* *
Pitcairn Islands, New Swabia
la finalité dernière ,Sobre las Olas
alto el fuego, una red encomiable

5 recycling stumpers old but interesting Slate article on recycling [3/23/10].

Shelby County v. Holder (*) / citizens united/ MCCUTCHEON ET AL. v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION Plain of Jars vair los portaaviones estadounidenses “the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms”

whylom / * * letter pound to crane You Are Everything The number of animals killed in the United States is estimated at a million per day… roadkill

Patras; The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz; comorbities; The March To The Sea. Brod. sublation — Moby Dick (production) — RamapoO valley —labile— * A new anti-Semitism rising in France (WP)

lapallissades. glassine.gehenna — Vauban —Oxus ; Formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world [*] — Zosima teaches that people must forgive others by acknowledging their own sins and guilt before others: no sin is isolated, so everyone is responsible for their neighbour’s sins (Zizek)

This is the clearest description I’ve come across of the snap-back/ terms of access provision of the proposed treaty with Iran, which (as it’s described) sounds pretty reasonable:

Iran will also immediately adhere to the Additional Protocol of the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which allows IAEA inspectors to demand access to any site in the country, including military facilities.

Once it submits a request to Iran to visit an “undeclared” facility, the IAEA and Iran will have 14 days to agree on the terms of access. If IAEA concerns are not met within that period, a joint commission made up of the seven negotiating countries — Iran and the United States and its partners — plus the European Union, will have up to seven days to review the dispute and decide what Iran needs to do.

Only five of the eight members need to agree, effectively ensuring that Iran, Russia and China cannot prevail if they vote together. Iran then has three days to implement the decision. If it does not, “then we can begin snap-back” of sanctions, an administration official said.

[Elsewhere: “a good deal“]

…..INFERIOR…....
……ORBITAL………
…….FISSURE…….…
N……..Infra-……..….
u………orbital…………
d……….foramen……….…
ie………..Bannana………..
suit…………Massacre………….
………….Charles…………..
HODDEN………Did…….curseof…
GRAY……………bin………capist………
strid…………….ca………..tranoul…...
ation……………..pi..tow is………………
land………………s…XILLA…………………
MA……………………….c…..FLOATING…………..…….
20………….um………………..……..
……………….……………….………

Life is good; mistakes are made; forgiveness should be often asked for and accepted. Love Life. Life is God.

War and Peace, 1956 w/ Audrey Hepburn (as Natasha), Henry Fonda (as Pierre), and Mel Ferrer (as Prince Andrew — “I was a hater of life”). (Mel Ferrer died in June of ’08 and I recently saw him also as Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises). Also starring Vittorio Gassman and Anita Ekberg, with Herbert Lom, Oskar Homolka, Helmut Dantine, Tullio Carminati, Barry Jones, Milly Vitale, Anna-Maria Ferrero, Wilfrid Lawson, May Britt, Jeremy Brett and John Mills.

Was talking with someone why Absolom was repeated in the title to Absolom Absolom! but the repetition is the bible’s [for example. Sam II; 19:4]:

And the king hid his face; and the king cried out in a great voice, saying, my son Absolom, Absolom my son!

Septuagint (which doesn’t add any thing but still nice to see):

Και ο βασιλευς εκρυψε το προσωπον αυτου και εκραξεν ο βασιλευς φωνη μεγαλη, λεγων, υιε μου Αβεσσαλωμ, Αβεσσαλωμ υιε μου.

One idea: that A Strange Commonplace is essentially a form of picaresque novel –that it is nothing other than an interesting collection of unrelated vignettes– and the “repetitions” serve the same purpose as the hero/ protagonist of the typical picaresque novel, that of tying the various adventures together. In other words, the repetitions serve a structural purpose, and are what make A Strange Commonplace plausible as a single book. (Which may be close to the same as saying — the repetitions are Macguffins.)

Another idea: is that while, as in the forgoing, A Strange Commonplace is essentially a picaresque novel –one unrelated tale followed by another and having “repetitions” instead of a central protagonist– the repetitions were not added after the fact, to provide the structure, but were rather used before the fact, in order to create the vignettes in the first place — as part of a method of composition.

[In this view, Sorrentino, instead of saying, “I’m going to add a borsalino hat to this story so as to suggest a tie-in with this other story with a borsalino,” has established before writing the story, as a formal or informal rule of its composition, that it is to include one or more of these repeated elements. So they are essentially writing prompts for him: objects like the homburg hat and the gabardine dress located Sorrentino among the field of things he is capable of writing of, and so became his staring point.]

In what sense a symbol: I don’t entirely discount the idea of the repetitions serving a more traditional symbolic function, but would argue, first, they are more “signs” which we come to identify with certain ideas (the Grey Homburg, for example, with some sort of male sexual misdeed) than symbols of bottomless significance or “meaning.” And, second, that some sort of accounting needs to be made for the fact that human characters don’t seem to enjoy a privileged existence over objects with respect to their symbolism: that is, if the “grey homburg” is a symbol of something, so is “Claire.” One is not more or less symbol than the other, one is not more or less character than the other.

*

Elsewhere on this site: a Commonplace concordance.

[Sonya’s remarks not too far off from the Pope’s in the recent Encyclical, “but now, it’s not convincing my friend, as I must” …“]

*
“…a shortened form of ‘attire’ (n.). The notion is of the tire as the dressing
tire of the wheel.” Space Fence
Ludlow massacre
Petroleum play
Desquamation
Didicoy. PETM
.

400PPM
..Mal Waldron *
Stuart Murdoch
zanzibar Volubilis
… “But why be wanton?”
Developed from the adverb ‘then’, and not distinguished from it in spelling until c.1700… than

United States. Nietzsche’s distinction between nations that are plants that climb (Greece) and those that are like plants that spread (Rome) …

Ancient cultures and ethnic diversity. How ethnically diverse was Rome? If it was more diverse when it was decaying than when it was growing, or the opposite, what would that speak to? [I.e., how does diversity track against the rise and fall of the Roman Empire — against the rise and fall of other nations and empires.]

— Was Rome more or less diverse than Greece? Than Persia? The Parthians? Were ancient states “diverse” in the same way modern ones can be? (Are modern states, on the whole, diverse?) Was there an ancient conception of diversity? Does diversity mean different things among different cultures or races? (Did diversity in Ancient China mean the same as in Ancient England)

— If Rome was never as diverse in the same sense as the United States (another “spreading plant”) has become, does that provide the United States with a different set of opportunities? might be a somewhat different variety of ‘plant’?

— And races comparable to City-states? Are “spreading plants” more or less diverse than climbing flowering ones […]

“Pauvre et san honneurs la nudité de sa condition avilissait tous les avantages des autres” (Valery of Mallarmé, as quoted by Ciryl Connolly, The Unquiet Grave.)

this terrible school of abnegation is undertaken voluntarily […] to escape the lot of those who have lived their whole life without finding their true selves in themselves

Brothers K.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope…

Fifty hospitals in the United States are charging uninsured consumers more than 10 times the actual cost of patient care, according to research published Monday.…50 U.S. hospitals mark up prices 1000 percent for some patients, study finds [POST]

(An interesting fact raised in the article is that there are about 5,000 hospitals in the U.S. — confirmed here, which says 5,686.)

Pausanias, Desc. of Greece, Laconia, 24. 2:

εστι δε και υδατος ψυχρου κρουνος εκβαλλων εκ πετρας

ψυχρου (ψυχρος, -α, -ον): cold, chill κρουνος, -ou (m): spring, well-head.

*
There is also a spring of cold water flowing out from the rocks.

dispositivos lentos

In the essay “How To Read” Ezra Pound recommends the books below as “a curriculum for instructors, for obstreperous students who wish to annoy dull instructors, for men who haven’t had time for systemized college courses.” He stresses that you have to be careful about the translation and make inroads, even if not big ones, into learning the original language.
_____________________________________

–HOMER, in full

–OVID, and the Latin ‘personal’ poets, Catullus and Propertius.

–A PROVENCAL SONG BOOK– With cross reference to Minnesingers, and to Bion, perhaps thirty poems in all.

–DANTE– ‘And his circle’; that is to say Dante, and thirty poems by his contemporaries, mostly by Guido Cavalcanti.

–VILLON–

[…]

VOLTAIRE– That is to say, some incursion into his critical writings, not into his attempts at fiction and drama, and some dip into his contemporaries (prose).

STENDHAL– [Le Rouge et Le Noir and the first half of La Chartreuse de Parme.]

FLAUBERT (omitting Salambo and the Tentation) — and the Goncourts.

GAUTIER, CORBIERE, RIMBAUD.

Submarine Alert (*). The Narrow Margin (*/ “sixty cent special… strictly poison under the gravy”) from “Tess” enjoyed his quote of Whitman that appeared

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
How curious you are to me!–

and this of Hardy’s own:

Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow creatures existed, to her.

Not so much a concordance as a gathering of key statements on central themes.

Neon: “so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters […]” [179, footnote]; “this little photo’s guy a year ahead of him in school with the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic and athletic excellence and popularity and success […]” [180] [Note: it comes to mind that there a neon sign belonging to a podiatrist’s clinic in The Pale King. See Pale King pp.165.]

Death: “it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies” [143]; “dead or not, Dr. Gustafson knew more about all this than I” [153]; “after we’d both died and were outside linear time and in the process of dramatic change” [163]; “I actually convinced myself that the tongues’ babble was real language and somehow less false than plain English”; “it’s not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die by the way” [166]; “In logical terms, something expressed in words will still have the same ‘cardinality’ but no longer the same ‘ordinality.’ All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer a question of which comes first.” [167]; “A lot of history’s great logicians have ended up killing themselves” [167]; “the reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all” [180];

Time: “outside of the logical sequential clock time we all live by” [151]; “words and chronological time creat all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on” [151]; “if I’m saying words that words and sequential time have nothing to do with it you’re wondering why we’re sitting here in this car using words and taking up you’re increasingly precious time” [152]; “how clumsy and laborious it seems to convey the smallest thing. How much time would you even say has passed” [153]; “all the English that’s been expended on just my head’s partial contents in the tiny interval bewteen then and now” [153]; “that would take too much time to relate in detail” [158]; “the dream takes place in dream time as opposed to waking chronological time”; “the speed with which my whole life blew by like that” [161]; || “the sheer amount of time Dr. Gustafson spent touching and smoothing his mustache” [162]; “after we’d both died and were outside linear time and in the process of dramatic change” [163]; “In logical terms, something expressed in words will still have the same ‘cardinality’ but no longer the same ‘ordinality.’ All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer a question of which comes first.” [167]; “This occurred at 9:17 PM on August 19, 1991, if you want to know the fixed time precisely.” [173]; “it was intensely mental and would take an enormous amount of time to put into words” [174]; “if it was going to hurt I wanted it instant” [176]; “instant” [177]; “because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English” [178]; “What if no time passed at all?*” [179] (w/ footnote discussing past, present and future in terms of a speeding automobile);

Logic: “he thought he’d caught me in some kind of logical contradiction” [146]; “there was a basic logical paradox I called the ‘fraudulence paradox'” [147]; “aren’t I sort of logically contradicting myself right at the start” [152]; “or, in logical terms, that their domans were exhaustive and mutually exlusive” (formula here) [164]; “‘validity’ (which happens also to be a term from formal logic)” [164]; “In logical terms, something expressed in words will still have the same ‘cardinality’ but no longer the same ‘ordinality.’ All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer a question of which comes first.” [167]; “A lot of history’s great logicians have ended up killing themselves” [167]; “The German logician Kant” [173];

Language (words): “the realization didn’t hit me in words” (also around here statements about putting things clumsily, “a long, rushing, clumsy way,” etc., and again on pp. 150) [148]; “just try and put a few seconds’ silences’ flood of thoughts into words.” [150]; “one word after another word English we all communicate with each other with” [151]; “words and chronological time creat all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on […] and yet at the same time English is all we have to understand it” [151]; “if I’m saying words that words and sequential time have nothing to do with it you’re wondering why we’re sitting here in this car using words and taking up you’re increasingly precious time” [152]; “how clumsy and laborious it seems to convey the smallest thing. How much time would you even say has passed” [153]; “all the English that’s been expended on just my head’s partial contents in the tiny interval bewteen then and now” [153]; “I actually convinced myself that the tongues’ babble was real language and somehow less false than plain English”; “it’s not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die by the way” [166]; “In logical terms, something expressed in words will still have the same ‘cardinality’ but no longer the same ‘ordinality.’ All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer a question of which comes first” [167]; “it was intensely mental and would take an enormous amount of time to put into words” [174]; “as a verbal construction I know that’s a cliche” [175]; graffiti you can’t even read [176]; “because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English” [178]; “it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole” [179]; “not another word” [181].

Other words/ themes (to look into potentially): “flash”, “paradox”, “keyhole”, “insect”, the various women’s names, cliche (Neon makes some of the same points about cliche that Infinite Jest does), baseball (American Legion); sexual double-entendres.

The Fraudulence Paradox [147]:

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside — you were fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were.

Other: Berry Paradox, Russell’s paradox, list of logic symbols, respice finem, Moser.

–(Feeling like a fraud is a natural result of trying to communicate in regular linear time what truly occurs in instantaneous all-encompassing time? Is dieing like writing? Writing is like giving full expression to what happens in an instant — that is– life?)

Feel I disagree with this –I feel I do, rather than actually doing so– but can positively confirm a strong sense of disagreement. Why (what words does this ‘strong sense’ evoke):–

The Humanities are proponents of the solitary and so necessarily in conflict with technology, which is a proponent of the “connected” and “linked in”. Technology represents ‘the crowd’ while the humanities represent ‘the one.” (Monarchy could have/ did repeatedly, survive democracy in the ancient world, but could it have/ can it, survive technology today? Can an individual?)

To have a chance of not being utterly decimated in this conflict — supposing it to have already been defeated– and supposing further its decimation to be undesirable, the humanities’ greatest champions should be put forward; and Shakespeare, “being clearly the greatest champion of English literature” and so forth –and of the humanities probably too– should consequently be focused on: it is Shakespeare that ought to meet the Hector of Technology….

In short, the best secular reason one might give for going for a walk (solitude) instead of surfing the web (the crowd) is Shakespeare — concludes, not entirely unreasonably, the voice evoked by this “strong sense.”