twitterpation

Predawn birdsong for some reason seems to peal with far more volume in the city than at home in the forest, and was noticing this fact on this dark December morn, also recalling how I’d read somewhere that more animals were becoming nocturnal to avoid human, so perhaps in the woods, our feathered friends aren’t compelled to be such early-risers, nor have they taken to our bird-feeders. So this latter sentiment from Victorian poet Oliver Herford (*1860 – †1935, born on the day that the referring article was published) coupled with the fact that ornithologists do not really know why birds sing during the winter with mating season so far off—both courtesy of Better Living through Beowulf—resonated with us as a reminder that the cold, dim days don’t last forever: 

I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember. 

“We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,”
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.

bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag

Via Everlasting Blört, we directed to another old friend’s find in this menacingly brilliant rhythmic rendition of the Villon Song by Stick in the Wheel, a recitation of the late Victorian poet and literary critic William Ernest Henley’s—best-known for his 1875 “Invictus” and being the peg-legged inspiration for the character Long John Silver of Treasure Island—translation, interpretation of fifteenth century Françoise Villon “Tout aux taverns et aux filles”—Villon’s Straight Tip to All Cross Coves. Henley is here represented by a bronze bust of him executed by sculptor August Rodin in 1868.

зáумь

Invented in 1913 by radical futurist Aleksei Yeliseyevick Kruchyonykh (*1886 – †1968) with literati contemporaries including David Burliuk and Vladimir Mayakovsky (see previously), the non-referential linguistic experiment zaum was to be a demonstration that language is indefinite and indeterminate, spontaneous and non-codified—something that the listener or interlocutor would give form to and thus revealing something about the universal undercurrents of communication. Though transrational in nature, the Russian prefix and noun are meant to convey “beyondsense” and adherents are referred to as zaumiks. Listen to examples recited at Weird Universe at the link above, including Kruchyonykh’s poem here pictured—Дыр бул щыл, transliterated as Dyr bul shchyl, which the author claimed was more patriotic and nationally insightful than the entire canon of Alexander Pushkin.

twinkle, twinkle

We are treated to an albeit abridged but nonetheless thoroughgoing history of the asterisk from Keith Houston’s Shady Characters, beginning with a frustrated librarian of Alexandria called Zenodotus who was determined to make a version of the epics of Homer as close to their original form as possible before centuries of editing, commentary and poetic license had turned the text into the unruly document that Zenodotus and colleagues were now heir to. In order to pare down the Iliad and the Odyssey, Zenodotus devised tracked-changes and version control, first introducing a range of proofreading or editor’s marks, to begin with a dash (—) in the margins to indicate a line to be excised, later named the obelos—that is, a roasting-spit. 

Having left us the literary legacy of dividing the poems into books, glosses of unusual words, a form of labelling and alphabetical indexing so scrolls did not need enrolling to know the contents, many duplicate verses obelised and a calculation of the time that passes in the course of the war and homecoming, a century later, grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace took up the mantle of Homeric scholarship and stewardship and expanded the vocabulary of the critical symbols, with his asteriskos—little star and not to be confused with the asterism, to signal duplicate lines or something appearing elsewhere. With the conditional, footnoted sense developing over the millennia, the subtext was that for a a line with an * attached, there was more to the story. Other marks in the system which also indicated punctuation, breath and pronunciation, the sigma and antisigma (Ϲ, Ͻ) for what’s interchangeable, a dotted diple (>·) or an asteriskos/obelos combination to indicate an editorial disagreement and spurious authenticity. Our comic Gallic heroes are of course named in reference to these annotations. Much more to explore at the link up top.

ultima thule

Via Strange Company, we learn that on this in 1848, Edgar Allen Poe sat for a daguerreotype portrait with the vernacular caption above in a studio in Providence in the state of Rhode Island. From the Latin designation for the extreme limits of exploration and travel, the term comes from Poe’s poem Dream-Land: 

I have reached these lands but newly 

From an ultimate dim Thule— 

From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime 

Out of Space—out of Time 

This title was coined by spiritualist and romantic interest of Poe, Sarah Helen Whitman, whom had met three years prior through shared interests.

woad and madder

Courtesy of The Morning News and having only dared to ventured out to where the freshly-turned fields begin to remark on these colour-coordinated trees and their turning leaves, we quite appreciated this reflection on russet—the colour of peasants, foxes pelts and penance. 

In addition to the earthy and autumnal hues, in this thorough-going essay that explores the emergent colour—where the reds of blood, fire and ochre of the Caves of Lascaux and here in the dark ruddy-orange tinge of it—through fashion, poetry and sentiment—Biron from Love’s Labour’s Lost yearning for expression “in russet yeas and honest kersey [course woollen cloth] noes” and even Oliver Cromwell preferring a “plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows over that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.” And if the author’s column rings familiar in hue and cry—it’s the happy continuation of these previous instalments of colour stories.

6x6

like a version: a brilliant cover of the 1998 Massive Attack hit Teardrop 

the goldilocks paradox: a preliminary survey of superhabitable exoplanets understood to be far more stable and conduscive to life as we know it  

smudge, sharpen, blur: an exhibit that encourages visitors to adjust levels for masterpieces 

 travis touchdown: paparazzi in Croatia snapped a few pictures of Nicolas Cage in costume filming his upcoming The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent  

all mimsy were yᵉ borogoves: an animated reading of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky—illustrating how the reader makes meaning for nonsense words  

sign o’ the times: a review of the Super Deluxe release of Prince’s (previously) 1987 masterpiece

to live alone in the bee-loud glade

Via Kottke, these superlative entries in the macro category for International Garden Photographer of the Year commended us to one recent snapshot that brought to mind William Butler Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree. What pictures from your garden are you keen to share? Explore an expansive gallery of many more superb and patient, intimate snapshots at the links up top. 

bredlik

As our artificial intelligencer Janelle Shane (previously) recalls to mind, circa 2016 there was a genre of verse introduced by Sam Garland on observing a cow licking loaves of bread in an unattended bakery and framing the poem from the frame of said cow that enjoyed a memetic moment:

my name is Cow,
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon is shiyning brite,
and all the men haf gon to bed – I stay up late.
I lik the bred.

We had forgotten but just as well as Shane was waiting for the internet attention the style was getting had virtually faded away before training her neural network on the subject to see what it would expound on in the same meter (and the same non-standard Middle English spelling) without undue outside influence. Seeding it with three word prompts (e.g., cow, lick, bread), the neural network created some noble rhymes.

you’re not supposed to hear me—that’s a soliloquy

Delightfully LitHub delivers forty adaptations of Hamlet, ranging from anthropomorphic Christian produce, a Monsterpiece Theatre production to Maximilian Schell’s 1961 eponymous presentation spoofed by MST3K in 1999 or Derek Jacobi in the title role on Frasier and Ethan Hawke in Hamlet 2000, ranked for your consideration.  We especially liked the unique performance of Fleabag priest Andrew Scott, clocking in at number eight.  Which tropes and interpretations do you think have particularly aged well?

barrister, broker, billiard-maker

The classic of ostensibly children’s literature that contained the imaginative, nonsensical poetic interlude The Hunting of the Snark was original penned by Lewis Carroll in 1876 but was not in print in Russia until 1991—authorities having perhaps detected a subversive undertone to the rich allegory—
and is presently receiving a new treatment by Berlin-based illustrator Igor Oleinikov to project the “Agony in Eight Fits” through the lens of despotism and disaster with uniformed and besuited men leading the expedition. The illustrator that Carroll commissioned himself, Henry Holiday (*1839 – †1927, back cover shown, the Boojum, being highly dangerous and another made-up word, is the Snark’s true nature and will make the hunter “softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met again”), for his initial publication also considered the poem a tragedy and full of existential angst and has been the topic of much academic analysis, deconstruction and debate, inspiring a great deal of other homages despite the author’s warning not read too much into it.

clientes com distúrbios e atrasos na fala

The latest instalment of This American Life had a particular resonant first act that really lingered and prodded in ways that I was not quite expecting.  Composer and musician Jerome Ellis became a joyful rule-breaker for a captivated audience and gave with his performance piece a real object lesson on the reasonable accommodation of time and pacing that most of us don’t spare a thought for lest we’re able to indulge our impatience and cast aspersions on others for being too slow.
Introduced by way of a Brazilian law that provides a half-price relief for mobile subscribers who are diagnosed with a speech impediment—a severe stutter like Ellis has, the state government tried to make allowances for the normalised and preferred fluency that none of us has by degrees. While I don’t exactly stammer and don’t pretend to come from the same place experientially, I felt I could relate by getting annoyed when one supplies (or tries to) the elusive word too quickly or finishes my sentences for me—and I know it’s just meant as a kindness whether in English or in my non-native German when I struggle, which is usually—and then not knowing if it’s worth the effort to finish one’s thought and growing by degrees a bit more taciturn. Our temporal expectations can be impositions just like any other but also an opportunity for exchange.

artistique apparu

Having later significant influence on contemporaries like Edward Hopper, born this day in 1881 (†1946) Léon Spilliaert, graphic artist and Symbolist painter, spent his formative years sketching the Belgian countryside. The autodidact was able to ply his talents as a career and was commissioned to illustrate anthologies of short-fiction in a Brussels journal that published writers in the same genre, which channelled the gothic components from Romanticism and Impressionism to form a distinct visual and poetic movement in France, Belgium and Russia. Before moving on to executing his own works with studies in landscapes, coastal scenes and brooding dreamscapes Spilliaert especially enjoyed illustrating the works of the representative writers of the movement, Paul Verlaine and Edgar Allan Poe.

7x7

you gotta eat them plums: an arcade version of William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say” (see previously)—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links

op art: more on the Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely (see previously, born Győző Vásárhelyi, *1906 – †1997) whose work informed the movement

earth for scale: ESA solar probe finds new “campfire” phenomena on the Sun

manhatta: a 1921 short considered America’s first avant-garde experiment set to the verse of Walt Whitman

slob serif: awful typefaces (not this one) for awful protests—via Memo of the Air

primary pigments: more colour stories (see also) from Public Domain Review

hasta la pasta: the history behind linguini, fusilli and every variety in between

the inauguration of the pleasure dome

Via Weird Universe we are acquainted with the portfolio and curriculum vitæ thus far of underground filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger (*1923) whose anthology of short works explore Thelema and its adherents through his eponymous 1954 (remastered in 1966 for 1978 for wider audiences as Anger’s original concept included projecting the action on three screens simultaneously) through the cinematic filters of surrealism, the occult and homoeroticism.
Playing the goddess of magic Hecate himself, the short also stars Anaïs Nin as Astarte (Ishtar) and fellow director and pioneer of New Queer Cinema Curtis Harrington (*1926 – †2007, whose credits include numerous television series—Baretta, Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels and also Orson Welles’ unfinished The Other Side of the Wind) was in the role of Cesare, the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and was inspired by the ritual fancy-dress parties that founder Aleister Crowley would host that invited guests to come as their madness and a recitation of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s atmospheric poem. More to explore at the links above.

someday i’ll have a disappearing hairline, someday i’ll wear pajamas in the daytime

Released this month in 1994, Crash Test Dummies’ “Afternoons and Coffeespoons,” the third single from the album God Shuffled His Feet (the cover art is Titian’s 1523 Bacchus and Ariadne with band members faces on the figures) considered to be the most popular song according to the alternative rock band’s fanbase and was among the highest charting in their repetoire references the 1915 T. S. Eliot verse “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. This interior monologue of reflection and lament on estrangement, isolation and disillusioning realisation of morality resounding in both works takes on an especially resonant meaning in the latter musical tribute in these times.

Maybe if I could do a play-by-playback
I could change the test results that
I will get back
I’ve watched the summer evenings pass by
I’ve heard the rattle in my bronchi…

6x6

why that’s a perfectly cromulent word: neologisms coined, defined and used in a sentence by a machine learning algorithm—via Things magazine

elrodon, son of halcyon: anti-depressant (see also) or Tolkien character—via Super Punch

your perfectly creased coordinated casuals: Kristen Wiig reads the early work of Suzanne Somers—via Nag on the Lake

specious logic: Trump argues against testing and tracing

howards end: E. M. Forster’s prescient 1909 sci-fi foray “The Machine Stops”

the floor is haunted: responsibly confined to our own living rooms, AI Weirdness (previously) imagines escape rooms

unnamed

Synonymous with anonymous and from the Greek ἀδέσποτος—that is, without a master or owner, adespota is used in classical scholarship as a collective term to cover writings that were not attributed to any particular author, especially epigrams taken from plaques and monuments whose provenance and history was lost when they were anthologised.
The related German borrowing for use primarily in the context of art history rather than written work is Notname—not a not-name a bit confusingly like a Notausgang on an exterior door isn’t No Exit but rather Emergency Exit—is a contingency or convenience name given to the portfolio of an artist or their school whose true identity is unknown—such as the Master of the Embroidered Foliage or the Berliner Maler.

chronogram

As much as these days can seem rather untethered, time still marches forward and Messy Nessy Chic brings us a thought-provoking survey of some of the myriad ways that civilisation has tried to regulate and legislate the cycles of the Sun and Moon.
One will encounter some of the earliest attempts to figure human reckoning, superstition and experience with cosmology and the progression of the seasons—and whether indeed time’s arrow isn’t a flat circle that brings everything around again, to efforts to install decimal time (or at least one that followed more regular rules) and the French Revolutionary Calendar plus other ways of resetting the clock. A chronogram, incidentally, is a headstone, plaque or commemoration that one sometimes encounters with those seemingly random capitalised or illuminated letters, like in the more straightforward epitaph for Elizabeth I of England: My Day Closed Is In Immortality—or, MDCIII corresponding to 1603, the year of her death or in lengthier passages called chronosticha on buildings that relate a parable and record when construction was completed.

ffont ffamily

A commission from the Welsh government has netted a sleek, unifying typeface for its public services and signage that reflects Cymraeg and its unique orthographic characteristics (see also) with its range of diagraphs expressed in dedicated ligatures based on the textura of the country’s oldest manuscripts including the thirteenth century epic The Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest) that recounts the heroic cycle of poems of Llywarch Hen and the struggle against the incursion of the Anglo-Saxons in the Mabinogion, the earliest collection of prose of the British isles, and The Black Book of Carmarthen (Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, both distinguished by their location and the colour of their vellum bindings) that addresses various subjects including the Arthurian legend and Merlin (Myrddin).