“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

Not sure that I was familiar with this word, which comes up in this thorough exploration of the constitutional question surrounding the conviction, out of office, of an official impeached while in office.

The author seems to use it in this sentence, and one a few paragraphs down, to mean “plausible” while wiktionary’s definition is more like “specious”:

“So far as I can see, Bobbitt’s position rests primarily on a colorable—but tenuous—argument from the text of the Constitution’s impeachment clauses.”

During the height of the lockdown the attendant penned several faux punkrock and rap tunes to show his defiant attitude toward the virus. He imagined these efforts might themselves “go viral” (how he triumphed to imagine them “going viral”!) but they did rather stand languid and confused, was his lasting observation. Here was the best them, punk song called Emaskulated! [Appendix A has gone missing for the nonce. B and C are children’s poems: “Where Do Crumbs Come From?” & “I Have Sticky Shoes”]

Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!

Used to be such a pretty boy
Had such a great face (oo la la!)
But now I got this mask in place
And you can’t see my well chiseled jaw.

The girls used to drop dead to see this mug,
Now they just don’t give a frug
Because my mouth is boxed and crated
And I’ve been emaskulated!

Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!

My nose was probably my best trait
Not too wide and not too straight
But now these nostrils are in the dark
And none of the ladies care to remark.

I don’t look like a master of surgery!
I look like I got a serious injury!

I feel hot and isolated!
I feel so emaskulated!

I used to make such great remarks
And everyone thought I was some kind of wise man
But now I speak and they can’t understand
They say, heh, did you just say something, man?
They say, heh, what are you mumblin man?

(What’s that? Whachoo mumblin?)

Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!
Ema-ma-ma-ma-maskulated!

ἰητρικὴν ὅστις βούλεται ὀρθῶς ζητεῖν, τάδε χρὴ ποιεῖν …

………………………// . / \
………………………| ||||\
…………………... . / . /, | ||||\\|
………………//// . / \ \\||||\\
Lampedusa|Trial of The K\·ights Templar. moider.
Garum|ΎNok.Larentide Ice/| Sheet. tocsin.
knout |·paratactic; liana;/ϐ pleach; Morpheme.
februa·|Stalking horse offer\\ Ύvariation of the field
epigone. sedulity Verdelho\\\ Piero di Cosimo
…………//// . /· \ \Ύϐ\||· Ύ||\\
…………….· Ύ . / . /, | ·|ϐ ||·|\\|
……………..| |··|||\ϐ ϐ
……………../ϐ /. /· \

The question of — taken all in all, is it any more difficult for a contemporary English reader to read Finnnegans Wake without assistance than it is for a contemporary English reader to read Dante (or Chaucer, or The Bible) without scholarly assistance? That is, thinking of all the critical apparatus needed to read Dante if you don’t already know medieval Italian or know Italy of the period — the translation and the notes on translation and the historical notes — and thinking of what if one just had a simplified version of FW like one could have one of these simplified versions of Chaucer or The Bible or the like they put out. 

I don’t know what a negative answer to that would tell us exactly. Maybe that FW was written within its own historical epoch, if that can be imagined, that it is possible for an author to discover such blackholish historical “singularities”; maybe that a true classic is something essentially rare and inaccessible, deceptively rendered not so by The Modern Library… Of course this assumes one considers FW a classic, but in any case, and for obscure reasons, The Divine Comedy strikes me as an interesting book to bring alongside it. Maybe a comparison can be teased out later.

Points of interest about the foregoing passage: first is the “quick hissing thuds.” “Hissing” is a surprising modifier of “thuds.” Faulkner may have been thinking of a specific sound rubber soles at that time made; even so, one might have expected “squishing”, but one gets “hissing”, –hissing thuds,– which maybe is what squishing is.

Second is “suave and sourceless.” I don’t like “suave” overmuch here. (Pylon was published between Light in August and Absolom, in 1935.)

Third is “unearthly day colored substance” (descriptive of fluorescent light?) Not unbearably/intolerably day colored substance; not unearthly light colored fluid, or substance colored light; it’s not light, but it’s day-colored, it’s substance, but unearthly.

Would like to do some metric analysis of his listing of commercial objects, which starts with obvious iambs, then the feet seem to expand, and then to expand again: “the hats and ties and shirts, the belt // buckles and cufflinks and handkerchiefs//, the pipes shaped like golfclubs and the drinking tools shaped like boots…”

What I’m calling the first line would iambic tetrameter, what I’m calling the second would be dactylic trimeter, and what I’m call the third would be, I don’t know what. I want to say that everything between pipes and golf is stressed as well as everything between ‘drink-‘ and boots, two dilated feet, but an expert is called for.

“He entered the store, his rubber soles falling in quick hissing thuds on pavement and iron sill and then upon the tile floor of that museum of glass cases lighted suave and sourceless by an unearthly day-colored substance in which the hats and ties and shirts, the beltbuckles and cufflinks and handkerchiefs, the pipes shaped like golfclubs and the drinking tools shaped like boots and barnyard fowls and the minute impedimenta for wear on ties and vest-chains shaped like bits and spurs, resembled biologic specimens put into the inviolate preservative before they had ever been breathed into. ‘Boots?’ the clerk said. ‘The pair in the window?'” (From the opening of Pylon, Faulkner.)

Space. Space between the bumpers of cars. Space as the gaps between customers in memory. Time as that which occurs between the appearance of customers. (Customers don’t occur in Time and Space, but exist as the always moving borders of Time and Space. Nothing can be said to occur which does occur in between the appearance of customers.)

Take the filter out and put it back. Walk to where the rag is and stop, then walk back to the filter and have a look. Check the fridge and its handle. Look out over the room to the sugars. Pull out this fridge and clean what’s in back of it (how did that thing get in back of it)

Customer with difficulty filing for disability. Customer thinking the county needs more playing fields, needs more open land for the kids. Customer added to her purchase to accommodate the three dollar minimum. Customer ordered medium chai latte with extra hot soy and a cookie. Customer carried a text book, thick but with a soft cover: with fluorescent pink and lime green post-it notes protruding from two of its edges.

Woman from the hair salon remarked that that was her bus that just came, so that the server, spurred to activity, whipped down a sheet of sandwich paper and found instead he’d grabbed three.

“Cold today,” customer said. “but it’s gotten warmer,” server said. “Yes it has gotten warmer,” customer said. “What does It’d mean,” customer asked. “How do you spell it?” “I — T — apostrophe — D… I never seen that before.” “Oh, it means ‘It had’ or ‘it would’ I think.” “Sounds like it’s from the streets.” “You don’t hear it a lot, I guess, but it’s like ‘he’d’ or ‘they’d.'”

(Chance Sweepings….)

Gorgias is the Platonic dialogue for our times! Interesting distinction made here between persuasion that instills belief by means of knowledge, and that which instills belief without knowledge. Gorgias 454e:

βούλει οὖν δύο εἴδη θῶμεν πειθοῦς, τὸ μὲν πίστιν παρεχόμενον ἄνευ τοῦ εἰδέναι, τὸ δ᾽ ἐπιστήμην;

Shall we lay it down then that there are two forms of persuasion, the one producing belief without knowledge, the other knowledge? (Woodhead)

An example of persuasion with knowledge would be a teacher persuading a student that the sum of a triangle’s angles is equal to 180 degrees. An example of persuasion without knowledge would be a lawyer’s argument (as opposed to a physician’s — indeed, independent of a physician’s knowledge) that a person should wear masks or not; or, independent of a geometer’s knowledge, that a triangle’s angles in fact equaled 360 degrees.

The rhetorician’s art, says Socrates, is to be persuasive about things he doesn’t really know about.

……q……g
.au………..ra
lia…..P……vel
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
rrida bashitru Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
.BubbsalnBubb..
..Bub.ooBubb….
………edirbongo ananeyillsuion
m … t …m
m .. t ..m
m .. t ..m
m … t …m
m …. t ….m
m ….. t …..m

I wrote this before reading Finnegans Wake but it seems somewhat to “foresee” it. I was thinking of the “discrepancies” that Faulkner excuses himself for at the beginning of The Mansion and thinking how a new conception of the novel might embrace or allow for (or demand) mistakes of that sort —

That illogicality of plot is “a feature not a bug” . . . if a story is the patched- together parts of 20 conflicting stories but is stylistically and thematically consistent, if the story as a result states contradictory things as true –a la the discrepancies in the Snopes trilogy that Faulkner felt obligated to explain– this perhaps is to be preferred in the next evolution of the novel. Not so hard to envision the “next Shakespeare” as putting forward a sort of “mash up” of what would have otherwise appeared as his separate tragedies –because– the same person will seem Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth, to himself, herself, at once. Without the conceit of the stage, or of a drama, the author will see all those personalities and their dramas converging and mixed in himself.

If one could conceive of a mash-up of all Shakespeare’s plays into a single novel –one that was really effective– wouldn’t that somewhat resemble Finnegans Wake? If one could “unmash” FW what would one find?

Related question, have there been any rules established yet for the creation of mash-ups/ collage, like there were for perspective in painting way back when? Do we know anything about what goes together, to achieve what effects and why?

Related question, how would you make a mash up or collage of Shakespeare’s works? I think the obvious strategy would be to start with Hamlet as your foundation and then just start piling on and taking away. A weirder thought that occurred to me was to start with the idea of the jester-clown, which gives you a point of entry into both the comedies and tragedies.

Nice to find a Greek passage I understand pretty well…. In brief: the gods don’t desire to become wise because they are wise already, while the ignorant don’t desire to become wise because they don’t know they lack wisdom. Love, on the other hand, represents an in-between state, which is neither ignorant nor wise, neither rich nor poor,  …. Plato’s Symposium [English]:

[203e] … ὥστε οὔτε ἀπορεῖ Ἔρως ποτὲ οὔτε πλουτεῖ, σοφίας τε αὖ καὶ ἀμαθίας ἐν μέσῳ ἐστίν. [204a] ἔχει γὰρ ὧδε. θεῶν οὐδεὶς φιλοσοφεῖ οὐδ᾽ ἐπιθυμεῖ σοφὸς γενέσθαι—ἔστι γάρ—οὐδ᾽ εἴ τις ἄλλος σοφός, οὐ φιλοσοφεῖ. οὐδ᾽ αὖ οἱ ἀμαθεῖς φιλοσοφοῦσιν οὐδ᾽ ἐπιθυμοῦσι σοφοὶ γενέσθαι: αὐτὸ γὰρ τοῦτό ἐστι χαλεπὸν ἀμαθία, τὸ μὴ ὄντα καλὸν κἀγαθὸν μηδὲ φρόνιμον δοκεῖν αὑτῷ εἶναι ἱκανόν. οὔκουν ἐπιθυμεῖ ὁ μὴ οἰόμενος ἐνδεὴς εἶναι οὗ ἂν μὴ οἴηται ἐπιδεῖσθαι.

Was interested in this from The Gorgias. Couldn’t think offhand of another place where Athens is singled out for its freedom of speech (ἐξουσία τοῦ λέγειν). 461e, Socrates speaking:

“It would indeed be a hard fate for you, my excellent friend, if having come to Athens, where there is more freedom of speech than anywhere in Greece, you should be the one person there who could not enjoy it.”

δεινὰ μεντἂν πάθοις, ὦ βέλτιστε, εἰ Ἀθήναζε ἀφικόμενος, οὗ τῆς Ἑλλάδος πλείστη ἐστὶν ἐξουσία τοῦ λέγειν, ἔπειτα σὺ ἐνταῦθα τούτου μόνος ἀτυχήσαις.

.la”” “How Story
.la”” “”; “ Of Jonah
.la””; “” “”; relates to idea
.la””; “” “”; of Amor
.la””; “” ” Fati”
.la””; “” “”; ….
.la””; “”;
.la””; “”; “How Story
.la””; “”; “”; “ Of Jonah
.la””; “”; “”; “”; relates to idea
.la””; “”; “”; “”; of Amor
.la””; “”; “”; ” Fati”
.la””; “”; “”; “”; ….

……… Napoleon’s
……..France
. ginglymus
Kanyakumari
Puranas Ganesha
Memphis Group squidge
cohete Toi invasion violac
Archibald Lampman…. cark
Archibald Lampman…. cark
cohete Toi invasion violac
Memphis Group squidge
Puranas Ganesha
Kanyakumari