I wanted to share something from the surprisingly gripping novel The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (author of The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth), but the story of a young, orphaned, female chess prodigy (who is equally prodigious at self-medication) is written in a style as plain as it is enthralling…not the makings of a good excerpt. I highly recommend it. You don’t need to know anything about chess but if you do, you will be surprised at the accuracy of the details.

WORK

He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

—Cormac McCarthy
—from The Road

WORD(S)

salitter. noun. As coined by Jakob Böhme in Aurora, the power and force of god. The kind of thing Dylan Thomas might have been referring to with the words “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

“In the divine pomp and state two things are especially to be considered: First, the Salitter or the divine powers, which are moving, springing powers.” (Jakob Böhme)

“What is in Paradise is made of the celestial Salitter. What is in the fallen world is made of the corrupt Salitter. The former is clear, bright, resplendent. The latter is dark, poisonous, and foul-smelling. The forces of the celestial Salitter give rise to celestial fruits, flowers, and vegetation. The corrupt forces of the earthly Salitter exert themselves, in vain, to do the same.” (Andrew Weeks)

See WORD entry above (Cormac McCarthy)

WEB

1. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili aka Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream or, simply, The Dream of Poliphilus is an amazing and beautiful incunabula (remember that WORD late last August?) set in the typeface that would become the modern Bembo and lavish with beautiful woodcuts. Apparently the language is a bizarre Latin and Italian concoction and the hieroglyphics mostly fake, but it’s oh-so-beautiful to look at. Wikipedia has links to many different online editions. My favorites are the Rare Book Room (much more good stuff there as well) edition and the high-resolution scans from the Herzog August Bibliothek.

2. “A Blood Clot in the Brain, and an Artist Is Born.” There might be hope for rescuing my creativity yet. Caveman style.

3. On the polar opposite side of things from the Hypnerotomachia is MONOLITT…a work of, I don’t know, socially-ambient sculpture?, that “paints the mood of the city” by pushing out paint based on the mood of social media posts.

4. ► Midnight Oil - “Beds Are Burning”

5. Today in 1984, the made-for-TV movie The Burning Bed (►watch it on YouTube), starring Farrah Fawcett, premieres on NBC. Based on the true story told in a harrowing nonfiction book, the movie drove thousands to call the domestic violence hotline advertised at the end of the movie, changed the nature of domestic violence discussions in the US and arguably inspired a few copycat acts. And it showed that Farrah Fawcett really could act, which wasn’t so apparent from the iconic poster of her I had on my wall for a while. Incidentally, today is also the birthday of R. L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps children’s horror series, but I associate him with his Scholastic Press Bananas magazine (the teen equivalent of their Dynamite) that I read avidly (I clearly remember this issue with Charlie’s Angels—including Farrah Fawcett—on the cover).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D. ponders: “Thanks for sharing the Al Jolson video, which sent me down a happy but uncomfortable rabbit trail of reading about blackface and cultural ‘appropriation’ in the arts. No answers from this cat. It’s complicated.”

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