JD_Cunningham

JD_Cunningham, 4 months ago to poetry

It is a serious thing, nothing.
The notion confounds the mind
As wind confounds the sea.
A woman fixes words to a miracle,
A man describes himself to God.
The syllables amount to something,
But they are nothing to speak of.
-- 'To Speak of Nothing' by N. Scott Momaday

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #NScottMomaday @bookstodon

(Art credit: Sisa Jasper)

JD_Cunningham, 4 months ago to books

A collection of rare Japanese textbooks from the 1800s to the 1940s on all sorts of subjects is now available online and it's especially interesting to see how they're illustrated and printed.
#books #BookHistory #study #Japan

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/01/japanese-rare-textbooks/

kimlockhartga, 5 months ago to bookstodon

@bookstodon As we approach the end of 2023, I would love to know about the very best books you read this year. (They don't have to have been published in 2023 for your "best of" list.)

JD_Cunningham, 5 months ago to poetry

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset---
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the round
of the empty
flowerpot.
--'Poem' by William Carlos Williams

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #cats @bookstodon

(Art credit: Debra Hall)

JD_Cunningham, 5 months ago to books

#BookReview Setting the perfect tone for this collection of twenty-three tales of Baba Yaga is the spell-poem by Stephanie M. Wytovich that opens it. The stories that follow are traditional and modern, set in Slavic forests or a swamp in the American Deep South. Two of the stories are interesting variations on our Hansel and Gretel tale, another is told by the Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs, and in one Baba Yaga falls in love.

The Baba Yagas vary too, they are ancient and young, beautiful and ugly, cruel and compassionate, but she is always a powerful figure who is closely connected to the natural world.

Into the Forest was edited by Lindy Ryan with an introduction by Christina Henry, and the stories are by women fantasy and horror writers who bring a welcome feminist sensibility to many of them. There are some very strong selections, but the collection does have a few weaker choices.

A couple of the stories are bursting the seams of a short story and could be developed into novels. The perfect kind of eerie anthology to cozy up with through the dark, cold months.
#reading #books @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

"...how pointless I think dystopias are now. This sort of creeping sense that we're doing their imagining for them. We're just feeding them - the right - with more and more possibilities for how bad things could get. Our imaginations are in service to the wrong ends."

From a fascinating conversation between writers Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison.
#books #reading #OliviaLaing #MJohnHarrison @bookstodon

https://granta.com/olivia-laing-m-john-harrison/

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to art

"On the whole, any painter who really knows his craft recognizes that he is moving in the wrong direction right from the initial sketch." -- from José Saramago's 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', trans. Giovanni Pontiero

#SundaySentence #bookQuote #art #quote @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

Another tempting book list, this time from World Literature Today with seventy-five translated books to check out. I can see more than a few that are already on my TBR, but might just find a couple of others to add.📚❤️
#reading #bookList #books #literature #translatedLiterature @bookstodon

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/lit-lists/75-notable-translations-2023-michelle-johnson

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to poetry

As the full moon rises
The swan sings
In sleep
On the lake of the mind
--Kenneth Rexroth from 'The Silver Swan'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon

(Art credit: Wilheim Goebel)

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

I like what the New Yorker did here - a list of favorite books published in previous years, but read this year especially because it includes one of my favorite books of all time - Nadezhda Mandelstam's unforgettable Hope Against Hope.

#reading #books @bookstodon

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2023-in-review/the-year-in-reading

StelliformPress, 6 months ago to sciencefiction

It's the first picture of the new Arboreality in the wild! The new version has a silky matte cover, gold foil title text, and aged and distressed Ursula K Le Guin Prize and Philip K Dick awards medallions + more!

This book would make a beautiful gift. https://www.stelliform.press/index.php/product/arboreality-by-rebecca-campbell/

#bookstodon #ursulakleguinprizeforfiction #climatefiction #ecofiction #sciencefiction #speculativefiction

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to bookstodon

"We could recognize her in an instant, even though we’ve never seen her up close. She’s always with us, a whisper on the wind, a shadow passing over our eyes when we’re looking away." - from the story Last Tour Into the Hungering Moonlight by Gwendolyn Kiste in the anthology of Baba Yaga stories, Into the Forest

#SundaySentence #bookQuote #amReading #currentlyReading @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to crochet

Talk about an ambitious project! New Zealand artists Lissy Robinson-Cole and Rudi Robinson crocheted a full-size Wharenui Harikoa or House of Joy which celebrates Māori cultural traditions from 5,000 balls of wool.

#crochet #FiberArt #FibreArt #artwork #NewZealand @fibrearts

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2023/12/wharenui-harikoa/

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

#FridayReads
There are three books I'm reading at the moment and all have drawn me in in their different ways:

• Botticelli's Secret by Joseph Luzzi - an account of the commission the artist Sandro Botticelli was given by a member of Florence's powerful Medici family to illustrate all hundred cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy
• The Housekeepers by Alex Hay - a terrific revenge heist story pitting downstairs vs upstairs masterminded by a former housekeeper of a grand London Mayfair house who has a hidden agenda
• Into the Forest - an anthology of retellings of Baba Yaga stories by a wide range of horror and fantasy writers

It should be a good reading weekend!
#currentlyReading #amReading #books #reading #bookstodon @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to poetry

It was winter, near freezing,
I'd walked through a forest of firs
when I saw issue out of the waterfall
a solitary bird.

It lit on a damp rock,
and, as water swept stupidly on,
wrung from its own throat
supple, undammable song.

It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
-- The Dipper by Kathleen Jamie from 'Selected Poems'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry #CurrentlyReading @bookstodon

(Art credit: Deborah Butts)

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

Reading is being killed off because of new technology? Ha ha ha...
#reading #books #FreedomToRead #ReadingCommunity @bookstodon

https://www.publicbooks.org/this-is-your-brain-on-books/

Likewise, 6 months ago to books

Bad book covers do such a disservice. For a pastime that exists mainly in the mind, an off-putting cover has the power to push away even the most literary of lovers. As much as I love books, when I want to buy a book, if the cover is terrible, I won’t. Books are works of art-starting with cover & ending with the story, & I want the whole, beautiful picture. 📚
#books #read #bookcover #fediverse @bookstodon

Krisss, 6 months ago to art Dutch

Contemporary Black and White
By BilykArt ©

IG: @bilykart

#art #flowers

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

I finally read Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell last week, what an wonderful imagination she has. It's fascinating to see where it takes a story and the places her characters inhabit. A really good storyteller is an author I treasure.

#reading #storyteller #books #KatherineRundell @bookstodon

MarianHellema, 6 months ago to bookstodon Dutch

@bookstodon
#AmReading

This book is a real pleasure

On New Year's Eve the 85 year old Lilian takes a long walk in Manhattan. On the way she visits places from her past and talks to people she meets. Meanwhile she looks back on her life as an ad copywriter, poet, wife and mother

You can't help but love her independent, prickly character and her way with words

You can read her as a feminist, but this is not too explicit or preaching, which I liked all the better

Thanks again @JD_Cunningham

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

"There was an entire commune of voices living inside the optician. They were the worst lodgers imaginable. They were always too loud, especially after ten o’clock in the evening. They trashed the optician’s interior. They were many of them, they never paid their rent, and they couldn’t be evicted." -- from
Mariana Leky's What You Can See From Here, translated by Tess Lewis

#SentenceSunday #BookQuote #quote #reading @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to art

#art to start 🎨
...reflections in a pond

'Blue irises at the pond III' by Irina Laube
#painting #acrylic #landscape #florespondence

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to books

#BookReview The Ukrainian/Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky is described in the introduction this way:

“He was one of the few honest and uncompromised writers of the Soviet period. He managed not to join the Communist Party, to sign his name to any denunciation of another writer, or to sell out his talent to curry favour with Soviet officialdom.”

Earlier this year NYRB published this collection of the first three books of his memoirs in a new translation by Douglas Smith.

Nature and language may have been the two greatest loves of Paustovsky’s life; his descriptions of Kyiv in autumn, his love of being by the sea, and connection with poetry are marvelous.

Reading his eyewitness account of what Ukraine went through after WW1 during the civil war made me appreciate even more what the Ukrainian people have gone through during their traumatic history.

It’s impossible to describe all the riches of the stories and writing this volume contains, a stunning book and unforgettable reading experience, I wanted it to go on for another 800 pages.

#reading #memoir #books @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to poetry

An Afternoon in the Stacks

Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but he chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here, the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.
--Mary Oliver

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @bookstodon

(Art credit: Vincent Van Gogh)

JD_Cunningham, 6 months ago to bookstodon

"People have been living on earth for thousands of years, and yet they’ve still not learned to be good. How strange." - from The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith

#BookQuote #quote #CurrentlyReading @bookstodon