WORK
“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”
—Wallace Stevens
—from Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
WORD(S)
escharotic /ES-kər-AH-tik/. adjective or noun. Generally, something that tends to form an eschar (a dry crust or scab). Or a drug or caustic substance that does the same. From French escharotique, from Greek escharōtikos, from escharoun (to form an eschar).
“And there’s some yellow gone past its bearings, all underside and protected curl. There’s a yellow sanctified. An escharotic. Hints and tangles.” (Lia Purpura)
“I noted once more how exceedingly thin, sallow and, as it were, escharotic or flaky the flesh of his left wrist and hand in the air appeared.” (David Foster Wallace)
“Lastly, it is widely felt that the remedies do not fit the ailment; that like an escharotic they would destroy sound tissue as well as diseased.” (Alonzo Taylor)
WEB
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“A Massive Crowdsourcing Project Is Digitizing Thousands of Coded Union Telegrams, and Unearthing Astonishing ‘Emails’” → Archiving the Civil War’s Text Messages. There’s more in Slate, including an example of a coded and decoded message. [Thanks, Reader C.!]
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Last summer we shared a bit about the Lituya Bay Megatsunami. Now, via Reader B., comes Damn Interesting’s fantastic story about that terrifying event.
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ListiClock tells time using “a BuzzFeed list for every second of every day.” Speaking of lists (and when aren’t I?), here’s a useful Wikipedia List of common false etymologies of English words. And a not-so-useful List of animals with fraudulent diplomas.
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Jealousy, a fake love letter and a cursing acrostic that fooled the boring biographer…this little gem of a story has it all.
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Novelist Mauro Javier Cardenas chooses 9 Novels with Really Long Sentences…and not (only) the usual suspects! I imagine you Clamorites could come up with more… [Thanks, Reader B. and Maybe-a-Reader M.]
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The Hidden Messages of Colonial Handwriting
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Katexic favorite Marian Call is touring the west coast (of the US). If you can’t make one of those dates, you can always listen to (and purchase) her music on Bandcamp. Bonus: Marian talks a bit about—and performs a few songs with—her typewriter “Madeleine” (named after Madeleine L’Engle).
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Courtesy of auto complete, play Google Feud.
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I can already hear the cries of “but it’s not art!” → Amalia Ulman—The First Great Instagram Artist Lives Many Fake Lives
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Today in 1897, poet and Robert Frost Medal award winner (his 1935 fisticuffs with Frost notwithstanding) Wallace Stevens is born in Reading, Pennsylvania. A Harvard graduate, Stevens spent most of his life working as an insurance company executive and composing, mostly late in life, the poems that would establish him as one of America’s greatest (and poorly imitated) poets and the bane of high school students everywhere, banging their heads against their thick literary anthologies, tormented by visions of jars, blackbirds, ►ice cream and ►the nothing that is.
WATCH/WITNESS
Mike Grier’s short film Dust “is set in a harsh and unpredictable natural environment where people have isolated themselves in an ancient city behind a massive wall. A socially marginalized tracker teams up with a black-market merchant to save the society that has rejected his way of life.”
WHAT!?
I have a bad case…. I bet you thought I was going to add a few views to the 37,000,000+ tallied so far by Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen didn’t you?
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader H. adds a bit about Faulkner, whose birthday we celebrated in the last issue: “Just a minor point. Faulkner had a brother, Bill or Tom who also wrote a novel.” — Indeed! William’s younger brother John wrote a few novels, some short stories and, just before his death, a memoir about he and his more famous sibling.
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Todd Klein objects: “Reader M cries [in a comment last week], ‘Todd Klein’s website is the worst!’ He or she is entitled to that opinion, but the comment is the worst kind of snarking because it is so general. Worst in what way? I might consider changes if I knew. Or not, but millions of views so far have not elicited any similar comment to me directly.”
I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.
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