progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

Anne Enright. I was slow to read her, I guess because whatever summary I’d seen didn’t stand out, but the execution is so, so good (and much bleaker than I’d expected).

Whereas this bit of Ashbery could be rolled out unaltered as a dril tweet.

Why someone chose to put a checkmark next to this line, out of an entire book of Ashbery poems, rätselhaft.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Innocence. This "party" scene starring a count, a monsignor, and three novelists is the funniest thing I've read in a bit.

food chain

Cercocarpus betuloides (mountain mahogany)

I was expecting many fine things from Reyner Banham’s Four Ecologies, but among them was not the 'basic Los Angeles dingbat.'

#tdor #transdayofremembrance

Finished The Story of the Stone, and I must say there's a real age-of-Musk vibe to the highly foreseeable dynastic collapse in the last volume:

What happens when a collision of crisis cascades, what happens when a casket of cholera goes critical, brekekekex koax koax

36 hours out and God just punted on one of His last best chances to avert this

This case came into English through D.T. Suzuki, who rendered it, "Think not of good, think not of evil, but see what at
this moment thy own original face doth look like, which thou
hadst even prior to thy own birth."

Yeats, the big kook, loved Suzuki's essays and made this out of them. (This was in his late sixties, around the same time he submitted to a "Steinach operation," aka a vasectomy thought to increase rejuvenating hormones.)

60 hours till the operating room.

Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate) case 23. What's translated here (by Blyth) as "Original Self" is 本來 "original" plus 面目 "face," a phrase also in the Platform Sutra attributed to the Sixth Patriarch. Google wants to translate 本來面目 from modern Chinese as "true features" or "true colors."

OMG the Soylent is versioned. Do they patch it for vulnerabilities??

Young Don's notes on Thucydides are more philological, but he wrote "cf. Nazi Germany" next to the Corinthians warning the Lacedaemonians about the Athenian national character:

"Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life... to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others." [1.70]

Young Don's notes on the Oresteia:

Woman like man
night like day
tragedy like joy
fire + darkness

Eumenides: Orestes saved because matter is not blood. Cf. Aristotle's idea of form & matter.

Orestes goes mad: the charioteer image p. 261

Appearance & Reality, p. 67
Depends upon assumption that there's a dichotomy.
Ulysses, p. 69, again, 123

In 2006 I decided that instead of studying what I was supposed to be studying, I wanted to learn ancient Greek. I went to Black Oak Books in north Berkeley and found a Loeb Oresteia and an Oxford Thucydides; Berkeley is a good town for this. On my way to the register I opened the covers and, there on the flyleaf I saw "Don Davidson," Harvard '38 and '39.

This is what happens to the libraries of eminent philosophers after they change state.

Changing out the rear wheel on an ebike is a grandmaster challenge and I’m no grandmaster, but I succeeded by dint of wearing an impractical dress

I was googling for a pic of the Antikythera mechanism and it came out of my brain as "Ankylotheria device," which you don't need to try yourself because it's a big nada. No corroded gears, no crooked beasts! Pleistocene on the brain I guess.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pleistocene/comments/xcf5iz/an_ancylotherium_picking_some_ripe_and_juicy/