Links loved:
I am daydreaming about staying in this gorgeous residential library next time I get to the UK.
A medieval Japanese scroll depicting rats cooking up a banquet.
A review of Louisa May Alcott’s excellent non-fiction essays.
A 10th-century culinary poet’s work.
It ought to be the rhythm of words, and their units, that tells you about their boundaries. A fascinating history of punctuation—and how early texts had none.
One of the only things I miss from twitter: weird medieval guys. And now, happily, there is a book collection.
“What is your substance, whereof are you made / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” How a digital world could confirm that we are all ghosts.
And this beautiful post by
on writers as memory keepers—and what we lose when collective amnesia persists.Vocations
Praising the craft of war in poems slashed by the censor,
with violent rhyme and valiant hatred of man for man,
youngsters with thighs of flint tightly bound in leather
went with a clang of greaves and terrible flash of arms.
Euphorbus stabbed Patroclus; beautifully Hector gored him,
Hector was beautifully slain by thunder-helmeted Achilles!
Sing the club and ax, the brave and double-edged blade,
the arduous dance of blows, keen foresight of resistance.
Yours is the task of judging in a forceful soldierly stanza
man's hatred of man, and clothing the verdict in a chant—
while my fiery task
is to strain in the night's cool pitchers
the resonant honey
of a woman's
different
song.
--Zuzanna Ginczanka, trans. by Alissa Valles
Gladstone's Library was funded with money from owning enslaved people.Bad history.
I loved the rat wedding banquet!