Flappers at the Chicken Little Inn, circa 1926. From my Elizabeth Wells album.
By God
Sometimes by night I don’t know why
I awake thinking of prepositions.
Perhaps they are clues.
“Since by Man came Death.”
I am puzzled to hear that Man is the agent of Death.
Perhaps it means
Man was standing at the curb
and Death came by.
Once I had a dog
would go with anyone.
Perhaps listening for
little by little the first union.
-from Glass, Irony and God, Anne Carson
It’s something like 65 degrees of gorgeous outside today so naturally I am shunning it in favor of bed & this rather wonderful book.
Milton Bradley’s The Checkered Game of Life (1860) was the original version of Life (though it in turn took heavy inspiration from the even more morally didactic “Mansion of Happiness”). It was marketed in a pocket version and many soldiers carried it in the Civil War which alone is enough to make me want to play it. Tonight’s homework procrastination: figuring out whether I could make a decent facsimile.
Virginia Woolf’s manuscript of To the Lighthouse (Via)
IMG_0002 (by lulubryan)
Secret Natural History Museum in Sheffield now open to the public, home to a skull model of a “Terror Bird,” an extinct type of carnivorous flightless bird that could stand up to ten feet tall.
Young Pope John Paul II, shaving al fresco (via Slide Show: Portraits of the Popes as Young Men : The New Yorker)
Svankmajer’s “Punch and Judy” by anonymous_emily on Flickr.
“Hope grew up and married a mouse who lived in a delicatessen…. She … grew fat on smoked sausages and pickled fish and a dozen sorts of cheeses and biscuits. Cheerful hardly knew her when he went to visit her and see her well-fed family.”
Decades before Facebook, Palmer Brown nailed that disorienting feeling you get from catching up with old friends whose lives have diverged from yours utterly.
Kitchen Stories! Watch it: it’s delightful and sad, my favourite combination.
Hidden Mother (by Mirror Image Gallery)
