Without coffee he could not work, or at least he could not have worked in the way he did. In addition to paper and pens he took with him everywhere as an indispensable article of equipment the coffee-machine, which was no less important to him than his little table or his white robe. He allowed nobody else to prepare his coffee, since nobody else would have prepared the stimulating poison in such strength and blackness. And just as in a sort of superstitious fetishism he would use only a particular kind of paper and a certain type of pen, so he mixed his coffee according to a special recipe, which has been recorded by one of his friends: “This coffee was composed of three different varieties of bean — Bourbon, Martinique, and Mocha. He bought the Bourbon in the rue de Montblanc, the Martinique in the rue des Vieilles Audriettes, and the Mocha in the Fauborg Saint-Germain from a dealer in the rue de l’Université, whose name I have forgotten though I repeatedly accompanied Balzac on his shopping expeditions. Each time it involved half-a-day’s journey right across Paris, but to Balzac good coffee was worth the trouble.”
—Stefan Zweig (translated by William and Dorothy Rose)
—found in Balzac
sprachgefühl /SHPRAW-khgə-fyuul/. noun. A feeling for language, particularly an intuitive understanding of when language usage is appropriate, effective and “right.” A sense and feel for language. From German sprache (language) + gefühl (feeling).
“Sprachgefühl is a slippery eel, the odd buzzing in your brain that tells you that ‘planting the lettuce’ and ‘planting misinformation’ are different uses of ‘plant,’ the eye twitch that tells you that ‘plans to demo the store’ refers not to a friendly instructional stroll on how to shop but to a little exuberance with a sledgehammer. Not everyone has sprachgefühl, and you don’t know if you are possessed of it until you are knee-deep in the English language, trying your best to navigate the mucky swamp of it. I use ‘possessed of’ advisedly: You will never have sprachgefühl, but rather sprachgefühl will have you, like a Teutonic imp that settles itself at the base of your skull and hammers at your head every time you read something like ‘crispy-fried rice’ on a menu.” (Kory Stamper)
“SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is this reviewer’s nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for ‘Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Ten-dance’ or ‘Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time’ depended on whether or not you were one.” (David Foster Wallace)
“…Sprachgefühl was no longer enough since words themselves pertained less to the senses or the body (as they had for Vico) and more to a sightless, imageless, and abstract realm ruled over by such hothouse formulations as race, mind, culture, and nation.” (Edward Said)
More than 100 of The Oldest Color Photos Showing What The World Looked Like 100 Years Ago. Seeing such old images in color still tickles some dissonance deep in my brain.
Some nice visualizations → Bias, She Wrote: The Gender Balance of The New York Times Best Seller list
“Facebook doesn’t want your money. It wants your time. ¶ minutiae is a response to our current moment: an anonymous anti-social media app that forces its users to document the in-between moments of life.” I kind of love this app. → minutiae: the anti social media app
A powerful photo essay → The Apple Pickers of the Yakima Valley
The Quiet Majesty of America’s Public Libraries :: Pairs with Millennials are the most likely generation of Americans to use public libraries.
“Whether divining ancient wisdoms or elevating the art of cold reading, tarot is a form of therapy, much like psychoanalysis” → The truth about tarot
“We analyzed 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts” → How Do You Draw a Circle?
Surprisingly interesting…and it seems so simple in hindsight: why are different eggs shaped the way they are? → Cracking the mystery of egg shape
The Hyperloop Will Be Only the Latest Innovation That’s Pretty Much a Series of Tubes
Today in 1876, General George Custer is killed in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In what would come to be known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” more than 250 U.S. soldiers would be killed in well under an hour by a combined force of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Though victorious, the battle was a turning point in a protracted conflict, marking the beginning of the end of the Indian Wars. Custer’s legacy has been, to put it lightly, mixed: for nearly a century Custer was seen as a heroic military figure who gave his life for the cause of his country; in recent decades assessment of his military strategy, not to mention his own conduct, has been greatly diminished.
In Fall, “a falling man finds peace in his fate.” But what about the rest of us?
I don’t know quite what to make of time for sushi, but it is mesmerizing. So are the prequels, going to the store and late for meeting.
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