mánasteinn

We always enjoy—albeit too often only vicariously and not as active readers who’ve done the assignment beforehand—listening to episodes of the BBC World Book Club and are usually drawn in, intrigued to add a new title to the pile, by a thoroughgoing discussion that some might call spoilers but strike me more as insights from the author. A recent instalment featuring poet, lyricist and novella-writer Sigurjón “Sjón” Birgir Sigurðsson, sometimes collaborator with The Sugarcubes and Björk and his now very timely 2013 work Mánasteinn: drengurinn sem aldrei var til (Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was) about identity, otherness and escapism through cinema in Reykjavík just as the nation is granted independence and the island is visited by the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. Visit the link up top to listen to the programme and learn what’s next on their reading list.

en attendant godot

The original French version of the play, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had its premiere performance on this day in 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, coming in translation to London’s West End two years later. Held as one of the most significant English-language theatrical pieces of the twentieth century, the tragicomedy extolling existential conundrums in the milieu of vaudeville in two acts follows the characters Vladimir and Estragon (see also) as they await the titular Godot, whom never arrives. The author grew weary and distracted by what he felt was over-analysis, declaring he had not imbued the play with deeper meaning, but later Beckett came to embrace these multiple readings and interpretations.

in the public interest

Untethered to a particular year (otherwise we’d be reluctant to dip our toes in the recent past), we enjoyed this piece from the New York Times Insider section—via Digg—as a final year-end list for 2020 of seventy-four favourite facts gleaned and cited in the articles that they came from—see also. It’s a fun read-through and we liked re-encountering the concept of “pants drunk” and Bayesian logic, and especially enjoyed learning the delightful fact that unique among their kind when “ants of the species Myrmecina graminicola encounter danger while on a slope, they tuck into a ball and roll away” and that the form of protest in Latin America that involves pot-banging (see also) is called cacerolazo—the Spanish word for casserole. Let us know your favourite new fact.

i just want to find eleven-thousand seven hundred and eighty votes

In an extraordinary hour-long phone call over the weekend reminiscent of Trump’s earlier attempt to persuade the Ukrainian government to smear his political opponent with defamatory material discovered or manufactured regarding his son, Trump pressured the Georgian secretary of state to apply a new calculus to their method for tabulating the vote and overturn the narrow but solid and multiple times reconfirmed win for Joe Biden whose ticket carried the state. This behaviour, inappropriate and contemptible, is a low point in American democracy and warrants a second impeachment before Trump sets a new nadir.

it is pitch black—you are likely to be eaten by a grue

Via Waxy, we learn that in homage to the first text-based version of the pioneering computer game Oregon Trail (see also) that began circulating—peer-to-peer—in the winter of 1971, Aaron A. Reed of Substack will be looking back at the past five decades of gaming and its evolution with an in depth retrospective year week for the coming year. Watch that space for new instalments. You have died of dysentery.

it befits the roman pontiff

Since in response to earlier threats from Leo X (previously) and repudiation of forty-one points put forward in his Ninety-Five Theses, Martin Luther burned his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine at the Elstertor in Wittenberg, the Pope issued his Decet Romanum Pontificem (the title taken from the first words of the text) on this day in 1521, excommunicating the religious reformer (see previously). The Catholic Church has not rescinded the excommunication, despite urging from Lutherans. 

 

schrifterlaß

On this day in 1941 in a directive circulated by head of the party chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann settled the long-standing Fraktur-Antiqua Dispute (see previously) by declaring the former “undesirable” and the latter Latin script influenced by printing and automation to be in align with the ideals of Nazism. Although a typographical debate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the blackletter and calligraphic typefaces coexisted. Originally seen as un-German when the Antiqua font came in after the 1806 dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and scholastically used for parsing Germanic tradition and terminology from foreign influences, supporters and proponents on both sides extolled the virtues of their preferred over the alternative, citing one was better for compact printing, higher legibility—did not contribute to myopia and blindness, more universal, less ornamental, and so on. Eventually these arguments began to carry ideological and political weight, with the Führer denouncing its continued use in 1934 in a speech before the Reichtag: “Your alleged Gothic internalisation does not find a place in this age of iron and steel, glass and concrete—of womanly beauty and manly strength—of headraised high with defiance…” The probable motivation for this edict was for ease in distributing propaganda material to countries being occupied and attacked in a typeface that the besieged were familiar with.

the seditious dozen

A group of Republican senators and senators-elect with the backing of the vice-president have announced plans to reject electors from states that are considered “suspect” for having voted wrongly—unless Congress commits to creating a commission to investigate their baseless claims of voter fraud.

Having failed to achieve any the desired outcome in the court system full of judges appointed by the Trump administration, the incumbents seem to hope that this treasonous band of sycophants can delay, belay the inevitable. In a normally anodyne ceremony, the senate convenes to ratify the ballots of the Electoral College on 6 January. The senate, which voted to acquit Trump of high crimes and misdemeanours after the House impeached him, feels that this dopey cos-play coup will likely fail because of Democrat control of congress and the likelihood of the GOP losing their thin majority of senate seats as well in the Georgia run-off election.