Part II, Chapter 20
(Don Quixote, Ormsby translation)

“He preaches well who lives well,” said Sancho, “and I know no more theology than that.”

“Nor need you,” said Don Quixote, “but I cannot conceive or make out how it is that, since the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, you who are more afraid of a lizard than of God, know so much.”

PARTE II, Capítulos 20

—Bien predica quien bien vive —respondió Sancho—, y yo no sé otras tologías.

—Ni las has menester —dijo don Quijote—. Pero yo no acabo de entender ni alcanzar cómo siendo el principio de la sabiduría el temor de Dios, tú, que temes más a un lagarto que a Él, sabes tanto.

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m t m. . .
w
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The crane crunketh... crunk

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Eumenides 984-987 (Smyth):

χάρματα δ᾽ ἀντιδιδοῖεν
κοινοφιλεῖ διανοίᾳ,
καὶ στυγεῖν μιᾷ φρενί:
πολλῶν γὰρ τόδ᾽ ἐν βροτοῖς ἄκος.

Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement.

Niether sun nor death may be looked fixedly at. [*]

Dvořák’s transcription of the song of the scarlet tanager (top) and the appearance of the song in the third movement of the quartet.

Period. The pencil as it formed a word, then broke it off, departing upward, traced a familiar pattern. The pencil, having formed a word, rises up

*

Period. The pencil, having legibly formed the familiar pattern of a well-known word, rose from the paper, then fell upon it, then repeated the process; forming another familiar shape in a pattern roughly similar to, though not the same as, the familiar shape preceding it; then this pencil briefly doubling back to “dot” something (to dot, that is, “to draw very tight circles to form a mark in the shape of a dot”, to dot as in the phrase, “to dot an i“);

rose from the paper and completed that whole process (complete with the doubling back to “dot” one letter more and to “cross” some such other character); then repeated many times this similarly (though in each case the unit of varying length and of varying contour across bottom and across top and with or without requiring this “doubling back” to “dot” or to “cross” some figure that needed this action for the completion or perfection of its form)

repeated many times this similarly until having formed the familiar pattern called by some “a complete complex sentence”, which others will call still more simply, “a sentence,” whereupon it, this activity, was entirely stopped, and there was a “period”, a “dot” like that of the character of the i, yet placed around the very root, as it were, or base, of the concluding word; as if to start still another familiar pattern or word but having gotten so far only as the first mark or dot, broken off at almost the exact moment of inception.

*

Thinking of the two forms of the plural of cannon –cannon and cannons– I used ngrams to see what was more popular. Pretty decisively “cannon” is the winner, but the margin narrows as the word itself becomes disused:

100 cannon, 100 cannons
several cannon,several cannons
battery of cannon,battery of cannons

Other words with plural forms that are the same as their singular — related to which, I’m reminded of Marianne Moore’s somewhat striking use of the plural of “deer” in this line of The Octopus (at least, to me this plural s-less “deer” rings out):

What spot could hold merits of greater importance
for bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats and ducks?

Word cannon apparently arises from Greek κάννα — reed.

Balzac “Another Study of Womankind” (trans. Jordan Stump): “…In the winter she wears a boa over a fur cape, in the summer, a shawl and scarf; the bourgeoise has a remarkable talent for vestimentary redundancy.”

Vestimentary redundancy is a rendering of “les pléonasmes de toilette.” Autre étude de femme: ” en hiver, elle a un boa par-dessus une pèlerine en fourrure, un châle et une écharpe en été : la bourgeoise entend admirablement les pléonasmes de toilette.”

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One thinks of people as being a common source of frustration, but I don’t believe I have in recent memory encountered any person, or anything at all in fact, so frustrating as the situation I encountered this morning when I tried to put on sweat pants while wearing tennis shoes — the most ridiculously painful and unpleasant thing looking at my foot stuck where the knee should be and being unable to move it either forward or back and leaving me almost exploding with rage. This after the first foot had gone through relatively easily.

Boning up on my “state nicknames” I was moved to inquire why Virginia was the Old Dominion State. Wikipedia gives this explanation. A more thorough account here says the wikipedia version is without proof, yet possible. The name gained popularity during the civil war but it’s not known for sure where it came from.

Meanwhile South Carolina, now the palmetto state, was once the iodine state: “In the late 1920s, the South Carolina Natural Resources Commission began a public relations campaign to advertise the high iodine levels found in fruits and vegetables grown in the state.”

Why does it feel so good to read about Louis Armstrong? This is about his house –I guess his only one– in Corona, NYC. A snippet:

Armstrong himself was so concerned with blending in with his working-class neighbors that when his wife decided to give the house a brick facade, Armstrong went door-to-door down the block asking the other residents if they wanted him to pay for their houses to receive the same upgrade. (A few of his neighbors took him upon the offer, which accounts for the scattered presence of brick homes on the street to this day.)

And:

When word would get out, as it always did, that Armstrong was in town, a line would form outside his room, and Armstrong would listen to people’s hardships and give them money: $20 here, $50, sometimes as much as $500. When Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, asked why he’d give away money like that, Armstrong responded, “Money? What do I need money for? They’re gonna write about me in the history books one day.”

So I stood there in front of the cups, arm raised as if to grab a cup but utterly paralyzed for a surprising amount of time, unable even to ask them if they would repeat their orders. Then I don’t know what happened, but my head somewhat dipped, like an interior strut had been snapped, and I began to remember what they had said with extreme vividness, actually hearing the raspiness of the voice of the first customer express the first order, and the nasalness of the voice of the second customer as she expressed her order; so it was not by directly remembering their orders, but by replaying in memory the experience of having heard them at the register, that I was able to recall what the two orders had been (Iced chai, iced vanilla latte) then quickly extended my reach to grab two medium, cold-beverage cups.

nnnnnn
Angles of carpets upon the planes of chairs
In between the sofa arm and the lamp stand
nnnnnn the universe and its map
nnnnnn which glows like an alien
nnnnnn upon the drape-like muttering of the television
As its brightness is bright, so do drape ends end
nnnnnn and achieve the floor neatly
nnnnnn and with as little reality.
As it is bright so are the drapes drawn,
The earth contained by certain extreme choke points
nnnnnn such as, for example, the Straight of Hormuz,
nnnnnn or the remote control of this television.

nnnnnn
nnnnnn

What “counts”: the things we mean not to count and/or think completely incidental to what we do is what is historically significant about us, I believe Tolstoy would say. Whatever we do not choose is what historically counts.

Perhaps in the world of today this is like saying: what you do online (what you may learn, what you may express) is significant only to yourself, but the data that may be extracted from what you do, your clicks, that is history. Big Data = historical force.

Youtube: a favorite scene from Checkov’s Seagull. (“It’s the tragedy of my life. When I was young I always looked as if I’d been drinking heavily.” “It would have been nice to have been a mediocre writer even, you know.”) Another favorite from Uncle Vanya, prescient on environment.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.

‘The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.’

The king is history’s slave.

War and Peace, Book 3, part 1, chapter 1. Maude translation.

The shoulder of the jogger. I had been looking to see if the jogger ahead of me was the jogger I’d passed previously. This “previous jogger” had worn a sleeveless shirt and had a tattoo of a kind I could not recall on her shoulder, while this “current jogger” had a shirt I’d call sky blue in coloration, and I was looking at the shoulder of it, and no tattoo could be seen there.

That corner of her shirt, –and I don’t believe I’m joking — although I may be joking– occurred to me as something vitally important. Looking at the figure of a woman is something that will engender in some sexual excitement. Sexual excitement derived from things that don’t seem sexual we call a fetish. I saw on this shoulder a kind of distillation of ordinariness, something so uninteresting, it seemed what my whole life was made of. Not sexual, not a fetish, not of interest, the fabric of everything. It was a sort of opposite of a fetish: a fixation on something that left me utterly lifeless and benumbed.

This jogger and I actually ran on opposite banks of the stream for a while after that. The trail on her side being far more meandering, I was surprised to she she’d caught up with me at George Mason, and I lost heart a bit when I lost track of her on Walter Reed… On reflection, it seemed to me my interest in this patch of shirt was like being enthralled by one coke can but not by any of the billions of others that are exactly like it. And it seemed a portal into the “dark matter” of our lives: the huge chunks of it we spend doing nothing in particular. (I guess I see the modernist project as unpacking exactly that “dark matter.”)

Opinion: think the appeal of this Leadbelly Cotton Fields recording is that the tempo, in a subtle natural way, is continuously surprisingly increasing.