RIP, Wendy Battin. A fine poet. A fine soul. A scientist in mind and poet of the heart who understood something about the quantum lattice of both. Wendy asked, not too long ago, why we called death “peace.” I have no idea, but I hope for Wendy that beyond this now comes that knowing.
WORK
“Geometry 1”
Courage: the heart times time.
Silence:
Reason: a program
Spring: a recoil, a coil, a
Helix: one body climbing a staircase
Matter: is dark, or light, or
Weightless: the thing that escapes when the earth lets go
Frogs shrill as April high in the trees.
Soon the sky will fall and I will be here to catch it.
—Wendy Battin
—from On Barcelona
WORD(S)
vernissage /vər-nə-SAZH/. noun. A private viewing of art or paintings before a public exhibition. From French vernir (varnish), and originally meaning the day before an opening, during which exhibitors could retouch and varnish their work.
“For the artists of Paris, the most important date in the social calendar always fell a day or two before the Salon opened to the public. Le jour du Vernissage, or Varnishing Day, saw hundreds of painters descend on the Palais des Champs-Élysées to put the finishing touches on their works, filling the exhibition hall with the scraping of ladders and the penetrating stink of varnishes, turpentine and drying oils.” (Ross King)
“He handed the girl a jar of ointment, happy to be present at a vernissage no larger than the skin area of a typist.” (J. G. Ballard)
“It matters very much that he chose her at his vernissage, that his work was what was being held up to where the light could get at it that night. ” (Andrew Hood)
WEB
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Men Explain Lolita to Me. A fine pairing: 80 Books No Woman Should Read
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NPR’s “Songs We Love” — 2015 edition. Nice interactive features and some good music.
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For a Shakespeare Anniversary, an Online Re-Creation of a 1796 Show
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51 of the Most Beautiful Sentences in Literature. What are some of yours?
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Today is winter solstice—the shortest day and, obviously, the longest night—in the northern hemisphere. The word solstice is from the Latin for “the sun stands still” because of the way in which it appears to both rise (barely) and set (too quickly) in the same place for many days. Winter solstice is the occasion of natural celebration here in the Northern latitudes, but it has been the basis of festivities since ancient times when the myth was that if people didn’t celebrate the sun might not decide to return. At this time of year, I understand the fear. Just as Stonehenge was created to commemorate the summer solstice, Ireland’s Newgrange commemorates the winter solstice, the one time of year that the light shines through and illuminates the underground “triple spiral.”
WATCH/WITNESS
![The History of Typography, in Stop-Motion Animation [click to view]](https://buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/baf1123a-f18f-4beb-8b39-86424239ddec.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJEXF6S6TCOKT7N3Q&Signature=oCgml1SeklPg59R%2FDYXBlxUUhqg%3D&Expires=1707569023)
The History of Typography, in Stop-Motion Animation
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader B. on Peter Watts, author of last issue’s WORD(S): “Peter Watts is one fiercely fine writer.”
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Reader J. expands on Peter Watts WORD(S) on free will: “…about the illusion of free will. Perception and motor control are actually more complex than that. Postdiction is the psychological term that addresses the illusion of backward causation. Benjamin Libet’s experiments tell us less about free will than they do about the difference between objective time and neural time.”
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