“This is not a letter”

Letters/not-letters from Katherine Mansfield (Letters of Note ).

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Phrase of the day: cacoëthes scribendi

I found it Jean Stafford’s Collected Stories (1969), in the “Author’s note,” where Stafford writes briefly of the two principal books of her childhood, one by her father, the other by a first cousin once removed. Stafford never read either book:

However, their titles influenced me when my cacoëthes scribendi set in and I wrote about twisters on the plains, stampedes when herds of longhorns were being driven up from the Panhandle to Dodge, and bloody incidents south of the border.

Merriam-Webster has it: “an uncontrollable urge to write.” Cacoëthes has an interesting past:

borrowed from Latin cacoēthes “malignant tumor at an early stage, disease of character,” borrowed from Greek kakóēthes “malignancy, wickedness,” noun derivative from neuter of kakoḗthēs “ill-disposed, malicious, (of things) abominable, (of tumors, fevers, etc.) malignant,” from kako- CACO- + -ēthēs, adjective derivative of êthos “custom, disposition, character” — more at ETHOS.

And there’s a note:

Use of the word in the sense “insatiable desire” is largely dependent on an oft-quoted line by the Roman satirist Juvenal: “tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes” (“the incurable disease of writing takes hold of many”).

The phrase appears in Juvenal’s seventh satire: “Tenet insanabile multos / Scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde senescit” [An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many, and grows old in their sick hearts].

Cacoëthes reminds me of other bad words: cacophony, of course, but also cacography (bad handwriting, bad spelling), cacology (bad diction or pronunciation), and kakistocracy (government by the worst people). Kakistos is the Greek superlative.

[Latin from The Perseus Project. English translation from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (2002).]

Griffy, Zippy, and NPR

“Th’ reassuring timbre of Mary Louise Kelly, th’ velvety tones of Steve Inskeep, th’ friendly chatter of Ari Shapiro, th’ lilting warmth of Audie Cornish”: Griffy and Zippy listen to NPR.

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A speech balloon on the move

[Nancy, February 1, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s (new) Nancy , one balloon is about to pop another.

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Word of the day: ekphrasis

The word of the day at Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is ekphrasis: “A description of or commentary on a work of visual art.”

I’ll borrow Merriam-Webster’s etymology:

borrowed from New Latin ecphrasis, borrowed from Greek ékphrasis “description,” from ekphrad-, stem of ekphrázein “to tell over, recount, describe” (from ek- EC- + phrázein “to point out, show, tell, explain,” of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS .

I recall sitting in an NEH seminar and being told that if one wanted to befuddle colleagues, all that was necessary was to speak the word ekphrasis. Well, maybe. I’m not so sure. At any rate, the idea of ekphrasis is hardly obscure. Think of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Or Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Or back to the beginning: Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield, which you might want to seek out on your own (Iliad 18).

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Art into words : Erasmus ekphrasis : Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures

“Tin yars in Versales, Mazura”

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

This novel, which began with overtones of Dickens and Proust, shifts to a Jamesian (Henry) manner with many touches of Austenesque satire.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors” : “Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells” : No Remington, Ticonderoga : “Flatteringly, like the dentist”

Melinda Wilson (1946–2024)

The New York Times obituary describes her as the person “who rescued her future husband, the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson, from psychological ruin when they were dating in the 1980s.”

Says Brian, on Instagram: “She was my savior.”

Kranmar’s Vision Pro

[Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, in The Honeymooners episode “The Man from Space,” first aired December 31, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

From the maker of Kranmar’s Delicious Mystery Appetizer comes an AR device for the rest of us:

[Click for a larger view.]

A related post
In there and out here

[Bus icons created by Freepik — Flaticon.]

In there and out here

“It’s an iPad for your face”: from Nilay Patel’s skeptical review of Apple’s Vision Pro (The Verge ).

I hadn’t planned on posting anything about the Vision Pro, but one sentence in Patel’s review prompted this post: “This is the best anyone has ever made in there look, and it’s still not nearly as good as out here.”

Readers of Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) will recall the novel’s ending, when Martin Dressler leaves his in there, the fever-dream of the Grand Cosmo, “a new concept in living,” for the world outside it. From the final paragraph:


Out here will always be better than in there.

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A kidhood mondegreen

A song popped into my head, I looked it up, and I found that I’d been hearing it wrong from kidhood.

The song: “In the Middle, in the Middle, in the Middle,” by Vic Mizzy. New Yorkers of a certain age will remember it from PSAs during kids’s TV programming. Here’s the song, as sung by Mizzy’s daughter Patty Keeler. (I’m unable to find the PSA itself.) There was another PSA with an instrumental version of the song. And there’s a more recent version of the song by They Might Be Giants, with Robin Goldwasser singing.

My mondegreen: “Keep your eyes to look out, keep your ears to hear.”

But the song says, “Teach your eyes to look out, teach your ears to hear.”

And a more minor mondegreen:

Me: “And wait, and wait, until you see the light turn green.”

The song: “And wait, and wait, until you’ve seen the light turn green.”

Well, I’m glad I got that straightened out.