.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

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Note that this biography was written in the 1960’s and has probably been superseded in some respects by later scholars.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

Ngrams: “conflation.”

NYT: “A Pew survey published in June found that only 35 percent of Canadians now view the United States as a reliable partner, down sharply from 2022, when it was 82 percent.”

It’s odd how Noah will make these comments about the DSA being as bad as MAGA, clearly in an effort to warn Democrats about the threat posed by the far left, while his respondents are largely outraged MAGA supporters saying MAGA is not so bad as the DSA.

(The threat of DSA is not their pie in the sky platform, as the MAGA people represent; but, like with MAGA, as MAGA itself has shown, the threat is the inevitable corruption.)