The second paragraph of today’s selection rang my bell. It gets at the reason I spend time putting these newsletters together. To be unafraid to share art means being unafraid to love it in the first place. That happens, in part, through sharing. And so the cycle goes.

WORK

"After Breaking the Map [her first book] came out, I put Lieberman on the shortlist for a Stranger Genius Award in literature. Part of my rationale for shortlisting her, rather than giving her the award outright, was that she was young for a poet, that she’d surely have other, and even better, books of poetry in years to come. And now, that even better book of poetry is here, and I can’t track Lieberman down on some balcony after a reading and tell her how much I love it. There will be no more books after this one.

This is a lesson that we all have to learn over and over, but I’ll tell it to you anyway, in case you’re in particular need of hearing it right now: If you love something that somebody does—some art, some words, some sounds—you tell them that you love it. You tell everyone how much you love it, repeatedly and enthusiastically. Don’t save your appreciation for later, or worry about wearing people out with your passion. Because the happy truth is this: If a piece of art truly moves you, you will never, ever run out of new adjectives to express how much you love it. Getting to love someone’s art is one of the very finest parts of being alive."

—Paul Constant on the death of poet Kim-an Lieberman
—from The Stranger, 5/14/2014

WORD

pleonasm. noun. Redundancy; using more words than necessary to convey meaning; verbosity for rhetorical emphasis or as a stylistic fault.

“‘That old and antique song,’ &c. : — This is not mere pleonasm: ‘antique’ carried, and, perhaps we may say, still carries, the idea of quaintness added to antiquity.” (Richard Mite, in a note to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”)

“I needed a new beginning, so I decided to pay a social visit to a personal friend with whom I share the same mutual objectives and who is one of the most unique individuals I have ever personally met. The end result was an unexpected surprise. When I reiterated again to her the fact that I needed a fresh start, she said I was exactly right; and, as an added plus, she came up with a final solution that was absolutely perfect.” (George Carlin on his proposed “Department of Pleonasms and Redundancies”)

WEB

1. All of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, Gauguin, and many others digitized. Free! With sketches and extensive annotations. A treasure trove! Though if you do happen to have $650 to spare, I’d love the print edition.

2. Two great tastes that go great together in Stephen Greenblatt’s article “Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne”. The Florio translations that Shakespeare would have known and read are free on the web…though the new selected volume from which Greenblatt’s article is adapted looks like a worthy purchase.

3. “Isn’t it striking that the most-typical and most-maligned genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western secular art?” — Considering Instagram using Berger’s classic Ways of Seeing.

4. These Minimalist Paper-Based Movie Posters are ingenious. It doesn’t get more minimal than that.

5. Today in 1954, Elvis arguably invented rock & roll.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Two gmail-using readers note that clippings is going into their “Promotions” folder. I’ll jigger the subject lines to see if that helps, but the best fix for this (if it’s a problem) is to drag one of the messages to the “Primary” folder and answer “yes” when asked about doing this for future email messages. You can do the same thing in two other ways.

• Reader V. observe that I post some links to my personal Facebook and Twitter streams that should go here. In fact, each link in clippings represents (literally) at least 10 times as many rejects, some of which I share elsewhere. At some point I’ll share the overflow regularly on the katexic site or tumblr or something…the point of this newsletter is to be highly selective, relatively brief, and ultimately ephemeral!

As always, I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com