Month: October 2016

If the news cycle has got you down, we’ve got some good news: Someday, we’ll all be dead and gone and none of this will matter. If that sentence was actually comforting for you, you’re going to love artist Agelio Batle’s “Ash Dancer,” a full-size graphite skeleton that gradually vanishes like the point of a person-shaped pencil.

The San Francisco-based artist works in all kinds of media, from sculpture and painting to installation and performance art. He describes “Ash Dancer” as a form of “material investigative work,” partially inspired by his love of science and nature.

Batle’s choice of graphite as a medium is doubly significant. Graphite is best known as the stuff of pencil “lead,” and indeed many of the drawings accompanying “Ash Dancer” on display at the Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco were done in graphite. But the mineral is also a part of the planet, naturally occurring in igneous and metamorphic rocks. In an ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust path, Batle’s graphite was removed from the earth only to take the shape of disintegrating human remains.

And the skeleton will disintegrate; Batle’s made sure of it. “Ash Dancer” will be hung just above a moving, paper-covered table. As the graphite bones bump against the table, the soft mineral will transfer to the paper, dissolving the body even as it creates a visual record of its own demise.

The skeleton is not Batle’s first work in graphite. Previous projects have included ephemeral feathers, hands, leaves, and animals, some of which are available in his online shop.

“Ash Dancer” will be on display at the Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco from November 5 to December 29, 2016.

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The Nobel Prize’s literature committee went with a far left field candidate this year: musician Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter is receiving world literature’s highest prize for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” according to this morning’s announcement, as reported by The New York Times.

Dylan has been floated as a potential candidate for the prize for years, but his chances have been seen as quite low, considering that it typically goes to more traditional members of the literary world, like novelists or poets, with the occasional nonfiction writer thrown in. The prize going to Dylan seemed so unlikely that in 2015, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard declared: “If Bob Dylan wins, I will eat my copy of Blood on the Tracks.” Some of this year’s more favored candidates included writers Don DeLillo and Haruki Murakami.

Widely considered the greatest songwriter in the English language, Dylan, who is still touring at 75, is the first American to win the literature prize since Toni Morrison in 1993. He’s only the 14th American to win since the prize’s inception. The prodigious artist published a book of prose poetry, Tarantula, in 1971, in addition to several books of drawings and paintings. Dylan received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his contributions to music.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is the last of the Nobels to be awarded; the scientific awards were announced last week, as was the Nobel Peace Prize. The economics prize was announced earlier this week. The awards ceremony takes place annually on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

[h/t The New York Times]

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If you simply want to find slang, there are plenty of places to look online, but if you want a thoroughly researched, meticulously documented view of 600 years of English slang expressions, Jonathon Green’s Green’s Dictionary of Slang is what you need. Until now, getting a look at Green’s three volume masterpiece involved a trip to the library, or shelling out hundreds of dollars. This week, with the launching of Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online, it’s become a whole lot easier to dig into the fascinating, long history of English slang.

The site allows lookups of word definitions and etymologies for free, and, for a well-worth-it subscription fee, offers citations and more extensive search options. We have made good use of Green’s dictionary here at mental_floss, for articles like “31 Adorable Slang Terms for Sexual Intercourse from the Last 600 Years,” “35 Classy Slang Terms for Naughty Bits from the Past 600 Years,” and “35 Creative Slang Terms for Death from the Past 600 Years.”

The range of usually-not-discussed-in-polite-company human experience is covered in the dictionary, and constantly expanding with new research. As Green’s announcement states, “the dictionary breaks down into the following major themes and categories; the order is based on frequency of definition:

Crime and Criminals 5012; Drink, Drinking and Drunks 4589; Drugs 3976; Money 3342; Women (almost invariably considered negatively or at best sexually) 2968; Fools and Foolish 2403; Men (of various descriptions, not invariably, but often self-aggrandizing) 2183; Sexual Intercourse 1740; Penis: 1351; Homosexuals/-ity 1238; Prostitute/-ion 1185; Vagina 1180; Policeman / Policing 1034; Terms of Racial or National Abuse: 1000; Masturbate/-ion 945; Die, Death, Dead 831; Beat or Hit 728; Mad 776; Anus or Buttocks 634; Defecate/-ion & Urinate/-ion 540; Kill or Murder 521; Promiscuous / Promiscuity 347; Unattractive 279; Fat 247; Oral Sex 240; Vomiting 219; Anal Sex 180; STDs 65.

Now doesn’t that sound like a lexicographical good time? Check out Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online here.