And…we’re back! Did you miss us?
Welcome to the first issue of the new weekly(ish) edition of Katexic Clippings. After more than 300 issues and almost 300,000 clickety-clicks on our links it was time for a change. So here we are, complete with brand new website. I hope my absence made all your Clamoring hearts grow fonder.
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
—from Essays and Aphorisms (translated by R. J. Hollingdale)
tittle /TI-təl/. noun and verb. A point or mark used as a diacritical. For example the dot atop the lowercase ‘i’. In early horn-books, a series of dots (⋰) indicating an omission. More generally, the smallest part. Also to whisper or gossip (see tittle-tattle). From Latin titulus (title, or in the medieval sense a stroke or accent).
“Time on the farm is the time of the wide world, neither a jot nor a tittle more or less, Resolutely I beat down the blind, subjective time of the heart, with its spurts of excitement and drags of tedium…” (J. M. Coetzee)
“Some amusement was elicited in literary circles by the predicament of a woman who was delivered of a son old enough to be her father but it served to deflect Mr. Tracy not one tittle from his dispassionate quest for scientific truth. His acumen and pertinacity have, in fact, become legendary…” (Flann O’Brien)
“—But for heaven’s sake, let us not talk of quarts or gallons —let us take the story straight before us; it is so nice and intricate a one, it will scarce bear the transposition of a single tittle; and some how or other, you have got me thrust almost into the middle of it—” (Laurence Sterne)
“It is now I shall speak of me, for the first time. I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it.” (Samuel Beckett)
“…there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications.” (James Joyce)
My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard ← The clichéd description “searing expose” is fitting. Man’s inhumanity to man.
Step Inside the World’s Most Dangerous Garden (If You Dare) ← “…within Alnwick’s boundaries, kept behind black iron gates, is a place where visitors are explicitly told not to stop and smell the flowers: the Poison Garden, home to 100 infamous killers.”
I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything ← Way, way more interesting than I expected. [Via Reader C.]
I Tried a Medieval Diet, And I Didn’t Even Get That Drunk ← “I drank diluted wine at dinner, and sometimes at lunch; I ate bread at almost every meal; I sought out richly stewed meat whenever I could. The regimen was not just about what to eat, though, and I also followed its prescriptions for daily life.”
Analyzing the language of Heavy Metal with Natural Language Processing ← The least metal word? “Particularly.”
New Evidence on Van Gogh’s Ear… ← Now with contemporary medical sketches…
Today is the third International #Firgunday, in which participants share compliments and pride for others, mostly on social media. If you’re having trouble figuring out what to say, there’s a Firgunator that will help. According to the founders, “Firgun (pronounced FEER-GOON, פרגון), is a Hebrew word that means an act of kindness performed solely to make another person feel good.” Wikipedia says the word “describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other,” or “a generosity of spirit, an unselfish, empathetic joy.” I want every day to be #Firgunday.
Idem Paris - David Lynch’s short film on the art of making lithographs
Exit Mundi: A Collection of End-of-World Scenarios
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