• Antje & I have been reading Pokémon manga all summer. This is awesome and makes slogging through pages of “grrrr” and “eeeeee!” and “pika!” totally worth it.

    (via io9)

  • Barbara Murray Schilling, 77, a longtime Philadelphia writer who as Barbara Holland penned 15 nonfiction books such as Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences, died of lung cancer Tuesday, Sept. 7, at her home in Bluemont, Va., where she had lived since 1993.

    “She’s a wisp of a woman with short white hair and a face that’s weather-beaten enough to be called craggy,” a Washington Post interviewer wrote after a 2007 visit to her home in rural Loudoun County.

    “She has just published her 15th book. It’s called_The Joy of Drinking_, and, as the title suggests, it’s a lighthearted history of humanity’s long romance with strong liquids.”

    As a Mother’s Day trifecta, the reporter wrote, “she jokes that stores should sell The Joy of Drinking in a gift package with The Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex.”

    As Barbara Holland, she had sold “lots and lots” of short stories to magazines such as Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1950s, but in Philadelphia she became an advertising copywriter, too.

    Mrs. Schilling worked for Domsky & Simon, an ad agency at 734 Pine St., which accommodated her “when my mother would want to take some time off or go off and live in Denmark for six months,” her daughter said.

    She sometimes worked from home, but when she kept office hours, the firm “allowed her to not have to worry about child care. She could bring me along, and she did.”

  • The last time I was in the States, I saw a young guy in Des Moines, Iowa (for Jesus sake, Iowa!) wearing a T-shirt that said, “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t deal with science fiction.”

    At that moment, I realized that the Revolution was over and my side has won.

    —Robert Anton Wilson, in the preface to Semiotext(e) SF (via sciencefiction)

  • For I can snore like a bullhorn
    or play loud music
    or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
    and Fergus will only sink deeper
    into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
    but let there be that heavy breathing
    or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
    and he will wrench himself awake
    and make for it on the run - as now, we lie together,
    after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
    familiar touch of the long-married,
    and he appears - in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
    the neck opening so small
    he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
    about the mental capacity of baseball players -
    and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
    his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

    In the half darkness we look at each other
    and smile
    and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body -
    this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
    sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
    this blessing love gives again into our arms.

    —

    After Making Love We Hear Footsteps by Galway Kinnell

    (via Eve Tushnet)