Seen on the street

For all the free minds out there: Shake off the shackles to liberate the thinking mind

Rooster: Ereading app to help you read more

Recommended by Book Riot, I decided to try out a new reading app called Rooster that delivers bite-sized pieces of literature straight to my smartphone. After downloading it on trial for a week, I have so far found that it is a good concept catered to fit into the busy schedules of modern people but there are still many teething problems to iron out.

What Rooster essentially does is every month the team would pair two books, one classic and one contemporary, for its readers, a concept that is gaining popularity given a wide range of subscription packages promising unique selections are popping up everywhere from beauty related to organic food products. For the month of April, Rooster recommends “The Mind-Body Problem” by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and “The Kreutzer Sonata” by Leo Tolstoy, both revolving around themes of matrimonial harmony and sexual desires.

To make reading less daunting, Rooster breaks the book down into digestible installments that could be finished in 10 to 15 minutes and allows readers to customize the day and time they prefer to receive the installments, which I thought was a pretty neat function. Below is a screenshot of my settings:But soon I realized that whenever a new installment is delivered, I will be automatically logged out of my account and the app will reset itself back to the default settings. In other words, even if I left off at page five of installment seven, a new delivery will bring me back to page one all over again.

Jack Kerouac and his Golden Eternity

I tweeted this video a couple of days ago but decided it was too beautiful not to share on this blog. Although this video is an advertisement for a bicycle company, the cinematography, music and post-processing made this such a fine piece of artwork. More importantly, the haunting narration was based on a letter written by Beats generation maestro Jack Kerouac to his former wife that makes it existential, transcendent yet romantic at the same time.

This video was so good I watched it on loop for a good 10 minutes, so hope you guys will enjoy it and below is the full text:

Prose in the trash

I was on my way home one day and saw this broken wardrobe door panel, which was stenciled with a sorrowful poem, lying in the middle of a walkway. My heart instantly went to the author who penned it and I quickly took a photo of it as I walked past. Upon closer inspection, I was slightly bemused by the juxtaposition of the sobriety of the content against its location, unwanted and discarded on top of drainage covers and near a yellow warning line.

After doing a quick internet search, I found out that the prose came out of an incomplete stanza from “Maud; A Monodrama” by Victorian poet Lord Alfred Tennyson. The actual stanza flows as such:

Half the night I waste in sighs,

Half in dreams I sorrow after

The delight of early skies;

In a wakeful doze I sorrow

For the hand, the lips, the eyes,

For the meeting of the morrow,

The delight of happy laughter,

The delight of low replies.

Not bad for such a random and spontaneous occurrence isn’t it?

View full poem HERE.

Book map for the bookworm

In this age and era, most of us do not really need a map in our lives since we can pull out an interactive one straight away on our smartphones.

But when I saw this gorgeous book map, I stopped and marvelled at it because contained within the labyrinth of streets and alleys, there are more than 600 literature titles packed into it. Doesn’t that already make this fictional work droolworthy? A Christmas gift idea for your bookworm friend perhaps?

The map can be bought online HERE.