"Incredible colour footage of 1920s London shot by an early British pioneer of film named Claude Friese-Greene, who made a series of travelogues using the colour process his father William - a noted cinematographer - was experimenting with. It's like a beautifully dusty old postcard you'd find in a junk store, but moving."

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

Lemme lemme lemme upgrade U. #beyoncearthistory

I don't even understand how amazing this girl is.

http://doxiequeen1.tumblr.com/

Bruises on your mind

"I stayed under the moon too long. 
I am silvered with lust. 
Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes. 
My voice is trees tossing in the wind. 
I loose myself like a flock of blackbirds
storming into your face.
My lightest touch leaves blue prints,
bruises on your mind.
Desire sandpapers your skin
so thin I read the veins and arteries
maps of routes I will travel
till I lodge in your spine. 
The night is our fur. 
We curl inside it licking."

Stop what you're doing right now

Get up.

Leave your house.

Go to a movie theater (preferably IMAX).

Buy a ticket to Star Trek Into Darkness.

Witness Benedict Cumberbatch absolutely own your life/the universe and win the award for most attractive villan of all time. 

                       

Seriously. Forget about everything and just go. 

Afterward, find whatever store this shirt is at and buy it.

Helena

"Breathe in. Breathe in. Breathe in more. 
Now. Once you start choking, let all your breath out, and think of the choke part as him."

"Questions of science, science and progress, do not speak as loud as my heart."

"Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you"

The shiv'ring piano, foaming at the mouth,
Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you.
"My darling," you will murmur. "No!" I'll shout.
"To music?!" Yet can two be ever closer

Than in the dusk, while tossing vibrant chords
Into the fireplace, like journals, tome by tome?
Oh, understanding wonderful, just nod,
And you will know I do not claim to own

Your soul and body. You may go where'er
You want. To others. Wether has been written
Already. Death these days is in the air.
One opens up one's veins much like a window. 

-Boris Pasternak

Ad Hominem

"The Poet:

Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine—

where’s the pink crimp in my side

where they took you out?

The Octopus:

It must be a dull world, indeed,

where everything appears

to be a version or extrapolation

of you.

The birds are you.

The springtime is you.

Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators—

everything becomes

you.

I, with a shift

of my skin, divest my self

to become the rock

that shadows it.

Think of when

your reading eyes momentarily drift,

and in that instant

you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text

gone before you can focus.

That’s me.

Or your dozing revelation

on the subway that you are

slowly being

digested. Me again.

I am the fever dream

in which you see your loved ones

as executioners. I am also their axe.

Friend, while you’re exhausting

the end of a day

with your sad approximations,

I’m a mile deep

in the earth, vamping

my most flawless impression

of the abyss

to the wild applause of eels."
-N.B.

Cohen

"I`m but lust

I'm nothing but pain 
I did these mistrust 
but Never Again."

The following is a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his 11-year-old daughter when she was at camp. Prepare yourself for great wisdom…

Image by Hulton Archive / Getty Images

August 8, 1933

Dear Pie:

I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy — but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed pages, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs “Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up a Saturday Evening Post story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me “Pappy” again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?

I will arrange the camp bill.

Halfwit, I will conclude.

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about…

How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion

Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. My come-back to your calling me Pappy is christening you by the word Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will and I think it would be a word that would hang on if I ever told it to your contemporaries. “Egg Fitzgerald.” How would you like that to go through life with — “Eggie Fitzgerald” or “Bad Egg Fitzgerald” or any form that might occur to fertile minds? Try it once more and I swear to God I will hang it on you and it will be up to you to shake it off. Why borrow trouble?

Love anyhow.

Water Trapped For 1.5 Billion Years Could Hold Ancient Life

Listen here: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/16/183950854/water-trapped-for-1-5-billion-years-could-hold-ancient-life

Scientists have discovered water that has been trapped in rock for more than a billion years. The water might contain microbes that evolved independently from the surface world, and it's a finding that gives new hope to the search for life on other planets.

The water samples came from holes drilled by gold miners near the small town of Timmins, Ontario, about 350 miles north of Toronto. Deep in the Canadian bedrock, miners drill holes and collect samples. Sometimes they hit pay dirt; sometimes they hit water, which seeps out from tiny crevices in the rock.

Recently, a team of scientists (who had been investigating water samples from other mines) approached the miners and asked them for fluid from newly drilled boreholes.

Greg Holland, a geochemist at Lancaster University in England, and his colleagues wanted to know just how long that fluid had been trapped in the rock. So they looked at the decay of radioactive atoms found in the water and calculated that it had been bottled up for a long time — at least 1.5 billion years.

"That is the lower limit for the age," Holland says. It could be a billion years older. That means the water was sealed in the rock before humans evolved, before pterosaurs flew and before multicellular life.

As Holland announced this week in the journal Nature, this is the oldest cache of water ever found.

But how did it end up underneath that gold mine in northeastern Canada? Where did it come from?

"The fluids that we see now are actually preservations of ancient oceans," Holland says.

About 2.7 billion years ago, the landscape of small-town Timmins looked a bit different. Beneath prehistoric seas, tectonic plates were spreading, and magma was welling up to form new rock. As the rock matured under heat and pressure, water was trapped inside tiny cracks.

The rock drifted around the globe for eons, helping form continents and mountain ranges, and all the while it kept its cargo of water sealed up tight inside.

"It's managed to stay isolated for almost half the lifetime of the Earth," Holland says. It's a time capsule. And it doesn't just hold water. "There's a lot of hydrogen in these samples."

That's significant because hydrogen is food for some microorganisms. Hydrogen-eating microbes have been found deep in the ocean and in South African mines where chemical reactions in the rock produce a steady supply of hydrogen.

Enlarge image

Mars, seen in this composite image, has a lot of water in its polar ice caps. If water is also trapped in the planet's crust, experts say, it could house microbial life.

NASA/JPL

And that hydrogen, says Holland, "could provide the energy for life to survive in isolation for 2 billion years."

Holland's colleagues are now testing the water samples for evidence of microbes. They hope to have results within a year. If life is found, it would have evolved distinctly from the surface world and might give a unique insight into the earliest forms of life on Earth. Its discovery would also give hope to people searching for life in places that are even more remote.

Carol Stoker, a research scientist with NASA, is focused on searching for life on Mars.

"If you go back to the very early history of Earth and Mars, sort of the first billion years after the surfaces cooled, Earth and Mars looked very similar," Stoker says.

Both planets had vast surface oceans and thick atmospheres — they were good places for life to begin. On Earth, it did.

"The logic is if that happened on Earth, why shouldn't it have happened on Mars?" she says.

As Mars got colder and drier, surface life would have died off. But Martian microbes might still survive deep in the planet's crust — preserved in isolated pockets of water, just like the ones found in Canadian bedrock.

Queen Cate

Boris

“They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the ‘blaze of passion’ often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.” 

Paul Celan

"Not until 

as a shade I touch you, 

will you believe 

my mouth"

Maureen Medved

"...and he touches you with his fingers. And he burns holes in your skin with his mouth. And it hurts when you look at him. And it hurts when you don’t. And it feels like someone’s cut you open with a jagged piece of glass."

Finals are almost done and this is how I feel

The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History

30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand

“A great cow full of ink.”

29. Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri

“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”

27. Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling (2000)

“How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”

26. Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”

25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound

“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”

23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw

“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”

22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence

“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”

21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)

“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”

19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling

“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”

18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen

“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”

17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes

“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)

“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”

15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote

“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”

12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope

“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”

11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972)

“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876)

“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger

“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”

7. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)

“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”

6. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning

“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”

5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)

“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”

4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)

“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

2. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)

“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

1. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928)

“My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”

Astaire / Audrey

Nick Lake

"It’s like she had a soul that was much too big for her; it filled her to the brim till there was no more space, so it flowed out through her eyes.”

"So fill each one of these bags with some glitter, my photo resume, some candy, and a note."

11 DAYS.

Frank Sinatra, December 12, 1915-May 14, 1998

Kelly, Sinatra

"Most of what has been written about me is one big blur, but I do remember being described in one simple word that I agree with. It was in a piece that tore me apart for my personal behavior, but the writer said that when the music began and I started to sing, I was “honest.” That says it as I feel it. Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I’m honest. If you want to get an audience with you, there’s only one way. You have to reach out to them with total honesty and humility…You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad—if you’re indifferent, endsville. That goes for any kind of human contact: a politician on television, an actor in the movies, or a guy and a gal. That’s as true in life as it is in art."

J. Bradley

“I wanted to write 'stay'

on your sides, surround

your bed with oceans

of salt. I hope he folds you

into a fox, loves you

like a splintered arrow,

brandishes the kill

of your lips. May the bouquet

of your hips wither.

May the wolves

forget your name.”

“Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.”

-Charlotte Bronte