finalist @thinkfinalist - Tumblr Blog

"too overcast for stars, so I won't bother about that..." #duncansaidit #greatmeadowloopenvirons #notavacation #acadianationalpark (at Great Meadow Loop) https://www.instagram.com/p/CPwjVjuslq_/?utm_medium=tumblr

#duncansaidit #greatmeadowloopenvirons #notavacation #acadianationalpark

Lucky Number 7

7 years is a long time.

I remember my 7y.o. self. Cute glasses, smile, taking care of my younger siblings, talking to my imaginary friends under the grape arbor.

I'd forgotten about this little blog, except that tumblr does continue to send occasional reminders to my old email account and I sometimes go.over there to see if anything interesting has shown up.

Which of how I happen to know that today is the big celebration.

I've moved onto Instagram and podcasting now and never really had an audience over here, but I'll leave this here for posterity.

Shine on.✨

theparisreview

The pyramids of Giza, imagined by Athanasius Kircher based on traveler’s reports, from Sphinx Mystagoga (1676). At the time, the Jesuit scholar was convinced he had successfully solved the enigma of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. As John Glassie wrote last year, Kircher was “a premodern man caught up in the middle of what’s now called the scientific revolution.”

However, despite posterity, as Daniel Stolzenberg points out in the Public Domain Review, in his day Kircher was one of Europe’s most successful scholars.

He embodied the contradictions of a moment when recognizably modern ways of thinking about the past had become available, yet older and conflicting models remained appealing and, to many, persuasive. As such, he allows us to explore a side of history too often lost to view. Without this view we cannot fully grasp the work of thinkers like Galileo or Descartes, much less understand the age on its own terms.

thinkfinalist

Love this photo

Don't know what it is about this photo. Is it the fog that mutes the green. The flat house that reminds me of the Portage house.

Sure on this shining night Of star-made shadows round, Kindness must watch for me This side the ground. The late year lies down the north. All is heal'd, all is health. High summer holds the earth. Hearts all whole. Sure in this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far alone Of shadows on the stars. ~ Permit Me Voyage, James Agee

sunset, August 2016 (at Lexington, Massachusetts)

songsforgorgons

‘I would get up at one or two a.m. and I would call every gay bar I had the number to from the 1940s. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just stay on the phone and listen to the sounds in the background. I would stay on until they hung up, and then I would call another one of my numbers, until I had called all the numbers I had … That phone. Those numbers. That was my lifeline … It meant there was a place somewhere — even if I couldn’t go there — that place was out there. I could hear it. Freedom.’ She called the bars two to three times a week like this — for fourteen years.

From an interview with Myrna Kurland in Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, by Marie Cartier (2013). Myrna passed away in 2014, at age 86. A video of an additional part of her interview may be viewed here. (via songsforgorgons)