The time feels right to give this poor newsletter a break after another long run.

We might return, so I hope you'll stay subscribed and find out.

Whatever the future of the relationship between our inboxes, stay well and be kind!

-c

RIP, John le Carré, who transformed the spy novel into spellbinding works of art through a kind of magic I still don’t understand.

WORK

“It’s difficult to say what I mean,” you said. “I don’t know how to describe where we are now.”

I consider your attention---especially now that newsletters have become de rigueur---a gift. But if you insist on getting me something, here's my Venmo---just kidding. What I would really love would be for you to share Katexic Clippings with a friend, post a link on social media, put it in your blog...wherever you share.

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People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.

---Sebastian Faulks
---found in A Week in December (2009)

More long reads than usual in the mix today, since it’s possible there won’t be a newsletter for a few weeks.

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Hans was never good at giving proper answers. He always had different answers in his head, odd answers, answers that his teachers and his parents and his grandmother and even his crazy grandfather seemed to think were wrong. But they weren’t answers, they were just answers. He wondered suddenly what the Ice Maiden would do if he gave her a wrong answer. And, thinking this, he found he couldn’t open his mouth at all.

RIP Alex Trebek. RIP Sean Connery. They live on together in SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy. Fittingly, though it often has hazardous connotations, jeopardy comes to us, through French, from the Latin jocus (joke, game).

And thanks to Jamie Thingelstad for the kind words in his great Weekly Thing newsletter, a variety pack of writing, photography, technology, productivity and much more. Tastily eclectic, just the way many of us like it.

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"There's always a story," she said. "It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world."

A few Halloween-tinged items this issue, if you’re into that sort of thing. See you on the other side of the election (the real horror).

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When he looked again the appalling apparition had gone. The corridor was dark and, briefly, silent. He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and would rather have had a chaperone.

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One reason that cats are happier than people
is that they have no newspapers...

---Gwendolyn Brooks
---from "In the Mecca"
---found in In the Mecca (1964)

WORD(S)

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Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

---Salman Rushdie
---from "Books vs. Goons"
---found in the Los Angeles Times (April 24, 2005)

WORD(S)

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I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

—Mark Haddon —found in (2008)

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Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.

---Slavoj Žižek
---found in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006 documentary by Sophie Fiennes)

WORD(S)

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But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

—Lauren Oliver —found in (2012)

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I suppose, if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.

—Beryl Markham —found in (1942)

It recently came to my attention that even my oldest friend has been missing the fine print at the end of the newsletter. So, in case you skip that too, a reminder that you might like my other newsletter Notabilia, featuring, as a reader recently put it, “Daily excerpts from a wide range of writing, by turns acerbic, topical, comedic, moving (okay, sometimes most of these at once.)”

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It is a strange fact, but incontestible, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men's minds, than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause.

---Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
---found in The Last Man (1826)

WORD(S)

If you are also a Notabilia subscriber, I apologize for sending you this issue twice.

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Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable.

---A. S. Byatt
---found in Possession (1990)

The results are in, and you great majority's preference for the newer, fatter newsletter is noted. That said, I am going to try to help the skinnies: I will embolden links that would have been the only links shared by younger, slenderer me. Thanks for all the feedback!

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"A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A business-man has business books and a dreamer has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting."

---Walter Mosley
---found in The Long Fall (2009)

Question: do you prefer the newer, fatter newsletters (lots o' links) or the former, slender version? I'm selective in any case, but would like to know which you'd rather see.

Note: as you may have noticed, I'm relaxing my stance against sharing articles behind paywalls. If you run into anything you can't access because you're over the limit, relax and let me drive (I'll send you the article).

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A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;---not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

Even I was surprised that three readers noticed I only had nine WEB entries last week. I wish I had some numerological explanation, but it was a simple cut-and-forget-to-paste error.

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All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Have I told you lately how much I appreciate your time and attention? I am grateful. Thank you!

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Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between "guilty" and "innocent." Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn't I be "neither" or "both"?

---Paul Beatty
---found in The Sellout (2015)

A Brobdingnagian issue to keep you busy this week, including---as item "zero" in the WEB section---Hamilton links that actually work. Also, though statistics count for little, I was tickled to notice that links in the email newsletter, specifically, have been clicked more than a million times. If I had a dime, etc.

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...Yaw wasn't certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man's church with Edward and Mrs. Boahen and sometimes with Esther, and so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed's future. And if you point the people's eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.

---Yaa Gyasi
---found in Homegoing (2016)