Personae

In a 1920 letter, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The stock joke of the London stage is a fabulous stage direction ‘Sir Henry turns his back to the audience and conveys that he has a son at Harrow.'”

This is perhaps beaten by J.M. Barrie, who allegedly told a young actor in one of his plays, “I should like you to convey when you are acting it that the man you portray has a brother in Shropshire who drinks port.”

(Futility Closet)

 

https://tilbageidanmark.tumblr.com/post/798054739191431168/old-danish-text-about-witchcraft

Cortège - Shaw’s Directions For His Funeral

“My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed, not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honour to the man who perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the single exception of Noah’s Ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind yet seen.”

— George Bernard Shaw, letter to The Academy, Oct. 15, 1898

Via Futility Closet

Analog Days - excerpt

This is something that happened before it all started: My Berkeley friend offered me her ex-fiancé’s old car. You try to go back to the beginning but when you do there’s still everything before the beginning, and what about that? All sorts of things keep happening, as the history books say: some of them good, some of them bad.

The ex-fiancé had wanted to learn Arabic and gone to the language institute in Monterey, he couldn’t afford to study it otherwise. Accordion player, Dylan fan. He would never have to serve. That was pre-. Now it was after and he was off to Iraq and decided to drive across the country to where he had to report for duty. After a breakdown (not automotive, mental), he left his car in Boulder, flew to Georgia. The car was mine if I wanted it.

A strange letter came in the mail, sealed with black duct tape and written in crazy-looking capital letters. It was a handwritten deed on the back of a page of Arabic language exercises.

I called the Colorado number I had and spoke to an old man who said yeah, it’s on the lawn, come’n get it. I had pictured a Toyota or Honda for some reason; it was a brown Ford Bronco, the old kind.

The whole thing started to feel too weird.

I didn’t call back or go get the truck. Someone I didn’t know had had a breakdown in it and was off to the war in Iraq and it just didn’t seem worth it.

I asked my friend every now and then about her ex-fiancé. She said she got emails saying if she knew what he was doing she would never speak to him again. Then I started seeing the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and imagined the duties of an Arabic translator, and was glad not to have his Ford Bronco. I wondered if, technically, I owned it, the deed was still in a drawer somewhere, I thought, but I’ve packed and moved across the country since and never saw it.

Someone finally went on TV, wrote editorials, about what he had done at Abu Ghraib and why and who had told him to. Finally someone said it. He became one of my heroes, pretty much all we had in that terrible year. It took a while before I made the connection and realized that it’s his car I could have owned, or maybe do own. I pictured driving around in it sometimes, in my mind, listening to Dylan. One of the dark albums, the ones about America. Blood on the Tracks, Bringing It All Back Home. I guess really they’re all dark.

Read more: Literary Hub

From Analog Days by Damion Searls.

Lost Jack Kerouac story found at assassinated mafia boss' estate sale

A lost story written and signed by legendary San Francisco writer Jack Kerouac has been found among the belongings of an infamous mafia boss who was gunned down in 1985. The two-page story, titled “The Holy, Beat, and Crazy Next Thing,” was written shortly before the publication of Kerouac’s 1957 masterpiece “On the Road.”

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Darker Children’s Editions

Wrong Hands

Watch Out For Her - Samantha M. Bailey

This psychological thriller tells the story of Sarah Goldman, her husband Daniel and their young son who are starting over in a different city across the country. In her previous home Sarah, a stay at home mum, thought she’d found the ideal caregiver for her son, Jacob. Holly, a med student, wanted to spend time away from her parents and Sarah needed some time to pursue her photography career. Jacob, Sarah and Holly seem to be a good fit and things are going swimmingly but there are early signs that things might go awry. The story is told from several viewpoints and flashes back from the present day in Toronto where the family has moved to escape an undisclosed but unpleasant situation with Holly to the recent past in Vancouver. When Sarah finds hidden cameras in her new home she realizes that she has not left the past behind. Who is watching now? The story, after a bit of a slow start, takes a lot of twists and turns. It wasn’t gripping but the plot held my interest and kept me guessing. This novel doesn’t put demands on the reader and would be a  perfect airplane or beach read. 

Collective Farm

In the best collective use,

Geese afoot are gaggles

(Even when one goose gets loose,

Falls behind and straggles);

Skein‘s the word for geese in flight.

Turtledoves form dools.

Barren‘s right (though impolite)

For a pack of mules.

Starlings join in murmuration,

Pheasants in a rye,

Larks in lovely exaltation,

Leopards, leap (they’re spry).

Ducks in flight are known as teams;

Paddings when they swim.

Herrings in poetic gleams

Please the wordsmith’s whim.

Cats collect into a clowder,

Kittens make a kindle.

Sloths of bears growl all the louder

As their forces dwindle.

Lapwings gather in deceit,

Apes convene in shrewdness,

Mares in stud (an odd conceit

Bordering on lewdness).

Foxes muster in a skulk,

Squirrels run in drays

While collectives in the bulk

Make up word bouquets.

— Felicia Lamport

Via Futility Closet

A Parthenon Made From 100,000 Banned Books

 

It’s Banned Books Week 2025.  Argentine artist Marta Minujín has created a full-scale architectural replica of the Parthenon in the German city of Kassel using 100,000 banned books from all over the world, collected from public donation. The colossal structure stands on Friedrichsplatz — a park where thousands of books were burned in 1933.

Via everlasting blort

Funeral For A Postponed Death

Nearly 50 years ago tens of thousands of people were seized off the streets without a trace by Argentina’s right wing dictatorship. The search for justice never stopped. In 2011 Marta Dillon was finally able to lay the body of her mother to rest. 

I knew that Marta Taboada’s body had been found, because her daughter, also named Marta, had written about it in the newspaper where we both worked. I’d learned the details in an article published on the back page of Página/12 on November 24, 2010:

My mother was murdered on February 3rd, 1977, at 2:05 in the morning, on the corner of Santamarina and Chubut, Ciudadela. Her death certificate says: “Multiple bullet wounds. Jane Doe, thin, 5’4″, dyed blond hair…” My mother is now, concretely, a skull with a few teeth, a morphologically designated jaw, tibias and femurs, radii and ulnas, clavicles. I’m sure I’m making mistakes in this listing of bones, but I do know that her torso is still missing. She, however, is not.

I remember that I sent Marta an email with a subject line that read “Uf.” The body of the email was only: “Martita, your back page today is extraordinary. Extraordinary. I don’t have much else to say, I’m still in shock.” I don’t think I ever spoke directly to her about her mother’s reappearance.

I did know the details, though. How Marta (mother) had lived clandestinely, a militant member of the Frente Revolucionario 17 de Octubre, in a house in Moreno on Calle Joly, near the train station, with her four children (Marta, Andrés, Juan, and Santiago), her boyfriend, Juan Carlos, and Gladys Porcel. How a squad had burst into that house, taken away the adults, and left the children behind, all witnesses to the kidnapping.

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From the book Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enriquez