WORK
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
—from Love in the Time of Cholera
WORD(S)
fleer /fleer/. verb or noun. To grin or grimace; to sneer or jeer; to jibe…or the look of one doing so. A mocking speech. Unknown origin, possibly related to Norwegian and Swedish flira, Danish flire (to grin, to laugh inappropriately).
“What, dares the slave
Come hither, cover’d with an antic face,
To fleer and scorn at our solemnity?”
(William Shakespeare)“The gas-lights hissed with a faint, malicious susurration, and except for their infinitesimal mechanical vivacity, that jetted fleeringly from obscenely open small slits, all life was extinguished.” (Hermann Broch)
“Nat wore the look he got when he was listening to something amazing that was new to him. A fleer of analysis, like he was startled to learn that he could have missed this before, given that he knew everything about anything worth knowing.” (Michael Chabon)
“I have always seen her critical, scornful and fleering; but now it is with genuine ill nature that she tears those she calls her friends to pieces.” (Simone De Beauvoir)
WEB
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Useless Press is “a publishing collective that creates eclectic Internet things.” For example, the forthcoming PCKWCK, a real-time, serialized, re-imagining of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.
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“On the evolution of a word that feels eminently like itself…” → A History of Horny
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Reader C. shares a link to some visualizations of punctuation in novels inspired by some punctuation posters shared here earlier.
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Today in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovers the (now) dwarf planet Pluto. Using a ►blink comparator, Tombaugh was systematically searching for the unknown Planet X that had been predicted by famed astronomer Percival Percival Lowell. Pluto got its name from the suggestion of then 11-year old Venetia Burney (who lived ong enough to see Pluto’s demotion from planet to dwarf planet), a suggestion Tombaugh liked because it started with the Lowell’s initials.
WATCH/WITNESS
![GM Maurice Ashley v. chess hustler [click to view]](https://buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/5a68e2e0-b4a9-42c9-b5c6-a41e99639dea.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJEXF6S6TCOKT7N3Q&Signature=26O2tyQuMNWzVM9GRgB2ScOK6Xk%3D&Expires=1707569229)
Watch Grandmaster Maurice Ashley play trash talking chess hustler in Washington Square Park. Related: Magnus Carlsen (and Liv Tyler!?) do the same.
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
- Reader B. makes two notes: “‘dilemma telegraph’ [from Peter Conners’ prose poem ‘The Babies of Winter’] is a phrase I will now try out wherever possible. ¶ [E.M. Forster’s] ‘The Machine Stops’ is indeed amazing.” — For the Clamor: the full story online.
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