Wondering tonight if there is an analogy between the Greek city-states of the fifth century B.C., of Thucydides’ Greece, and the nation states of the Modern World — how closely do their interactions track and how would you measure.
Seems like so much of world history is about whether it’s the rich or poor or middle class who hold power, which I guess was a big part of Karl Marx’s point.
Did I read somewhere that some people think this song, The Orioles’ Tell Me So 1949, was the first rock song? Must be on account of the guitar sound… Maybe first guitar distortion was what I’d read. Anyway.
Majority: the masses are dreaming
Kind of extraordinary passage from the Libation Bearers, at least as translated by Smyth (582-605). (Forgive the odd formatting.)
Tweet speculating about why the two Iberias share a name.
Hadn’t realized that “polymorphously perverse” was a Freudian term. I came across perversely polymorphous in Barth’s Anonymiad and wondered if Allen might have borrowed the phrase for Annie Hall. Definitely not.
I found these notes on Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse helpful. I don’t have a lot of experience with Barth but was surprised, in Menelaiad, by how well he knew the Iliad — the arrow of Pandoras, e.g.. Sotweed Factor shows a lot of learning too.
En un mot, je veux que l’expression de mes souvenirs soit sincère et, pour cela, il est nécessaire qu’elle reste entièrement secrète….
“Like a chamber perpetually locked up” — said of an incurious mind in Conrad’s Chance.
Just learned of Anki (wiki) — name is Japanese — and am trying that for the first time. My first cards:
ὑπισχνέομαι: to take upon oneself, promise. δὲ ὑπέσχετο τοῦτο ποιήσειν, ἂν μὴ πορευόμενος Ὀρφεὺς ἐπιστραφῇ πρὶν εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν αὑτοῦ παραγενέσθαι (*)
ἀστραπή, fiash of lightning, lightning. καὶ Κύκλωπες τότε Διὶ μὲν διδόασι βροντὴν καὶ ἀστραπὴν καὶ κεραυνόν, (*)
κτέανον, possessions, property. “χρυσέα φόρμιγξ, Ἀπόλλωνος καὶ ἰοπλοκάμων/ σύνδικον Μοισᾶν κτέανον” Golden Lyre, joint possession of Apollo and the violet haired Muses... Pythian 1.
βαθμός — stair step
They both decided that they would remain unmarried and live together for the rest of their lives, in a state described by Charles as “a sort of double singleness”. (*)
Greek “ to cry like a raven”… It’s interesting that English too makes a verb out of “crow” but the sense is figurative, to boast, to vaunt.
“[Proust] likened Agostinelli to a ‘nun of speed,’ because of his motoring attire — boots, a long hooded coat, and goggles — which nearly covered his body. Early chauffeurs were often exposed not only to the elements and the dangers of primitive roads but to untrained drivers speeding toward them from the opposite direction. Proust later interpreted as ominous a passage in the article referring to the risks of being a driver: ‘May the steering wheel of the young chauffeur who is driving me remain always the symbol of his talent rather than the augury of his martrydom!” [Marcel Proust, A Life, William C. Carter.]
Idea that there is something inherently selfish-seeming or even (not to put a moral judgment on it) something actually *selfish* or self-involved about mental illness or illness generally — when we are sick our sickness tends to become a predominant concern — and this creeps into the tone of The Bell Jar’s second half; meanwhile, Wallace’s short story The Depressed Person (which very probably owes a debt to The Bell Jar) somewhat obviates this issue by tackling it head on: the character is really trying not to make it all about himself but in so doing is comically only making it worse.
Not knowing anything about it I would hypothesize Melville’s literary development went something along these lines:
— Melville wanted to be Shakespeare — wanted to be everything. Scientist, philosopher, adventurer, poet.
— He realized with Moby Dick this was an absurd thing to undertake, that he had been joking all along. His philosophizing wasn’t philosophy, his cetology wasn’t science.
— He says, now let’s get serious, what can I say that isn’t an absurd joke, what real truth is accessible to the novelist? And his style becomes more spare.
That Melville commentary I found in a free library having remarked on the change in style between Moby Dick and Bartleby — which really is striking. Melville seemed to have utterly turned his back on Elizabethan grandiloquence and utterly turned his front to modern austerity and prosody.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 