Jamais souverain pontife ne s’était permis un discours d’une telle sévérité envers sa propre maison. Le pape François a dressé, lundi 22 décembre, un « catalogue » de quinze maladies qui menacent le haut clergé, et plus particulièrement la curie (le gouvernement de l’Eglise), parmi lesquelles la mondanité, l’hyperactivité, les rivalités, les bavardages, les calomnies et la zizanie…. [Monde] [Curia ]

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Son diagnostic est tombé à coup de formules chocs : « L’Alzheimer spirituel », « la fossilisation mentale et spirituelle », « le cœur de pierre », « le terrorisme des bavardages », « la schizophrénie existentielle », « le narcissisme faux », « la planification d’expert-comptable », « les rivalités pour la gloire », les « faces funèbres », « l’orchestre qui émet des fausses notes »…

Appelant les évêques et cardinaux à laisser « l’Esprit saint » inspirer leurs actions, il a souligné que « la guérison [était] le fruit de la prise de conscience de la maladie ».

The skeleton (out of his grave, supplying his bones, and with a body to move around in) will be intercepting and otherwise pleasurably receiving sound produced by these persons (who have full bodies –for everyone here has full bodies) at D.C 9 tomorrow night (2/28):

“It was incubated in New York, where nobody cares about anything, and birthed in D.C., where everybody cares about Nothing—but it eschews the bipolar, all-or-nothing fight between God and the Devil, in favor of confronting the rabble of lesser deities of deprivation and excess who constitute the pantheon from which our generation poaches their boutique metaphysics a la carte.

A remark I interpret as saying that “Beyond Good and Evil” is essentially correct, but new-ageism, the big contribution of our baby-boomers, is not that: it is “boutique metaphysics a la carte.”

Dream. I’m in a helicopter with my father: he on the left, piloting, I on the right, concerned that he is not fully appreciating the height of the trees we approach. He thinks I’m worrying too much but, when we near them, he is forced to pull back hard on the throttle. This happens more than once.

Then we are flying over a plain full of jungle cats, mainly lions and lionesses. I’m holding from out of the helicopter a “Sienna Chicken” on a long string, and the cats are chasing after it, and finally I let them have it, releasing the string.

Then I’m on the ground. I believe it to be safe on the ground now, because I’ve already given the cats the sandwich, yet I notice one leopard has nevertheless continued to follow me. It may be that he doesn’t know I’ve already let go of the “Sienna Chicken”, or it may be that he does know and that he is actually interested in me.

A little behind me I notice a sort of trash can I could leap onto, the only possibility for defense, at which point I wake.

Inframince (infrathin):

“Aesthetic concept developed by Marcel Duchamp for whom it generally characterised a thickness (“épaisseur”), a separation, a difference, an interval between two things, in general little perceptible. The inframince qualifies a distance or a difference that you cannot perceive, but that you can only imagine. The best example of it, is the “inframince separation between the bang of a gun (very near) and the mark of appearance of the mark of the bullet on the target”.

(Will think of this as an effort to portray an instance of inframince — capturing the point, while typing, between a cursor blinking and a letter appearing. This one too: of one’s foot landing at the midpoint between two of a car alarms’ reports.)

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ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
rrida bashitru Mar
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Libation Bearers, 59-60 (Trans.: Smyth.)

τὸ δ᾽ εὐτυχεῖν,
τόδ᾽ ἐν βροτοῖς θεός τε καὶ θεοῦ πλέον.

Pindar, Olympian 7.43-47

ἐπὶ μὰν βαίνει τε καὶ λάθας ἀτέκμαρτα νέφος,
καὶ παρέλκει πραγμάτων ὀρθὰν ὁδὸν
ἔξω φρενῶν.

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[45] Truly, a cloud of forgetfulness sometimes descends unexpectedly, and draws the straight path of action away from the mind…. Diane Arnson Svarlien

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Tropic of Cancer:

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.

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It wasn’t exactly a religious experience, but somehow, a little at a time, she had found herself surrendering to her old need to take care of people. Not for compensation, certainly not for thanks. Her first rule became: “Don’t thank me.” Her second was “Don’t take the credit for anything that turns out well.” One day she woke up understanding clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there were very few limits on the good it became possible to do. [Against The Day.]

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Conclusion of Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United:

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to the age when we can procreate.[…] (concerning dunning-kruger effect)

Writing about typing though, in this case, at a cash register:

“register“

William Shakespeare,Charles Dickens,James Joyce,Franz Kafka
(with ‘Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘; with only the last names; “Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky“

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The idea that mass communicated speech, without dialectic, is either (a) not to be considered as being in a serious way “speech” or (b) to be considered as speech that is inherently unfree, and thus not to be protected, in either case, under the first amendment.

Thus, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, even if televised, would be considered free and protected speech, as it contained “dialectic”; while a commercial saying merely “vote no on proposition 11” would not be protected (for being mass-communicated while containing no dialectic); while a person telling his friends and neighbors to “vote no on prop eleven” would be protected speech (as, though not dialectic, it is also not mass-communicated).

(How might one determine whether or not speech contained “dialectic”? — What would be the test?)

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A RE-REFORMATION (a reunion), in which the religions of the world would unite or reunite (all religions? all Christian religions?) to re-establish the question of religion, to cast in more vivid colors where we are now: supposing all religion is equally right or equally wrong, what are its principles, what is the alternative, what is its justification? What is the worldliness that is the opposite of all these religions? (is it “worldliness” that is the opposite?)

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From The Dan Green / Biblioklept interview.

Biblioklept: I’ll admit to a mild fascination (if you’ll forgive the oxymoron) with literary Missouri. It’s not just the pedigree—Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, William Burroughs, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Maya Angelou, Marianne Moore…Jonathan Franzen—but also the geographical location itself, which, at least in my imagination, seems to mix urban with rural, West with South (and a shot of East, perhaps). Is there a Missouri literature? What is it?

DG: Except for Twain, most of the great Missouri writers were from St. Louis. Eliot and Burroughs were born there (as was Kate Chopin), Tennessee Williams mostly grew up there. Elkin and Gass were imports, but did most of their writing there. I can’t really see much connection among them, except for Gass and Elkin, who were united in their literary sensibilities. Eliot fled and never looked back, Burroughs as well. Williams switched allegiance to the deeper South. There’s not much specifically “Missouri” about their work, although I sometimes think there’s not much “Missouri” in Missouri either. It’s exactly in the middle of the country, and, as you say, other regionalisms sort of converge here. Missouri has produced and continues to produce good writers, but I’m not aware of many in-common themes or preoccupations. Most of the writers I’ve mentioned were pretty cosmopolitan in their concerns. Even Twain, ultimately.

s.ag.i
ingsi. sad
Maryopthami
rrida bashitru Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
pt.BubbsalnBubb.yh
shiBub.ooBubbatr
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
rrida bashitru Mar
T U’ dnnelS o-da
.BubbsalnB bb..
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an g in es
siron sa
yof Eg
a bas
S o
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her………\….….la…rie
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“`.- _da

“Equal” (having happened on the latin word for ‘level’ aequus wondered if that had come from the latin word for water “aqua“: and consequently had the question of: if our original idea of equality, or if our predisposition to equality as an idea, might have arisen from the sense that equality was, in its essence, somewhat water-like.)

Now of course that is pretty thin etymological suggestiveness I’m appealing to, and I’m sure it’s not the actual case, or even a little related to what must probably be the actual case, but it had me wondering again if it was at least true that water suggested equality more than the other three of the four basic elements of the classical world, air, earth, water, fire; — and I thought that it did, — because water alone among those elements really suggested the trait of levelness, water alone was really capable of that quality of being level, while to be level and equal seemed about the same.) “Level” “Even“

sign on the gate

Stendhal, Life of Henri Brulard, (trans. Catherine Alison Phillips):

Was it that I had a depressing personality? . . . And here, as I could not tell what to say, I began again, without thinking, to admire the sublime aspect of the ruins of Rome and its modern grandeur: opposite me the Coliseum; and, beneath my feet, the Farnese Palace, with its beautiful arcaded loggia full of modern works; the Corsini Palace, too, beneath my feet.

Farnese Palace. Corsini Palace. Wikipedia:

is the name given to an architectural feature, originally of Italian design. They are often a gallery or corridor at ground level, sometimes higher, on the facade of a building and open to the air on one side, where it is supported by columns or pierced openings in the wall.

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…The way that fossils are like the ordinary and are suggestive of the idea of “eternal return” — fossils are totally random moments of time that are kept (recorded) effectively forever.

..the fossilized moment is the superior of the non-fossilized moment– in the way that an unrecorded event from the past is to a recorded event from the past

…what is meaningful about a thing as it lives is not what’s meaningful about it as a fossil.

This came to mind as I had had a memory that seemed to me like the mnemonic analogue of a fossil –it was a memory of nothing at all extraordinary– like the fossilized footprint of a Stegasaurus, which is not the footprint of some amazing leader or genius among the stegasauruses, but some random member of the group who happened randomly to be walking in that spot

[… do records tend naturally to be records of the acts of famous individuals or ordinary individuals… do records, the act of recording, favor certain individuals over others… how does remembering differ from polling? (how do remembering, writing down memories, and polling differ?) might a parallel history, or several of them, be occurring…]

a memory of nothing extraordinary (like having a specific memory of taking a spoon from out of the utensile drawer, which I do most everyday, but knowing the memory of taking this spoon was the memory of a particular day, a day which was itself in no other way memorable)

a memory of a pile of leaves I saw a year or two ago around this time –nothing extraordinary about the pile –nothing extraordinary about the day on which I saw the pile– and not better remembered than a fossilized footprint evokes the thing it has fossilized– but recalled better than all the other leaf piles I have seen

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What was my one idea today: that two different nations could share the same physical boundaries, could coexist in the same physical space, be room-mates, like the U.K and France decide it makes more sense for both peoples to reside only in France, yet they keep their laws intact and the nations remain distinct.