The etymology for “California” being in dispute I wonder if califourchon might assert a claim, thinking of baja california as being “straddled” by the sea?–
Reviens à califourchon sur ce fameux âne qui t’accompagne toujours dans la mémoire dela postérité…. Baudelaire
It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than promoted, by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.
(Federalist Papers 37)
Item I gyve and bequeath to mr richard Hamlett Sadler Tyler thelder XXVIs VIIId to buy him A Ringe; to William Raynoldes gent XXVIs VIIId to buy him a Ringe; to my godson William Walker XXVIs VIIId in gold and to my ffellowes John Hemynges, Richard Burbage and Heny Cundell XXVIs VIIId A peece to buy them Ringes.
Aristotle’s Will, (a statue considered a compensation for childlessness). Barge on the Cumberland river. Pioneer Ten, plaque, Voyager record.
“Because to be bad, Mother, that is the real struggle: to be bad — and to enjoy it! That is what makes men of us boys, Mother. But what my conscience, so-called, has done to my sexuality, my spontaneity, my courage! Never mind some of the things I try so hard to get away with — because the fact remains, I don’t. I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear. See, I am too good too, Mother, I too am moral to the bursting point — just like you!” (Portnoy’s Complaint.)
Although I think this must be right, and that writing does not require knowledge or learning in the same sense that the sciences do, I think also that learning may operate as a sort of acid vat in which one’s bad taste, except for the most adamantine chunks of it, as well as other impurities, may be made with repeated dunkings to dissolve (which may be what Proust means in what follows by “that tact which our invention acquires”) — from William Carter’s Marcel Proust, A Life (pp.293):
Marie complained in her letter sent with the poems of not being a learned person, which provokes Proust to reply with a deeply held belief about language and art: “Strictly speaking, no knowledge is involved, for there is none outside the mysterious associations effected by our memory and the tact which our invention acquires in its approach to words.” The poet must find his own way in the sea of words by using a navigational system that remained mysterious. The charts, when discovered and retrieved, always lay within. “Knowledge, in the sense of something which exists ready-made outside us and which we can learn as in the Sciences — is meaningless in art.”
……..Quel démon a doté la mer, rauque chanteuse
……..Qu’accompagne l’immense orgue des vents grondeurs,
……..De cette fonction sublime de berceuse?
……..[*]
* * *’
Phillips curve — trempés de boue — Où par les longues nuits la girouette s’enroue, la girouette s’enroue (o) “My soul spreads wide its raven wings/ More easily than in the warm springtide.”
what Beckett said of a coincidence he’d encountered (the second volume of his letters) (Translation from the French, George Craig):
It is odd, the way time (yes, yes) works in little tight groups of associated things. Here in the loft I find an old copy of transition (1938) with a poem of mine, the wild youthful kind, which I had quite forgotten, and an article (also by me) on a young Irish poet (young then) who had just published a volume of poems in the same series as Echo’s Bones. The next day I get a card from the bloke in question, from Paris. Have not seen or heard of him for four years.
In French the first sentence reads:
C’est curiex, la facon du temps (mais oui) de proceder par petits paquets de choses associees.
ἣ μὲν γάρ θ᾽ ὕδατι λιαρῷ ῥέει, ἀμφὶ δὲ καπνὸς
γίγνεται ἐξ αὐτῆς ὡς εἰ πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο
*
Iliad 22.149-150. Butler. Wikipedia: In Iliad XXII (149ff), Homer states that the river had two springs: one produced warm water; the other yielded cold water, regardless of the season. (These lines concern the first of the springs).
A topic we’d never broached before, I’d asked him if he’d dreamed at all recently and he said — No fortunately not. “Why ‘fortunately’?” I said — did he have bad dreams? No, he did not have bad dreams, he replied emphatically (emphatically, as if he thought that only a bad person could have a bad dream, I thought). He then gave me to understand that all dreaming was something bad in his view, or certainly a sign of something bad, he had said. But could they not be delightful and interesting, I’d said? I’m glad I do not have dreams, he affirmed without answering that question directly. —But why again? I insisted. Because they’re not there, he said, as if it were obvious. Seeing things that aren’t there? No thank you, he said: I’m glad that I do not have any dreams. (I was struck by this characterization of dreams as “things that were not there”: as if having dreams were like believing in ghosts.)
The Hamlet (pp.343).
“Wait,” the old man said in a reedy, quavering voice. He was known through all that country. He had no kin, no ties, and he antedated everyone; nobody knew how old he was — a tall thin man in a filthy frock coat and no shirt beneath it and a long, perfectly white beard reaching below his waist, who lived in a mud-daubed hut in the river bottom five or six miles from any road. He made and sold nostrums and charms, and it was said of him that he ate not only frogs and snakes but bugs as well — anything that he could catch. There was nothing in his hut but his pallet bed, a few cooking vessels, a tremendous Bible and a faded daguerreotype of a young man in a Confederate uniform which was believed by those who had seen it to be his son. “Wait,” he said. “There air anger in the yearth. Ye must make that ere un quit a-bruisin hit.”
Le stoïcisme, religion qui na quun sacrement, — le suicide! (Baudelaire)
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Links below lead to vocabulary lists for each illumined chunk along with my (only half-comprehending, I fear) translations. The passage is Ovid’s telling of how the wild olive tree (oleaster) came into existence. Metamorphoses, 14.512-526.
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Hactenus Oenides, Venulus Calydonia regna
Peucetiosque sinus Messapiaque arva relinquit.
in quibus antra videt, quae, multa nubila silva
et levibus cannis latitantia semicaper Pan
nunc tenet, at quodam tenuerunt tempore nymphae.
Apulus has illa pastor regione fugatas
terruit et primo subita formidine movit,
mox, ubi mens rediit et contempsere sequentem,
ad numerum motis pedibus duxere choreas;
inprobat has pastor saltuque imitatus agresti
addidit obscenis convicia rustica dictis
,nec prius os tacuit, quam guttura condidit arbor:
arbor enim est, sucoque licet cognoscere mores
quippe notam linguae bacis oleaster amaris
exhibet: asperitas verborum cessit in illa.
*
runnng up a hill, the strain of doing so gradually and then more speedily rises up the legs, an accretion like the filling of two vials, two vials with a serum of “strain”, (“strain” being the expression of the resistance of reality to one’s activity — the surrealist director of the athlete’s mind above the beakers and burners of his legs, the scientist’s legs) the vials beneath the bunsen burner of ones peritoneum, then disappears when it should be in the abdomen; here it goes under the tunnel, so to speak, it is not felt there, is “subdominal”; then it reappears not as a sort of strain as formerly but as a desperate need for breath, it has transformed, the strain having risen but not without alteration, not continuously so
…
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Maryof Egypthami
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…Proposition, the sort of amateur writing that rather than being convex, toward the reader, is convex, toward the writer…
………… (What should be projected is suggested; what should be fully argued is outlined; what should be novelistic is diaristic; instead of the painting, the sketch; instead of the sketch or the painting, the precis, the treatment, the note about what it would be, the note about what it would be if it were to exist — but the author, artist, won’t make it exist; the author will make the note exist: the note which is to tell us both what the artwork was to have been and how it was to have be taken. This is “convex toward the writer.”)
The bay that the world’s largest bridge crosses is called the Jiaozhou bay.
Dostoevsky’s ideal of the Russian Christ, of Russian service to the world: a country whose job it was to serve the world, a country that was a servant to the world of nations like Christ to the world of people (could a Christ-like nation be more achievable than a Christ-like individual, can a nation seek to embody the spirit of love, could Russians collectively actually become Christ? Are we all Russians?)
Kierkegaard had said that his genius was not equal to that of an apostle: what was his view exactly.
Can you identify, on a map, the gulf of Taranto? The Gulf of Taranto is between the heel and the boot of Italy. Also, Sicily is separated from mainland Italy by the Straight of Messina.
But what is the body of water between the northern coast of Africa and Sicily called? (the body of water between Africa and Sicily is called the Straight of Sicily)
Someone said that the difference between a peninsula and a cape was that the latter had two sides and the former had three. Thus it was not, for example, The Peninsula of Good Hope. (Is this true?)
The Russian Christ. (What if we, of one nation, were to utterly give ourselves to another nation? Not to the people per se but to the idea of that nation’s purpose. Could it be done, what would that mean?) Related: what if it were the obligation of one nation to elect the leadership of another nation, if all nations were required to have elected leadership but no nation was allow to elect leaders itself?
*
Hemingway article — GARY LUTZ … the warmer it gets… Spanish suffixes — –Tetélestai (Aiken) – (bleeding edge review)
………………. Eumenides 984-986 (Smyth):
……………….χάρματα δ᾽ ἀντιδιδοῖεν
……………….κοινοφιλεῖ διανοίᾳ,
……………….καὶ στυγεῖν μιᾷ φρενί:
Whipped cream mango raspberry straw
lid to pour cash register a good worker
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
