Good morning,
Here’s the fourth Missing Tooth.
It took a long time to bring it all together because my brain is a bowl full of mush at the moment.
I hope you enjoy it.
(The newsletter, not the mush)
All best,
N.
PS Corrections—particularly of my spelling, grammar, and overuse of em-dashes—are always welcome.
What’s making me happy
The NGV triennial
The genre insanity of Shadow in the Cloud
Edie so excited about her new light up sketchers she can’t stop dancing:
George Bernard Shaw’s Writing Shed
George Bernard Shaw was an unsociable socialist.
"People bother me," he once admitted in an interview from the tiny writer’s shack. "I came here to hide from them."
The wooden shack—often confused for a tool shed—sat at the bottom of his Hertfordshire garden on the outskirts of a small village with one shop, no train station, and no newspaper delivery.
The shack consisted of a single desk, a typewriter, a small bed, a cane chair, and a telephone connected to the main house so he could converse with his wife. She, for her part, would always be sure to tell visitors that Shaw was ‘out’ when he was in his shack.
The only remarkable feature of the shed was that it sat on a large turntable and could rotate to follow the sun throughout the day.
Shaw’s shed is the dream of most writers. But as much as I like the idea of having a space away from the world to hide and write, I could never stand the crushing isolation that that type of workspace must bring.
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
-Elizabeth Bishop
Alice In Wonderland Book Club
I’m starting an Alice In Wonderland book club where, each month, we’ll read a chapter on Lewis Carroll’s nonsense classic, drink tea, and eat tarts.
We’re starting at the end of March in Melbourne. Let me know if you’re interested.
Audible
I have a problem.
I have too many credits on my Audible membership. Usually, I listen to audiobooks on public transport or in the car but, pandemic and all, that’s just not happening.
I can’t cancel the membership because I’ll lose all the credits and Jeff Bezos will win. But if I don’t cancel the membership, the credits will keep building up.
It’s quite a Catch-22. (A book I could use my credits on, but won’t.)
If you would like one, shoot me an email and I’ll gift it to you. You don’t need an Audible membership, just an Amazon account.
Northanger Abbey
She began to curl her hair and long for balls.
- Jane Austen
Ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue
I kicked open the door of the bedroom and shouted at Bridget.
“ANCIENT GREEKS COULDN’T SEE BLUE!”
“Huh?”
“There’s no word for blue in Ancient Greek! Or Ancient Roman!”
“Latin."
“Or old Chinese tales or the first Hebrew bibles. Blue just didn’t exist!”
“Yeah I know. There was RadioLab episode about it a few years ago.”
“Oh.”
The theory—called the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis—suggests that our perception is shaped by the language we use.
We struggle to see colours we don’t have a name for.
For example, which square is the odd one out here?
When asked the same the question in a 2006 study by psychologist Jules Davidoff, the Himba tribe in Namibia struggled to answer correctly. In the Himba language, there is no word for blue.
They could, however, easily spot the odd square out in this image:
With many more words for green than us, the Himba tribe could easily see that the right hand side of the second row is clearly a different shade.
We don’t name the colours we see, we see the colours we have named.
The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis raises dozens of questions about how humans see the world.
Would an afternoon spent in the paint sample section of Bunnings turn me into some kind of ultra discerning colour sommelier?
What would race look like if we didn’t have words like brown, black and white?
And does it only apply to colour? Would using more logical language make people more logical? A more feminist language, more feminist?
In his book The Language Hoax, linguist John McWhorter warns against getting too carried away with the possibilities:
"...language does affect thought, but in very small ways in very artificial and psychological experiments—that’s true. But to call it a world view... most linguists would be skeptical of that."
Perhaps Ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for blue because that particular group of colours isn’t actually that common in the natural world.
There are few blue animals, most blue flowers are a recent development, the ocean is more often green, and we only think of the sky is grey, yellow, red, and deep purple as well as blue.
It wasn’t until blue dyes became widespread that words meaning blue became popular.
If McWhorter is correct, does this mean we only see the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis because we’ve create a name for it?
What I’m Reading
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton