WORK

“Amphitheatre”

Being alone, the water seemed calmer,
his marble ledge more secure than it was.
There was one boat coming in, and music
from the taverna might have drawn him down.
Nothing but a few moments of rest,
some accounting of things tethered to him.
Beyond that only the mind, gone quiet.
Even the gulls forgot he was alive.

So it arrived, the beautiful sadness,
and he had to set a place for it to be:
a hollow sheered of everything but light.
Like that bare spot beneath the olive tree
lashed by the chain of a circling dog.

—Christopher Bakken
—from 32 Poems

WORD(S)

ambit. noun. A circumference. The space around a house or castle. The confines or bounds of a district, precinct, or borough. A sphere of influence. From Latin ambitus (a going round), from ambio (I go around). Consider other words with this root such as ambition, ambience and ambiguous.

“His great parts did not live within a small ambit.” (Anthony Wood)

“This particular ambit of uncertainty places my age at roughly two and a half, which is about the earliest point at which the brain retains memory.” (Gene Weingarten)

“I do not exclude my own person from the ambit of the cataclysm which will come and of which I have the components at this moment in my trunk.” (Flann O’Brien)

“A disused ambit of the spirit’s way,
The sort of thing that August crooners sing”
(Wallace Stevens)

“The conceit or ambit of Million Penguins ran thusly: Can a collective create a believable fictional voice?” (Bryan Alexander)

WEB

1. Thanks to Reader G. for a link to a brief history of the pilcrow (¶)—one of my favorite punctuation marks—and its appearance on Medium. And even more for the three-part history of the pilcrow by the always amazing Keith Houston linked to therein: Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

2. THE WORLD NEEDS MORE LOVE LETTERS…a cool project to share the snail mail love.

3. Darius Kazemi’s XOXO conference presentation ►“How I Won the Lotttery” is worth a few minutes for any creative (or creative wannabe), but it boils down to this: there are two kinds of advice given about creativity, a) how to win the lottery and b) how to buy more lottery tickets…and you’re way better off buying all the tickets you can.

4. Amy Elkins’ Black is the Day, Black is the Night is an artistic collaboration through letters with lifers and death row inmates that you should just check out rather than read me trying to come up with an appropriate description.

5. Today in 1942, the ALCAN (aka the Alaska Highway) is completed, connecting Alaska to the rest of the United States (not that you’d think Alaska was part of the US given shipping policies and the questions asked by tourists about converting their US currency) and some awfully nice parts of Canada. Spurred on by World War II and the Japanese invasion of some Aleutian islands, the 1700 mile long highway was built by more than 11,000 soldiers and now exists for your RV-ing pleasure (and for Alaskans to take advantage of socialized medicinal care).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

Reader T. wasn’t too impressed by the “Slow Type” story. He writes:

Well, the SLOW TYPE article was fascinating, with a few great points, but overall far too precious for me. It just reminds me of the romantic pretension, if not hypocrisy, of a guy like Wendell Berry, who has the woman do the typing.

I think we need to remember with greater clarity what it was like before “word processing.”

In 1983 I had to have my dissertation typed by hand, which meant that if you made a single typo the entire page had to be retyped. No white out allowed! And if you had to calculate the size of a footnote, good luck!

I wrote it on an IBM Selectric III bought with my first PFD check in 1982.

I will never forget the indescribable joy when I got my Leading Edge Model D in 1986 in Anchorage. It was like a gift from heaven and that freedom from the toil of typewriter-typing, which allowed focus on the words themselves instead of the drudgery of retyped pages, is something I still won’t take for granted.

Call me a Gradgrind if you will, but I have to smile at those who lament something that at least for me, is not lamentable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_Edge_Model_D

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