February 2012
11 posts
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Jennie Lowe Stearns and the Radio Free Song Club,...
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“Earth”
(Poem by Les Barker;...
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January 2012
14 posts
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“Television”: Robyn Hitchcock with...
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The dead
Last night I dreamed that the news was reporting that the writer Julio Cortázar had been arrested after fatally stabbing his friend and translator Paul Blackburn during an argument in a Paris bar. While browsing through accounts of the incident and reflecting on how tragic it was, it suddenly stuck me that the reports could not possibly be true, as Blackburn in fact died years ago, in 1971, of...
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WatchMateo (formerly “Brooklyn”) plays the Tail Game.
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Peg Leg Howell: “Low-down Rounder’s...
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December 2011
11 posts
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November 2011
7 posts
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The woman by the stream
A number of years ago I was invited to deliver a lecture at a summer conference on ethnobotany at the University of Tokyo. It was not my first visit to the country; I had been stationed there for two years shortly after the war, and had developed cordial relationships with a number of Japanese colleagues. Although I never learned to recognize more than a handful of kanji, I became fairly...
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Re The Conversions:
“I can only imagine that Capt. Burton alludes to a species of divination once practised in this country, but surely now obsolete, however it may be across the Atlantic. Several old authors give an account of ‘divination by snails,’ in the attempting of which the hearth was covered with white ashes thinly and evenly strewn. A snail being placed amongst...
October 2011
5 posts
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Spencer Holst: "Four Snow Leopards"
Four snow leopards in transit by train to the Cincinnati zoo were by accident loosed from their cage, and unbeknownst to their sleeping keeper, they leaped from the slowly moving boxcar at sunset, together disappearing into a Kansas field burgeoning with wheat that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was not until midnight, when the train pulled into the Chicago station, that their absence...
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The survivor
(Found on the body of a partisan) My Dearest M—, As you are no doubt aware, on the 12th day of this month the invading army, after an extended siege, was able to breach the inner ring of our defenses at several points on the eastern side of the city, leaving our forces in an untenable position. Amid the general evacuation that ensued, our unit was among several assigned to hinder the...
September 2011
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