14.1.08
13.1.08
9.1.08
Over twenty months, five hundred and seventy-five letters passed between them. Elizabeth Barrett Browning would later describe her physical improvement over these months as a resurrection, a shedding of the "graveclothes" in which she had allowed her illness and morbidity to dress her. Her family must have felt so too on that day in January, 1846 when she suddenly appeared downstairs: she had hardly been out of her room in six years, and even then only when carried. Eight months later, after she and Browning had eloped to Florence, the men in the family would virtually rebury her: her brothers refused to communicate for years; her father refused forever, returning her letters unopened, rejecting her son, and cutting her from his will. One of the last poems she wrote as Elizabeth Barrett was the sonnet to Browning in which she asks, "How do I love thee?" and then counts the ways; the first poem written in her miracle, second life as Elizabeth Barrett Browning was called "The Runaway Slave" [At Pilgrim's Point].Browning, Barrett, Love
Today In Literature
Delancey Place
"Out of approximately 200,000 species of flowering
plants, only about 3,000 have been used extensively
for human food. Of these, only fifteen have been and
continue to be of major importance: four grasses
(wheat, rice, maize, and sugar), six legumes (lentils,
peas, vetches, beans, soybeans, and peanuts), and
five starches (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams,
maniocs, and bananas)."
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"Today, there are just over 6 billion people on earth.ibid. sort of
Six hundred years ago, in 1400, humankind was just 6
percent of that, or about 350 million, slightly more than
the current population of the United States. ... The 350
million people living in 1400 were not uniformly
distributed across the face of the earth, but rather
clustered in a very few pockets of much higher density.
Indeed, of the 60 million square miles of dry land on
earth, most people lived on just 4.25 million square
miles, or barely 7 percent of the dry land. The reason,
of course, is that that land was the most suitable for
agriculture, the rest being covered by swamp, steppe,
desert, or ice.
"Moreover, those densely populated regions of earth
corresponded to just fifteen highly developed
civilizations, the most notable being (from east to
west) Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Indonesia,
Indochina, the Islamic West Asia, Europe, Aztec, and
Inca. Astoundingly, nearly all of the 350 million people
alive in 1400 lived in a handful of civilizations
occupying a very small proportion of the earth's
surface. Even more astoundingly, that still holds true
today: 70 percent of the world's six billion people live
on those same 4.25 million square miles."
8.1.08
...who was not fruitful,Catherine Carter Verse Daily
who did not multiply, who had no dominion...
7.1.08
Sze Tsung Leong: I wrote about two types of beauty, one that is singular, planned, and imposed, the other that is manifold, unplanned, and accumulated slowly over time through historical layering. It’s this second type that is being destroyed in Chinese cities through the narrowing of history in order to build the present. Now, since China is in transition, there are still places where you can see a layering of history, but as these get destroyed, and others “preserved”—that is, rebuilt so that they become a very specific idea from the present of what the past should be—they become rarer and rarer.
6.1.08
3 Kings:
King George V Dock 1957The site is Virtual Mitchell, linked through the Glasgow Digital Library
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5 King St 1916
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King's Cinema and cafe c.1930
With nature and a cameraPhotographing a kingfisher's nesting hole in a river's bank
Being the adventures and observations of a field naturalist and an animal photographer
Richard Kearton, Author of "British Birds' Nests," "Birds' Nests, Eggs, and Egg-Collecting," etc. etc. 1898
Glasgow Digital Library
We set sail with a gentle breeze of wind, bearing to the westward, and were not well got out of the harbour, when Mr Campbel observing the whiteness of the waves attended with an extraordinary noise beating upon the rocks, express’d his dislike of it, as in those parts a never-failing prognostick of an ensuing stormA Late Voyage to St Kilda, by Martin Martin. First published in 1698
The feather store (restored), where feathers were kept to be paid as rent
Abandoned Communities ..... St Kilda
5.1.08
Wind rattled the TV antenna on the roof.
Boys with green teeth showed themselves
At our picture window.
The bird remained silent.
4.1.08
the chronophaged links in the Sottsass post below:
house
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second link here
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and the room divider, also featured at Click Opera
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