Came upon the Greek for that interesting Dionysius passage on the “austere style” and am thinking of making it a longer term project to dive into that.

Couple things learned right off.
–Greek word for “name” (ὄνομα) means in a grammatical context noun.
–What has been very nicely translated as “austere style” is (αὐστηρᾶς ἁρμονίας), literally something like “bitter harmony.” That immediately evoked for me the musical practice of Charles Ives; I wonder could he be put in the same ranks as Pindar, Thucydides, Aeschylus…

(Briefly, Dionysius of Halicarnassus divides Greek writing styles into three: one harsh and noble, one pleasing and florid, and one that combines the two. Unknown to me: has there been any attempt at a thorough categorizing of English writing styles?)

one of the few places on the Earth whose waters feed three oceans…. Triple Divide Peak

idea that (following Auerbach in Mimesis), as the conceit of the afterlife in Dante’s Comedy, and the conceit of ‘the stage’ in Shakespeare’s plays (“all the world’s a stage”) , and the metafictional aspect of Don Quixote (Cervantes writing not about Don Quixote per se but about a history of Don Quixote he has found), are artifices that contribute to the realistic effects of these works; so secondary literature and critical apparatus about Ulysses make possible the realism of the book itself, and represent a further evolution of such artifices in Western Literature. 

The experience of not getting a dad joke (He brews it) then suddenly getting it (hebrews it) — describing what is really going on there.

The jocular question: “how does Moses make his tea?” The jocular response: “He brews it.” The mind, when it does not get the joke, hears he brews it, and when it does get the joke, hears hebrews it? Or does it hear, when it gets it, hebrews it and he brews it at once?

Envisioning the mind as a hollow bowling ball with two holes. To get the joke, the answer must fly through the one hole (the literal response) and out the other (the double entendre). When a person does not get the joke, it goes in and out the same hole. When a person gets the joke but does not find it funny, it passes through both holes but without having “touched base” (or perhaps having touched “the wrong base.”) When a person takes longer than he should to get the joke, then laughs harder than he should when he gets it, he is resisting any interpretation but a literal one, then is ultimately overwhelmed by the absurdity of trying to cram the nonsensical response through the only literal hole.

Question: to deliver the joke properly, on which syllable of the punchline should the teller place the accent? The question is whether to pronounce it as two unrelated words, “hebrews” and “it”, or as the phrase “he brews it”/  hebrewsit. (Or the question is whether to put the accent on the antepenult or penult, which is perhaps to say the same thing.) Attendant tended to mix it up without about equally hilarious results.

Curiosity‘s wheels… “Let’s see if these beefier wheels hold up better than Curiosity’s!” (tweet). Wikipedia: “After six years of use, the wheels are visibly worn with punctures and tears.” Same twitter thread indicates Curiosity’s wheels spelled something in the sand. Wikipedia: ” Each wheel has a pattern that helps it maintain traction but also leaves patterned tracks in the sandy surface of Mars. That pattern is used by on-board cameras to estimate the distance traveled. The pattern itself is Morse code for “JPL” (·— ·–· ·-··).”

Here is the “long lost” Appendix A to Chance Sweepings. Attempt here was to show a transaction with a customer as described through the entry of  PLU codes. I will think of this as a fairly successful experiment and have wondered if a similar technique could be applied to computer use — really slowing down what we do when we type.

APPENDIX A: 7,2,4 “plu”

Right hand, index finger: press 7,2,4, “plu”; press 9,2,4, “plu”; press 5,0,0, “plu” (see total, which is too large, and suspect I haven’t closed out the previous sale)

Right hand, index finger: press “void”, 7,2,4, “plu”; press “void” 9,2,4, “plu”; press “void”, 5,0,0, “plu” (see my fears were ungrounded –the previous total was correct– and so I reenter the sale).

Right hand, index finger: press 7,2,4,”plu”; press 9,2,4,”plu”; press 5,0,0,”plu”; (then he says he wants a cookie) press “cancel.”

Right hand, index finger: press “tax one”, 7,2,4,”plu”; press “tax one” 9,2,4, “plu”; press 5, 0, 0,”plu”; press 9, 0, 0,”plu”; press (though you don’t really need to) “subtotal”.

(The total is 8 something. 8.46. It is often remarked that the price is modest relative to the number of buttons pushed.)

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………..Hypogeumtom bolo (x);f laske
………..Manius Curius Dentatus s k e t
……………………………….φὶ
………………………………….δὲ κ
……………………………………απν
……………………………………………ὸς
…………………melismatico f Chevy Chase ; flasket
………………… measure);Anacharsis;bollard;
…………………….Archibald La mpman…. cark
………………………stupe…///.………………………g
…………………………Owens Valley ………………. e
………………………….…..///.Omertà ……………….o
…………………………… oriel…///…all over painting
……………………………..hatikvah…///.cantatrice .a
………………………………La ……………………………….. g
……………………………….La ……………………………….. n
………………………………..Llorona….syncope………. n
…………………………………inedia………Porlock …….. e
…………………………………DalekINTP Merrill Gilfillan

“I have enjoyed the journey. The happiness of these days I would never have known living in the castle. I’ve seen the people as they are without pretense. I’ve seen their beauty and their ugliness with my own eyes. I thank you.” (from Hidden Fortress.)

Hippocrates 2.11 : “ῥᾷον πληροῦσθαι ποτοῦ, ἢ σιτίου.”  It’s easier to become full with drink than with food.

(Googling this I’m encountering some arguments against juicing. Seems some people think it’s easier to drink more than the same quantity unjuiced.)

A customer’s lifetime of scanning poetry alerted him to the presence of something decidedly odd about the Covid-19 sign taped to our ice cream case. And indeed, on closer inspection, it seems that what we have here are two lines of Trochaic Hexameter (albeit broken up and with a substitution in the final foot):

Wear a/ mask
And/ keep your/ social/ distance/
We are/ not re/sponsi/ble
For/ Covid/–19/disease./

(Customers will frequently remark on the unwieldy English of this sign. Oh, so it wasn’t you guys who did Covid-19 eh?) Asked to go full tilt and put this into rhyme we get —

Wear a mask, we must implore,
And stand six feet from us or more.
We’re not to blame, let us be clear,
For the virus you contract in here.

Having tried four or five versions of that, and finding this the best, I’m reminded of how subtle poetry can be. Between the spritely and mundane, a mere syllable can make an almost mystical difference.

(Chance Sweepings …)

Seems odd now this has never occurred to me (randomly stumbled on) that the mother-wife should be such a non-presence in King Lear: “What happened to Queen Lear? Where is she? How might things h bn, had she not been absent? If I recall aright, Shakespeare never even addresses this q. But isn’t this a deafening silence?”

Seems fair to mention that Shakespeare took this story pretty much as is from other sources,… but even so, the three adult-seeming daughters with a father and no mother undeniably creates the underlying familial atmospherics of that main plot, while a single father with two adult sons and no apparent mom –and with not the same mom– composes the familial atmospherics of the subplot. (Can we project from this what I think is no where explicitly stated that Lear’s two unfaithful daughters were illegitimate?)

Customer said the first thing he’d do to make the economic expansion more equitable would be to increase the housing stock (specifically by slashing zoning laws). “The rents people are paying is outrageous.”

(Attendant speculated that the reason the customer had said “the rents people are paying is outrageous” rather than “the rents people are paying are outrageous” was in order to avoid having to say “are” twice. Yet it may well have rather been that the speaker had changed his idea while he spoke, going from the one just quoted, that rents being paid were outrageous, to an idea that rent, as a general matter, “was” outrageous. Of course, we do not and ought not hold spoken language to the same standards as written language, but it is interesting to reflect on the causes behind our unintended departures from the orthodox.)

Customer ordered everything bagel with lox and med peach smoothie.

Customer asked which smoothie the server preferred and the server answered with which was the most popular, yet the customer insisted on hearing which he liked best. (This encounter brought to mind something the Attendant hadn’t thought of in years, his intense dislike of this word “smoothie.” First became aware of it in Athens, GA in the 90’s, but originally it applied to a smooth person, attested from the 1920s.)

It was not the wing of an insect floating in the stopped up sink, but a spinach leaf.

Watch This Billion-Year Journey of Earth’s Tectonic Plates, NYT

Not sure that I was familiar with this word, which comes up in this thorough exploration of the constitutional question surrounding the conviction, out of office, of an official impeached while in office.

The author seems to use it in this sentence, and one a few paragraphs down, to mean “plausible” while wiktionary’s definition is more like “specious”:

“So far as I can see, Bobbitt’s position rests primarily on a colorable—but tenuous—argument from the text of the Constitution’s impeachment clauses.”

During the height of the lockdown the attendant penned several faux punkrock and rap tunes to show his defiant attitude toward the virus. He imagined these efforts might themselves “go viral” (how he triumphed to imagine them “going viral”!) but they did rather stand languid and confused, was his lasting observation. Here was the best them, punk song called Emaskulated! [Appendix A has gone missing for the nonce. B and C are children’s poems: “Where Do Crumbs Come From?” & “I Have Sticky Shoes”]

Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!

Used to be such a pretty boy
Had such a great face (oo la la!)
But now I got this mask in place
And you can’t see my well chiseled jaw.

The girls used to drop dead to see this mug,
Now they just don’t give a frug
Because my mouth is boxed and crated
And I’ve been emaskulated!

Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!

My nose was probably my best trait
Not too wide and not too straight
But now these nostrils are in the dark
And none of the ladies care to remark.

I don’t look like a master of surgery!
I look like I got a serious injury!

I feel hot and isolated!
I feel so emaskulated!

I used to make such great remarks
And everyone thought I was some kind of wise man
But now I speak and they can’t understand
They say, heh, did you just say something, man?
They say, heh, what are you mumblin man?

(What’s that? Whachoo mumblin?)

Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!

ἰητρικὴν ὅστις βούλεται ὀρθῶς ζητεῖν, τάδε χρὴ ποιεῖν …

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Lampedusa|Trial of The K\·ights Templar. moider.
Garum|ΎNok.Larentide Ice/| Sheet. tocsin.
knout |·paratactic; liana;/ϐ pleach; Morpheme.
februa·|Stalking horse offer\\ Ύvariation of the field
epigone. sedulity Verdelho\\\ Piero di Cosimo
…………//// . /· \ \Ύϐ\||· Ύ||\\
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The question of — taken all in all, is it any more difficult for a contemporary English reader to read Finnnegans Wake without assistance than it is for a contemporary English reader to read Dante (or Chaucer, or The Bible) without scholarly assistance? That is, thinking of all the critical apparatus needed to read Dante if you don’t already know medieval Italian or know Italy of the period — the translation and the notes on translation and the historical notes — and thinking of what if one just had a simplified version of FW like one could have one of these simplified versions of Chaucer or The Bible or the like they put out. 

I don’t know what a negative answer to that would tell us exactly. Maybe that FW was written within its own historical epoch, if that can be imagined, that it is possible for an author to discover such blackholish historical “singularities”; maybe that a true classic is something essentially rare and inaccessible, deceptively rendered not so by The Modern Library… Of course this assumes one considers FW a classic, but in any case, and for obscure reasons, The Divine Comedy strikes me as an interesting book to bring alongside it. Maybe a comparison can be teased out later.

Points of interest about the foregoing passage: first is the “quick hissing thuds.” “Hissing” is a surprising modifier of “thuds.” Faulkner may have been thinking of a specific sound rubber soles at that time made; even so, one might have expected “squishing”, but one gets “hissing”, –hissing thuds,– which maybe is what squishing is.

Second is “suave and sourceless.” I don’t like “suave” overmuch here. (Pylon was published between Light in August and Absolom, in 1935.)

Third is “unearthly day colored substance” (descriptive of fluorescent light?) Not unbearably/intolerably day colored substance; not unearthly light colored fluid, or substance colored light; it’s not light, but it’s day-colored, it’s substance, but unearthly.

Would like to do some metric analysis of his listing of commercial objects, which starts with obvious iambs, then the feet seem to expand, and then to expand again: “the hats and ties and shirts, the belt // buckles and cufflinks and handkerchiefs//, the pipes shaped like golfclubs and the drinking tools shaped like boots…”

What I’m calling the first line would iambic tetrameter, what I’m calling the second would be dactylic trimeter, and what I’m call the third would be, I don’t know what. I want to say that everything between pipes and golf is stressed as well as everything between ‘drink-‘ and boots, two dilated feet, but an expert is called for.

“He entered the store, his rubber soles falling in quick hissing thuds on pavement and iron sill and then upon the tile floor of that museum of glass cases lighted suave and sourceless by an unearthly day-colored substance in which the hats and ties and shirts, the beltbuckles and cufflinks and handkerchiefs, the pipes shaped like golfclubs and the drinking tools shaped like boots and barnyard fowls and the minute impedimenta for wear on ties and vest-chains shaped like bits and spurs, resembled biologic specimens put into the inviolate preservative before they had ever been breathed into. ‘Boots?’ the clerk said. ‘The pair in the window?'” (From the opening of Pylon, Faulkner.)