Rhododendron Day
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‘Dosis sola facit venenum’ — Paracelsus
This is the epigraph to K. Groark’s weird and fascinating paper from the Journal of Ethnobiology (1996)
This is one time where I am especially happy to read the anthropological record and not be a participant in the events reported. [via Chris Brown’s Field Notes]
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There will be an exhibition at the Grolier Club this fall, celebrating the centenary of Billy Budd (12 September to 9 November). I have just seen an advance copy of the concise, elegant catalogue, Melville’s Billy Budd at 100.
Mark your calendars.
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as Gothic as it gets
something evil flowed into the man to make him bigger : he seemed to dilate and glow with an increase of personality
— John Masefield, Sard Harker, 1924
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‘let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time’
So what does Shakespeare teach us? Nothing. His tragic theater is not a classroom. It is a fairground wall of death in which the characters are being pushed outward by the centrifugal force of the action but held in place by the friction of the language. It sucks us into its dizzying spin.
— Fintan O’Toole, No Comfort, in New York Review, 6 June 2024