1852 / 2025
“There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”
— Frederick Douglass. Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester [. . .] July 5th, 1852. Published by Request. Rochester : Printed by Lee, Mann & Co, 1852.
The single most persuasive reminder that there is more than one history of America.
James Earl Jones performed the Oration, here :
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/4/what_to_the_slave_is_the
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“To live in luxury that does not belong to you is not to live in luxury at all. You realize you are an attribute of the luxury, not meant to luxuriate, meant instead to shine bright and cold like a diamond . . .”
— Corina Bardoff, “Barbara Blue”, in : North Anerican Review 310:2 (Summer 2025)
Bardoff’s story is winner of the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction prize for 2025.
A nimble, tricky tale, integrating style & content : all the thousand scraps that Aimee has stitched together to craft something new that “Judith” can inhabit for a time before shedding it. There are some excellent tiny brilliants scattered along the way : there is no brother coming to the rescue (explicit from the beginning) ; and Bardoff diagnoses the pathology in calling a girl a girl past a certain age. I love the off-cadence heart / earth / hearth play in the central protective rhyme. This is even more transformative than Angela Carter, very finely done.
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in today’s mail (5 July)
— Mark Valentine. Borderlands and Otherworlds. Tartarus Press, [2025].
Colkection of 32 essays on books and reading, with an emphasis on the fantastic and supernatural in the interear years and into the 1950s. The original edition has sold out but a paperback is reported in production.
recent reading :
— Muchael Innes. The Secret Vanguard [1940]. An Inspector Appleby Mystery. Open Road Integrated Media, [POD 30 June 2025].
“For an artist has a right to work with quotations if they are his medium, and daisies and buttercups which were not these flowers purely but these flowers plus a little Cowper and a little Crabbe . . .”
— Sylvia Townsend Warner. Kingdoms of Elfin [1977]. Foreword by Greer Gilman with an Introduction by Ingrid Hotz-Davies. Handheld Press, [2018].
/ re-read, with delight