Stendhal, Life of Henri Brulard, (trans. Catherine Alison Phillips):

Was it that I had a depressing personality? . . . And here, as I could not tell what to say, I began again, without thinking, to admire the sublime aspect of the ruins of Rome and its modern grandeur: opposite me the Coliseum; and, beneath my feet, the Farnese Palace, with its beautiful arcaded loggia full of modern works; the Corsini Palace, too, beneath my feet.

Farnese Palace. Corsini Palace. Wikipedia:

is the name given to an architectural feature, originally of Italian design. They are often a gallery or corridor at ground level, sometimes higher, on the facade of a building and open to the air on one side, where it is supported by columns or pierced openings in the wall.

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…The way that fossils are like the ordinary and are suggestive of the idea of “eternal return” — fossils are totally random moments of time that are kept (recorded) effectively forever.

..the fossilized moment is the superior of the non-fossilized moment– in the way that an unrecorded event from the past is to a recorded event from the past

…what is meaningful about a thing as it lives is not what’s meaningful about it as a fossil.

This came to mind as I had had a memory that seemed to me like the mnemonic analogue of a fossil –it was a memory of nothing at all extraordinary– like the fossilized footprint of a Stegasaurus, which is not the footprint of some amazing leader or genius among the stegasauruses, but some random member of the group who happened randomly to be walking in that spot

[… do records tend naturally to be records of the acts of famous individuals or ordinary individuals… do records, the act of recording, favor certain individuals over others… how does remembering differ from polling? (how do remembering, writing down memories, and polling differ?) might a parallel history, or several of them, be occurring…]

a memory of nothing extraordinary (like having a specific memory of taking a spoon from out of the utensile drawer, which I do most everyday, but knowing the memory of taking this spoon was the memory of a particular day, a day which was itself in no other way memorable)

a memory of a pile of leaves I saw a year or two ago around this time –nothing extraordinary about the pile –nothing extraordinary about the day on which I saw the pile– and not better remembered than a fossilized footprint evokes the thing it has fossilized– but recalled better than all the other leaf piles I have seen

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What was my one idea today: that two different nations could share the same physical boundaries, could coexist in the same physical space, be room-mates, like the U.K and France decide it makes more sense for both peoples to reside only in France, yet they keep their laws intact and the nations remain distinct.

οὐ γὰρ οὕτω φαμὲν τὴν τῶν ποιητῶν ἀρετὴν ὡσεὶ κττεόνων ἢ χαλκέων: ἀλλ᾽ ἐκείνη μὲν οὐδενὸς ἔχεται καλοῦ καὶ σεμνοῦ, ἡ δὲ ποιητοῦ συνέζευκται τῇ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, καὶ οὐχ οἷόν τε ἀγαθὸν γενέσθαι ποιητὴν μὴ πρότερον γενηθέντα ἄνδρα ἀγαθόν.

“Of course we do not speak of the excellence of a poet in the same sense as we speak of that of a carpenter or a blacksmith; for their excellence depends upon no inherent nobility and dignity, whereas the excellence of a poet is inseparably associated with the excellence of the man himself, and it is impossible for one to become a good poet unless he has previously become a good man.” Geography 1.17.

French: Le gisement lui-même, (*) Ces hécatombes de régiments anéantis, Swann’s Way Water Lily Passage

Greek: λιαρός, Eumenides 746, Iliad 18.98, Crito 51c– 52δ — never right to do wrong or requite wrong with wrong, Agamemnon, 88-91. καὶ κηρὸς καὶ πίττα καὶ κόκκος καὶ μίλτος, Iliad 6.301, Agamemnon, 92-96, Libation Bearers 505-507

Spanish: El trabajo sería

English: Valance Corbeil Cully Halloo

Latin: Wild Olive Tree (Ovid)

N-Grams Viewer: Meteoric Rise of ‘Robust’, ‘ground zero‘

Quotes: My Life, Swimming, a “devotee of equality” (Plato), Uncle Dick Postnatural from Federalist Papers 37 (*) * To be bad and to enjoy it

Shapes: 9/9 , 8/31, 6/ 19 * * * * *

Notes: a part of what I thought (editing needed) (page turning) running (legs as vials) knowledge and art pains programme to ‘A Leg Up’, Altars called for Nietzsche note *

Concordances: ‘Brown‘ in On The Road. Sun and Stars in Romeo and Juliet. Time in A Strange Commonplace [NOTES about this]

Short story like: Grove ; Knees and Hands: are the gates ; A Leg Up; Form and Perform. Perhaps They Do. ; Trivial Questions; The Time Was 11 am ; WLK

Poem like: walking while hearing car alarm ; curtains around steam; Fresher and Fresher Paint ; bags of aeolous ; stained red end cushion; a granule

Absurd: To Cup (i) ; that’s so stupid but

A study: I didn’t intend to do any “projects” this year but inadvertantly arrived at a spot near a “project” into which I was subsequently sucked : Time in ‘A Strange Commonplace’.

Proust: “Ils pensaient, en effet, à ces hécatombes de régiments anéantis, de passagers engloutis, mais une opération inverse multiplie à tel point ce qui concerne notre bien être et divise par un chiffre tellement formidable ce qui ne le concerne pas, que la mort de millions d’inconnus nous chatouille à peine et presque moins désagréablement qu’un courant d’air. ”

Andreas Mayor: “They thought certainly of these hecatombs of regiments annihilated and passengers swallowed by the waves; but there is a law of inverse proportion which multiplies to such an extent anything that concerns our own welfare and divides by such a formidable figure anything that does not concern it, that the death of unknown millions is felt by us as the most insignificant of sensations, hardly even as disagreeable as a draught.”

Libation Bearers 505-507 (English):

παῖδες γὰρ ἀνδρὶ κληδόνες σωτήριοι
θανόντι: φελλοὶ δ᾽ ὣς ἄγουσι δίκτυον,
τὸν ἐκ βυθοῦ κλωστῆρα σῴζοντες λίνου.

(Electra)

There are weather and climate records, and then there are truly exceptional events that leave all others in the dust. Such has been the case across Earth’s high latitudes during this last quarter of 2016, on track to be the planet’s warmest year on record. Sea ice extent and area have both plummeted to record lows for this time of year in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Such dramatic losses rarely occur at the same time, which means that the global total of sea ice coverage is phenomenally low for this time of year.…

Breakfast at Tiffyany’s (movie). Emotional values are facts, not intellectual suppositions that may be altered until a convenient situation is arrived at, not airy trivialities to be ignored without consequences. Love is a fact, if you’ll acknolwedge it.

Phoenicia is really a Classical Greek term used to refer to the region of the major Canaanite port towns, and does not correspond exactly to a cultural identity that would have been recognised by the Phoenicians themselves, vaguely comparable to the Hanseatic League. The term in Greek means ‘land of purple’, a reference to the valuable murex-shell dye they exported. It is uncertain to what extent the Phoenicians viewed themselves as a single ethnicity and nationality. Their civilization was organized in city-states, similar to ancient Greece. However, in terms of archaeology, language, life style and religion, there is little to set the Phoenicians apart as markedly different from other Semitic cultures of Canaan. As Canaanites, they were unique in their remarkable seafaring achievements.…Phoenicia

Wallace Stevens (New England Verses X):

Ashen man on ashen cliff above the salt halloos

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (I.viii.7):

If I fly, Marcius,/Halloo me like a hare.

Halloo:

Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa). The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted: Fowler’s has it that “hallo” is first recorded “as a shout to call attention” in 1864.

When Freddie Gray was 22 months old, he had a tested blood lead level of 37 micrograms per deciliter. This is an absolutely astronomical amount. Freddie never even had the slightest chance of growing up normally. Lead poisoning doomed him from the start to a life of heightened aggression, poor learning abilities, and weak impulse control. His life was a tragedy set in motion the day he was born.… Kevin Drum (4.30.15)

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“You may not like what Democrats stand for, but they aren’t engaging in widespread official vote suppression, chanting that should their candidate win her opponent should be tossed in jail, promising to prevent any Republican president from filling vacancies on the Supreme Court, suggesting that they’ll try to impeach their opponent as soon as he takes office, cheering when a hostile foreign power hacks into American electronic systems, and trying to use the FBI to win the election.

“Only one party is doing all of that. And we should all be very worried about what Republicans will do after November 8, whether they win or lose….” Paul Waldman

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“And does he not, said I, also live out his life in this fashion, day by day indulging the appetite of the day, now winebibbing and abandoning himself to the lascivious pleasing of the flute and again drinking only water and dieting, and at one time exercising his body, and sometimes idling and neglecting all things, and at another time seeming to occupy himself with philosophy. And frequently he goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever enters his head. And if military men excite his emulation, thither he rushes, and if moneyed men, to that he turns, and there is no order or compulsion in his existence, but he calls this life of his the life of pleasure and freedom and happiness and cleaves to it to the end? That is the perfect description, he said, of a devotee of equality.”

~The Republic

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Spanish demonstrative pronouns this morning— throughout my endeavoring through an introductory Spanish grammar book I consistently conflated este and ese in my written exercises. Now I wrote them repeatedly on a sheet of paper, este, esta, esto/ ese, esa, eso,/ aquel, aquella, aquello/– the stubborness with which I would not, could not understand; the stubbornness with which I nevertheless attempted understanding –looked again, looked again, wrote down–; and these two resolves, one intentional and one not, one supposedly intelligent one supposedly idiotic, never meeting to form an actual understanding of basic Spanish — not any understanding at all. —I lived in Peru for a year/ I was living in Peru for a year. —

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What are the criticisms of the character of the writer as expressed in The Cain Mutiny (the movie) (1) the writer speaks of what he does not really know (or “knows” in some amateur way — in this case, about psychology); (2) the writer misleads others by doing this; (3) the writer doesn’t stand with those he has mislead, but hides behind ambiguity, his “mights”, “may haves”, and other such disingenuous qualifying remarks. … (Brings to mind somewhat the falsifying journalist of The Wire.)

Interesting, the use of ‘ground zero’ was in the ascendant well before 9-11. (n-gram viewer)

Idea that instead of contrasting Nietzsche with other philosophers, especially those he speaks of most often, he is to be best contrasted with the literary figures of around his time –Joyce, Kafka, Proust, I’m thinking of (perhaps a generation after)– in being “autobiographical.”

But where Joyce, Kafka, Proust, etc. are (you could say) “autobiography plus the novel” (their lives and manners and situations are the subject, the novel is their means or form or excuse) (that is a debatable proposition yet it’s at least clear that their novels resemble their own biographies more than they do some other person’s biography and it may well be asked why should that be?), Nietzsche is –and perhaps just as explicitly as they are– “autobiography plus the philosophical treatise.”

Idea that he was giving us first and foremost a personal philosophy, a return to something more like Montaigne; a philosophy about his person; that it is his christianity he addressed; his Kant (“Kant qua Nietzsche”), his Christ, Stendhal, and so forth; — the idea that Nietzsche never actually addresses a thing outside his own thought or a person who is not himself.
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