RIP, W. S. Merwin.

WORK

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—W. S. Merwin
—from The Second Four Books of Poems

WORD(S)

kipple /KIP-əl/. noun. Useless, multiplying junk, dross, rubbish. A word that seems particularly useful in our age of endless digital detritus and debris. Commonly attributed to speculative fiction author Philip K. Dick as a coinage in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, this is probably incorrect. It is likely Dick took it from the title of 60s sci-fi fanzine Kipple, a title one less charitable reader had mockingly re-defined as “useless junk.” And that magazine’s editor had himself appropriated the word from an old joke: “Do you like Kipling? I don’t know, I’ve never kippled,” (a joke Dick would re-tell in his later novel Galactic Pot-Healer).

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it.” (Philip K. Dick)

“…the grad students were slavering at the thought of having a bottle-washing dogsbody in residence. Someone to clean out the spam filters, lexically normalize the grant proposals, deworm the Internet of things, get the limescale out of the espresso machine, and defragment the lab’s prodigious store of detritus, kipple, and moop.” (Cory Doctorow)

“Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on.” (William Gibson)

WEB

1. Birding bop. Should I bird or should I go? You get the idea… → Welcome to Birdpunk

2. I think I meant to share this a few years ago but forgot… → Why forgetting is really important for memory: U of T research ※ Also: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past. ※ But, and, because I’m feeling sprawly this morning, “You will not own what you think you will own. You will borrow it. That is raw and beautiful, right now. It’s not sad and hollow.”

3. Check out Raija Jokinen’s wonderful art, created using a technique that fuses “painting, drawing, papermaking, embroidery and textiles [to] explore the borderlines of physical and immaterial feelings.” → Raija Jokinen Works.

4. Thich Nhat Hanh’s final mindfulness lesson: how to die peacefully

5. It seems like it should go without saying that ending an addiction (or addictive behavior) is the first part of a process, not a meaningful activity in itself? → Why beating your phone addiction may come at a cost

6. “According to Elgammal, ordinary observers can’t tell the difference between an AI-generated image and a ‘normal’ one in the context of a gallery or an art fair.” → The AI-Art Gold Rush Is Here ※ Pairs directly with A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist and tastily with The Human Brain Is a Time Traveler.

7. De-platforming was a thing long before social media… → Auden on No-Platforming Pound

8. “Why so many men online love to use ‘logic’ to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they’re wrong.” → The magical thinking of guys who love logic

9. Paper(y)(ish) art links, in no particular order: Vox Poplar (a generative, collaborative project), Chie Hitotsuyama’s stunning art made of rolled and twisted ropes of wet newspaper, Tiffany Miller Russell’s molded, layered paper scenes and portraits, and Calvin Nicholls paper sculptures.

10. Today in 1958, The Champs’ song “Tequila” hits #1 on the US Billboard pop chart. It would be The Champs’—in reality the Danny Flores Trio, who only concocted a name for themselves, inspired by Gene Autry’s horse Champion, after the recording session—only hit. Written by “Chuck Rio” (actually Danny Flores, who used a pseudonym because he was under contract to a different record label at the time), who also shouted the song’s one-word lyric, tequila!, and recorded the memorable saxophone solo, the song was a B-side of an album that had little success and only saw the light of day thanks to a Cleveland DJ.

WATCH/WITNESS

“A Dutch archaeologist finds artisans and thought leaders who are redefining craft, skill and, ultimately, the real meaning of a knowledge economy.” → ► The Future Is Handmade ※ See also, from the same series: ► The Tale of a Women’s Coup, ► The Pen Shaper, ► Mike Snowden builds and plays a cigar box guitar, ► Anthony Bourdain visits Arion Press, and much more.

[Found via The Craftsmanship Initiative, which aims to “shine a light on those reclaiming craftsmanship’s principles of excellence and durability as a pathway to a better world” by highlighting masters at work, facilitating workshops, and producing a quarterly multimedia magazine. A treasure trove!]

WHAT‽

► Casting a Fire Ant Colony with Molten Aluminum

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D.: “Another interesting article about Lisa Smartt, last words, and the like I think the Klamor (yes, I did that) might like: What People Actually Say Before They Die.”

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

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

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

WORK

This is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words and metaphors for what we already know.

—Alberto Manguel
—from “AIDS and the Poet”
—found in A Reader on Reading (2010)

WORD(S)

bampot /BAM-pot/. noun. An idiot; a fool; an obnoxious person. Scottish slang of unknown origin, probably related to Northern English barmpot (a container for storing yeast) and barm (the froth on fermenting malt liquor; the head of a beer) both also used as slang with the same meaning and from which we also get barmy, slang for being mentally unsound.

“What a bampot, as Mrs Baxter would say, but what can you expect from a woman sharing her one brain cell with a poodle on a turnabout basis.” (Kate Atkinson)

“…governments usually tended to be more rational about the disposition of their strategic interstellar deterrents than bampot street performers with a grudge against society and a home brew nuke.” (Charles Stross)

“Hacks never changed much, in any generation. You always got the same complement of trojans, skivers, flakes, whizzkids and bampots.” (Christopher Brookmyre)

WEB

1. Ranging in size from a few millimeters (really) to a few inches, New York City’s Grolier Club is holding an exhibition of more than 950 miniature books. → Behold, the Tiniest of Books

2. Have fun playing with this computeiful inventorface of portmanteaus and rhymes! → Portmanteau & Rhyme Generator

3. This thread about a strangely browsable, occasionally accidentally beautiful compendium. → Helen Rosner: There’s this incredible book…. ※ You can dip into it yourself on Project Gutenberg: Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser

4. As Reader B. puts it, “The concept here is amazing, but I also love the phrases: transient anus, warty comb jelly.” → Animal with an anus that comes and goes could reveal how ours evolved

5. Recently discovered: a book of “literary confessions” with amusing, witty, occasionally cutting handwritten contributions from Virginia Woolf, Virginia West, Hilaire Belloc and others. → Really and Truly: A Book of Literary Confessions (Thanks, Reader C.)

6. This link is everywhere, but for good reason. I find it mesmerizing. → This Person Does Not Exist ※ Pairs with, because…tasty, ironic, weirdness: Man angry his photo was used to prove all hipsters look alike — then learns it wasn’t him, which is based on this research: The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

7. A revealing con that didn’t take nearly long enough! → I Made My Shed the Top-Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor

8. Loving the pictures of Cal Cullen’s typewriter art installation in Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center in this article… → Typewriter repair at the museum. ※ While I’m talking typewriters: if you are in or near enough to Rockford, Illinois on March 29-30, consider checking out the Paper Fingers: Mechanical Typewriting in the Digital Age event.

9. “Don’t worry, the colleague you’ve never met isn’t trying to kiss you over email.” → ‘XX’? But I Hardly Know Her! ※ Related: How “XOXO” Came to Mean “Hugs and Kisses”

10. Today is Mario Day (celebrated on MAR 10 because, written that way, the date resembles MARIO), celebrating the iconic mustachioed Nintendo video game franchise character who debuted as the jumping man in the 1981 Donkey Kong game. Mario Mario (yes, his last name is also Mario, at least according to the IMDB; he was named after Mario Segale, Nintendo America’s landlord, who burst into a development meeting demanding overdue rent) is a busy guy, appearing in more than 200 games, multiple film and TV shows, the 2016 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, and soon amusement parks in Japan and the United States. And that signature hat-and-mustache look? Turns out they were pragmatic choices: the artist found hair difficult to draw and the mustache was easier to see than a mouth, particularly on the low-resolution screens at the time. If all this is too newfangled for you, today is also International Bagpipe Day.

WATCH/WITNESS

► Witness a single cell grow into a salamander, from fertilization to hatching, in this short time-lapse film by Jan van IJken

WHAT‽

I had no idea the maraca could be played like a boss. → ► Compasses Mejor Conjunto Festival San Martin de los Llanos 2013

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C.: “This is a good one about [Dan] Mallory…”

• Reader G.: “Loved your web links this week. Language of letters, communal bathing and Words at the threshold were all very interesting to me. I also wanted to share with you this article about dance, which has recently been something I’m doing and can attest to its positive benefits.”

• Reader T.: “Mr. Sweet Potato looks like a blackface version of Mr. Hankey.”

• Reader B.: “Vacation and unemployed… I think the hero of Eraserhead offers this line a few times. ¶ And I do not mean that Sardonically, but am now very conscious of the way my grin stretches across my mouth bones.” – Well played!

• Reader R.: “Followup for your various versions of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with this must-listen by Marc Martel. They say no one will ever sound like Freddy Mercury. They are wrong.”

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

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

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

No newsletter next week because I will be on vacation. 🏝️ Aloha! ※ Also: did you know it’s possible to go on a vacation and be unemployed?

WORK

You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core.

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C. S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

—Kevin Brockmeier
—from “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device”
—found in The View from the Seventh Layer

WORD(S)

capitonym /KAP-i-toh-NIM/. noun. A word that changes meaning (and sometimes pronunciation) when capitalized, such as August and august, Earth and earth, Polish and polish. A portmanteau of capital + -onym (word or name).

“An herb store owner, name of Herb,
Moved to rainier Mt. Rainier,
It would have been so nice in Nice,
And even tangier in Tangier.”
(Dave Morice)

WEB

1. I love Robyn O’Neil’s large scale (one piece is 14 feet long!) pencil drawings that remind me (and many others, apparently) of Bosch and Bruegel. ※ I actually discovered Robyn thanks to her delightfully conversational, personal podcast Me Reading Things.

2. “Letters reveal how language changes. They also offer a peek into the way people–especially women–have always constructed their private and public selves.” → The Ladylike Language of Letters ※ Also, since InCoWriMo continues: Find a Local Letter Writing Society.

3. “…some of our favourites from the first hundred years of the book cover (as we commonly understand it today)…” → The Art of Book Covers (1820–1914) [Thanks, Reader C.!]

4. Fascinating reading as more and more implications of DNA testing, research and history emerge. → Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths – or Falling Into Old Traps?

5. I want to be snarky about this, but maybe there’s something to the idea… → Why we need to bring back the art of communal bathing

6. Old news, but new to me. And delightful. At least for the dolphins. → Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High ※ See video and more pics: What does a dolphin use to get high?

7. “…we refresh and refresh every tab, and are not sated. What are we waiting for? What are we hoping to find?” → Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction (Yes, I see the irony).

8. “It is engraved with 13 verses from the poem recounting the adventures of the hero Odysseus after the fall of Troy.” → Homer Odyssey: Oldest extract discovered on clay tablet [Thanks to a different, but related!, Reader C.]

9. I haven’t read linguist Lisa Smartt’s Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death (and naturally have my own thoughts on what these words might mean or point to), but it’s fascinating to consider the words people choose in their last moments. → Final Words Project

10. Today in 1876 in Eastport, Maine, Julius Wolff cans the first sardines (in North America, anyway, the earlier history is disputed by avid sardinophiles). Sardine isn’t a specific species, but a name given to a variety of small, oily herring. Canned sardines are an often underrated food both for their taste and nutritional value, but also merit distinction as one of the few canned foods I am aware of that have an active community of enthusiasts (search for yourself and see). And because word nerds need to know, the words sardine and sardonic are most likely related: the former is thought to have come from the island of Sardinia, while the latter derives from a Sardinian herb, Sardonia, which was reputed to “produce facial convulsions resembling horrible laughter, usually followed by death,” leading to sardanios, as seen in Homer to refer to scornful laughter.

WATCH/WITNESS

► Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airports (6 Hour Time-stretched Version)

WHAT‽

Mike Dawes is a one-man band on a single guitar…and reveals beauty within songs you might not otherwise appreciate. Amazing. → ► Mike Dawes - One (Metallica) - Solo Guitar ※ See also, Mike’s version of a wholly different style of song, equally awesome: ► Somebody That I Used To Know - Mike Dawes - Live At Cedars Hall.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D.: “Heya Chris! The image of the film from those 6 oil drums [used to conjure the sound of the end of WWI] is pretty amazing.”

• Reader R.: “Add this chopstick on guitar sampling version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" to you growing collection of Queenly oddities.”

• Reader B.: “The Meghan Daum essay impressed me. I don’t know her, but I’ve been in many of those kinds of conversations.”

• Reader V.: “Love it. Subscribed to the newsletter a few weeks ago, and it has been fun so far. What more could I want? Quotes, words, links. All the best things that the internet offers.”

• Reader N.: “Palaver! From the beginning of ‘The Dead’ by James Joyce: ¶ I love this line: ‘The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.’”

“Tell me. Lily,” he said in a friendly tone, “do you still go to school?”

“O no, sir,” she answered. “I’m done schooling this year and more.”

“O, then,” said Gabriel gaily, “I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?”

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:

“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”

Gabriel coloured, as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.

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

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

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

WORK

I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear this? I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw—the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can’t I say that, Willy?

—Arthur Miller
—from “Death of a Salesman” (1949)

WORD(S)

palaver /puh-LAV-ər/. noun and verb. A conference, dispute or contest (originally, primarily West African). Tedious, time consuming or idle talk or other activity. Loud or confused talk. Flattery. From Portuguese palavra (talk), from Latin parabola (a parable, words, speech). See also: bunk, bunkum, hokum, cajolery, wheedling, jabbering.

“He had many compatriots who wrote just like him—although with less intelligence—other cultural journalists who had adopted the slick palaver of the moment.” (Siri Hustvedt)

“The loading and priming of the thing was such a palaver he nearly changed his mind.” (Kate Grenville)

“Her voice contained a hint of phoniness, an echo of the daytime palaver in her shop.” (Ross Macdonald)

“Through the trees there is the sound of the wind, palavering.” (Mary Oliver)

WEB

1. In less than 12 minutes, A Sonic Conjuring explores how audio producers re-created the sound of the final moments of World War I—and the ensuing peace—using “using audio shadows captured on film.” And it is, as a friend said, astonishing.

2. Typewriter Cartography‽ Yes, please.

3. Each week in What’s the Difference?—Brett Warshaw’s newsletter “for the curious and confused”—a concise exploration and explication of a wide range of potentially confusing things such as “Jails and Prisons,” “Cement and Concrete,” and “Cremini, Button, and Portobello Mushrooms.”

4. It’s easy to fall into (or hard against) the ongoing tech backlash. Not so fast… → My disabled son’s amazing gaming life in the World of Warcraft

5. [Via Reader S.] comes this intriguing and creepy “fur mirror” (really a kind of fur display/monitor) by Daniel Rozin. ※ See also: Rozin’s similar piece that uses 450 rotating penguins in place of fur and more information about Rozin and this exhibition at the bitforms gallery.

6. The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies features more than 700 images of art and office supplies and tools now forgotten (or nearly so).

7. “The public service of black cops, for some, has become equal to aiding the enemy. That’s why Edwards took up a project he calls ‘Black Outlined Blue.’ He wants to tell the stories of black cops in the Atlanta Police Department who deal daily with the duality of life in their skin and life in their uniform.” → The Burden They Share

8. Excellent longform journalism pieces this week, each of which is sad and bonkers in its own way. → “Down The Rabbit Hole I Go”: How A Young Woman Followed Two Hackers’ Lies To Her Death ※ A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions

9. I’m skeptical of the “Intellectual Dark Web” label, which seems like the kind of shorthand that logically eats itself, but I do think there’s something to embracing honest assessment of ideas and our relationship to them…as Meghan Daum does. → Nuance: a Love Story ※ See also: A conversation with Meghan Daum.

10. Today in 1962, the Soviet Union exchanges pilot Gary Powers and student Frederic Pryor for Soviet KGB Colonel Vilyam “Willie” Fisher in Berlin. Powers’ U-2 spy plane had been shot down nearly two years earlier over Sverdlosk by the Soviet air force using a “Divina” surface-to-air missile, and Powers was serving a ten-year prison term. Fischer, convicted as part of the “Hollow Nikel” espionage case in New York City, was four years into his thirty-year sentence. Pryor—arrested in August, 1961, was, by all accounts, just a student in the wrong place at the wrong time, used as extra leverage to force the US into a trade. Powers, who initially faced a groundswell of criticism for both failing to engage the self-destruct explosives in his plane and not making use of his suicide pill (actually a coin with shellfish toxin embedded in its grooves), was later recognized for his service and bravery. In 1977 Powers was piloting a news helicopter when it ran out of fuel. Going down in a heavily populated area near Encino, California, Powers diverted his emergency descent to avoid a group of teens playing baseball, resulting in a crash that killed him and the cameraman just 50 yards from the baseball diamond. ※ See also: Gary Powers: The U-2 spy pilot the US did not love || Francis Gary Powers, Jr.’s “A Few Words of Defense” || Steven Spielberg’s dramatization, Bridge of Spies.

WATCH/WITNESS

The steampunk, gothic, “anymation” story of Jasper Morello, a “disgraced aerial navigator who flees his plague-ridden home on a desperate voyage to redeem himself.” → ► The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.

WHAT‽

“…cook the rice, anak!” → ► Tsinelas - A Short Action-Comedy Film.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader E.: “The writer’s choice to be nearly invisible was powerful and makes sense to this visual artist. For some time I thought my aversion to artbiz was envy and weariness and being jaded, but I now think sharing on the small scale is the only way to create.”

• Reader B.: “ I must say, sir, that this latest publication offered me many pleasing moments of delight and instruction, as I have gradually understood is your method. ¶ Yr obt svt-”

• Reader S.: “You, prescriptive grammar, and Dreyer-who-supports-the-Oxford-Comma? It’s Bizarro world!”

• Reader J.: “I won’t look back at my smartphone like I do cigarettes. I already regret the former and feel like I’d be better off going back to the latter.”

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

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

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

WORK

As a serial abuser of parentheses, I warn you against their overuse, particularly in the conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness. One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping down to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience. One rather needs a beauty mark and a peruke to get away with that sort of thing.

—Benjamin Dreyer
—from Dreyer’s English : an utterly correct guide to clarity and style (2019)

WORD(S)

apotropaic /ap-ə-trə-PAY-ik/ /apətrəˈpeɪɪk/. adjective. Something that prevents—or is intended to prevent—evil influence or bad luck. From Greek apotropaios (averting evil), from apo (away) + trepein (turning).

“This close, the biodome looms over everything, and everybody in Rosewater glances at it every hour, as if it has apotropaic powers.” (Tade Thompson)

“…an Agnus Dei (a small wax cake impressed with the figure of a lamb bearing a cross, blessed by the Pope and thought to possess apotropaic power—a more modest version of the flying phallus pilgrimage badge).” (Melissa Mohr)

“T suddenly understand the gesundheit-impulse, the salt over the shoulder and apotropaic barn-signs.” (David Foster Wallace)

WEB

1. The discovery that a microbe involved in gum disease is the cause of Alzheimer’s not only might yield treatments, but could lead to a vaccine → We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it

2. Cal Newport, author of the insightful (and admittedly imperfect) book Deep Work, has a new book out (Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology) that is interesting and a little maddening. This interview captures the gist → Why We’ll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes

3. If great scientists had logos…

4. I lean heavily away from prescriptive grammar books, but occasionally a titles comes along that manages to avoid off-putting pedantry and show a deep love of words in happy order. Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style is one of those rarities → Meet the Guardian of Grammar Who Wants to Help You Be a Better Writer ※ See also: The Hedonic Appeal of “Dreyer’s English”

5. Digitizing the vast ‘dark data’ in museum fossil collections

6. Hyperlocal, micro-publishing, “pomenvylopes” and postcards…the delights of small-scale, under-the-radar publishing are myriad → A Writer’s Choice to Be Borderline Invisible [Thanks, Reader K.!]

7. Owen Earl, of indestructible type*, wants to (and does) “make high quality, versatile, modern typography that’s accessible to everybody.” And he’s just released another amazing “pay what you want” (all the way down to zero), open source, meticulously detailed and documented font → Indestructible Type Bodoni*

8. A film trope I hadn’t thought about before → The Art (or Non-Art) of the Cinematic Dictionary Open

9. An essential quiz → Tolkien Character or Antidepressant?

10. Today is Setsubun, the day before the first day in Spring in Japan. Though the name literally means “the division between seasons” and is more properly called Risshun, Setsubun is celebrated as part of the Japanese Spring Festival. Celebration of Setsubun is accompanied by mamemaki, a ritual of throwing roasted soybeans (“fortune beans”) out the door, warding off evil spirits—sometimes impersonated by mask wearing family and friends—and initiating a fresh Spring start to the year. Modern Setsubun celebrations, naturally, sometimes involve televised festivities with celebrities tossing not just soybeans, but also peanuts, candy and even envelopes of money. Other Setsubun practices include silently eating futomaki (“fat” sushi rolls) while facing in that year’s lucky direction, drinking ginger sake, and putting up small decorations of holly and sardines above doorways to prevent bad spirits from entering.

WATCH/WITNESS

The making is beautiful; the results-in-motion are mesmerizing → ► Trepō - Zoetrope Pottery

WHAT‽

► Bo-meme-ean Rhapsody

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “[InCoWriMo is] no different than any other month for me, as you well know.” – Indeed. In fact, this week’s WORD came from one of your letters from many years ago.

• My other favorite Reader B.: “Endpapers!”

• Reader T.: “I think you and y’all will dig this video of a kid tearing it up with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on a uke.”

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

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

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

WORK

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

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

WORD(S)

ataraxy /AT-ər-aks-ee/ – ataraxia /at-ər-AK-see-ə/. noun. Deep tranquility; calmness. Stoic indifference. From French ataraxie > from Greek ataraxia (impassiveness) > from a (not) + tarassein (disturb). See also: serenity, imperturbability, equanimity, composure.

“Hope and ataraxia shrivel away, he is shocked into desperate reality.” (James Tiptree, Jr.)

“I was nonplussed, I stared at my teacher, never before had his swollen face seemed so replete with indifference, stone ataraxy.” (Will Self)

“…maybe this is how it goes: the boy dies and she’s like you, numbed of feeling, not concerned about anything. Practically in a state of ataraxia…” (Clarice Lispector)

“Oh, coffee, el café. Our country has survived for centuries thanks to this plant and the Arabic drink. It’s a docile, attenuated drug, with a marvellous effect, for it stimulates one’s consciousness without letting it get out of control or driving it crazy. Ideal brew for somnolence or laziness, for despondency or apathy, for ataraxy or an excess of resignation.” (Hector Abad)

WEB

1. February is International Correspondence Writing Month (aka, for the camel-casing cognoscenti, InCoWriMo or LetterMo), in which intrepid participants write a handwritten letter every day. ※ If February doesn’t work for you, there is always National Letter Writing Month in April…

2. Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods From Their Massive Stumps (and the picture of the sapling slays me).

3. From the origins of qwerty and why you’re tying your shoelaces wrong to trusting your senses and “black don’t crack,” the BBC Ideas Debunking Modern Myths video series has you covered.

4. Paper book geeks, meet the endpaper enthusiasts. ※ See also, the Vintage Endpapers collection on flickr and the University of Washington’s growing Decorated Paper Collection.

5. The BabyLand Diaries go inside BabyLand General Hospital, where Cabbage Patch Dolls are “born” through an artificial tree-like birth canal (and that’s not even the weirdest thing)…before exploring the still-mysterious, classically awesome, processes of labor and childbirth.

6. Peter Gorman’s Barely Maps are intriguing minimalist maps/graphics/visualizations. ※ While we’re mappin’ it up, see also: The map that popularized the word ‘gerrymander’

7. “It’s as rare as finding a fossilised sneeze,” said professor Phillip Manning of the identification of a 100-million-year old fossil of a hagfish.

8. “Biohacker” Dave Asprey has made millions convincing people to put butter in their coffee and follows an insane regimen of supplementation, stem cell injections and more so that he can, he says, live to be 180. Guru? Huckster? I don’t know, but it makes for a fascinating story.

9. Wow…feast your eyes on the Winning Images from the prestigious 7th Annual Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest! ※ See also: Wildlife Photographer of the Year: sharing a daydreaming leopard with the world

10. Today in 1832, author, mathematician, photographer and Anglican deacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known as Lewis Carroll—is born in Daresbury, England. In addition to his most famous written works—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its darker sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There—Carroll was an accomplished artist in the then-new field of photography and a well-regarded mathematician with 11 books to his (real) name. Carroll was also an avid correspondent—recording nearly 100,000 letters sent and received in his personal register alone, (which he didn’t start keeping until he was 29)—and inventor of the nyctograph and nyctography, a writing template and a shorthand devised so he could capture ideas in the middle of the night without having to take the idea-killing time to light a lamp. ※ Previously: Lewis Carroll’s “Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing.”

WATCH/WITNESS

American Sign Language is distinct from English, with its own grammar, syntax and vocabulary…so ASL has to grow to accommodate new science concepts and terminology. This is ► how deaf researchers are reinventing science communication. Thanks, Reader B.

WHAT‽

Watch ► Noodle School to meet some of the students who have flocked to Lanzhou, China, to learn the secrets of its famous noodle soup. ※ Previously: catch a screening of ► Ramen Heads if you ever get a chance.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K.: “I enjoyed today’s Katexic Clippings even more than usual today, which is saying a lot. I particularly enjoyed following Tutivillus down the rabbit hole, and am wondering how I could capture something of him, in a thoroughly indirect way, in an image of my own. ¶ Among the countless ruminations on Mary Oliver’s passing, I think you might especially enjoy this great rant by my dear curmudgeon friend John Straley, about those who are dismissive of her work.”

• Reader B: “With regards to ‘The Return of Handwriting’ article; how cursive became the latest fetish – really?”

• A different Reader B.: “The opening question of her [Mary Oliver’s] poem gets me as well. ¶ Makes me think of ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ Also, that weird exchange between God and Job, when God complains that Job doesn’t know anything because he didn’t make the world, after all. ‘Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.’”

• Reader T.: “Considering the dad jokes last week, I bet some Clamorites are geeky enough to appreciate this command line command to display a random dad joke. Found via our mutual geek idol, Brett Terpstra.”

• Reader F.: “Wow…you really elevated Mary Oliver’s ending to ‘The Summer Day’! Hayden’s incredible ending to ‘Those Winter Sundays’ AND Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’! I have always been transfixed by Hayden’s whole poem, and ‘The Second Coming’ has to be in a class by itself. The ‘wild and precious life’ seems to me to be in a totally different class—a question that people always seem to want to answer. I never do because I stop at her use of the word ‘one.’ But I do acknowledge that it has become recognizable as her mark of inviting readers into a poetic conversation. But in that poem, I really love the grasshopper.”

• Reader E: “We know you love those Words of the Year (me too!). Since your roundup of links, the MacQuarie (Australian) Dictionary announced their word of the year.”

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

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

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

RIP, Mary Oliver. Today’s WORK is perhaps Oliver’s most famous poem, but for good reason: it never grows old and that final question will live forever in the pantheon of closing rhetorical questions, right up there with Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and Yeats’ “Second Coming”.

WORK

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver
—from House of Light

WORD(S)

solecism /SOL-i-siz-əm/ /ˈsɒlɪsɪz(ə)m/. noun. A grammatical mistake or a non-standard usage. More generally: a mistake, a blunder, a breach of etiquette, a lapse in manners, an impropriety. See also: faux pas, gaffe, blunder. From Greek soloikos (speaking incorrectly or awkward/rude in manner). Perhaps originally meaning to speak like the people of the Greek colony Soloi, who were reputed to have spoken a corrupted form of Greek.

“…they were all bad spellers, and their memos, alive with solecisms, made Puttermesser grieve, because they were lawyers, and Puttermesser loved the law and its language.” (Cynthia Ozick)

“His son said nothing; only the red of his cheek merged deeper, as if I had committed a solecism we must both ignore.” (Hortense Calisher)

“He [Tantalus] also committed the unpardonable solecism of telling tales about the private lives and mannerisms of the gods, amusing his courtiers and friends with insolent mimicry and gossip.” (Stephen Fry)

WEB

1. I’m skeptical of personality quizzes but still take them all the time. I have to admit that 538’s Big Five quiz is more interesting—and, for me at least, much more accurate—than most. What shapes are you? ※ Previously: Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs.

2. Whoa…the story of Esteban, The Escaped Slave Who Discovered America.

3. I’m a notorious purveyor of “dad jokes” to my (now adult, but daddy don’t care) children. But until this article about The Dad-Joke Doctrine, I hadn’t thought much about how they work, despite humor being one of the most fascinating areas of cognition and linguistics. ※ Can’t end without sharing some jokes: Reddit’s dadjokes board remains very active, as does Twitter’s DadSaysJokes…and there are some classics of the genre in the listicle 50+ Dad Jokes That Are Actually So Bad You’ll Laugh.

4. The Return of Handwriting? I didn’t know it had ever gone away. ※ See also: A tiny, in-demand restaurant in Maine asked for reservations by notecard – and got 20,000 of them.

5. On the other hand: SLOWLY is a smartphone app that connects you with virtual “pen friends” to exchange virtual letters and stamps. “Meet a new pen friend, seal your letter & place a stamp,” all on your phone…and the further away your correspondent is, the longer it takes for your “letter” to reach them.

6. Mr. TH.INK feeds my Nutella obsession with a link to The Nutella Billionaires: Inside The Ferrero Family’s Secret Empire. ※ Previously: Nutella: How the world went nuts for a hazelnut spread (in which we learn that the original Nutella was a loaf, among other things) and the Quartz Obsession: Nutella.

7. I might have found the culprit behind my (un)creative life: Tutivillus (or Titivillus), a medieval demon of writing and literacy.

8. Via Reader B., a peculiar story of a lost Da Vinci masterpiece that may or may not be lost (and may or may not be by Da Vinci)…and how it might be at the center of—and key evidence in—the investigation into Donald Trump’s possible collusion with Russia.

9. You might care about the value (or not) of Really Bad Reviews, or you might revel in the copious examples linked therein. Or both. Either way, The Art of the Pan is a good read.

10. Today in 1949, FBI founder and then Director J. Edgar Hoover invites twenty-one-year-old actress Shirley Temple to watch Harry S. Truman’s inaugural parade from his office balcony, where he gives her a tear-gas emitting fountain pen. A routine victim of threats and harassment since her first days as a child actress, Temple developed a friendship with Hoover during FBI investigations and would later ask Hoover to perform a background check on her future husband Charles Alden Black.

WATCH/WITNESS

“What happens when a drummer loses time?” Paul Wager was a professional drummer for more than 40 years, including stints with B. B. King. Then he suffered a stroke. ► LOST TIME explore’s Wager’s story through his own reflections. ※ See also: a behind-the-scenes interview with director and editor Leo Pfeifer and the radio story that sparked the creation of the short film.

WHAT‽

Don’t miss The Crater Lake Monster, Star Pilot: 2+5 Mission Hydra, Escape from Galaxy 3 and many other full-length— classics?—of 60s and 70s sci-fi on the FUTURE ZONE channel. Still image above from ► The Giant of Metropolis, in which “Muscleman Ohro travels to the sinful capital of Atlantis to rebuke its godlessness and hubris and becomes involved in the battle against its evil lord Yoh-tar and his hideous super-science schemes.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C.: “You shared the amazing project exploring who has the largest vocabulary in hip-hop a while back. You and your readers should know it’s since been updated with more than 75 new artists and shows some interesting trends.”

• Reader M.: “※ is such an elegant little character. I couldn’t find much about it though. Katexic should dig something up.” – Good idea!

• Reader B.: "Grover: this is weird, but the first time I played it he clearly said ‘f@#king.’ The second time, clearly not. ¶ I reloaded and the same thing happened. ¶ I do not understand. – Interesting. I’m that way with the Yanny or Laurel recording. Also: I grawlixed the swear word to avoid triggering spam filters.

• Reader A.: “Wow that octopus is different!”

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

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

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

WORK

There are people whom the sea depresses, whom mountains exhilarate. Personally, I want the sea always—some not populous edge of it for choice; and with it sunshine, and wine, and a little music. My friend on the mountain yonder is of tougher fibre and sterner outlook, disapproves of the sea’s laxity and instability, has no ear for music and no palate for the grape, and regards the sun as a rather enervating institution, like central heating in a house. What he likes is a grey day and the wind in his face; crags at a great altitude; and a flask of whisky. Yet I think that even he, if we were trying to determine from what inner sources mankind derives the greatest pleasure in life, would agree with me that only the emotion of love takes higher rank than the emotion of laughter. Both these emotions are partly mental, partly physical. It is said that the mental symptoms of love are wholly physical in origin. They are not the less ethereal for that. The physical sensations of laughter, on the other hand, are reached by a process whose starting-point is in the mind. They are not the less ‘gloriously of our clay.’ There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.

—Max Beerbohm
—from “Laughter, 1920”
—found in And Even Now (1920)

WORD(S)

oppilate /OP-i-layt/. verb. To block, obstruct, stop up. Most of often pores or bowels. Noun: oppilation; adjective: oppilation. To remove such an obstruction is to deoppilate. From Latin ob (in the way, against) + pīlāre (to ram down, pack closely).

“He pictured himself for the next three years spending a large part of his time suffering the oppilations and vertigo of travel in smelly and bug-ridden coaches.” (Winston Graham)

“Avicen cries out, that ’nothing is worse than to feed on many dishes, or to protract the time of meats longer than ordinary; from thence proceed our infirmities, and ‘tis the fountain of all diseases, which arise out of the repugnancy of gross humours.’ Thence, saith Fernelius, come crudities, wind, oppilations, cacochymia, plethora, cachexia, bradypepsia, Hinc subitœ mortes, atque intestata senectus, sudden death, etc., and what not.” (Robert Burton)

WEB

1. In The Guardian: why we are fascinated by miniature books. And when they say “miniature,” they really mean it: the smallest is less than 100 micrometers (around the diameter of a human hair) in width and height and has pages that have to be turned with a sharpened needle. ※ David Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books doesn’t include any miniatures, but it’s fun to browse anyway.

2. I hear Grover swearing in this Sesame Street clip and now I can’t unhear it. But, an audiologist explains that it’s all in my ears. What do you hear?

3. In The New York Times and in The Atlantic, stories about the discovery of flecks of lapis lazuli in the tartar of a 10th century-nun and what it tell us about forgotten medieval female scribes.

4. I’ve featured various kinds of typewriter art and sculpture here before, but Jeremy Mayer’s human(ish) sculptures made of typewriter parts are a whole different thing.

5. @TerribleMaps on Twitter. Trust me.

6. This American Life’s “The Room of Requirement” is extraordinary for its range (the Brautigan Library!) and emotion (homeless girl befriends children’s librarian, ultimately becomes one herself, and then journeys back to meet the woman who changed her life). ※ See also: the 110-Year-Old Dead Tree that is Now a Magical Little Library.

7. The story of Justin Alexander is one of spiritual seeking, sadhus, suspicion and disappearance in a remote region of the Indian Himalayas.

8. A treat for your eyes: Booooooom’s 64 Favorite Photos by 64 Photographers: 2018 Edition ※ See also: Anastasia Pottinger’s Centenarians and Time Lapse Video of Keith WIlliams Making Geodesic Spheres

9. The occasional weird links dump: silver skivvies and Costco’s 7-pound tub of Nutella (plus the Quartz Obsession: Nutella) and HATETRIS and The Influencer who Didn’t Influence and ► 15 Minutes by Tim Minchin and Who is Little Debbie?.

10. Today in 1935, comedian Rip Taylor is born in Washington, D.C. The handlebar mustache and toupee wearing, confetti and prop wielding comic was Carrot Top (but actually funny) before there was a Carrot Top. Taylor was a regular on the Ed Sullivan Show, a regular Atlantic City performer, a 1970s TV game show fixture, a voice on various cartoons from Scooby-Doo to The Addams Family, touring partner with Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds and Mickey Rooney, and a guest on various 80s and 90s sitcom and a part of the Jackass, umm, universe. ※ Watch Taylor’s appearance on David Letterman in 1987, an early 80s interview with Taylor, Phyllis Diller, Marcia Lewis and Melanie Chartoff and his appearance on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”.

WATCH/WITNESS

Made from over 14,000 photographs and constructed over seven years, Simon Schreiber’s short stop-motion film ► The Lighthouse tells the story of “a lighthouse keeper’s surprising discovery pulls him out of his monotonous, daily routine and takes him onto a journey into uncharted territory.”

WHAT‽

Kirie/Kirigami Octopus Cut From a Single Piece of Paper by Masayo Fukuda

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J.: “If you’re interested in more about Janet Greene, the anti-communist answer to Joan Baez, CONELRAD can help out.” – Wow, a fascinating article from a fascinating site!

• Reader B.: “Was the title a riff on ‘Begin the Beguine’? ¶ And thank you for another fine transmission from Galaxy K.” – You have eagle eyes! It was admittedly a bit feeble…

• Reader W: “Loved all the Words of the Year links. Add this Columbia Journalism Review commentary to your list!”

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

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

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

WORK

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our Jives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

—Tom Stoppard
—from Arcadia: A Play in Two Acts

WORD(S)

galore /gə-LORE/. adjective. In large quantity; in abundance. From Irish go leor, from Gaelic gu leòr (to sufficiency).

“There were bear galore and deer in quantity, and many a winter day, in snow up to his knees, did the writer of this pass in tracking bruin to his den, where, I am bound to say, I commonly left him. I agreed with my lamented friend, the late Robert Weeks, poet: ¶ Pursuit may be, it seems to me, / Perfect without possession.” (Ambrose Bierce)

“Some of Theresa’s college friends (retro eyeglasses, thrift-store chic clothes, goatees galore) come around, and the talk gets a bit too pop-cultural and swervy and superallusive for me…” (Chang-rae Lee)

“What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for a tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to gang around with. So scram…” (Truman Capote)

“I won’t even get started on the décor in the dining room and on the table. When the French want to get away from the traditional ”Empire“ style with burgundy drapes and gilt galore, they go for the hospital style.” (Muriel Barbery)

WEB

1. Yeet! It’s the first newsletter of the year, which means it’s time for Word(s) of the Year! First, WOTY winners and short lists: American Dialect Society (and nominees), Merriam-Webster’s, Dictionary.com, Collins, Oxford, Cambridge Dictionaries, Australian National Dictionary Centre, LinguiBishes and Geoff Nunberg. ※ Plus, WOTYs in German, Dutch and Japanese. ※ Finally, some grist for the mill on such lists: Language nerds worked really hard on that ‘Words of the Year’ list and Language Jones on the problematic nature of such lists.

2. Let the Fountain Pens Flow! is a solid story about the ongoing renaissance of fountain pen use, including some of my favorite pen world personalities.

3. The fascinating story of David Maurer, the dean of criminal language.

4. The story of Wilson Bentley’s Crystal castles: the first snowflake photos – in pictures is a visually arresting story with a sadly ironic end. Via MR TH.INK which I encourage you to subscribe to. ※ While I’m at it, I discovered the captivating, and occasionally terrifying, profile The Whalers’ Odyssey in that wonderful newsletter too.

5. The Mind is a Collection is a “born-digital museum of early-modern cognitive models.” ※ The Mind is a Metaphor is a “collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind.”

6. RIP Bob Einstein. Many know him best as ► Super Dave and he appeared on all kinds of media since those days, where he inevitably stole the show. Others will remember him as Curb Your Enthusiasm regular Marty Funkhouser, where he provided one of my ► favorite (and most profane, definitely NSFW) tv comedy moments of all time.

7. A look at children texting with (often solely) emoji and digital-age language learning. ※ See also: Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries.

8. “Copyrights, patents and trademarks are all important, but the term ‘intellectual property’ is nonsensical and pernicious.” I couldn’t agree more (convince me I’m wrong)!

9. I’m “152: Emotions & senses” – Which Dewey Decimal Number Are You?

10. Today in 1987, astronomers report witnessing the birth of a galaxy for the first time. The New York Times described the event as “detecting evidence that perhaps a billion suns ignited within a huge gas cloud 71 billion trillion miles from Earth.” Given the evocative name Radio Galaxy 3C 326, this area would later yield photos of one galaxy, 3C 326 North, “stealing” gases from its smaller neighbor, 3C 326 South. Incidentally, a “billion trillion” is also known as a sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) and, according to the Light Speed Calculator, light from that galaxy would take more than 170 million years to reach Earth. And in 2010, astronomers asserted that ‘Trillions Of Earths’ Could Be Orbiting 300 Sextillion Stars in our universe, three times as many as previously estimated.

WATCH/WITNESS

The ► Four Generations meme is so simple and delightful…and joyous.

WHAT‽

Janet Greene singing her 60s folk song “Poor Left Winger”.

I’m just a poor left-winger
Befuddled, bewildered, forlorn
Duped by a bearded singer
Peddling his Communist corn
In the Café Expresso…

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Although you aren’t a huge Christmas fan, can I still say that each Katexic is a gift to us, your readers?” – Why, thank you!

• Reader E.: “That FLOPPOTRON Bohemian Rhapsody is almost unbelievable. Wow.”

• Reader K.: “We started celebrating Festivus a few years ago and couldn’t be happier. There’s even a book!”

• Reader C.: “A serious visual feast this issue and of most unexpected kinds. The typewriter drawings and the albums of vintage photography were top-drawer.”

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

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

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

WORK

I bought my brother some gift-wrap for Christmas. I took it to the Gift Wrap department and told them to wrap it, but in a different print so he would know when to stop unwrapping.

—Steven Wright

WORD(S)

Saturnalia /sat-ər-NAIL-yə/. noun. The festival of Saturn, the ancient Greek god of agriculture. First celebrated in 497 BC. As part of Saturnalia, slaves were treated to a banquet and allowed to make fun of their masters, the toga was replaced by colorful clothes, and slave and masters alike donned conical felt hats. A time of peace, Saturnalia was also marked by temporary cessation of military activities and closing of the courts. Many customs of Saturnalia influence modern-day Christmas and New Year’s activities including the exchange of gifts, decorating with holly branches, and displaying evergreen wreathes. The customary greeting during Saturnalia is “io, Saturnalia!” where “io” is pronounced like “yo.” Try it!

WEB

1. While searching for where to stream some classic Rankin & Bass Christmas shows (the classic Rudolph and Frosty), I stumbled across a playlist of ► Fractured Fairy Tales! These twisted parables took me back. In a good way.

2. Feast your eyes on Ryan Khatam’s flickr photo albums of vintage photography, magazines, advertisements, postcards and more.. Some highlights: The Madonna Inn, Illustrations by Zdeněk Burian and Ryan’s “best of” selection.

3. The Rare Book School YouTube channel contains some great videos up for those of us fascinated by the construction of books, including ► The Anatomy of a Book: Format in the Hand-Press Period and ► How to Operate a Book.

4. [Via Reader B.], the capstone article about the strange Jered Threatin act/incident/performance art piece. As the author observes, “maybe by writing the very story you are now reading, I’ve played a part in carrying out Jered Threatin’s master plan.” → Jered Threatin ※ Previously: Threatin: band creates fake fanbase for tour attended by no one → A fake band goes on tour: Threatin provides a perfect tale for our times → Did Threatin’s Ridiculous European Tour Stunt Actually Work? → The Story of Threatin, a Most Puzzling Hoax Even for 2018

5. The SweatyPalms board on Reddit is aptly named. Other possibilities: HeebieJeeebies or AnxietyInducing.

6. The New York Times has been publishing some great writing about the people in the technology machine. This time around, a profile of Donald Knuth, one of the greatest and most influential computer scientists of all time…and creator of TeX, perhaps “the greatest contribution to typography since Gutenberg.” → The Yoda of Silicon Valley.

7. While you are on the NYT site, explore (and possibly torment yourself) by answering a question you might not have known you have… → What Is Glitter? - A strange journey to the glitter factory

8. Lenka Clayton’s typewriter drawings. ※ Previously, in the same vein: Tim Youd and A Visual History of Typewriter Art from 1893 to Today.

9. On January 1, everything published for the first time in the US in 1923 is liberated from copyright prison. I guess the death of Sonny Bono and the politicians being, umm, pre-occupied with other things (not to mention no danger to Disney yet) allowed this to happen. → For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain.

10. Today Festivus—the supposedly less-stressful, Christmas-time holiday for the rest of us—is celebrated. Created by author Daniel O’Keefe in honor of his first date with his future wife, Festivus would gain global prominence thanks to a 1997 episode of Seinfeld called The Strike, of which O’Keefe’s son Dan was a writer. Festivus traditions include “The Airing of Grievances,” in which each person explains how the world—and the others in the room—have disappointed them that year, “Feats of Strength,” a round-robin wrestling match that doesn’t end until the head of the house gets pinned, and the “Festivus Pole,” an unadorned pole that replaces the traditional Christmas tree (though this was an invention of Seinfeld writer Jeff Schaffer…the original O’Keefe tradition instead centered around putting a clock in a bag and nailing it to a wall). As Jerry Costanza kicks things off, “Welcome, newcomers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you’re gonna hear about it!”

WATCH/WITNESS

► ADBC: A Rock Opera … a 70s rock opera pastiche telling the story of the nativity (“a new telling, ‘told in rock’, of the birth of Christ, this time from the point of view of the Innkeeper”) with music by Matt Berry and lyrics by Berry and Richard Ayoade. You know this has to be something to see me through my aversion to musicals and my resentment of Christmas.

WHAT‽

► “Bohemian Rhapsody” on FLOPPOTRON is truly amazing. And, in the spirit of the seasonal trifecta, how about a capella group ► Six13 performing “Bohemian Chanukah” ※ Previously: ► Marbles, Magnets, and Music and ► Wintergatan - Marble Machine

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader A.: “Love the ”silence“ theme in the Web section. In the walks my previous home adjacent to National Forests, I became observant of how much highway / airplane noise one could here until you went in quite a ways. I wondered about the possibilities of maps that might show the outlines of places one could go where there was no human caused sound – now I know the area of it is one square inch ;-)”

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

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

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

Thanks to the Clamorites who drew my attention to the incomplete, “canorous”-free Robert Service quotation in the last issue. Here is the complete version:

“Silence had raised a startled head and poised there, listening. Then, with crack of pick and boom of blast, man had hurled her back. Further and further had he driven her. With his advancing horde, mad in their lust for the loot of the valley, he had banished her. His engines had frightened her with their canorous roar.” (Robert W. Service)

WORK

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

—Philip K. Dick
—from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

WORD(S)

obmutescent /ob-myew-TESS-ənt/. adjective. Willfully silent. Obstinately mute. From Latin obmutescere (grow mute), from ob- (to, toward) + mutescere (to become mute).

“The Finns’ obmutescence seemed especially to go hand in hand with that other most famous Finnish characteristic, their drinking.” (Michael Booth)

“Crimond, who broods over it all like an obmutescent winged avenger, scaring the living daylights out of his friends, is really successful only when off stage…” (Stephen Fry)

“Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of an audience. ¶ Therefore, I was manna in the desert of Jud’s obmutescence.” (O. Henry)

WEB

1. Soundscape ecology—and silence and solitude—in Denali National Park (near my old home) → Whisper of the Wild ※ See also, near my new home, the Quietest Square Inch in the U.S.

2. The Science of Silence: How Solitude Enriches Creative Work

3. “Silence, for me, is neither an absence of sound, nor is it uniform. The silences of the river are different from the silences of a desert. Yet both are vast, and they are full of surprises.” → On a Walk Through Busy India, a Nature Photographer Discovers a Craving for Silence ※ Part of the ongoing Out of Eden Walk, Paul Salopek’s 21,000-mile walk tracing the paths of the first humans to migrate out of Africa in the Stone Age, “a decade-long experiment in slow journalism.”

4. “As I browsed subjects ranging from agriculture to medical mathematics, I noticed a sign hanging overhead: ‘Realm of Knowledge and Silence.’” → How an abandoned lab could show us the future.

5. One of the better running jokes in Get Smart was the Cone of Silence, which ► appeared in the first episode but featured even before that in the demo reels used to sell the show to the network. The joke got new life in the 2008 film farce starring Steve Carell and then the even shorter-lived farce Scott Pruitt: EPA Director and his top-secret phone booth.

6. “You and the voice in your head – whatever you want to call it – are pretty much all you have in the end. You have to hang on to it, and listen out for it.” → The Power of Shutting Up and Sitting in Silence

7. “Cultivate quiet spaces or go mad.” – some of the examples, such as MetaFilter, show how various the ideas of “quiet” can be. → Finding silence online is difficult, but the pursuit is worthwhile. ※ Pairs well with The Disconnect, the online magazine you have to unplug from the internet to read.

8. “she set to make of nothing most” – I keep going back to some of Olena Kalytiak Davis’ poems because I’m not always sure what is going on, but beautiful. → “SONNET (silenced)” by Olena Kalytiak Davis

9. Silence for the eyes: Jason Oddy Photographs The Deafening Silence Of Empty Political Spaces ※ Lorado Taft’s sculpture “Eternal Silence” (aka the “Statue of Death”) ※ Jason Oddy Photographs The Deafening Silence Of Empty Political Spaces

10. Today in 1928, the “Shakespeare of science fiction” Philip K. Dick—and his twin sister Jane Charlotte, who would die just six weeks later—is born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Among the 44 novels he would write before dying at only 53 are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, adapted for the film Blade Runner, the Hugo award winning The Man in the High Castle, and my favorite, the as-always-mind-bending A Scanner Darkly. Dick was a troubled, often addicted, survivor of multiple suicide attempts who was mostly unknown to readers outside the science fiction world at the time of his death…but whose work has had significant influence on not just science fiction, but speculative and modern fiction of all kinds, not to mention Hollywood.

WATCH/WITNESS

After considering his request for 16 years, the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps—which doesn’t allow visitors—decided to allow Philip Gröning to shoot a film documenting their lives. After nearly three years of editing, ► Into Great Silence is the (naturally-lit, with no commentary or sound effects) result. ※ See also, a documentary invoking many other kinds of silence: ► Samuel Beckett: Silence to Silence documentary.

WHAT‽

► Puddles (and Tongo Hiti) cover Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”. ※ I’ll just leave this here too: ► All The Small Things (Blink 182 Sad Clown Cover) - Postmodern Jukebox ft. Puddles Pity Party.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “I am so loving the recent Clippings. Without fail I come away with a sense of wonder at this crazy world. Such treasures, such oddities, such disturbances you share with us… thank you!”

• Reader M.: “thanks for these weekly gatherings .. always something invites a click .. today little potato and yasmin williams ..”

• Another Reader B.: “Excellent Trumbo quote. Reminds me of the antiwar passages in near-contemporary All Quiet on the Western Front. ¶ I’m ambivalent about the Ann Arbor street scene. So beautiful, yet - books sprawled out upon a filthy street? Where they can be injured? Also, a few yards from that very spot I helped move an entire bookstore across the same street. ¶ China: I cannot get Americans to pay any attention to China, most days. Drives me nuts.”

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

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

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

WORK

Because the guys who say life isn’t worth living without some principle so important you’re willing to die for it they are all nuts. And the guys who say you’ll see there’ll come a time you can’t escape you’re going to have to fight and die because it’ll mean your very life why they are also nuts. They are talking like fools. They are saying that two and two make nothing. They are saying that a man will have to die in order to protect his life. If you agree to fight you agree to die. Now if you die to protect your life you aren’t alive anyhow so how is there any sense in a thing like that? A man doesn’t say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn’t say I will spend all my money in order to save my money. He doesn’t say I will burn my house down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living? There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.

—Dalton Trumbo
—from Johnny Got His Gun

WORD(S)

canorous /cə-NOR-us/. adjective. Musical, melodious, richly resonant, tuneful. From canor (melody), from canere (to sing). From PIE root kan- (to sing) from which are derived accent, canto, chant and incentive, among other words. See also: euphonious, harmonious.

“The groom was in the utmost alarm, both on his own account and on mine: but, in spite of this, so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous, in this unhappy contretems, taken possession of his fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter, that might have wakened the Seven Sleepers.” (Thomas De Quincey)

“Motions of waking trouble winter air,
I wonder, and his face as it were forms
Solemn, canorous, under the howled alarms,—
The eyes shadowed and shut.”
(John Berryman)

“Silence had raised a startled head and poised there, listening. Then, with crack of pick and boom of blast, man had hurled her back. Further and further had he driven her. With his advancing horde, mad in their lust for the loot of the valley, he had banished her.” (Robert W. Service)

“Though canorous spells from the musical bells
Of the city’s fifty towers
Shouted the news of his lunatic cruise
In the early morning hours…”
(J. R. R. Tolkien)

WEB

1. There is something amazing and comforting and classically awe-inspiring about listening to ► the sound of the wind on Mars. || Pairs well with: The Search for Alien Life Begins in Earth’s Oldest Desert.

2. Announcing the Winner of the 2018 Bad Sex Writing in Fiction award || See also (if you can bear it), the shortlist.

3. Ironically, significantly less robotic writing can be found in this roundup of the 2018 Interactive Fiction Competition entries. Also known as IFComp, the competition is “an annual celebration of new, text-driven digital games and stories from independent creators.” || See also: the full list of 2018 entries.

4. The US Library of Congress’ Crowd initiative invites everyone to help transcribe and tag items from their vast collection. How can you pass up a chance to discover fascinating writing and make a contribution to historical knowledge? Campaigns right now include Civil War Reminiscences and Letters to Lincoln. Thanks, Reader C.

5. Is speciesism, aka anti-animal language, really a thing? || See also: a new PSA from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Philosophers

6. What if there was a war on a religious minority with more than one million detainees, constant surveillance and espionage, and a complete abrogation of human rights…and no one seemed to care? → China’s Uighurs told to share beds, meals with party members & Spying On The Uyghurs: A First-Person Account From A Han Chinese Student & China’s brutal crackdown on the Uighur Muslim minority, explained & China admits to locking up Uyghurs, but defends Xinjiang crackdown

7. “In their latest installment of Literature vs Traffic, Spanish design collective luzinterruptus transformed a major street in Ann Arbor, Michigan, into a glowing river of 11,000 books.”

8. Two fantastic (in very different ways) longform pieces about technology and humanity and connection at its best → The Friendship That Made Google Huge and worst → Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche.

9. The eyes have it, paper and books edition → Daria Aksenova’s narrative shadowboxes and “illusionary paper” series & Elizabeth Sagan’s book-lov(ing)(er) photos & for the DIY-ers How to make a book page wreath, and more book art ideas.

10. Today in 1905, screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo is born in Montrose, Colorado, USA. Trumbo’s 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun won one of the first National Book Awards…and so inspired the band Metallica that they not only wrote their well-known song “One” as homage, but bought the rights to the film so they could use segments from it in their iconic ► music video. But it was as a screenwriter that Trumbo would find his greatest fame, success and eventually—as a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten—heartache, writing films such as The Brave One (which won an Academy Award he couldn’t claim because he couldn’t be credited), Roman Holiday (same), Spartacus, Exodus, Papillon and the aforementioned Johnny Got His Gun.

WATCH/WITNESS

“In this stunning 360° video, former U.S. inmate Rickey Jackson, who was wrongfully imprisoned for 40 years (including being on death row and in solitary), ► tells the story of his rebirth.” || See also: After 39 Years of Wrongful Imprisonment, Ricky Jackson Is Finally Free.

WHAT‽

It’s a spoken word poem. It’s performance art. It’s why we have the interwebs. It’s the ► Official “Tainted Love” Dance Tutorial.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader A.: “Don’t think some of us didn’t notice you’ve started slipping an interrobang into the title of the WHAT section!” – You noticed‽

• Reader S.: “I applaud your bravery in linking to a Quillette article. That said, it’s hard for me not to see the magazine’s proponents as the children of CP Snow, doubling down once more against Hume. That’s to reduce all of this far too much, but in the rush to kill off theism’s delusions we seem to be accepting Scientism far too easily. My own life remains a constant struggle to balance my reason and my passion, yet balance we must. ¶ also thanks for the article on ‘reading problematic writers/DFW’ as it led me to Mary Karr’s poem ‘Suicide’s Note: An Annual.’”

• Reader B.: “I was sure you were pulling my leg with the pronunciation of contretemps [/KON-trə-ton/]! I guess if I accept that the final ‘n’ is really that gargly, back-of-the-throat, almost-silent, thing the French seem to have a thing for, I can accept how wrong I’ve been pronouncing this word for the last 30 years.”

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

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

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

WORK

I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough—enough accomplishment, money, fame—my neuroses will disappear. I’ve been in this fog certainly since, at least, my own graduation day. Over the years I’ve felt: Kindness, sure—but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I’ll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It’s a cycle that can go on … well, forever.

—George Saunders
—from Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness

WORD(S)

contretemps /KON-trə-ton/. noun. An awkward, embarrassing, difficult situation or disagreement. A minor disagreement. A clash. Originally a French fencing term contre-temps (an unfortunate accident, a mistimed motion), from Latin contra (against) + tempus (time).

“…so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous in this unhappy contretemps taken possession of his fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter…” (Thomas De Quincey)

“Except for a minor contretemps when Agnes caught the dog Gambol in the kitchen, trying to steal a capon, and chased him out into the hall, calling him names and brandishing a broom, the dinner was all it should be…” (Fiona Buckley)

“O Claribel, Claribel. No memory of her can elude for long our first contretemps. That is too bookish a word. Our wreck.” (Guy Davenport)

“Our little contretemps and my little rising tide have gone off together in a stout, chilly breeze. Good spirits are notoriously more fragile than bad.” (Richard Ford)

“It was as great a contretemps as she had feared. The priests showed the coldness natural in undertakers who had been summoned to a house where there was nobody even ill…” (Rebecca West)

WEB

1. Yaas! → America can thank Black Twitter for all those new words

2. Do You Even Bake, Bro? (subtitle: How the Silicon Valley set fell in love with sourdough and decided to disrupt the 6,000-year-old craft of making bread, one crumbshot at a time) is a fascinating article both on its face and because of its deep, neo-romantic assumptions about enjoyment and authenticity (and sometimes gender).

3. Centuries of Sound is “an attempt to produce an audio mix for every year of recorded sound. Starting with 1860, a mix is posted every month until we catch up with the present day. The scope is moreorless everything, music of course, but also speech and other sounds…”

4. Paper engineer and artist Matthew Shlian is back in Colossal with fabulous new paper sculptures || Previously: 2016 paper sculpture gallery & Geometric Paper Sculptures || See also: Paper Animation Film Fest 2018.

5. RIP Ricky Jay, the best close-up (and old-school, scholarly) magician ever. You can’t go wrong with this 1993 profile: Secrets of the Magus.

6. “Counterintuitively, the social justice stance on human evolution closely resembles that of the Catholic Church. The Catholic view of evolution generally accepts biological evolution for all organisms, yet holds that the human soul (however defined) had been specially created and thus has no evolutionary precursor. Similarly, the social justice view has no problem with evolutionary explanations for shaping the bodies and minds of all organisms both between and within a species regarding sex, yet insists that humans are special in that evolution has played no role in shaping observed sex-linked behavioral differences. Why the biological forces that shape all of life should be uniquely suspended for humans is unclear. What is clear is that both the Catholic Church and well-intentioned social justice activists are guilty of gerrymandering evolutionary biology to make humans special, and keep the universal acid at bay.” → The New Evolution Deniers (and the comments) perfectly illustrate the maddening paradox of Quillette.

7. I’ve said many times that Ear Hustle is one of the best podcasts/audio shows out there. It’s still true, so you should go listen. But the most current news is: co-host Earlonne Woods just had his sentence commuted!

8. “It seems to me, as just a layman and an amateur, that the internet is almost the perfect distillation of the American capitalist ethos, a flood of seductive choices.” → A new (to most of us) David Foster Wallace interview || See also: Maria Bustillos on coming to terms with the art, life and legacy of “damaged or criminal” artists like Wallace.

9. Meet Birds Aren’t Real, QAnon disinformation parody as performance art (I’m waiting for the Bards Aren’t Real parody of the Shakespeare deniers) || Previously, The Wizard of Q considered QAnon as a kind of sprawling new form of the novel.

10. Today in 1942, Enrico Fermi creates the first nuclear chain reaction, turning an abandoned squash court underneath the University of Chicago football stadium into “Chicago Pile–1 (CP–1),” a primitive nuclear reactor that generated a half-watt of power. The success of CP–1 lead directly to the production of enough plutonium to produce the atomic bombs that would end World War II and usher in the nuclear age and the ensuing Cold War.

WATCH/WITNESS

Staying musical this week, thanks to Reader J. Yasmin Williams is a guitar prodigy in the style of Michael Hedges and Billy McLaughlin. In addition to ► GuitKa (guitar + kalimba) as seen above, Williams also ► brings in a cello bow with beautiful results. Listen also: ► “Restless Heart”…WOW.

WHAT‽

► Little Potato is a documentary about “A Russian Mail-Order Bride and a Jaw-Dropping Twist.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J.: “Hey Katexic, great catch on this one - Quillette, Scary Pockets, PMJukebox, MKwan, etc. while you’re at it, how about Yasmin Williams?” – Done!

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

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

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

My thanks to readers from A. to W. who pointed out my typo… Disney’s Steamboat Willie debuted on November 18, 1928, not 1828!

WORK

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

—Rachel Carson
—from The Sense of Wonder (1956)

WORD(S)

gamine /ga-MEEN/. noun or adjective. A playfully mischievous, pert, usually petite, girl. A female street urchin. A boyish looking young woman; an elfish tomboy. A borrowing from French gamin (a boy who lives on the streets), originally meaning just a young boy or a glassmaker’s assistant. Earlier origin unknown.

“…her arms outstretched, face beaming, overwhelmed with joy and music: Coming in late to vespers, her color high, strange grasses in her gamine, slightly flyaway hair.” (David Rakoff)

“…in a perfect inversion, the young lady at the table sprang out of that exact position, and Howard registered in his peripheral vision a gamine type with spidery-lashed wet eyes, and arms of sinew and bone like a ballet dancer’s.” (Zadie Smith)

“Her skin had the patina of an outdoorswoman. She had recently cut her bright blond hair, a practical gesture that lent her a gamine look.” (Anita Shreve)

“This had nothing to do with Graham Greene. It had to do with the removal of his friend’s overcoat, revealing: a woman of a certain age but still fiercely gamine, in purple angora sweater and skintight shiny black trousers.” (Martin Amis)

WEB

1. Most of Africa is north of the equator…and it extends to the same latitude as Norfolk, VA. Barcelona is in line with Portland, OR. Paris is further north than Montreal. → Why your mental map of the world is (probably) wrong

2. Why Is Japan Still So Attached to Paper? || Pairs well with The Complete Guide to Japanese Washi Paper

3. On Quillette, The Voice of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’

4. ► Why Beautiful Things Make us Happy

5. “You realize that you need not obey the impulses of this moment – which, it seems safe to say, tend not to produce a tranquil mind.” → To survive our high-speed society, cultivate ‘temporal bandwidth’

6. Magic Printed (and Renaissance era typography)

7. “New methods are allowing a group of scientists to reëxamine the world’s libraries and archives, in search of the hidden lives of authors.” → Do Proteins Hold the Key to the Past?

8. I’ve been reduced to this: learning of mesmerizing performers like Chris Rodrigues and Abby the Spoon Lady through a fascinating Washington Post story, despite their 100k+ YouTube subscribers and a ► video of their performance of “Angels in Heaven” that is about to break 11 million views.

9. Very different feasts for the eyes: Eron’s haunting wall paintings & Christopher Payne’s General Pencil photos.

10. Commencing today, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, through December 10th, International Human Rights Day, is 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence, an “international campaign to challenge violence against women and girls.” More than 3,700 organizations from more than 160 countries are participating.

WATCH/WITNESS

A conversation last night reminded me that I am unrepentant about (most of) my 80s rock listening…then and now. Michelle Kwan’s cover of “Sweet Child o’Mine” on a guzheng nails not just the iconic song, but one of the era’s best solos. Also: a worthy cover by bluegrass musicians Thunder and Rain & Postmodern Jukebox doin’ it New Orleans style & Scary Pockets makin’ it funky & a wistful version by Taken by Trees.

WHAT!?

In Lynch’s own words, “Ant Head” is a “short video featuring my friends the ants along with cheese, etc. and one-and-a-half tracks from the ‘Thought Gang’ album.” (Thanks, Reader B.)

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: I am aghast, sir, as your use of squamous without a single Lovecraftian example. ¶ I correct your error thusly:

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began.

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

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

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

WORK

My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers

—Theodor (Dr. Seuss) Geisel’s Lake Forrest College Commencement Speech, June 4, 1977 … in its entirety

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And, when they were served,
he regarded them with a penetrating stare.

Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
“To eat these things,” said my uncle,
"you must exercise great care.

You may swallow down what’s solid
BUT
you must spit out the air!"

And as you partake of the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.

WORD(S)

squamous /SKWAY-məs/ & squamulose /SKWAY-myə-ləs/. adjective. Covered with scales; scaly. Composed of scales or a resemblance of scales. In anatomy, the thin scaly part of the temporal bone. In medicine, a suture with thin overlapping parts resembling scales. From Latin squama (scale); possibly related to squalus (filthy, foul), from which squalid and squalor are derived.

“There was Littleface, whose actual features occupied a tiny square in the centre of a squamous, bloated head.” (Robert Stone)

“…to make a sordid story as squamous as possible, the network head bought, for his schedule, a handful of shows produced by the ex-actor…” (Harlan Ellison)

“She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality.” (Ursula K. Le Guin)

“It was a raptor perch, well used. Buzzard or eagle or both. There were big black and white turds, and dozens of excreted bird and animal bones. It had a miniature forest of lichens, foliose and squamulose.” (Robert Macfarlane)

“…he took hold of that same Rowdy Dick by pantleg and armpit and swung him, oh wrathful lambs, against the abutment where the poem was inscribed, swung him as a battering ram might be swung, and cracked Rowdy Dick’s skull from left parietal to the squamous area of the occipital, rendering him bloody, insensible, leaking, and instantly dead.” (William Kennedy)

WEB

1. The basic story of today’s WORK is curious…but the deeper story behind it—and Geisel’s painful Hollywood experience—gets real interesting.

2. I’ve been following the Threatin hoax…here is a meander for the Clamor: Threatin: band creates fake fanbase for tour attended by no one → A fake band goes on tour: Threatin provides a perfect tale for our times → Did Threatin’s Ridiculous European Tour Stunt Actually Work? → The Story of Threatin, a Most Puzzling Hoax Even for 2018.

3. “…it didn’t matter in the slightest if participants showed any artistic ability. After just 40 seconds of low-quality sketching, subjects not only remembered significantly more, they also recalled more detail and context about the words and ideas they were studying. In short, they learned more, faster.” → Drawing Is the Fastest, Most Effective Way to Learn, According to New Research

4. (We are hanging by) a thread. → The Dystopia is Already Here || Pairs well, in my mind anyway, with Guess who’s championing Homer? Radical online conservatives.

5. I’m not sure what to make of Rebecca Mead’s article “How Podcasts Became a Seductive—and Sometimes Slippery—Mode of Storytelling”…is it news that podcasts aren’t, well, news? That storytelling and narrative are part of nonfiction? That manipulation of the audience is part of the art and craft of story?

6. When Michelle Alexander speaks, I listen. “Recent criminal justice reforms contain the seeds of a frightening system of ‘e-carceration.’” → The Newest Jim Crow

7. This is a technology going in the right direction for lovers of paper and digital… → IllumiPaper: Illuminated Interactive Paper

8. Look! → Siena International Photo Awards (SIPA) & Soviet Russia in full color [Thanks, Reader B.!] & 1913-1915: Views of Tokyo, Japan

9. Listen! → The Biblio File features “twenty-forty minute interviews with accomplished authors, publishers, biblio people, conducted by an excitable bibliophile.” The archives go back to 2006. A few episodes to get you started: Richard Minsky on his Book Art and Scholarship & Hugh McGuire on an alternative future for book publishing & Alberto Manguel on his favourite libraries and bookstores

10. Today in 1828, Walt Disney’s ► Steamboat Willie (starring Mickey Mouse), premieres in New York. In addition to being the first Disney cartoon with synchronized sound, it was also the first cartoon that could boast a fully post-produced soundtrack. More links: Steamboat Willie on Wikipedia & Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again.

WATCH/WITNESS

“There are 800,000 unmarked graves in Glasnevin Cemetery. This is the story of one.” → ► The Bookbinder’s Daughter

WHAT‽

Roman Fedortsov’s fantastic (and sometimes terrifying) photos of deep sea creatures on Instagram and on Twitter.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C.: “Your ‘see also’ left out the best synonyms for farrago: gallimaufry and salmagundi! And mélange! And olla podrida!”

• Reader K.: “I just don’t understand how World War I gets so little attention now, even on a momentous date like the 100th anniversary of the armistice. Sigh. Anyway, Letters of Note published Wilfrid Owen’s powerful and sadly final letter from just four days before the end of the nearly forgotten war.”

• Reader S.: "Your readers might enjoy seeing the The First Book Printed in Antarctica. It ended up selling for almost 100K.

• Reader A.: "When I saw the image of a subway entry seemingly in the middle of nowhere I thought it must be some sort of joke. However, I soon uncovered a different world. One involving rapid development: ¶ The speed at which all this is happening in China makes me wonder why we speak about ten year plans in Melbourne, Australia. ¶ In part this scenario of a station in a field reminds me of the discussion of the development of infrastructure before people in Stockholm:

In contrast, places like Vällingby, a Swedish suburb outside Stockholm built in the 1950s, were sited around a new Metro station. Building rail infrastructure through built-up areas is extremely expensive, but building it through farmland, before new neighborhoods are built, is comparatively cheap."

To which I say: —Considering it that way, I wonder that there aren’t (or maybe there are and I just am not finding them) more examples like the Chongqing Metro stop. It makes for fascinating photos, kind of the opposite of ruin porn…

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

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

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

Thanks to Reader B. for multiple World War I related links in this issue.

WORK

The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on reconnoitring duty, and in the end, once they are back in safety, apply their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.

The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently makeup its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

—Hermann Broch (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)
—from The Sleepwalkers

WORD(S)

farrago /fə-RAW-goh/. noun. A medley, a confused mess, a mixture, a miscellany. From Latin farrago (mixed fodder for cattle, also generally a mixture), from far (grain). See also: hodgepodge, hotchpotch, mélange, potpourri.

“What strange farrago of impossibilities have these holy dealers in occult divinity jumbled together?” (Thomas Holcroft)

“…what would his book be? Nothing,—he would add, throwing his pen away with a vengeance,—nothing but a farrago of the clack of nurses, and of the nonsense of the old women (of both sexes) throughout the kingdom.” (Laurence Sterne)

“Mrs Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard, a farrago, a galimatias.” (Henry James)

“Somewhere in the world, every night, some company romped its way through Queen Mab’s Island, that farrago of nonsense history and rumbustious English whimsy…” (Penelope Lively)

WEB

1. Via Reader O. comes news that the Art Institute of Chicago has put more than 50,000 hi-res images online and into the public domain (“using CC0 licenses for copyright nerds in The Clamor”).

2. In the latest “they’re coming for you” news, the ‘world’s first’ A.I. news anchor has gone live in China.

3. The eternal readers’ debate about readability and literary value continues in Sam Leith’s “Pretentious, impenetrable, hard work … better?” I say: yes, and we need unpretentious, penetrable books too. And all kinds in between.

4. “Once a television comfort for preschoolers, ‘Look for the helpers’ has become a consolation meme for tragedy.” I wanted to write off Ian Bogost’s article as typical backlash (no one is taking Mr. Rogers away from me) but…I couldn’t. → The Fetishization of Mr. Rogers’s ‘Look for the Helpers’

5. A “snapshot of our time,” a “global selfie,” whatever you want to call it, the Memory of Mankind (MOM) project is a fascinating project creating a million-year time capsule. Learn more about the project and its founder.

6. In celebration of my birthday (or something) on October 23, Starbucks opened up its first ASL store. So cool.

7. Disease sniffing dogs could soon be an important part of the fight against malaria and more.

8. Not that long ago, something like the GIPHY Animated Gif Film Fest would have existed only as Zoolander level parody. Confession: I spent too much time enjoying the results of the Fest’s prompt: “Can you compel an audience with an engaging story in under 18 seconds?”

9. A fascinating story of (in)human endurance, human (in)sanity, a Camel-smoking contrarian, and Courtney Dauwalter winning and losing a kind of race I can’t even begin to understand. → Ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter Takes On The World’s Most Sadistic Endurance Race

10. Today at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, an armistice is signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, ending World War I. Described at the time as “the war to end all wars,” an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilians would die as a direct result of the violence and up to 100 million deaths are attributed indirectly through various genocides and the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Though the generals on the Western Front knew the armistice was coming, the fighting continued, with more than 11,000 casualties that morning: the last British soldier killed in action had survived four years in the trenches only to die 90 minutes before the Armistice took effect; the last American would die just one minute before hostilities ceased. Despite the scale and the sheer brutality of the combat, World War I is (amongst Americans, at least) arguably a forgotten war. See also: War Is Done! The sights and sounds of the final hours of World War I & In Photos Unpublished for 100 Years, the Joy of War’s End on Armistice Day & World War 1: Harrowing pictures show France still scarred by First World War trenches & Thomas Hardy’s poem “There Was a Great Calm” & listen to the Moment the Guns Fell Silent Ending World War I.

WATCH/WITNESS

“…deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of the other person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart. And if you remember that you are helping heim or her to suffer less, then even if they say things full of wrong perception, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion.” → Thich Nhat Hanh on Compassionate Listening.

WHAT‽

Abandoned? Post-apocalyptic? Or not…the Chongqing Metro Station in the Middle of Nowhere.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S.: “Dude, Vulfpeck!!! I have been telling people about them for the last little while after stumbling on them in YouTube. Not normally a band I would like (I usually hate ”music school bands“) but the bass player, Joe Dart, is truly immense. You might like this one too – he’s somehow related to the band, but I haven’t quite puzzled through the genealogy yet.”

• Reader W.: “I think I see what you meant connecting the furor over Instagram poets with the article about shallow connectivity. It seems that what passes for poetry in the Instagram world is too much like what passes for intimacy in a world mediated through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

• Reader G.: “your WORK resonates with me exactly.”

• Reader M.: “So many things to love in this edition! Corybantic—such an evocative word, and the Huxley quote is right on. And then there’s candy too. NY Times magazine just explored candy from many countries, including the Japanese versions of Kit Kat, and I have to say from experience that the Finnish salty, black licorice called Salmiakki is a definite obsession with the Finns. And tiny books! I have two favorites that I have had for years: Thoreau’s Walden and a book of Georgia O’Keefe prints.”

• Reader B.: “Much applause from this Katexic corybant!”

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

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

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

WORK

She marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.

—Charles Frazier
—from Cold Mountain (1997)

WORD(S)

corybantic /KOR-ə-BAN-tik/. adjective. Wildly excited; frenzied. Derived from Corybant, a priest of Cybele, Greek (and Phrygia’s only known) Goddess of fertility and nature, whose worship included loud music and riotous dancing. Celebrants, then and now, literally and figuratively, are sometimes called corybants or corybantes.

“That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas.” (Aldous Huxley)

“They filled the cavernous depths of the dining room from end to end, behaving as though they were extras in one of those continental films his wife pretended to love, eating with such abandon, gesturing so exuberantly, rising from the tables to dance with such corybantic fervour that he felt half dead.” (Beryl Bainbridge)

“I was able to discern a hefty blonde, no doubt Annie herself, clad in a yellow track-suit, leaping up and down and shouting commands in time to the music. The corybants she commanded were mainly young, but among them I spotted a breathless Ballard, pale and eager, leaping as best he could, clad in a bright purple track-suit and elaborately constructed plimsolls…” (John Mortimer)

“But in that moment of solitude prosaic, earthbound Mr. Pinfold had been one with hashish-eaters and Corybantes and Californian gurus, high on the back-stairs of mysticism. His mood on the road to Cairo was barely less ecstatic.” (Evelyn Waugh)

WEB

1. Interesting that the two most important sources in this article give largely contradictory advice. But I guess we who journal do so for all kinds of reasons…depending on the person, the day, the mood… → What’s All This About Journaling?

2. Continuing down the candy trail. → In Japan, the Kit Kat Isn’t Just a Chocolate. It’s an Obsession.

3. Faithful Reader B. shared this story with the click-baity (for a certain set that includes me) title How Instagram Saved Poetry. I thought about it and was equally intrigued and troubled. It reminded me of another recent article on the Instagram poetry phenomenon, Instagram Poetry Is A Huckster’s Paradise. I thought about that and was sad, but I wasn’t sure what I was sad about. Stephen Marche’s The Crisis of Intimacy in the Age of Digital Connectivity started to put it all together for me, and it’s about a lot more than poetry, writing or even art.

4. “Day and night he wrote visas. He issued as many visas in a day as would normally be issued in a month. His wife, Yukiko, massaged his hands at night, aching from the constant effort. When Japan finally closed down the embassy in September 1940, he took the stationery with him and continued to write visas that had no legal standing but worked because of the seal of the government and his name.” → The Japanese Man Who Saved 6,000 Jews With His Handwriting

5. On the little-known novel Hunter, by the author of The Turner Diaries, and its role in extremist actions. Written in 1995 but even more relevant today. → After the Massacre

6. Great news, word nerds! → Green’s (Amazing) Dictionary of Slang will soon be free.

7. Tiny Books Fit in One Hand. Will They Change the Way We Read?

8. For your eyeballs: Simon Schubert’s “Paperwork” creased paper art & Joe Reginella’s Memorial Statues Mark[ing] Fictional Disasters in NYC & 2018 Astronomy Photographer of the Year winners

9. For your earholes: the oldest surviving Duke Ellington radio broadcast, known only to a small handful of connoisseurs and never made available to the public (includes the story of the recording and solid musical notes and links) & ► The Hot 8 Brass Band covers Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”

10. Today in 2008, Barack Obama becomes the first person of African-American (or bi-racial) descent to be elected President of the United States.

WATCH/WITNESS

Spotify dropped ► “Animal Spirits” into my Discover Weekly list this week (ironically, it turns out) and it brought me some (vaguely Jackson 5 style) joy. Tune in and turn it up. Some other Vulfpeck favorites: ► “Dean Town” (that bass player crushes it!) & ► “Cory Wong” with its clever “script-over” style. They are just so fun to watch and listen to.

WHAT‽

“Let’s ► explore how cinematographers and directors create shapes inside the frame to add visual storytelling to their films.” Includes examples from Sleeping Beauty, Psycho, Fargo, The Graduate and dozens more.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Rupi Kaur and the Instapoets previously in Katexic: Meet Rupi Kaur, Queen of the ‘Instapoets’ & Why Rupi Kaur and Her Peers Are the Most Popular Poets in the World & On Instafame & Reading Rupi Kaur

• Reader M.: “Add this one to your sex robot files: World’s first sex robot resort lets customers pay to take bots’ ‘virginity’”

• Reader E.: “Everyone is dancing with, or recoiling from, the General Dynamics robots. But this little pogo-stick-style-hopping (monopedal) example is just as mesmerizing in its own way.”

• Reader A.: “Interested in the mention of Pride and Prejudice in the books started, but not finished. I remember avoiding Austen for much of my Bachelor of Arts, until I came to my senses and took a class with John Wiltshire which involved reading all her novels. ¶ I feel that their is a bit of myth and (mis)judgement around Austen’s work. One of the best things I did, although I would rather reread Mansfield Park or Emma than Pride and Prejudice. ¶ On another text, I started reading Game of Thrones. Then I watched the show and gave up going back.”

• Reader G.: “I was a little surprised by the list of books people were giving up on. I consider Nathaniel Hawthorne’s books to be the ones I remember giving up on. But I enjoyed most of the Game of Thrones series, although having it also be a TV show means that I watched some and read some and have yet to complete either version all the way through, it is a very time consuming series and pushed my boundaries of how much violence I could stomach. ¶ But Pride and Prejudice is delightful as all her books are. ¶ I also loved all of Orwell’s books and found them easy reads. ¶ I remember starting the Lord of the Rings trilogy several times in high school before I finally got through it all the way. ¶ Overall I found the list surprising based on my own experience.”

• Reader B.: “1. ‘wondering if catarrh can ever be cathartic’ - man, I do love Ashbery. ¶ 2. Interesting how the top two failed reading books each represent a jump from other media. ¶ 3. For Q, I agree that it’s good storytelling (hey, the author should read a book on this…), but I’m still struck by the weird echo with this one.”

And then they added another Katexic story, for which I am so grateful!

The old man rested on the balcony. Gazing over the zinc balustrade he beheld a vast sky gently studded with delicate clouds. A breeze passes over the pine and birch woods lining the horizon. Below them the ancient lake, dotted with swimmers and boats, glimmered in the afternoon light.

He grimaced and sighed. His few remaining strands of hair trembled across his chilly scalp. The melancholy was unshakeable. Every shred of energy and beauty beyond the balcony just pinned his gloom more tightly to his awareness. He clenched both fists with desolate fury, then let them sag in glum futility. He closed his eyes.

The sun gradually declined to the horizon, cloud by cloud. The old man heard the breeze pick up into a wind that chilled his weary frame. Eyes still closed, he could just make out the sounds of people retreating from the waters below. He imagined the sky darkening in the meticulous fashion it always displayed this time of year, ruthlessly. Again he sighed, expecting the immediate triumph of night.

Behind him a doorknob jolted, then a door crashed open against drywall. “Mr. Jacoby!” came a cry from within.

The old man twitched his hands on the chair, spastically half-spinning it around on the balcony’s time-worn marble. “Calhoun,” he snarled. “I told you never, ever to interrupt my afternoon meditation. You know this is a time sacred to my peace of mind - a tranquillity all too easily mangled by intrusion!”

Panting, the young man skidded on the dark room’s Moroccan rug. “I know, ah, sir. But this, this -”

“Yes?”

“…it’s from L.”

The old man froze in mid-rage. His eyes expanded, brows trembling. His left hand seemed to drift upwards on its own power, while his right clutched the chair’s leather handle. It couldn’t be, he assured himself. It couldn’t be L., of all things. Not since the disaster. Especially not since the unending pit on the lunar surface, the plague of catarrh dreams, the demolition of Trump Tower, and the discovery of the disturbingly human-like Antarctic songbird clan. This isn’t L.’s time, he assured himself, and certainly not the hour of K., and yet found a musical hum surfacing from his withered throat. I cannot permit such joy. It is too much for an age that does not - that can not - deserve it. Yet he turned his weathered, tear-worn face to Calhoun, who waited patiently in the dusk-darkened room.

“Where” - he coughed - “where is it?” And found himself humming audibly now.

“Right here, sir.” A trembling young arm extended itself from the murk towards the old man. Upon a red-gloved hand rested a shining envelope bearing but a single word on its crisp surface. “Katexic.”

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

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

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

If you enjoy Katexic Clippings, I sure would appreciate you sharing the love on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and anywhere else you’d be willing to! On with the show…

WORK

XVIII

Fires
Burn in my heart.
No smoke rises.
No one knows.

—Kenneth Rexroth
—from “The Love Poems of Marichiko”

WORD(S)

catarrh /kə-TAR/. noun. An inflammation of the nose or throat; the mucus formed from such an inflammation. From Greek katarrhein (to flow down), from kata- (down) + rhein (to flow). See also catarrhal, catarrhous, and the partially derived catarrhine, used to describe the narrow space between the nostrils of some primates and humans, from kata- + rhinos (nose).

“Don’t fall into the water,” the Siren warned. “It’s a catalyst that will give you catarrh, catatonia, and catalepsy.” (Piers Anthony)

“He sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck.” (Lester Bangs)

“…people resistant to balding have the same nucleic acid in their skin tissue as catarrhine monkeys, which are also immune to balding.” (Stanislaw Lem)

“…he offers his hand jabwise; i.e., thrusting it oddly forward with the thumb turned out, and introduces himself in a catarrhally confidential little bass: Dobrolyubov.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

A few hotel ghosts wander stiffly, wondering if catarrh
can ever be cathartic, and if there’s any afterlife, and if so,
whether it’s near as the next room, or the closet even…
(John Ashbery)

WEB

1. A history of “tart cards.” → Dial ‘S’ for sex

2. I’ve only read a few of these, but I can confidently say Terrance Hayes’ book belongs. → TS Eliot prize announces ‘intensely political’ shortlist

3. I’m almost sold by this making of lemonade from the dwarf lemons that are QAnon. → The Wizard of Q

4. “Our results indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment” → Do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter?

5. Remember that time Donny Osmond’s needs trumped the red hot Beastie Boys? → Excerpt: Beastie Boys Book by Michael Diamond, Adam Horovitz

6. I’m not surprised by the top three. Are you? → Exclusive: Data Reveals … The Books We Most Often Try To Read But Secretly Give Up On

7. Why do these tragic, brilliant pieces of long form journalism keep finding me? → A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death

8. It’s all our fault. This is why we can’t have nice things. → The world’s biggest organism is facing its end

9. The winning photos in the 2018 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition include some stunning entries. See also, zooming back out a bit, Cantor Arts Center and Stanford Libraries collaborate to make Warhol photography archives publicly available.

10. Today in 1915, the human voice is heard across the Atlantic for the first time when B. B. Webb, a radio engineer in Arlington, West Virginia, says “Hello” in a signal received by an American Telephone and Telegraph Company antenna mounted on Paris’ Eiffel Tower. The first two-way transatlantic telephone call wouldn’t be established until 1927. The first text message—the Spanish Influenza of the voice-calling world— wouldn’t be sent until 1992.

WATCH/WITNESS

► The Life of Death is the story of "the day Death fell in love with Life."

WHAT‽

Coming soon to an open plan office stable near you, Panasonic’s Human Blinders—I mean, “Blinkers” are apparently not an April Fool’s Day joke.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader L.: “Thx for this! A word I actually didn’t know, describes me…😀”

• Reader J.: "I don’t say this enough - just brilliant. A moveable feast. ¶ Thank you, Mr. Lott. […] ¶ ps - Just before I received this katexic I had just finished reading Jane Doe Ponytail in today’s NYT. Wrenching, indeed.

• Reader B.: “xenonyms! ¶ Another awesome transmission from the other side of the nebula.”

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

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

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

WORK

[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also,with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps.   While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
….the Cambridge ladies do not care,above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless,the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

—E. E. Cummings
—from Selected Poems

WORD(S)

fugacious /fyoo-GAY-shəs/. adjective. Inclined to flee. Fleeting, transient, evanescent. In botany, things that last for a short time, usually petals or leaves. From Latin fugere (flee).

"As I climbed the Cliffs, when I jarred the foliage, I perceived an exquisite perfume which I could not trace to its source. Ah, those fugacious universal fragrances of the meadows and woods! Odors rightly mingled! (Henry David Thoreau)

“At a bus stop bench she sat him down. ‘Whatever is happening between us is fugacious,’ she told him, knowing he would understand. It was Saturday, and fugacious had been Thursday’s word.” (Vendela Vida)

“The glowing ember in the furnace, a red sun dying before my eyes, turning fugacious, turning to gas, in my memory lives on, dies each night in its beauty.” (Bill Green)

“They seem to enjoy their new-born freedom, and flutter in the March wind like tethered butterflies. Their happy day, however, is soon over; their fugacious petals shrivel in three or four days. The leaves are rush-like, ribbed, and sheathed.” (John Wood)

“You are a senseless frivoler, a fugacious gid, an infamous hoddydoddy; you are a man with the hoe with the emptiness of ages in your face; you are a brother to the ox, with all the dundering niziness of a plain, ordinary buzzard added to your shallow-brained asininity.” (John Kendrick Bangs)

WEB

1. The pictures of this fascinating event make me unaccountably nervous. → The Strangest Desert Festival In the World Makes Everyone’s Mad Max Dreams Come True [Via Reader B.]

2. “The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve?” → The Automation Charade. Pairs with: The Robots Are Coming To Las Vegas.

3. The Good Place is one of my favorite television shows. Today I learned that creator Michael Schur (also co-creator of both Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine) directed the ► video of the Decemberists’ “Calamity Song”, which is based on a section of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest…which Schur owns the film rights to.

4. I’m a fan of reading in all its many modes and guises, but it’s worth nothing that neither paper or digital are perfect. → Neither Paper Nor Digital Does Active Reading Well

5. Are almost all scientists wrong about what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs? → The Nastiest Feud in Science

6. “The question of who is alive and who is dead is not new, but the answer is one that has changed historically.” → Who is Dead?. See also: 25 Death Masks of the famous and infamous

7. Keith Houston delves into the long history of emoji and what led to them. → Emoji, part 1: in the beginning & Emoji, part 2: what went before

8. Two really fine pieces of long form journalism that held me rapt this week. → From Newcastle and New Zealand to the Killing Fields of Cambodia & The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail

9. A meander for your eyes (and occasionally your taste buds). → Lauren Ko’s Geometric Pies & Dinara Kasko’s Origami Cakes & Dragon Scale Bookbinding & Sylvie Facon’s Book Spine Dresses & Inside the psychiatric hospitals, churches and fields of China – in pictures

10. Today in 1894, poet, painter and essayist Edward Estlin “E. E.” Cummings is born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Known for his experimental language and typography, many of Cummings’ poems are traditional, even formal at heart (like today’s WORK, which is a sonnet). Previous linkage: Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation, listen to Cummings read three of his poems. They also have 85 of his poems online. Thanks to the LibraryThing community, you can browse the titles in Cummings’ own library.

WATCH/WITNESS

► Fauve is a raw, powerful 16-minute film that is the cinematic equivalent of a fine short story. Stark, beautiful and terrible.

WHAT‽

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, I could watch ► Attack of the Tumbleweed on a loop for hours.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Podcasts are still thin enough on the ground that this has become a running joke in some podcasts. Tanis, for example, has many quick scenes where the narrator patiently tries to explain to interviewees what they are. ¶ pie de grue!”

• Reader T.: “Don’t think we didn’t see you slip that interrobang in this week’s newsletter!” – Who me‽

• Reader G.: “Maybe some of the winners of the 2018 Third Coast / Richard H. Driehaus awards would convince some of your podcast-skeptic friends?”

• Reader S.: "Came across this bit in Babel on xenonyms and thought your readers might like it:

Hungarian, for instance, is a xenonym of Magyar, which is the Hungarian word for the Hungarian language. In the days of the British Empire, the British were notorious for using xenonyms in favour of native place names. Hence, Mumbai was changed to Bombay and Chennai to Madras. This latter example demonstrates how xenonyms can be used to subjugate a native language.

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

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

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

WORK

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

—Marie Howe
—from What the Living Do

WORD(S)

pedigree /PED-i-gree/. noun. A line of descent, most often of a purebred animal, or the document describing it. A genealogical table. A derivation or background. From Old French pie de grue (literally “crane’s foot,” referring to the appearance of spreading lines in a genealogical chart).

“There is no tracing the connection of ancient nations, but by language; and therefore I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.” (Samuel Johnson)

“At the time she had sneered at his Otherisms; she knew the grandees of her creed by name, had its hierarchies graven upon her heart. That particularly nasty strain of belief that was mysticism, to which she assumed he was referring when he spoke of the wasted lifetimes of the agnostic world, had nothing whatsoever to do with her own high-pedigree catechism; and appeared to her to consist mainly of the desire to explain phenomena such as spectral activity, telepathy and alien spacecraft.” (Rachel Cusk)

The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
(Emily Dickinson)

WEB

1. As a long-time Alaskan, I’m quite familiar with artifacts of Chinook Wawa: North America’s Nearly Forgotten Language…you might be too. See also: the usual (happy) concoction of enhancement, addition and nitpickery on the article over at Languagehat.

2. By now you’ve all heard about Banksy’s self-destructing/shredding art. I’m enjoying the clever spectacle (and assume the conspiracy was deep). Now, Banksy has released a video showing how he did it and the reaction as it happened. Pairs with: Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe.

3. There’s a lot to admire in Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories, so I was interested to learn more about her in this New York Times Magazine profile. I found myself alternately intrigued and enraged by her thinking and her off-putting, unrecognized privilege.

4. Continuing to feed my own addiction with typewriter-y links, the most recent rabbit hole opened up when I learned that Barbie typewriters had hidden cryptographic capabilities. Then I stumbled across this lavishly illustrated excerpt from Typewriters: Iconic Machines from the Golden Age of Mechanical Writing. See also: How Margaret Atwood Learned to Type && Somewhat related, this heavily-illustrated thread on “well-designed/beautiful keyboards.”

5. An interesting new (two-decades long!) project commencing → Massive trove of centuries-old undelivered mail seized by British warships going online. Thanks, Reader B.!

6. Austin Kleon is pretty much always great (life, art, writing…it all seems so straightforward when he explains it), but his recent entry about finding your way with maps—with many quirky examples—was exceptional. More for you: An Incomplete Atlas of Fantastic Maps

7. Did you know that Shockwaves from WWII bombing raids reached the edge of space‽

8. A feast for your eyes this week: John T. Unger’s life-size, hyper-detailed anatomical mosaics && Aleksey Kondratyev’s “Ice Fishers” photos && Shortlist | The Architectural Photography Awards 2018

9. I kind of can’t stop watching this ► deer accidentally re-creating the indelible—and not always in a good way—Phil Collins drum lick (and that tongue…I’m starting to think the deer knew just what it was doing).

10. Today in 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America institutes a new, parent-focused film rating system with descriptors G, M (later PG-13), R and X (later NC-17). The system, as problematic as it can be, was certainly better than the three-decades old system it replaced, the Hays Code, which was based on an evaluation of the morals of a film. Incidentally, the X rating only came to be associated with porn after it was adopted (and often augmented with a few more to make the mythical XX and XXX ratings) in the 70s by the porn industry as a kind of advertising; before then, various films had received the X rating, including A Clockwork Orange.

WATCH/WITNESS

Mesmerizing ► video of rock balancing artist Kokei Mikuni. I could watch this kind of thing for hours. See also: ► Michael Grab && Manu Topic.

WHAT!?

Tim Youd creates all kinds of art with typewriters. In performance, he retypes entire novels onto one double-layer sheet of paper with the same model typewriter used by the writer of the novel…in a location intimately connected to the novel. The resulting sheets become part of weirdly beautiful Dyptichs, the ribbons become part of his series of Ribbon Paintings, and some of the typewriters become sculptures. Related viewing: ► Youd talks about his creative process at SCAD.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader V.: “Looks like Houston might not be able to follow in Vancouver’s sex doll footsteps.”

• Reader D.: “FYI, a big batch of new words and senses of words in the OED just came out. And I’m a 30+ year old juvenile, immediately seeing ‘Bobbit’ in close proximity to ‘bone-on’!”

• Reader C.: “Probably not in response to your sharing The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle, but the Nissin (‘Cup Noodles’ not ‘Cup o Noodles’!) company has opened a store with some noodle lovin’ merch.”

• Reader F.: “I also love podcasts and don’t understand why more of my friends don’t listen to them. Your more enlightened readers might want to add this to their pile of listening lists: The Eight Most Informative Podcast Episodes You’ll Ever Hear.”

• Reader A.: “I recently shared my podcast habits when Doug Belshaw shared his OPML file. The podcast that I think many overlook, but is worth a listen, is ABC Future Tense. It always has diverse topics incorporating a wide range of voices.”

• Reader C.: “Is The Podcast Club The New Book Club? No. I’m the only person in my circles who even knows what podcasts are.”

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

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