WORK
“The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.”
—Cormac McCarthy
—from The Road
WORD(S)
scaramouch(e) /SKAIR-ə-moosh/. noun. A cowardly, foolish braggart. As a proper name, a stock character in Italian farce who is routinely beset by the Harlequin. From Italian scaramuccia (skirmish).
“…here he wears the Jack-Boots, there the Small-Sword; is here an Enthusiast, there a Buffoon; on this Side he acts the Mountebank, on that Side the Merry-Andrew; nothing comes amiss to him, from the Great Mogul, to the Scaramouch; the Devil is in them more or less…” (Daniel Defoe)
“…if I may lean on Perian’s punning style, The Malacia Tapestry could unfussily be retitled Tom Cojones and left at that. De Chirolo, a raffish scaramouche, is a terrible ‘one’ for the girls…” (Martin Amis)
“If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow
Scorched by Hell’s hyperequatorial climate
Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:
A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;
In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.”
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)“They revelled last night in ‘Don Juan,’ whom we left in hell at half-past eleven. We had scaramouch and a ghost, and were delighted. I speak of them; my delight was very tranquil, and the rest of us were sober-minded.” (Jane Austen)
WEB
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“A virus essentially obliterated Lonni Sue Johnson’s hippocampus, and she can no longer recall what happened five minutes earlier. Her life has become an endless series of jump cuts.” → “Life Lines” on an artist with amnesia
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“Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet”. If you can’t visit the museum that resulted in person, try the 3-D tour.
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“It seemed to him, coming from his island, where until Friday arrived he lived a silent life, that there was too much speech in the world.” → J.M. Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel Prize speech in the persona of an older Robinson Crusoe [also available ►as a video]
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Today in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (originally titled The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.) is published. A strong candidate for the title of First English Novel, both added to the lexicon—“my man Friday” becoming Man/Girl Friday—and spawned many imitators now mostly forgotten. And for good reason: Defoe’s novel is more complex than the mimics gave him credit for…it’s an adventure story and the story of a castaway, but it’s also a morality tale, a story of spirit and utopia, an allegory for imperialism and (arguably) man’s progression from primitivism to civilization, and a long musing on the “middle state.” The literary legacy of Robinson Crusoe, a motley genre sometimes called the Robinsonade, includes works as diverse, but intertwined, as The Swiss Family Robinson (and Lost in Space), Lord of the Flies and The Island of the Day Before, and—with a stretch—an amazing array of post-apocalyptic fiction which I eat like bitter, addictive candy. And I have to mention, when it comes to specific more-or-less derivative works, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe stands out above the rest. And, just for fun, here’s Al Jolson singing “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday On Saturday Night” from the 1916 musical.
WATCH/WITNESS
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader T. caught me: “You’ve mentioned that many Katexics contain ‘easter eggs’. Was your polysyndeton in the entry for Shakespeare’s birthday one of them?” — Indeed it was!
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Reader S. writes: “Just got my first issue, I’m sorry I hadn’t been following before, it is lovely. It is great to hear your voice in these. I look forward to many more!” — Glad you’re reading…you are one of the audience in my head all the time!
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Reader K. objects: “‘You probably don’t know what you’re looking at’ is awfully close to the kind of clickbait caption I abhor.” — Not intended as clickbait, just an observation…did you know it was typewriter art before watching the video?
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