Here we see the poetic power of The Beatitudes, their gnomic wisdom shining forth in a manner not seen, for example, in the Decalogue.
2. frontlet — decorative ornament worn on forehead; phylactery
Depending from her frontlet, the wooden body of which depicted one of the many gods and powers tormenting the mental lives of the Wamiweri people, the princess had several beaded silver wires hanging down with an enormous rough emerald at the bottom of each.
3. dicrotic — of a pulse having two beats for every heartbeat
I wished that I had the ancient Chinese art of pulse diagnosis as I felt the odd, skipping, dicrotic beating of Sir Richard’s pulse beneath my thumb, until I came to my senses and realized that, yes, I was stupidly taking his pulse with my thumb.
4. euchre — to trick, to outwit
Well, I guess I got euchred out of my horse fair and square, so to speak, but that don’t mean I have to like it.
5. flounce — to move in exaggeratedly impatient or angry manner; to make overdramatic movements; to decorate with pleated trimming
“Well! I never!” she said as she flounced out of the dining room, audibly sniffing with her nose in the air, which provoked Bill to say sotto voce “I’ll just bet she has.”
6. succory — chicory
White succory makes a beautiful change in daily salads, its thin red lines making a colorful contrast to the blanched leaves.
7. Brummagem (or brummagem) — gaudy and cheap; fake, counterfeit
Once again, Grandmama had given him some brummagem toy instead of what he’d asked for, so Wilton (or ‘Wiltie’, as she called him) found himself pretending to thank her profusely for the knock-off Tickle Me Malmo, its hideous blue and yellow head leering at him in an alarming manner.
8. obliquity — state or condition of being neither parallel nor perpendicular, quality of being oblique; mental perverseness
He approached the overheating problem with his usual obliquity, announcing that he was going to the beach “for research” for the rest of the afternoon.
9. eidolon — phantom, ghost; ideal, representation of idealized thing
Jane Harrison speaks of the destructive process whereby human beings take their gods, so forceful and potent in original conception, and overthink them and intellectualize them until they become mere eidolons that can no longer perform any of the purposes for which they were originally besought.
10. teratological — monstrous, of or related to congenital malformations
After retiring from active practice, Dr. Wells devoted himself to his teratological collection, perhaps becoming over-devoted to his private museum of the bizarre and grotesque.
The aged king was laid in a great howe near the source of the river for which he was named.
2. riband — [archaic] ribbon, esp. a decorative one
But Jane’s new bright red riband couldn’t entirely hide the thin patches on her most festive headwear, and once more she wished so much they could afford a new hat—or hats, of course, since Mother’s was even more worn.
3. heteronym — identically spelled words with different meanings; different words naming the same thing; imaginary character used by author to write in different style, pseudonym
By showing the tangled consequences which follow the decision of the protagonist to hide his male identity behind a female heteronym, the author—behind his (or her) own pretentious nom de plume Reinhard de St. ffaulkes—wishes to delineate the intersecting and radiating spheres of modern identity, but, in the end, just leaves us all a bit confused, as I suspect the author himself (or herself) may have been by the time he (or she) arrived at the macabre courtroom scene, with its strange interplay of light and shadow and facts from documents opposed to facts from eyewitnesses, not all of whom seem to be precisely differentiated or even characterized.
4. boor — rude person; yokel; peasant
Yes, I quite understand why you had to invite him, the big boor, but I don’t see why you had to seat him next to Agatha, who is probably my most sophisticated friend.
5. tattersall — squares formed by crossed color lines over another, usually light, solid color; fabric in this pattern
He wore his habitual yellow tattersall waistcoat with its red and green lines beneath his green corduroy jacket with the leather elbow patches, and thought himself quite dashing.
6. impendent — impending, imminent
The whole house was suffused with an air of impendent disaster, though it was an open question whether the legal cataclysm would strike before the final collapse of the leaking water pipes.
7. quale — subjective perceptible quality considered as independent entity
I found it impossible to assemble the various qualia arriving fuzzily at my mind into any coherent picture of the real world objects associated with them, though whether this was due to my illness or to the very strong drugs they had given me, I cannot say.
8. misericord — room in monastery where some relaxation of monastic rules was permitted; small ledge on folding church seat providing support for people standing; small dagger or pike designed for making a killing ‘mercy’ stroke against a wounded enemy
Besides this effulgence of talented artistic depiction, it remains as well to investigate why so many of these intricate English misericord carvings depict sin and sinful acts.
9. palanquin — small boxlike litter for carrying a reclining passenger by several men holding poles attached to the conveyance
In Eastern Bengal at this time regulations were drawn up for the regulation of palanquins, generally following those already extant for hackney carriages.
10. yoctosecond — 10−24 seconds, one septillion of a second, one trillionth of a trillionth of a second
So far, scientists have little to say about the time during the Planck Epoch, a ten-trillionth of a yoctosecond in duration, or 10-43 seconds.
Bonus Vocabulary
(British slang)
camp as a row of tents — flamboyantly effeminate
Now Uncle Howard, he was camp as a row of tents, but we was all surprised when Reggie came out that summer and then ran off with that scrawny professor, the one with the torn ear and the daft glasses.
1. doula — trained woman assisting mother during and after childbirth
Though the doula may provide emotional support and practical advice, she differs from a midwife in that she cannot perform medical activities.
2. congener — something of the same type as another; living organism belonging to same genus as another; fusel alcohols and other chemicals produced during fermentation (besides ethanol) which give a liquor its characteristic taste
Many claim that drinking very pure vodka almost obviates the risk of hangover, citing its near lack of congeners which some suppose engenders the morning-after malaise.
3. doughty — brave and resolute, valiant
“So once more, my doughty comrades, up and at them!”
4. protanopia — daltonism, color-blindness between red and green
The prevalence among males of protanopia is one reason for the standardized red-yellow-green sequence of traffic lights, though in some cases the inability to detect red colors can make the sufferer unable to detect whether the red light is actually off or on.
5. garrote — to kill by strangling, esp. with a thin cord or wire; to kill with iron collar formerly used in Spain for executions
Christopher Lee, like all British commandos, was taught dozens of ways of dealing death, from a sudden knife thrust to the spine to garroting a sentry from above.
6. culm — [botany] plant stem, esp. of grass or sedge
In order to more fairly compare the two yields, we shall measure the number of grains per culm in our study.
7. culm — waste coal or coal dust; inferior anthracite
To most effectively use all this excess culm, however, it must be dried and pulverized to obtain anything like a steady heat.
8. piezometer — instrument for measuring pressure of fluid, or compressibility of same
To better understand the strata permeability, a series of fourteen piezometers was placed about the tract.
9. hipshot — having one hip lower than the other
He shuffled hipshot towards me, his characteristic ungainly gait the result of some childhood boating accident I’d been told, but the crabbed look on his face needed no explanation, save that he was just pure mean through and through.
10. Malagasy — person from Madagascar
The second mate was a Malagasy whose smile grew bigger with each abusive order he threw at his gang of lascars in the pinnace.
Bonus Vocabulary
(divination)
splanchnomancy — divination by examination of human entrails from victim sacrificed for that purpose
Though some later Christians accused the ancient Romans of splanchnomancy, in fact those pagans practiced haruspicy, the art of reading portents from the viscera of sacrificed animals, not humans.
1. qaid (also caid) — local leader or judge in North Africa; Berber chief
But the qaid interrupted Deschamps at this point, and brought out the leather-bound edition of Cooper’s works we had presented to the chieftain, and Teddy and I knew then that our gift had been a prescient one indeed.
2. shrike — any of several species of songbird with strongly hooked and toothed bill, used by some species to impale or rend their prey
Also called the ‘butcherbird’ from its habit of leaving the bodies of the eaten prey hanging from thorns, the northern shrike is larger than its southern cousin, though the latter plays with the remains of dinner in the same fashion.
3. choad — [slang] short and squat penis; loser; perineum
“Okay, okay, you don’t have to be such a choad about it, we’ll try calling her one more time!”
4. carl — [archaic] churl, peasant
During the festival the roles were reversed, and a carl might sit at the very head of the table, hoping to be waited upon by a noble (which never seemed to happen, to be sure).
5. pap — bland food, porridge; nonsense, foolish word
I won’t be satisfied with the pap you give to the voters out on the stump.
6. pap — [archaic] teat, nipple
The maiden sat now silent in the corner, her twins feeding at her paps.
7. trudge — to walk laboriously or wearily
And so we go on, trudging down the road of life towards an uncertain future from a past that seems increasingly impossible in this bizarrely extended present.
8. squill — lily-like plant found in Europe; sea onion
The red squill is effective against rats though it is generally shunned by domesticated animals.
9. kedge — to warp a ship or boat by hauling on a cable attached to an anchor dropped at some distance from the vessel
In these shallows the sloop from time to time would ground but was always as quickly kedged off by our stout cabin boys, who seemed to enjoy the mundane task.
10. piles — hemorrhoids
“Sorry Travers can’t join us; he claims a distant cousin stopped by for a sudden visit, but I suspect his piles are bothering him again and he couldn’t face the prospect of sitting for three to four hours at the opera.”
Bonus Vocabulary
(decorative arts)
delft — tin-glazed pottery typically having white opaque glaze with decoration in blue, usu. Dutch or English
The delicate power of fine delft can be seen in the gorgeous enamel but especially in the beauteous decoration.
1. panentheism — tenet that God is the entirety of the universe and yet somehow transcends the universe as well
The author claims Rumi as a believer in panentheism because the Sufi poet finds God to be both transcendent and immanent, but then again, this is also the view held in most Catholic orthodoxy.
2. antiperistasis — quality whereby opposition to a force causes the original force to grow stronger
Through some miracle of antiperistasis Jennings functioned best in the worst situations, just as when he was the only man aboard the yacht to keep his head when the reef stove in the hull, but in ordinary times he was lackadaisical, almost soporific in his attitude, giving no attention to anything whatsoever as if he could not be bothered unless the circumstances were truly dire.
3. antiperistalsis — reversed peristalsis, upward (instead of downward) impelled motion of the intestines’ contents
And as a secondary consequence of the neuro-motor damage Lieutenant Soark was afflicted with a terrible and violent antiperistalsis, with results which I shudder to recall and which I dare not describe.
4. rugosity — state of being wrinkled or corrugated
The several spring showers which had pleased us so much had unfortunately left the dirt road to Old Man Mosley’s house in a terrible state, and the rugosity of the loose-packed gravel threatened to buck our Model A into valley below.
5. tire — [obsolete] to dress, to attire
She tired her hair with jewels in a cunning golden net, giving pride of place to the huge sapphire her lord had given her the evening before.
6. barchan — crescent-shaped sand dune formed by wind
Our headlong flight took us to the base of a deceptively short barchan, whose height of sand was sufficient, however, to hobble our horses and prevent our escape from Black Robert and his marauders.
7. heliotrope — pinkish purple color; flowers for which the color is named
He opened the door wearing an angora sweater of such a distracting heliotrope that I found myself forgetting why I had interrupted my neighbor’s breakfast.
8. delf — pit, quarry, mine
Into the dark delves fell the miners as the retaining piles gave way.
9. cheviot — coarse woolen twill fabric
Comfortably bundled up in his cheviot motor coat, Flenders pulled on his driving gloves and invited us to come along for the ride.
10. criminogenic — causing crime, of the bases of criminal behavior
Parker, on the other hand, turned the equation completely around, positing that the most significant criminogenic impulses arose, not in the conditions and stresses affecting the poorest and most vile citizens, but from the so-called ‘leaders of society’, whose own villainies were papered over with the euphemism of ‘white collar crime’, as if the much greater despoliations and numerically more significant losses of life and health were mere bagatelles of crime, and thus (in Parker’s view) this snidely dismissive insouciance towards the greatest lawbreakers—certainly the largest in terms of actual material theft and human suffering—led to a concomitant belief pervading all levels of society in the ultimate worthlessness of human beings and thus the rise in crime statistics of the lower classes which was so trumpeted by the media.
Bonus Vocabulary
(Jungian psychology)
enantiodromia — supposed tendency for any extreme in a system to arrive or to turn into its opposite
But all this focus upon the power of human reason may engender the enantiodromia that Jung claimed to find in any extreme perturbation of any psychologic system, as when the triumph over superstition during the French Revolution led to the—quite reasonable, I’m sure—noyades and other judicial murders of thousands across all the lands of France, and just as reason led Che Guevara to kill his own thousands as commander of La Cabaña Fortress.
And so he joined other mononymously known natural scientists such as Darwin and Mendel, though in Lysenko’s case it was because he was infamous as a fraud.
2. landrace — plant or animal exemplar purposely bred to thrive in local conditions
The bitter potato landraces exhibit greater pest resistance, but this is offset of course by the lower price at market.
3. henrietta — twilled cashmere
She wore a scarlet jacket made from some of the new dyed henriettas just imported from Europe.
4. rectify — to make right, to correct; to purify through repeated distillation; to change into direct current
If you will provide the details we shall be pleased to rectify the omissions posthaste.
5. abscissa — x-coordinate of point in Cartesian plane system
The abscissa is customarily taken as the independent variable.
6. hierarch — high priest; person in high position of authority
The court ruled, however, that the priest was working solely as an agent of the hierarch, and therefore that high official bore liability for the tragic events of that fateful Thursday.
7. caprine — of or related to goats
In the shuddering dim light of the dying fire the would-be cowboy’s dude ranch woolies took on an ominous caprine appearance, as if the furry chaps now revealed a pagan demon or the archfiend himself, summoned to this blood-drenched land by the weird tales told by the old and bitter cook.
8. telpherage — automatic and usually electrically powered cable car system for moving minerals or other goods
Fleeming Jenkins is known as the primary inventor of the telpherage system, developing the idea while at the University of Edinburgh.
9. aigrette — egret crest feather or feathers used as headwear decoration, or similar decorations formed of jewels
Whether made from heron feathers or only simulated from stiff lace, an aigrette is an absolute necessity for a hat worn by any lady of fashion this season.
10. quoit — rope ring or ring of flattened metal, used in tossing game
Bernie then tossed his final quoit right over the attentive tail of our poor Westie, causing her no little discomfiture.
Bonus Vocabulary
(Latin)
cacoethes scribendi — mania for writing
So fierce became his cacoethes scribendi that soon no surface was safe and we could no longer visit our favorite restaurant, lest he cover the table cloth and napkins with his detailed thoughts upon the strange—and to his mind, suspicious—death of the inventor of the Diesel engine.
Chillingsworth now placed the tip of his birch fescue on the map projected upon the wall by the clever device he’d carried in his vest pocket.
2. oho — exclamation of surprise, elation, recognition
“Oho!” exclaimed Percy brightly. “Looks like the hand is afoot now!” as he played his initial card.
3. rhonchus — wheezing or rattling sound made during breathing, caused by non-gaseous material in the lungs
With a mighty rhonchus he jackknifed himself into a sitting position upon the overstuffed feather bed.
4. rarefy — to make less dense
Of course the possibility of rarefying the habitual thought patterns of the career politicians involved in this mighty effort may seem minuscule at best.
5. filigree — intricate and delicate decoration made of metal wire; ornate or intricate design
As I leaned closer across the threshold of the bed, the ruddy lines that marked the enormous proboscis took on a mysterious and portentous air, as if his giant avuncular nose (a family trait which, I am glad to say, I do not share with my brothers) had been decorated with a lace filigree of red threads depicting some long-ago forgotten map of a long vanished region, perhaps the railway lines of the Carpathian Mountains during the very time of my ancestors of whom my bedridden uncle was speaking at this moment with such vehemence.
6. suzerain — state or ruler having control over dependent state
Though the duchy henceforth was allowed the fiction of independence, in all but purely domestic affairs it always had to bow to the will of its suzerain in Aachen.
7. eruct — to belch
Now from the back of the classroom as Mr. Heaney was waxing rhapsodic on the power and glory that was Rome came a thunderous reverberating roar from the very bowels (as it seemed) of Spivey, as that tyro felt the action of the gallon of ginger beer he’d consumed after morning maths, and the entire class approved the interruption as the poorest student in class eructed a long and deep sonorous counterpoint to the teacher’s enervating lecture.
8. antinomy — contradiction, paradox
But unfortunately it was at this precise moment that the deep antinomies of rampant capitalism were seen in their worst guises.
9. antimony — silver-white metal element used in alloys and medical compounds
The 51st element in our modern periodic table was known best in ancient times in its black sulfide, making antimony the source of kohl, one of the primary cosmetics of early history.
10. aptotic — [linguistics] uninflected
Over two-thirds of its nouns no longer exhibit any plural form at all, making Swedish the most aptotic language in the Germanic family.
Bonus Vocabulary
(French)
lèse-majesté (also lese majesty) — crime against dignity of the sovereign or the state, treason; offense against established order
The absolutism of the Sun King’s rule has its roots in the tyrannical edicts of Roman emperors such as Tiberius and Caligula, who invented the crime of lèse-majesté to persecute anyone who dared to not treat them as the gods they purported to be.
I knew we were in trouble but I only began to suspect just how much trouble when a helicopter appeared overhead and four men in black began abseiling from it on long ropes down into the clearing next to the charred remains of the ice cream van.
2. irredentist — of or related to policy of acquisition by a country of territory belonging to another because of historical or cultural ties; advocate of such policy
The commission hoped to avoid such irredentist squabbles by a forced migration of the two peoples, though any historian could have advised them against such dislocation.
3. growler — four-wheeled carriage, hansom cab; large container for beer
Leaving the rest of our breakfast upon the table, we rushed quickly to the street and hired a growler to take us to the depot.
4. Bantustan — one of the quasi-autonomous ‘homelands’ for blacks under South Africa’s apartheid regime
Of course the Bantustans were some of the most sterile land in the region, obligating those residing within to work cheaply at the pleasure of the whites to obtain the necessities of life.
5. precipitate — very sudden, abrupt, heedlessly quick; to make happen prematurely, to cause to suddenly occur; to hurl down
Because of your precipitate release of this buggy software we have lost an opportunity to make serious inroads into our competitors’ market.
6. precipitous — steep
Charley finally staggered still moaning away from the precipitous cliffs, but the crisis was not yet fully over.
7. parison — mass of molten glass just before being blown into a final shape
At Williamsburg the boys liked nothing better than to watch the glassmaker take the glowing parison and shape it into a pitcher, a tumbler, a vase, or seemingly any shape he desired.
8. arnophilia — bestial sexual congress between men and sheep
But of course the perverted pleasures of arnophilia are not nearly no frequent as you seem to believe, especially out here in the country.
9. niello — black mixture usually consisting of silver, sulfur, copper, and lead, used as fill in silverwork, leaving black lines or background when the surrounding silver is polished
But the real stunner of the find was a 9th-Century Anglo-Saxon dagger with silver and brass inlay, with the name of either the owner or the craftsman in niello letters.
10. obambulate — to walk around, to wander
One day God was out walking with his angels when he came across Satan, who was also obambulating about.
Bonus Vocabulary
(British nautical)
Irish pennant — untidy loose ends of rigging or lines
“How can you call your boat shipshape when you’ve got dozens of Irish pennants hanging about everywhere?”
If it is hard for ‘kids today’ to appreciate what life was like before the advent of cell phones, it is almost as difficult even for those of us who lived through that strange sea change we now just call ‘the Internet’ to fathom the madness of minds great and small who saw the future coming and thought they were surfing a wave of exciting boundless technological change into a glorious Promised Land of scientific marvels and a wholly new era in the very lives of humans on this puny Earth. Even as we first read Mondo 2000 and Wired magazine, some of us must have realized that the vast transformational paradise described in their pages was, as we call it nowadays, ‘vaporware’, a beautiful pipe dream, but like many (if not most) results of hitting too hard the pipe, as evanescent and imaginary as any other hallucinatory fantasy. For all the transhumanist promises of R. U. Sirius of the soon-to-arrive wonders of smart drugs and the revolution of the totally connected world, we now can survey the ruins of the dream and see the decay of new evolutionary cultural spaces of self-publishing and ‘Information Must Be Free’ into ad-supported podcasts controlled by huge behemoths who managed to carve out their own territory just as the railroads managed to make off with most of the (admittedly stolen) lands opened up to settlers throughout the West in 19th Century America. Instead of transfigurational connectivity we have Dark Mode; rather than the (usually dystopian, but still always ‘cool’) weirdly wired world of Neruromancer and Johnny Mnemonic, we have 5G service that still seems to take forever loading the new Kingdom Rush or Township or Candy Crush or Pokemon GO updates; in lieu of acetylcholine-infused cocktails regenerating and improving brain cells, we have battery life issues solved by bigger phones and portable or wireless chargers and still not enough power; instead of a new Golden Age or at least a pleasure world for the hacker elite, we have a new set of millionaires (now called billionaires) who rule because of … well, that’s debatable.
But out of those halcyon days of promise and hope came many ridiculous works of hubris and self-duped professions of faith in the glorious days to come, and among those is this book I’ve just read, The Information Inferno, which promised (in 2001) to be “The Book That Changed The Way Books Look”. Like so many promises of the new millennium, this turned out to be wrong, dead wrong.
It was not supposed to be like this. The Information Inferno from its fiery start—the first chapter uses a new font with flames above each letter—lays out a manifesto for an entirely new New Age, an age of triumph for a new medium blending the best of the old, words and images finally joined as never before through the miracles of computers. Ah, computers! How wonderful they seemed to our ancestors of two decades ago. The incomprehensible sheer power to manipulate text and pictures placed at their fingertips! The connections between thought and science and data that once took generations which would now happen at light speed! As my friend Jim DeVito once said, “People sure were naïve when they were our parents.” Or in this case, us.
Unfortunately, the failure of this book’s program is obvious to any current reader, and should have been obvious to any reader back then. The vaunted font with the flames (you can see it on the cover of the book)—called “Whodinian Fire” and, we are informed, trademarked by “CyberCity Press”—is simply unreadable, and there is much worse to come. The unreadability turns out to be a blessing, because once we manage to comprehend the actual text, we will regret it.
Another hallmark of the Internet Age is shown by the legal fiction of “CyberCity Press”, under whose name the “Design” is copyrighted, with the text itself being copyrighted under the rubric of “CyberCity Publishing”. The copyright page has several notices of trademarks and service marks along with the usual legal boiler plate. We learn there that “The Book That Changed The Way Books Look” is a trademark of the same “CyberCity Press” (though they missed a trick and forgot to grab “The Book That Changes The Way Books Look”), along with a lot of other cute words and phrases. (I might be worried about using this legally protected trademark here if it weren’t for the fact that they (whoever ‘they’ might be) let the trademark lapse back in October of 2002, perhaps the smartest move around this whole publishing venture.) The putative author of this worldchanging opus is one “Whodini”, who (or better, which) also turns out to be a trademark of the legal entity that was created to protect this oh-so-valuable property from the hordes of scammers who, it was feared (by somebody), would rush in to grab all the valuable property and ideas being promulgated by this breathtaking and breathless genius who saw the future of publishing and design long before the rest of us clods. And thus does duality and the infinite expansion of fictive legalities make its appearance in the supposed Garden of Technology Eden, just one of a seemingly infinite number of snakes looking about for actual humans to tempt towards a knowledge of … well, what, exactly?
Well, there we run into some problems, because even if writing has been replaced by ‘content creation’, there are still some poor schmucks (like me, for instance) who have the strange idea that words do matter, that building a fancy high-tech well-designed and beautifully illustrated Website or book with simple repetitions of “lorem ipsum” isn’t quite the same as having something to say. Reading the text of The Information Inferno is not quite the same descent into idiocy that ChatGPT will bring us to, but it ain’t far from it—though we have to assume that this book at least was written at some point by an actual human being. The argument, as far as I can make it out through the dazzle and gee-whilikers whiz-bang of the design, is that long books are stupid, that there’s too much data for the fast-moving folks of the future to bother themselves with, that therefore books should present just small and easily digested bits of text for the reader, and—to top it all off and the great insight of the mythical “Whodini”—text should be combined with images for big impact! Oh, and also the text itself should be in color. Okay.
This short summary doesn’t even begin to capture all that is stupid in both the subject matter and the delivery of this hefty tome. For example, rather than ‘old’ ideas like ‘chapters’ and ‘page numbers’, the author slash designer presents his magnum opus divided into ‘gigabytes’ and ’megabytes’ and ‘soundbytes’. (The only other book published by this nebula of legal entities appears to be one Christ In Color (also called 100 Soundbytes of Christ), where—according to the (now defunct) Webpage breathlessly announcing this new book designed by Whodini—“100 famous soundbytes from the New Testament are set in a rich purple color and placed against a black background.” Ooookay.) Almost all of The Information Inferno consists of text in nearly unreadable fonts laid out (usually poorly) in front of images from old paintings and stock photos—most of which have been simply flipped at the gutter to use the same mirrored image for left and right page. This makes the book read like a gloriously produced (more on that in just a sec) version of the world’s worst PowerPoint presentation.
Van Gogh wonders if he cut off the wrong sensory organ
This use of old out-of-copyright art mirror-flipped at the gutter leads to such monstrosities (many, many times) as this two-page spread from ‘Gigabyte Eight’, featuring a classic image of Van Gogh—though in this case he has no ears, and three eyes, one of which stares out at the reader in horror as if trying to distance himself from the facile and puerile philosophy being presented in his name. Is it true that “Van Gogh taught us that madness need not be a crime, that genius can find refuge in art, and that the most effective bombs explode not in the face but in the heart”? Seriously, read the whole text, and you will know as much as you need to know about the content presented here, which, come to think of it, may not be all that far from ChatGPT quality at that.
The whole book is gloriously produced, as I said before, in that the high-res images are reproduced in striking color on heavy satin finish paper, bound in Skivertext with smyth-sewn signatures, and weighs enough to kill someone with, should the need arise. It seems a shame that such loving care was lavished on such a terrible product, but this was not the only waste of the early Internet Age. I spotted my first typo at page twelve, and gave up counting about the time Whodini gave up using normal page numbers and began labelling pages instead with ‘Megabyte’ numbers. (See the image in the paragraph above for an example.) And don’t get me wrong: proofreading is hard, and even harder in captions and headings and the like—and nearly all the text in this book is of that ilk. But … well, the text is almost unreadable at many places in this tome, which purportedly shows the wonder of the Brave New Book Publishing World, specifically because the ‘designer’ cannot stop using all the features of whatever software he has on his Apple computer. He brags that, believe it or not, he created this whole opus using solely his one computer at home. I, for one, believe it quite easily. And in the closing section of the book, which seems to be a (slightly) more cogent essay grafted on to the series of “soundbytes” that make up the bulk, wherein Whodini™ is making the case that books of the future will have text in color and will have images integrated with the text, will have indeed the text right smack dab on top of the image (Wowzers!) (This, by the way, is the grand revelation of the entire book), there follows a section of supposedly normal text the old way with just black and white text on pages with not pictures at all. The point being, look how bad this looks compared to that fantastic pictures and text combined stuff Whodini™ just showed you. I was struck, however, by the fact that the designer chose a monotype-adjacent typewriter font for this section, that he used ‘dumb quotes’, that he couldn’t even keep his margins or the gutter consistent from the first two pages to the next, and … more oddly … that between each and every sentence there was a period followed by two spaces followed by three periods followed by another space.
That is to say. … Whodini wrote each sentence of this six-page section of the book with very odd punctuation and spacing. … As if the normal operation of paragraphs was unknown to Whodini. … Or maybe it was two spaces around each side of the ellipses. … And sometimes there would not be the ellipses between sentences. I suppose because they were deemed to be connected in some way? … But mostly it was endless text in a standard but nearly as unreadable font as the bizarre ‘art’ fonts used in the rest of the book, with extra space randomly thrown in at the top of the page, or maybe the bottom, or the gutter, or I just don’t even know anymore.
So, what is the final verdict? Well, the verdict of history has been known for some time now. Even WIRED magazine has given up the crazy almost unreadable typography and design that it was so enamored with in the late ‘90s and early ‘noughts. In spite of its great pretensions and overweening self-confidence, The Information Inferno did not manage to ‘change the ways books look’. Instead, this gorgeously produced overweight tome was harbinger of the coming revolution which is still called today by the misnomer ‘Technology’, as if that explained anything of the last quarter decade. The era upon us now like a panther on our soon-to-be lifeless corpse is one where art and literature and illustration and writing have all been replaced by ‘content’—a catch-all for blather and now AI-generated nonsense which no longer has to actually be good as long as it looks good. And design and style have been swapped for flash and shiny whizzbangs of CGI and production values in service of the anti-revolution. So much effort is put into creating cool logos and fictitious business names and killer apps and viral content, that somewhere along the way the world of arts and letters was abandoned, and printing—which originally sped Luther’s Theses across Europe and continued to spread ideas around the entire world—was itself declared dead and why look into a book or magazine or newspaper when it’s all on your phone anyway? Thus it is that Whodini’s magnum dopus looks striking, is printed wonderfully on the heaviest paper you wish that book of Bosch reproductions had used, but the actual words—if and when you finally are able to read them—are banal beyond belief, the philosophy no better than the nonsense you spouted as a freshman in college sitting around a student lounge high as a kite and discussing Kierkegaard and munchies. Do not drop The Information Inferno on your feet, as it will break your toes, but pick up some other book, almost any other book will do. There’s still plenty of good stuff out there, in the books that haven’t changed the way that books look.
And so, my brother, I implore you to enter this holy season with a mansuete and humble inclination, turning your thoughts away from the recent unpleasantnesses.
2. emmet — ant
Consider the lowly emmet, too small to have large thoughts, yet still he has concern for his community and fellows, foraging always to feed the nest, rushing to protect his queen.
3. musth — period of heightened aggressiveness and sexual activity in male elephants
The onset of musth is accompanied by secretion from the glands just before the eyes, and its effects can be made much more manageable by providing the afflicted elephant with a mixture of camphor and opium.
4. luculent — lucid, clear; brilliant
Halsey was a wonderful minister, known for his luculent exegesis and his inspiring presence.
5. cromlech — dolmen, megalithic tomb
Excavations outside the perimeter of the cromlech revealed no other sign of occupation, save for a small deformed needle of bronze which may have been part of a clasp, found some twenty yards from the northernmost stone.
During the breeding season the tufted puffin’s bill is enlarged by deciduous horny plates.
7. physic — medicine, esp. a purgative, laxative
Caution must be used in the application of a strong physic, particularly if internal hemorrhage is suspected.
8. cathexis — investment of emotional energy upon a specific thing; such energy invested
Thus we see how an object may have an erotic cathexis, but the same object may also have a cathexis of love, which is different, perhaps even very different.
9. barnburner — very exciting event; radical wing of New York Democrats in 19th Century
But the opening fight proved to be the real barnburner of the night, going the full fifteen rounds with both gladiators giving as good as they got, with the nod going to Kid Romeo, who won by only a single point.
10. diencephalon — back of the forebrain
Only the olfactory senses pass directly to the cerebrum; all other connections between the cerebrum and the nervous system are made through the diencephalon.
Bonus Vocabulary
(psychiatry, French)
folie à deux — delusion shared by a couple
But most later researchers believed that the lovers’ experiences were merely folie à deux, though only Professor Thornburgh declined to posit a more banal explanation for the reported phenomena.
