.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

Tumbril: A cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their death, especially to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

1919: “Once Steve came in suddenly, his face pale above the dripping poncho, his snapping, and said in a low voice, ‘Now I know what the tumbrils were like in the Terror, that’s what they are, tumbrils.”

(Speaking of Red Cross ambulances in WWI.)

Verdi’s Shakespeare operas comparable to spaghetti westerns? Or more comparable to Shakespeare’s historical plays? Got an abridged version of his Macbeth today.

Larrup: (v.) To hit or beat. (n.) Backtalk, rudeness.

Difference between an engine and a motor seems to be roughly that the former creates, through a chemical reaction, the energy by which it’s powered, while the latter relies on a pre-existing power source, like electricity.

Surprised to come across acidulous instead of acid in a book from the 1960’s.

Agamemnon, 88-91

“The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects’ barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint.” The Leopard, Di Lampedusa.

Was struck by the arms of the angel of this tonight, an eternally human component. The expression that makes the painting be alive, its genius. Hands of Mary those of the traumatized. It’s wild how dead and aloof she seems as opposed to the angel’s eagerness. Young woman who suspects she’s in trouble. (Curious about the small window by her head.)

Why is Mike Johnson looking into the back of my microwave?

Is it because he thinks there are answers in the back of my microwave?

Is it because he knows there are not answers anywhere else and the one place he hasn’t checked yet is in the back of my microwave?

Is it like one of those occasions when after checking everywhere your house keys could possibly be, you start looking in places they couldn’t possibly be, places like in a locked drawer or like in the back of my microwave?

Or is it because there aren’t any answers? Or is it because, though there are answers, they are not the ones Mike Johnson had been hoping for? 

Is it because Mike Johnson already knows the answers but wishes he didn’t? Is it because Mike Johnson is pretending he doesn’t? Is Mike Johnson going so far to perpetrate this ruse as to rigorously search my microwave?

Yglesias having made the interesting point yesterday that historical accuracy is a fairly modern development and that Homer himself was historically inaccurate.

Hemingway took part in this parade that Hart Crane “might well have watched” according to Unterecker.

The idea that classical music could experience a resurgence in popularity, being so unfraught, as it were. Openly about nothing but music itself.

life is just a picture in which I am included but that I watch as if it were a play with no plot… Pessoa

“But to be no longer circumscribed and defined by his father was like finding that all the clocks wherever he looked had stopped, and all the watches, and that there was no way of knowing what time it was.” The Human Stain.

Can’t believe I’m looking up proboscis again. But this time I’m noting the etymology as well — pro (in front of) bosko (feed, nourish), i.e., in front of the mouth.

After some cursory searching, it does seem, unsurprisingly, that Faulkner publicly expressed some views that we would call NIMBYish today — right down to writing letters to the editor to preserve the old county courthouse.

Feel like the only face-saving deal Trump can make with Iran is (a) we get all the nuclear material and in return (b) we don’t interfere in the administration of the Straight. Face-saving but a bum deal.

Probably he will try to run out the clock and make this the next admin’s problem.

Can’t believe I’m looking up stanchion again, which I must do every six months.

“It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.” The Human Stain.

To inspire himself to write, he recalled thinking, “All you have to do is sit down and work!”