"11-year-old Joey, who killed his first deer when he was seven, lives in Kentucky with his family." - Where Children Sleep: James Mollison’s Photographs. It was very hard to choose one to use for linkage because there are all sorts interesting or sad for all sorts of reasons. You should go and look. (via @brainpicker)
There’s always a line with sex, drawn at different places for different people, where things get too weird to handle. They start getting scary. Maybe for a normal human being it’s those people who hang themselves by hooks from the ceiling or choking somebody. Maybe it’s wearing a wig. Maybe it’s marrying a turtle. The exact point doesn’t really matter, it’s that with Rick Santorum it starts at the earliest possible place. He’s terrified of the concept of sex. Everything to do with it. Rick Santorum is the Lou Costello of sex. He’s constantly sputtering, tapping us on the shoulder and trying to warn us about the ha-ha-ha-hairpie or ga-ga-ga-ga-gays right around the corner.
It’s impossible to read All You Leave Behind without thinking of William Gibson’s Sprawl novels, the architecture is the same, all slow decay and Darwinian solutions, and Cregan has a fantastic eye for location.
This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids: Yayoi Kusama’s “The Obliteration Room” art installation. Start to finish pics at the link. (from Colossal, via Helen P - ta!)
On July 11th 1897, the Swedish aeronaut Salomon August Andrée (seated above) lead an expedition to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon.
Along with his companions - photographer Knut Fraenkel and engineer Nils Strindberg (to his right and further right respectively - Andrée’s balloon - The Örnen (Eagle) ascended from a specially built base on Danskøn (“Danes Island”, in the Svalbard archipelago). The balloon quickly disappeared from view. And forever.
The bodies of the three explorers were discovered 33 years later, along with their journals and photographic negatives.
The photographs can be viewed here, and a fascinating article about the “archaeology” of them can be found here
Although the full contents of Andrée and Strindberg’s journal writings have never been released by the Swedish government, apparently genuine portions of entries were adapted into a song cycle by the composer Dominick Argento. A fascinating analysis of this can be found here.
Some extracts follow.
(photo via the Grenna/Andrée Museum)
I write books, albeit glacially slowly. I'm a freelance editor, working across all genres, at all lengths, from short stories to epic novels. This is not my office, though, more a personal space.