|k| clippings: 2016-03-10 — admeyeringly

WORK

“Admire as much as you can, most people don’t admire enough.”

—Vincent van Gogh
—from The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (translated by Arnold Pomerans)

WORD(S)

aperçu /a-per-SYOO/. noun. A summary. A revelatory glimpse. An intuitive, immediate insight. A borrowing from French; past participle of apercevoir (to perceive).

“Although the letters are full of shrewd observations and crisply formulated images, Van Gogh was no coiner of the aperçu. The expressive force of his prose lies more in the accumulation of arguments…” (Ronald de Leeww)

“Inside the front cover, above his name and the date inscribed in blue ink, was a single penciled notation in his 1949 script, a freshman aperçu that read, ‘Metaphysical poets pass easily from trivial to sublime.’” (Philip Roth)

“If you go to a classic definition you know what a true classic is, and similarly a ‘true romantic.’ But if you go to both, you have an algebraic formula, x = x, a cancellation, an aperçu, and hence satisfying…” (Charles Ives)

“I had not the heart to tell her that my Big Book on Bonnard—it sounds like something one might shy coconuts at—has got no farther than half of a putative first chapter and a notebook filled with derivative and half-baked would-be aperçus.” (John Banville)

WEB

1. Rare Walt Whitman letter, written for a dying soldier, found in National Archives

2. “The artistically eclectic author talks about his fiction, the importance of a visual imagination, and how hard it is to get decent artwork on a book jacket” → Sci-Fi Hero Samuel Delany’s Outsider Art [Thanks, Reader B.!]

3. Death apps promise to help people curate their afterlives

4. An animated chart of 42 North American butterflies [Thanks, Reader D.!]

5. Today in 1926, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, the first “Book-of-the-Month Club” volume, is published. While the Club would grow from 4,000 to more than 500,000 members in just 20 years—and remains in operation, if not a literary force, today—the more interesting part of the story is the author of that first release. Warner, openly gay and a member of the “Bright young things”, would go on to author a half-dozen more novels, many books of poetry and nearly 150 stories and biographical sketches for The New Yorker. See also: a review of I’ll Stand By You: Selected Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland.

WATCH/WITNESS

The still image might not look like much, but watching the solar eclipse from 35,000 feet with excited, geeky commentary approaching “double rainbow” territory is awesome! Not only was this flight and deviation from the flight path planned for a year…but the passengers were on the way to Hawaii, not Anchorage.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M. says we might have been had: “BoingBoing is reporting the covert scan of museum’s Nefertiti bust appears to be hoax. But a hoax of a sort where the hoax is actually the real thing.”

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