October 21, 2020

166
Brown broken down cardboard box for a flat screen tv which has itself been made flat: made so that you can see four of the six surfaces of the box at the same time, jammed in between two of the five grey scuffed plastic three dimensional tubs that have been set out for the neighborhood’s recycling: brown with a pale blue picture on it of the flat screen tv itself, the thing itself, which must be in one of the homes around here.

October 20, 2020

“If you look online at where the satellite transponders show where the fishing fleet is, you can see clusters of fishing boats around these methane plume hotspots,” Johnson said….

October 19, 2020

It is thus a double restoration from a double disruption .

Random Passage from Ancient Geographer Strabo (5.3.232)

October 18, 2020

Strabo was an ancient Greek geographer whose life straddled the first centuries BC and AD, and this is a passage, taken totally at random, from his best-known work Geographica. (For fun, here is a map of what the world might have looked like to Strabo.) Links lead to the vocabulary tool at Perseus.

Geographica, 5.3.5

παρακινδύνως μὲν οὖν ὁρμίζονται μετέωρα ἐν τῷ σάλῳ τὰ ναυκλήρια, τὸ μέντοι λυσιτελὲς νικᾷ: καὶ γὰρ ἡ τῶν ὑπηρετικῶν σκαφῶν εὐπορία τῶν ἐκδεχομένων τὰ φορτία καὶ ἀντιφορτιζόντων ταχὺν ποιεῖ τὸν ἀπόπλουν πρὶν ἢ τοῦ ποταμοῦ ἅψασθαι, καὶ μέρους ἀποκουφισθέντος εἰσπλεῖ καὶ ἀνάγεται μέχρι τῆς Ῥώμης, σταδίους ἑκατὸν ἐνενήκοντα.

TRANSLATION (Hamilton / Falconer)

Now although it is with peril that the merchant-ships anchor far out in the surge, still, the prospect of gain prevails; and in fact the good supply of the tenders which receive the cargoes and bring back cargoes in exchange makes it possible for the ships to sail away quickly before they touch the river, or else, after being partly relieved of their cargoes, they sail into the Tiber and run inland as far as Rome, one hundred and ninety stadia.

October 16, 2020

a th sn f …………………..t below
r h e e r ………………….. ch lci i l
p a d d e …………………..I w i r i f
e f g s s ………………….. l eli k cl
n i e id h …………………..c th u t t
n n t d p …………………..i ge up r
e g h e l …………………..t on ou t
d e e s a …………………..s sps s e
c r ewli s …………………..a a n h h
ir tht i t …………………..e n dw o

ch lci i l
l eli k cl
e n dw o
I w i r i f
c th u t t
a a n h h
s sps s e
t on ou t
i ge up r
n ash wo
t below

October 16, 2020

“Having seen it all,” said Moges Alemu, 84, a factory owner who in a bygone era was Emperor Haile Selassie’s flight technician, “I can say there has never been anything as highly anticipated in this country as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.” [POST]

October 15, 2020

Dream. Helping elderly Asian Pacific couple find someone on the train. They can’t get off unless a certain person is there and I’m checking every train car for that person (including places where a person could not possibly be, such as under dropped coats and going through book shelves).

Dream. A social situation in an outdoor setting, but there is a sort of gas flare in the dream that does not seem dreamlike but real. It will go off and seem like nothing from a dream. Does no one else in the dream see this reality? (This is different from hearing a clock tower in a dream and realizing it is an alarm clock; this is more like an actor really dying onstage.)

October 14, 2020

Dylan lyrics: Union Sundown

October 13, 2020

Song of Myself, 48 “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,/ And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,/ And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, /And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero…”

Small continent after all

October 12, 2020

Wallace, known as a stickler for correct usage, at IJ pp. 386, uses enjambment to mean simply ‘jammed in’:

This segues into an entr’acte, with continent squeezed in for world in ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ which enjambment doesn’t do the rhythm section of doo-wopping girls a bit of good, but does usher in the start of a whole new era.

That’s a good, but I don’t think technically correct, use of the word. Enjambment means the content of one line of poetry spilling into the next line of poetry. What Wallace is describing is a word with three syllables being said in the space of a word with one syllable, — which is actually kind of the opposite.

October 11, 2020

Hippocrates, 19. eng

ἐπὴν διακοπῇ ὀστέον, ἢ χονδρὸς, ἢ νεῦρον, ἢ γνάθου τὸ λεπτὸν, ἢ ἀκροποσθίη, οὔτε αὔξεται, οὔτε ξυμφύεται.

When bone, cartilage, tendon, the lower jaw or foreskin are cut off, they do not grow back or reunite.

October 8, 2020

Milky Way galaxy is a flat disk 100,000 light years or so across, but it’s also about 2,000 light years thick

Items near cat-hair covered sweat shirt

October 6, 2020

From left to right: pink rubber cat comb shaped like an upright seated cat as seen from the front (the rubber spiked back of this rubber cat to go against that of the old but living one); bottom half of it seen through a curved tumbler perhaps a fifth full of water, its transparence marred in points by drops of water clinging to its side and reflected light.

Within the refractive circle of the water surface is visible a semi-circumference of the vessel’s base.

Book, right side up, (Anne Boyer’s The Undying) with cover concealed by a book, downside up, Complete Poems of William Blake, the white of its barcode oddly salient against the dirty white or tan of its background. The spine of Blake’s Complete meets the bottom edge of Wallace Stevens’ Complete — his photograph in a suit there. That hard bound book partially covered by a sky blue paperback that contains criticism of the poems it rests on, and is upside down, splayed open, itself largely concealed beneath the closed Campaigns of Napoleon.

The dark green dust jacket of The Campaigns, with an eagle emblem on it, lifted to reveal a half inch sliver of the cover beneath, a similar dark blue sliver of Stevens’ Complete visible at the bottom edge of its pale dust jacket. The cat comb, the water glass, The Undying, and the Blake, all resting on a cat-hair-covered sweatshirt, tossed on that spot some while ago, one involuted arm of it rising in a mound of blue cloth by The Campaigns.

October 5, 2020

7.The unreal person understands the statements and intentions of real people, even when unexpressed, while the real person understands nothing of the unreal person’s intentions and ideas, expressed or unexpressed…. Theses of Higgs

Lessepsian migration

October 4, 2020

Theodosius was the last emperor to rule over both the eastern and the western halves of the Roman Empire…. Theodosius I

Groove: Meaning “spiral cut in a phonograph record” is from 1902 …

Lessepsian migration : Lessepsian migration (also called Erythrean invasion) is the ongoing migration of marine species across the Suez Canal, usually from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, more rarely in the opposite direction. It is named after Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer in charge of the canal’s construction.,,,

October 3, 2020

ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egyptham
rrida.
thsn. fMar
gUA.
he er. o-da
.p.Bub
p a d d bb..
….Bu f.
. g s s. B0bb..
swin
..ie id ..ines
ging..n t d p.. sand
Mar
e g h e ami
rrida.
de es. Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
siron.Bbb
salnubb

October 2, 2020

(Amazon comment) Une somme de travail, une vie dédiée à l’explicitation d’un domaine d’investigation vaste, un flot de connaissances parfaitement maîtrisées et qui époustoufle.

Adrenaline Control

October 1, 2020

The group was named after the song “Proud of Your Boy,” an outtake from the soundtrack to the Disney musical “Aladdin.”oh god. And there’s more:

Becoming a full-fledged Proud Boy is a four-step process, according to McInnes’s essay. First, a prospective member publicly declares he’s a Proud Boy. Second, he undergoes a ritual beating that continues until he can name five breakfast cereals. “The rationale here is we all need better ‘adrenaline control,’ ” McInnes wrote. Members must also swear off masturbation at this stage.

At the third level, members get a Proud Boy tattoo bearing the group’s name. The fourth and final step involves getting into a public fight that advances the group’s cause.

September 30, 2020

Voltaire to Diderot, 11 juin 1749.

je place ce témoignage de votre estime autant au-dessus des marques de la faveur des grands que les grands sont au-dessous de vous… *

“I place this testament of your esteem as high above the marks of favor of the great as the great are far beneath you.”

Dewpoint with pyracantha potentially reached

September 29, 2020

Gal running with hands below waist, palms parallel to ground, an “Egyptian” or “ready for anything” posture… Gal running with hands at chest-level, palms out, a “please don’t” posture, running on balls of feet… Old gal hawking with impressive unselfconsciousness, reaching so deep in the lung that, as I reflect on it moments later, I am myself made to choke and cough.

How writing sometime purges, other times reinforces memories. Thus I’ve never had a stronger sense of pyracantha than after having, the other day, written the word down for the first time (as if perhaps a dew point had been reached, with the “dew” being conscious memory); thus, it used to be I would think of the line of An Octopus about chipmunks whenever I saw chipmunks, but after having written of always having that memory on seeing that animal, which I very frequently do, now I hardly do. (Though maybe, on having written this, that connection will be restored.)