Satrap of Saturn

Armouricca is a world with a long history of the failures and difficulties of planetary domestication. Re-settled and re-invigorated several times over tens of thousands of years, the planet basically resists becoming anything remotely earth-like. Suitable planets are hard to come by, and the people of the terrestrial diasporic oecumene [the terhumene ] cannot bring themselves to commit fully to vacuum-based life in habs, domes, and ships, nor make the existential and psychic leap to mass transfiguration into vacuum-adapted bodies—thus, earth-ish planets are objects of obsessive and recurrent interest. “Armouricca” is the name favored by the dominant culture these last two cycles of settlement and attempted domestication (“terraforming” a lifeless planet into the image of the Old Place being virtually impossible, making home-like  has been a sufficient goal for some myriads of planets and other bodies ever since the First Age). References and archives across the galaxy identify the...

update from an earlier post on Roman religion primary sources plus some contemporary academicky secondary sources . i have, at last count, 977 books and articles on everything from this stuff to geology to the EZLN and islamic anarchism, and i have not been reading them with the enthusiasm that i download them with!  oh hey. something on [achaemenid iran/globular star clusters/early modern city-states/feline palaeontology/arabic calligraphy] that i absolutely want to read. let me download it and put it in the appropriate folder and not look at it again for months. while i cannot read everything, i do read a lot when i give myself a reading list and some goals. the new goal is get up to speed on religion among pre-christian greeks and romans enough to teach introductory classes on it. to that end, the titles infra are not themselves a reading list, not something i could reasonably absorb while also working and parenting and gardening etc., but more of a reading ecology. from  ...

back in the long middle stretch of the twentieth century, comic poetry was something you could make a living off of. i grew up with multiple books by Ogden Nash on various family member's bookshelves, including one containing short animal poems that was my very own. ("A most peculiar bird is the pelican / Its beak can hold more than its belly can", etc.) the following poem does not appear to be online in text anywhere a few casual moments turned up. following a brief but heated exchange over how many Ls in someone's name necessitate retaliation with lethal force, my conscience compelled me to locate the poem in a scanned book and make the text available before god and the internet. et violà, behold! WHAT'S IN A NAME?  SOME LETTER I ALWAYS FORGET  Not only can I not remember anecdotes that are racy,   But I also can't remember whether the names of my Scottish friends begin with M-c or M-a-c,   And I can't speak for you, but for myself there is one dilemma...