WORK

The rez mullet! I also find my former haircut amusing in stylistic terms. It’s embarrassing now. But there’s always been a conscious and subconscious classist / racist edge to mullet jokes, especially when it comes to white guys with mullets. If one means to tell a racist / classist joke then make it a good one, but I don’t actually think that many folks realize the cultural importance of the mullet in Native American-warrior history. Take a look at Chief Joseph.

Unravel those braids, my friend, and you’ve got a legendary mullet, comparable to mine. The contemporary motto for the mullet wearer is “Business in front, party in the back,” but the Indian mullet-warrior motto was “I don’t want my hair to get in my eyes as I’m kicking your ass.” The Indian-mullet motto, coincidentally or not, is the same as the motto for hockey-mullet wearers. Somebody needs to do a study…

—Sherman Alexie
—from “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Turns Twenty”

WORD(S)

winklepicker. noun. A shoe with a long pointed toe popularized in the 1950s. Derived from the word winkle (short for periwinkle) a small mollusc whose meat must be dug out with a sharp, pointed instrument (a winklepicker), leading to the popular phrase “to winkle it out.” Though similarly pointed shoes were fashionable in medieval times, they became seriously popular as part of the British “Teddy Boy” (dance hall creeper) style. Also, a fisher of periwinkles.

“The incredibly pointed custom-built shoes in which teenagers keep other teenagers at arm’s length…The shoes, called winklepickers, look like something out of Grimm’s fairy tales.” (Spectator, 1960)

“South London where the river mists rise in autumn and the winklepickers walk bell hoop and melt.” (Thora Pattern)

“Bobby’s knees were drawn up to his chin, the nonexistent heels of his Keds-clone winkle-pickers caught in the gray mesh of the Aeron’s seat.” (William Gibson)

WEB

1. The 2014 Longlists for the National Book Award are out. Some good reading there. Cue the debate about who was overlooked.

2. Reader M. shares Yulia Brodskaya’s complex quilled paper art. Wow.

3. Just $9,000 and you can join this social network for other rich jerks.

4. Maria Popova at the 2014 Future of Storytelling Conference on ► “Wisdom in the Age of Information”. I still don’t know how she does it.

5. Today in 1783, poet Jane Taylor is born. You probably know her from her poem “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, though I have to admit I only knew the first verse (and a second verse my mom apparently made up to end the lullaby quickly). Taylor and her sister, Ann, collaborated on many books of poems for children, such as Little Ann and Other Poems. Robert Browning claimed her as an influence and Stuart Curran claimed her “capacity to reveal the inner life as a thing” was “unrivaled in English Literature before Dickens.” Umm, OK.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D. remembers the sequence of posts on the photography of abandoned places and points out Antonio La Grotta’s Paradise Discotheque series.

• The same Reader D. also follows up with Alejandro Cegarra’s powerful photos of squatters in an abandoned skyscraper in Caracas, the same building that was mentioned here multiple times before.

• Reader T. points out the Kalamazoo Typochondriacs, a “group for manual typewriter enthusiasts”

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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