|k| clippings: 2015-09-17 — busy bees

WORK

“Glad Day”

Bees have built a hive in the wall of my shack.
I don’t want to argue anymore about prosody.
I don’t want to discuss Saussure, or the meaning
of meaning. All I want is to imagine those bees
making a honeycomb inside my life—all I want
is the unbelievable taste of that wild honey.

—Joseph Stroud
—from Of This World: New and Selected Poems

WORD(S)

scuttlebutt (scuttle-butt) /sku-təl-but/. noun. Rumor; gossip. In nautical terms, a water cask or a drinking fountain. From scuttle (a hole/opening in a ship’s deck) + butt (barrel). Like last issue’s furphy, the name of the object became slang for the idle talk that commonly took place around it.

“He asked whether I was going to breakfast. The scuttlebutt on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said.” (David Foster Wallace)

“We arrived home to a very special heroes’ welcome: the town had been starving outright for good scuttlebutt. So hip hip hooray, welcome home the pitiful Prices!” (Barbara Kingsolver)

“Rick Raymond taps the microphone and the men stir from their scuttlebutt and applaud. From more than one man’s oily lips issues that whistle one only hears in crowds.” (Colson Whitehead)

“She was not as easy to place as Astrid or Jackie; she was a newborn, after all, and, well, the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her.” (Junot Diaz)

WEB

1. McSweeney’s Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar

2. Typography legend Adrian Frutiger has died. If you’ve used a computer, you’ve used his fonts (such as Univers and Avenir). Typophiles will enjoy his eye interview.

3. Finding Wonder in The World Book Encyclopedia

4. Out of English and Back Again: On Unintentional Retranslation. If the embedded PDF gives you troubles, you can go to it directly

5. Today in 1967, The Who appears on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour performing their hits “I Can See for Miles” and “My Generation,” ending their set with an explosion that leaves shrapnel in Keith Moon’s arm and Pete Townshend’s hair singed. The ►full video of the performance is fantastic, not just for the performances and bizarre climactic destruction but also for the Smothers’ sly, subversive wit.

WATCH/WITNESS

Hard to describe these amusing videos that “grew out of an online game to match song lyrics to social network profile pics.” Still above is from “Tweeted (Tainted) Love”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K. on Agatha Christie: “Something many people know: Agatha Christie wrote the play everyone knows, The Mousetrap. Something many don’t know: the St. Martin’s theatre in the West End has been continually staging the play since 1974.”

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