Category: language

the kindling vision it brings;
And for a moment I rejoice

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That whisper takes the voice
Of a Spirit, speaking to me,
Close, but invisible,
And throws me under a spell
At the kindling vision it brings;
And for a moment I rejoice,
And believe in transcendent things
That would make of this muddy earth
A spot for the splendid birth
Of everlasting lives,
Whereto no night arrives;
And this gaunt gray gallery
A tabernacle of worth
On this drab-aired afternoon,
When you can barely see
Across its hazed lacune
If opposite aught there be
Of fleshed humanity
Wherewith I may commune;
Or if the voice so near
Be a soul’s voice floating here.

In a whispering gallery, Thomas Hardy

Studio Museum in Harlem will open in Fall 2025.

Private archive

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The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the January 6th insurrection from its website, and whitehouse.gov took down an explainer page about the Constitution. On February 7th, Trump sacked the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency that maintains the official texts of the nation’s laws, and whose motto is “the written word endures.”

More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark

Julian Lucas, New Yorker

A guerrilla archiving movement has responded.

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https://www.tumblr.com/thunderstruck9/779371060151910400/hernan-bas-american-1978-private-bouquet

The basest will be well esteem’d

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Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are loved of more and less;
Thou makest faults graces that to thee resort.
As on the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteem’d,
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated and for true things deem’d.
How many lambs night the stern wolf betray,
If like a lamb he could his looks translate!
How many gazers mightst thou lead away,
If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!
    But do not so; I love thee in such sort
    As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness; (Sonnet 96), William Shakespeare

AG2023_1078355a helpful to me, real helpful

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I see him still. He’s helpful to me, real helpful. Tells me things I need to know.

Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.

That skill allowed her more freedom hour by hour and day by day than any other work a woman of no means whatsoever and no inclination to make love for money could choose.

(TM)

In this here place … love small

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In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon — everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother — a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.

Beloved, Toni Morrison

via The Marginalian.

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