Good Morning!

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Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry.
— Muriel Rukeyser,
poet, social justice activist
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“Poetry and beauty are always
making peace. When you read
something beautiful you find
coexistence; it breaks walls down.”
— Mahmoud Darwish,
Palestinian poet
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J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 painting of Rivendell

“Rivendell is a valley in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s fictional world of Middle-earth, representing both a homely place of sanctuary and a magical Elvish otherworld. It is an important location in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, being the place where the quest to destroy the One Ring began. Rivendell’s feeling of peace may have contributed to the popularity of The Lord of the Rings during the war-troubled 1960s. … The house of Elrond in Rivendell is also called The Last Homely House East of the Sea, alluding to the wilderness (Rhovanion) that lies east of the Misty Mountains. Rivendell lay in eastern Eriador at the edge of a narrow gorge of the river Bruinen (one of the main approaches to Rivendell comes from the nearby Ford of Bruinen), well hidden in…

“By the time On Tour with Eric Clapton was released in 1970, the husband/wife pairing of Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett could loosely be placed in the category of ‘seasoned veterans’ within the music industry, despite the fact that they had only been recording as a unit for a very short period of time. … Working on the television show would bring Bramlett in contact with Leon Russell (also a member of the Shindig! band) and Russell would play a very important role in Delaney’s musical future (and the pair also filtered into a potent scene of musicians featuring former Byrds members Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman that would eventually spawn The Flying Burrito Brothers). Bonnie Lynn O’Farrell was climbing her own ladder in the music industry, putting two notable notches onto her musical resume at a very early age, singing with blues legend Albert King and later, the Ike and…

I thought I would ignore the story you have read about in every publication: the unprecedented indictment of a former President of the United States. Special Counsel Jack Smith released the indictment yesterday, and I read every word. It is a dramatic narrative of a man who was determined to hold onto state secrets, storing them in public spaces, hiding them when necessary, completely indifferent to the law governing classified documents. The irony, as the indictment points out, is that Trump repeatedly lambasted Hillary Clinton in 2016 for being careless with state secrets and promised to enforce the law if elected.

If you haven’t read the indictment, please do so. At the least, it may make you wonder how Republicans can bring themselves, even now, to echo Trump’s claims that he is the victim of a witch-hunt.

Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the events of the past 24 hours and the…

Azar Nafisi was teaching American literature in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979. Because she refused to wear the mandated head covering, she was forced to leave the university. She continued to teach her students in her home. She moved to the United States in 1997. In 2003, she published Reading Lolita in Teheran, which was a huge bestseller. She became an American citizen in 2008. Please open the link and read the interview in full. It appeared on the website of American Purpose.

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Azar Nafisi has championed literature as an act of resistance against threats to freedom and imagination. To read dangerously, as Nafisi puts it, is to arouse curiosity and challenge the status quo.

Sahar Soleimany sat down with the critically acclaimed Iranian-American author to talk about the importance of resistance writers at a time of heightened threats to…

Opinion | June 8, 2023: “There’s a well-known passage in the title essay of Joan Didion’s 1979 collection ‘The White Album’ that begins with a litany of 1960s tragedies, including the massacre at My Lai, a harrowing story of child abandonment and a very brief and cryptic mention of Robert Kennedy’s assassination: ‘I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a veranda at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.’ The section concludes with a personal revelation: In June of 1968, Ms. Didion experienced ‘an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,’ for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant. ‘By way of comment,’ she wrote, ‘I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.’ Over 40 years later, ‘The White Album’ is regarded as…

Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale Univerity who has written extensively on European history and threats to democracy. This essay is a fascinating history of Ukraine, which was published in The New Yorker.

He writes:

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency…

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal. Even at the time, I knew it was swimming a bit upstream to launch a blog just at the very moment that the blogging era seemed to be crashing to a close. But I did so because I’d long felt the need for a place to find commentary, news, reviews, and links related to a movement that I found endlessly fascinating and that others seemed to as well. As I noted on the fifth anniversary of Locus Solus, back in 2018, I didn’t have a clear picture of what this site might become or what kind of audience it might find, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it…

Syracuse University’s SUPARS system was developed by Pauline Atherton as an early antecedent of what we might today call ‘search’.

“Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, let alone a computer-based information retrieval system. Their hands trembled as they touched the keyboard; several later reported that they had been afraid of breaking the entire system as they typed. The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. They typed one key term or instruction per line, like ‘Motivation’ in line 1, ‘Esteem’ in line 2, and ‘L1 and L2’ in line 3