.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

roy ayers … the memory

Ngrams: “conflation.”

NYT: “A Pew survey published in June found that only 35 percent of Canadians now view the United States as a reliable partner, down sharply from 2022, when it was 82 percent.”

It’s odd how Noah will make these comments about the DSA being as bad as MAGA, clearly in an effort to warn Democrats about the threat posed by the far left, while his respondents are largely outraged MAGA supporters saying MAGA is not so bad as the DSA.

(The threat of DSA is not their pie in the sky platform, as the MAGA people represent; but, like with MAGA, as MAGA itself has shown, the threat is the inevitable corruption.)

“Drunk cavorting and ithyphallic silenus, balancing a kantharos on his penis” (*)

Rum & Coca Cola, Profesor Longhair

Freer Gallery of Asian art today, where I haven’t been in decades. Interesting thing is you’re immediately confronted not with Asian art but with Whistler… Charles Lang Freer

I wonder if a reason the term “free markets” polls better than “capitalism” is that capitalism is essentially a Marxist term for free markets, having an implicit pejorative sense.

Hoses? Do you now address me about hoses? You wish to know what sort of things I have hosed off, with what volume of water, at what personal expense? How many things from my past, from deep in my past, I have hosed? And had I hosed not merely to ‘hose off’ but to ‘water off’ as well? Had I sometimes used my capacities as a ‘wielder of the rubber’ to promote efflorescence, to promote germination, to effect saturation? Had I in fact made occasional patches of earth a kind of towering flowering king’s ransom? with vegetable chalices, with rubies of birds and chards, with petal headdresses of gold, forged in large part by my water, the water from my rubbery hose? My hose indeed the mighty hammer that I beat upon this anvil of ground to create this shower of petals and barks? This fire cracker my hose launched into the sky of the earth where it explodes in colors like bees. A great horse shoe shaped garden, it was, where my hose length had easy ingress to the all spots it must make sodden, where with a minimal adjustment of my torso I might spray all about, hearing the water fall in thick drops or in a light spray upon the broad leaves, the fat soil. Had I washed the seeds off cars? Had I not poured for the dusty doors of the garage a refreshing blast of drink from my hose, which they gratefully swallowed, feeling rehydrated, refreshed and cleaned? Let me give you a hint, the answer to all these questions is yes….

So when I glimpsed a coiled hose to my right at the side of the house (which I have elsewhere referred to as a shed) I was launched into a fever of concerned thought, what should I do, what should I do? Should I grab it, should I make off with it, should I say “mine! mine!”? Should I do something useful with it? Should I, perhaps, have some sort of thought about hoses or about this particular hose? ought I to fashion some sort of thought? What, what?

Well, what in fact I did was almost immediately forget its presence, though not before it had injected me with a sort of sustaining booster shot of love, as it were, a sort of love of life – ay, thought I, seeing its green coil by the house side, it is I who have been hosed by this hose, coiled though it may be, and my true self arose garden-like within the boundaries of myself once again. Hosed, my friends? Yes, friends, quite thoroughly hosed. Hosed and hosed off. My fear is hosed off, my pride is hosed off, I have become a lush garden of love.

9 juin 1847: La paresse est sans doute le plus grand ennemi du développement de nos facultés.

Funny story from Carlos Baker’s 1969 biography of Hemingway. Piggott is a small town in Arkansas. The Pfeiffers are Hemingways in-laws. (Hemingway museum in that house off Cherry Street now.)

“He had just begun to walk around the town, wearing western clothes, full beard, long hair, and a sling to support his splinted arm, when an incident occurred which increased his former prejudice against Piggott. One day after grade school had reopened, he was limping through the schoolyard across Cherry Street. The children mistook him for a tramp. When they saw him heading for the Pfeiffer house, they became frenzied in their determination to protect the town’s leading citizens from this rough-looking outlander. Some two dozen boys and girls pursued him, yelling “Tramp! Tramp!” and pelting him with snowballs. He was pale and shaken when he reached the Pfeiffers’ front porch, and often mentioned it afterwards as a nightmare experience.”

Ah, so to dub (“to make a knight”) is not related to dub (to double a recording.) Maybe I already knew that.

Interesting that television wasn’t introduced to South Africa until 1976.

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.