Nothing makes my day like finding a picture of a swell looking dame in a crop top reading Balzac by the side of the road.
(Source: charmingnotion)
My no. 1 Brautigan fave…
“I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word ‘mayonnaise.” ― Richard Brautigan (and he did, sort of…)
Me too
Am I gay, if the first thing I noticed was the groovy curtains?!
What was the second thing you noticed. If you said “the cool firetruck”, then probably. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
OK, I had that exact firetruck for Christmas when I was about 6, how did she get it?
(Source: vigorton2)
Betty Lou Gerson c. 1950’s. She provided the voice of the villainous, selfish socialite Cruella De Vil in the 1961 Walt Disney animated feature One Hundred and One Dalmatians.
This comic strip was presented last night at the Encyclopedia Show during the Book Festival in Madison, Wisconsin along with the following essay
Liber Linteus or Sympathy for the Mummy
By Lynda Barry
October 21, 2011
It’s the mid 1800’s, and a Croatian guy goes to Egypt on vacation and buys a mummy as a souvenir. So you can already tell what kind of guy he is. The mummy turns out to be wrapped in strips made from a book hand-written on linen in Etruscan, a language that died out two thousand years ago.
It’s known as Liber Linteus, It’s the longest Estruscan text ever found. It seems to be a ritual calendar of some sort but no one really knows what it says. No one has spoken Etruscan for centuries. Only a few fragments have been translated, like this one:
For the spirit of night, for the city, for the people everlasting.
You can see the Liber Linteus on display in a glass case in Zegreb. And quite near to it you can also see that certain someone. You can see the unwrapped mummy that was once inside of it.
How was this treasure of Etruscan writing found? It sounds like something that happened in a frat house. The Croatian guy takes the Egyptian mummy home. He props it up in the corner. He shows it off to his friends when they come over. They make jokes about it. They rattle their drinks and point their cigars at it.
And then one night, who knows why, the Croatian guy is suddenly like, “ Know what? I’m unwrapping that mummy.” You KNOW there had to be drinking involved.
His brother goes, Don’t do it man! You’ll wreck it. That’s the easiest way to wreck a mummy.
But the Croatian guy doesn’t care. He’s unwrapping and unwrapping and pretty soon here are the blackened hands with yellow fingernails, here are arms with elbows joints covered with shiny skin dried down tight, here are the darkened feet with perfect toenails, the hipbones and it turns out it’s a lady mummy. Here is her face. Her shriveled ears, her dried out eyelids with lashes still attached, her scab nose and a row of teeth in surprisingly good shape.
The Croatian guy likes her even better this way. He displays her standing up. He displays her linen bandages. His friends come over they and drink and smoke and the Croatian guy talks some very stupid shit about the unwrapped mummy right in front of her.
If this was movie and he did that, he’d have to die, right?
And he does!
He dies then his brother inherits the mummy. But the brother does not want it. “ Before he unwrapped it I would have taken it but now that mummy is a mess. You can’t fix it back to how it was. Go head and sew all that shit back on. Won’t matter. That mummy is jacked up forever.”
Other relatives are offered the mummy but no one wants her.
And this is where I get all sad for the mummy. Where was she kept during this uncertain period? Was she still in the sitting room with same evening shadows still passing over her face? Was she in a box in a storage unit? Was she having humidity issues?
What if the Etruscan writing had never been discovered? What then? What do you do with a jacked up mummy no one wants?
But because of this dead language, you do want her. You display her on red cloth in a glass case with her head gently raised, the strangeness of her unwrapped body on full view. Her arms by her sides, her lips parted and her teeth looking so alive. Some kind of big sadness is here. Some kind of shipwreck flare. She’s naked under museum lights, stranded in realm of the living. Isn’t there someone somewhere merciful enough to cover her?
For the night, for the city, for the people everlasting.
.
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