|k| clippings: 2015-02-04 — thinkandfeel

WORK

I wrote to you on the first of this month, and am now going to write on the last of it, to close a year that has laid so many ominous eggs. Whether the next will crush or hatch them we shall soon have some chance of foreseeing.

[…]

I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel—a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept. The only gainer is history, which has constant opportunities of showing the various ways which men can contrive to be fools and knaves. The record pretends to be written for instruction, though to this hour no mortal has been the better or wiser for it. Adieu.

—Horace Walpole
—letter to Sir Horace Mann, 12/31/1769

Note: the emphasis shown above is in the original. Walpole is emphasizing a line he coined in a series of notes later collected as “Detached Thoughts”, a rewarding compendium of tiny brilliancies.

WORD(S)

boustrophedon /BOO-struh-FEE-dun/. adjective and noun. An ancient writing method in which lines alternate from left to right and right to left. More generally, changing direction or going back and forth. From Greek, literally, “the turning of the ox.”

“The inscriptions are read from right to left and vice versâ in ‘boustrophedon’ style (bous, ‘an ox,’ and strephō, ‘to turn,’ therefore, as an ox ploughs), as in ancient Greek modes of writing.” (Edward Clodd)

“She then walked boustrophedon along the pews on either side of the main aisle, replacing on their hooks whatever loose hassocks had been left on the floor…” (Colin Dexter)

“Whereas, false boustrophedon, alternate lines instead of having vertical orientation will curl around upside down, this also being called Schlangenschrift which means snake-writing.” (Rebecca Gowers)

WEB

1. “The color tabs that began as the mechanism to draw Baldauf away from herself (in her desire not to read the book) and into the world of Infinite Jest have now produced a unique art object that has its own aura of appeal.” → “Reading David Foster Wallace for the Colors” (Hat-tip: Reader C.)

2. Jonathon Green—the author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang and Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made—has many more slang timelines than the one for terms for drunkenness mentioned here before. → See timelines for: mental instability, pubs and bars, the vagina, the penis, and three timelines for intercourse (the basics, oral and other varieties, and orgasms and bodily fluids). Needless to say: there are some potentially offensive (and delightful and bewildering) words therein.

3. Humans are tiny, amazing creatures…and it’s never more clearer than when goggling at a 1.5 billion pixel photo covering a 61,000 light year long section of the galaxy containing over 100 million stars. → “Hubble’s High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy”

4. I’ve linked to discussions of “poetry voice”—that strange reading style with high and low voice in unexPECted places you hear only at poetry readings—before. Now Toyota is getting into the act. → ►“Rav4 Beat Poetry Brochure Reading”

5. Today in 1947, Dan Quayle, 44th Vice President of the United States is born. Quayle may be remembered for many things, but none more so than his seemingly bottomless capacity for linguistic invention. A few choice examples:

“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.”

“I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”

“You take the UNCF model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

“One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared.’”

“Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• (A different) Reader C. swoons: “Reader S. [who shared ‘this gem from Weird Al’] is my hero.”

• Reader J. is keeping me honest: “I’m pretty sure there’s a Rom word or two in Finnegans Wake—wouldn’t that count as something more that Eurish? In any case, don’t be harder on it than Joyce wanted to make it. (There are stories—fifieth–hand by the time they get to us, naturally—of Joyce being heard laughing [fiendishly? demonically? maniacally?] behind closed doors as he was writing it. Which, of course, took him seventeen years–so it probably shouldn’t be an effortless read.) I read it while I was in the Air Force (no one was paying attention, thank goodness), armed with the Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake and Anthony Burgess’s Re Joyce—extremely helpful, enough so that I got through the thing. And, while I can’t claim to have a strictly speaking comfortable grasp of its niceties, HCE, ALP, and expressions like ‘the agenbite of inwit,’ ‘The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity,’ ‘three yearsquarks for Muster Mark,’ ‘our funnaminal world,’ and (ova curse) ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs’ (which I’ve quoted to pretty much every class I’ve ever taught these past thirty years—why? because like Everest, it’s there) will be with me till I join the Anna Livia flux and flow forever.”

• Reader B. makes a good point about the epistolary novel: “Epistolary: that form was vital in the rise of the British novel. The UK discovered novels very late, really the early 1700s, way after everyone else was doing book-length fiction. ¶ So you’ve got people like Samuel Richardson making important, widely-read novels of letters. They get parodied, too.”

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