It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

• Support the White Helmets

• Incidental Comics’ “The Many Faces of the Novel”.

• “Free Mailbox Stickers Signify Goods Residents Are Willing to Lend [things to] Neighbors.”

• At Awful Library Books: “Steven is Retarded”.

• 37 Times When One Tiny Grammar Or Spelling Fail Ruined EVERYTHING.

• Sage Sohier’s portraits of people with facial paralysis.

• JPS’s punny street art.

• “Seven Letters to Write Before You Turn 70”.

• “Where to find Vintage Stamps”.

• floating recipes (photography).

• How Different Groups Spend Their Day (Interactive Graphic)

• Jim Goldberg’s photographs of rich and poor people, with the subjects’ own handwritten comments about themselves on the prints.

Film and Video

• ► Death of a Nation a spoken word piece about Ferguson and…all of us.

• ► Ex Libris, a short film. “A woman called Iris meets a man called Thomas amongst the book stacks in the basement of a library.”

• ► “The Wife of Bath”, a short animated adaptation of Chaucer’s tale that was rightfully nominated for a half-dozen international award.

• ► Goodness Newness Oldness Badness.

• ► Let’s Be Civil, Kenneth!, a 1950s-style domestic drama.

• ► Sugar Ray, the Jukebox Musical. Sugar Ray’s hits performed Rent style by the Upright Citizen’s Brigade.

• The ► Major-to-Minor version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is good, but I actually prefer his ► minor key version of “I Want You To Want Me”. Once you start looking for this kind of thing, it’s hard to stop listening. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in minor? “Losing my Religion” in major? &c. &c.

Commonplaces: autumn

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” (Sylvia Plath)

“The multicolored leaves were softly glowing against the black sky, creating an untimely nocturnal rainbow which scattered its spectral tints everywhere and dyed the night with a harvest of hues: peach gold and pumpkin orange, honey yellow and winy amber, apple red and plum violet. Luminous within their leafy shapes, the colors cast themselves across the darkness and were splattered upon our streets and our fields and our faces. Everything was resplendent with the pyrotechnics of a new autumn.” (Thomas Ligotti)

“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—” (John Keats)

“…the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.” (Sarah Vowell)

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” (Albert Camus)

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” (Ray Bradbury)

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring…” (Truman Capote)

“Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s shirts.” (James Joyce)

“Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk
Of summer that brought them here…” (Philip Larkin)

“Spring passes, and the year, grown sturdier,
Rolls on to summer like a strong young man;
No age so sturdy, none so rich, so warm.
Then autumn follows, youth’s fine fervour spent,
Mellow and ripe, a temperate time between
Youth and old age…” (Ovid)

“I’ve become resigned to having my soul for a cloister and to being no more to myself than an autumn in an arid expanse, with only a glimmer of living life, as of a light which expires in the canopied darkness of pools, with no energy and colour but that of the violet splendour of exile…” (Fernando Pessoa)

“…Days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.” (Robert Browning)

“a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long” (E. E. Cummings)

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