I time travel quite a bit.
No, seriously, I do. It’s cheap and you can do it whenever you want, really. So long as you have photographs….
My father, the great photographer and organizer, died last year. While he was still with us I did a time capsule for him…here he was seventeen. Here he was in his twenties, and then in his late twenties and a soldier in uniform … one when he met my mother and then in his early thirties holding toddler me in his arms, and then in his forties still young and full of gung-ho optimism about the world flying out into adventure under the flag of the United Nations into Africa with wife and daughter in tow – and him in his fifties, and then his sixties, and then the later ones, in his seventies, thin and spare and white-haired…
…This is a time machine for the soul. And it looks back, only back
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Five hundred new fairytales
Spinning a yarn … King Golden Hair – Illustration: Barbara Stefan
A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years, Victoria Sussens-Messerer reports in The Guardian.
The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.
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Images courtesy of Joop van Putten and Hans Westerink
Medieval cathedral converted into a book shop
Completed in 2013, the 15th-century cathedral has been converted into a modern book store and can be found in Zwolle, The Netherlands. It spans over three floors and includes a shop in the former church building.
The architect radically changed the interior design of the 547-year-old Gothic building, but had to ensure they left the original features, such as the pipe organ, stained glass windows and decor intact.
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The Secrets of Jin-shei, my novel about a world based on an Imperial China that never was, has been out in 13 languages for a few years now, but is still getting new reviews.
Just yesterday, a woman in Colombia posted a review on Amazon saying: “The book is beautiful, touching, sad, sweet and magical.”
I love it when a reader discovers a book of mine like this… and makes it young again.
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28 Brilliant Works Of Literary Graffiti
Daniel Dalton of BuzzFeed collects examples of graffiti from Animal Farm to Slaughterhouse-Five.
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – Lewis Carroll. London, UK.
Samuel Beckett – Camden, London.
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Secrets of the Creative Brain
A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.
Nancy Andreasen
“Doing good science is simply the most pleasurable thing anyone can do, one scientist told me,” Nancy Andreasen says in an article in the Atlantic. “It is like having good sex. It excites you all over and makes you feel as if you are all-powerful and complete.”
Among those who ended up losing their battles with mental illness through suicide are Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Anne Sexton, and Arshile Gorky.
Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill.
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Quote of the Day
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Alma Alexander
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