.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

What do we know of the experience of being ignorant, of how it feels? We know of the experience of being ignorant that it resembles closely the feeling of thinking one knows, the feeling, indeed, of feeling one is omniscient. (Perhaps even the numbness of total unknowing, idiocy, is a sort of presumption of total knowledge… Could this be why plants have not further evolved — because they are a variety of tedious know-it-alls? Plants are too arrogant to evolve.) (Edit: note that this describes those who don’t know they don’t know. Those who do know they don’t know experience not-knowing as a kind of shame and pain.)

Does the feeling of (actually) knowing differ in any way (in many ways?) from the feeling of incorrectly thinking one knows? In the way we just said, yes: ignorance is a far more sweeping feeling of knowing, of knowing all, than is actual knowing. The person who thinks he knows more than he does also thinks that knowing is more than it is. (Perhaps: real knowing isn’t a “feeling” at all, while thinking one knows is.) (And yet knowing, whether correct or incorrect, can often be accompanied by a feeling of victory — I got it right!)

Additionally, although those who know tend to be guarded and cautious about stating as known things they strongly suspect, or even things which are objectively known, there is one class of thing which, through experience, they have come to know with confidence and certainty: and that is the misconceptions of those who only think they know. (That is, experts know even better than they know their field, the errors of amateurs and students of their field.) These — the misconceptions — the knowers may know even better than the thing they hope to know about, we reiterate.

We know you don’t have any special knowledge of the answer to this, we may even suspect the opposite, but why do *you* think Joyce used different writing styles in Ulysses (unlike what he did in Dubliners, for example)? Was it necessary? Was it dilettantish? Was it meaningful?

It was necessary. I would guess he tried something in an ‘orthodox’ style and it didn’t work or interest him, so he tried it in a different style and found it did. (Because something works, I’m inclined to say, it must mean something or implies a meaning. But having said that, I’m not so sure.)

Is your saying yes to absurd requests a statement of the inner Situationist in you? Saying yes to an absurd request is all you can do to fight the logic of what they call “techno-capitalism,” creating within it what you will call a “dangerous air pocket of absurdity.”

Is your saying yes to absurd requests a show of revolt against the fact you can’t say no when you’d like to? Since you can’t say no to this one thing that doesn’t make much sense to you, you’re going to say yes to this other thing which makes even less sense to you, and thus neutralize entirely the value of your assent.

Is it done as a kind of self-skepticism: for the request that you find absurd is liable actually to be quite reasonable and advantageous? (You are absurd; the request that’s been made of you is not actually absurd.)

Is it done to give the appearance of strength, where one is not strong, (for one only has strength to perform requests one finds reasonable) or out of one’s training to be agreeable? (In a word, yes.) Or is it done in an attempt to throw into the face of the asker of the absurd request (who must expect consciously or unconsciously a refusal of the request they must surely guess is completely absurd) the absurdity of their request? (Yes.) Or just good manners? (All of these things will seem a part of it.)

Search topic: “how did capitalist versus communist societies compare with respect to environmental damage?” It was counter-intuitive that people living in want would cause more environmental damage than a society of such consumerism and waste and excess as our own (despite having read previously of some of the careless environmental practices of the Soviets, like dumping spent nuclear reactor rods into the open sea) but the top twenty search returns all seemed to point in that direction (though of course the search engine is a capitalist creation.) Reason given is that western economies were more efficient. Also, consider Chernobyl.

idiote, veule, vendue: “idiotic, spineless, sold.”

Looked up The Iron Gates (geological formation of river Danube), looked up analemma and Philopoemen (‘Greece ceased to bear good men’ after Philopoemen, wrote Pausanius)  Window I close: John Keats’ To Sleep; window I close: instructional video concerning free weights. A “kind of interesting” remark of my own comparing a line from Timon of Athens with a line from Marianne Moore’s The Octopus is also closed — so that I now have just one open blank tab.

Also that night I’d read the Floundering Four section of Gravity’s Rainbow. Having been made to laugh out loud by it, quite uncommon for me, I was also reminded of the ethos that guided my youthful appreciation of music — The Replacements were a sort of Floundering Four — and perhaps here too was something about our own music group that I didn’t get enough at the time. (Oh I floundered in the group but unintentionally and it pained me.)

If there is to be a true resistance to the alliance forged of international military, governmental and corporate interests, this Counterforce must itself be unruly and floundering. You can’t fight order with order but must fight it with an irrational creativeness. Against General Patton you send Director Fellini. (Counterpoint: you need to make sense in a functional Democracy. You need to provide the electorate with a reasonable alternative to the pomp and clamor of an insane political party like one of the ones we have.) Counter-counterpoint: Mussolini and Fellini have something in common, but the latter was joking.

Looked up Pearl, Yangtze, Yellow rivers…. Locally, they are swapping out the names of southern civil war generals for civil rights leaders in schools. I think the way to look at this is as rebranding (heh we’re not a backward civil-war-lovin place, we’re a forward looking diversity lovin place!) but I find myself more in favor of anti-branding, signs that do not signify or signify the unexpected or non-obvious. Foreign or ancient names in foreign and ancient script… Perhaps there should be an official Namer in the county, who is a real professional like a doctor, and whose job is to supply names that don’t signify. (Perhaps very dry comedians could be given this role.)

Looked up Merovingians. Childeric, Childebert, Clothar, Fredegunda, Brunilda, Clovis, The History of The Franks. Turns out the French “Louis” came from “Clovis,” name for royalty among the French for some 1500 years. Looked up Carpathian Mountains — that little corner of the Ukraine it cuts off. Looked up Zagrus Mountains (Iran, Iraq, Turkey) looked up Scandanavian Mountains (formed northern border of Norway and Sweden — believe these to be part of the same Ancient mountain chain comprised also of the Caledonian and Appalachian chains)…

Customer having brought up Horace the other day, I searched for but could not find that ode of his which I liked so well and is so famous, having misremembered the title — Bandusian Fountain. The most memorable part of it, he speaks of intending to sacrifice a goat to the fountain: at the very moment the goat is to enter adulthood and into its own, he says, its blood is to stain the fountain’s crystal water. There is something so very cruel and awful about this image, which Horace doesn’t shrink from, that gives the poem great power.

INTERNAL PLATONIC MONOLOGUE

Can you read and not understand what you’re reading at the same time? (No, surely not.) You would say, then, if you’re looking at a page, but not understanding what is said on that page, that you’re not reading? (Yes.) Well but what about this: suppose you were reading something in a language you didn’t know; or something in a language that you did know but which was highly technical, such as involved the design of rocket engines; or something that was in a language that you knew, and which was not necessarily highly technical, but was especially prickly logically, demanding you keep in mind many things at once, as in a Supreme Court case; I suppose you would agree that in these instances you could actually read the words while not understanding what exactly the words meant? (Yes.) So you would be reading without understanding what you’re reading? (Quite so.) So there seem to be two types of reading, one which recognizes what the words are and another which grasps what the words mean. And when you said before that you disagreed that reading without understanding was reading, you meant that reading to really be reading requires both kinds of understanding. Do you agree with that? (Yes.)

Lack of spiritual advancement: inner and outer impermeable to each other. Lack of spiritual advancement: compulsively checking your blog’s stats, which never register change. Nature takes you to a point then drops you: which was a phrase of Updike’s. Why did men stupefy themselves: which was a question of Tolstoy’s. (They had bad consciences. They did things they knew to be wrong, was why they stupefied themselves, according to Tolstoy.) Prince Andrew’s insight that the pursuit of glory is a kind of living for others. Listening to Shannon’s record tonight while I cook, then I read in The Post: “A physical phenomenon known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation shows that for every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more moisture.” I will feel: liberalism is too sensitive to science, conservatism not enough so, and science has some to learn about how to talk to the public.

The tendency to think of ourselves as the moderns and the ancients as “the start of things” when in fact the reverse is true. (You could perhaps support the idea that We are “the start of things” — as we are the start of a certain understanding of things — but how do you support the idea that the ancients are “moderns”?) “The ancients were basically like us, moderns, Plato could practically be writing for the New Yorker; while we’re just beginning to realize we are not ‘us’ anymore. Probably since WW1 we have not felt quite ourselves — and we are now the true ‘start of things’.” (Idea that the more technology strives to connect us, the more art must strive to disconnect — reactionary anti-AI anti-spellcheck idea of art). Person to whom I recommended Alyosha The Pot really liked Alyosha The Pot…… Oneself as an issuer, not experiencer, of coincidences…. My conservatism: people excited because “this is unprecedented” don’t know history — it’s precedented. My political liberalism: it’s likely that we’re at an agricultural revolution type cataract in history, which has created, and will require yet more, drastic change.

Q: Would you propose there are two ethics that everyone unconsciously tries to adhere to: one of those pretty well summed up by the ten commandments, or some combination of them and Plato, which you could call The Ethic of The Individual or Mind; and the other pretty well exemplified by the practice of not driving recklessly and not littering, and reducing your carbon footprint, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and voting in government elections, which you could call The Ethic of The Collective or the Body (The Body seeming a kind of collective or multiplicity and The Mind seeming a kind of individual or unity)? A: No.

Some people don’t know the Roman numeral for 5 and some people are Edmund Wilson — which, to think of all the reading that has gone into writing this one book, is truly mindboggling to me, yet a matter of course for people who are really concerned with intellectual work. And you are somewhere in between the two and really much closer to the guy who doesn’t know his roman numerals — a comedian. A Comedian, we find, is the designation that most makes sense for you, but so then why are you so serious? Why do you read Edmund Wilson?

What was the House of William The Conqueror? (House of Normandy.) Who was Margaret Power? (Potentially interesting personal history there but offhand I don’t really recall who she is.) If only I would get up before 5 each day, is thought… Additionally I need to clear off this desk: what do I have here (draft of a letter) what do I have here (empty compact disc case, Woodie Guthrie, a “jewel case’ I’m told they’re actually called; Polybius in translation beside a Greek Lexicon; a broken audio speaker, paycheck stubs, commercial correspondence, holiday cards, to-do lists, only one of which is applicable to today, some of which look like they could be applicable to today but are from months ago; and the like.) But if I reliably got up at 5 am, for example, I would assuredly read selections from Walt Whitman in Camden. Opined: “Key to a good day is getting up before the internet.”

Looked up urheimat, acicular, martingale, (“so I had heard that correctly and it is a word.”) How could Jesus have known so much without having studied, it’s asked in The Book of John. It’s because it wasn’t for his own glory, or on the basis of his own authority that he knew. Trying to channel Pindar and winding up sounding like I don’t want to say what (which is what happens when you try to channel Pindar.) A piece of pragmatic writing advice: try putting your last idea first.

Theme of the day across the internet had been: “I look at my stats and ask myself why I do this.”

Blogger I’d known for years put up a personal statement on his blog, quite a departure from his usual. He had taken it down by the next day but it had given me some insight into him.

Looked up ‘bezel’ (bezel of a ring), looked up hudabrastic (refers to English mock heroic verse) looked up louable (French for laudable).

Looked up failson (blushing to discover there is such a word)

Sought out passage in de Tocqueville (I was pretty sure he had said there was no place with less freedom of speech than the United States — had he actually?)

Sought out passage in Gospel of Mathew (I was fairly sure Jesus had taken quite a hardline against divorce — had he though?)

If pride is a joy that comes from thinking more highly of oneself than is just, according to Spinoza, then shame must be thinking more lowly of oneself than is just? (Doesn’t necessarily follow… Does he not make a comment about shame?)

Wrote and published post on blog that The Party of Disappointed People, in the novel The Tunnel, had anticipated The Tea Party, and the novel JR had anticipated Trump, the idea being that literature may have a role to play in political science. Could be used in conjunction with polling.

My status as a failed writer being central to my identity as a worker or “attendant” like Faulkner’s failure as a poet was central to his identity as a novelist, was thought; (but was that really central to his identity as a novelist?) — one foot of the compass was planted firmly in “writing” so that the other could or must trace out annually this circle of occupation and civic duty.

Idea that having established I could not write, I would invent a fictional character, Michael, who could write, and I would carefully transcribe his writing and maybe let it stand for my own.

(When you tried to look at this imaginary person’s writing, however, it was like the hazy writing of a dream and you couldn’t decide if there was actual writing there or if it was only a sort of actor’s prop…. And yet you could somewhat see “Michael” himself, who looked a little like you. Which is itself an important revelation about writing: seeing how autobiographical the work of O’Connor and Kafka turn out to be, for example.)

Idea: what if all of history had been written by the same person. (Idea that in the future, technology will be that same person, that one voice, though there will be different technologies, different computer voices.)

That we have already been heading in that direction: the technological in us having been given more and more expression or “voice.”

Idea that there can be something old-feeling and old-fashioned about ancient history that goes beyond the subject matter, as if only old people wrote ancient history (which is not a criticism but a characterization of “voice.”)

Idea that this is the way Cheever sometimes seems to write a short story: he has a character in view, he writes two or three adventures or situations with that character, then at a certain point he asks himself what the common thread of these situations has been, and that’s his conclusion, that’s the short story.

Idea of reimagining of practice of Kintsugi as “showing one’s code”? (All our thoughts on blogs show nothing of the code that’s behind their ordering and transmission. These lines of code are like the cracks in the pottery that Kintsugi might beautifully highlight.)

Racism/ tribalism kind of the worrisome reciprocal of natural family affection…? both tribalism…? to be without “racism” altogether implying the absence of sympathy towards “one’s own”…?

(… could it be that the extreme polar opposite of racism is alienation? or was racism a sort of artificial tribalism, like football team fandom, and actually also a cause of alienation?)

The idea that our memory fails us as we grow older because we can’t hear it above our self-applause…? that this is also why we even grow deaf…?

The argument that knowledge is not really knowledge until it has gone through the filter of the middle class…? until it is taught to children in public school…?

Idea that knowledge may be used (burning of fossil fuels for energy) but ultimately is not useful (will have unintended consequences a la climate change) unless it is “educatable” — unless it is broadly understood…?

That this might also go for a concept like Evolution…?

(Implying… discovery of truth is only the beginning of having knowledge, which involves further an intergenerational process of absorbing it….?) And the reason why is that there will be political ramifications.

Idea that Homer must have been a Trojan…? That great literature is the bequest of the defeated and humbled? (Weil says something very close to this in Poem of Force.) Calls to mind the amazing cinema of post-war Japan and Germany. Art from loss and pain. Wilde: “suffering wears no mask.”

Preferring sickness over health not per se but because there is another sickness which sickness undermines, but which health supports…? (Aka addiction, habituation)

Principle of a style of interior design conceived: a blend of purely functional and purely aesthetic elements such that you can’t tell which is which, everything camoflauged in the house.

Principle of exterior architecture conceived: favorite parts of diverse structures cut and pasted into one.

Thinking earlier today of how different it must have been to read the bible (or anything) in say the seventh century vs today. You read a Penguin edition and you have no idea how many layers upon layers of editors and scribes and translators and the decisions they have made are between you and the original writer. A Princess and the pea feeling may unavoidably arise. What would the Bible (or Plato or Sophocles) be to you in that older form?

Humility: read more contemporaries. Ennobling to read the greats while humbling to encounter the depth of talent among peers. Humility: warding off Dunning-Kreuger effect.

Woke with the question, why did Greil Marcus think music was so important? (Marcus actually answers this himself — Lipstick Traces, pp.140). Looked up charivari and its pronunciation. Read articles on how to distinguish fake wheat from real whole wheat products. Looked up Nazi in Wikipedia to re-establish a point I’ve been making with people, that the Nazi inclusion of “socialism” in their name was mere window-dressing to appeal to workers, and did not indicate real belief in socialist principles (which I believe I got from Richard Evans); however the wiki page seems to assert that they did believe in socialist principles for non-Jewish Germans, so now I don’t know. (Hitler was against Unions and redistribution of property, was my understanding — capitalist positions.) Article in Times about a fossil graveyard in Nevada; why were there so many ichthyosaur fossils in the same place? (Seems to have been a sort of ichthyosaur spawning ground.)

Masks and The Korematsu Case: not quite getting the joke

Feeling that one’s own reasoning comes shy of proper understanding where it hasn’t for others, others who are perhaps smarter and yet who have examined the same evidence/ read the same papers. Two recent examples of this.

— the Korematsu case “had to be wrong,” yet my reading of the majority and minority opinions indicated to me the stronger argument prevailed, that it was the correct judgment, even if the policy was wrong;

— wearing masks “certainly seemed the thing to do,” before the vaccine, yet I couldn’t reason to that position on the basis alone of the evidence I’d found for it.

To be clear, I was pretty sure that the Korematsu decision was wrong and that wearing masks was right but why was I unable to reason my way to those judgments? (i) One possibility was — I simply didn’t have all the information. There’s probably a ton of information that circulates around a Supreme Court opinion, for example, that doesn’t appear in the Justices’ opinions, and it may well be that a lot of that was prejudicial in the Korematsu case. Another possibility was (ii) — reason itself only took you so far in important moments, which often occurred on the fly. Then you had either to trust in someone or in some feeling you found in yourself. (iii) A third possibility, and this I found the most likely, was that I was like a person not getting the joke. I had all the information with which to arrive at the right idea of things, but was unable to look at that information in the right way, an intelligent way, so I didn’t understand it: I didn’t laugh at the joke/ didn’t see that Korematsu was obviously wrongly decided. All one can do is see that other people are laughing and go along, a person in my position might reasonably think.

The reason Korematsu came up as something to read was 9/11 and the resultant issue about screening people of SW Asian descent at airports. There, I thought the reason against having any sort of racially discriminatory policy was that, generally speaking, terrorism was multi-cultural, often white. But if we were openly at war with Saudi Arabia, say, would I be against screening people of that descent? Openly at war with Quebec, would I be against screening Canadians with French-looking last names at airports?

Checking Stats: A “salient symbol”

…bloggers, tweeters, podcasters, youtubers, looking at their stats and asking themselves and their audience, why again am I doing this? which got me to thinking why am I doing this and got me to thinking how people cavil that Big Tech is directing traffic from their blogs when the truth is so much worse than that, that people just don’t care about their blog, that people just out-and-out personally don’t like them. And got me to thinking how, while I thought keeping a blog was still worthwhile to do, or that I was inclined to do it whether or not it was worthwhile, it indicated also I’d fallen in a rut again. The zero stats quite parallel to the arms so often on the bakery case these days, staring out at the “zero stats” of Columbia Pike, the relentless eventless street of the weekday afternoon.

Zero stats. I studied, if you could call it study; and I wrote, if you could call that writing; and I edited and polished and posted what I wrote; and I checked the stats, which showed nothing, no interest from the general public; and I checked the stats, which showed the same; and I checked the stats still later, which showed nothing still, the same, no change, or maybe some robot passing through, some person who knew me from high school. And it gets me to thinking that while the internet and my blog stats were not responsible for my rut, which predated the internet, they were, today, the most salient symbols of it.

Looked up Duel, the early Spielberg film… Why did I distrust my own instincts and opinions as much as I did? (It was correct and smart to distrust ones own opinions, so maybe that was it, or maybe you were just lucky, or maybe you didn’t do it nearly enough) …. Looked up nasalize, to be sure it was a word, and paratonnere, French for lightning rod. It turned out stitch, the noun, and stick, the verb, were related, but I logged off before discovering or fully figuring out how that might have related to stick, the noun.

Libertarian customer (after I’d spoken approvingly of Lenin) had said it’s easy to see the monsters of history because they’re the ones who try to save humanity (which offers some insight, maybe, into the enthusiasm for the demonstratively in-it-for-himself-alone-leaders like Trump among libertarians), with which I tried to counter with that quote of Lenin’s — “was what the revolutionists were doing in 1917 so bad given what the capitalists were doing in 1917? Who,” Lenin asked, “were the worst monsters in 1917?” But I granted I didn’t know much about Lenin’s life beyond what Edmund Wilson reports in To The Finland Station. (Libertarian customer’s parents, from Belarus, had not liked the Tsar much either, he’d conceded — which was why they’d emigrated to the States.)

PERSONAL LIBRARY ISSUES

Satanic Verses going to Goodwill (same location I got it from — like a library book), Herodotus going to Goodwill (hard to imagine I’ll read Herodotus again), hardbound modern library edition of Plutarch is the same size and color as the hard cover modern library edition of Moby Dick, so those two will go together somewhere, though they are hard to see against the shelves’ unpainted wood. Having read that cover to cover in the Bracey’s basement, THE OLD BOXING ROOM, these days a kitchenette for the elderly parents. Perhaps in the wood shelf painted white they’ll be seen together. Canadian History For Dummies can go. A Derrida Reader can go. Scores to Beehtoven’s 8th and 9th can go but I am keeping Don Giovanni: an impressive wide soft blue object I’m unlikely to reopen. John Updike’s poems, Freud can go. A Strange Commonplace, which I love and made a study of, and is slim, I shall keep in the white painted bookshelf. Another copy of Herodotus: this one I’ll keep. But I can’t possibly make serious headway returning my books to the shelves until I find the boxes with my Loebs, whose green-ness is intended to “tie the room together.” Found two red ones, but I’ve given up on Latin, but one of them is Horace, of whom I made a “study.” They will look good somewhere, two and red: “Twoness and redness.” Perhaps in between the hardbound modern library editions, with their “twoness and brownness.”

Heard of and sought out info about Jimmy Carter’s experience at the Chalk River Laboratories nuclear meltdown: had never heard of that before and had forgotten he knew nuclear engineering. Read his Crisis in Confidence speech. Looked up sonnet crown. Saw some writing of mine that had some spirit in it juxtaposed with some writing of mine that didn’t and asked, what was spirit? (At the time I was writing the spiritless writing, I’m fairly sure that the spiritlessness of it was exactly what I approved of about it: for what we call “spirit” is perjorative and subjective, I’m sure I was thinking, something like that.)

Needing to kill a few minutes I arbitrarily pulled something from my shelves, which turned out to be Henry Miller’s book on Rimbaud, The Time of The Assassins. How this brought back to me ideas I’d entertained twenty and thirty years ago! There was no useful place in the world for the genius. The genius was too unique and inventive to be employed in any bourgeois labor. The genius had to do the work of a dishwasher, of a stevedore, to get by, roaming the earth on an empty stomach… sort of thing.

What did I think of such ideas now? That perhaps the world had changed somewhat since Miller had written this book: it had grown better at identifying and supporting geniuses — those people in the top one percent of their field — but now tended disproportionately to neglect the artists of the top ten or twenty percent, those who were very talented and/or hard-working but not of the very first rank. Not genius but a broader ecosystem of the arts seemed to struggle with excessive hurdles today, was my opinion. (Though it was also somewhat paradoxically true that the world seemed less interested in Genius today than it was in its opposite and in making sure everyone’s point of view was represented.)

I notice in the physical book that my younger self has underlined the word recidivist and written in the margins “one who relapses.” And I think to myself that this might be the stuff of a good Legend of Sisyphus remake: in which over the course of a man’s life he knows the meaning of the word recidivist right up until the very moment that he reads it or hears it in conversation, whereupon all knowledge of it totally vanishes — he may even think it means revanchist for a while — and he has to look it up again. After he has looked it up, he knows it until the next time he needs it, at which point the cycle repeats. But this only occurs for forty years, let’s say, — no need to drag it out through eternity.

The idea that Graphic Novels represent a sort of culture of populism. (It would be interesting: if art for leftists had become what politics is for rightists — populist.)

Q: populism in government has a negative connotation as it implies that the will of the people supersedes the rule of law. Is there an analogue to the rule of law in culture? Or is culture free to be whatever it wants to be? (Perhaps the French Academy offers a vision of a sort of cultural rule of law. Perhaps a vision of a populist cultural rule of law is Disney. Corporate culture generally indicates the will of the people, but a sclerotic form of it.)

Idea that past, present and future, are to be understood as rates, as speeds. The future is light speed and a limiting velocity — in the process of slowing in the present — moving more and more slowly in the past, — where there exists, somewhere, a full stop. (Can we find, in our written histories, evidence of a Red Shift?)

Wouldn’t it be unexpected if after five plus centuries of spiritual and intellectual turmoil, “we all” (that is, western society) went back to being Christian Under a Single Universal Church again, the Reformation having failed, Science having failed, Enlightenment having failed, Capitalism having failed, Democracy having failed, Technology having failed, because all the theories and inventions and efficiencies and marvels don’t add up to a reason for people in general to take heart and behave and have hope and live. (This is somewhat Naptha’s position in Magic Mountain. Michel Houelbec will seem also to argue in that line in Elementary Particles.)

Michael Gerson, a couple days before Christmas, on the unexpected quality of hope as seen in the nativity story: the king of the Jews was not a warrior but a child; the real grounds for hope and change were not “secret wish fulfillment,” that the world and my life would be as I’ve wanted it — that I didn’t have cancer, that I was a success — but would reveal we’ve been wishing for the wrong things — would result in a change of heart.

Idea that climate change is the anti-technology or its representative, ying-zig to technology’s yang-zag, and that whatever efficiencies Technology creates today, the Anti-Technology will undue over time…. We don’t realize it’s Technology telling us this, but there is no greater evil, according to New Technology, than Old Technology.

(Counterpoint: Climate change is an anti-technology like Hector is an anti-hero, destined to fail against the divine Achilles of Human Know-How, which is to have its own, more unexpected source of demise.)

Looked up caritative (which I first had as caritive.) Caritative means charitable. While having this phrase of Shakespeare’s on my mind: “the gilden puddle that beasts did cough at.” Recalled l’etang was the French word for pond. (And I felt, after all this looking up, I of course hadn’t made myself the least bit cultured or knowledgeable or capable of writing that ineffable “something” that would qualify my life as a true life. Somehow the information I’d gathered never penetrated to develop me, or me as a writer. I was Howie on ‘The Fall Guy’, I was a Jeopardy! contestant….)

“Feels good to punctuate correctly,” I observe… Looked up Longmen Grottoes (a quite old religious site in China) curious about its English sounding name (Longmenshan is a mountain range in China.) Gross fixed capital formation: having read the definition twice I am still not sure what it is — will come back to it. (Am not yet persuaded that the understanding of it is “out of my star” so I will come back.) Checking my blog stats again which have been kind of ruined by what I’m guessing is some kind of bot: on roughly a weekly basis it will randomly hit twice on one of my weird blog posts, then leave a bunch of hits. Would be funny if it was Chat-GTP3, vacuuming up my information, and that this was the way one left one’s imprint on the ages.

Caritative was a word that arose in the book of a long time acquaintance of mine, a scholar. Amazing how much reading has gone into the making of this fairly small book. How is it, I’m made to wonder, that people who are not historians think that they know things about history? The ignoramuses at the store, for example, god bless em, who listen to podcasts and think they know something about history, but who haven’t even a proper idea of what it is to really know, it often seems.

That episode from Star Trek is suddenly recalled, when the crew is caught in a time loop, and the way to get out of it is if they communicate a message from one loop to the other. Can history do such a thing and does it know what message to send? My own days, too, like such a loop.

Astronaut Kate’s floating blond hair tassels back and forth. (Just came back from watching a live performance of Parliament, Cosmic Slop from 1976. Song about woman prostituting herself to provide for her family. Gary Shider I think is the name of the man in the diaper. George Clinton I think coming out toward the end, energetically, perhaps a little too energetically, clapping in time. “Powerful performance,” is thought.)

Astronaut Kate Rubins has pressurized the hatch. Mission control has already gotten together for a celebratory group photo. (I think it is their sounds that one has been hearing throughout the broadcast, shuffling and chatting, a background noise behind the two lady commenters, public relations types sitting behind a news-style desk, one from NASA one from SPACEX, — the laughter, the muttering, the echoic chair scraping and paper shifting of Mission Control.) mission control a kind of interesting phrase with its two nouns

First four crew mission. Think announcer just said they were over Idaho but I was at the time writing this sentence and wondered if what I thought I had heard could be right: that is, had been writing this sentence which now follows the event that formerly it preceded and was disrupted by: that I was checking the weather for tomorrow: windier, colder, but not bad, “don’t imagine I’ll need any special dress for my walk,” is thought. (Looking at a view of the docked Dragon, solar panels glaring, crew getting dressed, crew checking pressure locks.)

UP NEXT: HATCH OPENING (written beneath camera view of the hatch). (also, I’m cooking now — mixed frozen vegetables with fresh but precut prewashed Kale and tofu cubes. Soft deep wafting smell of the cooking rice.)

Looked up un nuit blanche, French for “a sleepless night.” Adduced arguments in defense of my use of paper towels: (a) “we choose our battles,” (b) I have had, for a long time, quite a low carbon footprint for a U.S. Citizen, (c) “nothing beats a good paper towel”; (d) your real sin with respect to the environment is water consumption. (True and the real problem, which is obfuscated by this towel). Looked up “degraded curiosity rovers wheels.”(Consider: They say “why don’t you get out there and show them” but then he gets out there and shows them that showing anyone wasn’t necessarily the best idea… So instead why don’t I “stay in here and do nothing”? Why don’t I “show” no one?) why don’t I collapse

Looked up 2 Peter 3:8, interesting: to God not only is a thousand years as a day but a day is as a thousand years — a thousand pages — Ulysses. A day that lasts a thousand years qua a day that is a large careful book.

INSIGHT is an interesting word: seems to have started out meaning “mental vision”, the sight one has in the mind — imagination, I suppose — and later came to mean the mind’s penetrating understanding of things exterior to it.

Pindar (tr. Lattimore): “the end of empty hopes is despair.”

Looked up aula regia, “jawn”, Grace O’Malley. Looked up Lou Reed’s “The Gun,” Thelonius Monk’s Criss Cross (stumbled on wild version of Criss Cross by percussionist Chris Dave). Looked up Maximus Planudes & Macellum of Pozzuoli… I looked up well known Roman emperors and obscure English rock stars and literary French words and basic Physics concepts. . . . I looked up rimbambante, I looked up inlassablement.

Having thought you were “doing the work” only to discover that those you know to be really “doing the work” are exceedingly puzzled by “the work” that you say you’ve done. This, they say, not quite believing, is your… work? (Because you do, at least, talk like one familiar with actual work, and have thus created the expectation you have accomplished actual work.)

Idea that the return of the podesta — the version from the Middle Ages, of hiring someone to run your chaotic town — might be a good option for some countries today with poor governance issues/ intense tribalism. However, there’s often a split among people in those very communities about whether internal tribalism or foreign influence is the real source of their difficulty with self-governance.

The deliberations of the powerless. The peasants of Seven Samurai.

Talon is heel in French. Pulse is poul. Nutation is English, derived from Latin, meaning with reference to nodding. Gazouiller is French again meaning to chirp. “Passerines” are most of all birds — are birds known for perching – and have for their feet three toes in the front and one in the back.

Pertinax was the Roman emperor after Commodus and the first emperor in The Year of Five Emperors (A.D. 193). Mississipi-in-Africa later became incorporated into Liberia. Arden of Faversham: Renaissance true crime drama that Shakespeare may have written parts of. (Was there a Van Morrison song about “Arden”?) Mongolian Revolution of 1990: peaceful. Result of Soviet crack-up. al-Lat: pre-Mohammed Arabian god. Scotopic: “relating to or denoting seeing in dim light.” Sans gêne is useful: lack of constraint, brazenness. Inland customs line (part of history of India), εἰσφέρειν (word giving me trouble), Aaron Van Langevelde (election worker who took a stand against his own party.) The Holocene and Pleistocene and Miocene and Eocene and the Triassic-Jurrassic extinction event and the Pennsylvanian sub-period and the BIG 5 Mass Extinctions and the Des Plaines Crater and Sundance Sea, I looked up. Ioannis Metaxas I looked up. And William Fitzwilliam Owen, Francis Guy, Patrick Heron. And Thaïs “most famous for instigating the burning of Persepolis.”

Praying first thing this morning between the stair’s bannisters. Previous day I had read in my shop notes how the Baptist customer’s interpretation of the idea that real life seemed “on the other side of the glass” (as some of us had been talking about) was that it was heaven that was on the other side: heaven was so totally unlike the world as this born poor customer’d encountered it and he felt that acutely. Death was what divided us from reality. My born-comfortable thinking had been there was a wall of flesh and instinct, filled with evolution, that kept me from living a life I considered real. Maybe I could see it his way: and it was, as an idea, an interesting feeling. On earth as it is in heaven took on a different ring.

The idea of the Internet is that the enemy is poverty: it’s poverty and ignorance that’s created God and Heaven, the agents of continued poverty. Wealth and science don’t solve everything, says the internet, but so much would change were it to be more evenly distributed. And you, who have benefited so much from wealth and science, you are so selfish to entertain thoughts of heaven while not doing more to distribute the world’s wealth more evenly. What you have to do is simple and doesn’t involve prayer, though you can pray if you like, says the internet: do the obvious.

MLK: the reason you, a free person, do not feel free, is that you’re not working for the freedom of others, who are not. You are not working for justice.

Looked up Edith Wharton, one of those authors I had been supposed to read but blown off in highschool. (About the high society = boring, I presumptuously thought at the time. ) Does it bother you, as it bothers me, that you don’t really understand science? The problem is that there are truths unavailable to you because of intellectual limitations. This is different than with Christianity for example where you don’t need to be a theologian to understand God, maybe the opposite.

Idea that the argument against St. Francis not saving even food from one day to the next was to be found in the story of Joseph and the Pharoh’s dreams — the seven years of feast and famine and of providing, during the years of plenty, for the years of famine.

The argument against St. Francis not saving (as I read it in the New Yorker) is that the world operates in lengthy cycles that a mere day-by-day faithfulness doesn’t quite apprehend…?

One wished to grab their personality in their arms — which only weighed as much as a papier-mâché statue of yourself — and stand it to the side of you and stalk off from it. “Take up your bed and walk.”

Setting down toothbrush on sink rim, the dollop of freshly drawn paste is now being pulled with glacial slowness crosswise from the bristles. I hadn’t meant to brush my teeth at all, I have realized, but to change my shirt, which is strewn across the tank of the toilet, this was why I’d entered the bathroom; and so I have left the brush in this unaccomplished state.

We know you don’t know anything about Samuel Beckett but what do you think is important about Samuel Beckett?

Obviously the style but less obviously the content. Malone is Job, not in the sense that he is reduced from a great position to a bereft one, but in that both his sufferings and his gratifications are pathetically meager, life is a monotonous beat of pathetic meagerness, yet he bears up.

Looked up sea of Paratethys (ancient sea), looked up Hammett (Wim Wenders film, Ross Thomas involved in script) and singular they, which made sense to me as a gender-neutral third singular. But I think you can also see he as a masculine/ gender neutral pronoun.

Looked up Paratethys again and stared at the map of very ancient Europe. A gut was a straight or channel subject to strong tidal currents. (It takes me a while, looking at wikipedia’s explanatory map, to distinguish which is the water and which the land of the map.) Looked up Temptation with a Lot o’ Soul, which was a record I had bought and liked: “All I Need”, “Know I’m Losing You”, “No More Water in The Well,” should put that on now, in fact I will. Yesterday it was Squeezing Out Sparks, today it is With a Lot o’ Soul: 1967, sound quality improving as I set the phone down on Draper’s Iliad, book 1. Iliad With a Lot o’ Soul…? (No.)

Looked up Second Battle of Algeciras. This was why I had looked up “gut” as a geographical feature: this was a naval battle during the Napoleonic wars that occurred in the gut of Gibraltar (which is also known as the straight of Gibraltar.) Name Gibraltar of Arabic origin…. ça n’en finit plus: it never ends, lapsus calami: slip of the pen…..

Looked up Candles in the Rain and Day of the Dupes and Sandtown and Timosthenes and Joseph Hirshhorn and recalled the saying the wise know useful things not many. (The most useful things were principles and laws I took it, while I spent all this time tracking down details I hadn’t heard of.) Reading Swann’s Way today in which the young narrator, believing in the other-worldly powers of his father, thinks he can turn the narrator into a real writer, simply by willing it; but other times the narrator is made to reflect that maybe his father has nothing to do with whether or not he can write or be a writer: perhaps the narrator will just grow old and die like other people, only he will have had a reputation for not being able to write. So funny that passage. Which is what we face.

Lying in a foreign vs. a native tongue. How “what Raskalnikov and Proust do are completely opposite.” The experience of attempting to relocate in a text the place where one had stopped reading.

“Lack of traction” was something I would internally complain about at this time of life. It wasn’t surprising that I hadn’t made much progress as a writer. It was a little surprising that I had actually made no progress as a writer. “I hadn’t even found someone of similar talents or views with whom to exchange ideas, a semblable, a friend,” was something I would think, complain of, which was evidently not a sort of writing problem, but a sort of personal problem, I was coming to see. There was something about “traction” I didn’t want perhaps. There was possibly a mental health problem involved. It very much resembled an relationship I had with a woman: something I both obsessed over and was trying to avoid. This had something to do with avoiding real life, which I yet needed. Ozu’s Yokiko would come to mind.

How the words implicit in ancient languages have a superficial resemblance to the words I unintentionally omit when I write English.

That is, a Greek sentence of five words might be ten words rendered into English (because individually the words contain more information). And an English sentence of mine, which might be five words, needs an additional five for it to actually sound like English — because, through inattention mainly, I inadvertently omit them.

Idea that conservatism involves an imperfection and wrongness, which conservatives get beyond, like a limp, while liberalism involves a perfection and rightness that undermines them, a smirk.

Next read in horror an article through to the end — a talented author on the verge of achieving stardom, at the pinnacle of authorial success, has been accused of sexual assaults. What were the allegations exactly? were they serious, do they seem plausible? is what I’m curious to know. You have to read the article to the end to find out, and indeed, the allegations do seem to be quite serious and plausible.

(You would like for people to be praised or chastised in public for the public good or evil they do, their good or bad books; but instead their private good and evil can become such a factor, excusing and elevating poor work, while diminishing good — is, I suppose, the principle behind my alarm and interest at seeing something of this kind.)

PERSONAL LIBRARY CONCERNS

Robert Creeley’s Selected had made it through my first book purge but now I hesitated before returning it to a shelf, having never quite felt in sympathy with it. Then I read a couple poems, saw something in them I couldn’t outright dismiss, and placed it between Kierkegaard’s Selected Diaries and Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Chinese Poems. There was a paper beneath it, old note in my handwriting from years ago, it looks like. “The coldness of the patrician: had I, in trying to be less cold, become more plebeian?” That could go. Stupidity could go. I was a plebeian in the worst way (though, yes, somewhat reserved). Then there was another such note, fallen out from the book, and then another, and I tossed them without reading. (Not a hypocrite, perhaps not enough of a hypocrite: never take others to task for their stupid remarks and so suffer, too, my own feeble comments.)

Kept Creeley, kept the Goodwill-purchased Crime & Punishment and the Garnett Karamazov. (Later I was lying in the cot in the center of the room, reading and napping, thinking “if I could only walk out of here brain damaged. If when I walked out of this house tomorrow I was like Father Zosima’s brother….” Utterly stupid thoughts.) Then I was noticing the shelf where I’ve placed all my authors’ biographies: Whitman, Joyce, Crane, Kafka, Faulkner, Coleridge, O’Hara, O’ Connor, Melville, a couple more. Big names along the spine in most cases. I like how the green of the Loebs, which are not a uniform green, some newer than others and some without their dustcovers, are working out. These are placed near the biographies.

In the process of organizing it… there are four books shelves. I’ve established that the one to the left of the cot is to be full of old books and European books, and the one to the right of the cot is to be filled with new books, American books; but if Europe and the U.S. is a literary East and West, then what is to be the literary North and South? My immediate answer would be that the North is the East (is Asian writing) and the South is “minorities”: that is, the under-represented people of all lands. As it stands, the bookshelf in the “South” contains, on the topmost areas, a mishmash of books I’ve had forever, and on the bottom-most shelves, books I feel I should read for some reason or other — because I’ve been given them, because I’ve bought them, because they are books that everyone who has a claim to reading ought to have read — but which I have not yet read for some reason or other. (“North” today: Old and New European books.) (Yes, I sleep on a cot. No, I don’t have a life.)

Fact is: I’m never going to get rid of enough books if I haven’t asked myself seriously why it is important owning books in the first place. And the one obvious thing about that, which I’m constantly rejecting as impossible, is that it’s all for show.

Youtube of Lev Yashin’s saves, having come across his name and story in a tweet. Having inadvertently come across quite an aggregate of my spiritless writings in one place. (Generally two senses in which I will find my writing to be “terrible”: “like a kid” and “dispirited.” Though even the writing I will consider to be good will not seem to pertain to what “actual writing” is about). Wandering about, thinking of the Gorgias…. When a goalkeeper ceases to be tormented by the shots he’s let by, said Lev Yashin, he’s done. The one time in my life I played keeper, it makes me think of. I remember punching the ball out of the penalty area to cheers, and I’m startled to think how my life was once that. How do I think my life will go from here? (a job of some kind, muddle through to no cheers.)

Penguin editions of The Trial and Death of Socrates, The Analects of Confucius and The Tao of Lao Tzu together on the shelf.

Mailer’s take on American Psycho was correct, is my first thought on seeing the spine on the book of his essays on the shelf beside The Tao.

My recollection of American Psycho is that it implies a connection between the superficiality and the sadism of the protagonist, but makes no attempt to connect them. Mailer wasn’t satisfied by this and neither was I. On the other hand, it reminds of the side by side narratives of Light in August and Wild Palms. Those don’t obviously connect, yet that’s okay. Psycho is the same but with themes instead of plots.

I had somehow confused The Yellow and The Yangtze rivers, and was now thinking of how much different it must be to be a Chinese person with this entirely different geography and tradition around them — for whom the Yangtze is something familiar and The Mississippi something strange– and which the word “mississipi” might evoke nothing, or a river, but for me evokes richly many ideas of a geographic, social, cultural, political kind – accents and Faulkner and plantations and civil rights battles.

Q: when had that Coleridge phrase that begins “water water everywhere” last come up? A: this is very stupid… I was taking the laundry out of the drier in my undergarments and discovered a quarter in the drum but had no pockets to put it in (this is so very stupid but the question was raised) — but in my laundry basket there were loads of pockets and so etc. the phrase popped up.

But before that it was in the Wikipedia entry for Coleridge, which was at pains to point out that the phrase concludes not with “but not a drop to drink” — as is frequently said — but with “nor any drop to drink,” which I thought was a rather fine distinction for wikipedia to make, because any phrase so popular and well known as that one is bound to arrive at one in a slightly battered or mangled condition. Plus the ‘nor’ sounds odd to modern ears which we expect to be preceded by a neither or other negative (e.g., “But there wasn’t water for washing, nor any drop to drink.”)

Thought of dementia while I failed to understand the French I studied. In what sense was the confusion I faced the confusion the dementia sufferer faced?

Internal Platonic Dialogue about Nature

I have the idea that there’s no “wriggle room” in nature’s laws unless you consider something like this “wriggle room”: that water boils at 100 Celsius at one altitude but not another — what do you think of my idea?

I don’t understand… there isn’t a law that says that water must boil at 100 degrees c. There is a law that says it will under certain conditions boil at 100 degrees. The law says also, under different conditions, it will boil at different temperatures. What do you mean?

Well I don’t know, this was never my strong subject.

Well, it’s not my strong subject either, but I think this is related to what they call the Gas Laws or… something referring to Gas.

Okay but I guess now I remember what I’m saying. Science’s laws never “wriggle” or if they “wriggle” they are not science. But Nature, or Nature’s Laws do wriggle, in that how much heat is required to make a liquid boil varies widely depending on where you are and what kind of liquid…. Am I making sense? And science tamps down on that and says to Nature, you needn’t bother with the wriggling, because we see how you do. And of course Nature does not stop wriggling, but is just putting on a show at this point and still knows it’s been had.

I see what you mean. And I would add to it that, by making it stop wriggling in one place, we make Nature wriggle in another. That’s one of Nature Laws we haven’t set down yet. So that our very knowing of Nature’s laws, which should make it still, instead, over time, make it squirm or “wriggle” only in a different place.

principle. If it is poetry if it is tragedy if it is philosophy if it is genre fiction if it is children’s fiction or non fiction or traditional or experimental, if it is politics even or especially, a philosophy of pragmatism and “whatever works.”

There is a sense in which pragmatism is always provisional: we’ll do the thing that works until we find the thing that must work or that most works. When we find that thing which, whether it works or not, seems very important, we will perhaps reassess our pragmatism.

Reading of St. Anselm giving away his patrimony, thinking of Faulkner’s Uncle Ike, who did that, an acknowledgement of the sin of slavery and our depredation of the forests; whereas I was downwardly mobile because of a hangup let’s call it and would think of that as a virtue.

The time when I got an inheritance I thought about this explicitly a lot: there was an idea to give it to Charity (with the idea that that would do me good, not anyone else good) and the idea to amass it into as big a pile as possible (with the idea that that would be fun, a video game) but trying to amass it rather filled me with anxiety or suspense — not a very good game — and giving it en masse away always carried with it the intimation of being stupid, rather than good — this was obviously performative and a desperate avoidance of self-care — when what I was really hoping for was the “transformative.” (Today I think: whatever you may do with money it is unlikely to be “transformative” in the way you want it to be, unless it keeps you from being poor. Also: St. Anselm, in giving up his inheritance, had traded one life for another. He hadn’t traded one life for nothing.) I wound up, after going this and that way in my thoughts, being basically prudent, buying index funds. I notice that great artists, however, tend to spend outside their means: this goes for Joyce, who was poor, and for Proust, who was rich, and for Baudelaire, who’d received an inheritance.

A restatement of Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato: that the dialogues should be considered as interior. Books seemed to be from the heavens down but were really from the genes up.

Looked up George Washington Carver (was he the same figure I’d learned of as a youth, or had I or my perspective changed or had the opinion of him changed) looked up Battle of Aspern-Elling (where Marshal Jean Lannes died — having been reading the memoires of his then aide-de-camp.) 

Self, not as one that experiences coincidences, but as one that produces coincidences.

Pressures on an upwardly mobile individual: individuals of the upper class, through exclusiveness, push back; individuals of the under classes, through inclusiveness, claw back.

Bertrand Russel seems pretty squarely to identify the belief in an after life with dark historical periods. I see that among the believers I know — people wishing for a better life — but I see also people who can’t accept the death of family members as a real end to them.

King Philip the Fifth was not King Philip the Second. King Philip the fifth was later to become a tyrant, but while he was young, successful and good, rooted out his plotting courtiers and scored great victories in the Greek’s Social Wars.

Father Zosima’s brother — “a day is sufficient to experience all happiness.” Ecclesiastes 9:10: — because we can’t do anything when we’re in the grave, apply yourself with vigor to whatever you find to do in life. Luke 9:12, 62 is like Dylan’s “Don’t look back.”

The word Duck (the animal) actually came from verb Duck (to dive) … Bernicia, California . . . Hoggar Mountains,. . The genitourinary system. . . .

Who is in the Minority?

The idea of being a minority writer not because one is among an ethnic minority, and not because you have an unpopular viewpoint, and not because you are a singular genius, but because, though one writes, which implies an idea of self-worth, one is, as it were, an under-confident person. Which is kind of the crux with everybody. If you can be what you are, with confidence, it doesn’t matter what you are. If you can’t be what you are with confidence, then you’re in the minority, whoever you are. Rich as you are, privileged as you are, if you aren’t that with confidence, you are not privileged and you are not rich. If you are no one at all, how can you be someone privileged and rich?

(Counterargument: wouldn’t you say that under-confident people are actually in the majority, being more numerous than confident ones, regardless of how it may make them feel? Moreover, what you’ve said is not true as stated: for while it is perhaps not appreciated how much the under-confident person can undermine himself, yet, except in special cases, he is still likely to receive great advantages from his wealth and privilege if he is indeed possessed of those things. Finally, as we’ve discussed before, we don’t really believe in what you are calling an under-confident person: we believe that there are people who don’t possess confidence in the right measure and who will therefore be under-confident in some instances, overconfident in others.)

Looked up CW (content warning), recalled being a child and asking myself, why did my parents watch news? and asked myself — why did I now not watch but follow the news? Looked up Cippus… Irbut Fair… Szeged (third largest city in Hungary at the time. Internet: why did people care so much about San Francisco? Only the fourth most populous city in California.)

I watch all 9 minutes of the Hearns- Haggler fight, which I might have seen as a teen or pre-teen. I notice how Hearns smiles at Haggler, as if utterly unphased by Haggler, right up to the moment that his knees buckle and he falls into the referee’s arms.

Looked up ‘draa’ and ‘barchan’: a draa is essentially a very large dune while a barchan is a dune with a crescent shape. Qur’ an today: stressing God’s mercifulness. Spinoza today (as I speculatively interpret it): God is behind us, in Nature, not before us, in heaven. There’s no free will, nothing to be done; understanding God is something (the only thing) that can actually be done. (Russell, as I recall, loves Spinoza but dismisses his geometric method.)

Oedipous at Colonus: can’t recall a thing about it but it comes to mind as an example of a dramatic work whose protagonist’s defining drama is rather behind him, like Achilles in Hades, Odysseus in Egypt, Helen in The Odyssey.

My ideas, being dumb and foolish, needing to be ridiculed, but preferably before I express them, is thought. Henry Miller: having come to identify him with something amorphous and New Age in our culture — “spirituality” — yet, dipping into Sexus one night, it could almost have been my own writing. A dream in which I see myself as a spoiled exceptionally petulant 11 year old child on video. I weep and am enraged at the camera, what do you expect me to do? (I’m unable to please people and it’s clear that this is the only thing I imagine there is to do. If I can’t please you what do you expect me to do? If I can’t please people, what is there to do?) Artist whom I knew as Prince: peace is more than the absence of war. Artist George Jones: I’ve had choices. Looked up apocope, Lava Treasure and The Battle of Fort Sanders.

Internet, where amazing things like peat slippage may be learned of. In the real world there is no peat slippage nearby, nor may one learn of it easily or nearby. Simultaneously Dragon Crew has surpassed Wave Point One on its journey to the International Space Station, about 200 m distant. About thirty minutes from docking, wave point 2 coming up. Looking at the astronauts at the controls, space travel is no longer like the first Star Wars, with its limited special effects and tin foil, or like the shuttle program, with its knobs and tiles, but is today like watching a movie about space travel in the future, very calm, like driving a luxury car. DRAGON Crew very close now, looking for soft capture. Camera very close between the nearing objects. Almost 700 miles over the planet, 17,000 miles per hour, the two vessels just ten meters apart.

The coup de grace of My Mix tonight: the grey blob of concentrated cream of mushroom soup dumped upon the sauteed vegetables, retaining for a time its cylindrical shape, as well as the impressions of the can’s ringed interior.

Disimprove looked up, which means to make worse. Not to not improve – to actually make worse.  Those selfless and noble gasses of whom you see examples everyday, nurses and doctors and lawyers and teachers and electricians, selfless and noble and the gas that keeps our society hovering magically above the ground, a levitation of professionalism, of those who do their jobs, inexplicably raising our life and the nation’s every morning out of pure muck. They are indeed like the dawn bathing our world in a luster. Thank you. That popular music critic having maybe found escape from the deadening elitist social society in which he’d been raised (John Cheever World) in exciting deviant popular music (Sex Pistols) while I found escape from the deadening popular culture (Three’s Company) in which I was raised, in not elitist but certainly high brow literature (Moby Dick)…? “I shall be Chateaubriand or nothing,” had said Hugo and he had become, basically, Chateaubriand.

(i) I had a repeated skin condition on my hand from work. (ii) I bought a vaseline product, which worked a little, but the roommate cut off a bit of her aloe plant and put its ichor on the sore. “That’s plant blood,” I said. (iii) Plant blood seemed to work better than the Vaseline product (which itself of course contained “plant blood”) but it occurred to me this was the essential meaning of the idea in Genesis that God gave to Man dominion over the plants and animals: the meaning was — yes, you’re allowed to use plant blood; yes your pain and injury means more than the plants’ pain and injury. And I found it appealing that Genesis would concern itself with an ethical question so basic it is almost invisible: is it permitted for us to use nature to serve ourselves?

Idea. Maybe Dashiell Hammett’s work was more anti-literary, a la Bob Dylan’s, than it was literary or non-literary — for his sardonic metaphors and impatience with elaborate description and for his being a yarn teller.

Idea that you, who do not know your audience, also do not know if you’re joking or not. If you only knew who you were addressing, your tone would appropriately slant. But since you don’t, everything remains neutral, objective, intellectual, mere “ideas” toward which you take no stand. (No: you do know you’re a comedian, yet you think, just like one of those movie kung fu masters, whose fighting style is built on drunkeness, and who manages to neutralize all of his opponents in combat despite looking at every moment as if he is about to fall down and pass out, you will surprisingly say something now and then that may be truth. That’s what you think.) Counter argument: that’s what all comedians think. That they’re actually saying something quite serious.

Some people don’t want there to be heroes, don’t want there to have to be heroes; they want systems that work so that individuals won’t have to make sacrifices. Some people want there to be heroes and think they have to be heroes themselves: systems are fine but inevitably break down, and then you need extraordinary people and/or ordinary people acting extraordinarily — and these exist.

antartica’s longest river is only about twenty miles long I come across

Idea that the artwork gives the artist standing on which to speak of things unrelated to art. What did Tolstoy really know about Napoleon? But because he wrote War and Peace we care.

Made pensive by a typo, as I am so often: “there is is” for “there it is.”

King Lear’s retinue of knights with a direct modern analogue to Grampa not being allowed to drive. Why two cars, Grandpa, why not one? why not none? We can take care of you.

Looked up George Somers. Looked up “richissime”, french for extremely rich, and hippocras, a spiced wine from the middle ages.

Positively Fourth Street

Bob Dylan’s music I think was the first place I encountered the title of an artwork not directly stating the subject of the artwork. Positively Fourth Street, for example, in no way suggests the content of the song by that name, but is an interesting phrase that intriguingly alludes to a personal significance for the song writer.

Faulkner’s titles are often like that — If I Forget Thee Jerusalem — though the allusions are not personal but literary. The Chapters of Ulysses are a little like that (although technically there aren’t chapter headings) — they tease out certain aspects of the chapter, or invite a certain perspective on them.

I suppose the title Ulysses is itself like that, or is that, having basically nothing to do with the book itself, while providing an important lens on it. Imagine if it had instead been called “Bloom,” how it would lose its heroic/ mock heroic and mythic suggestion.

I have no idea what kind of title is Le Rouge et Le Noir…. Noticing CCR’s Glory Be and The Velvets What Goes On sound very similar…. Noticing the dirt on the computer screen which gives the impression of being punctuation…. Having not previously realized that cardboard paper towel and toilet tissue rolls were “incommensurable in their diameter” as I put it. They don’t fit inside each other.

Again the idea that Pessoa threw his writing in the trunk and O Hara in a desk and Dickinson in a trunk and Kafka and many others in what was as good as a trunk, or perhaps even actually a trunk, and how putting one’s own writing on the internet was surprisingly like putting it in a trunk in terms of how much it was actually seen but surprisingly like a public forum in the way it could diminish one’s writing (you were playing to a stadium crowd though you knew the stadium to be empty) — and yet one did it, not all that dedicated, it would seem.

Idea: Internet writing will always lack the marinade that only the trunk can provide, the trunk is the spit in which the writing is roast; nor can one read marinade (that is, with marinade) on the internet. The Trunk of Marinade — that is, the marinade of not merely not having an audience but of having a fortress set up against an audience.

Idea that deism is the foundational American Religion. (Perhaps not the deepest spiritual outlook, as I understood it, but it felt very American, and I was American, and maybe that was the outward bound of who an American could spiritually be. “Science — but God.” “Be pragmatic, have middle class values, get ahead, use common sense — but God.”)

Idea that biographical details are hostile to imaginative acts, but that imagination must yet be based on an author’s personal experience. Thus Conrad, a sailor, will write of ships; and Proust, a socialite, of society; but this does not, and actually can not, have anything to do with their biography. Proust, Conrad, can not have thought about their work — this is me; (whereas I do more or less think of this as “me” and thus, of this work, as memoir. Proust actually addresses this issue in his discussion of reading in “Combray.”)

Story concept: there’s an author so good-natured that, rather than writing anything, he writes everything about himself and his works that every biographer and critic and fan of his work might wish to know — and there never arise any of those.

Looked up abseiling, suppediate, intromittent. Looked up Dakota fire pit. Looked up Marie de France, and others.

When will I learn at last this ancient Greek word which means “to receive favorably, accept”? (I may have just done it by actually giving expression to my obduracy, though perhaps on editing this years from now I will find I have continued to deceive myself on this point.) [Editing this years from then I do believe I recall the word, which is δέχομαι, a common word which I ought to have committed to memory years ago.] (Looked up obdurancy, which is how I first spelled it, which I guess works, but the word is not what I want. Obdurant suggests a willed resistance to the right answer.) Observation: My spelling is bad in several senses but the most interesting resembles the errors of poor technology: not like me spelling phonetically where that isn’t appropriate — parkay for parquet — but as if the computer misheard me or made a bad prediction of what I meant — ‘than’ for ‘that’ or ‘eye sore’ when I mean ‘I’m so’ — when I am the computer too.

Saw someone question the need to begin a question with “question:” Looked like the gifts I’d gotten for my niece and nephew wouldn’t arrive in time for the holidays: coin purses shaped like tacos, in which I would put a gift. My thought, such as I could form it, was that Stevens, dealing with ideas, produces something substantial in feeling, whereas what I was writing seemed essentially factual and journalistic, and there was nothing either above or beneath it to make it more substantial in feeling.

A modern remake of The Clouds considered — The Blogs.

Idea that the reason Africa remains so tribal and resistant to the rule of law, is that it’s never been conquered in the way, say, Britain was conquered by Rome, which intrusion acted somewhat as primer coat for later civilizations. (Intensely hypothetical, but if Rome’s empire had only extended directly south what would be the effect today?)

(Condensed idea: subjugation is a prerequisite for the rule of law.)

Looked up Pele’s Hair, Berlin (Lou Reed album) — hadn’t realized it was Jack Bruce on bass. Sympotic was the adjectival form of symposium and Kottabos was an Ancient Greek game of throwing the sediment of one’s empty wine cup at a target. To note: boy’s transition from spoiled rich kid to okay rich kid in Captains Courageous (film) A hypocrite in Ancient Greece was an actor. (Is it peculiar that Jesus rails against the “hypocrites”? Do the prophets rail against pretenders and fakers in the same terms? Did Buddha?) Looked up scotopic and billabong and asetose. Looked up Lester Maddox and Amanda Peterson and Midrash Rabba and 1993 cruise missile strikes on Iraq… ….Can’t name the wood of which the door is comprised, can’t identify the pattern of its engraved rectilineal figures, or know how to describe the angle to which it is opened…. I forget the presence of the shadows and reflections in the picture, I say nothing of the jostled state of the rugs… And this is what writing is, to notice and know the names of these things. I should be able to notice and identify everything.

If the Greek Gods could be combined into one god would they be the equal of Yahweh? Would the Greek myths equal the OT? No, I don’t know exactly what I mean by “equal” in those questions, in what sense equal, but something like this comes to mind:

Genesis = The Myths / Homer
Exodus/ Kings etc = The plays/ The Histories
Prophets = Philosophers

The only way I can explain a number of my anomalies, or even my general condition, is (though it’s not stated as an aspiration, which is how you sometimes find it) ‘rock n roll.’ Kid stuff in a sense, but with ideas that penetrate the script of the mainstream view. Perhaps rock n roll simply indicates the ad hoc, and is the opposite of the carefully engineered (though that’s become really untrue.)

Notion: I associate rock n roll with progressive values but can rock really represent “progress” from classical music while being so much more rudimentary? Counter notion: rock n roll is essentially democratic and youth oriented, not politically progressive; it doesn’t represent progress in music but is the music of a society, perhaps, that has technologically progressed.

The ab in abandonment had made me think of the ob in obvious, which was something I’d looked up the previous day. What was obvious was something in the way, in the viam, in the road. . . . . Thinking of ob by the fridge, thinking of ab by the bed.

Listening to song Carrot Rope I’m puzzled, as I so often am by song lyrics, by how the lyrics “don’t make sense” — whether in an absolute way or merely to me — and yet will nevertheless seem “to work” so well. And by “work” I mean that I’m not troubled by the possibility that the lyrics might mean nothing or that they mean something stupid or untrue; I feel they must mean something interesting. Carrot Rope to me is a nice catchy song that “makes no sense,” like quite a lot of Astral Weeks, for example, or Gimme Shelter, whereas a nice catchy song like Love for Sale does “make sense.” I can clearly understand the meaning of the lyrics of Love for Sale.

I perform a search online about Carrot Rope’s lyrics. I come across three interpretations, the third of which was so brilliant it must be the answer or mainly the answer — a carrot rope is a wedding ring, made of carets, pulling you like a leash. It explains many of the obscure parts of the lyrics. I doubt that Astral Weeks or Gimme Shelter is like this, with a key, but I find now in this song an underlying idea that definitively holds these lyrics up.

Reading, finished Chandler’s book on Napoleon, which I envisioned as a companion to rereading War & Peace (had Napoleon been a great man?) which I’ve started. Greek, Lysias. French, de Maupassant. Writing again — that ideal I’ve had of the epiphany seems to have lost meaning for me — there’s nothing really important about each moment of life, but seizing on one, not letting it get away, may be an important artistic conceit or device or prompt in the post-Proust-Joyce era. But the spiritual significance no longer feels there — a day that is like a thousand years to God. To find just one year in any day.

War & Peace: touched by the piety of Mary Bolkonsky. Prince Andrew must pray for the capacity to love. (The only other recourse for the unloving is hating.) Also, the soldier who, in his panic, deliberately looks for people where he knows them not to be, my very self. Release of prayer: how the right humility might lead us out of fear.

… chaos and significance of the political situation; uncertainty surrounding the climate situation;  magnitude of that and human complacency regarding it; newspaper headlines — seem like evidence of a vacancy within me writ large: a projection of the interior I can’t see; through the lens of the news, upon the wall of historical events, myself

Time of The Assassins. return it to a spot between The Possessed and the French Le Rouge et Le Noir. (But it doesn’t fit vertically there, so it’s going to have to go between Open Boat and Other Stories, dollar edition, and Silent China, Lu Xun, David’s gift.) Something also needs to be done about Polybius: will put him where the Gravity’s Rainbow was.

In that position, Polybius has Gaddis (Recognitions) on the left and a long row of Faulkner on the right, but then, since he is taller than Gaddis, and since Gaddis is far taller than the Vintage editions of Faulkner, I wedge him between Infinite Jest and Gaddis instead. But the black spine of the Digireads.com edition of Polybius clashes too terribly with the orange of the spine of Infinite Jest and the pale blue of The Recognitions so I reinsert it to the right of The Recognitions again so that its black goes with the black of the Vintage Faulkners. Anyway, this shelf has a very 20th/ 21st century vibe except with only a few green Loebs at the end, so the Pynchon I have removed from here will probably go back where it was.

HOW AM I TO UNDERSTAND THIS

I had been in my twenties, it was during the election of 2000 or during the administration of George Bush, that I first began to think of Presidential nominees and Presidents as exaggerated portraits of myself. When I saw George W. Bush in over his head, cavalier about matters of extreme consequence, stumbling over words, presenting himself as the “historical president,” I thought with chagrin — that is me.

When, on the other hand, I saw Barack Obama nimbly getting ahead of issues, making courageous unpopular choices, and saw him explain complicated problems in a simple, moving way, I thought with regret — this was not me. (Only on those rare occasions when I thought Barack Obama behaved a little badly did I think — well that is kind of me.)

With Trump and Clinton it only got worse. Clinton was the person who had “done the work”: she had read everything and weighed everything and knew the issues inside and out. While Trump, who was too uninterested and undisciplined to do the work, traded on his comic personality, which had nothing to do with his performance of the job…. That was me.

But it wasn’t conservativism in my soul that made me see myself in Republican politicians, Trump had made me realize, it was populism — trading the serious and difficult for the trifling and pleasing. And what could be a worse thing to have in one’s soul?

Then the feeling (as I’m unloading the dishwasher): that I’m like one of those scientists in the movies who, having been exposed to some new pathogen or chemical, keep a journal of the progress of the disease: “it has now been forty years since my initial exposure and I continue to exhibit the emotional development I had at the moment of first exposure, which seems only to burrow deeper and deeper,” I might write. “The feeling is akin to walking around in a large baby suit …. I would guess the pathogen to either inhibit hormones or neutralize their influence, but will need to perform more tests.”

Pathogen of national affluence, pathogen of environmental damage, pathogen of technology, pathogen of what was once called sin… But since I have a sibling who’s been exposed to nearly the exact same environmental factors, who developed normally, what are we to say? Isn’t there some power above you constantly enjoining you to grow up, to take personal responsibility — and you refuse? (Looked up Viviani’s theorem and Speed Reading and Walden’s Ridge.) Someone had asked me the other day why I didn’t have kids, did I know the answer? (I look up arrested development but that seems not to be aan actual clinical psychological thing.)

Listening to records and hearing the bass player do the same things I would do, first John Cale now Van Morrison. Not a whole lot you can do I guess.

Idea that the reason I write is that I resent the thing I’m actually good at — being a caring and attentive person — Idea that the reason I don’t write well is weakness, immorality.

Idea. That I will die in my sixties, and have that much time to make the blobs of my writing congeal into one blob.

Idea. To the question, “how to put these pieces, or blobs, of such diverse conceptions together?” the answer — “you just put them (thrust them, mash them,) together.” The answer “The Pensees.”

Idea. It really doesn’t matter if the blobs congeal, you now realize, though you’ve made it your day to day work. There is no question now of “writing something.”

Idea that Writing, also carried with it that kind of centripetal or centrifugal feeling — one rushes on as if one might ever reach the center or escape it — but this is exactly the trick, the deep groove of your personality, that always keeps you in the exact same orbit, the exact same distance from the same center.

Looked up Greek  ἐπιεικῶς, which came up in a French-Greek dictionary as être en état convenable then looked up convenable in a French-English dictionary which came up as “suitable.” I breathed out, turned my neck around so that I heard all its joints (but “from inside”), looked at my glass and asked myself when had you just heard that word “suitable” then recalled I had looked up a word that had appeared in Justice Alito’s leaked abortion opinion that meant “suitable,” a word which I wanted to say was appositive, but which wasn’t that, I felt sure. I reread through the draft opinion looking for the word, but couldn’t find it. I checked a thesaurus under “appropriate,” and couldn’t find it. (Apposite had, I guess, after all been the word.)

Tried to remember, and “make a part of myself through remembering,” what the smart customer had said the other day about test taking — you had to be humble, he had said, about taking tests. And wasn’t the carelessness I’d evinced from childhood on with respect to intellectual issues, in failing to carry a 1 while performing simple addition, for example, the same carelessness I evinced today, in failing to identify a Greek verb as passive, and the same carelessness that, when I wrote, would frequently omit the most important word from the sentence, or misspell a word as its homophone, as I just now did, writing ‘edition’ for ‘addition,’ and this the result of a haste borne out of a sort of arrogance or lack of humility? It was true that people who were good at solving problems were not necessarily persons who were known for humility — surgeons for example — yet that was with respect to people that they were not humble, while with respect to problems they were indeed humble — not “I got this,” but “what is this” is the attitude. [Reflecting on this years later, I’m guessing what the customer meant was that test problems will often seem to have an easy solution — which is a trap, for which one should be watchful — but turn out to be tricky.] [Editing this years later still, I’ve learned from Reiner Stach that Kafka’s notebooks had a lot of omissions and mistakes too; for instance he had nearly misspelled The Castle as The Lap, which are close in German.]

Certainly, there was a ceiling to my intelligence that was a function of my mind’s ability to understand, but beneath that there was another ceiling, which could be made higher or lower based upon how humble and patient with the subject matter I was; by how much I paid attention.

Looked up demimonde and welter: I had no idea that you didn’t pronounce the ‘s’ in demesne. That the word really meant ‘domain’ and was pronounced almost like that. Looked up Corrie ten Boom, and declared it was obvious I had “nothing to do with knowledge, with literacy, I made such basic mistakes.” ( I was a comedian of knowledge, a basic mistake maker.)

Idea that Joyce, over his career, was trying to do what it took the whole Homeric tradition, over centuries, to accomplish, which was possible to do owing to technological advancements. Idea that a criticism made by modern physics and economics of classical physics and economics is that the classical represents as a universal case what is in fact only a specific case. Idea that I haven’t seen modern ethics criticize ancient ethics on similar grounds, but it’s probably out there. (I suppose you could say multi-culturalism is that.)

(Interesting the way Literature has sought to flirt with Science. Is Melville’s “Cetology” supposed to be a real natural study? Is “Anatomy of Melancholy” real science/ psychology?) Looked up edentulous and paused over it. (Related edentate means never having had teeth, like an anteater.) Echoic referred to an echo and decretal to a decree and attemptive meant “disposed to attempt.” Nicolas Poussin’s Martyrdom of Erasmus resembled too much a modern medical procedure but, as it appeared on wikipedia, was visually arrestingly crowded. Hemingway, of The Sun Also Rises, would like one not to shy from the sight of the goring of horses. Did you think Shakespeare was an author like Mailer, writing under pressure, under deadlines, or an author working under only his own constraint, a gentleman author? [Former.] Looked up U.S.–Philippines War. Looked up “ring-chiastic composition,” “epithalamic.” Thought of people who were both intellectually brilliant and emotionally warm. Excellent question: what triggers my “funny voice” — now I’m talking about cucumbers in my “funny interior voice” — why? (What is the relationship between theater and schizophrenia? And are all or most of the psychological disorders observable in milder forms in our everyday mentality?) George Jones had such voices.

Wadded paper towel in the room corner which I purposefully don’t pick up. Always something to be done so why not leave it undone this time, why not let the room fill up with towels? Regardless of what you do, it doesn’t end….. And I do leave it but I pick it up the next time I pass, which undoubtedly is the trigger for the next round of chores.

How could you contrast the courage involved in physical combat with the courage involved in exposing something personal about yourself? Did these forms of courage work counter to each other or did they support and enable each other? The essential importance of the LGBTQ movement didn’t have to do with sexuality or with gender, for it was a movement in which every person belonged, but with the goal of being your actual self in this world.

(That’s always been ‘out there’ too for me as a reason to write: there was no way I could ever “be myself” in the world — maybe just in this corner of it then — the corner of this page here. And maybe having found myself there, in writing, I could continue to push it forward into still more physical and public regions.)

To what extent did young people’s incoherent writing resemble old people’s incoherent speaking? (In both cases the linkages between concepts would often seem present — i.e., not really incoherent — but submerged.)

Looked up autoficition. Montaigne says the only person who should write about his life, to be read, is “the good man”: how did you stand with respect to that comment?

idea. It’s the bad writing of the best writers that most discloses their biographical selves.

(The basis for Writers’ fiction is frequently their personal experience, but when they write poorly, they have failed to make it transcendent, they have simply, unwittingly reported on themselves.)

Looked up Ascapart and Bevis of Hampton (Brittish mythology), looked up Charles Aznavour (French language singer) and Siphonodendron (ancient plant life) and corner radii (principle of urban planning). Phrase cucullus non facit monachum had come up. Proverbial. I had thought it was quoted in Measure for Measure but it actually comes up in Twelfth Night. The clothes don’t make the man, you may say. Did I have an idea that was new to me today? (no) Looked up ‘dike’ and ‘solus rex.’

Idea that “nature vs. nurture” is a false opposition because “nature” is just “nurture” over time. If you expose a population to positive or negative conditions for generations that will produce positive or negative attributes in those populations for generations, would be my guess. Can the nurturing or neglect of an individual overwhelm the generational advantages or disadvantages of their population? Can an individual break out of the influence of its generation?

Alcohol enhances ability to write (yes, complex) watching a movie diminishes capacity to write (yes) strenuous exercise diminishes capacity to write (yes) walking enhances or increases capacity to write (yes, complex) socializing decreases capacity to write (insufficient data… yes) writing personally enhances capacity to write impersonally (yes) reading will tend to result in writing (yes)

Q: tendency to exaggerate our own experiences and times above those of others notwithstanding, what if the 20th century really does represent some sort of agricultural revolution type order of change?

Looked up Kathiawar, peninsula in North West India, coastal town, Ghandi birthplace. Ghandi biography recalled, Charles Ives biography recalled, perform internet search for “Fellini biography” and suddenly the cat leaps up behind me, a scrambling of paws and claws against the faux leather of the couch back. Charges up from behind me and growls terribly with hunger, a really quite demanding and hideous growl. Not the medicinal food this time, is probably the meaning of her hideous growl — serious hunger.

Maxim: people often attribute others’ failures to their weaknesses, but more often these exist on parallel tracks.

What is the literary evidence for the idea of human progress? If you were to restrict your inquiry to Western literature, from say Homer to Joyce, what would be the evidence that humankind had (positively, negatively, laterally) changed during that time?

(Question occurs to me because I was thinking of the idea of “not living a real life” as being a question of more recent literature, not to be found in ancient or even renaissance sources.)

Somewhat related, in Homer’s eyes, how strange would Crime and Punishment have been? Would “he” have scoffed and said it was nonsense, would “he” have said it was a great advance on his own art? Would he have said it was “ahead of its time”?

Split second decision required. The clothes I just threw onto the toilet tank are about to slip off. I will need either to (a) rush now to ensure that they don’t drop (b) or not rush and stoop to pick them up later. (I rush to ensure they don’t drop.)

Idea. The artwork is the avatar of the artist; he wants it to stand for him. But the artwork itself contains an avatar, which gives us a glimpse of the real artist, apart from his work — how Joyce really looks in life — Daedulus. The artist holds up his work – this is me – while the work holds up his avatar — this is him. And writings in which the author and avatar are the same — a la Montaigne– are personal letters, essays, memoirs.

Idea that “The Humanities”, unlike the STEM fields, rather than working toward a presumed positive, like more heat efficient buildings, is rather a reducer of a known negative, like “stupidity.”

(I would say this formulation doesn’t quite work. What first occurs to me to say is that all education, whether it concerns Calculus or the battle armor of ancient Roman centurions, works to reduce the known negative of ignorance about a particular thing. So given that, how does an English class reduce ignorance in a way that a Math class does not?)

Good point. Another idea I was having was that Democracy and The Humanities were somehow linked, and it wasn’t entirely strange that you seem them both under threat now…?

(Again, this formulation doesn’t quite work for me. By the humanities, I understand the arts and sciences, as they were developed by the Greeks and Romans, and the return to such classical ideas in the Renaissance, where they were scrutinized and elaborated upon, and from there forward became more and more specialized. But I think what we know today as Democracy has very much evolved in tandem with the scientific revolution and the growth and maturation of science, and so I think that STEM has at least as much to do with Democracy as The Humanities do and probably more.)

Good point again. But now I’m led to think of how many very ignorant people there are, not that this is something new. People who don’t know how to assess the truth of statements or see the point in doing so, people who don’t know how to weigh conflicting accounts, people who don’t know how to find good sources of information, and I can see a path to the liberal arts being able to do something about that but I am not seeing a path to that by teaching people mainly STEM.

(I suppose I agree but would put it like this: the liberal arts makes a student more self-reflective, which will in turn help them to identify their own biases and prejudices, and failings and strengths, which is useful and important to any task they might undertake. Perhaps it also inculcates the idea of the disinterested pursuit of truth, while there’s something de facto interested about STEM, because people know that’s the way to make money.)

It is perverse to identify belief in self with evil incarnate: internal platonic dialogue

Based on internal evidence you affirm the soul to exist, now what do you say the soul to be? “‘I believe in myself and the spirit that’s in me.’” Correct. And now what do you think of intellectual activity and the soul? Do you think you are being more soulful, so to speak, when you’re doing a math problem than when you are working on your car or performing a feat of strength? What do you think?

“This may depend on the specific soul we’re talking about — on who a person is and what it means for them to truly ‘be themselves.’ But I suppose the brain has an instrumental use like the hand has an instrumental use and is not any more related to soul than is the hand. A football player would be more himself performing the physical work of playing football than he would be performing the mental work of a mathematician. (Though, by the way, there’s significant mental work involved in playing sports.)”

Well, I accept that but still disagree with what you’ve said on two counts, if you care to hear them? (Well, since I am you I don’t see any objection –what is the first?)Consider the situation in which the football player reflects on his own playing. (Okay, I already agree with you, just by hearing mention of that concept of self-reflection, but let’s go ahead and flesh this out.) The football player watches himself on tape, identifies certain positive and negative patterns to his playing, and generates a plan to promote the former and delimit the latter. This is a sort of intellectual activity and I would say it might plausibly represent something more “soulful” than his actual playing. Because remember: before too long that football player is going to be too old to competitively play football, and yet the knowledge he derives from playing and reading and thinking about playing will always remain with him. (Although I already told you I agree with you, and I do, I hadn’t thought of that part of it yet, and find myself even more persuaded by you than I was initially. You’re entirely correct and there is no need for any additional argument.)

Second, consider prayer and/or meditation. Feelings of piety, tranquility. Perhaps you would call these the opposite of mental activity and a kind of anti-thought; nevertheless it is something that occurs in the head, or at any rate involves mental activity, and it’s  also something involved with what we think of as our essence and soul. We don’t meditate or pray with the foot or stomach but with the brain, it’s a mental activity. So there again you have the head and mental activity associated with the most important of all human activities, not merely the uses you’re calling instrumental.

Related question. You saw a sort of menacing religious meme on the internet today that said “Satan doesn’t ask you to believe in him but asks you to believe in yourself,” which sounds a little like our Tolstoy quotation from a moment ago– “I believe in myself and the spirit that’s in me” — how do you respond to this? Do you think that belief in yourself could be wrong or sinful?

I respond that believing in one’s self has got to be in some sense fundamental. Even if you decided to commit your life to a religious purpose, and if you said “not my will but thine…” there must be some you in you who has made that decision, an adult of some kind. Further, I would say that, while of course people who believe in “something higher” will want others to believe in that thing more than in themselves in a certain sense –“lean not on thine own understanding” and so forth– it is perverse to identify belief in self with evil incarnate. Believe in yourself, believe in Jesus, but believe not in the person who made that meme, is how I would respond.

q: In the parlance of the book, Revolutionary Suicide, would you describe yourself as a revolutionary suicide, a reactionary suicide, or not a suicide? [Reactionary.]

Q: when they call Hollywood “the dream factory,” do they mean that the movies it creates are dreams, or that the movies it creates inspire dreaming? [former.]

Q: suppose rock music existed but amplification didn’t, how would it sound? [Leadbelly, John Cage.]

Idea that Rome was destroyed by “indiginous tribes.” As the barbarians were to Rome, Europe was to the American Indian. (To state it more accurately: perhaps the classical era was a period in which nomadic cultures still retained advantages over more developed societies.)… How do we contrast, say, Visigoths and Aztecs?

Idea that the challenges a story’s protagonist faces, in overcoming their central dilemma, are analogous or even the same as, the challenges the author himself faces in bringing a story from beginning to end.

Looked up 1 Kings 3:9 again. Because Solomon wishes for an “understanding heart” (and not for long life or riches or the defeat of his enemies or other desirable things) he will get both an understanding heart as well as those desirable things he has not wished for. (Echoes of Job who, while asserting no claims to good fortune, yet has his good fortunes restored.) “You can have the things you want as long as you don’t want them first — and you definitely better not imagine you deserve them.”

“Yoknapatawpa of my room, Yoknapatawpa of my mind.” Faulkner, in a Cowley letter, expressing the wish to “write everything, say everything.” Cowley, in an unrelated essay, remarking on how all Faulkner’s characters say what they would say not what Faulkner would — that they are not mouthpieces for his own ideas. Sometimes I will run afowl of that in my own writing, I suspect, — saying what I think — but what I’m trying to get to is showing what I think is not what I think but part of the “Yoknapatawpa of my mind” — the fictional landscape I make my decisions within.

There is a city of thought we live in, I live in, and must get out of to truly think. (Idea that a person must write the entirety of the Comedie Humaine before they can think: that’s how they “get out of the city,” by writing the whole thing, grain by grain, out of themselves.) Counter argument: Balzac did not become spiritually enlightened for having written The Comedie Humaine.

I Believe in Me

I was thinking about what you were saying before about how it’s perverse to identify yourself with evil incarnate, but then I found myself thinking of addiction and of Infinite Jest, which we read not too long ago, and thinking that in that case it really does seem as it were satanic or it least extremely self-harmful to follow one’s own will, and oneself really does seem ones worst enemy and a sort of Satan in that instance, and how do you respond that?

I respond that what we were saying before presumed a healthy person, while in the case of an addicted person different rules may apply. However, I feel moved by your idea of a person who is their own worst enemy, his own worst enemy to the extent that that person really is a Satan to himself, and the source of all the world’s evil, insofar as he experiences anything evil. (Does Satan exist? Yes. And who or what do you say then is this Satan? Myself, though only to myself) This makes me want to stop here and ponder this more deeply…

(But I can’t make myself stop and ponder “more deeply.” I just sit here waiting for another thought to come.)

A typical or I guess Platonic view of it would be that the self is composed of a body and soul and the soul is the good and immortal part of ourselves which we need to cultivate and the body is the bad and mortal part of ourselves which we need to curb and tame, and then maybe there is a third part of ourselves which makes decisions along the lines of, are we going to do what the body urges us to do or what the soul urges us to do? But if, as we were saying, there isn’t any soul in the sense of there being an immaterial ghost, or in the sense of our minds being able to exist without our bodies, and what the soul most truly is is that voice in the body that asserts “I believe in myself in the spirit that’s in me” (whatever that may mean), then what are we to do when the person saying that is at the same time hurting himself or hurting others? What are we to think when the human we find terrible and capable of all manner of atrocities tells us with the absolute sincerity of conviction — “I believe in me!”

Lesson learned about writing: you can’t edit bad writing into good writing. Corollary. There is no point at all in pushing around commas.  Corollary. If you encounter good writing in the midst of bad, erase the bad and keep the good. The good writing can never make the surrounding bad writing good. An answer to the question ‘What is good writing’? There is good writing then there is bad writing then there is writing which is entirely different from the rest, which is the actual good writing. Why don’t your ‘lessons about writing’ have value, according to you? Because you are like a person you claim Nietzsche to have been (though you have no standing at all to make claims about Nietzsche): writing from the wrong side of his complexes, in the platonic cave of our complexes, seeing the shadows on the cave walls of our complexes.

Conservative author (and admirer of Reagan) on C-Span radio last night as I drove to pick my father up from off the ground (my, at that time, comically elderly father having sat down, could not now stand up) — offering the view that Reagan never stopped acting; from the moment he woke to the moment he slept, with his wife, with his children, with the public, he never stopped acting, pretending, never let you know what he really was thinking, “exceptionally self-contained,” was I believe the phrase the author used …

I’d been under the impression that this was the wrong way to be, was literally hypocritical, but maybe the answer to life was to put on still more of a show, create more and more distance between the person one really was and the person one showed…? Maybe Baudelaire/ Auden would agree that you created a kernel of authenticity by making a full display of the artificial?

Alternatives: one performed acts and one feigned to perform acts and one should strive only to perform acts and not to perform any feigned acts; one should perform both acts and feigned acts, but have a clear idea which was which; one should perform only feigned acts, and keep oneself far elsewhere in reserve; one should hide even from oneself whether one’s acts were feigned or real, so that whether one was actor, character, audience member, or person crossing the street outside the theater, was always in doubt both to you and to everyone else.

The David Brooks from the other day, arguing that the beginning of moral action was to consider the humanity of the person in front of you “seemed possible — was like the coffee shop.” I tried to think of the personhood of the customer with large breasts, stupid as that sounds, and of the man who had recently died, what his last days had been like, as impossible as that was. These were acts of imagination in a way and difficult to perform in the midst of a crowd.

CONCLUSION: HAVING FAILED TO FAIL

You have tried to non-idiotically become a writer, or something similar, through reading, through writing, through walking, through observation, reflection, meditation, study, — and you definitely haven’t succeeded. To succeed would mean “having written something,” which has been your fixation for years. “To write something” would be — “to write something undeniable.” “To write something undeniable” would mean — from which ever angle you looked at it, you yourself must be forced to admit that whatever this was “had a quality.” (What was “a quality” was self-evident, irreducible) — “to write something” would mean to write something a Flaubert or Tolstoy or Henry James would have had to concede was “something” yet it could also mean writing something stupefyingly successful with The Public, though bad. This is not what you tend to think of as “writing” exactly, but you would have to admit the movie Jaws, for example, was in a certain sense “undeniable.”

(You could contrast this “undeniable” with Stendhals’ lottery — a book in the running for being here a hundred and two hundred years from now.)

The aim for a person who hasn’t succeeded at an activity, and really cannot succeed at it in the way that he thinks of it, must be to feel his failure so completely that the desire for it is crushed, that he actually begins to blush for shame at his misdirection, that he actually finds the activity revolting and unpleasant or boring even as an idea, achieving an “anagnorosis,” in short, which may make possible the foundation for activities of a different sort. He has failed so much he’s been freed to try something anew. He is sincerely and completely penitent and shuns his former pursuit, which was not done in the service of humanity but in the service of himself, he now realizes — which can align at times but not in this case.

You, unfortunately, seem always to be insulated from failure of that degree, taking away with the one hand the same self-exposure you give with the other — you drop the shield from one side to present one with another — thus fending off the needed disaster and rejection. This descrying about having failed, or having failed to fail, is certainly part of it — even now you are trying — and failing, — and even now you shall try and try again, despite knowing — for you don’t really know yet the full extent to which you are unqualified for this. You would like to put it to the side, this paper mache figure in your likeness who wants to “write something” and walk away from it, but it weighs as much as you do and really seems to be you. When you walk away it follows. That paper mache person may even be “you” or this thing — which is not quite paper — and walking away from it may be the best thing you can do in terms of walking away from what you reject in yourself.