|k| clippings: 2014-12-03 — beard of dreams

WORK

“It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…”

He was silent for a while.

“…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone…”

—Joseph Conrad
—from Heart of Darkness

WORD(S)

pogonotrophy. noun. The cultivation of a beard or other facial hair. See also, pogonology, the study of beards and ophiopogon, a flower popularly called snakesbeard. From Greek pogon (beard) and trophia (growing, nourishing).

“There’s a theory that beard fashions blow in on the tail-winds of ferment and upheaval, and thus we see the clean-shaven look favoured by the Romantics (you might have thought that rambling man of the woods William Wordsworth was a dead cert for fuzz) giving way to seventy years of pogonotrophic magnificence following the European Revolutions of 1848. The huge Victorian face-bush finally met its end during World War One, kiboshed by a ban on beards in the military (hygiene? gas mask efficiency?)” (Kevin Smith)

“Yours faithfully, Isidore Tufton, Author of The Growth of the Moustache Movement, The Topiary Art as applied to Whiskers, and the article on ‘Pogonotrophy’ in The Hairdressers’ Encyclopædia.” (Punch Magazine, 1920)

“The wearing of the beard by some questionable vagabonds who called themselves philosophers, was but a corruption of the institution of Pogonotrophy.” (Westminster Review, 1854)

WEB

1. Sounds like the plot of a much better movie than the one involved → “Stuart Little leads art historian to long-lost Hungarian masterpiece”

2. While we’re on visual art, how about this— all that is known of collage artist Karl Waldmann: he was born in Germany and he disappeared in 1958, presumably into the Soviet Gulag prison system. His work was discovered in 1989 and there is now a lot of it, most found in flea markets and second-hand shops.

3. Why Everything You Think About Aging May Be Wrong → I hope so, since by the time I hit 50, I’ll be at least 125 mentally.

4. Yusuke Oono’s laser-cut, 3D, 360° story books.

5. Today in 1857, novelist-cum-prose-poet Joseph Conrad is born. Best known for Heart of Darkness (and the filmic version Apocalypse Now), Conrad seems to have been sadly relegated to particular level of literary purgatory where the often spoken of but not-so-often read pace endlessly in frustrated little circles. A man of great reserve, a sailor forced from the sea by ill-health (and a growing attraction to writing) Conrad suffered from gout, dental afflictions, neuralgic pain, recurring malaria and depression severe enough that he shot himself in the chest in a failed suicide attempt…all while writing some of the most beautiful prose of any novelist in his third language, English (after his native Polish and the French he became fluent in as a child), which he learned in his twenties. Conrad claimed that French was too “perfectly crystallized” and English so attractively “plastic” that it had become “the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D. writes in appreciation: “I loved the Strand poems. Thank you!”

• Reader J. also writes about Strand: “I had the privilege of squiring him around town during a visit and his humility and insight were as apparent in conversation as in his instantly recognizable poems.”

• Reader P. asks, re: the fraudulent-but-not Lego letter: “And the moral of the story?”

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