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A neighbor across the street when I step out, whom usually I would not acknowledge, I call out to — Heh there! Howdy! — the deep snow having so collapsed the perceived distance between us. We’re the only colored things in the street. She seems a bit annoyed but knows it too.

I asked Gemini (Google’s A.I.) to complete some analogies that had been suggested to me by a few recently read Homeric similes. Results are edited for length:

ME: how would you conclude the following analogy. “As ships are to horses, stones are to what?”
GEMINI: As ships are to horses (transportation over water), stones are to birds (obstacles to flight).

ME: How about this: “As stones are to snow, ships are to what?”
GEMINI: As stones are to snow (hindrance to accumulation), ships are to waves (hindrance to smooth passage).

ME: “As wave is to fire, fire is to what?”
GEMINI: As wave is to fire (extinguisher), fire is to wood (fuel).
(Of this answer Gemini further says: “This analogy highlights the contrasting roles of opposition and sustenance.” It gives explanations for all its responses but this one I was curious to know.)

ME: Last one! As fire is to wooden ship, wave is to what?
GEMINI: As fire is to wooden ship (destruction), wave is to sandy beach (shaping).

Finally combining all these analogies (or rather, the similes they came from), I asked it: “How is standing on multiple ships like an expert horse-rider riding multiple horses like how fire is brought upon a ship to burn it like a wave is brought over a ship to sink it like how the falling of stones cast as weapons is like the falling of snow?”

Gemini, while admitting this was an interesting question — in fact, it always concedes the interest in the question — discussed the meaning of each individual simile without making an effort to say how the similes were alike.

Isaiah 28:20: “The bed is too short to stretch out on,/ the blanket too narrow to wrap around you.” Impressed by how contemporary and universal in appeal that metaphor is: people over every epoch and walk of life know what it means to have too small a bed.

Learned the new to me word “prodrome” the other day. I’d forgotten δραμ- (which I’m guessing is where the “drome” is coming from) was a form of τρέχω — run.

Beautiful piece by Noah smith… The Players on the Eve of Destruction.

Surprised by the number of typos I encountered in my Vintage International edition of Knight’s Gambit. Just three or four but somewhat at odds with the meticulous manuscript notes of the Appendix.

‘Nothing by which all human passion and hope and folly can be mirrored and then proved, ever was just a game,’ his uncle said. ‘Move.’ (Knight’s Gambit. Statement about chess but with clear application to Art.)

The Crisis of Confidence speech, Jimmy Carter 1979. Just read this for the first time and it is a pretty odd speech — where he gives these quotes of people, unattributed, often negative about him, I found odd — though you could argue there are prescient bits.

I haven’t seen the video of it, but I’m guessing — probably incorrectly, I will say — that the problem with this speech was: people were mainly concerned about concrete issues of inflation and energy, while he was trying to make it about something more abstract, a crisis of confidence.

Faulkner: “inside the parvenu’s monstrous mushroom” — of what we would call a McMansion. (Knight’s Gambit.)

interesting question entertained at sententiae antiquae over the past 24 hours: would Achilles or Odysseus be more likely to “shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?”

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.

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Having fallen asleep reading Swann’s Way — and sleeping poorly — I dreamed at one moment that I was still reading Proust; at another, that I was describing my own life in terms Proust would have used; and at another that I was the narrator himself — but not a voice, the actual person — which wasn’t Proust, but me.

“Fire step”: makes sense but hadn’t heard of it til Soldiers’ Pay. Dog snout: before I have deposited the contents into the puzzle feeder his nose is in the scoop. (More efficient that way, is his aside.) Deleted the day’s afternoon work with the cursor of the morning’s run: hurt my feet, paralyzed my legs, lost all energy, now feel generally sore. Though crumpled, I can tell it’s a Post Office receipt: they always circle the web address and ask if you will fill out the survey. Spinoza’s Theory of Attributes: “need to read Spinoza again.” (I need to generate flash cards for which Microsoft Word functions can be found on which Microsoft Word tabs, not read Spinoza.) (I actually do need to read Spinoza: God is behind us, driving us, not before us, guiding us.) Idea: that there is an intellectual element to what we call muscle memory. You can feel, as your pinky reaches for the hyphen, and knows to traverse the keys just so, arcing beyond the brackets but not so greatly as to reach the zero, that this is learned, that you have learned.

comment on Poseidon, Divine Hypocrite…. A question I had while reading this book was, how is it appropriate that Poseidon, the sea god, just happens to come to the forefront of the action when the battle reaches the seashore and the ships? Why is it appropriate the sea god interferes exactly at this point?

And Christensen’s translation of 39-44 really brings into high relief the extent to which the Elements are at play in these passages: the Trojans are “like a whirlwind” (Hector is also in other places described as such) and “the earthshaker Poseidon who grips the land rose from the deep sea” — a lot of elements in in those lines. On top of this we know that Hector brings fire — so all of the elements are represented in this battle. (Could Homer be a foundation for the belief in four elements? Could the Iliad have influenced Empedocles?)

So the Trojans are fire and air while the Greeks are land and water? (And yet the rivers are on the side of the Trojans and Hephaistos who brings fire is on the side of the Greeks.)

Meanwhile, ships seem a sort of intermediary between sea and sky (Zeus?) like horses do between humans and land.

A stab at unpacking the analogy of horses and ships: wind is to ships as horses are to chariots but winds are controlled by Zeus while horses are controlled by men. (Something inapt there. Oh well.)

ngrams: Smokestack Lightning,Howling Wolf

πολλοὶ γὰρ πλουτέουσι κακοί, ἀγαθοὶ δὲ πένονται (*)

Soldiers’ Pay is by and large without “modernist tricks,” stylistically speaking, excepting Faulkner’s use of parentheses — which I don’t know if I’ve encountered in an author before him. (Feel like Virginia Woolf will employ devices like this, particularly in To the Lighthouse, though that was published a year after this in 1927.)

You could say what’s inside the paren is the voice of the Greek Chorus, a comment on the action, though it’s generally just a character’s unattributed thought, somewhat like an aside in theater.

A little more striking is when he leaves *out* of the paren what he should have included within them, which he does in a least one spot — obliterating that line between comment and thing commented on, between character thought and author narration — which I think he pursues more seriously in his later books. (Soldiers’ Pay is his first published book.)

When he does this, the effect is of objectifying the character’s thought. Without the privilege of parentheses or quotes to set it off, the thought becomes a thing and part of the landscape, something present in a room like a table might be. (A character didn’t think something: rather, there existed this thought. This thought, belonging to no one, was part of the surroundings.)

Interesting comment from Noah Smith again — did he believe demonic possession was real? Certainly. “Social movements are suprahuman entities — ‘demons’, if you like. They can possess humans and make them lose their individuality and start acting as fingers of a nonhuman pseudointelligence.”

First blush of roast Upon Thy brow,
Rays from the coil upon thee now.
Aureate, Eloquent, Fluffy, Cheesy,
A nutty crust, a little seedy.
My jaw orbits gnaw by gnaw your ring
And frees you of the bready thing.