link)
• Around the world in 80 books (large Goodreads reading group with many lists) 
• Europe (and other regions) in translation: recommended reads 

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Searching for a place in an e-reader
If you have an e-reader, it might be interesting to run a search there: e-book readers can neatly look for a word in all e-books they have in their files, and create a neat sorted list with bookmarks.


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More links
If you know an interesting world-book-link, feel free to add it in the comments.

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Global Reading & The Danger of a Single Story
This post belongs to the global reading challenge "7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books". In addition to the links, a video clip:  reflections by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie on single points of views and the prejudices they invite, and on world literature:

 

Island reads: Paradise lost & found - with Mather in New York, with Taylor in China, with Miller in Big Sur & with Maron in Berlin

This blog post is inspired by the "It's Monday! What are you reading?" series, which now finally made me get my island reading notes together. More about the series and further reads, at the bottom of this post.

So good to have this island time, and with it, time to read. And interesting how the books that I found and brought connect to a larger theme: civilization, the dream of a better world, of paradise, and the way those dreams can disrupt into dystopia. Let's start - in winter, in a megacity:

A Technology Blackout:   
"Cyberstorm" by Matthew Mather 

Remember the fear that roamed the world when the new year 2000 and the fear of the 2K-bug approached? When experts warned of computer failures, even expected a domino of bluescreens, maybe even a worldwide blackout? Nothing happened, luckily. But of course, all the technology our modern world is made of also brings evermore risks. Matthew Mather is both an author and a computer expert, and in his new book "Cyberstorm", he takes us right into such a massive technology drama, and tried to make it as realistic as possibl - in his author note Mather says: "thanks to the members of the cybersecurity community who lent me their time and insight into making this as realistic a scenario as possible of what a full-scale cyber event could like."

Cyberstorm, set in winter, in New York, is a thought-provoking read that makes you look at your surrounding from another angle: all the technology we take for granted. Here's a book description: 

"Cyberstorm is ... a haunting description of what would happen in case of a cyber attack - all systems failing one by one. First, we only see some issues with our direct internet connections, then the infrastructure gets hit: supermarket checkout counters stop working, ATMs as well, TV feeds are failing, power goes down, and so on.... To make things worse, the protagonists of the story live in New York, and it is around Christmas, just in time for blizzard season. Initially, people huddle together and share, and even help each other, but as resources get scarce, they start the slow descent from human to animals that just want to survive."

The e-book was released in April, and still is available with the promotional release price of 0.99$, direct link: Cyberstorm. 

**

While reading Cyberstorm, i remembered my first trip to Asia. I visited Thailand, took a train to Chiang Mai in the North, spent a couple of days there, and from there, joined a day-long bus tour to the Golden Triangle: the place where the borders of China, Myanmnar and Thailand meet at the Mekong River. It's a beautiful, hilly region, and we also visited a tranquil hill town with an amazing view. "That would be a perfect place to retreat to for a while," we concluded.

There was no electricity, though. No running water. If a cybestorm hits, its one of the places where life will move on, self-sustained. It's of course also a place where the young people move away from, to find their luck in a larger city. "And at night, the region is not all peaceful," our tour guide explained. "There are hidden drug fields here in the hills. In the night, there's harvest traffic of the different kind, and police patrols guard the borders of the Mekong."

It were those memories that made me pick the next e-book, set in Asia, in a hill town:

A Dream of Paradise that goes wrong:

"Harvest Season" by Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor's novel could be described as "The Beach" meets "Shangri-la" in China: "In a remote mountainous valley in southwestern China, it's harvest season. The ganja is coming down off the mountain slopes in baskets. Paradise. What could go wrong?" ...

The author was once guidebook author for Lonely Planet and/or the Rough Guide, and in the book, he uses “Rough Planet” as title for the guidebooks – one of the core themes of the book is how charming, innocent small places that are like paradise for the first couple of travelers who stay there then in time turn into travel hotspots and lose their charm – while the bandwagon of travelers who look for those charming spots moves on, and the cycle repeats, in an endless chain of touristifying the world. 

The other core theme is respect of culture, and the dream of a Shangri-la opposed to the reality of the rough world… and drugs as a way to escape, only that in the book, (surprise..) most of the trips aren’t good ones.

It's not an easy book, but especially if you travelled with a backpack at some point in your life - or thought of doing so - I would recommend it. It also gives some clues to Chinese culture, and the new generation in China. For some excerpts from the book, and some travel notes from his current trip through Thailand, like this one with unusual travel advice:

Next time your bus breaks down... Blog about it. Really. It helps. You’ll get busy taking pictures, talking to your fellow travelers as they stand in the sun batting away flies and grimacing at the yelping neighborhood dogs, for whom a sudden invasion of foreign-smelling foreigners must be something like a canine iteration of the zombie apocalypse. .. In other words, I’m not saying blogging is the answer to everything, but twenty minutes out of Chumphon, which I will also blog about before too long, it helped.

More over at the author's blog. And here's the book link Harvest Season 

**

From the remote hills of China in our present time .. to the remote coast of Big Sur in 1940 and to Berlin. That's where the next 2 book lead, and both were chance finds from the fabulous telephone box book exchange (here's a photo)

Between freedom and censorship:
"Big Sur" by Henry Miller
"Big Sur" is a collection of notes and essays written while Henry Miller was struggling with being censored, and living on a tiny budget on the Western shore of the US - here's the book summary:  "First published in 1957, Miller tells the story of his life on the Big Sur, a section of California coast where he lived for fifteen years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place—one of the most colorful in the U.S.—and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there ... he has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book—the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints & cliches of modern life."

Reading in it is like overhearing a self-conversation of a man stitting at the ocean, full of thoughts, reflections, ponderings, pleadings, and stories from living out there, at the edge of civilization and wilderness. Here are two quotes, to give a feel for its atmosphere:

"One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things" 

 "There is an old saying that if you do not — that if you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.‎"

When utopia turns into dystopia: 
"Stille Zeile Sechs"by Monika Maron
I picked the book for its curious title: "Stille Zeile Sechs" translates to "Silent Line Six", which in the book is an address of a house: number 6 in the street called "Silent Line". But you can read it as meta-instruction, too: the lines in the narrative that are missing, that are lingering in between, silent, but almost graspable.

The book itself is fiction, but reads like its woven from autobiographic reflections and obstacles - it's set in the former East Germany, in the mid eighties, and not easy to sum up. The official description says:

"Rosalind Pokowski, a historian decides to free her head from work. A once powerful official offers her an opportunity to work and to write his memoirs. It situates these texts on the border between autobiography and fiction, or the "documentary" and the fictional; within the discourse of memory; and within German-German discourse both before and after the Unification in 1990. -  And as in Maron's other novels, the characters are victims and victimizers at the same time."

The nature of narrative, history and biography:
Altogether, Maron created a brief but thought-provoking read that adresses the nature of narrative, history, and biographic stories. How much of our life narrative do we adjust? How much of personal and historical memory is constructed? Written in first person, the story challenges the reliability of the narrator, especially when it switches to third person in a critical scene, where she shows a side that hasn't appeared before.

The other huge theme of the novel is the dream of a better society - Socialism in the East of Germany, and in the other Eastern States. This hope of a better, fairer, more just world. And all the measures that were taken to construct this better society - only that it didn't work out, and instead of a better society, the measures lead to a totalitarian system - and the ones in power didn't want to accept that, and instead added pressure and measures, and tried to cover up the things going wrong, to keep up the dream, and at some point, to keep up their power. The tragedy of utopia: the way it can easily turn into its counterpart. And then creates another generation who makes a plan for a better world...

*****

 

Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there:

More monday reads from other bloggers: link list at book journey

And my own new book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.

Metro/polis: Paris

inspired by photo friday's new theme "Metropolis", i returned to those moments from one of the largest cities i've been to in the last 2 years: Paris.

Art Deco meets department store: Samaritaine 

view from Sacre Coeur
(i also tried a video there: Paris, Sacre Coeur)

this is near Sacre Coeur, a modern church

and finally: the Paris Metro

which now made me look for the connection 

of Metro and Metropolis:

"Metro is an abbreviation of metropolitan,
and is the name of many products and services relating to urban areas,
especially public transport systems."

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for more Paris in this blog, try this link:

life as a journey that sometimes leads to Paris

animals in the city: F/light, or: stepping into "The Birds" square

Animals in the City

qarrtsiluni magazine's current issue has the theme "Animals in the City". As always, the magazine goes online in daily posts, and now my contribution is online: "F/light". The photo, it's from my first journey to India - and i still remember walking into this city square, and finding myself in a scene that could come from Hitchcock's film "The Birds".

The city is: Jaipur, and maybe you've seen images of its iconic building before: The Palace of the Winds. Here's a photo, if you look closely, you can see the similar facade structures in the upper right corner of the birds photo.



And an extra note for the extra-animal in the photo: the cow. It's an animal you can see often in India, and it also is a symbol for how different animals are seen in different cultures: for us, cows are one of the main animals to farm and turn into meat. In India, cows are holy: the idea to eat cow creates the same reaction as the idea to eat cat or dog would create for a Westerner. They are the givers of milk, though, and Indian families who own a cow are lucky . In another culture difference, cows are walking freely in the streets of India, creating unusual-for-us sights in the city centers, like this scene:



More animals, in the city and elswewhere:
Make sure to check out the other entries in the qarrtsiluni "Animals in the City" issue, too. quite a number of birds populate it. Would be interesting to see a final animal statistic once it is completely online :)

The issue also brought me back to another online issue: YB poetry #5: Animal with Bumblebee, Dog, Squirrel, Monkey, Fish, Snail Woman, Reindeer and more wildness.

today: rain, grit, steps, the city, the world, and the general tragedy of utopia

today: sun
today: & rain
today: catching up
today: "be here now"
today: Grit. & A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behaviour
today: seeing the first red rose petal take shape in the garden
today: new white fluffy bathtowels
today: being there again, for one photo moment
today: the art of adding large small bits of information into a finished layout...
today: Martha Marcy May Marlene

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yesterday and today felt slightly surreal: it was like switching realities from the island time and the home-unpacking-laundry-mode to media-projects-important-next-steps-mode. 

going through the garden, i thought: "step by step." and also: "i want a clone." but then, it’s the counterparts that make life so vivid, that adds and connects the single pieces to the layers of life.

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favourite moment of today: being stuck before a red light, and then turning it around, seeing it as a city stage, and a sky stage, especially when the rain started to pour.

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right now, i am still moved by the Martha Marcy May Marlene film. i thought i just watch a bit of it, and was mesmerized. it made me remember the Man Son exhibition i visited in 2010, and the parallels it drew to the RAF. here's a bit from the blog note back then:

the 2 focus points of the exhibition are persons / events of 1969: the murders committed by the Manson-Family in Hollyood, and the actions of the RAF-terror group in germany in 1969. there is weird parallel between both groups, even when looking at the photos, both groups had so many young, good-looking, energetic leaders/ members. added to that, all the emotions / happenings / moods of this time, and the group dynamic, and also the almost “pop” / media coverage aspect of it, interpreted in artistic ways: this ambivalent thrill of the dark.(into the dark - Man Son 1969)

it also made me think of our vulnerability. our longing for meaning and connection. and all the possible positive and negative things that come from it. how our minds are so complex. how we all basically know what good and bad is: how things sometimes go terribly wrong. how afterwards, it's hard to understand how that could happen. maybe that is so moving about the Martha film: it doesn't give the whole picture, because there never really is a whole picture - there is always a larger frame. but it makes it graspable, how we can get lost/assimilated in a group, and through that, in a value system that eats us up.

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also, still pondering on 3 books i read while on the island. there is a half-written "reading" blog post that is waiting since 10 days to be completed. at least it pinpoints exactly where things got too large to put into some lines. one of them is Hunger Games, and the way it both engages the reader into this life-show-survivor-game, and makes the reader despise the format... which, together with the Martha film, and the other books - both from German authors who lived in the former East Germany, in this society that was supposed to be more social... -  leads back to the Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behaviour, and to a line from the half-written book blog post:

"This hope of a better, fairer, more human world. And all the "necessary" measures that are taken to construct this better society ..  

The tragedy of utopia: the way it can easily turn into its counterpart."