"Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child..."

"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."

From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.

I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.

ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.

Just how vogue is "just how"?

It slammed me in the face today. I was glancing at "So, Just How Violent Is Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built?" (New York Magazine) and clicked to my next tab and the first headline I saw was "Just How Fragile is Trump’s North Korea Diplomacy?" (The New Yorker).

Now, that I've noticed, I predict I will see it everywhere. I'm making a tag for it.

Why does it matter to me? Because it's a silly promise of exactitude that I know will not be met. And because it speaks of our aimless yearning for specific knowledge. I feel a little wistful about it.

Let's search Google News for some recent "just how" headlines... "Just how hot is 'hot as balls'?" Oh, well, my question is: Just how hot is 'just how'?

"Royal wedding quiz: Just how well do you know the royal family?," "Just How Much Business Can Batteries Take From Gas Peakers?," "Just How Common Is Salmonella Poisoning?," "Instagram will soon show you just how addicted you are to the app," "Just How Clean Are Pillows and Blankets On Airplanes?," "Why doesn't anyone ever tell you just how much your kids' teeth will cost you," "Just how did Matt Lauer's famous desk button work?," "Just How Catholic Is the Met's New Fashion Exhibit?," "'As it is in heaven': And just how is that?," "Just how bad is America, really?," "Just How Unethical Is Trump's Legal Team?", "This close-up of Kim shows just how much make-up you need for the Met Gala."

It is bizarre, this notion that we need to know the precise workings of the mechanism whereby Matt Lauer closed his door, that a clicked-to article could contain the tantalizing details of what it's like in Heaven, that the dirtiness of all those pillows on all those planes could be expressed with fine-grained accuracy, that the aspect of your use of Instagram that's categorizable as addiction could be rigorously quantified.

Notice how often "just how" is paired with "you" and "your." The absurdity of promise of specific knowledge is magnified by the pretense of making it information about you: your children's teeth, your addiction to Instagram, your make-up at the Met Gala, your knowledge of the royal family.