WORK
“It’s hardly a coincidence that ‘Shipping Out,’ Wallace’s most well-known essay, appeared only a month before Infinite Jest, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what’s so great about writing, said that we’re existentially alone on the planet—I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling—so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the bridge of human loneliness.”
—David Shields
—from How Literature Saved My Life
WORD(S)
dwine /DWIYN/. verb. To waste or pine away, decline, wither. From Middle English dwinen, from Old English dwīnan (to disappear, to languish); also Old Norse dvīna (to dwindle or pine away).
“Lyke as the purpour flour…Dwynis away, as it doith faid or de.” (Virgil, trans. by Gavin Douglas)
“A race, which…must, to use a fine though half-forgotten word, begin to dwine away.” (The Spectator, 1889)
“I will dwine your flesh on your bones.” (Samuel R. Crockett)
“As well die in a bog-hole or break your neck over a crag as dwine away with ague in the cold heather, as you are like to do…” (John Buchan)
“Pine away—dwine away— / Anything to leave you!” (Rudyard Kipling)
WEB
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Various authors on their favorite words…and some good ones in the comments area too! → From plitter to drabbletail: the words we love
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“There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards five workers. You’re in a nearby café, sipping on a latte, and don’t notice.” → from Lesser Known Trolley Problem Variations.
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“The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR…” → Explore the Journal of Universal Rejection.
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Today in 1860, Erastus and Erwin Beadle release the first dime novel, Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. Northern Illinois University has a fantastic collection of digitized dime novels (and “nickel weeklies”) called, appropriately, Nickels and Dimes. Thanks to UMN digital libraries, you can peruse some digitized dime novels. Or check out some of the cracking dime novel covers—one of their hallmarks—in this Library of Congress exhibit.
WATCH/WITNESS
“Aria” — sculpture by John McAbery.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader C. makes an interesting point about retronyms: “Retronyms make me think of a whole group of words where the prefix is political: Asian-American, gay marriage, female scientist, black culture, etc… The modifiers are not actually necessary but they are effective in implying ‘not normal’ or ‘special anomaly’. Americans are American, marriage is marriage, scientists are scientists, culture is culture. It’s an interesting exercise, for instance, to merely take notice any time an article headline feels the need to use the adjective ‘girl’ or ‘woman’ to describe any profession. Would the reverse happen for ‘male scientist’ or ‘man politician’? And would the article suffer any from the removal of that prefix?”
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Reader B. recommends: “That lovely Carver quote brought to my wandering mind Wendell Berry’s fine early novel Jayber Crow, with its barber protagonist.”
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Reader C. is disappointed in my Memorial Day issue: “No excerpt from war literature for the work portion of today’s newsletter? Expected but disappointing.”
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Former Reader T. was disappointed in Katexic as a whole: “The poetry didn’t resonate with me at all and it [the newsletter] felt pretentious, unreal…”
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