“Success”
Book 1, chapter 2; Book 2, chapter 8

Characters

1.2 Napoleon (black “entertainment consultant”), Claire (his wife), a writer of memoirs made recently famous (unnamed)

2.8 Carson (married man), His also married co-worker with whom he arranges a date (unnamed). [Also mentioned: Sigmund Freud and Meryl Streep]

General Subject/ Plot

1.2: An affair between a memoirist and the wife of an old drug dealer now entertainment professional ends when the woman confides she has myeloma.

2.8: A triste between two married coworkers begins over their lunch break, after one has told the other about a dream he’s read about.

Motifs

1.2 Napoleon, Claire, suit, white shirt, white wine, Chelsea/ Williamsburg, Gitanes, writer/ memoirist, lovers, Los Angeles.

2.8 In Dreams, Meryl Streep, White blouse, business suit, Jesus. Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams),

Notes

In (1.2) the unnamed memoirist, flush with career success, is emotionally callow or made to feel so, and the chapter ends with his career being stalled in L.A.; in (2.8) Carson achieves a dubious romantic success, initiating an affair with an office colleague in spite of their both being married … Can’t quite unpack what is going on in the written-of dream in (2.8). But it seems that, throughout A Strange Commonplace, there are dreams, written of dreams, and here, a dream that is spoken of having been written about.

Are these to be understood as allegories on success (such as, “the ambition to success is shallow and the results of it fleeting and not one hoped and the successful person is not who you’d like him to be”)? In general, what do the chapter headings tell us about the chapters? Is it a more structural than thematic purpose they serve, bringing chapters together which are otherwise not clearly related? They sometimes too seem to draw attention to an aspect of the story that is not the most descriptive or central important.

“In the Bedroom”
Book 1, chapter 1; Book 2, chapter 18

Characters

1.1: wife and mother (unnamed); her unfaithful husband (unnamed); Janet (wife’s cousin); Ralph (whom the husband is staying with.)

2.18 wife and mother (Anna); her unfaithful husband (Jack); their “slow” child (Joey); Jack’s mistress (Jenny); their neighbors (unnamed).

General Subject/ Plot

1.1: Broken marriage. Straying husband, in letter on kitchen table, asks to be taken back, which the wife views with scorn.

2.18: Broken marriage, domestic violence. Overworked wife of straying husband snaps when he’s late for dinner again and leaves mentally ill child at home alone to go to a bar. Husband, who can’t believe this when he gets back, beats and rapes her.

Motifs

1.1 whiskey; Homburg, Fedora; Happy; white silk scarf with blue polka dots; bottle of worcsteshire sauce; Gerritsen Ave/ *.

2.18 Cold supper; whiskey; 7 and 7; Chesterfields; Jesus; green dress; Nassau country, East Flatbush, Canarsie, Chinatown; teapot

Notes

In both a discussion of the husband’s career prospects, in (1.1) going nowhere, in (2.18) may be improving (after having gone nowhere for a while.)… In the bedroom, the wife finds something of her husband’s she once liked and steps on it; in the bedroom, the husband (who hasn’t touched his wife in the bedroom for sometime) rapes her after he’s beaten her (aroused once she’s been degraded)… The first in the bedroom has a family of three with a daughter, the second with a son.

The Second installment is notable for being a continuation of the first ‘Cold Supper’ –these could easily be two parts of the same episode– which is rare for the book. Both the first “in The Bedroom” and the first “cold supper” include the bottle of Worcestershire sauce.

Floruit
Heptarchy
Mercia Rhodopis
Parian Chronicle Moonlight tower
Charition mimebatik, stew, easement
concretion (bowling ball beach pict) ,
Barents, Kara and Laptev seas,,
Bharatiya Janata Party Sangh
|……………|……………|
|………….|………….|
|…………|…………|
|………..|………..|
|……….|……….|
|………|………|
|……..|……..|
|…….|…….|
|……|……|
|_ _ _ _ _|

segundo mandato, el rumbo, dos tercios, padecer, ambiental

*
« Je refuse cette nomination, car je ne pense pas que ce soit le rôle d’un gouvernement de décider qui est honorable », a-t-il expliqué, ajoutant que l’Etat « ferait bien de se consacrer à la relance de la croissance en France et en Europe » plutôt que de distribuer ces distinctions. [Monde]

du livre à succès, se consacrer, à la relance “ à 1,5 million d’exemplaires” “très fortes ventes”
*
Aegeus, after whom the Aegean *

Waiting For The Robert E. Lee (Robert E. Lee steamboat)

“The guitar was human; the guitar taught me the secret of the guitar; the guitar learned me to play on the guitar. No music-master have I ever had but the guitar. I made a loving friend of it; a heart friend of it. It sings to me as I to it. Love is not all on one side with my guitar.” (Pierre, Melville.)

Micheal laid the Kafka biography over his chest. It was no use. It would require a complete renovation from top to bottom and even then the old failing structure would stand. The loudness, the coarseness, the glumness –not outside but within– the coarseness –now laying with eyes toward the cieling from the couch, now inserting change to get on the bus, now descending the stairs to get the mail –“It’s no use.”

Eboulement d’une falaise à Saint-Jouin-Bruneval * *

I was thinking about the tamarisk the other night again and another odd thing occurred to me about it, namely that in at least three of the mentions of the tamarisk weaponry is somehow involved. I haven’t gone back to the Iliad in a while so this is all a bit foggy and from memory but I believe the following is true:

— in the first mention, a slain Trojan’s armor is concealed in the tamarisk bush;

— in the second, the axle of a chariot gets twisted up in a tamarisk;

— in the third, a spear that has missed its target is lodged in the ground beside a tamarisk.

I would have to go back and read it, but it seems as if they might be notably different sorts of armament as well: shield — chariot — spear…. I don’t believe the fourth mention involves a weapon. There, the tamarisk is named among other plants as being consumed by fire on the bank of the river Xanthos. [Initial note on the tamarisk in Homer is here.] [Update: is fire the ‘weapon’?]

Looking through the introduction to Don Gifford’s annotation of Ulysses I saw stated the basic premise (or one of them) of the David Foster Wallace story Good Old Neon—

We are all aware, for example, that we can think and perceive far more in the course of a few minutes of multi-leveled consciousness than we could spell out in words in as many hours.

It crossed my mind that this could have been part of the inspiration for Wallace’s story, but probably a more interesting consideration it raises involves contrasting how Joyce and Wallace each portrayed thinking as an act in their fiction: Is Wallace’s portrayal of thought in Good Old Neon to be considered an evolution of, a departure from, or essentially the same as, Joyce’s portrayal of thought in Ulysses? Have we learned anything, in the past hundred or five hundred years, about the portrayal of thought and thinking?

Because the Iapetus Ocean was positioned between continental masses that would at a much later time roughly form the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean, it can be seen as a sort of precursor of the Atlantic. The Iapetus Ocean was therefore named for the titan Iapetus, who in Greek mythology was the father of Atlas, after whom the Atlantic Ocean was named… Iapetus (*) (*) (*)

*

“If even the lowest slave and scullion maid can bear to commit suicide, why should not one like myself be able to do what has to be done? But the reason I have not refused to bear these ills and have continued to live, dwelling in vileness and disgrace without taking my leave, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart which I have not been able to express fully, and I am shamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity….” Sima Qian

*

Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law ~ Stevens’ dissent, Bush v. Gore

“Alors le Lepreux l’etreignit, et ses yeux tout a coup prirent une clarte d’etoiles; ses cheveux s’allongerent comme les rais du soleil; le souffle de ses narines avait la douceur des roses; un nuage d’encens s’eleva du foyer, les flots chantataient. Cependant une abondance de delices, une joie surhumaine descendait comme une inondation dans l’ame de Julien, pame; et celui dont les bras le serraient toujours, grandissait, grandissait, touchant de sa tete et de ses pieds les deux murs de la cabane. Le toit s’envola, le firmament se deployait; et Julien monta ver les espaces bleus, face a face avec Notre-Seigneur Jesus, qui l’emportait dans le ciel.”

*
Etreindre: hug, grasp. Prirent: passe simple, prendre. Narine: nostril. Flot: wave. Foyer: hearth. Pâmer: to swoon. Cabane: shed, cabin. Emporter: carry away. (Text with diacritical marks.)

*
“Then the leper hugged him, and all at once his eyes took on the brightness of stars; his hair stretched out like the rays of the sun; the breath from his nostrils had the sweetness of roses; a snow of incense rose from the hearth, the waves sang. At the same time, an abundance of delight, a superhuman joy descended as a flood in the soul of Julien, as it swooned; and the one whose arms still held him grew, grew, touching with his head and feet the two walls of the cabin. The roof flew off, the firmament spread out; and Julien climbed toward the blue spaces, face to face with Our Lord Jesus, who carried him away in the sky.”

Questions/ Notes “Signifying Nothing” [David Foster Wallace]

–TITLE (Why the title?). (1) The narrator an “idiot” who tells a meaningless story? (does the story otherwise suggest Macbeth?) (2) The story does signify something, but about signifying nothing; for example — how treating exceptionally weird outlying events as if they were nothing is a successful strategy for coping with such events (the story concludes— “it was good”.) (3) The story may signify something but the characters themselves do not: they don’t openly express what they’re thinking or feeling. (“His face had zero expression” = his face signifies nothing.)

Plot/ structure. Four Scenes: (I) the protagonist is a young man packing to leave home for the first time when he has a memory of an incredible event from his childhood; (II) in the moving van with his father, in transit to his first living on his own situation, he discloses this memory to his father and becomes enraged at his father’s response; (III) this rage continues for a year during which (living away from home) he doesn’t speak to his parents; (IV) he reconciles with his parents during a dinner at an Italian restaurant.

Time. The narrator (21) is telling of an event that occurred “two years ago”, when he was 19. The event he remembered when he was 19 occurred when he was “around 8 or 9.” We don’t know how much time elapses between the story’s first scene (packing up boxes) and the second (transporting them to the narrator’s first apartment.) But it’s probably brief. “Over a year” then passes before the story’s final scene at the Italian restaurant. (And, I guess, another year passes before he gives this narration.)

Of the passage of time, we know that between the time the narrator was “8 or 9” and the time when he was 19, the TV set had been replaced by an “entertainment center”, while the mother’s TV afghan has remained the same (“the same as in the memory”) (We don’t know at all that the past and the narrator’s memory of the past are the same or rough equivalents –indeed, he is unsure himself). Also his younger sister has come to adopt the same restaurant as her special birthday dinner spot that he once had…. The one specific date mentioned in the story is July Fourth –his sister’s birthday.

Repeated words, phrases, concepts. “Wierd” (very often); “pissed off” (very often); “chicken”; “get the fuck outta here” […] the idea of being expressionless; the idea of not saying anything […]

psychology. A general psychological landscape of the feelings that might attend a young man’s leaving home for the first time –the menacing intercession of his father between him and his TV (he has to leave the house), his mother’s comforting afghan (it’s okay to sit around and watch TV); the narrator’s growing resemblance to an engorged penis (he’s pissed off, red, then pink)… Does “to leave the nest” mean for a young man to “become a dick” in some sense? […] the wax candles, the mention of shitting in public, the feeling of wanting the van to “swallow him whole” … Does the long hair of his sister’s boyfriend correspond to the narrator’s own early obsessive interest in wax candles — a young woman responding to signs of womanhood as a young man does to more masculine signs?

*
Conclusion My baseline view is that the story is a condensed and mysterious form of bildungsroman –a young character encounters and passes over a major hurdle to his personal growth; but, different from traditional narratives of this sort, the challenges the protagonist face more involve troubling “impressions” than concrete physical or professional hurdles.

I’m noticing a sort of parallel construction here with the two phrases of the line each beginning with prepositions (epi and ek although what is the “ek” doing?) chiasmus is it almost? with Odysseus dropping and the night coming and with the night smelling fragrant and Odysseus fighting for his life (as if the night’s fragrance suggested its own continuing struggle to exist?):

And out I fell, fighting for my life, and on came the fragrant smelling night.

εκ δε επεσον θυμηγερεων, επι δ’ αμβροσιη νυξ ηλυθ’.

*
θυμηγερεων: endeavoring to rally one’s spirit, making a fight for life. αμβροσιη: sweet-smelling, fragrant.

*
[And I fell, fighting for my life; and the night came, smelling fragrant.]

*
Lat.: I came out and dropped, nursing a hold on life, and immortal/ night came on..

Fag.: So, fighting for life, I flung myself ashore/ and the godsent, bracing night came on at once.

Stagefright ; Michael Wilding ; Laziest Gal in Town (Porter) ;

prolusion ; adduct, Tulsa Sound, compendious, schlaft

homo sacer ; ; ἐξαπίνης (on a sudden) ; knot / nautical mile ;

***

Cypress (cupressus): (Ep.5.17).Fig tree, wild (caprificus): (Ep.5.18).Fig (ficus): (Ep.16.46).Garlic (allium): (Ep.3.3).Grape-berry (uva): (Ep.2.20).Grape-vine (vitis): (Ep.2.9).Grass (gramen): (Ep.2.17).Hemlock (cicuta): (Ep.3.3).Ivy (hedera): (Ep.15.5).Mallow (malva): “that eases an overloaded body” (Ep.2.68).Oak (ilex): (Ep.2.23); (Ep.10.8); (Ep.15.5), (Ep.16.47).Olive (oliva): (Ep.2.56); (Ep.16.45).Pear (pirum): (Ep.2.19).Poplar (populeus): vine married to(Ep.2.10).Sorrel (lapathum): “that loves the meadow” (Ep.2.57). “Tree” (arbor): (Ep.2.56); tree on hillside (Ep.12.20), (Ep.16.46).

General References: slip, shoot (propago) (Ep.2.9); branches (ramos) (Ep.2.13); fruit tree (pomus) (Ep.2.17), woods (silva) (Ep.2.17), fire wood (lignis) (Ep.2.43), branches of trees (ramis arborum)(Ep.2.56), “blades, leaves” (herba)(Ep.2.57); “salad” (herbis) (Ep.3.7); herba (Ep.5.21), herba and root (radix) (Ep.5.67-68); woods (nemus) (Ep.6.9); woods (silva) (Ep.11.6); woods (silva) (Ep.13.2), “nard” (nardus) (Ep.13.2); Ceres, floreo (Ep.16.43-44), vine-garden (vinea) (Ep.16.44), branch (termes) (Ep.16.45), seed (semen) (Ep.16.55).

Citron (citreus): citron roof (4.1.20). Cypress (cupressus): Achilles compared to (4.6.10). Grape-vine (vitis): (4.5.30). Grass (gramen): ((4.7.1), (4.12.9). Grassy (herbosus): herba (4.2.55). Ivy (hedera): (4.11.4). Laurel (laurus): of Apollo (4.2.9). Oak (quercus): (4.13.10). Oak (ilex): roman people are like (4.4.57). Palm (palma): (4.2.18). Parsley/ celery (apium): (4.11.3). Pine (pinus): Achilles compared to (4.6.10). Pine / Pitch-pine (taeda): (4.4.43). Rose (rosa): (4.10.4). “Spikenard” (costum) *: (4.12.16), (4.12.17). Thyme (thymum): (4.2.29). Tragopogon (come): (4.7.2). “Tree” (arbor): “unmarried” (4.5.30); ((4.7.2).

General References: flos (4.1.32); nemus (4.2.30); leaves (frons) (4.2.36); folium (4.3.7), nemus (4.3.11); frons (4.4.58); Ceres (4.5.18); “crops” (frux) (4.6.39); pomifer, frux (4.7.11); vine-leaf (pampinus)(4.8.33); “blossom, flower” (flos) (4.10.4); garden (hortus) (4.11.2) leafy twig (verbena)(4.11.7).

……….`
………~.
|…….. `
……..
/……X
|………...
|………...
|………..*
modernist platonic dialogues
* .S * # Portable …………….) T
….Chart…. Climate …………..) X
“I want to live“.(“attempt to
Faulkner-Gaddisdelineate a
flaubertinteriorcoincidence”)

|………..|
|………..|
|………..|
|………..|
|………..|
|………..|

………………..

———————1=====——————-====-0———-
………..1………………………………………0
…………..1………………………………..0
………….1……………………………0
………..1…………….0
…..1…0
/B\
|F e T|
lacia|
|u h h|
|r a a|
|b v l|
|o i w|
|d o e|
|y t g|
\B/
t a
e…… c
m……. h
o…….. i
r……… p
d………. a
r……….. p
i………… e
h…………. r
………..

Ash (ornus): (3.27.58). Ash (fraxinus): (3.25.16). Balsam (balanus): (3.29.4). Grape-vine (vitis): Falernian (3.1.44); (3.23.6). Grass (gramen): (3.7.26). Grassy (herbosus): (3.18.9). Laurel (laurus): (3.4.19); (3.14.2); (3.30.16). Myrrh (myrrha): myrrh scented (murreus) (3.14.2). Myrtle (myrtum): (3.4.19); (3.23.16). Oaken (robustus): (3.16.2). Oak (quercus): (3.23.10). Oak (aesculus): (3.10.17). Oak (ilex): (3.13.14), (3.23.10). Palm (palma): (3.20.12). Pine (pinus): to Diana (3.22.5). Rose (rosa): (3.15.15); (3.19.22); (3.29.3). Rosemary (ros marinus): (3.23.15-16). Seaweed (alga): (3.17.10). “Spikenard” (costum) *: (3.1.44). “Tree” (arbor): (3.1.30); (3.4.27); “almost sent to my grave by a–“(3.8.8).

General References: arbustum (3.1.10); vineyard (vinea) (3.1.29); grove (lucus)(3.4.7); leaves (frons) (3.4.12); “glade” (saltus) (3.4.15); “trunks” (truncus)(3.4.55) [see entry for “tree” in book ii]; thicket (dumetum) (3.4.63), woods (silva) (3.4.63); Flower (flos) (3.8.2); turf (caespes) (3.8.4); cork (cortex) (3.8.10); cork (cortex) (3.9.22); nemus, satum (3.10.5-6); woods (sylva) (3.11.13; thicket (fruticetum) (3.12.12); Flower (flos) (3.13.2); “garland” (corona and vitta) (3.14.8,17); flos (3.15.15); silva (3.16.29); woodland (nemus) (3.17.9), leaf (folium) (3.17.9), firwood (lignum) (3.17.14); woods, leaves (sylva, fronds) (3.18.14); “Rosy” (Rhode) (3.19.27); woodland (nemus) (3.22.1); fruit (frux) (3.23.4), fruit bearing (pomifer) (3.23.8), crop (seges) (3.23.6), herbage (herba) (3.23.11), “a sort of grain” (far) (3.23.20); fruit (frux) (3.24.13), Ceres (3.24.13); woodland (nemus) (3.25.2); vine-leaf (pampinus) (3.25.20); Flower (flos)/ garland (corona) (3.27.29-30), pluck (carpere) flowers (flos), (3.27.44), sap (sucus) (3.27.54); flos (3.29.3), Sylvanus, thickets (dumetum) (3.29.23), stock, stem (stirps) (3.29.37).