Got to watch those guys who bath once a week...
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Got to watch those guys who bath once a week...
One is the Gosforth Cross from Cumbria, carved in the first half of the tenth century, towering 4.4 metres high in the churchyard of St Mary's... [it] also has carved stories that we might remember from Norse mythology, including Loki bound and tortured with snake poison for his crimes, and a figure with its foot in the mouth of a monstrous fanged beast, perhaps Odin fighting the wolf Fenrir at Ragnarok.
Reading on the station about out of this world travel.
Bit of a contrast.
He dreamed - of all things, of all damned American things - of the infamous image taken by Michael Collins during the first successful moon mission, back in 1969: the photograph of the lunar module leaving the moon's surface, and of the earth beyond.
No Russian mind should be steeped in these thoughts.
panWell, the good thing about Peirene novellas you don't get on with: they are short.
This Icelandic novella (about a researcher having a breakdown over a mistake she's made in the archive) I think would have been a better short story.
This was the author's first fiction though, so wonder what the others are like. Will they also be translated?
I'm not usually a fan of campus novels, so this one had points against it before the start!
Similar parchments and manuscripts were used in other parts of medieval Europe, with prayers to the saints for safe delivery, invocations against evil, and holy images. One of these, an English scroll from c.1500, was found to have traces of human proteins associated with vaginal fluids, as well as honey, cereals, milk and legumes (all used as historical treatments during pregnancy and childbirth).
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And I moan about biscuit crumbs 😮
Place names might also hint at religious beliefs and practices, the location of cult sites, a local preference for a particular deity....place names such as Selby, Whitby and Wetherby.... 'Willow Farmstead', White Farmstead' and 'Sheep Farmstead'....
Elsewhere, we glimpse... individuals who lived there... Grimsby ('Grim's Farmstead'), Ormskirk ('Orm's Church') and Skegness ('Skeggi's Headland')...
"...and yet you're none of those things..."
Burn!
3/3
Love this series.
I bought this copy second hand, not realising that someone had annotated it.
Very touching: they wrote out the whole final poem, I think clearly a fan.
The legal doctrines the US created to take Indigenous land still govern how the US treats those living at the margins...
Powerful end to a powerful book.
Dangerous times on the Waterstones app...
As recently as 2022, Justice Samuel Alito argued that Indigenous nations do not share a common political interest, because "before the arrival of Europeans, the tribes were at war with each other."
What is sad about these statements is that Supreme Court justices are no better or worse than the general public; most people don't know what a federally recognized tribe is, how jurisdiction works on a reservation...
In a personal letter to President Monroe in 1817, Jackson confessed that he had long viewed treaties with Indigenous nations as an "absurdity." Such treaties were necessary, Jackson wrote, when Indigenous nations were strong and the federal government was still weak, but now, "circumstances have entirely changed." ?
Want!
THE LACTATION CONSULTANT'S OFFICE is in the Boys' Quarters. We squeeze past two jeeps in the narrow driveway to get to the one-room office at the back of the main house. The signage is lopsided, dusty, but my doctor said Dr. Laoye is good at what he does.
Tomorrow, it will be three weeks since the funeral. It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing 'My mother died' on a blank sheet of paper...
Went to hear Toby Green talk about the restitution of museum objects to Africa. As several members of the audience (and the Gambian respondent) pointed out, perhaps reparations, debt relief, climate crisis, economic reconstruction might be ahead in the queue...
Still didn't get to look at the library though.
#MerseyrailFail
A great evening in a beautiful venue.
I wrote this book because I believe the American public needs to understand that the legacy of colonization is not just a problem for Indigenous peoples, but a problem for our democracy.
#WomensPrizeLL25
By far the most exciting read is The Chosen... to hear the familiar streets of Williamsburg described in the opening chapter as "cracked squares of cement,.. softened in the stifling summers,'... my small, crowded district of Brooklyn.... A book about my home! ...
What a wonderful new sensation, to delve into the pages of a book and realize that the familiar sense of alienation, of confusion, was gone.
"Don't you see, girls," Mrs. Meizlish proclaims, "how easy it is to fall into that category of choteh umachteh es harabim, the sinner who makes others sin, the worst sinner of all, simply by failing to uphold the highest standards of modesty? Every time a man catches a glimpse of any part of your body that the Torah says should be covered, he is sinning. But worse, you have caused him to sin. It is you who will bear the responsibility..."
How did I not know TK Maxx have books?
(Could turn into an expensive discovery)
Ooh shiny new books.
Loved Private Revolutions, so hoping I can get (as many as I can read) through the library too...
pickThis is a pacey look at the history of something I'd never thought about, just taken for granted (thinking of the language of police and medical dramas). Kennedy's book is based on an extended article, so it's a relatively quick read about a heavy subject.
I want to read more about the changes in approach and understanding of prosecuting attackers, the impact of dealing with the "rape kit backlog" and remote medicine.
Some politicians argued that survivors should be pushed into going to the hospital for their own good. Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia:...""What we need is trauma-informed care, not just the DNA. We should be encouraging women to go to a clinic...."
The problem with this logic was that so many survivors found the "trauma-informed care"' to be harrowing, and in the aftermath of an attack they didn't want to wait for ten hours in an ER ...
Feeling quite demoralised (work redundancies). This is the kind of inspiring reading that provides a bit of perspective.
Anyone who has ever seen goldfinches fluttering and chattering and alighting on seedheads in meadows, or watched them bumbling through the thistledown they love, will know why the word charm was chosen for their collective noun. A charm of goldfinches soars at dusk, swoops at dawn, sings upliftingly in summer trees. In flight, the yellow stripe spreads into a golden cape.
[CT scans of The Goldfinch] ...show...the painting bears the traces of a blast, the minuscule indentations of hurtling matter, broken shards, hard pellets blown scattershot....
the explosion registered in a surface that did not split or shatter because it was not dry. The Goldfinch was still wet, still drying
.... when I stand in front of this painting it carries the last of his energy....
The painting lives. The creator survives.
Ever since boyhood, the curate had found a secret thrill in the labyrinthine contrivances of mystery novels: that these were set exclusively in a seaside England, where murder was more plentiful, that they were populated by a circular cast of changing names but set character mattered not at all, for the appeal was the same since curiosity first met construction, and was the same one that occupied him now in Troy's kitchen: How was it done?
I once saw, in a hotel in Algiers, a Dutch still life of redcurrants glinting silver dish and was on a momentarily transported to a long-ago Delft day. Paintings can take you anywhere, but they are also a land in themselves, a society, a place to be.
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So many fascinating pictures reproduced in this book.
pickThe New York tourist board should be paying her the £££. Or more likely, the $$$... Such a sweet story about moving somewhere new.
...not being able to neither help...
??!
First (only?) snowdrop in the garden.
She had finally found a way to get rid of this place, this apartment that had taunted her with its sadness, its poverty, with the dirty windows, the misshapen and faded couch and the coffee table with rings from mugs like wet footprints that had dried on the surface. But then another part of her wanted to throw her body onto those piles and stay there forever like a waiting room until her mother came back...
This is what happened in Faha over the Christmas of 1962, in what became known in the parish as the time of the child.
To those who lived there, Faha was perhaps the last place on earth to expect a miracle. It had neither the history nor the geography for it. The history was remarkable for the one fact upon which all commentators agreed: nothing happened here.
#Firstlines
When Sam was little, the Shenzhen Children's Library opened a half-hour walk from her home. It was ahead of its time: the first dedicated children's library in all of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau....a children's library was groundbreaking. It had a mission: 'When the children are wise, so is the nation; when the children are strong, so is the nation.'
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Fascinating look at a group of women's lives growing up in modern China.
panQuite glad to be at the end of this one!
How late is it?" Con asked.
"Late, late," said the taxi driver. "Listen."
A newsreader was speaking to them. A million things were happening out there in the world: scandals and calamities, old lovers reunited, murders foul, great works of art and business. A lioness was moving through the city, she had been spotted in Strand, in Rondebosch, in Gugulethu.
They were seated at the old kitchen table in Woodstock. He'd taken a taxi that morning straight from the airport and found his mother sitting there, reading. It was a quiet scene, and he was visited by equal desires to wake her from her reverie and to keep it intact. Perhaps just sit quietly beside her, pick a book for himself from the shelf. He was intrigued; she'd never been a big reader.
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