Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Harlem Night Clubs 1932


Details at Big Think.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Photo c.1910


From an incredible series at The Big Picture of color photos taken in Russia a hundred years ago.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Good Tree Gone

Story here.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Poem

This poem, it seems to me, honors anyone ever lost at sea.

New Religion
by Bill Holm

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

"New Religion" by Bill Holm, from The Chain Letter of the Soul: New & Selected Poems. © Milkweed Editions, 2009.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Short Film

Photo


More photos by Johanna Heldebro.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Poem

As a fan of a good rack of ribs in summertime, I am compelled to post this poem by William Notter called "Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz".

She had a truck, red hair,
and freckled knees and took me all the way
to Memphis after work for barbecue.
We moaned and grunted over plates of ribs
and sweet iced tea, even in a room of strangers,
gnawing the hickory char, the slow
smoked meat peeling off the bones,
and finally the bones. We slurped
grease and dry-rub spice from our fingers,
then finished with blackberry cobbler
that stained her lips and tongue.

All the trees were throwing fireworks
of blossom, the air was thick
with pollen and the brand-new smell of leaves.
We drove back roads in the watermelon dusk,
then tangled around each other, delirious
as honeybees working wisteria.
I could blame it all on cinnamon hair,
or the sap rising, the overflow of spring,
but it was those ribs that started everything.

"Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz" by William Notter, from Holding Everything Down. © Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.