I can look back and see that I’ve spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push “being kind” to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough—enough accomplishment, money, fame—my neuroses will disappear. I’ve been in this fog certainly since, at least, my own graduation day. Over the years I’ve felt: Kindness, sure—but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I’ll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It’s a cycle that can go on … well, forever.
—George Saunders
—from Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness
contretemps /KON-trə-ton/. noun. An awkward, embarrassing, difficult situation or disagreement. A minor disagreement. A clash. Originally a French fencing term contre-temps (an unfortunate accident, a mistimed motion), from Latin contra (against) + tempus (time).
“…so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous in this unhappy contretemps taken possession of his fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter…” (Thomas De Quincey)
“Except for a minor contretemps when Agnes caught the dog Gambol in the kitchen, trying to steal a capon, and chased him out into the hall, calling him names and brandishing a broom, the dinner was all it should be…” (Fiona Buckley)
“O Claribel, Claribel. No memory of her can elude for long our first contretemps. That is too bookish a word. Our wreck.” (Guy Davenport)
“Our little contretemps and my little rising tide have gone off together in a stout, chilly breeze. Good spirits are notoriously more fragile than bad.” (Richard Ford)
“It was as great a contretemps as she had feared. The priests showed the coldness natural in undertakers who had been summoned to a house where there was nobody even ill…” (Rebecca West)
Yaas! → America can thank Black Twitter for all those new words
Do You Even Bake, Bro? (subtitle: How the Silicon Valley set fell in love with sourdough and decided to disrupt the 6,000-year-old craft of making bread, one crumbshot at a time) is a fascinating article both on its face and because of its deep, neo-romantic assumptions about enjoyment and authenticity (and sometimes gender).
Centuries of Sound is “an attempt to produce an audio mix for every year of recorded sound. Starting with 1860, a mix is posted every month until we catch up with the present day. The scope is moreorless everything, music of course, but also speech and other sounds…”
Paper engineer and artist Matthew Shlian is back in Colossal with fabulous new paper sculptures || Previously: 2016 paper sculpture gallery & Geometric Paper Sculptures || See also: Paper Animation Film Fest 2018.
RIP Ricky Jay, the best close-up (and old-school, scholarly) magician ever. You can’t go wrong with this 1993 profile: Secrets of the Magus.
“Counterintuitively, the social justice stance on human evolution closely resembles that of the Catholic Church. The Catholic view of evolution generally accepts biological evolution for all organisms, yet holds that the human soul (however defined) had been specially created and thus has no evolutionary precursor. Similarly, the social justice view has no problem with evolutionary explanations for shaping the bodies and minds of all organisms both between and within a species regarding sex, yet insists that humans are special in that evolution has played no role in shaping observed sex-linked behavioral differences. Why the biological forces that shape all of life should be uniquely suspended for humans is unclear. What is clear is that both the Catholic Church and well-intentioned social justice activists are guilty of gerrymandering evolutionary biology to make humans special, and keep the universal acid at bay.” → The New Evolution Deniers (and the comments) perfectly illustrate the maddening paradox of Quillette.
I’ve said many times that Ear Hustle is one of the best podcasts/audio shows out there. It’s still true, so you should go listen. But the most current news is: co-host Earlonne Woods just had his sentence commuted!
“It seems to me, as just a layman and an amateur, that the internet is almost the perfect distillation of the American capitalist ethos, a flood of seductive choices.” → A new (to most of us) David Foster Wallace interview || See also: Maria Bustillos on coming to terms with the art, life and legacy of “damaged or criminal” artists like Wallace.
Meet Birds Aren’t Real, QAnon disinformation parody as performance art (I’m waiting for the Bards Aren’t Real parody of the Shakespeare deniers) || Previously, The Wizard of Q considered QAnon as a kind of sprawling new form of the novel.
Today in 1942, Enrico Fermi creates the first nuclear chain reaction, turning an abandoned squash court underneath the University of Chicago football stadium into “Chicago Pile–1 (CP–1),” a primitive nuclear reactor that generated a half-watt of power. The success of CP–1 lead directly to the production of enough plutonium to produce the atomic bombs that would end World War II and usher in the nuclear age and the ensuing Cold War.
Staying musical this week, thanks to Reader J. Yasmin Williams is a guitar prodigy in the style of Michael Hedges and Billy McLaughlin. In addition to ► GuitKa (guitar + kalimba) as seen above, Williams also ► brings in a cello bow with beautiful results. Listen also: ► “Restless Heart”…WOW.
► Little Potato is a documentary about “A Russian Mail-Order Bride and a Jaw-Dropping Twist.”
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? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day.
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: https://katexic.com/.
You just read issue #399 of katexic clippings. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.