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.
_________________________________________

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

…

……q……g
.au………..ra
lia…..b……vel
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
dabashitru
nnel
———————1=====——————-====-0———-
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…

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…………………………………,,,…..o. i v airvair
…………………………………..diorite doff\di/
…………………………………..diorite doff | |
………………………………….diorite doff | |
………………………………………../ /
…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

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS

ON LITERARY COMPOSITION, translation W. RHYS ROBERTS (Perseus)

AUSTERE COMPOSITION

The characteristic feature of the austere arrangement is this : — It requires that the words should be like columns firmly planted and placed in strong positions, so that each word should be seen on every side, and that the parts should be at appreciable distances from one another, being separated by perceptible intervals. It does not in the least shrink from using frequently harsh sound-clashings which jar on the ear ; like blocks of building stone that are laid together unworked, blocks that are not square and smooth, but preserve their natural roughness and irregularity.

It is prone for the most part to expansion by means of great spacious words. It objects to being confined to short syllables, except under occasional stress of necessity. In respect of the words, then, these are the aims which it strives to attain, and to these it adheres. In its clauses it pursues not only these objects but also impressive and stately rhythms, and tries to make its clauses not parallel in structure, or sound, nor slaves to a rigid sequence, but noble, brilliant, free. It wishes them to suggest nature rather than art, and to stir emotion rather than to reflect character. And as to periods, it does not, as a rule, even attempt to compose them in such a way that the sense of each is complete in itself : if it ever drifts into this accidentally, it seeks to emphasize its own un-studied and simple character, neither using any supplementary words which in no way aid the sense, merely in order that the period may be fully rounded off, nor being anxious that the periods should move smoothly or showily, nor nicely calculating them so as to be just sufficient (if you please) for the speaker’s breath, nor taking pains about any other such trifles. Further, the arrangement in question is marked by flexibility in its use of the cases, variety in the employment of figures, few connectives ; it lacks articles, it often disregards natural sequence ; it is anything rather than florid, it is aristocratic, plain-spoken, unvarnished ; an old-world mellowness constitutes its beauty.

*
(Dionysius goes on to say that exemplars of this style include Thucidydes and Pindar.)

–compare stephen dedalus to K. […]
— evaluate the expression “as K is to Kafka, Dedalus is to Joyce” […]

–ask and answer a variant of this question: are there authors for whom there is not a clear proxy of themselves in their fiction? (Is there a “Faulkner Character” in Faulkner’s fiction? a “Shakespeare character” in Shakespeare’s work?) [There does not seem to me to be a “Shakespeare character” (an author character) in Shakespeare’s fiction — he makes no more of a personal appearance his in his work than a writer of sitcoms does in his, I would say. (There are few or no ‘author characters’ in sitcoms, I would guess — television audiences aren’t interested in author characters.)] Maybe the writer of the sonnets is the ‘Shakespeare Character’? Or Hamlet? There are maybe a couple clear ‘Faulkner characters’ in his lesser works, or in one of them I recall, but his best work seems without anything like that, while on the other hand Hemingway’s best work seems never without anything like that, always has the “Hemingway or author character” central.

–Evaluate “as Ishamael is to Melville, K. (or Daedelus) is to Kafka (Joyce)”

–what is the point of such exercises, would you say [the point is not: how do I parse a biography from a novel? the point is: how do we write books? Can the process be uncovered… To answer, where do books come from?]

—he makes no more of a personal appearance his in his work than a writer of sitcoms does in his… I wonder if this may actually be an important idea: sitcoms, genre fiction, commercial fiction –you don’t find writer characters in those books as much– (and “those books” are Shakespeare and Faulkner as much as they are Elmore leanord and L. Ron Hubbard and the rest — whatever is the meaning of “genre fiction.”) Why?

–[Actually: you do see writers personal lives in their sitcoms, Curb Your Enthusiasm/ Seinfeld, for instance.]

…. But the part that feels the most useless to me is people’s vicarious participation in the event, which on the ground is a horrible tragedy, but in cyberspace is flattened to a meme like any other. Millions of people with no connection to Paris or the victims mindlessly throw in their two cents: performative signaling purely for their own selfish benefit, spreading information that is often false and which they have not vetted at all, simply for the sake of making noise [POST]

The Forest and The Trees: Pattern and Meaning in Horace, Odes 1. (Andrew Fenton). A problem this article doesn’t address is that it’s not just the plants that are mentioned with so much variety in the first book of odes, but also the mountains, the bodies of water, and the winds — there is a lot more variety in the first book in general.

On the other hand, I very much liked Fenton’s discussion of the arbol that nearly killed Horace. Horace’s lack of specificity in naming the tree really is quite striking and feels intentional (like it is simply ‘that tree.’)

…………..For if passion continues in a man it …………..
…………..changes his life to nothing but instants …………..
…………..and as passion cunningly serves its de- …………..
…………..luded master, it gradually gains the as- …………..
…………..cendancy until the master serves it like …………..
……… a blind serf! ………. ………………………..

……….. …….. ………… ….~Kierkegaard, “Purity of Heart”
…….. ………………… ……….. ….Steere/ pp.51

Ash, fraisnine, frene.

Apple, pume, pomme.

Eglantine, eglenter, eglantine.

Fir, sapide (forest of fir), sapin.

Flowers, flur, fleur.

Grass, erbe, herbe

Olive, olive, olivier

Orchard, verger, verger

Pine, pin, pin

Saffron, sasfree (verb, past part., burnished with saffron.), safran.

Tree, arbre, arbre

Wheat, ble, ble

Woods, bruill, bois.

Yew, if, if

Portrait of a Lady [634]

‘[…] Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. What have you to care about? You’ve no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it is you’ve nothing to consider. You must save what you can of your life; you mustn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part. It would be an insult to you to assume that you care for the look of the thing, for what people will say, for the bottomless idiocy of the world. We’ve nothing to do with all that; we’re quite out of it; we look at things as they are. You took the great step in coming away; the next is nothing; it’s the natural one. I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life — in going down into the streets if that will help her! I know how you suffer; and that’s why I’m here. We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us, what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this? Such a question is between ourselves — and to say that is to settle it! Were we born to rot in our misery — were we born to be afraid? I never knew you afraid! If you’ll only trust me, how little you will be disappointed! The world’s all before us — the world’s very big. I know something about that.’

If you go to Capital Self-Storage in the morning, you’ll see dozens of doors open a bit, jackets hung up and chairs pulled out as the morning routine begins. There is shaving, pants being ironed, deodorant smeared on armpits…. [POST, 10/22/15]