Sarah Bryan

Snickers bar and a metal whistle

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

YouTube video by Camila R. ONE OF THE BEST JUMPSCARES EVER: "The Woman in Black" (1989)

youtu.be/rYKrsD8lCug?...

The one in my yard in NC, giving me the side-eye after I put a fence around the tomato plants.

SORRY. Sorry.
Have we seen this *incredible* news video coming out of Queensland? Wait for the witness/witnesses statement

Thank you for standing Strom on his head. We love you here in the Carolinas!

In praise of Senator Booker!

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, land of paradox

Yes in NC. Also taking everything out of my Amazon cart and sourcing it from independent/local retailers.

if you thought archives were problematic, wait till you see no archives

NOT NOW, MELVILLE. READ THE ROOM.

But the what-ifs are more plausible now than ever.
We’re already losing sleep…but we can put those hours of middle-of-the-night anxiety to good use. Let’s talk about this. Pass it on.

We're in a period of American history when our entire cultural infrastructure may possibly be changed forever. Maybe it'll all be fine -- maybe a few years will go by and all these materials that we care about will be safe and sound right where they've always been.

“. . . can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Artistotle’s own library . . . How can we sleep for grief?”

I’m often haunted by the words of the character Thomasina, a teenager in the early 19th century in Tom Stoppard’s play “Arcadia,” when she learns from her tutor about the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria in 48 BC...

Of course, there’s more data out there than a million people working for a million years could back up – and for that reason I understand that this may sound at first like a crazy idea. But if we protect even the tiniest portion of it, at least we’ll have saved that much.

If we organize our action plan and prioritize most endangered collections, subject areas, media forms, etc., and if enough of us are willing to spend even an hour or two a week downloading material and creating back-ups, we could end up saving critical parts of our heritage for future generations.

Who will join me in starting a community to build a grassroots back-up system for such cultural data?

Music, films, manuscripts, books, historical documentation…so much of what we depend on having access to – and passing down to future generations – is only as safe as the institutions that provide them to us.

...but when Musk and DOGE start taking aim at federal cultural entities, and if we lose the infrastructure of federal granting to cultural nonprofits, then an incalculable amount of our heritage is in serious danger.

A traditional music recording or a rare historical manuscript may not seem a likely target for ideologically motivated data-purging...

...that are being targeted for ideological reasons, in case the data disappear (not only from websites but maybe even from the servers that store them to begin with). *Is it time for people who care about cultural heritage to start doing the same thing with cultural materials?* ...

From the current vantage point of the early weeks of the new administration, it’s becoming apparent that a great deal of research and data is in danger of being lost. Scientists and medical folks are banding together to download information from government websites...

I’d initially planned a year in goblin mode, but somehow a berserker year fits my mood even better.

A small figurine representing a medieval Norse warrior, holding shield and sword, with a conical helmet and wide eyes. He is biting the top of his shield, in an attempt to control his rage.

Friends and colleagues beware! My mom gave me a replica of one of the 12th-cent. Lewis Chessmen. I've decided that the figure she chose for me is going to set the tone for my new year's resolutions and how I'll behave in 2025. She gave me a berserker.

If you see me biting my planner or phone, run.

I have this book, it
Knocks on walls in-
siiiide my miiiind
I know what I’m reading
Neeeeexxxt….

(There just better not be any bothies in it is all.)

#uncannyconmunity

Eagerly awaiting the copy I’ve ordered!

Christmas at our house always begins with the annual festooning of Mama Charo, my 4th great-grandmother. Her name was María del Rosario Pérez y Hernández de Sigarroa, and this portrait was made in Havana circa 1835, by an unknown artist.

A circa-1900 image of an older white man and young white woman standing outside a board-and-batten house with an open window, posing with a fluffy medium-sized black-and-white dog sitting up right in a wooden chair.

A circa-1930s photo of a dog and cat sitting outside in a wicker armchair on a sunny day, with planted ferns and shrubs behind them. The dog is small and brown with a collar, and the cat is small and white.

Circa-1930 photo of a small, shaggy, dark-and-white terrier sitting in a wooden chair on a porch.

Circa-late-1920s photo of a small jack russell-mix dog standing on his hind legs in a child's wooden chair, with a middle-aged white woman crouched next to him, wearing glasses and a white dress.

For years I've been collecting old snapshots of dogs posed sitting in chairs. It used to be a Thing. Here are the most recent additions to my collection. (Now and then if the stars align, there's a cat in the chair too.)

Reading about Rev. Thomas Prince, who set out to write a comprehensive chronological history of New England in 1728.

Volume 1 covered the Creation of Adam to 1630.

Volume 2 took 25 years to write and covered 1630-1633.

There is no Volume 3.

Meanwhile, between the release of the RCA-Victor album and the nationalizing of the industry, poor Beny had gone to the big guaguancó in the sky, so the recycled sleeve represents the passing of a musical as well as political era.