Journal of a small bookstore in Thimphu, Bhutan
junctionbookstore@gmail.com
• About us
• Location & Hours
• Facebook
• Reading group at the bookshop
• Ask me anything
Junction Bookstore
junctionbookstore@gmail.com
• About us
• Location & Hours
• Reading group at the bookshop
• Ask me anything
Junction Bookstore
The First Annual Scavenger Hunt in Thimphu was about to begin which is why the shop looks unusually crowded in this picture.
Photography credit: Upasana Dahal
![cruello:
The Paris Library floods, 1910
1910 Great Flood of Paris:
The 1910 Great Flood of Paris was a catastrophe in which the Seine River, carrying winter rains from its tributaries, flooded Paris, France, and several nearby communities. [read more]
Photo: Historical Library of Paris](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7nwxo0pIR1qcu0ewo1_500.jpg)
The Paris Library floods, 1910
1910 Great Flood of Paris:
The 1910 Great Flood of Paris was a catastrophe in which the Seine River, carrying winter rains from its tributaries, flooded Paris, France, and several nearby communities. [read more]
Photo: Historical Library of Paris
(via the36seconds)
Curious History: The Book Reader of the Future
This appeared in the April 1935 issue of “Everyday Science and Mechanics.” The strange thing about this past prediction of future technology is how similar the shape of the object is to that of original desk top computer. A square box that allows the reader to see enlarged text. Science fiction is frequently a precursor to the future. Although a writer in the 1930’s could not have imagined that the process would be done with a microchip instead of film, the similarities are still quite profound.
(via odditiesoflife)
Gilbert Garcin, The Collector, 2004
A Waking
I was walled inside a dream.
Its walls had no consistency,
no weight: its emptiness was its weight.
The walls were hours and the hours
sorrow, hoarded forever.
The time of those hours was not time.
I leapt through a breach: in this world
it was four o’clock. The room was my room
and my ghost was in each thing.
I wasn’t there. I looked out the window:
not a soul under the electric light.
Vigilant streetlamps, dirty snow,
houses and cars asleep, the insomnia
of a lamp, the oak that talks to itself,
the wind and its knives, the illegible
writing of the constellations.
The things were buried deep in themselves
and my eyes of flesh saw them
weary of being, realities
stripped of their names. My two eyes
were souls grieving for the world.
On the empty street the presence
passed without passing, vanishing
into its forms, fixed in its changes,
and turned now into houses, oaks, snow, time.
Life and death flowed on, blurred together.
Uninhabited sight, the presence
looked at me with nobody’s eyes:
a bundle of reflections over the cliffs.
I looked inside: the room was my room
and I wasn’t there. Being lacks nothing
—always full of itself, always the same—
even though we are not there … Outside,
the clarities, still uncertain:
dawn in the jumble of the rooftops.
The constellations were being erased.
— Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger, in A Tree Within
Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams at Cafe Nicholson in New York City (1949).
(Source: vintageanchorbooks)
Reading Group: George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four
Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell’s nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff’s attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell’s prescience of modern life—the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language—and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written. (amazon.com)
Reading Group on Thursday
We are back to reading and discussing short-stories for a while.
We will be discussing the quintessential Uncanny text according to Freud, ETA Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1816).
We’ll also be discussing Raymond Carver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance’. You can read it online HERE.
In ”Why Don’t You Dance?” a man whose marriage has collapsed puts his furniture up for sale in the front yard, where he has arranged it as it was inside his house, running out an extension cord so that the television and the record player work. A young couple come along and try out the furniture, stay for drinks and then, at the man’s suggestion, dance together in the driveway. The intimacy of marriage is voided, exposed, re-enacted and distanced, all at once. The moment may be said to suggest memory, art, the astonishing bond of intimacy among a world of strangers, the ghostliness of one’s attachment to any place or relationship. (Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds)
