A leg up: This is another absurdist piece in which a certain position of the leg is given a perhaps undue degree of attention or predominance.

From the program: “It is is envisioned that the audience, upon reading A Leg Up, rather than standing and applauding half-heartedly or wildly, will instead stand and lift their right leg up, quite soberly and stolidly — indeed they should do this even if they have not read or otherwise enjoyed A Leg up –; balancing upon their left foot, as if frozen in a march, they should hold this position for about as long as they would otherwise clap or for about as long as it would have taken them to read A Leg up if that’s what they had done…”

Of course no one need read A LEG UP, that is ridiculous. Yet all might do one better and “read the experience,” as it were, of having one’s leg up, the program continues. One might “read” in this manner without access to or need of paper, without access to or need of writer, of written, of computer, of other reading device or publisher, of internet, of another… (One might hold one’s leg up, in other words, and feel, and not be told, exactly what that is like.)

“Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity,” Debussy wrote… String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10

Un pont aérien — coincées — axe de circulation

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho … The dump is full
Of images. (Stevens, The Man on The Dump)

Corbeil: A decorative basket for the display of flowers or fruits.

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NASA keeps a five millennium catalog of all the eclipses (both solar and lunar) that have occurred or will occur since 1999 B.C. to the year A.D. 3000.… vox

“At his large dinner party –there were about sixty guests– Marcel tried a dangerous stratagem: that of seating people next to each other who normally should have been at each other’s throats. Léon Daudet was surprised to learn that that ‘ravishing young lady’ next to him was the daughter of a well-known Jewish banker. Daudet’s wonder increased as he realized other tables resembled his own, where ‘rabid enemies’ calmly ‘chewed their cold-jellied chicken within two meters of each other.” He attributed this tour de force, which no one else in Paris could have achieved, to the ‘torrents of understanding and good will that emanated from Marcel, spreading in whirlwinds and spirals through the dining room.’ The host was delighted that his risky little experiment in social chemistry had succeeded. He modestly explained to Daudet that everything depended on how smoothly and adroitly the introductions, the first contacts, were carried out. Marcel had done this brilliantly, insulating those seated at each table in generous buffers of his charm.” (Marcel Proust, A Life. William C. Carter. pp.302.)

‘αὐτίκα τεθναίην, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄρ᾽ἔμελλον ἑταίρῳ
κτεινομένῳ ἐπαμῦναι

let me die soon, since I was not destined to come to the aid of my companion while he was slain [Perseus: Greek / English]

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“She painted canvases of an originality that might some day be noted, and in the meantime, since her retirement from teaching, she was combining her painting with travel and trying to evade her neurasthenia through the distraction of making new friends in new places. Perhaps some day she would come out on a kind of triumphant plateau as an artist or as a person or even perhaps both. There might be a period of five or ten years in her life when she would serenely climb over the lightning-shot clouds of her immaturity and the waiting murk of decline. But perhaps is the right word to use. It would all depend on the next two years or so.” (Tennessee Williams, Night of the Iguana.)

Very casually undertaken, the page numbers here refer to the Penguin edition of 2011. “Brown” in On The Road (Jack Kerouac): 77, 80, 82, 88, 89, 146, 188, 193, 216, 226, 260, 263, 266, 270, 271, 273, 280, 280, 283, 284.

“I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.” Lyn Hejinian, My Life (pp.65).

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)

Shakespeare’s will:

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.)

Hamlet [2.2.422-424], Hamlet speaking:

O, old friend! Why, thy face is valanc’d since I saw thee last. Com’st thou to beard me in Denmark?

Beard as a verb has the sense of “confront, oppose with” (see). Valanced is draped or curtained, like a bed. Noun form here.

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.”

Eumenides 746 (smyth)

νῦν ἀγχόνης μοι τέρματ᾽, ἢ φάος βλέπειν.