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Buson (translation Saw and Shiffert):

Coolness —
the sound of the bell
as it leaves the bell

I like thinking of “the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.” It’s a sound that’s not yet heard, isn’t it? A sound that’s only begun its passage to the hearer? And yet that “coolness” suggests the poet’s characterizing a sound he’s heard. And yet again, the poet didn’t apply “coolness” to the sound of the bell, he applied it to its sound as it left it. So maybe, maybe, he means something more like the sound of the bell on first being stricken, rather than the sound of its subsequent resonances?

Very important, actually urgent, from Ezra Klein: This Is What I Fear Most About A.I.

“Perhaps the trouble with literature in our time,” [Maxwell Perkins] wrote [Malcom] Cowley, “is that there aren’t as many rascals as there used to be.” [Max Perkins, Editor of Genius. Berg.]

This was the 1940’s. Makes me wish I’d held onto The Brooklyn Follies a bit longer to read Auster’s encomium on rascals again… The original meaning of rascal is “rabble.” A rascal to me, I suppose, is a person who gets into scrapes. Feel like Auster thought of a rascal similarly — a scrapper.

Really? Galoot comes from Goliath?

Former architect said “if it’s hardware it must have a name,” but couldn’t recall the name of the locks you put at the top and bottom of one side of a double door. Answer seems to be a flush bolt.

Looked up the spelling of “cliquish,” which looks to me like it’s pronounced clickwish. 

Looks like encroach is related to crochet, both having as their root “croc” meaning “hook.” Approach is totally unrelated to encroach.

Forgot what “bleeding edge” meant… While something that is cutting edge is the latest thing, something bleeding edge is so new it’s not known if it has a positive application, a double edged sword. (Also the name of a 2013 Thomas Pynchon novel, which I’d be curious to read again.)

On his best, probably mean at his best, Buddy Emmons.

I put Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies into one of those Free library bins but not the one I’d intended to that will contain a lot of serious reading. (I’ve seen Mann, Nietzsche, Borges… I’ve taken from it a Willie Nelson biography.) When I went there, it was around school let-out time, and this was very near a school, and there was a big crowd around the free library, so I found another spot.

Though Auster doesn’t go much into specifics about it, it was nice to read a book about Brooklyn from the time that I was there, and when the worst thing we had to worry about was that Bush might beat Gore. (I have an image I associate with the result of that election but can’t recall if it was the day after it or what: a newspaper sheet strewn over a small stool or table in the kitchen of our squalid flat with the windows open on a rainy day.) That was calamity enough, yet it proved only to be the leading edge.

Funny that Hemingway didn’t like A Fable. As I recall, Faulkner struggled to write it, too, taking, like, seven years with it, while As I Lay Dying took six weeks. I Imagine receiving the Nobel Prize is probably somewhat rattling to one’s creative propensities. 

“[Hemingway] had a sour grapes theory that ‘no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards.’ The case seemed to be proved by Faulkner’s A Fable, published in August. It struck Ernest as false and contrived: all a man needed, in order to do 5,000 words a day of that kind of stuff, was a quart of whiskey, the loft of a barn, and a total disregard of syntax.” Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.

Interesting. Looks like the ham in place names (Birmingham, Knottingham) is related to the word hem, as in a dress hem. The sense is of a place hemmed in, or boundaried.

‘Dandle’ is an interesting word, etymology uncertain.

In Palo Alto and Cambridge, computer scientists suggest that Americans stop thinking about A.I. as a mere tool, but akin to an alternative species, one the world will have to live with, for better or worse…. NYT

… the invasion of the fools.

She returned home and wrote:

Dear Abe,
I’ve felt awful all day about this morning’s note, in which I fear I spoke with too great a casualness about your work. I hope you think little enough of me to disregard that note entirely or else to chalk it up to a fit of presumption on my part, which was only a fit, and not how I truly feel. I’m very sincerely sorry for any unintended disrespect I might have shown to you or your work, — Robin

Robin was standing; these days she always stood when she wrote letters. The paper she had positioned on the slightly curving cover of her closed record player (which was how she would generally listen to music) and the pen was of the bic brand, which she had seen directly on entering her home, around 9 PM, by a leg of the sofa. She tended to stand when she wrote because she felt it imparted to her writing a greater sense of urgency than it otherwise would, and indeed this letter seemed to express her thought more clearly than those she had made earlier at her desk. She felt confident in her response at last, and, with a sense of relief, she now typed it up, striking out only the word ‘unintended’.

Fictile, capable of being molded.

So it looks like it was Furthman and not Faulkner who wrote the “was you ever stung by a dead bee” theme in To Have and Have not. Not what I’d have guessed.

Gen, a word Hemingway uses in his correspondence — “information.” In bird watching, it is specifically info about the location of a bird.

vor die Hunde gehen, to go to the dogs