Today’s WORD arrives nearly simultaneously with the new David Foster Wallace Reader, an author whose final book I’ve left partially unread because I’m not ready to contain the knowledge of having read every word he intended to share with the world.
WORK
“Professor Theodor Mommsen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902, wrote a thousand learned essays and books […]. The German scholar’s devotion to literature was legendary. Once, Mommsen, the father of twelve, was a passenger on a “horse car” bound for Berlin and was deeply immersed in a book. Annoyed at the wailing of a young boy sitting nearby, he demanded that the noisy child identify himself so that he could be reprimanded by name. “Why, Papa, don’t you know me?” the boy cried. “I’m your little Heinrich.” On January 26, 1903, Mommsen was similarly absorbed in another book he had just climbed a ladder to get from the topmost shelf of his library. While peering at the volume, the eighty-five-year-old historian held a candle too close to his head and set his long white locks on fire. He alertly threw the skirts of his study gown over his head and smothered the flames, but his face was scorched and his hair consumed; his death ten months later was attributed in part to the freak accident.”
—Nicholas Basbanes
—from A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
WORD(S)
finifugal. adjective. Shunning the end of anything. From Latin fīnis (end) + fuga (flight).
“In modern as well as in ancient times, the finifugal tendency…is apparent.” (L.A. Tollemache)
“Many things in life deserve being finifugal about: the last twenty pages of a good book, a special meal that someone has just spent hours preparing for you, a slow walk in a light rain.” (Ammon Shea)
WEB
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“…like regular pornography, the internet has transformed it. Freed from the already relaxed constraints of tabloid journalism, grief porn is no longer obligated to fake newsworthiness or importance.” → “This Kid Just Died [VIDEO]: Grief Porn Enters the Facebook Era”
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Chun Kwang Young makes newspaper sculptures of a sort you’ve never seen before.
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Today in 1713, novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne is born. Like many avid readers and wanna-be writers, I spent some time obsessing over Sterne’s remarkable work The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, whose inventive construction seemed to presage the next 200 years of development of the novel. Michael Winterbottom’s tribute to the unfilmable novel, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is an entertaining—and sly—entertainment if you don’t have patience for the book. Or even if you do.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader T. points out a book I’d missed: “Speaking of marginalia, I’m assuming you’ve already seen the book, S.?”
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Reader B. appreciated last week’s WORD and WORK: “Lovely. Always good to evoke Angela Carter. And I like that phobia.” — I was introduced to Angela Carter’s work by Reader J., right here in these comments.
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