Saturday and Sundry Words and Things: guayabera, Klein bottle, & woke.

I've learned a few new, to me, words this week: guayabera, Klein bottle, and woke.

Guayabera : I came across this one at The Sartorialist, a daily stop on my wander through the streets and back alleys of the internet. It's a garment once, possibly still, favoured by males living in certain countries.

The origin of the garment is something of a mystery, thought to be the result of a mixture of Native American and Spanish styles, developed in the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Various claims for the distinctive style have been made, from Mexico to other Latin American countries to the Philippines.(Wiki.)

Klein bottle : this one appeared in a comment thread on a political website, context of its metaphorical use, in that instance, would be a little too involved to fully explain here, and in any case I'd probably get myself into political trouble. So, just the words. Wikipedia tell us that:

In mathematics, the Klein bottle is an example of a non-orientable surface; it is a two-dimensional manifold against which a system for determining a normal vector cannot be consistently defined. Informally, it is a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down. Other related non-orientable objects include the Möbius strip and the real projective plane. Whereas a Möbius strip is a surface with boundary, a Klein bottle has no boundary (for comparison, a sphere is an orientable surface with no boundary). The Klein bottle was first described in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein.

Picture a bottle with a hole in the bottom. Now extend the neck. Curve the neck back on itself, insert it through the side of the bottle without touching the surface (an act which is impossible in three-dimensional space), and extend the neck down inside the bottle until it joins the hole in the bottom. A true Klein bottle in four dimensions does not intersect itself where it crosses the side.

Unlike a drinking glass, this object has no “rim” where the surface stops abruptly. Unlike a balloon, a fly can go from the outside to the inside without passing through the surface (so there isn’t really an “outside” and “inside”).

More detail HERE.

Clear as mud? It was to me too. This little video might help.

Or, there's this (hat-tip HERE)

A German topologist named Klein
Thought the Mobius Loop was divine
Said he, "If you glue
The edges of two
You get a weird bottle like mine."


My own encounter with the Klein bottle was in a metaphorical sense, for which it has much fertile ground (without boundaries!)

From http://lisamaroski.com/2010/11/11/introducing-mobius-strips-and-klein-bottles/

It exemplifies the concept of a merging continuum or union of opposites. The Klein bottle embodies the type of paradox that could be incorporated into language to be able to speak into being a world that works for everyone—us and them, old and young, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, black, white, yellow, and brown—at the same time. For the world to work for all, I propose a linguistic structure based in the notion of both/and.

Woke : It's a word, of course, a common one; but it's being used nowadays as a concept.

A David Brooks' piece in the New York Times a few weeks back:
How Cool Works in America Today

Mr Brooks' article begins:

If you grew up in the 20th century, there’s a decent chance you wanted to be like Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Humphrey Bogart, Albert Camus, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean or Jimi Hendrix. In their own ways, these people defined cool.

The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something, but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.

He later continues:

I started to look around to see if there might be another contemporary ethos that has replaced the cool ethos. You could say the hipster ethos you find in, say, Brooklyn qualifies. But that strikes me as less of a cultural movement and more of a consumer aesthetic.

A better candidate is the “woke” ethos. The modern concept of woke began, as far as anybody can tell, with a 2008 song by Erykah Badu.

He expands on "woke" individuals:

The woke mentality became prominent in 2012 and 2013 with the Trayvon Martin case and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Embrace it or not, B.L.M. is the most complete social movement in America today, as a communal, intellectual, moral and political force.

The woke mentality has since been embraced on the populist right, by the conservative “normals” who are disgusted with what they see as the thorough corruption of the Republican and Democratic establishments. See Kurt Schlichter’s Townhall essay “We Must Elect Senator Kid Rock” as an example of right-wing wokedness.

To be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures. The woke manner shares cool’s rebel posture, but it is the opposite of cool in certain respects. Cool was politically detached, but being a social activist is required for being woke. Cool was individualistic, but woke is nationalistic and collectivist. Cool was emotionally reserved; woke is angry, passionate and indignant. Cool was morally ambiguous; woke seeks to establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable.

Postscript: A couple of my own archived posts on the subject of old-fashioned "cool": HERE (2009) and part 2 is HERE; there are some comments too.

COOL ~ Part 2

Back on 5 and 6 May I was considering coolness. Didn't come to any world-shattering conclusion on the matter, but came up with the questionable theory that those zodiac signs most likely not to give a hoot about opinions of others are most likely to add a soupcon of cool to one's natal chart: Aries, Scorpio, Virgo, Capricorn. I emphasise that these are not Sun signs - just zodiac signs, and part of any and all natal charts. It's when they are highlighted that the cool may seep through.

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.


Dean Sluyter offers his opinions on the topic of cool in an article at Huffington Post: "It's Official - Nobody's Cool". He reasons that because it is now revealed that Jack Kerouac, previously thought to be the embodiment of cool, was obsessed with fantasy baseball, he must be stripped of that legendary aura.

"Mr. Cool, the guy who started it all, was a geek. And if Kerouac's not cool, nobody's cool. What a relief! We can just relax and be ourselves. (That would be ... cool?)

Of course, Kerouac didn't really start it all. He got the cool thing from jazz musicians, hanging around the 52nd Street nightclubs during his brief stint as a benched football player at Columbia, transforming the laid-back-even-when-frantic rhythm of bebop -- the beat -- into Beat Generation prose, writing lovely poetic tributes to Charlie Parker's Buddha-eyes.

If anyone started it, it was Prez, Lester Young, half a generation before Parker. Somehow lightening and purifying the gutbucket sound of the tenor sax till it sang like an alto, Prez used that cooled-out voice to slice through the overheated busyness of early jazz, unhurriedly hanging behind the beat or somehow mysteriously hovering above it, in an ever-cool, rarefied realm not touchable by the mundane world of 4/4. And just incidentally, Prez appears to have been the first person to wear sunglasses as a cool fashion statement; he may even have coined the word "cool" as a term of approval."

(Butting in here with an strological note: Lester Young (27 August 1909) had Sun/Mercury/Jupiter in Virgo; Moon/Uranus in Capricorn. I rest my case, as stated above. (It was gettin' heavy!)

Interesting word, actually. In physics, that which is cool is that which exhibits less random molecular activity -- that which is more settled. Maybe real cool, the essence of cool, is inner cool, settled awareness, buddha mind, the nirvanic state.

In that case, we can amend our statement. Nobody's cool but those who have stopped shaking and stirring this jar of muddy water called the mind long enough so that the mud can settle and the water's natural clarity can shine forth. ....................."

My husband (avid jazz fan) agrees that the idea of coolness, in the sense I'm writing about, must have originated in music. Early jazz was thought to be "hot" ("The Hot Club of France" for instance). Then along came some now legendary musicians with a new, less frantic, cooler, very confdient style, and lowered the temperature.

COOL ?

In writing yesterday's post I asked myself what constitutes "cool", in the music world and elsewhere. I guess that cool, like beauty, is really in the eye or ear of the beholder. There ought to be some kind of loose definition possible though.

Are some zodiac signs cooler than others? I mean, when taken in isolation (that's important), without the full chart mix - an individual "flavour". From my own astro perspective here's how I see the isolated zodiac signs, others may see things differently, it depends on one's own astro makeup as to what's cool and what's not.

Aries: cool, because it leads and is unafraid to be itself, impervious to criticism.


Taurus: uncool - too traditional and reliable - too close to the status quo.


Gemini: can be both at the same time - or alternately.



Cancer: uncool - too sentimental and cheesy.



Leo: would like to be cool, but too keen to be popular and take the limelight.



Virgo: cool because it's so tight-ass nitpicking and doesn't care what people think.



Libra: uncool - too charming and easy to like.



Scopio: coolest of the cool - scary, sexy, fairly unpleasant and hard to like.



Sagittarius: much too much of a good thing to be truly cool.



Capricorn: potentially cool - similar reasons to Virgo.



Aquarius: potentially uncool - tries too hard please and understand "the people".



Pisces: can be both at the same time, like Gemini, but generally doesn't care to be cool.