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wintry mix

2020-02-18 · letter vlog · John · 4:00 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing (also: Science & nature) · mode: Personal essay

Using Indianapolis's grey winter and the Midwestern wintry mix, John argues that the pathetic fallacy works because weather really does affect our emotions and because we cannot help seeing the world through ourselves: what you're looking at matters less than how you look and who you're with.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Kaveh Akbar's January, the Mountain Goats' grey sky, the pathetic fallacy in Keats, Shakespeare and Dickinson; wintry mix introduced

  • ★★ John quotes a Kaveh Akbar poem, 'It's been January for months in both directions', says it really has been, and jokes that in Indianapolis the only answer to why the sky is blue has been that it isn't. — 00:00:00 · Indianapolis

    “It's been January for months in both directions.”

  • ★ John keeps thinking of a Mountain Goats line about the grey sky being vast and real cryptic above him. — 00:00:00

  • ★★ John explains the pathetic fallacy: ascribing human emotions to the non-human, often to reflect characters' inner lives, as in Keats's weeping cloud or Shakespeare's threatening clouds in Julius Caesar. — 00:00:00
  • ★ John says in Emily Dickinson's poetry clouds are sometimes curious and other times mean. — 00:00:44
  • ★★ John says the device often works because whether a cloud weeps or threatens is largely down to who is looking at it and when. — 00:00:44
  • ★★ John explains wintry mix, common in the American middle: precipitation shifting between sleet, snow and rain, sometimes with snow pellets called graupel. — 00:00:44

00:01:13 — Wintry mix: unromantic, unreviewable for The Anthropocene Reviewed, Wilson Bentley's snowflakes; John kind of likes it

  • ★★ John contrasts beautiful snow with wintry mix, which is radically unromantic and feels like the sky spitting on you. — 00:01:13
  • ★★ For years John has wanted to review wintry mix for The Anthropocene Reviewed as a thoroughly Midwestern precipitation: practical, unlovely and unpretentious. — 00:01:13 · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)
  • ★★ John says the problem is that there is literally nothing interesting about wintry mix, while snow is interesting. — 00:01:43
  • ★★ John tells of Wilson Bentley, amateur photographer who took the first close-up photograph of a snowflake in 1885 and photographed over 5,000, calling them ice flowers and tiny miracles of beauty. — 00:01:43
  • ★ John says wintry mix has no such tales to tell, and it's hard to imagine even Bentley being supremely happy about it. (hedged) — 00:01:43
  • ★★ John says he doesn't love being pelted by freezing rain or lashed by sleet across a grocery store parking lot, but he does kind of like wintry mix. — 00:02:12
  • ★★ Wintry mix is one of the ways John knows he is home: he loves Indianapolis precisely because it isn't easy to love, and you have to stay a while to know its beauty and read the clouds as more than threatening. — 00:02:41 · Indianapolis

00:02:54 — Why the pathetic fallacy works; the drive with Sarah; how and with whom you look

  • ★★ John says the words 'pathetic fallacy' sound derogatory and were originally intended that way. — 00:02:54
  • ★★★ John says the pathetic fallacy works first because many of us really are affected by weather, especially in dim winter: weather lacks emotions but literally causes them. — 00:02:54
  • ★★★ John says, second, we can't help seeing the world in the context of ourselves, especially our emotional selves: a feature of human consciousness, not a bug. — 00:02:54
  • ★★ Driving through Indianapolis with Sarah last week (week of 10 February 2020) to a poetry reading, John found the weather adventurous, even hopeful; on another night it would have felt threatening. — 00:02:54 · Sarah Urist Green, Indianapolis
  • ★★★ John concludes that what you're looking at matters, but less than how you're looking or who you're looking with; that night the weather was beautiful. — 00:03:39

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description recommends reading Kaveh Akbar's poem 'Wild Pear Tree' in his brilliant book Calling a Wolf a Wolf. — video description

Mentioned

Central: pathetic fallacy · wintry mix

Also: People: Emily Dickinson · John Keats · Kaveh Akbar · Sarah Urist Green · William Shakespeare · Wilson Bentley

Projects: The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)

Works: Julius Caesar (play) · Ode on Melancholy

Groups: The Mountain Goats

Concepts: graupel

Places: Indianapolis · Midwestern United States

Only in the description or credits: Calling a Wolf a Wolf · The Mess Inside · Wild Pear Tree

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