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Afghan medics tie the body of a believed suicide attacker to a stretcher before putting on an ambulance at the scene of an attack in central Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Jan. 18, 2010. Taliban militants struck the heart of the Afghan government in Kabul on Monday, prompting fierce gunbattles after a suicide bomber blew himself up near the presidential palace. AP

Canadian army Cpl. Melissa Gagnon pulls security in the village of Rajan Qala in the Arghandab River Valley section of the Kandahar province of Afghanistan Jan. 10, 2009, during Operation Fazilat. The operation is a coalition forces effort to clear the area of improvised explosive devices and establish a presence in the community. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Christine Jones/Released) Date Posted: 1/15/2010

U.S. Army Capt. Charles Day, a surgeon with 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, assists Spc. Frank Romanowski and Spc. Timothy Currie as they lift a patient before placing him on a backboard during their Emergency Medical Technician recertification training at Forward Operating Base Airborne, Afghanistan, Aug. 8, 2009. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Rob Frazier/Released) Date Posted: 1/13/2010
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IGA Gallery: scroll

In Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, Jason Epstein posits “The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them… The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives”

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A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir

American Jewish writers fascinated by Marilyn Monroe included Norman Rosten, Alvah Bessie, and most notoriously Norman Mailer, who published Marilyn: A Novel Biography in 1973. A couple of years later, Mailer met Barbara Davis Norris, a woman half his age who had been raised as a Free Will Baptist in Arkansas and had previously dated another womanizer by the name of William Jefferson Clinton who was destined for national celebrity. In 1980, she married Mailer in his Brooklyn Heights home, taking on the name Norris Church Mailer and becoming his sixth wife. She describes their tumultuous lives .

A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer – Hardcover – Random House.

A candid (long) conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media.

March 1969

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan « NextNature.net.

norma jean (MM) and sister bernice miracle

Vintage Photographs.

Chilling Aerial Photos of 9/11 Attack Released – .

8 Unconventional Ways to be Buried .

Waterboarding for dummies .

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE CIVIL WAR: MEMORIAL.

various links for those interested

Black Soldiers in the Civil War – Academic Info.

with an assist from Anthony

ANTIQUE INDIAN BASKETS MUSEUM California Native American Basketry.

Big Generation Gaps in Work Attitudes Revealed .

Abandoned Mental Asylum Hellingly, RIP, 33 Creepy Photo Tribute .

Finnegans Wake, Chop Suey
On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun “Work in Progress,” the book which would become Finnegans Wake sixteen years later: “Yesterday I wrote two pages — the first I have written since the final “Yes” of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. . . .” Though increasingly plagued by eye problems — ten operations, and counting — Joyce’s lifestyle had improved from the Ulysses years, thanks to Weaver’s continued support, and money given by Sylvia Beach against future royalties. He and his wife, Nora, were able to get new clothes, a new flat, even new teeth: “The dentist is to make me a new set for nothing,” wrote Joyce to Miss Weaver, “as with this one I can neither sing, laugh, shave nor (what is more important to my style of writing) yawn. . . .”

(Continued)

Vale, Oregon. Photo by Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration.

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via Powell’s Books – Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields.

U.S. Millionaire Population Soared 16% in 2009 – The Wealth Report – WSJ.

Red Cloud – a life.

chief red cloud..battles and treaties

THE BONE WARS

When most people think of the Wild West, they picture Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, and caravans of settlers in covered wagons. But for paleontologists, the American west in the late 19th century conjures up one image above all: the enduring rivalry between two of this country&apos;s greatest fossil hunters, Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. The “Bone Wars” as their feud became known, stretched from the 1870&apos;s well into the 1890&apos;s, and resulted in hundreds of new dinosaur finds (not to mention reams of bribery, trickery, and outright theft, as we’ll get to later).

via The Bone Wars – The Lifelong Feud Between Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.

CHIEF RED CLOUD BEFRIENDS OTHNIEL C. MARSH

Rare Photograph of Red Cloud and Othniel C Marsh.

“I forgot to remember to forget” Elvis Presley sang in 1955. I know that it was 1955 because I just Googled the title and clicked on the link to the Wikipedia entry for the song.

How cool is that? Not long ago, I would have had to actually remember that Elvis recorded the song as part of his monumental Sun Records sessions that year. Then I would have had to flip through a set of histories of blues and country that sit on the shelf behind me. It might have taken five minutes to do what I did in five seconds. I almost don’t need my own memory any more.

That strikes many of us as a good thing: the costs low, the benefits high. We can be much more efficient and comprehensive now that a teeming collection of documents sits just a few keystrokes away.

But as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.

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Our Digitally Undying Memories

with an assist from Anthony

AP News: 12 centuries-old shipwrecks found in Baltic Sea.

The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments .

A book that defends plagiarism, champions faked memoirs and declares fiction dead has the literary world up in arms

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RIP: The novel – Writers and Writing – Salon.com.

Morris Dickstein&apos;s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, published last year by W.W. Norton, is one of five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. The author, a professor of English and theater at CUNY Graduate Center, has written and edited numerous other works of literary and cultural analysis. His explorations of American literature, films, and music of the "long decade" between 1929 and 1941 seem to be written in an almost classical mode — as if he were simultaneously channeling the major figures assayed in his Double Agent: The Critic and Society (Oxford, 1992).

My short discussion of Dancing in the Dark recently appeared at the website of the National Book Critics Circle. This was written as part of my duties as a member of the NBCC board, but doing so was no burden; this is a book to inspire enthusiasm. So without further ado, here follows the transcript of an e-mail interview with its author. The winners of the NBCC awards will be announced during a ceremony at the New School University in New York City on Thursday night.

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5 Biggest Wars of the History

A Verse to Self: Joan Houlihan’s The Us

a review by Jacob A. Bennett

The first stanza in the first poem of Joan Houlihan&apos;s poem sequence, The Us, tells us, the readers, that we are listening to a voice from outside of time:

Us nest fine a weather long

between the heat of kin

the least of us in huts built round with stones.

A sky-hole takes the cook-smoke through

via continued

click for poem

Scott and Zelda

On this day in 1948, F. Scott Fitzgerald&apos;s wife, Zelda, and eight other patients were killed in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Zelda’s first breakdown in 1930 resulted in a sixteen-month stay in a Swiss clinic, and she spent six and a half of the next eight years in American institutions. Though discharged to her mother&apos;s care in the Spring of 1940 — Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, and just months away from a fatal heart attack — she would periodically readmit herself to Highland. It was during one of these stays that she and the others died, unable to flee the rooms into which they had been locked for the evening.

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Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

LIFE photo archive .

elivis and his dad

Morning Cup of Links.

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Powell’s Books – Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe.

funny. you don’t look Jewish

The Lemba people of Zimbabwe and South Africa may look like their compatriots, but they follow a very different set of customs and traditions.

They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.

[article in full]

Mike discovers and blogs about the war to end all wars.

The Great War, Sir Mike, and Me | mikegerber.com.

…and he supplies this link to somne videos (BBc), a documentary (black and white) abuot WWI, for which
CLICK HERE TO SEE VIDEOS

Photographer Jason Hawkes, a frequent contributor to the Big Picture blog, returns today, sharing with us some of his latest images of American cities seen from above at night – New York City and Las Vegas, both cities that undergo significant transformations after the sun goes down.

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The King of Pot is shorter than you&apos;d imagine. When you meet a famous drug dealer, one expects scars and a distrustful sneer and some flashy clothes. But Bruce Perlowin, found waiting for an elevator at the Los Angeles Convention Center dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, is more Patch Adams than Tony Montana. Standing about 5 feet 6 inches tall, he has Robin Williams&apos; twinkling eyes as well as his manic energy.

What he lacks in stature, though, he more than makes up for in reputation among pot smokers and those who bust them. Perlowin is the biggest West Coast dope smuggler in U.S. history, a fact he offers like a verbal handshake to every new person he meets.

in fulol

INSIDE THE AFGHAN SURGE: a gallery