homesky... always more special on the evening before going on a journey.
(even when it's just a short trip).
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On the way to Tyrol / passing the sign of my hometown / light memory reflections
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Road moment: when the mountains appear at the horizon ... together with that feeling of larger horizons.
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Mountain view from our balcony :) so good to be here, and to have luck with the weather.
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Giant alpine lift construction. All the things mankind developed...
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Mountain zen with silver horizon
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Water, sky and stone.
And a timeless horizon :)
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Flower windows :)
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Saturday: Today brought sun and rain and sun and thunder... and a beautiful sign: we went up to Timmelsjoch, an alpine pass. There's a crystal up there, as hope and sign for world peace. So here's a wish, for peace , and sunny skies.
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Ötztal-Bike-Marathon 2017 - Start of 4500 participants!
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Sunday morning in the mountains - taking the "Sessellift" in Vent.
Blue skies and views opening.
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Up at 2235 meter altitude.
A sunwarmed bench, a dream of flying.
Stone paths and stoic cows.
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more photos, notes to follow...
The colorful pretty vibe
of a single flower
in a world of greens/greys/browns
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... and a second mountain/lift tour, after a rain pause:
Gigijjochbahn Sölden.
The view, like a reflection on natural monuments + human monuments.
Both pretty amazing
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the timeless + rough
beauty of alpine grounds
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Mountain balance: creating a stone cairne.
Looking up, a flock of crows:
the lightness of today.
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Trail statue: the winged guardian angel of all who wander....
or just a hiker with backpack :).
- as always, we see is what we think
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Cherry cake at the Gigijoch alpine cafe at 2.238 metres
- a delicious mountain moment :)
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A different monday: driving back home from the mountains along a scenic route: via the "Fernpass", past the "Zugspitze". This feeling of open roads, of possibility.
And a quote: "One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure".
It's a beautiful, special summer for me. Without planning to, it turned into a summer of art, of places, of newness. With short trips, and with paintings, exhbitions and own studio time. Since April I am joining the 100 days art project, and since then, I am mostly posting on my instagram page.
Now the 100 days are almost complete. I probably will continue the daily practice, and with it, the vibe of this summer of art.
Here are some of my fav moments from the last weeks:
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Visiting the documenta 14 in Kassel "FREEDOM" + the Parthenon of forbidden book. So many. A reminder of the power of words.
For some more impressions from there, try my photo slideshows:
Comic Con Germany
The day you stand in line with Wonder Woman and Rocket Racoon....
... isn't a dream, it's Comic Con :)
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Black Forest
After the comic con weekend: time for some mountains:)
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The 100 Days Project
“Click” is the name of today’ mandala. It’s #93/100 – a collage, I had fun cutting paper and trying different colors until it “clicked” into place. It’s also a good counterpart to the current work project, which is about statistics and tests (and exciting in a nerdy way). #the100dayproject + my 100 days podcast talk
This summer, I am taking a trip around the world in short stories (more here: reading the missing parts of the world). The current destinations are: the Granta "Travel" issue, the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and a Berlin collection.
Granta Travel
Published in summer 2013, the Granta travel collection is refreshing and different, offering unusual places, and an unusual stories. Here's the official note:
"From the Amazon to rural China, west Texas to the caves that lurk beneath the Peak District, this issue of Granta takes you out of your chair and out into the world. Haruki Murakami goes home to Kobe, Teju Cole meditates on danger in Lagos and Lina Wolff imagines a woman adrift in Madrid. Here are eighteen collisions between people and the places that have made them, shaped them and terrified them."
And here's the online page with excerpts of several of the stories and additional texts: Granta Travel
* The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
It was during one of my online searches for international short stories that I arrived at the New Yorker Fiction Podcast page. I almost klicked away, then tried one of the podcasts - and then returned there several times. Such a great format and series. The podcast include both the stories and a talk about them. Here are some of the international talks / stories, with extra links:
Argentine
Hisham Matar reads “Shakespeare’s Memory” by Jorge Luis Borges
"This story, which is one of the last that Borges wrote, is a meditation on the mind, understanding, and inspiration—and it draws on the author’s deep erudition..."
Israel
Jonathan Safran Foer reads Amos Oz’s “The King of Norway”
"Zvi Provizor loved to convey bad news: earthquakes, plane crashes, buildings collapsing on their occupants, fires, and floods. He read the papers and listened to all the news broadcasts very early in the morning... (story link)
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Berlin Metropole Parallel to the Granta Travel collection, i am reading a Berlin collection - this is another of the surprise treats telephone book box. The collection was published in 1999, and features stories and essays from the re-united and new / old capital Berlin, and was very timely back then with stories on Berlin turning to a huge building site, and the shift of the capital from Bonn back to Berlin, covering moments and views from the German reunification in 1990 to the capital shift that happened in 1999.
Unfortunately, there is no online page for the book, and no english versions of the stories. So no direct links to share from it, but it made me go and revisit my own memories of being in Berlin: "Four Berlins, or: I am (t)here"
*** The New Yorker Fiction Archive
And more reads, leading from Berlin back to New York and onwards: listening to the New Yorker Podcast and following the links included, I arrived in Haiti and Sri Lanka, in Ethiopia and Norway:
Haiti
Edwidge Danticat: "Ghosts"
"Pascal Dorien was living in Bel Air—the Baghdad of Haiti, some people called it, but that would be Cité Pendue, an even more destitute and brutal neighborhood, where hundreds of middle-school children entering a national art contest drew M-16s and beheaded corpses. Bel Air was actually a mid-level slum.."
Sri Lanka
Romesh Gunesekra: "Roadkill"
"The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi I was a little apprehensive. Most of us living in the south of Sri Lanka had come to think of this town as the nerve center of terror..."
Ethiopia
Dinaw Mengestu: "The Paper Revolution"
"When Isaac and I first met, at the university, we both pretended that the campus and the streets of the capital were as familiar to us as the dirt paths of the rural villages where we had grown up and lived until only a few months earlier..." Norway
Karl Ove Knausgaard: "Come Together"
"I was almost twelve years old, going into the fifth year of barneskole..."
Book joy is...
....when you walk into the local library and on the shelf of the "new books", see a book that you remember, even when you aren't sure who told you about it, or where you read about it. So you pick it up, and read into it, and enjoy the story, and then - after the first chapter - finally you remember where you first read about it: in a book blog from the other side of the world. That's exactly how i arrvied at...
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Written in Sweden, and thus making it my first Scandinavian read of this year: “The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared” is a brilliant, humorous, witty read with a storyline that zigzags through Sween, while the backstory moves around the globe and includes a whole chain of political key events, in a Forest-Gump like scenario.
The first time i saw the book, it looked very different - the english edition has a blue cover, and the elephant that is part of the storyline doesn't show on the cover. I am just glad the German edition doesn't have the Spanish cover, i guess i wouldn't have recognized the book then - even though the title is memorable, of course. For the fun of it, here's a cover collage, combined with the reading note from the Wordsmith blog - set in India, this is the review that i remembered without being to place it when at the library:
”I have rarely enjoyed a book as much as I did this one - in a true comic sense. Yet, if I have to think too much, and that kind of thinking comes much too easily for me, then I would say that in reading about Allan Karlsson's life, there is a fair bit to learn from. Don't take life too seriously - and there is nothing in the world that can't be washed away with some good food and vodka. Who can argue against that? Throw in some great friends, and an elephant and you are set for life, even if you are hundred years old. Or perhaps that's what makes you live to one hundred years old.”
And a life quote from the book: "Things are what they are, and whatever will be, will be.”
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The Lost Mountain: 44 Days Across the Pyrenees
My second read is the complete counterpart to the recommended-beststeller-novel: it's a chanced-upon-autobiographic-ebook. Also, it is the next in the unplanned series of "long-distance" walk books. After "Hartland - walking through America" by Wolfgang Büscher (review link)
+ "Journey to Ki", the Tibetan travelogue by Simon Wernell (review link), which followed the trail books from last year: Wild by Cheryl Strayed and A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. (i should put a trail post together at some point..)
So now: walking through the Pyrenees. It's a region i've been to myself, as part of a road trips to the South of France. Here's a photo from a drive into the Pyrenees:
I don't really know that much about the region, though. And the lines of the book description, they made me both think of my own time there, and of this mood of the 100-year-book: this stepping out of the window of the everyday, into the unknown. Here's the book description:
"In early August 2008 David Bryan, having become unbearably bored of his monotonous office life, set out on an ambitious and perhaps naive journey to walk the entire mountain range of the Pyrenees from their starting point at Cape Higer on the Atlantic coast to the finishing point, 500 miles away at Cape de Creus on the Mediterranean.
Utterly inexperienced and unfamiliar with the terrain, culture and language, he quickly finds trouble in the form of severe storms, wild dogs, and dehydration. He is saved only by learning quickly and the company of some colourful and humorous characters he meets along the way."
David Bryan captured his trail experience in this brief but vast read of about 150 pages, and takes you with him up there into the wilderness, where the focus of life both opens into vastness, and turns to the main necessities of life: where to find water, how to not loose track, where to sleep. He walks alone, but finds companions along the way for parts of his trail. The book includes a wonderful, returning Freudian slip: when David Bryan wonders about something, he wanders - which made me think of the classic quote: "Solvitur ambulando" - "It's solved by walking". And so he walks on, for 44 days, through hard rain and days of burning sun, through encounters of wild dogs and life questions, through happiness and fear, across the Lost Mountain. Here's the e-book at amazon: The Lost Mountain
2 quotes from the book: "We talked
for hours about our journeys, through life as well as the Pyrenees. I realised
now that if they walked with such purpose for such personal goals, then the
reason behind my walk was not as ridiculous as I had feared a week ago."
“I should
have spent every day trying to understand the world instead of own it. Money,
toys cars and phones, were not what I was searching for, and so the quest for
them had only ever made me miserable. The rush hour, the half hour dinner
breaks, all I ever wanted was to be free and live in peace.”
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NEXT READS: From mountains to islands, from Sweden to Poland, and from 2 male authors to 2 female authors...here are the books i plan to read this week, more about them, next monday:
"História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands" by Eleanor Stanford
& "Marzi" - Marzena Sowa's memoir of growing up in Communist Poland, told in episodes that are put into text and images by Sylvain Savoia
***** This blog post is inspired by the blog series "It's Monday! What are you reading?" which is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. participating blogs are listed in this Linky Book List
Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there:
this blog post is inspired by the blog series "It's Monday! What are you reading?" which is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. more about that, at the bottom of this post.
My current reads are a mix of e-books and paperbacks, inspired by the season and the theme of travel:
A Christmas Carol
I finally read Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Actually it was a recent read that made me curious for the original: in November, I read "Noel" - a graphic novel inspired by Dickens' tale. So now, the original, in the shape of a free e-book (here's the link). It felt like stepping back in time in a digital way. And reading it, it felt like I once saw a film version after all, some of the scenes seemed like deja-vu. The story itself and the moral is touching - this question that is more present at the ending season of the year: what will remain of our life in the end? What memory or imprint do we leave in this world, a warm or a cold one?
The Kindness of Strangers
A chance find, and it was the subtitle that made me pick it up: "One man's journey from coast to coast. No promises. No guarantees. An no money." Could that work, to travel, and to mostly depend on the kindness of the people you meet while passing through? And what experiences come from it? The focus of Mike McIntyre's book is on the people he meets, and on the stories they share. A different kind of tavel book. One that puts a road realization into words: that the richest experiences in life mostly haven't much to do with money.
Travels with Charley, continued
John Steinbeck's travelogue on exploring rural America: i started to read it on an island, and during the transit back home - and from there, it accompanied me through the week. This week I looked for a map of his trip, and found one, it's from the National Steinbeck Centre:
The photo belongs to a photo file that also includes a photo of Steinbeck's camper, the "Rocinante". The book ends on a reflective note that also is about the nature of journeys themselves: "Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space has ceased."
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Journeys... into Words
One of the book joys of this week was: browsing books and planning the starting reads for the 2013 reading challenges. The first books are on the way now.. January will bring: A Journey From India (India/America) + The Elegance of the Hedgehog (France). Looking forward.
7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books (Link) The idea of this reading challenge is to explore the world by books from different continents and countries, and by visiting various world lists while planning the reads, to encounter the one or other unknown angle and fact about our world. ***** It's Monday! What are you reading? This blog post is inspired by the blog series "It's Monday! What are you reading?" which is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. participating blogs are listed in this Linky Book List
Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there:
Twitter is hosting a fiction festival in November and they are now open for proposals:
"We want to invite authors and creative storytellers around the world to push the bounds of what’s possible with Twitter content. Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter — short story in Tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting — or, even better, how you’ll create a new one. The proposal must fit into the time window of our five day festival— but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour."
The festival will kick off on November 28th. And it was this date that sparked an idea: i will be traveling in the last week of November. first i thought: okay, so that won't work out timewise....
Tvispos
..then i thought twice: i plan to send travel notes from the road. and a short format would be very fitting to catch single moments and encounters, in the form of short prose or prose poems turned into visuals: Twitter "TVifis. Here's the line from the proposal:
"TVifis: a Tvifi is a twitter-length travel fiction that is turned into a visual, and then both twittered in words and added to the tweet as visual."
The visual above is an example, and this is how it would look like in twitter:
Looking forward to the festival and the stories and formats that will be presented there.
PS: Deadlines for proposals is November 15th, so there are still some days to send a proposal. The hashtag of the Twitter Fiction Festival is #twitterfiction.
Big Backpack, Little World (a chance encounter)
So many places in this world, and so many books - the eternal question probably is: from the million of possibilities, how to figure out the journeys to take, and the books to read? Just try it, is one option. That's how I came across the travel memoir "Big Backpack, Little World", which happened to be free for the day just when I checked the e-book travel listing. So glad I ordered it:
"Big Backpack, Little World" is a fine read - a travel memoir by Donna Morang, who lived in Montana and Alaska. After retirement, she decides that she is ready to try something new again, and starts backpacking and teaching English abroad. She has a wonderful humour and a perspective of someone who has seen a lot already, and at the same time is open and excited about life, and keeps learning herself. It's a joy to follow her trails to Mexico, Spain and Cambodia, and made me also think of my own days of solo traveling in other countries. As starting point, I'd recommend her blog updates from Mexico, which have the same warm touch as her book: ESL Donna
The Left Hand of Darkness (a modern classic)
A modern classic, and the second book ever that won both the prestigious Hugo Award and the Nebula Award: that's "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's labeled science fiction, but in the introduction Le Guin suggests to read it rather as a thought-experiment: not as a future prediction, but as a story that describes reality, the present world, "a truth - wrapped in fiction". The story itself has the form a of journal or a travel report. It starts with the words: "I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination..."
On first glance, a very different book than "Little World", but both books are about getting in touch with the previous unknown, and sharing knowledge with people that live in a different place, in a different kind of society, and who speak another language (and then with the reader). The traveling in Le Guin's book has a much larger dimension, though - it's to another world, a world named Winter, as messenger. Here's a quote that gives an idea of the concept, which was informed by Le Guin's family, too: both her parents were anthropologists, and the theme of cultural encounters runs through her book:
"Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal: it is individual. Not We and They, not I and It, but I and Thou."
Beyond the book: Wired Interview and a literary course
Le Guin is over 80 now, and still giving fascinating interviews - WIRED spoke with her last year, they have the talk up on their page both as transcript with images and as podcast: Still Battling the Powers That Be
And here's a short interview that is moving - Le Guin about life, age, books in time, and being an author:
For some background information of the book, you can check out the online literary class of Eric Rabkin at Michigan University, several video lectures are dedicated to Le Guin's book (here's the course link: English literature: Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Human Mind, Our Modern World.
"My Life" by Lyn Hejinian, and "My Emily Dickinson" by Susan Howe
I am still following the "ModPo" Modern Poetry Class, and it's like a guided tour through modern poetry with a lot of reading samples. Interesting also how the themes of this week connect: from the traditional travel memoir of Small World, to "My Life" by Lyn Hejinian, who created an experimental biography, written at age 37 in 37 segments of 37 sentences each, and later, at age 45, revised into 45 segments of 45 segments each - by format itself already a reflection on the nature of life and memory. Here are 4 sentences from one of the childhood segments: "A pause, a rose, something on paper. Solitude was the essential companion. The branches of the redwood trees hung in a fog whose moisture they absorbed. Lasting, "what might be," its present a future, like the life of a child."
And - Susan Howe, and her writing that is sparked by Emily Dickinson, especially by her poem #754. Reading it is a reminder again of the power of words that still stand on a page, that remain, that are an open side of a dialogue waiting for a reader, long after the writer has gone.
The starting lines of said poem #754, one of those that still echo from the reading:
"My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - In Corners - till a Day.."
For more, try this google link. It leads to 1.750.000 pages loaded with words - quotes, notes and responses to a poet unforgotten.
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It's Monday! What are you reading? This blog post is inspired by the blog series "It's Monday! What are you reading?" which is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. participating blogs are listed in this Linky Book List
Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf + monday reads. there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there:
Some lines about me: I'm into roads, stories, places, crossings, and all the things they lead and connect to. I edit BluePrintReview and the blueprint book + lit blog. Apart from being an editor and blogger, I am also an author myself. My new book Worlds Apart launched some weeks ago:
Worlds Apart: the true story of 2 friends, 2 journeys, and 10 life lessons
In the global world, a traveler from Europe and a teacher from Asia meet in the web, share their journeys, and the joys, longings, and life lessons that wait along the road. Captured in letters and photos that reach from China and India to Germany and the Mediterranean Sea, a dialogue across continents and cultures unfolds: Worl(d)s Apart
For the last couple of days, i've been in Mexico every morning for some minutes. It's one of the countries i've never been to myself, but that doesn't feel all foreign - there even is a city i walked through in images and in lines repeatedly: Puerto Vallarta, home of poet + friend Rose Hunter.
Her book A Foal Poem is both a collection of poems, and a poetic travelogue that takes the reader into the inner reality of places, beyond the tourist facades. it starts with a map, and my first touch of it was "Aposematic" - a poem that was first published in BluePrintReview, here's one of its road lines:
me the butterfly and you the relentless road, with zircon glints !
Later, another poem become base of a collaboration that moved through several places: Puertos, and on the third page, it's Puerto Vallarta again, with its beach road, the Malecón:
concrete for miles, yet it's this section of the Malecón that has been chosen for soapy water bucket bleach
Finally, when Foal took shape, i helped with the cover- the image is based on a street scene from Vallarta, and the process of getting the cover together for POD later lead to a (rather unpoetic) how-to-entry in the blueprint book blog: How to create a book cover for print-on-demand services like CreateSpace
but back to Foal:
I first read the book right after it was published, and now am revisiting it, and like with journeys, when visiting a place again, you see more, the details, the patterns forming within, how one place and thought leads to another. maybe that started already during the first read, when at some point, i felt drawn to gather lines for a found poem, which eventually got published in the Found Poetry Review: Or, a Moral Inventory
Someone recently said: "With books like this, I don't need to travel, I get there in words" - and this is how Foal feels to me, this touch of another place, woven into pages that wrap you up while reading - and like with most foreign places, it takes a bit to get into this different world that comes with rebar houses and tejones appearing - until, at some point, those become part of your own vocabulary, and you find yourself, walking along a relentless road, thinking of a foal.
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Book link, About, & Review Forward
For more about Rose's book Foal, her bio, and her other books, visit her website
Some lines about me: I'm into roads, stories, places, crossings, and all the things they lead and connect to. I edit BluePrintReview and the blueprint book + lit blog. For more of my personal book reviews, click here: "Books", and for a bit more about me and the web projets i'm involved in, visit me at blueprint21. Apart from being an editor and blogger, I am also an author myself. My new book Worlds Apart just launched, and Rose was one of the authors who read an early version of it and accompanied the whole process that leads from draft to final book. Thanks for that!
Worlds Apart - a true story about 2 friends, 2 journeys, and 10 life lessons:
In the global world, a traveler from Europe and a teacher from Asia meet in the web, share their journeys, and the joys, longings, and life lessons that wait along the road. Captured in letters and photos that reach from China and India to Germany and the Mediterranean Sea, a dialogue across continents and cultures unfolds: Worl(d)s Apart
Review Forward: This book review is inspired by Review Forward, a new online initiative for authors & book bloggers. For more reviews, visit the facebook page or the twitter-stream.
