1. A history of the mundane is different from a diary in that it seeks to refer only to experiences that most every person has on ordinary days. Suddenly getting hit with the smell of someone doing their laundry would be an example of such an experience. Experiencing the death of a parent would not.
2. A history of the mundane differs from a novel in that it seeks to preserve the private life of its characters, rather than drawing them out.
3. A history of the mundane has events but doesn’t attempt to organize them into a plot, and doesn’t concede, without resistance, to the existence of non-mundane or dramatic events.
4. To the extent The History is a poem, it takes no interest in language or sentiment.
5. To the extent it is a sitcom, it dwells on the unentertaining or boring, as if in search of the essence of those qualities.
6. To the extent it is a work of Advanced Physics: only irreproducible experiments are allowed. Only total chaos in nature is assumed.
7. Above all, the attempt is to reveal what is going on when there is nothing going on — example, Chance Sweepings.

Pedestrian drumming soda can with fingers. Thumb and fourth finger of right hand on either side of the can top’s diameter, gripping; intervening fingers drumming on front lip (second, middle, second middle), whole can held at about waist height by a slack arm. “No sipping as he passed.”

The paper that slipped from the standing customer’s hands gave him multiple opportunities to snatch it back before it fell to the ground, where he picked it up: customer reached for it (and it slid to the side in the air, almost pendular); customer reached for it (and it bent backwards and down); customer reached for it (but it was now too low: he had the right x but wrong y); so it landed on the floor where the customer would have to stoop to pick it up (though he was by that time already almost all the way stooped.)

*

(Dissections of minutiae galore at Chance Sweepings…)

(Faulkner with rather a few negative comments about the automobile it occurs to me. Beside the preceding (1935), there is the one from A Fable (1954) quoted in Isola di Rifuti and there is one from Intruder in the Dust (1948) which I can’t find to peel from my stacks and quote from at the moment. Undoubtedly more. Colonel Sartoris’ automobile (1929) was kind of a big deal if I recall….The Reivers… Undoubtedly multiple papers about this…. in fact, just this one, William Faulkner On The Automobile As Socio-Sexual Symbol –which sounds as if it might focus on the Intruder passage– offers in just the preview a few citations from other works that concern this and incidentally makes me want to read Requiem For A Nun, which has so far eluded me.)

“The car moved; it accelerated smoothly and on its fading gearwhine it drifted down the alley, poising without actually pausing; then it swung into the Avenue, gaining speed — a machine expensive, complex, delicate and intrinsically useless, created for some obscure psychic need of the species if not the race, from the virgin resources of a continent, to be the individual muscle bones and flesh of a new and legless kind– into the empty avenue between the purple-and-yellow paper bunting caught from post to post by cryptic shields symbolic of laughter and mirth now vanished and departed.” Pylon, pp.86, Faulkner

Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper: “Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry we must always pay strict attention. Fellas, let’s make a house call.”

‘Butterfly’ which evokes neither butter nor fly; reminder to look up etymology of that, nestled in complex structure of plant and shadow at the outskirts of the unfenced yard. In the moment that I see and pass it, two strides, it spreads out its wings then folds them back.

Knees and the idea of participating in social media: these “wings of thought on the sides of the thorax of a different thought”, that I didn’t get enough sleep last night. (Such “mental insects” I think to call them, but plankton is more like, food for “the whales of thought.”) (planktic or planktonic is the adjective for plankton.) Dream that the living and dining area at home have several large stainless steel bowls full of sliced oranges. Dream that a high-star general is testifying before Congress that a certain horse can be safely transferred home from Europe. (Perhaps my mind had meant to dream “a certain force“. It may also have meant a house.)

Had woken up remembering an incident, from decades ago, in which I’d been dishonest. Next the thought occurred that we were here to strive for God’s perfection — and why didn’t I think of that more often? (Because I didn’t go to church.) Next the thought occurred that it was better to suffer wrong than to do wrong — and why didn’t I think of that more often? (Would say it was because I didn’t read Plato that much, but I actually did read Plato kind of a lot.) Why didn’t I think that what I thought and perceived was what God thought and perceived or that I and others had immortal natures?

About to cross Walter Reed to pick up a few articles at the Harris Teeter, inadvertently kicked a travel-sized tooth brush from the curbside into the curb itself with its rainwater, where it half floated, the bristles at the head splayed out with use but not discolored.

Strong sun after a rain, humidity, sunlight on the full stream; the vigorous but not torrential ripples of the creek as it flexes between the rocks (the rocks are its muscles, the banks are what it hefts, lifts; the trash and pollution is the grime it collects as it works out, its dirty shirt, litter like a sweat-filled towel on its banks.) There is an actual old shirt and landscaping glove on the rocks here.

(What was beside the crushed ribbed plastic water bottle on the sidewalk?) Two twigs. (Describe the juxtaposition of the twigs.) The blond smooth one was propped upon the dark rough one. (We were just kidding about that but) (…but were you made to think anything about this?) No I was thinking of other things at the time, the most unusual of which was of Satan’s tempting of Jesus in the desert (Huh…?) how Satan had offered Jesus all the kingdoms of earth (And…?) how did one stand with respect to that offer? Did one choose as Jesus had chosen, or did one choose as Satan had tempted, and did one act like a person who’d made that decision, or did one act like someone who’d made the opposite decision? (And…? Conclusion..?) and concluded I was a robot, in which it was difficult to locate an identity capable of making an authentic decision of any kind (Where was I?) Maybe in writing, maybe much later.

Mentally ill woman in Shirlington, backpack, shouts angrily paranoid but as it were well-thought out things at people she comes across. Today talking about how we were all “time-stamped.” She yells really loudly. First came across her around Glebe, Walter Reed soon after Pupatella had opened up. “Fuck you, Pupatella!” she had said repeatedly among some other things I didn’t get at the time.

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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.m h ……….,,,,,.i r v …………………….v
.o. i v airvair……………………. v v
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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
u………..t a………..o
….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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………..Hypogeumtom bolo (x);f laske
………..Manius Curius Dentatus s k e t
……………………………….φὶ
………………………………….δὲ κ
……………………………………απν
……………………………………………ὸς
…………………melismatico f Chevy Chase ; flasket
………………… measure);Anacharsis;bollard;
…………………….Archibald La mpman…. cark
………………………stupe…///.………………………g
…………………………Owens Valley ………………. e
………………………….…..///.Omertà ……………….o
…………………………… oriel…///…all over painting
……………………………..hatikvah…///.cantatrice .a
………………………………La ……………………………….. g
……………………………….La ……………………………….. n
………………………………..Llorona….syncope………. n
…………………………………inedia………Porlock …….. e
…………………………………DalekINTP Merrill Gilfillan