WORK

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from Pnin

WORD(S)

sinistral /SIN-i-strəl/ adjective. Left-handed. Related to, or located, on the left side of the body. When describing some molluscs, a shell that coils clockwise from its apex. In obsolete, but occasionally invoked usage, something unlucky, darkly suspicious or deeply unfavorable. See also: chirality (handedness), of which sinistral is one and dextral the other. From Latin sinistr-, sinister (left).

“Preston would then initiate others into the mysteries of an upside-down, inside-out, sinistral, always faintly askew (if not entirely reversed) universe. A true avatar of topsy-turveydom, Preston gave himself body and soul to the search—in common places such as pools of rainwater, tarnished ornaments, November afternoons—for zones of fractured numinosity, usually with the purpose of fracturing in turn the bizarre icons of his foul and bloated twin, the adult world.” (Thomas Ligotti)

“Also one of his fingers is missing.” ¶ “Which finger?” ¶ “Index on his right hand.” ¶ “At least he can’t pull a trigger,” I said. “Unless he’s sinistral.” (Lawrence Sanders)

“Number one represents a sixteenth-century gentleman in the act of handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned hat in his left hand. Note the sinistral detail…” (Vladimir Nabokov)

“This house on Franklin Avenue was rented, and paint peeled inside and out, and pipes broke and window sashes crumbled and the tennis court had not been rolled since 193 3, but the rooms were many and high-ceilinged and, during the five years that I lived there, even the rather sinistral inertia of the neighborhood tended to suggest that I should live in the house indefinitely.” (Joan Didion)

“The whorls of a snail shell lean asymmetrically out from the center. My snail’s shell was dextral, with a right-side opening, as is most common. However, some snails are sinistral, with a left-side opening.” (Elisabeth Tova Bailey)

WEB

1. Before Facebook and Twitter, even before the web, there was sinister… paper. → The 19th Century Moral Panic Over … Paper Technology

2. I’m not sure how I feel about oyster vending machines, but the prospect doesn’t make me hungry.

3. Wow, almost 30,000 recordings of early 20th century wax cylinders and 78 rpm records at the Internet Archive!

4. I shared an article about this story a few issues ago, but this deserves sharing for the headline alone. → Calibri in spotlight as Fontgate could leave Pakistan sans Sharif

5. Is the fear of malevolent artificial intelligence rooted in a reasonable fear that it could be as destructive as our own?

6. I had no idea there was a lost Sylvia Plath novel. Thanks, Reader B.!

7. Greece’s disappearing whistled language. Thanks, Reader V.!

8. Not as obvious as a first glance at the headline might make you think… → Feeling bad about feeling bad can make you feel worse

9. Unsurprising, but interesting, particularly those who are playing both sides against each other to their profit and our detriment. → Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed

10. Today is International Lefthanders Day (#lefthandersday). Supposedly founded in 1976 by publicist Dean R. Campbell (though I can’t find any documentation for this oft-repeated claim), the official site says today provides “a chance to tell your family and friends how proud you are of being left-handed, and also raise awareness of the everyday issues that lefties face as we live in a world designed for right-handers.” Maybe you’ve wondered, “Why are some people left-handed?” If you’re a left-hander, did you know there’s an Association of Left-Handers? And even non-lefties might enjoy browsing a collection of famous left-handers. Good further reading: Adrian Flatt on “The sinister handed”. Good watching: ► Right.Left.Write., a short film about growing up left-handed.

WATCH/WITNESS

“…all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. ¶ It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

► Richard Feynman on the beauty of the flower. || See also: all flowers are related to a single ancestor and this is what it might have looked like.

WHAT!?

Rhode Island-based artist Jessica Rosner uses kitchen gloves to offer a look at James Joyce’s Ulysses unlike any other. Thanks, Reader C.!

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• (a different) Reader C.: “It shouldn’t be needed but if anyone in the Clamor skipped over the 2017 National Geographic award photos they should stop reading my comment and go there. Literally amazing.”

• Reader M.: “I planted five secret letters. It felt so good! Thank you.”

• Reader W.: “Long time reader, first time writer here. I should’ve shared my gratitude for Katexic a long time ago. So I am doing so now. And in some secret letters. Thank you so much for what must be untold hours of work.”

• Reader J. “#20 on the literary would you rather list. Ah, the shame.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

The Mullah Nasruddin, the one-man Three Stooges of Sufi holy wisdom, wanted to buy something, so he strolled to the market and there saw a splendid bushel basketful of red peppers. He asked how much they cost. Only one dinar, exactly how much money he had! He went around inquiring what other baskets of things cost, and all of them were much more expensive.

And so he bought the beautiful peppers and went home. Soon a neighbor walked by and saw Nasruddin sitting in front of his house with a half-empty basket of peppers in his lap, eating them and crying miserably. “Mullah Nasruddin, why are you eating those peppers?” the neighbor asked. Nasruddin looked at him tearfully and said, “I went to the market and bought them. I paid a full dinar. Surely one will be sweet!”

—from “Foreword” (The Missouri Review, 1994)

WORD(S)

panjandrum /pan-JAN-drəm/. noun. A powerful, usually pompous and overbearing, official. Also, rarely, a rocket-propelled cart used during World War II. The word was supposedly created by playwright Samuel Foote as part of a nonsense line to put to the test actor Charles Macklin’s claim to remember anything upon hearing it once (see first example below).

“And there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top.” (Samuel Foote)

“But there is learning—science. Any imbecile that has got an income believes in that. He does not know why, but he believes it matters somehow. It is the sacrosanct fetish. All the damned professors are radicals at heart. Let them know that their great panjandrum has got to go too, to make room for the Future of the Proletariat.” (Joseph Conrad)

“Paul Slazinger, the former Writer in Residence, I remember, objected to real institutions of higher learning giving honorary degrees with the word ‘Doctor’ in them anywhere. He wanted them to use ‘Panjandrum’ instead.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

“The idea was that the Panjandrum, a kind of explosion-driven Ferris wheel, would be set rotating and then released into shallow water to roll up onto enemy beaches.” (Neil Downie)

WEB

1. The 2017 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year prize winners are all wonderfu…but the grand prize winner is extraordinary.

2. Powell’s Compendium of Readerly Terms contains punny entries such as wordigo, readultery, camareaderie and many (well, 39) more. [Thanks, Reader S.!] || See also, a punny bonus.

3. Did you know Banksy operates an “art hotel” in Bethlehem? Open for the year of 2017, at least. It’s just as—Banksian—as you’d expect. → The Walled Off Hotel

4. The British Library flickr account has more than a million (1,023,714 images in over 1000 albums at the time of writing) free images for your browsing pleasure. Clamorites might enjoy starting with Book Covers, Illustrated Letters & Typography, Ghosts & Ghoulish Scenes and Maps, found by the community.

5. I’m not sold on the sales pitch for the book, but I do love writing letters…and combining letter writing with random acts of kindness sounds like fun. You can play too! → Secret Letters to Strangers Month - Global Kindness Initiative

6. You might remember the beautiful Keaton Music Typewriter shared here a few years ago (because you memorize every link, right?). Turns out there is one for sale for just $12,000. || See also: a ► video demo of the typewriter in action.

7. I once gave a presentation that changed my own life…and it involved automatons, simulacra, technology and we, the ghosts in the machine. So the mechanical age “pre-history” of artificial intelligence fascinates me. And hopefully you. → Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence

8. The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run. Via [Reader B.], who adds, “Bonus for the Dead Hand theory.”

9. List: 20 Literary Would-You-Rathers

10. Today in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee publishes a short summary of his new “World Wide Web” project to a public USENET news group (remember those?), describing a “world” that consisted of “documents and links” that could be “clicked by a mouse” to follow links to “other documents.” Today you can navigate 8K porn with your voice and pay with BitCoin while bots concoct a custom fake news stream just for you. Ah, progress.

WATCH/WITNESS

“► The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a 1910 American silent film and the earliest surviving film version of L. Frank Baum’s made by the Selig Polyscope Company without Baum’s direct input. ¶ It was created to fulfill a contractual obligation associated with Baum’s personal bankruptcy caused by ‘The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays…’”

WHAT!?

► RARE Contrails | Early morning 787 Dreamliner. Chemtrails conspiracy time?

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader R. on The Evolution of Trust: “[See this on] the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In particular when the options are labeled ‘cheat’ or ‘cooperate’ you know you’re being gulled.”

• Reader B.: “We love Incubus, partly because of its ludicrous backstory. ¶ My wife had fun with the scene when the poor sister calls out for her brother, played by Shatner. The woman keeps hollering ‘Marco? Marco?’ Finally my wife responds: ‘Polo….’”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

As issue #350 nears, a little promotion! While supplies last, new subscribers as well as anyone who: likes or shares the Katexic Clippings Facebook page, shares this Facebook announcement, mentions @katexic on Twitter, or links to the newsletter page is eligible for a free set of limited edition pun·ctuation postcards! When I see the activity I will contact you for a mailing address and send them your way.

WORK

Nothing to Save

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.

—D.H. Lawrence
—from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

WORD(S)

gorget /GOR-jət/. noun. Armor for the throat. The part of a wimple that covers the neck. An ornament for the neck such as a necklace or decorative collar. A distinctive color on the throat of an animal, usually a bird. From Old French gorge (throat).

“He was wearing too much. The coat of mail with its standard, the cuirass with gorget and pauldrons, the hounskul helmet from which he could scarcely see out…” (Italo Calvino)

“He watched the iridescent play of the light upon its gorget and the slow pulsing of blood from its breast with painful feelings of identification which were interrupted by a sudden silence: The bird had stopped its stroll and was extending its wings.” (Ralph Ellison)

“The officer waited for them, dressed like a recruiter, molten at the throat where his gorget took the sun.” (Thomas Keneally)

“I know a slave when I see one. A slave is a slave, with or without a gorget; if he doesn’t wear it around his neck, he has it tattooed on his soul. It takes at least three generations to rub it off.” (H. Beam Piper)

WEB

1. Is the world really better than ever? And is that mindset, or the pessimism it is intended to counter, holding us back?

2. What a font choice goes really wrong… → Glitter or Hitler?

3. These Accurately Titled Novels are hilarious (because they’re true). || While we’re at it, how about 11 Fictional Restaurants We Wish Existed?

4. You might remember the delightful paint colors generated by a neural network? Well, now peruse similarly generated British style placenames (who wouldn’t want to live in Colon-in Mead or Galling Compton)? If you like the placenames, you might enjoy the Twitter feed…at the time of this writing the featured name is Lickley Stalhay). || See also: terrible fruit names, not-so-terrible metal band names and mystifying Broadway musical names.

5. Speaking of very artificial intelligence, soon RealDolls will want to talk (hopefully about how it feels to live in the Uncanny Valley). → How to Choose a Personality for Your Sex Robot

6. I recently had my first real-life experience with someone telling me their preferred pronouns. Using them feels like the right thing to do. But perhaps, like me, others started out with questions… → Your Most Awkward Questions About They/Them Pronouns, Answered

7. A fascinating Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages. || And while language cartography is a thing, Is the study of language a science?

8. I’m a longtime McSweeney’s reader, as are many Clamorites. Thanks to Reader A. for sharing links to a note about the death of the real Timothy McSweeney and an archive link to the story of the man himself.

9. FindSounds is a search engine for sounds.

10. Today in 1935, Allen Lane publishes the first 10 Penguin books (including titles by Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway), selling three million(!) books in the first year, initiating the paperback revolution. The iconic, color-coded design was established with the first 10 books, each of which sold for about the same price as a pack of 10 cigarettes. Penguin has continued to embrace high-quality, recognizable designs…so much so they inspired a book of their own.

WATCH/WITNESS

The Evolution of Trust is a brilliant little game and explainer about cooperation, trust and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The subject has deep implications for life in the contemporary networked world.

WHAT!?

The bizarre story of Incubus, a long-lost horror film made entirely in Esperanto, starring William Shatner. Watch ► the full movie.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S. has a theory about the Wellerism, “Does your mom darn socks?” “I’m assuming this is a reference to the bowdlerization (it’s language all the way down!) of Regan/Pazuzu’ s growling in The Exorcist for network TV to something like ‘Your mother darns socks that smell!’”

• A different Reader S. riffs: “Not a Wellerism or a Tom Swifty, but similar in concept. In high school we had an ongoing game that started when someone said ‘By the way, I like roadside tables.’ From there flowed ‘As a rule, I like the 5th amendment,’ ‘All in all, I like orgies,’ ”In general, I like Ike,’ ‘In the end, I like sodomy,’ and numerous others I can’t recall just now. Probably for the best."

• Reader H.: “Not sure if this counts as a Tom Swiftly but G.K. Chesterton once wrote how 32,000 women rose up and said they would not be dictated to. The next year they were stenographers.”

• Reader B.: “That Weller[ism] quote surprised me. I keep forgetting Dickens’ Gothic touch.”

• Reader T.: “one addition to your Wellerisms… In our family we said, ‘I see, said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.’”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

—Pat Conroy
—from The Prince of Tides

WORD(S)

Wellerism /WEL-ər-izm/. noun. An expression combining an obvious statement—usually a well-known cliche, quotation or proverb—followed by a facetious addition. A canonical example: “I see, said the blind man,” which exists in myriad forms. Named after Sam Weller, a comic character in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, prone to making this kind of statement, for example, “There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’.” Unlike the “sarcastic interrogatives” explored here last week, Wellerisms have been clearly documented in other languages, such as in the Dutch, “Alles met mate, zei de kleermaker en hij sloeg zijn vrouw met de el,” which translates into English as, “everything should be done measuredly, said the tailor and he hit his wife with a ruler.”

See also: Tom Swiftys, a form of Wellerism that uses a pun on the attribution. Again, an example from Dickens: “You find it Very Large?” said Mr. Podsnap, spaciously." Both of these are of a rhetorical form covered here before, the paraprosdokian.

And one more thing…note how Wellerisms and Tom Swiftys can be reversed and turned into a joke or riddle: “What did Archimedes say to the skunk? Eureka!”

Some more Wellerisms and Tom Swifty’s (what are some of yours or others you’ve heard?):

• I see, says the blind man. Tell us news. (James Joyce)
• Everyone as they like, as the woman said when she kissed her cow. (Francois Rabelais, translated by Peter Motteux)
• “My business is looking good,” said the model.
• “That’s my mission in life,” said the monk as he pointed to his monastery.
• “Let’s dig up that body,” said Tom gravely.
• “I have to go,” Tom said peevishly.

WEB

1. This is personal: Please Stop Calling Suicide Victims “Selfish” or “Weak”. || See also: Artificial intelligence can now predict suicide with remarkable accuracy.

2. Is the death of reading threatening the soul in a “quiet war?”

3. Does (counter-intuitively to me) announcing your plans make you less motivated to accomplish them? Yes and no. || See also, the original study (PDF).

4. Whoa! Dan Harmon is bringing Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens Of Titan to TV. In case you don’t know who Dan Harmon is, he created Community and co-created Adult Swim and Rick and Morty. If you don’t know who Kurt Vonnegut is—

5. On Swintec’s clear typewriters, the only kind allowed in many prisons, and their role in prison life.

6. No one could see the colour blue until modern times? || Embedded within that story, a fascinating Radiolab story: Why Isn’t the Sky Blue? || And within that: Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language. I dare you not to think of the the dress.

7. Take a moment to savor the amazing winners of the BigPicture Photography Competition, a gallery bookended by two of my favorite wildlife pictures ever. [Thanks, Reader B.!]

8. Find those elusive songs from TV and movies using Tunefind.

9. Following up on a story noted here a few weeks ago: Salvador Dalí’s Remains Exhumed, Revealing A Perfectly Arranged Mustache.

10. Today in 1829, William Austin Burt is granted U.S. patent No. 5581X for his “typographer”, called therein, “the first practical typewriting machine.” This wasn’t really true…Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri had invented one nearly 30 years before for his blind lover the Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, of which some typewritten pages survived.

WATCH/WITNESS

Time and Space is the third place winner of the Galway Film Fleadh One Minute Film Festival competition. See past winners (and presumably, soon, the rest of this year’s crop) on their site.

WHAT!?

Apparently, the Photographer Being Sued By A Monkey Over Its “Selfie” Is Now Broke.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• A few sarcastic interrogatives from readers (some a bit darker than others): Does a pigeon’s butt pucker in a power-dive? Is Helen ready? Does Rose Kennedy own a black dress? Does Rebecca Black like Fridays? Does your mom darn socks [must be a family thing]? Does the Pope wear a funny hat? And, of course, does the Pope poop in the woods?

• Reader B. on last week’s issue: “Another trove!”

• Reader G.: “Loved the 25 maps! Language is so interesting. ¶ Those anti-suffragette postcards are something else… I’ll just leave it at that.”

• Reader M.: “I’m not sure why anyone wouldn’t want a third thumb. It might not be enough to save us as a species.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

Fifty Words Written After Learning the Arctic Bowhead Whale Can Live up to Two Hundred Years

There’s a whale, right now, who may have escaped a Nantucketer’s harpoon in 1850. And a Japanese whaler in 1950. Who once heard the distant songs of 50,000 of her kind. Then several thousand. Then hundreds. But who can hear 25,000 again, singing in the warming water.

—Nate DiMeo
—the memory palace (Episode 50)

WORD(S)

sarcastic interrogative. noun. Defined by folklorist Charles Clay Doyle as “stock questions with glaringly obvious yes or no answers. The function of each such question is to respond derisively to a prior query, itself calling for a yes or no answer so as to suggest that the answer to the original query is too obvious to be worth proffering seriously.” Perhaps the most famous example: “Is the Pope Catholic?” And perhaps the most canonical: “Can a duck swim?”

Some colorful examples (please share some of yours!):

• Is a frog’s arse watertight?
• Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?
• Does Howdy Doody have wooden balls?
• Does Barbie have a plastic fanny?
• Does a maurauding mackerel make a mullets muckhole munch?
• Do chickens have lips?
• Is a pig’s butt pork?
• Do fat babies fart?
• Does a snake have knees?
• Is the hole close to a donut?

WEB

1. The only thing better than maps are maps about words! → 25 maps that explain the English language

2. Enjoy the 1984 issue of the Post New York Post.

3. “The origin of the word ‘prosthesis’ meant ‘to add, put on to,’ so not to fix or replace, but to extend. The Third Thumb is inspired by this word origin, exploring human augmentation and aiming to reframe prosthetics as extensions of the body.”

4. Letterpress love! → Amos Kennedy Jr.: From Corporate Analyst To Modern-Day Artisan

5. If you’re going to fake historical documents you might want to choose a font a typeface that exists at the time… → A Font Is at the Heart of Pakistan’s Prime Minister’s Legal Troubles

6. The Ultimate Latin Dictionary: After 122 Years, Still At Work On The Letter ‘N’

7. “Established to create books which aren’t, in the quotidian sense, books at all … Container creates objects which masquerade as parking meters, wallpaper, or crop seed sleeves.” Their first production is a diverse series of Rolodex Books by eight writers and artists. Next up, book objects made from vintage metal lunchboxes.

8. Vintage typewriters gain fans amid ‘digital burnout’ :: And who knows, you might get really lucky → ‘€100 typewriter’ found to be German code machine [Thanks, Reader C.]

9. The ultimate tattoo? → Scientists Upload a Galloping Horse GIF into Bacteria :: And serendipitously, via Reader B., the science behind this CRISPR encoding.

10. Today in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the first atomic bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The successful Trinity Test was he fruit of the Manhattan Project, which in the usual government fashion saw the initial $6000 estimated cost end up running to more than $2-billion. Kenneth Bainbride, the director of the Manhattan Project, turned to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist, and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Bainbridge would later describe the explosion as a “foul and awesome display.” The United States wasted no time, putting the new weapon to use just three weeks later, (perhaps needlessly) bombing Hiroshima, Japan, ending World War II.

WATCH/WITNESS

Salvador Dali takes a turn on the television game show “What’s My Line?” Hint: there are scores of great clips from “What’s My Line” on YouTube. You’re welcome.

WHAT!?

From vintage everyday, an amazing collection of vintage anti-suffragette postcards.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader V.: “Pandiculation might be my new favorite word. But am I the only one that yawns every time I think of it?”

• Reader M.: “The history of privacy as we know it may be brief, but I mourn its passing as I would an infant taken too early.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

—Søren Kierkegaard
—from The Journals of Kierkegaard

WORD(S)

pandiculation /pan-dik-yoo-LAY-shən/. noun. Stretching and yawning, as when first waking up. Rarely, just yawning. From Latin pandiculari, from pendere (to stretch).

“The skipper, a big-bellied man with a red face, stood in the wheelhouse and yawned. (If I were a visitor from another planet – but then, am I not a visitor from another planet? – I think that of all the earthlings’ quirks it is the act of pandiculation that would surprise and fascinate me most, that slow stretch and then the soundless ape-howl, in which they indulge themselves with such languorous relish.)” (John Banville)

“…Yet when Mars depicts Venus, he cannot but paint from above; from the imam’s throne, the archbishop’s pulpit or via the pornographer’s lens…” I pandiculate, and Aphra Booth swivels around. (David Mitchell)

“…in the next edition of my Opium Confessions revised and enlarged, I will make you believe and tremble: and à force d’ennuyer, by mere dint of pandiculation I will terrify all readers of mine from ever again questioning any postulate that I shall think fit to make.” (Thomas De Quincey)

WEB

1. Privacy as we think of it is a new (and deeply endangered) thing. → The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images.

2. The Positive Lexicography Project is “an evolving index of ‘untranslatable’ words related to wellbeing from across the world’s languages” from Afrikaans to Zulu/Xhosa.

3. The 174 videos in the Japanology series cover everything from mushrooms to swords to cram schools and Shinto shrines. Clamorites might enjoy starting with stationery. [Thanks, Reader B.]

4. This poet is riding through Denver delivering dreams to doorsteps. Nightmares cost extra.

5. Wikipedia: The Text Adventure turns Wikipedia into an interactive, text-based game. Zorks!

6. Is the tilde the sarcasm punctuation mark we’ve been looking for? → The Internet Tilde Perfectly Conveys Something We Don’t Have the Words to Explain

7. Fascinating to think that the first inventors to record sound never listened to it…they were only interested in the visual picture… → At The Dawn Of Recorded Sound, No One Cared

8. On squicks and squees and re-imaging the (tagging) vocabulary of porn → Can These Pornographers End ‘MILFs,’ ‘Teens,’ and ‘Thugs’? :: Balances well with The More Things Change, which examines how, with sex and sexual practices, the more things change, the more things, well, change.

9. A Piece of Work is everything you wanted to know about modern and contemporary art but were afraid to ask … In this 10-episode podcast series, [Broad City’s] Abbi [Jacobson] looks for some answers in lively conversations with curators, artists, and some friends, including Hannibal Buress, Tavi Gevinson, RuPaul, and Questlove.

10. Today in 1850, a 30-year old Persian merchant known as the Báb (birth name: Sayyed ʿAli Muhammad Shirāzi) is executed for apostasy in Tabriz, Iran. Accounts differ in drama—members of the Baha’i Faith (of which his teachings were the forerunner) tell a story in which the firing squad’s bullets sever his ropes and the Báb disappears…finally being found in another part of the barracks calmly dictating to his secretary—but all agree that the first volley harmed neither the Báb nor Anís, a young follower, who had been suspended 10 feet above the ground for the execution, and they both had to be rounded up, re-bound, and finally killed by a second volley.

WATCH/WITNESS

Beckett is the trailer for “A short lived detective drama from 1972” starring Sam Beckett as Beckett the private eye, Andre the Giant as Little Bim (longtime Clamorites may remember some links to the story of Beckett and Andre’s unexpected real-life relationship), Jean Paul Sartre as Walleye Molloy and Jean Cocteau as Huggy Bear. I want to live in the alternate reality where this isn’t an alternate reality.

WHAT!?

Other than humans, the palm cockatoo is the only other species who make, and make music with, a musical tool → Birds play sick jungle beat with drumsticks they make themselves. See also, the longer but interesting scientific abstract video that goes behind the scenes of the 6000+ hours effort to film more than 60 drumming events.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “With regards to the Oldest Color Photos… it should be noted that a number of the photographs are credited to Albert Kahn and there is much more to be said about him. ¶ With the invention of Autochrome, Kahn, a very wealthy man, endeavored to build a photographic archive of the various cultures of the entire planet — in color. What he accomplished is not only to captured cultures before they disappeared, but also captured history unfolding. The only reason I know about him is because I discovered there was a BBC series that told his story, ”Edwardians in Colour“. He produced not just colored photographs, but colored movies. ¶ I recommend the series because it gives context to the photographs. ¶ I haven’t been able to see the entire series and don’t know how many episodes there are, but I have watched four of them on YouTube. Here is the first one.”

• A different Reader B.: “For your invocation of the glorious Flannery O’Connor, do you know the band Ministry? They sampled your quote (spoken in the movie version) in this kickass song.”

• Reader G. also on Flannery O’Connor: “‘Where is there a place for you to be? No place. … In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.’ ¶ but still, I feel like going back to places I’ve been and new places have got to feel different than this place I’m in right now. I feel like I would feel different, cast free, a great weight lifted. But I guess no matter where I go, there I am. I felt like this prose rang true, and I wanted to argue with it too.”

• And Reader J.!: It’s interesting how your selection from Wise Blood connects with the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”:

  “Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

And then the great conclusion, one of the bleakest notes on behalf of pure immediacy I know of:

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

“…Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.”

“Nothing outside you can give you any place,” he said. “You needn’t look to the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”

—Flannery O’Connor
—from Wise Blood

WORD(S)

falcate /FOWL-kayt/. adjective. Sickle shaped. Hooked. Curved to a point. From Latin falcem (sickle) + -ate (resembling). Not to be confused with defalcate (to embezzle, sadly not pronounced to rhyme with defecate).

“In conversation Mr Cave employed with lip-smacking relish the terms ‘petiole’, ‘inflorescences’, ‘falcate’ and ‘lanceolate’, and he was also comfortable with ‘sessile’, ‘fusiform’ and ‘concolorous’.” (Murray Bail)

“Doug took hairpin turns in conversation. Normally I didn’t mind, and even liked it—I was glad I could follow his falcate thoughts.” (Alena Graedon)

“…but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work personally — his little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve from body to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet…” (David Foster Wallace)

“In my mind I saw the rainbands of the storm, the falcate concentric arms, reach out across a thousand miles to embrace the coast.” (Greg Jackson)

“The dark moon that overtook us after the Sabbath ended on the evening we spent in Sepphoris would show the first, falcated trace of its rebirth on the evening after next.” (Nick Tosches)

WEB

1. The Boise Public Library has installed a vending machine for personal, handwritten letters. → The Letter Box Project

2. Salvador Dali’s body to be exhumed to resolve paternity case

3. Sometimes you just need a little good news (and if the comment(er)s are lousy, don’t tell me about it). → Strangers buy car for 20-year-old Texas man who walks 3 miles to work every day

4. And the data are in…yay scIEnce. → The ‘i before e, except after c’ rule is a giant lie

5. 8 compelling cats that changed Russian culture. [Thanks, Reader A.!]

6. Up a wombat’s freckle: Barry Humphries on the development of Australian slang [Thanks, Reader B.!]

7. Baby steps… → How to capture videos of brains in real time: Watching mice think as they walk

8. The Cognitive Bias Codex visually organizes more than 180 ways we “think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.”

9. Highlights from the most recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, including “woke,” a new sense of “thing” (originating, in recorded form at least, on the television show The West Wing), the “particle zoo,” and “post-truth.”

10. Today in 1990, 1,426 people are suffocated and trampled to death in a tunnel near Mecca during the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. The stampede started when seven people fell from a pedestrian bridge onto pilgrims exiting the tunnel below, causing panic exacerbated by failed ventilation in the 110°F heat. Amazingly, this wasn’t the most deadly such incident: at least 2,236 pilgrims were killed in the 2015 “Mina Stampede.”

WATCH/WITNESS

► Breakdancing Gorilla Enjoys Pool Behind-the-Scenes is pretty glorious.

WHAT!?

A strangely compelling video: ► Pingsider | How Table Tennis Balls are Made

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “A dilemma in the definition of limen, it does not distinguish between a conscious threshold and unconscious threshold. There are blind people who, while they can’t see, nevertheless respond to visual cues without understanding why. They are consciously blind, but some part of their brain is still taking in and reacting to visual information. So, does limen describe a threshold to the physical capacity of our senses or to our awareness?”

• Reader A.: “Thank you for your newsletter. It’s the highlight of my week and always catches the corners of the internet that I don’t normally see. I found the ‘Fall’ video really disturbing, but not as disturbing as ‘Time for sushi’. ¶ Since pretty much everyone likes internet cats, I thought this article about the true and fictional cats of Russia might interest readers”

• A different Reader A.: “I’m intrigued [by Minutiae], then I see it’s $14.99 for the app, then I have to think, that’s like 3 or 4 fancy coffees. I’m conflicted.”

• Reader N.: “Thank you for the old photographs. When I was very young–about 4 or 5–I spent an inordinate amount of time quarreling with my parents. I thought that they could tell me about their childhood in a world without color, but I had seen the photos to prove that they grew up in a black/white/grey world. ¶ I have been happily reading your mailings…”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

Without coffee he could not work, or at least he could not have worked in the way he did. In addition to paper and pens he took with him everywhere as an indispensable article of equipment the coffee-machine, which was no less important to him than his little table or his white robe. He allowed nobody else to prepare his coffee, since nobody else would have prepared the stimulating poison in such strength and blackness. And just as in a sort of superstitious fetishism he would use only a particular kind of paper and a certain type of pen, so he mixed his coffee according to a special recipe, which has been recorded by one of his friends: “This coffee was composed of three different varieties of bean — Bourbon, Martinique, and Mocha. He bought the Bourbon in the rue de Montblanc, the Martinique in the rue des Vieilles Audriettes, and the Mocha in the Fauborg Saint-Germain from a dealer in the rue de l’Université, whose name I have forgotten though I repeatedly accompanied Balzac on his shopping expeditions. Each time it involved half-a-day’s journey right across Paris, but to Balzac good coffee was worth the trouble.”

—Stefan Zweig (translated by William and Dorothy Rose)
—found in Balzac

WORD(S)

sprachgefühl /SHPRAW-khgə-fyuul/. noun. A feeling for language, particularly an intuitive understanding of when language usage is appropriate, effective and “right.” A sense and feel for language. From German sprache (language) + gefühl (feeling).

“Sprachgefühl is a slippery eel, the odd buzzing in your brain that tells you that ‘planting the lettuce’ and ‘planting misinformation’ are different uses of ‘plant,’ the eye twitch that tells you that ‘plans to demo the store’ refers not to a friendly instructional stroll on how to shop but to a little exuberance with a sledgehammer. Not everyone has sprachgefühl, and you don’t know if you are possessed of it until you are knee-deep in the English language, trying your best to navigate the mucky swamp of it. I use ‘possessed of’ advisedly: You will never have sprachgefühl, but rather sprachgefühl will have you, like a Teutonic imp that settles itself at the base of your skull and hammers at your head every time you read something like ‘crispy-fried rice’ on a menu.” (Kory Stamper)

“SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for ‘Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance’ or ‘Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time’ depended on whether or not you were one.” (David Foster Wallace)

“…Sprachgefühl was no longer enough since words themselves pertained less to the senses or the body (as they had for Vico) and more to a sightless, imageless, and abstract realm ruled over by such hothouse formulations as race, mind, culture, and nation.” (Edward Said)

WEB

1. More than 100 of The Oldest Color Photos Showing What The World Looked Like 100 Years Ago. Seeing such old images in color still tickles some dissonance deep in my brain.

2. Some nice visualizations → Bias, She Wrote: The Gender Balance of The New York Times Best Seller list

3. “Facebook doesn’t want your money. It wants your time. ¶ minutiae is a response to our current moment: an anonymous anti-social media app that forces its users to document the in-between moments of life.” I kind of love this app. → minutiae: the anti social media app

4. A powerful photo essay → The Apple Pickers of the Yakima Valley

5. The Quiet Majesty of America’s Public Libraries :: Pairs with Millennials are the most likely generation of Americans to use public libraries.

6. “Whether divining ancient wisdoms or elevating the art of cold reading, tarot is a form of therapy, much like psychoanalysis” → The truth about tarot

7. “We analyzed 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts” → How Do You Draw a Circle?

8. Surprisingly interesting…and it seems so simple in hindsight: why are different eggs shaped the way they are? → Cracking the mystery of egg shape

9. The Hyperloop Will Be Only the Latest Innovation That’s Pretty Much a Series of Tubes

10. Today in 1876, General George Custer is killed in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In what would come to be known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” more than 250 U.S. soldiers would be killed in well under an hour by a combined force of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Though victorious, the battle was a turning point in a protracted conflict, marking the beginning of the end of the Indian Wars. Custer’s legacy has been, to put it lightly, mixed: for nearly a century Custer was seen as a heroic military figure who gave his life for the cause of his country; in recent decades assessment of his military strategy, not to mention his own conduct, has been greatly diminished.

WATCH/WITNESS

In Fall, “a falling man finds peace in his fate.” But what about the rest of us?

WHAT!?

I don’t know quite what to make of time for sushi, but it is mesmerizing. So are the prequels, going to the store and late for meeting.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S. makes a good point: “Glad to see the reference to the anniversary of Alan Berg’s death, but more needs to be made over why he was executed. It was White Nationalists who killed him, and it was just the start of their increasingly violent rise. I highly recommend the recent documentary Oklahoma City for a good overview of the 80s and 90s rise of White Nationalists in the US. THIS, not Islamic terrorists, is the greatest threat to America these days.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can’t really make a summer day last forever. A home run can’t really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day.

—Michael Chabon
—from Summerland

WORD(S)

limen /LI-mən/. noun. A threshold, typically of consciousness and sensation. The point below which a sensation isn’t perceived. See also, the more common adjective, liminal. Latin līmen (threshold).

“Margin of evening, an indeterminate limen between creatures diurnal and nocturnal. Twilight congeals as the first raccoons descend the chinquapin oak.” (Christopher Dewdney)

“I could complicate this with a few more real and imaginary castles—and a loving and respectful reference to your own seminal work on the limen and the liminal. What do you think? Will it wash? Will I be torn by Maenads?” (A.S. Byatt)

“Such to the dead might appear the world of the living—charged with information, with meaning, yet somehow always just, terribly, beyond that fateful limen where any lamp of comprehension might beam forth.” (Thomas Pynchon)

“…getting drunk does serve to mobilize the internal contradictions and conflicts, to point up and make urgent the appetites and needs which are smoldering below the limen of awareness, and so to ignite the fuse.” (Robert M. Lindner)

WEB

1. Thibaud Poirier’s amazing photos of grand libraries

2. What the Bard can teach science about language and the limits of the human mind → Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense

3. DNA evidence exonerated six convicted killers. So why do some of them recall the crime so clearly? → Remembering the Murder You Didn’t Commit :: See also, The Problem with Eyewitness Testimony.

4. A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction: What to make of our new literature of radical pessimism.

5. Did Bob Dylan Crib Some of His Nobel Prize Lecture from SparkNotes? Hilarious, if true.

6. Jane Solomon’s Dictionary Playlist of songs related (sometimes tenuously) to language and linguistics. Can you think of more?

7. This Guy Spent A Year Exploring The Subculture Of Competitive Punning

8. A Postal Museum photo essay following a package in the 1960s. → Sorting the Past :: Pairs with The lost genius of the Post Office.

9. Hysteria over hyphens :: pairs with A Linguist Says ‘Yes!’ To The Exclamation Point.

10. Today in 1984, talk show radio host Alan Berg is gunned down in his driveway in Denver, Colorado. Berg’s loud, bitter and mostly liberal views angered and engaged radio listeners, though his style was tame by today’s standards.

WATCH/WITNESS

Merch Mulch (2017) is “a three-dimensional photogrammetric amalgamation of abandoned shopping malls, digitally reconstructed from YouTube videos taken prior to the sites’ destruction.”

WHAT!?

Comedian Jamie Loftus is eating the book Infinite Jest. Or occasionally butt-chugging it. Follow her progress via the hashtag #eatinginfinitejest. Thanks to the two Readers C. (or should that be Reader Cs?).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: "That opening quote [by Denis Johnson] was moving, until the last line knocked me sideways. Well done, and RIP. ¶ PS: In the Realm of the Senses is definitely date night material. Consider it a test, at least.

• Reader M.: “How is it that someone can design a movie poster-a-day? How is it that most are better than the originals?”

• Reader F.: “Isn’t the jè just another interrobang?”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

RIP, Denis Johnson :: “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking” | An appreciation in the Los Angeles Times | Another in the New York Times | And The New Yorker | The AP obit

WORK

Or maybe that wasn’t the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn’t matter. What’s important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up. A mist covered everything and, with the sunshine, was beginning to grow sharp and strange. The bunnies weren’t a problem yet, or they’d already been a problem and were already forgotten, and there was nothing on my mind. I felt the beauty of the morning. I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how a slave might become a friend to his master.

—Denis Johnson
—from Jesus’ Son

WORD(S)

steenth /STEENTH/. adjective. The latest in an indefinitely long series. Derived from “sixteenth” > from Old English siextēne (six and ten) and still used that way in stock trading, where it refers to 1/16 of a point in price. See also: umpteenth.

“There’s this Monaco gook. He snoops around in his yacht, digging up telescope-eyed fish, and people talk about it. ‘Another darned fish,’ they say. ’That’s the ‘steenth bite the Prince of Monaco has had this year.’ It’s like a soap advertisement.” (P. G. Wodehouse)

“The Commissioner almost beats his own head against the desk in his exasperation as he reiterates over and over: ‘But why? Why? Why?’ And for the steenth time, he gets the same indigestible answer: ‘Because he was killing me.’” (Cornell Woolrich)

“A jiffy later, I was on my way up, and another steenth of a jiffy I was at the eaves…” (Paul Hutchens)

WEB

1. “The library building once housed an insane asylum—so notorious that the park was known as ‘Barmy Park.’” → The Library of Books and Bombs [Thanks, Reader B.]

2. “Stab” appears rather early… → I’ve tracked (and graphed) all my son’s first words since birth

3. “Fifty years ago, Marottichal was rife with alcoholism and illicit gambling, but everything changed after one man taught the town to play an ancient game of strategy.” → The ancient game that saved a village

4. Can Prairie Dogs Talk?

5. Talk of adjective order (and “GSSSACPM” … and ablaut reduplication) has spiked of late…and it is a fascinating (and ultimately complicated) topic! So, some links old and new. → A surprisingly good article in Slate | Language Log’s Big bad modifier order | Mark Forsyth’s Bish bash bosh | Neil Whitman on Ordering Your Adjectives | A bit more technical but intriguing, Donka Minkova’s Ablaut reduplication in English: The criss-crossing of prosody and verbal art

6. A brief essay on true “first editions,” AKA books published during the incunabula, with a few nice illustrations. → On the Nature of Things

7. “…This mark is based on the Tilburg dialect word ‘jè’ (which sounds more or less as ‘yeah’) that is used as a confirmation but often expresses some doubt or mild irony. The jè-mark bridges the gap between the exclamation point and the question mark.” → TilburgsAns introduces a new punctuation mark

8. Sweden has just listed the entire country on Airbnb :: Speaking of Airbnb, they are launching a print (!?) magazine because they found that existing travel magazines had “almost no people in them.”

9. “I designed A Movie Poster A Day in 2016 and here’s the collection.” (many are better than the real ones).

10. Today in 585 BCE, a solar eclipse said to have been accurately predicted by the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus occurs, the drama of which, according to Herodotus, ends a decade-long war between the Medes and the Lydians. This event is arguably the earliest historical event whose date is known with precision to the day.

WATCH/WITNESS

“In 1936, a family of Russian Old Believers journeyed deep into Siberia’s vast taiga to escape persecution and protect their way of life. The Lykovs eventually settled in the Sayan Mountains, 160 miles from any other sign of civilization. In 1944, Agafia Lykov was born into this wilderness. Today, she is the last surviving Lykov, remaining steadfast in her seclusion.”

WHAT!?

Starting at just $450…jeans that convert into a denim diaper. → Y/Project | Detachable Cut-Out Side Jeans

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “The opening poem reminded me of James Gunn’s underrated The Listeners (1972). A hard read for me as a kid. ¶ I saw In the Realm of the Senses with a crowd at college. When it ended… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more intense, aroused, exhilarated, and scared group of people. ¶ PS: ”swell-bent for leather"? Get some Judas Priest down ye!

• Reader F.: “Thank you for sharing Chana Bloch’s ‘Voyager’ poem. I had never heard of her before, but in that one poem she hit on a theme that has inspired and haunted me since I was a child and Voyager was launched.”

• Reader M.: “I watched In the Realm of the Senses with my boyfriend and roommate late one night, stoned then stunned, then deeply uncomfortable.”

• Reader D.: “The story about Karen Carpenter becoming an icon in the Philippines buzzed in my head with all the discussions of ‘cultural appropriation’ lately. Not the same thing but related somehow.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

RIP, Chana Bloch.

WORK

Bequest

The Golden Record aboard Voyager, 1977

We wanted to make a good impression. Maybe even to launch a conversation.

Bonjour in fifty-five languages—some, like Sumerian and Akkadian, long dead.

Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry, the tap-tap of Morse code, birdsong and whale song.

The silhouette of a naked man and woman made the final cut, but no nude photographs. Taxpayers were adamant. Not even a naked baby.

And no photos of war or nuclear explosions. They might get ideas.

A billion years from now, when the earth is a charred cinder, our Voyager may land on some friendly galactic shore. And with it, the Golden Record, our calling card.

To Whom It May Concern: We just wanted to drop by and say, Hello, how are you? We were fine.

—Chana Bloch
—from Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems 1980–2015

WORD(S)

coriaceous /kor-ee-AY-shəs/. adjective. Leather-like. Resembling leather. From Latin coriaceus (same meaning), from Latin corium (hide, leather, skin) + -aceus (of the nature of). See also scoriaceous (having the nature of scoria (masses, slag, dross)) and cuirass (originally a body armor made of leather).

“Swallowing fear he tried again but the slick, coriaceous walls held him fast.” (Anthony Huso)

“Christie showcased a capacious personality and a coriaceous hide (‘If you’re going to do it, at least man up and say I’m fat’) but presented mainly platitudes and no clear agenda.” (Mark Halperin)

“The genus, or rather family, of Epeira, is here characterized by many singular forms; some species have pointed coriaceous shells, others enlarged and spiny tibiae.” (Charles Darwin)

“Vex not thou the poick’s mind, With thy coriaceous ingratitude.” (Robert Louis Stevenson)

WEB

1. “…a collection of “persuasive” cartography: more than 800 maps intended primarily to influence opinions or beliefs — to send a message — rather than to communicate geographic information. The collection reflects a variety of persuasive tools, including allegorical, satirical and pictorial mapping; selective inclusion; unusual use of projections, color, graphics and text; and intentional deception.” [Thanks, Reader K.]

2. Keeping Track of Every Book You’ve Ever Read: A New York Times editor on the coffee-stained list she’s kept for almost three decades

3. A hoax paper [PDF] was published by some hoaxers. I don’t think the publication means what they think it means. Neither does Hank Reichman.

4. Philographics is a series of posters that “explain big ideas in simple shapes.” Effectively, in some cases, icons.

5. The new paint colors invented by neural network story has been going around. I share here because: 1) funny, 2) this is the original story and 3) lost in the laughter is how amazed we should be at what is essentially the early infancy of AI. It’s like judging how the adult version of a two-week old will think and what he or she will come up with.

6. This guy going around a museum and using FaceApp to add smiles to classical art has finally found a good use for FaceApp

7. The always awesome Strong Language blog has some decidedly NSFW annotations of James Joyce’s erotic letters to his wife, Nora Barnacle :: pairs with Waywords and Meansigns Opendoor Edition, in which over 100 musicians and readers from 15 countries have put Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music.

8. How The Whitest Singer Of The ’70s Became An Icon In The Philippines

9. I’m about as prescriptivist as one gets, but The “Jane Austen” fallacy is a sound idea and coinage…though I am confused by the quotation marks in the name.

10. Today in 1936, Geisha and prostitute Sada Abe is arrested after walking around Tokyo for several days with her lover’s severed penis and testicles hidden in her kimono. The multi-day search for Abe caused panic, a near-stampede and traffic jams throughout Tokyo. Abe’s actions and trial not only caused a sensation and spawned a multitude of books and movies (most famously In the Realm of the Senses) but the transcript of her interrogation and confession was widely circulated, greatly amplifying an already strong tradition of fiction and essays by dokufu or “poison women.” After her release from prison in 1941, Abe toured as an actress in small stage productions before becoming a waitress (and showpiece) in a Tokyo pub. Abe was last seen in a Japanese nunnery in the mid–70s.

WATCH/WITNESS

“The School of Life is both a You Tube channel and a real-life school (for adults) in 10 locations around the world devoted to emotional education. We address the questions we’re never taught enough about at regular school or college: How can relationships go well? What is meaningful work? How can love last? How can one find calm? What’s gone wrong (and right) with capitalism?”

WHAT!?

One of two visualizations of Every Color Of Cardigan Mister Rogers Wore From 1979–2001. Some surprises lie therein, including a possible secret behind the popularity of the red and green cardigans.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J.: “Thank you for the ‘everydays’. I think I’ll get lost in it for awhile. ¶ I need to breathe in dedication and inspiration.”

• Reader B.: “Superb links to Chinese worker creations.”

• Reader C.: “Some of the 7x7 creations are incredible. Some, not so much. But I love the collaborative spirit and look forward to more. Thank you.”

• Reader V.: “[Malcolm] Gladwell drives me crazier than a soup sandwich, but this time I think he’s really on to something.” — Crazier than a soup sandwich!?

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 for a new WORK every day and concīs publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw

I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms
bent over machines, our youth died young

I swallowed labor, I swallowed poverty
swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life

I can’t swallow any more
everything I’ve swallowed roils up in my throat

I spread across my country
a poem of shame

—Xu Lizhi (translated by Eleanor Goodman)
—from Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry

WORD(S)

ploce /PLAW-see/. noun. A figure of speech in which a word is emphatically repeated to bring attention to a particular attribute or quality. Latin, from Greek plokē (complication) from plekein (to plait). See also symploce, the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning and end of successive clauses, such as G.K. Chesterton’s “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Some examples of ploce:

“Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death?” (William Blake)

“I feel that the time is always right to do what is right.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

“How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!” (William Shakespeare)

“How much wider does this wider go?” (anonymous, quoted by Lisa Smartt)

“Give me a break! Give me a break! Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar!” (ad jingle)

WEB

1. Fascinating, layer upon layer, of writing, labor, industrialization, class and…humanity. → The Chinese Factory Workers Who Write Poems on Their Phones :: see also, Iron Moon, the documentary film and the recently released anthology, Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry

2. “Each 7×7 invites one visual artist and one writer to engage in a two-week creative conversation. The format, inspired by Surrealist games of the early 20th century, challenges participants to improvise, in their respective disciplines, a spontaneous story that pushes into ever-wilder imaginative terrain.” → 7x7

3. “A new study says historic smells are part of our ‘cultural heritage’ and should be saved to bring the past to life.” → Why you like the smell of old books

4. A fun exploration and great visualizations… → Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?

5. “The Snail Mail Game Show is an interactive project based in challenges and creativity. Every round, participants receive a prompt with a creative challenge to complete and send back. Any mediums are allowed, the only rule is the submission must be sent via snail mail.” → Snail Mail Game Show

6. “For 10 years he’s been posting a new digital illustration—ranging from the abstract to representative, sci-fi to surreal, somber to sarcastic—every 24 hours.” → A CGI Master Made a New Artwork Every Day for 10 Years. Here Are The Results

7. Trying to preserve Chinese letterpress printing…the sheer logistics are something. → Taiwan’s last lead-character mold maker works to preserve the past

8. Malcolm Gladwell. I know. But this is good…and needed. → Malcolm Gladwell on Why We Shouldn’t Value Speed Over Power

9. Such a cool interactive timeline/visualization (“that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015”) to browse around in. Prepare to get lost. → Histography

10. Today, the 2nd Sunday of May, is Mother’s Day in the United States and nearly 100 other countries from Anguilla to Zimbabwe…and Benin, where it is celebrated on May 14. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation making the day official. Assumed by many to be another example of a holiday created by greeting card companies to sell their wares, the modern version of Mother’s Day was inaugurated in 1908 by Anna Jarvis, who wanted to celebrate the efforts of her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, a peace activist who had treated injured soldiers on both sides of the United States Civil War and subsequently organized “Mothers’ Friendship Day” to bring together families from opposing sides of the war. If those families could meet and find common ground, perhaps there is hope for us yet in these politically tumultuous times.

WATCH/WITNESS

It took Jamie Scott three years of shooting to create ► this gorgeous time lapse video.

WHAT!?

The ► BriefCam Video Synopsis service transforms surveillance video into timestamped composites…the result is eery, Big Brother-ish and intriguing.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J.: “I was of course morally exercised on seeing that Graham Parker/Dave Edmunds’ seminal ‘Crawling from the Wreckage’ wasn’t listed among the Vehicle Wreck Ballads, but then happily found it among the Car Wreck Songs. Clearly they are correct, and ‘CftW’ is no ballad in the traditional sense. But I would urge them (and everyone) to abandon their precious (and fake!) genrism (this should perhaps be genrsme–who has time to look these things up?) and embrace the bracing fact that we all live, as it were, ‘under wreckage,’ as Jack Clarke once said that we live ‘under image.’ It is well to salute them all–Graham, Dave, and Jack–as we all try to figure out in what direction we’re supposed to try to crawl.”

• Reader C.: “The similarity in names brought this song to mind when you mentioned ► Luna Lee in Katexic. A good Sunday morning listen (and and old favorite): ‘Luna Marie’ by the Mad Maggies.”

• Reader S.: “Your subject line, ‘this better captivate theclamorites.’ Rhopalic! I see what you did there.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

The only alternative left for mankind…is discipline…But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.

—Carlos Castaneda
—from The Active Side of Infinity

WORD(S)

rhopalic /rə-PAL-ik/. noun or adjective. A sequence in which each word has one more letter or syllable than the one before it. From Latin rhopalicus > from Greek rhopalos (a tapered club). Some examples of both the syllabic and letter variety:

“This sentence cleverly exemplifies rhopalicism.” (Stephen Fry)

“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalises intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.” (Dmitri Borgmann)

“I never totally misinterpret administrative, idiosyncratic, uncategorizable, overintellectualized deinstitutionalization.” (Richard Lederer)

And
a black-
bird follows
you from city
to city, changing…
(Brenda Hillman)

“Goose, gather metrical monstrosities.” (Macmillan’s Magazine)

WEB

1. This week in weird Wikipedia → Category:Vehicle wreck ballads (it feels like there should be more of them) :: pairs well with the List of car crash songs

2. Something to add to your arguments about books vs ebooks and Amazon vs publishers → Amazon expands its literary horizons, making big imprint in translation niche

3. An oldie but a goodie → “Toto’s ‘Africa’” by Ernest Hemingway

4. In Harper Lee’s Letters: Books, Fame and a ‘Lying’ Capote

5. A contrasting photographic diptych → Jessica Weiser’s ‘Freckle Project’ (in black & white) and Colourised Pics Of Russia’s Female Snipers

6. If you don’t know Zardulu, you should..and probably do without knowing it → Meet Zardulu, the “art villain” behind the latest viral video :: pairs with well with ► Reply All #56 - Zardulu

7. An interesting essay by an art critic who returns to—or tries to return to—actually being an artist → Jerry Saltz: My Life As a Failed Artist

8. The American Shakespeare Center has never shied away from interpretations of the Bard’s work…now they are offering thirty-eight $25,000 prizes for plays that “vibe off of and are inspired by Shakespeare’s work” → You could win $25,000 for your Shakespeare fanfic [Thanks, Reader C.]

9. A trio of readings about artificial intelligence that should be considered together, probably in this order → Artificial Intelligence Tech Will Arrive in Three Waves + Our Machines Now Have Knowledge We’ll Never Understand + The Myth of a Superhuman AI

10. Today is Email Debt Forgiveness Day, where you can send, “without apologies or explanation,” that email you’ve anxiously been avoiding. I suspect even the most ardent Inbox Zero-ists in the Clamor have an email or three they’ve been dreading sending.

WATCH/WITNESS

Luna Lee covers a lot of songs on the gayageum (an instrument that is awesome and hard to describe)…but ► her version of Nirvana’s “Lithium” is my favorite.

WHAT!?

Sports aren’t a big thing in Katexic Clippings, but ► bowling twelve strikes in a row in under 90 seconds!?. Plus, any sport in which one can play as well as one’s friends without putting down one’s beer and cigarette is in its own category.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S.: “I was prepared not to like it, but the ‘mindfulness in plain english’ essay is absolutely masterful. Rarely have a read a summary of the human condition (as I experience it) as good as the intro section. I look forward to reading the whole thing.”

• Reader J.: “Incredible, as usual. You do great work, Mr. Lott.” — Thank you!

• Reader C.: “Nabokov could be the featured WORK every week!”

• Reader K.: “Google Books, what could (and should) have been. Argh.”

• Reader B.: “The language of air travel is almost as skull-crackingly unbeautiful as, well, air travel.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

Happy birthday, Vladimir Nabokov!

WORK

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from Speak, Memory

WORD(S)

intromission /in-troh-MISH-ən/. noun. Generally, the act of introducing, inserting or entering. Specifically, the very first moment of sexual intercourse. In (Scots) law, to assume the authority to deal with another’s property either with permission (legal intromission) or without (vicious intermission). From Latin intrō (inward) + missum (to send). ¶ See also: adosculation (impregnation by external contact, sans intromission) of which the 1753 Chambers Cyclopedia notes, “divers kinds of birds and fishes are also impregnated by adosculation.” Also?

“I am sorry that you lost your cause of Intromission, because I yet think the arguments on your side unanswerable.” (Samuel Johnson)

“Clint slid off his sunglasses, and smiled, deciding to exercise his new confidence: the confidence he enjoyed as a Laureate of the San Sebastiano Academy for Men of Compact Intromission.” (Martin Amis)

“Lindy chatters away breathlessly as her probes nuzzle and squeeze into my orifices, filling my intimate spaces front and rear, top and bottom. It’s not the intromission that offends—she is considerate and lubricious, the pulsing sense of congestion pleasant after so long without intimate contact—but I find her personality annoying. It’s like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i’s.” (Charles Stross)

“‘All about what?—all about what?’ said Delia, whose attempt to represent happy ignorance seemed likely to be spoiled by an intromission of ferocity. She might succeed in appearing ignorant, but she could scarcely succeed in appearing happy.” (Henry James)

“This brief relapse to the mundanity of modern electronics had the salutory effect of making us more or less start over again, intermission leading to re-intromission, so to speak.” (Alfred Alcorn)

WEB

1. From Colgate Lasagne to Crystal Pepsi: visit the Museum of Failure :: See also, the Museum of Failure site.

2. When I’m not actually having to listen to the tampering, disabling and destroying of words, I find the language of air travel fascinating. → How to Speak Airline: A Glossary For Travelers

3. The long, sad, maddening take of Google Books and what might have been. → Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria :: And if that isn’t enough, pairs well with How Google Book Search Got Lost.

4. Access a database of 70,000 books banned around the world going back to 1575

5. Anjana Iyer’s beautiful illustrations of sometimes (wrongly) called “unstranslatable” words from around the world.

6. Literature is built on lone and level sands… → Is Snapchat the sign of a post-literary future?

7. Easy to read…not necessarily so easy to do. But still. → Mindfulness in Plain English

8. “…explore collections of music, dance, and speech from almost every corner of the globe, recorded by hundreds of pioneering ethnographers” organized by geography or culture. → The Global Jukebox :: Speaking of global exploration, The Google giveth and The Google taketh away…the new Google Earth is amazing.

9. Take a moment to marvel at Jordan Matters’ Tiny Dancers Among Us photos.

10. Today is English Language Day at the United Nations, celebrating one of the six official UN languages and the “lingua franca of the modern era.” April 23 was chosen because it is, as Clamorites probably know, the day chosen to commemorate William Shakespeare’s birth (and death). If nothing else, it’s a good day to bovver yourself a little to appreciate the beautiful weirdness of English or worry over its place in academia, etc. How will you celebrate?

WATCH/WITNESS

► “For a curious young boy, The War of the Worlds is just the beginning.”.

WHAT!?

Eran Amir’s ► This Video is Not in Reverse is just what it says (and trippy). See also the other two related films: ► Black & White (In Colour) and ► Fast Slow Motion.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. on ‘the sorrows of young mirther’: “Your title this week sent me into deeply Romantic, even Byronic groans.”

• Reader C. on litost: “Experiencing litost, deep in the bones, is the first sign of real adulthood.”

• Reader J.: “I’m so glad I followed the link to Self Reflected. The combination of art, technology, and the brain was fascinating and beautiful.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

All his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.

—Kingsley Amis
—from Lucky Jim

WORD(S)

litost /LEE-tohst/. noun. A Czech word defined by Milan Kundera as “a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self,” sometimes accompanied by a desire for revenge…to make another share in the suffering.

“[Litost] designates a feeling as infinite as an open accordion, a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse, and an indefinable longing. The first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog.” (Milan Kundera)

That word litost can also mean too little
to be translated correctly—
a thumbprint as singular as the shade of green
on a grass blade
(Shane Book)

“The alcoholic, Alan Bold wrote, can use his artistic ability to confront litost with creativity.” (Donald W. Goodwin)

WEB

1. Art of/from/in the brain. Self Reflected was “made using an elaborate combination of hand drawing, deep neuroscience research, algorithmically simulated neural circuitry, adapted brain scan data, photolithography, gilding, and strategic lighting” → Self Reflected gallery. See also: the Guided Tour and Closer Look videos.

2. From Polari to Pig Latin…and eight points in between. → Top 10 Secret Languages. And while I’m in the mood for lists, how about 10 Indispensable Scottish Words?

3. A breathless headline but an eye-opening link. → After You’ve Seen These Maps, Your Image of the World Will Never Be the Same Again!

4. An amazing story of collaborative art from, of all places, Reddit. → Place

5. Merde! → Bad language: why being bilingual makes swearing easier

6. Mastodon, an open-source Twitter-like system, is mildly interesting on its own. But using it as a platform for Oulipo-inspired experimentation, like oulipo.social in which “No one is allowed to use the letter ‘e,’ or ’any variant of it, that is found in Latin script,” is fun and fascinating.

7. Incidentally, Mouse Reeve, the creator of oulipo.social, also collaborated on Drift, an amazing experimental typography book (and site) that featured randomly generated typographical compositions.

8. An hors d’oeuvre, a lagniappe… → xkcd: Mispronunciation

9. The geometric paper animals by Guardabosques! are awesome. I particularly like the Japanese Macaques and the various birds

10. Today in 1962, singer, songwriter, painter and future Nobel Prize in Literature winner Robert Allen Zimmerman—better known as Bob Dylan - Wikipedia—debuts his song “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City in New York. Based on the Negro spiritual “No More Auction Block” (a staple in Dylan’s live performances at the time; listen to Odetta’s performance), Dylan’s iconic song, like many of his best songs, became famous as performed by others….in this case Peter, Paul and Mary’s version that hit #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. A few other interesting covers: The Killers, Regina Spektor, Sam Cooke and Johnny Cash.

WATCH/WITNESS

Clown Service, a short film by Tig Notaro.

WHAT!?

Voice Swap

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. enjoyed the funnies: “My Fully Optimized Life is the funniest thing I’ve read in days. ¶ I know far too many people like that.”

• As did Reader G.: “My Fully Optimized Life reminds me of myself on steroids. So funny! ¶ I also laughed at this one, which you might enjoy.”

• Now fewer than three Clamorites wrote to express their unhappiness with (a different) Reader G.’s comments about the “scientific errors” in The Survival of the Friendliest and all of them requested I not publish their comments. But I can characterize the gist as basically asserting there’s more to the story than the dogmatic science and the old adage about forests and trees (Les arbres cachent la forêt).

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

April is National Poetry Month. I don’t have a big project this year…but Notabilia will be all short poems and bits about poetry all month!

WORK

If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.

—Yevgeny Zamyatin (translated by Gregory Zilboorg)
—from We

WORD(S)

misprision /mis-PRIZH-ən/. noun. Misconduct or neglect of duty by a public official. Rarely, legally, the concealing of—or failing to prevent—treason or a felony committed by someone else. More generally, a mistake. Also a term used by literary critic Harold Bloom to describe strong writers who misread or misinterpret their influences and forebears in order to create a creative space for themselves. From Old French mesprision (error); from Latin prendre (take).

“I’m not even sure the whole fact of talking to him wouldn’t open us up to misprision.” (Christopher Buckley)

“I understand the interest in the Baraja, the Italian deck, the German with its other colors, the Ganjifa, and so on, but I was always a devotee of the standard modern Rouennaise fifty-two. I loved the history that led to what we play with, the misprisions, the errors of copying that got us suicide kings and one-eyed Jacks.” (China Miéville)

mirrors, vials, furnaces
misprision of moments lifted from their concealment
moments of rain ascend in the manner of smoke
(Carolyn Forche)

“Error. Error upon error. Error, misprision, fakery, fantasy, ignorance, falsification, and mischief, of course, irrepressible mischief. An ordinary day in the life of anyone.” (Philip Roth)

WEB

1. This handmade Book of Disquiet, unbound and printed on ephemera, is beautifully executed and true to the spirt of Pessoa’s essential collection. The lavishly illustrated “behind-the-scenes” blog is engrossing.

2. At the other end of the bookmaking spectrum: 3D printing is tackling what may be its biggest challenge yet: the humble book.

3. There are never enough tiny pies! → How a pocket-sized snack changed the English language

4. “…an intricate type map of the capital teeming with infamous fictional characters from London’s literary past and present.” → Lose yourself in this beautiful literary map of London

5. So many tasty visual treats. → 2017 Sony World Photography Award Winners & Shortlist

6. A fantastic New York Times multimedia feature on the late Chuck Berry. Lavish listening. → Before & After Chuck Berry

7. Laughing and crying is the appropriate response. → There are people who spend their time yelling at the Mars Curiosity rover on Twitter

8. My Fully Optimized Life Allows Me Ample Time to Optimize Yours

9. “A commander with a history of depression created a unique way to keep his soldiers from killing themselves. The Army had other ideas.” → The General Who Went to War On Suicide

10. Today in 1982, Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands, starting the Falklands War which would incur 1,010 British—and 2,306 Argentinian—casualties before the latter surrendered after 74 days of fighting. Argentina continues to maintain that the Falklands, a Crown colony since 1841, belong under their rule. Not only was this claim never explicitly relinquished, but in 1994 was enshrined in the Argentinian constitution.

WATCH/WITNESS

Why not a happy video at the end of a long weekend? Like this little girl mistaking a broken water heater for a robot? Daaaawwwww.

WHAT!?

A variety of actors audition to be Stephen Hawking’s new voice. Includes Lin-Manuel Miranda, Stephen Fry, Liam Neeson, Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson and Eddie Redmayne. The final choice is obvious in retrospect.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M. on Missing Richard Simmons: “I share your view of the warmth and humanity of the podcast. The The Daily Beast has your back too. It was also vexing and inspired deeply contradictory feelings in myself about Simmons.”

• Reader B. on the same: “The Richard Simmons podcast drew me in as well. There was something of rubber-necking, then some pop culture history, plus general weirdness. ¶ And some interesting gender politics. ¶ The reactions to it remind me that ‘celebrity culture’ isn’t a contradiction in terms after all, once you realize ‘culture’ means something like ‘that which appears in a petri dish’.”

• Reader G. on Survival of the Friendliest: “I […] stopped after a few paragraphs because it made several scientific errors. Natural selection and fitness apply to individuals within species and not to species themselves. Properties of species are nothing more than the summation of the characteristics of individuals within them and not some synergistic property (the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts). The old canard of individual animals/plants behaving in a manner that will increase the survival of the species is just that; a canard. There are some scientists who continue to work in this error but as a famous animal behaviorist once said to one of my PhD committee members when the latter pressed the former repeatedly for an answer in a seminar ‘well, those are all games we like to play in the bath’.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.

—Lucy Grealy
—from Autobiography of Face

WORD(S)

prosopagnosia /praws-ə-pag-NOH-zhyə/. noun. An inability to recognize familiar, or what should be well-known, faces. Commonly(ish) known as “face blindness.” From Greek prosōpon (face) + a (without) + gnōsis (knowledge).

“Due to his impact with the beech tree, the flubbery rattle of the brain within its shell referred to technically as ‘coup contracoup,’ Joe lost most of his ability at visual memory, even for faces such as his mother’s and my own, a deficiency called ‘prosopagnosia.’” (Jim Harrison)

“Dr Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape. As with Dr P., and as with Macrae and Trolle’s patient, it is especially the animate which is so absurdly misperceived.”

“Headaches, disordered speech, weakness, visual disturbances, nausea, numbness, paralysis. Prosopagnosia, pareidolia. The softening sky reflected in the water. Silver but appearing rose gold in that light. The momentary sense of having traveled back in time.” (Ben Lerner)

“Some were consoled by Weber’s bombshell: a simple neurological quirk that revealed how everyone suffered from a form of prosopagnosia. Even normal recognition fails when the observed face is upside down.” (Richard Powers)

WEB

1. Someone Organized All 403 Of Bob Ross’ Paintings On One Happy Little Website

2. Multiple layers to this compelling story → ► A Peasant vs The Inquisition: Cheese, Worms and the Birth of Micro-history

3. A look inside the still-vital institution and some great photos. I want a copy of the failed, asymmetrically bound New Collegiate dictionary. → A Journey Into the Merriam-Webster Word Factory

4. Why Mind Wandering Can Be So Miserable, According to Happiness Experts :: Pairs with Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, on how meditation made him a better historian.

5. Inside the Fountain Pen Hospital → Where Fountain Pens Are Saved and Sold

6. In case you missed it, the ► Missing Richard Simmons podcast became a bit of a phenomenon. I got hooked despite myself. It’s also been controversial, being labelled an experiment in privacy invasion and morally suspect. I agree most with the premise that it was questionable, but not cruel.

7. Survival of the Friendliest: It’s time to give the violent metaphors of evolution a break

8. How To Pay Attention: 20 Ways To Win The War Against Seeing

9. An “exclusive to BobDylan.com” → Bob Dylan: Q&A with Bill Flanagan

10. Today in 1484, William Caxton publishes the first English printed version of Aesop’s Fables. You can read Caxton’s version of the Fables (and then some) on Aesopica or browse a reprint in the Internet Archive.

WATCH/WITNESS

Masterpieces never sleep by Lesha Limonov:

Delft Blue Eyes (Nails) by Francine LeClercq & Ali Soltani:

Two of ten finalists for the Rijksstudio Public Award 2017, an award given to the best of those who “download images from Rijksstudio and use them to create their own artwork.” Open for public voting until April 20.

WHAT!?

“We’ve done almost no research into this area, but human reproduction in space is going to be key to us living on Mars.” → ► Space Sex is Serious Business.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader E. on most disturbing books: “I was surprised there was no mention of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. See NYRB’s review by Daniel Mendelsohn. I had to stop reading it.”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century. In the morning the world is curved space where everything is continuous; in the afternoon it is a flat space where quanta of energy leap.

The paradox is that both theories work remarkably well. Nature is behaving with us like that elderly rabbi to whom two men went in order to settle a dispute. Having listened to the first, the rabbi says: “You are in the right.” The second insists on being heard, the rabbi listens to him and says: “You’re also right.” Having overheard from the next room the rabbi’s wife then calls out, “But they can’t both be in the right!” The rabbi reflects and nods before concluding: “And you’re right too.”

—Carlo Rovelli
—from Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre)

WORD(S)

seraglio /se-RAHL-yoh/. noun. An enclosure used for confinement, most often for a harem or polygamous unit. For Muslim nobles, the rooms or apartments reserved for wives and concubines. Or the harem itself. Sometimes, more generally, a Muslim noble house or palace as a whole. Sometimes, more generally, a brothel. From Italian serraglio (an enclosure or animal cage), from Latin sera (door bar), related to Turkish seray (palace).

“During his residence at Marlow, the enemies of Mr. Shelley spread a report that he was keeping a seraglio, an opinion that was somewhat strengthened by some peculiar notions he was known to entertain with regard to marriage.” (derived from Leigh Hunt)

“We have been taught to tremble at the terrific visages of murdering janisaries; and to blush at the unveiled mysteries of a future seraglio.” (Alexander Hamilton)

“She was wearing a tasselled shawl affair and a voluminous velvet dress the colour of old blood, and both arms were busy almost to the elbows with fine gold bangles, like a set of springs, which suggested the circus ring more than the seraglio.”

“I live in an interesting house at McLean’s Hospital, one which no man had entered since 1860; suddenly it was made co-ed. It was like entering some ancient deceased sultan’s seraglio.” (Robert Lowell)

“Nancy had expected the cabin to be dominated by a bed, possibly in the shape of a swan, but the Marlin was a day boat. The cabin was anything but a seraglio. It was about as voluptuous as a lower-middle-class dining room in Akron, Ohio, around 1910.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

WEB

1. Fascinating examples in the article and the book just jumped near the top of my reading list. → Danielle Steel Loves the Weather and Elmore Leonard Hates Exclamation Points: Literature by the Numbers Thanks, Reader B.!

2. The Long, Strange History of Women Wearing Deadly Clothing

3. ‘Purple Rain’ — As Retold In A Language Without A Word For Purple

4. Vote for your favorite of the 10 finalists for the 2017 “net based prize for net based art.” Some intriguing projects.

5. Afraid of Jail? Buy an Upgrade

6. Oxford Dictionaries add ‘clicktivism’ and ‘haterade’ as new words for angry times

7. It’s interesting to see how supposedly bumbling comedian Tommy Cooper meticulously organized his jokes and planned his physical staging. If you’re wondering who Tommy Cooper is, you probably know some of his jokes.

8. A comic by Boulet → How to Beat Writer’s Block in Just 40 Easy Steps

9. This month, the USPS announces a new series of WPA Posters Stamps. :: Pair with the Library of Congress WPA Posters Collection

10. Today in 1863, the Confederate states’ most powerful Steamship Georgiana is bombarded and finally scuttled while attempting to force its way through a federal blockade to Charleston, South Carolina. Today in 1965, teenage diver and future pioneer in underwater archaeology E. Lee Spence, found the wreckage (see galleries of artifacts from the ship). The Georgiana was owned by George Alfred Trenholm, Secretary of the Treasury during the last year of the Civil War and, Spence has convincingly claimed, inspiration for Margaret Mitchell’s famous character Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind.

WATCH/WITNESS

Seven-year-old drummer Avery Molek nails Rush’s “Tom Sawyer.”

WHAT!?

Image above from the 360° virtual Auto-Icon.

“The cabinet contains Bentham’s preserved skeleton, dressed in his own clothes, and surmounted by a wax head. […] Bentham had originally intended that his head should be part of the Auto-Icon, and for ten years before his death (so runs another story) carried around in his pocket the glass eyes which were to adorn it. Unfortunately when the time came to preserve it for posterity, the process of desiccation, as practiced by New Zealand Maoris, went disastrously wrong…” → Auto-Icon

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. on most disturbing books: "…keep in mind that I researched and taught Gothic literature, so trawled through quite a lot of darkness. ¶ Perhaps Blood Meridian, which is gorgeously written. It also flays the underside of American self-regard through an anti-western that’s probably the most violent thing I’ve read. Some books are depressing; BM crackles with energy, then blots it from the earth. ¶ Or the Bible. Easy target, I know, but I didn’t read the thing until my late 20s. I expected horror, and was floored by the epic amounts of bloodshed and terror. — Three other Clamorites said The Bible!

• Reader D. adds: “You’ll probably appreciate my vote for most disturbing book ever, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men [by David Foster Wallace]. I still can’t get it out of my head. I still can’t figure out how Wallace wormed his way so deeply in there.”

• Reader C. chimes in: “Nabokov’s Lolita without question. Not because it’s pornographic as it was once misunderstood to be, but because it is not. So beautifully written, the elevation of that beauty making it that much more disturbing.”

• Reader V.: “…has to be Naked Lunch. ‘Yes, Yes!’ No, no, no!”

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

Early in January Cyril Grey received a letter from Lord Antony Bowling. ‘My good Grey,’ it began, ‘may the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!’

—Alesteir Crowley
—from Moonchild

WORD(S)

catafalque /KAT-ə-fahlk/. noun. A temporary platform or tomb on which a body is laid in state for a funeral and/or procession. In Roman Catholic funerals, a coffin-shaped object draped with a pall, representing the corpse. From Italian catafalco (same meaning), from Greek kata (down or beside) + fala (scaffolding, or a wooden tower). The Medieval Latin use led to the French chafaud and échafaud (scaffold).

“On the bedcover a gold-embroidered pomegranate pattern shimmered in the dim light of two pendant lamps which, like at a catafalque, shone either side of the bed—Mortimer’s bed. He could easily imagine the outstretched form of the murdered man in the shadow of the baldachin.” (Alexander Lernet-Holenia)

“Because of the frost, rigor mortis stiffened his body so quickly that he ended up lying on his catafalque with his dead fingers gripping his watch, which ticked loudly, to the embarrassment of those attending the funeral.” (Magdalena Tulli)

“Poor Snow White. She wasn’t very comfortable anywhere else; not in her stepmother’s castle, not in her glass catafalque, not in whatever place her awakening prince lugged her off to.” (Jane Urquhart)

“For the next forty-eight years Mrs T. (or ‘Big Bertha,’ as the hospital staff too now called her) continued to lie in Parkinsonian state, rigid, mute, motionless, and glaring, upon her specially reinforced catafalque of a bed, attended by relays of diminutive nurses.” (Oliver Sacks)

“Let the orchestras rehearsing for the feast be made up of strange instruments, whose mere sound prompts tears. Let the servants be clad in sober liveries of unknown colours; let them be lavish yet simple, like the catafalques of heroes.” [alternate version in notebooks, ‘catafalques of suicides.’]" (Fernando Pessoa)

WEB

1. The Wellcome Image Awards “recognise the creators of informative, striking and technically excellent images that communicate significant aspects of healthcare and biomedical science.” In other words, some amazing art! → Wellcome Image Awards 2017 | Winners’ gallery

2. Fascinating to see the variety (and clusters of similarity) of scores of examples of 1984 In Covers.

3. Some interesting answers to the question, “What is the most disturbing book you’ve ever read and why?” What say you, Clamorites?

4. Futuracha is an amazing typeface, but because it is only available as EPS figures, it’s not been easily usable. So, the forthcoming Futuracha Pro font project is welcome…creating an even better face with amazing ligatures and a variety of alternates for common pairs of letters.

5. The Oxford comma: Decried, defended, and debated: An infographic

6. “Each etymology is like a magic portal into a tiny truth about history, culture, language, or the mind—a miniature eureka, a quiet a-ha, a satisfying huh, or a little story that I believe only a good word origin can tell.” → mashed radish – everyday etymology Via Reader A.

7. Spreadable coffee is now a thing. I’ve planted the seed in the mind of a colleague who is in Japan that he should bring some home for me.

8. How to become a super memorizer – and what it does to your brain + Ancient technique can dramatically improve memory, research suggests

9. The right explanation…and an interesting response. → Why words die.

10. Today at sunrise was the Aztec New Year (in Nahuatl, the Yancuic Xīhuitl, or in Spanish Año Nuevo Azteca), the first day of the year according to the Aztec Calendar, which has 360 named—and five unlucky nameless—days. Celebrations generally take place the night before and involve:

• ceremonial dancing with colorful costumes and headdresses featuring quetzal feathers
• offerings of seeds and the lighting of “ocote” or pitch-pine candles
• the burning of a flag representing the year that has passed and the perfuming of a flag for the new year
• much celebratory noise-making with seashells, fireworks and pulque, a drink made from the magüey cactus

WATCH/WITNESS

Aimee Mann’s video, starring Bradley Whitford and Matthew Weiner, for “Patient Zero,” a song from her new album. The video is fine, but really just an excuse to emphasize that Aimee Mann has a new album out!

WHAT!?

Meet the Rubber Man — British Pathé, 1947.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader W. asks, “why are you hating on the Walden game. Have you even played it?” — My apologies! My ‘finally,’ was based on their description of how long the game took to create, not a comment on any quality of the game itself, which I haven’t played.

• A reader who wants complete anonymity notes, regarding Dr. Seuss’s old, racist cartoons, that many people today have forgotten the significant psychological effects that Pearl Harbor and stories of subsequent atrocities had on Americans at the time, observing that Navy ships would detour to see the Pearl Harbor ruins as a reminder. — I agree, and my point wasn’t to indict Seuss, whose views obviously changed over time, but because the dehumanizing effects of conflict shouldn’t be minimized or dismissed if we are to learn from these lessons.

• Reader B.: “Katexic is such a delight. Each edition refreshes, stimulates, pleases. Must take a great deal of work to turn it out. Thanks for that.” — Thanks for reading! Email to you coming soon.

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

Milton was totally blind for the last twenty years of his life, yet he managed to produce a steady stream of writing, including his magnum opus, the ten-thousand-line epic poem “Paradise Lost,” composed between 1658 and 1664. Milton devoted the morning to solitary contemplation in bed, beginning at 4:00 A.M. (5:00 A.M. in the winter). First he had an aide read to him from the Bible for half an hour. Then Milton was left alone to compose as many lines as his memory could retain. At 7:00, Milton’s aide returned to take dictation—and if the aide happened to be running late, one early biographer noted, Milton “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked.” After dictation, the aide would read to him until lunch was served at noon. Then Milton walked up and down his garden for three or four hours. In the late afternoon and evening he received visitors, ate a light supper, smoked a pipe, and went to bed at about 9:00.

—Mason Currey
—found in Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

WORD(S)

megachiropteran /meg-ə-kər-OPT-ər-ən/. noun or adjective. Of or pertaining to the suborder Megachiroptera, which includes herbivorous fruit bats and flying foxes. Despite the “mega” in the name, this order includes some microbats as small as 2.4 inches long! These bats are distinguished by smooth-crowned molars and a claw on the index finger.

Thanks to Reader S. for suggesting the word and sending a link to the page discussing why this is the best anagram in English (with “cinematographer”) and how it was found (scroll past the tech stuff) and listing some other awesome anagrams. :: Also, the full list of anagrams by score and real soapstone teaspoons.

“Moles and shrews still feed almost exclusively on insects, while various bat species (especially among the Megachiroptera, that other suborder) have attained much larger sizes and diverged into diets of fruit, nectar and pollen, fish, other bats, small birds and rodents, lizards, and blood.” (David Quammen)

WEB

1. Such a great idea, art rifling and rummaging through the everyday. → Shawn Huckins - Paint Chips series

2. Why the Internet Didn’t Kill Zines

3. Ever wondered “How many giraffe’s necks equal the length of the Weinermobile” or “How many kegs of beer could the New York City sewer system carry per day?” Then the Weird Converter is for you.

4. MIT claims to have found a “language universal” that ties all languages together :: Also: the original paper on which the article is based (PDF).

5. Wow! This could be where consciousness is formed? → A giant neuron has been found wrapped around the entire circumference of the brain

6. Guatemala syphilis experiments worse than Tuskegee.

7. Love this site collecting examples of the (dying art of) movie/cinema/play tickets. → Tickets Please!

8. I’d heard a bit about his early racist cartoons, but this piece lays out the history and asks a reasonable question → Can We Forgive Dr. Seuss?

9. Eight days a week? → The Case for Eating Weed at Work

10. Today in 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, USA, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers his “iron curtain” speech (which he had titled “The Sinews of Peace”), essentially inaugurating the Cold War. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” Churchill proclaimed, noting the importance of “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States” to fighting the “fifth columns” that “constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation.” :: Also, read or listen (mp3) to the full speech. :: Also, I feel compelled to note that today in 1979 Voyager I made its closest approach to Jupiter and it is National Tree Planting day in Iran. In my head these are all connected.

WATCH/WITNESS

Jeremy Irons Reads (a whole bunch of) TS Eliot. Thanks, Reader B.

WHAT!?

10 years in the making, Thoreau’s pond has finally been made into a video game. → Walden, a game.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. makes some excellent observations (to which I note, if you didn’t see it, that there’s some info and links about the construction of the genre map at the very bottom of the long page):

I wonder if anyone else had the same experience (of bemused frustration) with Every Noise at Once that I had. Just sticking with musics I’ve lived with for decades, I found the Spotify-selected examples to be bizarre. The “Jazz Bass” example had some nice bass in the background, but it was far in the background. Out front was a guitar solo. The example of “Deep Jazz Guitar” was a trombone solo. The example of “Jazz Brass” was a drum solo. The example of “Traditional Folk” was a Newgrassy version of Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter.” The example of “British Blues” was Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park.” “Traditional Blues” was T-Bone Walker’s electric “T-Bone Blues.” Country Gospel was Marty Robbins’s “Big Iron” (I’m not kidding). There’s no entry for “Chanty” or “Chantey,” and under “Shanty” they list the Sheringham Shantymen singing “High Germany,” which is like listing “Hey Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” as Romanian Folk.

It was neat to see the display (which no doubt would make excellent sense to people who can properly appreciate that kind of thing) of all the genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, etc. of music. And I suspect there’s a machinic-assemblage problem built into the selection system. I have little doubt that “Polish Reggae,” “Swiss Hip Hop,” “Symphonic Black Metal,” “Chinese Indie Rock,” and “Discofox” (example: Nico Gemba, “Der letzte Fox.” Who knew?), I suspect the machine does a better job of hitting those on the nose. And rest assured that they’ve caught the very essence of the instrument in their Accordion entry, and not once, but twice: once under “Accordion” and once under “Accordeon.” Double the fun!

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 concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

"…we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modem economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. […] We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

—Neil Postman
—from Amusing Ourselves to Death

WORD(S)

agnotology / agnatology /ag-nə-TAHL-ə-jee/. noun. The study of cultural ignorance or doubt, particularly relating to scientific research and data. A recent coinage by Robert N. Proctor and Iain Boal combining Latin agnosia (ignorance) + ology (from Latin logy, the study of). See also misology (the fear or hatred of knowledge) and the earlier philosophical area of agnoiology. Thanks, Reader S.

“We need a political agnatology to complement our political epistemologies.” (Robert N. Proctor)

“Agnotology serves as a counterweight to traditional concerns for epistemology, refocusing questions about ”how we know“ to include questions about what we do not know, and why not. Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle.” (Londa Schiebinger)

“Another element of agnotology consists in contending that the dismissal of science is supported by public opinion because people have a poor level of education and training.” (ed. Matthias Gross, Linsey McGoey)

WEB

1. A Million People Live in These Underground Nuclear Bunkers

2. I’ve never been a particular fan of his acting, but Hanks sure seems like a good guy… → Tom Hanks is coming out with short fiction anthology revolving around typewriters

3. The Forked Tongue Map is an interactive graphic that lets you explore—with graphics, video and text—59 endangered languages spoken in Queens, NY (in which there are an astonishing 500+ languages spoken in total).

4. Library Hand, the Fastidiously Neat Penmanship Style Made for Card Catalogs | Atlas Obscura [before you complain about “another Atlas Obscura link,” read the comments below].

5. In the longest such study ever conducted, what some might consider common sense is confirmed…our personalities when we are “old” are basically nothing like when we are teens. → Personality Stability From Age 14 to Age 77 Years

6. Every Noise at Once is an “an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space.” In other words, a massive, interactive map of musical genres from opera to deep tech house…and seemingly everywhere else.

7. Turns out, there’s more to the Mall of America than meets the eye. → Writer-in-Residence - Mall of America

8. Speaking of quintessentially American writing → Walt Whitman’s lost novel The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle found

9. ITUNES TERMS AND CONDITIONS: The Graphic Novel

10. Today in 1616, Galileo Galilei is officially banned by the Roman Catholic Church from promoting, teaching or defending his heretical view that the Earth orbits the Sun. Officially, he is to “abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it… to abandon completely… the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.” Galileo didn’t relent and in 1633 was put on trial for heresy, threatened with torture and finally sentenced to indefinite house arrest, which he remained under until his death in 1642. Pope John Paul II officially “rehabilitated” Galileo in 1992. Fortunately, the Flat Earth Society is still fighting the good fight.

WATCH/WITNESS

Powerful acting by a favorite in this short piece → Michael K. Williams Asks: Am I Typecast?

WHAT!?

Squid speak a unique, undeciphered language using their skin

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M. has a gentle complaint: “The Nüshu link would have been more interesting if I hadn’t seen it already because…Atlas Obscura! Doesn’t everyone read their site anyway?” — I do worry about featuring aggregators or other ‘must read’ sites too often. FYI: of 4228 links shared in Katexic Clippings so far, only 21 have been from the rightly venerated Atlas Obscura.

• Reader C. is happy: "I was delighted to see George MacDonald Fraser’s words in Katexic. I’m agog each time I discover a friend who hasn’t read any of the deliriously funny Flashman novels.

• So is Reader G.: “So much to stir up the imagination with this posting! Loved the WORK, I was not aware of the ‘tjukurpa’ and found the information interesting and curious. What a pity more is not known about it now. I also appreciated the list from other readers of more apocalyptic writing. One of my favorite subjects to indulge in, I’m always looking for good suggestions. Thank you!”

• Reader B. knows his post offices: “I had not yet read your entry about Winifred Gallagher tells the story of how The Post Office Created America. Did I not just send you an envelope postmarked from the B. Free Franklin post office? If not, I’ll do it tomorrow. It is the only post office in the USA that does not fly the nation’s flag.”

• The same Reader B. muses on willpower: "With regards to this subject, when I think of willpower, I think of Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film for Hitler, Triumph of the Will. I then console myself with a quote from Dashiell Hammett’s novelette, This King Business:

“Mentally, he wasn’t a heavy-weight. His revolution was crude stuff. It would get over chiefly because there wasn’t much opposition. He had plenty of will-power, I imagined, but i didn’t put a big number on that. People who haven’t much brains have to develop will-power to get anywhere.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

Every Aboriginal newborn is assigned a ‘tjukurpa’ – a story from the time of the world’s creation which, in its details, will tell them everything they need to know about where to find food, medicine and water for hundreds of miles around. It will teach them about magic and spirits and detail an elaborate moral code. A tjukurpa is a cross between a Bible parable, a Just So story, a supermarket plan and a travel guide. It is a multi-dimensional map of life that speaks of time, space and meaning. Events in the story’s plot – battles and birthplaces and hideouts – correspond to actual facets of the physical landscape, so you will know that you can find carrots, for instance, in the spot where the bush carrot beat the bush potato in a fight. Tjukurpas are incredibly complex. They are taught in stages, with each new level of detail being revealed by elders when an individual is considered ready. They are imparted in as many ways as possible: dance, song, body-painting, rock-carving and sand-drawings that cover a hectare. But they are highly secret. They are passed down strictly between members of the same ‘skin group’. Men do not know the women’s tjukurpas, and women do not know the men’s. White people have only ever been told as much as the youngest Aboriginal children. The paintings that artists such as Shorty produce are highly codified and obscured, so that their tjukurpas remain hidden. But they are all based on these essential, ancient lessons.

It is said that the Australian Aboriginals belong to the oldest surviving culture on earth. It appears profoundly different from ours. But I have come to believe that, in one crucial sense, we are just like the Aboriginals. We share their means of negotiating reality. Our lives, to an almost unimaginable degree, depend on stories.

—Will Storr
—from The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

WORD(S)

garboil / garboyle /GA(R)-boil/. noun. A tumult; a confusion; a commotion; an uproar; a hubbub; a hurlyburly. From Old Italian garbuglio (a tangle, a mess) < possibly from Latin bullīre (to boil).

“Far from the moiling crowd and garboyle of the world.” (The National Review)

“Yet others have disappeared, snatched from their places of refuge, to vanish into the prisons of the Exfernal Powers, denied trial, forbidden even to know the names of their accusers. Their minds may already have been destroyed by drugs and torture, their bodies melted into garboil.” (Margaret Atwood)

“…the most terrifying din and the principal uproar arises from the anguished howls of the devils, who, lying in wait in that confused garboil, receive chance blows from swords and suffer ruptures in the continuity of their substances, which are both aerial and invisible.” (Francois Rabelais)

“Then in ’82 there had been the Egyptian garboil I mentioned a moment ago; Joe Wolseley had asked for me point-blank, and with the press applauding and the Queen approving and Elspeth bursting into tears as I rogered her farewell, what the blazes could I do but fall in?” (George MacDonald Fraser)

WEB

1. I’m an unashamed member of #TeamSpeed when it comes to most audiobooks and podcasts. I am not alone in this ‘overclocking’.

2. There’s something beautifully weird and obsessive about Waclaw Szpakowski’s “labrynthine” single-line drawings.

3. Speaking of the beautiful weird, have a listen to Emil Amos’ Drifter’s Sympathy show.

4. Play The Great Language Game and see what languages you recognize.

5. Browse The Food Lab’s Top 30 Hot Sauces. My favorites are all in there except WUJU. Any others missing?

6. Thanks, Reader B. for sharing an intriguing story On Dracula’s Lost Icelandic Sister Text.

7. From Reader C., some links that should convince even the crustiest Clamorites that Twitter can be useful: @medievalpoc, featuring fascinating information about people of color in European Art History, and @discarding_imgs, routinely sharing tasty medieval images.

8. Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm

9. Remembering Nüshu, the 19th-Century Chinese Script Only Women Could Write

10. It’s a good day for sweets and the sweetums who love ’em: on this day in 1906, Kellogg’s is founded as the “Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company,” an offshoot of the Kellogg brothers work at a religion-based sanitarium (T.C. Boyle’s fabulous book Road to Wellville is based on this history); today in 1913, more than 100 years after its debut, Cracker Jack began putting toys in their tasty, eponymous product; and today in 1985, Cherry Coke is rolled out to the public a few years after a very successful taste test at the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee.

WATCH/WITNESS

Available for streaming this month only, TOWER is a riveting—partially animated and partially live action—look into the infamous 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting.

WHAT!?

“First and foremost, I, Luna Cobra, am the inventor of eyeball, or sclera, tattooing (tattooing the white of the eye in a solid or mix of colours). I first attempted the procedure on sighted human eyeballs in 2007 on three well-informed and consenting parties. Since then, I have fine-tuned both the technique and materials to increase the safety and minimize the risks of tattooing the eyeball.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader T. riffs: “Thanks for the nudge into old-time TV on YouTube with the link to ‘Frankfurter Sandwiches.’ Mr. Harry Rose is cool, but ‘second hand rose’ Peggy Lennon, who also wrapped her talents around the ‘Frankfurter,’ is a revelation. Speaking of gems on YouTube, may I also suggest going back in further to old-time radio? The premiere episode of Gunsmoke is one of my all-time favorites of any medium.”

• Reader J. brings on more about the apocalyptic: “Yes, Beyond Thunderdome! which borrows some of its linguistic babble from the great Ridley Walker. Also I’d much recommend two horsewomen of better apocalypses than Margaret Atwood’s–Doris Lessing (especially her Memoirs of a Survivor, but also the spooky pair, Mara and Dann and The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog) and Angela Carter (her absolutely wonderful Heroes and Villains).”

• Reader B. wasn’t happy with the same selection: “I certainly disagree with Tea’s book list, which is biased towards recent works and leaves out both giants and excellent exempla. For example: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Or, more recently, Cormac M’s The Road. Margaret Atwood’s recent trilogy. Not a single post-nuclear title? Not one? Not Earth Abides or On the Beach? Or Canticle for Liebowitz?”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

For one of my age, I have seen very little of the drama. The first presentation of Falstaff I ever saw was your Leer last winter or spring. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is to say, as I truly can, I am very anxious to see it again. Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Leer, Richard the Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially MacBeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth— It is wonderful.

Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet commencing “O, my offence is rank.” surpasses that commencing “To be or not to be.” But pardon this small attempt at criticism. I should like to hear you pronounce the opening speech of Richard the Third. Will you not soon visit Washington again? If you do, please call and let me make your personal acquaintance.

—Abraham Lincoln
—from an August 17, 1863 letter to actor James Henry Hackett

WORD(S)

logodaedalist /lawg-ə-DEE-də-list/. noun. One who is highly skilled in the use of words. See also logodaedaly (skill in using words). From Greek logodaidalos, from logos (word) + daidalos (skillful).

“He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine handwriting.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

“‘raking out the clinker’ was a phrase of Kipling’s that appealed to Wodehouse, and polishing them to a near-final 1,500 next morning in revision was a pleasurable chore, logodaedaly following logorrhea.” (Richard Usborne)

“I am Bosco, the logodaedalist.
It’s my job to repair broken-down words…”
(James Laughlin)

“Words can be endlessly drawn upon to cancel out other words, when the spokesman is such a logodaedalist as Berowne. Not for nothing is he the predecessor of Mercutio, and both live under the aegis of Mercury — ‘the President of Language…’” (Harry Levin)

WEB

1. Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again

2. Is Willpower a Finite Resource, or a Myth?

3. A little perspective… → Hubble Space Telescope captures death of star in Rotten Egg Nebula

4. Why monkeys can’t talk—and what they would sound like if they could (answer: unsettling). Pairs with ►Orangutan Found To Mimic Human Speech.

5. Reasonable people may disagree with The Guardian’s Top 10 Books About the Apocalypse. What say you?

6. Moij Design’s origami inspired dishes, concrete art and ornaments. Thanks, Reader M.

7. Phonetic Calligraphy (@IPAcalligraphy) combines the beauty of calligraphy with the charm of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

8. Introducing Open Access at The Met, more than 200,000 images, all of which are searchable as part of the 10,000,000 images you can search with the new Creative Commons search engine.

9. The opera-loving sisters who ‘stumbled’ into heroism

10. Today in 1809, future United States President Abraham Lincoln is born in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. Certainly one of the most important US presidents, Lincoln saw the country through its deepest existential crisis, the Civil War, and who knows what influence he might have had on the fallout of that war and the end of slavery were he not assassinated in 1865. Lincoln was a deep thinker, significantly more complex than many popular cultural portrayals would have us believe on everything from slavery and authoritarianism to his own melancholy (that we’d now call clinical depression). The best way to know Lincoln is through his own words and the words of those who’ve studied him most closely, for which I highly recommend The Annotated Lincoln and the Library of America’s The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection. Also, given the WORK I chose today, you might enjoy “Men of Letters: Shakespeare’s Influence on Abraham Lincoln”.

WATCH/WITNESS

Vaudevillian ►Harry Rose performs “Frankfurter Sandwiches” in 1929. See also, ►Peggy Lennon’s 1967 performance on the Lawrence Welk show. And if none of that is on point enough, enjoy a ►pseudo-retro burlesque take by “Varla Jean Merman”.

WHAT!?

“A symphonic mash-up of the Brahms 1st Symphony and Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’” re-composed, arranged and conducted by Steve Hackman. Performed by the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra with vocalists Andrew Lipke, Kristin Newborn and Will Post.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader A. echoed the sentiments of more than a few: “I watched Ten Meter Tower multiple times. There was something about the fear and the vulnerability of those would-be divers that was more naked than if they’d been unclothed.”

• Reader V.: “The only thing more disappointing than YOLOCAUST being removed is that more people aren’t still talking about it!” — Note you can still access YOLOCAUST in the Internet Archive.

• Reader K.: “John McWhorter is a funny, persuasive writer. He single-handedly brought me to the descriptivist side of the eternal linguistics wars. My world is so much richer without spending mental coin on that fight!”

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? Check out Notabilia…it’s practically made for you!

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar.

To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.

Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.

The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.

—John McWhorter
—from Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

WORD(S)

hyperthymesia /HIY-pər-thiy-MEE-zhə/. noun. The condition of possessing an extremely detailed autobiographical memory, sort of a photographic memory for life experiences. From Greek hyper (excessive) + thymesis (remembering).

“In one study, even people with the disorder hyperthymesia, which causes them to remember every event in their lives in painstaking detail, were susceptible to false memories at roughly the same rate as the rest of us.” (Erik Vance)

“The technical term psychologists nowadays apply to super-memory is ‘hyperthymesia’, or ‘Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM)’. The condition was first clinically described by psychologists in 2006. Super memorisers were, however, anticipated years before in Borges’ story, the wonderfully titled ‘Funes the Memorious’.” (John Sutherland)

“Jill Price has the first diagnosed case of a memory condition called ”hyperthymestic syndrome“ — the continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day of her life since she was fourteen.” (Jill Price)

WEB

1. An astounding project, YOLOCAUST “combined selfies from the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin with footage from Nazi extermination camps.” The project, the response—including from those in the original photographs—and the ensuing conversations are intriguing. You can see the original images in the Internet Archive (roll over the images). :: Pairs with Forever present: Digital immortality for the Holocaust’s last survivors

2. “Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung isn’t just a mouthful—it tells an annoying political story” → Austria’s Word of the Year Has 52 Letters

3. Be the best bard you can be! → Crowdsourcing for Shakespeare

4. “Russian futurist book art from 1910 to 1915 combines dynamic lithographs with the sounds of zaum poetry. This interactive exemplifies the interplay of word-image-sound through audio recordings, Russian transliterations, and English translations of 10 poems, presented directly within the pages of the artist’s books.” → Explodity

5. Cool visualizations → Constellations of first sentences from each chapter of short stories

6. Weird, and I need to make this work for me. → Knowingly Taking a Placebo Still Reduces Pain, Studies Find

7. From the Constitutional Post (est. 1774) to today, Winifred Gallagher tells the story of how The Post Office Created America in this 99% Invisible story and interview. See also, the New York Times review that includes Gallagher’s book.

8. You don’t need to be a linguist to enjoy browsing the newly open Lexicons of Early Modern English site.

9. Ha! → List: Concepts for Which I Suspect Germans Have a Single Word

10. Today in 1951, cartoonist and artist John Callahan is born in Portland, Oregon, USA. A quadriplegic since a car accident at 21, Callahan drew his rough, dark, occasionally macabre, taboo-busting and very funny cartoons by holding a pen between his two hands. See also: Callahan’s NYT Obit and the Independent’s obit, Prophet of bad taste. Just a few months ago, there were reports that Gus Van Sant and Joaquin Phoenix had a Callahan biopic in development.

WATCH/WITNESS

“We sought to capture people facing a difficult situation, to make a portrait of humans in doubt. We’ve all seen actors playing doubt in fiction films, but we have few true images of the feeling in documentaries. To make them, we decided to put people in a situation powerful enough not to need any classic narrative framework. A high dive seemed like the perfect scenario.” → Ten Meter Tower

WHAT!?

Detailed renderings, derived from obsessive watching, of Famous Television Show Home Floor Plans.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Here One is fascinating. Thank you.”

• Reader J.: "Ahhh… ‘You know, culture needs stewardship, not disruption.’ POPOVA quoting Sullivan ¶ All the time I have just now. But, Lovely. Ahhh.

• Reader B., who shared the Bibliomania link, adds: "I can’t get enough of this. ¶ Going into a bookstore and asking for their books on books section is like muttering a password for a secret chamber.

• Reader F.: “Your bit from David Foster Wallace’s essay on Federer doesn’t make me want to read his sports-writing. But it reminds me that I’m glad my sports-phobia didn’t prevent me from reading his other essays, which are (dare I say it?) ace. Never did finish Infinite Jest.”

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? Check out Notabilia…it’s practically made for you!

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer’s ascendancy. One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth. The others are more technical and make for better journalism.

The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan,⁷ who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

—David Foster Wallace
—from “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”
—found in Both Flesh and Not

WORD(S)

pother (alt. puther) /PAW-t~her/. noun or verb. A vocal commotion; loud turmoil; a thick cloud of dust or smoke. As a verb, to cause a pother (naturally) but also to trouble one/oneself over a mundane or trivial matter. Origin unknown, but likely derived from the rhyming bother. See also: dither, ado, tizzy, flap and hurly-burly.

“Then thank heaven we can discuss facts calmly, without a lot of useless pother … facts which I have got from Miss Osgood. For instance, that you are what Mr. Osgood – and many other people – would call an unscrupulous blackguard.” (Rex Stout)

“All this pother of coming to England and seeing lawyers wasn’t to marry her, but to prevent her from marrying anybody else.” (Virginia Woolf)

“What a wonderful pother is here, to make all these poetical beautifications of a ship! that is, a phenix in the first stanza, and but a wasp in the last…” (Samuel Johnson)

“I wish at any rate that any book could wait until I produce the Silmarillion. I am constantly interrupted in this – but nothing interferes more than the present pother about ‘me’ and my history.” (J.R.R. Tolkien)

“Away up the road was a puther of dust, then the flash of glass as the automobile turned.” (D.H. Lawrence)

WEB

1. This On Being interview with Maria Popova is a few years old, but just too good not to share. And it couldn’t be more timely, really. And I adore Popova…if you aren’t a regular Brain Pickings reader, you should stop reading this and go there now (but do come back). → Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age.

2. At first I thought, “yet more wireless earbuds.” But Here One is something else: AI-assisted personal listening. With big implications for the future of all kinds of audio experiences.

3. Speaking of amazing developments hinting at a fascinating future, how about growing human organs in animals? → The Early Days of Organ Farming Are a Bit Gnarly. See also: Mice cured of diabetes by cells grown inside rats — are humans next?

4. Google News Lab’s The Year in Language: 2016 is interesting and includes some fun interactive widgets to delve into the results (even if the by-state results don’t include Alaska or Hawaii. Grr.).

5. Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying [Thanks, Reader B.!] :: See also, earlier WORKs from Nicholas Basbanes’ book A Gentle Madness that explores this topic.

6. Hey, this newsletter is partly intended for word nerds, after all! → Interview with a Lexicographer (Jane Solomon)

7. What Lincoln called the “hot letter” is a habit worthy of reconsideration. → The Lost Art of the Unsent Angry Letter

8. Research says…at least until the next study. → Smart, Emotionally Stable People Enjoy Morbid Humor

9. Cat faces recognized as human and human faces recognized as cats by face-detection algorithms. → Cat or Human

10. Today in 1964, Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb is unleashed upon the world after a delay due to U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Good reading: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True, Art of the Title on Dr. Strangelove and the 1964 New York Times review.

WATCH/WITNESS

Allesandro Moreschi, though in his fifties at the time, is the only castrato singer ever recorded. It’s not what he would have sounded like in his prime singing days, but intriguing, haunting and sad nonetheless. Listen also: Moreschi singing Ave Maria and “Hostias Et Preces”.

WHAT!?

Not a WHAT!? entry because it’s weird or bizarre, but because it feels like Gary Gulman’s comedy is based on direct observations of my brain…and thus I suspect it will resonate with many Clamorites as well.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C. follows up: "The Everything is F**ked Syllabus reminded me of the Lexicon Valley podcast episode “Seven Centuries of F–ks” that includes your fave John McWhorter.

• Reader B.: “Thank you for the additional carnage.”

• Reader N.: “Really appreciated the link to Bowie’s fav books. I’m adding a bunch to my list.”

• Reader M.: “Chris, aside from all the rest, thanks so much for this.”

Thank you for reading! 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? Check out my other little projects: concīs (a literary journal of powerful concision) and Notabilia (a daily newsletter featuring a single, carefully curated short work for loving readers).

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

“But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shamble after as I’ve been doing all my life, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?”

—Jack Kerouac
—from On the Road

WORD(S)

carnage /KAR-nəj/. noun. Extensive, indiscriminate slaughter, most often of human beings. A collection of carcasses. From French carnage, from Italian carnaggio (murder, slaughter), from Latin carnaticum (slaughter of animals), from carnum (flesh). Various sources note that “[Robert] Southey tried to make a verb of it,” so I’ve included that example as well.

“The carnage of 9/11 generated an intense surge of patriotic solidarity, even with America’s Babylon, a city scandalously and notoriously indifferent to Heartland values.” (Simon Schama)

“More athletes actually got killed in the hand-to-hands, but they lacked the dramatic, cathartic aspects of football, the sheer carnage when 144 men were involved at once, the drenching of the arena stands with blood.” (Ursula K. LeGuin)

“Mark! where his carnage and his conquests cease!
He makes a solitude, and calls it – peace!”
(Lord Byron)

“…And swords rage where the Eagles cry & the Vultures laugh saying
Now comes the night of Carnage now the flesh of Kings & Princes…”
(William Blake)

“All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.” (W.H. Auden)

“…there was vast confusion, havoc, conflict, honourable death, bloody battle, horrible consternation, and upon Tal Mavra, a thousand banners: there was an outrageous carnage, and the rage of spears and hast signs of violent indignation.” (Robert Southey)

WEB

1. Thousands of terms for drunks and drunkenness → The Drunktionary :: Pairs with our previous links to an interactive “Timeline of Slang Terms for Drink, Drunks and Drunkenness” and maybe “Drunk Shakespeare: The Trendy Way to Stage the Bard’s Plays in the US & the UK.”. Oh, and Thomas Nashe on Eights Kinds of Drunkard.

2. I encourage you to check out the free and open FutureLearn course Japanese Culture Through Rare Books, if only to watch (or download!) the extensive series of videos on Japanese books, materials, binding and culture. Fascinating.

3. I try to stay away from direct politics here, but: Postal Service business is up, deficit is all politics.

4. I prefer the magazine title “Those Magnificent Women and Their Typing Machines” → These Women Reporters Went Undercover to Get the Most Important Scoops of Their Day.

5. Enter Chaumont’s Le Signe, France’s graphic design museum.

6. Everything is f**ked: The syllabus :: Pairs well with Calling Bullsh*t in the Age of Big Data — Syllabus and “F*ck Nuance” a paper by Kieran Healy.

7. Words of the Year 2016 from: Oxford English Dictionaries & Dictionary.com & The Chronicle of Higher Education & Merriam-Webster & The American Dialect Society (PDF).

8. Imogen Foxell’s OED Word of the Day illustrations.

9. David Bowie’s 75 Favorite Books.

10. Today in 1561, Sir Francis Bacon—philosopher, writer, scientist and orator—is born in London. Bacon was a true renaissance man, excelling as a philosopher and scientist…and the field in which they overlapped. Bacon’s most significant legacy is likely his thoughts on the scientific approach to the natural world and what that means for our own conception of our place within and, possibly, over it. This was a particularly vital area given that Bacon lived and wrote during a time when science was beginning to challenge—and sometimes displace—religious thought. I’ve learned most from Bacon’s work through his letters and his commonplace book, even if the latter has been used by deluded conspiracy theorists to claim he (as leader of a cabal) must have been the real author of Shakespeare’s work (though the story of the audacious, brilliant, unrelated and not-a-little-cuckoo Delia Bacon, who originated the theory, is fascinating).

WATCH/WITNESS

“When Peter Bellerby couldn’t find the perfect handmade globe for his father’s 80th birthday, he took matters into his own hands. He spent the next few years learning and perfecting the lost art of globemaking, which turned out to be a difficult, detailed process.” → ► The Globemakers: Craft with a Modern Spin

WHAT!?

“Chris Heck fought his way up over the most dangerous, life-threatening tricks, with numerous sore finger injuries, and nervous breakdowns to where he is today.” → ► Fingers of Steel

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. shares: “Though I dispute (my back, indeed my chine disputes) the idea that everything old is new: some old things just get older. However, to anyone who’s missed seeing All That Jazz, it wouldn’t hurt to start with ► the Youtube excerpt of this song-and-dance piece. This is a movie that stands with 8 1/2 (to which it builds a gorgeous system of homages) as the greatest metatext about artistic creation in the history of film; and it stands with Singin’ in the Rain as (not only a great piece of metacinema, but) an epochal transformative text in the history of movie musicals. La La Land? It’s show time!”

• Reader B: “The typewriter story is grand.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

As Peter Allen said in his song, “everything old is new again.” And so it is with the return of Katexic Clippings in 2017 and today’s WORK, apropos for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and our energetic political times.

WORK

“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
—from The Radical King

WORD(S)

chine /CHIYN/. noun or verb. The spine or backbone. The rim of a cask formed by the ends of the staves. In cooking, a cut or joing that includes the spine and connected flesh. In geography, the crest of a ridge though also, historically (and oddly), a fissure or crack in the earth. In shipbuilding, the change in angle of the cross-section of a hull, where the bottom and sides meet (such as a sharp chine). As a verb, to cut through the spine when butchering. From Middle English chyne, from Middle French eschine, then things get hairy but it appears to be a blend of the Germanic source of shin and Latin spina (spine).

“A prodigious chine of roasted bear’s meat.” (J. F. Cooper)

“We then struck the roughest of descents, down broken outcrops and chines of granite.” (Sir Richard Burton)

“It has been but a month from putting in the eight-by-threes, treated with creosote and laid a foot and a half apart in the long northernish rectangle of our cabin’s base, construction fir let into grey marl on the chine of an island, to the last sheet of shingling on the roof.” (Guy Davenport)

“In a very few minutes a hard chine launch came swiftly to them from the carrier…” (Nevil Shute)

“Its iron-rimmed chine struck the nape of his neck, dislocated vertebrae and crushed the spinal column.” (Annie Proulx)

“…the head is so obtuse as to go absolutely crazy over a pair of hunkers, which is no more than a chine of beef.” (William O’Rourke)

WEB

1. Music’s Weird Cassette Tape Revival Is Paying Off

2. You should definitely read this magical Twitter story about typewriters and travel

3. I’m unreasonably excited about Jim Jarmusch’s new film ► Paterson because it uses prose poems by the great Ron Padgett and stars Adam Driver, who I find intriguing. The New York Times has a solid, positive review. For more on Padgett and Jarmusch’s film, see interviews in Town & Country and Bleecker Street. And Padgett’s own site links to a solid, short profile of Padgett for readers.

4. The headline is a bit click-baity, but the whole thing is still really cool (be sure to read the comments) → The mind-blowing AI announcement from Google that you probably missed.

5. ’Tis the season… → ►DIY Science: How far does a sneeze travel? and the accompanying research articles: Snot Science: A snotty setup + Snot Science: Results are nothing to sneeze at + Snot Science: Taking mucus to the next level.

6. Hey grrrl, let’s go on vacay. → 25 Words Turning 25 Years Old in 2017

7. I was sure I’d shared this before, but Reader C.’s suggestion prompted me to look and apparently I’d kept it to myself. Word buffs using a Mac, enjoy! → You’re probably using the wrong dictionary

8. This is actually good advice for anyone who makes things, whether a Trump supporter or not. → John Scalzi’s 10-point plan for getting creative work done in the age of Trump

9. The title makes clear what it’s aboot → Why Do Canadians Say ‘Eh’?

10. Today in 1919, 2.3 million gallons of molasses erupt from a broken holding tank in Boston, Massachusetts, creating the Great Molasses Flood, AKA the Boston Molasses Disaster. The 25-foot (at least) tall wave—moving at 35 miles per hour—engulfed the city’s North End, tearing buildings from their foundations and crushing them, killing 21 people and wounding more than 150 others in the process. Ultimately attributed to faulty tank construction and lack of testing before filling them, nearly 100 years later a group of scientists and students discovered why the winter conditions made the spill significantly more deadly. And more research. The Atlantic published some amazing pictures of the aftermath. See also: a story of the day from 2014, the London Beer Flood.

WATCH/WITNESS

Those of us in northern climes have all tossed (sometimes boiling) water in the air to watch ►the frosty display. But, it turns out, the Mpemba Effect—the idea that boiling water actually freezes faster than cold water in this context—is weird and controversial.

WHAT!?

The strange, sad story of Jimmy Ellis, aka Orion, the Man Who Would Be Elvis and how many thought he was Elvis when all he wanted to do was take off the glittering mask.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• My thanks to those who inquired about Katexic Clippings during the unannounced holiday hiatus; my apologies to those I neglected to answer.

• Reader J.: “Enjoying reading what you clip. Enjoying thinking about other things, again. Motherhood is a blast, but it sucks the life out of everything for at least a little while.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

"I dig Strauss and Wagner, those cats are good, and I think they are going to form the background of my music. Floating in the sky above it will be the blues – I’ve still got plenty of blues – and then there will be western sky music and sweet opium music (you’ll have to bring your own opium!), and these will be mixed together to form one. And with this music we will paint pictures of earth and space, so that the listener can be taken somewhere. You have to give people something to dream on.

The moment I feel that I don’t have anything more to give musically, that’s when I won’t be found on this planet, unless I have a wife and children, because if I don’t have anything to communicate through my music, then there is nothing for me to live for. I’m not sure I will live to be 28 years old, but then again, so many beautiful things have happened to me in the last three years. The world owes me nothing."

—Jimi Hendrix
—from Starting at Zero: His Own Story

WORD(S)

engastration /en-ga-STRAY-shən/. noun. A method of cooking in which one animal is stuffed inside the other, most often fowl-in-fowl. The most famous example is the turducken (a deboned chicken stuff inside a deboned duck which is stuffed inside a turkey), but there are many variations including the Pandora’s Cushion (a goose stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a quail), gooducken (goose stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken) and the turbacon which is made of “a 20-pound pig with an 8-pound turkey, a 6-pound duck, a 4-pound chicken, a Cornish game hen, a quail, lots of bacon, 6 pounds of butter and a splash of Dr Pepper.” Sign me up.

“Upon particular occasions, a wild boar used to be dressed whole and stuffed with all kinds of animals, one within another; this dish was called the Trojan Horse […] The passion for engastration seems to have had its admirers in all ages.” (The School for Good Living)

“…if there is any philosophic engastration, it may be the geometric discourse that contains the metaphoric one by making it possible and by lending meaning to its terms.” (James Elkins)

“The cherpumple [a three-layer cake with cherry, pumpkin and apple pies baked in] is a sweet variation on engastration…” (Josh Friedland)

“Not satisfied with merely cramming creatures into one another for the consumption of their masters and mistresses by means of what is now known as ‘engastration’, Tudor cooks can also be credited with physically combining animals for their feasts by a process of culinary grafting. Perhaps the most famous example of such mind-boggling creativity is the so-called ‘cockentrice’, which was produced by sewing a pig’s upper body on to the bottom half of a capon or turkey.”

WEB

1. The 2106 Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio, improved this year by “(i) including a larger number of words; (ii) involving a broader range of minority groups as participants; and (iii) considering potentially offensive gestures for the first time,” is fun and fascinating reading. See the full report (PDF) or the handy Quick Reference guide (PDF).

2. National Novel Generation Month always yields some ingenious results, but Liz Daly’s Blackout may be the best yet. Using Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as its source, Daly’s program created the short book of blackout/erasure poems The Days Left Foreboding and Water. Previously in Katexic Clippings: Daly’s 2014 NaNoGenMo project.

3. I have this Jabberwocky Diagrammed poster on my office wall. The oddly diminutive diagram of a sentence from Infinite Jest might make a nice companion piece.

4. “For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans […] the sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes.” → The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz.

5. Fascinating look at mining data from maps based on how they’ve changed over time. → He Collected 12,000 Road Maps—Now We’re Discovering Their Secrets.

6. Time Magazine selects The Most Influential Images of All Time.

7. Need a gift for your hard-to-please friend concerned about preserving our languages for our eventual alien overlords? The limited, numbered edition Wearable Rosetta Disk is just $1000. See also: a short video on the making of the wearable disk.

8. “One researcher the book cites clocks inner speech at an average pace of 4,000 words per minute—10 times faster than verbal speech. And it’s often more condensed—we don’t have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know what we mean.” » Fascinating stuff in the Atlantic article “The Running Conversation in Your Head: What a close study of ‘inner speech’ reveals about why humans talk to themselves”.

9. “Scientists have discovered a ‘lake’ in the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone, who enters this pool at the bottom of the sea will suffer horribly.”.

10. Today in 1942, James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix is born in Seattle, Washington, USA. Caught joyriding and forced, at 19, to choose between prison or the Army, Hendrix chose the latter, becoming a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) before being honorably discharged as “unsuitable” just over a year later. Though he would die of an accidental overdose just eight years later, in that short time Hendrix would become one of the most influential and celebrated rock guitarists of all time, using the wah-wah pedal, distortion, feedback and the “piano style” of holding a bass note with his thumb while playing the melody (aided by his use of right-handed guitars turned upside down and restrung for left-hand playing) in new ways that would influence every succeeding generation, not to mention establishing himself as a premier instrumentalist in a part of music that was still almost exclusively populated by white men. Some classic listening: ►“The Star Spangled Banner” and ►“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” both at Woodstock, 1969; an ►acoustic version of "Hear My Train A Comin’; the ►album version of “Hey Joe”. Some tasty but less well-known cuts: ►Jimi with Curtis Knight and The Squires, “Gloomy Monday”; ►Lonnie Youngblood and Jimi, “Goodbye Bessie Mae”; ►Little Richard and Jimi, “Hound Dog” (just for fun).

WATCH/WITNESS

OK Go has created another ►stunning video. I can hardly imagine the planning that went into the timing of this 4.2 seconds of physical, explosive effects. Check out the ►behind the scenes video. Mindboggling.

WHAT!?

►Underwater Flatulence in 120 Fps kind of—umm—speaks?—for itself.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. muses: “cicurate…. said aloud, it sounds like a weird interzone between secure (security) and curate.”

• Reader K. shares: “Clamorites that enjoyed the story of Roald Dahl’s Zone-ish tv show will enjoy Atlas Obscura’s recent article with even more on the story”

• Reader J. writes: “Enjoying reading what you clip. Enjoying thinking about other things, again. Motherhood is a blast, but it sucks the life out of everything for at least a little while.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

“There was one of those sunsets beginning — the kind we’ve been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We’ve never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It’s everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it’s from atomic tests; but it’s said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.”

—Nadine Gordimer
—from The Late Bourgeois World

WORD(S)

cicurate /SIK-yoo-rayt/. verb. To tame; to make mild; to reclaim from the wild. From Latin cicur (tame).

“…it is from some impurity of Body, Soul or Spirits, that a man sinks below that belief; and that his Virtues then are but Complexional or merely Moral, such as are found in a cicurated Beast or some better-natur’d Brute.” (Henry More)

“Nor did he only try to Cicurate the Indians.” (Cotton Mather)

“…a bold & nimble Insect, nothing is able to affright, or cicurate this giddy creature, but still returns where it is beaten off, & therefore it is observed that Homer chose rather to compare his hero to a fly than to a Lion, or a Bear.” (John Evelyn)

“But this learned bishop was the greatest beauty thereof, endeavouring by gentleness to cicurate and civilize the wild Irish…” (Thomas Fuller)

WEB

1. RIP: Leon Russell. The tribute A Show For You: A Leon Russell Appreciation is not only worth a listen…it includes my friend Gardner!

2. Also, RIP: Mose Allison. If you aren’t familiar with Allison (or even if you are), this ►Mose Allison YouTube playlist is worth a spin or three.

3. Staying on the sound and music theme, behold Soundbreaking, an “eight-part series [that] explores the art of music recording, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of brand new sounds. Featuring more than 160 original interviews with some of the most celebrated recording artists of all time.” [Thanks, Reader F.]

4. “The Internet Archive Manual Library is a collection of manuals, instructions, walkthroughs and datasheets for a massive spectrum of items.” → More than 77,000 of them for everything from military manuals like the PAM 21–41 Personal Conduct For The Soldier to manuals for computer games, synthesizers, vending machines and more. [Thanks, Reader A.]

5. The pens of the world’s most famous authors. [Thanks, Reader N.!]

6. The always interesting Atlas Obscura says, “this frozen tunnel in central Alaska is both an engineering feat and a valuable climate classroom.” And it’s only 15 miles from me. → Permafrost Tunnel [Thanks, Reader K.]

7. Photographer Tracks Down People He Snapped In His Hometown Almost 40 Years Ago To Recreate The Remarkable Images

8. Unfathomable is, as Reader B. says, “…awesome: good writing, wild invention, terrifying threats, inspirational success.”

9. Emoji made from old master paintings.

10. Today in 1923, South African writer, activist and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Nadine Gordimer is born outside Johannesburg. The daughter of a passive Russian refugee father and an activist mother, Gordimer would go on to write more than a dozen novels (at least three of which were banned in South Africa) and close to two dozen collections of short fiction, almost all of which probed the subtleties of race, love and politics in South Africa. Winner of practically every major literary award (and recipient of 15 honorary degrees), Gordimer joined the African National Congress when it was illegal to do so, advised Nelson Mandela during his trial and was active in the anti-apartheid movement and many post-apartheid causes. “The truth isn’t always beauty,” Gordimer would write in The London Magazine, “but the hunger for it is.”

Addendum: in Gordimer’s excellent Nobel Lecture, she makes an observation that remains critical today at near- and far-remove:

“… In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state’s indictment of treason, and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of blind commitment. As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean ‘balance’. The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on his side of the scale. Yet, to paraphrase coarsely Márquez’s dictum given by him both as a writer and a fighter for justice, the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats’s beast slouching to be born.”

WATCH/WITNESS

This week’s WATCH from Reader B., who writes, “It is the movie ►A Thousand Clowns based on the play that preceded it. A sleeper. A masterpiece. It was a major inspiration to me and here it is in its entirety. I don’t know why it is available for free, nor for how long, but this great play/movie is hard to find and see, don’t miss the chance.”

WHAT!?

In 1961, Roald Dahl hosted a Twilight Zone-alike television show called Way Out (the title screen says ’Way Out; I don’t know what that’s about)…a show created quickly to replace Jackie Gleason’s failed talk show You’re In the Picture. All of this just as weird as it sounds. Fortunately for us, the ►entire one-year run is available on YouTube.

Incidentally, when I say Gleason’s show failed, I mean it was a serious fail: instead of airing the second episode, which was already in the can, Gleason appeared on television to apologize. “Last week we did a show that laid the biggest bomb—it would make the H-bomb look like a two-inch salute,” he said, later adding, “You don’t have to be Alexander Graham Bell to pick up the phone and find out it’s dead.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Thank you for the pointer to ‘You Want it Darker’. Woke up and listened to that several times before dawn. ¶ Then on to the rest of the album. ¶ PS: 2016 is an annus horribilis.”

• Reader T.: “I assume you’ve seen it, but the ►McKinnon-as-Clinton tribute to Cohen on SNL was pretty poignant on multiple levels.”

• Reader C.: “This issue’s title, ‘fall & LIFT?’ I see what you did there. Hallelujah.”

• A different Reader T. asks: “Doesn’t the story about Cheetos violate your no-politics rule?” — The subconscious works in mysterious ways.

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

Clamorites, I need your help! I won’t be able to be online as much as usual for a few weeks, so now is a great time to send fascinating links, words and quotes my way. The next issue or two will be all about you. Show us what you’ve got! Don’t make me bring out the “all pencil” issue…

WORK

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government—
signs for all to see.

I can’t run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
a thundercloud
and they’re going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring …

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen
—from “Anthem”

WORD(S)

psephology /see-FAH-lə-jee/. noun. The scientific study of elections, voting behavior and statistical trends in voting. Rarely, used to refer to Greek numerology. From Greek psēphos (pebble), from the pebbles used by the Ancient Greeks in voting. A side-note: ballot derives from the Italian balla (ball), based on a similar method of voting by placing balls in a container.

“Frank Hardie, a classical scholar and later President of Corpus, said ‘Why not call it psephology? The Athenians dropped a psephos, a pebble, into an urn when they voted.’” (David Edgeworth Butler)

“By the lights of the psephology manuals, Ohio ought to have been a natural for the Democrats…” (Simon Schama, 2004)

“What I want to point out here is that there is a considerable breadth of numerological practices, ranging from psephology/gematria through to practices close to mathematical physics…” (Andrew Gregory)

WEB

1. RIP, Leonard Cohen. David Remnick’s recent New Yorker profile was so well done I had it on my list of links to share well before Cohen’s passing. The song ►“You Want it Darker” has been running non-stop in my head since I heard the news. And if you haven’t read it, Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers is bizarre, hilarious and seductive.

2. From Merriam-Webster, Trending Words from Election 2016.

3. “How many ways are there to read James Joyce’s great and bizarre novel Finnegans Wake? ¶ To answer this question, we gathered a host of musicians and writers, artists and scholars, weirdos and generally adventurous people. We decided to set the book to music, creating something that is simultaneously an audiobook as well as musical adaptation.” → Waywords and Meansigns: Recreating Finnegans Wake in its Whole Wholume. [Thanks, Reader A.!]

4. “The Phantom Atlas is an atlas of the world not as it ever existed, but as we believed it to be.” → A short trailer for the book.

5. Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, With Horrifying Book Curses. [Thanks, Reader S.!]

6. “What makes swear words so offensive? It’s not their meaning or even their sound. Is language itself a red herring here?” → Naughty Words

7. List: Fall DIY Projects That Help Numb the Pain of Existence

8. ►Two sonic branding experts explain the thinking behind some of the world’s most recognizable sounds

9. Eggsactly, eggsciting, eggscetera. → eggsconcept

10. Today is World Kindness Day. Please consider celebrating it. A bit of language history: the word kind comes from Middle English kinde, from Old English (ge)cynde, which speaks to “the feeling of relatives for each other.”

WATCH/WITNESS

Shortly after Stanley Kubrick’s death, Jon Ronson (author of The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test) was invited by Kubrick’s widow to explore the more than 1000 boxes of memorabilia, photos, fan (and not-so-fan) letters, newspaper clippings and more collected by Kubrick about his own films. ►Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes is the result.

WHAT!?

New at Tedium, an article exploring the accidental origin and the surprisingly interesting story of the cheese curl (AKA cheese puffs, cheese balls, Cheetos), which included this ►hunger-inducing video.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• I feel a little frisson whenever Reader M. writes in: “loved this edition. <3”

• Reader J. followed the Karlbox link: “I like the J Peterman catalog too. I’ve never bought, but as I read I went on safari in my mind.”

• Reader B. employs tmesis I can stand behind: “Another fan-fucking-tastic report!”

• Reader N. tells us how she really feels about the author of the composition 1917–2006 report: “I worked with Andrea Lunsford for several years and can tell you that she is deeply dishonest, profoundly stupid, and very elastic with the truth. She’s a schmoozer and she is NOT a reader. Her mission is to save students from reading literature. She is the kind of person who thinks that a student paper is just as good as or better than Proust and a Beethoven symphony no better than a toddler banging on a saucepan.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

The full Katexic Clippings newsletter will resume next Sunday, assuming I’ve seen the last of this fever by then (though I do enjoy the strange dreams borne of my boiling brain). Until then, a truncated version comprised of a few items typed up before the fire set in.

WORK

The Hebrew Bible’s penchant for euphemism can lead to surprising reinterpretations of familiar passages. Everyone knows that Eve was created from Adam’s rib, right? But ribs aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew—that is a translation made by the Septuagint, the early Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. The word actually used is side (tsela), and, as we’ve seen, side can be used as a euphemism for the genitals (Gen. 2:20–23). Scholar Ziony Zevit takes this euphemism and runs with it, arguing that in the Genesis narrative Eve is actually made from Adam’s penis, in particular from his penis bone. Most mammals have a baculum, a bone in their penis, which helps with erections. Only humans, spider monkeys, whales, horses, and a few other species lack it, achieving erections through blood pressure alone. Zevit thinks that the ancient Israelites would have been quite knowledgeable about comparative anatomy, given that they probably encountered lots of skeletons—of animals in fields, and of humans in caves where bodies were entombed. They would have known that men and women have the same number of ribs, another mark against the rib theory, and would have seen that the bone men were in fact missing was the baculum. It makes a certain kind of sense, then, to have God create Eve from Adam’s baculum. This explains the bone’s disappearance in humans and gives new richness to Adams famous welcome of Eve: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”—flesh, of course, being one more euphemism for the penis.

—Melissa Mohr
—from Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

WORD

tmesis /tə-MEE-sis/. noun. The splitting of a word by interjecting one or more other words. Similar to last week’s diacope but at the level of word rather than phrase. The use of a curse word as the intervening word, as in un-fucking-believable, is the most common example in English and is called expletive infixation. From Greek tmēsis (cutting).

“Oh so loverly sittin’
Abso-bloomin-lutely still.
I would never budge
Til Spring crept over the window sill.”
(George Bernard Shaw)

“I greatly admire [Peter Lubin’s] definition of tmesis (Type I) as a «semantic petticoat slipped on between the naked noun and its clothing epithet»” (Vladimir Nabokov)

“This is not Romeo. He’s some other where.” (William Shakespeare)

“It’s gettin’ to be ri-goddamn-diculous around here.” (John Wayne)

“It’s a sort of long cocktail—he got the formula off a barman in Marrakesh or some-bloody-where.” (Kingsley Amis)

WATCH

Watch Space Station Fisheye Fly-Through 4K, “a fly-through of the International Space Station […] shot in Ultra High Definition (4K) using a fisheye lens for extreme focus and depth of field.” Just one of many offerings from the NASA Ultra High Definition Video gallery.

WHAT!?

A twofer from the doll factory by British Pathé: 1963 and 1968.

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

Thanks to all who sent best wishes and shared Katexic last week! Today’s WORD comes at the request of Reader C., who asked if I would share more “figures of speech, literary devices, and rhetorical figures.”

WORK

“I had heard ever since I could remember, and believed, that adult life was to be an unremitting struggle in which the best I could hope for was to avoid the workhouse by extreme exertion. My father’s highly coloured statements on such matters had sunk deeply into my mind; and I never thought to check them by the very obvious fact that most of the adults I actually knew seemed to be living very comfortable lives. I remember summing up what I took to be our destiny, in conversation with my best friend at Chartres, by the formula, ‘Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.’ Even if I had been free from this delusion, I think I should still have seen grounds for pessimism. One’s views, even at that age, are not wholly determined by one’s own momentary situation; even a boy can recognise that there is desert all round him though he, for the nonce, sits in an oasis.”

—C.S. Lewis
—from Surprised by Joy

WORD(S)

diacope /diy-AK-ə-pee/. noun. A literary device in which the repetition of a word or phrase is separated by a word or two. From Ancient Greek diakopē (gash, cleft) > dia (through) + kopē (cutting). See also: next week’s WORD.

“Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me.” (William Shakespeare)

Kill, Baby, Kill (American release title of Mario Bava’s 1966 horror film Operazione paura)

“Drill, baby, drill!” (2008 Republican campaign slogan used by Michael Steele, later immortalized by Sarah Palin)

“(burn, baby, burn) disco inferno! (burn baby burn) burn that mother down!” (Leroy Green & Ron Kersey)

“My name’s Felix Leiter,” said the American. “Glad to meet you.” ¶ “Mine’s Bond – James Bond.” (Ian Fleming)

WEB

1. Before book v. ebook there was scroll v. codex. → The mysterious ancient origins of the book

2. Pollin’ dirty! With elections nearly upon some of us, ProPublica’s examination of bad ballot design (and simple fixes) is all the more interesting. → Disenfranchised by Bad Design

3. You don’t have to be a chemist to enjoy the “Things I Won’t Work With” series by Derek Lowe. A great name, a scary compound and a Twain reference…how can you go wrong? → Things I Won’t Work With: Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane

4. “The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses (BAHFest) is a celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory.” → Bahfest | THE ONE AND ONLY Festival of Bad ad Hoc Hypotheses

5. In the continual font fascination department → More than 800 languages in a single typeface: creating Noto for Google

6. I’m sure some will claim that it’s only gotten really bad in the last ten years… → “Students in first-year composition classes [in 2006] are, on average, writing longer essays, using more complex rhetorical techniques, and making no more errors than those committed by freshman in 1917.”

7. Westworld is full of Shakespeare quotations, but it’s using them all wrong. [Thanks, Reader C.!]

8. The ellipsis in medieval manuscripts: How subpuncting in the Middle Ages give the modern era its strangest punctuation mark. And, from within, Unfinished story … how the ellipsis arrived in English literature.

9. For just $2850 USD, you too can line the pockets of both Karl Lagerfeld and Faber-Castell and own the KARLBOX. The description veers into J. Peterman territory.

10. Today, the day before Halloween, is Mischief Night (also known as Devil’s Night or Beggar’s Night) in many parts of Canada and the United States, celebrating a night of trickery before a night of treats. Whatever happened to good old Halloween Eve?

WATCH/WITNESS

“A father and son work collaboratively to understand each other in drawings and photographs thru the filter of the Autistic spectrum.” View photos online. Check out the book.

WHAT!?

Jesus Jara’s short film ►Mortal Rent claims, I suspect rightly, to be the first Spanish film made entirely using the (failed 1987 toy turned contemporary cult/hipster tool) Fischer-Price PXL–2000 camera.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. asks: “Have you thought about doing a purely Canadian issue? I am reading Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (which I am loving) and as happens each time I read a less-than-superstar Canadian writer, I feel frustrated by the challenge, even just a few miles south of the border, of getting my hands on contemporary Canadian writing. When I do, I sense that I am missing out on a world of delights and discoveries.” — Challenge accepted! Not sure when I'll get to it. In the meantime, do any of you Clamorites have suggestions?

• Reader M., in appreciation: “Bill Bryson is so eloquent on–everything. He’s probably pilloried by the experts, as all my favorite writers seem to be, but somehow I don’t care.”

• Reader K., in tears: “Stutterer was fantastic. I teared up. And I never do that! Thanks for sharing it.”

• Reader C., with an addition: “I was moled over to see Mole Day featured today. Other readers might like to know that every Mole Day has a theme. This year’s was ‘The Periodic Table of the EleMOLEments,’ which is even more lame than my own pun. But some of the past themes have been fun.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

It’s time for our annual pledge drive—just kidding! But it is my birthday (seriously), so if you want to give me a gift—and you’re still subscribed on purpose—I’d be grateful if you’d share Katexic Clippings with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs, snail mail and CB radio. Or buy me a Nakaya Decapod Writer Aka-tamenuri with two-tone flexible medium nib…but sharing a link is way easier.

WORK

“As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?’ It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.”

—Bill Bryson
—from A Short History of Nearly Everything

WORD(S)

retund. verb. To weaken or diminish. To repress, repel or refute. To drive back. From classical Latin retundere (to dull, blunt, repress, quell), from post-classical Latin (to refute).

“How then might shield, or breast-plate, or close mail Retund its edge?” (Robert Southey)

“…the air being variously impregnated, sometimes more and sometimes less, with vapours and exhalations fitted to retund and intercept the rays of light…” (George Berkeley)

“[The skull] is covered with skin and hair, which serve … to quench and dissipate the force of any stroke that shall be dealt it, and retund the edge of any weapon.” (John Ray)

WEB

1. “This is one day’s observations from Himawari–8, a Japanese weather satellite, animated in a loop. It shows the western Pacific, Australia, and parts of Asia, Antarctica, and Alaska as they looked on one day in mid–2015. It covers 24 hours in 12 seconds—a time lapse factor of 7,200×.” → Glittering Blue + A New and Stunning Way to See the Whole Earth

2. Oh, Merdle! → What the Deuce: The Curse Words of Charles Dickens.

3. Squick!, which leads me to the Wisdom of Repugnance, coined in 1977 in an article on cloning by Robert Klass, which is broken down clearly and logically by Don Berkich.

4. A powerful, lavishly illustrated story → Photographer Documenting the Homeless Discovers Her Own Father Among Them

5. On Not Reading shows that even a Dean at Yale like Amy Hungerford can be, as Shakespeare coined it, a lack-brain. Tom LeClair gives her proudly ignorant manifesto the thrashing it deserves.

6. The Fascinating Story Behind Why So Many Nail Technicians Are Vietnamese (hint: it involves Tippi Hedren and it was no accident).

7. Literary award offers $100,000 for books which have yet to be written

8. The Guide to Digitized Natural History Collections should keep your browser busy for a while.

9. A “radical burger joint” in Watts makes for an intriguing story of culture, food and conflict. → The People’s Cheeseburger

10. Today from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. it is Mole Day, commemorating ► Avogadro’s Number (6.02 x 10²³ – get it?), a basic unit of measurement in chemistry. If your chemistry skills are rusty, it’s basically this: one mole of any substance contains Avogadro’s Number of molecules or atoms of that substance. I can’t tell you how many times this tidbit has come in handy in my life. Also, today is the birthday of myself and, more importantly (literally and figuratively), my Grandma Lori…happy birthday, us!

WATCH/WITNESS

Stutterer, an Oscar-winning short film by Benjamin Cleary, is well worth 13 minutes of your time. The film is described in the New Yorker:

“…a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood. Greenwood stutters, to the extent that verbal conversation is difficult. When he tries to resolve an issue with a service representative over the phone, he can’t get the words out; the operator, gruff and impatient, hangs up. When a woman approaches Greenwood on the street, he uses sign language to avoid talking. But in his thoughts, which we hear, he does not stutter. And when he chats online with a woman named Ellie he can express himself freely, and is casual, charming, and content. When Ellie writes that she’s coming to London, he panics. How he navigates her visit provides the film’s narrative and emotional suspense.”

WHAT!?

This sign is just one of many found browsing the delightful Ask MetaFilter thread: “Looking for emphatic warnings against really bad ideas”.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader V.: “Thanks for the link to the article on driverless cars and the trolley problem. I’d never considered that conundrum in this context. Suddenly that philosophical chestnut is invigorating and not a little terrifying.”

• Reader C. adds: “Sandel’s ‘Justice’ video series is very well done. But I can’t be the only reader who shivered a bit at some of the questions and comments by the students, our best and brightest!?”

• Reader B. writes of the last issue: “Such a rich cargo in this one.” — Why thank you, kind sir!

• And then Reader B. has thoughts and questions: "1: do people use fustian to suggest ‘fusty’? ¶ 2: I am heading back to Malta in January, and will check on “M’hawnx min ibul ma saqajk!”. The language is definitely curious to listen to, tonally a mix of Italian and Arabic. ¶ 3: that Awl piece is splendidly barbed, ‘spending hours of your spare time plowing through some dense and symbol-laden carnival of affectation and ambiguity only makes you resentful of the publishing industry that pushed the book on you in the first place…’ — Re: fusty and fustian: the roots don’t appear to be connected, though usage might conflate them. I take fusty as meaning stale, old or obsolete rather than the bombastic fustian.

• Reader P. also enjoyed The Awl link: “It’s funny because it’s true.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”

—Oscar Wilde
—from The Picture of Dorian Gray

WORD(S)

fustian /FUS-chən/. adjective or noun. A pompous, bombastic style of writing or speaking. Also, a coarse family of twilled fabric that includes moleskin, velveteen and corduroy. From Old French fustaigne, from Medieval Latin fustaneum (staff, stick, cudgel), a loaned translation of Greek xulinos (made of cotton).

“He could remember how he had once stood on the heath and put that same brass telescope to his eye and seen a man in white fustian on the gallows at Dorchester.” (Virginia Woolf)

“Yashar Kemal’s most recently translated novel comes through the language barrier disconcertingly like a sword-and-sorcery romance. Not only the style, with its magic touch of fustian (‘I am Gazele, the gazelle-eyed, take my eyes, they are yours’) but the content suggests a picturesque never-never world.” (Angela Carter)

“Lest I should think the tailoring business lacked poetry he dazzled me with a recitation of fabrics — bombazine, brocade, calico, dimity, duck, flannelette, fustian, muslin, sateen, velveteen.” (Beryl Bainbridge)

“Betjeman stuck with the more fustian [publishing] house of John Murray because, as a cultural conservationist dedicated to the preservation of a vanishing England, he didn’t want his books to look modern at all. He didn’t want a front cover showing nothing but a typeface: he wanted little drawings of herbaceous festoons and time-honoured architectural doodahs…” (Clive James)

“Although Burton disclaims ”big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Alcestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit … elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies etc. which many so much affect,“ he employs all of these devices in a great phantasmagoria of prose. It is an opéra bou fe of paraphrase and quotation…” (Peter Ackroyd)

WEB

1. “136 recipes over 12 chapters, specially illustrated by Dali, and organized by meal courses, including aphrodisiacs.” → Salvador Dali’s Rare Surrealist Cookbook Republished for the First Time in over 40 Years. Thanks, Reader M.!

2. The fascinating history of movable type in China…400 years before Gutenberg. → Johannes Gutenberg was not the father of printing so much as its midwife

3. “M’hawnx min ibul ma saqajk!”

4. For those of us who don’t have $625 to spare (or $300 for a used copy), behold Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online. Headword search, definitions and etymologies are free, advanced search tools (including the ability to search for words by meaning, history, and usage), full historical citations in each entry, and a bibliography of over 9,000 slang sources for $60 per year. See also: an interview with Green on Wordnik and the Quartz story “This man has spent 35 years compiling entries for a 132,000-word online slang dictionary that you can search for free.”

5. “Why the F*%k Would I Waste My Time Reading Literary Fiction If It’s Not Going To Give Me An Edge In The Mental Cognition Game?”

6. I’m revealing one aspect of my peculiar nerdery here, but…you might enjoy Your Postal Podcast, “a monthly podcast highlighting USPS news, events and activities.”

7. In Cinephilia & Beyond—an epically good site that I can’t believe I’d never come across before—a jaw-droppingly great piece on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Via Reader A.

8. Driverless cars are colliding with the creepy Trolley Problem. An old article, but—as it always does—the famous Trolley Problem get me thinking. Then a Facebook friend reminded me of the wonderful video series ► Justice with Michael Sandel that delves into this and many other philosophical conundrums. See also: the Justice web site including community discussion forums that one can hope are better than the YouTube comments.

9. The Blind Photographers

10. Today in 1854, playwright, poet, novelist, essayist Oscar Wilde is born in Dublin, Ireland. Known for his sharp wit—fairly characterized as both razor and rapier—Wilde authored required reading for page and stage, most famously The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, along with a seemingly endless stream of epigrams and one-liners. Not one to shy away from controversy, Wilde would attempt to sue the wife of a homosexual lover for libel only to see the evidence her side dug up used against him. Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for “gross indecency,” an experience from which he never really recovered, though it inspired two more important works, “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, written from self-imposed exile in France. Wilde would die destitute in a Paris hotel at just age 46, saying on one of his last forays outside of his room, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” For more on Wilde’s life, I highly recommend Richard Ellmann’s unsurpassed biography.

WATCH/WITNESS

XKCD: Fashion Police & Grammar Police

WHAT!?

► Schwarzwälder Schinken — Genuss auf meine Art!

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S.: “Am I the only person blushing over trying to need umop apisdn upside down on an iPad?” — Only if you rotated your iPad more than, say, twice…

• Reader B.: “Bravo for another fine one!” — Why, thank you, fine sir!

• Reader J.: “I don’t think Chaudhury has watched enough television to really know what he’s talking about (this, if it’s an insult, is certainly a lightweight one). There are great word-and-syntax spinners/twisters on the tube, and even (though rarely, and usually Tilda Swinton) in the movies, and it’s not always ironic. Check Deadwood—you’ll die bingeing!”

• Also from Reader J.: "By the way, I’m not sure if you’ve ever covered this, but (as I’m sure you know), Hartford celebrates the ‘Wallace Stevens Walk’ (the route he took to work every day) with a series of marble pieces on each of which is engraved one of the thirteen ways. When I was up there last summer I’d just stopped at the Dickinson house in Amherst, then the Twain and Stowe houses in Hartford, and capped it off by attempting the Stevens Walk, taking photographs of the stone as we proceeded. (Only ‘attempted’ because my girlfriend’s sneaker came apart on stone 7, or was it 8? I suspect that, weary of holding the foliage back so that I could take three shots [always bracket!] of the rocks, she ripped up her own shoe.) ¶ In any case, at about that time I realized that there must be loads of such photos on the web, and I was right. Anyone who wishes can look up ‘Wallace Stevens Walk’ and see what a verse of ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ looks like hammered into a chunk of marble. ¶ And for anyone too lazy to google, here’s one of my own:

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

Sir, —Stephen Halliwell is right to defend his use of the “standard” translation “wide-arsed” for an adjective in Aristophanes. This rendering is vivid and faithful to the Greek compound word it translates. However, it may be possible, by a slight modification, to take account of Simon Goldhill’s objection that this translation misleadingly connotates a fat, not a repeatedly buggered, fundament. I have wondered before whether ambiguity may be removed by translating Aristophanes’ work with the less subtle, but more expressive, “arse-widened”.

—N.J. Sewell-Rutter
—from TLS: The Times Literary Supplement

WORD(S)

coffle (kaffle) /KAW-fəl/. noun. A train or chain of humans or animals, usually slaves. From Arabic qāfilah (caravan).

“Before sunrise she hear them—one, two, three hundred foot hitting the ground and rumbling like slow thunder. They used to wake her and scare her so much that she thought they was a militia marching to hell. The slave coffle.” (Marlon James)

“You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, ‘you know we raised you as we did our own children.’ Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping-post? Did you raise them to be driven off in a coffle in chains?” (Jermain Loguen)

“Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself in the privacy of his very own home and skull, then TV’s ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cojones will be broken.” (David Foster Wallace)

WEB

1. If I were a rich man, one of these would be mine. → Inside the New York Public Library’s Last, Secret Apartments

2. Awesome photo series and story, shared simply and directly. → I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa.

3. I’ll have the ampersand pizza…and tattoo. → Miscellany № 77: amperbrand.

4. I’m not sure I’m buying what they’re selling even though I’m watching. → Why television writing has become the new home of verbal complexity

5. Is “Snarxism” a thing? Is it killing conversation? → The Snarxist Temptation

6. @DeepDrumpf is a Twitterbot from an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) postdoc that uses neural networks trained on Donald Trump’s speeches and debate language to create Tweets that are sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing. Pair (or rinse your palate) with @AMightyHost, which uses data sources including WordNet and Wikipedia to invent new fleets inspired by the catalog of ships in The Iliad.

7. It hurt me more than it hurt them… → Kids Are Judgmental, Morally Pure Little Jerks

8. America’s Workforce Runs on Uppers

9. On CBC’s q, an episode in which graphic designer Christopher Rouleau and writer Anne Trubek discuss the question Is handwriting obsolete in the digital age? Also, Every Day Commentary writer Anthony Sculimbrene takes issue with Trubek, Trubek responds and then Sculimbrene has one more go.

10. Today is Leif Erikson Day in the United States, as established by the US Congress in 1964. Believed by many to have landed in North American more than 500 years before Columbus, Erikson established a settlement in an area he called Vinland (named after the abundance of grapevines found there) that was likely in the north of Newfoundland (though Cape Cod makes a persistent claim as well…and why not?). October 9 marks not any particular day of Erikson’s life, but the arrival of the Restauration in New York City, commencing the first organized immigration from Norway. Leif Erikson day is a state holiday in seven US States including, naturally, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

WATCH/WITNESS

Walk around in a 3D splendid house from the ancient Pompeii

WHAT!?

Edward Barton - I’ve Got No Chicken But I’ve Got Five Wooden Chairs. Barton had a minor hit in the 80s with a strangely memorable unaccompanied singing of one of his poems by Jane Lancaster, then his girlfriend, now a Nia instructor. Note: the odd Japanese Kleenex ad that eventually brought me here could’ve been a WHAT!? entry on its own.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. was the first, but not only one, to correct me: “Stevens and Frost weren’t at all chummy—Stevens said Frost spun yarns, and Frost said Stevens made ‘bric-a-brac’ —but it was Hemingway Stevens brawled with in Key West. I do wish I could have been there with a smartphone.” — You are correct, of course. Why I thought Stevens punched both of them, I do not know.

• Reader F. was first of a few with another correction: “‘The supreme fiction…flickering’ oh, yes, Wallace is the only book I would have on a desert island or anywhere else. I carried my paperback of The Necessary Angel everywhere during my travel/consulting days. […] but re the Faulkner bit… ‘about he,’ etc.??? How did that get by your eagle eyes?” — An editing/moving/pasting error of the worst kind…because no one will believe that’s what it was!

• Reader N. celebrates Wallace Stevens too: "Thank you for featuring Wallace Stevens. I am going to celebrate this week by posting a poem every day about Wallace Stevens, including one by Berryman. — I’m guessing it will be the Dream Song with “he crowed good / that funny money man?”

• Reader C. shares a word: “A while back you wrote, ‘UPSIDE DOWN can be spelled upside down using letters that are right-side up: umop apisdn.’ As it turns out, there’s a word for this: symbiotogram, which is a kind of ambigram.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”

—Wallace Stevens
—from Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

WORD(S)

escharotic /ES-kər-AH-tik/. adjective or noun. Generally, something that tends to form an eschar (a dry crust or scab). Or a drug or caustic substance that does the same. From French escharotique, from Greek escharōtikos, from escharoun (to form an eschar).

“And there’s some yellow gone past its bearings, all underside and protected curl. There’s a yellow sanctified. An escharotic. Hints and tangles.” (Lia Purpura)

“I noted once more how exceedingly thin, sallow and, as it were, escharotic or flaky the flesh of his left wrist and hand in the air appeared.” (David Foster Wallace)

“Lastly, it is widely felt that the remedies do not fit the ailment; that like an escharotic they would destroy sound tissue as well as diseased.” (Alonzo Taylor)​

WEB

1. “A Massive Crowdsourcing Project Is Digitizing Thousands of Coded Union Telegrams, and Unearthing Astonishing ‘Emails’” → Archiving the Civil War’s Text Messages. There’s more in Slate, including an example of a coded and decoded message. [Thanks, Reader C.!]

2. Last summer we shared a bit about the Lituya Bay Megatsunami. Now, via Reader B., comes Damn Interesting’s fantastic story about that terrifying event.

3. ListiClock tells time using “a BuzzFeed list for every second of every day.” Speaking of lists (and when aren’t I?), here’s a useful Wikipedia List of common false etymologies of English words. And a not-so-useful List of animals with fraudulent diplomas.

4. Jealousy, a fake love letter and a cursing acrostic that fooled the boring biographer…this little gem of a story has it all.

5. Novelist Mauro Javier Cardenas chooses 9 Novels with Really Long Sentences…and not (only) the usual suspects! I imagine you Clamorites could come up with more… [Thanks, Reader B. and Maybe-a-Reader M.]

6. The Hidden Messages of Colonial Handwriting

7. Katexic favorite Marian Call is touring the west coast (of the US). If you can’t make one of those dates, you can always listen to (and purchase) her music on Bandcamp. Bonus: Marian talks a bit about—and performs a few songs with—her typewriter “Madeleine” (named after Madeleine L’Engle).

8. Courtesy of auto complete, play Google Feud.

9. I can already hear the cries of “but it’s not art!” → Amalia Ulman—The First Great Instagram Artist Lives Many Fake Lives

10. Today in 1897, poet and Robert Frost Medal award winner (his 1935 fisticuffs with Frost notwithstanding) Wallace Stevens is born in Reading, Pennsylvania. A Harvard graduate, Stevens spent most of his life working as an insurance company executive and composing, mostly late in life, the poems that would establish him as one of America’s greatest (and poorly imitated) poets and the bane of high school students everywhere, banging their heads against their thick literary anthologies, tormented by visions of jars, blackbirds, ►ice cream and ►the nothing that is.

WATCH/WITNESS

Mike Grier’s short film Dust “is set in a harsh and unpredictable natural environment where people have isolated themselves in an ancient city behind a massive wall. A socially marginalized tracker teams up with a black-market merchant to save the society that has rejected his way of life.”

WHAT!?

I have a bad case…. I bet you thought I was going to add a few views to the 37,000,000+ tallied so far by Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen didn’t you?

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader H. adds a bit about Faulkner, whose birthday we celebrated in the last issue: “Just a minor point. Faulkner had a brother, Bill or Tom who also wrote a novel.” — Indeed! William’s younger brother John wrote a few novels, some short stories and, just before his death, a memoir about he and his more famous sibling.

• Todd Klein objects: “Reader M cries [in a comment last week], ‘Todd Klein’s website is the worst!’ He or she is entitled to that opinion, but the comment is the worst kind of snarking because it is so general. Worst in what way? I might consider changes if I knew. Or not, but millions of views so far have not elicited any similar comment to me directly.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

A few readers wrote about the bad link to the Clyde (and Bonnie) letter. I’ve had broken links in the newsletter before, but that’s the first one ever that was simply the wrong link altogether. Not bad given that Katexic has shared more than 3000 links so far!

WORK

I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from Lolita

WORD(S)

foehn (fohn, föhn) /fən/. noun. A warm, dry wind blowing down a mountain valley, specifically the north side and usually referring to the Alps. See also: katabatic, a wind on the lee, or sheltered side of a mountain. Borrowed from German. From Latin Favōnius (the west wind; a wind god).

“The wind blew from the south: an African wind, a foehn wind that tore the clouds to bits and then was gone.” (Hans Christian Andersen)

“Indeed, if these half-crippled hobblers could still hope to be cured, these rubber-tipped stick-walkers, if Baden could still help them, then my little beginner’s pains must disappear like snow in the foehn, and in me the doctor would see a shining example…” (Herman Hesse)

“…what to do or where to go in order to escape those migraines that troubled one end of him [Rilke] and the hemorrhoids that pained the other; because, if the sirocco and the bora were insufferable at Duino, there was the foehn to make Munich miserable, not to omit most of Switzerland, and his neuroses to ruin the rest.” (William Gass)

“Probably the coldest winter Austria’s had in seventy-nine years, he thought. It always is. Where was the Fohn, that lecherous Lurleian breeze from the Austrian Alps which reputedly caressed the jeweled hair of Danube’s Queen?” (Ellery Queen)

WEB

1. A web meander filled with treasure: a moving memory palace episode about Washington Phillips and a 1920s musician who left 18 tracks and a trail of myth and legend in his wake. For a taste, listen to Phillips’ ►Lift Him Up…and then just try not to listen to the whole playlist.

2. Part of the Washington Phillips mystery was whether or not he played a dolceola, a “fretless zither” that looks like Schroeder’s miniature piano in Peanut. Turns out, he didn’t, but it’s a fascinating instrument. Fun to watch Andy Cohen demonstrate one of those little guys…even more to download (free!) Leadbelly’s Huddie Ledbetter’s Best featuring dolceola accompaniment by Paul Mason.

3. I have zero desire to go to Burning Man. But—wow!—Victor Habchy takes some stependous photographs of the event.

4. Speaking of amazing photography: Voyages follows six photographers to remarkable spots around the world.

5. “…some of their findings run counter to received wisdom about the origins of creativity and how to foster it in human minds” → Scientific American on Where Creativity Comes From.

6. Algorithms Could Save Book Publishing—But Ruin Novels.

7. Listen to a pop song in the style of The Beatles composed (mostly) by an Artificial Intelligence system called FlowComposer. More examples of AI compositions at the links.

8. From American cheese to vaccines: 100 Objects That Shaped Human Health.

9. “I made a troll honeypot on Twitter. It posts opinions on a couple dozen topics, then, when people respond to it, responds at random from a list of 18 possible replies.” » Botsplaining.

10. Today in 1897, writer, terrible postmaster and Nobel Prize laureate William Cuthbert Faulkner is born in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner’s great-grandfather, W.C. Falkner, had not only published a best-selling novel but was also a decorated Civil War colonel, eventually ousted for recklessness. In third grade, Faulkner was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he replied, “I want to be a writer like my great-granddaddy.” We have that desire and the constant penury of his hard-drinking writer’s life—-and the fact that at just 5‘–5“ tall he was refused enlistment during World War I—to thank for some of the finest novels and short stories in the English language. In addition to his literary fiction, Faulker famously moved to Hollywood to write, as he put it, the two types of movie he was familiar with, ”newsreels and Mickey Mouse cartoons," a part of his life fictionalized in the Coen brothers film Barton Fink. Faulkner would write or re-write many screenplays including To Have and Have Not, the only film to have two Nobel Prize winners (Faulkner and Hemingway) associated with it and The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks…rather successful despite both Hawks’ and Faulkner’s claims afterward that they still didn’t know who the murderer was.

…I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

—William Faulkner
—from his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech

WATCH/WITNESS

Composed of more than 17,000 images produced by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, this Time Lapse of the Sun in 4K is incredible, even hypnotic.

WHAT!?

Matt Bucy cut “The Wizard of Oz”—every scene, title and even the fine print—into individual words and arranged them alphabetically, from “a” to “zipper,” creating a strangely compelling film. [Indirectly via Reader B.]

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M.: “Todd Klein’s posters are AMAZING but his website is THE WORST.” — His site didn’t even crack to top 5 of worst sites I was brutalized on the morning I received your comment!

• Reader S.: “The warning [before the Corey Feldman “music” video] wasn’t emphatic enough.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

“Feast Day in the Colonies”

Our three-legged pig has been run over by a hay cart. I use my grandfather’s cleaver to cut the meat from the bone. Even the gristle and fat go into the great iron pot. The sizzle is like the sound of the locusts we eat. The dried vegetables we add look like pieces of shed skin. Gravy is the day’s gift. While we gnarled four squat in the dappled shade, the old woman sings, her voice rasp as an empty bag. The one-eared boy watches from a distance, his eyes glistening like grease.

—Robert Miltner
—from hotel utopia

WORD(S)

agelast /A-jə-last/. noun. One who never laughs; a humorless person. A borrowing from Rabelais’ Middle French agelaste, from Greek agélastos (not laughing).

“But the calumny of certain cannibals, misanthropists and agelasts had been so atrocious and unreasonable that it overcame my patience and I decided not to write another jot.” (Francois Rabelais)

“…a similar confusion underlies the story of one determined Roman ‘agelast’ (‘non-laugher’), the elder Marcus Crassus, who is reputed to have cracked up just once in his lifetime. It was after he had seen a donkey eating thistles. ‘Thistles are like lettuce to the lips of a donkey’, he mused (quoting a well-known ancient proverb)—and laughed. There is something reminiscent here of the laughter provoked by the old-fashioned chimpanzees’ tea parties, once hosted by traditional zoos (and enjoyed for generations, until they fell victim to modern squeamishness about animal performance and display).” (Mary Beard)

“… it is no coincidence that the term ‘agelast’ was most recently revived by Milan Kundera for the apparatchiks of Socialist Czechoslovakia who, if they smiled at an interrogation, did so with a terrible earnestness.” (Charles Martindale)

WEB

1. Behold, the Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine, just one kind of vending machine I’d consider placing in my office. And living room.

2. Some fascinating visualizations of creativity and US cities using Kickstarter project data that both confirm and deny some common sense (and anecdotal) evidence. Dig in!

3. An intriguing letter (in both language and detail) from Clyde Barrow—to former gang member Raymond Hamilton—in Bonnie Parker’s hand, is up for auction. At a $40K estimated price, it’s just a little too rich for me. But you can see and read the letter on the auction web site.

4. Speaking of letters and correspondence: I’m not sure how I missed the amazing looking book Pen to Paper: Artists’ Handwritten Letters from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art until now! See an illustrated review and then just try to resist it. Clamorites interested in handwriting (and “hand-thinkers and hand-folders”) should make the Handwritten site a regular stop.

5. An interview with John McWhorter, on the release of his new book Words on the Move, including notes on language drift and “literally” (literally).

6. I’m not a massive sports fan, but…this: When a guy comes in ninth and still wins an Olympic medal, you know the drug problem in sport is bad.

7. LOOK/HEAR “explores the relationship between scenes and soundscapes, looking and hearing. A system of aural and visual signals generates shifting typographic forms and triggers associations about people and environment.”

8. Why Is the Basic Marble Notebook Made by So Many Brands Still So Popular?. Since 1886!

9. Take a minute to check out these mesmerizing and varied examples of How Mapmakers Make Mountains Rise Off the Page.

10. Today in 1851, the first issue of The New-York Daily Times (later to become simply The New York Times) is published, selling for just one penny. Originally a Monday-Saturday publication, the NYT would add a Sunday edition in April 1861 to accommodate US Civil War news. In 1914, the NYT—now famously branded with publisher Adolph Ochs’ jab at the salacious newspapers being printed by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer: “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—would become a global newspaper thanks to dirigible delivery to Europe. Known today both for its journalistic qualities and its forays into technology from its web presence and archives to its paywall, the NYT reported in 2013 that revenue from subscriptions eclipsed that from advertising for the first time in many decades. For all of its relative prominence online and in social media, the NYT isn’t even the highest circulation newspaper in the United States (it lags behind both USA Today and The Wall Street Journal), much less globally, where it is just inside the top 40.

WATCH/WITNESS

Todd Klein is an amazing letterer, artist and calligrapher who has worked with the likes of Neil Gaiman and Allan Moore. Click through for more and better views of his works…and prints for purchase if you’re so inclined. [Thanks, Reader B!]

WHAT!?

For the (many!) in the Clamor who avoid social media, here’s the musician personality of Corey Feldman “performing” on the Today show. There are some sadnesses you just can’t unsee. You have been warned.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C. on zibaldones: “Zibaldone! I assigned that as the major project for my creative writing class: 60 pages for the semester (easy) filled with illustrations of any kind, recipes, poems, etc. References included a certain Chris Lott’s online Commonplace Book. ¶ I wish this article had been available then. I have never not done one…just did not know there was a name for them.”

• Reader B. on dakhma(s): There’s a tower of silence sequence in Pynchon’s Against the Day. ¶ A character rides into a scary western town, and finds, first, corpses hung from telegraph poles. Then:

“[w]hen the townsfolk of Jeshimon ran out of telegraph poles back around 1893, trees being scarce out here, they turned to fashioning their arrangements out of adobe brick. Sophisticated world travelers visiting the area were quick to identify the rude structures with those known in Persia as ‘Towers of Silence’—no stairs or ladders, high and steep-sided enough to discourage mourners from climbing, no matter how athletic or bent on honoring their dead—living humans had no place up top…”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

A further curiosity is that the bibliomaniac invariably must then set out on another quest for a great book as soon as his anxiety returns. The quality of the boasting, the constant search for new conquests, and the delight in recounting the tales of acquisition and success bring to mind the activities of the hypersexual male hysteric who must constantly reassure himself that he has not been castrated. It seems germane to this point that Casanova, after his many amatory adventures, settled down as a librarian in the castle of Count Waldstein at Dux, in Bohemia.

—Nicholas Basbanes
—from A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

WORD(S)

malison /mal-i-zən/. noun. A curse. A malediction. The opposite of a benison. From Old French maleiçon (curse, to speak ill).

“What think you of it, Florian? do I chase
The substance or the shadow? will it hold?
I have no sorcerer’s malison on me…”
(Alfred Lord Tennyson)

‘That sort of stuff is useless,’ the photographer ventured—reasonably, lest one of Maitland’s deep Latin malisons extend the curse to his exposure-meter. (Thomas Keneally)

“Woe upon woe; from days of old some god
Laid on the race a malison, and his rod
Scourges each age with sorrows never ending.”
(Sophocles, trans. by Francis Storr)

WEB

1. The harrowing, moving story of the not-so-forgotten “Falling Man” of 9/11.

2. An amazing 35-minute “paraphrase” of Blade Runner composed of 12,597 aquarelle (water colored) frames.

3. Some of Rolling Stone’s 20 Great Hip-Hop One-Liners really are rather clever.

4. The Write Stuff: How the Humble Pencil Conquered the World

5. From Reader C. comes news (and a review) of a “choose your adventure” app that riffs on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. » A Midsummer Night’s Choice. Side note: I own paper copies of the two Ryan North “choose your adventure” versions of Shakespeare mentioned at the head of the review: Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. I haven’t used the versions yet, but I highly recommend the books.

6. This makes me a little queasy. → Beer to be made from yeast swabbed from Roald Dahl’s writing chair

7. “…a documentary portrait of artists, writers, and collectors who remain steadfastly loyal to the typewriter as a tool and muse […] movingly documents the struggles of California Typewriter, one of the last standing repair shops in America dedicated to keeping the aging machines clicking […] a thought-provoking meditation on the changing dynamic between humans and machines, and encourages us to consider our own relationship with technology, old and new, as the digital age’s emphasis on speed and convenience redefines who’s serving whom, human or machine?” → California Typewriter

8. How to Keep a Zibaldone, the 14th Century’s Answer to Tumblr

9. Choose your tagline: “I’ll take one with extra cheese and norovirus” or “Burrito Drone is the name of my new band.” → Alphabet and Chipotle Are Bringing Burrito Delivery Drones to Campus

10. Today in 1792, in the early days of the French Revolution, the 45.5 carat Hope Diamond—one of the most famous jewels in the world—is stolen while King Louis XVI and his family are in prison. The Hope Diamond, which was cut from a much larger stone called The French Blue that was among those worn by Marie Antoinette, would reappear in the early 1800s; King Louis XVI didn’t fare as well…he was brought to the guillotine just a few months after the diamond disappeared. The blue/violet color of the diamond is due to trace amounts of boron. Though supposedly cursed—and there have been quite a number of brutal murders, suicides and other deep misfortunes among the various owners of the gem—Harry Winston, the diamond’s final owner, mailed it to the Smithsonian in a brown paper bag for $2.44 in postage and later died peacefully of old age.

WATCH/WITNESS

Detail from Annie Vought’s hand-cut paper art and typography piece “I am Crossing an Ocean, With 2 Others On a Piece Of Paper.” Browse more in Annie’s Cut Paper gallery.

WHAT!?

Ballet Zoom’s “Cats”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. on whether listening to audiobooks is a kind of cheating: “No! […] As the author states ‘For difficult-to-understand texts, prosody can be a real aid to understanding.’ It was true for me. After many years of false starts, I was unable to get through Joyce’s Ulysses. Then I listened to it unabridged on CD, a splendid experience.”

• Also from Reader B.: “With regards to the Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter article, Ms Trubek is talking about the end of the holograph and all the subtle significance handwriting carries. We will lose the ephemeral expressions of the writer that makes original artwork, like that of the painter, distinct and unique.”

• Reader A. on 100 years of stop-motion in three minutes: “I was almost ready to protest a lack of Wallace and Gromit, but did get a thin cheese slice (no Gromit, tho).”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

A bigger issue for you today since last weekend was spent preparing to launch the concīs Summer Season anthology (which any of you who like poetry, prose poetry or flash fiction should read).

WORK

“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.”

—Richard Wright
—from Black Boy

WORD(S)

dakhma (dokhma) /DOK-ma/. noun. A raised circular structure, or tower, upon which Zoroastrians place the bodies of their dead to be consumed by vultures. AKA a “Tower of Silence.” From Persian dakhmak (funeral place).

“Alexander promptly ordered the dakhmas, or Towers of Silence, to be closed.” (H.G. Rawlinson)

“When Joseph dies, his body will be placed in the dokhma, and the three-day ceremonies too will be permitted. Whether he’s had a navjote or not…” (Cyrus Mistry)

“In a dream I saw him. Like Opi’s mother he had no lips, and also like her, he was on the dakhma.” (Rebecca Kanner)

“The first corpse brought to a new tower—‘dakhma’—must be the body of the innocent child of a mobed or priest. No one, not even the chief watcher, is allowed to approach within a distance of thirty paces of these towers. Of all living human beings ‘nassesalars’—corpse-carriers—alone enter and leave the ‘Tower of Silence.’” (Helena Blavatsky)

WEB

1. The Oatmeal (with an assist from Augusten Burroughs) nails it again. → How to be Perfectly Unhappy.

2. Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter. Wait, Oh Yes it Does!

3. A barely literate prisoner with a dictionary and a Mario Puzo novel teaches himself to read then finds (many!) errors in—and becomes friends with the editor of—Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Another great episode of the Criminal podcast.

4. Some fascinating Lincoln links [must resist bad puns]: The Blood Relics From the Lincoln Assassination and the amazing story of the 1901 exhumation of Lincoln’s body.

5. You abso-effing-lutely should read The Dexterous Tongue’s explanation of English Expletive Infixation!

6. Before the computer, there was something almost as complex: the Chinese typewriter.

7. Kurt Vonnegut’s only play—Happy Birthday, Wanda June—is underrated. It’s funny and full of outrage. And despite not being much of an opera listener, I’m intrigued by the idea of the Indianapolis Opera adaptation. Among other videos at the link, this ►workshop performance clip. [Thanks, Reader J.]

8. Is Listening to an Audio Book “Cheating?”. Cognitively, the short answer: mostly not.

9. Apparently, a company has successfully trademarked the contraction “should’ve.”. I’ll let that one speak for itself.

10. The Nod Travel Pillow makes a ton of sense…but could I bring myself to actually use it?

11. Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

12. Hindsight is…well, you know. → The Good Old Days? 12 Crazy Vintage Ads That Prove We’ve Come A Long Way

13. Get Lost in the Stacks of These 10 Beautiful University Libraries

14. Starved, tortured, forgotten: Genie, the feral child who left a mark on researchers. See also, the Nova documentary ►Genie: Secret of the Wild Child (transcript here).

15. Today in 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deploys the National Guard to intimidate the “Little Rock Nine”—nine black students scheduled to enter the all-white Little Rock Central High School—and support the protesting segregationists. I wish this sounded more outlandish. The action, and the polarizing photos, would lead to fiery national debate in what became a seminal moment in the history of the civil rights movement. Coincidentally, on this same day in 1908, novelist, essayist and poet Richard Wright was born just outside Natchez, Mississippi. Wright’s work, including the powerful novels Native Son and The Outsider, would be a significant force in race relations and civil rights in the United States and, after his permanent move to France, around the world.

WATCH/WITNESS

►Over 100 years of stop-motion animation in three minutes.

WHAT!?

Inside London’s Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History where, among other exhibitions, you’ll find massive hairballs, bladder stones, shrunken heads, cat skulls, the skeleton of a Fijian merman, “Russell Brand’s Pubes” and celebrity poo. See also: ►One Day in The Life of Viktor Wynd - National Geographic Documentary.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. was close to the Godunov action: “…days after his defection, the Bolshoi Ballet travelled to Chicago, which is where I saw their performance of Spartacus with my ex-wife. The ballet aside, what I remember most were the bulky men in dark suits who guarded the edges of the stage to prevent other dancers from ‘escaping’. There was also a loud argument in Russian, a violent woman’s voice complaining somewhere behind us, where spotlights were being operated. It went on and on, often louder than the orchestra. A pity I don’t understand Russian.”

• Reader T. on Spurious Correlations: “I would be surprised if there weren’t a lot of things correlated with Nicolas Cage’s activities on this planet.”

• Another Reader B. on ‘acedia’: "This one had some good timing, as its focus on acedia met with my watching the film Melancholia. ¶ I tried to escape both with the same director’s previous film, Antichrist. Maybe it’s time for some cartoons instead.

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

Certainly the most destructive vice, if you like, that a person can have—more than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins—is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred’s a subset of self pity and not the other way around, “It destroys everything around it, except itself.”

—Stephen Fry
—from BBC 4 Interview

WORD(S)

acedia /ə-SEE-dee-ə/. noun. Listlessness, torpor, deep malaise, a distaste for the obligations of life or religious practice, the sin of sloth. As Thomas Aquinas put it, a “sorrow of the world.” See also: weltschmerz. From Greek akēdeia (negligence, apathy).

“But for sloth,” said Sir Gawaine. “A tendency towards acedia is his only weakness.” (Thomas Berger)

“Mysteries intrigue her, arrogance depresses her, and she enjoys a drink rather oftener than a doctor might recommend. She is given to occasional bouts of acedia, a sin not encountered in the Ten Commandments; the purpose of life now and then evades her grasp.” (Amanda Cross)

“Hours of acedia, pencil on the desk
coffee in a cup, ash-tray flowing
the window closed, the universe unforthcoming,
Being ground to a halt.”
(John Berryman)

WEB

1. “Sting’s brain scan pointed us to several connections between pieces of music that I know well but had never seen as related before…” → Don’t scan so close to me: McGill researcher scans Sting’s musical brain. Also: the full paper, “Measuring the representational space of music with fMRI: a case study with Sting”. Thanks, Reader M.

2. Book Critics vs. Food Critics.

3. Bryan Alexander—futurist, writer, teacher and fellow bookworm—is rounding up a near-future science fiction reading group of sorts. Strong readers, loosely joined, with great book choices so far. Join in!

4. Following on our earlier link to the Mother Jones expose on private prisons comes news that the Justice Department will stop using them.

5. “Stationery options are so plentiful that a designated paper concierge is on hand to advise customers on selecting the just-right weight, texture, shade, sheen, and thickness.” → A 100-year-old Japanese stationery store lets customers design the perfect, custom notebook

6. From heavy metal bassist (including appearance in the cult film Heavy Metal Parking Lot) to devout Hasidic luthier. → The story of Z.Z. Ludwick.

7. A lagniappe: (with the right font), UPSIDE DOWN can be spelled upside down using letters that are right-side up: umop apisdn

8. The Long History of Olympic Typography: A Debate

9. These Surreal Ancient Alchemy Manuscripts Are Terrifyingly Cool

10. Today in 1979, Alexander Godunov—principal dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet and well-known (in the USSR) actor—defects to the United States while on tour in New York City. Godunov’s defection would indirectly spark an international incident when his wife and fellow dancer, Lyudmila Vlasova, was detained at the airport until U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev intervened and Carter was convinced she was returning willingly. Godunov would serve as principal dancer for American Ballet Theater, which was directed by his friend and fellow defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, and then play a few well-known roles, including a memorable turn in Peter Weir’s film Witness and battling with Bruce Willis in Die Hard. In 1987, Godunov became an American citizen, celebrating with a burger stuffed with caviar. Sadly, Gudonov’s life was cut short by complications from hepatitis and alcoholism. He died in 1997.

WATCH/WITNESS

It looks like embroidery, but Jasmin Sian’s art is composed of ink, graphite and cut-outs from paper lunch bags. Click through and then zoom in. Amazing. [Thanks, Reader S.!]

WHAT!?

A sample from the Spurious Correlations site. Plenty more there. And in the book.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K. on the strange story of Robert Kennicott: “I love the idea of a collector who became collected, like a macabre iron-colored butterfly, pinned somewhere in the bowels of the Smithsonian!”

• Reader T. on Hip Hop Vocabulary: “Dang, dat Wu Tang!”

• Reader B. on last week’s WORD: “Now I’m waiting for an alternate history about the Chrisom Trail.” — Oooof.

A few readers had thoughts on Reader M.’s search for a word representing the feeling when “one reads a book, loves it and then goes to reread it and the magic is gone:”

• Reader S. asks: “How about ‘notslogia’?”

• Reader A. ponders: “libraturity? ¶ lost bookolescence? ¶ a state of post-narratopause? ¶ this is hard!”

• Reader J. suggests: "I don’t have an answer for him, but this gentleman just might: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. — Indeed. Love the DoOS.

• The same (audacious) Reader B. who committed the act of punnery earier notes: “‘readgret’ fills me with horror on all kinds of levels. ¶ One critic (can’t find it now) said the opposite was ‘fundability’, the ability to go back to a text and get more out of it another time. ¶ Maybe what you’re looking for is ‘divestibility’”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

Reader M. has a question for all of you: “What’s bothered me for 15 years is one reads a book, loves it and then goes to reread it and the magic is gone. There is no word in the English Language for this. Do you think your followers might come up with something?”

The only thing I could think of was “readgret” but that’s both an ugly portmanteau and not specific enough…

WORK

After he had defeated the Egyptians in battle and accepted their surrender, Harun-in’-Rashid decided to teach his new subjects a lesson. “Egypt’s rulers called themselves gods,” he said, “and so they were arrogant enough to challenge me. Now they will be ruled by the lowest of my slaves,” and he made Khosaib, a stupid negro, Egypt’s new governor. Khosaib, however, was so stupid that when a group of farmers came to him for help because the cotton they’d planted on the banks of the Nile had been destroyed by heavy rains, he replied, “You should have planted wool instead.”

A pious man heard what Khosaib said and recited these lines:

If knowledge were the measure of all wealth,
the ignorant would live in poverty.
Yet here is a man who should be starving,
and his prosperity leaves the wise speechless-
which proves that getting rich is not a skill,
and who knows why God granted him such luck?
It happens: Sages must stand aside like beggars
for stupid men who are given royal robes.
If an alchemist dies bitter in his failure,
know that somewhere a fool found gold in the trash.

—Sa’di (trans. by Richard Jeffrey Newman)
—found in Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan

WORD(S)

chrisom /KRI-zəm/. noun. A child’s baptismal robe (originally a face cloth) or, upon death before 30 days old, a burial shroud. Derived from pronunciation of chrism, a sacramental balm or oil. From Greek khriein (to anoint). See also chrisomes (children who die in their first month of life).

“Mozart’s pain
I heard then, in the cranny of the hurricane,
As since the chrisom caught me up immersed
I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea”
(John Berryman)

“Christening was a festival with apostle-spoons and a white chrisom cloth, basins, ewers, and towels at the parish church.” (Park Honan)

“The place dripped radiance; was filling like a chrisom with radiance.” (A. Merritt)

WEB

1. This week’s link cluster: the brain. First, the fascinating and sad story of Henry Molaison, the “man who couldn’t remember” and the research into—and ultimately custody of—his brain (Thanks, Reader B.!). Then, a unique brain of a different kind, that of the world’s greatest free-climber, Alex Honnold, who essentially doesn’t feel fear (I become nauseated watching him climb on video). Finally, a glimpse at the plasticity of the brain and a bright future for some victims of paralysis: ‘Brain training’ technique restores feeling and movement to paraplegic patients.

2. And, Reader B. strikes again with CuratedAI, “A literary magazine written by machines, for people.”

3. It just might be that book lovers live longer. But if you’re smart, you should be watching more trashy films. How to find the time? Maybe I’ll just stick with the benefits of being bad-tempered and pessimistic.

4. Which hip hop artists have the largest vocabularies…and how do they shape up against Shakespeare? You might be surprised…

5. The UC Berkeley Chancellor spent $9000 on an “escape hatch” to “provide egress” from student protestors.

6. A nice bit about commonplace books (everyone should keep one!) and a picture of an interesting historical example with hand-cut alphabetical tabs → Commonplace Books and Uncommon Readers [Thanks, Reader C.]

7. A weird case: an artist being sued in order to be forced to claim he is the creator of a painting.

8. The Strangers Project is a collection of over 20,000 anonymous handwritten “journal entries” shared spontaneously by passing strangers. I ask people to write about anything they want—as long as it’s true. [Thanks, Reader G!]

9. American naturalist and Alaska explorer Robert Kennicott’s death was a mystery; 150 years later, his skeleton helped solve it.

10. Today in 1784, Russian fur trader Grigory Shelikhov founds Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island, the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska. From this base, the Russians would explore the Alaskan mainland and assert their claim over the territory they would later sell to the United States for $7.2 million dollars…or two cents per acre.

WATCH/WITNESS

1920’s Surrealist Erotica is Amazingly NSFW. Astonishing photography by Olga Solarics (1896 – 1969) of the Atelier Manassé.

WHAT!?

During the 2004 Olympics in Athens, commentator Mary Carillo put on a segment that started out describing the professional game of badminton…then morphed into a kind of performance art.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. on 17 Maps That Will Change The Way You Look At The World Forever: “This is why everyone needs to own a globe. ¶ …I wrote about how baffled I was by the sun setting pretty much in the north. It freaked me out. I think I wrote you a letter about it, because you are in Alaska and probably don’t think twice about it.”

• Reader A. shares a great map resource: “For the map pile: OldNYC - some 80,000 historic images of New York City mapped to their location. There are ways to participate like notifying of images that are rotated and transcribing notes on the back of photos.”

• Reader F. adds: “Lovers of map links might like this little guy, showing ‘the real value of $100’ in each state.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

My thanks to everyone who shared Katexic Clippings with friends…looks like there’s still a place for this email throwback after all!

WORK

"We’ve described how we treat books; now let’s consider how we read them.

When it comes to reading we grant ourselves every right in the book, including those we withhold from the young people we claim to be teaching.

1. The right not to read.
2. The right to skip pages.
3. The right not to finish a book.
4. The right to reread.
5. The right to read anything.
6. The right to escapism.
7. The right to read anywhere.
8. The right to browse.
9. The right to read aloud.
10. The right not to defend your tastes.

I’ll stop at ten. A nice round figure, that also happens to be the sacred number of the famous Commandments. Except this is a list of things you can do."

—Daniel Pennac
—from Better Than Life

WORD(S)

scrivello /skri-VEL-oh/. noun. A small elephant tusk weighing “less than 20 lb,” according to the OED or “of a small size commonly used for making billiard balls” by Merriam-Webster. Likely from the Portuguese, a variant of escaravelho (pin, peg).

“The horn is a small scrivello with a large oblong hole near the point, so as to act as a speaking trumpet…” (Richard Francis Burton)

“The bits of ivory and related memorabilia that his father had kept—tusk tips, a scrivello—had been scattered…” (John Walker)

“At its conclusion, a fearful uproar is made by the scrivello horns, called Kpwen, the sound being like that of a chorus of lusty jackasses.” (J. Alfred Skertchly)

WEB

1. It’s been a week of maps. Here are some for you to explore. Jerry Gretzinger has spent 30 years mapping the imaginary country of Ukrainia in over 3000 8x10 panels. Back in the real, old world, Old Maps Online indexes more than 400,000 historical maps in libraries around the world. Courtesy of Cornell Library, a collection of “persuasive” cartography, or maps “intended primarily to influence opinions or beliefs.” And a map burning up social media with its perfect combination of hilarious and absolutely unsupported research, What Cost is each State Obsessed with.

2. Learn to fold an origami elephant, help set a record and support a good cause. → #ElephantOrigamiChallenge

3. “The three lost worlds feature beautiful scenery, moving music, and are inspired by Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, Lord Byron’s Darkness, and John Keats’ When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” → Experimental Game Turns Players into Poets and Writers

4. Following a link from a few years ago to PDF editions of Paul Klee’s two Selected Notebooks, now you can browse all 3,900+ pages of Klee’s notebooks online.

5. Braille typography and (conceptual) Braille tattoos

6. Slow cooking. Slow computing. Slow reading. Slow living. Slow TV seems inevitable. → Netflix’s newest show for binge-watching is a real-time knitting marathon

7. Cecilia Levy’s paper art…remarkably delicate art made from old books.

8. I want to live there. → Life Behind the Stacks: The Secret Apartments of New York Libraries.

9. Take a moment to marvel at the 2016 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year winners and honorable mentions.

10. Today in 1934, in United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, U.S. Appeals Court judges Learned Hand and Augustus Hand (cousins and a story in their own right: Augustus had a hand in some of the court’s most famous rulings on censorship and contraceptives, while Learned is the most frequently cited lower-court judge in Supreme Court history) rule that Joyce’s famous novel was not obscene or libidinous and therefore not pornographic. The ruling makes for interesting reading. Really. A bit of the flavor:

“The net effect even of portions most open to attack, such as the closing monologue of the wife of Leopold Bloom, is pitiful and tragic, rather than lustful. The book depicts the souls of men and women that are by turns bewildered and keenly apprehensive, sordid and aspiring, ugly and beautiful, hateful and loving. In the end one feels, more than anything else, pity and sorrow for the confusion, misery, and degradation of humanity. Page after page of the book is, or seems to be, incomprehensible. But many passages show the trained hand of an artist, who can at one moment adapt to perfection the style of an ancient chronicler, and at another become a veritable personification of Thomas Carlyle. In numerous places there are found originality, beauty, and distinction […] Indeed, it may be questioned whether the obscene passages in Romeo and Juliet were as necessary to the development of the play as those in the monologue of Mrs. Bloom are to the depiction of the latter’s tortured soul.”

WATCH/WITNESS

On August 1 every year, the city of Warsaw stops for one minute in remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the 63-day, failed attempt by the resistance to liberate Warsaw from the Nazi occupation. Related recent reading: Diane Ackerman’s book about an amazing story closely connected to the uprising: The Zookeeper’s Wife.

WHAT!?

Spoken word poetry? Performance art? I do not know (and probably couldn’t tell you if I did).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. makes an apt connection: “I used to teach ‘Shortest Way’ alongside ‘Modest Proposal’, and not just for my 18th-cent class. It’s a nice pair to think about authorial intent, satire, and biography.”

• Reader D. enjoyed the WATCH/WITNESS link: ‘Memory Lane’ was wild! And great! Thanks for sharing it. How delightfully creepy!

• Reader G’s comment is apropos today and before…: “ Life is too short to read a badly written book– unless the story is really, really compelling. But still, badly written is painful and I can’t help but wonder if I am damaging my own voice through the exposure. I used to read every book I started, but this year I am more particular and I am actually rejecting them and not finishing them if the beginning sucks.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

As I feared, this newsletter is leaking readers like a sieve. I assume some of the former Clamorites are happy enough with the website. Fair enough. But if you’re so inclined, I’d appreciate you sharing a link to the newsletter with your real life, Facebook, Twitter and other friends: http://ktxc.to/go !

WORK

Mr. Stocks:

A lottery is a taxation
Upon all the fools in creation;
   And heaven be praised,
   It is easily raised,
Credulity’s always in fashion:
   For folly’s a fund
   Will never lose ground,
While fools are so rife in the nation.

—Henry Fielding
—from The Lottery (1732)

WORD(S)

parnel /PAR-nəl/. noun. A prostitute. More specifically: a priest’s mistress (though who’s to say none of those were love matches?). Often seen in the phrase “tender parnel.” Also rendered as pannell, pernel and others. From Pernel, a shortened form of the name Petronilla which was, at one time, a popular feminine form of the name Peter. Beyond that, the etymology is unclear.

Henry Hankovitch, con guítar,
did a short Zen pray,
on his tatami in a relaxed lotos
his mind on nuffin, rose-blue breasts,
and gave his parnel one French kiss
(John Berryman)

Get you to church and have a good priest that can tell you what marriage is; this fellow will but join you together as they join wainscot; then one of you will prove a shrunk panel, and like green timber warp, warp.
(William Shakespeare)

WEB

1. The STRONG LANGUAGE blog is a “Sweary blog about swearing” (NSFW, naturally). Highlights include Mapping the United Swears of America & the followup Sweary maps 2: Swear harder, Donald Trump swears a lot and “More man? Plague, plague!”: How to curse like a misanthrope.

2. Technology killed bookstore chains. Can technology save indie bookstores?

3. The Terrible Beauty of Californian Wildfires, as Seen by David McNew

4. Stick that in your cup and drink it… → InStem study finds cockroach milk is next superfood

5. “Fantasies about the future have a troubling effect on achieving actual goals. If positive thinking doesn’t work, what does?” → Don’t Think Too Positive.

6. “We are reduced to quarter rations and no coffee,” he continued. “And nobody can soldier without coffee.” → If War Is Hell, Then Coffee Has Offered U.S. Soldiers Some Salvation

7. The archives of Randall Munroe’s archives of his What If (Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions) series are a great browse [Thanks, Reader A.!]. I recommended the book a few years ago…and still do!

8. Once all but left for dead, is cursive handwriting making a comeback?

9. The always awesome Atlas Obscura now has a podcast! And don’t forget their forthcoming book.

10. Today in 1703, Daniel Defoe is pilloried (literally, as in the stocks’ harsher sibling), for publishing his pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church in which he satirized Queen Anne’s actions against the non-conformists (“…people in the World, who, now they are unperched, and reduced to an equality with other people, and under strong and very just apprehensions of being further treated as they deserve…”), arguing they should simply be exterminated (“Crucify the Thieves!”).

WATCH/WITNESS

Watch “Memory Lane,” an automaton diorama by Mark Ryden, in action.

WHAT!?

The Energy of Hair [Thanks, Reader T.!, who adds, “it makes me think about Samson, of course…”]

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• I bet Reader M. isn’t alone: “Am I the only one who just doesn’t feel they get as much out of audiobooks as reading to themselves? Or reading aloud to someone else?”

• Reader B. on Frank O’Hara’s “As Planned”: “Loved that poem. Reminds me of Bukowski. ¶ —signed, fellow epeolator.”

• Reader F. also adores O’Hara: “I’ve read Lunch Poems every year for at least 25 years. It never gets old. It never gets tired.”

• Reader K. must know something about my diagram love: “I bet a Venn diagram of Clamorites and Epeolatrists would be nearly 100%!”

• A different Reader B. wants to lose some FOUND: “FOUND Magazine is excellent. The FOUND podcast is OK. But forget the FOUND app.”

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

“As Planned”

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

—Frank O’Hara
—from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara

WORD(S)

epeolatry /ep-ee-OL-ə-tree/. noun. The worship of words. From Greek epos (word) + latreiā worship.

“A long farewell to Marshall McLuhan, most treacherous of clerks and a threat to all who cherish epeolatry.” (The Observer, 1968)

“Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified. Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by nature…” (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

“He never ran into any other visitors, and generally stayed for an hour or two, reading aloud something he knew Mr. Greene, in his arcane epeolatry, would have approved of…” (Erik Hoel)

“I’m a book-bosomed literarian guilty of epeolatry and bibliosmia, which means I ALWAYS have a book with me, I’m educated, and I worship words and smell books.” (Fortified By Books)

WEB

1. I suspect many Clamorites are already fond of Found magazine, which collects “FOUND stuff: love letter, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, receipts, doodles - anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life.” Now, behold the FOUND podcast, which is super enjoyable. The first episode centers around a found letter by a man who wants to become the “Asian Oprah…”

2. Miniature milestone as Russian claims new record for world’s tiniest book

3. Many people talk about music as if it has universal traits. Not so much. “Dissonance” is in the mind’s ear of the beholder. Pair with the podcast episode “The Ballad of Tin Ears”, a fascinating look at tone-deafness (genetic and imagined), and one man’s quest to sing even a little bit better.

4. Welcome to the positive lexicography, an evolving index of ‘untranslatable’ words related to wellbeing from across the world’s languages.

5. 17 Maps That Will Change The Way You Look At The World Forever

6. Datagasm, on "micro-targeted digital porn … pushing human sexuality into some seriously weird places. Pair with the not-porn-but video Orgasm Faces in Slow Motion.

7. Chuck Lorre’s list of words that confuse the CBS censor.

8. “The Strand Bookstore has included a literary matching quiz in its job application form since the 1970s. Here are some quizzes from years past. Can you match the authors and titles? Beware of trick questions.” → Test Your Book Smarts [[Via Reader C. and Reader K.]]

9. Ebook sales drop by nearly 10%; downloaded audio up over 40%!

10. Today in 1911, Hiram Bingham “discovers” Machu Picchu, often (mistakenly) called “The Lost City of the Incas.” Bingham was led to the ruins by Melchor Arteaga, a local farmer, and his 11-year-old son Pablito, who actually guided Bingham along the main ridge. I’m deathly afraid of heights, so mostly content with fabulous books like Mark Adams’ Turn Right at Machu Picchu, in which Adams attempts to re-create Bingham’s original expedition. You, intrepid Clamorite, might want to visit before it collapses…or not. Or just sit back, relax and check out Machu Picchu in 16 Gigapixels.

WATCH/WITNESS

This sloth selfie still owns the Internet.

WHAT!?

Marie Osmond talks Dada and performs Hugo Ball’s 1916 Poem “Karawane”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• From Reader L.: “I welcome YOU back with greedy brain arms. The weird reverse arrows in the WEB section? Not so much.” — As you can see, that was a short-lived experiment.

• Reader B. on private prisons: “A scourge that isn’t going to get better anytime soon no matter who is elected.”

• Many thanks to all the readers who welcomed us back. Please keep comments and suggestions coming!

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

And…we’re back! Did you miss us?

Welcome to the first issue of the new weekly(ish) edition of Katexic Clippings. After more than 300 issues and almost 300,000 clickety-clicks on our links it was time for a change. So here we are, complete with brand new website. I hope my absence made all your Clamoring hearts grow fonder.

WORK

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

—Arthur Schopenhauer
—from Essays and Aphorisms (translated by R. J. Hollingdale)

WORD(S)

tittle /TI-təl/. noun and verb. A point or mark used as a diacritical. For example the dot atop the lowercase ‘i’. In early horn-books, a series of dots (⋰) indicating an omission. More generally, the smallest part. Also to whisper or gossip (see tittle-tattle). From Latin titulus (title, or in the medieval sense a stroke or accent).

“Time on the farm is the time of the wide world, neither a jot nor a tittle more or less, Resolutely I beat down the blind, subjective time of the heart, with its spurts of excitement and drags of tedium…” (J. M. Coetzee)

“Some amusement was elicited in literary circles by the predicament of a woman who was delivered of a son old enough to be her father but it served to deflect Mr. Tracy not one tittle from his dispassionate quest for scientific truth. His acumen and pertinacity have, in fact, become legendary…” (Flann O’Brien)

“—But for heaven’s sake, let us not talk of quarts or gallons —let us take the story straight before us; it is so nice and intricate a one, it will scarce bear the transposition of a single tittle; and some how or other, you have got me thrust almost into the middle of it—” (Laurence Sterne)

“It is now I shall speak of me, for the first time. I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it.” (Samuel Beckett)

“…there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications.” (James Joyce)

WEB

1. My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard ← The clichéd description “searing expose” is fitting. Man’s inhumanity to man.

2. Step Inside the World’s Most Dangerous Garden (If You Dare) ← “…within Alnwick’s boundaries, kept behind black iron gates, is a place where visitors are explicitly told not to stop and smell the flowers: the Poison Garden, home to 100 infamous killers.”

3. I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything ← Way, way more interesting than I expected. [Via Reader C.]

4. I Tried a Medieval Diet, And I Didn’t Even Get That Drunk ← “I drank diluted wine at dinner, and sometimes at lunch; I ate bread at almost every meal; I sought out richly stewed meat whenever I could. The regimen was not just about what to eat, though, and I also followed its prescriptions for daily life.”

5. Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age

6. Analyzing the language of Heavy Metal with Natural Language Processing ← The least metal word? “Particularly.”

7. New Evidence on Van Gogh’s Ear… ← Now with contemporary medical sketches…

8. Candle Flames Contain Millions of Tiny Diamonds

9. This Barista May Be the Best Coffee Artist in the World

10. Today is the third International #Firgunday, in which participants share compliments and pride for others, mostly on social media. If you’re having trouble figuring out what to say, there’s a Firgunator that will help. According to the founders, “Firgun (pronounced FEER-GOON, פרגון), is a Hebrew word that means an act of kindness performed solely to make another person feel good.” Wikipedia says the word “describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other,” or “a generosity of spirit, an unselfish, empathetic joy.” I want every day to be #Firgunday.

WATCH/WITNESS

Idem Paris - David Lynch’s short film on the art of making lithographs

WHAT!?

Exit Mundi: A Collection of End-of-World Scenarios

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Thanks to Reader T., Reader B., Reader R., another Reader B., Reader C. and Reader K. for asking about my unplanned-then-extended hiatus.

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? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/.

WORK

I was struck by what you say in your letter about having been to Nuenen. You saw everything again, “with gratitude that once it was yours” — and are now able to leave it to others with an easy mind. As through a glass, darkly — so it has remained; life, the why or wherefore of parting, passing away, the permanence of turmoil — one grasps no more of it than that.

For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.

—Vincent Van Gogh (translated by Arnold Pomerans)
—found in The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

WORD(S)

demonifuge /də-MON-ə-fyoozh/. noun. Something used to exorcise a demon. More generally, something that can serve as protection from, or ward off, evil spirits. From Latin daemōn (evil spirit, deity, idol) + -fuge, a common method of creating English nonce-words from Latin (e.g. vermifuge).

“…as she turned and the black cape swirled you could see, within, the simple ways the simple shape (legs, hips, haunch, waist) can be made to shine on the reptile eye, and burn on the reptile brain. The glamour: charms, rhombs, wishbones, magic rings -gramarye, sortilege, demonifuge…” (Martin Amis)

“The wood of the peach tree is a demonifuge, and Taoist priests use if for making the seals with which they seal their talismans and amulets.” (Charles Williams)

“Charlotte F. Otten notes that androsaemon (‘man’s blood’) was a real herb, famous as a demonifuge.” (John Leonard) anything

WEB

1. Photo Sleuth: Early Photo Sleuths In the Dead Letter Office

2. A little geeky, but interesting → On creating web sites that exist simultaneously as books

3. Lighthouse Traveling Libraries

4. A neat little gewgaw… → (Audio)Visualizing the Billboard Top 100 since 1956

5. Today is Cinco De Mayo. Celebrated primarily in the United States and Mexico, Cinco De Mayo began as a relatively minor holiday celebrating the Mexican army’s 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War but—like Oktoberfest and St. Patrick’s Day—has become a significant American celebration (often mistaken by we gringos for Mexico’s Independence Day) of Mexican culture. The battle it celebrates, in which 2000 hastily assembled Mexican soldiers defeated more than 6000 French troops was much less important strategically than it was symbolically…and as a rallying point for Mexican morale.

WATCH/WITNESS

Adam Donnely’s Site-Specific Cameras project uses pinhole cameras built from on-site materials to capture images of those places.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. on speed reading: “I could never understand the reason for speed reading: why hurry through what should be a more leisurely activity. Woody Allen said it best about speed reading, ‘I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.’”

• Another Reader B. on ‘Brumal’: “Brumal is a splendid word. Reminds me of the French Revolutionary calendar’s month of Brumaire, which took over the October-November overlap.”

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

Enjoy the WORD(S) section? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/clippings/.

WORK

“Les Fenêtres”

We drive to a window factory and traverse its rooms, the summer night pale as the steeple of a church. Behind each door, you dust locks, turn hinges, dragging your signal flares and your phosphorus glow. A yellow light catches spots in each pane as we count the saints on dim clerestories. Soon I ask, one word at a time, mouthing into the watery dusk: Est-que je ne suis pas une fenêtre? You turn from the work, appalled, our reflections like sand burning into glass. A porous moon stares through the doorframe. The locks say nothing.

—Kristina Marie Darling
—from Scorched Altar

WORD(S)

brumal /BROO-məl/. adjective. Wintry. Belonging to winter. Occurring in winter. From Latin brūmālis (of mid-winter, of the winter solstice); from brūma (winter solstice).

“Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left
the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove
the butterflies home.”
(C.D. Wright)

“This old Venetian fort dying, the flags, the soldiers like bluebells are your landscape, the hot gleet of summer, the fine mucus, or the brumal bear licking her culprits the baby dogfish.” (Lawrence Durrell)

“But we were now in the very heart of winter, and after much frost scarcely a single wretched brumal flower lingered and languished.” (Thomas Hogg)

WEB

1. Here are Dr. Beards’ 100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language. A few of my favorite are on there. What words do you find most beautiful, for whatever reason?

2. Military Flags from the Grammar Wars of the Mid–21st Century

3. Yep…I mostly regret the speed-reading training I took part in when I was young… → The harsh truth about speed-reading

4. This should take care of that craving for a quick burger → There’s Probably Poop in Your Burger

5. Today is International Press Freedom Day, dedicated to the idea that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” And such a day is sadly still needed following one of the worst years for press freedom ever. Related (and depressing) browsing/reading: the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freeedom Index.

WATCH/WITNESS

Watch ►the making of Japanese handmade paper of Kyoto Kurotani. It’s refreshing to watch a master craftsman at work.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. shares a couple of puns (aka paronomasia): “One of my favorites, though not quite precisely exactly a pun (it’s some kind of quantum-entangled syntactical squiggle); but it’s from Townes Van Zandt, so still warms my cockles: ¶ ‘Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.’ ¶ Or a deep cut from All’s Well: ¶ ‘That wishing well had not a body in’t, // Which might be felt…’”

• Reader K. also took up the literary pun challenge: “John Donne was punny. He played on both his own name and that of his wife, Anne More, with his line, ”Thou hast not done, For I have more."

• Reader B. one-ups my Nabokov: “Nabokov loved word play of all kinds, puns included. But Time magazine wins with this headline.”

• Reader C. shares more: "You know Shakespeare was the Pun Master. My favorite comes from the freshly-stabbed Mercutio: ‘ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.’

• Reader N. connects WORD to WORK: “Old but nice: ‘Aftermath’ by Longfellow”

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

Enjoy the WORD(S) section? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/clippings/.

Question…what are your favorite literary puns? Musical puns? Others?

Comment…Shakespeare’s anniversary was last Saturday…expect some Shakey-related links this week.

WORK

i.
he sat
on the edge of his bed
all night

day came
& he continued to sit there

he thought he would never be able
to understand
what had happened

—Robert Lax
—from Love Had a Compass: Journals and Poetry

WORD(S)

paronomasia /pair-on-ə-MAY-zee-uh/. noun. A play with words using words that sound alike but have different meanings. A pun. Perhaps the most famous example in literature are the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York,” in which the “sun” also refers to Richard himself, a son of the house of York. Paronomasia, in fact, can be broken down into five types…which I leave as an exercise for the Clamor. From Latin, from Greek paronomasia (play upon words which sound similarly), from paronomazein (to alter slightly, to call with slight change of name).

A few more examples of (literary) paronomasia:

“You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—” ¶ “Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!” (Lewis Carroll)

“We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

“You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless, of course, you play bass.” (Douglas Adams)

“What is majesty, when stripped of its externals, but a jest?” (Edmund Burke)

And some thoughts on paronomosia, high and low.

“The point of paronomasia is that a mere accidental phonetic relationship assumes the appearance of a semantic relationship.” (Wolfgang Müller)

“Paranomasia: words that are unrelated but sound alike, placed in proximity for the fun or pleasing sound of it. Kissing cousins-in-law, couples that look good in public (or on paper) but aren’t, in fact, compatible. Not croce/crochet (false friends), but a place for the plaice or traditore-traduttore. The heart’s hurt, if you stretch it.” (Rachel Cantor)

“Paronomasia is a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words…” (Vladimir Nabokov)

WEB

1. Which Shakespeare Play Should I See? An Illustrated Flowchart

2. Leaving the clickbait headline intact… → People obsessed with grammar aren’t as nice as everybody else, study suggests

3. The Guardians Shakespeare 400 series is chock-a-block with interesting articles, columns and quizzes.

4. The Medieval Death Bot tweets “real deaths from medieval coroner’s rolls.” [Indirectly via Reader B.]

5. Today in 1859, U.S. Congressman and General Daniel Sickles is acquitted of murdering Philip Barton Key II, son of Francis Scott Key (composer of the “The Star Spangled Banner”), becoming the first person to successfully employ a defense of temporary insanity. Sickles, himself a serial adulterer, had suspected his wife of illicit liaisons before, but she’d successfully denied the accusations until an anonymous poison pen letter arrived…spurring Sickles to force his wife to write out a confession before he ran out and shot the unarmed Key multiple times. Newspapers at the time called Sickles a “hero” for “saving women from Key.”

WATCH/WITNESS

Scanned in its entirety, The First Book of Jazz is a charming little book by Langston Hughes (illustrated by Cliff Roberts).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. has a (sad) point: “‘Aftermath’ is especially grim if we think of its application to mass casualty incidents, with humans being mowed down/under. All flesh is grass, eh?”

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

Enjoy the WORD(S) section? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/

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: http://katexic.com/clippings/.

WORK

• Those that belong to the emperor
• Embalmed ones
• Those that are trained
• Suckling pigs
• Mermaids (or Sirens)
• Fabulous Ones
• Stray Dogs
• Those that are included in this classification
• Those that tremble as if they are mad
• Innumerable ones
• Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
• Et cetera
• Those that have just broken the flower vase
• Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

—Jorge Luis Borges
—classification system for his imaginary Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge

WORD(S)

aftermath /af-tər-math/. noun. Today’s WORD is familiar but its etymology may not be. Aftermath is derived from the Old English math (a mowing, a crop), which combines mow and the suffix -th (a suffix that forms nouns from verbs denoting a process or action) in the same way as the commonplace grow + th does. So aftermath is literally a “second mowing,” which has come to more generally mean consequences or conditions arising from an event, most often an unpleasant one.

“…the certainty and authority that I heard reminded me of the plain, less-than-enthusiastic report of a documentary, which is the tone of voice of those undoubting parts of the Bible. ¶ ‘I NEVER HEAR THE EXPLOSION. WHAT I HEAR IS THE AFTERMATH OF AN EXPLOSION. THERE IS A RINGING IN MY EARS, AND THOSE HIGH-PITCHED POPPING AND TICKING SOUNDS THAT A HOT ENGINE MAKES AFTER YOU SHUT IT OFF; AND PIECES OF THE SKY ARE FALLING, AND BITS OF WHITE-MAYBE PAPER, MAYBE PLASTER-ARE FLOATING DOWN LIKE SNOW. THERE ARE SILVERY SPARKLES IN THE AIR, TOO-MAYBE IT’S SHATTERED GLASS. THERE’S SMOKE, AND THE STINK OF BURNING; THERE’S NO FLAME, BUT EVERYTHING IS SMOLDERING.’” (John Irving)

“…And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly / And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only their infernal aftermath / And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of starlight and zero // ‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars…” (Ted Hughes)

“Sometimes reporters will speak of wanting to spend the night at Puerta del Diablo, in order to document the actual execution, but at the time I was in Salvador no one had. ¶ The aftermath, the daylight aspect, is well documented.” (Joan Didion)

WEB

1. Typewritten Typewriter.writer..ter…

2. Your health tip for the day → Mounting data suggest antibacterial soaps do more harm than good

3. And your mental health tip for the day. → UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet

4. The evidence continues to grow → Taking Notes By Hand May Be Better Than Digitally, Researchers Say

5. Today in 1824, poet, beauty, would-be king of Greece, minor Don Juan and author of the epic poem “Don Juan,” and perhaps the first rock star style celebrity, George Gordon “Lord” Byron, dies of fever and (probably) sepsis in Missolonghi, Greece, where he is planning a siege in support of Greek independence. In his short 36 years, Byron became one of the most admired and imitated poets in England, fathered at least three children (including Ada Lovelace who would become famous as a mathematician and her work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, making her essentially the first computer programmer), had a long series of scandalous affairs with cousins, some famous women (and probably some men) including Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s half-sister and, it is thought, his own half-sister, and became a legend in Greece for his valiant fighting for Greek independence. “Byronic” has come to mean a combination of romance and arrogance, cynicism and darkness—and physical beauty—that is both fascinating and repellent.

WATCH/WITNESS

Enjoy the Jastrow illusion. One of my all-time, mind-bending favorites. See also: some more information and examples.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. suggests: “If you liked Koyaanistocksi, I would like to recommend Samsara.” — I assume you mean the film? In which case I heartily second your recommendation.

• A different Reader B. has his clever cap on: “It’s only ‘aphetic’ for now. Soon it will become merely ‘phetic’.” — I see what you did there…

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