“Shakespeare himself may have found it disturbing. He set out, it seems, to write a straightforward comedy, borrowed from Giovanni Fiorentino’s novella “Il Pecorone” (“The Big Sheep”), only to find himself increasingly drawn into the soul of the despised other. Shylock came perilously close to wrecking the comic structure of the play, a structure that Shakespeare only barely rescued by making the moneylender disappear for good at the end of the fourth act.”…. Stephen Greenblatt, New Yorker

“All along he had seen what was happening to him; and yet held by convention he had refused to act always, because somehow he was not hard enough to act. He was not strong enough, that was the real truth — had not been.”(Theodore Drieser, Free.)

fence on the Boston C … Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage. [x]

related to the foregoing, to what extent are Elizabeth W. and Reefy’s other dark haired girl versions of the same? Elizabeth Willard has two expressions of her restlessness (a love of the stage, sexual activity) somewhat like the dark haired heiress has two main choices for suitors (representative of wealth/ sexual activity)

Trying to sort out the order of events in the two stories “Paper Pills” and “Death” from Winesburg.

Dr. Reefy is forty five when he begins his courtship with the dark haired girl.

He is described at that time as having a jaded grey horse.

At the beginning of “Paper Pills”, we are told that now Dr. Reefy is an old man with a white beard, but that long before he drove a jaded white horse from house to house, then later he married the girl with the dark hair and money.

I had thought that Reefy’s grey horse had turned white but it must be his white horse that has turned grey or else two different horses, both jaded.

In “Death”, Dr. Reefy’s beard is described as grey, but he doesn’t have it yet; he has a brown mustache at this point.

(Perhaps this is just random but, in the two stories involving him, there is an odd transposition at play, in that Dr. Reefy’s beard and horse are both described as having been both white and grey.)

Reefy is described, during his relationship with Elizabeth as being in “middle age”, which must be some years before he turned 45, when his relationship with the girl with dark hair occurred. (His relationship with Elizabeth preceded that with the girl with the dark hair.)

Elizabeth is described as being a “a tired, gaunt old woman at 41” when she has the decisive moment with Dr. Reefy, when Dr. Reefy observes the youthful force within her, a few months after which she dies.

Elizabeth died when George Willard was 18, and began seeing Dr. Reefy when George Willard was “12 or 14,” so she must have herself been in her mid to late thirties. (The implication is that she was 23 when she gave birth to Geoege Willard.)

“Paper Pills” takes us from the present day, when Reefy is 55, back ten years to when he married the heiress at 45. We don’t know anything about the period of Reefy’s life between his affair with Elizabeth and his marriage to the heiress.

Curiosity: do we have enough information to determine the age of George Willard at the time “Paper Pills” begins? Say Reefy was 30-35 during his relationship with Elizabeth, then George Williard (18 at the time of her death) would be 38 at the time Dr. Reefy has a large white beard at 55. That is close to the age Anderson would have been when writing these stories (Born 1876, Winesburg written over 1915-16.)

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And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. [*]

came again upon κρεμμανυμι, in Homer, a lyre hung upon a peg (Odyssey, 8 105): “κὰδ δ᾽ ἐκ πασσαλόφι κρέμασεν φόρμιγγα λίγειαν” and he set upon the peg the clear-toned lyre.

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“A public figure can never be an artist and no artist should ever become one unless, his work being done, he should choose to retire into public life.” Ciryl Connolly, The Unquiet Grave.

The rotating kernel of his/her thought pushed backward upon the rich swart stalk. Had he wished with golden ears to rise above her brothers? Swart kernel. Big bushel of Joseph dreams among colorful flowered racks of folk with she coats. Of loud trucks.… walk

Wanted to see how frequent the mention of “hands” was with respect to other major thematic words/ body parts. This is using the text from Project Gutenberg and Chrome’s “find” function.

Hands: 205*

Shoulder(s): 47

Feet: 39

Body: 66**

Winesburg: 201

George Willard: 150

Adventure: 27***

Dream–: 39

Total number of words in Winesburg, Ohio: 70,806

* number does not include the 11 references to Ed Handby. ** number does include the seven or so references to “everybody” and “nobody”.*** includes verb to venture, of which there are three instances.

Using the novel Herzog to explain the poetry of Ashbery. (A moment of clarity today about Ashbery’s poetry) — it was the novel Herzog but without the markers of punctuation and font Bellow uses to differentiate between letters (epistles), thoughts, speech, (indirect and direct discourse) and narration. It was, in a word, (formally speaking) Herzog without the punctuation. A declining to discrimminate between first person and third, between what the first person thought and what the second person said and what the third person wrote that he had once thought. All idea, language, lost their point of origin, in time and in person, and was put on the same flat plane.

This made Ashbery’s poems harder to read than Herzog. On the positive side it made reality in a way reversible: between what Herzog said he did and what he said he said or imagined he wrote or said, there did remain a difference with Ashbery, but so uncertainly, that what was imagined could have been, and what was said now could have been written before, and what was written before might be the poem you now read.

Aratus of Sicyon… From Pausanius. I believe Pausanius calls him the best of the Greeks of his time (271-213 b.c.). First great leader of second Achaean League.

“Mais alors, autant que par l’identité que j’avais remarquée tout à l’heure entre la phrase de Vinteuil et celle de Wagner, j’étais troublé par cette habileté vulcanienne. Serait-ce elle qui donnerait chez les grands artistes l’illusion d’une originalité foncière, irrédcutible en apparence, reflet d’une réalité plus qu’humaine, en fait produit d’un labeur industrieux ? Si l’art n’est que cela, il n’est pas plus réel que la vie, et je n’avais pas tant de regrets à avoir. Je continuais à jouer Tristan.” (La Prisonnière, Wikisource.fr)

Scott Moncrieff: “But then, no less than by the similarity I had remarked just now between Vinteuil’s phrase and Wagner’s, I was troubled by the thought of this Vulcan-like craftsmanship. Could it be this that gave to great artists the illusory appearance of a fundamental originality, incommensurable with any other, the reflexion of a more than human reality, actually the result of industrious toil? If art be no more than that, it is not more real than life and I had less cause for regret. I went on playing Tristan.”

/ Night of the Iguana/ “Fred’s dead” (Could that be the inspiration for Tarantino’s “Zed’s Dead”?) nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind or violent.”
………….Man’s inhumanity to God..
………….The pain we cause him.
………….We’ve poisoned his atmosphere
………….We’ve slaughtered his creatures of the wild
………….We’ve polluted his rivers
………….We’ve even taken God’s noblest creation, man,
………….And brainwashed him into becoming our own product,
………….not God’s. Hacked, stacked and canned.

Western Interior Seaway Beguines and Beghards Beguine self-dealing

The Water Will Come: A Must-Read Book on Sea Level Rise (Jeff Masters review)

(I’d been wondering how much thermal expansion contributed to sea level rise versus melting land ice: wiki says “Based on figures from between 1993–2008 two thirds (68%) of recent sea level rise has been attributed by melting ice, and roughly one third has come from thermal expansion”)