WORK

But the deeper reality is that I’m sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naïve. How do we know how we feel? I’m likely much closer to Žižek’s aforementioned description of : There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I to think I feel.

WORK

“All Blood Runs Red”

—the motto on Eugene Bullard’s plane. Bullard was the first African-American pilot to fly in combat, and the only African-American pilot in World War I. Bullard flew for France, but never for the United States; he tried to sign with the US Army Air Service, but they were only selecting white pilots. ※ Watch the 3-part documentary ► All Blood Runs Red: The Incredible True Story of Eugene Jacques Bullard.

WORD(S)

titivil · /TIT-i-vil/ · /ˈtɪtɪvɪl/. noun. A demon said to record peoples’ sins to be used against them on Judgment Day, specifically collecting a sack of syllables dropped, skipped or mumbled during divine services and the idle gossip and chatter of churchgoers during services. Later, more generally, a gossip, a scoundrel, or a tattletale. AKA Tutivillus, Titivillus. Origin unknown. See also: knave, rogue, swindler, scallywag, busybody.

“I am infinitely indebted to my publishers and friends MM. Calmann, Lévy and to their excellent collaborators for the care and experience they have employed in lightening the burden, which Titivillus will place on my back on the Day of Judgment.” (Anatole France)

“I cannot help thinking that Titivil or Tutivillus, that literary devil, must have found himself working overtime when they published the New English Bible, with all its modern cliches.” (Country Life)

“Titivil is a word of doubtful etymology but it was current in fifteenth and sixteenth century English in the sense ‘scoundrel,’ with particular application to a mischiefmaking tell-tale, and Tom Titivil is to be taken as such a character.” (Kelsie Harder)

WEB

1. Controversial? Maybe. Essential? Absolutely → Nikole Hannah Jones on What is Owed

2. More reading for this moment. And hopefully many moments until it becomes happily irrelevant → You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument ※ The First Year Out ※ Reconstruction In America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876

3. Boompilled! → Boompilled: Fireworks Conspiracy Theories Are Bursting Across The Internet ※ The Boom in Fireworks Conspiracy Theories ※ But it doesn’t all have to be serious: I’m the Guy Setting Off Fireworks Every Night In Your Neighborhood and I Have You Right Where I Want You

4. Last week I offered you a chance to buy Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s childhood home for me, allowing me to retire in style. No one did, so this week I offer you a new opportunity → An Entire Old West Town Is for Sale. But It’s in New Zealand.

5. Coronavirus + Summer? → Walking Is Making a Major Comeback ※ In Praise of the Flâneur (apropos of nothing: flâneur is one of my favorite sounding words)

6. I had no idea the bake sale had an activist history → The Power of the Bake Sale ※ Speaking of food, some of these recipes look really good, and not just because I’m hungry right now: cook a classical feast: nine recipes from ancient Greece and Rome

7. Download and print this book designed by Big Jump Press in June 2020 in response to the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor → Read This Out Loud ※ While I have your…ear? Eyes? More bookish links: A clever overview of a variety of book critters, including literal Bookworms Thanks, Reader M.! ※ Page Through This Incredibly Detailed Sino-Tibetan Book Printed in 1410 ※ Rare Book School Lectures archive

8. John Peel’s iconic radio show ran on BBC radio from 1967-2004. This epic, growing list is at 968 sessions and counting → John Peel Sessions

9. This week’s miscellany → U.K. Museum Reimagines Classic Art With Face Masks // Pick a year and play those hits with Nostalgia Machine // Identifying Generational Gaps in Music // I Am Liesl von Trapp and I Owe the Resistance an Apology // In Taiwan, Pizza Hut Created Ramen Pizza // Plants fill seats at Barcelona opera house concert // Book fountain page by page

10. Today in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, are assassinated in Sarajevo, the causus belli of World War I. On this same day in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles is signed, ending the bloody war between Germany and the Allied Powers. In between, more than 9 million soldiers were killed and more than 21 million wounded…along with nearly 10 million civilian casualties. Sadly, this wasn’t the most deaths in the wars of human history, but it was almost inarguably as brutal as any if you consider the proportion of the fighting that involved trench warfare, chemical weapons, and direct hand-to-hand fighting in battles with death tolls nearly equalling those of the most deadly in history. It is absolutely inarguable that World War I is too often overlooked, overshadowed by World War II and the natural desensitization of time. ※ View the Treaty of Versailles as submitted to the U. S. Congress.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Combining archival footage with testimony from activists and scholars, director Ava DuVernay’s examination of the U.S. prison system looks at how the country’s history of racial inequality drives the high rate of incarceration in America.” → ► 13th

WHAT‽

A promotional ad for social distancing that has more than two million views? Only in the age of Coronavirus. I watched it three times. → ► A Cart Apart

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J.: “‘Africa’ - wow. Clever and - it took me down the rabbit hole of Tesla Coil music. Btw, I wonder if you might get around to some kind of tribute to the greatest living musician, Jacob Collier. ¶ Also - thanks for the BLM Heads-up. ¶ Also, also - for the Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. Down time for a sunny day.” – That’s incredibly high praise for Jacob Collier, who I have to admit I’ve only heard of, not actually listened to. I guess it’s time!

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

GOETZ: Someone was to have come in the autumn.

HILDA: Who?

GOETZ: I don’t know any more. [Pause] Tell me. What is today? What day of what month?

HILDA: Do you think I count the days? We have only one now, that begins and begins again; it is given to us with the dawn and taken away with the night. You are a clock that has stopped and always tells the same time.

—Jean Paul Sartre
—from “The Devil & The Good Lord” (translated by Kitty Black)
—found in The Devil & The Good Lord and Two Other Plays (1960)

WORD(S)

costive · /KAH-stive/ · /ˈkɒstɪv/. adjective. Slow or reluctant to act; lethargic. Stingy. Originally: constipated. From Latin constipare (to press or crowd together), from con- (together) + stipare (to cram, pack).

“The Goose in Mother Goose is, or so they say, the Hamlet of animal roles, introspective and moody as only a costive bird straining over its egg might be.” (Angela Carter)

“With his little bit of money he could not, even in that notoriously cheap (because poverty-stricken) country, find a retreat or lavatory that would accommodate him long enough to coax, like a costive bowel, the art of verse back.” (Anthony Burgess)

“…the nuptial party was throttling back on celebration, the adultery table was candidly staring, the grappas were being costively withheld…” (Julian Barnes)

“…his companions had once persuaded the very young and costive Babbington that he was going to have a baby…” (Patrick O’Brian)

WEB

1. “I use time as a medium to define how long each portrait is colored in. 1 year of life = 1 minute of color.” Powerful. → stolen

2. Be careful who you donate to. → “The Black Lives Matter Foundation” Raised Millions. It’s Not Affiliated With The Black Lives Matter Movement.

3. An interesting, interactive approach. Slide a few dials around and see how your intuition compares to reality. → Do You Know How Divided White And Black Americans Are On Racism?

4. Apologies to all the people named Karen who aren’t Karens → You Know Karen. But do you know the names that could be “other Karens” or “future Karens?” We found them using data.

5. “…an imaginary museum that explores the strange place between art and curiosities.” → The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things

6. “Watch Netflix at work by making it look like you’re on a conference call.” → Netflix Hangouts

7. I’ve never asked for donations, but I’ll make an exception if you want throw this my way. → Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s childhood home up for sale, complete with pool, party room and library for 22,000 books

8. Play like a child at home → Fold-n-Fly database of Paper Airplane Designs ► Play like a researcher at home → Seventy-Five Scientific Research Projects You Can Contribute to Online

9. For laughs → Texting With Famous Authors ※ For “dawwwwww” laughs → San Diego Zoo’s baby pygmy hippo makes splashy debut ※ For grimacing laughs → This Foot Does Not Exist ※ For pained laughs → Name a thing that lasted longer than the Confederacy. (New Coke, among other things).

10. Today in 1788 the U.S. Constitution is ratified. Today in 1964, civil- and voting-rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner are abducted and lynched by a group including a Deputy Sheriff under the supervision of a Sheriff known for ignoring racially motivated crimes. ※ Today in 2015, Charles Marshall, armed with a cordless drill with no bit, is shot and killed by police after his wife called the police because he was suicidal and had sliced open one of his wrists. The cop told Marshall’s distraught wife that, “We [police] are trained to kill.” ※ Also today in 2015, Adrian Simental, unarmed, is killed by police responding to a psychiatric call. ※ Today in 2016, Pedro Cruz-Amado, wielding a metal chair, is killed by the police responding to a psychiatric call. ※ Also today in 2016, Lane Lesko, armed with a BB gun, is shot and killed by police responding to a psychiatric call.

WATCH/WITNESS

[Content warning: the N-word.]

“The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power 30 years later.” → ►A Class Divided (full film) | FRONTLINE

WHAT‽

►“Africa” by Toto on Musical Tesla Coils

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Apricots: as a lifelong Jacobean revenge fan, I can’t help but share this odd bit from Malfi, where a schemer detects a hidden pregnancy via that fruit.”

• Reader J.: “I loved the full etymology – but couldn’t resist the sound connection: from Arabic al-birquq, from Spanish Albuquerque…”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

I wasn’t sure what to do this week—with this newsletter, with myself—until I read Christina Tran’s How We Show Up.

The fight isn’t new and, despite what you might think if you know me only through these weekly missives, it isn’t new to me. I don’t know when I will feel like it’s the right time, if ever, for Katexic Clippings to return to its former format of frivolity. Until then, consider Katexic Clippings a mix-tape for turbulent times.

Also, a correction: one of the links last week was broken. The corrected version: Racial Injustice has Benefited Me – A Confession.

WORK

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

—Toni Morrison
—found in her 1993 Nobel Lecture

WORD(S)

What an etymology!

apricot · /AY-pri-kot/ · /ˈeɪprɪˌkɒt/. noun. Formerly apricock or abrecock. The stone fruit of the Himalayan tree Prunus armeniaca, of the rose family. The tree itself. The color of the fruit. ¶ From Catalan abercoc and Portuguese albricoque, from Arabic al-birquq, through Byzantine Greek berikokkia, from Latin praecoquum (early-ripening fruit) … from which we also get the word precocious. ¶ The original Proto-Indo-European root pekw- is the source many other words including: kitchen, pumpkin, biscuit, charcuterie, ricotta, kiln and (dys)peptic.

“He was baffled to know that apricot trees existed in, of all places, our orchard. On late afternoons, when there was nothing to do in the house, Mafalda would ask him to climb a ladder with a basket and pick those fruits that were almost blushing with shame, she said. He would joke in Italian, pick one out, and ask, Is this one blushing with shame? No, she would say, this one is too young still, youth has no shame, shame comes with age.” (André Aciman)

“That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on.” (Diane Ackerman)

“Last apricot light flooded landward and brought their shadows uphill, past the lifeguard towers, into terraces of bougainvillea, rhododendrons, and ice plant.” (Thomas Pynchon)

WEB

1. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading in recent weeks (months, and years). Obviously, reading (alone) isn’t enough. → What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For? ※ What Is Optical Allyship? 3 Ways To Be Actively Anti-Racist

2. Among so many other things contributing to America’s mass incarceration problem, the predatory system of cash bail could be the easiest one to fix. → How Cash Bail Works ※ We Can’t End Mass Incarceration Without Ending Money Bail ※ The Fight to End Cash Bail

3. “Defund the police” is a slogan that demands, like many big ideas small enough to fit on a sign, some unpacking, not least because it is actually just the first step necessary for a much larger project. Dismissing the idea is easy, as is retreating to limited—painfully fruitless—ideas of incremental reforms. But with a little effort, the possibility of transformation becomes a vision that’s hard to unsee → Vox provides a solid overview: The “abolish the police” movement, explained by 7 scholars and activists. And the Cardozo Law Review goes deep: Are Police Obsolete? Breaking Cycles of Violence Through Abolition Democracy

4. While I’m at it, abolishing prison, the malignant fraternal twin of militarized and misguided policing, isn’t as outlandish as too many think. → What Is Prison Abolition? ※ A former prosecutor’s case for prison abolition ※ Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

5. This Friday is Juneteenth.

6. Truly novel ways to promote social distancing are already becoming rare. But they’re out there. → Shoes for Social Distancing

7. I understand nothing of how this works, but the results are mind-boggling. Just look at page 8. → EAR2FACE extrapolates, with already uncanny accuracy, images of peoples’ faces from pictures of their ears. Let that sink in for a minute. ※ Also impressive, with near-future implications: Real-time Face Video Swapping From A Single Portrait.

8. Some artistic delights → Lin Yung Cheng’s conceptual photography ※ Karin Pfeiff Boschek’s pie art ※ Chris (Simpsons artist)’s strange, funny, surreal, mystifying illustrations ※ Calida Garcia Rawles’ paintings of people in water ※ Samantha French’s painting of people underwater

9. Sometimes you just need a laugh. → 40 Memes That Perfectly Sum Up The Trainwreck That Is 2020 ※ Punhub

10. Today in 1939, actress and singer Ethel Waters becomes the first African American to star in her own television show, The Ethel Waters Show. The show, a variety program that included a dramatic performance of the Broadway play Mamba’s Daughters, adapted as a vehicle for Waters by DuBose Heyward, author of the original novel, may in fact have been the first time an African American ever appeared on television. Born when her mother was in her mid-teens, raised impoverished, and married at thirteen to an abusive husband, Waters struck out on her own, working as a maid for less than $5 a week, until she was discovered singing at a party on her 17th birthday. Also an acclaimed singer, Waters won an Emmy Award, was nominated for an Academy Award and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, among many honors. ※ ► Listen to Waters’ version of “Stormy Weather,” eventually listed in the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress. ※ ► Watch Waters’ “Am I Blue,” from the 1929 film On With the Show, the first film to be recorded in color (though only black and white copies survive). ※ See and learn about the historic Ethel Waters Residence, Waters’ residence in the mid 1920s, and home to an important literary salon during the Harlem Renaissance.

WATCH/WITNESS

► James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965). Title should read “defeats” Buckley. It’s not even close. ※ James Baldwin: “I Can’t Afford Despair”

WHAT‽

A marvelous—and soothing—video whose title Google translates as “I will make a knife into a knife.” → ► Transformation of a Knife

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

Many, many thanks to everyone (I’ll spare you a long list of initials) who wrote in over the last week to support my abrupt change of content recognizing current events. Those notes happily outnumbered the unsubscriptions.

• Reader T.: “The CIA has tips for resistance.”

• Reader B.: “I confess to finding myself caught by opposing impulses and arguments. On the one hand is the line you articulated well, pace Wiesel, that it is vital to speak out against injustice. On the other are voices saying that this is the time for marginalized voices, that for whites to speak risks centering discourse on their experience.” – I hear you. I’ve settled in on the mode of trying to amplify marginalized voices, and some others that seem most genuine and insightful to help with that, while being mostly quiet myself. But it’s challenging in any case. Just going dark, which was my first impulse, seems wrong.

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

For the first time in almost exactly six years and more than 400 issues, I find myself unable to ignore current events (and the politics that are part of it) here. In addition to the demands of my conscience, I realized that of the many newsletters I read, the ones that pretend it’s business as usual right now inspire feelings ranging from frustration to outright repulsion. Silence isn’t an option. I hope you read in solidarity and remain a subscriber, but if the former is impossible, the latter probably should be too.

I’ve read, listened to, watched or engaged with everything I’m sharing. Some a long time ago, many in the past few weeks. I keep coming back to the words of Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lies are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and women are prosecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must–at that moment–become the center of the universe.

WORK

Allowables

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don’t think
I’m allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

—Nikki Giovanni
—found in Chasing Utopia (2013)

WORD(S)

insurrection · /in-sə-REK-shən/ · /ˌɪnsəˈrɛkʃən/. noun. Organized opposition, uprising, rebellion, or revolt against government or civil authority. From Late Latin insurrectiō, from insurgere (to rise up). See also: insurgency, revolution, putsch, coup d’état.

“When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is the most sacred of the rights, and one of the most indispensable duties of the people.” (popularly attributed to Marquis de Lafayette; found unattributed in M. A. Thiers’ History of the French Revolution)

“…insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any another, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them […] Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of organization, discipline, and habitual authority; unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and ruined.” (Karl Marx)

“The Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hope on ‘institutions’. It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. If I leave the established it is dead and passes into decay.” (Max Stirner)

WEB

1. Explainer: what is systemic racism and institutional racism? ※ Racial Injustice has Benefited Me - A Confession

2. The anger behind the protests, explained in 4 charts ※ Don’t Call It Rioting ※ There isn’t a simple story about looting

3. Violent protests are not the story. Police violence is. ※ How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country ※ Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide

4. De-escalation Keeps Protesters And Police Safer. Departments Respond With Force Anyway. ※ How Much Do We Need The Police? ※ How to reform American police, according to experts ※ National Police Accountability Project ※ 8CantWait

5. Brené Brown with Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist ※ Kendi on The American Nightmare ※ Q&A with Ibram X. Kendi on the Current Protests, Joining BU, and Anti-racist Research

6. What it means to be anti-racist ※ First, Listen. Then, Learn: Anti-Racism Resources For White People ※ Anti-Racist Resource Guide ※ You can order today from these black-owned independent bookstores

7. Seeing White ※ 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge ※ Anti-Racism Daily Newsletter ※ Guide to Allyship ※ Ally Resource List

8. Photos and Voices of the George Floyd Protests: ‘We Deserve to Be Heard’ ※ From Minneapolis to Syria, Artists Are Honoring George Floyd Through Murals and Public Artworks ※ Meet the Artists Behind Some of the Most Widespread Images Amid George Floyd Protests

9. There are many excellent places to donate in the links above. The five I chose: Justice for George Floyd ※ Black Visions Collective ※ We The Protesters ※ Campaign Zero ※ National Bail Fund Network

10. Today in 1943, poet, teacher and activist Nikki Giovanni is born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Once dubbed “the poet of the Black Revolution,” gained fame as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement and has continued to be one of America’s most important writers ever since. Giovanni has taught at Virginia Tech (where she is a University Distinguished Professor) since 1987, where she delivered an acclaimed commencement address/chant poem after the 2007 mass shooting there. Giovanni has won seven NAACP Image awards, the Langston Hughes Award, the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award and a Presidential Medal of Honor, among scores of others. ※ Poet Nikki Giovanni On The Darker Side Of Her Life ※ ► James Baldwin & Nikki Giovanni, a conversation (1971) ※ ► Nikki Giovanni Reads her own Poems ※ ► Explorations in Black Leadership: Nikki Giovanni ※ The best place to start reading Giovanni’s work: The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998.

WATCH/WITNESS

► The danger of silence | Clint Smith

WHAT‽

“Foster, 80, carrying a ‘black lives matter’ sign, said she came out because it was important to show people that she had no hatred in her heart. […] ‘I’m 80 years old. If I die too bad,’ she said about the risks of someone her age marching.” → Woman, 80, is sole protester at event in Town of Palm Beach.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Maybe a little hope when we need it. It doesn’t take as many people to win as you might think. Check out The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world”

• Reader D.: “The good folks of the Katexic Clamor should get their free copy of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States while they can.”

• Reader S.: “I’m an Indian, and this is about the indigenous experience, but it’s never been more relevant: How to Survive an Apocalypse and Keep Dreaming.”

• Reader T.: “Do you know about The Highlighter? It’s been an essential newsletter on race, education, and culture for a long time.”

• A different Reader B.: "So much this:

ESQ: How can we get the black people to cool it?
JAMES BALDWIN: It is not for us to cool it.
ESQ: But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most?
JAMES BALDWIN: No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest.

from James Baldwin: How to Cool It"

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

WORK

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…

—Walt Whitman
—found in the Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)

WORD(S)

cathexis · /kuh-THEK-sis/ · /kəˈθɛksɪs/. noun. The concentration or charge of energy invested into an idea, person or object. From Greek kathexis (retention, holding), from katechein (to hold fast, occupy), from echein (to have, to hold), from PIE root segh- (to hold). First recorded by Sigmund Freud. See also: hypercathexis, an excessive concentration of mental energy.

“Shrinks call it cathexis,” Susan said. ¶ “Cathexis?” ¶ “A powerful emotional investment in something or someone, which in fourteen-year-old girl terms feels like love, but probably isn’t.” (Robert B. Parker)

“…bath as steam engine, body as conditioned caldron of excess libido, cathexis cathartized. His bath cools like soup in a blown-upon spoon…” (Richard Powers)

“We can try all sorts of techniques to get in touch with the hinterland of your psyche but my feeling is that, unless you your self are prepared to voyage there, it will prove impossible to extirpate this negative cathexis.” (Will Self)

WEB

1. For the LOLs → BIRD NESTING STYLES: A CRITICAL REVIEW ※ A new MasterClass: Your Dad Teaches Loading the Dishwasher ※ ► Classic Warner Bros. Bloopers

2. This Word Does Not Exist uses text generation algorithms to “make up words, definitions and examples from scratch.” (Thanks Reader S.)

3. The Kentucky Miner Who Scammed Americans by Claiming He Was Hitler and Plotting a ‘Revolt’ With ‘Spaceships’

4. Hong Kong Shop Offers ‘Tear Gas’ Flavored Ice Cream in Support of Pro-Democracy Movement

5. The Hellbox was where metal sorts (pieces of type) were tossed after printing. Sorting the used type out was a job for apprentices known as printer’s devils, a position once held by Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. ¶ In 1990, renowned print and typography firm Linotype merged with another company, becoming Linotype-Hell, and later made a Photoshop like product with the wonderful name Linotype-Hell DaVinci. ※ See (but please don’t use) the typographically horrifying Hellvetica font. ※ Watch ► a clip from the “Printer’s Devil” episode of The Twilight Zone. (Thanks for the spark, Reader B.)

6. Awwww, Penguins Get Private Tour of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. ※ Meanwhile, somewhere in California, there arose a pop-up Emergency Art Museum.

7. ‘Iso’, ‘boomer remover’ and ‘quarantini’: how coronavirus is changing our language

8. The Shakespeare and Company Project lets you browse the records (what they borrowed, where they lived, and sometimes scans of the original cards) of the many famous (and not so famous) authors and philosophers who used the renowned bookstore’s lending library from 1919-1962. As the center of bohemian literary culture, this means notables including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein…but literally thousands of more lesser-known (and forgotten) names.

9. Eye candy → Parker Thornton’s Photography ※ Polly Verity’s sensual faces curved and folded from a single sheet of paper ※ Andoni Bastarikka’s sand sculptures that near the uncanny valley ※ a parliament of shells

10. Today in 1819, poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman is born in Huntington, New York. ¶ Whitman’s wild free verse was the first to clearly establish an American poetry, breaking from its English roots. Deeply influenced by the strange, contradictory world of sexuality in the Victorian influenced world of antebellum America—and some brutal experiences as a hospital volunteer during the Civil War—Whitman’s poetry was expansive, populist, sensual, and simultaneously glorified individualism and the people. It’s no surprise that Whitman’s influence can be seen on all kinds of writers, including William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, John Berryman, and the entire Beat movement. It’s not a stretch to argue that without Whitman to play against, we wouldn’t have poets like Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot. ¶ Everything you could want to know about Walt Whitman can be found in The Walt Whitman Archive ※ Read (and listen to) Leaves of Grass. ※ ► Watch Brooklynites reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” ※ The Whitman, Alabama project has people from across that state telling stories of their lives…and reading Whitman. ※ Whitman wrote two famous poems when President Lincoln died: hear ► James Earl Jones reads “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d”; read "O Captain! My Captain!. ※ Or, wait, Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled?

WATCH/WITNESS

Your two minutes and forty seconds of zen → ► Blooming Flowers Timelapse

WHAT‽

► The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby (but all notes are E and F)

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “The longest palindrome in Morse Code is ‘intransigence.’ This is almost the perfect Katexic sentence.”

• Reader M.: “Speaking of David Lynch, his Weather Report is back and it is splendid!”

• Reader S.: “Many fine literary references to ‘fizzgigs’, but you missed the most important fizzgig, Kira’s companion in The Dark Crystal!”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

Sorry about the newsletter delay last weekend. The TinyLetter gods will neither confirm nor deny, but I’m pretty sure my account was “flagged for potential” abuse because of, ironically, the links in item #8 of the WEB section.

WORK

“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise——”

“Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.

“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily. “Really you are very dull!”

—Lewis Carroll
—found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

WORD(S)

fizgig · /FIZZ-gig/ · /ˈfɪzgɪg/. noun and adjective. A frivolous or flirtatious girl. A silly notion. A firework that fizzes. A spinning top. A harpoon or spear (also fishgig). In Australian slang, an informer. Perhaps from fizz (a hissing sound or disturbance), from obsolete fise (to break wind) + gig (multiple meanings, including frivolous person and whipping top), origin unknown but possibly onomatopoeic.

“…late last year we came upon an absolute fizgig of a girl…” (Michael Faber)

“…Joe asked what the eff I were doing talking to that fizgig for he had taken a fierce set against him from the start.” (Peter Carey)

“Seagriff, in turn taking the glass, further makes out that the men have fish-spears in their hands, and an implement he recognises as a fizgig…” (Mayne Reid)

“Deliverance Dobbins, a frumpish, fizgig of a maid, ever complaining of bodily ills though her chuffy cheeks were red as pippins…” (Agnes C. Laut)

WEB

1. Mail Art, a Quirky Pursuit That Hasn’t Been Popular Since the ’60s, Is Suddenly Having a Renaissance Amid the Worldwide Lockdown Thanks, Reader J.

2. Tiny Animals on Fingers ※ Angela Lansbury as teapots Thanks, Reader B.

3. Fractal wrongness is “the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person’s worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person’s worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.”

4. Russian Doll words (not about dolls) ※ Russian Artists Michael Zajkov’s Ultra-Realistic Dolls (all dolls) ※ My Secret Life as a Reporter for “Doll Reader” Magazine (a little bit about dolls)

5. LibraryThing was GoodReads before there was a GoodReads, much less before Amazon barged in, and it is now free to all forever.

6. The ancient Greeks saw all the colors. ※ The Ancient Romans Gave Us “Bones of the Dead” Cookies ※ Colonialism Shaped Body Shaming ※ The Black Death Yielded British Pub Culture

7. William Warren’s Shelves for Life are “designed to be taken down and reassembled as a coffin,” presumably for the owner, but possibly for that one friend who never returns the books they “borrow.”

8. “Deep-speare!” → This AI Poet Mastered Rhythm, Rhyme, and Natural Language to Write Like Shakespeare

9. Door Dash is Evil ※ Grubhub is Evil ※ Copyright Claims are Evil ※ The SCAN System Used by Law Enforcement is Evil ※ Supermarket Organic Veggies are Evil?

10. Today in 1844, Samuel Morse sends the first long-distance telegram from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in Washington, D. C. to the Mount Clare railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland, tapping out, “What hath God wrought” in his own eponymous dot & dash code. Originally Morse’s telegraph system used paper tape, but operators soon realized they could make out the letters from just the clicking of the receiver, simplifying the system considerably. In 1861, the Western Union Telegraph System completed the first transcontinental U. S. telegraph line, and by 1866 the first permanent trans-Atlantic cable was completed. Buoyed by Thomas Edison’s invention of the Quadraplex system allowing four simultaneous messages to be transmitted, the telegraph had transformed global communication by the mid-1900s. ※ Learn Morse Code using Google Creative Labs’ Morse Typing Trainer. ※ For the less industrious among us, there’s the Morse Code Translator, which can encode and send messages to your friends (or enemies). ※ Check out this collection of Strange CW (Telegraph) Keys, including (working) models made from rubber stamps, lollipops, bananas, a handsaw and more. ※ FYI: the longest palindrome in Morse Code is “intransigence.”

WATCH/WITNESS

► Wander “through beautiful spaces accompanied by the world’s favourite voices.”

WHAT‽

David Lynch wrote, drew, and directed this short film and it is every bit as Lynchian as anything could be. → ► FIRE (POZAR)

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M.: “Wasn’t that Val Kilmer article fascinating? I still don’t even know what to think about it or what intrigued me most—his ideas about Twain and Eddy, his art, or the whole explanation of how he was a better actor when he wasn’t playing lead characters. It pains me that his chiseled jaw is gone.”

• (A different) Reader M.: “Well, ‘parergon’ is certainly a more classy word for my writing than ‘sideline’ or ‘hobby’! Thanks for the new word and for bumping the value of my work up a bit!”

• Reader O.: “I always love your missives, but somehow ‘The Exciting of Trains’ link just hit me the exact right way at the exact right time. Thank you for sharing that and every other part of this email.” test–test

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

WORK

To keep a house in which every object, down to the smallest bibelot, is in perfect taste, is in shocking taste. No house can be truly tasteful unless it contains at least half a dozen atrocities of varying sizes and uses. This must not include the residents, however.

—Judith Martin
—found in Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior: Freshly Updated (2005)

WORD(S)

parergon · /pə-RƏR-gawn/ · /pəˈrə:gɒn/. noun. An ornamental accessory; a byproduct; a piece of writing that is subsidiary to another work; work in addition to one’s primary employment. From Greek para (beside, beyond) + ergon (work). See also: opuscule.

“This long counting of landscape as parergon—subsidiary work, mere accessory—is an odd aspect of European cultural history, and sadly revealing of a much older fault in man: his belief that nature is there purely for his use…” (John Fowles)

“Sometimes this making or doing was their profession; sometimes it was a parergon carried on deliciously in leisure hours.” (A. P. Herbert)

“Literature was for him no parergon, no mere way of escape from politics. If he was an amateur in feeling, he was a craftsman in execution…” (George Wyndham)

WEB

1. An old thread, but a goodie → What is a piece of writing, on the internet (i.e. not a book), that you return to or at least consider foundational? ※ One of my picks: this pair by Allie Brosh, aka Hyperbole and a Half: Adventures in Depression + Depression Part Two. PS. Wherever you are, Allie Brosh, I hope you are well.

2. “Gaming the lottery seemed as good a retirement plan as any…” → Jerry and Marge Go Large

3. I had no idea tamales were a Mississippi Delta fixture. → How the humble tamale came to represent a region and its people. ※ I was aware of this concoction at the other end of the taste spectrum, but not the story behind it: The Creator of Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa Cake Confesses. ※ And, while on food (or should I say “food”?): I Made Ranch Gummy Bears And You Should Too.

4. I can’t tell if this is satire or not. Or if that makes it better or worse. → Christians Against Dinosaurs

5. “A collection of good news, positive trends, uplifting statistics and facts — all beautifully visualized by Information is Beautiful.” → Beautiful News. ※ See also, an online magazine founded by David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne): Reasons to Be Cheerful, “A self help magazine for people who hate self help magazines.”

6. One of the more interesting profiles of an almost accidental, definitely weird, celebrity I’ve read → What Happened to Val Kilmer? He’s Just Starting to Figure It Out. ※ A fantastic profile of an underrated musician: The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic.

7. From the Clamor to your ears → Sweet Music Comes Across the Sky interprets the songs of Thomas Pynchon (Thanks, Reader S.) ※ Apocalypse Grooves maps Coronavirus proteins to sounds (Thanks, Reader B.).

8. A fun exploit of font ligatures → Scunthorpe Sans “censors bad language automatically,” kind of. ※ You do know about the Scunthorpe Problem, right?

9. I can’t resist a snail mail campaign for something good. Nor should you. → 18 Million Thanks

10. Today in 1866, composer and pianist Erik Satie is born in London. Satie, smarting from being called a “clumsy but subtle technician,” began calling himself a phonometrician or gymnopedist. The latter word, coined by Satie, was perhaps an oblique reference to the ancient Greek festival (or dance) called the Gymnopaedia. Whatever the origins, Satie would soon write the composition he is best known for, the ► Gymnopédies (which you will surely recognize). ¶ Satie was a bit…different. Among other eccentricities, Satie claimed to live on a diet of white food, hoarded umbrellas, carried a hammer for protection, stacked two grand pianos on top of each other in his flat (using the top for correspondence), founded his own religion, and composed pieces like “Vexations,” a piece intended to be played 840 times in succession. Satie’s influence was significant, particularly on experimental artists like John Cage and minimalists like Steve Reich. Satie’s years of heavy drinking—including a fondness for absinthe—took their toll, and he would die at just 59. ※ Listen to Satie’s ► Gnossiennes, beautiful pieces that remind me of a modernist Chopin. ※ Watch the documentary Erik Satie: Things Seen to the Right and the Left. ※ Listen to Gnossiennes No. 1 Forever, a composition that uses Markov Chains to create an endless version of this beautiful piece. ※ Listen to every recording of Gymnopedie No. 1 at the same time. ※ Listen to the complete “Vexations” (clocks in at nearly 10 hours).

WATCH/WITNESS

► Traumatized Baby Elephants Find New Human Parents

WHAT‽

► The Exciting of Trains reminds me of the ridiculous vintage 16mm films we used to dig up in the ancient film library, but even funnier.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader A. with an always-relevant suggestion: “Read Gödel, Escher, Bach…”

• Reader B.: “That flipbook was insane!”

• Also Reader B., belatedly (thanks to me): “For Chernobyl, I was most impressed by the HBO series. Well, I had quibbles with a few details, but was blown away by the 99% others. ¶ Also, it felt like Lovecraftian horror in a way. ¶ For more, I strongly recommend this: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.”

• Reader C.: “Little Richard’s influence just isn’t appreciated enough. He Changed Everything!”

• Reader J.: “UFOs - No. If you want the real explanations of what those pics are, check out Thunderfoot. Scientific analysis wins again. ¶ Here’s his two videos explaining how things get picked up on radar, infrared, etc. as well as the science behind the specific US Navy reports: see ► UFO spotted with ADVANCED Infrared CLOAKING device! and ► US Navy CONFIRMED UFO: BUSTED (Part 2).”

• Reader M.: “Re: Balzac’s assertion that music communicates with us more directly than poetry, Richard Strauss was having his characters debate this very question a hundred years later in his brilliant little opera Capriccio frm 1942, and no doubt the debate is still with us.”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

WORK

Believe me, in painting his Saint-Cecilia, Raphael gave the preference to music over poetry. And he was right; music appeals to the heart, whereas writing is addressed to the intellect; it communicates ideas directly, like a perfume.

—Honoré de Balzac (translated by Clara Bell & James Waring)
—from “Massimilla Doni” (1837)

WORD(S)

chrestomathy · /kreh-STAHM-ə-thee/ · /krɛsˈtɒməθɪ/. noun. A collection of choice literary passages, most often by a single author, and moste often to assist in learning a foreign language. From Greek khrēstos (useful) + mathein (to learn); from PIE root mendh- (to learn). See also: chrestomathic.

“…although the Diary of a Romantic Artist contains some of what we might expect, it also served as many other things: work journal, travel notebook, jotter for a proposed Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, aide-memoire, file of sent letters, chrestomathy, address book, and so on…” (Julian Barnes)

“This is also the topic of ‘Shadow and Ash’—an intellectual chrestomathy whose fragmentary method is finally its content.” (Samuel R. Delany)

“The introduction to this chrestomathy, the troubled prolegomena you have just read, is all the explanation I can give at this time, of who I am and what all this means.” (Harlan Ellison)

“Daniel glances at Barnes, who is going through a chrestomathy of head-shaking, throat-slitting, eye-bulging, and hand-waving.” (Neal Stephenson)

WEB

1. Don’t let the mundane title fool you…this flip book is stupendous, dark and beautiful. Thanks, Reader S. → I made a really big flip book during quarantine ※ Flipbook Gangnam Style -vs- Psy Gangnam Style

2. At the always entertaining Strong Language, the curious history of the Sofa King. → It’s Sofa King famous!

3. “It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.” → The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months ※ ► Golding’s Introduction to Lord of the Flies

4. “…a single player iPad game where players help NASA classify coral reefs…” → NeMO-Net

5. The Pudding has been on fire lately. Take a musical quiz because it’s interesting, and contribute to identifying “generational gaps in music” at the same time. Also, I totally have Gen-Zers beat when it comes to recognizing Taylor Dane. → Music Challenge

6. The uplifting story of Emerson, age 11, and her mail carrier, Doug. Also, if you’re an American, support the USPS! → Emerson and Mail Carrier Doug. ※ Instead of Killing the US Postal System, Let’s Expand It

7. Reader P. says, “Apparently this is a real thing.” → Jean-Michel Basquiat Barbie ※ Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines virtual exhibit

8. I agree with Reader B. that some of these are really good! → A thread of user-made Penguin Classics covers. ※ The Penguin (or Oxford World) Classics Cover Generator.

9. Maybe? → It’s time to take UFOs seriously. Seriously.

10. Today in 2003, as an entry in its ongoing (since June 20, 1995!) Astronomy Picture of the Day series, NASA publishes a picture of NGC 7293: The Helix Nebula, which would come to be known as “The Eye of God.” Taken by the Hubble Telescope, the nearly 11,000-year-old nebula—also known as “The Eye of Sauron”—is approximately 700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Contrary to the eye-like appearance from Earth, the nebula is believed to be cylindrical, our view being “down” the cylinder to the star at its center. Further imagery of the nebula revealed that it contains at least 10,000 comets swarming around, and often colliding with each other, inside it.

WATCH/WITNESS

Awesome concert: ► It’s Little Richard. 1964 UK TV Show. (RIP).

WHAT‽

► “Kiss from a Rose” by Seals

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C.: “Am I the only one who finds Jukebox kind of mind-blowing? And the deep fakes? They implications of both of these are exciting and deeply, weirdly troubling.”

• Reader M.: “I have spent a good amount of time the past few weeks editing and ‘correcting’ various poet friends’ use of Covid-19 (and other variations) and explaining why all caps makes sense for an acronym. After all, we do mostly write NASA and not Nasa, even though that acronym is pronounceable.”

• Reader B.: “As a kid I used to take in a lot of Soviet space imaginations. My maternal grandparents were Russian and very pro-USSR. They often went to Sochi and back. Grandfather was a hardcore Stalinist. They liked to bring me magazines with space stuff.”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

WORK

…you must know that there are two kinds of combat: one with laws, the other with force. The first is proper to man, the second to beasts; but because the first is often not enough, one must have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the man. This role was taught covertly to princes by ancient writers, who wrote that Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. To have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing other than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting.

Thus, since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast, he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from wolves. So one needs to be a fox to recognize snares and a lion to frighten the wolves.

—Niccolò Machiavelli (translated by Harvey C. Mansfield)
—found in The Prince (1513-1515; this translation 1985)

WORD(S)

perfidy /PER-fi-dee/ /ˈpə:fɪdi/. noun. A deliberate betrayal of trust or breach of faith, particularly professing friendship to deceive. More commonly seen in its adjective form perfidious (faithless, deceitful, treacherous). From Latin perfidia (falsehood, treachery), from the phrase per fidem decipere (to deceive through trustingness), from per- (forward, through) + fidem (faith).

“Among all nations they excelled in the union of common sense and vision. But also among all nations they were most ready to betray their visions in the name of common sense. Hence their reputation for perfidy.” (Olaf Stapledon)

“…how insensitive, how perfidious it would have been on our part to be sneaking little kisses and holding hands, without being truly in love…” (Stefan Zweig)

“Ellie showed the kind of cold disinterestedness that raised her above the smiling perfidy of the majority of her kind.” (Edith Wharton)

“…Peter was a worse louser and lackey, perpetrated his low perfidity after Judas had betrayed his Master…” (Flann O’Brien)

WEB

1. Some mind blowing glimpses of the future with fascinating implications. Jukebox uses neural nets to generate music—and even “rudimentary” singing!— in multiple genres and styles. Vocal Synthesis is trained on the speech and speech patterns to create new audio (from a “special message” from Barak Obama and Donald Trump to Jay-Z performing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”). ¶ As these kinds of programs rapidly improve, theoretical questions of copyright (who “owns” the copyright of an AI-generated voice performance?) and life (how do we tell real from literally fake news?) become real and pressing. ※ See also: From the pyramids to Apollo 11 – can AI ever rival human creativity? ※ One more link, this time a bit less world-changing: This Meme Does Not Exist.

2. Even right here, people (and birds), live in different worlds. A pair of them: There’s an Entire Industry Dedicated to Making Foods Crispy, and It Is WILD and Inside the Outrageously Prestigious World of Falcon Influencers.

3. I love this project! Check it out while you can: This Website Will Self-Destruct

4. The King’s Letters, the fascinating story of “The 15th-century scholar who upset the Korean aristocracy by creating a native script for the Korean language, and thus wean it off Chinese characters.” ※ Pairs well with: The origin of language in the brain is 20 million years older than we thought.

5. I Turned a 1920’s Typewriter into an EDM Drum Machine.

6. Yes, I’m the kind of person that, in the midst of a pandemic, worries over such things. Maybe this is why: COVID or Covid? The comfort of pedantry at a time of national crisis. ※ See also, the Chicago Manual’s shop talk on the Styling COVID-19 and Related Terms. ※ And in sign language, literally: Due to Covid 19

7. A life well lived: Madeline Kripke, Doyenne of Dictionaries, Is Dead at 76

8. How Soviet Artists Imagined Communist Life in Space. ※ Bonus: Nikolai Mikhailovich Kolchitsky’s fantastic illustrations.

9. First, consider that there is a “literary magazine for Taco Bell literature.” Then enjoy an interview with the editor of Taco Bell Quarterly, who explains how to make art out of a fast food brand.

10. Today in 1469, writer, philosopher and diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli is born in Florence, Italy. Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who would be the ruler of Florence from 1516-1519. Machiavelli’s book has been celebrated and condemned in the centuries since for its formal innovation, philosophical subtlety and its seeming recommendation of cruelty, autocracy and deception. The latter perception—a partially unfair one driven by partisan interests including the Catholic church—resulted in the eponym Machiavellian (one who prefers expedience and desired outcome to morality; deceitful, cunning, scheming, duplicitous) as early as the 1570s.

WATCH/WITNESS

► The Iguana King documents a Florida iguana hunter, one of a small clan going after these reptiles that, thanks to climate change, are “at once a sought-after pet, a destructive pest, and a delicacy.”

WHAT‽

► Wait for It

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader L. writes: “A little something to add to your list of locked-in delights, 7 Spectacular Libraries You Can Explore From Your Living Room.”

• Reader K. with a reminder: “I don’t know who needs this, but Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity and Literally Kills You.”

• Reader B. shares my shame: “While I can barely doodle, Banksy is doing this during his lockdown!”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

If you enjoy Katexic Clippings, I could use your help getting the word out that it’s back: share a link, forward a copy to a friend, bedazzle the name on your shirt before your next Zoom session…whatever you’re willing to do. Thank you!

WORK

I shall look forth from my window, the laburnum and the mountain-ash becoming mere silhouettes in the foreground of my vision. I shall look forth and, in nay remoteness, appreciate the distant pageant of the world. Humanity will range itself in the columns of my morning paper. No pulse of life will escape me. The strife of politics, the intriguing of courts, the wreck of great vessels, wars, dramas, earthquakes, national griefs or joys; the strange sequels to divorces, even, and the mysterious suicides of land-agents at Ipswich—in all such phenomena I shall steep my exhaurient mind.

—Max Beerbohm
—from “Diminuendo”
—found in The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896)

WORD(S)

teratology · /tayr-ə-TOL-ə-jee/ · /tɛrəˈtɒlədʒi/ · noun · The study of physical abnormalities, gross defects, and the conditions that give rise to them. From Greek prefix terato- (of or pertaining to monsters), from Greek teras (monster or monstrosity). See also: teratoid, teratophobia, teratophilia, teratogenetic, teratoma, teratical.

“Teratology and the iconography of nightmare were his hobbies…” (H. P. Lovecraft)

“…the silence rumbled into unwelcome life with the sound of heavy breathing – a slack snorting that belonged to something teratoid and beastly.” (Kate Atkinson)

“…this bull ends up begetting on Minos’s queen the Minotaur, a hideous teratoid monster who has to be secreted in a special labyrinth and propitiated with human flesh…” (David Foster Wallace)

“…he was trying to say a single word that I, with my Ancient as well as Modern Greek, can identify, though I have never encountered it: teratophilia, erotic attraction to monsters.” (Kingsley Amis)

“She was afflicted with teratophobia, an unusual but well-documented condition: literally, a fear of bearing a monster, a fear of something horrible growing inside you.” (Paul Bowdring)

WEB

1. How the Fake Beatles Conned South America.

2. The readaletter tag on YouTube is delightful, with all kinds of people (celebrities and not) reading letters to friends, family and the public. ※ Staying with letters, read about The Stamp that Almost Caused a War .

3. No one knows, and can more accessibly talk about, new and emerging online language than Because Internet author Gretchen McCullough, and this new interview is no exception: Why “Ok.” Is the Most Terrifying Text You Could Ever Receive.

4. FixMyQuarantine links to interesting videos, songs, articles, useless facts and uplifting news intended to “help people escape boredom of staying at home.” Even better, the selection changes every 24 hours. Thanks Reader S.

5. Weaving together the ideas of Marcel Maus and Lewis Hyde on gifts and the gifted with the contemporary, mercenary market and notions of a spiritual economy, Ted Gioia’s Gratuity: Who Gets Paid When Art Is Free is a must read.

6. Unlike almost everyone else I know, I couldn’t bear Tiger King. But this not-so-depressing or salacious piece on The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People was great.

7. Speaking of animals: Pets in prison: the rescue dogs teaching Californian inmates trust and responsibility. ※ Pairs well with: We Put Too Many People Behind Bars. This Pandemic Shows Why That’s Not Necessary.

8. Looking for some big books to occupy your time? Then The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Over 500 Pages is for you. ※ And if you’re one of those tricksters who find pandemic reading pleasurable (or necessary), then the inimitable Bryan Alexander has your back: Reading for the plague: a syllabus.

9. For your eyes: The weirdest, most wonderful virtual museums you can visit without leaving your couch & An inspired photographer, a disrupted senior class and 500 portraits that capture what they lost. ※ For your ears, a bit of nostalgia: 10 TV themes played on piano by Ethan Iverson. ※ And for, well, the rest of you: Burning Man Is Going Virtual, and So Are the Orgies.

10. On this day in 1986, the worst nuclear disaster in history—along with the Fukushima Daiichi disaster the only incident rated at the highest level on the International Nuclear Event Scale—occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, in what is now northern Ukraine. The accident would release 100 times more radiation than both of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, killing two plant workers immediately and more than two-dozen first responders within a few months. The ultimate death toll, including eventual deaths from cancer and other diseases, could reach 16,000. More than 350,000 people in Pripyat and nearby areas were relocated, turning Pripyat into a ghost town. After putting out the immediate fire and shutting the rest of the plant down, the reactor was covered by a 400,000 cubic meter concrete and steel structure called the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Sarcophagus but, due to degradation, the sarcophagus was replaced in 2018 by the New Shelter. ※ See also: Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl (a short film shot by drone in 2014), a Traveler piece on What It’s Like to Visit Chernobyl Today, and the acclaimed Chernobyl miniseries.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Enjoy a ► virtual walk through the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden—complete with cherry blossoms—in this extraordinary video captured by cinematographer Nic Petry…”

WHAT‽

Watch the ► Hamlet Monovlogues, in which “Hamlet is a struggling millennial vlogging his struggles of life as the events of the play unfold.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. writes in, “So glad to see Katexic back! Readers might enjoy this thread on the Origin of the Triscuit name. It’s certainly not what I would have guessed.”

• Reader B. says, “May I draw the attention of the Clamor (Klamor?) to this wonderful series of Sir Patrick Stewart reading Shakespeare’s sonnets? And while I’m at it, I have to plug Star Trek: Picard, which is a great binge watch even for non-Trek fanatics like me.”

• Reader K. stops by, "I’m just going to leave this right here: As a gift to our friends (you) in a time of crisis, we’ll be keeping a thread here of beautiful, obscure, and often quite useless words.

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/

It’s hard to completely ignore a global pandemic but, as usual with Clippings, while some items are inspired by current news and events, none are directly about them. Enjoy!

WORK

My soul is a secret orchestra, but I don’t know what instruments – strings, harps, cymbals, drums – strum and bang inside me. I only know myself as the symphony.

—Fernando Pessoa (translated by Richard Zenith)
—found in The Book of Disquiet (2001)

WORD(S)

anchorite /AYN-kər-iyt/ /ˈaŋkərʌɪt/. noun or adjective. Someone who has withdrawn or secluded themselves from the world, usually for religious reasons. A recluse; a person of solitary habits. From Greek anakhoretes (one who has retired), from anakhorein (to retreat, retire), from ana (back) + khorein (withdraw). See also: ascetic, hermit, loner, solitarian.

“As a mongrel anchorite he could not bear the heat of the house, or the way the TV seemed to attack you like a barking dog, or to sleep within the dank scent of heating oil.” (Jim Harrison)

“Holy men and anchorites have long found in the upper world of the mountains an environment more conducive to contemplation than the secular bustle of the lowlands.” (Robert Macfarlane)

“That is the delusion of the anchorite—a delusion in which the man forgets the rights of others for the sake of his own sanctity.” (George MacDonald)

WEB

1. Trained a neural net on my cat and regret everything

2. There’s a slew of streaming media by entertainers of all kinds right now, including comedy, but Tip Your Waitstaff is one of the more interesting. Each week Mike Birbiglia and a guest (so far including John Mulaney, Gary Gulman, Maria Bamford and more) get together to work on jokes, which is both fascinating and funny.

3. Nick Cave on creativity in the age of the Coronavirus | David Lynch Predicts a ‘More Spiritual, Much Kinder’ World After Quarantine Ends | John Keats wrote A Letter from Quarantine.

4. Color Names is a collaborative effort to name all (16,277,216) RGB colors based on user-submitted names and voting. Meanwhile, colors.lol selects palettes from which sets and names are randomly generated, leading to combinations such as “ungentlemanly light grey, deadly muted blue and entopic periwinkle.” | More seriously, this two-part piece on The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains is eye-opening and pairs well with this 2012 Radiolab episode on Colors.

5. Thanks to the #ColourOurCollections initiative you can download coloring book pages based on materials from libraries, archives and museums from around the world.

6. As my ability to pseudo-multitask becomes weaker—and the sheltering in place becomes staler—I find myself using ambient sound/noise systems more to help concentrate and focus. My current pick is the Name of the Rose Ambient Background Generator, just one of more than 200 customizable sound generators at MyNoise. A few other recommended sites: Rainyscope for rain sounds, Coffitivity for coffeeshop sounds and Soft Murmur for a mixable variety.

7. From the early days of commercial printing comes comes an extraordinary saga of piracy and fraud.

8. The news is getting old,but the language of, and around, Coronavirus remains fascinating. A mini-roundup of articles on the topic: A “Lockdown Lexicon, Covidictionary, Glossary of Coronacoinages” in two parts: #CORONASPEAK – the language of Covid-19 goes viral & #CORONASPEAK – the language of Covid-19 goes viral – 2 | Social change and linguistic change: the language of Covid-19 | Corpus analysis of the language of Covid-19 | Coronavirus meets linguistic diversity | ‘Take care and be safe’: Rewriting email etiquette in our new coronavirus reality | and a bit of fun, the Covid-19 Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

9. For your ears: Matthew Perpetua’s curated yearly playlists (1970-2005) | A Buddhist Monk Covers Queen, The Beatles, and The Ramones | Rare footage of a Snow leopard calling. For your eyes: 2020 Sony World Photography Awards | 50 Weirdest Stock Photos You Won’t Be Able To Unsee. For both: Louis Armstrong House Museum’s first virtual exhibit.

10. Today in 1770, while the barely 15-year-old Marie Antoinette was being married by proxy to Louis XVI of France, Captain James Cook—on a mission to find the mythical continent of Terra Australis—becomes the first European to lay eyes on the Eastern coast of Australia.

WATCH/WITNESS

Watching 植物男子 (“Plant Guy”) ► create his incredible terrariums, including cliffs and waterfalls, is compelling and soothing—a meditative window into miniature worlds.

WHAT‽

Normally a “Los Angeles based monthly curatorial screening showcasing contemporary and archival experimental film/animation,” in the era of physical distancing Cathode Cinema has transformed itself into ► CathodeTV, featuring “past programming, experimental shorts, strange TV feeds, subconscious channel surfing, themed blocks of programming and much more.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Thanks to the many folks who wrote in last week with encouragement and stories. It was great to hear from you, and I’ll be in touch with each of you soon.

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

Greetings, friends! You might remember me from episodes like “Not that newsletter again!” and “Why doesn’t he just make a website?”

The promised transformation of this newsletter during its hiatus didn't (yet?) materialize...but the times we are living in are so extraordinary (though, as usual, I tried to stay away from current events...we all get enough of that!) that maybe that's not just OK, but comforting. At least that's what I tell myself. So, you tell me, should I send more of these?

WORK

…you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind of tool, will help you to extend your solitude over a greater expanse of ground. People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult. All living things do this, everything in nature grows and defends itself according to its kind and is a distinct creature from out of its own resources, strives to be so at any cost and in the face of all resistance. We know little, but that ~we must hold fast to what is difficult~ is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Charlie Louth)
—found in Letters to a Young Poet (written 1902-1908; first published 1929; this translation 2011)

WORD(S)

monophobia · /mah-nuh-FOE-bee-uh/ · /mɒnəʊˈfəʊbɪə/. noun. A severe, even morbid fear of being alone. Also, a generic term for a single, simple or specific phobia. From Greek mono- (alone, single, sole, only) + -phobia (a fear of, or aversion to, something). See also: eremophobia, isolophobia.

“The fear of solitude, monophobia, manifests itself frequently in hysteria, in neurasthenia.” (Ch. Féré)

“If he is afraid of being alone he knows that he has monophobia and has the satisfaction of knowing that he is a pathological case. If he keeps worrying, in the middle of a meal, about the possibility of being buried alive, he can flatter himself that he has taphephobia, and that it is no worse than a bad cold.” (Robert Benchley)

“…for a while I thought I would inherit my father’s lavish array of phobias: aerophobia (he flew once, as a child: a five-shilling ‘flip’ at the seaside. That did it), acrophobia (when he took his children to the top floor of the Empire State, in 1959, it was only our presence, he said, that stopped him from screaming), and nyctophobia, or fear of the night.* Nyctophobia overlapped with partial monophobia. There were many things he couldn’t do alone.” (Martin Amis)

“New siblings to rival. Perhaps for a moment, only a moment, this affront will being us together, all human, all much more alike than different, all much more alike than is good for our prickly pride. Humanity, E pluribus unum at last, a oneness focused on and fertilized by certain knowledge of alien others. What will be born of that brief, strange, and ironic union?” (Octavia Butler, from “The Monophobic Response”)

WEB

1. There’s hope for the pandas → Finally, Some Privacy: After 10 Years, Giant Pandas Mate in Shuttered Zoo … and for us? → Thanks to COVID-19, Internet-Connected Sex Toy Sales Are Booming

2. It turns out tunnel-boring machines are far from, well, boring. → Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines

3. A promising early experiment that may become more important than ever. → A Brain Stimulation Experiment Relieved Depression in Nearly All of Its Participants | Paradoxical pairing: If You Have Anxiety and Depression but Feel Better During Coronavirus, You’re Not Alone

4. If you’re an introvert jonesing for some of the stress of extroverting, Hyphal Mesh has you covered, every Tuesday at 12:30 PT / 3:30 ET.

5. Paper-Bag Masks from 50 Years Ago

6. People are finding delight in all kinds of things right now. Is it time to discover delight in the dead?

7. The Letterform Archive is a (well) “curated collection of over 50,000 items related to lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design.” And now the online archive is open to all.

8. Some long(ish) reads: The Mortician and the Murderer | a bank-robbing Olympic cyclist naturally uses his bike as a getaway vehicle | The highly unusual company behind Sriracha, the world’s coolest hot sauce | How a tiny endangered species put a man in prison | The Crazy True Story of the Zanesville Zoo Escape

9. Get ’em in your ears: NPR’s updated list of virtual concerts of all kinds | the Cabin Fever Tunes schedule of folk/country/americana livestreams | Nightly Met Opera streams. And your eyes: The Art Of Quarantine | Unraveling the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt’s Spellbinding Mummy Portraits | Jonathan Harris’ works. And a bit of both with the ongoing Social Distancing Festival.

10. Today in 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space on a voyage lasting 108 minutes. At lift-off, Gagarin spoke to ground control, saying “Off we go! Goodbye, until [we meet] soon, dear friends!” The first phrase, Poyekhali! in Russian (listen to it)—popularly translated as “Let’s go!” or “We’re off!”—became a popular phrase that is now a regular part of the Russian lexicon. See also: a ► 5-minute mini-documentary of the historic event, a nice piece on how Gagarin inspired Soviet design, Poyekhali! Gagarin cut, a collaboration between composer Úlfur Eldjárn and filmmaker Christopher Riley celebrating astronaut Tim Peake’s first orbit of Earth in 2015, and the finally-revealed true story of Gagarin’s death in 1968.

WATCH/WITNESS

Mike Olbinski’s ► Vorticity 2 combines two years of storm-chasing footage into a mesmerizing short (under eight minutes) film. Pairs well with these unbelievably cool clouds over Lake Michigan.

WHAT‽

I don’t know what ► Paulette Traverso’s Messages from Quarantine is, exactly, but its surreal-y, dada-esque silence fits my headspace right now.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• It’s been a while. I sure would love to hear from you!

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

Greetings, Clamorites!

After more than 400 issues starting in 2014, Katexic Clippings is officially going into hybertransformation mode—aka hiatus—in which your intrepid editor sleeps a lot and fattens up with new ideas for bringing a revitalized newsletter back later this year (so don’t leave quite yet).

In the meantime, I’m sure I will be unable to resist posting some cool stuff to (which is effectively a two-year archive of newsletters…plus some bonus prizes) and .

WORK

Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

—David Lynch
—from Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (2006)

WORD(S)

banausic /bəˈnɔ:sɪk/ /bə-NAW-sik/. adjective. Ordinary; routine; run-of-the-mill; mundane; dull. Derogatory, obviously, banausic originated in Ancient Greek as a pejorative label for the laboring class, including artists and musicians. It’s possible that the Elizabethan use of “mechanical” was a translation from the Greek. From Greek banausos (handicraftsman).

“History, fortunately, will forget these banausic and irrelevant gnats, but not before thousands more die screaming in South Africa under the premiership of a man who is freedom’s friend as much as Margaret Thatcher is Dorothy’s.” (Stephen Fry)

“Continuing on without pause, he said, ‘Exacting? Prosaic? Banausic to the point of drudgery? Sometimes. Often tedious? Perhaps. But brave? Worthy? Fitting, sweet? Romantic? Chivalric? Heroic?’ When he paused, it wasn’t just for effect—at least not totally. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ’—by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood—gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.” (David Foster Wallace)

“The locals attempt country dances, a banausic and inappropriate entertainment.” (China Miéville)

WEB

1. “Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then ‘basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.’” → The End Of Empathy

2. Each load of the the LOC Serendipity page provides a new random list of links to openly available books and other publications from the Library of Congress. Makes for a fun meander. ※ Even more fun, if you have a short attention span like mine, is the companion LOC Visual Media Serendipity site.

3. “What are human murmurations, I wondered?” Another insightful essay by Rebecca Solnit. → When the Hero is the Problem [Thanks, Reader B.!]

4. The San Diego Zoo and the University of California San Diego are crowdfunding a cervix-navigating robot to fight against the impending extinction of multiple species of African Rhino. ※ Watch ► the project’s video

5. The nutrition study the $30B supplement industry doesn’t want you to see

6. If your interests run to technology, social media, attention, unplugging, etc., then Venkatesh Rao’s thoughts on “Waldenponding” (I suggest starting with Part 2, grokkable even if Harry Potter isn’t your thing, then Part 1 if you’re interested) are an intriguing read.

7. Lenka Clayton Typewriter Drawings (“made with a portable 1957 Smith-Corona Skyriter typewriter” – but how?) ※ Clayton has a lot of interesting projects of all kinds, but I am naturally drawn to the wordy ones, such as Corrected Love Letters, Today I was interviewed by the New York Times, Unanswered Letter and a project I shared here in 2015, the Mysterious Letters Project.

8. Ummm…hmmm. → Woman with two wombs gives birth twice, nearly a month apart

9. 5fathom is just a person sharing “things rich and strange,” and it’s a cornucopia of little delights.

10. Today is Easter, aka Pascha, aka Resurrection Sunday, a Christian holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Easter Sunday is the first day of Eastertide, the Easter Season, which lasts seven weeks, ending on day 50, Pentecost Sunday. The dying of Easter eggs originates in the early Christian community of Mesopotamia, who dyed eggs—an ancient symbol of birth and rebirth—red in memory of the blood of Christ. In addition to being an ancient fertility symbol, the hare was widely believed to be hermaphroditic and so able to reproduce without losing its virginity, which led to its being associated with the Virgin Mary and to the German Lutherans casting of the hare in the part of a judge—similar to Santa Claus—who determined if children had been naughty or nice at the start of Eastertide. In Western Christianity, which follows the Gregorian calendar, Easter is a “moveable feast” that can fall anywhere between March 22 and April 25; in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which follows the Julian calendar, it falls on a Sunday between April 4 and May 8.

WATCH/WITNESS

I’m going to let ► Black Sheep’s official description do the talking. Powerful.

Everything changed for Cornelius Walker on 27 November 2000 when Damilola Taylor was killed. Damilola was 11, the same age as Cornelius. He lived five minutes away. He had the same skin colour. Cornelius’s mother, scared for her son’s safety, moved their family out of London. Cornelius suddenly found himself living on a white estate run by racists. But rather than fight them, Cornelius decided to become more like the people who hated him. They became his family and kept him safe. And in return, Cornelius became submerged in a culture of violence and hatred. But as the violence and racism against other black people continued, Cornelius struggled to marry his real identity with the one he had acquired.

WHAT‽

An Australian study demonstrates: cyclists not human enough for drivers. In order to look into this idea, the researchers developed the insect-human scale seen above. This is fine.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. regarding the recent WORK by Octavio Paz: “What complete nonsense. I really enjoy the newsletter, though!”

• Reader D.: “You’ve had tiny frogs and hopefully tiny bees in recent Katexic emails. How about tiny fish with an outsized impact?”

• Reader B.: "1. saprophytic? Chip Delany is amazing. ¶ 2. tenebrous? I will deploy some Ech-Pi-El:

‘It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries.’

3. I sing the body Katexic!"

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

Hey, thanks for reading! Two quick notes: 1) I’d appreciate you sharing Katexic with your friends, on social media, and on websites and 2) I try not to link to many things behind paywalls, but if I do and you are unable to access it, let me know and I’ll send you a copy.

WORK

Everything in the universe is older than it seems. Blame Einstein for that. We see what a thing was when the light left it, and that was long ago. Nothing in the night sky is contemporary, not to us, not to one another. Ancient stars exploded into ruin before their sparkle ever caught our eyes; those glimpsed in glowing “nurseries” were crones before we witnessed their birth. Everything we marvel at is already gone.

Yet, light rays go out forever, so that everything grown old and decayed retains somewhere the appearance of its youth. The universe is full of ghosts.

But images are light, and light is energy, and energy is matter; and matter is real. So image and reality are the same thing, after all. Blame Einstein for that, as well.

—Michael Flynn
—from The January Dancer

WORD(S)

tenebrous /TEN-ə-brəs/ /’tɛnɪbrəs/. adjective. Gloomy, shadowy, full or darkness. From Latin tenebrae (darkness).

“The tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city: it is morning and I miss the clear night.” (Samuel R. Delany)

“Angela and I are my interior dialogue: I talk to myself. Angela is from my dark interior: she however comes to light. The tenebrous darkness from which I emerge. Pullulating darkness, lava of a humid volcano burning intensely. Darkness full of worms and butterflies, rats and stars.” (Clarice Lispector; translated by Idra Novey)

“The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny.” (Angela Carter)

“But we aren’t through yet, no, we haven’t had the fancy words. Eldritch. Tenebrous. Smaragds and chalcedony. Mayhap. It can’t be maybe, it can’t be perhaps; it has to be mayhap, unless it’s perchance. And then comes the final test, the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate: Ichor.” (Ursula K. Le Guin)

WEB

1. A story that truly deserves the adjective “extraordinary” in many ways: who the book collector was, the volume and variety he collected, that he read and summarized the books…and that some of that index survived. → ‘Extraordinary’ 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time Thanks, Reader K! ※ Linked within that story is another worth reading: How Christopher Columbus’s son built ‘the world’s first search engine’

2. See the first image ever taken of a supermassive black hole. Just to provide some context since it’s easy to forget how big “supermassive” is: this black hole has the mass of 6.5 billion of our suns. And our Sun could contain 1.3 million Earths! ※ I’m agog that some people are actually complaining about the photo’s quality, but just in case: In Defense of the Blurry Black Hole Photo.

3. The strange politicization of cursive writing (and its conflation with handwriting). → Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back.

4. The Visible Poetry Project “pairs 30 poets and filmmakers to collaborate on short films for the month of April.” The results are awesome.

5. From cannabutter to the connectome and bawbag to sprunt, there are a bunch of (mostly) interesting new words going into the OED in March. ※ See the full list.

6. “The newly discovered Malagasy amphibians have brains that could sit on a pin.” → New staple-size frog is one of the tiniest ever discovered ※ Related, in the sense that I hope the bees in question were really tiny too: Doctors find four bees in woman’s eye, feeding on her tears.

7. Artificial Intelligence seems like one of those things that is quietly transforming our world in mostly overlooked ways while we’re all distracted debating—or waiting for—the garish apocalyptic visions to be realized. → Visualizing the AI Revolution in One Infographic

8. Quacks of the Week → The Fake Sex Doctor Who Conned the Media Into Publicizing His Bizarre Research on Suicide, Butt-Fisting, and Bestiality and Bret Easton Ellis Thinks You’re Overreacting to Donald Trump.

9. Famous Movie Scenes you probably didn’t realise were Borrowed from Paintings ※ Pairs tastily with The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Art Thief.

10. Today in 1894, the first public kinetoscope parlor opens in New York City. The kinetoscope, the precursor to modern motion picture in both camera and ultimately projection, was a product of Thomas Edison’s workshop. Though Edison claimed credit for the device, most of the work creating it was performed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Charles A. Brown under Edison’s leadership. That first parlor featured ten kinetoscopes set up in two parallel rows of five that viewers would sequentially watch for twenty-five cents per row. To provide some context, one dollar in 1894 was the equivalent nearly thirty dollars today. Edison’s company generated nearly 2.5 million (in today’s dollars) in its first eleven months of selling the machines and films. ※ You can ► watch some of those early kinetoscope films including the scandalous The Kiss as well as ► Monkeyshines, the first film recorded in the United States.

WATCH/WITNESS

"I composed a piece of music made entirely from sounds that I had recorded from a collection of antique cameras. […] To accompany this track I created a video response […] made entirely with stop motion animation, with over six thousand still photos shot and then edited together." → ► Digital Analogue by Lu Sisi

WHAT‽

I’m mostly sure that the Heavy Metal Knitting World Championships are a real thing.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Now I’m imagining you and a helpful doggie crafting Katexic one night, after a rainstorm!”

• Reader L.: “About ‘Millennials have created a form of written English that’s as expressive as spoken English’: once I grew too old and tired to maintain the energy to be a hater, I’ve discovered I love exploring how language is evolving to fit the form of texting, chatting, and tweeting.”

• Reader F.: “Bad, poaching porcupines. Good, I learned the word ‘bezoar’ (and the alliteration).”

• Reader C.: “Am I supposed to take the Kindle scamming article as career advice?”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

WORK

All men, at some moment in their lives, feel them selves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has “invented” him self by saying “No” to nature – consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

—Octavio Paz
—from The Labyrinth of Solitude

WORD(S)

calque /KOWLK/ /kælk/. noun. A loan word. A word borrowed from one language into another, often with some modification. From French calque (a copy), from calquer (to trace by rubbing); from Latin calcare (to press down, to stamp, to tread).

“It seems to me that this excess of technicalities and, elsewhere, of calques from slang and American colloquialisms is not always useful, and reveals a certain amount of ingenuous exhibitionism.” (Primo Levi)

“…these glossaries would discontent a serious-minded linguist, mongrel as they are in their origins, and mingling as they do loanwords, nonce words, neologisms and calques.” (Robert Macfarlane)

“…Eventually a being will conceive
(in stalls of staves, in calques of cramp, in knuckleheads and thrall—
god help us all) the stems of words.”
(Heather McHugh)

WEB

1. Get ready! In addition to being the cruelest month, April is also (National) Poetry Month and, hot on the heels of InCoWriMo, (National) Card and Letter Writing Month. I like to celebrate both poetry and snail mail every month, as victims of my epistolary acts can attest to, but make a special effort to combine the two in April. ※ In the US, April is also the official month of: Jazz Appreciation, Parkinson’s Awareness, Cancer Control, Mathematics and Statistics Awareness, Arab American Heritage, Grilled Cheese, Pecans, Soft Pretzels and Soyfoods.

2. How scammers employ “plagiarism, book-stuffing, and click-farms” to game the Kindle Unlimited system…some earning up to $100,000 per month.

3. Read or listen to the downright amazing Emily Wilson in conversation with Tyler Cowen on Homer, The Odyssey, The Iliad, Socrates, Silicon Valley’s love of Stoicism, electing politician by lots, using Twitter to get real about translation and much more. ※ Also from Emily Wilson (and barely skirting my self-imposed ban on explicit politics, so don’t @me): What Beto O’Rourke’s love of the Odyssey says about him.

4. Dope and Sex and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Slang Lexicography with Jonathon Green: Part I and Part II

5. “What does this mean for AI? ¶ First, it suggests there’s no particular reason to study or try to mimic the columnar structure of the primate cortex; bird brains have a different structure and do just as well, neuron for neuron, as we do. ¶ Second, it means that if we ever get AIs that are ‘on the intelligence ladder" – doing the same thing as animal brains – we should expect that their abilities may scale linearly-ish with available computing power. Which dectuples every 5-12 years. Great.’” → Neuron density in humans, birds and other animals—and its implications for development of artificial intelligence.

6. “Mike Kelly, curator at the Archives and Special Collections of Amherst College, explores highlights from their Emily Dickinson collection, a huge variety of manuscript forms – from concert programmes to chocolate wrappers…” ※ See also: the complete Emily Dickinson collection at Amherst.

7. Millennials have created a form of written English that’s as expressive as spoken English (original title: “Millennials destroyed the rules of written English – and created something better”)

8. When I sharpen a pencil, I see a mess. Haruka Misawa saw a method for creating beautiful, delicate, literally unique paper shaving flowers. ※ More information on Misawa’s site.

9. Some weird links found me this week: How Russia Fell in Love with Candy Bars Made of Blood & Porcupines are being poached for their stomach content & Judge makes quick decision in Melbourne’s ‘serial farter’ case

10. Today in 1959, Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, better known as the (14th) Dalai Lama—aided by the United States CIA’s Special Activities Division—flees Tibet for India and begins what he describes as “freedom in exile” following China’s brutal defeat of the Tibetan Rebellion that had begun just three weeks earlier. The Dalai Lama’s exile continues as does China’s refusal to recognize Tibetan independence.

WATCH/WITNESS

About her sweet (I dare you not to feel at least a little happier after watching it) animated short ► Omelette, filmmaker Madeline Sharafian writes, “I wanted to make something that focuses on how meaningful it is to make food for someone you love.”

WHAT‽

From the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, ► Real-time MRI imagery of what the tongue and mouth look like when singing (and speaking) ※ Tangentially related: you don’t need an MRI machine to see ► this man lick his own forehead.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D.: “I’ll see your bird punk and raise with Fantasy Birding Is Real, And It’s Spectacular.”

• Reader H.: “Your use of stenographer in your definition of amanuensis brought back a quote of Chesterton’s: 23,000 women rose up and said we will not be dictated to. The next year they all became stenographers.” – Ouch!

• Reader B.: “I can furrow my brown at the Josh Rogan piece. That one […] seemed weirdly angry, not matching at all what I’ve heard from other people.”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.

Today’s WORD suggested by Reader J. Thanks!

WORK

from “Teen-age Gangs Speak Strange Tongue; Here’s a Glossary of Common Expressions”

• Bop—To fight.
• Bopping Club—A fighting gang.
• Cheesy—Traitorous.
• Diddly bop—First-class gang fighter.
• Gig—A party.
• Jitterbug—To fight.
• Rank—To insult (usually profanity concerning a boy’s mother).
• Shin battle—Intra-gang practice or test-of-mettle fight among gang members.
• Snag—To attack an individual.
• Sneaky Pete—Cheap wine.
• To sound—To joke or needle.

—found in The New York Times (March 24, 1958)
—full article

WORD(S)

amanuensis /ə-MAN-yoo-EN-sis/ /əˌmænjʊˈɛnsɪs/. noun. A literary assistant or factotum. A typist or stenographer. From Latin āmanuensis; from the phrase servus ā manū (slave at hand, aka handwriting); from ā (from) + manū (hand).

“I became Olivia Manning’s flunkey, her amanuensis, her temp worker, in effect saying to her, for however long it took to thread her words on the page, Where you go, I follow.” (Nicholson Baker)

“Think of him as the amanuensis of all those whose tales we’ve yet to tell him, the histories of those woman who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten…” (Angela Carter)

“How could Lord Morton have known that Sir Bradley, his faithful amanuensis and chief engineer, was a merman in disguise, an ally to the sea creatures bent on the destruction of all mankind?” (Ben H. Winters & Jane Austen)

WEB

1. Wave reviews: Under – Norway’s new underwater restaurant.

2. “Softer foods from agricultural lifestyles may have changed the human bite, making it easier to form certain sounds.” → Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins

3. “Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression.”

4. Julie Phillips on The dangerous shifting cultural narratives around suicide

5. The “Mandela Effect” is a collective misremembering, named after the phenomenon of people around the world falsely remembering, in often vivid detail, Nelson Mandela’s death in the 1980s, though he was alive at the time. Other common examples of this kind of group false memory, both of which I’ve been victim of, include the name of the “Berenstein” Bears and Sinbad’s non-existent genie movie. Thanks to the web and social media, examples of the effect are easier and easier to discover. My latest: the “flesh” colored crayons of my childhood which, thanks to this exhaustive history of Crayola Crayon colors, I am highly unlikely to have experienced for myself since the name was changed many years before I was born. Indian Red? Not so much…those were around until 1999.

6. I’ve tried listening Joe Rogan’s show. I just don’t get it. But…can his weird influence be ignored? → “So how did Rogan—the Fear Factor guy!—become the Larry King of the Intellectual Dark Web?”

7. Not into college basketball’s March Madness? How about a bracket of 100 new(ish) English words duking it out for domination? That’s what Daniel Donoghue does in his “History and Structure of the English Language” course. ※ See the live bracket (I’m betting on snerfle or salty).

8. “The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.”

9. For yr eyeholes: Alia Bright’s paper sculpture typography pieces & Bian Xiaodong’s anti-gravity ceramics & Winners of the 2018 Skypixel Aerial Photo and Video Contest & Pippa Dyrlaga’s exquisite paper cuttings ※ Related: Munch’s iconic work “The Scream” might not be screaming.

10. Today in 1853, the first issue of The Provincial Freeman is published in Windsor, Ontario. Co-edited by Mary Ann Shadd Cary (the first black woman publisher in North America and one of the first black lawyers in the U.S.) and the Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward, the fiery, anti-slavery paper (its masthead declared it to be “Devoted to anti-slavery, temperance and general literature”) documented the activities of African-Canadians, many of whom were recent arrivals fleeing slavery in the States. Its run would last nearly five years. ※ Read some notices from the paper.

WATCH/WITNESS

On day 86 of a walking trek to the South Pole, a very hungry ► Aleksander Gamme digs up his final food cache and the result is…one of the clearest moments of joy you’ll ever see on video. You don’t need the subtitles to get this one. ※ Via the very appropriately titled ► “Bliss” episode of Radiolab, where you can learn more about Gamme and the video.

WHAT‽

Inspired by the ► Origami Magic Ball, scientists investigating “soft robotics” have created ► a mechanical gripper that can grasp and lift irregularly shaped objects up to 100x its own weight. And it does so with (slightly-creepy) style.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader L.: “OK, I now know the meaning of kipple, but what is moop? (Cory Doctorow’s quote?)” – Great question! MOOP is an acronym popularized by—if not originating from—Burning Man participants and stands for “Matter Out of Place”! See this story…

• Reader J.: “much to love here, as usual ¶ but especially ‘Magical Thinking’ and ‘birdpunk’”

• Reader B.: "So many good things: ¶ 1) I love the ant castings. Can watch those for hours. ¶ 2) Kipple: knew the PKD origin, but not the fanzine, so thank you for that. ¶ 3) Bogost’s piece on creative AI is fascinating. Gratifying, personally, as I’ve been talking about this for 4 years. ¶ 4) The Pound/Auden story is fascinating, too. Thank you. That vexed author-work relationship! ¶ Last week two of my students confessed - that is the word - their admiration for Garrison Keillor. They were very apologetic. (The earliest deplatforming I’ve heard - using the name - was in British universities during the 1960s. I’d have to research that.)

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: mailto:clippings@katexic.com.

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: https://katexic.com/.