A themed edition because today I have my own ticket to the fair or, as I like to call it, foods-on-sticks-ville. Oh the humanity!

WORK

"Then it occurs to me that I had bacon yesterday and am even now looking forward to my first corn dog of the fair. I’m standing here wringing my hands over a distressed swine and then I’m going to go pound down a corn dog. This is connected to my reluctance to charge over to a swine pro and demand emergency resuscitative care for this agonized Hampshire. I can sort of picture the look the farmer would give me.

Not that it’s profound, but I’m struck, amid the pig’s screams and wheezes, by the fact that these agricultural pros do not see their stock as pets or friends. They are just in the agribusiness of weight and meat. They are unconnected, even at the fair’s self consciously special occasion of connection. And why not?—even at the fair their products continue to drool and smell and scream, and the work goes on. I can imagine what they think of us, cooing at the swine: we fairgoers don’t have to deal with the business of breeding and feeding our meat; our meat simply materializes at the corn-dog stand, allowing us to separate our healthy appetites from fur and screams and rolling eyes. We tourists get to indulge our tender animal-rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon. I don’t know how keen these sullen farmers’ sense of irony is, but mine’s been honed East Coast keen, and I feel like a bit of an ass in the Swine Barn."

—David Foster Wallace
—from “Ticket to the Fair”

WORD(S)

nundinal. adjective. Of or related to a fair or market day. In Latin, nundinalis, the market day or the weekly market, properly the ninth day (nundinus).

“The nundinal or eight-day period of Rome.” (G. C. Lewis)

“The so called nundinal letters, which are not referred to in ancient treatments of the calendar, are taken by modern scholars to refer to an eight day cycle of market days…” (Alan Samuel)

WEB

1. “A Ticket to the Fair” by David Foster Wallace. “I suspect that every so often editors at East Coast magazines slap their foreheads and remember that about 90 percent of the United States lies between the coasts, and figure they’ll engage somebody to do pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something rural and heartlandish.”

2. The “1939 New York World’s Fair”, including the original “Futurama”.

3. The soundtrack for the 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “State Fair”.

4. Video proof of 59 foods on a stick available at the Minnesota State Fair in 2006. This year the Official Food Finder lists 83 foods on sticks—including deep fried lobster, big fat bacon, and hot dish—out of 303 different food options such as “all the milk you can drink,” pizza tots, lamb fries (hint: they’re not potatoes…or the lamb meat you might expect), comet corn and bourbon wurst.

5. Today is the first day of the 151st Minnesota State Fair which today attracts 1.8 million visitors annually, including more than 236,000 in a single day in 2013. And that’s not counting the ghosts.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. provides one of my new favorite (and most succinct) reviews of this newsletter: “I love this shit.”

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