Things I learned while looking up other things, 2021.1.11
Dear friends,
First, because it needs to be said: the problem is white supremacy, and it's everywhere.
Googling the phrase "the luxury of attention" I was slightly dismayed by how many of my results were for funeral homes—nearly as many as for luxury hotels. (What is a funeral home, really, but a transient hotel for an extremely specialized clientele?) I am very conscious of how privileged I am, with regards to where I can spend my attention (and many other things). Thank you for being here and interested where I spend my attention.
Some of my attention has been spent lately on Dickinson—mostly the Apple+ show—and some (a very little) on the poet herself. I would not consider myself a devoted fan (once I learned that many of her poems can be sung to either The Yellow Rose of Texas or the theme to Gilligan's Island—your choice—it did tend to color my enjoyment), but the show is highly diverting. I've been trying not to read more about Emily Dickinson, mainly to avoid spoilers, but I did look up Edgar Allan Poe, which led me to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, which led me to this sentence: Forty days after her entombment, he entered her vault, cut off a lock of her hair, kissed her on the forehead and lips, and wept for several hours, staying by her side until a friend found him 30 hours later. (And that's not the MOST wtf?? thing Griswold ever did!)
Some small things that amused me this past month:
First, because it needs to be said: the problem is white supremacy, and it's everywhere.
Googling the phrase "the luxury of attention" I was slightly dismayed by how many of my results were for funeral homes—nearly as many as for luxury hotels. (What is a funeral home, really, but a transient hotel for an extremely specialized clientele?) I am very conscious of how privileged I am, with regards to where I can spend my attention (and many other things). Thank you for being here and interested where I spend my attention.
Some of my attention has been spent lately on Dickinson—mostly the Apple+ show—and some (a very little) on the poet herself. I would not consider myself a devoted fan (once I learned that many of her poems can be sung to either The Yellow Rose of Texas or the theme to Gilligan's Island—your choice—it did tend to color my enjoyment), but the show is highly diverting. I've been trying not to read more about Emily Dickinson, mainly to avoid spoilers, but I did look up Edgar Allan Poe, which led me to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, which led me to this sentence: Forty days after her entombment, he entered her vault, cut off a lock of her hair, kissed her on the forehead and lips, and wept for several hours, staying by her side until a friend found him 30 hours later. (And that's not the MOST wtf?? thing Griswold ever did!)
Some small things that amused me this past month:
- 12 (my favorite number) is the smallest abundant number (a number whose factors sum to more than itself). Abundant numbers are sometimes called excessive numbers, but that seems excessively judgmental to me.
- In the late 1980s, the UK sold all their desert camo (called DPM, for "disruptive pattern material") to the Iraqis. This became awkward when British troops began arriving for the first Gulf War.
- "GORP is a mindset, embodied at its most blessed by crunchy principles of human fellowship, ego death and interconnectedness with the natural world—principles that feed into each other in an INFINITELY ENNOBLING BLESSED-GORP-CONTINUUM a.k.a. the “GORPOBOROS”"
- "In philately, tête-bêche (French for "head-to-tail", lit. "head-to-head") is a joined pair of stamps in which one is upside-down in relation to the other, produced intentionally or accidentally."
- "The song’s refrain, a very jazzy “scooby-dooby-oo,” provided Distel with the title of his version—“Scoubidou”—which the French adopted as the name for the then-faddish plastic-thread craft known, in the U.S., as lanyard weaving."
And I'm all for using the right word, but I don't think this is the primary thing we should be taking away from conversations with coup experts: "Technically, the coup experts pointed out, if Trump did seize another term, the correct term would be autogolpe, not coup, since he would simply be an existing president extending his own rule, rather than an outsider overthrowing an incumbent."
Thanks for reading, friends. Stay well!
Yours,
Erin
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