Get your kicks on Route 66: The Philosopher's Library moves into a gas station

The Academy of Modern Ruins is repurposing this abandoned gas station on Route 66 as The Philosopher’s Library. Visitors to the website are invited to submit a book that’s changed their life. 

From The Academy of Modern Ruins website:

"Located in the Mojave desert, The Philosopher’s Library will be a remote sanctuary filled with books about leading an examined life, as well as a card catalogue where travelers can share their philosophies for personal well-being. 

Initial preparations for the library are underway. Share the books that changed your life below and we’ll include them in our catalogue. Your description will be printed on a handsome book plate inside the book you’ve recommended."

"Who Steals My Good Name" (W.D. Snodgrass)

W.D. Snodgrass

"Who Steals My Good Name"

(W.D. Snodgrass)

For the person who obtained my debit card number and spent $11,000 in five days

My pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus,

Scowled, "Well, that's the last time I say my name's

Snodgrass!" Just so, may that anonymous

Mexican male who prodigally claims

My clan lines, identity and the sixteen

Digits that unlock my bank account,

Think twice. That less than proper name's been

Taken by three ex-wives, each for an amount

Past all you've squandered, each more than pleased

To change it back. That surname you affect

May have more consequence than getting teased

By dumb kids or tracked down by bank detectives.

Don't underrate its history: one of ours played

Piano on his prison's weekly broadcast;

One got rich on a scammed quiz show; one made

A bungle costing the World Series. My own past

Could subject you to guilt by association:

If you write anything more than false checks,

Abandon all hope of large press publication

Or prizes—critics shun the name like sex

Without a condom. Whoever steals my purse

Helps chain me to my writing desk again

For fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse:

May your pen name help send you to your pen.

   "Who Steals My Good Name" by W.D. Snodgrass was originally published in Poetry magazine, April 2003, and collected in Not For Specialists (2006).  He gained early fame with his first book of poems Heart's Needle in 1959, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960. He taught at Syracuse University for many years and died at his home in upstate New York in 2009.

"Ulysses Seen": Bloomsday online in a graphic novelization

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan can now safely come down from his tower with his robe ungirdled. 

 

It appears as though James Joyce's Ulysses, after having won the battle for literary expression in 1933, is continuing to win the war -- this time on the web, and almost ninety years after the book's first publication. Ulysses Seen, the graphic novelization of Ulysses (online, with an accompanying reader's guide, and created by illustrator Robert Berry) ran into trouble when it was submitted as an iPad application. According to business manager Chad Rutkowski at Throwaway Horse, "I don't think the Apple representative that I first spoke with even knew what Ulysses was."



Apple, apparently, at first decided the graphic novel was a little too graphic and requested Throwaway Horse remove several offending panels depicting partial nudity ("partial nudity," of course, is a salacious, tantalizingly vague oxymoron from an era of more delicate sensibilities). Throwaway Horse complied. 

 

Then representatives at Apple -- after having received the modified app -- looked again at Ulysses Seen and reversed their previous decision. Now both apps are available, just in time for Bloomsday, June 16. And in the same spirit, Apple has agreed to publish a graphic novelization app of that other succes d' scandale, "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. Molly Bloom would doubtless approve, and waits breathlessly.

Yes.

(images from UlyssesSeen, rendered by Robert Berry at Throwaway Horse, LLC)