by Iris Schieferstein
Music: Yma Sumac (1950s)
Peruvian goddess and singer Yma Sumac had one of the most powerful singing voices in the world. She also looks strikingly similar to a girl named Sophia with whom I spent a strange night with in Peru many moons ago.
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Yma Sumac – Cuncho (The Forest Creatures)
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Yma Sumac – Ataypura (High Andes)
The Erotic Pensées of Leviathan Porthucias
Critics and censors of Leviathan Porthucias, a poor Greek farmer, always argued with proponents of free speech as to how far is too far in literature. Porthucias only wrote one book and spent almost all his entire life in mental institutions. He had one unnamed lover who he was apparently monogamous with, but she was only a hallucination of his rattled brain. He also had a dog who spoke fluent Hebrew and lived under his hat. There is almost no evidence of his existence.
“She came dressed in purple lace….when she levitated toward the white curved moon….a small puddle of her desire was left on the stool….I stood there as a ghost should do….never pretending or making a single sound…her body was white and young…a dress laid on the floor in a perfect rumpled velvet circle…her fingers were like cold glass and glistened after she removed them from her body….I wanted my mouth around them….but knew I would be found….a ghosts lips are always sealed….smoke of pistols last dusk…..twilight in gunpowder……my sweating corpse in a noose.” – From the Erotic Pensées (1924)
Photographer: Julia Margaret Cameron
“Wist ye not that your father and I sought thee sorrowing?” (1865)
Extinct: Tasmanian Tiger
Commonly known as the Tasmanian Tiger, the thylacine was the largest known carnivorous marsupial in modern times. Somewhere betwixt a hyena, an opposum, and a house dog, the thylacine became extinct in the late 1930s.
