Ornament & F-Word

My feedreader was unusually quiet this morning. It has to be the calm before the storm, as if everyone is holding their breath waiting for the election news to start coming in. I hope all of our subscribers in the US exercise their rights and this election day unfolds peacefully.

Featured Articles

Is beauty natural?

Aeon • 5 Nov 2024 • ~4200 words

Charles Darwin was fascinated by extravagant ornament in nature as Jane Austen was in culture. Did their explanations agree?

The two also share a concern with the philosophically rich relationship between the natural world and aesthetic beauty. Darwin was fascinated by capricious ornamentation – natural features such as the peacock’s plumes, which seemed to serve no other purpose but beauty, even to the detriment of other sorts of biologic fitness. He saw a paradox: the naturalist posits that all that exists can be explained in natural terms. And, yet, there is a sense in which ornament, in its superfluity, goes beyond what nature dictates. How can the naturalist make sense of ‘excessive’ beauty, of nature’s ‘wonderful extreme’, which may appear to defy or transcend the closed logic of the naturalistic worldview? Austen prefigures Darwin’s contention that aesthetic ornamentation is a natural human practice that places us in continuity with the wider natural world. Like Darwin, she grapples with ornament’s apparent superfluity, and the tension between naturalism and aesthetic ‘excess’. She writes evocatively of this clash in Pride and Prejudice: ‘I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild,’ gossips Mrs Hurst after Elizabeth traipses across dirty fields to see her ill sister. Worst of all: ‘her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain’. The aesthetic is literally drenched in the natural; human ornament splashed with mud.

A Brief History of the Most Famous Swear Word in the World

Literary Hub • 5 Nov 2024 • ~4200 words

Jesse Sheidlower on the Limberness and Literary Uses of “Fuck”. An excerpt from his book The F-Word.

And it just feels good to say. It feels good in the mouth, giving shape to catharsis; it can also feel good in the brain, satisfying a strong emotional need or a desire for personal expression. It can help us bond with peers, gain or direct attention, persuade listeners, and establish or test intimacy.

Recommended Articles

Has poppymania gone too far?

The Guardian • 5 Nov 2024 • ~4050 words

Over the past 20 years, the symbol of remembrance for the war dead has become increasingly ubiquitous – and a culture of poppy policing has grown with it.

Over the past 20 years, poppies have boomed, with ever-more flamboyant displays, including a three-metre poppy hung on Antony Gormley’s monumental sculpture the Angel of the North and a fibreglass poppy, the largest yet, five metres in diameter, which looms over the concourse at King’s Cross station. Once a modest sign of remembrance, the poppy has increasingly been used as a prop for performative patriotism, and a way to gauge others’ loyalty to an ideal of national sacrifice. In 2010, then prime minister David Cameron and a team of ministers insisted on wearing poppies during a state visit to China, even though Chinese officials asked them not to because the poppy is a symbol of China’s humiliation in the 19th-century Opium wars. (“We informed them that they mean a great deal to us and we would be wearing them all the same,” an unbending British official told journalists.) Public figures who appear without a poppy in November quickly find themselves attacked by social media trolls and the tabloids.