It’s just depravity that they try to make glorious, natural. But it ain’t.
The beauty of what we do is its secrecy, its smallness.
– TM
Category: language
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Private archive
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 YorkerA guerrilla archiving movement has responded.
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The basest will be well esteem’d
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
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AG2023_1078355a helpful to me, real helpful
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)
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AG2025_1056028a disburdens the air of this dark weather
and by the power of that amorous hope
that sustained you, though life was bitter,
disburden the air of this dark weatherFrom poem 34, Petrarch:The Canzoniere. Translated by: A.S.Kline
Image from page 624 of “The American florist : a weekly journal for the trade” (1885). Appropriate for A Landscape longed for.
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In this here place … love small
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 Morrisonvia The Marginalian.
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040125
040125
Cécé, Emmelie Prophète. Translated from French by Aidan Rooney. Archipelago Books, 2025. Les villages de Dieu, Mémoire d’encrier, 2020 (Un extrait (PDF) est disponible).
Laferrière loves it.
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AG2025_1045258a ou passer du monde visible
Discours de reception de Dany Laferriere, 28 mai 2015.
“C’est Legba qui m’a permis de retracer Hector Bianciotti disparu sous nos yeux ahuris durant l’été 2012. Legba, ce dieu du panthéon vaudou dont on voit la silhouette dans la plupart de mes romans. Sur l’épée que je porte aujourd’hui il est présent par son Vèvè, un dessin qui lui est associé. Ce Legba permet à un mortel de passer du monde visible au monde invisible, puis de revenir au monde visible. C’est donc le dieu des écrivains.”
