WORK

“Audit”

Up to now echoes are not
      the first things said.
Up to now if I’ve called for help
      my rescuers haven’t heard me.
Up to now the present is discernible
      only as the past, and
Up to now it’s not clear
      what love entitles me to.
Up to now there is no real evidence
      that anyone’s out to get me.
Up to now the misery of thin children
      happens in remote places.
Up to now I have lived no day as if
      it reduced my remaining days.
Up to now I’ve not looked around
      to see if I’m alone.
Up to now the death of one season starts another.
Up to now the poem I haven’t written
      is as good as it will be when I write it.
Up to now the moonlight has revealed
      nothing but continued expectation.
Up to now it always ends up raining.

—William Louis-Dreyfus
—from The New Criterion (September, 2014)

WORD(S)

flitch (flytch, flick). noun. A side of (unsliced) bacon, a square of whale blubber or a halibut steak. In the 1500s a flitch was given as a prize in Essex, England to any married couple who could prove they had lived in conjugal harmony for a year and a day. Also, a length-wise cut of a log with one natural side. From Middle English flicche, from Old English flicce, related to Old Norse flikki and finally from Middle Low German vlicke “piece of flesh.” Interestingly, the word flesh has different roots.

“He walks with dangling breeches…And shewes his naked flitches.” (Robert Herrick)

“Juniper instinctively sought the protection of the aristocracy—getting behind him, ducking between his legs, surrounding him, dancing through him—doing anything to save the paltry flitch of his own bacon.” (Ambrose Bierce)

“…as a certain Friar Loopy, a filcher of flitches, endeavours to prove, provided that he can chance upon folk as daft as he is: ‘Lids,’ as the saying goes, ‘worthy of their pots’” (Rabelais)

“The neap mud along the shore lies ribbed and slick like the cavernous flitch of some beast hugely foundered…” (Cormac McCarthy)

“Father O’Flynn would make hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as big as the Phoenix park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of it.” (James Joyce)

WEB

1. Before I finish typing this sentence, the following link will be shared in approximately 21,952 more places, but it’s too good to leave anyone behind: “Iconic Portrait Photos Throughout History Recreated with John Malkovich as the Subject”.

2. If getting drunk on the Bard’s words isn’t enough for you, how about getting literally drunk? “Drunk Shakespeare: The Trendy Way to Stage the Bard’s Plays in the US & the UK.”. Bonus: The Shakespeare Pro App is worth every penny of its $9.99 price…and then some.

3. Tamsin Shaw on the evolving nature of the idea of genius and its tangled twin roots of human individuality and the gods.

4. 51 quotes in the Oxford English Dictionary come from a mysterious—and yet to be found—book called Meanderings of Memory. Sasha Weiss dug into the story in The New Yorker. And there’s a bit more in the Wikipedia entry.

5. Today in 1690, the first multi-page newspaper in the Americas, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was published. Intended to be a monthly, it was shut down by the British colonial authority before a second edition could be produced, noting that “The Governour and Council having had the perusal of said Pamphlet, and finding that therein contained Reflections of a very high nature: As also sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports, do hereby manifest and declare their high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet, and Order that the same be Suppressed and called in…” Read the paper with modernized spelling and some supplementary images courtesy of the National Humanities Center.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. was “set off” by the claim that Laura Mersini-Houghton has proved the existence of the multi-verse and disproved the existence of black holes. I agree with his conclusion:

Since I can’t do the math, I tend to aproach high-end physics as poetry: that is, beautiful inventions motivated by aggregations of raw hunch. (It’s the “raw hunch” that, in real physics, needs to be supplanted, or at least replaced, by “the math.”) Still, your claim that Laura Mersini-Houghton has “proved” the existence (?) of the multiverse really set me off. I mean, I evidently have a personal stake (who knew?) in a uni-universe. This led me, when I should have been sticking closer to home, to a search for Mersini-Houghton’s ideas (it seemed like what we’ve seen are mostly over-heated explosions of enthusiasm from her host university’s publicity department, and that the relevant papers appeared in non-peer-reviewed journals). This led me to a strange and wonderful precinct, part Stephen Hawking, part Terry Gilliam.

When I tried (desperately!) to unravel the mystery of the space brains, I found myself deposited, floundering, here.

And I began to wonder whether the aforementioned gap (between “the math” and “raw hunch”) hasn’t been filled by a kind of popularizing blogosphere (even weirder than the brainosphere) in which math is dumbed down (uplifted?) into a kind of poetry so that ordinary brains, not at all capable of floating free in space, can claim to have an opinion (?) (!) about, say, string theory, or the Higgs Boson. Ultimately it all comes down to the willingness to say: I know nothing.

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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