A lady bears fruit for this poor brute,
Who cups and he grates, and he cuts and he plates,
And he endlessly hears the cash register’s toot.
It isn’t for moot, this fine fruit, he salutes.

_{(Doggerel aplenty @ Chance Sweepings)}

“A Life of Flannery O’Connor” review:

One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions. She was an anagogical writer, of that there is no doubt.

anagoge.(X).

(Nightmare Town). The idea that The Castle, for example is a film noire, but with violence and crime at an infinite remove from the reported action. In Nightmare Town the veneer between strange proceedings and its covert illegal intent is very thin and the violence is now; in The Castle, there is no present violence and there might be only that strange veneer, the criminality being so covert as to be undiscoverable or perhaps not really there.

For some reason he had come to harbor an exceptionally strong fear of the hot waterpot, so that, even after it had been unplugged, he would keep it some distance from the other appliances; and so that, even after it had been unplugged for some while, and even after its exterior and interior temperatures had reached equilibrium with the ambient air, he would remove it from direct exposure to sunlight and continue to regard it warily from across the room.

When would it show its true nature? he would think. When would it engulf that whole area in flame? When would the searing temperature of those flames melt the paint from off the doors? When would the searing flames indeed melt, like wedges of cheese, the doors themselves?

When would the house pets, sensing their danger, fly forward to the closed windows (and, with a miraculous adroitness and understanding hitherto unsuspected, tap out the panes with their paws, thus making good their escape?)

When would the firemen, huge men from the country, and agile women with the capacity to get in and out of the smallest spaces, delicately cradle the terrified housepets, overcome with gratitude for the brave humans’ appearance (the brave humans so different from that neglectful man who had caused them to become so threatened)?

When would the firemen turn to the gathered people, their homes now devastated by flames, the neighbors’ homes now smoldering ruins, and say in righteously condemnatory tones, “Who? Who has done this? What person failed to perform their basic obligations and with inevitably catastrophic results?”

And when would I step forward from the crowd and face them (could I step forward and face what I’d done? Would I not simply die for shame and run off?) When would I step forward to face the crowd and say, I, I am the person you seek! I am that careless man who has made you all suffer!”

And so to put off that dreaded day for a time (though could that day be forever held back?) he continued to watch warily the cool and unplugged pot.

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.” (nytimes 1.5.13). Former President of Uruguay speaking.

Nous avons un commandant qui n’a pas froid aux yeux ! Vingt mille lieues

……q……g
.au………..ra
lia…..b……vel
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
a th sn f slmCAh
r h e e r eieieoki
p a d d e.usntia..
e f g s s.. E ic…
n i e id h.. CO….
n n t d p……O0
e g h e l……i9
d e e s a…….P
c r ewli s.. …..P
ir tht i t9o09
ch l c i.. ….CO
l e i k c.. ….CO
..e a …..,,,,.v a v
hl……………..,,,,,a i
..Limbs. of the. horse
..e. c …………,,,,,.v a
.m h ……….,,,,,.i r
.o. i v airvair
.. A. a I

The toponym “Cabin John” is thought to be a corruption of the name “Captain John”, but the origin of the name remains unresolved. . . Cabin John, Maryland

“The meaning of ‘Voyages II’ is now clear: it is a dramatic ritual in which the poet attains to a mystic unity with the forces of nature and with his own art, and out of that unity his vision is perfected. It is a portrait of the poet reborn into the world and gift with complete understanding… Crane perfected the means for expressing the very movement of the mind in search of unity.” Voyages II: an experiment in redemption.

Wikipedia: “Unique among writers of ancient Athens, Euripides demonstrated sympathy towards the underrepresented members of society […] His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes.” Bacchae 761-764 (English):

τοῖς μὲν γὰρ οὐχ ᾕμασσε λογχωτὸν βέλος,
κεῖναι δὲ θύρσους ἐξανιεῖσαι χερῶν
ἐτραυμάτιζον κἀπενώτιζον φυγῇ
γυναῖκες ἄνδρας, οὐκ ἄνευ θεῶν τινος.

 For their pointed spears drew no blood, but the women, hurling the thyrsoi from their hands, kept wounding them and turned them to flight—women did this to men, not without the help of some god. 

I wonder: Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic? And that the modern-day piano wouldn’t be with us if a deaf person hadn’t demanded its existence? …nyt

Indeed, roles have been reversed in some ways: Today, it is Germany that opens its door to refugees and whose chancellor, Angela Merkel, is outspoken in defense of global values and embodies decency and respect. By contrast, the Britain that sheltered and nurtured my family is a sad shadow of its former self…. nyt

“I’ve been doing this almost 30 years, and I’ve lost 10 or 12 drivers so far,” Nabely said. “Most of the drivers I lost, they’re good people.” [Post from 2014]

More crumbs tapped from the pan of Chance Sweepings . . .

Customer showed attendant pictures of cruise to Panama. Customer showed attendant pictures of recent family cruise. Customer showed attendant pictures from trip to Greece. Customer showed tendentious “funny” political youtube … a youtube of an incredible soccer goal … a video of hilarious saturday night live sketch… showed him latest jokey internet meme. Customer showed picture of her walking, picture of her running, picture of her resting, picture of her hilariously collapsing after having run; picture of her meal, of her meal with friends, of her alone at the empty table afterwards. Customer wanted to show video of Abiy Ahmed doing pushups. Attendant shown beautiful pictures of native Morrocco and Tunisia, of the mosques and fruit trees of the horn of Africa. Attendant shown “portrait of a customer as a young man.” Attendant shown live eagle nest cam. (Seeing what the eaglets were doing.)

Yes, attendant did have copy of Whitney Huston holiday album, he said. Tig was name of the pit-mix dog of the gal. Zero was name of the cat of Tony’s that had been struck by a car and lived. Will had been the name of the young man of yesterday who saw a future in hyperbaric medicine. “Maybe a version that could travel with sports teams.” Brian in Charleston this weekend, Nancy in Chicago next weekend — Rick, Margo, & Max. Shared with Max my theory that when people say they’ll see you “tomorrow” you never actually see them the next day. You may see them soon –and if they say they’ll see you soon you may in fact see them tomorrow— but you won’t see them tomorrow if that’s when they say they’ll see you. (It may even be a certain type of person’s polite way of saying that you should probably not expect to see them too soon.) Cheerful teenage gal with Giant shirt who apologized for the happy cartoon figure on her credit card, which she figured I was mystified by (– I was actually looking for the chip); said she had chosen it when she was “much younger.” Cute happy teenage girl working at Giant: small mocha blended coffee drink with whipped cream.

Watching old exedrin comercials — Life got tougher so we got stronger, for a headache so bad it shows

Interesting, original sense of word alight (to land on, dismount) was to make less heavy (a horse’s burden was made light after you’d dismounted.) Online etymological: “The notion is of getting down off a horse or vehicle, thus lightening it.”

Symposium (Plato) 195e

ἐν γὰρ ἤθεσι καὶ ψυχαῖς θεῶν καὶ ἀνθρώπων τὴν οἴκησιν ἵδρυται, καὶ οὐκ αὖ ἑξῆς ἐν πάσαις ταῖς ψυχαῖς, ἀλλ᾽ ᾗτινι ἂν σκληρὸν ἦθος ἐχούσῃ ἐντύχῃ, ἀπέρχεται, ᾗ δ᾽ ἂν μαλακόν, οἰκίζεται.

(Roughly: For Love makes its home in the souls and dispositions of gods and men, and not in all souls equally, but when it should chance on one having a hard disposition, it flees; and when it chances on a soft one, it abides.)

lacia…………
u h h…………..
r a a…………….
b v l………………
o i w……………….
d o e………………….
y t g………………………
.T I……………… y
…..n…………. e
….d……… l
………….e… l
………..f… e
………e. h
……..n s
……s t
….e e
…o i
..f r
.h r
a

Had sought, typing this into the search bar: walden old masters. (Search had returned– walden universiity masters program). Had erased that and typed in WLuden then shook head no and typed WH old masters without seeking the results for that one either then put WH Icarus in the entry field and finally found the poem. (Not Walden, or Ogden or Wadden, but Auden, W.H. Auden. W.H. Auden.)

I was still in my running shorts. I had already seen the Bruegel painting on which the poem is based, — the pale green of its water, as seen on the painting’s reproduction on the wikipedia page devoted to it, reminding me of something that occurred while I was still running perhaps an hour previously, before I had even reached the schoolyard that had made me think of Bruegel for the first time in a while (for the first time probably since the last time I had passed that schoolyard, which always makes me think of those Bruegel scenes of communities with everyone up to various activities, if Bruegel is the one I mean). (When I first wrote this, I was sure it was Bruegel, having just looked it up, and could even spell Bruegel with a sense of assuredness, but now while I’m editing months later, I am unsure.) (I should probably continue editing this, for clarity and such, but let me just give the order of operations here, the plot so to speak, to make it simpler. Maybe that will allow me to avoid any more editing. (i.) I went for a run and saw a strange green paleness in the river. (ii.) on the way home I passed a school yard which always reminds me of well-known paintings by Breughel. (iii.) Breughel reminds me Auden’s poem The Old Masters but I couldn’t think of Auden’s name all the way home, and that was the first thing I did when I got home, performed an internet search for the name of the author of that poem, still in my running shorts. (iv.) Actually, the first thing I looked up was not Auden but Bruegel, to make sure that was the painter I was thinking of. (v.) It took me a few attempts to type in something similar enough to W.H. Auden to have his name come up. That’s about all that’s recounted in this post.)

I had been running for exercise along the river, rested on a sunwarped picnic bench, and raised my sunglasses to see what that pale greenness in the water was: was it the sun or something submerged or something submerged that the strong sun had revealed? I continued on the path and further on found the discrepancy still more stark: there was the shadow of the bridge, then beyond it a patch of water rendered this extraordinary green by the sun. Pollution maybe. That was the very same hue of green the wikipedia page of the Brueghel painting later reminded me of — the color of the water toward which Icarus fell.

From there, I went over the fourteenth street bridge on foot for the first time ever that day, myself and my knee braces, to the Jefferson Memorial, which was then having some work done on it, which I’d read about in the Post — some sort of algae being removed from the exterior of its dome. I walked around the paths, noting their vulnerability to flooding. It occurred to me: fiction did at least have this one sure un-obscure point with the “real world” in common: that point in the life of a fiction writer when he has the idea for a fiction. This is “the hinge”! I cried out in my interior. “This is the answer I’ve sought!” (For one could deny that a fiction has any relation to the thing it portrays, I had thought, but one could not deny that in some point in history, a very real point, the idea of a fiction or a book took hold; and this, what inspires fiction, locks in place the fiction to the person, the fiction to the non-fiction, to the history.) (Not exactly sure what I meant by this now.)

Unimportant though it is, the idea for a fiction occurred, a believable future in which the potomac’s waters were level with the memorial’s base. Character in his knee braces, his sweaty shirt and ‘bra’, meanders to the other side of the Memorial and witnesses a spot he hasn’t been in many years, “not since he was a child” he probably thinks. He had been on one of those paddle boats once, he knows, and tries to recall the circumstances, though that was probably forty years ago. That character is sitting on the steps of the Memorial now, looking at the chained up paddle-boats, thinking things of this kind (those chained up paddle boats seeming a Memorial of their own, he’s probably thinking, a memorial to the forty years of ones life that had elapsed, those chained up paddle boats for tourists, in the river gently rocking) — sounds of construction erupting from the interior chamber of the memorial, “Nymphette”-looking Japanese tourists taking selfies in front of the water, Forty-something housewife with a limbaugh-listening husband taking pictures with her Ipad at a goose.

I had looked up Bruegel because I couldn’t remember the name of the painter whom I think of every time I pass that schoolhouse and its grounds, which I only pass these days when I’ve gone too far on my run (the Memorial being about seven miles away) and need a short cut back to my house, –schoolyard in which, during recess, in every part of the wide roughly parabolic zone, some extraordinary child-like activity is occurring, utterly oblivious to every other child-like activity occurring right beside it:

In the corner, a child is alone and kicks at the base of a tree repeatedly; in this area, children throw a ball through the gaps of a jungle gym; in this area, three girls are gathered, serious as adults, expressing judgments; afar, a baseball game occurs on one half of a baseball diamond and a football game on the other, each with no more than half the needed players; afar, tag and hide-and-seek; between the near-and-far, two girls who have a ball but are talking and not throwing it while standing at what seems an unreasonable distance apart… many such activities.

Exhausted and with joint pain, walking by this, and unable to think of the name Breughel, unable to think of the name Auden — in my thoughts calling him Walden.

(a.) We’re taught to feel guilty and ashamed of things that are not wrong and are not shameful. (b.) Efforts to escape this condition tend to result in still more guilt and shame. (c.) There is a desire both to treat people as objects and to prevent them from being treated that way. (d.) Is it evil to sometimes fulfill our perverse desires? (e.) The bad are bad with abandon, while the good aren’t permitted any fun. (f.) (Speculation: could Wallace’s “fraudulence paradox” be a sort WASP analog to Roth/Portnoy’s Complaint?)

Hippocrates 13 ( English):

γέροντες εὐφορώτατα νηστείην φέρουσι, δεύτερον, οἱ καθεστηκότες, ἥκιστα, μειράκια, πάντων δὲ μάλιστα, παιδία, τουτέων δὲ αὐτέων ἃ ἂν τύχῃ αὐτὰ ἑωυτέων προθυμότερα ἐόντα.

(He’s talking about what age of person is best able to bear with fasting.)