"Sound carries faster through water than through air, and soon we heard a plink-plink-plinking. It was followed by what sounded like bacon..."

"... sizzling in a frying pan, which turned out to be a bubbly photosynthesizing elixir of microbes, decaying muck and insect larvae. Then there was a clicking — possibly aquatic snails... — and the quiet pops of fish mouths opening and closing, a miraculous sound that this lapsed fly fisherman thought she would never hear. Somewhere in the humid thickets a bullfrog croaked... During the pandemic, he... started listening to tidal pools along the sea walls — hearing nothing at first and then drawn by a 'persistent scraping.' It turned out to be limpets: aquatic snails that have teeth stronger than Kevlar to feed on algae and excavate rock. (He said he wouldn’t mind being reincarnated as a limpet.)... On our walk, we 'ear-witnessed' a Sabrett hot-dog stand’s hot buzzy generator before taking the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge, where he captured its vibrating walkway and staccato of speeding cars clip-clopping over metal plates."

From "It’s the Summer of Soundwalking. He Is Your Sherpa. 'We may be hearing but not listening,' Jacek Smolicki said, showing a reporter how sound travels through tree roots in Central Park and amplifying the scraping of aquatic snails" (NYT gift link)(lots of photos and sound recordings).

Marginalia...

... was the original name of this blog and the subject of the first post on it, so I'm always delighted to find something bloggable that can take the "marginalia" tag.

I love this one, from the biography "John Adams" (pp. 763-764)(commission earned):

Unlike [Thomas] Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, [John] Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestley.

Ah, John Adams was a proto-blogger! 

"After the rain, he went out in search of snails. He talked to them; they did not creep away from him. He held them in his hand..."

"... observed them and laid them to the side where no bird could see them. When he died, all the snails from the neighborhood came together to form his funeral cortege."

 
Wrote Elias Canetti, quoted in "A Nobel Prize winner’s brilliant tirade against mortality/Elias Canetti described 'The Book Against Death' as 'the only book that I was born to write,' but it was also a book he could not finish, or even properly start" (WaPo).

Some of Canetti’s meditations span several pages; others are brisk aphorisms. Many are straightforward; a handful are downright gnomic. “He only wants to be kissed by very old ravens,” one particularly mysterious entry reads. Canetti sometimes chronicles his personal life in the book — he writes wistfully about his first wife, who died in 1963, and he cannot resist a few joyful remarks about the birth of his daughter — but he also includes short, grotesque fictions. In one, he imagines “a people made up of individuals who have kangaroo-like pouches, into which they stuff their shriveled dead and carry them around with them.”

"She was always half-broke. When you date women, she joked, there’s no man to grab the check...."

"If you are made nostalgic by the mention of defunct Manhattan bars and restaurants, this book will be like reading the liner notes to a Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra album at midnight through a glass of bourbon....  'Sex, to me, should be a religion,' Highsmith wrote. 'I have no other.... As long as beautiful women exist, who can be really depressed?'... She was a powerful and systematic drinker... 'The world and its martinis are mine!... I wonder if any moment surpasses that of the second martini at lunch, when the waiters are attentive, when all life, the future, the world seems good and gilded (it matters not at all whom one is with, male or female, yes or no)'.... Writers drink because 'they must change their identities a million times in their writing... This is tiring, but drinking does it automatically for them. One moment they are a king, the next a murderer, a jaded dilettante, a passionate and forsaken lover; other people actually prefer to stay the same person, stay on the same plane, all the time.... Without liquor I would have married a dull clod, Roger, and had what is called a normal life.'... She kept snails as pets, and would smuggle them through customs in her bra."

Writes Dwight Garner in "Patricia Highsmith Lived Extravagantly, and Took Copious Notes" (NYT). The book he's reviewing is "Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995."

"Goblincore: the fashion trend that embraces ‘chaos, dirt and mud’/Sales of clothes and accessories featuring mushrooms, snails, frogs and worms are booming, but why now?"

Headline at The Guardian. 

Yes, I know this isn't the most important thing going on in the world right now, but maybe that's why we've got Goblincore. I remember a similar enthusiasm for mushroom and frog motifs in the early 1970s.

[Goblincore] “romanticizes the ugly, lesser appreciated parts of the natural world.” Its trappings include animal skulls and earthworms... [I]t is about “chaos, dirt and mud.”... “I’ve been tagging some of my pieces as goblincore for over 18 months but recently it seems anything frog, snail, moss or mushroom related has exploded,” says Jane Geloso, owner of the Palm Tree Etsy store.... 

[I]t can be tied to queerness and anti-capitalism. In relation to queerness in particular, she says, “there’s something incredibly freeing about goblincore. Mushrooms are huge in the community and some species of fungi have thousands of sexes – it’s just about vibing and existing, not fitting into a mould.”... 

A close but more feral cousin to cottagecore, a trend for a stylised, agrarian way of life and its aesthetic – prairie dresses, jam tarts, thatched cottages and strawberry motifs – that was big last year, goblincore is... more “rough around the edges.” 

“Wildflowers and white linen dresses are wonderful but goblincore is staining that same dress with mud and moss and watching snails and slugs eat the wildflowers”....

Isn't it just hippies all over again? And then it's just a question of how much of a "dirty hippie" you are — either really, because you're poor or you've lost track of hygiene, or as a matter of style, a funky aesthetic. 

Now, please gaze upon these vintage cannisters (from 1976). Maybe you remember the strange era in America where people put stuff like this in their kitchen:

I believe if you stare at that image for 60 seconds, thoughts of the actual important news stories of the day will rise up within your brain and dance about to the maddening music of tinkly harps and flutes:

"… there’s a weird number of people battling snails from medieval times … Why is this?"

"We don’t know. Seriously. There are as many explanations as there are scholars."

One answer is: "Since human knights are often seen trembling before—or, indeed, losing to—the harmless, slow-moving snails, it makes sense that the image is a way to emphasize cowardice."

"How to cleans the sweatie and sluttish Complexion..."

"Take thirty Snails prepared, a quart of Goats milk, hogs suet three ounces, camfre poudred two drams, beat them together, and distil them in an Alembick."

Advice from 1665, from the blog Ask the Past, which was linked today at Metafilter.

Let's try one more. This is "How to Tell Jokes, 1558":

"Where your pleasantries are not rewarded with the laughter of listeners, cease and desist from telling jokes in the future. The defect is in you, not in your listeners... For these are movements of the mind, and if they are pleasant and lively, they are an indication and a testimonial of the nimble mind and the good habits of the speaker-- this is particularly liked by other men and endears us to them. But if they are without grace and charm, they have the contrary effect, so it appears a jackass is joking, or that someone very fat with an enormous butt is dancing and hopping about in a tight-fitting vest."

Someone... with an enormous butt is dancing and hopping about... which is actually all we do these days, in case you want to Ask Last Night at the VMAs (go to 1:45).

Watch out for snails.

Really.

UPDATE, February 12, 2009. I'm coming back to this post while adding the "mollusks" tag to things, and I see that the 2 links it contained are dead. Reading one URL, I can see that there were some "giant snails." I guess they were pretty damned big or at least quite numerous. Something amazed me 5 years ago. At least I still have this record of having once been amazed... by a mollusk.

UPDATE, August 4, 2024. I'm coming back to this post while adding another new tag — "snails." Would I have started this tag if I'd realized I had a "mollusk" tag I could have used? No, but I'm continuing with this slow — get it? — process anyway because I experienced a tiny bloggish delight while writing a post about marginalia — the first topic of discussion in the history of this blog — then clicking on the "marginalia" tag and discovering a cool old post with snails. This made me want to create a "snails" tag, because the previous post had quoted this, from the writer Elias Canetti:

"After the rain, he went out in search of snails. He talked to them; they did not creep away from him. He held them in his hand, observed them and laid them to the side where no bird could see them. When he died, all the snails from the neighborhood came together to form his funeral cortege."