“archy and mehitabel,” meanwhile, has never gone out of print since it first appeared, 84 years ago

Miss Mara, mistress of the high wire
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Miss Mara at Circopedia

to Louise Norcross from Emily Dickinson:

I want so much to see you, and ask you what it means, and why this young life's sacrifice should come so soon, and not far off. I wake in the morning saying "Myra, no more Myra in this world," and the thought of that young face in the dark, makes the whole so sorrowful, I cover my face with the blanket, so the robins' singing cannot get through - I had rather not hear it. Was Myra willing to leave us all? I want so much to know if it was hard, husband and babies and big life and sweet home by the sea. I should think she would rather have stayed... She came to see us first in May. I remember her frock, and how prettily she fixed her hair, and she and Vinnie took long walks, and got home to tea at sundown; and now remembering is all there is, and not more Myra. I wish 'twas plainer, Loo, the anguish in this world. I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side. The thought to look down some day, and see the crooked steps we came, from a safer place, must be a precious thing...

letters from dickinson to frances and louise norcross
Emily Dickinson's Correspondences
search "blanket" site:archive.emilydickinson.org
Emily Dickinson Archives

Jones Benally
23rd Annual World Hoop Dance Contest
Indian Country Today

These well-cleaners

Madrid has a lot of serious underground
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also a lot of guitars

Because We've Landed on the Moon but Nobody Wants to Live There

Thank you David Bowie

As if the landscape isn’t alien enough, an entire island of giant cacti pops out in the middle of nowhere

Mashan County is in desperate lack of natural resources, Wangmo Guizhou province My 24, 2008.

Alejandro Olivares photo essay Living Perifiria 
 Burn Magazine
via MEDIAPART

12 shemales on the scene, 14 years roaming, of stripper on stripper, for vacant corners of big avenues, for full population mud huts, for unknown hamlets on the official map, raising and lowering leaky tents, living in boxes that look like sandwich cars; a little and a little gypsy circus, bending songs of elderly Latinos, a whistle before going on stage, a moron in charge of sound, as Olga Tanon Maxim; Thiare Salome, Ashly and Kasandra as the trio Pandora, wearing sequined second selection, using makeup craft fairs, sporting lush crepe paper boas, pants tucked into the crack, plastic wigs, hair in the armpit; poster peaks, peaks of gum magic trick in the crotch, a pregnant lesbian transvestite; lovers, a hoarse voice and Choriza scares the curtains; quilters eating chicken bones, Don Ramon on the wall; tongue kisses, a man who looks like Madonna, a transvestite in a wheelchair; Fabiola Taylor; queen show, the regent of gossip, the Broadway Circus bitch
Broadway Backstage
Alejandro Olivares

arcing through space

From a post at wood s lot
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The Livonians or Livs are the nearly extinct indigenous inhabitants of Livonia, a large part of what is today northwestern Latvia and southwestern Estonia. They spoke the Uralic Livonian language, a language which was closely related to Estonian and Finnish. As of 2010, there was one person still living who was known to have learned Livonian as her mother tongue and approximately 30 who had learned it as a second language. This last native speaker of Livonian, however, died in 2013. 

Entry at wikipedia, whose Jimmy Wales came out pretty strong on the Snowden thing recently.
So Manning, Jimmy. Chelsea Manning. What'ya got?

One of us has a twitter account

Bose was a famous trial of the 'electric kiss'. It was an attractive young woman - isolated was established - through the electrostatic latent drawn electrically charged. The men in the company were then challenged to kiss her. Once the brave volunteers brought his lips near her cheek, there is a spark jumped on the man and shrank back. .

Bonne fête Joni!

until it sticks:

I look again at Alexandra's face as she sat in the garden and I recall a sentence by Anton Chekhov, who was also a doctor. "The role of the writer is to describe a situation so truthfully... that the reader can no longer evade it."

John Berger
via wood s lot

Margaret Atwood

...what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect back stage where we can be ‘“ourselves”? What happens to us if we must be “on” all the time?

Atwood on Eggers at NYRB

Dante Dan Brown downtown/uptown in the NYRB

I will read most anything to hand, in a priority/accessibility matrix of proximity and effort-to-get-to sort of way. So there's a science-fictiony thriller title calling out from the paperback rack at the adjunct suburban library some months back so okay, Dan Brown, okay, but not the DaVinchy Code one. Cuz I won't willingly read that. Will, but not willingly. For reasons of past experience with pop-cult idiocy and crap-mind sludge-candy.
 So okay. I read it, the one calling out from the library.
Ghastly non-literary accumulation of words, clunk rhythms and poetryless gurge...but. It's got this NSA premise and seeming insider info context that was timely as shit, as I read it this summer(2013)...published in 1998, so written before that.
 It's like he has this grasp of some unspoken facts and unseen complexities of thread and no art to deliver it with, just the slog of a barely literate mind using the format of "book" to present the info. The halting testimony of an ESL witness to some off-camera disaster. A not-so-bright adolescent who just happened to be at the scene. A drooling stuttering oracle, gems of prophecy puked up in a stream of meaningless spew . In a social context where glib emptiness and confidently delivered nada sells, and the market's driven by retarded enlightenment baby-stepping toward  predicated and secured truths.
His moral stance in DF is right out of the pseudo-manly pulps of 50's sf, window dressing.
He's trying, his heart's somewhere near it, but again, it's like so much of the literary spew these last decades. Idiots who think art is purely a commercial artifact, useful for conveying some "thing", like truth or ethical instruction, as opposed to art being unavailable to consumer eval without reduction to commodity. Didactic use of the form without any recognition there's a higher business of art that won't be visible bent to the service of anything other than itself.
A horrible book, prescient and homely, not quite WTF, not quite yeah.

Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient. from a book ad at cryptogon

"Like a shadow gliding along beneath one's feet, the posthumous & bereaved life. Silent speech can ring deafening in the ears."
Joyce Carol Oates ‏@

Slingerland hated the railroad, and he could not see as Neale did, or any of the engineers or builders. This old trapper had the vision of the Indian -- that far-seeing eye cleared by distance and silence, and the force of the great, lonely hills. Progress was great, but nature unspoiled was greater. If a race could not breed all stronger men, through its great movements, it might better not breed any, for the bad over-multiplied the good, and so their needs magnified into greed. Slingerland saw many shiningbands of steel across the plains and mountains, many stations and hamlets and cities, a growing and marvelous prosperity from timber, mines, farms, and in the distant end -- a gutted West.

Zane Grey @today in literature