.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

The one Maureen Dowd Column I’ve (mainly) read in the last thirty years. Too much of a wordsmith for me. But Trump is in fact Iran’s Newest Hostage.

FUN TO IMAGINE with Richard Feynman. Why is ice slippery, for instance? Good question.

Herdic, a type of horse-drawn carriage.

“The problem is that the rescue infrastructure is exhausted.” Thoughtful editorial about the craziness of the markets, which assume government rescue, and A.I. (NYT)

Klein: “You’re working so hard. And the idea that that is taxed so much more higher than somebody making money just by letting money sit in an index fund… there is a fairness question here.”

Yglesias: “You can’t really instantiate sound conservative ideas without carving out broad Trump-adjacent exceptions.”

Makes me mad too: Trump Killed the One Thing That Made Filing Taxes Easier (NYT)

No growth without change. Yglesias: “There is no growth without physical transformation — new people, new homes, new infrastructure — and everywhere it actually happens people get upset at the fact of change.”

Moved the laundry on (and notes) and took a break by scrolling through political blogs and notes. And I read one tweet about how liberal white women were the most moral force in history and I sank in myself a little (for I was not of that fiber myself) and started hand scrubbing the wood floors (and notes) and I only did a medium job of it but they looked better.

And notes. And cleaning out at last that stand-up dust pan on a rainy day, the dustpan having had a thick carpet of dog hair on it ever since, well, for a long time. Took it out on the back patio to soak on a rainy day. And notes, and texts, and reading about Dostoyevsky, pausing a while over a passage that dwelt on his belief in the afterlife — an uber Russian nationalist, an uber Russian Orthodox Christian. And I sank in myself a little thinking about the afterlife, and thinking “I believe in Dostoyevsky.”

And I thought I was not the most courageous person in history nor was I part of the cohort that was (what did white liberal women have that I didn’t have? I wondered as I scrubbed the wood floors, by what was I impeded?) and sank in myself a little and I thought “But I’m not going to dwell on thoughts of that kind today, which are not useful thoughts.” Then the rain stopped and I and every other neighbor with a dog that wouldn’t go out in the rain went out into the yet dripping air to walk our dogs and I thought, “no, not today will I be having those thoughts.”

Sad story. (True, it valorizes Vance and is probably from his people).

Hannania take on Raskolnikov. (Young men are in general a menace to society.)

Serious proposal: “Iran gives up its more than 950 pounds of nearly bomb-grade highly enriched uranium, and in return the United States gives up on regime change.”

Tweet: a “vortex of misinformation.”

Vronsky’s teeth are so often mentioned as being white and strong, you imagine something has to be up — that Tolstoy has some plan in mind with regard to Vronsky’s teeth.

You remember how, in the Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy equates the strong white teeth of the peasantry with a kind of important simple virtue and wonder if he wants to make a similar point in this book?

And sure enough, after Anna’s death, Vronsky, with his big bright smile, has developed a tooth ache. Beneath the show of excellence, there has developed an underlying issue.

That’s one of the truly artistic touches of Anna K., in which, actually, there are aren’t a lot of fine touches. The book is story-telling, philosophy, psychology, social observations, but not so much in the way of “artistic touches” as you would find in say, Flaubert, or in, say, poetry.

(Maybe what I’m most seeing here is the difference between novels and poems as such: how novels will seem a much diluted, yet more relatable, version of poems. They have a lower “artistry to word” ratio. And yet I didn’t encounter this concern with Dostoyevsky, whose prose style is so much more hectic. From my point of view, Dostoyevsky’s writing has a poetic urgency that Tolstoy’s doesn’t.)

The real artistry of Anna Karinina (and perhaps this is true of the novelistic art as a whole) is not in its “fine touches” though it has them, but in its structure. The novel blends quite perfectly two distinct but intertwining stories: of a love that leads to despair and a love that leads to hope.

A tree had fallen across the forest path and, quite sensibly, rather than removing the whole tree, the Park Service has only cut out the section of it that blocks the path. Less sensibly, I am standing in the path at that very point, my legs straddling the space between the cut-off segments, as if I believed my legs to be conducting a current that flows between the cut-off segments of the dead, severed, fallen tree….

And now the dog is moving me on.

I look at my watch and see we’ve been walking for ten minutes. When I next look at my watch, it is precisely ten minutes after that, and I project the walk as a whole will be of about thirty minutes in duration, which turns out to be about right.

If Whitman was the poetry of America’s rise what was the poetry of America’s decline? (Wasn’t it just all the terrible American poetry we illiterate ones had collectively written? Not even all that terrible, just actually illiterate.)

“The U.S. is more like Rome than like Greece but in its apparent decline, it most resembles a city-state“

Stubbornesses: I want to go this way up the hill, so as to avoid having to circumnavigate the work crew, while he wants to go to up the side with the work crew, because we haven’t been that way in a bit — but today I win.

“Dear, of course that is the only thing that makes sense but I suppose I would yet have two requests,“: that’s what you say when you only want to *sound* concessive…

And now the dog is moving me on.

I’m looking at my watch but to see the time, not to see the *time elapsed*, and so have no idea how much time has elapsed since we first started walking, when, at about 9:25 AM, I come to a stop between the two tree sections. We get home, in fact, just around 10.

Had no idea that the term “sniper” (meaning “sharpshooter”) is derived from “snipe” the bird, apparently owing to the difficulties involved in hunting snipe. (A sniper is someone skilled enough to actually shoot a snipe.) The bird name may come from a Proto-Germanic root meaning “beak or snout” — for it has a long beak.

I have reached the snipe shooting chapter in Anna Karinina and will say, in such an incredible book, I’m a bit bored by them.

Hadn’t heard this mot of Faulkner’s: “Writing a novel is like trying to knock together a chicken coop in the middle of a hurricane.”

Wallace invokes it in a letter to Delillo, D.T. Max reports.

Bibble, synonym of tipple. “Sepulchral señors, bibbling pale mescal,/ Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,/ Should make the intricate Sierra scan.” (Stevens.)

Cato Institute good on Trump’s disgraceful pardons. “Biden’s pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government. In contrast […] Trump’s second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion.”… NYT good too.

Myrmecochory: seed dispersals by ants.