Melville, The Confidence Man:

“Who?” Then drawing near, as if for a good long explanatory chat, his left hand spread, and his pipe-stem coming crosswise down upon it like a ferule, “You think amiss of me. Now to undeceive you, I will just enter into a little argument and–“

Ferule.

They went on to become the first overtly Christian heavy metal band to gain acceptance in the mainstream… Stryper. Origin of name (which still doesn’t totally make sense) …:

The name “Stryper” derives from the King James Version of the Bible. “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

The Tillman Act (1907) (named after Benjamin Tillman):

Roosevelt used his Presidential stature to influence public opinion and to persuade Congress. The NPLA and other grassroots organizations also pushed for reform. The result of their efforts was the enactment of the Tillman Act of 1907. The act specifically prohibited direct contributions from corporations and businesses to political parties and election committees. It was the first law on the books to specifically address campaign funding on the federal level.

Unfortunately for those who wished for an incorrupt government, this law was easily circumvented. Businesses and corporations would give their employees large bonuses with the understanding that the bonus would be given to a company “endorsed” candidate. The corporations thus found a loophole, gained political access, and received an additional tax deduction for “employee benefits.”

Edge of the west

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“It ill befits anyone to make himself known save him who has qualities to be imitated, and whose life and opinions may serve as a model.” (Montaigne, Of Giving the Lie — trans. Frame)

Pindar, Olympian 7.52-53 [English]:

ἔργα δὲ ζωοῖσιν ἑρπόντεσσί θ᾽ ὁμοῖα κέλευθοι φέρον:
ἦν δὲ κλέος βαθύ.

In conversation I’d called Shelley Duvall Shelly Long. Shelley Long was in Cheers I was told, are you sure you don’t mean Shelly Duvalle.

I’d gotten mixed up, I confessed. Then the person I’d spoken to said, “I thought MASH was a little bit mean-spirited, I have to admit. I really just don’t like bullies,” my friend then said. I said, “I agree with you.” I said, “I think you’re right” (I too thought MASH, the movie, might have been a little bit mean-spirited.) But which Altman do you like, I said. Gossford Park. Uh huh, I nodded, affirming.

I was thinking that, though I liked that one too, it probably wasn’t the best of Altman. I thought the one they said was the best was probably Nashville (but did they say that one was the best or another?), and I thought “California Split… Three Women” and I kind of wanted to see California Split again but I thought Three Women, which I didn’t want to see again, might be better put together. I’d like to see that one again also, I then said, speaking of Gossford Park.

*

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First proposition of the fifth book of Spinoza’s ethics…. Did I remember it (no, I did not remember it)–

Even as thoughts and the ideas of things are arranged and associated in the mind, so are the modifications of body or the images of things precisely in the same way arranged and associated in the body.

If modernism concerns the ordinary, the everyday, then how to explain Kafka as modern, or surrealism?

[i.] Dreaming is ordinary, therefore etc.
[ii.] The distortion of Kafka results from the effort to establish the truth of our emotional life in the midst of the ordinariness of family and commercial pressures.
[iii.] The ordinary almost by definition includes nothing strange, but does often include an appearance of strangeness.
[iv.] maybe surrealism and kafka has more to do with postmodernism than with the movement whose epicenters are Proust and Joyce.
[v.] Kafka is extremely geared to ordinariness in every respect (the turn of plot, the psychology and behavior of his characracters) but one: the conceit of his tales.
[vi.] The ordinary is, in fact, bizarre and surreal; it is only our habit of perception that makes them seem otherwise.

If modernism concerns the everyday, concerns today, then post modernism concerns the “right now” within the everyday, the ‘right now’ and ‘right here’ [Generally in the context of — here I am doing the same thing again; now what, again, is this ‘same thing’ I am doing? What can be said about this sameness, this finding myself in this position again] such that, for the artist, the making (the process) and the thing made have become conflated. [If I, as an artist, am concerned with the right now then, insofar as I am an artist, I must right now be in some way engaged with making art.] Is my doing by doing enough or must my doing somehow result in the done? In this conflation, like at the nodes of a sine curve, some have made their artistry that of “an actor on the loose” whiles others, sticking to older less demonstrative forms, seem attuned to how very much a moment can contain.

“People in these countries suffer from other people’s driving, other people’s manufacturing, other people’s attachment to things like flat screen TVs and Ipads that most Somalis and South Sudanese will touch only in their dreams…” [NYT]

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–Attire note. Like Miller’s Crossing and Against the Day, hats are a recurring theme of Sentimental Education of which a glimpse is to be found in that passage also.[1.4.39].) Dress hems and white cravates are two more frequently mentioned garments.)

–at Pellerin’s, one is presented with *two* paintings…. Other rooms that have so far had paintings (tableaux): the Arnoux store, and the office above it…

–I find it difficult to say if Frederic’s admiration of Pellerin’s paintings is sincere, or how to qualify his admiration. The general idea seems to be that Pellerin exhibited promise as an artist but was lead astray by thoughts of grandeur (not of his own grandeur, but of the grandeur of things). In this age, great things can’t get beyond the starting of them.

–having trouble for a couple reasons visualizing the lay out of the apartments above Arnoux’s shop. First Flaubert never mentions the three windows that are seen from outside the shop in his description of the interior of upstairs floor. Indeed, he mentions only window looking out on a courtyard. Second, as described here, Flaubert seems dramatically to require that there be two street entrances to the apartment when he has told us only of one… But I don’t think any of these descriptions exclude the possibility of the others, he leaves much of the upstairs undescribed.

–Is it important in some way that, from the outside, the upstairs is characterized by these three lighted windows while, when inside the upstairs room, one see only a small window, giving out on the courtyard?

All translations by Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb edition.
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Apple (μηλος): [1264-1271]. Barley meal (αλφιτα): [300-303]; [1304-1306]. Barley (καχρυς): [1304-1306]. Barley, (κριθη): [715-718]. Cumin: “cress-and-cumin peeling skinflint” [1351-1359]. Fig, (συκα): (adjectival form) “impeach wood” [144-145]; [300-303]; “impeach wood” [894-897].Dried Fig, (ιςχας): [293-298]. Fig Leaves (θριον): [433-436]. Garlic (σκοροδον): head of [673-679]; [1170-1172]. Grain, (σιτον): [715-718]. Grapes (βοτρυς): [448-452]. Hellebore (‘ελλεβορος): [1484-1489]; “Mustard” (καρδαμον): [453-455]; “cress-and-cumin peeling skinflint” [1351-1359]. Olive tree (ελαα): [448-452]; olive picker [706-712]. Pomegranate (ροα): [1264-1271]. Sesame (σησαμα): [673-679]. Vine (αμπελος): [1284-1291]. Vine, (ψευδαμαμαξυς): “bastard vine” [317-326]. Wheat (πυρος): [1401-1405].

General References: nut (καρυον) [56-61];whey w/ fig juice [350-353]; “onion” (ηδυσμα), vegetable seller (λαχανοπωλης) [488-499]; gruel [736-742.]; vine poles [1197-1204]; vine pole [1284-1291]; ]bran pile [1299-1315].

” It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion”… The Beast in the Jungle.

The idea that Faulkner’s long parenthetical sentence became Wallace’s long footnotes and endnotes, but that maybe footnotes are working their way back into the body of the text.

Possibly the footnotes have become the main text (the footnote having replaced the footnoted?), possibly the footnotes are italicized in the main text or been made equivalent to it in other ways (the distinction between what is essential and what is by-the-way having been blurred or obliterated?), possibly the footnoted has been, as it were, impregnated with the footnote, so that the footnote exists within the footnote as something implied. (Question: is a footnote a mark of writing not thoroughly thought through in advance, either as a positive –stream of consciousness– or a negative? Is the very idea of the footnote one of ‘afterthought’?)

Jamais souverain pontife ne s’était permis un discours d’une telle sévérité envers sa propre maison. Le pape François a dressé, lundi 22 décembre, un « catalogue » de quinze maladies qui menacent le haut clergé, et plus particulièrement la curie (le gouvernement de l’Eglise), parmi lesquelles la mondanité, l’hyperactivité, les rivalités, les bavardages, les calomnies et la zizanie…. [Monde] [Curia ]

*

Son diagnostic est tombé à coup de formules chocs : « L’Alzheimer spirituel », « la fossilisation mentale et spirituelle », « le cœur de pierre », « le terrorisme des bavardages », « la schizophrénie existentielle », « le narcissisme faux », « la planification d’expert-comptable », « les rivalités pour la gloire », les « faces funèbres », « l’orchestre qui émet des fausses notes »…

Appelant les évêques et cardinaux à laisser « l’Esprit saint » inspirer leurs actions, il a souligné que « la guérison [était] le fruit de la prise de conscience de la maladie ».

The skeleton (out of his grave, supplying his bones, and with a body to move around in) will be intercepting and otherwise pleasurably receiving sound produced by these persons (who have full bodies –for everyone here has full bodies) at D.C 9 tomorrow night (2/28):

“It was incubated in New York, where nobody cares about anything, and birthed in D.C., where everybody cares about Nothing—but it eschews the bipolar, all-or-nothing fight between God and the Devil, in favor of confronting the rabble of lesser deities of deprivation and excess who constitute the pantheon from which our generation poaches their boutique metaphysics a la carte.

A remark I interpret as saying that “Beyond Good and Evil” is essentially correct, but new-ageism, the big contribution of our baby-boomers, is not that: it is “boutique metaphysics a la carte.”

Dream. I’m in a helicopter with my father: he on the left, piloting, I on the right, concerned that he is not fully appreciating the height of the trees we approach. He thinks I’m worrying too much but, when we near them, he is forced to pull back hard on the throttle. This happens more than once.

Then we are flying over a plain full of jungle cats, mainly lions and lionesses. I’m holding from out of the helicopter a “Sienna Chicken” on a long string, and the cats are chasing after it, and finally I let them have it, releasing the string.

Then I’m on the ground. I believe it to be safe on the ground now, because I’ve already given the cats the sandwich, yet I notice one leopard has nevertheless continued to follow me. It may be that he doesn’t know I’ve already let go of the “Sienna Chicken”, or it may be that he does know and that he is actually interested in me.

A little behind me I notice a sort of trash can I could leap onto, the only possibility for defense, at which point I wake.

Inframince (infrathin):

“Aesthetic concept developed by Marcel Duchamp for whom it generally characterised a thickness (“épaisseur”), a separation, a difference, an interval between two things, in general little perceptible. The inframince qualifies a distance or a difference that you cannot perceive, but that you can only imagine. The best example of it, is the “inframince separation between the bang of a gun (very near) and the mark of appearance of the mark of the bullet on the target”.

(Will think of this as an effort to portray an instance of inframince — capturing the point, while typing, between a cursor blinking and a letter appearing. This one too: of one’s foot landing at the midpoint between two of a car alarms’ reports.)

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