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.

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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.

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Interesting how Menelaos’ presence in the duels in both books 3 and 7 has the effect of creating a hierarchy of strength and bravery:

Book 3’s duel tells us: Menelaos is stronger than Paris, and Paris is fearful of Menelaos (and only fights him owing to pressure from Hector).

Book 7’s duel tells us: Menelaos is weaker than Hector but not afraid of him (and is only restrained from fighting him by Agamemnon), while Hector is stronger than Menelaos, but somewhat weaker than Aias, and a little afraid of him.

I guess we knew these things anyway, but not so clearly defined, and it’s an interesting authorial choice to have Menelaos be the one who first challenges Hector.

Perhaps the real point is to draw a contrast between Menelaos, the lawful husband, and Paris, the seducer and usurper: the former is unafraid to fight, as a matter of honor, even a person better than him, who would surely defeat him; while the latter can’t even face the man he wronged.

idea. It’s the bad writing of the best writers that most discloses their biographical selves.

(The basis for Writers’ fiction is frequently their personal experience, but when they write poorly, they have failed to make it transcendent, they have simply, unwittingly reported on themselves.)

Looked up Ascapart and Bevis of Hampton (Brittish mythology), looked up Charles Aznavour (French language singer) and Siphonodendron (ancient plant life) and corner radii (principle of urban planning). Phrase cucullus non facit monachum had come up. Proverbial. I had thought it was quoted in Measure for Measure but it actually comes up in Twelfth Night. The clothes don’t make the man, you may say. Did I have an idea that was new to me today? (no) Looked up ‘dike’ and ‘solus rex.’

Idea that “nature vs. nurture” is a false opposition because “nature” is just “nurture” over time. If you expose a population to positive or negative conditions for generations that will produce positive or negative attributes in those populations for generations, would be my guess. Can the nurturing or neglect of an individual overwhelm the generational advantages or disadvantages of their population? Can an individual break out of the influence of its generation?

Alcohol enhances ability to write (yes, complex) watching a movie diminishes capacity to write (yes) strenuous exercise diminishes capacity to write (yes) walking enhances or increases capacity to write (yes, complex) socializing decreases capacity to write (insufficient data… yes) writing personally enhances capacity to write impersonally (yes) reading will tend to result in writing (yes)

Q: tendency to exaggerate our own experiences and times above those of others notwithstanding, what if the 20th century really does represent some sort of agricultural revolution type order of change?

Becoming of another ethnicity and family: passage of genetic material through the ears. Man’s talk somehow overcoming not just biological probability but my own personal and family history, so that my genetic coding has been changed by mere listening.

Looked up Kathiawar, peninsula in North West India, coastal town, Ghandi birthplace. Ghandi biography recalled, Charles Ives biography recalled, perform internet search for “Fellini biography” and suddenly the cat leaps up behind me, a scrambling of paws and claws against the faux leather of the couch back. Charges up from behind me and growls terribly with hunger, a really quite demanding and hideous growl. Not the medicinal food this time, is probably the meaning of her hideous growl — serious hunger.

Maxim: people often attribute others’ failures to their weaknesses, but more often these exist on parallel tracks.

What is the literary evidence for the idea of human progress? If you were to restrict your inquiry to Western literature, from say Homer to Joyce, what would be the evidence that humankind had (positively, negatively, laterally) changed during that time?

(Question occurs to me because I was thinking of the idea of “not living a real life” as being a question of more recent literature, not to be found in ancient or even renaissance sources.)

Somewhat related, in Homer’s eyes, how strange would Crime and Punishment have been? Would he have scoffed and said it was nonsense, would he have said it was a great advance on his own art? Would he have said it was “ahead of its time”?

Split second decision required. The clothes I just threw onto the toilet tank are about to slip off. I will need either to (a) rush now to ensure that they don’t drop (b) or not rush and stoop to pick them up later. (I rush to ensure they don’t drop.)

Idea. The artwork is the avatar of the artist; he wants it to stand for him. But the artwork itself contains an avatar, which gives us a glimpse of the real artist, apart from his work — how Joyce really looks in life — Daedalus. The artist holds up his work – this is me – while the work holds up his avatar — this is him. And writings in which the author and avatar are the same — a la Montaigne– are personal letters, essays, memoirs.

The day-long battle that begins in book 3 and concludes with book 7 begins and ends also with instances of individual combat: in book 3 it is Paris vs. Menelaos, in book 7 it is Hector vs. Aias, both of which resolve inconclusively. What are we to make of this parallelism?

As a first guess I would put forward that the story told in these books is of how Hector has to take the place of Paris — how Paris’ fault has become Hector’s responsibility.

However, there’s a lot to unpack in contrasting these two duels — in terms of the causes, results, the stakes, the combatants, etc. — and I would just note for now the two most obvious things:

First, that this parallelism exists in the first place and is the sort of thing that establishes the Iliad as an artwork, rather than merely a story.

Second, that it establishes as a sort of “trans-chapter” unit the occurrences of books 3 to 7. I hope to look at the structure and story of that unit a little more closely later on.

 Is it not curious that throughout book 5 we’ve seen Athena helping Diomedes defeat the Trojans but in book 6 the Trojans have the idea of praying to Athena to help them defeat Diomedes?

My guess is, Homer wants us to witness the Trojans doing something we know to be utterly futile, which stands for the hopelessness of their situation in general.

It’s funny: we hear the rather lengthy account of the ceremony Hector’s mother is to perform three times, once from Helenus, once from Hector, and once from narration of the actual ceremony, yet Athena’s response to it is given in a single line (311): “She spoke in prayer but Athena turned her head from her.”

 This is a wild story. I have to imagine something like infant dementia is responsible.

On reflection, it seems that quite a lot of the action in the Iliad’s book 5 involves chariots and horses. A list:

— The story of Pandoras not bringing his horses to Troy. His discussion with Aeneas about who’s driving the chariot.
— Diomedes discussing the origin of Aeneas’ horses and forging a plot to abduct them — the horses of Laomedon.
— The wounded Aphrodite asking Ares for his horses and she and Iris ascending with them to Olympus. (352-369)
— The horses of Laomedon coming up again in the conflict between Tlepolemos and Sarpedon, for the sake of which, we’re told, Heracles had long ago sacked Troy.
— Athena and Hera ride down in a chariot from Olympus and hide their horses in a mist, echoing Aphrodite and Iris’ ride up. (Ares’ horses seem also to have also been in a mist, 356.)
— Athena essentially pushes Diomedes’ chariot driver out of the chariot and becomes Diomedes’ driver herself.
— Ares, on being wounded, does not, incidentally, return to Olympus on horses but on his “swift feet.” (885)

Iliad 5.179-327: the odd story of how Pandoaras came to Troy without his horses, apparently thinking they would suffer hardship there, and how the theme of horses under-girds the whole encounter between Pandoras-Aeneas and Diomedes.  In broad outline:

I. Pandoras, the archer, laments having left his horses in his homeland, which has indirectly resulted in him wounding and angering, but failing to kill, both Diomedes and Agamemnon. 

II. Aeneas and Pandoras deliberate whether Aneneas will drive the chariot into battle and Pandoras attack Diomedes or if Pandoras will drive and Aeneas attack. Aeneas commends his horse’s abilities on their native plains; Pandoras says horses should stick with a familiar driver.

III. Diomedes, meanwhile, not only declines his own companion’s suggestion that they flee on their chariot but says he will meet Aeneas and Pandoras on foot and hatches a plan for capturing Aeneas’ special horses, which he describes. (It is curious that Aeneas himself has not told us of their special provenance.)

IV. Diomedes kills Pandoras with a cast spear and disables Aeneas with a large stone. His companion makes off with their horses’ as they’d planned, and they’re taken back to the ships.

No conclusions about it, more thinking it through. One thing I’m wondering about is why Pandoras, leaving his horses behind, means he has to to be an archer. I suspect the answer there is that hand-to-hand combatants needed chariots to move into and out of combat situations quickly.

I would also say there is an idea here that Pandoras was an animal lover.

What do we know of the experience of being ignorant, of how it feels? We know of the experience of being ignorant that it resembles closely the feeling of thinking one knows, the feeling, indeed, of feeling one is omniscient. (Perhaps even the numbness of total unknowing, idiocy, is a sort of presumption of total knowledge… Could this be why plants have not further evolved — because they are a variety of tedious know-it-alls?)

Does the feeling of (actually) knowing differ in any way (in many ways?) from the feeling of incorrectly thinking one knows? In the way we just said, yes: ignorance is a far more sweeping feeling of knowing, of knowing all, than is actual knowing. The person who thinks he knows more than he does also thinks that knowing is more than it is. (Perhaps: real knowing isn’t a “feeling” at all, while thinking one knows is.) (And yet knowing, whether correct or incorrect, can often be accompanied by a feeling of victoriousness. I got it right!)

Additionally, although those who know tend to be guarded and cautious about stating as known things they strongly suspect, or even things which are objectively known, there is one class of thing which, through experience, they have come to know with confidence and certainty: and that is the misconceptions of those who only think they know. (That is, experts know very well the errors of amateurs and students of their field.) These — the misconceptions — the knowers may know even better than the thing they hope to know about, we suggest.

We know you don’t have any special knowledge of the answer, we may even suspect the opposite, but why do *you* think Joyce used different writing styles in Ulysses (unlike what he did in Dubliners, for example)? Was it necessary? Was it dilettantish? Was it meaningful?

It was necessary. I would guess he tried something in an ‘orthodox’ style and it didn’t work or interest him, so he tried it in a different style and found it did. (Because something works, I’m inclined to say, it must mean something or implies a meaning. But having said that, I’m not so sure.)

Is your saying yes to absurd requests a statement of the inner Situationist in you? Saying yes to an absurd request is all you can do to fight the logic of what they call “techno-capitalism,” creating within it what you will call a “dangerous air pocket of absurdity.”

Is your saying yes to absurd requests a show of revolt against the fact you can’t say no when you’d like to? Since you can’t say no to this one thing that doesn’t make much sense to you, you’re going to say yes to this other thing which makes even less sense to you, and thus neutralize entirely the value of your assent.

Is it done as a kind of self-skepticism: for the request that you find absurd is liable actually to be quite reasonable and advantageous? (You are absurd; the request is not actually absurd.)

Is it done to give the appearance of strength, where one is not strong, (for one only has strength to perform requests one finds reasonable) or out of one’s training to be agreeable? Or is it done in an attempt to throw into the face of the asker of the absurd request (who must expect consciously or unconsciously a refusal of the request they must surely guess is completely absurd) the absurdity of their request? Or just good manners? (All of these things will seem a part of it.)

Search topic: “how did capitalist versus communist societies compare with respect to environmental damage?” It was counter-intuitive that people living in want would cause more environmental damage than a society of such consumerism and waste and excess as our own (despite having read previously of some of the careless environmental practices of the Soviets, like dumping spent nuclear reactor rods into the open sea) but the top twenty search returns all seemed to point in that direction (though of course the search engine is a capitalist creation.) Reason given is that western economies were more efficient. Also, consider Chernobyl.

idiote, veule, vendue: “idiotic, spineless, sold.”

Looked up The Iron Gates (geological formation of river Danube), looked up analemma (type of photograph showing how, from a fixed spot, the sun’s position in the sky will change over the course of a year.) Looked up Philopoemen (“Pausanias wrote that after Philopoemen’s death, ‘Greece ceased to bear good men’.”)  Window I close: John Keats’ To Sleep; window I close: instructional video concerning free weights. A “kind of interesting” remark of my own comparing line from Timon of Athens with line from The Octopus is also closed — so that I now have one open blank tab.

Before setting Age of Innocence down for the night, I flipped through the Norton edition’s critical supplements in the back and came across a letter from Wharton to Sinclair Lewis. . . . and awoke thinking was I doing ‘the work’ or was I doing that which distracted from, or impeded, the work? (Now nearing fifty I would have to say, based on my experience — that I was not doing ‘the work‘ but was not impeding anyone I knew of from doing it either.)

Also that night I’d read the Floundering Four section of Gravity’s Rainbow. Having been made to laugh out loud by it, quite uncommon for me, I was also reminded of the ethos that guided my youthful appreciation of music — The Replacements were a sort of Floundering Four — and perhaps here too was something about our group that I didn’t get enough at the time. (Oh I floundered but unintentionally and it pained me.)

If there is to be a true resistance to the alliance of military, governmental and corporate interests, this Counterforce must itself be unruly and floundering. You can’t fight order with order but must fight it with a irrational creativeness. Against General Patton you send Director Fellini. (Counterpoint: you need to make sense in a functional Democracy. You need to provide the electorate with a reasonable alternative to the pomp and clamor of an insane political party like one of the ones we have.)

Looked up Pearl, Yangtze, Yellow rivers…. Locally, they are swapping out the names of southern civil war generals for civil rights leaders in schools. I think the way to look at this is as rebranding (heh we’re not a backward civil-war-lovin place, we’re a forward looking diversity lovin place!) but I find myself more in favor of anti-branding, signs that do not signify or signify the unexpected or non-obvious. Perhaps there should be an official Namer in the county, who is a real professional like a doctor, and whose job is to supply names that don’t signify. (Perhaps very dry comedians could be given this role.)

Looked up Merovingians. Childeric, Childebert, Clothar, Fredegunda, Brunilda, Clovis, The History of The Franks. Turns out the French “Louis” came from “Clovis,” name for royalty among the French for some 1500 years. Looked up Carpathian Mountains — that little corner of the Ukraine it cuts off. Looked up Zagrus Mountains (Iran, Iraq, Turkey) looked up Scandanavian Mountains (formed northern border of Norway and Sweden — believe these to be part of the same Ancient mountain chain comprised also of the Caledonian and Appalachian chains)…

Customer having brought up Horace the other day, I searched for but could not find that ode of his which I liked so well and is so famous, having misremembered the title — Bandusian Fountain. The most memorable part of it, he speaks of intending to sacrifice a goat to the fountain: at the very moment the goat is to enter adulthood and into its own, he says, its blood is to stain the fountain’s crystal water. There is something so terrifyingly cruel and awful about this image, which Horace doesn’t shrink from, that gives the poem great power.

INTERNAL PLATONIC MONOLOGUE

Can you read and not understand what you’re reading at the same time? (No, surely not.) You would say, then, if you’re looking at a page, but not understanding what is said on that page, that you’re not reading? (Yes.) Well but what about this: suppose you were reading something in a language you didn’t know; or something in a language that you did know but which was highly technical, such as involved the design of rocket engines; or something that was in a language that you knew, and which was not necessarily highly technical, but was especially prickly logically, demanding you keep in mind many things at once, as in a Supreme Court case; I suppose you would agree that in these instances you could actually read the words while not understanding what exactly the words meant? (Yes.) So you would be reading without understanding what you’re reading? (Quite so.) So there seem to be two types of reading, one which recognizes what the words are and another which grasps what the words mean. And when you said before that you disagreed that reading without understanding was reading, you meant that reading to really be reading requires both kinds of understanding. Do you agree with that? (Yes.)

Lack of spiritual advancement: inner and outer impermeable to each other. Lack of spiritual advancement: compulsively checking your blog’s stats, which never register change. Nature takes you to a point then drops you: phrase of John Updike’s. Why did men stupefy themselves: question of Leo Tolstoy’s. (They had bad consciences. They did things they knew to be wrong, was why they stupefied themselves, according to Tolstoy.) Prince Andrew’s insight that the pursuit of glory is a kind of living for others. Listening to Shannon’s record tonight while I cook, I read in The Post: “A physical phenomenon known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation shows that for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture.”

The tendency to think of ourselves as the moderns and the ancients as “the start of things” when in fact the reverse is true. (You could perhaps support the idea that We are “the start of things” — as we are the start of a certain understanding of things — but how do you support the idea that the ancients are “moderns”?) The ancients were basically like us, moderns, Plato could practically be writing for the New Yorker; while we’re just beginning to realize we are not us anymore. Probably not since WW1 have we been quite us. (Idea that the more technology strives to connect us, the more art must strive to disconnect — reactionary anti-AI anti-spellcheck idea of art). Person to whom I recommended Alyosha The Pot really liked Alyosha The Pot…… Oneself as an issuer, not experiencer, of coincidences…. My conservatism: people excited because “this is unprecedented” don’t know history — it’s precedented. My political liberalism: it’s likely that we’re at an agricultural revolution type cataract in history, which will require drastic change.

Q: Would you propose there are two ethics that everyone unconsciously tries to adhere to: one of those pretty well summed up by the ten commandments, or some combination of them and Plato, which you could call The Ethic of The Individual or Mind; and the other pretty well exemplified by the practice of not driving wrecklessly and not littering, and reducing your carbon footprint, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and voting in government elections, which you could call The Ethic of The Collective or the Body (The Body seeming a kind of collective or multiplicity and The Mind seeming a kind of individual or unity)? A: No.

Some people don’t know the Roman numeral for 5 and some people are Edmund Wilson — which, to think of all the reading that has gone into writing this one book, is truly mindboggling to me, yet a matter of course for people who are really concerned with intellectual work. And you are somewhere in between the two and really much closer to the guy who doesn’t know his roman numerals — a comedian. A Comedian, we find, is the designation that most makes sense for you, but so then why are you so serious and why do you not laugh?

A: In a fowl mood. Even when my mood is good it is often not comedic or hostile to comedy.

What was the House of William The Conqueror? (House of Normandy.) Who was Margaret Power? (Potentially interesting personal history there but offhand I don’t really know who she is.) If only I would get up before 5 each day… Additionally I need to clear off this desk: what do I have here (draft of a letter) what do I have here (empty compact disc case, Woodie Guthrie, a “jewel case’ I’m told they’re called; Polybius in translation beside a Greek Lexicon; a broken audio speaker, paycheck stubs, commercial correspondence, holiday cards, to-do lists, only one of which is applicable to today, some of which look like they could be applicable to today but are from months ago; and the like.) But if I reliably got up at 5am, for example, I would assuredly read selections from Walt Whitman in Camden. “Key to a good day is getting up before the internet.”

Looked up urheimat, acicular, martingale, (“so I had heard that correctly and it is a word.”) How could Jesus have known so much without having studied, it’s asked in The Book of John. It’s because it wasn’t for his own glory, or on the basis of his own authority he knew. Trying to channel Pindar and winding up sounding like I don’t want to say what (which is what happens when you try to channel Pindar.) A piece of pragmatic writing advice: try putting your last idea first.

Theme of the day across the internet had been: “I look at my stats and ask myself why I do this.”

Blogger I’d known for years put up a personal statement on his blog, quite a departure from his usual. He had taken it down by the next day but it had given me some insight into him.

Looked up ‘bezel’ (bezel of a ring), looked up hudabrastic (refers to English mock heroic verse) looked up louable (French for laudable).

Looked up failson (blushing to discover there is such a word, c’est moi.)

Sought out passage in de Tocqueville (I was pretty sure he had said there was no place with less freedom of speech than the United States — had he actually?)

Sought out passage in Gospel of Mathew (I was fairly sure Jesus had taken quite a hardline against divorce — had he though?)

If pride is a joy that comes from thinking more highly of oneself than is just, according to Spinoza, then shame must be thinking more lowly of oneself than is just? (Did he make a comment about shame?)

Wrote and published post on blog that The Party of Disappointed People, in the novel The Tunnel, had anticipated The Tea Party, and the novel JR had anticipated Trump, the idea being that literature may have a role to play in political science.

My status as a failed writer being central to my identity as a worker or “attendant” like Faulkner’s failure as a poet was central to his identity as a writer, was thought; (but was that really central to his identity as a writer?) — Yes, it was because the one foot of the compass was planted firmly in “writing” that the other could trace out its twenty year circle — and could not trace out much else.

Idea that having established I could not write, I would invent a fictional character, Michael, who could write, and I would carefully transcribe his writing and maybe let it stand for my own.

(When you tried to look at his writing, however, it was like the hazy writing of a dream and you couldn’t decide if there was actual writing there or if it was only a sort of actor’s prop…. And yet you could somewhat see “Michael” himself, who looked a little like you. Which is itself an important revelation about writing: seeing how autobiographical the work of O’Connor and Kafka turn out to be, for example.)

Idea: what if all of history had been written by the same person. (Idea that in the future, technology will be that same person, that one voice, though there will be different technologies.)

That we have already been heading in that direction: the technological in us being given more and more expression or “voice.”

Idea that there can be something old-feeling and old-fashioned about ancient history that goes beyond the subject matter, as if only old people wrote ancient history (which is not a criticism but a characterization of “voice.”)

Idea that this is the way Cheever sometimes seems to write a short story: he has a character in view, he writes two or three adventures or situations with that character, then at a certain point he asks himself what the common thread of these situations has been, and that’s his conclusion, that’s the short story.

Idea of reimagining of practice of Kintsugi as “showing one’s code”? (All our thoughts on blogs show nothing of the code that’s behind their ordering and transmission. These lines of code are like the cracks in the pottery that Kintsugi may beautifully highlight.)

Racism/ tribalism kind of the worrisome reciprocal of natural family affection…? both tribalism…? to be without “racism” altogether implying the absence of sympathy towards “one’s own”…?

(… could it be that the extreme polar opposite of racism is alienation? or was racism a sort of artificial tribalism like football team fandom and actually a cause of alienation?)

The idea that our memory fails us as we grow older because we can’t hear it above our self-applause…? that this is also why we grow deaf…?

The argument that knowledge is not really knowledge until it has gone through the filter of the middle class…? until it is taught to children in public school…?

That knowledge may be used (burning of fossil fuels for energy) but ultimately is not useful (will have unintended consequences a la climate change) unless it is “educatable” — unless it is broadly understood?

That this might also go for a concept like Evolution…?

(Implying… discovery of truth is only the beginning of having knowledge, which involves further an intergenerational process of absorbing it….?)

Idea that Homer must have been a Trojan…? That literature is the bequest of the defeated and humbled?

Preferring sickness over health not per se but because there is another sickness which sickness undermines, but which health supports…?

Passive Subject (Schopenhauer, Proust.) To make of oneself a mirror and empty vessel filled only with the thing observed.

Inframince/ Duchamp. If it seems boring to you, you are not considering slivers of time or space that are small enough, the bullet between gun and target.

Epiphany/ Joyce. Ordinariness, according to him, could in moments erupt into significance that needed careful transcription. But perhaps any given arrangement of matter, stripped of the attribute of Time, any given moment, would be found to hold such significance.

Situations/ detournment. To play pranks on civilization so as to find the buried spirit beneath. (Corollary. The great soft underbelly of civilization seems to be the media. If the media were like a Fellini film, it would be “the hard underbelly” of civilization.)

Conservative or punk rock approach. Accept the obvious. If an activity is dull, don’t perform it. If a place is dull, leave it. If you can not, for any reason, do these things, you yourself are dull and to be left.

Political Thinking

A Disinterested though Partisan Appeal to the Political Scientists of the Future; Obergefell: a “reverse Dred Scott”? reach of the Obstruction laws. Heller. Dylan’s Chronicles, Caesar’s Gallic Wars. The Problem that seems like a political problem but isn’t.

Film

Hannah and her sisters chart , Late Spring: direction’s scene; [all of Late Spring posts]; Pulp Fiction Notes; Deathproof, Red Beard, money in To Have and Have Not; Jackie Brown/ interracial relations; children and violence in kill bill vol.I;

My most popular concordance here is Hats in Against The Day; my most extensive was PLANTS (now reduced to include just the plants of Shakespeare); and a couple I just kind of liked were Hands in Winesburg, Ohio and money in To Have and Have Not (the film.)

Concordances

Brave in Tempest; Chicken in Brother’s K.; ambiguities in “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities”; Plants in Horace’s Odes; A Partial Concordance of Sorrentino’s Strange Commonplace. **Eye in cyclops chapter of Ulysses; ‘The Fear’ in letters to Milena; Red, White and Purple in Venus and Adonis; ‘Nothing’ in King Lear; ‘Honesty’ in Othello; ‘beautiful’ in golden bowl; Invisibility/ Visibility in Mason & Dixon; Invisibility/ Visibility in Against The Day; Hats — Against The Day; lane outside the house/ Late Spring; Pairs in Late Spring / Late Spring; Kanagawa and Japanese locations/ Late Spring, to have and have not — specific dollar amounts mentioned; Jackie Brown/ interracial relations, children and violence in kill bill vol.I; Plants in the Song of Roland; ‘Pluck’ in Measure for Measure; Good Old Neon, Plants in Wasps; Hands in Winesburg; clothing in Hamlet, Everything, anything, something and nothing in The Wings of a Dove,”Beautiful“, Wings of a Dove, Lists in Marianne Moore’s An Octopus, Plants, Animals, Minerals in An Octopus, An Octopus: Water & Ice,

Odd Ideas & Writing

corporations are our bodies; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Milena and the Burrow; respice finem, Tolstoy, Wallace; factual error in Kafka’s Blue Octavo notebooks; complete account of K; In each play with a character named Burgundy, there is also a mention of the plant darnel.About the repetitions of “A Strange Commonplace”; What might it mean that “your body is inside you.” The Meteoric Rise of ‘Robust’ Postnatural / POPE, Montaigne, Nietzsche note * ;Fossils, fossilized memories, and “Eternal Return”; Free speech possible without “dialectic”?nEvolution of footnotes in fiction? Sureealism and the everyday, Twain and Hejinian; Ashbery and Herzog; How do we win at Centipede when we’re Frogger?, Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence: Boundless Prometheus, nauscopie & phase shift, *; Big Sleep/ Maltese, Obergefell: a “reverse Dred Scott”? Epiphany and the Will-less Subject; occupy wall street, the philosopher king ; climate change a technology problem not religion problem ; Writers’ Habits of Spending; Robert Creeley: A Piece ; dts, passive subject, epiphany ; Actually Crying with Boredom/ mission haiku, Fraudulence Paradox & Binging, “PHASE Shift“, diary, epiphany, fiction, scholastic, Flaubert and Dylan [Trump and Dylan], The Feeling of Thinking One Knows, Polka Dot Scarf, Tamarisk in Enquiry Into Plants, Theophrastus (i), In order to turn (the play) Agamemnon into (the poem) An Octopus, what would you need to do? Being Struck by a Wall, Preferred participants of this blog, Forever Overhead ending (a few of his short stories a bit like that), THIS IS NOT A NOVEL /SPREADSHEET, Anadiplosis, Quotation marks in An Octopus vs. those in Herzog, Cezanne’s Finances, metaphysical foundation for real world prohibition? (Deuteronomy) ,Infinite Jest on Reddit, Did chapters with the same name in Strange Commonplace (Sorrentino) share thematic elements in a way that chapters with different names didn’t? (Not that I could see.) “Major de Spain, General d’Espagne”, Heraclitus, fire, Good Man Is Hard To Find: Flannery O’Connor, Bob Wills ??? Cotton Fields. Taco — Tache — Tack. [I guess the question I meant to articulate here was: might a poem rhyme one way phonetically –in terms of its sounds– and another way literally — in terms of its letters and spelling, how it looks.] Random Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence: “boundless Prometheus”, Altars beyond words (like doctors without borders?) analyzing sounds in An Octopus, Glass that bends, Art & The Insurance Industry, Recycling — satan’s frozen tears returned to satan’s frozen tear ducts, “Erase” and “raze” related, Every single story had the word bird in it, for some reason;  Actual Reading Time vs. Fictional Thinking Time; Responses to the question, “Why can’t I catch a break”? In which I find a dirty shirt after having started the machine already, Rheotaxis in Hemingway, War’s where! Which war? The Twwinns, Researched & Unresearched Artwork, Heller, Nightmare Town, Dylan’s Chronicles, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Difficulty of style of Henry James. Freedom of Speech in Ancient Athens, Is biographical information about Joyce and the critical apparatus surrounding his work a supplement to, or essential structural element of, his work. Joseph Conrad’s conservative political views, Memorizing An Octopus,

(this), questions for statisticians, *, modernist platonic dialogues, * “Signifying Nothing” Russian Christ***, altars beyond words, pains, [***] voodoo doll of brain, aprender*; The “BEINGONAUGHT”, Dreams are the exercise of biology, Unprofitable Servants*******Hejinian, Blood Meridian / Moby Dick, Dylan and Trump* , *, Unnopenessee*, *Iago from James, WALK, language, *, Unnopenessee, * , Drafts of a Haiku (3rd is best), translating…Unnopenessee, poem, Knowing all nouns, *, Experimenter of Life, Patience vs. ‘Mindfulness’, Inventions, revise a little, a pile, Chance Sweepings: coffee table version, The Shoulder of The Jogger revise, Tracing Pencil/Exercise in Inframince, Outside the K-1 (poem), The Senselessness of Me Turning My Neck, ROGER, revise and put in 1st person (o — oo– or), (concept poem) That song we love: a Hymn to Virtue. Desenganarse,  Magma Square – 3, Anthony, Humatum, Trying to get out the door then actually doing so, SUMMS, Items near cat-hair covered sweat shirt, Brown broken down cardboard box, I had lead the thread of the red back and forth across the bread, needs revision black wagon, Letting go of sock, Chained up paddle boats for tourists, Waterpot, familiar pattern of a capital letter ‘T’, Displeasing stack, Am I in Ancient Greece? <Burg’s Steps>, Literaria Deformis: a history of my terrible writing.