Sebald in a sense having ressurected the narrative I of Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy — but

story idea of person wandering around housing complex like I have just done–

idea that the mechanism by which “Karl” becomes “K” is Kafka’s diminishing hopes of publication –of career as salvation, of career as even something “distantly out there” and possible–

(because career is not possible, Kafka is “K”)

ought publication to be considered the realm of the perfect or the realm of the good enough– in an absolute sense — if it’s going to be published it has to be good (because it represents oneself, one’s publisher)– if it’s going to be published of course it will merely be ‘good enough’ (almost nothing that’s published is actually much good, in an ‘absolute sense’.)

if it were true that only by reading the original manuscript could you have an ‘authentic reading experience’ what would that imply– which is most true or is it to be thought of as a spectrum: the author’s thought; the author’s manuscript; the author’s published thought [etc.]

Statue: what is interesting about the statue of the woman picking up after her dog is the length and the tautness of the leash between her and her dog; while she crouches the dog is pulling with the maximum strength in another direction. The dog is not portrayed in the statue.

“spectacle” …

“signs without the signified”…

the really big numbers we encounter in modern times: the size of the nat’l debt, the distance to the sun, the age of the earth … whereas in classical times it was “10,000”… (does our capacity to number precede or follow the things we find to number)… we know the Dow Jones goes up or down (and what it’s going up or down roughly may mean to us) but don’t really know what it represents (or how it goes up or down) or why it is thirteen instead of two thousand

(Of the ignition we know to insert and twist the key, of the engine we know it needs oil and gas, but what occurs between them is generally not known.)

(we have faith that a mechanic must know, but what if it were to come to pass that no one really knew how the one related to the other, that we forgot)

(often our “forest of symbols” is one of car or computer parts?) [NO.]

The idea that A.I will essentially be like this: there will be a car, we don’t know to fix, between us and experience, (between us and all of experience, not just our experience of transportation)

“Fraudulence” making a “statue of oneself” (good old neon) awareness of playing the expected role in the given drama or spectacle– the script — (Sommerby’s “script”) — “being oneself” (our android self) — (“being serious” equals building our statue.) android statue (to be a spectacle, whatever it may mean for oneself, is “at least also to distract others from themselves.”)

“Going on 10 years later, the evidence is in: The anti-Keynesian forces have been proved conclusively mistaken on every single argument. Their refusal to pick up what amounted to a multiple-trillion-dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk is the greatest mistake of economic policy analysis since 1929 at least”… The biggest policy mistake of the last decade.

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bavardage… being another much heard word of the 2000’s (though ngrams for chatter, chat shows not quite the surge in usage I’d expect; still, there is a surge.)… “High magic to low puns”: interesting how this word arose at the time not just in the sense of terrorist chatter but in the sense of g-chat, which begins around 2005… Bavardage is scarcely elevated in French ngrams, another surprising result.

………“The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
……….They scorn the best I can do to relate them.”

Song of Myself

WLK: * edgewood, ; by Center; 28th Rd (lot) ; WR/ Hill ; Monroe ; Abingdon near tennis courts ; 395 overpass, overpass; seeing onramp; past mailbox near first mail box;

Strides and Jerseys self as cold front Equality perfect lot In which some trivial questions are asked experience of nothing notable footfalls and gumchews walking while hearing car alarm … whether or not you’ve seen a fire engine Bright Red Winter Coat (8) post de luz The firehouse is Creon walking meditation “Cezanne of The Earth”

gals with leashes, jets and clouds, portraits and faces.fresher and fresher paint

If you believe that you are being constantly lied to, paradoxically you may be in danger of accepting untruths …denialism

Borges: “Moreover, there’s a tendency, or a habit, of judging an act by its consequences. Now that seems immoral to me, because when you act you know if your acts are evil or good. As for the consequences of an act—they ramify and multiply and perhaps balance out in the end. I do not know, for example, if the consequences of the discovery of America have been good or evil, because there are so many. Even as we are talking, they are growing and multiplying. Thus, to judge an act by its consequences is absurd. But people tend to do this. For example, a contest or a war is judged according to failure or success and not according to whether it’s ethically justified. As for the consequences, as I said, they multiply in such a way that, perhaps in time, they balance out and then become unbalanced again. It is a continuous process”….

une route pierreuse

I may have inadvertently struck upon my writing ideal — the ideal state in which to write– which is to bring oneself first to the point of actually crying with boredom. This is the state one needs to be in, weeping, blubbering with the tedium one has faced and has yet to face; perhaps there is a universal application.

The idea of dealing with, as opposed to alleviating boredom, has been inherent to Modernism from the start, I think, but most recently and forcefully appeared in Wallace’s novels –there, almost as an ethic.

Infinite Jest shows how trying to alleviate boredom –through distraction– if taken to its logical end, must result in boredom of another sort — in addiction. While the posthumous novel (its name not arising just now) shows the heroism involved in superhuman focus upon the tedious. Not a winking and nodding involvement but a wholehearted plunge into the dull, an acknowledgement of the deep seriousness of dull things….

Boredom is seeming death while distraction is the real thing, I want to say.

Imagine everything that tears are to compassion. Bring that same power to boredom and perhaps we will have achieved our “breakthrough.”

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*

The one after that I mistranslated too. Looked up whether ‘hand’ could take the plural. I looked up the Greek also for the phrase I had seen translated as “wind eggs” at the end of the Theaetetus. In the Greek word, which I can’t remember now, I saw evidence of “wind” but nothing at all that suggested the idea of “eggs”. Yet I couldn’t recall the Greek word for eggs.

I was struck by the conclusion of the Theaetetus: in the end we are better people for realizing we don’t know much of anything. Not the same but a similar feeling on reading this one section of The Pale King recently — Wallace portraying some young men realizing that people are cool are not necessarily people of value. People realizing that intelligence exists and they don’t have it. (Reading this seemed to melt away some of my own unintelligence. And unintelligence –strangely, as I think the Theatetus brings up– has to do with presuming one’s own intelligence — that one, simply by virtue of being one’s extraordinary self, knows everything already more or less well enough.)

Maybe part of the pleasure of reading a book is that of of having a part of one’s intelligence melted away — and the reason this is a pleasure is that, at the same time, it’s understood — that this has not actually been intelligence. This has been some imposter intelligence you’ve been cozening, all this while.

.
What if the combination of democracy and capitalism is given to increasing individuals’ sense of self importance? (That is, to the vast majority of individuals). Democracy giving the feeling to people: they are somebody. Capital giving to people the idea: they have no one.

38. eng.
καὶ ὅκου ἔνι τοῦ σώματος ἱδρὼς, ἐνταῦθα φράζει τὴν νοῦσον.

“Where are the Republicans who know in their heart the president is giving away the store to Vladimir Putin?” Schumer said on Capitol Hill. “The best people to check him are not Democrats but his fellow Republicans.” […] This echoes Adam Schiff from some weeks earlier telling Congressional Republicans to “wake up and do their jobs.”… “This is not oversight, this is collaboration” … It appears that only Republicans can make this right, and they –can’t, won’t; are befuddled or supine; defiant and indifferent; don’t know how to / kinda like him.

*

Asking myself what literature can do in political crises, I think mainly of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as being literary responses to political crises: that, insofar as literature has a place in American democracy, it is embodied now in the writings of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Though of course oratory can be literary –the Funeral Oration, the Gettysburg Address– and the court itself has developed, in the last couple decades, a less literary, more “news watching” feel.) (This is to say, I suppose, that I think of literature as being slow to influence, but with a lasting effect; and the opposite of say advertising.)

Other than this one wonders, might a magic word be spoken? one that could bring an ax to the “frozen seas” of this nation?

Lens comes from lentil, and has also a geology-specific meaning. (I was inspired to look this up having seen it, in the geologic sense, spelled lense.)

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Approaching from far away, the future has arrived and made me ashamed of my deep debt.

ἕκαθεν γὰρ ἐπελθὼν ὁ μέλλων χρόνος
ἐμὸν καταίσχυνε βαθὺ χρέος.

< Olympian 10.6, English, Svarlien

I do see, smiled Garvey. (Bilby was somewhat disturbed by how Garvey articulated this sentence, for Garvey had laid the stress on the word ‘see’, rather than on the word ‘do’, which is where Bilby would have laid the stress were he the one to have made that comment.)[*]

slosh slash slush splash splish splosh … Most of these are imitative. Slash is from the same word as slat (slash as punctuation mark not til 1960s.)

Stomachion would I guess imply “mouth battle” but is a corruption or misspelling of ostomachion — Wikipedia:

The word Ostomachion has as its roots in the Greek Ὀστομάχιον, which means “bone-fight”, from ὀστέον (osteon), “bone” and μάχη (mache), “fight, battle, combat”. Note that the manuscripts refer to the word as “Stomachion”, an apparent corruption of the original Greek….

The word stomach does indeed come from stoma (mouth). Bone-fight somewhat suggest bone wars, which I recently came across.

Spending time with Crying of Lot 49 this summer, I find, in Pynchon’s discussion of infinitesimals, still another idea maybe comparable to “epiphany” for thinking about the origin of a work of art (though it pertains to something more than to the work of art — pertains to Time and how we should stand with respect to it).

…”dt”, God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it really was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate (pp.129)

The infinitessimal or dt is something very like Duchamp’s inframince, it occurs to me. Though where inframince concerns a very small, but ostensibly measurable, moment of time, (or perhaps it is immeasurable because no one would ever conceivably want to measure it: no one would ever measure the warmth of a recently left seat, and if they did, it wouldn’t be inframince), a dt is a moment so small it isn’t measurable, and an epiphany (though this a total projection upon Joyce**) is “a thing at the last moment of the world” (I’m quoting myself here — nothing to do with Joyce) which I guess is a little like a dt: a thing as it’s poised to vanish. Which is like Kierkegaard’s saying of the eternal that it exists in every change:

if there is, then, something eternal in a man, it must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change […] it must be said that there is something that shall always have its time, something that a man shall always do

The thinking here is extremely loose of course: yet find myself wrestling with there being some sort of correspondence to be teased out among these ideas: Kierkegaard’s “eternal”, Joyce’s “epiphany”, Schopenhauer’s “passive subject”, Duchamp’s “inframince”, haikus (the whole genre), and now Pynchon’s infinitesimals,… and we might as well throw Being & Time in as well. There’s something about these authors’ ideas of ordinariness that implies also a certain philosophy of Time, an ethic, perhaps, of how to approach it.

** Joyce seemed to want to say that epiphanies were pregnant moments in time, whereas I would like to say that all moments are pregnant in that way, if subjected to the proper chemical bath of interrogations (everything, I fancy, at the last moment of the world, would show itself to be pregnant with meaning). In any case it does at least seem clear that Joyce was speaking of moments of ordinary life, not moments of historical significance — not pregnant in that sense — when he thought of epiphany.