Cezanne, according to Joachim Gasquet: “Listen, I don’t want to belittle him… I like him, I admire him a great deal, but he is very much of his time, as we all are. We make pieces. We no longer know how to compose.”

“After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding.” ~Finnegans Wake

Faulkner (S&F) : “I began to feel the water before I came to the bridge. The bridge was of gray stone, lichened, dappled with slow moisture where the fungus crept. Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky.”

Q: was there any correspondence or correlation between the philosophical question “what is reality?” and the everyday imperative or exhortation to “get real?”

A:  Yes, there was an opposite or inverse correlation. For implicit in the philosophical question, what is reality, was the idea that we don’t know what reality is, but only think we do; while implicit in the everyday imperative to “get real” was the idea that of course we do know what reality is, but simply refuse to see it or face it.

When we are told to “get real” we are being told to stop fooling ourselves, see the obvious. When we ask “what is reality”, we are told to stop fooling ourselves, look with care on the obvious.

(Amateur philosophizing galore –among other treasures–  at Chance Sweepings.)

Idea for a method of architecture which is not about new ideas about the sort of buildings that need to be made but simply about editing old actual building with no recourse to theory, even a simple cutting and pasting: of taking just the corner from that one huge house and blowing it up to make it the whole house or pattern of a house, or patching together hundreds of different styles. Architecture as seen and manipulated through a computer interface.

Had a supremely stupid idea of a house I’d like to live in: the facade a grid of fourty or fifty historical styles juxtaposed. However, the facade of the house would be like a television screen and the house itself would be a smaller reducing cone, that finally became a tunnel, just a wall of earth at the tail’s end. (Then the tunnel would lead to some distant river.)

The mantle makes up 84 percent of Earth’s volume, and though it’s solid rock, over the course of millions of years, it behaves like a liquid. (vox)…

Devo – Uncontrollable Urge

ngrams: (“Shakespeare, William Shakespeare“), (“Einstein, Albert Einstein“).

Slavoj Žižek explains this objet petit a in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin: “[The] MacGuffin is objet petit a pure and simple: the lack, the remainder of the Real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.” (Love thy symptom as thyself)…. objet petit a

“This is a deliberate, high-level cover-up,” Mr. Lenzi said. “They have hung us out to dry.” (NYT)

Take not the measure of thy goodness—it is gone
As soon as it is self-confessed and thought upon. (161)

A Proust moment: On waking to the music of the clock radio, for the briefest moment I’m unable to tell if I’ve just started listening to music or if I’ve just opened a web page.

tiraillement: sharp pain, pull, twinge, agonizing decision. “Ned Land, tourmenté par les tiraillements de son robuste estomac, se montait de plus en plus, et, malgré sa parole, je craignais véritablement une explosion, lorsqu’il se trouverait en présence de l’un des hommes du bord.” […]

Having read War & Peace not too long ago, this passage leapt out at me too. It seems right, that the pursuit of glory is a sort of living for others, that you’re trying to impress others; that, while emblazoning one’s name on history, a person is yet working against himself. But I think the tweeter goes too far in calling it altruism, first because it implies a benefit for others (whereas the pursuit of glory might be for others yet not benefit them.) Second, another way of looking at it is altogether is that it’s a psychological disturbance or need playing itself out in the world of the rest of us — see Good Old Neon and the fraudulence paradox, for one instance of how that might work — not the sort of spiritual munificence or aloof charitableness I identify with altruism. (Though she might be using a specific meaning of the word.)

Brown broken down cardboard box for a flat screen tv which has itself been made flat: made so that you can see four of the six surfaces of the box at the same time, jammed in between two of the five grey scuffed plastic three dimensional tubs that have been set out for the neighborhood’s recycling: brown with a pale blue picture on it of the flat screen tv itself, the thing itself, which must be in one of the homes around here.

“If you look online at where the satellite transponders show where the fishing fleet is, you can see clusters of fishing boats around these methane plume hotspots,” Johnson said….

It is thus a double restoration from a double disruption .…

Strabo was an ancient Greek geographer whose life straddled the first centuries BC and AD, and this is a passage, taken totally at random, from his best-known work Geographica. (For fun, here is a map of what the world might have looked like to Strabo.) Links lead to the vocabulary tool at Perseus.

Geographica, 5.3.5

παρακινδύνως μὲν οὖν ὁρμίζονται μετέωρα ἐν τῷ σάλῳ τὰ ναυκλήρια, τὸ μέντοι λυσιτελὲς νικᾷ: καὶ γὰρ ἡ τῶν ὑπηρετικῶν σκαφῶν εὐπορία τῶν ἐκδεχομένων τὰ φορτία καὶ ἀντιφορτιζόντων ταχὺν ποιεῖ τὸν ἀπόπλουν πρὶν ἢ τοῦ ποταμοῦ ἅψασθαι, καὶ μέρους ἀποκουφισθέντος εἰσπλεῖ καὶ ἀνάγεται μέχρι τῆς Ῥώμης, σταδίους ἑκατὸν ἐνενήκοντα.

TRANSLATION (Hamilton / Falconer)

Now although it is with peril that the merchant-ships anchor far out in the surge, still, the prospect of gain prevails; and in fact the good supply of the tenders which receive the cargoes and bring back cargoes in exchange makes it possible for the ships to sail away quickly before they touch the river, or else, after being partly relieved of their cargoes, they sail into the Tiber and run inland as far as Rome, one hundred and ninety stadia.

a th sn f …………………..t below
r h e e r ………………….. ch lci i l
p a d d e …………………..I w i r i f
e f g s s ………………….. l eli k cl
n i e id h …………………..c th u t t
n n t d p …………………..i ge up r
e g h e l …………………..t on ou t
d e e s a …………………..s sps s e
c r ewli s …………………..a a n h h
ir tht i t …………………..e n dw o

ch lci i l
l eli k cl
e n dw o
I w i r i f
c th u t t
a a n h h
s sps s e
t on ou t
i ge up r
n ash wo
t below

“Having seen it all,” said Moges Alemu, 84, a factory owner who in a bygone era was Emperor Haile Selassie’s flight technician, “I can say there has never been anything as highly anticipated in this country as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.” [POST]