WORK

“Inscription”

Stinking bird
no nightingale
sitting on my grave
fly up sing
listen to my hurt voice
I tried to make lovesongs
that would turn heaven into earth
I tried by suffering
well that was my own stupidity
now that I’m dead
now that I’m you
maybe God
will make me happy
I doubt it
but God can’t wait
bird come back perch on my stone
weep make up a new song
the one I couldn’t sing
leave one of your tiny innocent shits
on the silent marble.

—Vicente Huidobro (translation/version by Stephen Berg)
—found in The Steel Cricket: Versions 1958-1997

WORD(S)

chiasmus. noun. A literary and rhetorical device in which two phrases are presented with the second being a reversed or re-ordered form of the first. For example, as Cicero (and Richard Simmons) once said: “One should eat to live, not live to eat.” As you will see if you start looking for it, the chiasmus is a common, memorable technique ("Ask not what your country can do for you…; one for all and…; &c).

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower)

“CHIEF JUSTICE: Your means are very slender,
and your waste is great.
FALSTAFF: I would it were otherwise. I would my means
were greater and my waist slenderer.”
(Shakespeare)

“Architect: One who drafts a plan of your house and plans a draft of your money.” (Ambrose Bierce)

“At fifty a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass.” (Mark Twain)

“And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, Love the one you’re with.” (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young)

WEB

1. Rachel Sussman’s photos of The World’s Oldest Living Things are wonderful and surprising…I expected a tree or two, but an 80,000-year-old colony of Aspen? 3000-year-old moss-like plants that look like magnified spores? 2000-year-old brain coral? Related: the book. Sussman’s TED Talk (if you’re a TED Talk hater, zip it).

2. “On Cans”…the amazingly interesting history, production and taste of canned food.

3. The Book Cover Archive (thanks, Reader C.) & What Makes for a Brilliant Book Cover? A Master Explains.

4. So, actress Tippi Hedren and her daughter Melanie Griffith lived with a lion and the pictures are fascinating. I kept thinking of Grizzly Man but they didn’t, apparently, get eaten.

5. Today in 1764, historian Edward Gibbon sees a group of friars singing in in the ruins of Rome’s ancient Temple of Jupiter and is inspired to begin his lifelong work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Originally intended to be a history of the city of Rome, the book eventually became an obsession the took over Gibbons’ life. While certainly not without faults, Gibbons’ relative objectivity and commitment to primary sources changed the study of history (and because this included demoting religious texts, led to his being attacked as a pagan). And the whole thing is available free in an extensively annotated form.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C. “Dug the parataxis bit…” — And as I once noted in a conference presentation, the only UNsure things are MacBeth and prophylaxis.

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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