|k| clippings: 2015-11-10 — everything's A-OK

WORK

    It looks nice in the snow

            getting lost
                        where I used to get lost

—Larry Eigner
—from Things Stirring Together or Far Away

WORD(S)

nyctography /nik-TAH-grə-fee/. noun. A form of shorthand invented by Lewis Carroll using a system of dots and strokes. Frustrated with waking and trying to capture ideas in the dark—or go through the cumbersome lamp-lighting process only to have to extinguish it a few moments later—Carroll invented this shorthand for use with a 16-square gridded card he called the Nyctograph. Maybe it’s just me, but couldn’t Carroll just use regular letters inside the squares? Test your nyctographic reading skills with the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: An edition printed in the Nyctographic Square Alphabet devised by Lewis Carroll. From Greek nycto- (relating to night) + graph (related to writing).

“Any one who has tried, as I have often done, the process of getting out of bed at 2 a.m. in a winter night, lighting a candle, and recording some happy thought which would probably be otherwise forgotten, will agree with me it entails much discomfort. All I have now to do, if I wake and think of something I wish to record, is to draw from under the pillow a small memorandum book containing my Nyctograph, write a few lines, or even a few pages, without even putting the hands outside the bed-clothes, replace the book, and go to sleep again. … I tried rows of square holes, each to hold one letter (quarter of an inch square I found a very convenient size), and this proved a much better plan than the former; but the letters were still apt to be illegible. Then I said to myself ‘Why not invent a square alphabet, using only dots at the corners, and lines along the sides?’ I soon found that, to make the writing easy to read, it was necessary to know where each square began. This I secured by the rule that every square-letter should contain a large black dot in the N.W. corner. … [I] succeeded in getting 23 of [the square-letters] to have a distinct resemblance to the letters they were to represent.” (Lewis Carroll)

WEB

1. Some of these are astounding…from micropoetry and “linguistic serendipity” to imaginary moths. Don’t let the fact that Twitter is the platform for the experiments keep you from checking them out. » The 12 Weirdest, Funniest, Smartest Twitter Bots

2. Web Poets’ Society: New Breed Succeeds in Taking Verse Viral

3. The UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive contains digitized recording of more than 10,000 wax cylinders (dating back to 1893!) including vaudeville, Broadway, opera, famous speeches and the fascinating Recorded Incanabula. And there are thousands more awaiting your adoption.

4. Like his music, his life was sad and beautiful. » The Sad and Beautiful World of Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous

5. Today in 1969, Sesame Street—the program that taught me, and I suspect many others, to read—debuts on PBS. It has run there without interruption until sometime in the next month or so when it will move to HBO (with episodes appearing on PBS after HBO’s 9-month exclusive). The product of a grant worth more than $50 million in today’s dollars and the first show to be constructed based on educational research, Sesame Street debuted to high ratings and intense controversy about the effects of television on children. I don’t know about that, I just know I was addicted…and for many years was convinced Luis was my biological father. Even though I was 13 at the time, I still watched the show sometimes and cried when Mr. Hooper died (“we all feel sad”). Some trivia: Snuffleupagus was, for 15+ years, invisible to adults…whenever Big Bird tried to introduce him the adults couldn’t see him. This was changed because producers worried that the portrayal would discourage children from reporting abuse. Oscar the Grouch was originally orange (and in a now banned episode fell in love with the Wicked Witch of the West). Cookie Monster was created by Jim Henson for a commercial—he was then ►the “Wheel Stealer” AKA the Cracker Monster, I guess—years before the show. Ernie’s song ►“Rubber Duckie” reached #16 on the Billboard charts. The Count was born on October 9, 1,830,653 B.C. Big Bird is 8’ 2". James Earl Jones was the show’s first guest star…he ►recited the alphabet in 1979.

WATCH/WITNESS

The Poetry of Perception is “an eight-part video series [~20 min total] on representations of perception and sensation” featuring animations and work by Whitman, Dickinson and Williams. — Only 6 parts are available so far.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader P. is a confirmed Clamorer: "Ha! Just stumbled across sehnsucht and immediately knew it was a katexic type of word. Indeed, referenced Sept 29th! — And you can see sehnsucht in Logocopia.

• Reader J. on phatic and, um, “interruption phenomena”: “Roman Jakobson designated as one of his six functions of any speech act one ‘oriented towards contact,’ and he called it the phatic function. He, too, liked the example of various ‘empty’ greetings, but also ‘interruption phenomena,’ like ‘uh,’ ‘um,’ etc.—those gap-fillers in our utterances that make listeners aware that we’re not finished speaking. My teacher Al Cook used to extend it also to the holiday phone call in which we merely make contact with a string of uncles and aunts and cousins who are eating over at grandma’s house. An interesting phenomenon: when I explain vocal gap-fillers to my class by pointing them out in my own speech, I get caught in a loop where I can’t stop noting them (or, more exactly, where I have to rip myself away from attending to them as distinct from the actual content of what I’m talking about).”

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