The discover of liquid water on Mars brought to mind today’s WORK. And today’s WORD is inspired by Reader B., who was obviously paying attention to the Zipf’s Law video a few weeks ago.

WORK

“There is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier”

There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.

—Matthew Rohrer
—from the Columbia Daily Tribune

WORD(S)

hapax legomenon /ha-PAKS lə-GAW-mə-nawn/ (pronunciation guide). noun. A word that occurs only once in a text, oeuvre or a body of literature (aka a corpus). Often abbreviated as just hapax. Surprisingly, 40–60% of large collections of text are made of hapaxes. Read more: Wikipedia. See also: hapaxanthic (a plant that fruits and flowers only once). Borrowed from Greek hapax legomenon ([a thing] said only once).

“This is the Age of Complete Interconnection. No wires can hang loose; otherwise we all short-circuit. Yet, it is undeniable that life without individuality is not worth living. Every man must be a hapax legomenon…” (Philip Jose Farmer)

“The term for a word that only appears once in a text is hapax legomenon, which sounds like a character from an Asterix story, or a Scandinavian death metal band, and in this text appears only once.” (Alex Bellos)

“…where would their practice be or where the human race itself were the Pythagorean sesquipedalia of the panepistemion, however apically Volapucky, grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habakuk, opanoff, uggamyg, hapaxle, gomenon, ppppfff, over country stiles, behind slated dwellinghouses, down blind lanes, or, when all fruit fails, under some sacking left on a coarse cart?” (James Joyce)

WEB

1. Metaphor Map of English [Via Reader S. who says “I really don’t understand this but thought you might.” Well, it’s fun to explore even in my ignorance!]

2. First, the Oregon Shakespeare festival announces a large-scale project to “translate” all of Shakespeare’s plays into “modern English”. I’m no purist by any means—I love adaptations of—and new variations on—the Bard’s work…but this seems deeply misguided. I’m not alone in that. In modern times, this kind of project is actually an outlier. Much more interesting, to me, is the ongoing project to have some of our best novelists re-imagine Shakespeare’s plays as novels.

3. The strange and fascinating Ribbon Farm is “devoted to unusual takes on familiar themes. What we call ‘refactored perception.’” [Thanks, Reader M.!]

4. Jana Dambrogio’s “Letterlocking” Page takes forever (well, at least a minute or more; that’s what happens when you have 75+ megabytes of images on a single page) to load…but once it does, it is chock-full of interesting images and resources about historical, locking letterfolds.

5. Today in 1871, at 11:30 P.M., the Great Chicago Fire (cool site; check it out!) erupts. It would burn for 36 hours, kill nearly 300 people and leave over 100,000 people homeless in the 3.3 square mile area it consumed. While the Irish Catherine O’Leary (and her cow) made a fitting scapegoat during the heavily anti-Irish times, she (and her cow) were later exonerated and theories abound as to what really started the blaze. There’s no question, however, that the thin, mostly all-wood construction technique popular there at the time contributed to the fire going quickly out of control. Ironically, the demand for lumber to rebuilt was so great that some areas of Michigan were totally deforested…and Singapore, MI would subsequently be overrun by sand dunes and become, for a time, a famous ghost town.

WATCH/WITNESS

Some of the notes collected for the Hope 1980 artist book; a project from The Homeless Library.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader V. found an assignment: “I love the minimal elegance of the Animated Book Covers and plan to have my digital illustration students make some of their own.”

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

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

It’s not too late to back the Wordnik Kickstarter: Let’s Add a Million Missing Words to the Dictionary. I did. And it feels goooooood.

WORK

“The Urban Life”

These morning, when I pass alongside Parisian fish vendors, I witness blank, white, frozen men in the process of wage and capital, spreading out fish fresh from the sea and just off the boat. The unraveled forms sparkle in the sheen of coin and mother-of-pearl, luminous shocks of ice pounded down in stalls, the clear light of January. I suffer their separate deaths, their stared-through eyes, their void. Such jettisoned and mute nakedness…so suddenly I need to feel my heart beneath my coat to convince me who I am—my clean presence; my still warm, still life.

—Liljana Dirjan (translated by P.H. Liotta)
—from The Best of the Prose Poem

WORD(S)

fougue (fogue) /FOOG/. noun. Ardour; impetousness; passion. From French fougue, same meaning. From Latin fuga (flight, fleeing).

“‘Yes, she does have something of that fougue,’ Andrei Antonovich muttered, not without pleasure, at the same time regretting terribly that this ignoramus should dare to express himself quite so freely about Yulia Mikhailovna…” (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

“Thus Sforza, cursed with a too fertile brain,
Lost by his wiles the power his wit did gain.
Henceforth their fougue must spend at lesser rate,
Than in its flames to wrap a nation’s fate.”
(John Dryden)

“The conscious agility, fougue, and precision which fill the performer become contagious and delight the spectator as well.” (George Santayana)

“About six weeks, however, after his mother’s death, Coryston’s natural fougue suggested to him that he was being trifled with.” (Mrs. Humphry Ward)

WEB

1. Mostly subtle and wonderful → Animated Book Covers

2. Digital books stagnate in closed, dull systems, while printed books are shareable, lovely and enduring. What comes next?

3. 20 Words That Aren’t in the Dictionary Yet.

4. A Linguist Explains How We Write Sarcasm on the Internet

5. Today in 1887, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, AKA Le Corbusier, is born in Switzerland. A successful painter and co-founder of the Purism movement, Le Corbusier is remembered most for his career in architecture, particularly his continuing (and controversial) influence on urban planning and architecture stemming from his five principles of architecture and the Villa Radieuse (Radiant City).

WATCH/WITNESS

“Witness the eerily beautiful growth of larvae into bees in this mesmerizing time-lapse video from photographer Anand Varma.” → http://ktxc.to/vid-bee-time-lapse

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader T. pops up in with a well-timed link: “Every time you post a link to the New Yorker [aside: you don’t really read that rag regularly do you?] I think of the New Yorker Minute newsletter, which synopsizes [and sometimes skewers] each issue as it comes out.” — Indeed. I was going to post a link to a recent article about Kenneth Goldsmith, but now I can confine it here. And I might as well toss in Brian Kim Stefans’ destruction of that article (and Goldsmith).

• Reader K. slips on a journey to use each Katexic WORD in conversation: “I really WANTED to use the word caruncle, but the situation has not come up yet where I might casually slip it into conversation. But soon, I hope!”

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

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

WORK

“For more than three decades, coffee has captured my imagination because it is a beverage about individuals as well as community. A Rwandan farmer. Eighty roast masters at six Starbucks plants on two continents. Thousands of baristas in 54 countries. Like a symphony, coffee’s power rests in the hands of a few individuals who orchestrate its appeal. So much can go wrong during the journey from soil to cup that when everything goes right, it is nothing short of brilliant! After all, coffee doesn’t lie. It can’t. Every sip is proof of the artistry—technical as well as human—that went into its creation.”

—Howard Schultz
—form Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

“Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle’s Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.”

—Sarah Vowell
—from The Partly Cloudy Patriot

WORD(S)

caruncle /kə-RUN-kəl/. noun. A fleshy outgrowth. A naked excrescence of tissue. For example: a turkey’s wattle or a person’s dewlap. From Latin caruncula (little piece of flesh), diminutive of caro (flesh).

“I was so scattered, I’m still not sure what to write: About my back aching from where I’d slept? my head still gauzed, Pharaohnically wrapped, from when I’d been woken up? about the cut on my neck? the slit from chin’s caruncle to neck like an against the grain shaving mishap, just healing?” (Joshua Cohen)

“Crooke states that the hymen is not a single membrane but is really made up of eight parts, ‘caruncles’ and membranes, and says that ‘all these particles together make the form of the cup of a little rose half blowne.’” (Hanne Blank)

“We had plenty of farmyard creatures, as, for example, rabbits, the most oval animal of all, if you know what I mean; and choleric turkeys with carbuncular caruncles…” (Vladimir Nabokov)

WEB

1. This is a Vinyl Record Being Played Under 1000x Magnification

2. From Books to Ebooks and Back: The Future of Literary Consumption Is Unwritten

3. “At the intersection of the critical effort to preserve our digital history and the more nefarious impulse to commercially exploit it are formerly private citizens coming to terms with a shifting paradigm in how we understand and control our past, present and future identities. ’Our digital shadows reflect us but aren’t us, and so we shouldn’t let them define our experience in the world…” » Alan Massey on the vast, imperfect memory of the Internet

4. At the always-interesting BibliOdyssey » 19th Century Maps of Mars

5. Today is the first consolidated, official, International Coffee Day. Every day is International Coffee Day wherever I happen to be. The Guardian has posted 10 great coffee quotes. If you’re inspired, Sweet Maria’s is my go-to place for coffee brewing and roasting paraphernalia. See more on Twitter and Instagram.

WATCH/WITNESS

An interview with—and selected best-of videos by—calligrapher Seb Lester, who I’ve featured here before.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader F. shares a punctuation story to remember: “Your readers might be hooked by the title of this little gem, ‘UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation — not everyone loved it’ » http://ktxc.to/dissertation-sans-punctuation”

• And Reader R. shares another: “I wonder if Katexicans (?) could think of additions to this list of the Five Best Punctuation Marks in Literature?”

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

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

Somehow I missed the celebration, but it’s not too late to enjoy Little-Known Punctuation Marks for National Punctuation Day!

WORK

“I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

—Emily Brontë
—from Wuthering Heights

An OuLiPian version, substituting each noun from the seventh noun following it in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary:

“I lingered round them, under that benign skyflower; watched the Mother Gooses fluttering among the heathenesse and haircots; listened to the soft windcheater breathing though the grasshopper; and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slurs, for the sleaaping chairs in that quiet earthiness.”

Another version, substituting nouns, verbs and adjectives from Harrap’s Shorter English-French Dictionary:

“I lived round them, under that bestial slacker, wove the motorcades following among them the hecatomb and harlots, lobbed to the sorrowful windrow brimming through the grave; and wrangled how anyone could immolate unreceipted slynesses, for the slickers in that quotable easement.”

—OuLiPian versions from Word Recreations: Games and Diversions from “Word Ways”
—A. Ross Eckler (Ed)

WORD(S)

hiraeth /HEER-IYəTH/. noun. A Welsh word often portrayed as one of the mythical “untranslatables” that invokes a deep, nostalgic homesickness—sadness and longing—for a time, place and feeling in the past one cannot return to…or that never was. See also: sehnsucht and saudade.

“Well, with my pay in my pocket, and 500 pounds at my back, I thought I would enjoy myself as much as I could, and smother the hiraeth that was so strong upon me, the longing to go home to see Morva…” (Allen Raine)

“It’s pronounced ‘here-eyeth’ (roll the ‘r’) and it’s a Welsh word. It has no exact cognate in English. The best we can do is ‘homesickness,’ but that’s like the difference between hardwood and laminate. Homesickness is hiraeth-lite.” (Pamela Petro)

“…in other parts of the world those of us self-diagnosed with ‘Hiraeth’ oscillate between belonging to the home we’ve created in our heads…” (Lara Atallah)

WEB

1. Another in a long line of efforts that is, at best misguided, at worst…well… → A Facelift for Shakespeare

2. Where Do Languages Go to Die?

3. "Here you can see the pages from the original manuscript ‘Alice’s Adventures under Ground’ … The drawings are of his own hand.

4. First Line, Last Line, a blog of the first and last lines of many books.

5. Today in 1930, British crime novelist Colin Dexter—creator of the iconic Inspector Morse—is born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, England. Forced to resign from teaching due to progressive hearing issues, Dexter, a Cambridge graduate, worked as an administrator at Oxford for more than 20 years. During this time he started publishing his famous Inspector Morse novels, including Last Bus to Woodstock, the first novel in the series (and the first piece of fiction Dexter ever wrote). He would go on to write 13 novels from which a 33-episode BBC series was produced (not to mention an ongoing prequel series and spinoff). You might enjoy this interview with Dexter and seeing a few handwritten pages from the first Morse novel.

WATCH/WITNESS

“I spent 6 months and $1500 to completely make a sandwich from scratch. Including growing my own vegetables, making my own salt from ocean water, milking a cow to make cheese, grinding my own flour from wheat, collecting my own honey, and killing a chicken myself.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. writes: “That’s one doom-laden quote from F Stop Fitzgerald. A too-nice summary of writer’s block. ¶ Re: audio theater, I know it’s bad form to damn something before taking it in. And I will listen to the hour-long podcast as soon as I can. But podcasting is one decade old. People have been doing tons of creative digital audio work before NPR listeners caught on.” — ‘F Stop Fitzgerald’ … heh.

• Reader C. sends some love: “concīs is fantastic! The simple layout fits the premise and the editorial vision and selection is a step or three above the pack.”

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

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

WORK

“Anthony was glad he wasn’t going to work on his book. The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed—the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald
—from The Beautiful and the Damned

WORD(S)

chock-full /CHOK-FUL/. adjective. Filled to the limit. An interesting phrase because of its mysterious origin. Like most, I assumed it must come from choke, as in “full to choking” (choke, incidentally, comes from Middle English cheek, relating to the jaw). But it could also come from the Old French choquier (to collide, crash) and, thanks to non-uniformity of spelling in historical sources, we’ll probably never know.

When you’re before me, then I think you’re meat and bones,
chock-full of blood and tears, a mortal just like me;
but when I see you from afar, in memory’s mist,
then you grow monstrous like a god, and I go daft!
(Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar)

“For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by—has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock-full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure.” (David Foster Wallace)

WEB

1. ► A fantastic video on Zipf’s law (which explains, or at least rationalizes, so many things about life and language) with a description chock-full o’ links. Thanks to Reader S., who notes: “apologies if you have covered this in earlier issues and I just missed it, but when I saw [this] I immediately thought of you as it is a phenomenom of language (and other realms) like no other…”

2. Ann Heppermann on the rebirth of audio fiction

3. A roundup of Super Seventies Japanese Film Posters. See also: Swinging Sixties Japanese Film Posters

4. ‘I’m awful, I’m awful’: writers spill the secrets of their diaries

5. Today in 1896, F. Scott Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Despite a turbulent life wracked by mental illness and alcoholism that resulted in his death at just 44, Fitzgerald is now widely recognized as one of America’s greatest authors…but Fitzgerald never achieved significant success in his own lifetime and died believing himself a failure. Watch ► BBC Sincerely: F. Scott Fitzgerald (with Jay McInerney, but don’t let that dissuade you). Read some free books by Fitzgerald on Project Gutenberg.

WATCH/WITNESS

An interactive map of “theories of everything”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. was moved by Joseph Stroud: “Just ordered Stroud’s Of This World. I can’t believe it is not already in my collection of beloved books. Now it will be thanks to you—‘My Father Died’ sent shock waves through me of surprise and recognition in equal measure. Thank you.”

• As did another Reader B.: “That’s a beautiful poem from Stroud. Love the dark machine line. ¶ And once again Nabokov kills it.”

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

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

Another poem from Joseph Stroud today. A little dark to balance the earlier light. I can’t recommend Of This World highly enough.

WORK

“My Father Died”

I put down the phone. I put down the phone.
What is there to hold on to? Now grief
will have its way. There is a great machine
in the blackness that dismantles one moment
from the next. It makes the sound of the heart
but is heartless.

—Joseph Stroud
—from Of This World: New and Selected Poems

WORD(S)

shirr /shər/. noun or verb. To draw cloth together (into a shirring) using parallel threads. To bake shelled eggs until set. To poach eggs in cream instead of water. Origin/etymology: unknown.

“…there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol, rubber-capped, bepearled, smoothly tanned, as glad as an ad, in her trim-fitted satin pants and shirred bra.” (Vladimir Nabokov)

“…they rode with the slamming and jarring of the wagon half shirring the meat from their bones so that they cried out to be left and then they died.” (Cormac McCarthy)

“Jocelyn said he made it sound as though that were the only reason he’d moved out, because restaurant eating would be so swell. She felt she’d been traded for shirred eggs.” (Karen Joy Fowler)

“…A bird
drinks from the small sheer pond
of its rain-shimmering face, from its own
reflection, the wind-shirred sky’s.”
(Claudia Emerson)

WEB

1. New York Public Library Shares Decades of Hilariously Weird Reference Questions. Pairs well with Questions Your Local Librarian Will Not Be Answering for You.

2. I love this project. Probably because I love projects of self-exploration and serendipity. → Date Jar

3. “Maybe handwriting is neither a lost art nor an anachronism; perhaps new technology will show there is some useful alchemy left in the way language, the body, and our sense of identity intertwine.” → What’s the Point of Handwriting? [Thanks Reader M.]

4. The act of “manspreading”, or sitting with legs wide apart on public transport, is among 1,000 new words to enter the online Oxford dictionary

5. Today in 1823, Joseph Smith—religious leader and founder of the Mormon church—under direction from the angel Moroni, discovers the golden plates he would eventually translate as the Book of Mormon. According to Smith, Moroni prevented him from removing the plates from their hiding spot for four years. Then Moroni forbade Smith from letting anyone see the plates while Smith spent years translating them. Finally, eleven trusted confidants (now known as the Book of Mormon Witnesses) were allowed to see the 30–60 pounds of thin gold leaves before Smith returned them to Moroni. Or so it is related in The Book of Mormon.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Imagine you wake up one morning and can’t read. Your eyes work, but the letters on the page have turned into squiggles. They make no sense. Now meet Howard Engel, a writer of detective stories, who has this condition, but amazingly, has found a way to trick his brain to almost read again.” → ►The Writer Who Couldn’t Read

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. has a musical poetry moment: “Love that Stroud poem. ¶ As I reread it, some furious black metal started playing from another device near me, and I imagined Stroud’s voice in that growling ferocity. Nice.”

• Reader A. Knows Who’s Who: “Happy Who day! Seeing in high school, ”The Kids Are Alright“ was my call to the Who and to rebellion. For many a year I can pretty much recite the whole skit. I once wrote my own quasi analysis of the wording of the opening, even if it was scripted, it was clever. ¶ Thanks for the full link (I updated my own old post), the track on the album does not have all of the end parts, and you never see on the album that Townshend smashes Tommy’s acoustic guitar ¶ ‘Hope I die before I get…’”

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

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

WORK

“Glad Day”

Bees have built a hive in the wall of my shack.
I don’t want to argue anymore about prosody.
I don’t want to discuss Saussure, or the meaning
of meaning. All I want is to imagine those bees
making a honeycomb inside my life—all I want
is the unbelievable taste of that wild honey.

—Joseph Stroud
—from Of This World: New and Selected Poems

WORD(S)

scuttlebutt (scuttle-butt) /sku-təl-but/. noun. Rumor; gossip. In nautical terms, a water cask or a drinking fountain. From scuttle (a hole/opening in a ship’s deck) + butt (barrel). Like last issue’s furphy, the name of the object became slang for the idle talk that commonly took place around it.

“He asked whether I was going to breakfast. The scuttlebutt on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said.” (David Foster Wallace)

“We arrived home to a very special heroes’ welcome: the town had been starving outright for good scuttlebutt. So hip hip hooray, welcome home the pitiful Prices!” (Barbara Kingsolver)

“Rick Raymond taps the microphone and the men stir from their scuttlebutt and applaud. From more than one man’s oily lips issues that whistle one only hears in crowds.” (Colson Whitehead)

“She was not as easy to place as Astrid or Jackie; she was a newborn, after all, and, well, the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her.” (Junot Diaz)

WEB

1. McSweeney’s Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar

2. Typography legend Adrian Frutiger has died. If you’ve used a computer, you’ve used his fonts (such as Univers and Avenir). Typophiles will enjoy his eye interview.

3. Finding Wonder in The World Book Encyclopedia

4. Out of English and Back Again: On Unintentional Retranslation. If the embedded PDF gives you troubles, you can go to it directly

5. Today in 1967, The Who appears on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour performing their hits “I Can See for Miles” and “My Generation,” ending their set with an explosion that leaves shrapnel in Keith Moon’s arm and Pete Townshend’s hair singed. The ►full video of the performance is fantastic, not just for the performances and bizarre climactic destruction but also for the Smothers’ sly, subversive wit.

WATCH/WITNESS

Hard to describe these amusing videos that “grew out of an online game to match song lyrics to social network profile pics.” Still above is from “Tweeted (Tainted) Love”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K. on Agatha Christie: “Something many people know: Agatha Christie wrote the play everyone knows, The Mousetrap. Something many don’t know: the St. Martin’s theatre in the West End has been continually staging the play since 1974.”

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

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

Today’s WORK is sound advice for social media despite being written down at least 4400 years ago!

WORK

IV. Do Not Despise a Man Because is Not of Thy Opinion. Be Calm.

If you hast to do with a disputant while he is in his heat, do not despise him because thou art not of the same opinion. Do not anger thyself as to him when he is wrong, away with that! He fights against himself; do not ask him again so as to flatter thy feelings. Do not amuse thyself with the spectacle which thou has before thee, that is odious, it is small, it comes from a contemptible spirit…

XX. Do Not Be of An Irritable Temper.

Be not of an irritable temper, as to what is happening around thee; scold only as to thine own affairs. Be not of an irritable tempter towards thy neighbors; of better value is a compliment for what displeases thee than rudeness. It is wrong to fly into a passion with one’s neighbors to the point of not knowing how to manage one’s words. When there is only a little irritation, one creates an affliction for himself for the time when he shall be cool.

XXIX. Annoyed By A Man, Without A Remedy, Go Away from Him and Think No More of It.

If thou art wearied without a remedy, if thou art tormented by someone who is within his right, put his visage away and think no more of it when he has ceased to speak to thee.

—from The Oldest Books in the World: The Precepts of the Prefect, The Feudal Lord Ptah-Hotep (at least 2414–2375 B.C.)
—translated by Isaac Myer

WORD(S)

furphy /FəR-fee/. noun. A false report; a rumor. From Furphy water carts (and latrine buckets) employed during World War I in Australia by the Furphy manufacturing company. The slang use of the word derives from the fact that soldiers would stand around the carts—which were boldly emblazoned with the company name—exchanging gossip. See also: scuttlebutt.

“The furphy round the House is that they believe in the thing so solidly that they’ve convinced their husbands.” (John Wyndham)

“Some members described climate change as a ‘furphy’.” (Rosemary Bulger)

WEB

1. The first three volumes of The History of Cartography are available online thanks to the University of Chicago Press. Check out “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken.”

2. The earliest use of the F-word discovered

3. The “comics that we hope will explain depression to the non-depressed” genre is getting crowded (and no one has done it better than Allie Brosh: Part 1 and Part 2), but this is a great roundup → 21 Comics That Capture The Frustrations Of Depression. And “The Battle”, which isn’t on there, might be my second-favorite ever.

4. Amy Goda’s Giant Animals Made of Recycled Rice Straw

5. Today in 1890, mystery novelist Agatha Christie is born in Devonshire, England. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles introduced the first of her two most memorable characters, Hercule Poirot, he of the fastidious nature and “the little grey cells.” Though Christie would, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did Sherlock Holmes, come to despise this most famous of her characters, the rest of the world never has and Poirot would become the only fictional character (so far) to be given an obituary in the New York Times. I, too, prefer Poirot to Christie’s second-most famous Miss Marple, but not by much.

WATCH/WITNESS

“The founder of the American Bookbinders Museum talks about the tools and craft of bookbinding as it entered the industrial age.” → Tim James at the American Bookbinders Museum

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C. shares a useful link: “Re: world suicide prevention day → Helpful resource for how to ask ‘are you okay?’”

• Another Reader C. on Ruskin and J.M.W. Turner: “…you gotta love John Ruskin. The sentence (?) you provided, alone will do. I am still in high dudgeon about his portrayal in the movie [Mr. Turner]. I have a lot of problems with that movie, because I dearly love Turner’s work, and the great biography by James Hamilton which I read many years ago and have now reread, which seems to me much truer and less sensational. I understand that a movie about a painter could be really, really dull, but I don’t think you need to add or exaggerate personalities in order to give a little extra to the film. But that’s me. Just saw some of his later works from the Tate at an exhibition in SF, and some of these I luckily saw in my younger days, when visiting the Tate. Sometimes, no matter who is writing about it, the work transcends any description. However, Ruskin’s championing of him (although mixed at times) is certainly a point in his (Ruskin’s) favor.”

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

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

WORK

“In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to. We often take leave of them, at least, only with regret. And once we have left them, none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’ ‘Were we not tactless?’ ‘Did they like us?’ or the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else. All these qualms of friendship expire on the threshold of the pure and peaceful form of it that is reading. There is no deference either, we laugh at what Molière has to say only just so far as we find it funny; when he bores us we are not afraid to look bored, and once we have definitely had enough of him we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius nor celebrity. The atmosphere of this pure form of friendship is silence, which is purer than speech. Because we speak for others, but remain silent for ourselves.”

—Marcel Proust
—from Days of Reading

WORD(S)

synathroesmus /si-nə-TREEZ-mus/. noun. A piling up or accumulation of terms, usually adjectives, usually in the employment of extreme—often negative—emotion. From Greek synathroismos (collection, union, grouping). Some examples of synathroesmus in action:

“But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” (Charles Dickens)

“Who can be wise, amazed, temp’rate, and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment?”
(William Shakespeare)

“When you say exergasia, synathroesmus, and incrementum together in a list, it seems to me that you have thereby given an example of all three devices in that same phrase.” (Kim Stanley Robinson)

“Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, that thing last night beat — as far as the acting and story went — and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless and scrannelpipiest — tongs and boniest — doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went.” (John Ruskin)

WEB

1. “Indian rights activists, South American governments are challenged by recent encounters to rethink their ‘no contact’ policies.” → Some Isolated Tribes in the Amazon Are Initiating Contact. Related: Survival International — there are at least 77 uncontacted groups and tribes in Brazil alone!

2. A photographer looked through people’s forgotten, dead photo accounts for 5 years — here are the beautiful and eerie pictures he found

3. The loss of physical documents and the decay of web/internet resources are a candle burning at both ends. Archive Corps to the rescue?

4. Design aficionados might enjoy backing/buying this reissue of the 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual, origin of the iconic “worm logo” and many other familiar elements. Or you can peruse the low-res digital version (PDF)

5. Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. I’ve lost too many who are important to me—and nearly lost myself—to suicide. There are many things you can do to lower the death toll (at least 800,000 people every year take their own lives…probably closer to a million) but here’s the simplest: talk to your friends. If you think they might be in a crisis, ask them how they are doing and what you can do. If not, ask them what they are doing. The balance can be so fine and the edge so keen that, I’m speaking from experience, an unexpected inquiry—online or off—about anything, no matter how trivial, can make a life-saving difference.

WATCH/WITNESS

Body by Escher. Source unknown (if you know where it comes from, please let me know!).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. writes in re: Pynchon’s “Nick Mournival”: “Once again Pynchon is the supreme namer.”

• A different Reader B. on my most recent project:: “concīs is a bite-sized reading treat that supports a great charity. Good on you!”

• Reader J. on rhyming slang: “Al Cook (of sainted memory) taught me about Cockney Rhyming Slang at Buffalo, and I fell under its spell—especially the great CRS sermon delivered on The Two Ronnies (of semi-sainted memory). I sneak it into my teaching (of creative writing, but also of Britlit when I’m working with someone like Angela Carter) whenever I can. ¶ But while I’m writing, and the subject of great alternative voicings is in the air, check out http://ktxc.to/baseball-nicknames. Who’d think, today, that three players (including Franklin Gutierrez?) would have the nickname ‘Death to Flying Things’—they knew how to apply honorifics in the 19th century! (My last book originally was to have been titled ‘The Nicknames’ until I got sick of waiting for it to be published and found myself enraptured by the idea of the Venus transit.)”

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

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

For the latter entries in today’s WORK, I leave the original rhyming word to your imagination. I highly recommend browsing the fascinating collection of slang it comes from and playing a guessing game with the headwords (a random for instance: what do you think a “Camilla Parker” is?). Do any of you employ or experience rhyming slang?

WORK

catalogue: cattle dog
book: Captain Cook | Joe Hook | Joe Rook | King Farouk | rookery nook
newspaper: Johnny Raper | linen | linen draper (Sun: currant bun, Herald: Jim Gerald, The Times: Captain Grimes)
underwear: montezuma | wicked rumors | seldom see | insects and ants | east and west | Sunday best
venereal disease: hat and cap | band in the box | boot and socks | goldilocks | bang and big | Will’s Whiff | dribs and drabs | beattie and baby
various bodily functions: bubble and squeak | Robert E. | riddle-me-ree | pig in the middle | comical chris | snakes hiss | bangers and mash | pie and mash | Johnny Cash | tommy guns | banana splits | red hots | nicker bits | ali hoop | bob and hit | apple tart | beef-heart | broken heart | Andy Capp | sweetpea | you and me

—from Cassell’s Rhyming Slang (edited by Jonathon Green)

WORD(S)

mournival /MOR-nə-vəl/. noun. In the game of Gleek (the card game, which is decidedly not the game of gleeking I learned in grade school), a set of four aces, kings, queens or jacks in one hand. Metaphorically, a group of four. From French mornifle (group of four cards), possibly from mornifle (a slap to the face) as the metaphorical impact of such a hand of cards.

“And we’ll drink till our eyes do run over;
And prove it by reason
That it can be no treason
To drink and to sing
A mournival of healths to our new-crown’d King.”
(Alex Brome)

“The mess of simple bodies;
Nature’s first mournival—”
(Joshua Poole)

“There remain’d the last unavoidable Object of Value, which he bet against what prov’d to be a Cross-Ruff, whence it pass’d into the Hands of Nick Mournival, an Enterpriser of the Town.” (Thomas Pynchon)

WEB

1. This unique Tokyo bookstore offers one book title a week

2. “The whole phenomenon of creativity has become mystified, as behooves a concept that people use to reassure themselves about the future” → on The Cult of Creativity [I wish I had the chops to do a parody cover using Living Colour’s song “Cult of Personality.” But I’ll take any excuse to listen to that blistering guitar solo, one of my all-time favorites.]

3. A Collector Sees the Potential in a Humble Paper Clip

4. “Since artists’ books are not normally associated with African art, our goal in this exhibition is to introduce the genre and survey its ‘African’ manifestations.” → Artists’ Books and Africa

5. Today in 1960, singer/songwriter Aimee Mann is born. In the early 80s, Mann co-founded the New Wave band ’Til Tuesday, famous for their single “Voices Carry.” In the early 90s, Mann set out on a solo career that saw her pen some of the most wickedly poetic songs ever (here’s a decent playlist). In 2013 she joined forces with Ted Leo, performing as The Both. You might also know Mann from her turn as a cleaning woman on Portlandia or as the German nihilist who sacrifices her green-polished little toe in The Big Lebowski.

WATCH/WITNESS

►DJ Shadow’s “Scale it Back” music video is based on the story (memory sequence) that Memory World Champion Ben Pridmore created to memorize the order of a deck of cards (in less than minute).

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. asks: “What’s the source of that Burgess quote? Not The Wanting Seed?” – Nope. It’s from The Kingdom of the Wicked!

• Reader S. writes: “The US Festival!!! Funny thing, I misremembered watching the ’82 one (it was the ’83 concert I watched) but in doing so, took a trip down memory lane/wikipedia and stumbled across this gem, Oingo Boingo’s debut on the Gong Show: http://ktxc.to/oingo-boingo-gong-show ¶ And for bonus points—who was Oingo Boingo’s most famous member? Why Danny Elfman, composer of all scores Tim Burton-esque.”

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

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

WORK

“Hell”

Counting from the top: a chimney, antennae, a warped tin roof. Through a round window you see a girl trapped in threads whom the moon forgot to draw in and left to the mercy of gossipmongers and spiders. Farther down a woman reads a letter, cools her face with powder, and goes on reading. On the first floor a young man is walking back and forth thinking: how can I go outdoors with these bitten lips and shoes falling apart? The café downstairs is empty; it’s still morning. Just one couple in a corner. They are holding hands. He says: “We will always be together. Waiter, a black coffee and a lemonade, please.”

The waiter goes behind the curtain and once there, bursts out laughing.

—Zbigniew Herbert
—from Formations (Vol. 3)

WORD(S)

swive /SWIYV/. verb. To engage in sexual congress with; to copulate; for the extremely sensitive or those in denial: to make love. From Old English swifan (revolve, sweep), which is also the root for swivel…and the rest is up to our imagination. See also jape and a million more.

“At the sight of them our men put by all thought of plunder, which had in truth been lean, and made to swive the twain of ’em then and there.” (John Barth)

“Other words, such as swink and swive, have also been forgotten, except to those who have read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where he uses them unabashedly.” (Mark Morton)

“It’s attributed to the unkillable slave Chrestus. Around whom a cannibalistic cult now centres. They eat each other, you know. And they swive each other with no concern for lawful relationships.” (Anthony Burgess)

“A representative example is a piece he wrote in 1982 titled ‘To Quim and to Swive: Linguistic and Coital Parity, Male and Female’” (Terry Goldie)

WEB

1. “Very short stories composed entirely of example sentences from the New Oxford American Dictionary” → Dictionary Stories

2. A fascinating debate on many levels… → Fragments of ‘world’s oldest known Koran’ unlikely to pre-date Prophet Mohamed, says expert

3. The “Pavement Bookworm” → The homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews instead of begging

4. It is what it says…in a Safe-for-Work kind of way → JournalPorn

5. Today in 1982, the first US Festival sponsored by Steve Wozniak (Apple Computer co-founder) opens with a performance by Gang of Four (see the lineup of musical acts). The “US” was pronounced like the pronoun and the entire three-day event intended by Wozniak as an antidote to the 70s “Me” generation, combining music, technology and community in the hills of San Bernardino, California. In addition to the wide line-up of acts, free water and free showers, the event featured props from the set of E.T. and Empire Strikes Back, an arcade and the debut of new Atari games. Having lost $12 million dollars, Wozniak decided to do it all again in 1983, this time with days devoted to New Wave, Heavy Metal, Rock and Country (I wonder how many saw Flock of Seagulls, Ozzie, Bowie and Willie in one 4-day span?) and lost another $12 million (not to mention two deaths, one due to an overdose, another to a beating).

WATCH/WITNESS

Watch: “Dr. Oliver Sacks discusses his proclivity for note taking and his love of storytelling.” RIP.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. on concision and cold: “Concīs is a wonderful idea, elegantly formulated, Chris. And Skip’s a perfect icebreaker. I’ll let people know about it, for sure. And Fairbanks! I had you picked for a cold-weather guy, but that’s ridiculous.” — I’m honored to open with Skip’s work and equally excited about Cintia Santana, who is up next!"

• Reader B. admires Baltasar: “That Gracian passage is a splendid ode to audio theater. And to paying attention to sound in multimedia.”

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

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

WORK

We have eyelids but not earlids, for the ears are the portals of learning, and Nature wanted to keep them wide open. Not content with denying us this door, she also keeps us, alone among all listeners, from twitching our ears. Man alone holds them motionless, always on alert. She did not want us to lose a single second in cocking our ears and sharpening our hearing. The ears hold court at all hours, even when the soul retires to its chambers. In fact, it is then that those sentinels ought to be most wide awake. If not, who would warn of danger? When the mind goes lazily off to sleep, who else would rouse it? This is the difference between seeing and hearing. For the eyes seek out things deliberately, when and if they want, but things come spontaneously to the ears. Visible things tend to remain: if we don’t look at them now, we can do so later; but most sounds pass by quickly, and we must grab that opportunity by the forelock. Our one tongue is twice enclosed, and our two ears are twice open, so that we can hear twice as much as we speak. I realize that half, perhaps more, of all things heard are unpleasant and even harmful, but for this there is a fine solution, which is to pretend not to hear, or to hear like a shopkeeper or a wise man. And there are things so devoid of reason that one walls up the ears with the hands. For if the hands help us to hear, they can also defend us from flattery. The snake knows a way to escape the charmer: he keeps one ear to the ground and plugs the other with his tail.

—Baltasar Gracian (trans. by Christopher Maurer)
—from A Pocket Mirror for Heroes

WORD(S)

retiarius /ree-shee-E-ree-ə-s/. noun. A Roman gladiator who fought with a net and a trident. From rēte (net) + ārius (a man belonging to or engaged in).

“…the old man displayed a rather rotten-looking fisherman’s net, which he generally spread out invitingly on the sands, as if it were a carpet for queens; but occasionally whirled wildly round his head with a gesture almost as terrific as that of the Roman Retiarius, ready to impale people on a trident.” (G.K. Chesterton)

“…I was engaged in duels of fierce continual struggle, with some person or body of persons, that sought, like the Roman retiarius, to throw a net of deadly coercion or constraint over the undoubted rights of my natural freedom.” (Thomas De Quincey)

“Turned on my new axis to a swathe
of shriven grey, I remind myself
of a cork float in a fishing-net spread out
to dry in the sun, waiting for the fisherman
— both retiarius and secutor —
to attend to what is broken and undone.”
(Robin Robertson)

WEB

1. concīs magazine, a new little side-project of mine, debuts today with a poem by the inimitable Skip Fox.

2. Say Hello to the Exclamation Comma: The Punctuation Mark You Never Knew You Needed

3. Despite my typophilia, I don’t often share specific typefaces here…but Infini is so pretty, so complete (even a pictographic set) and so free…

4. How The Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive

5. Today in 1972, Boris Spassky phones in his resignation to Bobby Fischer, making Fischer the first United States native to win the World Chess Championship and ending the Soviet Union’s 24-year domination of the title. The Fischer-Spassky match continues to interest—even enthrall—many not just because of the deep political implications (and imagination: think Rocky v. Drago on the chessboard), and not just because Fischer was perhaps the best to ever play the game (his dominance on the way to the title match remains the greatest performance in chess history), but because Fischer was a compelling, complicated and unbalanced figure. I, for one, have read and watched everything I can about Fischer and look forward to ► Pawn Sacrifice, the latest movie about him and this historic battle.

WATCH/WITNESS

“In October of 1995, Ginsberg visited Paul McCartney and his family at their home in England. He recited ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’ while one of McCartney’s daughters filmed it. Ginsberg mentioned that he had to give a reading with Anne Waldman and other poets at the Royal Albert Hall and was looking for a guitarist to accompany him. ‘Why don’t you try me,’ McCartney said. ‘I love the poem.’” → ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’ by Allen Ginsberg with Paul McCartney and Philip Glass

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader E. should’ve faxed us this comment: “It might be too late for Yacht’s fax experiment, but apparently the fax isn’t dead yet. In a weird way, I’ll miss them.”

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

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

Katexic will be on hiatus until September 1. Be careful out there!

WORK

Today’s WORK, by the playful logophile Heather McHugh, demands (like much of her work) slow reading and re-reading, slippery savoring on the tongue. And, before anyone writes in, there are no typos in the poem you are about to read.

WORK

“Fastener”

One as is as another as.
One with is with another with;

one against’s against all others and one of
of all the ofs on earth feels chosen. So the man

can’t help his fastening on many
(since the likes of him like

look-alikes)… When the star-shower crosses
the carnival sky, then the blues of the crowd

try to glisten, to match it; and the two
who work late in the butcher-house touch,

reaching just the same moment
for glue and for hatchet.

—Heather McHugh
—from Upgraded to Serious

WORD(S)

globesity /gloh-BEE-si-tee/. noun. The increasing weight of the world. The global obesity pandemic. A portmanteau word, obviously, from global + obesity. Apparently coined by the World Health Organization in 2001.

“A woman frowning at her bathroom scale in St. Louis, a man whose pants are suddenly too tight in Jakarta, and a roly-poly child playing under a tree in Cairo all are part of a 1.1 billion-person trend called ‘globesity.’” (Ellen Creager)

“That’s just the top of a massive iceberg that’s threatening to sink the health of the young and old from Anchorage, Alaska to Zurich, Switzerland. The tentacles of globesity reach into every continent and grip every major city in the world.” (Jordan Rubin)

“A large part of the Future Lab’s message is packaging. Their design and journalistic backgrounds combine to produce catchy copy – think ‘flashpacking’, ‘turbo-shandy man’ and ‘globesity’ – coolly, seductively styled.” (Impact Lab)

WEB

1. You too can become a Citizen Archivist. I plan to contribute some time.

2. Another fascinating exploration from Keith Houston aka “Shady Characters,” this time on gnomons and marks of punctuation.

3. Discovered too late to participate, but the band Yacht ran an interesting experiment in ephemerality, distributing their new album’s art by fax.

4. [NSFW] → the illustrated diary of Jacq the Stripper…in which Jacq draws and quotes from some of her strange, sad, funny and disappointing audience.

5. Today in 1948, poet, essayist and translator Heather McHugh is born in San Diego, CA. MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, Guggenheim fellow, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, etc…but her words are the things. I can’t think of any other poet who plays with words with such delight and (sometimes bawdy) abandon, a characteristic that is just as evident in her boffo interview in BOMB magazine, from which I could cull quotes for a dozen newsletters. You could do worse than reading some of McHugh’s poems in Poetry or ► listen to this 2008 reading that begins with a poem indebted to the Jargon File later revised into the New Hacker’s Dictionary.

WATCH/WITNESS

“A film created by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss documenting the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times. This film shows the entire newspaper production process from hot-metal typesetting to creating stereo moulds to high-speed press operation. At the end of the film, the new typesetting and photographic production process is shown in contrast to the old ways.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K. writes re: “Orthography”: “ha! That first limerick looks like most of my iMessages now that I’ve switched to using voice-to-text!”

• Those clever poems also caught Reader O’s attention: “Wow! The second limerick finally makes sense to me! I would be ashamed, but instead I have chosen to be glad that I got it. :)”

• “Cellfish” stirred up some comments on Twitter and this, from Reader A.: “Oh man, I love ”cellfish“ I am turning it into one of our UdG Daily Try activities. In looking for images, I found this collection of possible new katexic words (unless that’s where you got it from).” — I hadn’t seen that collection before, but there are some newsletter-worthy creations there!

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

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

Today’s WORK (it took me a shameful number of seconds to grok the 2nd limerick) via the always wonderful Futility Closet, which the whole Clamor should be reading.

Also: we have contest winners that will be announced in a special Saturday edition…so don’t unsubscribe before then.

WORK

There once was a ,cal fellow,
Who grew .ically mellow;
With a — he was gone
To the town of :
To write for a sheet that was yellow.

She was wooed by a handsome young Dr.,
Who one day in his arms tightly lr.;
But straightway he swore
He would do so no more,
Which the same, it was plain, greatly shr.

A boy at Sault Ste. Marie
Said, “To spell I will not agree
Till they learn to spell ‘Soo’
Without any u
Or an a or an l or a t.”

There was an old maid from Duquesne
Who the rigor of mortis did fuesne;
She came to with a shout,
Saying: “Please let me out;
This coffin will drive me insuesne.”

—from Limerick Lyrics (Stanton Vaughn, ed.)
—via Futility Closet

WORD(S)

cellfish (cell-fish) /SEL-fish/. adjective. Using a cell phone in a way that disregards others, such as loud-talking in a restaurant, in line while the cashier waits, &c. A portmanteau combining cell (phone) + selfish.

“Don’t be Cell-Fish” (Long Island Mass Transit Authority)

“When he started taking calls from telemarketers during intimate moments, I realized that he wasn’t that into me and was really quite cellfish.” (Verbotomy)

“With fools, there is no companionship. Rather than to live with men who are cellfish, vain, quarrelsome, and obstinate, let a man walk alone.” (Buddha)

WEB

1. Snoop Dogg, the Jackson 5, the Ramones, Bryan Adams and many others meet Shakespeare. Just for the LOLs. → Pop Sonnets

2. “Took the light rail from Tianjin City to Binhai for a walk-around on the last day of 2007. It was a pleasant day, though an odd one too, as we wandered through a landscape that seems to have no idea what is happening to it.” → Photographer Jim Gourley’s photos from Tianjin, in what is now the evacuation zone.

3. I don’t go out of my way to watch—or avoid—most Spielberg films. But Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo is intriguing. → ► Dalton Trumbo (trailer)

4. The Scofield is an impressive new literary magazine, modeled on The Dial. The first issue centers around David Markson and the idea of “solitude.”

5. Today in 1590, colonist Charles White returns from a (three year!) supply run to England and discovers the Roanoke Colony (which was actually the 2nd settlement there, the first had disappeared before White re-settled at the same location in 1587)—including his granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas—has vanished. The only clue: the word “CROATOAN” carved into a tree, likely meaning “Croatoan” (now Hatteras) Island. Though the settlement had been dismantled, indicating an intentional relocation, the Roanoke colonists were never found and their fate remains unknown.

WATCH/WITNESS

Under Cover: ABC of Banned Books — “Books have been burned, challenged, banned, removed from schools and libraries and used as a rationale for death and destruction throughout history and across cultures. This flag book showcases examples of words and methods used in censoring works, as well as highlighting the continuation of these practices today.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader G. doesn’t like it: "Call me Ms Stick-in-the-Mud, but I don’t see how the ‘poem’ you shared is any such thing.’ — OK, Ms. Stick-in-the-Mud.

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

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

WORK

You don’t have to keep going down to the river, you know. It’s not always a pleasant place. Bears were sighted there recently. The spring floods have uprooted so many trees. Don’t forget the strange man with a dog. He was soaking wet, the man. Was he talking to himself? You shouldn’t be running away like that. Personally, I think with all this rain, the ground is hurt. It’s doing things that won’t support us, falling away in places. You’re going to put your foot down one evening without looking and the ground won’t be there. Is this what you want? You’ll be tumbling down deep into a hole, asking yourself over and over, Well, Well?

—James Haug
—from “Three Poems”
—found in jubilat (No. 27)

WORD(S)

bibulous /BIB-yoo-ləs/. adjective. A heavy drinker; an alcoholic; related to, or resembling, drunkenness. More generally, an absorbent material. It feels like there should be a portmanteau in here somewhere about one who is drunk on books. See also: bibulously. From Latin bibulus (readily drinking), from bibĕre (to drink).

“‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ did not immediately become the national anthem; though it was written by Francis Scott Key during the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814 (and set to the tune of ‘To Anacreon in Heaven,’ a British drinking song celebrating a bibulous Greek poet who is said to have choked to death on a grape)…” (Anne Fadiman)

“The hovel on Ferry stood, or, rather, leaned at a bibulous angle on a narrow street cut across at an oblique angle by another narrow street, all the old wooden homes like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses lurching this way and that way, and the shutters hanging off their hinges and windows stuffed with old newspapers, and the snagged picket fence and raised voices in unknown tongues and howling of dogs who, since puppyhood, had known of the world only the circumference of their chain.” (Angela Carter)

“The incumbent, the Professor at that time, was an old man bibulous by nature, who had been driven still further into his cups by the insubordination of his pupils.” (William Faulkner)

WEB

1. The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum is on track to digitize everything in its collection (more than 215,000 objects) by late next year. As it goes it is exploring ways of sharing those collections through its online collection database. For example (via Reader M.), explore some of their bookpapers, book covers or many other types. Or by color. And many more. Oh, and geeks will enjoy the explorations and behind-the-scenes look in the Cooper Hewitt Lab blog.

2. The Clamor knows I’m a list-buff and think everyone else should be too. The Wikipedia List of lists of lists will help a lot in that cause [via Reader C.].

3. I’ll just leave this one right here for you to figure out → No one will ever read this but

4. Typophiles and font-freaks will enjoy this gem from the Internet Archives, including “Type Design: A Homily” by Frederic Goudy and other interesting tidbits, each set in a new typeface. → Ars Typographica Vol 1, No 4 - An Occasional Miscellany

5. Today in 1422 (according to some sources), William Caxton—the first English printer and the man who brought the printing press to England—is born. The first book he printed was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…two edition of which, from 1476 and 1483, can be viewed online. Naturally, Caxton was the first English retailer of printed books in London, producing and selling, among other titles, the first English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

WATCH/WITNESS

Just one of many classic advertisements for Thorazine. It’s for hyperactive kids, the nauseated, the senile, the excited, the anxious… For the love of all that’s holy to you, stay away from the rest of the WHALE site.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader L. would know: “Old geeks might know about the earlier updated Devil’s Dictionary 2.0. And only geeks will get most of it.”

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

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

Two nuclear-grade errors in the last issue. First, the WORK, which I accidentally left unattributed, was by Anne Fadiman from her wonderful book Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. I hope it was obvious that the writing was too fine to be my own…and I would never feature my own writing anyway! Second, it is Ambrose Bierce, not Pierce. I’m not sure how that happened.

And don’t forget you have until the end of the week to enter the (Cormac) McCarthyisms Contest. Two options, one for readers and one for writers.

WORK

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

—Henry Beston
—from The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

WORD(S)

melligenous (melligineous) /mə-LIJ-i-nəs/. adjective. Like honey; similar in form to honey; made of honey. Many know mellifluous–which shares the Latin root mel (honey)–in terms of pleasant, musical sound. But the earliest citations show “mellifluous” being used in both the literal and metaphorical senses (in Higdon’s Polychronicon) back in the mid 1300s. Thus, the honeyed tone of Johnny Hodges, etc.

“But, after the Queen has satisfied her appetite, what is she to do? Nothing, as long as she can, and then commence her melligenous meal again.” (Overland Monthly).

“…whilst the flowers of Banksia ornata, Lambertia formosa, and some other species are rich in melligenous sap.” (Rev. W. Woolls)

“He’ll never cure Rosalind Ferne! — Did you ever hear such a melligenous name?” (Emma C. Dowd)

“…man must have lost his wits with his tail, both being now exceedingly rudimentary. Having lost his tail, he could no longer swing in the ethereal blue; and then, losing his wits, grew a mental tail, and swung in the deep inane, devising the ideal of discomfort, wherein all pleasures should be considered as evil, and all pains as exceedingly good; chewing aloes he swore they were as melligenous as the sugar cane, called black white, white black, and this fair world the abode of his satanic majesty; beat his wife, swore at the ‘kids,’ and kicked the cat over the garden wall.” (J. F. Fuller)

WEB

1. “A banknote from 1380 that threatens decapitation, a set of 17th-century prints so delicate they had never been opened, and 3000-year-old ‘oracle bones’…” → Oracle bones and unseen beauty: wonders of priceless Chinese collection now online. And, serendipitously via Reader B. comes a link to a story of something new from the other university on that side of the pond…the new Digital.Bodleian.

2. And you thought TSA didn’t have a sense of humor? → 25 Odd Confiscations: TSA on Instagram

3. Of interest to more than just librarians…anyone with an interest in technology, culture, preservation, copyright, etc. should check out this (sometimes quite funny) post/presentation → how to destroy special collections with social media

4. “British Movietone is arguably the world’s greatest newsreel archive, spanning the period 1895 to 1986.” And now it’s all being loaded to YouTube so you can get lost for hours when you should be working → British Movietone

5. Today in 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle enlightened CNN-watching America, noting, “Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.” Sadly, there were no reports of Quayle-ites emigrating to the red planet; happily, Mars exploration continues, close-up.

WATCH/WITNESS

A page from Nick Cave’s Handwritten Dictionary.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. finds a followup: “You shared Infinite Lego last year. Guess what? A book is coming out! http://ktxc.to/infinite-lego-promo”

• Reader D. is also an “active reader”: “Lovely post, Chris. I have never understood a book so well as when I have had a dialogue with it in the margins of the pages—in pencil.”

• Reader S. wasn’t the first to note the B/Pierce error, but there’s more: “I suspect I won’t be the only one to point out the typo in the reference to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. I would add that much of my young adulthood was spent hunkered down in dark spaces with a candle reading and rereading Bierce’s hallucinatory stories of ghosts and Chinamen rising from beneath the floorboards to reclaim their pigtails. I probably won’t sleep much tonight.”

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

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

WORK

During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book’s physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Hilaire Belloc, a courtly lover, once wrote:

Child! do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out!
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

What would Belloc have thought of my father, who, in order to reduce the weight of the paperbacks he read on airplanes, tore off the chapters he had completed and threw them in the trash? What would he have thought of my husband, who reads in the sauna, where heat-fissioned pages drop like petals in a storm? What would he have thought (here I am making a brazen attempt to upgrade my family by association) of Thomas Jefferson, who chopped up a priceless 1572 first edition of Plutarch’s works in Greek in order to interleave its pages with an English translation? Or of my old editor Byron Dobell, who, when he was researching an article on the Grand Tour, once stayed up all night reading six volumes of Boswell’s journals and, as he puts it, “sucked them like a giant mongoose”? Byron told me, “I didn’t give a damn about the condition of those volumes. In order to get where I had to go, I underlined them, wrote in them, shredded them, dropped them, tore them to pieces, and did things to them that we can’t discuss in public.”

WORD(S)

anthemion /an-THEE-me-ən/. noun. A flat floral motif in the shape of a honeysuckle or similar radiating cluster. Often found in ancient architecture and as a printer’s ornament. From Greek literal, diminutive of anthos (flower). See a nice example on the face of the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral and more information than you’re ever likely to need on this palmette.

“It was a four-story establishment with a vermiculated facade, the oval windows surrounded by onyxlike anthemion friezes.” (Peter F. Hamilton)

“In the Foreword to the 1966 version of Speak, Memory, Nabokov says that in looking for a title for the first edition, he ‘toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it’; it would be a fitting, if precious, subtitle for Lolita (as well as for several other Nabokov works). A grand anthemion entwines H.H.’s narrative, like some vast authorial watermark, and its outlines are traced by the elegantly ordered networks of alliteration, ‘coincidences,’ narrative ‘inconsistencies,’ lepidopterological references, ‘cryptocolors,’ and shadows and glimpses of Quilty.” (Alfred Appel, Jr.)

“Greek artists were transported to Rome and placed in charge of the most important public works. Roman art is, consequently, but a development or adaptation of the Greek. It is noticeable, however, that it almost completely ignored the most characteristic and popular of the Greek forms—for example, the anthemion—and adapted those, such as the acanthus and the scroll, which had been considered of minor importance among the Greeks.” (Marie R. Garesche)

WEB

1. This link is everywhere now (the hazards of not publishing daily), but it’s too awesome to not share → Cornell University—World’s largest natural sound archive now fully online

2. Of course not on par with Ambrose Pierce’s classic, but still amusing → The New Devil’s Dictionary

3. Charming Bookstores in Unexpected Places → What are some of your favorites?

4. The One Grand pop-up bookstore “Favorite Books" series continues → first Tilda Swinton, then Carrie Brownstein and now: Ta-Nehisi Coates.

5. Today in 1869, explorer (and astronomer) George Davidson deeply impresses hostile Chilkat Indians in Alaska with his prediction of an eclipse, ensuring the safety of his team which he feared would be attacked soon. A bit of the Englishman in the Tlingit Chief’s court.

WATCH/WITNESS

Isobel Varley, who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “the world’s most tattooed senior woman.” This photo is one in a series of photos of aging rebels by Muir Vidler.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S. was the first to spot my error: “Time warp or did the last email take over a day to get to me?” — No, I sent the last issue out with the wrong date. It hurts me worse than it hurts you, believe me…

• From Reader H. on the excerpt from Barthelme: “Barthelme’s 60 Stories (and his 40 Stories as well) are full of wonders.”

• From Reader B. on the same: “That’s astonishing Barthelme. ¶ And you did a fine followup with the booze word.”

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

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

WORK

“The snow is coming,” she said. “Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking the busthead ’round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. Come, viridian friend, come and sup with me.”

They sit down together. The pork with red cabbage steams before them. They speak quietly about the McKinley Administration, which is being revised by revisionist historians. The story ends. It was written or several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what it tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.

—Donald Barthelme
—from “Rebecca”
—found in Sixty Stories

WORD(S)

busthead (bust-head). noun. Cheap, strong liquor, usually of the illegal variety. Moonshine. Hooch. Poteen. Pop-skull. Bumblings. The origin is obvious to anyone who’s hit the busthead a little hard themselves.

“Appalachian connections to the beverage are both natural and cultural. Clear streams, deep valleys, dry corn, soft water, and industrious farmers come together in the production of whiskey, the almost magical mountain dew or white lightning. Those who know the drink call it corn squeezin’s, skull cracker, thump whiskey, happy Sally, stumper wine, blockade whiskey, tiger’s sweat, rotgut, or busthead.” (Mark F. Sohn)

“Their distillations?” asked Mr. Rand.
The old lady spoke up. “Busthead. Red-eye. Mountain dew. They’re brewing alcohol, Mr. Rand,” she informed him…
(Cherie Priest)

“Inside, the air was always thick with the smell of muscatel, smoke, cracklings, draft beer and busthead whiskey, expectorated snuff, pickled hogs’ feet, perfume, body powder, sweat, and home-grown reefer.” (James Lee Burke)

WEB

1. More contranyms/antagonyms/Janus words [via Reader K.] → 25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites

2. “Vladimir Nabokov’s opinions on various writers, culled from Strong Opinions.” → Nabokov’s Recommendations [Via Reader N. who notes: “This is a typically cranky and inconsistent list. I always enjoy things like this—or most of the time I do.”]

3. “The question, now, is this: is the paragraph itself destined to die just as the mark that once delineated it has disappeared from sight?” → Keith Houston of Shady Characters on the imminent death of the paragraph

4. The “backward index” is a thing…and one of beauty too. → Reverse Logic

5. Today in 1858, the first transatlantic telegraph cable is completed, connecting Valentia Harbor in Ireland and Trinity Bay in Newfoundland. On August 16th, the first message was successfully sent: "“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will to men.” Unfortunately, God wasn’t regulating the voltage and the quickly deteriorating cable became unusable by mid-October. Previously: The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature and “U Tr?”: A Glossary of Abbreviations Used by Early–20th-Century Telegraph Operators.

WATCH/WITNESS

Kuriositas has a photo-laden and fascinating story about the cashew—Covert Cashew: The Secret Life of a Nut—from seed to tasty morsel with many intriguing steps in between. I knew the cashew was a strange “fruit” (basically akin to a peach!) but had no idea how labor intensive, initially poisonous, etc. it was.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C. writes in about seaweed paper: “Since just this year I have become enamored of seaweed and have collected it for food (which, by the way, requires a fishing license) I am thrilled to see that it can be used for papermaking (another interest of mine) as well.”

• Reader P. liked last issue’s subject-line: “I love today’s subject line [monday’s dog-o-war] - the acknowledgement that Mon can be a mental struggle is comforting. ;-)”

• Reader A., naturally, shared a compelling dog-related item: “For the dogs, after hearing an NPR story on the woman who trained the lead actor dogs, I ordered and was absorbed by the movie White God, where the unwanted, shunned mixed breed dogs of Budapest get their revenge. It was moving to say the least ¶ http://ktxc.to/white-god-trailer ¶ I’ve read people conjecture its a metaphor of racism, but in the extras the director makes it clear that it was his inspiration of visiting a dog pound, and the gazes he saw from the dogs in cages, looking at him as a looming powerful White God (it’s a nod he says as well to the earlier movie White Dog).”

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

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

Today’s WORK is a little more intense than Monday feels for me this morning, but not by much.

Here’s a way to beat the day’s doldrums: enter the (Cormac) McCarthyisms Contest…one prize for a lucky avid reader, another for he or she who dares to scribble.

WORK

“Last of all my turn will come after someone’s spear or sword has removed the life from these limbs; and my dogs, turned savage, tear me to pieces at the entrance to my palace. The very dogs I have fed at table and trained to watch my gate will lie in front of my doors, restlessly lapping their master’s blood. It looks well enough for a young man killed in battle to lie there mutilated by a sharp spear: death can find nothing to expose in him that is not beautiful. But when an old man’s dogs defile his grey head, his grey beard and his genitals, wretched mortals plumb the depths of human misery.”

—Homer
—from The Iliad (trans. by E.V. Rieu; edited by Peter Jones)

WORD(S)

facinorous (facinorious, facinerious) /fa-SIN-ə-rəs/. adjective. Seriously, jaw-droppingly wicked. From Latin facinorōsus (criminal, wicked), from facinus (deed, especially bad deed).

“Nay, ’tis strange, ’tis very strange, that is the
brief and the tedious of it; and he’s of a most
facinerious spirit that will not acknowledge it”
(William Shakespeare)

“I am conscious that in arguing against the ”more deadly than the male“ conception of the woman criminal I am perhaps doing my book no great service. It might work for its greater popularity if I argued the other way, making out that the subjects I have chosen were monsters of brutality, with arms up to the shoulders in blood, that they were prodigies of iniquity and cunning, without bowels, steeped in hypocrisy, facinorous to a degree never surpassed or even equalled by evil men.” (Victor MacClure)

“Thirdly, consider the utter arrogant and facinorious nature of what the socialists are saying. It is in essence, ‘you produce and we will distribute,’ or ‘you work and we will enjoy the result,’ or more bluntly, ‘we will take from you what you have made.’” (John Bowman)

WEB

1. It’s not funny because it’s true… → Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title]

2. “Non-writers often believe ‘the muse’ is a friendly spirit who whispers ideas into warm, receptive minds. This is a charming misconception. The muse is a muscular, nude hermaphrodite with tentacles, wings, and the antlered head of a stag.” → The Fantastically Normal Life of a Writer

3. Making Paper from Seaweed: Papermaking with Atlantic BioInvader Codium Fragile

4. Eat Pigeon: An Introduction to M.F.K. Fisher, History’s Best Food Writer

5. Today in 1527, the first known letter (in English) is sent from North America to King Henry VIII from John Rut who was on a mission for the King to find the Northwest Passage. This was about the time that Henry was deciding to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, ultimately leading to the Reformation, so perhaps he was too busy to reply. At any rate, no further record of John Rut remains.

WATCH/WITNESS

Photographer David Kaszlikowski located this Himalayan mountain pool using a drone and then photographed it using “a 30-second exposure shot with a Canon 5D Mark III on a tripod. While the shutter was open, he ‘painted’ the water and surrounding area with an LED, creating an eerie glow on the ice and sky. ” That should mean something to photographers in the Clamor. I just think it’s eerily pretty.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S. writes in regarding Dali’s ‘Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko)’: “…that Dali you pointed to is my favourite of his. My first serious girlfriend’s Dad had a copy of it in his house which I’d stare at whilst laying in bed after, well, you know, and it was the perfect distance away from the bed, right at the tipping point between seeing the details and seeing the macro. Brought back nice memories.”

• Reader G. keeps it simple. In response to Christine Baumgarthuber’s It Ought to be Called Vice Cream, she writes: “I love ice cream.”

• Reader B. observes, about the same piece: “I liked the ice cream passage, but am madly in love with the name ‘Baumgarthuber’.”

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

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

WORK

“Do you urge immorality against these ice-cream shops?” he was asked.

“I should not like to urge it, but it is known,” came the answer.

Among the more egregious crimes committed by the shops’ proprietors was that of allowing young people of both sexes to intermingle and smoke. One inspector had said that he had seen girls of “tender years” smoking cigarettes in the shop. They were also seen dancing to “music supplied by a mouth organ.” Even worse, some of these young girls had become prostitutes.

Another inspector was asked: “Do you ask us to believe that the downfall of these women was due to ice cream shops?”

“I believe it is,” he replied.

It was concluded that ice cream shops embodied “perfect iniquities of hell itself and ten times worse than any of the evils of the public house. They were sapping the morals of the youth of Scotland.”

—Christine Baumgarthuber
—from “It Ought to Be Called Vice Cream”

WORD(S)

zeppole /ZEP-oh-lay/. noun. May refer to two different Italian pastries. The first is a deep-fried dough ball usually topped with powdered sugar and filled with custard, cream or honey-butter. The second is a baked cream puff made from choux pastry (or pâte à choux). The latter may be sweet—filled with ricotta and chocolate, candied fruits or honey—or savory, filled with anchovy. See also the US crispelli. Italian zeppole, plural of zeppola (fritter).

“For the common people of Naples, Christmas is a festival of eels, Easter a revel of casatelli; they eat zeppole to honor Saint Joseph; and the greatest proof of affliction that can be given to the dying Saviour is not to eat meat.” (Marc Monnier)

“Vinny preferred eating to talking. And the only white powder he liked was the sugar on his zeppoles.” (F. Paul Wilson)

“There were roulette wheels, zeppole and sausage stands, and a big glass cotton-candy machine in which sugar was spun into billows of flyaway, pale blue hair.” (Meg Wolitzer)

“Zeppole man across the street began to sing. Angel and Geronimo started to sing. The band across the street acquired an Italian tenor from the neighborhood…” (Thomas Pynchon)

WEB

1. “War and Peach” anyone? That’s just one of a half-dozen book-inspired ice-cream flavors. Or perhaps “S’Moria Steinem” is up your alley, in which case there are 10 Solutions to Ben & Jerry’s Women Problem flavors. Or, since I’m trying to stay away from the stuff, there are horror-inspired flavors like “Human Centipeach.”

2. Keats, Lincoln, Coleridge and many more faces in the Pictorial Guide to the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks.

3. A non-French speaker just won the French Scrabble championship [no surprise to any of us who have lost at Words With Friends to possibly-illiterate opponents].

4. Scientists are using DNA origami to 3-D print structures just nanometers across

5. Today in 1904, according to some stories, Charles Menches comes up with the idea of filling a pastry cone with ice-cream. His title as the emperor of ice-cream cones is in dispute, though, as other vendors at the St. Louis World’s Fair—at which the “cornucopia” waffle cone came to prominence—laid claim to this most wonderful invention as well. In fact, the Menches brothers of today, descendants of Charles and his brother Frank, claim their ancestors also invented the hamburger.

WATCH/WITNESS

On January 15, 2014, Alex Honnold free-soloed El Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) in El Portrero Chico, Mexico in a little over 3 hours. The climb rises 2,500 feet to the summit of El Toro. It could be the most difficult rope-less climb in history.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader W. supplements last issue’s WORD with, well, the Word: “As you probably know, the most common use of ‘imago’ is theological: the ‘imago dei’ or image of God that symbolizes how we are fashioned in God’s image and therefore should love one another as we should love Him. If you believe in that kind of thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

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

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

Today’s WORK is best read aloud…but then most good writing is, isn’t it? And…we’re having a contest. You should enter.

WORK

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.

—Gary Provost
—from 100 Ways To Improve Your Writing

WORD(S)

imago /i-MAY-go/. noun. In psychology, an idealized image of a person—including possibly one’s self—formed in childhood and persisting into adulthood. In biology, the final, adult stage of an insect’s transformation (see also: nymph and pupa), usually winged. From classical Latin imāgō (representation, natural shape).

“But it had all come hard upon: realignment of mother, death of father (the two imagos now transfigured)…” (Margaret Atwood)

“Signifying the imitation of a portrait, the word imago was applied to the image of the deceased. It designated the mask made from the imprint of a face.” (Barbara Cassin)

“The burst of lightning was the white of the sunlit room when he came up for air and opened his eyes. His mother’s tiny rotating imago faded against the ceiling. What seemed like heavy breathing was him trying to scream.” (David Foster Wallace)

Beneath the dun and the watershine—
Incipient spinner, set for the take-off…
And does, in clean tear: imago rising out of herself
For the last time, slate-winged and many-eyed.
(Charles Wright)

WEB

1. In The Care Package, editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman illustrates his father’s final years. And it is powerful.

2. Ever heard a podcast so good you didn’t want to listen to the last episode because you just didn’t want it to end? That’s how I feel about Mystery Show (which isn’t about mysteries in the sense of Serial or even crime). Thankfully it’s just on a short hiatus. Treat yourself!

3. “When a writer invokes the insidious progress of a cancer, you know she hopes to forestall the objection that there is little visible evidence to support her argument. What is this cancer threatening democracy and the world? Declining enrollments in literature courses.” → Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature

4. “Calvin and Markov digests Calvin and Hobbes strips and generates new comics using Markov chains…”

5. Today in 1983, the coldest (natural, ground-level) recorded temperature on Earth—−128.6° F (−89.2° C)—is recorded in Vostok, Antarctica. That’s, as various writers have put it: colder than a hair on a polar bear’s ass / colder than the frost on a champagne glass; colder than a well-digger’s butt; colder than a witch’s brass brassiere; colder than Hoth; colder than a Tibetan tin toilet top; colder than a cavern eel; colder than a halibut on ice; colder than moonlight on a tombstone.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Dali’s title — ‘Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko)’ — provides a perfect description of this painting…”. Instead of backing away from your screen, you can also view the thumbnail size to get the full effect.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. on Salinger: “I, too, enjoy rereading Catcher in the Rye. ¶ And both of my children hated it.”

• Reader S. shares an anime connection: “The anime Ghost in the Shell also draws on Catcher in the Rye, with the Laughing Man using a quote from the book as part of the image he displays in people’s visual implants instead of his actual face: http://ktxc.to/laughing-man-logo ¶ I’m more of a Franny and Zooey fan myself.”

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

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

“She was at her triturations. Spooning to death in a salver a speckled slug, marked like an ocelot, viscous and sticky. A whitish paste. Crooning a low threnody to her pawky trade.” (Cormac McCarthy)

A few months ago was inspired by the quote above to say, “I’d nominate this for a contest to determine The Ultimate Cormac McCarthy Sentence.”

Today’s WORK via Reader N.—thanks!

WORK

Yeats said that he wrote in form because if he didn’t he wouldn’t know when to stop. Like Samuel Beckett I prefer the word ‘shape’ to ‘form.’ At Trinity [College Dublin] during a course on Aristotle’s Poetics our Greek professor W. B. Stanford told us to come back the following week with our own definition of poetry. Mine was: ‘If prose is a river, then poetry’s a fountain.’ I still feel that’s pretty good because it suggests that ‘form’ (or ‘shape’) is releasing rather than constraining. The fountain is shapely and at the same time free-flowing.

—Michael Longley
—from “A Jovial Hullabaloo”
—found in One Wide Expanse (The Poet’s Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry)

WORD(S)

tintamarre /tin-tə-MAR/. noun. Generally, an uproar, a din, a hubbub…a clamor. Also a community parade filled with noise and noisemakers. From French tintamarre, from Middle French tinter (to ring), from Latin tinitare (to ring frequently), which is a frequentative/repetitive form of tinnire (to ring).

“He learn’d and profited much by that hurly-burly or tintimarre.” (Michel de Montaigne, translated by John Florio)

“I was president of the August 15 Committee in Edmunston the year they decided to hold the Acadian Tintamarre parade. I spent half my time arguing you do the Tintamarre on foot, not in cars.” (Frances Daigle)

“I did guess, by such a tintamarre, and cough, and sneeze, and groan, among de spirit one other night here, dat there might be treasure and bullion hereabout.” (Sir Walter Scott)

“A tintamarre of voices and a jingle of glasses accompanied the violins and tambours de Basque as the company stood up and sang the song, winding up with a grand burst at the chorus…” (William Kirby)

WEB

1. How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body

2. Readers B., C. and K. all shared a link to “The Really Big One”, about the possible future Cascadia earthquake that could destroy Seattle. Further reading from both ends of the spectrum of reactions: “Earthquake experts on ‘The Really Big One’: Here’s what will actually happen in Seattle” and “The Five Scariest Takeaways From the New Yorker Article About the Earthquake That Will ‘Devastate’ Seattle”

3. The Great Britain Air Letter, 1941–2011 A Miscellany to Celebrate 70 Years

4. Little girl hands in the world’s scariest poem to ‘Creativity Corner’

5. Today in 1951, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is published by Little, Brown and Co. Even now it sells more than 250,000 copies annually (more than 65 million so far). Dismissed by many as a dated book for adolescents, I enjoyed re-reading Catcher in the Rye just a few years ago…which may just mean I’m a dated adolescent. A few years ago, it was revealed in the documentary Salinger that five new Salinger books would be published starting this year.

WATCH/WITNESS

Word as Image (by Ji Lee) — “Challenge: Create an image out of a word, using only the letters in the word itself. Rule: use only the graphic elements of the letters without adding outside parts.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader G. writes in: “For my money, James Tate was one of our best short story writers even if everyone insists on calling them ‘prose poems.’”

• Reader W. wonders: “What happened to the Cormac McCarthy contest?” — Stay tuned. Real soon now…

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

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

This issue was delayed by an automated security system that, I'm guessing, didn't like Woody Guthrie's all-caps! So today will be a daily double...

WORK

NEW YEAR’S RULIN’S

1. WORK MORE AND BETTER
2. WORK BY A SCHEDULE
3. WASH TEETH IF ANY
4. SHAVE
5. TAKE BATH
6. EAT GOOD - FRUIT - VEGETABLES - MILK
7. DRINK VERY SCANT IF ANY
8. WRITE A SONG A DAY
9. WEAR CLEAN CLOTHES - LOOK GOOD
10. SHINE SHOES
11. CHANGE SOCKS
12. CHANGE BED CLOTHES OFTEN
13. READ LOTS GOOD BOOKS
14. LISTEN TO RADIO A LOT
15. LEARN PEOPLE BETTER
16. KEEP RANCHO CLEAN
17. DON’T GET LONESOME
18. STAY GLAD
19. KEEP HOPING MACHINE RUNNING
20. DREAM GOOD
21. BANK ALL EXTRA MONEY
22. SAVE DOUGH
23. HAVE COMPANY BUT DON’T WASTE TIME
24. SEND MARY AND KIDS MONEY
25. PLAY AND SING GOOD
26. DANCE BETTER
27. HELP WIN WAR - BEAT FASCISM
28. LOVE MAMA
29. LOVE PAPA
30. LOVE PETE
31. LOVE EVERYBODY
32. MAKE UP YOUR MIND
33. WAKE UP AND FIGHT

—Woody Guthrie (1941)
—from Lists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience

WORD(S)

kakistocracy /ka-ki-STAW-krə-see/. noun. Coinage for government by the worst citizens, supposedly the opposite of the aristrocracy (try to avoid the brain-numbing regression of what happens when the aristocracy is the kakistocracy). From Greek kakistos (superlative of kakos, bad) + English -cracy (government, rule). See also: the likely related cack (to discharge excrement, to vomit). See also: khakistocracy, a portmanteau referring to military rule of a country in conjunction with that country’s elites.

“…it had spotted the weapon-blink from Ablate, communicating this to its home GSV, the Kakistocrat, which had been cautious enough to pass this on to a select few of its peers including the Pressure Drop rather than broadcast the news.” (Iain M. Banks)

“The OED is full of words for different types of governments. I find most of them forgettable. But kakistocracy, describing so aptly the fear, which seems common in every generation, that their government is truly the worst possible one, is a word worth remembering.” (Ammon Shea)

“Should your agitation succeed it would result in the French Revolution over again, together with all its corollaries,—anarchy, kakistocracy,[Pg 30] a glorious tyranny on a false foundation, kakistocracy again, and chaos: a counter revolution, again a kakistocracy, and finally impotence, false and evil as the destroyed feudalism.” (Ralph Adams Cram)

WEB

1. Newly discovered annotations by Dickens in a bound collection of his All the Year Round journal reveals new work by Wilkie Collins, Lewis Carroll and Elizabeth Gaskell (among others).

2. Lisa Brown’s Three Panel Book Reviews.

3. “To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world.” → Robin Sloan on Minecraft and the possible future of the “networked, generative” novel.

4. An interesting look at translations of a poem that ultimately cost the original author his life. → Three [and a few more] translations of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Stalin’s Epigram’

5. Today in 1912, singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie is born in Okemah, Oklahoma. Creator of, most famously, “This Land is Your Land” and a notable influence on scores of famous musicians, the “Dust Bowl Troubador” made a beautiful noise out of his experiences during the Great Depression and his experience of an America that still exists…kind of…if it ever did. Listen to ► The Best of Woody Guthrie. Watch the ► BBC Arena documentary on his life.

WATCH/WITNESS

Dystopia, book art by Maddy Rosenberg - “Dystopia - 2007, 9 x 4 x.5 inches, edition of 30, linoleum block prints with digitally printed cover Cut, folded, and bound, open the cover and a three-dimensional city emerges, unfolds, metamorphoses.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. on James Tate: “I’m a little more enthusiastic about Tate’s strangely drifting gifts of association than you seem to be. Something about him caught me early—in the early 70s—and has stayed with me through the later books. Maybe we’re just more ready to forgive the excesses and shortcomings of our favorite poets because the poems they write that really touch us really touch us. Strangely, I was just talking with one of his (very, very fine) ex-students, Lesle Lewis, last Wednesday, and we spoke of him—of the dryness of his humor (which, she noted, he didn’t always let on he was aware of), and also what I’d call his strange gift of surreal decorum. Maybe a midwestern thing—I think by way of comparison of another wonderful midwesterner of a quite different stripe, Bill Sylvester. We also felt that in some ways Tate struck us like Ashbery—that each evolved a certain enormously resilient diction that took them through a fine stretch of admirable years. I thought today (though I didn’t know him) of writing a poem that might catch my feelings for him. I didn’t, but I did have a first line that might have gone somewhere: So Jim Tate’s gone to meet his funny maker. Well, so that’s enough. The funny makers often seem the best, to me.”

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

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

RIP, James Tate. An acquaintance stated it well in an appreciation when he noted that Tate’s “particular brand of whimsical absurdism somehow doesn’t age too well.” Too true, particularly when reading Tate’s many, many surreal prose poems. But there are so many wonderful poems living among their “average” neighbors (which are typically quite good). Today's WORK is from Tate’s first book of poems, published in 1967, when he was just 24. A volume of poems he apparently wrote as a college undergrad.

WORK

“Epithalamion for Tyler”

I thought I knew something
about loneliness but
you go to the stockyards

buy a pig’s ear and sew
it on your couch. That, you
said, is my best friend— we

have spirited talks. Even
then I thought: a man of
such exquisite emptiness

(and you cultivated it so)
is ground for fine flowers.

—James Tate
—from The Lost Pilot

WORD(S)

aposematic /a-POH-sə-mat-ik/. adjective. Animal colorations that warn and repel potential predators. See also the noun form aposeme. From Greek apo- (off, away) + sēmat (sign).

“Short of instinctive programming to avoid the aposematic organism (which is seen occasionally), it is unlikely that any potential prey will be prepared to sacrificially educate its predator. Thus, a combination of camouflage and its antithesis, aposematism, often occur.” (World Heritage Encyclopedia)

“Red or yellow spots are common aposematic colors in frogs.” (John D. Lynch)

“These reproductive leviathans publicly aroused and engulfed each other, or overwhelmed the humans thrown into their path. The organs became more elaborate, more aposematic. They proliferated, reared and tumbled, sucked, slimed, and reproduced.” (Brian W. Aldiss)

WEB

1. “The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.” → When You Give a Tree an Email Address.

2. “Print and online readers of a heart-wrenching true story display equal empathy and emotional engagement, regardless of the medium in which they read…” I’m not surprised. It’s not only a matter of the culture(s) around print and electronic reading, but our habits with them that makes the apparent difference. → A Columbia Journalism Review study.

3. How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers and Writers Have Always Known.

4. The interesting stuff isn’t about love, but about “embodied cognition” (which relates to the above link as well), which I am belatedly beginning to notice and understand. → How Grounded Is Your Love Life?

5. Today in 1955, deep into the Cold War, legislation is passed requiring the phrase “In God We Trust” appear on all U.S. coin and paper currency. The earliest request for the phrase came in 1861, when the Reverend M.R. Watkinson petitioned the Treasury Department to recognize “Almighty God in some form in our coins” in order to “relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism.” The familiar phrase’s presence has been challenged in court many times, on obvious grounds, but the Supreme Court has chosen not to hear the cases and the challenges have always failed.

WATCH/WITNESS

Sean Hill’s poem “Postcard to my Third Crush” made into a short film by Sam Hoolihan. This is one of many short poetry films produced by Motionpoems which, until today, I’d never heard of, but which features short films of poems by Lux, Beulieu, Merwin, Zapruder, Hicok and many more.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader P. was also moved: “Wow. I read both installments of ‘Innocent Man’, as well as the ‘Guilty Man’ piece linked to them. I am speechless–rare for me. Pamela Colloff is a powerful writer, deserving of much praise. If I were younger, I’d join the Innocence Project, in any capacity I could. This is why I am against Capital Punishment—and why I believe our justice system needs a serious overhaul…sadly, this is not a singular occurrence.”

• Reader C. shares another interesting punctuation court case: “k readers may enjoy this little case that also turned in a comma and incurred the wrath of the judge.”

• Reader B. enjoyed the Frank Stanford poem: “‘The Quiver’ is one fierce war poem.”

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

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

Finally received my copy of Frank Stanford’s collected poems and it is, as I expected, phenomenal.

And today’s word and some choice examples via Reader C. Thanks!

WORK

“The Quiver”

Come back dull and bloody all of you
let it hold the shame inside
itself like a helmet
bring a little soil each time
for a pillow
you aren’t as many as you were

—Frank Stanford
—from What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

WORD(S)

tatterdemalion /ta-tər-di-MAYL-yən/. noun & adjective. One garbed in ragged, tattered clothing or such clothing. Of disreputable or tattered appearance, decayed or dilapidated. From tattered plus, as the OED puts it, a “factitious element suggesting an ethnic or descriptive derivative.” Tattered comes from Old Norse tötrar and Old French tatereles (tatters). But perhaps also influenced by Tartar, an old term for a vagabond or beggar.

“Florry Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the sofacorner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening.” (James Joyce)

“Venomous weeds grew here, and tatterdemalion flowers, white, blue and rose; among crevices in the rust and tangled ancient iron a lizard would peep out drunkenly at the burning sun.” (William Styron)

“Most promising of these, to my mind, had been a small, tatterdemalion math constructed on a lookout tower originally put there to detect forest fires.” (Neal Stephenson)

“The occult knowledge of the Egyptians passed from Hermes Trismegistus to Moses, who took care not to pass it on to his band of tatterdemalions, their craws still stuffed with manna; to them he offered the Ten Commandments, which was as much as they could comprehend.” (Umberto Eco)

“…the company around the table grew a little closer together, their tatterdemalion garments rustling as a wind of consternation blew through them…” (Angela Carter)

WEB

1. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America examines and maps regionalisms of syntax (as opposed to the more common studies of slang and vocabulary) such as the “Drama So” and “Double Comparatives.” Fun to browse. Nothing from Alaska, sadly.

2. A break-down showing, shot-by-shot, how the “Ozymandias” episode of Breaking Bad visualized the poem. → Breaking Bad and “Ozymandias”

3. Man does something cool—busking with a typewriter, writing stories on the spot for one and all—and the Internet Outrage Machine turns on him. → I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything

4. Your next selfie could be your last, Russia warns

5. Today in 1958, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked the Fairweather Fault in the Gulf of Alaska, triggering the Lituya Bay Megatsunami, the largest in modern times. The tsunami devastated vegetation more than 1720 feet above the bay thanks to a wave that crested over 100 feet on the open ocean. Scars and changes in vegetation are still visible there today.

WATCH/WITNESS

On August 21, 2017 (my son’s 25th birthday…coincidence?) there will be a total solar eclipse across the United States. The last one was in 1991. GreatAmericanEclipse has created an awesome 10-foot long map tracing where it will be visible across the US.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader G. sees a change: “If authored by a man than of course he would think the Bycorne would be always plump and the Chichevache always starving. A woman author would have the opposite point of view (at least in my experience). Or perhaps over time women have gotten better and men have gotten worse. Present company excluded. ;)”

• Reader M. is inspired by the same: “Bycorne and Chichevache are going to be two characters in my next age-inappropriate children’s book. Very inspiring stuff!”

• (A different) Reader G. asks a good question: “I love the Deutscher book you quote from, there are so many insightful ideas about language in there. His perspective in color reveals a lot about how we think. ¶ Regarding this quote, I wonder if expressive power was sacrificed to some degree for expressive ability? Some words, because of the physical limits of our mouths, tongues, lips, etc, are just more difficult to pronounce than others.”

• Reader B.’s reaction mirrors my own: “‘Innocent Man’ was powerful, worth every paragraph. ¶ Such buried horror in the child’s statements!”

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

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

WORK

“Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular.”

—Guy Deutscher
—from Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

WORD(S)

Bycorne /BIY-korn/. noun. A mythical, human-faced cow which fed on patient, kind husbands (and was thus plump)…a counterpart to the chichevache, which fed on obedient, faithful wives and so was perpetually starving. Also, an obsolete spelling of bicorne, a two-pronged pitchfork.

“Now are portrayed two beasts, the one fat and flourishing, the other weak and thin. And the legend says: ‘These fearful beasts, Bycorne and Chichevache, according to their nature, can eat only patient husbands or sweet-tempered wives.’” (John Revell Reinhard)

“Chichevache (or lean cow) was said to live on good women; and a world of sarcasm was conveyed in always representing Chichevache as very poor,—all ribs, in fact—her food being so scarce as to keep her in a wretched state of famine. Bycorne, on the contrary, was a monster who lived on good men; and he was always bursting with fatness, like a prize pig.” (E. Cobham Brewer)

WEB

1. Powerful, Pulitzer-worthy storytelling about justice denied far too long. → “Innocent Man” Part One and Part Two. See also, the Nieman Storyboard interview/annotations

2. “As from February 2014, a series of Euro Banknotes, are drawn, scanned and spent on a daily basis. A social medium hacked to become part of a new territory. This site is a documentation of this attempt.” → banknotes.gr [Via Reader C.]

3. 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake [also Via Reader C.]

4. Various court cases have turned on an issue of punctuation. Various members of the Clamor shared the story of a missing comma’s place in Ohio appeals court history. That led me to the equally interesting story of Minnesota’s Great Umlaut War.

5. When you’re thinking of the greatest thing since sliced bread, keep July 7, 1928 in mind. That was the day Otto Frederick Rohwedder’s new loaf-at-a-time bread slicing machine made its commercial debut with the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri. Naturally, the city of Chillicothe maintains a bread news site.

WATCH/WITNESS

[untitled], 1975/1976 by Francesca Woodman.

Wikipedia has links to many of Woodman's (astonishing) photos. See also: The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman and Searching for the real Francesca Woodman.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader F. caught me out: “Tricky boy! A wonderful quote from Hesse that just happened to fall on his birthday?”

• Reader B. observes (correctly!): “Glass Bead Game is one of the strangest, deepest, most original and neglected books of all time.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

“What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires.”

—Herman Hesse
—from The Glass Bead Game

WORD(S)

lapsonym /LAP-sə-nim/. noun. “A word whose meaning you forget no matter how many times you looks it up.” Here we have a fresh portmanteau with a precise origin—coined by Kathryn Schulz on March 20, 2015 at 9:34a PST—that I can’t believe waited this long to be born. From Latin lapsus (a slip or fall) + onoma (name).

“Lapsonym will be the rare word whose meaning I won’t have trouble remembering.” (David Caithness)

“I’d like to think of lapsonym as also applying to a word you forget no matter how many times you look it up. My favorite lapsonym is litotes . Again and again, I have to stop and wonder: what’s the name for the figure of speech…” (Michael Leddy)

WEB

1. Between 2010 & 2013, Photographer Jimmy Nelson travelled the world to document some of the most fantastic indigenous cultures left on the planet today. → Before They Pass Away

2. The Little-Known Story of the Night Witches, an All-Female Force in WWII

3. Some Guy Renamed The Paint Colors At A Hardware Store

4. No surprise that Tobias Frere-Jones’s series on typography and type design is both excellent and interesting to both casual and hardcore type nerds. → Typeface Mechanics: 002

5. Today in 1937, at 8:43a, Amelia Earhart—on her second attempt to fly around-the world—transmitted “we are running on line north and south” and disappeared forever. Or maybe not. Modern analysis of radio signals supports a large body of evidence suggesting Earhart and/or her navigator Fred Noonan survived the crash and lived for some time as castaways on the atoll of Nikumaroro, once called Gardner Island.

WATCH/WITNESS

More cross-stitch tattoos by Eva Krbdk

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. tried out the rhyming keyboard: “I kept typing orange and nothing happened.” — That was, of course, the first thing I tried too…along with ‘silver’

• Reader S. thinks The Atlantic could have done better : “That reprint of Wallace’s essay is ok, but could they have not put the annotations to the side? There’s copious whitespace, and it would have made the flow of reading easier. But maybe that was intentional; skipping to side/footnotes does always cause an interruption I guess.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

Poet, jazz aficionado and radio show host, publisher and editor David Gitin passed away last Friday. He was a master of powerful, compressed, multi-layered poems, the best of them buds filled with flowers that bloom in the reading (and the readers). RIP.

WORK

“The Door”

the door
slopes of light

your body
a delay

in glass

—David Gitin
—from The Journey Home

WORD(S)

opsimath /AHP-sə-math/. noun. One who begins to learn or study late in life. By implication, one who develops slowly. From Greek opsimathēs (late in learning). Hard to believe, given some of the words those crazy kids spell, that this was the word upon which the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee turned.

“Do not confuse the opsigamist [one who marries late in life] with the opsimath (a person who begins to learn late in life), as they are of different ilk— the opsigamist has obviously not learned anything at all.” (Ammon Shea)

“He sat in a chair in his office, told himself to calm down. The old wordlists were whipping through his head: fungible, pullulate, pistic, cerements, trull. After a while he stood up. Prattlement, opsimath.” (Margaret Atwood)

“It was a few weeks later that she [the Queen] looked up from her book and said to Norman: ’Do you know that I said you were my amanuensis? Well, I’ve discovered what I am. I am an opsimath.” (Alan Bennett)

WEB

1. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is blowing up in my social network circles. This little collection (via Reader B.) is a good one. Ellipsism! → 23 Emotions People Feel But Can’t Explain.

2. Paul Bacon, designer of oh-so-many iconic book covers, died at 91. I bet the Clamor recognizes his work. → His NYT obituary: Paul Bacon, 91, Whose Book Jackets Drew Readers and Admirers, Is Dead and a well-illustrated appreciation.

3. ►Inside the Studio of William Blake.

4. The Atlantic has re-designed David Foster Wallace’s 2005 profile of radio personality John Ziegler to take advantage of current web technologies. Oh how I wish DFW were still alive to see new ways his work might be presented. → “Host”

5. Today in 1908, an asteroid (or a comet) exploded in an “air burst” approximately 3 miles above the earth near the Tunguska River in Russia. Now known as the Tunguska Event, it is—so far—the largest such “impact event” in recorded history. The explosion was at least 1000 times greater than the Hiroshima nuclear detonation knocking down more than 80 million trees across an 800+ square mile area and knocking people off their feet more than 50 miles away. Due to the remoteness of the region, there were no fatalities…and relatively little interest at the time. The first recorded expedition to the epicenter wouldn’t take place for more than a decade.

WATCH/WITNESS

▶ Eminem Lose Yourself - ASL Interpretation. I’m a sucker for these.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. on Borges’ list of books: “I like how Borges mercifully grants two spots to longer books.”

• Reader D. shares two quotes that resonate with me as well: Here’s a quotation I saw in Jessie Burton’s book The Miniaturist (which I am currently reading) that really resonated with me: “Growing older does not seem to make you more certain, Nella thinks. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.” ¶ When I was younger, I thought age brought wisdom. The wisdom, I realize, is that getting older is coming to terms with the fact that you have to become comfortable living with doubt. ¶ The quotation from Burton’s book was balanced out in my reading by this quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr., which I saw on Quinn MacDonald’s that resonate with me as well: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” ¶ That one gives me some measure of peace, too.

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

I thank everyone in the Clamor who sent email in addition to their votes to keep Clippings going. Obviously the YESs prevailed. Don’t feel, because of the poll, that I was fishing for more interaction—there was no hidden agenda—though I’ll admit I love receiving suggestions and comments. Based on your email, it’s possible I will move to a twice-weekly format. Otherwise I hope to expand Katexic to include some other features/ventures over the next year.

I also greatly appreciate your sharing Clippings with others who have not yet had the pleasure of subscribing. Onward.

WORK

inside a bat’s ear
a rose
opens to a star

—Eve Luckring
—from The Disjunctive Dragonfly

WORD(S)

myrmidon /MəR-mu-dən/. noun. In Greek myth, a member of the warrior tribe who accompanied Achilles to Troy. In more common use, a bodyguard, an assistant, a servant. A member of a posse, a gang-member, a ruffian, a hired thug who follows any order without question. Most broadly, a hanger-on, an opportunist. From Latin Myrmidones/Greek Myrmidones (the tribe), possibly derived from Greek mormos (dread, terror).

“Erskine-Brown and a Mr Thrower, his sedate solicitor, found the Kitten-A-Go-Go, paid a sinister-looking myrmidon at the door ten quid each by way of membership and descended to a damp and darkened basement where two young ladies were chewing gum and removing their clothes with as much enthusiasm as they might bring to the task of licking envelopes.” (John Mortimer)

“The King made a sign and the sages heard the iron step of the myrmidons that surrounded them at the foot of the throne, and whose naked swords did gleam like flame.” (Stanislaw Lem)

“…I would die in this bed as if paralyzed, or be shot to death here on this pillow by the tireless myrmidons whose eyes miss nothing.” (Heinrich Böll)

“She smiles. He sees upside down her mouth, with lips pressed shut, flex like a myrmidon’s small-bow being drawn…” (John Banville)

“No, Arthur, no, it is not so; I am now one of the myrmidons of that most special of special pleaders, Mr. Neversaye Die. I have given myself over to the glories of a horse-hair wig…” (Anthony Trollope)

WEB

1. PetaPixel’s 20 First Photos from the History of Photography

2. He did a lot more than dingbats… → Hermann Zapf, the font designer behind Palatino and Zapf Dingbats, has died at 96

3. If conely Crossed chadd szuch a hing. → Try an online rhyming keyboard

4. Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library

5. Today in 1977, Roy Cleveland Sullivan (aka “The Human Lightning Rod”) is struck by lightning for the 7th time. And survives. Previous strikes lit Sullivan’s hair on fire (twice), blew his big toe-nail off, knocked a shoe off and pierced his hat, shoulder and a leg in addition to the “usual” burns.

WATCH/WITNESS

Learn more about (and see other great pictures of) Lena Pillars National Park AKA Lena’s Stone Forest, outside of Yakutsk, Russia. Also, the UNESCO World Heritage Center Gallery.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. admired the most recent WORK: “Ah, Enderby. A nicely Joycean passage you selected, too. I should like to reread some lesser-known Burgess.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

Today marks the one year anniversary (and 216th issue!) of Katexic Clippings… and a good time to decide if it should continue. I have a sense that many are receiving the newsletter but no longer reading. Every project has a lifespan.

I will let you decide: if you are reading this and Clippings remains of interest, please take a second to click YES, recording your vote to keep the newsletter going. Thanks!

WORK

One of the bookstores not mentioned in my essay was the wonderful Phoenix in Lambertville. It was launched in 1987 by four English teachers, Michael, Barry and their wives. I don’t know that I ever met their wives, but I knew Michael and Barry. Although they probably never knew me by name, they knew my face. They had promised themselves to give the bookstore two years to pay off their investment. They succeeded in two weeks. Alas, the article about La Hune made me think of it. In ’87, business for them was fantastic. The Phoenix closed a year or two ago. When I learned it was closing, I snapped a picture.

Phoenix is a good name for a used bookstore. One hopes it will rise again. Just as Reader C. shared the article about La Hune with you, so do I. When a bookstore we are fond of closes, the subject tugs at the heart and we are compelled to share it with the like-minded.

—Bruce Harris Bentzman

WORD(S)

cecity /SEE-si-tə/. noun. Blindness. From Middle French cécité, from Latin caecitas (blindness).

“But who was he, Enderby, to adapt a great tragedy to the limited talents, New World phonemes and intonations and slangy lapses, cecity towards the past, Pyrrhonism and so on of this weak cry of players?” (Anthony Burgess)

“After light’s term, a term of cecity.” (Matthew Arnold)

“Beauty is the safest stimulant, the surest tonic, the most precious inspiration; natural beauty first of all, and the beauty of the arts closely following, twinlike handmaids to Aphrodite. But to perceive this the mentally blind are as incapable as the physically blind; and such, mental cecity is as general in these days as myopy is common in the schoolrooms of this generation.” (Ouida)

“Monocularity at home, cecity abroad.” (Julian Barnes)

WEB

1. On one of the roofs of the world: Xinaliq [via Reader B., who notes, “Some great stuff here, starting with the window.”]

2. [via Reader S.] → Some funny (and terrible) “Letterspacing” (AKA Kerning) Fails

3. Knowing my love of Larkin’s poetry, Reader N. shares a couple of links about his enshrinement in the Westminster Abbey Poets’ Corner → Lecherous. Racist. But my friend Philip Larkin deserves his spot in Poets’ Corner and Larkin has secured his place in Poets’ Corner, and about time too

4. Amazon is going to test paying authors by page views. Fractional payments are logical, business-wise, but how might they shape the work writers create? → What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page?

5. Today in 1868, Christopher Sholes is granted a patent for his “type-writer” machine. It wasn’t the first typewriter but, as this brief history of typewriters shows, it was the most influential design on the myriad machines to come. The Virtual Typewriter Museum is chock-full of fantastic typewriter images and historical notes.

WATCH/WITNESS

Reader J. shares this animated video for Juana Molina’s song “Un dia” with a note that I might “enjoy this and explain it to us.” I have no explanation…but I enjoyed the song and video!

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

None!

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

“Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.”

—Vikram Seth
—from A Suitable Boy

WORD(S)

grubble/grabble. verb. To grope. To feel about or feel one’s way in the dark. To scrape together. Grubble is a variant of grabble, from Dutch grabbelen (grab, grope).

“There I will be, and there we cannot miss,
Perhaps to Grubble, or at least to Kiss.”
(Ovid, translated by Dryden)

“Lame, cock-eyed hill-bitches, agitated into a perpetual state of oestrus, turning mean, nasty, as they frot and butt and rut and hump in the ordure and straw, gnash and grabble in their squatting capsules on the floor.” (Nick Cave)

“She grabbled around in her black and white bag and pushed some bills across the desk in a lump.” (Raymond Chandler)

“They deserve to grabble in the dirt and get nothing for it but a dry gut-ruble. They won’t listen.” (Robert Penn Warren)

WEB

1. Man Buys 10.000 Undeveloped Negatives At a Local Auction And Discovers One of the Most Important Street Photographers of the Mid 20th Century

2. From Reader E. comes Emoji Ulysses…which contains a profile link to a work on almost precisely the opposite end of the Ulysses spectrum, Infinite Ulysses. If you’re planning on finishing that emoji literature degree, you’ll also want to read Emoji Dick.

3. The Lost Ritual of Photographing the Dead

4. Dead Writers Perfume from Sweet Tea Apothecary

5. Today in 1756, 146 British prisoners, including two women and a few wounded soldiers, are allegedly herded at sword-point into an 18x15 foot cell in Calcutta that would later be dubbed the Black Hole of Calcutta. Later historians would conclude that the original number might have been as low as 64, though the fact that only 23 would survive the night, the rest succumbing to suffocation and trampling while their guards laughed at them outside, is not in dispute.

WATCH/WITNESS

Paul Latham flying over the English Channel, July 19, 1909. Before the crash. Which he survived.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader K. writes: “David Curran’s postal explorations from 6/11 will be of great interest to marketers, who are always looking for a new way to reach their audience. One of my favorite ideas is to send an actual prescription bottle, address and stamp on the outside, prescription for success (use our product!) within. They say it has an 80% open rate!”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

People possess four things
that are no good at sea:
anchor, rudder, oars
and the fear of going down.

—Antonio Machado (translated by Robert Bly)
—from The Sea and the Honeycomb: A Book of Tiny Poems

In his later book of Machado translations Times Alone, Bly translated the first line as “Mankind owns four things.” I like the earlier version better.

WORD(S)

villeggiatura /vil-lə-djə-TYəR-ə/. noun. A country residence; a rural retreat suitable for a holiday; a holiday spent in such a place. From Italian villeggiare (to reside in a country villa). Reader J. writes of the word that “as a country-born person who’s spent much of his life in cities, it cracked a kind of nostalgia nut in me—the idea of ‘going back to the village’ is where it took me.”

“Thus in consequence of her mother’s heroic proceedings, and of her brother’s absence on this villegiature, Mrs Verloc found herself oftener than usual all alone not only in the shop, but in the house.” (Joseph Conrad)

“I don’t wonder that she hates the country; I dare to say her child does not owe its existence to the Villeggiatura.” (Horace Walpole)

“Strolling the Hundred Fountains on a hot Roman afternoon, shaded by centuries-old trees and soothed by the gurgle and splash of water, one comes to understand the exalted place of villeggiatura in the Italian soul.” (Thomas Campanella)

“Add to this a multitude of green shutters and striped awnings, and a mass of Virginia creepers and wisterias, and fling over it the lavish light of the American summer, and you have a notion of some of the conditions of our villeggiatura.” (Henry James)

“We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

WEB

1. When a Bookstore Closes, an Argument Ends [Thanks, Reader C.!]

2. Maciej Ceglowski is creating a great travelogue as he travels through Yemen (and I love his site slogan: ‘brevity is for the weak’).

3. Watch the ► trailer for the upcoming Stanford Prison Experiment film. Looks a little over the top but entertaining. And…Ezra Miller!

4. Paul Ford on the “No to” poem, a collaboratively written litany of sorts, an anaphora poem, a poem of our time in so (too?) many ways.

5. Today in 1812, the United States declares war on Great Britain. There were many reasons behind the decision to take on the greatest naval force in the world including the impressment, ongoing trade restrictions and the seemingly insatiable desire for territorial expansion…none of which were to change much despite a three-front battle along the American-Canadian frontier and the Atlantic and Gulf coasts that claimed more than 15,000 American lives. As historian James Loewen put it, “the American Indians were the only real losers in the war.” The War of 1812 was more important in the American mind than it was for the British, who were busy dealing with Napoleon. In fact, today in 1812 also marks the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, in which nearly 50,000 soldiers were killed.

WATCH/WITNESS

View an album of “fiction-artist” Gennady Golobokov’s speculative fiction illustrations

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. writes: <<hearing Ulysses is even better than reading it. The best version I know of is the Naxos AudioBooks edition>> ¶ I wholeheartedly agree!

• Has Reader S. discovered the next Joyce? He writes: My son’s comment on this was “it’s like reading James Joyce, only harder to understand.” I think I agree. It’s an interesting exercise, anyway: http://ktxc.to/trump-2016-transcript

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

Captain Basil Hall, who was here in 1827 and 1828, and published his “Travels in North America” in 1829, was so upset by some of the novelties he encountered that he went to see Noah Webster, then seventy years old, to remonstrate. Webster upset him still further by arguing stoutly that “his countrymen had not only a right to adopt new words, but were obliged to modify the language to suit the novelty of the circumstances, geographical and political, in which they were placed.” The lexicographer went on to observe judicially that “it is quite impossible to stop the progress of language—it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible. Words and expressions will be forced into use, in spite of all the exertions of all the writers in the world.”

“But surely,” persisted Hall, “such innovations are to be deprecated?”

“I don’t know that,” replied Webster. “If a word becomes universally current in America, where English is spoken, why should not take its station in the language?”

To this Hall made an honest British reply. “Because,” he said, “there are words enough already.”

—H.L. Mencken
—from The American Language

WORD(S)

immane /i-MAYN/. adjective. Inhumanly cruel, brutal. Vast in size and of immense strength. Prodigiously great. From Latin immānis (savage, brutal, vast); from early Latin mānis/mānus (good).

“The immane cruelty of Hieron, the Tyrant of that City.” (John Bulwer)

“That immane and nefandous Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold…” (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

“The gull circled, calling into the pale blue sky where immane banks of cloud raced toward low mountains in the south…” (Kim Zupan)

“The immane approach of the stronger world to its weaker counterparts has to be countered with strong-arm methods.” (P. Kumar)

WEB

1. @GuyInYourMFA “should be very recognizable to anyone who has ever taken a creative writing workshop or attended a coffee house poetry reading.”

2. Two recent NPR stories on the resilience of paper and the power of notebooks/handwriting → In A Digital Chapter, Paper Notebooks Are As Relevant As Ever & Don’t Write Off Paper Just Yet

3. (dawwwwww) → First photos of the extremely endangred Ili Pika in 20 years

4. On some intriguing marginalia → Party of One

5. Today is, it must be noted, Bloomsday, in which fans of James Joyce’s seminal (see what I did there?) novel Ulysses—set on June 16, 1904—celebrate the book and its author. Bloomsday attracts fans of all kinds, enthusiasts and academics and the usual gaggle of hangers-on who really do mean to read Ulysses some day, which doesn’t sit well with some people. I don’t know what to tell you: it’s a wonderful book and celebrating Bloomsday sure ►looks like fun in Dublin. Even more than most of Joyce’s work (that I’ve read; I can’t say much about Finnegans Wake, which eludes me still), hearing Ulysses is even better than reading it. The best version I know of is the Naxos AudioBooks edition (free if you test the Audible service, which I have no feelings about), a beautiful bit of which you can listen to yourself. Close behind is the free RTE Radio Ireland marathon reading from 1982.

WATCH/WITNESS

See all the photos in the Atlantic feature: “Zoo Animals Escape Amid Heavy Flooding in Tbilisi, Georgia”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader N. breaks down bibliotherapy: "I was deeply disappointed in this article because it significantly neglects poetry. What could be more therapeutic than some of the sonnets written by the romantic poets? Or perhaps, more realistically, the nostalgia and cynicism of Philip Larkin can position a person’s depression in the zeitgeist. Reading Wordsworth’s THE PRELUDE might be the most helpful poetic cure for melancholy. ¶ Some people can begin with Mary Oliver, but why end there? I just googled poetry therapy and came up with this intriguing link. ¶ I know that I sound like a querulous pedant, but why should we toss out centuries of magnificent poetry for the latest YA pop pap?

• Reader B. twitches at a word that makes me itch too: “ ‘recency’: this has popped up in discussions of Twitter. I hate it, but there it is. ¶ Example: ’Any time you log in to Twitter, you see the most recent tweets from people you follow. This focus on recency makes Twitter indispensable for certain kinds of users.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

Today’s WATCH is a simultaneous discovery also shared by Reader C., who has contributed some great stuff lately...including pointing out the book that today’s WORK comes from, which is a wonderful thing: Trotta tells the story of cosmology’s greatest discoveries and mysteries using only the 1000 most commonly used words in English.

WORK

"Some of her friends, people she went to college with, have become a different kind of student-person. They are trying to catch the whisper of the dark matter rain all around us.

And to do that, they need silence.

But not a normal kind of silence. They need to silence all other kinds of normal drops that would usually scream over the quiet dark matter drops.

To do so, they have to find a place where normal drops can’t get to.

There are all kinds of normal drops flying around that you must take out, or else you could confuse their chuckle for the dark matter whisper.

Loud sounds come from bursts of fast drops coming from the sky. To take those out, student-people build dark matter ears deep inside rocks. Sometimes, they put the dark matter ears in deep mines, where other people bore to look for pretty things to put on their fingers.

Those are silent places, perfect for listening to dark matter."

—Roberto Trotter
—from The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is

WORD(S)

glossolalia. noun. Speaking in tongues; using a fabricated language. Particularly when associated with a trance state, schizophrenia or ecstatic religious speech. From Greek glossa (tongue, language) + lalia (talk, prattle, a speaking). [Thanks, Reader T.]

“Those soliloquies of ecstatic spiritual emotion which were known as Glossolalia, or, ‘the Gift of Tongues’.” (Frederic Farrar)

“Though many glossolalists believe they are speaking a real but unknown language, the utterance patterns are quite unlike ordinary language.” (David Crystal)

“Oblivious, the holy man continued his wheezy glossolalia, the goiter in his neck bobbing up and down.” (Robert Boyczuk)

“Long after dark
the men are raveled at a reddened stone
that beats back what cannot be seen, in kin-
dled twos, duplicity, the tongues of love,
the glossolalia of fire.”
(Heather McHugh)

WEB

1. A familiar spam mail scam…from 1797 → Letter Scam

2. Waffles? Yes. Keyboard waffles made with a typewriter waffle iron? Yes, please. → Interview With Chris Dimino: the Designer of the Waffle Iron Typewriter

3. ClickHole is becoming a favorite stop when I need a laugh. → This Spoken Word Poem Is Amazing Even If It Appears To Be Mainly About Don Henley

4. On bibliotherapy (my own most productive form of self-medication) → Can Reading Make You Happier?

5. Today in 1865, poet and Nobel Prize winner W.B. Yeats is born in Sandymount, Ireland. It’s hard to know where to start with a writer of Yeats’ poetic power as I myself am only just beginning to learn to “lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” His use of symbols, his lifelong exploration of traditional form while modernism and free verse poetry was on the steep ascendant, the subtle music of his language, the sweetness and severity…just read some of Yeats’ poems. And read them slowly. Savor them. If there’s any problem with Yeats’ work it’s that so many of us have become unaccustomed to reading poems such as his that the musicality is lost. Maybe make the reading a bit of meditative time in honor of his birthday.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Space Weird Thing” by Marian Call, “a sweded parody of ‘Space Oddity,’ the David Bowie song (and music video). The lyrics contain only the thousand most common words in English. It’s a loving tribute to David Bowie and it’s inspired by Flight of the Conchords, Michel Gondry, and especially the Up-Goer Five diagram by Randall Munroe.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader N. has my back: “It is my opinion that Former Reader T. is lacking in intellectual curiosity. Nothing feels less pretentious and less real than Katexic. The subjects you address are amongst the most urgent in the world for me. Former Reader T. sounds like a devotee of Disney World, if I may fling a few stones.”

• And Reader J. has thoughts on that too: “Don’t let this get to you, Chris—you’re doing fine. Odd thing about the WWW: no one goes gentle (i.e., quietly) into that good night. Everyone feels the compulsion to register one last squawk. I suppose that’s Democracy In Action and we should say yay: but for people like me, of a generation that regards tweeting as silly (information as conspicuous/imperspicuous production), a climate of whining is everywhere, like Pythagoras’s harmony of the spheres, only ceaselessly audible. If there isn’t a song with the refrain ‘Shut up and go,’ there should be.”

• Reader F. investigated Reader N.’s ‘cellar door’ comment: As I always cite Poe as the originator of the comment that ‘cellar door’ is the most beautiful phrase in the English language, I decided to check out my favorite source for authenticity—Wikipedia, of course—when I saw it attributed to Auden by a Katexic reader. I submit the following, which appears in the midst of a very long dissertation on the two words under discussion. What it may signal, perhaps, is that Auden knew his Poe. ¶ Here is the Wikipedia comment:

A story told by syndicated columnists Frank Colby in 1949 and L. M. Boyd in 1979 holds that ‘cellar door’ was Edgar Allan Poe’s favorite phrase, and that the refrain Nevermore in ‘The Raven’ was chosen as ‘the closest word to ‘cellar door’ he could think of.’ This may derive from a 1914 essay by Alma Blount:

Poe, who studied sound effects carefully, says that he chose ‘Nevermore’ as the refrain for The Raven largely because the word contains the most sonorous vowel, o, and the most ‘producible’ consonant, r. An amusing story is told of an Italian lady who knew not a word of English, but who, when she heard the word cellar-door, was convinced that English must be a most musical language. If the word were not in our minds hopelessly attached to a humble significance, we, too, might be charmed by its combination of spirant, liquids, and vowels.

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

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

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Today’s WORK shared by Reader N., who also has an insightful RESPONSE later in this issue.

WORK

“Yet, to my thinking, the real pet words are peripheral beings, only occasionally reflecting the author’s deepest themes and concerns. They’re capricious and extraneous—or they would be, if the author didn’t welcome them so warmly, didn’t put them on show so frequently. They are stray cats taken in by the author—as in John Updike’s adoption of ‘lambent’ and ‘crescent’ or Anne Tyler’s of ‘nubbin’ or John Cheever’s of ‘inestimable’ or H. G. Wells’s of ‘incontinently’ or Thackeray’s of ‘artless.’ Each of these words presents the critic with a little puzzle of devotion: What was it about this particular package of syllables? Why was this stray cat escorted into the author’s studio and offered a saucer of cream and a plump pillow by the fireplace? It’s not as though the studio were soundproof; during working hours, the author no doubt could hear other strays, seemingly no less deserving, meowing clamorously for admission.”

—Brad Leithauser
—from “Pet Words”

WORD(S)

purlieu /PəRL-yoo/. noun. In modern terms: an outlying area, the outskirts. Figuratively: the fringes, the margins. Also figuratively: to pursue an illicit relationship, usually with a prostitute. From Middle English purlewe (a piece of land on the edge of a forest), likely an alteration of Old French porale (a royal perambulation) with Old French lieu (place).

“He is weary of hunting in the spacious Forest of a Wife, and is following his Game incognito, in some little Purliew here at Thebes.” (John Dryden)

“Bone palings ruled the small and dusty purlieus here and death seemed the most prevalent feature of the landscape.” (Cormac McCarthy)

“His rather desperate plan was to avoid the cross-streets for now, as he couldn’t know what they might contain, perhaps he might run straight into the purlieus of a police station” (Franz Kafka)

“…my wanderings through the abandoned purlieus of the savage Miskahannocks grew desultory and ruminative…” (Michael Chabon)

“One apocryphal story has it that Berrigan, upon seeing a cantaloupe for the first time, thought it a bust of Max Jacob. There was a good deal of levity that evening in selected purlieus.” (Gilbert Sorrentino)

WEB

1. Minimalist, GPS-based city maps → Archie’s Press: Maps

2. David Curran has been testing the Irish postal service with a series of strange mailings including a toilet paper tube, a Möbius strip, various puzzles and more. See also, a similar experiment in the U.S. documented in the Improbable Research blog.

3. A mysterious book appearing on doorsteps, high tech design paired with calligraphy, intimate knowledge of tech culture and some fine writing (though comparing to Pynchon is a bridge too far) → The Mysterious Case of Iterating Grace (and part 2)

4. 8 Pronunciation Errors That Changed Modern English

5. Today in 1805 the old city of Detroit is destroyed in a fire that leaves nothing standing but one stone warehouse, some brick chimneys and Fort Lernoult, which stood on a hill above the flames. This inspired the seal found on the flag of the city which features two women, one looking at the burning city with the words Speramus Meliora (we hope for better things) and the other looking at a new city with the words Resurget Cineribus (it will rise from the ashes). One thing that did rise from the ashes was Detroit’s interesting radial street plan based on a similar plan for Washington, D.C. No cause of the fire was officially established but many attribute it to stray sparks from a local baker emptying his pipe.

WATCH/WITNESS

The Flowchart of J. Alfred Prufrock [Thanks Reader S.!]

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader T. dons his thinking cap: “Trying to come up with a trolley scenario involving the Journal of Universal Rejection. It shouldn’t be too hard, but the thought of there being such a scenario is enjoyable enough that I’m resisting actually creating one.”

• Reader N. on the Words We Love link: “I was surprised to find that about half of the favorite words were one-syllable and somewhat harsh sounding. I recollect that the poet W.H. Auden said that ‘cellar door’ was the most beautiful phrase in the English language. Note this discussion: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14FOB-onlanguage-t.html ¶ I also seem to recall that William Faulkner loved the word ‘wisteria’…”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

“It’s hardly a coincidence that ‘Shipping Out,’ Wallace’s most well-known essay, appeared only a month before Infinite Jest, his most well-known novel, was published. Both are about the same thing (amusing ourselves to death), with different governing données (lethally entertaining movie, lethally pampering leisure cruise). In an interview after the novel came out, Wallace, asked what’s so great about writing, said that we’re existentially alone on the planet—I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling—so writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the bridge of human loneliness.”

—David Shields
—from How Literature Saved My Life

WORD(S)

dwine /DWIYN/. verb. To waste or pine away, decline, wither. From Middle English dwinen, from Old English dwīnan (to disappear, to languish); also Old Norse dvīna (to dwindle or pine away).

“Lyke as the purpour flour…Dwynis away, as it doith faid or de.” (Virgil, trans. by Gavin Douglas)

“A race, which…must, to use a fine though half-forgotten word, begin to dwine away.” (The Spectator, 1889)

“I will dwine your flesh on your bones.” (Samuel R. Crockett)

“As well die in a bog-hole or break your neck over a crag as dwine away with ague in the cold heather, as you are like to do…” (John Buchan)

“Pine away—dwine away— / Anything to leave you!” (Rudyard Kipling)

WEB

1. Various authors on their favorite words…and some good ones in the comments area too! → From plitter to drabbletail: the words we love

2. This Artist is Turning Iconic Portraits into Selfies

3. “There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards five workers. You’re in a nearby café, sipping on a latte, and don’t notice.” → from Lesser Known Trolley Problem Variations.

4. “The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR…” → Explore the Journal of Universal Rejection.

5. Today in 1860, Erastus and Erwin Beadle release the first dime novel, Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. Northern Illinois University has a fantastic collection of digitized dime novels (and “nickel weeklies”) called, appropriately, Nickels and Dimes. Thanks to UMN digital libraries, you can peruse some digitized dime novels. Or check out some of the cracking dime novel covers—one of their hallmarks—in this Library of Congress exhibit.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Aria” — sculpture by John McAbery.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader C. makes an interesting point about retronyms: “Retronyms make me think of a whole group of words where the prefix is political: Asian-American, gay marriage, female scientist, black culture, etc… The modifiers are not actually necessary but they are effective in implying ‘not normal’ or ‘special anomaly’. Americans are American, marriage is marriage, scientists are scientists, culture is culture. It’s an interesting exercise, for instance, to merely take notice any time an article headline feels the need to use the adjective ‘girl’ or ‘woman’ to describe any profession. Would the reverse happen for ‘male scientist’ or ‘man politician’? And would the article suffer any from the removal of that prefix?”

• Reader B. recommends: “That lovely Carver quote brought to my wandering mind Wendell Berry’s fine early novel Jayber Crow, with its barber protagonist.”

• Reader C. is disappointed in my Memorial Day issue: “No excerpt from war literature for the work portion of today’s newsletter? Expected but disappointing.”

• Former Reader T. was disappointed in Katexic as a whole: “The poetry didn’t resonate with me at all and it [the newsletter] felt pretentious, unreal…”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

The barber turned me in the chair to face the mirror. He put a hand to either side of my head. He positioned me a last time, and then he brought his head down next to mine.

We looked into the mirror together, his hands still framing my head.

I was looking at myself, and he was looking at me too. But if the barber saw something, he didn’t offer comment.

He ran his fingers through my hair. He did it slowly, as if thinking about something else. He ran his fingers through my hair. He did it tenderly, as a lover would.

That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber’s chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber’s fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

—Raymond Carver
—from “The Calm”

WORD(S)

quidam /KWEE-dawm/. noun. An unknown person. An unidentified subject. Usually implies that the subject is insignificant, a nobody. See also quidamity, the state of being referred to as a nobody. Direct from Latin quīdam (an unspecified person).

“If the doctrine of our English quidams be right, the French must be very short of brain.” (Times [London, 1832])

“In regiae libidinis voluptatem castrati sunt quidam; sed nemo sibi, ne vir esset, jubente domino, manus intulit. [Some have been castrated to serve the lust of kings, but no one has ever emasculated himself, even at the command of his master.]” (Michel de Montaigne, quoting Lucretius, translated by M.A. Screech)

WEB

1. Thanks to Reader S. for sharing this article, which includes some fantastic pictures. Snail mail FTW. “A 92-year-old WWII vet who recently donated his wartime letters to the National Postal Museum reflects on a friendship that lasted a lifetime” → A Memorial Day Memory: Love From the Pacific Theater

2. “Samurai and courtesans: Japan caught in colour back in 1865 – in pictures”

3. “For those who love books, but don’t have enough time for reading. Here are the best books you can read in under an hour each.” → 24 books to read in under an hour (infographic)

4. RIP: William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, a must-have book for anyone who wants to write clear, powerful prose.

5. Today in 1938, short-story writer and poet Raymond Carver is born in Oregon. Carver remains one of my favorite authors…I discovered him in my mid-teens and his spare prose and plain poetry touched something in my unformed heart in a way very few others have. Often called a “minimalist” or, worse, a “dirty realist,” Carver’s work is deceptively simple. Not only are there rarely plumbed depths in his work, but the way they are made is easy to imitate but hard to realize, in the way it’s easy to imitate a world-class swimmer’s deceptively simple strokes and movement. As Carver noted in a 1986 interview:

“Critics often use the term ‘minimalist’ when discussing my prose. But it’s a label that bothers me: it suggests the idea of a narrow vision of life, low ambitions, and limited cultural horizons. And, frankly, I don’t believe that’s my case. Sure, my writing is lean and tends to avoid any excess. There’s a saying of Hemingway’s that I could take for my motto: ‘Prose is architecture. And this isn’t the Baroque age.’”

WATCH/WITNESS

Watch: “Legendary American literary journalist Gay Talese has been keeping an address book since the 1950s and has never erased a single name or detail. In this film, Talese gives us a tour of his address book, which contains the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tony Bennett, Francis Ford Coppola, and many more.”

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader T. writes in about ‘retronyms’: “These retronyms are pretty cool. <<Side note: Autocorrect changes the word to ‘retro yam.’>> What about a term for the word that necessitates a retronym? Because I think autocorrect would be one of those, right? ¶ We spent a few minutes this morning coming up with some retronyms. How about ‘straight sex,’ ‘premium cable,’ ‘conventional warfare,’ ‘mainstream media,’ ‘natural death,’ ‘brick and mortar store,’ ‘classroom teacher,’ ‘prescription drugs,’ ‘processed or organic foods’ (depending on when you think about it), ‘whole milk,’ ‘print publication,’ and ‘desktop computers’?”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

Today’s WORD describes another fun language group. Do you have any favorite retronyms? Or, better, words that will soon need one?

WORK

Due to my work and teaching commitments this summer, newsletters might arrive a bit thinner and possibly less often than usual for a while. If you’ve come across anything interesting in your own reading or browsing, I welcome suggestions to share!

WORK

“Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous (a chemical term meaning without water), consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink-for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

Today’s work comes via Reader B., who notes that it reminded him of some work found here before (true) and whose accompanying link eventually led me to the intense Behind Their Lines: Poetry of the Great War site.

WORK

“Jo’s Requiem”

He had the ploughman’s strength
in the grasp of his hand;
he could see a crow
three miles away,
and the trout beneath the stone.
He could hear the green oats growing,
and the south-west wind making rain.
He could hear the wheel upon the hill
when it left the level road.
He could make a gate, and dig a pit,
and plough as straight as stone can fall.
And he is dead.

—Ernest Rhys
—from The Leaf Burners

WORD(S)

eunoia /yoo-NOI-ə/. noun. A cultivated, intentional goodwill. In rhetoric, eunoia specifically refers to the feelings of goodwill a speaker inspires in an audience. Aristotle used the term to refer to the kind feelings between spouses which he maintained were the foundation of an ethical life. Eunoia is one of the shortest “panvowels” — words that contain all the vowels just once (see also: “regular panvowels,” or words which contain all the vowels just once and in order, such as facetious). From Greek εὔνοια (well-mind or beautiful thinking).

Poet Christian Bök wrote a book called Eunoia composed of five chapters, each of which use only one vowel…also known as a univocalic work.

“Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech. The text deletes selected letters.” (Christian Bök)

“There are two stories about the Archidamian War. The first is in Thucydides; the second is not (though it has to be pieced together from little bits of evidence in Thucydides along with other evidence). The first is essentially military, the other is not. It is in fact religious or ideological. To put that another way, the first is a story about battles for territory and attempts by one side to kill people on the other side; the second is a story of a struggle for goodwill, Greek eunoia.” (Simon Hornblower)

“The orator produces eunoia through his practical knowledge of the emotions. It is for that reason that the passions form part of the art of rhetoric. The quality of eunoia in the speaker is generated through producing emotions in the audience.” (Eugene Garver)

WEB

1. Dear Data is a “year-long, analog data drawing project” that is both intriguing and easier to just check out for yourself than have me try to explain. I’m absolutely doing this in some future letters.

2. The Oxford Centre for the Study of the Book has a great audio/podcast series of discussions about research into the “material history of the book”. The latest discusses a new archive of Graham Greene letters.

3. Kyua Shim’s site has many examples of his exploration into “code-generated typography.” You’ll have to click the “Portfolio” link to see it…Shim’s web is made in an annoying way that defies direct linking.

4. Minimalist Vocabulary Posters

5. Today in 1827, Andrew P. Kehoe firebombs his home and then sets off an explosion in the Bath Consolidated School in Michigan, killing 38 schoolchildren and six teachers, making it the deadliest mass school killing in United States history. Fortunately, 500 pounds of explosives did not detonate or the death toll would have been significantly higher. Kehoe, the school board treasurer and embarrassed loser of an election for a position as the town clerk which he had filled on an interim basis for a few months, was also facing foreclosure on his home. Kehoe, who drove to the school after blowing up his home, would die in a suicide explosion he triggered in his vehicle—which was filled with shrapnel materials—along with the school superintendent he had called out, a local farmer and Cleo Claton, an eight-year-old survivor of the initial explosion who had wandered out of the rubble of the school.

WATCH/WITNESS

B. B. King passed away last Friday. The 1972 BBC documentary Sounding Out is a great watch. My recommendation for a great listen with just the music: the classic 1965 album B. B. King: Live at the Regal.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. sees a connection: “Your combination of odaxelagnia with the poem’s last lines (‘Jesus didn’t / need balance / he had nails’) was fascinating, and a tad arousing.”

• Reader S. discovers a neat word: “Came across a neat new (to me) word today: aeonium, a type of house leek whose name comes from the Greek word for ageless. One and only one of each vowel…”

• Reader B. writes in regarding the WORKs selected in honor of the memory of Franz Wright: “Those two selections are amazing.”

• As does Reader P.: “Sorry, Franz. ¶ Glad to see the choices.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

RIP, Franz Wright. Another link in my personal poetry safety net undone. One that connected James Wright (obviously), John Berryman and Bill Knott. One that suspends me, sometimes barely, above the ground. One I know is ever-fraying. We’ll return to our regular form, and self, on Monday.

Wright wrote in a variety of styles. Following are two pieces from his 2011 collection of prose poems that are less about being representative of his work than illustrative of my sadness.

WORK

“One”

i’m going in for
a CAT scan i
mean an audition
for an opera
will it finally
break into
Two paths
this suffering One is tiresome
every gentle piece
of marble in
the sun was
once beaten
into shape
this doesn’t
work with people
take many deep
breaths maybe
breathing can help
Jesus didn’t
need balance
he had nails

—CAConrad
—from ECODEVIANCE

WORD(S)

odaxelagnia /oh-DAX-ə-LAG-nee-ə/. noun. One of the many and diverse paraphilias. In this case, sexual arousal through biting or being bitten.

“Biting for sexual pleasure is known as odaxelagnia and is used in courtship rituals to engage one another in the act of copulation among many species. According to the Kama Sutra, biting is an essential part of foreplay and ranges in its aesthetic appeal as well as sensual from nipping and pulling the skin to the ‘lines of jewels’ created by teeth-marks.” (Arlene Russo)

WEB

1. “As we iterate on the logged out experience and curate topics, events, moments that unfold on the platform, you should absolutely expect us to deliver those experiences across the total audience and that includes logged in users and users in syndication.” → Twitter chief’s six common crimes against the dictionary

2. The Typewriters in Films tumblr.

3. Wikipedia’s List of Eponymous Laws. Hat-tip: a reader who I cannot recall right now

4. Mx to join Mr and Mrs in the dictionary

5. Today in 1958, a patent is awarded for Velcro—a portmanteau of two French words: velours (velvet) and crochet (hook)—enabling people everywhere to avoid the trauma of tying their shoes. Swiss inventor George de Mestral famously created velcro after a microscopic examination of burrs that were stuck to his dog’s fur after a walk. Despite all our efforts to make it generic, Velcro remains a trademark name for the Velcro Industries product. And George de Mestral had the knack…he went on to invent the hygrometer and an asparagus peeler still sometimes seen in Only on TV ads. A bit of further trivia: George H. W. Bush’s staff coined the term “velcrosis” to describe the way people relentlessly swarmed around him when he made public appearances.

WATCH/WITNESS

NASA had me at: “twisted ropes of hot plasma and light on the surface of the sun that writhe like snakes…”. More sciency info in this article.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S. shares my pain: “Great. Now I can’t stop watching Seb Lester’s drawings…”

• Reader N. shares a fascinating link related to last issue’s WORD: “The Megrims” – W. H. Auden on Oliver Sacks’ book Migraines

• Reader T. doesn’t like it: “The dipped painting story is too precious and pointless for me. It is just posing. ¶ The reality is that everything is eventually washed away, with only tiny unconnected fragments that form the historical record.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

—Kurt Vonnegut
—from A Man Without a Country

WORD(S)

megrim(s) /MEE-grim(s)/. noun. A migraine headache or the kind of dizziness and vertigo that often accompanies such headaches. In plural form, megrims, depression or melancholy. Rarely, a whim, a caprice or a furtive thought. From Old French migraign, from Late Latin hemicrania (headache).

“If these megrims are the effect of Love, thank Heaven, I never knew what it was.” (Samuel Richardson)

“He was turning around, zipping his fly, talking mostly to keep the megrims away.” (Stephen King)

“Doth the ague, the megrim, or the gout spare him more than us? When age shall once seize on his shoulders can then the tall yeomen of his guard discharge him of it?” (Michel de Montaigne)

“But you told me last night that cricket gave you the pip, which I imagine is something roughly equivalent to the megrims or the heeby-jeebies.” (P. G. Wodehouse)

“Then the megrims began, like claps of thunder trapped inside his skull, and for hours he was forced to lie prostrate in his shuttered cell with vinegar poultices pressed to his brow, as cascades of splintered multicoloured glass formed jagged images of agony behind his eyes.” (John Banville)

WEB

1. The theorizing about social media is weak and distracts from a devastating story that everyone should probably read → Split Image

2. The Brooklyn Museum has an exhibit up called Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Even if you can’t attend, there’s gold in the teacher packet (PDF)

3. I’m fascinated by memory and ephemerality, particularly in this age of permanent impermanence → Oliver Jeffers’s Art of Bearing Witness

4. Stunning first shots from National Geographic’s 2015 Traveler Photo Contest

5. Today in 868, a version of the Diamond Sūtra is published in China and is now the oldest surviving complete, specifically dated book in the world. Sealed up in a cave in the year 1000, the scroll was discovered with many others in 1907 by the explorer Sir Marc Aurel Stein and is currently housed at the British Library. The Diamond Sūtra gets its name from the text itself: when asked what this Sūtra should be called, Buddha responds that it shall be known as ‘The Diamond that Cuts through Illusion’. Read a “new translation” of the Diamond Sūtra that integrates more than a dozen different translations.

WATCH/WITNESS

I can’t stop watching these videos of Seb Lester drawing versions of famous logos.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader S. found the torture method that might be the origin for ‘kibosh’: "One source claims the British method of execution involved putting burning pitch on people’s heads. ¶ Which is apparently something that actually happened, even if I am lazy and go to Wikipedia: pitchcapping.

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

“Early Elegy: Smallpox”

The world has certified itself rid of
all but the argument: to eradicate or not
the small stock of variola frozen,
quarantined—a dormancy it has
refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile
lens, her glass slide a clearest, most
becoming pane. How could it resist slipping
away with her, that discrete first pock?

—Claudia Emerson
—from Poetry (June 2012)

WORD(S)

kibosh (kybosh) /KIY-bawsh/ or /kə-BAWSH/. noun. To stop, end or finish off. Not an obscure word to most, but interesting because of its possible origins. The most popular—and the one I prefer—places kibosh’s roots in caipín báis, Irish for cap of death, the black cap traditionally worn by English judges when sentencing someone to death. Many reference a single source that it might also refer to a “gruesome” method of execution “employed by British forces against 1798 insurgents,” but I can find nothing further about what that method might be. Other etymological possibilities: Scots kye booties (cow boots), Hebrew kbsh (conquer) or Turkish bosh (empty).

“‘Hooroar,’ ejaculates a pot-boy in parenthesis, ‘put the kye-bosk on her, Mary!’” (Charles Dickens) [first known use of the term]

“For one thing, monsignor, making it hard for those you expose to your high-geared system of kibosh to see a doctor and ask him why the hell they can’t sleep of nights and want to mutilate people.” (Thomas Keneally)

“if there’s anything that can put the kibosh on a literary career, it’s the loving forgiveness of one’s natural enemies.” (Philip Roth)

“Watching her crunch those trout heads and bones with her pretty teeth, I was glad I had put the kibosh on my attack of leg-jealousy.” (Rex Stout)

WEB

1. Landscapes Made for Satellite Eyes

2. Hyperbolic, but not wholly unfounded → Louis John Pouchée’s lost alphabets are the most beautiful types ever

3. Classic Films Summarized by People Who Have Never Seen Them

4. The Small Colon Collider is returning to action.

5. Today in 1980, after 184 years, smallpox—the first, and so far only, disease completely contained by man—is certified eradicated by the World Health Organization. The last naturally occurring case was in Somalia in 1977. That patient survived. In 1978, two laboratory workers in Birmingham, England contracted smallpox in a research lab. One of them would later die, but smallpox claimed another victim: the laboratory’s director, who committed suicide.

WATCH/WITNESS

►Understanding Art: The Death of Socrates: In just over 7.5 minutes I almost guarantee you will learn something about—and perhaps form (more of?) an appreciation for—Jacques-Louis David’s painting. So good (both the painting and Nerdwriter’s series)!

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. savors a WORD: “‘absquatulate’ is a superb word to say out loud. ¶ absquatulate. ¶ absquatulate. ¶ absquatulate.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. ‘For my part,’ Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

—Diane Ackerman
—from A Natural History of the Senses

WORD(S)

absquatulate /ab-SKWAH-chə-layt/. verb. To abscond. To steal away. Rarely: to die. A mock-Latin combination of abscond + squat. See also, absquatulize.

“He certainly had his hump up. He absquatulated. The bung cried: ‘Square the omee for the cream of the valley!’ But the splodger had mizzled with his half-a-grunter.” (Angela Carter)

“And to think that Doña Estefanía absquatulated with all your beautiful chains! That just goes to show you it never rains but it pours.” (Miguel de Cervantes [trans. David Kipen]

“The former owners having been in some haste to absquatulate, random items of inventory had been left behind, the usual two-headed dogs in jars and pickled brains of notable figures in history, many from long before pickling as we know it was invented, the Baby from Mars, the scalp of General Custer, certified to be authentic…” (Thomas Pynchon

“I mistook her for a Tarkington student, maybe the dyslexic daughter of some overthrown Caribbean or African dictator who had absquatulated to the USA with his starving nation’s treasury.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

WEB

1. Dude! No, seriously, fun stuff… → Top 10 Most Extreme Substances

2. “The book was, we can now see, crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires.” → Finnegans Wake – The book the web was invented for

3. I don’t read French (the gist: meet a hipster who only watches movies on VHS); it’s the awesome vintage VHS box illustrations for contemporary movies that are worth a click. → De Game of Thrones à Gravity : un hipster parisien regarde tout en VHS

4. “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.” → William Faulkner Makes Us Wonder: What’s So Great About Poetry, Anyhow?

5. Today in 1527, an army of German Lutherans and Spanish Catholics (contempt breeds strange bedfellows) led by Charles Duc de Bourbon of France begin the Sack of Rome, considered by most the end of the Renaissance. This was, for obvious reasons, a significant victory for the Protestants. It was also a significant factor in the terrible and popular story of Henry VIII: Pope Clement VIII—who only escaped the sack with his life due to the bravery of the Swiss Guard (of the 189 members of the guard, only 42 survived), a gigantic ransom payment and a secret passage from the Vatican—was from then on unwilling to offend the Spanish Emperor (Charles V) and thus unwilling to grant Henry’s requested annulment from the (Charles V’s aunt) Catherine of Aragon, which resulted in Henry’s break from Rome. Though responsibility for the whole thing undoubtedly lies with Charles V, there was an immensely complex group of forces at work, not least the Duc de Bourbon’s ongoing protection racket that had ensnared the Pope, conspiracies and betrayal inside the Vatican, and the King of France’s attempts to take advantage of the strife.

WATCH/WITNESS

“Apostle Islands Ice Cave” (Andy Rathbun)

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader V. shares a link to complement the Surreal Type Samples: “Browsing further, I discovered more surreal type samples. Enjoy!”

• Reader B. writes in: “What a feast! ¶ Just blogged that fine alphabet.”

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

WORK

“A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff.’ A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead.”

—Caitlin Moran
—from Moranthology

WORD(S)

epistrophe /ə-PI-strə-fee/. noun. Repetition at the end of successive clauses, verses or sentences for rhetorical effect. From Greek epistrophē (a turning about), from strophē (a turning).

Some example of epistrophe:

“The grove of Angita lamented you,
The glassy watered Fuccinus lamented you,
All limpid lakes lamented you.”
(Virgil)

“…government of the people, by the people, for the people…” (Abraham Lincoln)

“There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.” (Lyndon B. Johnson)

“Why I should fear I know not,
Since guiltiness I know not.”
(William Shakespeare)

Bonus: listen to Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” (sic) with this in mind and the title becomes obvious.

WEB

1. Each May since 1981 (more or less), unknown parties have been placing a series of cryptic ads—in service of an unknown cause/conspiracy—in an Arizona Newspaper. It’s the May Day Mystery. Thanks, Reader K.!

2. An interactive visualization of Miles Davis’s complete(ish) catalog → Scaled in Miles

3. Since 2002, retired engineer Đức thắng Nguyễn has been creating an “amazing animated 3D catalog of mechanical contraptions”, including animations available on Nguyễn’s YouTube channel. Thanks, Reader C.!

4. Feelers: a typeface based on limbs and intestines

5. Today is Star Wars Day. As yet an unofficial, secular observance, Star Wars Day remains a day characterized by near-religious fervor by some. You might enjoy the listicle “37 Star Wars Facts for Star Wars Day”. Meantime, true believers already know how to celebrate. If you’re not one of them, watch an episode of Chad Vader: Night Shift Manager. May the Fourth be with you.

WATCH/WITNESS

Just one image from
a gallery of wonderful shots of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader N. shares a triply-relevant satire: “…something I read recently—a satire called Merrie Englande in the Olden Time by one George Daniel. […] Daniel was a popular social satirist and also a lover of Shakespeare. Mr. Bosky is the hero of the satire. I enclose a snippet of his style.”

THE UP-TO-SNUFF FRENCH SCARAMOUCH.

Monsieur Scaramouch, sharp-set enough,
At a Paris dépôt for tobacco and snuff,
Accosted the customers every day
With “Pardonnez moi, du Tabac, s’il vous plâit!”

He look’d such a gentleman every inch,
The Parisians all condescended a pinch;
Which, taken from Bobadils, barbers, and beaux,
Went into his pocket — instead of his nose!

Scaramouch sold, with a merry ha I ha!
Ev’ry pinch to his friend, le marchand de tabac:
Then buyer and seller the price of a franc
To the noses of all their contributors drank!

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

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

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Thanks to Reader C. for today’s WORD which, when I started looking for it, turns up everywhere in books I’ve read, some multiple times. And to Reader B. who recommended the book today’s WORK comes from. How much I must unknowingly miss every minute, every day.

WORK

“Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.”

—Ali Smith
—from How to Be Both_

WORD(S)

bosky /BAW-skee/. adjective. Abundant with woods, shrubbery or greenery. Verdant. Rarely: tipsy or drunk. Perhaps a variant of busky (same primary meaning), ultimately from Latin boscus (wood).

“Coming down a stony draw through green and well nigh lightless grottoes where lay stones and windfall trees alike anonymous beneath the mantled moss he saw cross through a bosky glen two equine phantoms pale with purpose: one, the next, and gone in the dark of the forest.” (Cormac McCarthy)

“It was a sight to make one bosky out of hand. Indeed, the warming properties of strong drink give it a more seductive appeal at sea than it ever has ashore” (William Golding)

“Hail, many-colour’d messenger, that ne’er
Dost disobey the wife of Jupiter;
Who with thy saffron wings upon my flowers
Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers,
And with each end of thy blue bow dost crown
My bosky acres and my unshrubb’d down,
Rich scarf to my proud earth; why hath thy queen
Summon’d me hither, to this short-grass’d green?”
(William Shakespeare)

"…The green is a reflective green, a green
in the juicy shadows of leaves—a bosky even green—
a word I will learn to use, and use without self-
consciousness, when at last I go to Germany. I have
holed myself away here, sometimes I am not here
at all, and I feel like the nice clean hole in the leaf
    and the magnifying glass above me.
(Patricia Lockwood)

more examples

WEB

1. A collection of articles based on private journals…including Nina Simone. → The Longform Guide to Diaries

2. “But IDEA Books also culls together texts so seemingly strange and obscure, volumes you didn’t think could possibly have existed, that you’ll want them for your own shelves immediately.” A strange book collecting niche. → Paper Chase: In Pursuit of Rare Books

3. Typophiles, prepare a drink → ‘Comic Papyrus’ Is Basically Your Biggest Typographic Nightmare Come True.

4. Discovery of Long-Lost Silent Film With All-Indian Cast Has Historians Reeling

5. Today is International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day. In its 9th year, thousands of participants plant/scatter sunflower seeds in urban spots that would otherwise be bare and neglected. See some of the flowers of the guerrilla’s labor in their flickr photo group. There’s even a helpful instructional video.

WATCH/WITNESS

A reconstruction of a triptych sketched in a letter by Vincent Van Gogh (use the ‘Facsimile’ link to view).

Check out a large view of the triptych. Download an even larger one. Dig in. Trace the brush-strokes. Seek beginner’s viewing mind, beyond the familiarity.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader E. votes yes on a contest: “Love the idea of the Cormac McCarthy contest. :-) You should look at the O. Henry story contest and the Bulwer-Lytton contests as models…” — Thanks! It’s going to happen soon. You heard it here first…

Multiple readers had thoughts on on Sherman Alexie’s “Facebook Sonnet.” I love hearing from the Clamor!

• Reader B.: “Arg. I like Alexie. but that’s just more silly tech-bashing. It dates back to Robert Putnam’s foolish insistence that online socialization didn’t count, and now Jaron Lanier’s idiotic but well-paid anti-internet stuff.”

• Reader G.: “Although I didn’t entirely agree with Sherman’s Alexie’s Facebook poem, I didn’t entirely disagree with it either. I have a connection with many of the people from my past after years of moving and the passage of time. I haven’t taken the time to forge the same connection with people in my present. But my friends on Facebook are my friends because I do value them and I want to know about them and I still care about them. Most of them are not from high school for me, but from everywhere I’ve ever lived. I do find Facebook a place of simultaneous connection and loneliness too. Interesting poem. I keep thinking about it.¶ He wrote a nice sonnet about something many people can relate to I think.”

• Reader T.: “I think it is more of an observation than a condemnation or a judgment. As in, there is a lot of loneliness on display and/or being facilitated by Facebook, but it’s not so much Facebook causing it. The loneliness was always there, but now at least we’re able to connect more on SOME level.”

• Reader N. shares a pleasing connection: I enjoyed the Facebook sonnet by Sherman Alexie. It reminded me of the vogue for satire about the too popular watering spots, Bath and Brighton, by Jane Austen and many others. A very popular satire was a full-length book of satirical epistles called “The New Bath Guide” by Christopher Anstey—written in the mid 18th century, several decades before Austen wrote. Here’s a small sample:

Then, O sweet goddess, bring with thee
Thy boon attendant Gaiety,
Laughter, Freedom, Mirth, and Ease,
And all the smiling deities;
Fancy, spreading painted sails,
Loves that fan with gentle gales.—
But hark!—methinks I hear a voice,
My organs all at once rejoice;
A voice that says, or seems to say,
“Sister, hasten, sister gay,
”Come to the pump—room—come away."

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.

I don’t share Alexie’s convictions in today’s WORK, or at least I’m not convinced it is necessarily so. Give the usual nod to the predictable irony that I learned of this poem—and enjoyed Alexie’s reading (he’s a fantastic writer)—on…Facebook.

WORK

“The Facebook Sonnet”

Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let’s undervalue and unmend

The present. Why can’t we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let’s exhume, resume, and extend
Childhood. Let’s all play the games

That occupy the young. Let fame
And shame intertwine. Let one’s search
For God become public domain.
Let church.com become our church.

Let’s sign up, sign in, and confess
Here at the altar of loneliness.

—Sherman Alexie
—from “Moyers & Company” broadcast watch and listen

WORD(S)

sousveillance /soo-VAY-ləns/. noun. A play on the French words sur (above) and sous (below), sousveillance is essentally “undersight”, surveillance from below (the hierarchy) rather than above. It is the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies." More broadly, it refers to people doing the watching rather than governments or other organizations watching from above. Even if you’re too busy doing last-minute shopping—or perhaps especially if you are busy doing last-minute shopping—you can participate in World Sousveillance Day on Christmas Eve.

“Mann further distinguishes between two forms of sousveillance: in-band, which arises from within an organization, and out-of-band, which is external to the organization and frequently arises from the perceived failure of surveillance mechanisms within institutions. It is not coincidental that ‘citizens videotaping police brutality and sending copies to news media’ is used as an example of the latter form.” (Torin Monahan)

“Sousveillance isn’t just a response to surveillance, it is the wellspring of freedom.” (David Brin)

WEB

1. Not sure about “worst” but…umm…not good. → The 23 Worst Children’s Book Titles In The World

2. The Keaton Music Typewriter

3. “…though it will be tempting to dismiss Ex Machina as a kind of nihilist Weird Science wallpapered over with intellectual pretensions, Garland also genuinely grapples with ideas about artificial intelligence and technology.” → Maria Bustillos on the new movie Ex Machina

4. “…the most perfectly surrealist works of literature are the type samples issued by the great type foundries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” → “The Dawn of Surrealism”

5. Today in 1992, four Los Angeles Police Department officers are acquitted on charges of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King, sparking riots that would result in “53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 7,000 fires, damage to 3,100 businesses, and nearly $1 billion in financial losses.” It’s hard to process the events in Baltimore—and so many other places—23 years after this decision and as we approach the anniversary of the murder of two Alaska State Troopers, one of whom was a friend and a good man. Deep waters.

WATCH/WITNESS

Untitled, Atlanta, 1984. Photo by Harry Callahan.
See more of Callahan’s work online from the George Eastman House and the Pace/MacGill Gallery.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. puts forth a candidate: “‘Crooning a low threnody to her pawky trade.’ I’d nominate this for a contest to determine The Ultimate Cormac McCarthy Sentence.” — That might be a contest I need to figure out how to run. So many candidates…and I need to think of an appropriate prize.

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

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

Daily(ish) email overwhelming you? Email chris+weekly@katexic.com to switch to the weekly digest edition.