|k| clippings: 2014-12-10 — 616.89 + 811 = ?

WORK

"But it was not to reassure himself that he had finally determined to look in the library for news of what had happened so many years ago. His anxiety, never entirely soothed during those years, had not focused on the practical consequences of his action. Rather, he had crossed the library’s threshold to discover how he would feel when Lino’s death had been confirmed. From this feeling, he thought, he would be able to judge whether he was still the boy he had once been, obsessed by his own fatal abnormality, or the altogether normal man that he had afterwards wished to be and was convinced he was.

He felt an intense relief and, perhaps even more than relief, surprise, when he realized that the news printed on the yellowed, seventeen-year-old paper stirred no appreciable echo in his soul. He was like, he thought, someone who has kept a bandage wrapped over a deep wound for a long time, finally decides to remove it, and discovers with amazement that where he had thought to find at least a scar, the skin is smooth and seamless, without any mark of any kind. Looking up the report in the newspaper had been like taking off the bandage, he thought again, and discovering himself to be unmoved was like discovering that he was healed. How this healing had come about, he couldn’t say. But without a doubt, it was not time alone that had produced such a result. He owed a lot to himself, as well, to his conscious desire, throughout all those years, to escape his abnormality and become like other people."

—Alberto Moravia
—from The Conformist

WORD(S)

hebetude. noun. A state of torpor, dullness, lethargy or languor. From Latin hebes (blunt, dull).

“For many hours he remained apparently forgotten, stretched lifelessly on the floor. From that solitude, full of despair and terror, he was torn out brutally, with kicks and blows, passive, sunk in hebetude. He listened to threats and admonitions, and afterwards made his usual answers to questions, with his chin sunk on his breast…” (Joseph Conrad)

“How soon my soul repairs its fault
When, sharpening senses’ hebetude,
She turns on my own life! So viewed,
No mere mote’s-breadth but teems immense
With witnessings of providence…” (Robert Browning)

“There is, however, a cerebral (brain) phase of spermatorrhœa which may be separated from the two preceding classes. It is characterized by indistinctness of vision, dilatation of the pupil, amblyopia (near-sightedness), diplopia (double sight); diminution in the sensitiveness of the auditory apparatus (deafness); feebleness of voice; mental preoccupation, hebetude of mind, confusion of ideas, and a profound melancholy.”

(from Manhood Perfectly Restored: Prof. Jean Civiale’s Soluble Urethral Crayons as a Quick, Painless, and Certain Cure for Impotence, Etc.)

WEB

1. The Strange Story Of The Man Behind ‘Strange Fruit’ → Two lives, indeed! Via Reader S.

2. WIKISKY is a kind of visual wikipedia for space images and astronomical objects. I can get lost in here for days (or light-years).

3. “Meet the Color Chasers, Yuri Suzuki’s [mini] Robots That Translate Color Into Sounds”

4. Fittingly, given the next entry, Tom Gauld illustrates how we should really organize our books. I bet some of you could add a few categories.

5. Today in 1851, Melvil Dewey, founder of the American Library Association, establisher of the standard card-catalog, and inventor of the Dewey Decimal library classification system is born. Too old to remember? Refresh your memory with the ► Dewey Decimal Rap. Originally named Melville, Dewey was an advocate of spelling reform—in his case toward simplicity—so he rid his first name of the “redundancy” (though his change of last name to “Dui” was short-lived). Dewey’s system, which has grown from a four-page pamphlet to a four-volume set, introduced relative indexing and locations for books, making it much easier to manage growing collections and is used in more than 200,000 libraries around the world. The system isn’t without its critics, though, who point out flaws in both the underlying problems of classification and the way Dewey’s world-view influenced his construction (for instance, Christianity has 88 top-level entries, while the Jewish and Muslim religions get just one each and Buddhists share a single decimal point). There’s always the Library of Congress Classification system, which is arguably even less rational. Incidentally, the librarian(s)(ish) amongst the Clamor might enjoy Jason Munday’s song ► The Dewey Decimal System.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M. notes: “Creeley’s poem is unsettling, claiming at once that we should dance without worry and that the direction is to follow. Not so simple after all.”

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