Looking up Barton Fink after having watch Morgan Freedman/ Brad Pitt movie Seven. (Both movies feature what is probably a human head in a box and so I’d wondered if they came out around the same time.)
Reading the entry for Fink, I discover it had been written while they were filming Miller’s Crossing and was heavily influenced by some Roman Polansky films I’d not seen or heard of. Looking over the plot summaries of the Polansky films, I don’t find any mentions of heads and boxes but I’m somewhat alarmed by the intensity of the stories described.
Looked up Pirkei Avot. “The more charity, the more peace” was among his sayings. Looked up peripety and comparator.
Q: how do you respond to the idea that, just as 1922 required a certain kind of art, and that revolutionary, 2022 requires its own kind of art, and that more traditional; while you, affecting the ways of the celebrated ones you might wish to describe as your forbearers, failed to “make the pivot” and instead made “revolutionary art” that was actually trivial and irrelevant and not at all “revolutionary”?
A: I didn’t have much choice.
Staring blankly at the Greek of the Phaedo as the rain falls with increasing heaviness and drama. We got our notion of equality from real things, like sticks and stones, being equal, the Phaedo says as the rain falls, and yet there is something lacking in the equality we see in such real things: they fall short somehow of equality itself. The stones that look equal to each other never quite were so….. I was getting confused by the difference between the Greek words for “equality” and “equal” and as the rain kept pouring one gradually got the idea that heh that’s a lot of rain, and it turned out to be a significant flood in our town.
In Infinite Jest I read the Eschatology chapter; in the revolutionary war history, of the Battle of Trenton. I’m later to ask the customers frequently, quizzing them: what battle did George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River precede?
Idea that time travel is possible through parking next to massive objects, and what could be more massive than what’s utterly boring?
Distracted now by an article on Gaddis; now I watch zoo animals clamber over each other in the new fallen snow, their likeness on the screen. A music video whose songs message was, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” I tapped out a reply to an email then looked up John Kirby and Tom Carper, whose voices I had heard on C-Span radio.
Idea that Capitalism was not a system of economy per se, but an historical process by which the robotic aspect of humans switches from potential to actual.
I generate a new spreadsheet to help with exercise goals. (The awakening of a new resolve is often accompanied by a new paper chart or digital spreadsheet. The word “spread sheet” is attested from 1965.) I’ve sent a few emails requiring a response out recently, and in the process of checking to see if anyone’s replied, I discover an email I myself have failed to reply to, and tap out a reply to it. Sorry not to have gotten back to you sooner…)
Look up “mimes”: I had seen a tweet about “fragments of mimes” and had forgotten all about this ancient Greek form of drama, perhaps comparable to a vignette? I look up Sophron, a writer of “mimes”: Oh, so it was Sophron, not Aristophanes, whose work Plato reputedly kept under his pillow, I now learn. Probably a spurious story in any case. Look up “pillow” (word itself is from Latin for “dust” which the Romans used to filled pillows) : the Egyptians had stone and wooden pillows but wikipedia makes no mention of soft ones. Greeks and Romans had soft ones. The Chinese had ceramic ones. Animals of course cushion their heads with their own body parts. Apes make pillows out of wood.
Search: history where does the idea of putting something under your pillow to achieve a result come from. (Search turns up a general history of pillows and a lot of New Age stuff — put crystal, tourqoise, iron under your pillow, etc.) Search: history origin putting something under pillow (same. Where does the custom of putting a mint on your pillow in hotels come from, I find answered.) I try a different search engine the same or worse results.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 