.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

And it doesn’t pertain at all to Thought (Thought is like math) or to Perception (which is like a florid verbal description of the sort you could never write yourself, the author is so talented)

(Thought is like a law court, Thought is like the judge; the judge, however, likes to go into the chemistry lab quite a bit and he is never quite the same when he comes back out.)

What else: women with dogs, dogs with dogs, dogs with boys, the man who is a public nuisance, the young running woman who mildly alarms you, the chair that is like a chiropractor’s table (you never know when, or where, it might give)…

You have no idea, as you’re looking with mild interest at the unexpected road closure, that you are going to make the judgment later today that it has actually, though not catastrophically, been a fairly bad day — the fault of one’s choices, naturally enough, not the fault of the day.

Noticing that while a lot of people are meticulous about using the plural verb with “data” they are less meticulous, and even reluctant, to use the plural pronoun.

Perhaps this is an accepted usage I don’t know about but I heard Chairman Powell doing it a lot during his remarks last week. The data always were, the data was always it.

Wondering if Wallace Steven’s First Idea (from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction) might better be seen through the lens of scientific revolution than of poetic discovery.

The first idea is the reality which Newton/ Galileo saw “without the varnish” of Aristotelian ideas. It is the reality, the phenomena, that Einstein saw without the varnish of Newtonian ideas. Einstein is a poet looking past Newtonian assumptions to arrive at a new idea of the elemental nature of the universe, the “first idea.” Maybe?

Interesting phrase “hunger for courage” — Hanania.

I’d passed the woman holding what I’d identified as French baguette inside the grocery store, now she has passed me on the street outside with her baguette. I thought of the word “baguette” then began mentally to defend my use of the word banquette in a text message earlier in the day (not to suggest that anyone had complained of my use of this word): banquette was a bad word to use in that it wasn’t a word everyone knew, I agreed, but a good one in that it meant something more precise than bench. (The kitchen bench, I might have called it.)

Staring from behind at the earing of the grocery store clerk as she makes an adjustment at my self-checkout kiosk. She has no idea I’m doing it and she wouldn’t care if she did.

Someone having thrust a stick, a short twig, through a mounting hole of a street sign post. When you see such arbitrariness, you assume a child, but it may not have been.

Question: was your downward mobility related positively, negatively, or not all, to your society’s decline?

Related question: Was your upward mobility, were it eventually to transpire, actually independent of your society’s decline?

Related: What is that remark of Confucius again? “When government is Just, good men grow wealthy?” (Probably imperfectly remembered bad translation.)

Question: Why were you glad the woman with the rollator had turned aside before it had become necessary to pass her? (Always awkward passing people. Maybe next they would pass you — and you would pass them again — then you had to stop to check your watch and got passed again — on and on.) Does anyone stop to check their watch today? (no.)

Experiencing no time at all between the removal of the bottle’s plastic cap and the consumption of the plastic bottle’s contents (If we could only see and slow time enough to see what we’re doing, it is thought, then our Will Power would excitingly appear.)

How did you demonstrate your handiness today? (Greased a lock.) How is it you can make a friend laugh but not an audience? (There is probably a good answer to that question, if you cared enough to seek it out. It probably has to do, though, with “assumed knowledge” in some way.)

Did you BEND anything today that wasn’t a part of your anatomical person? (What kind of idiotic question is that? Did I BEND anything today? If I had, if I hadn’t…. but yes, of course I did.)

Vietnamese woman energetically drilling, scraping, prodding, saturating, suctioning, swabbing my teeth. It would be so interesting to be a person as skilled as this, I reflect, as she performs these maneuvers over myself… I appreciate her quiet industry and intensity.

When seeking out a dentist, my only guiding principles had been — (1) location — and (2) that I’d had positive experiences with lady health professionals in the past (although not having myself been one of their patients — having not myself been to see a health professional in 3 decades until around now.)

In the lobby beforehand, still reading Tristram Shandy, fighting at every moment to read it over the noise of CNN reportage of the depressing “dogshit bill,” as Yglesias had called it, the BBB… I did manage, however, to come across a quotable passage in this not very quotable book, which I would probably post on a blog later —

“That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best — I’m sure it is the most religious — for I begin with writing the first sentence — and trusting to Almighty God for the second.”

This reminded me somewhat of the first sentence of Augie March but, having by a miracle efficiently found a copy of that book in my library — though my library is not extensive, just extremely disordered — I found it was not as snug a fit as I first thought, and tabled the idea of trying to link them. (Idea was supposed to have been — “spontaneously” is the only way to write. A writer’s fundamental work is experiencing — thought, emotion, sensation –, after which, the rest should follow more or less naturally. Contra-Flaubert, I suppose.)

The other statement that leapt out at me, in the waiting room, over the CNN, was a little Whitman-like (Whitman, who wrote spontaneously, not laboriously, according to my information). Tristram writes: “For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live.”

“Poetry’s great mission is the pursuit of truth on a human scale, bound by the measure of each person’s mortal voice.” Robert Pinsky/ nyt

Love this unflashy video on pneumatic road tubing.

I had closed a message to a friend with the semi-jocular suggestion that she “be good;” now, in the woods with the dog, I’m thinking that actually, seriously, that might be pretty good advice for me to follow myself, and I wrap my bowed, cotton-hatted head with my knuckles three times lightly, remembering my Lear (“Beat beat gates! Let thy wisdom in and thy folly out!”), thinking “be good.”

Now, like an echo to my own wrapping, I hear branches high above me knocking, three times or so, could almost be a woodpecker but more muted, maybe an old or weakened woodpecker, or a branch upon a branch — knock knock knock — (which makes me remember my Macbeth, the gate keeper or whatever he is, the morning after Duncan’s murder: “knock, knock, knock!”) — be good.

Helen Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire. One of those rare works of literary criticism, like Simone Weil’s Poem of Force, which is a beautiful artwork itself often. Great place to start reading Wallace Stevens.

Harold Bloom’s The Poems of Our Climate is also helpful, particularly with understanding the long poems, which Vendler doesn’t discuss; however, Bloom is inclined to theorizing and this will somewhat distract from his subject.

That Denial is a process of reverse-annealing, a kind of weakening of a weakness.

The word “archery” spoken by a passerby. “Maybe because he doesn’t like archery,” was I believe the phrase spoken by the young passing woman to her friend.

Judging that this bicycle, having reached the bottom of the hill, must be electric, not because the rider is not pumping his legs, and not because of its speed, but because of the uniformity of its motion as it now climbs out of the dip.

Situation isn’t favorable to reading the vanity plate of that conspicuously courteous driver — what do you imagine it would have revealed to you about the nature of his courtesy?

Woman blocking the walk: old, ugly, pained, doesn’t want to go to work, and you are that person.

Bus stop: overweight black or brown man of 30 with a white over-the-shoulder bag and eyeglasses.

Bus stop: poofy dark haired white woman, seen from the back, with big headphones enmeshed in the “poof.” Attractive figure of woman in the distance in business attire observed walking: I’m guessing she’s heading for the bus stop on Wisconsin.

Why are you staring off like that? You are trying to recollect an idea you had about someone that seemed to unlock, a little, the personality of that person.

What is that person in your mind really, neurons…? Neurons attached to what?

Observation requires a mass of words rubbing against a mass of perception — the sparks arrive as notes or new thoughts — but at this moment, the sense of it is, there’s not much going on in either department. The world is bland and I’ve got nothing to say

If you were to put all these statements together all you’d get is this guy you’re looking at in the mirror so why not just give them a photograph and be done?

I make an observation on the presence of Jersey Walls simply because I’ve recalled the name of those concrete traffic barriers, and I want to comment about a group of cars simply because the word “passel” has come to mind. If you were to list everything there was in the world, the list would at best be a part of that world; it wouldn’t contain it — the opposite. It’s a silly idea, what you’re trying to do.

Linda Greenhouse on the challenges conservative justices may face in upholding the President’s tariff rationale. (Originalism, textualism, the “major questions” and “non-delegations” doctrines, all argue against it, she says.)

You can listen to the proceedings here.

I like the point Noah Smith has been making recently, if I understand: Europeans have hated technological progress, identifying it with the U.S. — like air conditioning — but maybe they might love it, or embrace its necessity, by identifying it with China?

NYT 10/29: Two federal prosecutors in Washington were informed on Wednesday that they would be placed on leave after requesting a stiff sentence for a man granted clemency after participating in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, who later turned up armed near the house of former President Barack Obama.

Ezra Klein: From 2012 to 2024, Democrats moved sharply left on virtually every issue. They often did so arguing that they were finally representing communities that had long suffered from too little representation. This was what they were told to do by the online voices and professional groups that claimed to represent these communities.

But it went wrong. Democrats became more uncompromising on immigration and lost support among Hispanic voters. They moved left on guns and student loans and climate, and lost ground with young voters. They moved left on race and lost ground with Black voters. They moved left on education and lost ground with Asian American voters. They moved left on economics and lost ground with working-class voters. The only major group in which Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12-year period was college-educated white voters.

Gasconade: Boastful talk. “Approaching like a gasconade of drums.” (Wallace Stevens)

I think Harold Bloom’s discussion of Wallace Stevens’ poem The Snow Man (in The Poems of Our Climate) is more complicated than it needs to be and strangely neglects to consider the theme of snow.

The snow man is “nothing” because he is made of snow — of the impermanent — while the “nothing that is there” is the more permanent things that snow will conceal, and the “nothing that isn’t” is the snow itself — the impermanent, the seasonal, the merely perceived.

To not hear “misery in the wind” means both to not imbue the purely material universe with human sentiment as well as to not find the wintry state miserable.

The poem.

Idea of Trump as being a kind of reverse financial crisis.,,, But I don’t know what I mean by that yet.

I suppose he’s the reverse in that people keep on bidding him up not because they think he has value but because they think he doesn’t… ?

Interesting. Noah Smith today compares Louis XIV to Putin and the printing press to social media in explaining our global drift toward despotism.

20 mars. — Resté toute la journée chez moi lire le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge, de Dumas, très amusant et très superficiel. Toujours du mélodrame.