What I really wanted to post about today was the progress made in yesterday’s mural workshop. But I spent the evening at the Partners In Education in Newark (PeNewark) Forum at Arts High on the role of arts and culture in education. It was one in a series of conversations the organization is conducting to try to determine the best use of the one hundred millions dollars Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave to the city’s schools. Now back home, I still have a number of things to do. [So] I will save the workshop report for another day and exploit one of my drafts to make short work of posting.
With this post I unveil two new categories: “What You Live With” and “In the dictionary this whole time.”
Both predate my blogging by many years in the form of filed (that is, actual paper) archives. “What you live with” is an archive of remarkably disturbing but not very serious (?) cultural expressions. These expressions are news items that briefly illuminate some overall trend which makes me anxious. I wouldn’t venture to characterize exactly what that trend is; suffice it to say I began the file when I had it in mind to rewrite MOBY DICK as a novel about a monomaniacal visual artist seeking doomed revenge on the leviathan of pop culture. (Clearly autobiographical.) Melville, in seeking to “comprehend the whale,” pursues the real creature from every imaginable angle. The result of his quest is a paean to the numinousness of all actuality. Something like this is intended by my amassed file of reports and details from media culture, of which the title of this post is butt my first example.
“In the dictionary this whole time” is a much less mysterious category. Every now and then a day comes along when I find I’m making multiple trips to the dictionary. The discovery of one word’s definition leads to questions about another’s and I read and read. (Friends better educated than myself chide me on this habit. In response I do my best to make sure some portion of my searching is done in an actual etymological dictionary.) Very often this question about another word’s definition involves the word immediately following the word I have looked up. In this inaugural instance of this category, the first word I pursued was “calligraphy.” Learning that “kallos” was Greek for “beauty” I read further to discover other “kallos” beginning words. And in that manner I learned a new word that sorts well with the title of this post.
Reading the dictionary has a noble tradition; your friends shouldn’t chide you. Reading the dictionary is how Malcolm X educated himself. I don’t know if he had a nice butt or not, though.
Hey, I thought I replied to this last week. Thanks for coming to my defense. I have no doubt Malcolm X had a nice butt. Recently I just heard for the first time a whole speech of his — not just a sound byte — so now I know he was very funny too.