For centuries, monkeys and apes have fascinated artists from both East and West. The depictions range from serious to humorous, entertaining to thought provoking. On this 150th anniversary year of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species come explore simian symbolism through the ages. Highlights of this exhibition include an ancient Egyptian canopic jar lid that depicts Hapi the baboon headed god; a medieval manuscript with a blue winged monkey trying to imitate the birds in the border; a cut glass Libbey pitcher with engraved social commentary on Darwin; and a mischievous monkey created by Picasso as an illustration for the writings of Comte de Buffon, an eighteenth century French naturalist who influenced Darwin.
@ Toledo Museum of Art (via)
As stories break from their shackles, mighty publishing will take on the liquidity of Flickr groups, rapidly assembling and dissolving.
The roles of publicists, agents, editors, and writers will become fluid. An “imprint” will constantly shift in ownership and focus.
Flickr showed us the changes in publishing. But like the future, the changes were unevenly distributed. They’re catching up.
~ The Storybird Blog
One such fluid collaboration is developing around Shya Scanlon’s novel Forecast, to be serialized across forty-two journals and blogs in the near future, including a chapter at Necessary Fiction. Hosts are still being sought, if you’re interested and have a site to involve.
Confined within the walls of a terraced house in the ironically-named Rosemount area of Derry, entertainment became a precious commodity. One form of blessed relief was an old record player that had longwave radio and impressively could pick up radio broadcasts from thousands of miles away. Obsessed with listening in to foreign channels, I’d spend hours listening to the distant mysterious voices speaking and singing in Flemish, Norwegian, Catalan, all the more enthralling because I had no idea what they were talking about. In hindsight, they were probably discussing gardening, ads for pile cream or debates about interest rates but to this listener they were impossibly poetic ciphers, arabesques and hieroglyphs.
@ Dogmatika
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published the results of what would be one of the most famous experiments of American life. He went to the woods near Walden Pond in Concord Massachusetts to live a life of ascetic purity. He aimed to live alone, with the minimal requirements of life. He would remove himself from society to think and to appreciate life.
That’s tough material to adapt into a video game, and not material the most cynical critics and fans of games would expect.
@ Kotaku
When selecting the best raccoon carcass for the special holiday roast, both the connoisseur and the curious should remember this simple guideline: Look for the paw.
“The paw is old school,” says Glemie Dean Beasley, a Detroit raccoon hunter and meat salesman. “It lets the customers know it’s not a cat or dog.”
“I cannot personally get enough of these grey squirrels, people are eating them. If I was getting a hundred, they would take a hundred each and every day, the demand is so high. They are sold as soon as they hit the counter,” he added.
“They are going to top restaurants, butchers, the working man. They are a delicacy and they are really hard to get – especially up this neck of the woods.”
I miss The Low Road.
Sea Change is a journal of writing inspired by the sea. We also publish work that takes its inspiration from rivers, lakes, coasts, eddies—in short, all those watery places that sustain us.
The journal is sponsored by The MIT Sea Grant College Program, whose research, outreach, and education projects provide real-world answers to coastal questions and help create the coastal stewards of tomorrow.
A well-timed arrival, since Sea Stories has suspended publication (and didn’t publish fiction, anyway, which Sea Change does.) Also at sea, Miranda Literary Magazine is looking for submissions to an anthology on the subject.
Ways of the Woods: People and the Land in the Northern Forest is the [Northern Forest] Center’s mobile museum about the changing relationships among people and the land. This traveling exhibition combines interactive displays with live performance and demonstration to showcase the history, culture and heritage of the Northern Forest.
Ken Baumann writes:
Okay. So I’m finally in the clear in a legal sense to divulge the promised information: I’ve optioned the film rights to Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, and will be writing the screenplay.
That is such exciting news, and such a great novel by a favorite of mine. Can’t wait to see what comes of this.