Hello friends—a few links for reading and other miscellanies:
Watching clips of the Native Youth Olympics recently held in Anchorage is a joy.
Loved this musing by
on how paper dictionaries are always a labyrinth worth exploring.An article on the painter Marianne North, who not only was an intrepid botanical illustrator, insisted on painting plants not singly, as was nineteenth-century style, but in their natural habitat.
“Bearing witness to the atrocities, Zitkála-Šá lent her name and her fury to a 39-page report under the title Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery.” How Zitkála-Šá (1876-1938) wrote, investigated, and created art to expose the atrocities inflicted on Indigenous Americans in the early 20th century.
An open letter to investigate the NY Times’ wreckless ‘reporting’ and elimination of their public editor by a large cohort of journalists and scholars.
An article on the 16th-century Italian writer Moderata Fonte and her book On the Merits of Women, which she wrote before dying in childbirth at 37.
In 1884, Roberts Brothers published a “Famous Women” series of biographies, written by prominent nineteenth-century women writers. How many names do we recognize today?
And a poem by Li Qingzhao (1084 – ca. 1155):
Mist
In my narrow room, I throw
Wide the window, and let in
The profound lasciviousness
Of Spring. Confused shadows
Flicker on the half drawn curtains.
Hidden in the pavilion, wordlessly,
I strum the rose jade harp.
Far away a rocky cliff
Falls from the mountain in the
Early twilight. A gentle breeze
Blows the mist like a shadow
Across my curtain. O bright pods
Of the pepper plant, you do not
Need to bow and beg pardon.
I know you cannot hold back
The passing day.
—trans. by Kenneth Rexroth
The poem, delicious.
I love the poem by Li Qingzhao. Thank you for sharing it!