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“Dead man and devil”, Digestum Vetus with glossa ordinaria, f. 245 by Justinian, France c. 1300-1310 via The British Library, Public Domain

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And there, according to the genre, just one question is left: What was it that so angered the gods?

Dubravka Ugrešić, from “The Confiscation of Memory” in The Culture of Lies, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (via the-final-sentence)

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On what would have been his 109th birthday, Special Collections & Archives presents W.H. Auden’s Letters From Iceland.

Part letter, part travel book, and part poetry collection, Letters from Iceland commemorates three months Auden and co-author Louis MacNeice spent in Iceland in 1936.

Keep reading

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the body is a vessel of flame-flicker and even in dreams I say my lover’s name so picture me for verisimilitude made entirely of sunflowers but keep the long scar in the center of my chest, under it a grim doctrine frolics on a dissecting table. I who have been restored by cardiac shocks, dropped into morning wanton and struck.

excerpted from Shock By Shock by Dean Young, reviewed by Diane K. Martin for The Rumpus. (via therumpus)

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It’s always a good time to learn about medieval iconography! This image of Christ in the historiated initial on fol. 47r of Ms. Codex 738 is known as the Gregorian Man of Sorrows, which means that Christ is shown half rising out of the tomb, Crucifixion wounds visible, surrounded by the instruments of the Passion (the Arma Christi), arms often crossed over his torso. Legend has it that Pope Gregory once had a vision to this effect, and Gregory was a really really big deal, so you listen when he has something to say and you draw him religious fanart of Christ leaking blood for hundreds of years.

Manuscript description and digital images can be found here on the Penn Libraries website.

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Spotlight: “If You Want To Write” by Summer Pierre

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The holiday weekend awaits. Find more vintage covers, and stories, in the archives. 

Illustration by William Steig.

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Via The Paris Review, William Faulkner’s one weird trick for understanding his own writing.  More of the Faulkner interview here.

And you can hear one of TPR founder George Plimpton’s last interviews, with NPR’s own Jacki Lyden, here. (I tagged along as a baby production assistant!)

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Legendary Victorian art critic John Ruskin on how manual labor confers dignity upon creative work.

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On writing and reading poetry:

“You’re trying to say: I know what this thing is called. It’s called a chair, and that thing is a table. I’ve got this word ‘chair’ and I’ve got this word 'table’, but there’s something peculiar about this chair and table which using the words chair and table will not actually convey…Nobody reads a poem to find out what happens in the last line. They read the poem for the experience of travelling through it.”

—George Szirtes, in an interview in The Guardian

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If my students can imagine the possibility that choosing to work with their hands does not automatically exclude them from being people who critically examine the world around them, I will feel I’ve done something worthwhile, not only for those who will earn their degree, but for the majority who will not.

Brittany Bronson, "Your Waitress Your Professor"

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Barack Obama tells People magazine how he was mistaken for a parking valet at a restaurant while Michelle describes being taken for a shop assistant in Target. 

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Things You Don't Want Him to Say While His Finger Is Inside You

"I can feel it."

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Gelb by Justine Basa.

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U.S. Bogged Down With Too Many Cranberries

The holiday season is the golden hour for cranberries. But this year there are a few too many berries for Americans to consume. Scott Soares, executive director of the Cranberry Marketing Committee, says a surplus of 1.6 billion pounds are painting a less-than rosy picture for the industry.

DID WE HAVE TO LET THEM LINGER?!

(ed. Again, the intern loves his puns. We can’t stop him.)

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No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.

Colette (via observando)