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The joy of blooks (sic)

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dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#1New Post! Jul 24, 2020 @ 18:19:59
Over the past few years I have taken up a hobby. After beginning my own Blog, and fearing that my wafflings and ramblings would one day, without warning, disappear into some sort of black hole in cyberspace, I sought how my blog could be printed out. Ok, a vanity project!

I found a company in France, Blookup. (Get it? A cross between a Blog and a book) They do a fine job, if rather expensive.

After having my blog printed I branched out. Using Google free blog space, I now have a fine little library of blooks. Editions of the Dhammapada, Four Quartets, the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, favorite poems and more. Illustrated.

It keeps me out of mischief.
dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#2New Post! Jul 25, 2020 @ 12:26:12
Recently I received my latest Blook. This was a collection of all the various notes and quotes gathered over the past few years. "The Illustrated Notebooks of Dookie". It does have some light relief, what I have called "Lyrical Interludes", song lyrics that appeal to me.

The print run of one is now sold out.

Anyway, one to dip into from time to time, if only to look at the pictures. Here is one "note" which is from a short book by Susan Sontag "Regarding the Pain of Others", a book that had something to do with becoming accustomed to some of the terrible newscasts that invade our lives on a regular basis.

Susan had her own take on one aspect of this:-

"To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions."

The quote seemed worth preserving at the time. To ponder as and when. It does seem relevant to many of the threads here.
chaski On March 28, 2024
Stalker





Tree at Floydgirrl's Window,
#3New Post! Jul 25, 2020 @ 14:40:21
Book!

My COVID-19 reading list:

1. "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic" - David Quammen

2. "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" - Max Brooks

3. "Le hussard sur le toit" (The Horseman on the Roof) - Jean Giono (written about events during the cholera out break in Europe)

4. "Love in the time of Cholera" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

5. "The Masque of the Red Death" - Edgar Allen Poe

6. "The Plague" - Albert Chamus

7. "Dracula" - Bram Stoker

8. "Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales" - Brothers Grimm (ok… that one isn’t exactly in line with the other ones).

9. "The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror" - Mallory Ortberg

10. "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation" - Gene Sharp (kind of apropos of today... in reverse…)

11. "The Book of General Ignorance" - John Lloyd, John Mitchinson (I though it was about Trump and his supporters... I was wrong... well only partially wrong...)

13. "The Post American World" - Fareed Zakaria

14. "Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History" - David Quammen

I then started "Frankenstein; The Modern Prometheus" - Mary Shelley, but somehow I couldn't get in the groove of reading it... bored me to tears.

So I've moved on to "The Werewolf of Paris" - Guy Endore and "Carmilla" - Sheridan Le Fanu (a vampire story the predates Dracula).
dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#4New Post! Jul 25, 2020 @ 16:07:00
David Quammen looks interesting. I remember once seeing a Hammer Horror production of the Masque of the Red Death. Dracula I have read, and I did get through Frankenstein (interested by reading a few biographies of Shelley, and Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft)

Albert Camus, yes, read a few of his, including the Plague. Some of his quotes figure in my Blook....

"People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves"

"Don't walk in front of me.....I may not follow. Don't walk behind me......I may not lead. Walk beside me.....just be my friend"

"Blessed are the hearts that can bend, they shall never be broken"

And another, not in my Blook, but remembered from long ago........ "I would like to drive out of this world a God who has come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings."
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