The Museum of Stones

...stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,

stone from the tunnel lined with bones...

Carolyn Forché
New Yorker

His parents didn't know what to do:

In September[2007], David [Foster Wallace, then 45 years old] asked Amy to forgo her annual fall-break visit. He wasn't up to it. By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn't know what to do. "I started worrying about that," Sally [his mother] says, "but then it seemed OK."

David Lipsky/Rolling Stone 30.Oct.08
via RW

propaganda for gods, clairvoyants and a form of theocratic thought control

I did the entire show with my fly open!

My Heart to Fear

...every whichway, through their hoops
and scorn. For the walls of health are bright...

Heather McHugh
Verse Daily

The Return

...one leopard,
one tree,

and one nameless flower
blooming discreetly
in a corner.

There was all the time in the world...

Kate Lim
Verse Daily

The Laughing Thrush

...yes this is the place and the one time
in the whole of before and after
with all of memory waking into it...

W.S. Merwin 

Verse Daily

Ancient, 26,000-year-old footprints made by a child and a dog

the mendacious myths of Edward Said

A man should cook a decent meal at least twice a week.

The Bedbug Registry

via Danny Yee > Bug Girl

Duck

Instead of the missing Oddities, this will have to do:

Hazel Ruffles had all the diamonds. Alison Chivers held the hearts. The spades were with the dummy.

One Web Day
for Boynton
-
The Queer, the Quaint, and the Quizzical was a book in the university library stacks I found just wandering years ago, when I was young, and read for a while each time I was there. A 19th c. miscellany of weird stuff.
So Futility Closet is a compendium of things drawn from suchlike books, and many of them, and it was what I was going to link to as the One Web Day example of the internet's provident nature and overall good richness.
So but of course it is currently down, or gone, or missing for a while.
This after spending a few hours today poring over its Oddities archive.
Which may reappear any moment now.
As the somewhat missing Ramage has done.

Moving
Maria Bamford
SuperDeluxe.com
-
via Dayrobber
Dayrobber has the great business model

The Mole

..not in itself but later
in signs of its going
a reminder..

Merwin/Poetry Daily

The Deadly Sins/Despair;The One Unforgivable Sin

Yet there remains a persistent counterimpulse, an irresistible tug toward stasis and toward those truths that, in Melville's words, will not be comforted. At the antipode of American exuberance and optimism there is the poet's small, still, private voice, the voice of individual conscience; the voice, for instance, of Dickinson, who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, mined the ideal vocabulary for investigating those shifting, penumbral states of consciousness that do, in the long run, constitute our lives. Whatever our public identities may be, whatever our official titles, our heralded or derided achievements and the statistics that accrue to us like cobwebs, this is the voice we trust. For, if despair's temptations can be resisted, surely we become more human and compassionate, more like one another in our common predicament.

Joyce Carol Oates/NYTimes 25.Jul.93
-

There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows +substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - Across - upon it -
As One within A Swoon -
Goes +safely - where an Open Eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone

Emily Dickinson
Dickinson Electronic Archives

...and yellow flesh
And hinge of beak still beckoning...

Michael Waters/VerseDaily

You (actress)
-
The most comfortable music on earth.
-
Nobody Knows (誰も知らない; Dare mo shiranai)
-
IFC

There is at least one gratifying juxtaposition:

But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the world remains fuzzy around the edges. If we were told that our computer worked because there was an angel inside, some of us couldn’t disprove it. The cultures were undivided in Leonardo’s day, but now those of us who deal in metaphors don’t know how to make machines. If we wanted to move a mountain, we would have to rely on faith.

Hilary Mantel/LRB
-
The author Hilary Mantel is very well-respected around here.
Stones/Scorcese response any minute now.