a massless particle passes through the void

It's Christmas Eve. Thank you to all the year's visitors and commenters and may the owner of that Russian spambot give the poor overworked thing the night off.



A 2012 memorial mash-up.

We all begin well, for in our youth a massless particle passes through the void preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word we. "The principle of subjective inwardness is a wily creature and resembles a bedrock poverty, like falling against many armies or a great horseman in a potatoe," quoth the housekeeper. For of a very troth, there are thousands of little heaps of crumbs that were once granite boulders. Salt was born of a yearning for unilateral Mildred, whom everyone tried to amuse, whom everyone tried to please; that pretty creature in the drawer of a sublet room. I have known that cave since I was eleven, yet furtive birds (wrens and rails, for example) have only one secret, valid within its own framework, like a painted death. This delightful residence was situated on a small manuscript for the benefit of senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may run at once through the convent, beating on a lawyer who suggested both a cat and a geranium. This is very disquieting; if there was one thing we thought we could depend on it was a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, I languish thus, drooping and dull, as if I were in a dusky and tempestuous night having a read of what her mother would have called a Book.

The authors.

Gertrude Stein: The Making of Americans / Rae Armentrout: Chirality / Simone Weil: The Need for Roots, translated by Arthur Wills / Hegel: The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree / Aelian: On the Characteristics of Animals, translated by A. F. Scholfield / Jorie Graham: The Geese / Marguerite Young: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling / Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer / George Gascoigne: Dedicatory Epistle to 'The Posies' / John McPhee: Basin and Range / John Berger: Seker Ahmet and the Forest / Thomas Pynchon: V. / Baudelaire: The Old Woman's Despair, a prose poem translated by Michael Hamburger / Adrienne Rich: Leaflets / Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan and Isolde, translated by A.T. Hatto and revised by Francis G. Gentry / Lyn Hejinian: The Book of a Thousand Eyes / André Breton: Arcanum 17, translated by Zack Rogow / Gilgamesh, translated by N.K. Sandars / Ann Radcliffe: The Italian / Graham Robb: Balzac / Henry Adams: Democracy / The Letters of Abelard and Heloise translated by Betty Radice / Miguel Angel Asturias: El Señor Presidente translated by Frances Partridge / Walter Murdoch: On Sitting Still / Charlotte Brontë: Vilette / Gilles Deleuze: Desert Islands translated by Mike Taormina / George Herbert: Dullness / William Drummond of Hawthorne: Sonnet / Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot