Today’s WORK, by the playful logophile Heather McHugh, demands (like much of her work) slow reading and re-reading, slippery savoring on the tongue. And, before anyone writes in, there are no typos in the poem you are about to read.
WORK
“Fastener”
One as is as another as.
One with is with another with;
one against’s against all others and one of
of all the ofs on earth feels chosen. So the man
can’t help his fastening on many
(since the likes of him like
look-alikes)… When the star-shower crosses
the carnival sky, then the blues of the crowd
try to glisten, to match it; and the two
who work late in the butcher-house touch,
reaching just the same moment
for glue and for hatchet.
—Heather McHugh
—from Upgraded to Serious
WORD(S)
globesity /gloh-BEE-si-tee/. noun. The increasing weight of the world. The global obesity pandemic. A portmanteau word, obviously, from global + obesity. Apparently coined by the World Health Organization in 2001.
“A woman frowning at her bathroom scale in St. Louis, a man whose pants are suddenly too tight in Jakarta, and a roly-poly child playing under a tree in Cairo all are part of a 1.1 billion-person trend called ‘globesity.’” (Ellen Creager)
“That’s just the top of a massive iceberg that’s threatening to sink the health of the young and old from Anchorage, Alaska to Zurich, Switzerland. The tentacles of globesity reach into every continent and grip every major city in the world.” (Jordan Rubin)
“A large part of the Future Lab’s message is packaging. Their design and journalistic backgrounds combine to produce catchy copy – think ‘flashpacking’, ‘turbo-shandy man’ and ‘globesity’ – coolly, seductively styled.” (Impact Lab)
WEB
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You too can become a Citizen Archivist. I plan to contribute some time.
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Another fascinating exploration from Keith Houston aka “Shady Characters,” this time on gnomons and marks of punctuation.
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Discovered too late to participate, but the band Yacht ran an interesting experiment in ephemerality, distributing their new album’s art by fax.
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[NSFW] → the illustrated diary of Jacq the Stripper…in which Jacq draws and quotes from some of her strange, sad, funny and disappointing audience.
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Today in 1948, poet, essayist and translator Heather McHugh is born in San Diego, CA. MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, Guggenheim fellow, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, etc…but her words are the things. I can’t think of any other poet who plays with words with such delight and (sometimes bawdy) abandon, a characteristic that is just as evident in her boffo interview in BOMB magazine, from which I could cull quotes for a dozen newsletters. You could do worse than reading some of McHugh’s poems in Poetry or ► listen to this 2008 reading that begins with a poem indebted to the Jargon File later revised into the New Hacker’s Dictionary.
WATCH/WITNESS
“A film created by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss documenting the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times. This film shows the entire newspaper production process from hot-metal typesetting to creating stereo moulds to high-speed press operation. At the end of the film, the new typesetting and photographic production process is shown in contrast to the old ways.”
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader K. writes re: “Orthography”: “ha! That first limerick looks like most of my iMessages now that I’ve switched to using voice-to-text!”
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Those clever poems also caught Reader O’s attention: “Wow! The second limerick finally makes sense to me! I would be ashamed, but instead I have chosen to be glad that I got it. :)”
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“Cellfish” stirred up some comments on Twitter and this, from Reader A.: “Oh man, I love ”cellfish“ I am turning it into one of our UdG Daily Try activities. In looking for images, I found this collection of possible new katexic words (unless that’s where you got it from).” — I hadn’t seen that collection before, but there are some newsletter-worthy creations there!
I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.
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