One Peace Presents Detroit Days of Peace

300,000 in Peace Meditation Sept.21, 2004:

This year One Peace presents many local events with special guest Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee from Sri Lanka, a Gandhi Peace Prize winner and a founder of the Sarvodaya peace movement. 

Please join us at these free seminars and talks with Dr. Ariyaratne before the main event to be held at the Eastern Michigan University Convocation Center from 1-5 PM on the International Day of Peace, Sept. 21st.  This will be one of the largest gatherings held in the United States. All are welcome.

Tuesday, Sept. 9 – Citizens for Peace welcome Dr. Ariyaratne to speak on his approach to peace and nonviolence at Unity of Livonia located at 28660 5 Mile Rd., @ 7 pm.

Wed.,Sept. 10 -  Wayne State University, Detroit, MI  @ 12 noon

Thurs., Sept. 11 – Remembering 9/11 at Hope United Methodist Church located at 26275 Northwestern Hwy. @ 7 pm.

Saturday,Sept. 13 – Visit to the Great Lakes Buddhist Temple located at 21491 Beech Rd., Southfield, 48033 @ 10 am.

Saturday, Sept. 13 – Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center, Oxford, MI @ 6 pm.

Sunday, Sept 14 – Renaissance Unity Church, Warren, MI @ 9 am & 11 am

Sunday, Sept. 14 – The Aetherius Society, Royal Oak, MI @ 1 pm

Sunday, Sept 14  - “I Lift Detroit in Prayer.” A simple, moving ceremony will unite us all in song and prayer.

Tuesday, Sept. 16 – “A Better World Is Possible: Integrated Approach to Peace” Seminar at Schoolcraft College with Dr. Ari & Rick Brooks from 1 – 4 pm. in the Presentation Room of The Vista Tech Center, located at 18600 Haggerty Rd., Livonia, 48152.

Wed.,Sept. 17 –”Grassroots Empowerment: From Community to Global Awakening” Seminar from 1 – 4 pm. at EMU Student Center Auditorium located at 900 Oakwood St., Ypsilanti, 48197

Wed., Sept. 17 – ChildHelp Dinner @ 6 pm. at Mac and Ray’s Restaurant located at
20675 N. River Rd., Harrison Township, 48045. Cost is $25.00.

Friday, Sept. 19 - Short Talk & Free Vegetarian Dinner with Dr. Ari @ 6:00 pm at the Fisher Mansion located at
383 Lenox Ave., Detroit, 48215

Sunday,Sept. 21 – ONE PEACE Event at EMU Convocation Center, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, from 1 – 5 pm.  Meditations & Dialogue with Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, Michael Bernard Beckwith & Rickie Byars Beckwith.

There will be books available for purchase at all events. Donations appreciated.

Questioning Photography: words without pictures

A series of interesting articles on “photographic meaning” is now available from LACMA’s excellent photo blog “words without pictures” — this one from last November: Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be? by CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD mentions critic Michael Fried, whose upcoming book “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before” (Yale University Press) critiques art photography since the Bechers.  The most recent “words w/out pictures” article is on photo repetition; A Picture You Already Know by SZE TSUNG LEONG. 

September 21st is Peace Day

Did you know that September 21st is the International Day of Peace?
Established by a United Nation’s resolution
in 1981 and designated for September 21st in 2001, the International Day of Peace is still largely unobserved…. What can we do in our communities to help celebrate this world day? 

With our positive actions we can contribute. Peace walks & parades, prayers, meditations, peace pledges, vigils, storytelling & concerts; in our schools, libraries, places of worship, at work and with friends. This day is a gift that we can share.WHO CAN YOU TELL? HOW CAN YOU CELEBRATE?

“According to the Peace One Day organization, last year’s Day of Peace (2007) resulted in roughly 1.4 million children receiving inoculations and helped establish a mass polio vaccination program in Afghanistan, reaching children they otherwise would not have been able to as they are living in Taliban-controlled areas.” –Source: BBC, Jude Law Gives Peace Day a Chance  Said Mr. Law: “The message is simple. What will you do to make peace on 21 September?”

Please visit these websites for more info and ideas:

International Day of Peace

Peace One Day(and a fun and easy project for children) Pinwheels For Peace

Shirley Schreidell’s Top Ten

I have so many loves – just Dickens could almost fill the list…. I omit some lengthy choices like Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, (a page-turner!); Paul Scott’s  The Raj Quartet; Trollop’s He Knew He Was Right, and probably the greatest novel, War and Peace.

In no particular order:

1.    The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas,  the greatest adventure tale of all time!
2.    A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, the first paragraph and the final page are two of the most famous passages in all of literature. The plot in between ain’t bad either!
3.    Great Expectations, also by Dickens with his usual array of unforgettable characters (e.g. Miss Haversham in her bridal finery, sitting at the table with the mice-infested cake, and the clock on the wall, stopped at the hour she was jilted long ago!) Like Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Dickens creates great characters!
4.    Ninety-Three, Victor Hugo fast paced story of the French reign of terror in 1793.
5.    Cousine Bette, my favorite Balzac novel of a poor cousin’s revenge against her wealthy relatives.
6.    Chéri and The Last of Chéri, two novellas by Colette, sensuous writing! A middle-aged courtesan trains a 19 year old boy about life and love, ah me, what an opera this would have made with a score by, say, Massenet or Puccini…
7.    McTeague by Frank Norris. Naturalistic style – bare bones dialogue – one of the gloomiest endings ever!
8.    The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Tennessee Williams’ lone novel, with his usual sad, neurotic female – this one adrift in Rome.
9.    The Last Hurrah, Edwin O’Conner. This is an election year. Why not a political novel? This one is excellent – and I laughed for 427 pages!
10.    The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Published posthumously in 1958, this novel is a throw-back to the great 19th century tradition in style. Beautifully written, it is the story of a 19th century Sicilian prince who watches, powerlessly, as his island country slides into what Sicily would become and from which it has still not recovered.
11.    The Death of Napoleon, Simon Leys. What if the real Napoleon had escaped from St. Helena leaving a double in his place? This could be read as a fable – or the nature of greatness – or identity – or just for fun. A Delight!

Whoops! I knew ten would not be enough.

How about plays? – or short stories? – or memoirs? I have loads o’loves there, too…

Bestest,
Shirley

Television Delivers People: Richard Serra & Carlotta Schoolman

“Television Delivers People (1973) is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power-the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo. While canned Muzak plays, a scrolling text denounces the corporate masquerade of commercial television to reveal the structure of profit that greases the wheels of the media industry. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world. By appropriating the medium he is criticizing-using television, in effect, against itself-Serra employs a characteristic strategy of early, counter-corporate video collectives-a strategy that remains integral to video artists committed to a critical dismantling of the media’s political and ideological stranglehold.” — Ubu Web

a clever update response to this video can be seen at You Tube Delivers YOU

Brian Eno & David Byrne

“The album is available exclusively from this Web site. You can stream all of the songs for free and purchase it in a variety of digital and physical formats, including a limited edition Deluxe Package designed by Sagmeister Inc. All formats can be downloaded immediately and physical CDs will be shipped in the Fall.” - David Byrne

Everything That Happens, Will Happen Today a gospel inspired pop classic.

AMAZON’S CON GAME

Interesting how last week on August 1st,  Amazon.com announced it bought ABEbooks, one of the largest resellers of out-of-print books (over 100 million books they claim). ABE was a Canadian outfit that began seven years ago as a service to booksellers who wanted to post their listings online and remain fairly independent about it. Book Beat was one of those thousands of small independent retailers who used the service. We left ABE last year as we saw them become more demanding and greedy. They no longer allowed booksellers to process their own orders, inflated credit-card processing fees and took a larger cut from the already slim margins of booksellers. Bookselling collectives popped up mainly in Europe to combat the oppressive conditions online. Many are now jumping ship under the Amazon announcement of August 1st (at least those who don’t feel the need to give Amazon their share).

It may seem a strange move that Amazon bought ABE, as they claim to see the future of the book only in digital terms:

“…over at Amazon they are inadvertently thinking of ways to make the world worse for children and for the grown-ups who love them to pieces. What Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s founder, wants more than anything is to do away with the book as we know it. “Jeff once said that he couldn’t imagine anything more important than reinventing the book,” said Steven Kessel, one of Bezos’s top guys. Kessel is in charge of digitizing everything in sight.” –The Washington Post

Buying ABE works into Amazon’s strategy of owning and destroying the book market. They did it before in 1999 when they bought Bibliofind. (Book Beat were also once members of Bibliofind, one of the best service providers for professional booksellers selling online). Amazon paid over $20 million for it and then quickly closed it down. Buy out your competition and shut it down. American economics 101.

“Amazon.com has suggested that electronic books–the kind viewed on its Kindle device–are the future. Meanwhile, selling popular paper books helps pay the company’s current bills. So isn’t Amazon’s latest acquisition a step toward the past?” -Wall Street Journal

The small bookseller feels in increasing sense of doom and encroachment not from a level playing field but from a system that forces you to pay your own competition in order to survive -a bit like loading ammunition into your killer’s weapon. The public’s love affair with Amazon has created a non-taxed behemoth here in the US that has helped to decimate local economies and culture in favor of convenience and low price. In France (and other European countries) where books are highly valued and ingrained in their culture, they have laws in place to avoid the practice of mass market discounting and preserve their cultural standards. Amazon continues to pay heavy fines and operates at a loss in order to remain in Europe. Amazon was ordered to pay the French government 1,500 Euros each day they remain in business and hand over 100,000 euro ($146,000) to the French Booksellers’ Union, which sued Amazon in 2004 over its shipping policy. “The union said it was pleased with the court’s ruling, which would help protect vulnerable small bookshops from predatory pricing practices.” -The New York Times  

Another important yet unreported consequence from Amazon buying ABE is that this will also give them 100% owner of Bookfinder.com, the internet’s most powerful booksearch engine. By owning Bookfinder, Amazon will control the most important portal to the access of out-of-print books. Bookfinder is considered the google of the book world. Would Amazon ever consider abusing their stewardship of Bookfinder? You better believe it.

Small publishers too have felt the lopsided and often unjust practices by Amazon a threat to their survival. See: Why I Stopped Selling to Amazon.com  . The joke is  one huge marketing image and claim that “The World’s largest bookstore” has deviously foisted on the public. Their supply of “virtual books” is about the same available to any bookseller (unless they are no longer in business).

Slate magazine: “In fact, Amazon’s “megawarehouse” in downtown Seattle contains just 200 or so titles. Any other book must be obtained from a wholesale distributor or the publisher. This is exactly what any traditional bookstore does when it doesn’t have a book in stock. The difference is that traditional bookstores start out with a lot more than 200 titles in stock. “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore”? More like “Earth’s Smallest.”  --Slate.com on the Amazon Con

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove recently published his memoir Books, a title that describes his long-term love for bookstores and bookselling. He has bought the inventory of no less then 30 bookstores for his own shop Booked Up in Archer City, Texas filled with over 400,000 quality “junk free” books. Many chapters are devoted to tales and obituaries of once loved bookstores with not one  mention of the the ongoing threat from Amazon. The bookselling profession is one fading fast, like the corner drugstore and most remnants of small town USA, it is a cultural footnote passing away.  “Civilization can probably adjust to the loss of the secondhand book trade, though I don’t think it’s really likely to have to. Can it, though survive the loss of reading? That’s a tougher question, but a very important one.” -Larry McMurtry, Books   

Midnight Monster Video

MIDNITE MADNESS W/ wolfman mac & odd clouds

Midnite Madness Monster Party & Twilight Saga Book Release with Wolman Mac & Odd Clouds at the Book Beat Aug. 1st

The Book Beat is having a Midnight Madness Monster Party and book sale on August 1st at 10:00 PM -12:30 AM in honor of Stephanie Meyer’s third concluding book The Breaking Dawn, in The Twilight Saga series being released Friday August 1st at Midnight. This is a book her fans have been waiting for… The Book Beat is located at 26010 Greenfield in Oak Park. Call 248-968-1190 for more information.

Joining the late night festivities will be Detroit’s only local television horror host (actually its Detroit’s only locally produced television outside the news), the legendary . . . Wolfman Mac and his crazy crew of ghouls will be there in the flesh handing out Breaking Dawn books to eager Twilight Saga fans at the stroke of midnight. Its the summertime book happening Stephanie Meyer fans have long been waiting for — and a fun event for the whole family.

Wolfman Mac can be seen on Detroit’s Channel 20 every Saturday at midnight.  Watch the next NIGHTMARE CINEMA show Saturday, July 26th, on TV Channel 20 when he will announce details about the Book Beat Midnight Madness sale. Wolfman Mac shows the creepiest vintage horror flicks with retro cheeseball humor. Fans of the Ghoul and Sir Graves will love it! Listen to a radio interview with Wolfman Mac produced by WDET-FM.   

Also, performing “Live at Lincoln Center” (on the sidewalk in front of Book Beat) beginning at 11 PM will be Detroit’s wild and woolly freakout jam band THE ODD CLOUDS. There is nothing like the Odd Clouds anywhere. Click here to watch a Youtube live video of The Odd Clouds …  In-store guest DJs will rock the store with creepy old school vinyl, lounge music and horror soundtracks. Come prepared and wear your Halloween costume.

Book Beat and the Nightmare SINeMA crew will be filming all the madness for a future commercial to be shown on the Wolfman Mac’s Nightmare Sinema!  Wear a costume and be part of the action… come dressed as your favorite monster, vampire or wolfman…  This will be truly amazing Monster Madness!  AAaaaaaHhhhwwwwwoooooooooahh!!

In celebration of our 25th anniversary, Book Beat will be offering a 25% discount on ALL books Friday, August 1st, 10 AM -12 am and  Saturday, August 2nd, from 10 AM-7 PM.  (costumes are optional) – hope to see you there… stay creepy!

Pictured Above: Detroit’s outerlimit freakout musicians THE ODD CLOUDS!   

TATTOO LIT

Interesting sideline in body art is the literary tattoo - recent article in The Telegraph.UK provides links and a host of images from different blogs devoted to the lit tattoo. Tattoos may be associated in the public mind with bikers and football hooligans, but the growing popularity of more literary designs is finding an outlet on the internet.

LEGALIZE BOOKS

A new cartoon is posted daily on the site Toothpaste for Dinner, a webcomic created by Drew. Each comic is a micro-view inside a tiny surreal world where anything can happen. Using basic stick figures, and a wobbly caffeine inspired line, the artist is able to write convincing social satires with dead-pan humor. I found the above comic in a recent Publisher’s Weekly blog, and since then have been hooked on these utterly sincere, bleak and desperate cave drawings. Drew has done over 2,000 strips; a comic-per-day since 2002, with his partner Natalie Dee they toil endlessly in the salt mines of the humor world selling t-shirts for chuckles.

IMPORTANCE OF SUMMER READING

The long and hot days of summer are the perfect time for children to enjoy, or for the youngest, to discover the joys of reading. NPR’s Michele Norris asks three booksellers for their recommendations for summer reading for kids

Image left and below: Paris, 1929, Andre Kertesz On Reading

“Educators consider summer reading very important in developing life-long reading habits, in maintaining literacy skills and in promoting reading for pleasure. Studies have repeatedly shown that children who continue to read during the summer months perform better when school resumes in the fall. But, when summer vacation starts, many children want to put away their books. They want to be outside, riding bikes, playing softball, or cooling-off in the neighbourhood pool. Committing them to reading, even just a little each day, is a struggle especially when outdoor activities and the modern distractions of television, video games, and the Internet may seem more exciting.”

“Research has also shown that when parents are actively involved in learning at home, their children become more successful in and out of school. When it comes to helping with homework, most parents can hold their own. But, when it comes to reading, they need help. Parents want to know how to select books that interest children and how to create an atmosphere that encourages reading. Today, that help takes many forms; reading lists provided by teachers, summer reading programs sponsored by school and local libraries and educational Web sites that explain the reading process and provide tips on selecting books and advice on how to organize reading activities both parents and children will enjoy. This feature focuses on what the Internet can provide to assist parents in promoting reading at home over the summer.” — Jim Cornish, Classroom Connect, May 2003

One key to children’s reading success is making their reading experience entertaining, relaxing, and enjoyable. Allow children to choose their own reading materials and be aware of what their reading interests are. Help them find books that pique their interests. Below are information about and links to many reading lists that identify high-quality titles and serve many different audiences and purposes.

Notable Children’s Books An annual list compiled by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of ALA.

Top Ten Lists of “All-Time Classics”  ALSC created this list of classics that parents and children can read together for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America for national KidsDay (August 2001). There is one list for preschool to age 8 and one list for ages 8-12.

100 best paperbacks  A list created by ALSC for Reading is Fundamental (RIF).

Newbery Award Books. Each year, ALSC chooses the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children from books released in the previous year.

Caldecott Award Books. Each year, ALSC chooses the most distinguished American picture book for children released in the previous year.

Pura Belpré Award Books. Each year, ALSC chooses two works (one for narrative and one for illustration) that best portray, affirm, and celebrate the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.

Coretta Scott King Award Books Each year, the Coretta Scott King Task Force of the ALA Social Responsibilities Round Table chooses two distinguished books, one by an author of African descent and one from an illustrator of African descent, that promote an understanding and appreciation of the “American Dream.”

Robert F. Sibert Award Books. Each year, ALSC chooses the most distinguished informational book published during the preceding year.

Mildred Batchelder Award Books. Each year, ALSC honors an American publisher for a children’s book considered to be the most outstanding of those books originally published in a foreign language in a foreign country, and subsequently translated into English and published in the United States.

Booklist Editor’s Choice  Lists including “Books for Youth” compiled by editors of ALA’s review magazine, Booklist; with grade levels suggested.

The Teen Read Week website includes a list of resources for materials of interest to teens.

An extensive list of all of the high-school-age reading lists compiled by members of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of (ALA).

Outstanding Books for the College Bound

There are also numerous published lists. A recent one is The New Books Kids Like, edited by Sharon Deeds and Catherine Chastain, Prepared for the Association for Library Service to Children (Chicago: ALA, 2001). This organizes frequently requested materials around 44 topics and indicates grade levels within those topics. Source: ALA