.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

“People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas”, Bellow once wrote. “We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.” Herzog.

“I never could hang on to valuables — gold, silver. With me, money is not a medium. I am money’s medium. It passes through me — taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this undignified blundering costs plenty….”

From Herzog, Saul Bellow.

granite oceans gouged depthlessly by canyons… Wolfe

Richard Nixon expert now working for the Census Bureau having just driven by. Hot sun on my skin and reciprocal longing, from my brain, for shade…. I did not feel thirsty but thought I’d worn the wrong socks. “Humidity and shins a factor in my exhaustion,” I assessed. “As one runs, one becomes a marsh around one.”

The most meaningful event of the day occurred within the first 15 minutes of having woken up — and so I thought of the day as having been “top heavy” in that sense.

Woke up with a dream of a sexual encounter with someone I tangentially knew, which made me pensive but wasn’t the meaningful thing. Then I started leaping around and spilled a fair portion of my coffee — for I had discovered a bug.

I was too surprised to take any action against it — or to take any action for it for that matter; I had not previously seen his like here before. But not long after, while I was reading, I saw another one, or the same one, and he was being really obvious about it too, so that I put an overturned glass over him like I had done the other day at the shop, where I am sadly accustomed to seeing such creatures, so as to perform a catch and release; only this one moved too quickly for me and I hurt him — I saw that I had hurt him — which I didn’t like at all — the edge of the glass, instead of containing him, had first fallen on his back.

I carried him outside and threw him by the nearby tree alive but he had been hurt, which made me pensive, though those things are pretty tough. That was the most memorable moment of today, as I sit here in the evening.s

The Lost Weekend holds up, now looking into the source of the film, novel by Charles Jackson.

Found myself thinking Jimmy Stewart, in It’s a Wonderful Life, is kind of like an exaggerated Ray Milland — a Don with no reason given for his excesses.

Something I’d forgotten about: Don always putting the wrong end of a cigarette in his mouth.

Turns out I did the right thing today: when an emergency vehicle passes you on the other side of a four lane highway, divided by double yellow lines, (and not a median) you are required to pull over in this jurisdiction. (Been a while since I’d consulted the law on this point. And I felt the cars behind me were wondering too.)

avec ma mort eût disparu non seulement le seul ouvrier mineur capable d’extraire les minerais, mais encore le gisement lui-même…“Le gisement lui-même“

Tweet: String theory is what happens when an intelligent system is starved of sensory input and starts hallucinating. Intelligence needs grounding.

For this reason, intelligence is practically never the bottleneck to solving impactful problems. The bottleneck is iterated contact with reality.

Not sure what I thought pullulation meant but not a teeming, swarming or multiplying. “The ceaseless pullulation of the sea,” Wolfe.

Abri: a shelter; a cavity in a hillside; a shelter on the side of hill with an overhung rock as its roof.

About A Fable, I recall it having seemed a little contrived myself, but also having liked that about it. Most memorable aspect even. Need to read again.

Unlucky Stars live again. Could be reconvening next Summer.

Lectio difficilior potior, “the difficult reading is stronger.” (It’s more likely that a scribe, copying a text, would make it simpler rather than more complicated, so the more complicated text is probably the more accurate.)

Always curious to me the articles I’ll read from beginning to end. Many factors involved of course. Topic of this one, the incompetence of corruption.

Or is the real problem — that one is not “spherical.” That these are the concerns of the Non-Spherical Man?… Now why could that not be one of their superhero-movie superheroes — The Non-Spherical Man??

In the early versions of this comic strip, Non-Spherical Man is simply a square man who, while knowing that a measure of roundness is what’s called for in life, simply can’t manage to find anything remotely radial in himself. We are frequently disappointed in these early strips to find time and again N-S Man briefly acting like someone a little cool, rather calm, who takes it as it comes, who is not concerned with what They think, and so forth, but the roundness of the world finally works into the angularity of his soul and results inevitably in him having a complete freak out. (Non-spherical man shirt symbol: Spherical Man.) Most N-S Man strips from this period end with N-S Man having some kind of major spastic event, revealing him to be totally uncool, with all kinds of unshared judgments and assumptions. 

Facing flagging sales, the strip was re-envisioned in the 1960s, making N-S Man more misshapen than explicitly square, round in some ways, angular in others, each of these stories ending with the same ambiguous picture of the hero, looking out at the reader in such a way that you can’t quite tell if he is doing a really good job of containing a freak out or is just legitimately unflustered or unbothered by the events of the preceding narrative — events that would definitely have been jarring to any actually square person, with established protocols being ignored, authority and sensible rules flouted, things that were “just not a good idea” embraced with abandon…. 

When sales continued to plummet, the title was slated to be shelved and there arose a heated internal debate among the strip’s creators about how to resolve this essential ambiguity of the character for the final episode: was he essentially square but “holding it in” or had he actually learned something about resignation and letting things be and not caring about what Others think? Had the cool counsel of his slick sidekick and “black friend” Rick Warrior finally had its effect? Had he grown comfortable in his own skin at long last? 

The unanimous conclusion was — he had a totally massive spastic meltdown, lasting from the very first frame to the very last in the book, in which he not only freaks out about everything that had occurred in every previous strip but freaks out about not having freaked out about it in real time, etc…. Tears, red in the face, knowing he could only blame himself, knowing he was to blame, him….! Freaked out about mortality, freaked out about politics, freaked out about never having “found myself, let alone a partner….” In a way, it really was the perfect end to the Non-Spherical Man strip, because now no one wanted to hear anything about him ever again.

Hawthorne the author with an ‘e’, hawthorn the tree with no ‘e.’ This comes up because I had been thinking of Proust’s love of hawthorns while walking along Hawthorne Street, it turns out, which is presumably named after the author. This was last Spring and it was actually a row of cherry blossoms that inspired the recollection. It was after a light rain and the trees remained in full blossom but the sidewalk below was plastered with their petals in a surprisingly even and lovely pink distribution.

Looks like the word cancel comes from an early Latin word for lattice: “from Latin cancellare ‘to make like a lattice,’ which in Late Latin took on especially a sense ‘cross out something written’ by marking it with crossed lines.” Also by turns related to Latin carcer from which carceral and incarceration.

armamentarium, from the Times today, “All of the equipment available for carrying out a task, especially all the equipment used by a physician in the practice of medicine.”

Yes, it turns out, haunches does occur in the singular. You just don’t much hear it.

Thoreau’s journals: “There is something in the darkness and the vapors that arise from the head – at least if you take a bath– which preserves flowers through a long walk.”