Lucretius Book IV, translation Rolfe Humphries:

Of all the smellls there are
Some carry farther than others, but not one
Reaches as far as voice or sound or sight
(That last, I think, I hardly need to mention).
For odors come on wandering courses, slow
In their approach, are easily dispersed,
Fade in the air; one reason is, they start
From inner depths, and even seem to have
Some trouble in emerging; possibly
They even tend back to their source again.
We know that stronger odors emanate
From things when crushed, or ground, or burnt in fire,
And odors must be made of larger motes
Than voices, since they do not pass through stone
Where sound can penetrate, and it’s not easy,
At time, to find the whereabouts of a smell
Since ordors are no hot-foot messengers,
But dawdlers, and their trails grow cold in air,
Too vague, too wavering for the nosing hounds
Unless they pause and check and cast about.

After reading Infinite Jest again this past summer I made the experiment of posting a few things on the Reddit page devoted to the topic:

— Pretending to need to sniff
— Heads and Shoulders in the Room
— Squeaks: (1) (2)
— Neon

My experience of Reddit, though mainly limited to this, was that, though often the posts themselves are of a fairly basic or social character, the commentariat is quite helpful and often extremely knowledgeable, which most comes out when there are posts that ask the community about basic aspects of the book.

(As I think of it, I’ve had a similar experience with the ancient Greek “subreddit” — serious commenters, less serious posts.)

Probably this comment from commenter “ahighthyme” was the most personally enlightening to me, helping to explain Don Gately’s dream near the end of Infinite Jest:

The idea of digging up a head with some kid (he doesn’t yet know Hal, or anything about something believed to be buried in a dead guy’s head) is being put into Gately’s head by James’ wraith, just like the other ghost words he didn’t know. He’s simply baiting Gately to follow through by including naked Joelle and giant bags of corporate snacks—which Gately can’t resist—in order to prevent a Continental Emergency by showing AFR agent Wayne that the supposed master cartridge everyone’s trying to find was always just James’ head, which obviously no longer exists because it was blown to bits.

The story I told was the one about the Ghost Girls. I never told you about the Ghost Girls? Oh Yeah! So I was on this job and every day on my way to get to the place I had to pass this wood fence along the backs of these condos, maybe four or five condos, nice places, a high wood gate in the fence for each. And there was this one gate in the fence that I noticed was unlatched and a little ajar, and every time I passed it, it creaked. Every single time I passed it it creaked, so I thought, what is it with this?

I passed it during the day when I went to the job and passed it again when I got off at night. (That bus stop is the only one for miles that’ll take you to the — but nevermind.) So anyways this gate in the fence to the backyard of this nice house, this better than middle class condo, always creaked a little, and more and more each day it started to sound to me a little like a voice, like a person’s voice. I could not in a lifetime describe this to you: A little less like a creak and more like a voice. It was still definitely a creaking noise, you know, but then I would say to myself, is that someone talking to me or something? Should I stop?

Then (with the days passing, the job proceeding) I started thinking like I was actually understanding the voice, like I was hearing an actual word in the voice, which was really creeping me out. I mean, it was just a gate, but it was saying things like, Can we come out? Will you let us out? It was creepy as hell, oh yeah! really — creepy! but I just thought I was losing my mind, flashbacks or whatever. Anyway, it didn’t happen like that every day.

Well, one day toward the end of the job, I’d had a few (I mean: a few more than usual know what I mean, pops?) and I was like — this –, and just opened the gate. I thought it was there but it wasn’t so — it. Only it was there, man, oh yeah! it was really there! The circle, the little girls, the little girls who wouldn’t come out! who they hadn’t let out! I mean ever! It was all really there! Oh — !

Then I was running and running and the whole time I felt these claws at my back and I felt this awful cold and I left all my tools, and I felt scared man, I felt really — scared. And I am a pretty tough guy, you know?

Anyway, who — cares. But that is why I jumped when that drain was gurgling earlier. Cause I can hear it in everything now some days. In these — tools, for example, oh yeah, I can hear the ghost girls.

Deuteronomy 4:19 has got me wondering if the purpose of Genesis 1’s creation myth is not primarily to give an account of the beginning of the world, but a necessary foundation for the tora’s often underscored “real world” prohibition against the worshiping of idols. Deuteronomy 4:19:

And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the Lord your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven.

After all, if you did not think the sun and moon and animals were creations of God, you might be inclined to worship them in their own right.

Now looking at the wikipedia entry for Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, where there is a museum devoted to prehistory mentioned in the article I have just read, which was about the discovery of some two hundred footprints made by Neanderthal children, perhaps in a sort of prehistoric preschool, eighty thousand years ago. Before that, read article on super bolts — powerful lightning bolts which generally strike in the middle of the Atlantic ocean and Mediterranean Sea, a thousand times more powerful than regular lightning bolts. Before that, an article on “cleaner shrimp”: how they manage to avoid being eaten by the fish they “clean” by means of an identifying dance. Was reminded I had been moved to look up shrimp. Was reminded how a customer had said she had eaten a crepe filled with shrimp at an event at the Eden Center, and I told her, you just made me recall I’d been meaning to look up the etymology of shrimp. I can’t recall what had initially put the word shrimp in mind as something I would look up. Customer, I recall, hadn’t gotten bubble tea at the Eden Center, which is one of those things you hear of people doing at the Eden Center. (Shrimp seems to come from an Old Norse word meaning thin and was used in English to describe a small person very early on and an especially small person might have even been called a shrimplet, according to my source.) (Old Norse was a Germanic language.) Before that, read an article on “forgetting in mice.” The authors of a recent scientific journal had located a sort of chemical I think it was, or neuron, that arose during sleep which was responsible for the jettisoning of unneeded memories. I was most interested in the early part of the article, which concerned the unusual case of a man who never forgot anything, but would recall random numbers he’d been shown twenty years previously, and my attention drifted as I went on to read further of the specifics of the study. The article said that this man who never forgot had difficulty with abstract concepts and figurative language, which caused me to think of myself as being like him though to a lesser degree, a lesser version of the man who never forgot: for I had a good memory, I’d been told, (good but prone to lapses, good but not immune to embarrassing cases of misremembering) but was not so good with concepts. Montaigne, I recalled, expressed he had a very bad memory and I wondered if that might have been a key or otherwise related to his great genius. Now looking up Caribbean Monk seal. Initially my investigation into the range of pinnipeds (which are seals and related life forms) revealed they were not to be found in the Caribbean, which puzzled me, as I was sure that was where the poem had been written, but then I happened to glance, scrolling through the page, that there once had been this so-called monk seal in the Caribbean, which had been declared extinct in the 1950’s, and perhaps it was a seal of that sort that Hart Crane had been thinking of in the concluding line of his poem Voyager II, which is:

The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

Spindrift is the spray from the tops of waves. Spoondrift is an alternate spelling of spindrift. Now back to the monk seal page to see from the image there if the gaze is “wide”, if the gaze is somehow suggestive of spindrift, but the image available is not ideal for making such determinations and before I check the wider web for an image, I am moved to scroll down still further and read the details of its extinction. “The Caribbean monk seals’ docile nature and lack of flight instinct in the presence of humans made it very easy for anyone to kill them.” (Now I’m sad, feel sad: men clubbing these trusting creatures on the beach — our very selves). On top of that, overfishing of their habitat led to the starvation of those not killed for their blubber. I’m made to recall Melville’s idea that the whale, whose blubber we also of course sought, and seek, could never be brought to extinction because they would just hide beneath the ice caps, an idea which seems especially naive now that ice is melting so markedly at the poles. Now that we are literally making the poles melt along with hunting or otherwise driving so many animals toward extinction. Nothing is safe from us, it occurs to me to say, aside from what are probably our worst enemies, microbes of various sorts; the existence of these latter we indeed actively promote, it occurs to me to say — our overuse of anti-biotics, superbugs, and the like. Google images reveals a surprising number of contemporary images for a seal that’s been extinct, its “wide gaze” maybe suggested by the wide separation between the eyes. It occurs to me too that the ‘gaze’ of the last line might be contrasted with the ‘wink’ of the first:

–And yet this great wink of eternity

*

Voyages II: an experiment in redemption.

Voilà comment alors je voyais la chose : je la vois autrement aujourd’hui. Ce n’est pas quand une vilaine action vient d’être faite qu’elle nous tourmente, c’est quand longtemps après on se la rappelle ; car le souvenir ne s’en éteint point.….

*

That is how I saw the thing then: today, I see it otherwise. It is not when a villainous action is performed that it torments us, but when long afterward we recall it — for the memory is never extinguished.

To add to my notes about artists and their finances…. Danchev deals most directly with Cezanne’s in the wonderful epilogue to his biography (360-361), but in general characterizes Cezanne as a man of simple tastes, conservative with money.

Doesn’t seem to have had to work at any point in his life, although he did have to implore friends like Zola for loans occasionally — was supported through substantial allowance from his wealthy father, then an inheritance.

(Father began in hat trade, but made his fortune banking. Hats relied on rabbit farms — he had started his financial career by loaning money to rabbit farmers. Something like this.)

This isn’t made explicit, but real money from paintings seems to have come only near the end.

…Cezanne only really felt financially free after he’d received his inheritance, according to Danchev –in his 40s. Meanwhile his son sold all the paintings he came to inherit for well below what they were worth.

« Quand j’aurai inspiré le dégoût et l’horreur universels, j’aurai conquis la solitude. »

*
When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I will have conquered solitude.

… odd that in both the relatively close together (Numbers 20 & 22) stories of Moses and Aaron at the rock at Meribah, and of Balaam and his ass, God is found punishing servants who have apparently properly followed his commands.

Steve Hoffman Music Forums/ records with tight spindle hole. Comment:

The problem here is usually there’s no chamfer to the spindle hole. (A slight angle around the rim of each end of the hole) Instead of using a steel screwdriver, try a plain old plastic body click-top ball point pen, insert it, and rotate it a few times at a very shallow angle. That way you’re not cutting up the hole, you’re just swaging a slight chamfer.

Chamfer:

a transitional edge between two faces of an object. A form of bevel, it is created at 45° angle to two adjoining right-angled faces

Swage:

A tool, used by blacksmiths and other metalworkers, for cold shaping of a metal item.

Interesting observation. “You can always tell when a man is writing his own name. He has a special way of moving.” (Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye.)

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Sorrentino states, with a little hostility, what I’ve been telling myself about Ezra Pound (pp.197):

They “come to the conclusion” that Pound, after all, is more an influence and teacher and guiding light than he is a poet. That’s what they say in these “reviews.”

“uniting the separate but in such fashion as will retain the sense of separation” (the architecture of prisons and casinos, gather but keep isolated) –why the fragmentary will stick out as positive in the arts– no false attempts at unity

Du Bord against art on the grounds that it is simply the most realistic part of something essentially unreal — a representation of an escape that quells the need for actual escape–; against that, Kundera, that the novel is the essence of the spirit of play Du Bord was after in “real (political) life”? (the novel, not at all political, or a form of political joking, is a part of real life.)

…is there a comparison with plato here, “banishing homer”. both use artistic means to disparage great artists while asserting the pre-eminence of political (over artistic) life.

…also (and this doesn’t diminish anything) much of this can be parsed out of Shakespeare –being “all clothes” — world is a stage– seeming and being, and so on.

(it doesn’t diminish anything yet one will think: instead of undertaking political activity, why not just read Shakespeare? do only that)

… the artist aware of the spectacle he makes of himself. (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, aware of, worried about, the image of the saint they were making)

It would be an interesting thing were you to write at the same time as you think, and if you could describe all the time and all that is in the time that you type and think in, a la a seismograph of words, “but you cannot.”

So what is written thought contains thought that is the crystalization of thought before and after it. Written thought, for one thing, is the result of the thought of a person at work, and not the thought of a person idle or distracted, not the thought of a person concentrating on a work or on a state that is other than that which is involved in writing.

Written thought is, for example, not the thought of a person working at another tool (or is it). Written thought is not the same as the one concentrating on their love, or on their being.

Written thought is the thought, if it can be called that, of a person at work with a tool of a certain kind. (Or not: it is some remembered thought, or it is not thought at all that is involved

Perhaps I’d meant to say, an element of written thought is that it is the sort of thought one does while handling a tool, while of course not all writing is of that kind.

I think of Henry Miller as having once written something in this connection but it’s common experience: of thinking of great things to write that disappear when one sits down to write — when one is in the presence of the tool, which generates its own order of thoughts. Possibly?

awareness while reading … [1] of things not pertaining to reading (ambient sounds and air temperature, cold feet, uncomfortable chair, people entering room, etc.); [2] of things pertaining to reading but are not reading (hands on the page, turning the pages, knowing to turn the pages); [3] of things comprehended through reading [4] of being distracted by (1) as well as by associations produced by (3)

–what is reading — must it involve comprehension– can one comprehend one’s reading without being aware of it– for example, read and understand but have one’s mind somewhere else–

“understanding exaggeration” (why do we do it, and why does the unexaggerated truth not communicate the true extent of what’s we’ve experience –when we’re mugged by three guys, it must be five– the kid so smart he got straight a’s must have got them all in college level classes as well– and so on

Pale King, a couple mentions of ‘neon’ in section 22, long one.

Wallace’s conversation without interlocutors, conversations where it doesn’t quite matter whose speaking beyond what they say, continues to contribute to this notion of literature becoming this expressed interior conversation

Du Bord…. Awareness as ‘doubling’ (Was Agee ‘doubling’?) ‘double entendre’ of as the world turns, twin buildings he fatefully confuses… Foot and hat. (concordance of 22…)

sometimes shows itself as an unfinished worked stylistically as well as structurally — passages that are not quite at full strength.

Contrasting Pale King with the Mezzanine… idea that Baker condensed something experienced many times into one experience of lavish detail…. Wallace, while nodding to the existence of detail, remains faithful to the experience of observation rather than to the thing observed– you will observe something different the first time you experience it than you will the second or hundredth time…

a “calculus of writing” whereby the always changing subject of experience is presented over the always changing object

Metafiction. idea, there is no metafiction here. Wallace really is trying to write a true and meaninful memoir insofar as the legal notice will allow. But the presence of the legal notice (like a gravitational body?) distorts the straightforward presentation of fact.

unfinished works as a topic do intentionally unfinished works (a cezanne painting) differ from unintentionally unfinished works (the Pale King) (are the Trial, The Pale King and A Man without Qualities similar types of unfinished works.)

Like Ulysses’ Cyclops chapter (also elsewhere in Wallace) the technique of interlarding narrative bits with historical/ informative bits. (sect.36) (does maybe War and Peace set that precedent)

Pale King as unfinished response to Infinite Jest — to vice or evil of distraction (the Entertainment) a failure to deal courageously with boredom against the virtue or benefit of focus (The Tax Return, The Mindless Task requiring thought) which is to deal courageously with boredom.

[Is Pale King, like an Infinite Jest, a Hamlet reference?] (x) –no

Today read of a camera prototype which automatically edits out the undramatic moments, about the exact opposite of my own ideal. Of what does the undramatic consist? (However: is drama itself a camera of this type? is the stage a frame intended to emphasize that — things do change — life does occasionally happen?) Might more stable societies require that kind of assurance?

Proposition, that one’s talkative self and writing self are not to be understood as united, under the verbal, but to be at odds, for sharing the same source, and depleting it, the one from the other.

(I would say though: political commentators, for example, seem to write as they speak, and it will seem their speaking does not exhaust the font of their writing. For another sort, having spoken is having expressed, so why express again in writing?)

There’s an invisible machinery behind the content of a blog, by which the content is made available — invisible to readers. Now, at least, finally, visible to writers.

Already known… Again it seems that the literary practices of the early 20th century project the technological changes of the latter half.

philosophy appears to the subject to be writing first of all but writing that arises from the very core of the subject and an attempt to reach to the very peripheries of whatever it, (they, he…) might have to do with

fiction appears to the subject to be also writing but with its perspective shifted to the peripheries of all the subject might have to do with, with all his experience, looking to see if that experience has a subject, if that subject has a core (subject meaning the writer himself, herself)

behind this I the ego appears shifting– where the “clever English gentleman author” is only ever entirely within himself — entirely within Henry Fielding– who is writing Rings of Saturn?

“two man parade”

Idea that one should stop resisting that one is a “cutie-pie” and find a way out of the wilderness for cutie pies

“beneath the veneer of the other’s ideology is one’s own realized ideal.”

A page that won’t turn in my Spanish book (the thumb of my right hand on the corresponding side of the soft cover book) –a page in the glossary of the elementary Spanish dual language reader. I am on the R‘s but need to get to the S‘s so as to look up sigilosamente. My thumb is currently holding on (down) —

If I slide my thumb down the side too far I will likely wind up in the T‘s. If I don’t slide it down enough my thumb presses on the page without achieving anything, without having “slid” […] I will be looking at my thumb on the side of the book

-__ ……………………….
.-| ……………………….
. ;-_) ……………………….
.–.-`.–.\ ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_- –\ ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_.–._.( ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -. \ ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘) ……………………….
……………..–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘-| C in summer south of the
Istrian Peninsula………………………..South of the lakes the
μεταδίδωμι……..hough………………….the current is tidal
………………………………………………………..tid al reversing
κέχρηται……shinkansen……………………with the tides
…………………………………………………………..in the Red
………………………………………………………….. the Red
………………………………………………………….. SEA

-__ ……………………….
.-| ……………………….
. ;-_) ……………………….
.–.-`.–.\ ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_- –\ ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_.–._.( ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -. \ ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘) ……………………….
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘-|C……………………….
Istrian Peninsula ……………………in summer south of the
Istrian Peninsula………………………..South of the lakes the
μεταδίδωμι……..hough………………….the current is tidal
………………………………………………………..tid al reversing
κέχρηται……shinkansen……………………with the tides
…………………………………………………………..in the Red
………………………………………………………….. the Red
………………………………………………………….. SEA

Came across this funny passage in The Phaedo the other day and was reminded of Winesburg OH and of Hands. Phaedo 89b (the one stroking the hair is Socrates):

He stroked my head and gathered the hair on the back of my neck into his hand—he had a habit of playing with my hair on occasion—and said, “Tomorrow, perhaps, Phaedo, you will cut off this beautiful hair.”

“I suppose so, Socrates,” said I.

“Not if you take my advice.”

“What shall I do then?” I asked.

“You will cut it off today, and I will cut mine, if our argument dies and we cannot bring it to life again.”

Wing Biddlebaum (aka Adolf Myers) was the teacher-character in Winesburg who got in trouble for caressing the head and shoulders of young boys:

“Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.

And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair were a part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream.”

“The turn”: pet the cat, read a few pages, shoo the cat off to his own bed, reach behind me to turn off the light, then “turn” onto my left side, facing back of the couch, after which I am soon fast asleep. As I performed the operation this time, it clicked how exactly this resembled the operation of the previous night, an “eternalreturnality” becoming pronounced, so that the couch back had a resemblance to a box corner, a box that straddled the whole of the past two days.

About two thirds of the way through Infinite Jest now, reconsidering my view of complexly — that maybe I was right the first time — that it is in fact an instance of a non-poetic or non-thematic repetition in a work that does otherwise include such thematic repetitions (“squeak”, “head”, maybe “spider”…), consequently: still potentially of interest for considering the difference between a word that is merely repeated and a word that is repeated for thematic reasons.

For some reason today”ran around” instead of following my usual route. A reflection that: a day will come when I will not have,, or cannot use legs –will not have las piernas— so how nice, how exceptional, how rewarded I was, how grateful I should feel, to have observed this afternoon les jambs, my legs, on the one hand, rising and falling beneath me (if that’s descriptive of what legs do when one runs) on the other hand, transferring me through space at around the same rate that I would suppose such a raising and lowering would suggested. Even to be supported by ones legs is, if not quite a luxury, even still “pure bliss”. Etonnant. Tres supurbe. Let me not forget what I’ve had in being healthy, I thought. If I should become Job, let me not forget. (As Job didn’t.) (Person tried to tell me today to thank god for what is good, a logic I smiled at but resisted as being, at best, half the story.) (Remember the lord in the days of your youth: remember there was a time when you had it good.) The contrast of heavy athletic respiration and doleful sighs.

How to characterize the text in quotations in An Octopus? As Bad Writing? As Non-poetry? The writing one needs in some way, but is tired of? (If I were to write something that’s only half good, could I make it entirely good by putting the poor portions in quotes?) As Found text? What would be the effect of removing the quotations?… The idea that these are “reverse” or “anti” quotations — (you quote something worthwhile said by Shakespeare, but you reverse quote the things you can’t escape saying. Things said by Reagan you quote, things said by you and I you reverse quote). Maybe these reverse quote are a sort of admission of failure of the artist: I can’t escape saying certain things yet I can still in someway excuse or isolate it with a quote. (I want to say that Walt Whitman, the poet, is closer to Walt Whitman, the subject of his poem, than is Saul Bellow is to his Moses Herzog, but is it so? Is it the reverse? The many devices Bellow uses to convey different levels and kinds of expressed thought: thoughts, spoken thoughts, thoughts spoken in letters, in papers…)… Are these the “finger flexions” (f.f) of David Foster Wallace (B.I #48)…? Perhaps we have punctuation where once we had accentuation: punctuation now both a logical and (explcitly) rhythmic tool.

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