For your timely WORDy pleasure, I dug through the archive and posted the most excellent and apt syzygy.
“How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.”
—Virginia Woolf
—from The Waves
tarantism /TAIR-ən-tiz-əm/. noun. A nervous disorder that causes uncontrollable bodily movement; an extreme, even uncontrollable, urge to dance. Derived from tarantula, whose bite was commonly thought to be the cause of the problem. From Latin Tarentum (a town in southern Italy), popularly associated with tarantola (tarantula). || See also: tarantella, a rapid whirling southern Italian dance.
“In Mediterranean countries, spiders are thought to be poisonous, and in Spain and southern Italy the memory of tarantism is still vivid. It was believed that a tarantula bite infected a person with a fatal disease, from which it was possible to recover only by dancing frantically.” (Primo Levi)
“Curvet and caracole are terms from horsemanship for complicated steps and turns. Perhaps Legrand’s type of erratic dance here alludes to tarantism…” (Benjamin Fisher)
“To cope with ‘tarantism,’ the name given to the disease that follows on the bite of the Italian Spider, you must have recourse to music, the only efficacious remedy…” (J. Henry Fabre)
“What could account so entirely for his ways and actions as that strange poisoning which produces the state they call Tarantism?” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)
“She may sing and cajole herself into hoarseness, she may smile and gesticulate herself into a mild sort of tarantism, or freeze herself at one end of the table into a statue of Suppressed Reproach…” (Kate Douglas Wiggin)
Shelf life: novelist Hanya Yanagihara on living with 12,000 books…in a one-bedroom NYC apartment.
From “1–11” to “Zog,” the Hate Symbols Database “provides an overview of many of the symbols most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and movements, as well as some other types of hate groups.”
Voices from the Days of Slavery collects nearly seven hours of recorded interviews with former slaves including their time as slaves, slaveholders, freedom and even sing some songs learned during their time as slaves. Remarkable. || Pairs with a fascinating episode of 99% Invisible on the “Dismal Swamp” which uses interviews and songs from the archive.
This 17th-century Jacobean traveling library is beautiful.
Scroll down for the graphs! → The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television: Increases in the Use of Swear Words in American Books, 1950–2008
Want to Transcribe Rare Magical Manuscripts on Your Lunch Break? Turn out, you can.
Ear Hustle is a pretty amazing podcast made by a pair of inmates in San Quentin State Prison.
And a bit of a feel-good link: Meet Dindim, the penguin who returns to his human soulmate every year. As in Dindim swims at least 3000 miles to return to the man who rescued him.
Today in 1741, Vitus Bering, a Danish cartographer and officer in the Russian Navy, sights the southern coast of what would become the US state of Alaska. Four months later, Bering would become one of the 31 to die on the ill-fated expedition that included the discovery of Kodiak Island. Bering’s sympathy for the native people, including those who murdered some of his crewmen, caused the Russian administration to suppress much of Bering’s story for more than a century. The Bering Sea, Bering Island and the Bering Land Bridge are among the sites named in his honor.
► Eclipses Throughout Our Universe
► disillusionment of 10 point font → “Animated on a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe typewriter” (just like one of mine).
Reader C.: “Is that a sinistral coil I see in the Ulysses glove project?”
Reader B.: “In the fascinating article, ~The 19th Century Moral Panic Over … Paper Technology~ it reads, ‘The letters had to be hand-placed in a matrix, coated with a special…’. This might be a casual description with no intent to mislead, but if one is to be exacting, it’s wrong. Letters are hand-placed into a composing stick and then the grouping of letters are placed into a chase. The ‘matrix’ was the secret to Gutenberg’s success. It was the way of casting letters so they would all be equal in height and base allowing for straight/even lines of text.”
Reader B.: “Again, from ~The 19th Century Moral Panic Over … Paper Technology~ we read, ‘The problem with wood-pulp paper was its acidity and short cellulose chains, which made it liable to slow dissolution over decades.’ This is true and books printed from about 1850 to 1950 are dissolving in front of our eyes, while much older books persist. However, the technology and chemistry of wood pulp paper has changed and there are those who would argue that high alpha cellulose paper has the archival qualities of rag paper. ¶ One of the early producers of this paper (1940s) was Mohawk Superfine. ¶ I would also point out that many papers today are made from sustainable tree growth. I think such papers have a long future, where as one wonders what happened to the paperless business model. You’d think there would be a reduction in paper use.”
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