progress of pauline @pauline@myna.social

Mom says: "When you started this transition I was worried that someone was going to smash your face in, and now you're doing it to yourself!"

So I'm Pauline. I've written a couple volumes of #fiction, the last a counterfactual #novel starring a not-dead-at-25 #Keats in Italy. My diss at #Berkeley (where I persist in a job doing things to computers) was about the #modernist novel (#Joyce, #Woolf, #HenryJames) as #Romantic lyric, with help from #Wittgenstein and such.

I live with my excellent family in the #EastBay and mess with #guitars.

Also bound to post #trans stuff, including freakouts about the facial surgery I'm having in, um, two days, behind CWs if alarming or gross.

(#introduction to ease those awkward moments at the water cooler)

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??

If the date on the flyleaf is accurate, the European war had just started or was just about to start. Either way, young Don's own country would have a couple more years in the Spartan position of standing by.

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.

Reviewing the appeal letter I just sent Anthem in our ongoing tussle over coverage, discovered I had hyphenated "up-to-date" despite it not being in noun-preceding position, God DAMN it I feel like I let down the whole team

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