Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly (1887)

Source.

Yale's Photo Archives of the Great Depression

Photogrammar.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890)

In full.
Audiobook.

French Revolution Digital Archive

Source. Massive.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961)

In full.

c/f Frantz Fanon Archive

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910)

In full.

Ipod City, Shenzhen, Foxconn

Foxconn

• The haunting poetry of a Chinese factory worker who committed suicide - The Washington Post
• Million Robot Revolution Delayed—iPhone Manufacturer Foxconn Hires More Humans 
• Google Partnering with Foxconn to Test Industrial Robots
• Foxconn’s Pivot to America: Reverse Outsourcing With Robots
• Journey Inside the Cavernous Interiors of these Mega-Factories
• Analyst Downgrades Apple Because It Treats Workers ‘Like Animals’
• 'Mass suicide' protest at Apple manufacturer Foxconn factory
• 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?
• Apple's Foxconn PredicamentIn China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
• Terry Gou (Forbe's profile).
• A Chinese View of iPod City
• Foxconn orders massive nets to catch jumping factory workers
• Foxconn Promises 20% Wage Hike Following Suicides
• iPod City: Apple criticized for factory conditions
• Welcome to Ipod City
• The stark reality of iPod's Chinese factories

Shenzhen

• Wikipedia article
• Shenzhen Stock Exchange
• Shun Hing Square
• Shun Hing Square, Shenzhen
• SEG Plaza
• Pingan International Finance Centre

The Autobiography of a Super Tramp by William H. Davies

Source.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Film.
Script.

Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

In full.

Stalker (1979)

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Transcript (in English).

c/f Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 | Open Culture
c/f Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online | Open Culture

Fox and His Friends (1975)

In German, with English subtitles. Source.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis in English Translation

Source.

Francois Villon - Poetry in Translation

See Also: Société François Villon

Ballad Of The Gibbet
Les Regrets De La Belle Hëaulmiere
Rondel
The Ballad Of The Ladies Of Yore
Abor Amorris
To Death Of His Lady
The Debate Between Villon And His Heart
Ballade
Le Testament: Ballade: ‘Item: Donne A Ma Povre Mere’
Ballade: Epistre
Ballade: Du Concours De Blois
Le Testament: Ballade: Pour Robert d’Estouteville
Le Testament: Epitaph et Rondeau
Le Testament: Ballade: A S’amye
Rondeau

Five Translations

A Ballad of Francois Villon
Ballads from Francois Villon

Three Translations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I. The Ballad of Dead Ladies

II. To Death, of His Lady
III. His Mother's Service to Our Lady

Ten Translations by Charles Swinburne
I. The Complaint of The Fair Armouress
II. A Double Ballad of Good Counsel
III. Fragment on Death
IV. Ballad of The Lords of Old Times
V. Ballad of The Women of Paris
VI. Ballad Written for a Bridegroom
VII. Ballad against the Enemies of France
VIII. The Dispute of the Heart and Body of Francois Villon
IX. Epistle in Form of a Ballad to His Friends
X. The Epitaph in Form of a Ballad

Seven Translations by John Payne

I. Ballad of Old-Time Lords
II. The Doctrine of The Fair Helm-Maker to The  Light O' Loves
III. Seemly Lesson of Villon to The  Good-for-Noughts
IV. Ballad of Good Doctrine to Those of Ill Life
V. Ballad Crying All Folk Mercy
VI. Ballad, by Way of Ending
VII. Epitaph

Jobelin ballade 6
Jobelin ballade 5
Jobelin ballade 4
Jobelin ballade 3
Jobelin ballade 2
Jobelin ballade

To Death Of His Lady 

Death, of thee do I make my moan, / Who hadst my lady away from me,

Rondel 

Goodbye! the tears are in my eyes; / Farewell, farewell, my prettiest;

Ballad Of The Gibbet 

Brothers and men that shall after us be, / Let not your hearts be hard

Abor Amorris 

I have a tree, a graft of Love, / That in my heart has taken root;

The Debate Between Villon And His Heart

Who's that I hear?—It's me—Who?—Your heart / Hanging on by the thinnest

The Ballad Of The Ladies Of Yore 

Tell me now in what hidden way is / Lady Flora the lovely Roman?
Les Regrets De La Belle Hëaulmiere 

ADVIS m'est que j'oy regreter / La belle qui fut hëaulmiere,

Ballade 

I know flies in milk / I know the man by his clothe
Ballade: Du Concours De Blois

I’m dying of thirst beside the fountain, / Hot as fire, and with chatte

Le Testament: Ballade: ‘Item: Donne A Ma Povre Mere’ 

This I give to my poor mother / As a prayer now, to our Mistress

Ballade: Epistre

Have pity now, have pity now on me, / If you at least would, friends of

Le Testament: Ballade: Pour Robert d’Estouteville 

At dawn of day, when falcon shakes his wing, / Mainly from pleasure,

Le Testament: Epitaph et Rondeau 

Epitaph / Here there lies, and sleeps in the grave,

Rondeau 

Oh, grant him now eternal peace, / Lord, and everlasting light,

Le Testament: Ballade: A S’amye 

 False beauty that costs me so dear, / Rough indeed, a hypocrite sweet

Victorian Gallows Ballads

Source.

Mary Arnold, The Female Monster
Former prostitute uses carnivorous beetles to blind her own infant child. Hopes to increase its value as a tool for begging, but wins only prison and transportation.

The Execution of Nathaniel Mobbs
Drunken bully cuts his wife's throat in a fit of jealous rage. Bungles his own suicide attempt, and lives long enough to be hanged at Newgate.

Mrs Dyer, The Old Baby-Farmer
Reading woman takes in illegitimate babies for cash. Strangles 40 or more, then dumps their bodies in the Thames.

The Gallows Child
Nine-year old boy is condemned to death for stealing six handkerchiefs from an Oxford Street shop. Shopkeeper had paid five shillings each for them.

The Life and Trial of Palmer
Boozy, gambling doctor poisons family and friends to clear his debts. Hanged at Stafford Gaol, but survives as footnote in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The Silent Grove
Young man gets his girlfriend pregnant, then kills both her and the baby to avoid responsibility. One of many Bloody Miller/ Berkshire Tragedy variants - a combination of which eventually became Knoxville Girl.

The Liverpool Lodger
Evil lodger slaughters family and robs them. Victims include pregnant mother and two very young boys.

The Unnatural Murder
Disguised sailor returns home to his parents, hoping to surprise them with his new-found wealth. They mistake him for a stranger, kill him, and steal his gold.

Murder at Westmill
Nine-year-old boy brutally murders his infant sister. Mother driven mad by the crime.

Streams of Crimson Blood
Burglar breaks into rich old couple's house and kills them both.

The Murdered Maid
Poverty-stricken yokels kill lodger for her savings. But it's really their own daughter.

Cruel Lizzie Vickers
Housekeeper bullies her way into elderly employer's will then beats him to death for the £1,000 involved. That's the ballad's version, but the Old Bailey jury found her not guilty.

Frank Lima's Sacttered Vignettes

Frank Lima's Scattered Vignettes.

One of the few contemporary poems I stumbled across in my adult life and felt it contained a world within that I could inhabit, Frank Lima's Scattered Vignettes remains for me one of the most magical sustained invocations of language (English).

Elsewhere in this quixotic library and toy store, I have collected material of those who address misery by making an aesthetic object of consumption out of it. That is, while enjoyable, often, the trap. One cannot possess meaninglessness (the ultimate ghost of upheaval and trauma) by turning it into a product, buying and consuming it. Meaninglessness is more elusive than, say, delicious candy. In meaninglessness (death, violence, despair), the hunger is not sated by eating more of the same.

The groping towards any space of serenity in this relationship between observer, meaning and world, one that retains not only the images of trauma, violence and beauty but also the meaninglessness of those very things which make our time here storied, would require one to communicate or build something actually transformative.

This is not easy. Misery has stubbornly resisted prognostication and prescriptions, as in Marx, or magical solutions, as in Fascism. Often it hovers just outside the purview of Liberalism, the phantom limits of its ability to act. The nostalgia of religious fanaticism can only hold it at bay for so long. Ignoring it does not dispel it.

Frank Lima, so despairing, so ritually beautiful in his figures, so uncomplicatedly attuned to myth and the ceremonial gestures of magic, in a matter of a few pages, manages to cover a continental scourge of difficult and ambivalent territory. The miracle in these vignettes is how he never drops out of poetic voice. He takes things that are already meaningless (failed lives, the sad household objects that are the props for traditional magic) and uses them to help communicate the ultimate things, which are generally resistant to meaning (violence, ultimate taboos, spirit). Somehow the ineffable--by sheer conjuration of this sensitive but semantically perilous alchemy--manages to pass through.

For More on Frank Lima:
Here is an interview.

On the Concept of History - Walter Benjamin (1940)

Available online, in full.

One feels few writers have appeared besides Benjamin to have such a sensitivity for the breadth and quality of issues that needed to be addressed by Marxism for any Marxist-influenced thought to continue to have any legitimacy, beyond the inert barbarism of force, proletariat in name only, of Stalinism and its successors.

Paradoxically, the realpolitik of Marxism, always Marx's professed aims of his "theory" (not to interpret the world, but to change it), was the aspect of Marxism that stopped it dead in its tracks. The actual Marxist (-Leninist) state became incapable of interpreting the course of events in any way other than to paroxysm in knee-jerk, farcical enactments of its own party line, whether those solutions rang true or untrue before the tactical dictates of time: a petrified totalitarianism. As a result, its economy parodied liberalism (i.e. Napoleon) at its most appallingly imperialistic (having no example of economy of its own, only a critique), and the barbarity of its anti-humanism reached fiats of slaughter only debatably second to that of Fascism.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

The immediate problem that put Benjamin so far outside the purview of (and even hope for detection from) his Western Marxist contemporaries was that he recognized some sort of engagement needed to happen between Historicity and myth. When History was continuously being rewritten to suit the aims of the powerful, one could not, as dialectical Marxism seemed to rely on, posit simply that, on the on hand, the bourgeoisie conceptualization of time was ahistoric, and, on the other hand, an absolutely unequivocal discipline of Historicity existed.

Compounded with this problem was Marxist intellectuals own cupidity in relying on prognostication: that a salvation in the form of the total revolution would resolve "contradiction." Rather than perform the tortuous gymnastics needed to deny that myth, a literary trope even, was being invoked in these claims, or to dismiss the yearning inherit in the discipline of history, or worse (from a Marxist lens), to disavow history in favor of a transcendental, out-of-time conception of timeless fate (as in Heidegger), Benjamin begins to give an account of Historicity, expressly sensitive to myth, that includes the avowal of the mythic themes invoked in any accessing of the past, part and parcel of the writing of any history.

He begins to address the actual theological and mythic underpinnings of the writing of history, not to find the project out as an absurdity, but to flesh out its serious aims, those necessary to our cognitive and humane survival. He writes an actual myth, a myth that posits body and public before the forces of its actual gods, who are, in fact, non-deities: progress, labour, organization, power (capital) and the future.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

That is, he revisits Marx to save what is salvageable in Marx but needing articulation in the light of the  present--the present, which is always a surprise. Not accidentally, then, one of the themes that take relief in this concept of a cumulative, progressive (not transcendent, timeless) history is: garbage. But the dustbin of history (Marx's phrase) is not, precisely, just oblivion. It is the storage of ruins by which, in a process akin to the archaeological dig, we may yet illuminate our way to the future. It is, then, a myth for the progressive. At that, it is only marginally an optimistic one.

Perhaps its most serious philosophical critique lies in the sketch of a world of facts-- a view given articulation in the 20th century famously by Wittgenstein--rather than one of base materials. This is where Liberalism consistently outpaces radicals, in political terms: is it a fact, does it yield real world feedback capable of being reduplicated in real time? Or is it a theory, strictly surface interpretation, in the mode of detail-oriented, world-renouncing monks? A question I am really not equipped to deal with but recognize it is there; and for radicals: The Begging Question.

Paul Chan - My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future.

Objections aside, this is the climate and background I imagine to have been part of the writing of this mesmerizing, intellectually fervid document. To my mind, it is to seek in a history grounded in base materials (history's trash) our fate, but interpreted backwards through history's long train of wrecks.

Myths over Miami

I'm pretty sure what stories have grown up around the spirits and the gods have very little to do with literature.

This article, Myths over Miami by Lynda Edwards, is the closest example I have found to what a literal update of mythology and religion would look like in our culture, between cracks of pale light on the shadowy side of the post-millennium. These childish tales, from brightly chewed up wads of numerous indigenous belief systems indiscreetly and promiscuously borrowed from, mashed together with a child's happy lack of inhibition, combined with a sophisticated take on capitalism as the murder or suicide (murder-suicide) of god are by turns breathtaking, heartbreaking and harrowing.

There is no god but the explanation is theological. And extremely sad. The belief system is also living. Poly-genesis is, here, the result of a secret compact between naive belief systems, folk culture, the heroic (demonic) culture of gangbanging, a repressive system of immigration, a punitive system of homeless shelters and the anti-master dialectic of Judeo-Christianity. These are exactly the sort of stories that achieve genesis by successions of children whispering in rooms (children whispering in rooms being the origins of all magic). Different from various fundamentalisms, the universe these myths describe is recognizably ours, if wretched. Evil is assigned a symbolism of strictly literal and materialistic objects. Transcendence, overcoming is deferred.

The woman who collected these stories is a poet.

c/f How a 1997 New Times Feature on Homeless Kids' Folklore Exploded the Internet