Things I learned while looking up other things, 2020.8.11
Dear Friend, from my life I write to you in your life. I hope you all are doing "2020's version of okay".
(Because everything is weird and terrible, this is late because it was flagged by an AI as suspicious. Evidently AIs hate Samuel Johnson and related topics?)
Once you realize that all the carrot varietal names in this USDA guide to types of carrots sound like Great Band Names, all the descriptions start to sound like music reviews: "Some European seedsmen, however, describe this as the smallest of all Nantes-type varieties, smaller even than Amsterdam Forcing."
This blog about whether a painting is, or is not, by Gauguin (and really about how art moves through the world, how artists work by themselves and with others, how we find these things out, and who gets to decide authenticity) is incredibly compelling. (I'm looking forward to the movie or the prestige tv series ...)
Clifford's biography of Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi is well worth the time, and not just because I learned that "it was her custom to indicate excitement or anger by varying the size, colour, and shape of the words" she wrote. ("Give Hester Thrale Piozzi emoji" is now an entry on my time-machine to-do list.) Thrale is overdue for a modern biography, preferably by a woman who wouldn't gloss over Thrale's decades of near-annual 'confinements' as minor inconveniences preventing her from answering Johnson's letters in a timely fashion, as Clifford tends to do ...
The word eutaxiological ('asserting that order must have a planned cause') is a new favorite because it seems hopeful, somehow? "Welp, things are moving along nicely, someone must have planned it this way! Not just a blip in the general chaotic entropy, no sir!"
I did try some pandemic bread baking for a while (mostly fig-walnut no-knead, not sourdough, I don't need any pet microbes, thank you) but these brownies are so good—fudgy, with chewy edges—that they have become my primary baking outlet. (Ignore the odd instructions to put a bowl in a shallow saucepan of simmering water and just use a double boiler, if you have one. Somehow every new recipe I've tried in Covid Times has had one head-scratcher of an instruction, and it's a toss-up as to whether ignoring it makes a discernible difference in the end result. In this case, it does not.)
Paul Ford has made the opposite of doomscrolling.
Did you know you can hang a hammock in a minivan?
"Epistolarity is lacking in the index (and, in fact, dictionaries), although used in the title of Janet Gurkin Altman’s book, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982) and in other studies and in Albrecht Classen’s claim that “epistolarity — a term which I coined myself for practical reasons — is the art of letter writing and the literary corpus of epistles” (Disputatio 1 [1996], 91). Here it is defined as the study of letter-writing subdivided into epistolography, the study of letters themselves, and epistolary theory, the study of letter-writing theory or dictamen." (From this review of a book I now want to read.)
Entertaining liars could, at one point, win a silver whetstone for the best lie.
Hoping you and yours are safe and well,
(Because everything is weird and terrible, this is late because it was flagged by an AI as suspicious. Evidently AIs hate Samuel Johnson and related topics?)
Once you realize that all the carrot varietal names in this USDA guide to types of carrots sound like Great Band Names, all the descriptions start to sound like music reviews: "Some European seedsmen, however, describe this as the smallest of all Nantes-type varieties, smaller even than Amsterdam Forcing."
This blog about whether a painting is, or is not, by Gauguin (and really about how art moves through the world, how artists work by themselves and with others, how we find these things out, and who gets to decide authenticity) is incredibly compelling. (I'm looking forward to the movie or the prestige tv series ...)
Clifford's biography of Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi is well worth the time, and not just because I learned that "it was her custom to indicate excitement or anger by varying the size, colour, and shape of the words" she wrote. ("Give Hester Thrale Piozzi emoji" is now an entry on my time-machine to-do list.) Thrale is overdue for a modern biography, preferably by a woman who wouldn't gloss over Thrale's decades of near-annual 'confinements' as minor inconveniences preventing her from answering Johnson's letters in a timely fashion, as Clifford tends to do ...
The word eutaxiological ('asserting that order must have a planned cause') is a new favorite because it seems hopeful, somehow? "Welp, things are moving along nicely, someone must have planned it this way! Not just a blip in the general chaotic entropy, no sir!"
I did try some pandemic bread baking for a while (mostly fig-walnut no-knead, not sourdough, I don't need any pet microbes, thank you) but these brownies are so good—fudgy, with chewy edges—that they have become my primary baking outlet. (Ignore the odd instructions to put a bowl in a shallow saucepan of simmering water and just use a double boiler, if you have one. Somehow every new recipe I've tried in Covid Times has had one head-scratcher of an instruction, and it's a toss-up as to whether ignoring it makes a discernible difference in the end result. In this case, it does not.)
Paul Ford has made the opposite of doomscrolling.
Did you know you can hang a hammock in a minivan?
"Epistolarity is lacking in the index (and, in fact, dictionaries), although used in the title of Janet Gurkin Altman’s book, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982) and in other studies and in Albrecht Classen’s claim that “epistolarity — a term which I coined myself for practical reasons — is the art of letter writing and the literary corpus of epistles” (Disputatio 1 [1996], 91). Here it is defined as the study of letter-writing subdivided into epistolography, the study of letters themselves, and epistolary theory, the study of letter-writing theory or dictamen." (From this review of a book I now want to read.)
Entertaining liars could, at one point, win a silver whetstone for the best lie.
Hoping you and yours are safe and well,
Your friend,
Erin
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