In 2006, students in a high school class wrote to various authors inviting them to visit their school. The only one who wrote them back was Kurt Vonnegut.

WORK

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

—Kurt Vonnegut
—from a letter, November 5, 2006

WORD(S)

defenestration /dee-fen-uh-STRAY-shun/. noun. The act of throwing out a window. Fenestra is Latin (and French) for window. From this defenestrate and defenestrated are, dubiously, derived.

“She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination.” (Michael Chabon)

“Prague … seemed a good place, gloomy and defenestrated.” (Cyril Connolly)

“Winsome came awake from a dream of defenestration, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it before. From Rachel’s bedroom window it was seven stories to a courtyard used for mean purposes only: drunk’s evacuation, a dump for old beer cans and mop-dust, the pleasures of nighttime cats. How his cadaver could glorify that!” (Thomas Pynchon)

WEB

1. I’m not even sure how to describe this vocal + electronics cover of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box.” Let’s call it spellbinding.

2. I leave the debate to my scientific betters, but I found this article on “Repligate”, investigating the question of replication of research in the social sciences and the state of behavioral research fascinating.

3. The title says it all: Samuel Beckett Cat Motivational Posters.

4. Laura Hall wanders virtual ruins and wonders “What Happens when Digital Cities are Abandoned?”.

5. Today in 1876, “Wild Bill” Hickok is shot dead in Deadwood (present-day South Dakota). There was much more to the man than the legend would have you believe. Before he met his end, the fictional Wild Bill got off some good lines in the television series Deadwood, such as this:

“Some goddamn point a man’s due to stop arguing with his-self and feeling twice the goddamn fool he knows he is ’cause he can’t be something he tries to be every goddamn day without once getting to dinnertime and fucking it up. I don’t want to fight it anymore, understand me Charlie? And I don’t want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead reflects on the criteria of “relatability” (used by Ira Glass in his wrongheaded knock on Shakespeare I noted a few days ago).

• My question yesterday about words that sound least like their meanings (did you notice how I slipped a favorite of my own in—crepuscular—through the WORD(S) definition?) prompted reader C. to submit a few contenders, all worthy of the crown: pulchritudinous, envervated and apposite, of which he notes:

“Depending on the circumstances, apposite often isn’t. (Except paradoxically in this context it is, so it does describe itself.)”

• Granted, the idea of words that don’t sound like their meaning is subjective and easily veers into “that word doesn’t mean what you think it means” territory. Nonetheless, I submit: nonplussed, sanguine and meretricious.

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