Friday Links

1. Exactly what it says: 251 words you can spell with a calculator. (Bilge! Geologies! Illegible!)

 

2. Cool breakdown/data visualization of how Rolling Stone‘s “Top 100 Album” lists have changed over time/with different voters.

 

3. In defense of mindless entertainment after dinner, from Donald Hall:

“Try to forgive my comparisons, but before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book. Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk. Sometimes it is Zane Grey, sometimes Agatha Christie, sometimes the Red Sox.”

Wednesday Story

I just started reading a short story from A.S. Byatt, which appeared in The Paris Review thirty (!) years ago and then made it into a short story collection: “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” You can read the beginning of it here, in The Paris Review, and oh it’s a good time–dense and rich and wandering.

This description of the “narratologist” heroine!

Her ancestresses, about whom she thought increasingly often, would probably have been dead by the age she had reached. Dead in childbed, dead of influ­enza, or tuberculosis, or puerperal fever, or simple exhaustion, dead, as she travelled back in time, from worn-out unavailing teeth, from cracked kneecaps, from hunger, from lions, tigers, sabre-toothed tigers, invading aliens, floods, fires, religious persecution, human sacrifice, why not? Certain female narra­tologists talked with pleasurable awe about wise crones but she was no crone, she was an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power, who flew, who slept in luxurious sheets around the world, who gazed out at the white fields under the sun by day and the brightly turning stars by night as she floated redundant.

I mean, damn: “She was no crone, she was an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power…”

From 1953

Well well well, if it isn’t Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye sneaking in some social criticism that feels even more relevant 60 years later:

There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks. Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn’t, on account of it cut into their profits. Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system. Maybe it’s the best we can get, but it still ain’t any Ivory Soap deal.

“Unexpected In April”

That’s the title of a chapter in The Long Winter, about yet another blizzard that comes to the prairie in April (after the blizzards started in October).

There’s four inches of snow on the ground as I write this and another foot predicted by tomorrow night, and wow do I feel Laura’s despair over seven months of winter:

There were no more lessons. There was nothing in the world but cold and dark and work and coarse brown bread and winds blowing…The winter had lasted so long. It would never end.

Things I Didn’t Learn In School

It took me 30 years to learn that Dr. King was a radical and I didn’t learn about the Poor People’s Campaign he organized before his assassination until this year. (It involved 3,000 people camping on the Washington Mall for 6 weeks! You’d think someone would have mentioned it!)

Anyway, here’s a quote from the man himself:

And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.

“Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat”

Despite all the work I’ve done on myself, despite trying to reframe creative endeavors as a process, not a binary, I realized I still expect myself to be able to do the new job perfectly after less than a month. Because it’s just writing! I should be able to do that, I’ve done it forever, it’s easy…except when it isn’t.

Austin Kleon linked this last week in his newsletter and it blew my mind. It’s from a book by Verlyn Klinkenborg, as blogged by Mandy Brown:

If you think that writing—the act of composition—should flow, and it doesn’t, what are you likely to feel?
Obstructed, defeated, inadequate, blocked, perhaps even stupid.
The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense, exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.

But if you accept that writing is hard work, and that’s what it feels like when you’re writing,
then everything is as it should be.
Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat.
It’s a sign of engagement.
The difference is all in your mind, but what a difference.

The River

We went up the canyon (as far as we could; the upper half still isn’t open) and did our Afternoon River Hang (TM) for the first time this summer. In my 41st year, I’ve realized that I really like the water? I’ve never been a strong swimmer but I realized that hanging out by a lake or a hot springs or getting into a river is all I’ve wanted to do for the last year.

I am, of course, going to quote The Wind in the Willows:

Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

 

A New Week

It’s  a new week and here are some words for it, from Sister Corita Kent.

It’s hard not to look at the date of this (40 years ago) and be discouraged at how far we still have to go to “share as equals” but… the crocuses have always come up.

 

Start Of Summer

It’s going to be hot all week but the weekend was just perfect: blue skies, big clouds, just the right intensity of sun. Bradbury-rereading weather for sure:

Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

(The opening of Dandelion Wine, the summer book)

The Long Isolation

If you’ve never read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, I think it would make good quarantine reading. They run out of fuel, they nearly run out of food (Almanzo saves them!), they can’t leave the house, there’s nothing to do, and near the end of the book everyone is so broken down they’re ready to give up.

But then! Good old Pa jumps up and shakes his fist at the blizzard howling outside the tar paper shack:

“It can’t beat us!” Pa said.
“Can’t it, Pa?” Laura asked stupidly.
“No,” said Pa. “It’s got to quit sometime and we don’t. It can’t lick us. We won’t give up.”
Then Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.

 

It’s got to quit sometime and we don’t. That’s right, friends.