Thoreau putting flowers in his hat (Journals, June 19, 1852):

I am inclined to think that my hat, whose lining is gathered in midway so as to make a shelf, is about as good a botany-box as I could have and far more convenient, and there is something in the darkness and the vapors that arise from the head –at least if you take a bath–which preserves flowers through a long walk. Flowers will frequently come fresh out of this botany-box at the end of the day, though they have had no sprinkling.

still incapable

“Those ‘record highs’ and ‘record lows’ that the weathermen are always talking about– they’re meaningless now. It’s like comparing pole vaults between athletes using bamboo and those using fiberglass poles, or dash times between athletes who’ve been chewing steroids and those who’ve stuck to Wheaties. They imply a connection between the past and the present which doesn’t exist. The comparison is like hanging Rembrandts next to Warhols; we live in a postnatural world. Thoreau once said he could walk for half an hour and come to ‘some portion of the earth’s surface where man does not stand from one year’s end to an another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but the cigar-smoke of man.’ Now you could walk half a year and not reach such a spot. Politics –our particular way of life, our ideas about how we should live– now blows its smoke over every inch of the globe.” Bill Mckibben, The End of Nature (1988) Page 51.

The Sun: the worshiped sun [1.1.121]; the all-cheering sun [1.1.137]; the all-seeing sun [1.2.95]; It is the east and Juliet is the sun [2.2.3-4]; sun cheers the day and dries the night’s dank dew [2.3.5]; sunbeams [2.5.5]; the garish sun [3.2.25]; a meteor the sun exhales [3.5.13]; “When the sun sets the earth doth drizzle dew” [3.5.127]; “The sun for sorrow will not show its head” [5.3.306].

The Stars: star-crossed lovers [1.epilogue.6]; the earth-tredding stars [1.2.25]; some consequence yet hanging in the stars [1.4.107]; Juliet’s eyes as substitutes for stars [2.2.15]; Romeo should be cut into stars[3.2.22]; defying the stars [5.1.24]; inauspicious stars [5.3.111];

If a gravitational wave passed through you, you’d see one of your arms grow longer than the other. If you were wearing a watch on each wrist, you’d see them tick out of sync.… VOX

At that time, expectations were that the gas would burn out within a few weeks, but it has continued to burn more than four decades after it was set on fire….Darvaza Crater.

The use of improvisation on top of canovaccio enabled the avoidance of censorship because censors cannot censor that which is not written… Canovaccio

(above the glistening backs of cars)

This n-grams viewer graph jibes with my own sense that people are using the word robust a lot more often than they once did. (From latin robustus, literally “as strong as an oak.”)

I was under the vague impression that it was Donald Rumsfeld or the Bush administration that popularized its use, but the graph (which, of course, measures written and not spoken instances of the word) seems to indicate that its meteoric rise began circa 1980.

In a similar vein is the phrase “salacious details” which I recall as having arisen from the Monica Lewinsky investigation. (And, again, Iraq War, ‘embedded.’ — though contrast with ‘embedded journalist.’)

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams [ Keats]

American/ Sacramento River (map) El afán de independencia

pompier, “Un troisième pompier meurt dans les incendies au Portugal” (Monde.)

αι δ’ολολυγη πασαι Αθηνη χειρας ανεσχον.

*
ολολυγη, -ης: an ecstatic religious shout of women. (only citation in Cunliffe). ανεχω: hold up, lift up.

*
And all the women, crying ecstatically, lifted their hands to Athena.

*
Ian Johnston: All the women raised their hands, as they prayed to Athena.

préalablement ressortissant “un ressortissant nippon” lâche le supplice ,Deprisa — el redactó — Medio Ambiente — la petrolera :// salpicár, un perfil,rueda de prensa diaria,en deuil,,,, Having unleashed the most destructive political impulses of his party, he finally fell victim to them… Cantor (Nyt 2014/06/12)

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Murphy:

There were not many patients about as he followed Bom through the wards. Some were at matins, some in the gardens, some could not get up, some would not, some simply had not. But those that he did see were not at all the terrifying monsters that might have been imagined from Ticklepenny’s account. Melancholics, motionless and brooding, holding their heads or bellies according to type. Paranoids, feverishly covering sheets of papers with complaints against their treatment or verbatim reports of their inner voices. A hebephrenic playing the piano intently. A hypomaniac teaching slosh to a Korsakow’s syndrome. An emaciated schizoid, petrified in a toppling attitude as though condemned to an eternal tableua vivant, his left hand rhetorically extended holding a cigarette half smoked and out, his right, quivering and rigid, pointing upward.

They cause Murphy no horror. The most easily identifiable of his immediate feelings were respect and unworthiness. Except for the manic, who was like an epitome of all the self-made plutolaters who ever triumphed over empty pockets and clean hands, the impression he received was of that self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world which he had chosen for himself as the only felicity and achieved so seldom.

mollement … “Les Etats-Unis condamnent mollement les bombardements turcs contre les rebelles kurdes” [*]

repaire de geeks — nouilles chinoises — un lotissement sans âme

᾿εξάγεται δ᾽ ἐκ τῆς Τουρδητανίας σῖτός τε καὶ οἶνος πολὺς καὶ ἔλαιον οὐ πολὺ μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ κάλλιστον: καὶ κηρὸς δὲ καὶ μέλι καὶ πίττα ἐξάγεται καὶ κόκκος πολλὴ καὶ μίλτος οὐ χείρων τῆς Σινωπικῆς γῆς.

But Berryman differs from Whitman in his willingness to be deliberately illiterate; even Whitman was not prepared to operate outside of grammatical norms. Whitman is full of humor, but it is not syntactic or grammatical humor. On the contrary, his ornately parallel syntax, his fluid grammar, do not risk outraging literacy itself, no matter how heterodox his themes. Influenced by Hopkins’s wrenching of syntax, Berryman adopted grammatical and syntactic violations as his stylistic signature, wronging syntax in a mode beyond even that of Hopkins.…

Maryof Egypthami
rrida bashitru Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
pt.BbbnBubb.yh
shiBub.oBbatr
swin…ang…ines
ging..si ro n.. sa nd
Maryof Egypthami
bashitru
dnnel
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..b.ooB….
swin…ang…ines
ging..si ro n.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
rrida bashitru Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
…Bu. bb salu. ubb…
…..Bu b. ooBu bb…..

Alfelegim: I don’t want… Alfelegim zimp, I don’t want a fly.