Yasunari Kawabata

The first Japanese author to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata is a name I had regrettably not heard before today. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his short story "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket", I purchased his "Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories" - a series of short stories written over the span of his career - and greatly look forward to reading them!

I picked up also the collection of short stories "A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories" by Primo Levi (an Italian writer) and "Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories" by Stuart Dybek - an American author whose excellent article "The Surprising Power of Stories That Are Shorter Than Short Stories" introduced me to both previously named writers. In it, he discusses the dual visuality of haiku in their original form, speaks of poetry in fiction, and wraps up the article with the beautiful finishing lines: "Even though we all write on computers now, I still think of writing as words on paper. And when you write a story or a poem, it just illuminates. Meaning shines through words like light through cut paper, beaming out into the night, and projecting its image onto another person’s heart."

Revelation 6:8

Webster's Bible Translation:
And I looked, and behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell followed with him. And power was given to them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Other translations of this particular passage can be found here - it's really interesting to see the small variations. Personally, I like the Webster's Bible translation best, though I prefer the use of "Hades" instead of "hell". I think, following the version above, I like the New International Version best. Any thoughts?

Game of Thrones by Darina Darvin

I love calligraphy.

I also love quotes. So this project by Darina Darvin, a Russian woman from Kazan, is too good not to share. Done in Uncial script, Darina wrote down the mottos for the different houses in Game of Thrones, and it's beautiful. Check out the entire project here, and my favorites below.

T-shirt Prints

For my brother's Birthday I tossed together some t-shirt prints I thought he'd enjoy - for the last one I used his favorite line from the Monty Python dead parrot skit. They're all concepts I found online and liked, but while I pretty much recreated the first two I made the last one in my own style. Now he just has to buy himself some t-shirts (best if he finds ones he likes) and iron these prints on!