Icelandic Saga Database

This website contains all the extant Icelandic family sagas. The sagas are made available in an easy, readable format using modernized Icelandic spelling, with the Old Norse versions and translations into English and other languages made available where these exist in the public domain...

out & about

fans of "Out of the Past" might enjoy seeing its stars re-united in Don Siegel's breezy The Big Steal on TCM late tomorrow...also contains William Bendix!

"Just Those Five Notes" with Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson by Pete Welding - 2/18/1971

Now, if you talk in a certain way – in my case, like a person who spent the first 22 years of his life in a suburb of Boston, you talk in a whole different way – and, if only subconsciously, you attempt to sing the lyrics with an inflection or any other simplation of any dialect you’ve heard, it creates a situation in which the very sentence, as divorced from the music, cannot proceed in a natural, loose and relaxed way. This is why I think there’s an advantage in getting away from the traditional words and using the way you talk yourself – though I definitely would have to agree that the way they talk in Arlington, Mass., is lacking in quite a bit of poetic quality I hear in the way they talk in Mississippi. Nonetheless, there’s nothing gained in attempting to simulate that. You must have to use your own way.
I think a key to this is vowel sounds. You talk a certain way, and most of the sustained notes in blues melodies seem to occur on vowels. Say, you’re singing a melody and the last note of the melody is on the third degree of the scale, the blues note – in C it’s the E flat, E neutral or E natural, whatever it happens to be – and it’s a sustained note. If you are forcing out a certain vowel sound that sounds like the way Bukka White would pronounce “a’s” on some of his early records, it would be like the strangulation of the feeling of poetry, of the sound of your own voice. Whereas if you use your own vowel sound, any vowel sound can be sonorous and sound good if it’s hit at the right pitch level and articulated clearly; anything like that can be good...

YouTube - Canned Heat - Human Condition

YouTube - Canned Heat - On The Road Again

Hipster Dinosaurs

::: Decorated and Decorative Paper Collection :::

This database showcases a selection of decorated and decorative papers from Europe, primarily Germany, France and Italy, produced between the 17th and 19th centuries. Representative samples include Western marbled paper, paste papers and decorative papers, such as Dutch gilt and lithographically or linoleum block printed paper. Some examples of Suminagashi are also included in the database.Selected paper samples in this digital collection include loose samples, as well as paper that has been used for the covers and endsheets of books...

"Vancouver" from radicalcartography

Vancouver districts emerge as a patchwork of different street-naming conventions: all "streets" downtown, a "street"/"avenue" weave through most of the city, but with exceptional areas like the "street"/"drive" zone of Grandview, the "roads" and "malls" of the university, or the paths cut by Broadway and the Kingsway...

Frederick Law Olmsted

The spoils of the park

a couple of Claude Dangerfield record sleeves from this online Sun Ra exhibit...

ISP: Peirce's Century Dictionary Definitions

Peirce's Century Dictionary Definitions

Peirce wrote a great many definitions for the Century Dictionary. View a list in pdf format of Peirce's Century Dictionary definitions extracted from A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce. Find the word of interest in this list, then go to the URL below to view Peirce's definition.

The complete Century Dictionary is available online at www.global-language.com/century. Notice that a CD-ROM of the Century Dictionary is available.

Mushrooms + 40,000 Discarded Books = 1 Garden of Knowledge

Sandwiched within and between the reclaimed and decomposing books are several edible species of mushrooms like oyster and winecap, an intervention that highlights the living, ephemeral and cyclic character of these artefacts...

(thx RP)

Robert Smithson from

The Crystal Land

On the top of a promontory stood there motionless rockdrill against the blank which was the sky. High-tention towers transported electric cable over the quarry. Dismantled parts of steam shovels, tread machines and trucks were lined up in random groups. Such objects interrupted the depositions of waste that formed the general condition of the place. What vegetation there was seemed partially demolished. Newly made boulders eclipsed parts of a wire and pipe fence. Railroad tracks passed by the quarry, the ties formed a redundant sequence of modules, while the steel tracks projected the modules into an imperfect vanishing point...

from Mike Snook's Police Patch Collection - K9 Collection

Richard Howard on Frank O'Hara, quoted at Isola di Rifiuti: Alfred Leslie’s The Killing Cycle

“A man, in particular that emblematic man a poet, who by his surrogate office must stand, in particulars, for the generality—a man who dies at forty is at every moment of his life, we say, a-man-who-has-died-at-forty . . . and retrospectively we glean, in the course of a broken-off existence, the seeds of a destiny which, planted perhaps only by ourselves and cultivated however arbitrarily by our hunger for the inevitable, will bestow upon the blasted biography this flowering: a more grateful contour, an acceptable outline. We say, he was death-ridden, doom-haunted, and that he belonged to the race—as Thomas Mann said of Cocteau—which dies in the emergency ward.”

Russian Types

During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian 'types.' These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation...

out with Shasta & Jake

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE POSTERS

poet Jonathan Skinner is exploring the parks of Frederick Law Olmstead --The Spoils of the Park

Olmsted’s park designs are delightful when you have leisure but a nightmare when you have to get somewhere. (Can I have some leisure please?) I see a greensward at the end of the curve and can only hope against all odds that it is not the same greensward I just left...

Ann Coulter : Human Document

An Investigation Into the Hidden Subtexts of a Public Intellectual's Writings, Using the Techniques of Tom Phillips' "A Humument"

Human Document

from the Century Dictionary V & VI