fence on the Boston C … Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage. [x]

related to the foregoing, to what extent are Elizabeth W. and Reefy’s other dark haired girl versions of the same? Elizabeth Willard has two expressions of her restlessness (a love of the stage, sexual activity) somewhat like the dark haired heiress has two main choices for suitors (representative of wealth/ sexual activity)

Trying to sort out the order of events in the two stories “Paper Pills” and “Death” from Winesburg.

Dr. Reefy is forty five when he begins his courtship with the dark haired girl.

He is described at that time as having a jaded grey horse.

At the beginning of “Paper Pills”, we are told that now Dr. Reefy is an old man with a white beard, but that long before he drove a jaded white horse from house to house, then later he married the girl with the dark hair and money.

I had thought that Reefy’s grey horse had turned white but it must be his white horse that has turned grey or else two different horses, both jaded.

In “Death”, Dr. Reefy’s beard is described as grey, but he doesn’t have it yet; he has a brown mustache at this point.

(Perhaps this is just random but, in the two stories involving him, there is an odd transposition at play, in that Dr. Reefy’s beard and horse are both described as having been both white and grey.)

Reefy is described, during his relationship with Elizabeth as being in “middle age”, which must be some years before he turned 45, when his relationship with the girl with dark hair occurred. (His relationship with Elizabeth preceded that with the girl with the dark hair.)

Elizabeth is described as being a “a tired, gaunt old woman at 41” when she has the decisive moment with Dr. Reefy, when Dr. Reefy observes the youthful force within her, a few months after which she dies.

Elizabeth died when George Willard was 18, and began seeing Dr. Reefy when George Willard was “12 or 14,” so she must have herself been in her mid to late thirties. (The implication is that she was 23 when she gave birth to Geoege Willard.)

“Paper Pills” takes us from the present day, when Reefy is 55, back ten years to when he married the heiress at 45. We don’t know anything about the period of Reefy’s life between his affair with Elizabeth and his marriage to the heiress.

Curiosity: do we have enough information to determine the age of George Willard at the time “Paper Pills” begins? Say Reefy was 30-35 during his relationship with Elizabeth, then George Williard (18 at the time of her death) would be 38 at the time Dr. Reefy has a large white beard at 55. That is close to the age Anderson would have been when writing these stories (Born 1876, Winesburg written over 1915-16.)

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And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. [*]

came again upon κρεμμανυμι, in Homer, a lyre hung upon a peg (Odyssey, 8 105): “κὰδ δ᾽ ἐκ πασσαλόφι κρέμασεν φόρμιγγα λίγειαν” and he set upon the peg the clear-toned lyre.

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“A public figure can never be an artist and no artist should ever become one unless, his work being done, he should choose to retire into public life.” Ciryl Connolly, The Unquiet Grave.

The rotating kernel of his/her thought pushed backward upon the rich swart stalk. Had he wished with golden ears to rise above her brothers? Swart kernel. Big bushel of Joseph dreams among colorful flowered racks of folk with she coats. Of loud trucks.… walk

Wanted to see how frequent the mention of “hands” was with respect to other major thematic words/ body parts. This is using the text from Project Gutenberg and Chrome’s “find” function.

Hands: 205*

Shoulder(s): 47

Feet: 39

Body: 66**

Winesburg: 201

George Willard: 150

Adventure: 27***

Dream–: 39

Total number of words in Winesburg, Ohio: 70,806

* number does not include the 11 references to Ed Handby. ** number does include the seven or so references to “everybody” and “nobody”.*** includes verb to venture, of which there are three instances.

Using the novel Herzog to explain the poetry of Ashbery. (A moment of clarity today about Ashbery’s poetry) — it was the novel Herzog but without the markers of punctuation and font Bellow uses to differentiate between letters (epistles), thoughts, speech, (indirect and direct discourse) and narration. It was, in a word, (formally speaking) Herzog without the punctuation. A declining to discrimminate between first person and third, between what the first person thought and what the second person said and what the third person wrote that he had once thought. All idea, language, lost their point of origin, in time and in person, and was put on the same flat plane.

This made Ashbery’s poems harder to read than Herzog. On the positive side it made reality in a way reversible: between what Herzog said he did and what he said he said or imagined he wrote or said, there did remain a difference with Ashbery, but so uncertainly, that what was imagined could have been, and what was said now could have been written before, and what was written before might be the poem you now read.

Aratus of Sicyon… From Pausanius. I believe Pausanius calls him the best of the Greeks of his time (271-213 b.c.). First great leader of second Achaean League.

“Mais alors, autant que par l’identité que j’avais remarquée tout à l’heure entre la phrase de Vinteuil et celle de Wagner, j’étais troublé par cette habileté vulcanienne. Serait-ce elle qui donnerait chez les grands artistes l’illusion d’une originalité foncière, irrédcutible en apparence, reflet d’une réalité plus qu’humaine, en fait produit d’un labeur industrieux ? Si l’art n’est que cela, il n’est pas plus réel que la vie, et je n’avais pas tant de regrets à avoir. Je continuais à jouer Tristan.” (La Prisonnière, Wikisource.fr)

Scott Moncrieff: “But then, no less than by the similarity I had remarked just now between Vinteuil’s phrase and Wagner’s, I was troubled by the thought of this Vulcan-like craftsmanship. Could it be this that gave to great artists the illusory appearance of a fundamental originality, incommensurable with any other, the reflexion of a more than human reality, actually the result of industrious toil? If art be no more than that, it is not more real than life and I had less cause for regret. I went on playing Tristan.”

/ Night of the Iguana/ “Fred’s dead” (Could that be the inspiration for Tarantino’s “Zed’s Dead”?) nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind or violent.”
………….Man’s inhumanity to God..
………….The pain we cause him.
………….We’ve poisoned his atmosphere
………….We’ve slaughtered his creatures of the wild
………….We’ve polluted his rivers
………….We’ve even taken God’s noblest creation, man,
………….And brainwashed him into becoming our own product,
………….not God’s. Hacked, stacked and canned.

Western Interior Seaway Beguines and Beghards Beguine self-dealing

The Water Will Come: A Must-Read Book on Sea Level Rise (Jeff Masters review)

(I’d been wondering how much thermal expansion contributed to sea level rise versus melting land ice: wiki says “Based on figures from between 1993–2008 two thirds (68%) of recent sea level rise has been attributed by melting ice, and roughly one third has come from thermal expansion”)

Last year’s discovery was that if I treated my seriously held thoughts as ridiculous jokes I wound up not just with good absurdist material but with a revealingly authentic portrayal of my thoughts (for my “seriously held thoughts” were in fact absurd poses); thus, what I have come to refer to in interior memos as “Mad Monologues”:

The Man with the Ladder, Fingercise (with the health bar), Butcher of The Present, To a cut

This year’s discovery was that perhaps the reason my fragments rarely amounted to wholes was simple imaginative lethargy on my part; that I was the sort of busy but lazy person of whom Thoreau was probably thinking when he said, “he who works much does not work hard” and so what was needed was to push myself to get on with it a little bit, which is what might have somewhat occurred with this short story in five posts: Achuches 1 2 3 4 5|.

Straight Comedy: The Laver Confronts Lord Fridge Corner, List of There Will Be Blood lines to recite throughout your workday

Poems: More traditional, less reactionary, most successful.

Continuing Series: Stream BED: (3) (2) (1) :: Plant: Freedom of Thought ; New Hole. UnTamed: Feels like a Poncho ; The Nature of The Ring, its Position and Cruelty. Billby etc.: Jeffers, Time to begin,Henry ASSUSS: (1) (2)

Promising Fragments: NEXT (i)

Sci-fi: (Egyptons and Helephemes, Italian Brain, Ice Machine*, Spaceless Area*, ) APPLES

Imitations: Dickinson, Whitman, Sorrentino.

Overwritten: nothing can be done to save this one but it reminds of a curious aspect of that kind of bad writing we call overwriting, which is this:

Often times, one reaches an impasse with a piece of writing and, after setting it aside for a while, the longer the better, a solution or new direction will present itself. But overwriting seems to destroy this very capacity for a piece to be seen in a different light over time. One sets it aside, returns to it much later, and it is still as unyieldingly unpleasant and defective as before, as if it and its badness has been stuck in time by your efforts over it. Its badness has become indestructible, laminated, precisely because you have worked so hard to improve it.

Complete list.

Concordances: “Hands” in Winesburg, Ohio (will probably do a cleaner, more involved version of this next year); Plants in Wasps

Quotations: Intelligence is simply a multiplier of stupidity (Proust) ; Two Darknesses (Baldwin); Pen is “torpedo to him” (Johnson) ; Palinurus (Cyril Connolly) ; “perhaps the sexes are more related than we think” (Rilke) ; “Clear as the air” ; Disembodied (Coetzee) ; “those who have an excess of fortune’s goods, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are not willing to be governed and do not know how to be” (Aristotle) ; only in the world I fill up a place ; “IT” / On the Road

Notes: The “BEINGONAUGHT” ; Dreams are the exercise of biology ; Unprofitable Servants ; ideas ; The Future Of The Novel (something Dan Green said); Bookends of Ikuru ; Swann Rejoices ; Note on “Episode of Hands” ; Fossils, fossilized memories, and “Eternal Return” / Free speech possible without “dialectic”? Evolution of footnotes in fiction? how to explain the surreal as modernist? (Might have better answer to this now.) Ginsberg (as suggested by Today) present at Beckett’s filming of “Film”? brain qua voodoo doll Twain and Hejinian * (Schopenhauer, Proust and so on) ;

French Passages: Fanés (Proust); * ; “Ces savanes de Paris formées par des toit nivelés” “lapin” ; * ; Une Dentelle S’abolit ; “Peu de gens connaissent la mort”

Greek Passages: Strabo: moral excellence of poets ; Pindar, Olympian 7.43-47 “cloud of forgetfulness” ; Libation Bearers, 59-60 “more than god” ; Pindar, Olympian 7.52-53; Strabo 3.1.5 ; Pindar, Pythian 2.79-81 ; Job, II 9-10 ; Pausanias 10.22.3 ; Pindar, Pythia 1.22-24 ; Pindar, Pythia 4 17-18 ; The Libation Bearers, 61-65 ; Phaedo [91ξ–δ] Thucydides 1.2.2

English Vocab: Ferule ; Cosmolined Carborundum; Ticking (n.); Glacis ; Taupe ; Andaman Islands ; Inframince ; Stryper ;

Shapes: thoughts on shapes * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Other: Dream with Sienna Chicken ; I have just conjugated aprender, Shelley Duvall, Shelley Long , Level, Equal, Aqua, Water

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Peu de gens connaissent la mort. On ne la souffre pas ordinairement par résolution, mais par stupidité et par coutume ; et la plupart des hommes meurent parce qu’on ne peut s’empêcher de mourir.

Few people understand death. One doesn’t suffer it ordinarily through resolution, but through stupidty and custom; and most people die simply because they can not prevent dieing.

[23]

Susanna Hall:

Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she’s now in blisse.
Then, passenger, hast nere a tear
To weep with her that wept with all
That wept, yet set herself to chere
Them up with comforts cordiall?
Her love shall live, her mercy spread
When thou hast nere a tear to shed.

For a couple years I’ve been wondering how I might transform my idle “designs” (e.g.) into legitimate kalligrams, or objet d’art (or just into more interesting shapes) and this year I had a couple ideas, albeit somewhat vague and not yet acted upon ideas. (Note. These shapes can appear different than intended on different computer configurations — something I only dimly understand).

The first was to look at the Shapes as being avatars of a sort: I was to imagine them as markers of myself (or of somebody else) and around them I would need to put evidence of their interacting with the conceptual, and/or physical, and/or digital world, of which they were part. (To state it as a question: if the character of a person took this appearance, how must the character of the world that person exists in appear?)

The second idea was that I would start using something like this as the central image:

ar mad os armados Se e’rThe See’rThe See’rT he See’rThe See’r
…a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;pC B
.d””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;bse
..e””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;eNol
l””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;rie
..a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;Gslm
..n””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;eieie
..t””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;usnt
.o””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; E i
de””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;da
la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;um
>s””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;C
enfrentamientos armados

This was to be my “viewing screen of perception”, as it were, a clearly framed and extremely simplified slide or core sample taken of my perceptions at a given time — which I will think of as having about the same level of graphics as the earliest video games, like Pong. For example, this is how I might represent my perception of a crosswalk:

ar mad os armados Se e’rThe See’rThe See’rT he See’rThe See’r
…a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;pC B
.d””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;bse
..e””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;eNol
l””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;rie
..a””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;Gslm
..n; “”; “”;”crosswalk “”;eieie
..t””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;usnt
.o””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; E i
de””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;da
la””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;um
>s””; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”; “”;C
enfrentamientos armados

while, around the perimeter, perhaps intruding in, perhaps suggestive of viewing screens not one’s own, there would be things that exist but not necessarily as perceptions, mainly thoughts and thought fragments and perhaps also factual truths of which I was not directly conscious (geographic, meteorological, historical, biographical truths: heart rate, longitude and latitude, relative humidity, etc.)maybe also digital-physical things.

These ideas would seem to imply that I think the difference between a idle design and legitimate artwork is that the former is a thing perceived while the latter is the thing perceived plus information on the limits of perception, which I’m not sure about. But perhaps such prompts can be useful in taking the Shapes to another level.