“Gilberte appartenait, ou du moins appartint, pendant ces années-là, à la variété la plus répandue des autruches humaines, celles qui cachent leur tête dans l’espoir, non de ne pas être vues, ce qu’elles croient peu vraisemblable, mais de ne pas voir qu’on les voit, ce qui leur paraît déjà beaucoup et leur permet de s’en remettre à la chance pour le reste. Comme l’éloignement rend les choses plus petites, plus incertaines, moins dangereuses, Gilberte préférait ne pas être près des personnes au moment où celles-ci faisaient la découverte qu’elle était née Swann.” (Albertine Disparue, II, 210)

Scott Moncrieff: “Gilbert belonged, during these years at least, to the most widespread variety of the human ostrich, the kind which buries its head in the hope not of not being seen, which it considers hardly probable, but of not seeing that other people see it, which seems to it something to the good and enables it to leave the rest to chance. As distance makes things smaller, more uncertain, less dangerous, Gilberte preferred not to be near other people at the moment when they made the discovery that she was by birth a Swann.”

“L’embellie de l’économie française se confirme”….L’embellie

Shapes: a shape, a concrete poem, which tries to resemble in words a physical pile (of mail, of clothes, of desk clutter) but has hyperlinks, a la “cangue”, suggestive of a subconcious fears, desires, states…

“Talking of a penurious gentleman of our acquaintance, Johnson said, ‘Sir, he is narrow, not so much from avarice, as from impotence to spend his money. He cannot find in his heart to pour out a bottle of wine; but he would not much care if it should sour.'” (Boswell, Life of Johnson.)

Nous avions dépassé le tropique du Capricorne, et le détroit de Magellan s’ouvrait à moins de sept cent milles dans le sud. (Verne) détroit / Detroit/ Detroit River . . . ‘

l.
..Bub...oo..Bubb..
s.ag.i
ingsi. sad
Maryopthami
rrida bashitru Mar
a bas
S o
The See’r The See’rThe See’rThe See’rThe See’r………
| B/…
F e T….
lacia……
r a a………
o i w…………

three projects: (1) a person who constantly looks things up begins to grow sores and lumps on his head; (2) something factual: what are the limits of self-awareness? (Can I feel the blood in my left toe when I have an itch on my left forearm?) [holdd it forget that that could be one of the lumps]. … Pain in my knees, pain of the lumps, when the pain there is relieved, feels like a kind of “reaching up” of my upper calves […] hang on one second3 [interdextrousness of physical parts and of “consciousness” to be considered] conjoining of calves and thighs through inner nerves and pain

*

Joyce’s work (unlike Beckett’s) insulated against the moment of his writing them (to some extent also against the historical fact that he is writing them) it’s stated

If the black bag is not a black cloud over the green blue stained waves of the steps, then the black bag is the black sail that holds the wind and moves me forward… An Arm Outstretched

the hand sidles over the page as the pencil follows the hand’s arc…

The Statue of Las Vegas: “the surface that isn’t level with itself”

Wiki:

Ecolab, Inc., is a St. Paul, Minnesota based sanitation supply company founded in 1923. It was named “Economics Laboratory” before its name was changed to Ecolab in 1986.

Dysphemism, antonym to euphemism. Epicedium, funeral song, dirge.

6. [6.]
ἐς δὲ τὰ ἔσχατα νουσήματα αἱ ἔσχαται θεραπεῖαι ἐς ἀκριβείην, κράτισται.

Etymologies: Normal / ordinary / Standard. Mediocre indicates “halfway up a mountain” and, ornery is an american contraction arising out of ‘ordinary.’

“Oh! je portais ma pauvreté fièrement. Un homme qui pressent un bel avenir marche dans sa vie de misère comme un innocent conduit au supplice, il n’a point honte.” Balzac, The Shagreen Skin (120). (Translate).

………………………..[…] Then Pierre felt that deep in him lurked a divine
………..unidentifiableness,that owned no earthly kith or kin. Yet was
………..this feeling entirely lonesome and orphan-like. Fain, then,
………..for one moment, would he have recalled the thousand sweet
………..illusions of Life; though’ purchased at the price of Life’s Truth; so
………..that once more he might not feel himself driven out an infant
………..Ishmael into the desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany
………..and comfort him.

Cette clémence dont on fait une vertu se pratique tantôt par vanité, quelquefois par paresse, souvent par crainte, et presque toujours par tous les trois ensemble.

This leniency, ascribed to virtue, is practiced at times through vanity, sometimes through sloth, often through fear, and nearly always through the three of them together.

[16]

the interior of my hand on the front of the shirt and the exterior of my hand on the back of my shirt… STREAM WATER

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.o. i avair

“NAUSCOPIE” (the alleged capacity to detect the appearance of a sailing ship beyond the horizon by visual means only) and my own feeling that I can detect good and bad writing –discern the one from the other– by merely looking at it: that is, not by reading or comprehending it, but just looking at the words as one might look at a drawing to discern whether it is good or bad. Nauscopie of writing: by which art the space between the words indicate the quality of the writing.

As ridiculous as this sounds, and surely is, I remain half serious about it, having noticed about my bad writing a certain ‘look’ — though by ‘good and bad’ probably something like ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ is meant, or ‘beginning and advanced student’, rather than the more or less interesting works of a professional, for example. As if the spacing of words held a clue. (Could I tell from looking at a latin text, which I don’t understand, which was the work of Horace and which the work of a Roman teenager? Or does my special ability of logoscopie apply only to English?)

In sum, I don’t think I could distinguish between the major and minor works of Kant, or between the stronger and weaker arguments of a supreme court case just by looking, but perhaps between the work of a better and worse student? or the work of a student when he has tried more and tried less?

This might be an interesting experiement: present subjects with the closing arguments of legal cases (or even the majority and dissenting opinions of supreme court cases) and ask them “just by looking” to say which they think has the stronger argument, and which they thought won the argument, and which argument they thought most agreed with their own sense of justice. (1) do their glances have any predictive power? (2) supposing not, how do their glances inform their judgment? (3) supposing so, is their glancing more predictive than their reading? That is, does their glance tell them more than their reading does?

Earlier this week transpired my first editing of wikipedia. This was the phrase: “However, the Athenians recaptured Toroni under Nicias, just before the return of Brasidas, who was 2 miles away.” (My edit was to change Nicias to Cleon.)

Some things that surprised me: (i) it was very easy. I was looking for an address to inform someone about what I thought to be an error, and found it simpler to correct the error myself. (ii) Nicias had been hyperlinked in the text to Niciases wikipedia page, and when I changed it to Cleon, that link automatically changed to Cleon’s wikipedia page. (iii) didn’t need to log in or create an account. The whole process took 30 seconds, a minute.