|k| clippings: 2015-08-22 — dark hearts of individuals and unions

Katexic will be on hiatus until September 1. Be careful out there!

WORK

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

—Abraham Lincoln
—from a letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862.

WORD(S)

androleptic /an-DRO-lep-tik/. adjective. Characterized by the desire to take hostages, perhaps pathologically so. Derived from androlepsy, an Ancient Greek law that allowed—if a citizen was killed abroad and the murderer not delivered to Athens for punishment—the victim’s family to take up to three of the accused’s family as hostages and even try them for the crime. From Greek άνήρ (man) + λαμβάνω (I take).

“In his darker heart a nether self hulked above cruets of ratsbane, a crumbling old grimoire to hand, androleptic vengeances afoot for the wrongs of the world. Suttree muttering along half mindless, an aberrant journeyman to the trade of wonder.” (Cormac McCarthy)

"The handling of the crisis by both the Iranian and American Governments has been, perhaps, cateleptic. But it has not, at the time I write this, reached the androleptic stage. (Peter Canham)

WEB

1. Poet [Heather McHugh] wins $500,000 grant, spends entire sum on vacations for caregivers of the severely disabled.

2. Links to Dismaland started popping up and coming in literally two minutes after I sent out the last issue. Readers intrigued by the pop-up park might “enjoy” watching Inside Banksy’s Dismaland and Bemusment Park.

3. Via Reader C. comes THUG NOTES: Classic Literature. Original Gangster.. She writes, “In response to Pop Sonnets, these Thug Notes are also LOL in the opposite direction.”

4. “A book about trees written in trees” that includes works ranging from “lyrics by Radiohead to literature by Plato and Ursula K. Le Guin” → Translating Borges into Trees: An Interview with Book Artist Katie Holten

5. Today in 1862, Abraham Lincoln pens his most famous letter—one of the most famous letters—in response to Horace Greeley, who had been critical of Lincoln’s administration in his editorial “The Prayer of Twenty Millions”.

WATCH/WITNESS/WINNERS

Congratulations to Reader C. and Reader R., winners of the Cormac McCarthyisms contest.

Reader C. wins “The Ultimate Cormac McCarthy Sentence(s)” with this excerpt from Blood Meridian:

Long buttresses of light fell from the high windows in the western wall. There were no pews in the church and the stone floor was heaped with the scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls who’d barricaded themselves in this house of God against the heathen. The savages had hacked holes in the roof and shot them down from above and the floor was littered with arrowshafts where they’d snapped them off to get the clothes from the bodies. The altars had been hauled down and the tabernacle looted and the great sleeping God of the Mexicans routed from his golden cup. The primitive painted saints in their frames hung cocked on the walls as if an earthquake had visited and a dead Christ in a glass bier lay broken in the chancel floor.

The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic. Blood lay in dark tongues on the floor and blood grouted the flagstones and ran in the vestibule where the stones were cupped from the feet of the faithful and their fathers before them and it had threaded its way down the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red tracks of the scavengers.

Reader R. wins the “The Imitation Game” with this McCarthy-esque bit:

In a park where the homeless hide bedrolls under bushes and the rich cling to their phones and purses as though they were hearts and fortunes, where the trees fall and foil man’s design for beauteous longevity, where the bugs crawl up the smooth legs of children and women whose daily outing is a ride in a wheelchair say mum, their backs no longer sticky in the late November chill, I picked up five leaves, all of them red, of differing size but similar shape, similar lips that drank the dew from the early morning air, and took them home in my hands, careful not to crush their eggshell spirits as I rode subways and elevators and opened my stubborn-handled door.

(In fact, Reader R. nearly pulled off the literally unheard-of double-win with this searing line from Suttree: “There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp’s globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.”)

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. shares my admiration: “Heather McHugh is, alongside John Ashbery, my favorite living poet. No one matches her wit and wordy liveliness. Two of her poems that every poetry class and workshop I teach read and hear are “What He Thought” and “Language Lesson 1976”. And her collection of essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, is just brilliant. It includes meditations on the definite and indefinite articles, on Dickinson’s dashes, and on fragments—a very telling indication of how minutely discriminating her intelligence is.”

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