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.

ngrams: space, area, location, zone, place

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.

Ant having decided
to move that way
…
lust commination lust
ro………….………….ro
nhouAir moving across bulletin board.nhou
sebuPlate resting on my stomach.sebu
ngabDrops of water from an apple.ngab
un………………un
g……..……..g
a Ugalia
……

Assuming the Iliad was originally divided in three for a three day performance, how would they be divided? Author argues 1-8, 9-15, 16-24.

(I had been looking for evidence that books 3-7 could be considered their own unit.)

About the division into books of the Iliad and Odyssey — when and by whom?

1. Does praying for an outcome in The Iliad increase the likelihood of achieving that outcome? Thus, for instance, Meriones beats Teukros in the archery competition after praying for success (23.859-881), but Pandoras does not succeed in taking down Menelaos though he prays to Apollo before shooting at him (4.119-121).
2. Do characters have any proficiency in identifying which outcomes are the result of the god’s influence and which are not? In book 3, for example, Menelaos blames Zeus, for his mischances in attacking Paris, (whose influence over this event the narrator doesn’t mention), but says nothing of Aphrodite, whose direct intervention — as the audience is explicitly told — makes possible Paris’ escape.

Never heard of this law of contonation before, which explains why you can’t ever have a circumflex on the antepenultimate syllable or have it on the penultimate syllable if the ultima is long.

The law is that there can’t be more than one mora between the end of a word and the contonation, a short syllable being one mora and a long syllable being two.

See video.

Noticing an odd symmetry, or asymmetry, in the single combat between Hector and Aias (7.244-272). They attack each other three times a piece — a cast spear, a jabbed spear, and a thrown stone — and each time Aias’ shield is hit and resists the attack and each time Hector’s shield is hit and is compromised by the attack, until finally the stone thrown by Aias causes Hector’s shield to crumple in on itself entirely.

What does this suggest?

Also notable is that Aias wounds Hector in the neck in this passage, which is where Achilles later wounds him.

Marveling that that raindrop has managed to penetrate the complex skein of intervening tree canopies to reach the sidewalk exactly here (looking up from the wet mark it’s become) — “a million in one shot — if that’s what’s actually happened.”

Another fleeting fragmentary scent as I rub my nose, making me wonder if any odd orientation of the olfactory sensors there will result in a sensation of scent.

Right there is the point where, if the car intended to yield to my right of way, it would have stopped or started to, I imagine. And so I retreat.

Day one cherry blossom tree or dogwood blown over by the wind, day two chopped so that only bottom trunk remained, day three trunk covered in snow.

Forced to cross the street in the place I always used to because they’re working on power lines ahead… Fire engine performing 3-point turn into the garage of the fire house…. Gas prices “moving sideways from last week.”

Black skid mark perfectly centered within one white strip of the zebra stripes, sides perfectly parallel to the white reflective stripe.

Find empty Advil box on the ground to be put in the trash — but it’s not entirely empty, there’s something in it, a bottle of Advil?– no, an old chicken bone, still some of the fried breading around the top and base of the drumstick.

I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to think of the structure of Swann’s Way, because it is only the first volume of a seven volume book and it doesn’t seem to make sense necessarily to think of the structure of the volume without knowing first the structure of the book. Still there is something obvious about this that bears remarking on:

That the story of Swann’s love of Odette, which compromises the middle-most and longest portion of the volume, is book-ended or bracketed by accounts of two of the narrator’s personal experiences: in the first instance, encountering the richness of the past through memory; in the second instance, encountering the charmlessness of the present, to which nothing in imagination or memory corresponds.

Kanyakumari
Puranas Ganesha
Memphis Group squidge
cohete Toi invasion violac
Archibald Lampman…. cark
1 (0); 2 (1); 3 (0); 4 (0);
8 (2); 9 (0); (0); 11 (2);
(0); 19 (0); (0); 21(0);
; 28 (1); 29 (1); 30 (0);
37 (1); 38 (2); 39 (0); 40
(0); 47 (0); 48 (0); 49 (0);
Archibald Lampman…. cark
cohete Toi invasion violac
Memphis Group squidge
Puranas Ganesha
Kanyakumari

Finished Ship Fever (Andrea Barrett) and have been recommending it to my lady reader friends. Not that it is a book for ladies in particular but most of what I read is not in the ballpark of what these lady readers would like, while this is. General theme, women in science. Short stories, historical fiction, National Book Award, 1998.

Finished Swann’s Way. Believe it’s the third time I’ve read this and could probably not tell you much about his ideas of love and memory, but have been more trying to inculcate in myself his extraordinary sensitivity toward experience, which of course itself quite often takes the form of remembering. I was delighted to find that most times I felt the need to make a mark in the margins of a passage, I had already done so.

Woke with the thought that it might be interesting to contrast Molly Bloom and Odette de Crecy. Three points they have in common: they are intellectually limited relative to their partner, they are sexually promiscuous relative to their partner, and their partners accept these facts about them.

This may be my first time I’ve read the Iliad straight through in over a decade. I encountered some issues I want to look into more deeply, but some superficial things that I noticed about it include:

— there are some downright weird things that happen in this poem, like Achilles being addressed by his horses, or his dream with the recently deceased Patroclus, that had somehow escaped me on previous readings.

— the gods are much more heavily involved than I’d realized; really, equal partners with the mortals in this.

— the books have their own distinct characters. Maybe not in every book but in passels of them, certain similes, phrases, situations, themes, behaviors, are likely to predominate.

— the minor characters are more individual and subtly drawn than I’d previously credited them with being. Brisies’ brief eulogy of Patroclus, for instance, gives us a clear glimpse into his nature — Achilles’ gentler side.

— I found the ending quite moving, which I never had before. Poor Hector, poor Troy, sad situation.

— Finally, reconfirmed for myself that this is certainly a classic of world literature. Far more than an interesting story with good characters, it is a wonderfully structured work of art with a lot to notice and think about.