.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

vor die Hunde gehen, to go to the dogs

… She pats soddenly, with the flat of her hand, a patty of sand.

… An inner tube overturned in the wave: it knows what’s happened sooner than the rider does.

… The girl extends her thumb far to the right and her pinky far to the left to indicate the length of the biggest fish she’s seen.

… Inner tubes: the first one rises, the second one rises, the first one falls, the third one rises.

… The wave, rising, gathers sun in its concavity.

… The cave, the cave in, the miners diving in and out of it.

… The swagger of mom, the stagger of mom’s sister.

… The wave breaks first to its right, then to its left, and finally down the center — well, what about it? It’s just one of those things that happens with waves.

… Woman’s shoulders snapping back, her chest jutting forward, as her butt is slapped hard by a wave.

… You can’t make out what the boy screams in a thrilled tone above the sound of the surf, but it’s a statement of the obvious, you’re sure, or of what seems to him to be obvious.

… I had never seen quite that smile on my relative’s face before: he is remembering having been a young parent.

… A roll of wave as knotted and complex as the trunk of an old oak tree, its whole life passing in a few seconds. The ocean is nothing but one vast logging camp depositing many such as these onto the flatbed.

… And we are as a crowded shoreline of waves; we bunch up, we outstrip and trip each other up, we collide and form things, ducking and weaving, and disappearing.

Old Corndrinking Mellifluous Hemingway called Faulkner.

Came across Busan today, which I’d have called Pusan — which was changed a couple decades ago at least.

I’m not sure how much of this to attribute to Baker and how much to attribute to Hemingway, or to some other cause, but the former’s biography of the latter is among the liveliest literary biographies I have read, full of adventure, accident, misfortune, comic locutions, fame, and bad behavior.

In the end, it’s only the writer’s writing that matters, but it does seem like Hemingway was also quite physically courageous, I’ve learnt from Baker, which makes an impression on me.

Note that this biography was written in the 1960’s and has probably been superseded in some respects by later scholars. I just happened to see it at a used book store and it looked good.

Promenoir: a covered walk.

Ngrams viewer: dispositive. Been seeing this word a lot without really knowing what it means. Determining, conclusive, deciding, are synonyms.

of course yes

I’d never come across this, The Platonic Blow, Auden. Mentioned in this wildly glowing review of The Disappearers, Marlon James.

Remembering the weirdness of Rhinestone.

I’d forgotten why I’d called this “Paper Mache”: it was the idea I could walk away from my fake self — a fraud who thought he was a writer or what have you — like I could from a paper mache rendering of myself, only the problem was the copy weighed as much as I did and seemed actually to be me.

Mastodons, Hemingway called his extreme hangovers. 

Ort is a word that comes up in Timon, “bit, remnant, scrap,” from an Old English word for leftovers, it looks like.

… the cold brook, candied with ice (Timon). Candy is Arabic.

Whirlwinds and Spirals

Here’s that which is too weak to be a sinner,/ Honest water, which never left man i’ th’ mire. – Timon of Athens.

the magic that is poured on us every day (*)

“Water Lily Passage” (Proust)

“The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion of outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing…” The Leopard.

roy ayers … the memory