WORK
“Nearing the Moon”
Face facts. The moon is not the moon.
The moon is a lump of rock and sand and interplanetary debris.
But the moon is not that either. The moon
is a bump on the forehead of a blindman,
who, having tripped and fallen in an alley,
curses his blindness. Now we begin to approach it.
—Halvard Johnson
—from Winter Journey
WORD(S)
pelf /pelf/. noun. Spoils. Stolen goods. Ill-gained and corrupting wealth. From Anglo-French pelf, Old French pelfre (booty, spoils); see also: pilfer.
“ Here enter not base pinching Usurers, Pelf-lickers, everlasting gatherers.” (Rabelais [translated by Thomas Urquhart])
“The Gulag Tour, so the purser tells me, never quite caught on…Moscow is impressive—grimly fantastic in its pelf. And Petersburg, too, no doubt, after its billion-dollar birthday: a tercentenary for the slave-built city ‘stolen from the sea.’ It’s everywhere else that is now below the waterline.” (Martin Amis)
“Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power.” (James Joyce)
WEB
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This made me laugh…which was much needed. Thanks, Reader S. → The Gluten Free Museum (includes Caravaggio).
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“In his vastness and mobility, Chesterton continues to elude definition: He was a Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist. Poetry, criticism, fiction, biography, columns, public debate—the phenomenon known to early–20th-century newspaper readers as ‘GKC’ was half cornucopia, half content mill.” → A Most Unlikely Saint [Hat-tip: Reader C.]
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The History of Lorem Ipsum (including its origins in Cicero)
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London Upside-Down, New York Subways and Skyscrapers, An Imagined Underground…maps and illustrations, real and imagined, by the other Picasso… → Works of Renzo Picasso
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Today in 1882, the famous outlaw Jesse James is killed by Robert Ford, a young member of his by-then greatly diminished gang. Like many characters of the wild American west, the exploits of James and his gang were greatly embellished…and in conflicting directions. On the one hand, James is often thought of as a kind of Robin Hood character, robbing from the rich, prompted by the expansion of the railroad into his land. Neither appears to be true. On the other hand, James is often pictured as a cold-blooded killer…but that was really the m.o. of his brother, Frank. And, of course, rumors of his death being staged remain despite the prominent display of the body immediately afterwards and conclusive DNA testing in 1995.
WATCH/WITNESS
“&” by Gabriel Schama. Visit Schama’s website and gallery.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader W. feels it would be prudent “to let readers in on your little joke about visiting the ‘Museum of Hoaxes’ in San Diego, which doesn’t actually exist.” — Fair enough. But note I did say readers could ‘try to visit’ the museum…"
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Reader B. leads the way: “this triggered a memory (this? words without prefixes) … in Felicia Lamport’s Light Metres … she has a section of couplets and a quattrain or two … that turn on this …” — B. included a snippet from Google Books that led me to the original William Safire article including “The Deprefixers”. Scroll down…it’s delightful.
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