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…
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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.

My four ideas with the Iliad these days (have read through book 18):

— I’m looking at the parallelism of the two duels (between Paris and Menelaos and Hector and Aias), and that of the fights over the corpses of Sarpedon and Patroclus (which prefigure the concerns over Hector’s body) and wondering how many other such parallelisms there are that I’m missing and wondering in general what these parallelisms are about.

— I’m also thinking about how different gods seem to dominate different portions of the narrative: Athena the first third, Poseidon the second, now Apollo seems to be making an appearance.

— I’m looking at the theme of fire. Is it my imagination or is it the case that ever since Hector lit fire to the ships, more and more of the similes involve the idea of fire? as if the literal has become the figurative — the literal has become the emotional.

— Finally, the idea of taunting. There seem to be one or two books, I can’t remember which, in which it suddenly became a common behavior for warriors to taunt their killed, defeated adversaries. Why?

“Traveling around now the way I do, I see thousands of people doing work they hate, simply because they don’t believe they could make it doing something they really love. Some of these people are great successes at their jobs, if you measure success by how much money you make or how high up the ladder you climb. Almost to a person they talk about how they’re not happy because they’d rather be doing something else. When you ask them why they don’t do that, they usually answer by saying, ‘Oh, I could never do that.’ It all adds up to one thing — the fear of failing.” ~Merle Haggard, Sing Me Back Home.

[43] La mort d’un homme sensible qui expire au milieu de ses amis désolés, et celle d’un papillon que l’air froid du matin fait périr dans le calice d’une fleur, sont deux époques semblables dans le cours de la nature.

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When will I learn at last this ancient Greek word which means “to receive favorably, accept”? (I may have just done it by actually giving expression to my obduracy, though perhaps on editing this years from now I will find I have continued to deceive myself on this point.) [Editing this years from then I do believe I recall the word, which δέχομαι, which is a common word which I ought to have committed to memory years ago.] (Looked up obdurancy, which is how I first spelled it, which I guess works, but the word is not what I want. Obdurant suggests a willed resistance to the right answer.) Observation: My spelling is bad in several senses but the most interesting resembles the errors of poor technology: not like me spelling phonetically where that isn’t appropriate — parkay for parquet — but as if the computer misheard me or made a bad prediction of what I meant — ‘than’ for ‘that’ or ‘eye sore’ when I mean ‘I’m so’ — when I am the computer too.

Saw someone question the need to begin a question with “question:” Looked like the gifts I’d gotten for my niece and nephew wouldn’t arrive in time for the holidays: coin purses shaped like tacos, in which I would put a gift. My thought, such as I could form it, was that Stevens, dealing with ideas, produces something substantial in feeling, whereas what I was writing seemed essentially factual and journalistic, and there was nothing either above or beneath it to make it more substantial in feeling.

A modern remake of The Clouds considered — The Blogs.

Idea that the reason Africa remains so tribal and resistant to the rule of law, is that it’s never been conquered in the way, say, Britain was conquered by Rome, which intrusion acted somewhat as primer coat for later civilizations. (Intensely hypothetical, but if Rome’s empire had only extended directly south what would be the effect today?)

(Condensed idea: subjugation is a prerequisite for the rule of law.)

Looked up Pele’s Hair, Berlin (Lou Reed album) — hadn’t realized it was Jack Bruce on bass. Sympotic was the adjectival form of symposium and Kottabos was an Ancient Greek game of throwing the sediment of one’s empty wine cup at a target. To note: boy’s transition from spoiled rich kid to okay rich kid in Captains Courageous (film) A hypocrite in Ancient Greece was an actor. (Is it peculiar that Jesus rails against the “hypocrites”? Do the prophets rail against pretenders and fakers in the same? Did Buddha?) Looked up scotopic and billabong and asetose. Looked up Lester Maddox and Amanda Peterson and Midrash Rabba and 1993 cruise missile strikes on Iraq… ….Can’t name the wood of which the door is comprised, can’t identify the pattern of its engraved rectilineal figures, or know how to describe the angle to which it is opened…. I forget the presence of the shadows and reflections in the picture, I say nothing of the jostled state of the rugs… And this is what writing is, to notice and know the names of these things. I should be able to notice and identify everything present.

If the Greek Gods could be combined into one god would they be the equal of Yahweh? Would the Greek myths equal the OT? No, I don’t know exactly what I mean by “equal” in those questions, in what sense equal, but something like this comes to mind:

Genesis = The Myths / Homer
Exodus/ Kings etc = The plays/ The Histories
Prophets = Philosophers

The only way I can explain a number of my anomalies, or even my general condition, is (though it’s not stated as an aspiration, which is how you sometimes find it) ‘rock n roll.’ Kid stuff in a sense, but with ideas that penetrate the script of the mainstream view. Perhaps rock n roll simply indicates the ad hoc, and is the opposite of the carefully engineered (although that’s become so untrue.)

Notion: I associate rock n roll with progressive values but can rock really represent “progress” from classical music while being so much more rudimentary? Counter notion: rock n roll is essentially democratic and youth oriented, not politically progressive; it doesn’t represent progress in music but is the music of a society, perhaps, that has technologically progressed.

The ab in abandonment had made me think of the ob in obvious, which was something I’d looked up the previous day. What was obvious was something in the way, in the viam, in the road. . . . . Thinking of ob by the fridge, thinking of ab by the bed.

Listening to song Carrot Rope I’m puzzled, as I so often am by song lyrics, by how the lyrics “don’t make sense” — whether in an absolute way or merely to me — and yet will nevertheless seem “to work” so well. And by “work” I mean that I’m not troubled by the possibility that the lyrics might mean nothing or that they mean something stupid or untrue; I feel they must mean something interesting. Carrot Rope to me is a nice catchy song that “makes no sense,” like quite a lot of Astral Weeks, for example, or Gimme Shelter, whereas a nice catchy song like Love for Sale does “make sense.” I can clearly understand the meaning of the lyrics of Love for Sale.

I perform a search online about Carrot Rope’s lyrics. I come across three interpretations, the third of which was so brilliant it must be the answer or mainly the answer — a carrot rope is a wedding ring, made of carets, pulling you like a leash. It explains many of the obscure parts of the lyrics. I doubt that Astral Weeks or Gimme Shelter is like this, with a key, but I find now in this song an underlying idea that definitively holds these lyrics up.

Donald & Lydia a sad judgement gently delivered for our times, “making love from ten miles away” is our times. Or all times. We find reasons to preserve ourselves from intimacy.

Reading, finished Chandler’s book on Napoleon, which I envisioned as a companion to rereading War & Peace (had Napoleon been a great man?) which I’ve started. Greek, Lysias. French, de Maupassant. Writing again — that ideal I’ve had of the epiphany seems to have lost meaning for me — there’s nothing really important about each moment of life, but seizing on one, not letting it get away, may be an important artistic conceit or device or prompt in the post-Proust-Joyce era. But the spiritual significance no longer feels there — a day that is like a thousand years to God. To find just one year in any day.

War & Peace: touched by the piety of Mary Bolkonsky. Prince Andrew must pray for the capacity to love. (The only other recourse for the unloving is hating.) Also, the soldier who, in his panic, deliberately looks for people where he knows them not to be, my very self. Release of prayer: how the right humility might lead us out of fear.

… chaos and significance of the political situation; uncertainty surrounding the climate situation;  magnitude of that and human complacency regarding it; newspaper headlines — seem like evidence of a vacancy within me writ large: a projection of the interior I can’t see; through the lens of the news, upon the wall of historical events, myself

Time of The Assassins. return it to a spot between The Possessed and the French Le Rouge et Le Noir. (But it doesn’t fit vertically there, so it’s going to have to go between Open Boat and Other Stories, dollar edition, and Silent China, Lu Xun, David’s gift.) Something also needs to be done about Polybius: will put him where the Gravity’s Rainbow was.

In that position, Polybius has Gaddis (Recognitions) on the left and a long row of Faulkner on the right, but then, since he is taller than Gaddis, and since Gaddis is far taller than the Vintage editions of Faulkner, I wedge him between Infinite Jest and Gaddis instead. But the black spine of the Digireads.com edition of Polybius clashes too terribly with the orange of the spine of Infinite Jest and the pale blue of The Recognitions so I reinsert it to the right of The Recognitions again so that its black goes with the black of the Vintage Faulkners. Anyway, this shelf has a very 20th/ 21st century vibe except with only a few green Loebs at the end, so the Pynchon I have removed from here will probably go back where it was.

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I’m fairly pleased with myself for having identified the saxophonist on the radio as Jackie Mclean or a Jackie Mclean inspired artist, when it is actually Booker Ervin or a Booker Ervin inspired artist, I am soon to learn; and, not yet realizing my mistake, I ask myself how could I, who “had so much of what I called knowledge — though it wasn’t much — and wasn’t perhaps, what another would call knowledge — or what another who actually knew things would call knowledge — perish? How can a knowledgeable person die (which was not to say an ignorant person should die)?” And I by wondering this am really perhaps no so much self-impressed as I am impressed by knowledge and by how great, and great-feeling, a thing it is to know or think one knows.

I’m soon to learn I’ve totally mixed up these horn players, I have actually confused them with each other for years now; on realizing which, I then think — “yes my error and confusion can perish, and ought to perish. I ought not necessarily perish along with my confusion; in fact, I ought to remain extant, while my confusion perishes, or that would be desirable from my point of view. And it is in fact a good thing that what I call my knowledge, which is actually confusion, may perish without me, which is what learning is…. Is that what death is? Not the death of knowledge but the death of confusion? If I would be a totally unconfused person might I find immortal life? Might I simply die? Might I find I was not I, when I died, which is what I am when I’m unconfused?”

I know, or think I know, that knowledge, deep or shallow, is a projection of a biological organism, or else somehow encoded on it. And we know what happens to what we call “biological things” — they die and along with them, one supposes, everything that is “encoded” on them, their knowledge. But is it really possible the somewhat ornate things encoded in my mind can die? Is it possible I might become so encoded as to be immortal? Perhaps this is the idea behind people with elaborate tattoos: they imagine the flesh can become so encoded as to ward off death and corruption. Nothing that elaborate can perish, might be their idea. Of course, what I seem to be describing here (though I’m not actually sure I’m clear on it) is what is often called the Vanity of Knowledge. Yes, even elaborately knowledgeable people with well-tattooed brains must face disease and injury and poverty and humiliation and death. Yes, they must. We’ve seen it happen. Knowing can’t save you, or save us, from “the way of all flesh.”

So to recap — first: you don’t know what you think know; and second, what you indeed do know won’t save you (where “being saved” and “understanding” are the same) — unless, perhaps, ‘I am not I’ is a thing that can be known and be made sense of.