"I dig Strauss and Wagner, those cats are good, and I think they are going to form the background of my music. Floating in the sky above it will be the blues – I’ve still got plenty of blues – and then there will be western sky music and sweet opium music (you’ll have to bring your own opium!), and these will be mixed together to form one. And with this music we will paint pictures of earth and space, so that the listener can be taken somewhere. You have to give people something to dream on.
The moment I feel that I don’t have anything more to give musically, that’s when I won’t be found on this planet, unless I have a wife and children, because if I don’t have anything to communicate through my music, then there is nothing for me to live for. I’m not sure I will live to be 28 years old, but then again, so many beautiful things have happened to me in the last three years. The world owes me nothing."
—Jimi Hendrix
—from Starting at Zero: His Own Story
engastration /en-ga-STRAY-shən/. noun. A method of cooking in which one animal is stuffed inside the other, most often fowl-in-fowl. The most famous example is the turducken (a deboned chicken stuff inside a deboned duck which is stuffed inside a turkey), but there are many variations including the Pandora’s Cushion (a goose stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a quail), gooducken (goose stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken) and the turbacon which is made of “a 20-pound pig with an 8-pound turkey, a 6-pound duck, a 4-pound chicken, a Cornish game hen, a quail, lots of bacon, 6 pounds of butter and a splash of Dr Pepper.” Sign me up.
“Upon particular occasions, a wild boar used to be dressed whole and stuffed with all kinds of animals, one within another; this dish was called the Trojan Horse […] The passion for engastration seems to have had its admirers in all ages.” (The School for Good Living)
“…if there is any philosophic engastration, it may be the geometric discourse that contains the metaphoric one by making it possible and by lending meaning to its terms.” (James Elkins)
“The cherpumple [a three-layer cake with cherry, pumpkin and apple pies baked in] is a sweet variation on engastration…” (Josh Friedland)
“Not satisfied with merely cramming creatures into one another for the consumption of their masters and mistresses by means of what is now known as ‘engastration’, Tudor cooks can also be credited with physically combining animals for their feasts by a process of culinary grafting. Perhaps the most famous example of such mind-boggling creativity is the so-called ‘cockentrice’, which was produced by sewing a pig’s upper body on to the bottom half of a capon or turkey.”
The 2106 Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio, improved this year by “(i) including a larger number of words; (ii) involving a broader range of minority groups as participants; and (iii) considering potentially offensive gestures for the first time,” is fun and fascinating reading. See the full report (PDF) or the handy Quick Reference guide (PDF).
National Novel Generation Month always yields some ingenious results, but Liz Daly’s Blackout may be the best yet. Using Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as its source, Daly’s program created the short book of blackout/erasure poems The Days Left Foreboding and Water. Previously in Katexic Clippings: Daly’s 2014 NaNoGenMo project.
I have this Jabberwocky Diagrammed poster on my office wall. The oddly diminutive diagram of a sentence from Infinite Jest might make a nice companion piece.
“For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans […] the sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes.” → The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz.
Fascinating look at mining data from maps based on how they’ve changed over time. → He Collected 12,000 Road Maps—Now We’re Discovering Their Secrets.
Time Magazine selects The Most Influential Images of All Time.
Need a gift for your hard-to-please friend concerned about preserving our languages for our eventual alien overlords? The limited, numbered edition Wearable Rosetta Disk is just $1000. See also: a short video on the making of the wearable disk.
“One researcher the book cites clocks inner speech at an average pace of 4,000 words per minute—10 times faster than verbal speech. And it’s often more condensed—we don’t have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know what we mean.” » Fascinating stuff in the Atlantic article “The Running Conversation in Your Head: What a close study of ‘inner speech’ reveals about why humans talk to themselves”.
Today in 1942, James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix is born in Seattle, Washington, USA. Caught joyriding and forced, at 19, to choose between prison or the Army, Hendrix chose the latter, becoming a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) before being honorably discharged as “unsuitable” just over a year later. Though he would die of an accidental overdose just eight years later, in that short time Hendrix would become one of the most influential and celebrated rock guitarists of all time, using the wah-wah pedal, distortion, feedback and the “piano style” of holding a bass note with his thumb while playing the melody (aided by his use of right-handed guitars turned upside down and restrung for left-hand playing) in new ways that would influence every succeeding generation, not to mention establishing himself as a premier instrumentalist in a part of music that was still almost exclusively populated by white men. Some classic listening: ►“The Star Spangled Banner” and ►“Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” both at Woodstock, 1969; an ►acoustic version of "Hear My Train A Comin’; the ►album version of “Hey Joe”. Some tasty but less well-known cuts: ►Jimi with Curtis Knight and The Squires, “Gloomy Monday”; ►Lonnie Youngblood and Jimi, “Goodbye Bessie Mae”; ►Little Richard and Jimi, “Hound Dog” (just for fun).
OK Go has created another ►stunning video. I can hardly imagine the planning that went into the timing of this 4.2 seconds of physical, explosive effects. Check out the ►behind the scenes video. Mindboggling.
►Underwater Flatulence in 120 Fps kind of—umm—speaks?—for itself.
Reader B. muses: “cicurate…. said aloud, it sounds like a weird interzone between secure (security) and curate.”
Reader K. shares: “Clamorites that enjoyed the story of Roald Dahl’s Zone-ish tv show will enjoy Atlas Obscura’s recent article with even more on the story”
Reader J. writes: “Enjoying reading what you clip. Enjoying thinking about other things, again. Motherhood is a blast, but it sucks the life out of everything for at least a little while.”
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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