Notes on the final chapter of Time & Western Man which concerns “the mind of Jocye”. here .

–I was very interested to see Lewis comment that Joyce’s work is personal, instead of merely autobiographical, which I’ve been thinking about but not managed to say. This might be the real legacy of Joyce –his craftsmanship being non-emulatable– that he took this endeavor a bit personally and we do even more.

–Claim that Ulysses is overcharged surface with wooden stock characters beneath. (It’s because the characters are characters that are real and personal to Joyce –indeed, are ultimately Joyce himself– that they remain ultimately so embryonic. Bloom as evidently Joyce himself as Daedalus is.) Elsewhere, Lewis seems to say the same of Picasso. These are mere craftsmen, whose figures, beneath their impressiveness, are dolls lacking life.

–Refreshing to read some negative criticism, particularly of a figure so lionized as Joyce. Not just negative: hostile. Also refreshing to see a criticism of Modernism that goes deeper than “it’s hard, it’s unreadable.” (It’s a criticism of perspective on Time, though in what sense remains obscure to me.)

–This criticism of a perspective on Time reminds me of my own fixation with Joyce’s “epiphany”, which I seemed to see in other writers also — but Lewis means something else. Speaks of Bergson.

–His insight, in the Stein section, that there is one side of the arts (artsiest) that strives very earnestly to represent itself as what another side strives to parody (most commercial). The serious repetition of Stein compared with the parodied repetitiousness of a child in Anita Loos.

(This section hit home for me in that I will often encounter, in my own writing, that I don’t know whether what I’m writing is serious or not. I’ll write something bland and neutral which, to be made at all interesting, to “work”, needs to be pushed towards Stein or toward Loos.)

(The idea of taking this personally…)

“The main characteristic of the Time-mind from the outset has been a hostility to what it calls the ‘spatializing’ process of a mind not a Time-mind. It is this ‘spatializing’ capacity and instinct that it everywhere assails.

In its place it would put the Time-view, the flux. It asks us to see everything sub specie temporis. It is the criticism of this view, the Time-view, from the position of the plastic or the visual intelligence, that I am submitting to the public in this book.”

After a little more skimming, what Lewis calls the time-mind does seem to have some similarity to what I think of as “epiphany” — seeing all time in one time, yet as a result, fixing all the more concretely one one’s own time. “All ages are contemporaneous.” (Pound)

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Idea that some of the attitudes expressed in this Sorrentino interview are fairly descriptive of what is going on in Finnegans Wake, thinking particularly of where he says: “Yeah, I think Imaginative Qualities is a novel in which I first began to see the possibilities of… Well, to simplify it: of doing anything I damn well pleased. Literally, of doing anything I damn well pleased.”

The idea is that Joyce couldn’t very well say back then that he was “doing anything he damn well pleased” with FW since there was still this idea that writing mean something and be about things, so he made up this stuff about it being a dream or what have you (although that is a legitimate point of entry into the work.)

Also descriptive of FW is where Sorrentino says, in Imaginative Qualities, “The reader will see how the images of this book persist and reappear. That is because these things themselves are the plot. They carry all the meaning. Isolate flecks.” (“Isolate flecks” is from W.C. Williams:

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off).

An example of such persistent imagery in FW is the dialogues that recur: Mut & Jute, Mookse and Gripes, Gracehoper and the Ondt, etc.

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n………..a..v
c………...e a………..t
t………..h l………..c
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….B….
….u h h….….r a a….
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….b v lw o….….….….oi d o e….
….y t g….….…..….B B….
^{Tell all the truth but tell it slant}
….F e Tb b…..…..bblacia…...
….u h h…...….r a a….…
_{Tell all the truth but tell it slant}

Hipocrates 30. English.
παῖς οὐ ποδαγριᾷ πρὸ τοῦ ἀφροδισιασμοῦ.

(ποδαγριᾷ = “to have gout in the feet.” Foot pain.)

A thorough-going definition for a ‘stand’ here, as in a stand of trees or a grove: “A contiguous group of trees sufficiently uniform in age-class distribution, composition, and structure, and growing on a site of sufficiently uniform quality, to be a distinguishable unit.”

Surprised to find its origin is fairly late American English — 1868.

The pencil traces the familiar pattern of a capital letter ‘T’.

The sentence begins and ends with that letter (not of course counting the marks) the letter ‘t’.

In the word capital the slash with which we’ve ‘crossed’ the t but is a straight line at a perpendicular to (but not at all touching) the core, so to speak, of the cursive t. This erect line is in fact somewhat shorter than that of the l in capital.

Also in the word capital, The second a has no space visible within its enclosed space (we believe it was inadvertant, and a function of the extreme tightness of the circle of the a, itself a function of the smallness of the hand, by which we mean, the handwriting) while with the first a the circle is better formed, and the white of the paper may be seen beyond the interior of the a.

Came upon the Greek for that interesting Dionysius passage on the “austere style” and am thinking of making it a longer term project to dive into that.

Couple things learned right off.
–Greek word for “name” (ὄνομα) means in a grammatical context noun.
–What has been very nicely translated as “austere style” is (αὐστηρᾶς ἁρμονίας), literally something like “bitter harmony.” That immediately evoked for me the musical practice of Charles Ives; I wonder could he be put in the same ranks as Pindar, Thucydides, Aeschylus…

(Briefly, Dionysius of Halicarnassus divides Greek writing styles into three: one harsh and noble, one pleasing and florid, and one that combines the two. Unknown to me: has there been any attempt at a thorough categorizing of English writing styles?)

one of the few places on the Earth whose waters feed three oceans…. Triple Divide Peak

idea that (following Auerbach in Mimesis), as the conceit of the afterlife in Dante’s Comedy, and the conceit of ‘the stage’ in Shakespeare’s plays (“all the world’s a stage”) , and the metafictional aspect of Don Quixote (Cervantes writing not about Don Quixote per se but about a history of Don Quixote he has found), are artifices that contribute to the realistic effects of these works; so secondary literature and critical apparatus about Ulysses make possible the realism of the book itself, and represent a further evolution of such artifices in Western Literature. 

The experience of not getting a dad joke (He brews it) then suddenly getting it (hebrews it) — describing what is really going on there.

The jocular question: “how does Moses make his tea?” The jocular response: “He brews it.” The mind, when it does not get the joke, hears he brews it, and when it does get the joke, hears hebrews it? Or does it hear, when it gets it, hebrews it and he brews it at once?

Envisioning the mind as a hollow bowling ball with two holes. To get the joke, the answer must fly through the one hole (the literal response) and out the other (the double entendre). When a person does not get the joke, it goes in and out the same hole. When a person gets the joke but does not find it funny, it passes through both holes but without having “touched base” (or perhaps having touched “the wrong base.”) When a person takes longer than he should to get the joke, then laughs harder than he should when he gets it, he is resisting any interpretation but a literal one, then is ultimately overwhelmed by the absurdity of trying to cram the nonsensical response through the only literal hole.

Question: to deliver the joke properly, on which syllable of the punchline should the teller place the accent? The question is whether to pronounce it as two unrelated words, “hebrews” and “it”, or as the phrase “he brews it”/  hebrewsit. (Or the question is whether to put the accent on the antepenult or penult, which is perhaps to say the same thing.) Attendant tended to mix it up without about equally hilarious results.

Curiosity‘s wheels… “Let’s see if these beefier wheels hold up better than Curiosity’s!” (tweet). Wikipedia: “After six years of use, the wheels are visibly worn with punctures and tears.” Same twitter thread indicates Curiosity’s wheels spelled something in the sand. Wikipedia: ” Each wheel has a pattern that helps it maintain traction but also leaves patterned tracks in the sandy surface of Mars. That pattern is used by on-board cameras to estimate the distance traveled. The pattern itself is Morse code for “JPL” (·— ·–· ·-··).”

Here is the “long lost” Appendix A to Chance Sweepings. Attempt here was to show a transaction with a customer as described through the entry of  PLU codes. I will think of this as a fairly successful experiment and have wondered if a similar technique could be applied to computer use — really slowing down what we do when we type.

APPENDIX A: 7,2,4 “plu”

Right hand, index finger: press 7,2,4, “plu”; press 9,2,4, “plu”; press 5,0,0, “plu” (see total, which is too large, and suspect I haven’t closed out the previous sale)

Right hand, index finger: press “void”, 7,2,4, “plu”; press “void” 9,2,4, “plu”; press “void”, 5,0,0, “plu” (see my fears were ungrounded –the previous total was correct– and so I reenter the sale).

Right hand, index finger: press 7,2,4,”plu”; press 9,2,4,”plu”; press 5,0,0,”plu”; (then he says he wants a cookie) press “cancel.”

Right hand, index finger: press “tax one”, 7,2,4,”plu”; press “tax one” 9,2,4, “plu”; press 5, 0, 0,”plu”; press 9, 0, 0,”plu”; press (though you don’t really need to) “subtotal”.

(The total is 8 something. 8.46. It is often remarked that the price is modest relative to the number of buttons pushed.)

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…………………….Archibald La mpman…. cark
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…………………………Owens Valley ………………. e
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……………………………..hatikvah…///.cantatrice .a
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………………………………..Llorona….syncope………. n
…………………………………inedia………Porlock …….. e
…………………………………DalekINTP Merrill Gilfillan

“I have enjoyed the journey. The happiness of these days I would never have known living in the castle. I’ve seen the people as they are without pretense. I’ve seen their beauty and their ugliness with my own eyes. I thank you.” (from Hidden Fortress.)

Hippocrates 2.11 : “ῥᾷον πληροῦσθαι ποτοῦ, ἢ σιτίου.”  It’s easier to become full with drink than with food.

(Googling this I’m encountering some arguments against juicing. Seems some people think it’s easier to drink more than the same quantity unjuiced.)

A customer’s lifetime of scanning poetry alerted him to the presence of something decidedly odd about the Covid-19 sign taped to our ice cream case. And indeed, on closer inspection, it seems that what we have here are two lines of Trochaic Hexameter (albeit broken up and with a substitution in the final foot):

Wear a/ mask
And/ keep your/ social/ distance/
We are/ not re/sponsi/ble
For/ Covid/–19/disease./

(Customers will frequently remark on the unwieldy English of this sign. Oh, so it wasn’t you guys who did Covid-19 eh?) Asked to go full tilt and put this into rhyme we get —

Wear a mask, we must implore,
And stand six feet from us or more.
We’re not to blame, let us be clear,
For the virus you contract in here.

Having tried four or five versions of that, and finding this the best, I’m reminded of how subtle poetry can be. Between the spritely and mundane, a mere syllable can make an almost mystical difference.

(Chance Sweepings …)

Seems odd now this has never occurred to me (randomly stumbled on) that the mother-wife should be such a non-presence in King Lear: “What happened to Queen Lear? Where is she? How might things h bn, had she not been absent? If I recall aright, Shakespeare never even addresses this q. But isn’t this a deafening silence?”

Seems fair to mention that Shakespeare took this story pretty much as is from other sources,… but even so, the three adult-seeming daughters with a father and no mother undeniably creates the underlying familial atmospherics of that main plot, while a single father with two adult sons and no apparent mom –and with not the same mom– composes the familial atmospherics of the subplot. (Can we project from this what I think is no where explicitly stated that Lear’s two unfaithful daughters were illegitimate?)

Customer said the first thing he’d do to make the economic expansion more equitable would be to increase the housing stock (specifically by slashing zoning laws). “The rents people are paying is outrageous.”

(Attendant speculated that the reason the customer had said “the rents people are paying is outrageous” rather than “the rents people are paying are outrageous” was in order to avoid having to say “are” twice. Yet it may well have rather been that the speaker had changed his idea while he spoke, going from the one just quoted, that rents being paid were outrageous, to an idea that rent, as a general matter, “was” outrageous. Of course, we do not and ought not hold spoken language to the same standards as written language, but it is interesting to reflect on the causes behind our unintended departures from the orthodox.)

Customer ordered everything bagel with lox and med peach smoothie.

Customer asked which smoothie the server preferred and the server answered with which was the most popular, yet the customer insisted on hearing which he liked best. (This encounter brought to mind something the Attendant hadn’t thought of in years, his intense dislike of this word “smoothie.” First became aware of it in Athens, GA in the 90’s, but originally it applied to a smooth person, attested from the 1920s.)

It was not the wing of an insect floating in the stopped up sink, but a spinach leaf.

Watch This Billion-Year Journey of Earth’s Tectonic Plates, NYT