( via / via )

The Tapes - Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives.

" 'Fifty percent of respondents say that the event taking place is not occurring,' Madison says. 'The other fifty percent remain undecided. Clearly, the truth lies somewhere in between.' " --Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)

Egyptian Gods.

"The Stranger

Fond credos, wooden ecstasies!
We arrange a prison-temple

for the weak-legged little god
who might stamp the world to bits

or pull the sky in like a muslin curtain.
We hang his shrine with bells,

aeolian harps, paper windmills,
line it with biscuits and swansdown.

His lack of culture we expected,
scarcely his disdain however--

that wild hauteur, as if
it were we who blundered.

Wildness we fret to avenge!
Eye that hasn't yet blinked

on the unquivering gold atmosphere
of its trance--that we know

must be trained away:
that aloof, consuming stare.

Otherness that confronts us
as the mere animal does not--

once this was original sin
beaten away with staves of holy writ.

Old simplemindedness. But the primal fault
of the little god still baffles.

All other strangers are forgiven
their strangerhood, but he--

how save the eggshell d from his
reaching hands, how loose

ourselves from the disinterested
blaze of his wide pure eye?"

--Adrienne Rich

"The Republic is a strangely familiar place—a baroque approximation of Gold Rush era-California with an overlay of Aztec ceremony—yet the characters who populate it are true originals: rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three-year-old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig."