WORK

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

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from Pnin

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

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

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

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. List: 20 Literary Would-You-Rathers

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

Nothing to Save

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

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

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. FindSounds is a search engine for sounds.

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Pat Conroy
—from The Prince of Tides

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

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

—Nate DiMeo
—the memory palace (Episode 50)

WORD(S)

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Søren Kierkegaard
—from The Journals of Kierkegaard

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

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

—Flannery O’Connor
—from Wise Blood

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

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

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Michael Chabon
—from Summerland

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

1. Thibaud Poirier’s amazing photos of grand libraries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Denis Johnson
—from Jesus’ Son

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

4. Can Prairie Dogs Talk?

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RIP, Chana Bloch.

WORK

Bequest

The Golden Record aboard Voyager, 1977

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia for a new WORK every day and concīs publishing original short pieces of all kinds.

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

WORK

I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw

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

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

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

I spread across my country
a poem of shame

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

WORD(S)

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

Some examples of ploce:

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Carlos Castaneda
—from The Active Side of Infinity

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy birthday, Vladimir Nabokov!

WORK

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

—Vladimir Nabokov
—from Speak, Memory

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Kingsley Amis
—from Lucky Jim

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

Clown Service, a short film by Tig Notaro.

WHAT!?

Voice Swap

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

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

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Lucy Grealy
—from Autobiography of Face

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

Masterpieces never sleep by Lesha Limonov:

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

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

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

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

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

5. Afraid of Jail? Buy an Upgrade

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

Image above from the 360° virtual Auto-Icon.

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

—Alesteir Crowley
—from Moonchild

WORD(S)

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

Meet the Rubber Man — British Pathé, 1947.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORK

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

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

WORD(S)

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

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

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

WEB

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

2. Why the Internet Didn’t Kill Zines

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

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

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

6. Guatemala syphilis experiments worse than Tuskegee.

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

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

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

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

WATCH/WITNESS

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

WHAT!?

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

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

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

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

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

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

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

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