The mantle makes up 84 percent of Earth’s volume, and though it’s solid rock, over the course of millions of years, it behaves like a liquid. (vox)…

Devo – Uncontrollable Urge

ngrams: (“Shakespeare, William Shakespeare“), (“Einstein, Albert Einstein“).

Slavoj Žižek explains this objet petit a in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin: “[The] MacGuffin is objet petit a pure and simple: the lack, the remainder of the Real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.” (Love thy symptom as thyself)…. objet petit a

“This is a deliberate, high-level cover-up,” Mr. Lenzi said. “They have hung us out to dry.” (NYT)

Take not the measure of thy goodness—it is gone
As soon as it is self-confessed and thought upon. (161)

A Proust moment: On waking to the music of the clock radio, for the briefest moment I’m unable to tell if I’ve just started listening to music or if I’ve just opened a web page.

tiraillement: sharp pain, pull, twinge, agonizing decision. “Ned Land, tourmenté par les tiraillements de son robuste estomac, se montait de plus en plus, et, malgré sa parole, je craignais véritablement une explosion, lorsqu’il se trouverait en présence de l’un des hommes du bord.” […]

Having read War & Peace not too long ago, this passage leapt out at me too. It seems right, that the pursuit of glory is a sort of living for others, that you’re trying to impress others; that, while emblazoning one’s name on history, a person is yet working against himself. But I think the tweeter goes too far in calling it altruism, first because it implies a benefit for others (whereas the pursuit of glory might be for others yet not benefit them.) Second, another way of looking at it is altogether is that it’s a psychological disturbance or need playing itself out in the world of the rest of us — see Good Old Neon and the fraudulence paradox, for one instance of how that might work — not the sort of spiritual munificence or aloof charitableness I identify with altruism. (Though she might be using a specific meaning of the word.)

Brown broken down cardboard box for a flat screen tv which has itself been made flat: made so that you can see four of the six surfaces of the box at the same time, jammed in between two of the five grey scuffed plastic three dimensional tubs that have been set out for the neighborhood’s recycling: brown with a pale blue picture on it of the flat screen tv itself, the thing itself, which must be in one of the homes around here.

“If you look online at where the satellite transponders show where the fishing fleet is, you can see clusters of fishing boats around these methane plume hotspots,” Johnson said….

It is thus a double restoration from a double disruption .…

Strabo was an ancient Greek geographer whose life straddled the first centuries BC and AD, and this is a passage, taken totally at random, from his best-known work Geographica. (For fun, here is a map of what the world might have looked like to Strabo.) Links lead to the vocabulary tool at Perseus.

Geographica, 5.3.5

παρακινδύνως μὲν οὖν ὁρμίζονται μετέωρα ἐν τῷ σάλῳ τὰ ναυκλήρια, τὸ μέντοι λυσιτελὲς νικᾷ: καὶ γὰρ ἡ τῶν ὑπηρετικῶν σκαφῶν εὐπορία τῶν ἐκδεχομένων τὰ φορτία καὶ ἀντιφορτιζόντων ταχὺν ποιεῖ τὸν ἀπόπλουν πρὶν ἢ τοῦ ποταμοῦ ἅψασθαι, καὶ μέρους ἀποκουφισθέντος εἰσπλεῖ καὶ ἀνάγεται μέχρι τῆς Ῥώμης, σταδίους ἑκατὸν ἐνενήκοντα.

TRANSLATION (Hamilton / Falconer)

Now although it is with peril that the merchant-ships anchor far out in the surge, still, the prospect of gain prevails; and in fact the good supply of the tenders which receive the cargoes and bring back cargoes in exchange makes it possible for the ships to sail away quickly before they touch the river, or else, after being partly relieved of their cargoes, they sail into the Tiber and run inland as far as Rome, one hundred and ninety stadia.

a th sn f …………………..t below
r h e e r ………………….. ch lci i l
p a d d e …………………..I w i r i f
e f g s s ………………….. l eli k cl
n i e id h …………………..c th u t t
n n t d p …………………..i ge up r
e g h e l …………………..t on ou t
d e e s a …………………..s sps s e
c r ewli s …………………..a a n h h
ir tht i t …………………..e n dw o

ch lci i l
l eli k cl
e n dw o
I w i r i f
c th u t t
a a n h h
s sps s e
t on ou t
i ge up r
n ash wo
t below

“Having seen it all,” said Moges Alemu, 84, a factory owner who in a bygone era was Emperor Haile Selassie’s flight technician, “I can say there has never been anything as highly anticipated in this country as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.” [POST]

Dream. Helping elderly Asian Pacific couple find someone on the train. They can’t get off unless a certain person is there and I’m checking every train car for that person (including places where a person could not possibly be, such as under dropped coats and going through book shelves).

Dream. A social situation in an outdoor setting, but there is a sort of gas flare in the dream that does not seem dreamlike but real. It will go off and seem like nothing from a dream. Does no one else in the dream see this reality? (This is different from hearing a clock tower in a dream and realizing it is an alarm clock; this is more like an actor really dying onstage.)

Dylan lyrics: Union Sundown

Song of Myself, 48 “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,/ And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,/ And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, /And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero…”

Wallace, known as a stickler for correct usage, at IJ pp. 386, uses enjambment to mean simply ‘jammed in’:

This segues into an entr’acte, with continent squeezed in for world in ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ which enjambment doesn’t do the rhythm section of doo-wopping girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole new era.

That’s a good, but I don’t think technically correct, use of the word. Enjambment means the content of one line of poetry spilling into the next line of poetry. What Wallace is describing is a word with three syllables being said in the space of a word with one syllable, — which is actually kind of the opposite.

Hippocrates, 19. eng

ἐπὴν διακοπῇ ὀστέον, ἢ χονδρὸς, ἢ νεῦρον, ἢ γνάθου τὸ λεπτὸν, ἢ ἀκροποσθίη, οὔτε αὔξεται, οὔτε ξυμφύεται.

When bone, cartilage, tendon, the lower jaw or foreskin are cut off, they do not grow back or reunite.