A solid freeze yesterday morning, bolts of yellow in the trees…I can’t pretend the window of summer isn’t quickly closing, leaf and leaving.

WORK

The last of Summer is Delight —
Deterred by Retrospect.
’Tis Ecstasy’s revealed Review —
Enchantment’s Syndicate.

To meet it — nameless as it is —
Without celestial Mail —
Audacious as without a Knock
To walk within the Veil.

—Emily Dickinson
—found in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

WORD(S)

lickerous (lickorous, lycorous). adjective. Pleasing to the palate, delicious, tempting. Describing a person: one who is exceedingly fond of tasty food or greedy. Figuratively: excessively desirous, lecherous, lustful, wanton. See also: lickerish or liquorish. An Anglo-Norman variant of the Old French: lecheros.

“From women light, and lickorous, good fortune still deliver us.” (Randle Cotgrave, 1611)

“For all so siker [surely] as cold engendereth hail,
A lickerous mouth must han [have] a lickerous tail.” (Chaucer)

“…calling them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets…” (Rabelais)

WEB

1. Photography Anelia Loubser uses a simple, but somehow bewildering, technique: take a stark black-and-white portrait, crop it, and flip it upside down. The results are aptly collected in her “Alienation” series.

2. Tim Minchin’s speech upon receiving an honorary doctorate is funny and insightful, providing 9 realistic rules for life (#1: you don’t have to have a dream).

3. Akira Nagaya’s mind-bogglingly intricate paper cuttings. See his gallery site for some unbelievably tiny miniature works and more. Hat-tip: Reader C.

4. A solid profile from 2010 of the now late, controversial but always entertaining, comedienne: “Joan Rivers Always Knew She Was Funny…”

5. Today in 1698, Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, imposed a “beard tax.” Those who paid the tax were required to carry their beard token inscribed with the phrases “the beard tax has been taken” and “the beard is a superfluous burden.” If you think that’s strange, consider this: Peter’s might not have been the first beard tax…in his book One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair, Allan Peterkin maintains that Henry VIII enacted just such a tax in 1535, but it’s unclear what his evidence for this is.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Some time ago I shared a story about spam (of the email kind) literature and poetry. Now Paris Review has something to say about the art of [or in] spam. Hat-tip: (a different) Reader C.

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