Two nuclear-grade errors in the last issue. First, the WORK, which I accidentally left unattributed, was by Anne Fadiman from her wonderful book Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. I hope it was obvious that the writing was too fine to be my own…and I would never feature my own writing anyway! Second, it is Ambrose Bierce, not Pierce. I’m not sure how that happened.
And don’t forget you have until the end of the week to enter the (Cormac) McCarthyisms Contest. Two options, one for readers and one for writers.
WORK
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
—Henry Beston
—from The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
WORD(S)
melligenous (melligineous) /mə-LIJ-i-nəs/. adjective. Like honey; similar in form to honey; made of honey. Many know mellifluous–which shares the Latin root mel (honey)–in terms of pleasant, musical sound. But the earliest citations show “mellifluous” being used in both the literal and metaphorical senses (in Higdon’s Polychronicon) back in the mid 1300s. Thus, the honeyed tone of Johnny Hodges, etc.
“But, after the Queen has satisfied her appetite, what is she to do? Nothing, as long as she can, and then commence her melligenous meal again.” (Overland Monthly).
“…whilst the flowers of Banksia ornata, Lambertia formosa, and some other species are rich in melligenous sap.” (Rev. W. Woolls)
“He’ll never cure Rosalind Ferne! — Did you ever hear such a melligenous name?” (Emma C. Dowd)
“…man must have lost his wits with his tail, both being now exceedingly rudimentary. Having lost his tail, he could no longer swing in the ethereal blue; and then, losing his wits, grew a mental tail, and swung in the deep inane, devising the ideal of discomfort, wherein all pleasures should be considered as evil, and all pains as exceedingly good; chewing aloes he swore they were as melligenous as the sugar cane, called black white, white black, and this fair world the abode of his satanic majesty; beat his wife, swore at the ‘kids,’ and kicked the cat over the garden wall.” (J. F. Fuller)
WEB
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“A banknote from 1380 that threatens decapitation, a set of 17th-century prints so delicate they had never been opened, and 3000-year-old ‘oracle bones’…” → Oracle bones and unseen beauty: wonders of priceless Chinese collection now online. And, serendipitously via Reader B. comes a link to a story of something new from the other university on that side of the pond…the new Digital.Bodleian.
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And you thought TSA didn’t have a sense of humor? → 25 Odd Confiscations: TSA on Instagram
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Of interest to more than just librarians…anyone with an interest in technology, culture, preservation, copyright, etc. should check out this (sometimes quite funny) post/presentation → how to destroy special collections with social media
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“British Movietone is arguably the world’s greatest newsreel archive, spanning the period 1895 to 1986.” And now it’s all being loaded to YouTube so you can get lost for hours when you should be working → British Movietone
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Today in 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle enlightened CNN-watching America, noting, “Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.” Sadly, there were no reports of Quayle-ites emigrating to the red planet; happily, Mars exploration continues, close-up.
WATCH/WITNESS
A page from Nick Cave’s Handwritten Dictionary.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader J. finds a followup: “You shared Infinite Lego last year. Guess what? A book is coming out! http://ktxc.to/infinite-lego-promo”
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Reader D. is also an “active reader”: “Lovely post, Chris. I have never understood a book so well as when I have had a dialogue with it in the margins of the pages—in pencil.”
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Reader S. wasn’t the first to note the B/Pierce error, but there’s more: “I suspect I won’t be the only one to point out the typo in the reference to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. I would add that much of my young adulthood was spent hunkered down in dark spaces with a candle reading and rereading Bierce’s hallucinatory stories of ghosts and Chinamen rising from beneath the floorboards to reclaim their pigtails. I probably won’t sleep much tonight.”
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