The shoulder of the jogger. I had been looking to see if the jogger ahead of me was the jogger I’d passed previously. This “previous jogger” had worn a sleeveless shirt and had a tattoo of a kind I could not recall on her shoulder, while this “current jogger” had a shirt I’d call sky blue in coloration, and I was looking at the shoulder of it, and no tattoo could be seen there.

That corner of her shirt, –and I don’t believe I’m joking — although I may be joking– occurred to me as something vitally important. Looking at the figure of a woman is something that will engender in some sexual excitement. Sexual excitement derived from things that don’t seem sexual we call a fetish. I saw on this shoulder a kind of distillation of ordinariness, something so uninteresting, it seemed what my whole life was made of. Not sexual, not a fetish, not of interest, the fabric of everything. It was a sort of opposite of a fetish: a fixation on something that left me utterly lifeless and benumbed.

This jogger and I actually ran on opposite banks of the stream for a while after that. The trail on her side being far more meandering, I was surprised to she she’d caught up with me at George Mason, and I lost heart a bit when I lost track of her on Walter Reed… On reflection, it seemed to me my interest in this patch of shirt was like being enthralled by one coke can but not by any of the billions of others that are exactly like it. And it seemed a portal into the “dark matter” of our lives: the huge chunks of it we spend doing nothing in particular. (I guess I see the modernist project as unpacking exactly that “dark matter.”)

Opinion: think the appeal of this Leadbelly Cotton Fields recording is that the tempo, in a subtle natural way, is continuously surprisingly increasing.

Grouping of the passages from La Reserche I looked into —

On Art, Writing

Pouvoir être éclaircie, elle qu’on vit dans les ténèbres
Une Patrie Inconnue
Si l’art n’est que cela, il n’est pas plus réel que la vie
Ce milieu que nous ne voyons pas
Le gisement lui-même
(Knowledge and Art)
dans un ridicule l’artiste voit une belle généralité

On Behavior / General

les autruches humaines
Le ton dubitatif pour les résolutions irrévocables
Une vie plus inanimée que celle de la méduse
Water Lily passage (stupidity multiplier)
,,,parce que nous mourons nous-mêmes
Ces hécatombes de régiments anéantis
le défilé d’une armée compacte
Une sanglante barrière
Larivière
Fanés

Proust (La Prisonnière, tome 1.djvu/186): “Devant moi, devant Albertine, il y avait en ce matin (bien plus que l’ensoleillement du jour) ce milieu que nous ne voyons pas, mais par l’intermédiaire translucide et changeant duquel nous voyions, moi ses actions, elle l’importance de sa propre vie, c’est-à-dire ces croyances que nous ne percevons pas, mais qui ne sont pas plus assimilables à un pur vide que n’est l’air qui nous entoure ; composant autour de nous une atmosphère variable, parfois excellente, souvent irrespirable, elles mériteraient d’être relevées et notées avec autant de soin que la température, la pression barométrique, la saison, car nos jours ont leur originalité, physique et morale.”

Moncrieff translation: “Surrounding myself and Albertine there had been this morning (far more than the sunlight in the air) that atmosphere which we do not see, but by the translucent and changing medium of which we do see, I her actions, she the importance of her own life, that is to say those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more assimilable to a pure vacuum than is the air that surrounds us; composing round about us a variable atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, they deserve to be studied and recorded as carefully as the temperature, the barometric pressure, the weather, for our days have their own singularity, physical and moral.”

ngrams: robust,vigorous,thorough
ngrams:robust economy,strong economy,weak economy
ngrams:strong growth, robust growth
ngrams:process of evaluation,vetting process
ngrams:evaluation process,process of evaluation,vetting process

Seems that wooly mammoths and sabertoothed tigers enjoyed about equal popularity until the early 1970’s, at which point the mammoth took off and never looked back —

ngrams: wooly mammoth,sabertoothed tiger

Cave art at wikipedia depicting a wooly mammoth. Sabretooth skulls. Wikipedia says many of these saber-cat species were quite bear-like.

Among the links of the preceding “shape”, I find one to the wikipedia entry for Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953) and one to a youtube of a Bob Wills song by the same name (1946). Having assembled that a long time ago, I feel I must have been wondering if O’Connor could have listened Bob Wills, or been an enthusiast of his music, which would be to me an utterly mindblowing connection. However, the song was in fact written by Eddie Green and is quite old. Lyrics don’t present an obvious tie-in.

…Integument..l..Integument…
c h p……………e……………c h p
o o h……………m……………o o h
l p y…………….e…………….l p y
o p l…………….n…………….o p l
n o l…………….t…………….n o l
u l i…………….n…………….u l i
s e s…………….e…………….s e s
…………………..un trato denigrante Alek Wek hamzuzim
…………………..Berners Street hoax HyperloopClovis no
…………………..Scrunchie attemptive mens rea Naqada
…………………..swift jewel cowboys “Frost & Glow” cbic
…………………..Julio Camba [*;*] MR. WALT WHITMAN.
…………………..rheumatoid arthritis Clark Street tunnel
…………………..suppediate, Open outcry—comma splice
…………………..Archibald Lampman…. carkmma splicee
…………………..stupe…///.………………………gma splicee
…………………..Owens Valley ………………. ea splicet
…………………..…..///.Omertà ……………….o splices
…………………..oriel…///…all over paintingsplicep
…………………..hatikvah…///.cantatrice .aplicel
…………………..La ……………………………….. glicei
…………………..La ……………………………….. nlicec
…………………..Llorona….syncope………. nicec
…………………..inedia………Porlock …….. e
…………………..DalekINTP Merrill Gilfillancee

Couple (1) (2) interesting tweets from Krugman describing the familiar and curious sight of thriving retail districts with lots of vacant store fronts.

(Boswell, Life of Johnson.) “He said, ‘It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse; emulation, or vanity, or avarice. The progress which the understanding makes through a book, has more pain than pleasure in it. Language is scanty, and inadequate to express the nice gradations of mixtures of our feelings. No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions which contain a quick succession of events.”

Brexit belongs to this era in one quintessential way. It is an act of the imagination, inspired by an imaginary past, carried along by misdirected grievances, borne aloft by an imaginary future. The age of impunity is also the age of illusion turbocharged by social media…. Roger Cohen from last month quoted by Ishaan Tharoor today.

Saw more frisky geese this morning, and the surprise of it today was how well Mingus had captured the sound of their honks in the opening measures of his Bird Calls (1959) –spot on!

Had forgotten to mention this band name to interested parties — foulkerchief — portmanteau of ‘foul’ and ‘handkerchief’ (with alternate spelling foulkerkiech). For one your less popular bands probably.

*

Potentially disorienting question occurred to me while watching Hidden Fortress the other night– the ‘rebels’ of Star Wars — are these CSA confederates? Is Abe Lincoln, Dark Lord? Yoda, Stonewall Jackson? Why hadn’t I thought of this before? For some reason the rebels of Star Wars have been entirely detached from those other rebels that are foremost in my consciousness until now.

Idea too — that liberal-conservative split is a thing of the past in American politics and so what we have now is a conservative-populist split — with, however, the difference that this new conservatism is actually comprised of policies that were once considered liberal: toward high-tax, high service, Scandanavian-style states; while populism directs toward autocratic, oligarchic Russia-style states.

(Related or implied idea that what was once considered conservative in U.S. politics, namely, limited government, is no longer a viable political philosophy and probably hasn’t been for some time.)

ngrams viewer: complexifier,complicator. Looking at ngrams, it seems complexifier arose in the 1960’s and overtopped complicator in usage in the early 2000’s.

Word comes up because of a Jeff Bezos Medium post to the National Enquirer about a year ago (“No Thankyou, Mr. Pecker“, 2/7/19), in which he says that ownership of the Washington Post was a “complexifier” for him. I didn’t like the newfangled sound of complexifier, yet had to admit the more established complicator sounded outmoded or, for other reasons, not quite right. Would myself probably have said that owning the Post “made things complicated for me.”

Trying to process the fact tonight (because of this news item) that the sun is not made of fire.. but of hydrogen and helium undergoing nuclear fusion, thus producing light and heat

also, that I do not know what fire is (fire). ngrams: earth,air,fire,water

Oxidation state… “The term oxidation was first used by Antoine Lavoisier to signify reaction of a substance with oxygen. Much later, it was realized that the substance, upon being oxidized, loses electrons, and the meaning was extended to include other reactions in which electrons are lost, regardless of whether oxygen was involved.”

here is heraclitus on the sun:

3. The sun is the width of a human foot.
6. The sun is new every day.
94. The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out.
99. If there were no sun it would be night, for all the other stars could do.

Some of his more interesting mentions of fire:

30. This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.

31. The transformations of Fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind. . .

76. Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water.

90. All things are an exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares for gold and gold for wares.

(Reminded of the Winesburg, Ohio character who thought the world was on fire — on fire with decay.)

Libation Bearers, 423-428 (Smyth translation):

ἔκοψα κομμὸν Ἄριον ἔν τε Κισσίας
νόμοις ἰηλεμιστρίας,
ἀπριγδόπληκτα πολυπλάνητα δ᾽ ἦν ἰδεῖν
ἐπασσυτεροτριβῆ τὰ χερὸς ὀρέγματα
ἄνωθεν ἀνέκαθεν, κτύπῳ δ᾽ ἐπερρόθει
κροτητὸν ἀμὸν καὶ πανάθλιον κάρα.

rawnbenthicspal..
Soda-l….eguard..
.staffq……….gord..
.sh.au…………rair..
lia……b…….vel
swin…ang…ines
o.iang inesvai r
r… p…………. * *
d….. a …….* *
r……. p….. * *
i………. e… * *
h…………. r. * *
* * * * * * * *

Thought I would put this “out there”, another thrown-together site of mine — Taikonaught Wynd. It is a sort of link blog which offers up a more or less random grouping of lexical, etymological and encyclopedic items for review, updated every other day or so. A typical post looks like this:
………………

Madrepore. The Black Pirate. veria. foules solitaires.

………………
Basically, every time I look something up in Wikipedia, Google Translate, or the like, I bookmark it, create a link to it, place it in a group with other such links, then program it to appear on Taikonaut Wynd. I personally use the site for review (sometimes the items that appear are quite basic) while someone else might find it an interesting source of random concepts — like Madrepore.

Warning: my irregular uses of punctuation and capitalization are especially in evidence on this site. Title comes from a random pairing of two of my looked up words: taikonaut (a Chinese astronaut) and wynd, a narrow road between houses. Meaningless, but potentially evocative.

With respect to the chipper “howdy” with which the attendant greeted customers: it was almost never the case that the first syllable was higher-pitched than the second and was almost always the case that the interval in pitch between the two syllables was greater than one would encounter in normal conversational speech.

Sometimes the tonal distance between the syllables seemed to span several octaves (howwwwww- DY!), sometimes the “dy” seemed not more than a fourth above the tonic of the ‘how’.

(Idea for band name: Tonic Of The ‘How’)

Attendant’s eyes wandered from corner to corner of the ceiling of the store as he tried to apply musical values to his spoken discourse.

Attendant, in spirit of extreme silliness and idleness would contemplate that “do-re-mi-fa-so…” should be replaced by “how-dy-how-dy-how….”

Attendant noticed that customer’s “thaaaaaank YOU” covered about the same ascending tonal interval as his “howwwww DY”, almost a copyright infringement type scenario, he fretted.

—Old Testament,New Testament

—Pentateuch,Septuagint

—Prodigal Son,Good Samaritan (Prodigal Son,Good Samaritan,Sodom and Gomorrah)

—Ecclesiastes,Deuteronomy

—Jew,Hebrew,Israelite,Israeli

—Blessed are the poor,the mighty have fallen

—Book of John,Book of Luke,Book of Matthew,Book of Mark

—Gospel of Mark,Gospel of Matthew,Gospel of John,Gospel of Luke

—New International Version, King James Version,New Revised Standard, Living Bible, American Standard Version