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I first learned the Donner Party story as a teenager hiking over Donner Pass and their harrowing fight for survival has always stayed with me. So you can imagine how excited I was to read Ethan Rarick’s Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. Rarick provides an intimate portrait of the Donner Party and their unimaginable ordeal in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We were lucky enough to have radio host Dorian Devins interview Rarick and two clips from that interview appear below. Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for more audio clips from Rarick’s interview.

“The Basic Story”

(transcription after the jump.) (more…)

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Controversial enough to be jailed, bawdy, talented, end endlessly quoted, Mae West is the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. In her book, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White, Jill Watts looks at the ways West borrowed from African-American culture and helps us understand this endlessly complicated woman. In the telling excerpt below we learn about how West’s first Broadway play SEX came to fruition.

One day, Mae West and some friends sat stuck in New York City traffic. In a rush, she ordered her driver to take a shortcut past the waterfront, and as her car rolled past the docks she spied a young woman with a sailor on each arm. West described her as attractive but with “blonde hair, over bleached and all frizzy . . . a lot of make-up on and a tight black satin coat that was all wrinkled and soiled. . . .She had runs in her stockings and she had this little turban on and a big beautiful bird of paradise.” Mae remarked to her companions, “You wonder this dame wouldn’t put half a bird of paradise on her head and the rest of the money into a coat and stockings.” But as her friends speculated that the bird of paradise was probably a seafaring John’s recompense and that this woman of the streets at best made only fifty cents to two dollars a trick, Mae grew enraged. Certainly she was worldly enough to know about prostitution, yet she recalled, “I was really upset about that.” She insisted it disturbed her to witness such exploitation of a woman—and also to realize that a woman could be so ignorant of her potential for exploiting her exploitation. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

All over the world when people decide to name cardinal points, they look at the sky. Terms used for orientation should therefore be immediately transparent: we expect them to mean “toward sunrise,” “toward sunset,” “related to a certain constellation,” “in the direction of a certain wind,” and so forth. And indeed, Latin oriens “east” is akin to oriri “to rise,” while occidens “west” is a cognate of occidere “to fall down.” Speakers of Latin did not need an etymologist to interpret those words (such specialists existed even then, for example, Varro, the most famous of them all): sunrise and sunset tell their own story. But of the English words—east, west, north, and south—only the first reveals its past to the initiated. The other three are so opaque that after centuries of guessing their origin remains a matter of dispute. (more…)

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