.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

Vronsky’s teeth are so often mentioned as being white and strong, you imagine something has to be up — that Tolstoy has some plan in mind with regard to Vronsky’s teeth.

You remember how, in the Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy equates the strong white teeth of the peasantry with a kind of important simple virtue and wonder if he wants to make a similar point in this book?

And sure enough, after Anna’s death, Vronsky, with his big bright smile, has developed a tooth ache. Beneath the show of excellence, there has developed an underlying issue.

That’s one of the truly artistic touches of Anna K., in which, actually, there are aren’t a lot of fine touches. The book is story-telling, philosophy, psychology, social observations, but not so much in the way of “artistic touches” as you would find in say, Flaubert, or in, say, poetry.

(Maybe what I’m most seeing here is the difference between novels and poems as such: how novels will seem a much diluted, yet more relatable, version of poems. They have a lower “artistry to word” ratio. And yet I didn’t encounter this concern with Dostoyevsky, whose prose style is so much more hectic. From my point of view, Dostoyevsky’s writing has a poetic urgency that Tolstoy’s doesn’t.)

The real artistry of Anna Karinina (and perhaps this is true of the novelistic art as a whole) is not in its “fine touches” though it has them, but in its structure. The novel blends quite perfectly two distinct but intertwining stories: of a love that leads to despair and a love that leads to hope.

A tree had fallen across the forest path and, quite sensibly, rather than removing the whole tree, the Park Service has only cut out the section of it that blocks the path. Less sensibly, I am standing in the path at that very point, my legs straddling the space between the cut-off segments, as if I believed my legs to be conducting a current that flows between the cut-off segments of the dead, severed, fallen tree….

And now the dog is moving me on.

I look at my watch and see we’ve been walking for ten minutes. When I next look at my watch, it is precisely ten minutes after that, and I project the walk as a whole will be of about thirty minutes in duration, which turns out to be about right.

If Whitman was the poetry of America’s rise what was the poetry of America’s decline? (Wasn’t it just all the terrible American poetry we illiterate ones had collectively written? Not even all that terrible, just actually illiterate.)

“The U.S. is more like Rome than like Greece but in its apparent decline, it most resembles a city-state“

Stubbornesses: I want to go this way up the hill, so as to avoid having to circumnavigate the work crew, while he wants to go to up the side with the work crew, because we haven’t been that way in a bit — but today I win.

“Dear, of course that is the only thing that makes sense but I suppose I would yet have two requests,“: that’s what you say when you only want to *sound* concessive…

And now the dog is moving me on.

I’m looking at my watch but to see the time, not to see the *time elapsed*, and so have no idea how much time has elapsed since we first started walking, when, at about 9:25 AM, I come to a stop between the two tree sections. We get home, in fact, just around 10.

Had no idea that the term “sniper” (meaning “sharpshooter”) is derived from “snipe” the bird, apparently owing to the difficulties involved in hunting snipe. (A sniper is someone skilled enough to actually shoot a snipe.) The bird name may come from a Proto-Germanic root meaning “beak or snout” — for it has a long beak.

I have reached the snipe shooting chapter in Anna Karinina and will say, in such an incredible book, I’m a bit bored by them.

Hadn’t heard this mot of Faulkner’s: “Writing a novel is like trying to knock together a chicken coop in the middle of a hurricane.”

Wallace invokes it in a letter to Delillo, D.T. Max reports.

Bibble, synonym of tipple. “Sepulchral señors, bibbling pale mescal,/ Oblivious to the Aztec almanacs,/ Should make the intricate Sierra scan.” (Stevens.)

Cato Institute good on Trump’s disgraceful pardons. “Biden’s pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government. In contrast […] Trump’s second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion.”… NYT good too.

Myrmecochory: seed dispersals by ants.

I’m looking at the word sometimes.” that has appeared in the tool bar with that period and quotation mark. It is supposed to be the word “lenitives” without a period or quotation mark in the tool bar. I thought I had copied, with my cursor, the word “lenitives” from the site where I had come across it, but instead what the memory of my cursor, so to speak, somehow held, was this other bit, or this fragment of a bit, that I suppose I had formerly copied, this sometimes.”

And struggle though I did, I could neither recall what text I had copied this sometimes.” from, nor could I fathom why the cursor had failed to “pick up” or “recall” my “lenitives,” a word which, by the way, my spell checker doesn’t respect as legitimate, and which somewhat validates my not having known about it.

So now I faced a choice, which was: did I return to the site on which I’d found “lenitives” and renew my attempt to capture or copy it; or did I rather enter the word “lenitives” manually into what I want to call the “tool bar” or “entry field” or “slot” or “search box” perhaps, which would require a repositioning of my feet and a return to an upright position, so as to make the keyboard accessible to both my hands; or did I (also manually) retain my relaxed, non-upright position, while typing it out with one hand, which is to say, with one finger, which besides being awkward and exposing me to observing the tedious slowness of hunting and pecking with one hand, I would have to reflect at each moment on the sloth that had brought me to that impasse, which would obliterate finally any shred left of the conceit I may have had that I was doing something or working on something; for a person couldn’t be working on something while typing with one finger, with ones feet propped up on the desk’s edge, even if one might protest that ones real work more involved a mental process that had occurred before the typing. (I wasn’t working and had never worked, I was made to reflect — for I had never thought. Something like this cursor was blinking was how I produced words).

I selected with my arrow icon the tab on the page on which I’d found “lenitives,” whereupon the page in full appeared, as did the post in which the word had been used. I struggle to recall at this time if the word remained highlighted by my cursor but I know I became puzzled afresh upon seeing the word in what I had come to think of as its native location, as to why my cursor had failed to “grab” the word on its first attempt. I was tangentially, superficially, aware at this time also of the content of the post from which this word had been extracted. It concerned, as I recall, assessing the health complaints of nineteenth century correspondents in the light of modern medical knowledge. The word having been entered, I went to the wiktionary tab where ‘theirs’ had previously been looked up — yes, I will still find myself looking up ‘theirs’ on occasion — rather than to the one in which I’d pasted sometimes.” in the entry field or slot, then changed my mind and reverted to the wiktionary page with the sometimes.”, the origin of which I now suddenly recalled. The definition of “lenitives” was the plural of “lenitive,” and the definition of “lenitive” was “a pain reliever, an analgesis, a laxative.” The origin of sometimes.” had been a fragment of a quotation of Cynthia Ozyck’s I had somewhere come across; it may actually have been on my own blog