“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”
—Oscar Wilde
—from The Picture of Dorian Gray
fustian /FUS-chən/. adjective or noun. A pompous, bombastic style of writing or speaking. Also, a coarse family of twilled fabric that includes moleskin, velveteen and corduroy. From Old French fustaigne, from Medieval Latin fustaneum (staff, stick, cudgel), a loaned translation of Greek xulinos (made of cotton).
“He could remember how he had once stood on the heath and put that same brass telescope to his eye and seen a man in white fustian on the gallows at Dorchester.” (Virginia Woolf)
“Yashar Kemal’s most recently translated novel comes through the language barrier disconcertingly like a sword-and-sorcery romance. Not only the style, with its magic touch of fustian (‘I am Gazele, the gazelle-eyed, take my eyes, they are yours’) but the content suggests a picturesque never-never world.” (Angela Carter)
“Lest I should think the tailoring business lacked poetry he dazzled me with a recitation of fabrics — bombazine, brocade, calico, dimity, duck, flannelette, fustian, muslin, sateen, velveteen.” (Beryl Bainbridge)
“Betjeman stuck with the more fustian [publishing] house of John Murray because, as a cultural conservationist dedicated to the preservation of a vanishing England, he didn’t want his books to look modern at all. He didn’t want a front cover showing nothing but a typeface: he wanted little drawings of herbaceous festoons and time-honoured architectural doodahs…” (Clive James)
“Although Burton disclaims ”big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Alcestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit … elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies etc. which many so much affect,“ he employs all of these devices in a great phantasmagoria of prose. It is an opéra bou fe of paraphrase and quotation…” (Peter Ackroyd)
“136 recipes over 12 chapters, specially illustrated by Dali, and organized by meal courses, including aphrodisiacs.” → Salvador Dali’s Rare Surrealist Cookbook Republished for the First Time in over 40 Years. Thanks, Reader M.!
The fascinating history of movable type in China…400 years before Gutenberg. → Johannes Gutenberg was not the father of printing so much as its midwife
For those of us who don’t have $625 to spare (or $300 for a used copy), behold Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online. Headword search, definitions and etymologies are free, advanced search tools (including the ability to search for words by meaning, history, and usage), full historical citations in each entry, and a bibliography of over 9,000 slang sources for $60 per year. See also: an interview with Green on Wordnik and the Quartz story “This man has spent 35 years compiling entries for a 132,000-word online slang dictionary that you can search for free.”
I’m revealing one aspect of my peculiar nerdery here, but…you might enjoy Your Postal Podcast, “a monthly podcast highlighting USPS news, events and activities.”
In Cinephilia & Beyond—an epically good site that I can’t believe I’d never come across before—a jaw-droppingly great piece on the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Via Reader A.
Driverless cars are colliding with the creepy Trolley Problem. An old article, but—as it always does—the famous Trolley Problem get me thinking. Then a Facebook friend reminded me of the wonderful video series ► Justice with Michael Sandel that delves into this and many other philosophical conundrums. See also: the Justice web site including community discussion forums that one can hope are better than the YouTube comments.
Today in 1854, playwright, poet, novelist, essayist Oscar Wilde is born in Dublin, Ireland. Known for his sharp wit—fairly characterized as both razor and rapier—Wilde authored required reading for page and stage, most famously The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, along with a seemingly endless stream of epigrams and one-liners. Not one to shy away from controversy, Wilde would attempt to sue the wife of a homosexual lover for libel only to see the evidence her side dug up used against him. Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for “gross indecency,” an experience from which he never really recovered, though it inspired two more important works, “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, written from self-imposed exile in France. Wilde would die destitute in a Paris hotel at just age 46, saying on one of his last forays outside of his room, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” For more on Wilde’s life, I highly recommend Richard Ellmann’s unsurpassed biography.
XKCD: Fashion Police & Grammar Police
► Schwarzwälder Schinken — Genuss auf meine Art!
Reader S.: “Am I the only person blushing over trying to need umop apisdn upside down on an iPad?” — Only if you rotated your iPad more than, say, twice…
Reader B.: “Bravo for another fine one!” — Why, thank you, fine sir!
Reader J.: “I don’t think Chaudhury has watched enough television to really know what he’s talking about (this, if it’s an insult, is certainly a lightweight one). There are great word-and-syntax spinners/twisters on the tube, and even (though rarely, and usually Tilda Swinton) in the movies, and it’s not always ironic. Check Deadwood—you’ll die bingeing!”
Also from Reader J.: "By the way, I’m not sure if you’ve ever covered this, but (as I’m sure you know), Hartford celebrates the ‘Wallace Stevens Walk’ (the route he took to work every day) with a series of marble pieces on each of which is engraved one of the thirteen ways. When I was up there last summer I’d just stopped at the Dickinson house in Amherst, then the Twain and Stowe houses in Hartford, and capped it off by attempting the Stevens Walk, taking photographs of the stone as we proceeded. (Only ‘attempted’ because my girlfriend’s sneaker came apart on stone 7, or was it 8? I suspect that, weary of holding the foliage back so that I could take three shots [always bracket!] of the rocks, she ripped up her own shoe.) ¶ In any case, at about that time I realized that there must be loads of such photos on the web, and I was right. Anyone who wishes can look up ‘Wallace Stevens Walk’ and see what a verse of ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ looks like hammered into a chunk of marble. ¶ And for anyone too lazy to google, here’s one of my own:
I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.
Enjoy the WORK section? Check out my other little project: concīs » http://concis.io/
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/.
You just read issue #318 of katexic clippings. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.