|k| clippings: 2014-12-17 — walking on the moon

WORK

“The Stone Bench”

It’s not enough the neighbor cat climbs it,
or pauses. If I thought to lay out milk,
we’d be friends. But for the poured concrete

my yard is of the lush rest of growth,
wisteria and the choking grape, the late

surprise-lily erupting like night lava from space,

kudzu, a word reminding me of war words,
fubar, which it is. & the like. & is how
we know seasons. Which explains

the possum ignoring mute hummingbirds
slurping the Rose of Sharon dry, wingbeats
a blur, this world not helping but be close,

the soft silent whisper of teeth & nails.

—Marcel Brouwers
—from Jet Fuel Review

WORD(S)

mangata. noun. A Swedish word for the shining, wavy, road-like reflection of the moon on water. From Swedish måne (moon) + gata (street). Thanks, Reader G.!

There are many photos and illustrations of mangata, but I am not finding any examples of “real world” usage.

WEB

1. “Hello, banh mi! How food words join the dictionary”.

2. Bleak reading for film lovers » The Birdcage: How Hollywood’s toxic (and worsening) addiction to franchises changed movies forever in 2014. Tangentially related, the 2014 Black List (the year’s best unproduced scripts).

3. Beth Moon’s photographs of ancient trees. And more phenomenal shots in the Verve online galleries of Moon’s work.

4. Cormac “Sluggo” McCarthy → one-panel comics that might tickle your fancy.

5. Today is the first day of the Roman festival of Saturnalia. First celebrated on this day in 497 BC, and later expanded to a week of celebration, the festival honors Saturn, the greek deity of agriculture. As part of Saturnalia, slaves were treated to a banquet and allowed to make fun of their masters, the toga was replaced by colorful clothes, and slave and masters alike donned conical felt hats. A time of peace, Saturnalia was also marked by temporary cessation of military activities and closing of the courts. Many customs of Saturnalia influence modern-day Christmas and New Year’s activities including the exchange of gifts, decorating with holly branches, and displaying evergreen wreathes. The customary greeting during Saturnalia is “io, Saturnalia!” where “io” is pronounced like “yo.” Try it!

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader T. shares a great mondegreen: My favorite is john prine’s song a woman heard as the “HAPPY ENCHILADA” tune. She asked him to sing the Happy Enchilda song and he said he had never written about any kind of Enchilda. ¶ The actual line is ’It’s a half an inch of water—and you think you’re gonna drown“—but she heard ”it’s a happy enchilada and you think you’re going drown"!

• Reader N. shares some Flapper-related linguistic evolution and poses a question: I enjoyed The Flapper’s Dictionary. I picked up a nice piece of slang from Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth where a “cough drop” was used to refer to a person who put a real damper on things. It appears to have morphed into “Mustard plaster” in The Flapper’s Dictionary. I wonder if medical treatments are a common analogy for tedious people? Is illness a metaphor, however obscurely, for excitement?

• Reader N. also asks another good question: I recently found myself in a situation where I could ask 35 young people (18–24 age group) if they had seen “Gone With the Wind.” Not a one. I then asked who had heard of it and a only a couple of the brainiacs said that they had. I wonder if the life span of popular culture is diminishing? I very well remember the Marx Brothers, Glenn Miller, W.C. Fields, Astaire and Rogers, Greta Garbo, Sarah Bernhardt and Charlie Chaplin. Is my timing off (these people were all at the height of their careers long before I was born) or is the half-life of celebrity greatly diminished? — Being, I suspect, of a similar age, I wonder about that too…

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