When will I learn at last this ancient Greek word which means “to receive favorably, accept”? (I may have just done it by actually giving expression to my obduracy, though perhaps on editing this years from now I will find I have continued to deceive myself on this point.) [Editing this years from then I do believe I recall the word, which δέχομαι, which is a common word which I ought to have committed to memory years ago.] (Looked up obdurancy, which is how I first spelled it, which I guess works, but the word is not what I want. Obdurant suggests a willed resistance to the right answer.) Observation: My spelling is bad in several senses but the most interesting resembles the errors of poor technology: not like me spelling phonetically where that isn’t appropriate — parkay for parquet — but as if the computer misheard me or made a bad prediction of what I meant — ‘than’ for ‘that’ or ‘eye sore’ when I mean ‘I’m so’ — when I am the computer too.
Saw someone question the need to begin a question with “question:” Looked like the gifts I’d gotten for my niece and nephew wouldn’t arrive in time for the holidays: coin purses shaped like tacos, in which I would put a gift. My thought, such as I could form it, was that Stevens, dealing with ideas, produces something substantial in feeling, whereas what I was writing seemed essentially factual and journalistic, and there was nothing either above or beneath it to make it more substantial in feeling.
A modern remake of The Clouds considered — The Blogs.
Idea that the reason Africa remains so tribal and resistant to the rule of law, is that it’s never been conquered in the way, say, Britain was conquered by Rome, which intrusion acted somewhat as primer coat for later civilizations. (Intensely hypothetical, but if Rome’s empire had only extended directly south what would be the effect today?)
(Condensed idea: subjugation is a prerequisite for the rule of law.)
Looked up Pele’s Hair, Berlin (Lou Reed album) — hadn’t realized it was Jack Bruce on bass. Sympotic was the adjectival form of symposium and Kottabos was an Ancient Greek game of throwing the sediment of one’s empty wine cup at a target. To note: boy’s transition from spoiled rich kid to okay rich kid in Captains Courageous (film) A hypocrite in Ancient Greece was an actor. (Is it peculiar that Jesus rails against the “hypocrites”? Do the prophets rail against pretenders and fakers in the same? Did Buddha?) Looked up scotopic and billabong and asetose. Looked up Lester Maddox and Amanda Peterson and Midrash Rabba and 1993 cruise missile strikes on Iraq… ….Can’t name the wood of which the door is comprised, can’t identify the pattern of its engraved rectilineal figures, or know how to describe the angle to which it is opened…. I forget the presence of the shadows and reflections in the picture, I say nothing of the jostled state of the rugs… And this is what writing is, to notice and know the names of these things. I should be able to notice and identify everything present.
If the Greek Gods could be combined into one god would they be the equal of Yahweh? Would the Greek myths equal the OT? No, I don’t know exactly what I mean by “equal” in those questions, in what sense equal, but something like this comes to mind:
Genesis = The Myths / Homer
Exodus/ Kings etc = The plays/ The Histories
Prophets = Philosophers
The only way I can explain a number of my anomalies, or even my general condition, is (though it’s not stated as an aspiration, which is how you sometimes find it) ‘rock n roll.’ Kid stuff in a sense, but with ideas that penetrate the script of the mainstream view. Perhaps rock n roll simply indicates the ad hoc, and is the opposite of the carefully engineered (although that’s become so untrue.)
Notion: I associate rock n roll with progressive values but can rock really represent “progress” from classical music while being so much more rudimentary? Counter notion: rock n roll is essentially democratic and youth oriented, not politically progressive; it doesn’t represent progress in music but is the music of a society, perhaps, that has technologically progressed.
The ab in abandonment had made me think of the ob in obvious, which was something I’d looked up the previous day. What was obvious was something in the way, in the viam, in the road. . . . . Thinking of ob by the fridge, thinking of ab by the bed.
Listening to song Carrot Rope I’m puzzled, as I so often am by song lyrics, by how the lyrics “don’t make sense” — whether in an absolute way or merely to me — and yet will nevertheless seem “to work” so well. And by “work” I mean that I’m not troubled by the possibility that the lyrics might mean nothing or that they mean something stupid or untrue; I feel they must mean something interesting. Carrot Rope to me is a nice catchy song that “makes no sense,” like quite a lot of Astral Weeks, for example, or Gimme Shelter, whereas a nice catchy song like Love for Sale does “make sense.” I can clearly understand the meaning of the lyrics of Love for Sale.
I perform a search online about Carrot Rope’s lyrics. I come across three interpretations, the third of which was so brilliant it must be the answer or mainly the answer — a carrot rope is a wedding ring, made of carets, pulling you like a leash. It explains many of the obscure parts of the lyrics. I doubt that Astral Weeks or Gimme Shelter is like this, with a key, but I find now in this song an underlying idea that definitively holds these lyrics up.
Donald & Lydia a sad judgement gently delivered for our times, “making love from ten miles away” is our times. Or all times. We find reasons to preserve ourselves from intimacy.
Reading, finished Chandler’s book on Napoleon, which I envisioned as a companion to rereading War & Peace (had Napoleon been a great man?) which I’ve started. Greek, Lysias. French, de Maupassant. Writing again — that ideal I’ve had of the epiphany seems to have lost meaning for me — there’s nothing really important about each moment of life, but seizing on one, not letting it get away, may be an important artistic conceit or device or prompt in the post-Proust-Joyce era. But the spiritual significance no longer feels there — a day that is like a thousand years to God. To find just one year in any day.
War & Peace: touched by the piety of Mary Bolkonsky. Prince Andrew must pray for the capacity to love. (The only other recourse for the unloving is hating.) Also, the soldier who, in his panic, deliberately looks for people where he knows them not to be, my very self. Release of prayer: how the right humility might lead us out of fear.
… chaos and significance of the political situation; uncertainty surrounding the climate situation; magnitude of that and human complacency regarding it; newspaper headlines — seem like evidence of a vacancy within me writ large: a projection of the interior I can’t see; through the lens of the news, upon the wall of historical events, myself
Time of The Assassins. return it to a spot between The Possessed and the French Le Rouge et Le Noir. (But it doesn’t fit vertically there, so it’s going to have to go between Open Boat and Other Stories, dollar edition, and Silent China, Lu Xun, David’s gift.) Something also needs to be done about Polybius: will put him where the Gravity’s Rainbow was.
In that position, Polybius has Gaddis (Recognitions) on the left and a long row of Faulkner on the right, but then, since he is taller than Gaddis, and since Gaddis is far taller than the Vintage editions of Faulkner, I wedge him between Infinite Jest and Gaddis instead. But the black spine of the Digireads.com edition of Polybius clashes too terribly with the orange of the spine of Infinite Jest and the pale blue of The Recognitions so I reinsert it to the right of The Recognitions again so that its black goes with the black of the Vintage Faulkners. Anyway, this shelf has a very 20th/ 21st century vibe except with only a few green Loebs at the end, so the Pynchon I have removed from here will probably go back where it was.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 