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Katexic Clippings (ARCHIVE)

Withheld: September 13, 2020

Fires (because 2021 is a literal dumpster fire) ☡ 9/11 anything (because nearly 200k dead from Covid) ☡ 9/11 again (because no increase in unity, only racism) ☡ Florida felons (not) voting (because venality) ☡ Peter Thiel (because Peter Principle) ☡ Sturgis (because bikers for virus?)

Responses: September 13, 2020

from Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)

…the garden did not start out as metaphor. It started out as paradise. Then, as now, the garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food. It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses; it’s about winning, about providing society with superior things, and about proving that you have taste and good values and you work hard. And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.

—Anne Lamott
—found in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

funest

'Portent'

funest · /fju:ˈnɛst/ · /fyoo-NEST/. adjective. Causing or portending death or disaster. Catastrophic, calamitous, lamentable. From French funest, same meaning, from Latin fūnus (funeral, death). See also: funestal, funestous.

[Read more…]

Links: September 6, 2020

  1. Gregory Prescott’s portraits
  2. I practically never hype a book before reading it, much less before it’s been published, but this case deserves an exception. Allie Brosh, author of Hyperbole and a Half—the book and the blog, where two pieces appeared that I’ve written about before because they changed my life (Adventures in Depression and Depression Part Two)—has a new book coming out. This is fantastic news in its own right, but also because it confirms that Allie is out there and still writing, after dropping out of sight for nearly seven years! → Solutions and Other Problems.
  3. “Each year, some choose to ‘disappear’ and abandon their lives, jobs, homes and families. In Japan, there are companies that can help those looking to escape into thin air.” → The companies that help people vanish ※ Based on this video.
  4. Van Gogh, Jesus Christ, Napoleon…and Lady Liberty? → bas uterwijk uses AI to create portraits of famous historical figures
  5. The Oxford English Dictionary labs have released a new tool that takes texts of up to 500 words and visualizes the words’ origins, date of first usage and etymology. Fascinating (and fast)! → OED Text Visualizer Thanks, Reader B!
  6. Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles
  7. Never Say Wolf: How taboo language turned the wolf into a monster.
  8. This week’s curiosity cluster → For the Love of Mail: Letter Writing in a Pandemic ※ WhatsApp is fun, but nothing beats the inky, intimate thrill of a letter ※ We love their books but these letters between writers and editors showcase a dying art form ※ RealSnailMail ※ China combats ‘seven year itch’ with love letter service ※ A Letter Is In Fact the Only Device for Combining Solitude and Good Company | Quote Investigator
  9. Accumulation and its discontents
  10. Today in 1916, the first self-service grocery store (in the US, anyway), a Piggly Wiggly, is founded in Memphis, Tennessee. In addition to being the first true self-service grocery, they were also the first, for obvious reasons, to mark all individual items with prices, and invented shopping carts and checkout stands.
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