— By the way the customer articulated the first item of his order the attendant successively intuited there would be three items in his order.

Attendant has come to feel that people will employ different rhetorical devices and gestures and intonations based on how many items are in their order. If they are ordering just a small coffee, for example, they might say “small coffee” in a different tone of voice than they would if they were ordering a small coffee and a juice; and if they were ordering a bagel with cream cheese along with their juice and small coffee, they would say “small coffee” in still another tone of voice.

Similarly the prefatory remarks will be different in the case of long and short orders. Something very common for an order of three items or more, say, is when someone begins by saying “I would like” very slowly. (In rhythm this might almost be a dactyl or cretic; in pitch, I can’t quite determine –one might need an ear for quarter tones– but it would seem two of the same notes (I, would) followed by one of a lower pitch (like).)

— The PLU number for the second item he articulated, a small latte, was 721, and the price of the first and second item together was $7.21, so that, although it’s very uninteresting, the attendant received a mild surprise when he saw this sequence of three numbers twice in rapid succession, meaning totally different things.

(Note. When ringing up an item on the register, you don’t enter its price, but its code or PLU number, which helps with inventory and such things. 721 is the code for a small latte, the price of which is something like 3.38.)

The attendant had received a mild surprise, he has written, yet it must happen every couple months or so that the total of the register either equals the PLU number or interestingly comments on it in some way.

(Chance Sweepings)

It’s not obvious to me why I find James so hard to read: his sentences are not, in general, long, and his syntax is not, usually, tortuous. But there is an idiom at work here (often involving phrases such as “come at” “make up to”) which seems peculiar to a social group in which one doesn’t indigenously belong, an idiom in which the prepositions deployed are frequently not those one would expect.

Wandering in and out of metaphor, one comes upon a culminating sentence that, by its tone, promises to be revelatory about the scene which has just passed, but which one feels is not entirely grammatical. . . This is another thing.

Where there is a murkiness and obvious obscurity to certain passages of Faulkner, say, there is to James a more, as it were, ice-like dilemma of believing it is clear then discovering it is hard; and where a Faulkner or Joyce sentence might be unpacked and parsed –or clearly can’t be unpacked– with James, the feeling is, you need a dictionary that doesn’t exist. Needed to have belonged to that social group.

In this post from a while back, I suggested that Bob Dylan’s winning of the Nobel Prize represented a win for populism from the left over cultural institutions just as Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency represented a populist win from the right over political institutions.

I was thinking about these issues again and thought of another point of similarity between Dylan and Trump — their antagonistic attitude toward the press– but additionally felt I should add this one caveat about Dylan: that he had done at least one thing I considered seriously “literary” in the traditional sense, which his songs in fact seemed a sort of prelude or foundation for, which was his book Chronicles.

Now, I haven’t that read since it came out, and I am not sure what I’d think of it now, and I am sure he didn’t win the Nobel on its account; and yet, at the time of reading it, a comparison to Caesar’s Gallic Wars had come vividly to mind: not literature like a novel or a poem is, but as a well written personal account by someone of rare experience — a person, moreover, perhaps uniquely representative of their time.

1er avril 1824… J’ai vu le masque moulé de mon pauvre Géricault. Ô monument vénérable ! J’ai été tenté de le baiser… sa barbe… ses cils… Et son sublime Radeau ! Quelles mains ! Quelles têtes ! Je ne puis exprimer l’admiration qu’il m’inspire.

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Hm: hoax maybe from hocus-pocus, hocus pocus the name of a juggler initially, probably nonsense Latin.

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

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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