.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

Iliad 5.179-327: the odd story of how Pandoaras came to Troy without his horses, apparently thinking they would suffer hardship there, and how the theme of horses under-girds the whole encounter between Pandoras-Aeneas and Diomedes.  In broad outline:

I. Pandoras, the archer, laments having left his horses in his homeland, which has indirectly resulted in him wounding and angering, but failing to kill, both Diomedes and Agamemnon. 

II. Aeneas and Pandoras deliberate whether Aneneas will drive the chariot into battle and Pandoras attack Diomedes or if Pandoras will drive and Aeneas attack. Aeneas commends his horse’s abilities on their native plains; Pandoras says horses should stick with a familiar driver.

III. Diomedes, meanwhile, not only declines his own companion’s suggestion that they flee on their chariot but says he will meet Aeneas and Pandoras on foot and hatches a plan for capturing Aeneas’ special horses, which he describes. (It is curious that Aeneas himself has not told us of their special provenance.)

IV. Diomedes kills Pandoras with a cast spear and disables Aeneas with a large stone. His companion makes off with their horses’ as they’d planned, and they’re taken back to the ships.

No conclusions about it, more thinking it through. One thing I’m wondering about is why Pandoras, leaving his horses behind, means he has to to be an archer. I suspect the answer there is that hand-to-hand combatants needed chariots to move into and out of combat situations quickly.

I would also say there is an idea here that Pandoras was an animal lover.

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?)

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 victoriousness. 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 very well 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 suggest.

We know you don’t have any special knowledge of the answer, 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 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? 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? 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 (type of photograph showing how, from a fixed spot, the sun’s position in the sky will change over the course of a year.) Looked up Philopoemen (“Pausanias wrote that after Philopoemen’s death, ‘Greece ceased to bear good men’.”)  Window I close: John Keats’ To Sleep; window I close: instructional video concerning free weights. A “kind of interesting” remark of my own comparing line from Timon of Athens with line from The Octopus is also closed — so that I now have one open blank tab.

Before setting Age of Innocence down for the night, I flipped through the Norton edition’s critical supplements in the back and came across a letter from Wharton to Sinclair Lewis. . . . and awoke thinking was I doing ‘the work’ or was I doing that which distracted from, or impeded, the work? (Now nearing fifty I would have to say, based on my experience — that I was not doing ‘the work‘ but was not impeding anyone I knew of from doing it either.)

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 group that I didn’t get enough at the time. (Oh I floundered but unintentionally and it pained me.)

If there is to be a true resistance to the alliance of 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 a 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.)

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. 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 terrifyingly 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: phrase of John Updike’s. Why did men stupefy themselves: question of Leo 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, 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.”

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 not since WW1 have we been quite us. (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 will require 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 wrecklessly 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 and why do you not laugh?

A: In a fowl mood. Even when my mood is good it is often not comedic or hostile to comedy.

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 know who she is.) If only I would get up before 5 each day… 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 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 5am, for example, I would assuredly read selections from Walt Whitman in Camden. “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 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, c’est moi.)

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? (Did he 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.

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 writer, was thought; (but was that really central to his identity as a writer?) — Yes, it was because the one foot of the compass was planted firmly in “writing” that the other could trace out its twenty year circle — and could not trace out much else.

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 his 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.)

That we have already been heading in that direction: the technological in us being 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 may 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 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 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…?

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….?)

Idea that Homer must have been a Trojan…? That literature is the bequest of the defeated and humbled?

Preferring sickness over health not per se but because there is another sickness which sickness undermines, but which health supports…?

Passive Subject (Schopenhauer, Proust.) To make of oneself a mirror and empty vessel filled only with the thing observed.

Inframince/ Duchamp. If it seems boring to you, you are not considering slivers of time or space that are small enough, the bullet between gun and target.

Epiphany/ Joyce. Ordinariness, according to him, could in moments erupt into significance that needed careful transcription. But perhaps any given arrangement of matter, stripped of the attribute of Time, any given moment, would be found to hold such significance.

Situations/ detournment. To play pranks on civilization so as to find the buried spirit beneath. (Corollary. The great soft underbelly of civilization seems to be the media. If the media were like a Fellini film, it would be “the hard underbelly” of civilization.)

Conservative or punk rock approach. Accept the obvious. If an activity is dull, don’t perform it. If a place is dull, leave it. If you can not, for any reason, do these things, you yourself are dull and to be left.

Political Thinking

A Disinterested though Partisan Appeal to the Political Scientists of the Future; Obergefell: a “reverse Dred Scott”? reach of the Obstruction laws. Heller. Dylan’s Chronicles, Caesar’s Gallic Wars. The Problem that seems like a political problem but isn’t.

Film

Hannah and her sisters chart , Late Spring: direction’s scene; [all of Late Spring posts]; Pulp Fiction Notes; Deathproof, Red Beard, money in To Have and Have Not; Jackie Brown/ interracial relations; children and violence in kill bill vol.I;

My most popular concordance here is Hats in Against The Day; my most extensive was PLANTS (now reduced to include just the plants of Shakespeare); and a couple I just kind of liked were Hands in Winesburg, Ohio and money in To Have and Have Not (the film.)

Concordances

Brave in Tempest; Chicken in Brother’s K.; ambiguities in “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities”; Plants in Horace’s Odes; A Partial Concordance of Sorrentino’s Strange Commonplace. **Eye in cyclops chapter of Ulysses; ‘The Fear’ in letters to Milena; Red, White and Purple in Venus and Adonis; ‘Nothing’ in King Lear; ‘Honesty’ in Othello; ‘beautiful’ in golden bowl; Invisibility/ Visibility in Mason & Dixon; Invisibility/ Visibility in Against The Day; Hats — Against The Day; lane outside the house/ Late Spring; Pairs in Late Spring / Late Spring; Kanagawa and Japanese locations/ Late Spring, to have and have not — specific dollar amounts mentioned; Jackie Brown/ interracial relations, children and violence in kill bill vol.I; Plants in the Song of Roland; ‘Pluck’ in Measure for Measure; Good Old Neon, Plants in Wasps; Hands in Winesburg; clothing in Hamlet, Everything, anything, something and nothing in The Wings of a Dove,”Beautiful“, Wings of a Dove, Lists in Marianne Moore’s An Octopus, Plants, Animals, Minerals in An Octopus, An Octopus: Water & Ice,

Odd Ideas & Writing

corporations are our bodies; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, Milena and the Burrow; respice finem, Tolstoy, Wallace; factual error in Kafka’s Blue Octavo notebooks; complete account of K; In each play with a character named Burgundy, there is also a mention of the plant darnel.About the repetitions of “A Strange Commonplace”; What might it mean that “your body is inside you.” The Meteoric Rise of ‘Robust’ Postnatural / POPE, Montaigne, Nietzsche note * ;Fossils, fossilized memories, and “Eternal Return”; Free speech possible without “dialectic”?nEvolution of footnotes in fiction? Sureealism and the everyday, Twain and Hejinian; Ashbery and Herzog; How do we win at Centipede when we’re Frogger?, Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence: Boundless Prometheus, nauscopie & phase shift, *; Big Sleep/ Maltese, Obergefell: a “reverse Dred Scott”? Epiphany and the Will-less Subject; occupy wall street, the philosopher king ; climate change a technology problem not religion problem ; Writers’ Habits of Spending; Robert Creeley: A Piece ; dts, passive subject, epiphany ; Actually Crying with Boredom/ mission haiku, Fraudulence Paradox & Binging, “PHASE Shift“, diary, epiphany, fiction, scholastic, Flaubert and Dylan [Trump and Dylan], The Feeling of Thinking One Knows, Polka Dot Scarf, Tamarisk in Enquiry Into Plants, Theophrastus (i), In order to turn (the play) Agamemnon into (the poem) An Octopus, what would you need to do? Being Struck by a Wall, Preferred participants of this blog, Forever Overhead ending (a few of his short stories a bit like that), THIS IS NOT A NOVEL /SPREADSHEET, Anadiplosis, Quotation marks in An Octopus vs. those in Herzog, Cezanne’s Finances, metaphysical foundation for real world prohibition? (Deuteronomy) ,Infinite Jest on Reddit, Did chapters with the same name in Strange Commonplace (Sorrentino) share thematic elements in a way that chapters with different names didn’t? (Not that I could see.) “Major de Spain, General d’Espagne”, Heraclitus, fire, Good Man Is Hard To Find: Flannery O’Connor, Bob Wills ??? Cotton Fields. Taco — Tache — Tack. [I guess the question I meant to articulate here was: might a poem rhyme one way phonetically –in terms of its sounds– and another way literally — in terms of its letters and spelling, how it looks.] Random Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence: “boundless Prometheus”, Altars beyond words (like doctors without borders?) analyzing sounds in An Octopus, Glass that bends, Art & The Insurance Industry, Recycling — satan’s frozen tears returned to satan’s frozen tear ducts, “Erase” and “raze” related, Every single story had the word bird in it, for some reason;  Actual Reading Time vs. Fictional Thinking Time; Responses to the question, “Why can’t I catch a break”? In which I find a dirty shirt after having started the machine already, Rheotaxis in Hemingway, War’s where! Which war? The Twwinns, Researched & Unresearched Artwork, Heller, Nightmare Town, Dylan’s Chronicles, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Difficulty of style of Henry James. Freedom of Speech in Ancient Athens, Is biographical information about Joyce and the critical apparatus surrounding his work a supplement to, or essential structural element of, his work. Joseph Conrad’s conservative political views, Memorizing An Octopus,

(this), questions for statisticians, *, modernist platonic dialogues, * “Signifying Nothing” Russian Christ***, altars beyond words, pains, [***] voodoo doll of brain, aprender*; The “BEINGONAUGHT”, Dreams are the exercise of biology, Unprofitable Servants*******Hejinian, Blood Meridian / Moby Dick, Dylan and Trump* , *, Unnopenessee*, *Iago from James, WALK, language, *, Unnopenessee, * , Drafts of a Haiku (3rd is best), translating…Unnopenessee, poem, Knowing all nouns, *, Experimenter of Life, Patience vs. ‘Mindfulness’, Inventions, revise a little, a pile, Chance Sweepings: coffee table version, The Shoulder of The Jogger revise, Tracing Pencil/Exercise in Inframince, Outside the K-1 (poem), The Senselessness of Me Turning My Neck, ROGER, revise and put in 1st person (o — oo– or), (concept poem) That song we love: a Hymn to Virtue. Desenganarse,  Magma Square – 3, Anthony, Humatum, Trying to get out the door then actually doing so, SUMMS, Items near cat-hair covered sweat shirt, Brown broken down cardboard box, I had lead the thread of the red back and forth across the bread, needs revision black wagon, Letting go of sock, Chained up paddle boats for tourists, Waterpot, familiar pattern of a capital letter ‘T’, Displeasing stack, Am I in Ancient Greece? <Burg’s Steps>, Literaria Deformis: a history of my terrible writing.

I’ve come across two abiding literary “mysteries” during my reading here: the circumstances surrounding the four mentions of the tamarisk plant in The Iliad (supplemental) and a similar looking overhead light that occurs in both (Chandler’s) The Big Sleep and (Hammet’s) The Maltese Falcon. (Actually two similar looking sentences, you might say). Haven’t yet persuaded myself that coincidence explains either case.

Ngrams

I never hear google ngrams talked about anymore, but it’s a lot of fun. Here were some of my explorations:

The Meteoric Rise of ‘Robust’, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Pale Blue Eyes, Candy Says, creepy, scary, weird, etc., nuclear/solar power/energy, garbage can recycling bin, Napoleon and associated literary figures, assorted, Dinosaurs, Biblical, Ice-age mammals, “robust” et al., plural of cannon, variety Grant, Lincoln, Lee, Hitler, etc. Early 20th century authors, 19th century authors, “data is, data shows“,  Shakespeare v William Shakespeare, Einstein v etc., 9/11

A person that cannot, does not, never will, know Ancient Greek — Attic, Doric, Ionic, Homeric, or what you will — too disorganized.

Greek Passages

Greek: od 8.166, Iliad U. 111-112. Pindar, Pythian 3.107-109. Greek Anthology — 5.67, φιλοπολέμος / fond of war; James 1:17; Iliad 22.134-135; Romans 12:10, [Iliad. 18.22-25] * *, αναιρεω & Moses; Iliad 19 112-113; Iliad 19, 101-102; 22. 157-161; Eccl 12:1; Iliad 6; 144-146; Pindar, Pythian 3.107-109, IIiad 18.98. Crito , It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong; Libation Bearers 505-507; Strabo: moral excellence of poets; Pindar, Olympian 7.43-47, Libation Bearers, 59-60; Strabo 3.1.5; Pindar, Pythian 2.79-81; Job, II 9-10, Pindar, Pythian 1.22-24 The Libation Bearers, 61-65. Thucydides.Pythia 4, 272 — 274 . Mark 13:11, Olympian 10.6, HIPP, Olympian 10.22-23, Thuc. 3.45.7, Libation Bearers 585–602 . Hippocrates, aphorism 6, πολιὸν, THULE / Strabo 2.4.1 ; Apology [31ε-32α]. Pindar, Olympian 10.6 ; Hippocrates 38 ; Pausanias 1. 1.1 to 1.4.6; Agamemnon, 83-90; Olympian 10.22-23, Hippocrates aphorism 2.44, Hiippocrates 2.21, Hippocrates 6.13, Aristotle Politics 2.1271b, John 1, 47-51,  Hippocrates 4.38 , Parable of The Tares, Politics [1277α], Aristotle’s physical appearance according to Diogenes, Hymn to Hermes (79-81) tamarisk mention, Thucydides 3.45.7, Pausanius 1.30.4, Libation Bearers 585–602, Hippocrates 2.1, Aeschylus being told by Dionysis to write tragedies (Pausanius), Marcus Aurelius  9.42.4, Libation Bearers, 380-381 , Greece qua source of human race (Diogenes), Libation Bearers, 423-428 (Chorus), Eumenides 984-987 , Hippocrates 48,  random Strabo passage, Pausanius 1.30.4 (Timon), Hippocrates. 2.16, Hippocrates 2.43, Hippocrates 3.6, Oedipus Colognus 1225-1238, Hippocrates 8. 8, Luke, 18.4-5, Libation Bearers, 410-417, Hippocrates, 19, Random Strabo Passage, Hippocrates 1.14,  Hippocrates 13, Symposium (Plato) 195e, Bacchae 761-764, Pausanias 1.35.4, Philogelos 145,  Symposium [203e], Gorgias 454e, Hippocrates 2.11, Hipocrates 30, philogelos 172, Theophrastus — “Characters”, Hippocrates 4.72 ,

The opposite of a person who knows French is not a person who doesn’t know French, but a person who will never know, cannot know, French — too inelastic mentally.

FRENCH

St. Julian, Water lily passage *, Le gisement lui-même, Ces hécatombes de régiments anéantis. Proust.Fanés; Si l’art n’est que cela, il n’est pas plus réel que la vie;Le ton dubitatif pour les résolutions irrévocables *austriche, bovary, Pouvoir être éclaircie, elle qu’on vit dans les ténèbres, *, il avait beau écouter, il ne saisissait pas, La Rochefoucald 16, le détroit, Les bonheurs futurs, comme les rivages des tropiques, Bovary. bavardage .La Rochefoucald 19; mais à quel prix acquiert-on ce talent souvent médiocre et contestable, qui nous console, Delacroix. La Rochefoucald 5 . Il est un agent puissant, obéissant, rapide, facile, qui se plie à tous les usages et qui règne en maître à mon bord. (Verne), delacroix, ce qu’ils perdent en vérité littérale, ils le regagnent bien en indépendance et en fierté. *, “il avait beau écouter, il ne saisissait pas “(Bovary), fâcheuses, “Des homards de cent mètres, Crabes pesant deux cents tonnes” , 19 septembre 1847, « Quand j’aurai inspiré le dégoût et l’horreur universels, j’aurai conquis la solitude. » Ce n’est pas quand une vilaine action vient d’être faite qu’elle nous tourmente, c’est quand longtemps après on se la rappelle” (Rousseau),Qui proteste contre les profondes déceptions du contrat social (Balzac),  “L’opium est la seule substance végétale qui nous communiqué l’etat végéta”, Jean Cocteau. “C’est par amour de la perfection que ces figures sont imparfaites…” (Delacroix). L’injustice des hommes . — Quoi ! vous avez un canot ? “les pléonasmes de toilette” (Balzac), François de La Rochefoucauld — 26. Entre les pauvretés de la richesse et la richesses de la pauvretés… (Balzac) La Rochefoucauld [21], “La pendule, sonnant minuit,/ Ironiquement nous engage/ À nous rappeler quel usage/ Nous fîmes du jour qui s’enfuit” (Baudelaire), Homais and Bournisien (Bovary), une partie de la supériorité de Louis-Napoléon vient sans doute de ce qu’il n’a rien de l’artist (Delacroix), La Rochefoucauld (25), Updated Dual-Language Proust Passages, Dimanche 13 juin, 

Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: “Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events, we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the future to take on inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and shatters our design in fragments.”

Samuel Beckett, Molloy: “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”

Thoreau, Journals :“The bad are frequently good enough to let you see how bad they are, but the good as frequently endeavor to get between you and themselves.” 

MORE…

Quotations: Molloy; As You Like It; “Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand” (Moby Dick) Goodwood’s speech (Portrait of a Lady), “austere composition” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus); those who work much (Thoreau), That thing is not human, but I am human (Pierre); debate and conversation (Theatetus), Kierkegaard,Thoreau, Journals. whitman, a terrific towering palisade of dark mossy massiness Pierre, Murphy’s mind, Mark of Zorro, *, Hegel, *, Song of Myself, Uncle Dick, Portnoy’s Complaint, Inseparable from Human Affairs, My Life, Swimming, “empty pockets clean hands“, democratic man, Disembodied, middle class*, Palinurus, MLK, *, Une Patrie Inconnue*An ignorance truly bovine , “It’s real, it’s us“, *, end of nature, *, Wilde, Rousseau. (From Melville’s Pierre, interesting for its mention of Ishmael.) Balzac . From Life of Johnson. Portnoy’s Complaint. “When you act you know if your acts are evil or good” “Today my deepest wish…” “Wishing I were a negro”; Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; Bill Mckibben, The End of Nature,Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Pope Francis Tweet,“Virtue is only difficult through our own fault.” (Rousseau), ‘I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be all the more terrible.’…. [KAFKA],Ecclesiastes 11:7-10, Crane and Hemingway (Unterecker), ““You can always tell when a man is writing his own name….” Lucretius: odors must be made of larger motes than voices, since they do not pass through stone . . . Matisse on wives of painters. “Turn aside from the somewhat narrow path of poetry and take the still narrower one of knight-errantry” (Don Quixote), He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force when he meets it (Wilde), Johnson: so much writing, so little reading. War and Peace: the King is History’s Slave.  Un lagarto que a Él (Quixote), Horace, Odes 2.15.13-14; Dissonance as a token of manliness in music, Moses as portrait of the essential incompleteness to human life (kafka), dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor (Kafka), Kafka: forever starting my radius, Couple Pope quotes, Supreme and Beautiful Actions (Emerson), Pretension cannot act,Refuge from life, The Worst Man does more good than evil (Johnson), “Dramas deprived of all dramatic incident” (Fry on Cezanne still lives), Auerbach on Stendhal, Wallace Stevens The humble, Song of Myself, 48, take not the measure of they goodness , Whispering and Clucking (Faulkner), “Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble.” (FW) An unearthly day-colored substance (Faulkner) (*), Spinoza on timidity, PREFACE to Dorian Gray, 

What I call my “shapes” I’d intended as Kalligrams — essentially visual poems or poems containing visual elements — but somehow they never took on a poetic element and remained mere Designs, mostly uninteresting. Here are a few I consider to be standouts followed by the rest. (Note that these can appear rather different in different browsers.)

81, 84,
77, 80,
27, 103

Shapes: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) *(21)* (22) (23) (24) (25) (26) *(27)* (28) (29) (30) (31) (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37) (38) (idea of shapes) (39) (40) (41) (42) (43) (44) (45)* (46) (47)* (48) (49) (50) (51) (52) (53) (54) (55) (56) (57) (58) (59) (60) (61) (62) (63) (64) (65) (66) (67) (68) (69) (70) (71) (72) (73) (74) (75)* (76) (77)* (78) (79)* IDEA* (81)* IDEA* (83) (84)* (85) (86) (87)* (88)* (89) (90) (91) (92) (93)* (94) (95) (96) (97) (98) (99) (100) (101)* (102) (103)* (104) (105)* (106) (107) (108) (109) (110) (111) (112) (113)(Thoughts on Shapes)

This interpretive dance of the Perseverance landing is so interesting. For starters: the room, the motorcycle helmet, the circling, the backpack.

Doing some sleuthing. Marianne Moore’s Granite and Steel so clearly evokes Crane’s To Brooklyn Bridge in its subject and themes — and I find that “granite and steel” is actually a phrase that occurs in Crane’s Atlantis (which is also about the bridge)– I must wonder what she was thinking here. The title seems to acknowledge a debt, yet the poem itself does not seem fully aware of its extent   — seems almost an effort to reimagine Crane’s poem. (Alternatively, maybe if one writes about the bridge one is just bound to be confined to certain topics, such as seagulls and cables and harmony and Liberty.)

Whenever I contemplate taking action to save my writing in some semi-permanent fashion, I hear two quarreling voices:

–Not only did Kafka not save his writing, says the first voice, Kafka asked for his writing to be destroyed after his death, so your writing must be very special indeed if you propose now to make all these back up files! And not just Kafka, but many others, whose faith has concerned something less conservative, have left it entirely in the hands of readers and publishers and in the strength of their ideas, to determine what shall endure of their work.

–But wouldn’t you feel stupid, says the second voice, to wake up one morning and, still alive, find all your writing had vanished? For perhaps not all of that time you spent writing has been wasted, and now there is no proof whatsoever of your stylistic excesses! If you are really a strong enough person to enjoy or endure such a loss, you should be a strong enough person to take it into your own hands and burn it all down now, if it’s even possible!

(Ay and now there is the rub, the second voice adds, after some rumination, the second voice being very much the sort that will say “there’s the rub”; for it is perhaps as impossible to destroy what’s on the internet as it is to save what’s on it. One can only curate. On the internet, perhaps only a few abstruse, highly technical matters will, after all, prove to have really occurred.)

–Now recently a third voice, which I’m calling the voice of experience, I have heard speaking somewhat in this vein: it is not in you to be as noble as Kafka but it is in you to avoid feeling excessively stupid for the things you might do or neglect to do. So let us not have more of the same from you, pursuing what you think of as the noble while achieving what it is universally understood as stupid; let us just do that thing that is commended by common sense, and make some backup files.

Well, I have been attending to that voice of experience lately and studiously creating backup files of whatever work I see the slightest reason to preserve –of which there is not too much, I must say– and in the process making catalogues of a sort of the old posts I’ve made here for later reference. This is the point of this present post — as an alert that those old post “catalogues” or inventories, are coming.

(Conclusion.) And many more such notes the attendant has made since 2012 or thereabouts, when the store’s existence first seemed jeopardized by new development; nevertheless secure in the faith that for now he has more than satisfied his customers’ appetites for his morsels and sweepings, he hereby hangs his apron on the rack and declares solemnly this to be —

THE END OF VOLUME ONE

(Conclusory poem)

Appendices: A , B , C , D, E

The old vacuum cleaner leaves in its wake
The same stuff it was intended to take.
The old vacuum cleaner, resembling life,
Rolls endlessly over the same fallen stuff.

The new vacuum resembles conquering death,
Each crumb like a person taken up in its breath.
And though it should leave the carpet pristine,
I think we do rightly distrust this machine.

(Chance Sweepings)

Ηελιος μεν επειτα νεον προσεβαλλεν αρουρας,
εξ ακαλαρρειταο βαθυρροου Ωκεανοιο
ουρανον εισανιων· οι δ ‘ηντεον αλλαλουσιν.

προσβαλλω: to smite (here of the rays of the sun). αρουρας: fields, ground, space, earth, soil. ακαλαρρειτης: peaceful, still, silently or gently flowing, Epithet of Ocean. βαθυρροου: with deep, steady, flow. εισανιων (pres. part. εισανειμι): to ascend or climb to. ‘ηντεον (< ανταω): to meet with, encounter. // On νεον here, Cunliffe says it’s taken as an adverb “newly, recently, just now…”

*
Then Helios newly touched the cultivated fields
rising from the peaceful deep flowing ocean
into heaven; and they met with each other.

*
Lattimore. Now the sun of a new day struck on the ploughlands, rising/ out of the quiet water and the deep stream of the ocean/ to climb the sky. The Trojans assembled together.

From Book III of Spinoza’s Ethics, translated by Edwin Curley, in order of their appearance. (I made this without realizing Spinoza himself recapitulates all the affects and their definitions at the end of Book III, and so didn’t quite go all the way through.)

Will.  When the mind strives to preserve itself, only with respect to itself. [Prop 9]

Appetite. When the mind strives to preserve both itself and the body in its being. [Prop 9]

Desire. Different from appetite only insofar as it is self-aware. Desire is appetite aware of itself. [Prop 9]

Joy. “By Joy, therefore, I shall understand… that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection…” [Prop 11]

Sadness. “And [I understand] by Sadness, that passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection.” [Prop 11]

Pleasure/Cheerfulness. That affect of Joy that is related to the Mind and Body at once. [Prop 11]

Pain/ Melancholy. That affect of Sadness that is related to the Mind and Body at once. [Prop 11]

Love. Love is nothing but Joy with an accompanying idea of external cause. [Prop 13]

Hate. Hate is nothing but Sadness with an accompanying idea of external cause. [Prop 13]

Hope. “Hope is nothing but an inconstant joy which has arisen from the image of a future or past thing whose outcome we doubt.” [Prop 18]

Fear. “An inconstant sadness that has also arisen from a doubtful thing.” [Prop 18]

Confidence. Hope becomes confidence as the element of doubt is removed. [Prop 18]

Despair. Fear becomes despair as the element of doubt is removed. [Prop 18]

Gladness. “A joy which has arisen from the image of a past thing whose outcome we doubted.” [Prop 18]

Remorse. “A sadness which is opposite to gladness.” [Prop 18]

Pity. “Sadness that has arisen from injury to another.” [Prop 22]

Opposite of Pity. “By what name we should call the joy that arises from another’s good, I do not know.” [Prop 22]

Favor. “Love toward him who has done good to another.” [Prop 22]

Indignation. “Hate toward him who has done evil to another.” [Prop 22]

Envy. “Hate, insofar as it is considered so to dispose a man that he is glad at another’s ill fortune and saddened by his good fortune.” [Prop 24]

Pride. “A joy born of the fact that a man thinks more highly of himself than is just.” [Prop 26]

Overestimation. “The joy born of the fact that a man thinks more highly of another than is just.” [Prop 26]

Scorn. Thinking less highly of another than is just. [Prop 26]

Pity / Emulation. When we imagine something like us to be affected by an affect, we ourselves are similarly affected. When that imitation is related to sadness it is pity, when related to Desire, it is emulation. [Prop 27]

Benevolence. “This will or appetite to do good, born of our pity for the thing on which we wish to confer a benefit, is called Benevolence, which is therefore nothing but a Desire born of pity.” [Prop 27]

Ambition/ Human Kindness. “This striving to do something (and also to omit doing something) solely to please men is called Ambition, especially when we strive so eagerly to please the people that we do or omit certain things to our own injury, or another’s. In other cases, it is usually called human kindness.” [Prop 29] “This striving to bring it about that everyone should approve his love and hate is really Ambition” [Prop 31].

Praise/ Blame. “The Joy with which we imagine the action of another by which he has strived to please us I call Praise. On the other hand, the Sadness with which we are averse to his action I call Blame.” [Prop 29]

Love of Esteem, Shame / Self-esteem, Repentance. “Joy accompanied by the idea of an internal cause, we shall call love of esteem, and the Sadness contarary to it, Shame — I mean when the Joy or Sadness arise from the fact that the man believes that he is praised or blamed. Otherwise I shall call the Joy accompanied by the idea of an internal cause, Self-esteem, and the Sadness contrary to it, Repentance.

Jealousy. “This Hatred toward a thing we love, combined with Envy, is called Jealousy, which is therefore nothing but a vacillation of mind born of Love and Hatred together, accompanied by the idea of another who is envied.” [Prop 35]

*Longing. One doesn’t only desire a thing, but to desire it as when one’s desire was new. The sadness for the absence of such accidental causes of ones joy is longing. [Prop 36]

Timidity, A Sense of Shame, Consternation. “Further, this affect, by which a man is so disposed that he does not will what he wills, and wills what he does not will, is called Timidity, which is therefore nothing but fear insofar as a man is disposed by it to avoid an evil he judges to be future by encountering a lesser evil (see Prop 28). But if the evil he is timid toward is Shame, then the timidity is called a Sense of shame. Finally, if the desire to avoid a future evil is restrained by a Timidity regarding another evil, so that he does not know what he would rather do, then the Fear is called Consternation, particularly if each evil he fears is of the greatest.” [Prop 39]

Anger. “The striving to do evil to him we hate is called Anger.”

Vengeance. “The striving to return an evil done to us is called Vengeance.”

[Starting from here, I’m just grabbing from wikisource].

This mental modification, or imagination of a particular thing, in so far as it is alone in the mind, is called Wonder ; but if it be excited by an object of fear, it is called Consternation, because wonder at an evil keeps a man so engrossed in the simple contemplation thereof, that he has no power to think of anything else whereby he might avoid the evil. If, however, the object of wonder be a man’s prudence, industry, or anything of that sort, inasmuch as the said man, is thereby regarded as far surpassing ourselves, wonder is called Veneration ; otherwise, if a man’s anger, envy, &c., be what we wonder at, the emotion is called Horror. Again, if it be the prudence, industry, or what not, of a man we love, that we wonder at, our love will on this account be the greater (III. xii.), and when joined to wonder or veneration is called Devotion. We may in like manner conceive hatred, hope, confidence, and the other emotions, as associated with wonder ; and we should thus be able to deduce more emotions than those which have obtained names in ordinary speech. Whence it is evident, that the names of the emotions have been applied in accordance rather with their ordinary manifestations than with an accurate knowledge of their nature.

To wonder is opposed Contempt, which generally arises from the fact that, because we see someone wondering at, loving, or fearing something, or because something, at first sight, appears to be like things, which we ourselves wonder at, love, fear, &c., we are, in consequence (III. xv. Coroll. and III. xxvii.), determined to wonder at, love, or fear that thing. But if from the presence, or more accurate contemplation of the said thing, we are compelled to deny concerning it all that can be the cause of wonder, love, fear, &c., the mind then, by the presence of the thing, remains determined to think rather of those qualities which are not in it, than of those which are in it ; whereas, on the other hand, the presence of the object would cause it more particularly to regard that which is therein. As devotion springs from wonder at a thing which we love, so does Derision spring from contempt of a thing which we hate or fear, and Scorn from contempt of folly, as veneration from wonder at prudence. Lastly, we can conceive the emotions of love, hope, honour, &c., in association with contempt, and can thence deduce other emotions, which are not distinguished one from another by any recognized name.

When the mind contemplates its weakness it feels pain […] This pain, accompanied by the idea of our own weakness, is called humility ; the pleasure, which springs from the contemplation of ourselves, is called self-love or self-complacency. 

More on Cowardice and Consternation

Daring is the desire, whereby a man is set on to do something dangerous which his equals fear to attempt. Cowardice is attributed to one, whose desire is checked by the fear of some danger which his equals dare to encounter. Consternation is attributed to one, whose desire of avoiding evil is checked by amazement at the evil which he fears.

Explanation.—Consternation is, therefore, a species of cowardice. But, inasmuch as consternation arises from a double fear, it may be more conveniently defined as a fear which keeps a man so bewildered and wavering, that he is not able to remove the evil. I say bewildered, in so far as we understand his desire of removing the evil to be constrained by his amazement. I say wavering, in so far as we understand the said desire to be constrained by the fear of another evil, which equally torments him : whence it comes to pass that he knows not, which he may avert of the two.

Customer’s expressed view: masks were about people liking to control and manipulate others. Attendant’s unexpressed view: customer thought rules were for dumb normal people, not him.

Person appeared and sat outside to work at computer without purchasing anything. Attendant thought “– unless a customer needs the seat.” 45 minutes later, a customer needed the seat, so attendant went out and said something to the person. The person responded that he had been there and purchased something in the morning and felt he still had a right to the seat. “I have no problem with that at all,” he’d boldly asserted to the attendant. Attendant agreed, explained he couldn’t have known he’d been a customer earlier, and went back in.

(Non-altercations with customers galore at Chance Sweepings.)

Idea that Aristotle’s four causes might be a good organizing principle for a contemporary cook book: that dishes should be thought of as having material, efficient, formal and final causes — ingredients, recipe, presentation, satisfaction of appetite. (Or maybe: ingredients, utensils, recipe, satisfaction.)

Idea that there’s this analogy between the way ancient scientists thought and the way everyday people in Democracies think; the former are geniuses and the latter are not, but both their ideas are confined to intuitive thinking in a certain sense. Heavier objects fall faster than light ones.

(Could you look at ancient Athens as a kind of pinnacle of western intuitive thought?… I suppose, though, part of why Plato caused a stir was that his morality is counter-intuitive — Justice is not the will of the stronger, etc.)