WORK
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
—from A Man Without a Country
WORD(S)
megrim(s) /MEE-grim(s)/. noun. A migraine headache or the kind of dizziness and vertigo that often accompanies such headaches. In plural form, megrims, depression or melancholy. Rarely, a whim, a caprice or a furtive thought. From Old French migraign, from Late Latin hemicrania (headache).
“If these megrims are the effect of Love, thank Heaven, I never knew what it was.” (Samuel Richardson)
“He was turning around, zipping his fly, talking mostly to keep the megrims away.” (Stephen King)
“Doth the ague, the megrim, or the gout spare him more than us? When age shall once seize on his shoulders can then the tall yeomen of his guard discharge him of it?” (Michel de Montaigne)
“But you told me last night that cricket gave you the pip, which I imagine is something roughly equivalent to the megrims or the heeby-jeebies.” (P. G. Wodehouse)
“Then the megrims began, like claps of thunder trapped inside his skull, and for hours he was forced to lie prostrate in his shuttered cell with vinegar poultices pressed to his brow, as cascades of splintered multicoloured glass formed jagged images of agony behind his eyes.” (John Banville)
WEB
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The theorizing about social media is weak and distracts from a devastating story that everyone should probably read → Split Image
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The Brooklyn Museum has an exhibit up called Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Even if you can’t attend, there’s gold in the teacher packet (PDF)
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I’m fascinated by memory and ephemerality, particularly in this age of permanent impermanence → Oliver Jeffers’s Art of Bearing Witness
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Stunning first shots from National Geographic’s 2015 Traveler Photo Contest
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Today in 868, a version of the Diamond Sūtra is published in China and is now the oldest surviving complete, specifically dated book in the world. Sealed up in a cave in the year 1000, the scroll was discovered with many others in 1907 by the explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein and is currently housed at the British Library. The Diamond Sūtra gets its name from the text itself: when asked what this Sūtra should be called, Buddha responds that it shall be known as ‘The Diamond that Cuts through Illusion’. Read a “new translation” of the Diamond Sūtra that integrates more than a dozen different translations.
WATCH/WITNESS
I can’t stop watching these videos of Seb Lester drawing versions of famous logos.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
- Reader S. found the torture method that might be the origin for ‘kibosh’: "One source claims the British method of execution involved putting burning pitch on people’s heads. ¶ Which is apparently something that actually happened, even if I am lazy and go to Wikipedia: pitchcapping.
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