Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

"Antheil and Joyce. I don't suppose you ever hear much about those sort of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever appeared in America."
"I wish I had a cigarette," said McKisco calmly. "That's more important to me just now."

Often I sit alone at night, staring with the eyes of the mind into the blackness of unborn time, and wondering in what shape and form the great drama will be finally developed, and where the scene of its next act will be laid. And when that final development ultimately occurs, as I have no doubt it must and will occur, in obedience to a fate that never swerves and a purpose that cannot be altered...

We are perhaps au fait with the idea that the British Navy, the so-called "wooden walls of England", was at one time assembled from the totem species. We may equally recognize that oak trees were central to the construction of the Norse longboat, and the Viking's wider project of rape, pillage and civilization on the Atlantic littoral. But who would have thought that the inks used to fill da Vinci's notebooks, or to complete the line drawings and paintings of Duerer, Rembrandt and van Gogh, not to mention the score sheets of Bach, were all derived from an excrescent growth on oak trees caused by parasitic wasps? Oak galls, found especially on the Aleppo oak Quercus tinctoria, were the raw stuff of human letters for hundreds of years.

A Fish licence for Eric the half-bee. More info here.

This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time [...]
J. Conrad, Nostromo, 9.

Archaeological Site Yields Dental Surprise: Researchers have found a 4,500-year-old burial in Mexico that had the oldest known example of dental work in the Americas. Link

(via monochrome)

"There is little to tell about me, a life somewhat in the shadows; he who does not see it directly will notice nothing about it." "In reality it is very calm around me, never too calm, moreover." And to Milena: "My state of health is not essentially different from what it was in Prague. This is all. I will not venture to say more; what is said is already too much."
M. Blanchot, Friendship, 263.