WORK

Very Good Boy

“Does your dog do any tricks?”

“He published his autobiography last autumn.”

Laura’s brow wrinkled.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He wrote a book on the history of Russian ballet, and he has a novel in the works too—a spy novel set in Berlin. He needed something both to challenge his skills and to regain his crown as the king of the thriller.”

She looked down at the chocolate-colored Labrador, and gave David a look of complete incomprehension.

“He’s the strong, silent type.”

The dog licked its paw.

“Down, boy, down.”

Sources: New Oxford American Dictionary, Collins COBUILD Primary Learner’s Dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

—Jez Burrows
—from Dictionary Stories: Short Fictions and Other Findings
—(a book composed entirely of example sentences from various dictionaries)

WORD(S)

satisfice. verb. A blend of satisfy and suffice, coined by Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert A. Simon in his 1956 article ‘Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment’ to describe the behavior of pursuing the minimum satisfactory outcome. Satisficing is the opposite of maximizing or optimizing. Also, a Northern English/Scottish synonym for satisfy.

“That tendency is known as satisficing, a blend of sufficing and satisfying: a response bias that errs on the egocentric side of plausible answers to a given question. As soon as we find an answer that satisfies, we stop looking, whether or not the answer is ideal or even remotely accurate.” (Maria Konnikova)

“Then there is satisficing, a coping strategy whereby one takes in just enough information to meet a specific need and ignores the rest. This could be considered a practical approach for one who is not aware of the full range of choices.” (David A. Sousa)

“According to [the scholar Herbert] Simon, people can be maximizers and satisficers in different contexts. For example, when it comes to, let’s say, tacos, I’m a maximizer. I’ll do a rigorous amount of research to make sure I’m getting the best taco I can find, because for me there is a huge difference in the taco experience. A satisficer will just get tacos wherever they see a decent taco stand and call it a day. I hate getting tacos with these people. Enjoy your nasty tacos, losers.” (Aziz Ansari)

WEB

1. An amazing thread of grace, borders, trees and hidden treasures that leads to a physical network of Small Pilgrim Places suitable for all of us who are journeying. Thanks, Reader T.

2. This is perfect. → If the Zuckerberg hearing were the Gutenberg hearing

3. Google has released some cool experiments: Semantris is Tetris meets word association, powered by machine learning. I might have played a few dozen times already. Talk to Books is a Google Books search trained using human conversations (useful!).

4. Oh, and the green hair is a mohawk…and it sports fashionable stubble. → Green-haired turtle that breathes through its genitals added to endangered list

5. “The first step is for each of us to commit unsuicide.” → An Interview with Richard Powers

6. Cool story about how the “Harvard Sentences” Secretly Shaped the Development of Audio Tech. And those sentences have a kind of poetry of their own.

7. When algorithms surprise us demonstrates the weird ingenuity demonstrated by AI/neural nets. The tic-tac-toe solution is my favorite || pairs well with neural network-named tomatoes… “sun bungs” or “shart delights” anyone?

8. I shouldn’t be surprised this is so well written. → Molly Ringwald Revisits “The Breakfast Club” in the Age of #MeToo

9. Why is American currency so boring? → The year’s most beautiful banknotes

10. Today is World Art Day, an international day for celebrating the fine arts and promoting creativity. Founded by the International Association of Art (IAA) in 2012 to coincide with Leonardo Da Vinci’s birthday, activities are held around the world to celebrate…but there’s no reason you can’t celebrate on your own. One place to start: Open Culture’s list of 1.8 million free works of art (online) from world-class museums.

WATCH/WITNESS

Project Revoice uses recordings of earlier speech to give ALS patients their voices back.

WHAT!?

Shia LaBeouf “Just Do It” Motivational Speech

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: "Another brilliant installment… I vow to integrate pinguid into my vocabulary. Thank you again! ¶ The WORK from Cioran (new to me) got me looking through Johnson’s Idler essays for the first time in ages. (“We do not indeed so often disappoint others as ourselves.”) ¶ And reminded me of the concept of SLACK as preached by the Church of the Subgenius. ¶ “The reason They have been so successful these last 10,000 years is that – ironically – at any given time you actually have more Slack than you can possibly appreciate until it is taken away.”

• My other favorite Reader B.: “Pinguid: have you seen this? ¶ Cioran sounds very good. He might satisfy my Ligotti cravings.”

• Another Reader T.: “E. M. Cioran has obviously never had a cat or a dog.”

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

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything … Was boredom unknown to them?

This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity.

Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything…. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

—E. M. Cioran
—from The Trouble With Being Born

WORD(S)

pinguid /PEEN-gwid/. adjective. Fat, greasy, oil. Unctuous. Rarely (usually referring to soil): fertile. From Latin pinguis (fat) + -id (adjective suffix, as in languid, torpid, etc.).

“For the first minute the water grips me like a cryonic gel, glacial, faintly pinguid…” (Greg Jackson)

“Her suspicions got embellished by, of all people, Mike Fallopian of the Peter Pinguid Society.” (Thomas Pynchon)

“In the numb gesture of this ever-dead, a pair of pinguid crows hopped, foot to foot, along one pleading limb, like two conspiring nuns cackling and pecking and flapping into the air…” (Nick Cave)

“The angel would stand, giant in her consciousness, its head bent down. She would stare up into its meteor-scarred face and its wings would open slowly, with pinguid plumage, a wider span than any sea eagle.” (J. M. Ledgard)

“There, staring back at us, between the drum major’s braided cap and the gold epaulettes, were the dark pinguid features of Dada made flesh: His Excellency Al Haji Field Marshal and President for Life of Uganda: Idi Amin Dada.” (T. C. Boyle)

“Pingle should not be confused with pinguid, which means greasy, though if the food is too much the latter, it may cause the former. So if you were stuck with a bad cook in Antarctica you might pingle a pinguid penguin.” (Mark Forsyth)

WEB

1. A Major Dictionary Has Officially Added Emoji || A pairing from the other end of the dictionary spectrum: The Nationalist Roots of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary

2. This tree has been receiving love letters, upwards of 1000 a year, for more than 100 years…it even has its own postal code and mailman. || See also, a photo essay about Japanese mail boxes and (public) Mailboxes Of Seattle. || And I might as well throw in the ubiquitous (and rightly so) Brocolli Tree parable here too.

3. Unruly Bodies, a month-long [pop-up] magazine exploring our ever-changing relationship with our bodies.

4. Much beauties in this piece on Astronomical Typography.

5. Even people who “don’t listen to podcasts” can enjoy the trend of incredible, short-run, journalistic series such as Repeat and the upcoming Caliphate. The latter features (the awesome) Rukmini Callimachi. Read her recent report, The ISIS Files: When Terrorists Run City Hall, on the strange business workings of the would-be Caliphate and listen to her interview on Longform.

6. April Fool’s pranks written by neural network. Thanks, Reader B.

7. A wealth of photographic riches: 2018 Sony World Photography Awards || Fukushima, Seven Years On || Cascade of Lava

8. RIP → The World of Cecil Taylor

9. Don’t be so sure you know what a lowercase G looks like. Thanks, Reader S.

10. Today in 1911, writer and philosopher E. M. Cioran [chore-AWN] is born in Resinár, Romania. Author of amazing, #sadhappy books like The Trouble with Being Born, A Short History of Decay and On the Heights of Despair—titles emblematic of Cioran’s position as a leader of philosophical pessimism–Cioran was also a notable, and notably bleak, aphorist, writing such dark gems as “the fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one,” and “melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”

WATCH/WITNESS

A great short talk by Austin Kleon, a creative hero of mine. If you make things you should watch this.

WHAT!?

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M.: “…interesting stuff to browse, and then to browse links that come with it .. thanks for these invitations to wander ..”

• A different Reader M.: “This is an awesome selection of interesting tidbits, from start to finish! Thanks!”

• Reader B.: “Another rich delivery to my mental mines. Thank you!”

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

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.

—Donna Tartt
—from The Goldfinch

WORD(S)

flesh-pot (fleshpot). noun. Literally, a pot in which flesh (a highly desirable foodstuff) is boiled, generally referring to the phrase in Exodus (see below). As an allusion, a place or person of luxury, indulgence and titillation.

“Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” (King James Bible)

“At the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, New Orleans became North America’s pleasure dome. Out of its fleshpots rose jazz, America’s music.” (Andrei Codrescu)

“On my side, and along with my intellectual attractions, were the fleshpots of Egypt. When you could not find me to be with, the companions whom you chose as substitutes were not flattering.” (Oscar Wilde)

“On dry long fingers, Tarr studiously counted off the reasons: first, he never knew a Soviet delegation that didn’t carry a couple of security gorillas whose job it was to keep the boys out of the fleshpots. So how did Boris slip the leash night after night?” (John le Carré)

WEB

1. Anthony Acevedo, a most amazing man, has passed. As a 20-year-old Army medic, Acevedo kept a diary (of events but also sketches) of his time in a Nazi slave labor camp, part of Buchenwald, which can be seen in its entirety online thanks to the United States Holocaust Memorial museum.

2. I was skeptical of the host, but World Map: The Literal Translation of Country Names is pretty cool. And they shared their research links and sources || Pairs obliquely with Terrapattern, a “visual search tool for satellite imagery.”

3. NITCH is compulsively browsable collection of (mostly) portraits and brief, powerful quotes.

4. Ehrmagerd! The Internet Archive has an online handheld History archive with playable games from the 70s and 80s. I literally wore out the keys on a Speak & Spell when I was a kid. And back to it almost 40 years later…I was transported. || Related retro: will 2018 be the (next) year of HyperCard? See (and submit to) HyperCard Zine.

5. Let’s whiplash back to the world of very contemporary technology in our lives… → 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech

6. Utah governor signs law legalizing ‘free-range parenting’

7. On the thriving world of chess as “eSport,” featuring a few of my favorite things (and people) → I Want My ChessTV

8. Why We Like [media] Things That Are Bad For Us

9. Flat-Earther blasts off into California sky in homemade steam-powered rocket

10. Today in 1957, U.S. Customs confiscates more than 500 copies of Allan Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems. You know the one, the title poem begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” (listen to a 1956 recording of Ginsberg reading the poem || view the complete original manuscript and typescript). Two months later, the U.S. Attorney’s office chose not to prosecute. Then, on June 3 of the same year, undercover police with the San Francisco Police bought a copy from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s now famed City Lights bookstore and then arrested Ferlinghetti for publication of obscene materials. Heard before a judge who had recently achieved notoriety by sentencing five women convicted of shoplifting to watching the film The Ten Commandments, Felinghetti (and his business partner Shigeyosi Murao) was supported by a cadre of poets and critics. In the end the judge, Clayton Horn, ruled in Felinghetti’s favor, noting that the book was of “redeeming social importance” and was unlikely to “deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire.”

WATCH/WITNESS

This Girl!

WHAT!?

Hunting from the Cheetah’s perspective. Amazing.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Loved the opening quote. And want to use ‘pinchbeck’ as soon as possible.”

• Reader G.: “Much appreciation for the message in the WORK.”

• Reader M.: “I absolutely loved this issue of katexic! Thank you.”

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

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

—Jim Jarmusch
—from Movie Maker (#53, Winter 2004)

WORD(S)

pinchbeck /pinsh-bek/. noun or adjective. An inexpensive copper alloy that looks like gold. A counterfeit or a sham. The word first appears in the 1500s referring to a miserly person, of unknown origin. But it reappears in the 1700s as the name of an alloy used by jeweler and watchmaker Christopher Pinchbeck to make inexpensive products with the appearance of gold, over time coming to be known generically as a synonym for cheap and/or spurious.

“I saw you come aboard with your privileges about you like a cloud of, of pinchbeck glory!” (William Golding)

“Markson calls it ‘the precious, pinchbeck, ultimately often flat prose of Vladimir Nabokov.’” (David Shields)

“…they no more saw through Scarlett’s pinchbeck pretensions than she herself did.” (Margaret Mitchell)

“I told her of Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a pinchbeck bracelet, Dan Kelly’s token.” (James Joyce)

WEB

1. A fascinating look at the first AI-generated podcast…a technology in its infancy but growing (and learning) quickly. Thanks, Reader B.

2. The Solenodon is a wobbly, flexible-snouted, butt-nippled mammal that injects venom through it’s grooved lower incisors [the name comes from the Latin solen- (channel, pipe) + -odon (tooth)]. It’s also one of the earliest branches of mammal that survived the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs. What more could you want?

3. “What is involuntary to most people is a deliberate choice to them, something they can actively switch on if it helps them to achieve their goals, and ignore in other situations.” → How Psychopaths See the World

4. The Boston Public Library is asking for your help transcribing more than 40,000 letters between abolitionist leaders from the 1830s–1870s.

5. Subscribe to Letterjoy and receive “one historic letter every week, on fine cotton paper” from historic figures such as Lincoln and Einstein.

6. Movie poster design is intriguing and Posteritati just might be the one movie poster site to rule them all.

7. “False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth.” → The spread of true and false news online (from Science).

8. “Old” media continues to reinvent itself: National Geographic begins reckoning with its racist past; The New York Times is publishing obituaries of “remarkable women” they’ve overlooked.

9. Only one visible at the link, but I really want to see more of Tony Lewis’s collage art/poems built on Calvin and Hobbes. Thanks, Reader M.

10. Today in 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov becomes the first person to walk in space (or, in jargonese, “conduct extravehicular activity”). Turns out, it was a much more difficult, almost deadly, feat than the Soviets could admit for some time.

WATCH/WITNESS

“On Gong Bin’s right cheek are thin scars from when he deliberately cut his face in November 2014 because UNESCO had added Japanese handmade paper to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. According to Gong Bin, that was a ‘day of humiliation for China.’ He cut the lines on his cheek not because he thought the Japanese didn’t deserve the honor, but because, in his words, ‘We lost face.’”

—Mark Kurlansky on Gong Bin, subject of the very short documentary, The Paperist.

Pairs with: The Art Behind Barichara’s All-Female Artisanal Paper Making

WHAT!?

This toad without a face continues to freak me out because, obvious, and because…Demogorgon.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader F. with a reminder: “Don’t forget that other Humble Pie, the Britishest and whitest funk band of the 70s that initially featured Peter Frampton.”

• Reader B. on the contention that technology is resulting in our forgetting how to read: “I wonder why I haven’t caught the reading decline yet. Actually, I have in a single way: my vision is starting to degrade, so reading small print (on paper) is increasingly an issue, mostly late at night or in bad light. But the technology experience hasn’t had that impact. ¶ Am I just too obsessed with books and reading? Or am I doing something weird?”

• Reader G. on Babs’s cloned canines: “cloning a dog is a really interesting thing to do. In some ways MUCH more like cloning people. Because dogs have such personalities. I wonder if she finds that her new dogs have the same personality has her other dog, or if they have radically different personalities. And I wonder if an argument about an animal’s soul could be made based on that. Assuming animals have souls. I think they do, especially dogs. But it seems like the case of nature vs nurture could be made too. If nothing else, it is a fascinating experiment.”

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

At the end of the bough—its uttermost end,
Missed by the harvesters, ripens the apple,
Nay, not overlooked, but far out of reach,
So with all best things.

—Sappho (c630-c570 BC; translated by Edwin Marion Cox)
—from The Poems of Sappho (1925)

[Note: the “sweetapple” referred to in the transliterated version of this fragment was likely the result of grafting an apple and a quince]

WORD(S)

humble pie. noun. Metaphorically, the dish we eat when we have to admit we were wrong or retract a statement in humiliating fashion. I assumed the origin was humble as in not proud or of low origin, but it’s not! In fact, the humble in humble pie comes from umble pie, with umbles being the innards of an animal, usually a deer. In other words, a low-class food, allowing the punny humble pie to emerge. Umbles itself comes from the Middle English numbles (offal).

“…I came home just as Dodger was serving up a massive humble pie, stuffed with livers and heart and tripes in a simmering, rich brown gravy that was as thick as custard.” (Cory Doctorow)

WEB

1. From Linkmeister B., two great links: the surreal (phantom sheep! goats that are dogs!) and the surrealer (watch some of the ‘Director of Behavio’ videos).

2. Literally found in a cardboard box underneath some old bed sheets: parts of a draft slang dictionary for A Clockwork Orange.

3. Barbra Streisand’s dog Samantha died last year. So she had her cloned. Three times. The rich really aren’t like you and me.

4. A few weeks ago we went inside one of the last American pencil factories. On the other side of the pond, even holding a pencil is becoming a challenge.

5. While indulging my Anglophilia, I have to note that the Royal Mint is releasing a Quintessentially British A to Z Silver Proof Coin Series. Some of the entries—‘S’ - Stonehenge and ‘K’ - King Arthur—are obvious. But I admire the playful entries for ‘B’, ‘F’ and ‘Q’…

6. Future Fonts is a marketplace where type designers sell works in progress. The price goes up with each successive release/revision. And at the opposite end of the typography times, see some of the fascinating collection of historical printing artifacts, particularly steel type, in Britain’s St. Bride church: Part 1 and Part 2

7. Like many, Michael Harris is convinced that new media has made him forget how to read. Is there anything to our traditional notion of reading being an aberration? See also: the Gutenberg Parenthesis.

8. Say what you will about books, but dating sites aren’t going anyplace. If you’re in that particular circle of purgatory (or enjoy some wordy schadenfreude), you might want to read From ‘Bae’ To ‘Submarining,’ The Lingo Of Online Dating.

9. Target is selling an exclusive Oregon Trail handheld game. Now you can die if dysentery on your own couch! The floppy-disk style power button is a nice touch.

10. Today is National Grammar Day in the U.S. Expect a parliament of pedants (though I prefer a ‘quibble of pedants’ or, even better, an ‘actually’) to use this opportunity to try to foist their almost uniformly baseless rules and preferences on you. Just say no…unless you filled with generosity and can lovingly try to help such wayward souls figure out what they are really afraid of. Or, celebrate by reading a fun book like Ammon Shea’s Bad English.

WATCH/WITNESS

A map of Language Difficulty Rankings in Europe according to the Foreign Service Institute. The full FSI list includes more than just European languages. See also: a well-done infographic on the topic.

WHAT!?

Tatsuo Horiuchi creates intricate digital landscapes using…Microsoft Excel.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D.: “Another sabot is an eight-foot dinghy sailboat popular in Southern California. Kids learn to sail in them.”

• Reader B.: “Those faces, waiting for the execution with such eagerness. And such comfort and happiness among them. ¶ Another splendid Katexification!”

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

I was a man alone
Leaning on the white courtesy phone
Holy fools and hobo signs
I rebuke in moony lines

I drove into the sun
Yeah I was the dirt and when the wheels spun
Wanting to escape myself
Leave the gun upon the shelf

Stroll through, ’scuse me but I thought I knew you
Smiling like a check is due
Feeling pleasure that you’re bound to lose

Wait! Oh, you’ll find a better way
Oh yes I’m free to face all the darkness on my own

You were a holy mess
You were dressed in infinite forgiveness
But you were the heaviest
Cat in the crowd nonetheless

You were a wretched wave
All the sullen trolls that you swam out to save
All the moves and all your mind
Dust swirls in the sunlight

All things empty and amazing
Jot ’em down upon the wall
Dressed like a professional

Wait! Oh, you’ll find a better way
Oh yes I’m free to face all the darkness on my own

—Mike Doughty
—lyrics from “Wait! You’ll Find a Better Way”
—found on The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns

WORD(S)

sabot /SA-boh/. noun. A wooden shoe or clog. A sleeve that holds and guides a projectile through a rifle tube. In baccarat, the box or shoe for dealing cards. In Australia, a small, snub-nosed dinghy. From Old French çabot, a blend of çavate (old shoe) and bote (boot).

The word sabotage is derived from sabot, though the popular folk etymology that saboteurs threw their wooden shoes into the machinery like the proverbial monkey-wrench is sadly unlikely. More prosaically, sabotage comes from the general sense of the term used in French for doing things badly, particularly performing music, which would be likened to the sound of wooden shoes clomping across the floor.

“They were in the forest, as on the day before, in a hut used by sabot makers. Its walls were of straw, and its roof came down so low that one had to stoop. They sat close together, on a bed of dry leaves.” (Gustave Flaubert)

“I drank greedily, determined to chuck a monkey wrench or hurl a sabot into the entertainers’ works and to have a good time in the bargain…” (Gilbert Sorrentino)

“The inside of the flintlock had been replaced with newer technology and contained a magazine of real bullets complete with sabot and primer caps, cleverly hidden in the stock, and a rifled barrel.” (John C. Wright)

WEB

1. Issue #28 of Robert Wright’s Mindful Resistance newsletter (a highly recommended subscription) has a piece answering the question “What is the Mindful Response to a School Shooting?” I can’t believe I live in a time where something like that needs to be written…and I wish I could believe something will change.

2. Jason Kottke is an inspiration to many, not least for his longevity. Any reader of Katexic CLippings has to be familiar with his work and should read Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20

3. Take a gander at the Star Wars posters of Soviet Europe.

4. Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet? → Thanks to the indefatigable Reader B.! || See also: a notable link in the article which I shared here years ago, but deserves a new look now that the project is now live: BabelNet

5. Daily Art Magazine has painstakingly documented every piece of art in all four seasons of BoJack Horseman.

6. Mr. Rogers is getting a stamp. About time. Related new-to-me news: Catherine O’Hara has Canadian stamp.

7. Explore the Largest Known Early Map of the World, Assembled for the First Time.

8. Take a minute for this beautiful Google Arts & Culture exhibit of Japanese paper wrapping: Ogasawara-Ryu Origata Wrapping.

9. The images of the crowd, at least as interested in the woman who was supposed to “pull the trap,” are as horrifying as the photos of the condemned at the last public execution in the US.

10. Today the annual plum blossom festival is celebrated at the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine in Kyoto, Japan, with a special tea ceremony (Baikasai) performed by geiko (geisha) and apprentices (maiko) for more than 3000 visitors. While the outdoor tea ceremony dates back to “only” 1952, the shrine was built in 947.

WATCH/WITNESS

► Watch the first episode of Mr. Rogers’ from Feb. 19, 1968. See also: Mr. Rogers learns to breakdance.

WHAT!?

I was skeptical, but this ► cover of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by Japanese group Goose house won me over.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: "From Twine to the Roti-matic, what a fine return for Katexic!

• Reader G.: “Loved the WORK in this publication. With #21 – ‘love forgives everything’ – for me, that applies until I’ve fallen out of love. Maybe too, there are different levels of forgiveness.”

• Reader A.: “This one [#6 -- 'Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.'] is tough. One of the things a manager must do is hire those with more skill than themselves so that the work which gets done is top notch. Managers need to be competent enough to understand the product of their team, but to draw out work from each member so the whole is greater than the parts. Micromanagement is the bane of creative teams.”

• Reader R.: “Family drama with my love’s daughter remains in full force, and nothing could have been a better start to my day than seeing you in the inbox and reading these wonderful words of wisdom.”

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/.

My thanks to those who welcomed the newsletter after my unscheduled break. I want readers, not just subscribers, so it was gratifying to hear from you!

WORK

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
11. Give up blood sports.
12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.
13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
18. Admit your errors freely and soon.
19. Become less suspicious of joy.
20. Understand humility.
21. Remember that love forgives everything.
22. Foster dignity.
23. Live memorably.
24. Love yourself.
25. Endure.

—John Perry Barlow (RIP)
—from: unknown, to me, but dates back to at least 1977

WORD(S)

tribology /triy-BAWL-ə-jee/. noun. The study of fiction, lubrication and wear between interacting surfaces. From Greek tribos (rubbing) + -logy (suffix indicating science, study, theory).

“Individual trolls live for a long time, hibernating during the summertime and sleeping during the day, since heat affects them and makes them slow. They have a fascinating geology. One could talk about tribology, one could mention the semiconductor effects of impure silicon, one could talk about the giant trolls of prehistory…” (Terry Pratchett)

“…many thousands of recent unbound periodicals to which the library subscribes—serials with titles like Welding Design & Fabrication, Nutrition Reviews, Journal of Tribology, The Canadian Journal of Soil Science, Car and Driver, and Bee Culture—were secretly tossed into recycling bins this past February, March, and April; but no books were.” (Nicholson Baker)

WEB

1. A study that documents how people with depression use language differently (note the first finding and #16 in Barlow’s list above).

2. Some interesting reading, fully available online: Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, an “esoteric encyclopedia.” || Pairs with (kind of), a trove of Victorian magazines.

3. JC Debroize’s Organic Typography is…unsettling.

4. The New York Times explores our possible Post-Text Future…which might be a good thing given that we human paper users are losing “an elemental struggle between the natural and the mechanical” in the form of the ever-present—and possibly eternal—paper jam.

5. The Disconnect is the online magazine you can only read offline. I love playful publishing experiments like these!

6. How Facebook Is Killing Comedy is really about how Facebook’s omnipresence is crushing independent entertainment of all kinds.

7. Thanks, Reader B. for a pointer to a conversation about consciousness, particularly the “Where Are Words?” entry.

8. If you appreciate Iain M. Banks “Culture” series, Joseph Heath’s essay “Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks” is worth some time. If you don’t…I can only assume you haven’t read them.

9. I don’t want to be a Linear Lungs, so without further ado, the Wikipedia list of the moment: CB slang.

10. Today in 1990, Nelson Mandela, African political leader and symbolic leader of the anti-apartheid movement, is released from prison after 27 years. Mandela served much of his time in the notorious Robben Island Prison and refused at least three offers of conditional release in those years before newly elected South African President F. W. de Klerk ordered his release as part of his dismantling of apartheid.

WATCH/WITNESS

“► Leo and Laura traveled the world together, but now in their 90’s it’s become much smaller.”

WHAT!?

Honestly, at least half of these “unbelievable” kitchen gadgets, from the “head knife block” to the “Banana Surprise Yum Station,” seem at least as desirable as they are bizarre.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader T. comments on my radio segments: “Dude! You sound like This American Life meets The Writer’s Almanac. Well Done!”

• Reader D. on ruction: “When I was growing up in Indiana back in the ’40’s, the Hoosier grandmas and grandpas had ruction in their active vocabularies. I assumed it was somehow an offspring of ruckus. ¶ If it were new today, we’d naturally figure it must be related to erection, eh?”

• Reader B. with a flurry: “What a fantastic pause in Grossman’s dynamic tale. ¶ Lindy West on Twitter – no, I’m still not seeing it. I think this is a case of people using the tech wrong, to be frank. ¶ PS: ruction->rumpus brought to mind the catchphrase ‘what’s the rumpus?’ from the very great Miller’s Crossing.”

• Reader S. writes in: “Liked the piece on marginalia. I had forgotten about twine which is a neat tool. We have so far to go when it comes to the web – I am not sure if it will be possible to have our ‘representation theory of truth and singular points of view’ cake and eat our ‘knowledge as socially constructed act on the world’s biggest copying machine’ too. I guess time will tell.”

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/.

Did you know I was on the radio? I’m pleased to be a regular on Robert Hannon’s Northern Soundings. You can also listen to just my 3–5 minute segments in the KUAC-WORD section of the Katexic website, updated today!

WORK

The snow here hadn’t thawed. Its large, rough crystals were filled with the blue of the lake-water. But on the sunny side of the hill the snow was just beginning to melt. The ditch beside the path was full of gurgling water. The glitter of the snow, the water and the ice on the puddles was quite blinding. There was so much light, it was so intense, that they seemed almost to have to force their way through it. It disturbed them and got in their way; when they stepped on the thin film of ice over the puddles, it seemed to be light that was crunching under their feet, breaking up into thin, splinter-like rays. And it was light that was flowing down the ditch beside the path; where the path was blocked by stones, the light swelled up, foaming and gurgling. The spring sun seemed to be closer to the earth than ever. The air was cool and warm at the same time.

—Vasily Grossman
—from Life and Fate

WORD(S)

ruction /RUK-shən/. noun. A noisy disturbance; an uproar. Etymology unclear, but possibly derived from insurrection (not to mention destruction, which was first recorded almost 500 years earlier), or even eruption. See also: ruckus (rumpus + ruction?), rumpus, rookery and ruffle.

“Oh God, but is hard sometimes to love one another; if he get on like a beast, bind him hand and foot. I can’t have no ruction in this place.” (Derek Walcott)

“Pratt was raving. He appeared to be not only sore because the general ruction had spoiled his barbecue plans and ruined the tail end of his country sojourn, but specifically and pointedly sore at Wolfe for vague but active reasons…” (Rex Stout)

“They arrived at the church and waded through the tall, unshorn grass of the graveyard, amongst crooked ranks of crucifixes, stones and slabs, many of them askew and at oblique angles, as though they had been displaced by some crazy ruction of the earth.” (Jonathan Barnes)

WEB

1. A beautiful photo exploration. → Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories.

2. Notes: 1) the main point is about cursive writing, not handwriting generally and, 2) education today is based more on “myth” than not (because…the art part!) → Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths

3. Robin Sloan is always doing interesting things at the intersection of writing and technology. Two new projects: Penumbra’s New Fiction, featuring one story at a time in a limited edition printed on an old school Risograph (remember those?), and Music of the Mazg, about the “creative machine”-created music for the audiobook version of his fantastic novel Sourdough (that does, indeed revolve around sourdough starter).

4. Behold! More technology that works for us. → Automated Voice Recognition Typewriter

5. “Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocalypse.” → I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great by Lindy West

6. East Village Bar Boldly [and literally] Bans Customers Who Say ‘Literally’

7. Well, not literally all of us… → Why do we all have balls on our hats?

8. A great story about how Charles Schultz brought Franklin to his comic strip. → Guess Who’s Coming to ‘Peanuts’

9. This gets a little geeky, but I can’t be the only person challenged (and often troubled) by how marginalia is represented on the web. → Interactive marginalia

10. Today is World Cancer Day, which “aims to save millions of preventable deaths each year by raising awareness and education about the disease [and] pressing governments and individuals across the world to take action.” You can still get involved and, even better, think about how you might contribute a little toward this disease that has surely affected all of us.

WATCH/WITNESS

The hype is intense, but I don’t see any reason technology can’t support focus, mindfulness and meditation…which makes these brain-wave sensing sunglasses quite interesting! See also: brief reviews from Digital Trends and The Manual.

WHAT!?

Marbles, Magnets, and Music (Synchronized) to Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” (you’ll recognize the tune).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. loves the puns, I am sure: “Flours of Evil? I groan, sir. ¶ On Tarrare, I notice this Gothic theme from Wikipedia: ”After being suspected of eating a toddler".

• Reader C. was the first to express this sentiment about those Flours of Evil: “Cookie dough ruiner!”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

WORK

I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention—invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble. That is the big secret that has brought us down the ages hundreds of thousands of years, from chipping flints to switching on the washing up machine.

—Agatha Christie
—from Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

WORD(S)

mudlark / mudlarking. noun or verb. Rarely, slang for a hog. Traditionally, a street urchin or scavenger (or the activities of such); now, hobbyists and treasure seekers who search in muddy areas along rivers. Also, a generic name for various birds that like muddy environments, particularly the magpie lark and Australian slang for a racehorse that excels on muddy tracks.

“Other sewery professions included toshers and mudlarks who delved through muck, in sewers and along fetid riverbanks, for lost jewellery or the odd silver spoon.” (Bill Bryson)

“He had no time for reading, nor did he care what I wrote, nor did he believe I would ever get anywhere, but he liked to hear about it. He was interested in horses, mud-larks particularly. Listening to me was a harmless diversion and worth the price of a good lunch or a new hat, if needs be.” (Henry Miller)

“‘Mudlarks,’ Fraser told him, picking his way. ‘Winter and summer, they slog up to their middles, in the mud o’ low tide. Hunting lumps o’ coal, rusty nails, any river-rubbish that will fetch a penny.’” (Bruce Sterling and William Gibson)

“They resumed conversations that had been interrupted by tavern-fights thirty years earlier at the first Bomb in Dunkirk. And I began to understand that even Queena-Kootah is not so terribly far from London. Standing on a ship in Japan, I am closer to London than ever I was standing on the banks of the Thames as a mud-lark boy.” (Neal Stephenson)

WEB

1. Why Practice Rarely Makes Perfect

2. Fake news is old news. → Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century

3. I first noticed the little warnings (“to bake is to wait…”) while doing some Thanksgiving baking. Apparently, there is good reason → Thanks a Lot! New Reasons Not to Eat Cookie Dough. And it looks like the time is finally right for my manuscript, Flours of Evil.

4. Scurrilous manuscript that could have undone John Donne discovered

5. “[Tarrare] died shortly afterwards, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhoea.” And that’s far from the worst part of a story of failed espionage and a pathological food obsession…among other things. → Tarrare [Thanks, Reader C.!]

6. “On the eve of the Civil War, a nightmare at sea turned into one of the greatest rescues in maritime history. More than a century later, a rookie treasure hunter went looking for the lost ship—and found a different kind of ruin.” → The Wreck [Thanks, Reader B.!]

7. Last month was 2017 National Novel Generation Month again, in which participants write code that generates novels…and the results are in! Naturally, I am fond of the Edward Lear Limerick Generator, Shakespeare Summarizes Everything and Acrostic Sonnets on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

8. And in the same vein, the 2017 Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) winners have also been announced and some of them are amazing. See also: the IFDB (Interactive Fiction Database), “an IF game catalog and recommendation engine.”

9. “After academics picked out 30 words that have been ‘lost’ from the English language, self-confessed ‘word geek’ Paul Anthony Jones reveals obscure yet delightful terms that also need to be saved from falling into disuse.” → Twenty-six words we don’t want to lose

10. Today in 1926, Agatha Christie—future Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, “Queen of Crime,” and the best-selling novelist of all time—disappears. Christie’s car was quickly found abandoned at a quarry along with an expired drivers license and some clothes, but despite a massive search and front-page stories in England and the United States, it took ten days to find Christie, who was registed at a hotel in Yorkshire under the name of her husband’s lovers. Christie never provided an explanation, but many little gray cells have been applied to the real-life mystery, yielding theories ranging from amnesia, fugue states and suicidal depression to an aborted attempt to frame her unfaithful husband for murder.

WATCH/WITNESS

What Flying Was Like in the 60s

WHAT!?

from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man (1898) [via Public Domain Review]

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader M. brought a problem link to my attention. The story of the virtual Japanese pop sensation Miku Hatsune should have pointed to ► this video.

• Reader A.: “I wonder if Poe thought of his raven as rasorial. ¶ Was a bit dusty in the room when I watched ‘Falling Letters’. The pebble alphabet was a cheerful follow-up.”

• Reader B.: "First, the full rhyme [of the poem from which ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ coes] moved me deeply. I just spent an hour moving wood and walking in the forest. It reminded me of birds flying south for the winter, and of storing food against the cold months. ¶ Second, Re: One Flew Over, there’s an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia which turns into the Kesey story. Best of all, it stars Danny DeVito.

• Reader T. issues a corrective: “‘20 years ago there were only 130 websites total…’ Hmm. Maybe 25 years ago now?”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

WORK

Vintery Mintery Cutery Corn

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

—Traditional nursery rhyme

WORD(S)

rasorial /rə-SOR-ee-əl/. adjective. Scratching at the ground or scratching more generally. Originally and primarily used for describing birds. From the scientific Latin Rasores, used to describe an order of birds that scratch the ground for food. From Latin rāsor (scraper).

“They looked toward the door, saw only the paunchy guest of the evening moving toward it, in an unsteady rasorial attitude as though following a trail of crumbs to the great world outside.” (William Gaddis)

“Otherwise I’ll be a rich jailbird. But even if I hung around I wouldn’t see much of it. With two rasorial ex-wives—the Skanks from Hell are both well practiced at deficit financing—and a third who spends like the Hilton sisters, and three kids with college funds…” (F. Paul Wilson)

“I read somewhere of the remarkable optimism of a flea which a man found on his foot after crossing the desert of the Sahara. It had lived on in the sand, goodness knows how long, on the chance of some animal passing within the radius of a leap and so carrying it back to a congenial and not too rasorial a civilisation.” (Frank Frankfort Moore)

WEB

1. FutureMe: Write a Letter to your Future Self (and read some written by others).

2. My Sammelband has Frisket-Bite: A Short Glossary of Delightful Library Terms

3. Legendary typographer and designer, Erik Spiekermann, is bringing new, digital life to the letterpress.

4. The story of Hashima Island is almost as interesting as the ruins found there…which you can explore virtually thanks to a cool Google project using Street View cameras.

5. How ‘thoughts and prayers’ became the stock phrase of tragedies. See also: an apropos clip from Bojack Horseman.

6. Giant Straw Animals Invade Japanese Fields After Rice Harvest

7. For your sunbathing and writing efforts: Clotilde Olyff’s Pebble Alphabet: upper and lower case versions.

8. Every Second on the Internet is a compelling, creative visualization of the insane torrent of information that is the interwebz.

9. And when you are tired of contributing to all those seconds, take a spin or two on the Procatinator!

10. Today in 1975, Milos Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest debuts. Based on Ken Kesey’s novel of the same name, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the 2nd film to win all five major Academy Awards, a feat that wouldn’t be achieved again until the Silence of the Lambs in 1991. The role of Randle McMurphy—intended for Kirk Douglas, who owned the movie rights, and first turned down by Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Gene Hackman—was just one of many iconic roles for Jack Nicholson (and his first Oscar-winner), but it was Louise Fletcher’s most famous performance, a role she accepted after it had been turned down by Angela Lansbury, Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft and a number of other well-known actresses. Fletcher was so disturbed by playing the part that she refused to watch the film for many years.

WATCH/WITNESS

Falling Letters (Bokstavsbarn)

WHAT!?

► Miku Hatsune - Ievan Polkka. See also: Diehard Fans Turn Virtual Teen Singer into Japanese Mega-Star and Miku’s Wikipedia entry.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C.: “Love the Snow tha Product verse in that song.”

• Reader V.: “Reader beware and be careful Googling (onward genericide!) glabrous!”

• Reader T.: “Thanks for links to The Allusionist [‘Open Me’ Part 1 and Part 2] episodes. I devoured them and wanted more. I’m delighted every time I learn that the love of writing letters isn’t limited to myself and my dwindling crew of correspondence companions.”

• Reader M.: "I hope readers weren’t so turned off by your Louis C.K. ‘joke’ (really?) that they missed the excellent, funny animal photos!

• Reader F.: “Those Goofein Journals are great! It amazes me how Gurfein maintained a sense of humor and gentle ardor during what must have been terrifying times.”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

As always, I appreciate your support. If you like Katexic Clippings, please share it with your friends (and if you don’t like it, share it with your enemies)!

WORK

I got 1 job, 2 job, 3 when I need them
I got 5 roommates in this one studio, but I never really see them
And we all came America trying to get a lap dance from Lady Freedom
But now Lady Liberty is acting like Hilary Banks with a pre-nup
Man, I was brave, sailing on graves
Don’t think I didn’t notice those tombstones disguised as waves
I’m no dummy, here is something funny, you can be an immigrant without risking your lives
Or crossing these borders with thrifty supplies
All you got to do is see the world with new eyes

Immigrants, we get the job done

[…]

I been scoping ya dudes, ya’ll ain’t been working like I do
I’ll outwork you, it hurts you
You claim I’m stealing jobs though
Peter Piper claimed he picked them, he just underpaid Pablo
But there ain’t a paper trail when you living in the shadows
We’re America’s ghost writers, the credit’s only borrowed
It’s a matter of time before the checks all come
But…

[…]

The credit is only borrowed
It’s America’s ghost writers

[…]

Ay yo aye, immigrants we don’t like that
Na they don’t play British empire strikes back
They beating us like 808’s and high hats
At our own game of invasion, but this ain’t Iraq
Who these fugees what did they do for me
But contribute new dreams
Taxes and tools, swagger and food to eat
Cool, they flee war zones, but the problem ain’t ours
Even if our bombs landed on them like the Mayflower
Buckingham Palace or Capitol Hill
Blood of my ancestors had that all built
It’s the ink you print on your dollar bill, oil you spill
Thin red line on the flag you hoist when you kill
But still we just say “look how far I come”
Hindustan, Pakistan, to London
To a galaxy far from their ignorance
Cos-

Immigrants, we get the job done

—Lin Manuel-Miranda, Residente, Riz MC and Snow Tha Product
—from “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)”

WORD(S)

glabrous /GLAY-brəs/. adjective. Hairless, smooth. Most often used to refer to skin or leaves. From Latin glaber (hairless, bald).

“This abundance of terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive language, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for moldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for sneezing?” (Bill Bryson)

“Glabrous, which is the loveliest of all hair-related adjectives, means having no hair (on a given part) at all. Please note that glabrous means more baby’s-bottom-hairless than bald or shaved, though if you wanted to describe a bald person in an ironically fancy way you could talk about his glabrous dome or something.” (David Foster Wallace)

“…the neophyte attorneys were easily distinguishable from the parasite poets. The attorneys were glabrous, ambitious, social, and grave, the poets mendacious, flagrantly seedy, thinly optimistic, and (worst of all) poetic.” (Cynthia Ozick)

“A hirsute show of manliness ruffled along his forearms and from the collar of his shirt, reminding me of my own relative hairlessness, my chest (and stomach and buttocks) as streamlined and glabrous as a Ken doll.” (Viet Thanh Nguyen)

WEB

1. Over the past seven years, Rainbow Pack (founded by a 10-year-old!) has given 20,000 backpacks of school supplies to elementary school students in need. They would like to double that total in 2018. And for $10, you can help! → Rainbow Pack 2018

2. Remember when The New York Times tried to get hip with those neato grunge cats? → When Grunge Was Fake News

3. Combining, kind of, two things I love: coffee and paper. → G . F Smith launches new paper made from disposable coffee cups. See also: Kona Paper: Paper Made from Repurposed Coffee Bean Bag Fiber || EcoPaper’s Coffee Paper.

4. Celebrating the “humour & creativity of Tourettes” by not just dispelling myths but sharing nearly 650 pages of funny, shocking, surreal tics, searchable by keyword and theme. → tourettes hero

5. Seriously high-quality art history materials for your learning pleasure! → Smarthistory

6. A free book about artificial intelligence and the future that is both fascinating and readable. → Frankenstein’s Legacy: Four Conversations About Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and the Modern World

7. I had no idea the idea was even a thing. → Why Sign-Language Gloves Don’t Help Deaf People. And while I’m at it, here’s another Atlantic article about a previously unknown (to me) thing, this time in Japan: How to Hire Fake Friends and Family

8. The Allusionist delves into some powerful stories of snail mail relationships. → “Open Me” Part 1 and Part 2

9. Featuring funny, literal animals, not Louis C.K. Behold! → The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards Gallery.

10. Today in 1954, Ellis Island—gateway to the United States for more than 12 million immigrants—closes. From 1892–1924, Ellis Island was the focal point of what is claimed to be the largest human migration in modern history. Apparently, Ellis Island name changes were mostly mythical (or accidental), but the sometimes terrifying health inspections, including occasional eugenic screening, were not. See also: the jigsaw puzzle that could determine a would-be immigrant’s fate || the searcahable passenger lists of more than 51 million immigrants, passengers, and crew members who came through Ellis Island and the Port of New York || Selected Images of Ellis Island and Immigration, ca. 1880–1920 || Ellis Island Photographs from the Collection of William Williams, Commissioner of Immigration, 1902–1913 || Immigrant Number One, the story—and mystery—of the first person to arrive at Ellis Island || Ellis Island Oral Histories

WATCH/WITNESS

“When Marion Gurfein wrote to her husband Joe during his tours of duty in World War II and Korea, she sent him something more than letters. She created a mock newspaper, The Goofein Journal, which she hand-lettered on card stock. The Journal contained banner headlines, illustrations, photos and ‘news’ stories recording family events and a ‘social column’ which kept track of their friends’ whereabouts.” The site includes images, interviews and more.

WHAT!?

► A Chameleon Tongue Crushing Crickets in Slow Motion (20,000 fps). Side note: chameleon tongues can be up to 1.5x the length of their body…and the accelerator muscles that drive the tongue are essentially sphincters. See also: ► Chameleon Tongue Attack in Slow Motion - Earth Unplugged || If a chameleon tongue was a car, it could accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 1/100th of a second

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Another fine word horde. Thank you.” — Aggressive enough to be a horde, eh?"

• Reader A.: “Oh dear. I guess I mispronounced victuals until this very day. Even though I’ve seen and heard the correct pronunciation, I never made the connection. Thanks! ¶ ► ‘I Have A Message For You’ is a beautiful documentary, and I was also struck by how the animation in it sort of matched the video clip of the Fahrenheit 451 firebook. ¶ Thanks as always for an interesting start to the week!” — I didn’t make the connection between the style of the two videos!

• Reader L. issues a correction: “Quick note! Humbled and honored to have Anguish Languish make the grade, but I think you are attributing to me copy from wikipedia. Sorry if my note didn’t make clear where link ended and reference material began. My bad!!!”

• Reader G. too: “Clan of the Cave Bear doesn’t really have erotic scenes, unless you count the rape scenes. I think you mean Valley of the Horses, which has so many you can just let the books pages fall open to them.” — Sadly, no, I really meant Clan. Even the young me, who was clueless regarding the violence, knew the book was terribly written (and, to my knowledge, my mom didn’t have any others)!

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

WORK

The Fifth of November

Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

—Traditional English folk verse
—this version (and much more information about it) on PotW.org.

WORD(S)

genericide /jə-NAIR-ə-siyd/. noun. A more colorful term for when a trademarked name becomes genericized, or so commonly used that it becomes generic and is in danger of losing its protected status. Kleenex and Band-Aid are the prototypical victims of genericide. Technically, when a brand name is used generically, it is an example of antonomasia, a kind of metonymy in which a proper name is used for a common name. Fear of genericide is why you don’t hear Google employees using Google as a verb or see it used that way in their official sites and documentation. Google it and see!

For a living example, see the official Velcro videos ►Don’t Say Velcro and ►Behind The Scenes: Don’t Say Velcro.

“Today, all have become common nouns, bereft of monetary value, victims of ‘genericide’. This term was coined by marketing mavens to denote trademarks and brand names repeatedly lower-cased in everyday parlance.” (Scott Winokur)

“ …‘genericide,’ or (as Orin Hargraves puts it) ‘trademark creep’-is a common, neverending process. Common words that started as specific, trademarked products include ‘zipper,’ ‘thermos,’ ‘escalator,’ ‘popsicle,’ ‘band-aid,’ and ‘pooper-scooper.’” (Mark Peters)

WEB

1. Residents of the tiny Faroe Islands wanted Google to map their island. So they did…using sheep equipped with solar powered 360-degree cameras.

2. Super Terrain has create a version of Fahrenheit 451 that can only be read by applying flame to the pages. Thanks, Reader B.!

3. The alt-right is creating its own dialect. Here’s a complete guide. If that’s too—something—how about The IKEA Dictionary? Or The Don Martin (of Mad Magazine fame) Dictionary? Or a collection of short fiction composed entirely of example sentences from dictionaries?

4. Language ridiculousness du jour → Court rules request for ‘lawyer dog’ too ‘ambiguous’

5. Photos! We’ve got photos (and video)! → Photos Published of Female Librarians on Horseback Delivering Books in the 1930s || Photographer Spends Almost 10 Years Photographing the Most Beautiful Libraries Around the World || An aerial view of Chicago taken in 1914 with video from today

6. A podcast assertion about the mystery of consciousness led me to the story of The Man Who Lives Normally With Damage to 90% of His Brain. The truth turns out to be a bit different…but still pretty amazing.

7. The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English

8. Via Reader L. comes Anguish Languish, about which he writes, “Although written with a serious purpose in mind, the humorous aspects cannot be ignored, especially with Chace’s additions of phrases not in the traditional stories (‘A nervous sausage bag ice!’ for ‘I never saw such big eyes!’) and added plot twists.” See also: the Wikipedia article on this “ersatz, homophonic” language.

9. Where was this when I was skimming through Clan of the Cave Bear? → Audible’s new feature lets you skip right to the most erotic part of romance novels

10. Today in 1930, Sinclair Lewis is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.” When a Swedish journalist called Lewis the morning of the award, Lewis thought it was a friend of his playing a joke and mocked the journalist’s accent, saying he could do better and repeating, “You haf de Nobel Brize.” In his Nobel Lecture, appropriately titled “The American Fear of Literature,” Lewis praised many other writers who he felt deserved the prize more than he, including William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather and Thomas Wolfe, but also noted that “true-blue” professors of literature in America thought that, “literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead; it is something magically produced by superhuman beings who must, if they are to be regarded as artists at all, have died at least one hundred years before the diabolical invention of the typewriter,” who liked their “their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.” I’d say Lewis was mostly correct in his assessment of others…and his implicit assessment of his own work.

WATCH/WITNESS

“To escape Auschwitz, she left her father to die. Decades later, she got a message from him…”

WHAT!?

Photographer [Stefan Draschan] Spends Countless Hours Waiting To Capture Museum Visitors Who Match The Artworks. See also: Draschan’s People touching artworks series.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader N.: “I used to pronounce the word ‘victuals’ (pronounced vittles) as ‘vic-tu-als’. I found it in a poem by A.E. Housman and recited it to a few people until one person exasperatedly said he could not believe I was saying it incorrectly. In my defense, I was but 14. ¶ Reading a lot is a good way to learn how to pronounce words incorrectly.” — I mispronounced ‘victuals’ the same way…until just a few years ago!

• Reader M.: “Great to hear you in Northern Soundings with your usual erudition. One suggestion: sloooooow doooooown.” — I appreciate the advice…you aren’t the only one to tell me that. I’ll be working on it!

• Reader G.: “I really appreciated the article about the 2 soldiers who refused to participate in the Sand Creek massacre. I think it is really important to realize differences of opinion in history and notice those who took an unpopular stance and stood up for what is right. This is an important lesson for all of us when faced with participating or not in an injustice.”

• Reader B.: “A gorgeous newsletter. Well led off by the great Bradbury.”

• Reader P.: “Thanks for this. Keep ’m coming.”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

I’m pleased to announce that Katexic Clippings is now a regular part of Robert Hannon’s Northern Soundings radio show. Listen for our word-a-licious segment at the end of each episode airing Tuesdays at 10a AKST on KUAC radio (and via live streaming) or anytime on the Northern Soundings site. Even if you’re tired of me, Robert’s interviews on the show are uniformly great and deserve a much wider audience!

WORK

“For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles – breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”

—Ray Bradbury
—from Something Wicked This Way Comes

WORD(S)

oronym /OR-uh-nim/. noun. A sequence of words or which sounds like a different sequence of words because of ambiguous word boundaries in speech. “I scream” and “ice cream” are perhaps the most common examples. An oronym is essentially an extended version of the homophone, which usually refers to single words that sound alike. Many puns are oronymic, such as “visualize whirled peas.” Mondegreens, or misheard song lyrics (“excuse me while I kiss this guy”) are musical oronyms and many mistakes in popular sayings result from this kind of confusion such as “it’s a doggy dog world.” Coined by Gyles Brandreth in his 1980 book The Joy of Lex.

• “The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in ‘oronyms,’ strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways: The good can decay many ways. ¶ The good candy came anyways.” (Stephen Pinker)

• “…a computer has no way of telling the difference between ‘The stuffy nose may dim liquor’ and ‘The stuff he knows made him lick her.’” (Joshua Foer)

• “She argued passionately against stopping violins in the street.” (Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live)

• See the classic “Four Candles” sketch by The Two Ronnies. And not related to oronyms, you might as well take a few minutes to watch the “Sweet Shop Sketch” too!

• If you are seriously geeky, you might enjoy skimming Jennifer Hughes’ M.S. Computer Science thesis on the “MisheardMe Oronyminator” and “a nice cold hour.”

WEB

1. Clamor favorite Marian Call’s Grand Tour continues on the West Coast through November and early December. Catch a show (or two)!

2. Art and writing vending machines are a thing there should be more of (what better way to use old cigarette machines?). Check out Montreal’s Distroboto aka the zine machine and the Art-o-Mat.

3. I wish I’d heard this story a long time ago. → Remembering U.S. Soldiers Who Refused To Kill Native Americans At Sand Creek

4. Who knew that figuring out how to unboil an egg could lead to a revolution in cancer treatment (and make “unboil” a word?

5. Setting aside the controversy over the Booker Prize expanding its eligibility to any English-language novel, George Saunders 2017 win for Lincoln in the Bardo is well deserved. See also: George Saunders and Jason Isbell in conversation || George Saunders on life after the Man Booker Prize || A performance excerpt from the novel.

6. The ampersand (aka the “commercial and” or “esperluette”) is arguably the most beautiful glyph…this is a nice bit on its history with delightful illustrations. As always, I can’t bring up the ampersand without pointing you to Keith Houston’s short, illuminating series on the character and plug, again, his book Shady Characters.

7. Mansplaining is a problematic, perhaps over-used, idea…but two new words stemming from that conversation caught my eye this week: the funny (and equally problematic) mantrum and the significantly more useful, and sadly observable, hepeating.

8. Nostalgia’s unexpected etymology explains why it can feel so painful.

9. Woman Earns Over $70,000 a Year Showing Her Feet on Instagram.

10. Today is National Cat Day in the U.S. (but why limit yourself?), a day intended to “celebrate cats and help them to find forever homes.” They’ve even got a blog with “think pieces on life with felines.” See also: 20 Ways to Celebrate National Cat Day || the “Purr-fect Purr-sonalities” photo contest. But for my allergies, I agree with Mark Twain, who wrote, “If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”

WATCH/WITNESS

A powerful story of forgiveness: ►Debbie Baigrie befriends, and eventually helps free, the young man who shot her and was serving a life sentence.

WHAT!?

Were you ever asked “if they jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?” Well, ►245 people did just that in a rope jump in Brazil. Note that this was a rope jump, not one using elastic bungee cords as you might expect. This ►first-person video of the jump is illuminating.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader R. – err - L.: “Loved the asemic writing link! Part of the hypnotherapy background includes what we call ‘automatic writing’, so this was a nice connection between that part of my life and proper literary pursuits.”

• Reader B.: “Crash blossoms are awesome. Thank you. ¶ Zone Rouge: a fine metaphor for the way WWI looms like a homicidal ghost throughout the next century.”

• Reader C. remembers a nice ‘crash blossom’: “…from our own Daily News Miner: ‘US urges North Korea to drop nukes.’ This was probably 15 years ago. ¶ I used to have the clipping from the paper, but I can’t seem to find it right now.”

Reader J. makes a great point: "It strikes me that ‘crash blossoms’ (and more particularly garden path sentences) are strategies poets use all the time, or are related to their strategies, which are often given a special inflection with line breaks I only have time to look for an example from my own stuff, but you can surely find better:

Like Aleph and Zed,
crossbreeds dearly crosshaired, a couple
does and a coupled ease …

I think this is related also both to pre-Chomskian syntactic models (which were more linear, and more common-sensical, than his transformational grammar–though his ‘syntactical ambiguity’ is at the heart of all of this) and to Donald Davidson’s understanding of semantic behavior as a kind of hypothesis machine (which, I believe, contemporary linguists don’t like at all, though I’m working on very limited data). But the combination of enjambment and sound-play in those lines of mine (a crosshaired couple of does/ a couple of those and a couple of these/ what a couple does [duz] leading to a coupled ease) seems to me to point up a more general expectation that the kind of compression poetry allows (like the kind of compression headlines require) presses us to doublecheck our backtracking and revisit our anticipations all the time."

I hadn’t thought of enjambment in this way before, but it makes perfect sense. An example from a poem appropriate for the season, Burlee Vang’s “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse”:

The moon will shine for God
knows how long.

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

Another query for the Clamor…any favorite ‘crash blossoms?’

WORK

There were people I wanted so much before I had them that the entire experience of having them was grief for my old hunger.

—Sarah Manguso
—from 300 Arguments

WORD(S)

crash blossom. noun. An ambiguous headline, particularly one that yields comedic interpretations. Coined in 2009 by Danny Bloom based on the headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms” in Japan Today, crash blossoms tend to occur in headlines because of space constraints. These linguistic gems are a kind of garden path sentence, in which one must backtrack to resolve an ambiguity, most often due to words that can be nouns or verbs, as in the classic example: “The old man the boat.”

Language Log has a category devoted to crash blossoms with many great examples. One of my favorites: “Mutilated body washes up on Rio beach to be used for Olympics beach volleyball.”

Ben Zimmer wrote a New York Times column on the phenomenon yielding, among other gems, “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel.”

A few other choice examples:

“Fat men enjoy longer lasting sex scientific research show”

“McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers”

“Lawmen from Mexico Barbecue Guests”

“Genetic Engineering Splits Scientists”

“Girl found alive in France murders car”

“Trump demands dog ‘Dreamers’ deal”

WEB

1. 10 Books About Words For Logophilic Readers Interested In The Wonders Of Language (I’ve read five of them and all were good).

2. Inside Racists Anonymous.

3. About “Zone Rouge,” areas in France still cordoned off due to human remains and unexploded munitions from World War I.

4. The Washington Post’s robot reporter has published 850 articles in the past year.

5. An awesome collection of 70s Movie Poster Typography.

6. President Trump’s Lawsuit Against Estate Of Johannes Gutenberg. While we’re linking to The Onion, how about this one: Historians Discover Meditation Spread From Ancient China By Annoying Monk Who Wouldn’t Shut Up About How It Changed His Life.

7. A quick-hit exploration of asemic writing/art, including examples from Henri Michaux and Xu Bing, author of A Book from the Sky.

8. I find Brand New, a site that collects changes to famous (and not-so-famous) brand logos, strangely addictive.

9. Merriam-Webster has quite a few word games on its site that Clamorites are likely to enjoy. I had fun with, and did terribly on, the Original Meanings Quiz (subtitled: a quiz for the pedantic and those annoyed by them!)

10. Today in 1917, Margaretha Geertruida ‘Margreet’ MacLeod (née Zelle), better known as Mata Hari, (in)famous femme fatale and legendary spy (or was she?), is executed by a firing squad in Paris. A bit of trivia: what do Mata Hari, Geronimo, Beethoven, Descartes and the Marquis de Sade have in common? They all had their heads (more or less) stolen.

WATCH/WITNESS

From quarks and stuff to smart machines making more smart machines…in just under 20 minutes: a ► history of the entire world, i guess (through May 2017, at least).

WHAT!?

► Fidget spinner spinning in space! Can we finally say the fidget spinner phenomenon has jumped the shark?

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B.: “Re: Abbot and Costello, this is a nice set of audio explorations. ¶ Fun podcast in general.”

• Reader B. also adds: “Re: Frankenstein, the extra book is Volney’s Ruins of Empires. Really interesting late 18th-century book. Apparently the first European history to consider African nations on a par with their own.”

I appreciate the responses to my question about experiences discovering you had been mispronouncing a word for a long time. Perhaps my description of “mortified” was hyperbolic, though it’s been my experience that there can be a classist/elitist component to the experience, such as the time in my first year of college when I, a “hick from the sticks,” managed to mispronounce both clique (it’s not click-way) and cliché (it’s not kleesh) in the same presentation in a literature class I was in every way unready for. Anyway, on to your thoughts:

• Reader R.: “I could not count the number of times I’ve learned my pronunciation was wrong. I have always thought it came from learning words through reading rather than hearing. Since that is a mark of grace I have never been mortified.”

• Reader A.: “The only one is from long long ago. My favorite vegetable as a kid were those little kidney shaped green beans. One time in class (like 2nd grade) my teacher asked the class if anyone knew what a llama was. I shot my hand in the air and described the beans…”

• Reader S.: “I learned in my fifties (I am now in my seventies, but the pain of the discovery is still raw) that I was saying “donkey” wrong. Until that moment, I had pronounced it to rhyme with “monkey”. The way I say it now doesn’t rhyme with anything really, but at least I’m saying it right: ‘don’ as in ‘Donald’. ¶ Or perhaps it isn’t that simple. I was born and live in England, but between the ages of fifteen months and nearly eight years, I lived in the USA, in New Jersey to be more precise, and I have occasionally vaguely wondered whether NJ people say “donkey” to rhyme with “monkey”. Or perhaps I have always had something of a tin ear.”

• Reader D.: “I’ve never been sure how to pronounce ‘plebeian.’ I thought I knew how to pronounce it, and then I had someone rather disdainfully pronounce it a different way (to make the point that I did not know how to pronounce it, but also to undermine the point I was making in what I was saying. In other words, her goal was to make me feel dumb because she did not like my point. But I still avoid using it because I’m afraid that I pronounce it in the wrong way.”

• Reader G.: “Hors d’oeuvres is, of course, the mispronunciation I was teased for most ruthlessly. Deservedly so as I was well aware of how to pronounce the word when used at a party, but I believed it to be a different word when I read it in a cookbook. I’m sure there were many, many more, as my parents and older brother loved to laugh at my expense when they corrected me.”

• Reader J. "…try as I may, I can’t think of a comparable experience of my own, and I’m guessing that the reasons for this are more interesting than the fact itself, to wit:

it’s much more likely that someone would mispronounce a word than that they’d discover it; or so it seems to me, since I never discover any such thing;

I’m fiendishly driven to look things up, and (I believe) much more likely to make a wild (but pronounceable) substitution than to risk using a word I’m not sure about;

(and this is a rich one!) I have a passable working knowledge of English morphemes and their lexical combinations, and an absurd confidence in my capacity to engage and produce new combinations in an appropriate way. This in no way assures that I’ll pronounce unfamiliar words (most of mine are medicinal, these days: ah, rosuvastatin! oh, sweet finasteride!) correctly; but it does assure that I think I’m pronouncing them aright, and thus I proceed with sublime confidence and scorn all nay-sayers. Quod erat demonstrandum."

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

I have a question and would to hear from the Clamor: have you had the mortifying experience of belatedly, perhaps very belatedly, discovering you’ve been pronouncing a word wrong? Bonus points if it appeared you were the only one not in on the secret. What were some of those words? I suspect this is something that happens a lot to people who were strong readers as children, particularly if they grew up before the emergence of the many media opportunities we have now to hear less common and confusing words spoken.

WORK

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

—George Saunders
—from Congratulations, by the way

WORD(S)

litotes /LIY-toh-teez/. noun. A figure of speech using understatement to express an affirmative by negating its opposite. The definition is necessarily more complicated than the use: litotes is basically the opposite of hyperbole. “Warren Buffett isn’t too bad off,” is an example, as would be John Coltrane saying he “played the sax a little.” If you’ve ever used a phrase like, “he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed,” then you employed litotes. From Greek litotes (simplicity); from litos (small). See also: meiosis, which includes understatement of other kinds.

A few example of litotes in use:

“For that matter, I, too,
lost someone in the war at Troy—my brother,
and no mean soldier, whom you must have known…”
(Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

“In her days of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure…” (James Joyce)

“Ferris does not have what we consider to be an exemplary attendance record.” (Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)

“Sir, it is not unreasonable; for when people see a man absurd in what they understand, they may conclude the same of him in what they do not understand.” (Robert Boswell)

WEB

1. Kazuo Ishiguro wins the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. I only recently came around to the sense in awarding Bob Dylan the 2016 prize. I enjoy Ishiguro’s work, but it is so opposite Dylan in every way that I wondered at first if it was a prank.

2. If you can spot the “glaring errors” in this ABA Journal editorial quiz, I applaud you. If you catch all the “venial errors,” I bow before you.

3. The whole article is available free, but the bottom line: significant physical brain changes, not limited to the areas associated with “executive function,” were observed in three groups practicing, each practicing a different kind of meditation.

4. A fascinating short essay making a case for the importance of bridging the “neurotypical”/“neurodivergent” communication divide.

5. Flashbak has unearthed some compelling photographs of Belfast, Ireland circa 1955 || Pairs with these phenomenal photos, with equally great captions, taken of passengers by a cab driver in 1980s San Francisco.

6. Hapax (logomenon) was the WORD exactly two years ago. Now, Atlas Obscura provides more grist for the mill.

7. Some great long-forgotten expressions to knock your interlocutors for six. The one I plan to use first: a lazy sheep thinks its wool is heavy.

8. “Hijacked minds” and a “smartphone dystopia” are the definition of click-bait phrases…but at the heart of articles like Paul Lewis’s recent Guardian article is what I believe to be not just a real concern, but an incipient tragedy.

9. How is it that I’m not learning until just now that there’s a newly discovered Kurt Vonnegut story, “The Drone King,” in The Atlantic?

10. Today in 1942, comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello launch their famous The Abbott and Costello Show on NBC Radio. The show (many episodes can be found in the Internet Archive) would run for nearly nine years. In 1952, the duo’s television show, also called The Abbott and Costello Show, would premier. The TV show lasted only two years, but appears in multiple “top 100” lists and was one of Jerry Seinfeld’s primary influences when creating his eponymous (and I guess some would say successful) series. Incidentally, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet radio program also on the Internet Archive debuted on the same day as Abbott and Costello’s radio show.

WATCH/WITNESS

Spend four minutes with ► Adelene Koh, a (maybe the only) hand bookbinder in Singapore. Beautiful work (and thoughts on) rebinding old books.

WHAT!?

Timely for the season, peruse all of LitHub’s “40 of the Creepiest Book Covers of All Time”. Can you think of more and better? Thanks, Reader B!

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. on the Isle of Dogs: “I don’t see the Kurosawa influence, but the trailer looks fabulous. Now if only I can survive till March 23rd (it was hard enough holding out for Blade Runner!)”

• Reader B. on the reading lists hidden inside great books: “I love the syllabi novels. ¶ I always wanted to teach a course of the books referenced in Frankenstein.” — I remembered mentions of The Sorrows of Young Werther (a favorite of mine) and Paradise Lost…but searched and found a third, Plutarch’s Lives. Are there more?

• Reader D.: “Fun word fact about Madame Bovary - T.S. Eliot turned said madame’s name into an ism. He wrote: ‘I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarism, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.’”

• A different Reader J.: “I just spent an hour browsing the Degas notebook and it was not time wasted. I want more!”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

Today would have been H. Palmer Hall’s 75th birthday. I had the pleasure of publishing the essay from which today’s WORK is taken in the inaugural issue of Eclectica more than 20 years ago. RIP.

WORK

I remember Petra perfectly after more than two decades, the sound of her voice whispering “ich liebe dich,” the way she looked when she dove naked into the water at Hippie Hollow, the arch of her back when she dried her hair after a swim, the way her bare feet felt next to mine, the sheer wonder of her pale hair as the dry wind blew it into my face while she napped, the slightly salty taste of her skin in the hot Texas summer sun. She will always remain as she was then and I would not know her now in her mid-fifties. As poorly versed as we were in that language that is not considered a language of love, but of war, German will always be for me an erotic language.

—H. Palmer Hall
—from “The Woman of My German Summer: A Sixties Idyll”
—found in Eclectica (Vol. 1, No. 1)

WORD(S)

interoception /in-tair-oh-SEP-shən/. noun. The sense of conditions and stimuli within the body. Compare to exteroception (the sense of stimuli acting on the body) and proprioception (the sense of the position of the body, and parts of the body, to other bodies or parts of the body). Thanks for the WORD, Reader S.

“We gain access to the body’s wisdom through interoception, which literally means ‘perceiving within.’” (Daniel J. Siegel)

“In addition to proprioception, there is another not-commonly-known sense called interoception. This is the sense of knowing how your body is feeling from the inside. It is not based in thinking about how your body is, but on the direct experiencing of it. It is an internal, embodied feeling, a felt sense. Someone asks you how you are feeling and you say ‘fine.’ How do you know you are fine? Interoception.” (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

“That will prepare you to understand the gist of interoception, which is the origin of feeling. After that, we’ll discover the unexpected and frankly astonishing influence that interoception has over your thoughts, decisions, and actions every day.” (Lisa Feldman Barrett)

“Buddhist meditation increases the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (structures associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing)…” (Sarah Lazar)

WEB

1. “Frances Glessner Lee’s miniature murder scenes are dioramas to die for” → How a Chicago Heiress Trained Homicide Detectives With an Unusual Tool: Dollhouses

2. An Edgar Degas notebook online, complete and in high-resolution.

3. I continue to be fascinated by the Container project, creating “books that aren’t books.” They’ve announced their next two projects, available soon → E, UIO, A is “a series of 30 typewritten letters in envelopes with hand-inked elements and other embellishments” and Tem is a boxed set of “origami gemstones cradled in containers of plaster-fused gauze.”

4. An interesting essay that makes fitting use of creative web design/presentation → Long live the group chat: a look at the beauty, ubiquity, and therapy of group chats for black and brown people.

5. Got the morbs. Coffee sisters. Parrot and monkey time. Some great stuff in this Dictionary of Victorian Slang.

6. The Reading Lists Hidden Inside 12 Great Books.

7. Wow → Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2017 Underwater Photo Contest Winners.

8. Adam Aleksic, aka theETYMOLOGYnerd (a fun site to browse) has created quite an array of etymology infographics on topics as diverse as Star Wars, the anatomy of the eye, and Harry Potter spells.

9. Links to a variety of “games with a purpose,” where your playing contributes to language research and other projects. Cool. → GWAP.

10. Today in 1856, Gustave Flaubert publishes the first installment of his new novel Madame Bovary. The serialization of what is now considered one of the most important and influential novels every written would continue until December 15. Shortly after, French public prosecutors charged Flaubert (and the owner and printer of La Revue de Paris) with obscenity. The prosecutor’s speech is a literary read in itself, a passionate argument full of flights such as this: “…from this first fault, this first fall, she glorified adultery, she sang the song of adultery, its poesy and its delights. This, gentlemen, to me is much more dangerous and immoral than the fall itself!” Flaubert and the others would be acquitted, driving the popularity of the novel even higher. English readers might be interested in Julian Barnes’ assessment of the problems of translating, generally, and Flaubert and Madame Bovary in particular.

WATCH/WITNESS

A beautiful moment to witness → ► 66 year old Bodybuilder William Reed sees color for first time.

WHAT!?

Introverts, ambiverts and clumsy conversationalists like myself might find these conversational silence cards a tempting handout.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader G.: “…the Humble Comma is the absolute best example of using punctuation (while imbibing its virtues) that I have ever read. Someone should make an inspirational poster out of that and put it up in high school English classrooms everywhere.”

• Reader B. adds: “Commas: William Shatner must surely be a divine force.”

• Reader T.: “Sounds like reader ‘V’ is a bona fide snowflake. Need to grow up, indeed.”

• Reader D.: “I have to admit: for the longest time I thought ‘fazed’ was actually ‘phazed’ and derived from Star Trek and being stunned.”

• Reader J.: “Light as sound? I get it, like sound stored as a tactile surface. And I totally don’t get it. And I love it.”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

WORK

Thus all these tiny scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between “Jane (whom I adore)” and “Jane, whom I adore,” and the difference between them both and “Jane – whom I adore – ” marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place,” in Isaac Babel’s lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods.

—Pico Ayer
—from “In Praise of the Humble Comma”
—found in Time (June 24, 2001)

WORD(S)

faze /FAYZ/. verb. To perturb, disturb, unsettle or fluster. Unrelated to phase (from the Greek phainein, to show), with which it is commonly confused—see the Mark Twain example below—faze derives from the dialectal feeze (to alarm or frighten), from Old English fēsian (to drive away, to banish).

“His spirit?—why, it wasn’t even phased.” (Mark Twain)

“Peter and Don each did the same from down below, hooking their arms around her legs. It was a most awkward, animalistic position, and yet Peter found that it didn’t faze him in the least to be doing this.” (Elisabeth Hyde)

“It doesn’t faze me when my dreams are interrupted; they’re so gentle that I keep dreaming them as I speak…” (Fernando Pessoa)

“Red-Eyed Randy stands close to ArmedCompanion, who has the unfazed expression of a professional boxer challenged to a fight by a drunken nightclub bouncer.” (Nuruddin Farah)

WEB

1. Minna Sundberg, author and artist of the dystopic serial comic Stand Still. Stay Silent created a beautifully realized visualization of the tree of human languages.

2. Sometimes science fiction becomes reality, one small step at a time → Biomedical engineers connecting a human brain to the internet in real time || Also, another amazing (and beautiful) breakthrough: Scientists Can Now Repaint Butterfly Wings.

3. I don’t really get the science, but the idea (and the metaphor) are seductive → Light Has Been Stored as Sound For The First Time.

4. The interwebs have been abuzz with the news that Charlie (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) was originally a black character…the New York Times has the detailed story.

5. Even Racists Got the Blues (Thanks, Reader S.!)

6. Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes, yet there are only 24 hours in a day?

7. I’ll just leave this right here → A pile of trash in the ocean has grown to the size of France—and some people want it recognized as a nation

8. Interesting history of a now-rarely-used word (though it was used by Chaucer and Shakespeare) and how it probably came to be written into Kim Jong-un’s speech (neukdari just doesn’t resonate) → What is the definition of ‘dotard,’ which North Korea called Trump?

9. A compelling project that increases awareness of the beauty of endangered languages and maybe even contributes to saving some of them → the story of Tribalingual.

10. Today is National Punctuation Day (for Clamorites in the US…the rest of you are spared), celebrating the useful and illogical rules alike and promoting irritating acts of pedantry. I enjoy apostrophe catastrophes as much as the next person, but for my own amusement at the daily struggle of communication, tempered by sympathy, much as I am entertained by—and feel great empathy with—kitchen disasters and cake wrecks. Sorry, all you Eats, Shoots & Leaves fans, for not sharing in the condescending vision of punctuation dystopia. But we can all still laugh and learn the conventions together: XKCD on hyphens, writing skills and a third way || The Oatmeal on semicolons and apostrophes.

WATCH/WITNESS

View the trailer for ► Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion film Isle of Dogs, which he says is heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa!

WHAT!?

Via Reader B., a story on the Secret History of the Pissing Figure in Art. Pairs well with a typeface ready to make a splash: pissjar sans. I’m (kind of) resisting a steady stream of bad puns here.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader T. was the first of a few to add some context to last week’s WORD: “Just to be anal about it (hmmm — probably not the best expression to use in this context, but I’ll roll with it), a key ingredient to the term ‘cuck’ as used by white nationalists is not just that your wife is having sex with another man, but that she’s being pleasured by a BLACK man. Or, I suppose, a Jew, although I’m not sure how the optics of that distinction would play with the likes of Christopher Cantwell, who would probably be inconsolable in either case.” — Yes, though we are already seeing the term expand there just as it is expanding in terms of gender (in both white nationalist rhetoric and in porn, incidentally). I just chose not to go there assuming (correctly!) that some readers would bring it up.

• Reader M.: “The pairing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Harriet Tubman was a good one. And ‘cuck’! Getting a little political, are we?” — Not intentionally, or at least not in the way we see it in common public discussions right now. Clearly some readers felt differently: I lost a half-dozen subscribers, including the one quoted next.

• Reader V.: “Your claim to avoid politics and then posting something political makes me sad. Like saying ‘with all due respect’ and then being disrespectful. If you don’t think Coates, Tubman and cucks are making a political statement, you need to grow up.”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

WORK

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates
—from Between the World and Me

WORD(S)

cuckold /KUK-əld/. noun or verb. A man whose spouse has been unfaithful or the act making a cuckold of someone. Of late, a scornful political term embraced most strongly by white nationalists to describe their opponents, often abbreviated as cuck. From Middle English cukeweld (same meaning), from Old French cucuault: cocu (cuckoo) + pejorative suffix -ault.

The interesting aspect of the etymology is its roots in the behavior of the female cuckoo bird, some of which lay their eggs in the nests of—and leave them to be cared for by—other birds, leading to the figurative word we are becoming all too familiar with today.

“Wasn’t I yet another cuckolded husband, slightly distinguished by knowing how to self-define with an Old English word?” (Sherman Alexie)

“There is a word for taking another man’s wife – to cuckold. But what is the word for taking another man’s daughter?” (Zadie Smith)

“…Keith launched into a squalid decameron of recent gallops and tumbles, instant liaisons, valiant cuckoldries, eagerly requited grabbings and gropings, quickies and workouts and hip-twangers and knee-tremblers…” (Martin Amis)

“Once at the facility we got hold of a bootleg video of a group of cuckolded Guilter husbands talking about the difficulties of living with simultaneous rage and gratitude.” (George Saunders)

“To be a cuckold once was the luck of the game, but his double cuckoldry had a whiff of revenge about it.” (William Trevor)

“His face shone as if he had newly washed it with soap, so radiant was he in his enjoyment of his past experience of being robbed, cuckolded, and deserted, and in his sure and certain hope of being so again.” (Rebecca West)

WEB

1. A stupendous photo of wave-like structures in Saturn’s rings…and the story behind it. || Pairs with an amazing photo of the starry sky as seen in Finland. || And how about the most arresting images of Jupiter I’ve ever seen?

2. Investigations range in subject from George Bush and the Prime Minister of Pakistan to Justin Timberlake… → Meet the Font Detectives

3. Palimpsests! → Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World’s Oldest Continuously Run Libraries [back in 2014, it was the WORD]

4. Mondegreens! → I don’t even know if vaseline is edible. [perhaps the most famous example of a mondegreen is hearing Jimi Hendrix’s lyric as “excuse me while I kiss this guy.”] || See also, the classic Science Behind Mondegreens.

5. Eggcorns! → The Eggcorn Database [Eggcorns are similar to mondegreens (misheard lyrics) but aren’t part of songs. For instance, “Holland days” instead of “Hollandaise” sauce.]

6. Reading lists! → More Than 100 Exceptional Works of Journalism || 100 Great Works OF Dystopian Fiction || 2017 National Book Awards longlists

7. Thousands of examples of main titles from films as far back as 1920. → The Movie Title Stills Collection

8. “When you memorize, you start to notice the things that you notice, your own habits of attention, your habits of reading.” → Memorize That Poem

9. “A collaborative project with almost 90 artists and one instruction: look up.” → One Sky

10. Today in 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland to Philadelphia. Tubman’s brothers Ben and Harry accompanied her at first but had second thoughts, so Tubman accompanied them home before making her own escape. Not content to remain safely in the North, Tubman returned to the South many times, eventually guiding more than 60 slaves—including her parents and many siblings—to freedom. After the Civil War, Tubman settled on a small property sold to her by the abolitionist senator William Seward (yes, he of Seward’s Folly fame), establishing a family center and eventually a rest home before her death in 1913.

WATCH/WITNESS

Tom Gauld on Twitter: “Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader”. Time to celebrate…Tom has a new book, Baking with Kafka, coming out. If you don’t have all of Gauld’s books, you should!

WHAT!?

Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Pet Portraits

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K.: “I can’t stop laughing, I mean literally laughing, at those kitchen fails!”

• Reader C.: “We share first names and something else. I was also obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records as a kid.”

• Reader W.: “I was wondering if you would consider adding to the website at the same time as the newsletter? I am constantly trying to send links to friends from the current edition and they aren’t on the site yet!” — I hope you’ll consider (or continue to) refer your friends to the email newsletter. I think Katexic Clippings is best experienced that way and the website is already a concession to reader demand that I don’t want to make into a full replacement.

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

Barring a miracle in productivity, Katexic Clippings will be on hiatus for the next two weeks (though I might post some extras on the website)!

WORK

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”

—Zadie Smith
—from White Teeth (2000)

WORD(S)

cark /kark/. verb or noun. To vex, burden or harass…or to suffer from such. Also: a trouble, a burden, a weight. From Latin carcare (to load a wagon), from Latin carrus (wagon). Less commonly, to die, originally an Australian colloquialism, possibly derived from the caw of the carrion crow.

I want to begin
with a new song
on a love that’s my cark and desire,
but is so far I cannot hit her mark
or my words fire her.
(Guillem IX, Duke of Aquitaine)

“What fondness is it to cark and care so much, at that instant and passage from all exemption of pain and care? As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so shall our death the end of all things. Therefore is it as great folly to weep we shall not live a hundred years hence as to wail we lived not a hundred years ago.” (Michel de Montaigne, translated by John Florio)

“…when I had fewer years than thou, my father said, ‘There are many carks in life which a little truth could end.’” (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

“The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams.” (Charles Dickens)

“I asks when we’re allowed out for exercise an’ air. ‘We ain’t let out,’ says he, ‘till the ship sails or unless we cark it. Now, the money.’ Wish I could say I stood my ground, but Arie Grote ain’t no liar. He weren’t jokin’ ‘bout carkin’ it, neither: eight o’ them ‘stout an’ willing lads’ left horizontally, two crammed into one coffin.” (David Mitchell)

WEB

1. Corncob? Donut? Binch? A Guide to Weird Leftist Internet Slang || Thanks, Reader B.!

2. Along with providing a lot of information about safely using various drugs, TripSit also provides volunteer, real-time live chat support for, naturally, people who are tripping (as well as taking, or planning to take, other drugs). || See also: one of the best episodes of one of the best podcasts ever, Reply All #44: Shine On You Crazy Goldman.

3. “Elephants use many different vocalizations to communicate. Share a message in Elephant and help us save this endangered language.”

4. I know some Clamorites fly a lot. Artist Nina Katachadourian’s Seat Assignment “consists of photographs, video, and sound works, all made in flight using only a camera phone and improvising with materials close at hand.”

5. “Users [of Buddhist Bitcoin] would be able to earn ‘Karma Coins’ by meditating and teaching Buddhism. The coins could be spent within a special Buddhist community called the ‘Lotos Network.’”

6. Some examples of words/phrases first seen in print the year I was born: bioethics, comfort food, dorky, erectile dysfunction and love handles. What are some of yours? Find out using Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Search Words by First Known Use Date

7. “The most significant fact to emerge from this history, though, is also the most obvious: Make It New was not itself new, nor was it ever meant to be. Given the nature of the novelty implied by the slogan, it is appropriate that it is itself the result of historical recycling.” → The Making of “Make It New” || Thanks again, Reader B.!

8. Some of these (nearly 300) kitchen fails are so funny I couldn’t resist sharing the kind of listicle I usually avoid.

9. Subreddit of the week: DadReflexes

10. Today in 1955, the first Guinness Book of World Records—a book that fascinated me like no other when I was young—is published in London. Over the course of its 62-year-long history, the book has become the best selling copyrighted title in the history of publishing, selling more than 134 million copies as of August, 2015. A few records for your browsing pleasure: the oldest surviving love poem (written in 2031 BC), the most piercings (single-count, male), the most piercings (single count, female) (the same person holds the lifetime record, being pierced 4,225 times as of June, 2006) and the fastest time to drink one litre of lemon juice through a straw.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Robin Hanson, research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, ► speaks to his upcoming book, The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. It’s a unique look into the social and economic effects of whole brain emulation.”

WHAT!?

“Unseen for decades and salvaged by a junk dealer in the 1960s from a trash heap outside a house in Texas, his entire body of work would later go on to marvel the intellectual world. But during his lifetime, Charles Dellschau had only been known as the grouchy local butcher.” → Found in a Junk Shop: Secrets of an Undiscovered Visionary Artist

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B., purveyor of links, notes: “Another fine haul, sir. ¶ I note that that apartment’s owner is a Banville fan.”

• Reader M. notes a word in Virginia Woolf’s observation of the eclipse: “Pendent. A lovely, resonate, word. Need to use it more.”

• Reader K.: “Whoooaaa. Those voices from the days of slavery are powerful. I literally couldn’t help but weep at listening to some of the songs from yesterday during these particular days.”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

For your timely WORDy pleasure, I dug through the archive and posted the most excellent and apt syzygy.

WORK

“How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.”

—Virginia Woolf
—from The Waves

WORD(S)

tarantism /TAIR-ən-tiz-əm/. noun. A nervous disorder that causes uncontrollable bodily movement; an extreme, even uncontrollable, urge to dance. Derived from tarantula, whose bite was commonly thought to be the cause of the problem. From Latin Tarentum (a town in southern Italy), popularly associated with tarantola (tarantula). || See also: tarantella, a rapid whirling southern Italian dance.

“In Mediterranean countries, spiders are thought to be poisonous, and in Spain and southern Italy the memory of tarantism is still vivid. It was believed that a tarantula bite infected a person with a fatal disease, from which it was possible to recover only by dancing frantically.” (Primo Levi)

“Curvet and caracole are terms from horsemanship for complicated steps and turns. Perhaps Legrand’s type of erratic dance here alludes to tarantism…” (Benjamin Fisher)

“To cope with ‘tarantism,’ the name given to the disease that follows on the bite of the Italian Spider, you must have recourse to music, the only efficacious remedy…” (J. Henry Fabre)

“What could account so entirely for his ways and actions as that strange poisoning which produces the state they call Tarantism?” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)

“She may sing and cajole herself into hoarseness, she may smile and gesticulate herself into a mild sort of tarantism, or freeze herself at one end of the table into a statue of Suppressed Reproach…” (Kate Douglas Wiggin)

WEB

1. Annie Dillard’s Classic Essay: ‘Total Eclipse’

2. Shelf life: novelist Hanya Yanagihara on living with 12,000 books…in a one-bedroom NYC apartment.

3. From “1–11” to “Zog,” the Hate Symbols Database “provides an overview of many of the symbols most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and movements, as well as some other types of hate groups.”

4. Voices from the Days of Slavery collects nearly seven hours of recorded interviews with former slaves including their time as slaves, slaveholders, freedom and even sing some songs learned during their time as slaves. Remarkable. || Pairs with a fascinating episode of 99% Invisible on the “Dismal Swamp” which uses interviews and songs from the archive.

5. This 17th-century Jacobean traveling library is beautiful.

6. Scroll down for the graphs! → The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television: Increases in the Use of Swear Words in American Books, 1950–2008

7. Want to Transcribe Rare Magical Manuscripts on Your Lunch Break? Turn out, you can.

8. Ear Hustle is a pretty amazing podcast made by a pair of inmates in San Quentin State Prison.

9. And a bit of a feel-good link: Meet Dindim, the penguin who returns to his human soulmate every year. As in Dindim swims at least 3000 miles to return to the man who rescued him.

10. Today in 1741, Vitus Bering, a Danish cartographer and officer in the Russian Navy, sights the southern coast of what would become the US state of Alaska. Four months later, Bering would become one of the 31 to die on the ill-fated expedition that included the discovery of Kodiak Island. Bering’s sympathy for the native people, including those who murdered some of his crewmen, caused the Russian administration to suppress much of Bering’s story for more than a century. The Bering Sea, Bering Island and the Bering Land Bridge are among the sites named in his honor.

WATCH/WITNESS

► Eclipses Throughout Our Universe

WHAT!?

► disillusionment of 10 point font → “Animated on a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe typewriter” (just like one of mine).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C.: “Is that a sinistral coil I see in the Ulysses glove project?”

• Reader B.: “In the fascinating article, ~The 19th Century Moral Panic Over … Paper Technology~ it reads, ‘The letters had to be hand-placed in a matrix, coated with a special…’. This might be a casual description with no intent to mislead, but if one is to be exacting, it’s wrong. Letters are hand-placed into a composing stick and then the grouping of letters are placed into a chase. The ‘matrix’ was the secret to Gutenberg’s success. It was the way of casting letters so they would all be equal in height and base allowing for straight/even lines of text.”

• Reader B.: “Again, from ~The 19th Century Moral Panic Over … Paper Technology~ we read, ‘The problem with wood-pulp paper was its acidity and short cellulose chains, which made it liable to slow dissolution over decades.’ This is true and books printed from about 1850 to 1950 are dissolving in front of our eyes, while much older books persist. However, the technology and chemistry of wood pulp paper has changed and there are those who would argue that high alpha cellulose paper has the archival qualities of rag paper. ¶ One of the early producers of this paper (1940s) was Mohawk Superfine. ¶ I would also point out that many papers today are made from sustainable tree growth. I think such papers have a long future, where as one wonders what happened to the paperless business model. You’d think there would be a reduction in paper use.”

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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