Today’s edition brought to you by $20 of GoGo (should be called CrawlCrawl) in-flight internet, the red-eye out of Alaska and bad burned coffee. These are the times that try my commitment to not be one of those people Louis C.K. was talking about when he observed that “everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.”.

WORK

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from Lolita

WORD(S)

lallation /la-LAY-shun/. noun. Baby talk; gibberish. Also, confusion of the R sound with the L sound (AKA lambdacism).

“Disorders of articulation include lisping, lallation, substitution of sounds, omission of sounds, and addition and distortion of sounds.” (S. S. Chauhan)

“Lallation is sound separated from meaning, but nonetheless, as we know, not separated from the infant’s state of satisfaction.” (Colette Soler)

“Lallation it’s called, the difficulty Asians have in pronouncing ‘L’ and ‘R’ in English. For years it prompted adolescent jokes about ‘flied lice’ and ‘I went to U.C.R.A.’ The wisecracks have waned as Japan has given America lessons in quality and industry. No one is heard to mock the Honda Acula or the Sony Warkman.” (New York Times)

WEB

1. Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing.

2. How Ray Johnson’s contrarian sensibility inspired mail art. See also: Roberto Greco’s well-stocked image Tumblr and the Ray Johnson estate’s mail art and ephemera section.

3. Mise en place is the new GTD (sorry, productivity system joke). For A More Ordered Life, Organize Like A Chef. Even if the system of listmaking doesn’t appeal to you, perhaps this vaguely related work of book art will.

4. “I am almoost beshytten”: A 16th Century English to Latin Textbook.

5. Today in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial—and oh-so-disappointing-to-generations-of-teenage-boys—novel Lolita is published. A novel that isn’t, in my experience, what most think it is and one that we mere mortals best experience with the help of Appel’s Annotated Lolita (the first edition of which Nabokov himself was able to contribute to (a hall of mirrors)).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

Reader K. responds to the Smithsonian’s History of the Electric Guitar video with admirable brevity: “There are three terrible inventions: the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb and the electric guitar.”

Reader T. catches a significant typo in my note about the surprisingly prolific Cheng & Eng: “Dude, for some reason, the thought of 15000 C&E descendants scared the crap out if me. Thankfully, it is actually 1500.”

Reader H. noticed the final quotation about “risk” in yesterday’s newsletter: “Gotta love Dan Quayle, the Sarah Palin of his day.”

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

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