Εοικεν ὁ βίος θεάτρῳ· διὸ πολλάκις χείριστοι τὸν κάλλιστον ἐν αὐτῷ κατέχουσι τόπον. (x)

….a recently completed chunk of the memoir.

Seersucker Whipsaw, great crime fiction which loses some energy at the end. Written in the 1960’s, it attempts a position on race that I’m sure would not be found acceptable today, but was interesting to see.

(I’m reminded that a protagonist of Infinite Jest, really its hero, Don Gately, was an inveterate user of racial slurs, but I believe we’re only told this in a footnote, and don’t think we ever actually witness him using such language.)

— Le grand art d’un homme de génie est de savoir bien élever sa bête, afin qu’elle puisse aller seule, tandis que l’âme, délivrée de cette pénible accointance, peut s’élever jusqu’au ciel. (*)

Tweet: in D&D there’s a monster called a mimic which camouflage itself as a treasure chest, but then it’s a big mouth inside and it eats you. What would this be in real life? I think it’s your phone

(Comment: also Bitcoin and many such things, seemingly new to our times. Destroyers of value in the appearance of treasure chests.)

Sandy Denny: For Shame Of Doing Wrong (I Wish I Was A Fool For You Again)

I don’t know what I had previously believed towheaded to mean but I definitely would not have said ‘blond.’ (It may have morphed in my imagination into nappy-headed.) This is tow. Usage appears to have declined a lot since the early 20th century.

Tony Judt’s Post War filling in a lot of blanks for me about that period I hadn’t realized were there; I mean, what did European reconstruction after WWII even look like? (Interesting that Americans apply that word “reconstruction” only to the U.S. Civil War. Etymonline suggests it was the Union, not the war-damaged South, that was being “reconstructed.”)

Surprised to read that the total amount of aid in The Marshal Plan (1947) was about 200 billion dollars, in early 2000-era dollars, if you consider it as a percentage of U.S. GDP, which seems small to me. That’s only about a third of the American Rescue Plan, if memory serves, which got us out of the Financial Crisis, to say nothing of the size of the pandemic assistance package(s).

I was looking to see if ‘diet’ comes from δίαιτα — it does — and came upon a fact which ought not be surprising — but it was mildly so — that ‘diet’ the adjective, a la diet coke, is only attested from 1963. (I guess dietary previously fit the bill.) This is apples and oranges since ‘diet’ is both noun and adjective (and verb) but here is ngrams for diet, dietary.

Tossing in my sleep thinking of Poem of Force: doesn’t force have a defensive as well aggressive capacity? Yes, force and the threat of force can be used to render us into inert objects, but can’t it also be used to prevent that from happening?

Also that “little push” of Achilles and her account of it is quite fascinating: ἁψάμενος δ᾽ ἄρα χειρὸς ἀπώσατο ἦκα γέροντα. Reading this in bed last night I was thinking: if I actually knew how to read, these would be the sorts of insights I took from my reading.

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From Coetzee’s Diary of A Bad Year (pp.193)

“Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder. The texture of their prose becomes thinner, their treatment of character and action more schematic. The syndrome is usually ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is no doubt connected with the attenuation of physical powers, above all the power of desire. Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks.

The classic case is that of Tolstoy. No one is more alive to the real world than the young Leo Tolstoy, the Tolstoy of War and Peace. After War and Peace, if we follow the standard account, Tolstoy entered upon a long decline into didacticism that culminated in the aridity of the late short fiction. Yet to the older Tolstoy that evolution must have seemed quite different. Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live.”

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greenfield: A site, to be used for housing or commerce, whose previous use (if any) was agricultural.

Preceding had come up in this line, Agamemnon 1311: ὅμοιος ἀτμὸς ὥσπερ ἐκ τάφου πρέπει. Smyth translates τάφος as charnel house, which I’d always thought had something to do with charring, which is wrong. It comes from the Late Latin for graveyard. Char, the verb, comes from Charcoal, which has an unrelated origin.

Had no idea. Atmosphere from ἀτμός — steam, vapour.

Funny anecdote: Churchill’s military secretary Sir Ian Jacob is said to have remarked that the Allies won WWII “because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.”

I liked this one, attributed to Plato: ῾Ο αὐτὸς ἔφησε τὸν μὲν ὕπνον ὀλιγοχρόνιον θάνατον, τὸν δὲ θάνατον πολυχρόνιον ὕπνον.

Wondering if the shrinking of the Greek Chorus (n the 5th century bce) was analogous to the shrinking of the jazz orchestra in the early-mid 20th century. Costs maybe.

I don’t understand how this line works grammatically — looks like three singular accusatives, one feminine, two neuter — maybe πλατᾶν is an accusative of respect — but I liked Lattimore’s translation: “the oar blade’s fading footprint.” Agamemnon 695: … κατ᾽ ἴχνος πλατᾶν ἄφαντον.