Concerns, Quotes, Spider-Man, Animals and Writers

nypl:

Lisa is enjoying her time at the library. 

lisasimpsonbookclub:

No shame.

Submitted by hoaxdream

Source: soulofromanticism

(via itsallaboutdogs)

writersnoonereads:

A guest post from Dan Visel of With Hidden Noise:

No one reads Charles Montagu Doughty. I first came across the man in Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, still one of the best pointers to underappreciated writers and artists around. In “The Symbol of the Archaic,” he writes:

… the great unknown of English letters, Charles Montagu Doughty, who suspected all writers after Chaucer of whoring after strange dictionaries, who went into the Arabian desert (or “Garden of God”)—the most archaic act of modern literature—to save, as he said, the English language.

     That salvation is still one of the best of books, the Travels in Arabia Deserta, though we have neglected his masterpiece, The Dawn in Britain, with its archaic theme and its archaic English. (p. 23)

Davenport’s précis is surprisingly accurate. Doughty’s best-known work is a 600,000 word account of his largely solitary travels in the Arabian peninsula starting in 1872. Ostensibly taken with an interest in archaeology, Doughty discovered very little. Dead set in the correctness of his Christianity and the falseness of Islam, he refused both to proselytize and to pretend to be Muslim. His prose reads like nothing else in English:

I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Beduins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honourable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion. But I had eaten of their cheer, and might sleep among wolves. The fortune of the morrow was dark as death, all ways were shut before me. There came in a W. Aly sheykh and principal of that tribe’s exiles, he was a hereditary arbiter or lawyer among them, in the custom of the desert: the arbiter sitting by and fixing upon me his implacable eyes, asked the sheykhs of the Moahîb in an under-voice ‘Why brought they the Nasrâny?’ They said, ‘Khalîl was come of himself.’ (p. 551)

This did not go over immensely well with the reading public in 1884, but T. E. Lawrence was a fan of the book and brought about its republication in 1921. Andrew Taylor’s biography God’s Fugitive (1999) traces the life of this supremely prickly man who called himself Khalîl, focusing largely on Doughty’s trip to Arabia. Dover put out a two-volume edition of Travels in Arabia Deserta in 1980 which reproduces his illustrations nicely; a version abridged by Edward Garnett (sometimes called Wanderings in Arabia) can also be found.

Doughty’s later books are no less strange, though much harder to find, as none of them seem to have been reprinted. The Dawn in Britain (1906) is a six-volume epic poem presenting a new mythology of the founding of Britain. I have a copy of The Cliffs (1909), a chamber drama about the imminent danger of a German attack on Britain – Arabia made Doughty a patriot. The dramatis personae includes, among others:

SIRION, divine shining One from heaven; one of the Mighty Powers of the Universe.
YAMÎN and SHEMÔL; two strong heavenly Spirits, with Sirion.
TRUTH, (sunborn eternally on the Earth;) and a company of LIGHT ELVES with him.
JOHN HOBBE, Crimean veteran, now a shepherd on the Cliff.
TWO FOREIGN AERONAUTS, with their MACHINIST; that are Spies.
A LITTLE DEFORMED MAIDEN, (a ladys daughter, living abroad.)
MAKEPEACE, John Hobbes wife, (who does not speak.)
SOULS OF BRITAINS SLEEPERS.
GHOSTS OF ENGLANDS HERO-DEAD.
FOREIGN GHOSTS; (BUONAPARTE and THE MAID OF ORLEANS.)

One can’t imagine that this was ever performed. The text, in blank verse, sends one scrambling for the Oxford English Dictionary from Hobbe’s first speech:

Now in my once young veins, begins to creep
Dull age, rheums too. I moun, these lambing nights,
Lie out, in wind and wet, amongst the ewes,
In fold; that now I’ve pitched gin the heath-croft.
I feed them there of rapes, to give them strength.
     I may not rest, as I wor wont of sleep;
So a wimble bores my brain, of busy thought:
Wherefore, what though ’t be chill for an old wight,
I’ve left them ruckling mother sheep; to pace
Awhile here to and forth, longs the sea-cliff. (p. 3)

And so it goes for another 250 pages. With Doughty, there’s always the threat of crackpottery. But his English is like that of no one else, and he should not be forgotten.

[This is a guest post from Dan Visel of With Hidden Noise]

hollyblack:

accidentalformalist:

Francis Alÿs

The Nightwatch

Surveillance cameras observe a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms of the National Portrait Gallery at night.

FOX!!!!!

WHY WASN’T HE IN THERE WHEN I VISITED?!?!?

(via quelyn)

classicvava:

The Joanina Library at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

Source: necho1benryngksai

Source: cbords

Source: rupertzcat

photo-secession:

Gisele Freund - James Joyce, Sylvia Beach & Adrienne Monnier  (1938)

obitoftheday:

Obit of the Day: “Mama Bird”

Evelyn Bryan Johnson spent 102 years on earth…and 6 1/2 of those in the air. Mrs. Johnson held the record for the most flight hours logged by any women in the history of aviation: 57,635. (Mrs. Johnson is actually second all-time behind only Ed Long who logged over 64,000 hours.)

The first time Mrs. Johnson took a lesson is was 1944, her husband was fighting in World War II, and she was lonely and bored. From that moment she was in “love at first flight,” and before she had to give up the cockpit in her 90s Mrs. Johnson would fly 5.5 million miles. She would eventually become a flight instructor, run an airport in Morristown, Tennessee and an examiner for the FAA.

Called “Mama Bird” by many of her students, Mrs. Johnson was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2007.

NPR has two excellent pieces on Evelyn “Mama Bird” Johnson:

• Her obituary from May 11, 2012
• A piece from 2003 where Weekend Edition Saturday host, Scott Simon, flew with the then-93-year-old instructor

(Image of Evelyn Bryan Johnson from 1957 is property of the U.S. Air Force and courtesy of www.themarysue.com)

Check out a couple of other female pilots featured on Obit of the Day:

- Barbara Harmer, the first and only, woman to pilot the Concorde

- Betty Skelton, the “Fastest Woman on Earth”

Source:

Next up to read. 

writersnoonereads:

With only three books in print in English translation, it seems no one reads Juan Jose Saer (1937-2005). Believed by many to be the greatest Argentine novelist of the 20th century, Saer’s work, like his more well-known contemporaries Cesar Aira and Roberto Bolano, toys with the limits of genre, ultimately expanding our sense of what a novel can be. Befitting a novelist whose work straddled so many genres, Saer’s voice ranges from the lyrical to the hard-boiled.

Proof of his voluptuous lyricism is evident in the following passage from his novel of cultural dislocation and cannibalism, The Witness (trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Saramago and Javier Marias):

Amongst so many strange things: the predictable sun, the countless stars, the trees that resolutely put on the same green splendor each time their season mysteriously comes round, the river that ebbs and flows, the shimmering yellow sand and summer air, the pulsating body which is born, grows old and dies, all the vast distances and the passing days, enigmas which we all in our innocence believe to be familiar, amongst all these presences that seem oblivious to ours, it is understandable that one day, in the face of the inexplicable, we experience the unpleasant feeling that we are just voyagers through a phantasmagoria…. But, despite its intensity, that feeling, which we all have sometimes, does not last and does not go deep enough to unsettle our lives. One day, when we least expect it, it suddenly overwhelms us. For a few moments familiar objects are totally alien to us, inert and remote despite their nearness.

And his hard-boiled, gritty realism is evident in the opening of the recently published translation of Cicatrices (Scars, trans. Steve Dolph):

There’s this filthy, evil June light coming through the window. I’m leaning over the table, sliding the cue, ready to shoot. The red and the white balls area across the table, near the corner. I have the spot ball. I have to hit it softly so it hits the red ball first, then the white, then the back rail between the red and the white ball.

In addition to Scars, Open Letter Books has also recently published The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, which leaves us with the hope that we will one day be able to strike Saer from the roll of Writers No One Reads.

For more, see this appreciation in The Nation or this obituary published in the Guardian.

[Image via]

Zeplin.