|k| clippings: 2015-10-22 — the poultriest differences

WORK

"The truly savage and frenetic part of New York…the terrible, cold, cruel part, is Wall Street.

Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality that I as a (thank God) typical Spaniard found unnerving.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness. And I, who come from a country where, as the great father Unamuno said, ‘at night the earth climbs to the sky,’ I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings."

—Federico García Lorca (translated by Christopher Maurer)
—from Poet in New York

WORD(S)

cackle-bladder (cacklebladder) /KA-kəl BLA-dər/. noun. A tiny bag, or in modern times a capsule, of fake blood held in the mouth and used to counterfeit coughing up blood in order to fix a boxing match, participate in a con or play a part on stage or screen (or is that just another form of confidence game?). Originally filled with chicken blood, making the etymology obvious…

“Liddell shrugged. ‘It came off the shirt of an old-time con man. I’ve got a sneaking hunch it was a cackle-bladder. Cool off.’” (Frank Kane)

“Had him running around the country and took him for twenty-thousand dollars, then we blew him off with a cackle bladder in Buffalo, New York.” (Michael Kurland)

"It tells you how they work on the mark’s own larcenous cravings for a killing, how they build him up to betting his entire stake—and then ‘put the chill on’—via the ‘cackle bladder’ routine." (Billboard, June 16, 1951)

WEB

1. Feast and Phrase | Gastronomy in the world of words

2. “We asked renowned neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, technology theorists and hallucinogen researchers if we can ever tell whether the ‘reality’ we are experiencing is ‘real’ or not. Don’t worry. You’re going to be ok.” (I’m not so sure) » Is the world real, or is it just an illusion or hallucination?.

3. Issues #1–49 (1987–1999) of ETCetera, the magazines of the Early Typewriter Collectors Assocation, are online (free)

4. Digging Up The Bones Of Billy The Kid

5. Happy Fechner Day. Today in 1850, German philosopher, physicist and experimental psychologist, Gustav Fechner wakes from a dream with an inspiration on how to study the mind and perception: instead of asking people to think about their perceptions, Fechner had the idea to vary an external stimulus (like the brightness of a light) and ask people when they could detect a difference. In this way Fechner, building on the work of Ernst Weber, developed a scale that related changes in physical intensity to changes in perceptual intensity: Fechner’s Scale/Law (turns out the relationship is logarithmic). Fechner’s work was the start of the new and continually fascinating field of psychophysics.

WATCH/WITNESS

“A drone pilot taking a look at a giant wind turbine was startled to find a man sunbathing on the top of it. Kevin Miller flew the drone all the way up the 200ft turbine to find the mystery man flat on his back catching some rays…”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. exclaims: “LONG LIVE THE WATERBEARS.”

• Reader F. on the ‘the rise, and rise, of literary annotation’: “Annotation might be on the rise in all kinds of new forms (I’m looking at you Hypothes.is) but is any of it any good (I’m looking at you Genius)?”

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