Quite randomly came upon this mention of ‘vile figs’ in Jeremiah 29:17 today. KJV:
Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Behold, I will send upon them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and will make them like vile figs, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil.
(Also a fig tree Jesus cursed for not bearing fruit.)
I have absolutely never heard of ‘welcome in.’
Look Homeward, Angel seems to occupy a middle ground between Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses: it lacks many, though not all, of the defects of the former; and has many, though not all, of the virtues of the latter…. No, I don’t know quite what I mean by this…
Maybe the defect of POTA I have in mind is that it assumes Joyce’s personal history is important which, by the time of Ulysses, has become a more universal interest in the particulars of ordinary experience. Similarly, Wolfe seems to get bogged down at times in trying factually and compendiously to relate the details of his childhood, which comes at the expense of pith.
a Personal History (absent a person), The Book of Customers (Chance Sweepings), The Book of The Customers, Chance Sweepings. In which the world’s six or seven personality types order a coffee and leave. Chance Sweepings. A “Street level view of history,” a “Memoir of The Other Directed Person” (“Autobiography of One’s Prime.”), or “History of The Mundane”… As local history, without time; as epic poem, a collage…. A “song of occupations”….
Note to self. I’d given up reading The Laws during my “PLANTS” project because there were so few mentions of plants in Plato generally, and this was a long dialogue, indeed the longest, and seemed to continue in that vein. However, there is a fairly extensive discussion of agricultural regulation in the eighth book as well as some plant metaphors in the discussion of sexual morality.
The Hemingway biography led me to the biography of Maxwell Perkins (who was Hemingway’s editor) which led me to Look Homeward, Angel (which Perkins also edited) and to “Miss Elizabeth” the autobiography of the third wife of Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Anderson.
Having finished that last one, I now feel my reading could go in three possible directions: I could read Faulkner’s Mosquitoes (an early one which Elizabeth Anderson says was based on a boating trip they all made); I could read a biography of silversmith Bill Sprattling (with whom Anderson had a deep friendship after her divorce from Sherwood); or I could read Gellhorn, the biography of Hemingway’s 3rd wife, a copy of which I happen sort of randomly to have. Maybe I could do a tour of third wives more generally…
I think I will go with Gellhorn because, despite not having an overwhelming interest in her as a public figure, I’ve been enjoying reading of these interweaving lives.
“Miss Elizabeth,” by the way, was good! It was she who had introduced Faulkner to Sherwood Anderson, the latter having jumpstarted the former’s career. (Miss Elizabeth ran a book store in NYC and had had Faulkner as an employee. Later on she married Sherwood and they would all hang out in New Orleans.)
Spilth: spillage, spilled material.
That Evening Sun. Fun to see the Compsons outside of the novels. About being unable to persuade others of the rationality of your fears/ being able to write off others’ fears as irrational.
I’m not reading Plato’s Laws with much interest or comprehension unfortunately, but at times it enters some strange territory which makes me wish my reading were more thorough. Here he seems to compare the creation of the laws to the creation of a tragedy, and law givers to poets:
“‘Best of strangers,’ we should say, ‘we ourselves are poets, who have to the best of our ability created a tragedy that is the most beautiful and the best; at any rate, our whole political regime is constructed as the imitation of the most beautiful and best way of life, which we at least assert to be really the truest tragedy; we are your rivals as artists and performers of the most beautiful drama, which true law alone can by nature bring to perfection.’”
I suppose this squares with his representation of Socrates in The Phaedo as a tragic hero, a noble figure in an ironic situation, albeit one who is not to be pitied.
Article not very clear on the cause of the decrease in homelessness. I get the impression that Trump’s anti-immigration policies were probably an important factor but that no one really wants to say so.
Nothing much happened today and that was a good thing.
I had totally forgotten to ask my sister if I could leave the dog at her place for an hour or two this morning but when I got there she was still there and said sure and even gave him milk bones and for me some homemade cookies and bread, so that was good.
And I’d had an irrational fear later about taking the dog with me into the automatic car wash, as if there were even an outside chance it might give him an epileptic fit or something; but if anything, he seemed excited by the massive buffers and thick sprays and I was a little excited myself by the thick flopping tassels that swish over you at the end — so that was a good thing, as was the fact that the wash did actually a really good job on the bird stains which was my principle reason for going there and which I had wished I had done some preparatory work on in advance of my visit, though, as I say, that had turned out to be unnecessary.
And I’m always a little concerned when I go to the Trade Center to drop off the glass recycling that they’re going to ask me for my county ID, because the car has out of state plates, and even though I do have ID proving my county residency, it might be awkward if some county worker were to feel compelled to come up to me and say “heh, buddy, what are you trying to pull?”
In fact the only thing I can think of as having happened today was that when I first got into the car to take the dog to my sister’s my cheap, ridiculous looking sunglasses got knocked off my hat and fell into the street, then when I half got out of the car again to retrieve them I knocked my shin against the bottom of the doorframe, not that that had hurt so much, but that that, along with the sunglasses getting knocked off, made me think heh! what IS this? And I’m still not sure exactly what that was but yet will think of it as something that happened.
Bill Spratling, known as a silver designer, who shared living space with Faulkner while he was in New Orleans.
I’ve been struggling in recent years to characterize in my dream journal the age of the people I’m dreaming of.
The problem is that I am middle-aged and most the people I dream of I dream of as being both my age and looking much younger than that, maybe in their 30’s.
I never notice signs of aging in my childhood friends, for example, when I dream of them, never a wrinkle or gray hair, despite that I know quite a few of them still today, and may say to a certainty they exhibit signs of aging. It’s a bit odd in fact that I never dream of them as being old.
Perhaps there is just a time in our lives when we are actually ageless and our dream figures will ever be of that age. Perhaps there is an age that we regard as “normal” — and that is not yet for me middle or old age.
Auburn initially meant “whitish, yellowish-white” from Latin albus.
Herzog (Bellow): “No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die. Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it. But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them.”
Barbel: whisker like sensory organ of fish.
Dream: Herzog, the character, is rewriting the novel Herzog from within the novel by using A.I.
“Squish squish” (my regular speaking voice); “Squish squish” (in falsetto voice, tonal interval about a major third, descending); “Squish squish” (my actual steps in the muck.)
Ripshin Farm, Sherwood Anderson’s home in Troutdale, Virginia. (Troutdale is distant SW corner.) Previous to this, Anderson was in New Orleans and before that Reno. The Andersons had dogs named Rip and Shin.
Ptosis: “refers to droopiness or abnormal downward displacement of a body part or organ.” (The ptotic malevolence of his left eye – Wolfe.)
