This issue was delayed by an automated security system that, I'm guessing, didn't like Woody Guthrie's all-caps! So today will be a daily double...
WORK
NEW YEAR’S RULIN’S
- WORK MORE AND BETTER
- WORK BY A SCHEDULE
- WASH TEETH IF ANY
- SHAVE
- TAKE BATH
- EAT GOOD - FRUIT - VEGETABLES - MILK
- DRINK VERY SCANT IF ANY
- WRITE A SONG A DAY
- WEAR CLEAN CLOTHES - LOOK GOOD
- SHINE SHOES
- CHANGE SOCKS
- CHANGE BED CLOTHES OFTEN
- READ LOTS GOOD BOOKS
- LISTEN TO RADIO A LOT
- LEARN PEOPLE BETTER
- KEEP RANCHO CLEAN
- DON’T GET LONESOME
- STAY GLAD
- KEEP HOPING MACHINE RUNNING
- DREAM GOOD
- BANK ALL EXTRA MONEY
- SAVE DOUGH
- HAVE COMPANY BUT DON’T WASTE TIME
- SEND MARY AND KIDS MONEY
- PLAY AND SING GOOD
- DANCE BETTER
- HELP WIN WAR - BEAT FASCISM
- LOVE MAMA
- LOVE PAPA
- LOVE PETE
- LOVE EVERYBODY
- MAKE UP YOUR MIND
- WAKE UP AND FIGHT
—Woody Guthrie (1941)
—from Lists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience
WORD(S)
kakistocracy /ka-ki-STAW-krə-see/. noun. Coinage for government by the worst citizens, supposedly the opposite of the aristrocracy (try to avoid the brain-numbing regression of what happens when the aristocracy is the kakistocracy). From Greek kakistos (superlative of kakos, bad) + English -cracy (government, rule). See also: the likely related cack (to discharge excrement, to vomit). See also: khakistocracy, a portmanteau referring to military rule of a country in conjunction with that country’s elites.
“…it had spotted the weapon-blink from Ablate, communicating this to its home GSV, the Kakistocrat, which had been cautious enough to pass this on to a select few of its peers including the Pressure Drop rather than broadcast the news.” (Iain M. Banks)
“The OED is full of words for different types of governments. I find most of them forgettable. But kakistocracy, describing so aptly the fear, which seems common in every generation, that their government is truly the worst possible one, is a word worth remembering.” (Ammon Shea)
“Should your agitation succeed it would result in the French Revolution over again, together with all its corollaries,—anarchy, kakistocracy,[Pg 30] a glorious tyranny on a false foundation, kakistocracy again, and chaos: a counter revolution, again a kakistocracy, and finally impotence, false and evil as the destroyed feudalism.” (Ralph Adams Cram)
WEB
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Newly discovered annotations by Dickens in a bound collection of his All the Year Round journal reveals new work by Wilkie Collins, Lewis Carroll and Elizabeth Gaskell (among others).
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Lisa Brown’s Three Panel Book Reviews.
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“To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world.” → Robin Sloan on Minecraft and the possible future of the “networked, generative” novel.
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An interesting look at translations of a poem that ultimately cost the original author his life. → Three [and a few more] translations of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Stalin’s Epigram’
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Today in 1912, singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie is born in Okemah, Oklahoma. Creator of, most famously, “This Land is Your Land” and a notable influence on scores of famous musicians, the “Dust Bowl Troubador” made a beautiful noise out of his experiences during the Great Depression and his experience of an America that still exists…kind of…if it ever did. Listen to ► The Best of Woody Guthrie. Watch the ► BBC Arena documentary on his life.
WATCH/WITNESS
Dystopia, book art by Maddy Rosenberg - “Dystopia - 2007, 9 x 4 x.5 inches, edition of 30, linoleum block prints with digitally printed cover Cut, folded, and bound, open the cover and a three-dimensional city emerges, unfolds, metamorphoses.”
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
- Reader J. on James Tate: “I’m a little more enthusiastic about Tate’s strangely drifting gifts of association than you seem to be. Something about him caught me early—in the early 70s—and has stayed with me through the later books. Maybe we’re just more ready to forgive the excesses and shortcomings of our favorite poets because the poems they write that really touch us really touch us. Strangely, I was just talking with one of his (very, very fine) ex-students, Lesle Lewis, last Wednesday, and we spoke of him—of the dryness of his humor (which, she noted, he didn’t always let on he was aware of), and also what I’d call his strange gift of surreal decorum. Maybe a midwestern thing—I think by way of comparison of another wonderful midwesterner of a quite different stripe, Bill Sylvester. We also felt that in some ways Tate struck us like Ashbery—that each evolved a certain enormously resilient diction that took them through a fine stretch of admirable years. I thought today (though I didn’t know him) of writing a poem that might catch my feelings for him. I didn’t, but I did have a first line that might have gone somewhere: So Jim Tate’s gone to meet his funny maker. Well, so that’s enough. The funny makers often seem the best, to me.”
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