One Good Turn:
- Eugie Foster is fighting lymphoma, and could use a hand, if you’re so inclined… she has some ebooks for sale, which will help her pay for her treatment. I picked up a couple, and figured I’d pass the word on while I’m at it.
Literary:
- Ever been curious to check out Baudelaire? Don’t know which translator(s) most suit your tastes? FleursduMal.org is the site for you. You can read different translations of each of the poems from each edition, and make up your own mind!
- An interview with my friend Christine Lee Zilka and her coeditor at Kartika, about what they’re doing. Sounds like they want to diversify the field of Asian-American lit, which is a good thing. (The rants I’ve heard from a few Asian-American writers on the limitations of the label at the very least suggest this is a good thing.)
- Mallarmé’s vision of what books could become… possibly inspiration for us in this new rebirth of the book?
Story Mill-Grist:
- Has nobody written a weird tale about Margaret Brundage? From Wikipedia: “Margaret Brundage, born Margaret Hedda Johnson (December 9, 1900 – April 9, 1976) was an American illustrator and painter who is remembered chiefly for having illustrated the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Working in pastels on illustration board, she created most of the covers for Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938.”Castigating the old-guard sexists of SF is fine once in a while, but it seems to me that maybe folding these women into our literary consciousness by giving them a place in our stories within the genre might be a more entertaining and powerful way of bringing them into current “genre consciousness.” But if none of you folks out there is going to do it, I suppose I’ll have to…
- U.G. Krishnamurti almost certainly didn’t want people discussing and reading about him once he was gone, but to understand why, you’ll need to read more about him. He’s a thinker mentioned by Thomas Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a book I just finished reading, and mentioned recently. Speaking of which:
- More support for Ligotti’s thesis that, as Eliot put it, “human kind cannot stand very much reality”: a neuroscientist basically says the unreliability of memory is useful because it helps us forget our pains and sorrows–adaptive, I’d argue, is a better word than “useful.” I can hear Ligotti adding, “… for a species so steeped in psychic trauma that is an inescapable part of its own consciousness…” But her contention that art is a stand-in is questionable: art seems more often to be tied up in constructing consolatory fantasies, doesn’t it? Via Jay Lake, whose link salads are the most recent inspiration for my occasional link roundups.
Comical:
- Wanna know who invented the speech bubble in comics?
- I want this, but I know I won’t be able to get it shipped to me till I’m somewhere where it’ll get through the postal system without some censor stomping it. Sigh.
Not So Comical:
- Headlines like this one are going to keep getting more and more common, as climate goes bananas. Just ask people in East and South Asia lately, who suffered from Cyclone Phalin and not long before that, Typhoon Usagi. All we got was a lot of rain here in Saigon. Many were not so lucky.
Music:
- Color and musical synaesthesia is pretty interesting, especially when people try (in a doomed attempt to scientifically analyze the subjective experience without resource to neuroscience) to put together some scientific picture of what’s going on. (Also via Jay Lake.)
- Elgar: Cryptographer? Apparently. Or maybe prankster.
Health:
- My sister recommended I try a diet designed for people with insulin resistance a while back, and we’re considering trying it out now. Here’s one take on what such a diet looks like.
- If you find yourself abroad already, are no longer covered by the insurance system in your home country or the place where you were living until recently, but want/need to get health insurance? Maybe I’ll spare you hours of searching, because I found only one company that was willing to sell me any kind of policy in those circumstances: these folks. (Who were recommended in this thread.)