My apologies for the cryptic subject line of yesterday’s edition. Unfortunately it was an as-yet-undiagnosed technical problem, not a secret code. The investigation continues (it’s all geek CSI up in here).

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“Vienna”

A classic WORK today…one of the first poems I memorized and recite to myself like a mantra. The unanswered—and unanswerable—questions still fascinate me.

And a WORD that is ripe for (secular) rehabilitation, describing so well where I find myself in creative life and career.

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“Angels”

They have little use. They are best as objects of torment.

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“Chromatic”

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“Elegy”

Who would I show it to

Friends don’t let friends endure terrible typography. I often link to long articles and other works. If you are reading online, I strongly recommend the application of some design magic. The Readability bookmarklets make this a one-click option, as does Clippable and Evernote’s . does this automatically along with a jillion other things for readers on the web or Kindle, as does .

I’ve been a fan of Terrance Hayes for a long time and I’m stoked he won a MacArthur Fellowship (AKA a “genius grant”). You don’t need to know the Stevens poem (how many of us can really claim to know many of Stevens’ poems?) to appreciate this one, though you can read it here, keeping in mind, as Reginald Shepherd said of Stevens racism, “I don’t think his is a case that lends itself to easy condemnation or exoneration. I wonder if such terms are even appropriate.”

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It was a pleasure to burn.

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“Audit”

Up to now echoes are not       the first things said. Up to now if I’ve called for help       my rescuers haven’t heard me. Up to now the present is discernible       only as the past, and Up to now it’s not clear       what love entitles me to. Up to now there is no real evidence       that anyone’s out to get me. Up to now the misery of thin children       happens in remote places. Up to now I have lived no day as if       it reduced my remaining days. Up to now I’ve not looked around       to see if I’m alone. Up to now the death of one season starts another. Up to now the poem I haven’t written       is as good as it will be when I write it. Up to now the moonlight has revealed       nothing but continued expectation. Up to now it always ends up raining.

Sneaking in a date-book double. Happy birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald!

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“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated.

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…

—F. Scott Fitzgerald
—from The Great Gatsby

WORD(S)

genizah. noun. A store-room or other repository in a synagogue or cemetery for damaged, discarded or heretical books, documents and relics—anything with God’s name written or inscribed one it—before they are properly buried. For example, Cambridge University has digitized many such items in their Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection. In Hebrew, literally, “hiding place.” Hat-Tip: Reader B.

“Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo…” (George Moore)

“In medieval Cairo, this custom was extended to anything written in Hebrew, but instead of being buried, such items were stored in a genizah in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fostat (Old Cairo), where most of the Jews lived; the arid conditions preserved them.” (Sara Reguer)

“Besides these sacred and semi-sacred books, the Genizah proved a refuge to a class of writing that never aspired to the dignity of real books but, are, for all of that, of the greatest importance for Jewish history.” (The Friend)

WEB

1. Mindell Dubansky publishes a detailed blog about “blooks” or book-shaped objects made to emulate books, such as book boxes, lamps, flasks, lighters, baking molds, pop-out snake toys and many, many more. Fascinating (the New York Times agrees). See also, an informative little article on blooks at Book Patrol and their associated blooks Pinterest board.

2. A moving, eye-opening article about the drought and farmers in California: “Scenes from the New American Dustbowl”

3. First Laura Mersini-Houghton proves that our universe is just one among many…then she proves that black holes cannot, mathematically, exist. I’m going to hope the first result stands and the second is reversed.

4. When the rent for his commercial space quadrupled, ►Michael Seidenberg moved his bookstore, Brazenhead Books to his apartment, creating a (not-so) secret shop.

5. Today in 1895, Annie Londonderry becomes the first woman to bicycle around the world, not only questioning Victorian era assumptions about women, but causing some to question if she is a woman at all. Read Peter Zheutlin’s two-part series on Londonderry in which he chases down the story—and the person—and then retraces her epic odyssey.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader J. points out that Marian Call, featured here a short while ago performing an updated “Elements Song,” has been known to use a typewriter on stage and in her music. — I’ll trade you: a little Marian Call-related easter egg: http://ktxc.to/boing-xoxo-2014.

• Reader T. shares a video that “expand[s] on the winklepicker (and the poulaines of the middle ages).” He goes on, “Seems, like the mullet, there might be something deeper behind the historical tenacity of these choices.” — True that. In the case of the poulaine it appears to be a fashion that persisted, in part, as a form of religious rebellion.

• Reader J. echoes my own thoughts: “I’m so glad [you] spotlighted The Wheeling Year, which I’ve only begun to read, but it is bowling me over. Kooser, or his publisher, cannily classifies the book as ”Creative Nonfiction/Memoir“ (I believe—I don’t have it in front of me at the moment), but it’s really prose poems, it seems to me. Or maybe it’s just that Kooser can’t help but write poetry, whether in prose or verse. Great stuff!”

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

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

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The rez mullet! I also find my former haircut amusing in stylistic terms. It’s embarrassing now. But there’s always been a conscious and subconscious classist / racist edge to mullet jokes, especially when it comes to white guys with mullets. If one means to tell a racist / classist joke then make it a good one, but I don’t actually think that many folks realize the cultural importance of the mullet in Native American-warrior history. Take a look at Chief Joseph.

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I like the looks of farm dumps, almost always filling a ditch in a pasture. What is no longer good for anything—from an Oldsmobile with a frozen crank to storm-tossed sheets of corrugated roofing—gets pushed off the edge, or over a hill, or onto a cleft in a pasture, where time has been waiting in rain-gray coveralls with his cutting torch lit, its flame as red as a late September sumac leaf. For it’s always September in these heaps of rust and brown, with field mice and rabbits setting up house for bad weather, claiming the driest tin cans or the dome of a fender.

Today’s WORK might well be one of my anthems…my sad, ambiguous, sardonic theme song.

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“Not Waving but Drowning”

Today’s WORD isn’t particularly uncommon, but since I have a bit of an obsession with the linguistic version and will be featuring them occasionally…

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“Ten Ways to Mourn a Dead Language”

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“Moon”

Then are you the dense everywhere that moves, the dark matter they haven’t yet walked through?

Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary is marvelous. The last clause of today’s WORK is well known as a standalone quotation, but I forgot how the grandeur of that quote is diminished—yet its power in some ways heightened—by the small, human-sized tragedy it is part of…

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“Martin drunke” in today’s WORK could be related to the feast of St. Martin, the Martin Marprelate controversies in which Nashe was deeply involved or something else entirely…otherwise the slightly archaic language is easily understood. I’ve put it into the list form popular with the kids these days!

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Nor have we one or two kinds of drunkards only, but eight kinds.

Maxims…I can’t stop at just one. Just as the now proverbial Lay’s potato chip maxim would have it.

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“Wedding Bell Blues”

I was invited to a wedding in an abandoned storefront. A serial killer with a pleasant demeanor checked invitations at the door. “Keep moving, keep moving,” the cops ordered the gawkers clogging the sidewalk. The elderly bride wore long sleeves to hid the tattoos of sunning mermaids and leaping dolphins on her arms. Some of the guests still couldn’t sleep that night for fear of drowning in bed. Others of us felt more surprise than fear, like when you slice your finger on a piece of broken glass. You just hold your hand above heart level until the bleeding stops.

Please forgive my self-indulgence with today’s edition; the atypically long WORD and—for other reasons, atypically short WORK—commemorate a sad anniversary. And but so it goes.

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“A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

—David Foster Wallace
—from “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”

WORD(S)

fantod. noun. Fidgety, restless, a high and worried excitement, a nervous agitation. See also fantigue.

“But by and by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of fire away through the trees. I went for it, cautious and slow. By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most give me the fantods. He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire.” (Mark Twain)

“…our flesh doesn’t sweat and pimple here for the domestic mysteries, the attic horror of What Might Have Happened so much as for our knowledge of what likely did happen…it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, that come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-traveling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god’s city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent…” (Thomas Pynchon)

“Clipperton stares wordlessly up at the little wrought-iron racquet-heads that serve as spikes at the top of the portcullis and fencing around E.T.A., his expression so blackly haunted that even the hard-boiled attendant told some of the people back at the halfway place later that the spectral trench-coated figure had given him sobriety’s worst fantods, so far.” (David Foster Wallace)

“Orin and Hal’s term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It’s like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: ‘Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.’ ‘What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.’ ‘But it’s a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario — the living room rug needed something, I didn’t know what til right this very moment.’ The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged.” (David Foster Wallace)

WEB

1. In her Erasing Infinite project, Poet Jenni B. Baker is creating, page by page, erasure poetry from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

2. In “Reading Wallace Reading,” Mike Miley discusses his exploration of David Foster Wallace’s personal library and the powerful, disturbing annotations therein. In a similar vein, Maria Bustillos explored some of the self-help titles in his library.

3. The Univer­sity of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center just made 9 drafts of the foreword to David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King available.

4. Whatever your feelings about David Foster Wallace’s writing, his ► Kenyon College commencement address (aka “This is Water”) transcends the genre and reward listening and re-listening. Jessica Hagy, of Indexed, charts/illustrates one of the most important sections of the speech in Soaking in Wonder. See also: the full text of the address.

5. Today in 2008, David Foster Wallace—a writer who who delved into, and dwelled in, my heart as no other—hanged himself. He was 46.

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

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

The final piece in Michael Garriga’s triptych about the 1612 duel between Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro…words of witness, helplessness and doubt.

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“Master Lee, 23, Tanka Poet & Disciple of Sasaki Kojiro (with apologies for the poor translation)”

Today’s WORK is part 2 of the triptych from Michael Garriga’s The Book of Duels. Part 3 tomorrow!

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Michael Garriga’s volume The Book of Duels has an interesting conceit: he tells the stories—in compressed, poetic prose or, in one case, actual poetry—of 33 often infamous duels from the viewpoint of each of the duelists and a witness. Today’s WORK is the first of the triptych for Musashi v. Kojiro, April 13, 1612. The second and third pieces will follow in subsequent newsletters.

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“Life and Time”

We grow up but do not comprehend life. We think life is just the passing of time. The fact is, life is one thing, and time something else.

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes (today: a break from our usual high-falutingness to share some of a comedy icon’s best one-liners). Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

John Williams’ novel Stoner tells, in minimalist fashion, the story of William Stoner, a farm boy who becomes an professor of literature specializing in the classics and grammar and then spends his entire career—his entire life—at a small southern university, trapped by the politics of academia and his failed marriage. But somehow it’s a gripping work; I found myself waking at 2a to spend a few hours more reading.

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A solid freeze yesterday morning, bolts of yellow in the trees…I can’t pretend the window of summer isn’t quickly closing, leaf and leaving.

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The last of Summer is Delight — Deterred by Retrospect. ’Tis Ecstasy’s revealed Review — Enchantment’s Syndicate.

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“Glacial Erotic”

When the great sheet of ice lifted, enormous boulders were left scattered on mountainsides and deep in the forests. They assumed unusual positions.

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Sir, — Chris Skidmore would have us believe that Giles Mompesson was sentenced in 1621 to have his face “shoved into a horse’s anus” (June 13). This is surely a misreading of what is involved in having one’s face to the horse’s tail. In the same year, 1621, the House of Commons condemned Edward Floyd to “be carried from place to place upon a horse without a saddle, with his face toward the horse’s tail, and holding the tail in his hand”. This was the degrading punishment intended for Mompesson rather than some bizarre anal insertion.

Another disjeweling.

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“Lobster”

"The sanded & disjeweled." Bam!

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“Help”

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

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“The Easement”

& I don’t want the words for desire to fuse to a life of what presents a weed now here, now alone, scored with a yarn for longing, one lifting her skirt up slowly, slower where the world’s tilted, blustery, incapable & how to refuse us each to a one.

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“Failure”

New guidelines from the US Copyright office explicitly refuse copyright for the infamous monkey-selfie or elephant murals (and by extension, faces in tortillas, mermaids in driftwood and most of Kenny Goldsmith’s oeuvre). Oh, and divine or supernatural beings need not apply.

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“A Book of Music”

Coming at an end, the lovers Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where Did it end? There is no telling. No love is Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye Like death. Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length Of coiled rope Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths Its endings. But, you will say, we loved And some parts of us loved And the rest of us will remain Two persons. Yes, Poetry ends like a rope.

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Fatigue is one of the most interesting things in the world to think about. It’s like jealousy, or lying, or fear. It’s like one of those impure things that you keep well hidden. Like all those things, it makes you touch the ground. The first tired face you see in life is your mother’s, a face exhausted by solitude. Children in their early years bring dreams, laughter, and especially fatigue, fatigue before anything else. Nights stripped bare, overwhelming happiness. From the very start, fatigue knocks on two sacred doors in life: love and sleep. It wears love down like water over a stone; it floods sleep like water upon water. Fatigue is sleep’s barbaric intrusion into love, the flame of sleep over acres of love. Fatigue is like a bad mother, one who no longer gets up in the night to comfort and delight us with her voice or give us our share of joy in her arms. And you can tell tired people. You can tell them by the way they incessantly do things. The way they make it impossible for any restfulness to reach them, or any silence of love. Tired people are good at business, they build houses, pursue careers. To flee their fatigue they do all these things, and in fleeing they submit to fatigue. Their time is lacking in time. Everything they do more and more of, they do less and less of. Their lives are lacking in life. There is a glass window between one self and the other. They walk alongside that window incessantly. You can see the fatigue in their features, in their hands, and behind their words. Fatigue is in them like nostalgia, like an impossible desire.

The last day of vacation is too often preceded by sad dreams.

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It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

Occasional serendipities are our lucky glimpses at the deep connective tissue of the world, moments when our eyes are opened wide enough to see the clasps and couplings amongst and between. Today I’ll be in Rochester, Minnesota, a place I didn’t realize/remember lay on my way to the wedding for which I’d already planned to use this poem months ago.

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“A Blessing”

Today, the poem that came immediately to mind when I looked upon “Pud,” the 900-pound behemoth that won the state fair’s “Biggest Boar” contest (and who is svelte, apparently, compared to the 1335-pound record holder). Not a poem that sits easy, nor is it meant to.

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“Animals are Passing From Our Lives”

A themed edition because today I have my own ticket to the fair or, as I like to call it, foods-on-sticks-ville. Oh the humanity!

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A late poem by Auden written in response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the ending of the “Prague Spring,” a turn shorter than most of even that most quicksilver season.

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“August 1968”

A brief bit today from one of the best autobiographies ever.

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Today’s edition brought to you by $20 of GoGo (should be called CrawlCrawl) in-flight internet, the red-eye out of Alaska and bad burned coffee. These are the times that try my commitment to not be one of those people Louis C.K. was talking about when he observed that “everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.”.

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It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

Today the opening page of a fun novel described as a “nerdy, dystopic, sportively Hegelian, thriller.” As if that didn’t push enough buttons, the plot involves the death of print, a word-flu, secret societies and musings on technology and reading. It’s not Borges, but it ain’t bad. The excerpt’s a bit longer than usual, but it’s Saturday. And you can always scroll, baby, scroll.

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On a very cold and lonely Friday last November, my father disappeared from the Dictionary. And not only from the big glass building on Broadway where its offices were housed. On that night my father, Douglas Samuel Johnson, Chief Editor of the , slipped from the actual artifact he’d helped compose.

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…It is a small, khaki-colored handbook of Vietnamese phrases which was published by the Department of the Army in 1962 for issue to U.S. personnel in South Vietnam. At the time the Vietnamese involvement was still being described as a “counterinsurgency operation” … Here are several phrases drawn from the first section, on “initial encounters with locals”:

It’s impossible to read today’s poem without thinking of one of James Wright’s most famous poems. But it’s also impossible for me not to think of the raven I encountered a few days ago in the grocery store parking lot, his beak anointed with the grease of the discarded burger he pecked at as shamelessly as he’d pick at my flesh given the chance.

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There are a lot of people sharing things about depression right now. Some good, some—well—not so good. William Styron’s 1990 memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness remains one of the best first person accounts of living with depression and a version is available free from the Internet Archive as text, PDF, ebook, etc.