WORK

“Chromatic”

God prayed for rooftops and got the alphabet. Houses were to come first. Then umlauts. Then love. Instead, it starts with After and follows with Before. If ancestry is a tracing back, forestry must be a going forward. On a test: If (you pin a photograph of Artaud to a tree), then (matrimony). God watches while you rearrange your desires from Aching to Zero. There are __________ species that haven’t been named. If we do not name them, there will never be a record of their eyes. If I found I could love a child, I’d call her Olive, I’d eat her before the world ends. My mother is a house. She came first. Then gunshots. Then love. God is when you cry at your body. God is what the president calls a lo mejor. If my name starts with M, I am sisters with Morose, Moonrise, Machine. I remember when giving birth to animals meant a future of luck and hauntings. Haunting: an object that acts out in terror. Memory: an emotion made of string. God calls you terrible names. You still show him your noose. Loss is what comes after xylophone. Xylophone is how we strike our longings into sounds, how our violence sings.

—Meghan Privitello
—from Caketrain (No. 11)

WORD(S)

gardyloo. noun. The warning cry given before throwing dirty water from a window into the street. In modern use: a warning exclamation. From pseudo-French phrase gare de l’eau (beware of the water).

“The first impression of the Scottish capital was not pleasing, for at ten the beat of the city drums was heard; and, amid cries of gardy loo, what Oldham euphemistically calls ‘the perils of the night,’ were thrown over the windows down on the pavement, in the absence of covered sewers.” (William Leask)

“The overwhelming cataract of her questions, which burst forth with the sublimity of a grand gardyloo.” (Sir Walter Scott)

"“Gardyloo! Gardyloo! Gardyloo!” Faith! I hear that evening slogan yet, and see the daunderers on the Rottenrow skurry like rats into the closes to escape the cascades from the attic windows." (Neil Munro)

WEB

1. T(aylor) S(wift) Eliot.

2. “11 facts yü should know about the umlaut”. Hat-Tip: Reader S.

3. ►“The GIF’s Visual Language In Music Videos”. Watch as a series. Please ignore the ridiculous pronunciation of “gif.”

4. Prepare to get lost and find: The Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire (based, in part on the canonical Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World) and ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World which allows one to interactively explore the Roman empire in terms of time and cost to travel and communicate. Amazing.

5. Today in 1932, Albert Collins—“The Master of the Telecaster”—is born. His fretting fingerprints are all over the blues, most clearly in artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray and Johnny Winter. Listen to some full albums on YouTube: Cold Snap, Frostbite and Ice Pickin’. Or a few choice singles: “If Trouble Was Money”, “Cold, Cold Feeling (With Gary Moore)” and “Frosty” (with Stevie Ray Vaughan). If you don’t find yourself tapping your foot, check for a pulse.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. “just started getting into Merwin,” which he describes as “Amazing, weird stuff.”

• Reader Z. asks: “Did the rest of the W. S. Merwin poem [yesterday’s WORK] get deleted by accident?” — Nope. That is, in fact, the entire poem. And a good one too!

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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