.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

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….