From left to right: pink rubber cat comb shaped like an upright seated cat as seen from the front (the rubber spiked back of this rubber cat to go against that of the old but living one); bottom half of it seen through a curved tumbler perhaps a fifth full of water, its transparence marred in points by drops of water clinging to its side and reflected light.

Within the refractive circle of the water surface is visible a semi-circumference of the vessel’s base.

Book, right side up, (Anne Boyer’s The Undying) with cover concealed by a book, downside up, Complete Poems of William Blake, the white of its barcode oddly salient against the dirty white or tan of its background. The spine of Blake’s Complete meets the bottom edge of Wallace Stevens’ Complete — his photograph in a suit there. That hard bound book partially covered by a sky blue paperback that contains criticism of the poems it rests on, and is upside down, splayed open, itself largely concealed beneath the closed Campaigns of Napoleon.

The dark green dust jacket of The Campaigns, with an eagle emblem on it, lifted to reveal a half inch sliver of the cover beneath, a similar dark blue sliver of Stevens’ Complete visible at the bottom edge of its pale dust jacket. The cat comb, the water glass, The Undying, and the Blake, all resting on a cat-hair-covered sweatshirt, tossed on that spot some while ago, one involuted arm of it rising in a mound of blue cloth by The Campaigns.

7.The unreal person understands the statements and intentions of real people, even when unexpressed, while the real person understands nothing of the unreal person’s intentions and ideas, expressed or unexpressed…. Theses of Higgs

Theodosius was the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and the western halves of the Roman Empire…. Theodosius I

Groove: Meaning “spiral cut in a phonograph record” is from 1902 …

Lessepsian migration : Lessepsian migration (also called Erythrean invasion) is the ongoing migration of marine species across the Suez Canal, usually from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, more rarely in the opposite direction. It is named after Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer in charge of the canal’s construction.,,,

ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egyptham
rrida. thsn. fMar
gUA. he er. o-da
.p.Bub p a d d bb..
….Bu f.. g s s. B0bb..
swin..ie id ..ines
ging..n t d p.. sand
Mar e g h e ami
rrida. de es. Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
siron.Bbbsalnubb

(Amazon comment) Une somme de travail, une vie dédiée à l’explicitation d’un domaine d’investigation vaste, un flot de connaissances parfaitement maîtrisées et qui époustoufle.

The group was named after the song “Proud of Your Boy,” an outtake from the soundtrack to the Disney musical “Aladdin.” —oh god. And there’s more:

Becoming a full-fledged Proud Boy is a four-step process, according to McInnes’s essay. First, a prospective member publicly declares he’s a Proud Boy. Second, he undergoes a ritual beating that continues until he can name five breakfast cereals. “The rationale here is we all need better ‘adrenaline control,’ ” McInnes wrote. Members must also swear off masturbation at this stage.

At the third level, members get a Proud Boy tattoo bearing the group’s name. The fourth and final step involves getting into a public fight that advances the group’s cause.

Voltaire to Diderot, 11 juin 1749.

je place ce témoignage de votre estime autant au-dessus des marques de la faveur des grands que les grands sont au-dessous de vous… *

“I place this testament of your esteem as high above the marks of favor of the great as the great are far beneath you.”

Gal running with hands below waist, palms parallel to ground, an “Egyptian” or “ready for anything” posture… Gal running with hands at chest-level, palms out, a “please don’t” posture, running on balls of feet… Old gal hawking with impressive unselfconsciousness, reaching so deep in the lung that, as I reflect on it moments later, I am myself made to choke and cough.

How writing sometime purges, other times reinforces memories. Thus I’ve never had a stronger sense of pyracantha than after having, the other day, written the word down for the first time (as if perhaps a dew point had been reached, with the “dew” being conscious memory); thus, it used to be I would think of the line of An Octopus about chipmunks whenever I saw chipmunks, but after having written of always having that memory on seeing that animal, which I very frequently do, now I hardly do. (Though maybe, on having written this, that connection will be restored.)

Courageous death of Joachim Murat (but see also La Rochfoucalt on courageous deaths) … militaristic association of avant-garde — wonder if artists adopting this language are familiar with its distinctly Napoleonic overtones.

Finnegans Wake — Tip.

“The supreme virtue here is humility, for the humble are they that move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts.” (W. Stevens, quoted at Isola 2013)

Pyracantha. Trying to identify bushes outside storefront after one customer accidentally called them the “bu–ildings… those apartments there” — because of how the sparrows inhabit them. Horticultural customer suggested pyracantha, but I don’t think ours are berry-producing.

If you sneeze while you have the hiccups, the hiccups will go away. –Hippocrates (roughly)

Libation Bearers, 410-417 (English):

πέπαλται δαὖτὲ μοι φίλον κέαρ
τόνδε κλύουσαν οἶκτον
καὶ τότε μὲν δύσελπις,
σπλάγχνα δέ μοι κελαινοῦ-
ται πρὸς ἔπος κλυούσᾳ.
ὅταν δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀλκῆς ἐπάρῃ μ᾽
ἐλπὶς, ἀπέστασεν ἄχος
προσφανεῖσά μοι καλῶς.

[chorus] But again my heart throbs as I hear this pitiful lament. At once I am devoid of hope and my viscera are darkened at the words I hear. But when hope once again lifts and strengthens me, it puts away my distress and dawns brightly on me.

Ha, just as I suspected, I said, having jerked up the blanket and already begun to fold it.

Oh? I said, and what did you suspect? Are you telling me you suspected you’d find a shirt under the blanket (for I had seen the same thing myself when I jerked up the blanket to fold it: a dirty shirt).

You have me there, I said, for truthfully I at no point suspected I might find a shirt under the blanket on this couch.

So why would you even say such a thing, I said.

I don’t know, I said. I guess I suspected that I would find some article of dirty clothing to put in the washing machine after I’d already started the cycle — but I didn’t necessarily suspect that that something would be a shirt, or that that shirt would be found under this blanket when I lifted it up.

Do you mean suspect or expect, I said? I don’t know, I said.

I guess that makes sense I said. So what do we do with the shirt after we’ve already started the machine?

It wasn’t that long ago that we started the cycle, I said. We could just go up and put the shirt in, though that seems a long way I up for a single shirt. The alternative is we could put it in our dirty laundry bag, I said: make this the first dirty item of the new week rather than the last dirty item of the old week. Alright let’s do that, I said. Alright, now what did we do with the laundry bag, I said? I thought it was here, I said, but it isn’t. It must be upstairs with the laundry I said: remember how we held the bag upside down and watched the clothes fall into the washer; then we included the detergent in the mix; then we started the machine in its cycle; then we came back down the stairs having totally forgotten to bring the bag, now empty, with us. (I remember, I said. I remember.)

So the choice, I said, (do you mean the choices? I said. You may mean the options I said) are as follows: (i) return upstairs and put the dirty shirt into the already started washer cycle, bringing down the empty laundry bag; (ii) return upstairs and bring down the laundry bag and put the dirty shirt into it, making it “the first dirty item of the new week”; (iii) throw the dirty shirt onto floor in the knowledge that eventually it will get where it must; (iv) throw the dirty shirt on the floor for now but, when transferring the clothes from the washer to the drier, take the occasion to bring down the laundry bag, then put the dirty shirt in it.

… I don’t know what it was exactly that made me suddenly weigh the most the option I favored least, but in any case found myself trudging up the steps with a single dirty shirt: here I was bringing the whole of my own body weight up the steps for the sake of bringing this inconsequential weight of a single dirty shirt up the steps, which weighed less even perhaps than the finger I used to hold it up, weighed about as much as the clean shirt I was wearing and was already carrying up without even thinking — and would be carrying down again without thinking. Now the thing that weighed the most hefted up the shirt that weighed much less, and what sense did any of that make, I said.

και ουκ ηθελεν επι χρονον. μετα δε ταυτα ειπεν εν εαυτω, Ει και τον θεον ου φοβουμαι ουδε ανθρωπον εντρεπομαι, δια γε το παρεχειν μοι κοπον την Χηραν ταυτην εκδικησω αυτην, ινα μη εις τελος ερχομενη υπωπιαζη με.

*
εντρεπω: in pass., respect, regard;παρεχω: w/κοπος “trouble”, cause, bring about, do, grant, offer, present; κοπος: work, hardwork, trouble, hardship; εκδικεω: avenge, punish, help (someone) get justice; υπωπιαζω: wear out, treat with severity or keep under control. Χηρα -ας: widow.

*
And he would not for a time. But after these things he said in himself, If even I do not fear God, nor have respect for men; [therefore] I will help this same widow who troubles me get justice, that she will not wear me out in the end when she comes.

*
King James: [4] And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; [5] Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.

*
Full passage.

Wonder, if these proposed punctuation marks were prototypical emojis?… Was traditional punctuation inadequate or was it about to get extremely silly?

William Faulkner, The Town:

That’s what he had. That’s what happened to him. Because by that time he had probably resigned himself to no more than the vain and hopeless dream of vengeance and revenge on his enemy. I mean, to canvass and canvass, cast and recast, only to come always back to that one-gallused one-bale residuum which, if all their resources, including the price of the second hand overalls too, could have been pooled, the result would not have shaken the economy of a country church, let alone a county-seat bank.

Wordnet:

Elastic straps that hold trousers up.

(a.) You have caught a break, you have indeed been very fortunate, but you have failed to appreciate the break you have caught — you should appreciate your good fortune.

(b.) You’ve been unlucky, that can’t be denied. But if your failure has only been a matter of having bad luck, maybe your success is only a matter of having good luck.

(c.) There’s something about you that prevents the occurrence of things you consider positive from happening to you.

(d.) These are unjust times, which one is too just for — what is a just person to do in such times?

(e.) Opposite of the preceding.

…… ……The δοῦλος
…………The νωνῶν
……The γὰρ φ
…The ὁ κοι
…The ἔστι
…The καὶ
…The last doge was Ludovico Manin,
………who abdicated in 1797, when
………Venice passed under
………the power of
………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