cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones

[theartofanimation]

Sam Chivers  -  http://www.samchivers.com  -  https://twitter.com/mrchivers  -  http://samchivers.tumblr.com  -  https://www.flickr.com/photos/chivertron/albums  -  https://samchivers.myshopify.com

[tea-plus-plus]

As for Biluo's life after marriage -- Chuanqing couldn't imagine it. She wasn't a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered on a screen -- a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy purple satin. The years passed; the bird's feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.

Jasmine Tea, Eileen Chang

[tea-plus-plus]

When Weilong went upstairs, the people below sat down for dinner, and radio music drifted upward. Weilong's room, small like a boat, was launched on waves of music. The old wall lamp in its red gauze shade seemed to bob and float, and she felt herself swaying about, exuberant and elated. She opened the pearly net curtains and leaned against the frame of the glass door. There was a narrow balcony and, beyond the metal railing, the mist was drifting by, thick, white, and rolling; it felt like a shipboard view of the sea.

Aloeswood Incense, Eileen Chang

[tea-plus-plus]

This year I read

Ties, Domenico Starnone

East of Eden, John Steinbeck

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Bashō

The Fall of Language in the Age of English, Mizumura Minae

The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki Junichirō

The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin

The Idiot, Elif Batuman

The White Book, Han Kang

The Making of Modern Japan, Marius Jansen

Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke short stories

Walt Whitman poems

The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien (rr)

The Metamorphoses, Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

Kitchen / Moonlight Shadow, Yoshimoto Banana

Beneath the Wheel, Hermann Hesse

I Capture the Castle, Dodi Smith

Catullus poems, trans. Peter Green

The Rust Programming Language, Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

King Lear, Shakespeare

The Two Towers, Tolkien (rr)

[tea-plus-plus]

from somethingaboutmaps

[tea-plus-plus]

Big whirls have little whirls That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so, on to viscosity.

Lewis Fry Richardson

[tea-plus-plus]

With the tip of gold he hit Apollo; and the arrow pierced to the bones and marrow. ... Four times the moon had linked its crescent’s tips, ... And from these new-made boughs, the tears that drip are amber: it will harden in the sun. The stream’s clear waters bear that amber off, and it will then adorn young wives in Rome. ... a missile flying through the air that grows more incandescent as it soars below the clouds and finds a fire it had not known. ... Aglauros begins to feel the bite of secret grief; by night, by day, she longs, she moans; she’s worn away, a slow decay, like ice that’s pierced by fitful sunrays. ... Her bones became tough wood (although her marrow remained unchanged) ... they pour the sea into the sea ... and through her marrow ran fierce flames.

Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

[tea-plus-plus]

And as he swims, each time the surge permits his mouth to open, she is on his lips: the name—“Alcyone, Alcyone”— of one so distant. And he murmurs it even beneath the waves, when he can’t lift his weary head.

Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

[tea-plus-plus]

The forked-tip antlers gouged Gryneus’ eyes: one eyeball stuck upon the pointed horns; the other slid down to his beard and hung within the clotted blood below his chin.

Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

[tea-plus-plus]

He tries to tear the tunic off his flesh; but where he tugs, the fatal garment shreds his skin and—this is horrid to retell— sticks to his limbs, and can’t be ripped away, however hard he strives, or—eating through the flesh—lays bare his massive bones and sinews. The blood of Hercules is hissing now, as does an incandescent metal bar when plunged into a pool. The greedy fire cannot be checked as it consumes his guts, and all his body drips with blue-gray sweat; his tendons crackle, scorched; his marrow melts— the deadly heat within is just too much for Hercules to stand.

Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

[tea-plus-plus]

One man seeks refuge on a hill, another rows in his curving boat where, just before, he’d plowed; one sails across his fields of grain or over the submerged roof of his villa; sometimes an anchor snags in a green meadow; sometimes a curving keel may graze the vines. Where grateful goats had grazed along the grass, the squat sea-lions sprawl. And undersea, the Nereids, amazed, stare hard at cities and homes and groves; through woodlands, dolphins roam; they bump against tall branches, knock and shake oak trees.

Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

[crossconnectmag]

Cold North (by Gundersons)

A collection of illustrations from the home of the Northern Lights, Norway. Instagram: @crossconnectmag

[nevver]

Hazy lazy daze, Ann Rhoney

[colin-vian]

Iakov Chernikhov  1922

[tea-plus-plus]

Like I feel like fuck the people of the future. You know what I mean? Like, these are radio shows. They're meant to be ejoyed, like, right now. And then if no one ever listens to them again after we're gone, like, well, fuck them anyway walking around and being alive while we're dead. First of all fuck all those people, being alive and having sandwiches and meeting for lunch while we're dead and not existing. Like I hate them already, they can fuck themselves.

Ira Glass, on the death of Joe Frank

[tea-plus-plus]

Lost&Found, Kristina Varaksina

[nevver]

East of Eden, Karol Palka