A stone inscribed with mysterious writing ...

"Forty Feet below two million pounds are buried"

 ... found 90 feet deep, Oak Island [http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/OakIsland]

Lupe's way

“The Mexican It Girl” — spunky, beautiful, buxom, and mercurial

"To Harald, may God forgive you and forgive me too but I prefer to take my life away and our baby's before I bring him with shame or killing him, Lupe."


.... suicide note (1944), actress Lupe Velez, age 36.

The chaos of passion

"It is better for people to be like the beasts ... they should be more intuitive; They should not be too conscious of what they are doing while they are doing it".

 ... Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Chopin's lover

There’s an old adage (attributed to Herodotus) that says “a man calumniated is doubly injured—first by him who utters the calumny, and then by him who believes it". Certainly George Sand (1804-76) could be counted amongst those whose reputation has suffered such calumny both for her work and probably more for her relationship with Chopin. In her own time, she was lionized for her writings which have since fallen far short of being considered classics today even though her main subject was love (“All novels are love stories” she remarked), and her persistent theme the legal inequities for women in marriage. She wrote numerous novels (among them Indiana, Lelia, and Consuelo) as well as numerous plays, autobiography, political essays (Bakunin urged Marx to read her), travel books, journals and copious brilliant letters, the most celebrated to Flaubert, with whom she corresponded for years. Her admirers included Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte. The last three thought her the greatest French stylist of her time.

Sand’s affair with Chopin, a younger man, was as unconventional at the time as it was illicit in which as a woman she brazenly approximated to equality with men, in social dignity and in public responsibility. Edouard Grenier (1819-1901), a contemporary French poet observed of her [pictured here in 1864 at age 60, some 15 years after Chopin's death]:

"She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes, a little too close together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather course and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manners were very quiet".

A not so flattering assessment was proffered by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), another remarkable French poet of the time who started the symbolist movement:

"She is stupid, heavy and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of janitresses and kept women.... The fact that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation."

... a celebration of conviviality

If you want my apartment,

sleep in it

but let's have a clear

understanding:

the books are still free

agents.

If the rocking chair's arms

surround you

they can also let you go,

they can shape the air like a

body.

I don't want your rent, I want

a radiance of attention

like the candle's flame when we

eat,

I mean a kind of awe

attending the spaces between us—

Not a roof but a field of stars.

... Jane Cooper (1924-2007), American poet