un regard oblique

One Web Day
for Boynton
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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.

17.9.08

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

16.9.08

The Mole

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

Merwin/Poetry Daily

13.9.08

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
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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

12.9.08

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

Michael Waters/VerseDaily

10.9.08

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

9.9.08

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

6.9.08

This is an anthology, then, of the writing that gets produced when reasonable men and women fight off the extremes of protest and despair to which they’ve been driven by the devastation of this planet. That makes this a practical-minded collection, commendably light on the vaporous spirituality, the blank stare, found in so much nature writing. This is literature for a cause...

5.9.08

Summer in the City:

...Over there, bending the ear of a young cop who was attempting to pry himself away without leaving his post, was the little man who showed up at all public functions, waving a greasy, much folded piece of paper that may once have been an official document. His cause, an ancient and esoteric grievance, was instantly forgotten by anyone who listened to two minutes of it, although it seemed to keep him alive. The dirty shirtless man with the nine misshapen and mange-ridden dogs was there--from the look of them you assumed a carnival of incest--and so was the marooned Swiss woman with the stainless-steel hip who regularly woke up everybody on the block calling all night for her cat, Gaston...

Luc Sante/Pinakothek