Closing tabs

Trying to get school-related tasks done this last two weeks has been like wading through marmalade - that always happens at the end of the semester. I have two more minor tasks to finish this morning before I can guiltlessly (a) go to midday hot yoga [ED. This did not happen - I was interrupted in my post by the need to visit a friend in the hospital, and we ended up staying with his wife for a bit while she waited for scary tests to be conducted] and (b) write the luxuriantly copious blog post about summer writing thoughts that has been percolating for many days now. But before any of that, I think, some tabs to close....

A good Knausgaard interview by Scott Esposito (scroll down and click the link to open).

It really was bound in human skin! (More here and here.)

Documenting the last living Chinese women whose feet were bound in childhood.

Catch-up

Fiendishly busy. The next month is fairly daunting: the Thanksgiving overland odyssey (I'll be offline for the duration), the last three weeks of classes, several dissertation chapter meetings and a dissertation defense, a few eighteenth-century seminars and colloquia, opera tickets for Don Giovanni and Les Troyens, sundry departmental meetings, etc. etc.

I have a mystery rash on my lower legs that has caused me to google words like scabies, impetigo, ringworm, ensuring a computer screen full of ads for STD testing! (Doctor's appointment next Monday evening, internet self-diagnosis having been found wanting.)

Worst of all I am called for jury duty on Dec. 12! I must get it out of the way, I can't postpone it as I will be traveling quite a bit in the opening months of the new year, but I can't say I'm looking forward to it, not least because of constraints it places on various other end-of-semester scheduling obligations.

Seems like I have been too busy even to keep a proper log of light reading. Catch-up titles: Manel Loureiro's Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End (still can't get enough of these zombie novels, and spent the week after Sandy contemplating the possibility that I might even write one myself one of these days); Laini Taylor's Days of Blood and Starlight, an enchanting book that only prompts the complaint I WANT THE NEXT INSTALLMENT NOW!; Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho, which I thought was excellent (the first installment had some rookie continuity errors and points of confusion, though already very strong, but this really picks up momentum and delivers on the promise); and another appealing entry in the postapocalyptic zombie stakes, a good recommendation from my colleague Anahid, Kresley Cole's Poison Princess.

I always slightly grumble when these books are built on a romance chassis - I would rather hear less about the fellow's rippling pectoral muscles and more about the exact contents of the survivalist's larder! Still, very much worthwhile, and I dimly recall that Kresley Cole is the writer my friend "Lilia Ford" was recommending as so much superior to the rest of the paranormal romance cohort....

Happy Thanksgiving!

"Like life"

Shelley Jackson's new sub-"Skin" story.

A bottle imp

An interesting and gruesome story of a lampshade made of human skin.

On euphemism

The word "recovered" in this headline strikes me as odd...

"On to Z!"

Celeste Headlee on the pleasures of the Dictionary of American Regional English (via Bookforum):

[W]hen this reporter tested out some words from the DARE at a Starbucks in suburban Detroit, none of the patrons seemed familiar with a "monkey's wedding" (a chaotic, messy situation in Maine); "cockroach killers" (pointy shoes in New Jersey) or "mumble squibbles" (noogies, North Carolina-style).

While it's fun to learn about colloquial language, Hall says, there are serious practical uses for the DARE as well. Forensic linguists once used it when a little girl was kidnapped and police had only a ransom note to go on.

"In this ransom note, the writer said, 'Put $10,000 cash in a trash can on the devil's strip,' " Hall says.

The key phrase in the note was "devil's strip," a term used only in a tiny section of Ohio to refer to the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. As it happened, one of the suspects on the police list was a man from Akron. After being confronted with the evidence, linguistic and otherwise, the man ultimately confessed.

Doctors also use the DARE to understand patients who use colorful language to describe their illnesses. A patient complaining of "the groundage" or "pipjennies" likely has a rash on the feet or pimples.

Atlases of Dermatology

At Bookforum, Richard Cork on Francis Bacon's studio and the images Bacon hoarded there:

No such circumspection affected his treatment of the photographs he found in medical textbooks. They are truly painful to study, and many pages torn from one such book were unearthed in Bacon’s studio. Titled An Atlas of Regional Dermatology and published in 1955, it contains as many as 475 color photographs. The authors spare nothing in their determination to provide clinical close-ups of faces invaded by, for example, herpes simplex. These constellations of red spots are usually limited to “five to ten days,” yet the authors warn that “recurrences are common, and the eruption may be bilateral.” Bacon’s imagination could well have been dramatically stirred by the use of the word eruption. Judging by the paint marks scattered round two of these pictures, he looked at them intently. He also took a great deal of trouble to Scotch-tape another page from the book onto a large piece of paper. This time, the photographs zoom in on toes afflicted by plantar-wart lesions and tuberous sclerosis tumors. They look excruciating, and anyone would wince at the most distressing image Bacon tore from this book: The caption declares that the eruption of herpes shown here “is more extensive than usual.” Yet these matter-of-fact words cannot convey the visceral impact of the large, encrusted lesions exploding across most of a little girl’s cheek. The image is difficult even to glance at.

Tingle cream

Daniel Nester decides to get a tan...