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Wednesday, January 31, 2018

URBAN EXPLORER / THE GARDEN WITHIN THE GARDEN

San Diego's Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park.                                                                                        PillartoPost image by Phyllis Shess


The Japanese Friendship Garden (“the Garden”) is an expression of friendship between San Diego and its sister city, Yokohama. It illustrates two cultures and creates an immersive experience into Japanese culture.  It is located in San Diego's beautiful public garden called Balboa Park.

The Garden’s design is based on centuries-old Japanese techniques adapted to San Diego’s climate and florae and seeks to foster a relationship between humans and nature, providing a respite attuned to Japanese simplicity, serenity, and aestheticism.

The Garden sits on 12 acres. It offers a variety of educational programs, exhibits, and festivals as well as accredited horticultural classes to enhance and deepen visitor appreciation for Japanese culture. As a valued community resource, it is well known for its unique setting, stone arrangements, koi ponds, water features, sukiya-style buildings and landscape.

The Japanese Friendship Garden was first opened in 1991. The second phase, opened in 1999, was designed by renowed landscape architect Takeo Uesugi. This phase added the Exhibit Hall, Activity Center, and Koi Pond. The third phase, completed in 2015, comprised 9 additional acres which included a 200 cherry tree grove, large azalea and camellia garden, a water feature reminiscent of the San Diego watershed, and the state of the art Inamori Pavilion.

Today, about 100,000 individuals from all over United States and around the world visit the Japanese Friendship Garden annually. The Garden is a gift to the citizens of San Diego intended to provide the community with educational programs to foster better understanding of Japanese culture. Garden founders are thankful to the citizens of San Diego who have helped in throughout its development to promote continued friendship among diverse cultures.

The Japanese Friendship Garden is a member of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, a collaboration of 26 arts, science, and culture institutions in Balboa Park.

To learn more about the many ways this collaboration makes the Park a better place to visit, learn, and have fun, please visit the Partnership’s website at www.bpcp.org.

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SAVE THE DATE:

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

TRAVEL / 1 PIX = 1K WORDS

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San Gimignano, Italy home of the Convento di Sant’Agostino


Monday, January 29, 2018

MEDIA MONDAY / WORDS TO WRITE BY


Duke Ellington by Richard Avedon for New Yorker magazine, 1963
“...If it sounds good and feels good, then it is good!”
                           --Duke Ellington.
***
Ernest Hemingway at his stand up desk, Havana Cuba
“...I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of a day of every day that is wasted in your life.”
                           --Ernest Hemingway
***
Raymond Chandler
“...Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken down patois which something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split...!”
                           --Raymond Chandler
***

Sir Winston Churchill at his stand up desk
“...Writing a book is an adventure.  To begin with it is a toy and an amusement.  Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant.  The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

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                                    --Winston Churchill

Sunday, January 28, 2018

SUNDAY REVIEW / WHAT IS PROJECT GUTENBERG?


The man who sped up the arrival of the Renaissance

GUEST BLOG / By Catherine Sustana, contributor, Thoughtco.com--Founded by the late Michael Hart in 1971, Project Gutenberg is a free digital library containing more than 43,000 e-books. Most of the works are in the public domain, though in some cases copyright holders have given Project Gutenberg permission to use their work.

Most of the works are in English, but the library also includes texts in French, German, Portuguese, and other languages. The effort is run by volunteers who are constantly working to expand the library's offerings.

Project Gutenberg was named after Johannes Gutenberg, the German inventor who developed movable type in 1440. Movable type, along with other advances in printing, helped facilitate mass production of texts, which fostered the rapid spread of knowledge and ideas in art, science, and philosophy. In other words: Goodbye, Middle Ages. Hello, Renaissance.

Note: Because copyright laws vary from country to country, users outside of the United States are advised to check the copyright laws in their respective countries before downloading or distributing any texts from Project Gutenberg.

Gutenberg press
FINDING SHORT STORIES ON THE SITE
Project Gutenberg offers a wide range of texts, from the United States Constitution to old issues of Popular Mechanics to charming medical texts like 1912's Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured.

If you're specifically hunting for short stories, you can start with the directory of short stories arranged by geography and other topics.

(NOTE: If you have trouble accessing the Project Gutenberg pages, look for an option that says, "Turn off this top frame" and the page should work.)

At first, this arrangement seems straightforward, but on closer examination, you'll realize that all of the stories categorized under "Asia" and "Africa," for example, are written by English-speaking authors like Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote stories about those continents.

In contrast, some of the stories categorized under "France" are by French writers; others are by English writers writing about France.

The remaining categories seem somewhat arbitrary (Ghost Stories, Victorian Stories of Successful Marriages, Victorian Stories of Troubled Marriages), but there is no question that they are fun to browse through.

In addition to the short stories category, Project Gutenberg offers an extensive selection of folklore. In the children's section, you can find myths and fairytales, as well as picture books.

ACCESSING THE FILES
When you click on an interesting title on Project Gutenberg, you'll be confronted with a somewhat daunting (depending on your comfort level with technology) array of files to choose from.

If you click "Read this ebook online," you'll get completely plain text. This is an important part of what Project Gutenberg is trying to accomplish; these texts will be preserved electronically without complications from fancy formatting that might not be compatible with future technologies.

Nevertheless, knowing that the future of civilization is secure won't improve your reading experience today one iota. The plain-text online versions are uninviting, awkward to page through, and don't include any images.

A book called More Russian Picture Tales, for example, simply includes [illustration] to tell you where you might see a lovely image if only you could get your hands on the book.

Downloading a plain text file rather than reading it online is slightly better because you can scroll all the way down the text instead of hitting "next page" over and over. But it is still pretty stark.

The good news is that Project Gutenberg really, really wants you to be able to read and enjoy these texts, so they offer many other options:

HTML. In general, the HTML file will provide a better reading experience online. Take a look at the HTML file for More Russian Picture Tales, and-voilà!-the illustrations appear.
EPUB files, with or without images. These files work on most e-readers, but not on Kindle.

Kindle files, with or without images. Be aware, though, that Project Gutenberg is up in arms because of the Kindle Fire, unlike previous Kindles, is not particularly compatible with free e-books. For suggestions, you can read their webmaster's Review of the Kindle Fire.

Plucker files. For PalmOS devices and a few other handheld devices.

QiOO mobile e-book files. These files are intended to be readable on all mobile phones, but Javascript is required.

THE READING EXPERIENCE
Reading archival material, electronically or otherwise, is very different from reading other books.

The lack of context can be disorienting. You can often find a copyright date, but otherwise, there's very little information about the author, the piece's publication history, the culture at the time it was published, or its critical reception. In some cases, it may be impossible to even figure out who had translated works into English.

To enjoy Project Gutenberg, you need to be willing to read alone. Going through these archives is not like reading a bestseller that everyone else is reading, too. When someone at a cocktail party asks you what you've been reading, and you answer, "I just finished an 1884 short story by F. Anstey called 'The Black Poodle,'" you will likely be met with blank stares.

But did you read it? Of course you did, because it begins with this line:

"I have set myself the task of relating in the course of this story, without suppressing or altering a single detail, the most painful and humiliating episode of my life."

Unlike most works you read in anthologies, many of the works in the Project Gutenberg library have not withstood the proverbial "test of time." We know that someone in history thought the story was worth publishing. And we know that at least one human being -- a volunteer from Project Gutenberg -- thought a given story was worth putting online forever. The rest is up to you.

Browsing through the archive may raise some questions for you about what on earth that "test of time" really means, anyway. And if you feel you'd like some company in your reading, you can always suggest a Gutenberg piece to your book club.

THE REWARDS
Though it's wonderful to see a familiar name like Mark Twain in the archives, the truth is that "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" has already been widely anthologized.

You probably have a copy on your shelf right now. So the Gutenberg price tag, though fabulous, isn't really the best thing about the site.

Project Gutenberg brings out the literary treasure-hunter in all of us. There are gems at every turn, like this wonderful voice from Bill Arp (pen name of Charles Henry Smith, 1826-1903, an American writer from Georgia), featured in The Wit and Humor of America, volume IX:

"I almost wish every man was a reformed drunkard. No man who hasn't drank liker knows what a luxury cold water is."
Cold water may, indeed, be a luxury to the drunkard, but for someone who loves short stories, the real luxury is the chance to explore thousands of rich-but-almost-forgotten texts, to read with fresh eyes, to get a glimpse of literary history, and to form unencumbered opinions about what you read.

SOURCE:
https://www.thoughtco.com/free-short-stories-from-project-gutenberg-2990442

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And, creator of Project Gutenberg