|k| clippings: 2014-08-03 — Salmagundi Sunday; Patience

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

Links

• Another great piece in The Public Domain Review, this time: on “The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse”.

• Cameron McLeod’s created a system, Curatron, that combines crowd-sourcing and stats to curate themed art exhibits.

• Lori Nix’s photos of the aftermath of fictional catastrophes: The City.

• Browse the drafts and notes of Ellin Raskin’s award-winning book The Westing Game including typed manuscript, handwritten notes, and her audio commentary walking through it all.

• Take a large collection of Victorian taxidermy + a collection of strange masks and you have chipito’s creepy and mesmerizing Instragram gallery.

• Striking, slightly “off” portraits by Loretta Lux (No direct link; I suggest starting with Works V).

• The adult Wednesday Addams video series is good for a laugh or three.

• Levente Szabó’s contemporary covers for iconic novels.

• Is this the first written occurrence of the F-word in English?. Maybe. But I can’t resist marginalia.

• Selfies, selfies everywhere: 18 People Who Took Selfies Before Selfies Were Cool and some “Extreme” Selfies.

• 7 Horrifying Ailments Named After Literary Characters.

• Paris Review’s midterm exam on Dante. Even the Paris Review can be funny.

• Speaking of Dante, browse some of Botticelli’s powerful illustrations for The Divine Comedy.

Commonplaces: Patience

“PATIENCE, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” (Ambrose Bierce)

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry.” (Winnie the Pooh; A. A. Milne)

“Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth
Till every gust be laid,
To drop a limb on the head of him
That any way trusts her shade.” (Rudyard Kipling)

“Beware the fury of a patient man.” (John Dryden)

“She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.” (D. H. Lawrence)

“For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently.” (Shakespeare)

“Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.” (Montaigne)

“Nevertheless you were aware of moving, whether it was you who were moving or the landscape moving forward toward you, and you could remain patient with the idea of growth as long as the concept of uniqueness—that one and no other—shone like a star in the sky above you.” (John Ashbery)

“We have, from time to time in these pages, expressed our impatience with a certain kind of literary fiction. (By ‘these pages’, I mean the two I’m given. And by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’…)” (Nick Hornby)

"“I hope you’ve done nothing to dampen their morale,” Ignatius said gravely, tapping his cutlass impatiently on the iron gate." (John Kennedy Toole)

“Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist’s patience and a lover’s urge was simply not there.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

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