Techniques for answering the question, what is happening when nothing is happening?

May 9, 2023

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.

OLD POSTS: Politics and Film

May 10, 2021

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;

OLD POSTS: Concordances

May 10, 2021

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,

OLD POSTS: WRITING and odd ideas

May 10, 2021

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 reasonActual 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 NothingRussian 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), translatingUnnopenessee, 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.

OLD POSTS: “Mysteries” & Ngrams

May 6, 2021

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

OLD POSTS: Ancient Greek Passages

May 4, 2021

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 ,

OLD POSTS: French Passages

May 3, 2021

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

OLD POSTS: Quotations

April 30, 2021

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, 

OLD POSTS: Shapes

April 27, 2021

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)

April 26, 2021

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

Granite and Steel

April 25, 2021

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.)

Without the strength to “burn it all now,” committing writing instead to zip disc

April 24, 2021

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.

April 23, 2021

(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 and new vacuum

April 22, 2021

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)

Iliad 7; 421-423

April 22, 2021

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.

Spinoza: Definitions of Affects

April 21, 2021

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.

April 20, 2021

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.)

April 19, 2021

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.)

April 18, 2021

*……………………*……………………* …………..*
*……………………….*……………………….* ………..*
*………….. Archibald Lampman…. cark …………..*
*…………….. stupe…///.………………………g ……………..*
*………………….Owens Valley ………………. e………………….*
*………………….. …..///.Omertà ……………….o …………………..*
*…………………….oriel…///…all over painting …………………….*
……………………… hatikvah…///.cantatrice . -_.. -‘-…………….|
*…………………….La ……………………………….. n …………………….*
*…………………..Llorona….syncope……….n …………………..*
*………………….inedia……….Porlock………. e………………….*
*……………..DalekINTP Merrill Gilfillan……………..*
*……………………….*……………………….* ………..*
*……………………*……………………* ………..*

Customer Saturn

April 17, 2021

. . . .
. . ………………… ………
The shop itself put into the grill
now to be removed from it. Less hot
will it be
–as the tomatoes burst out,
(Lettuce like flames from the windows.)
Less hot will it be— (Onions visible
Less hot within the opened mouth.)
It was thus that Customer Saturn did eat and does eat still:
Less hot eyes glazed above the dilated nose,
Less hot forward lunge of the pinched opened face,
Less hot huge hands that hold the hot bread fast,
Less hot crumbs and grease on the rosy wide plate.

. . . .
. . ………………… ……… *
(Possible conclusory poem to Chance Sweepings, or maybe part of epigraph, anyway fit companion to preceding.)
. . . .