Archive for 2021
Crambe repetita (49)
1 January 2021, around 7.12.
Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, Business as Usual.
1.i.2021
1 January 2021, around 18.24.
‘We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.’ —Laura (Riding) Jackson, Anarchism Is Not Enough ‘…their inability to distinguish between the interestingness of dull poetry and the dullness of “interesting” poetry.’ —Laura (Riding) Jackson, Anarchism Is Not Enough
3.i.2021
3 January 2021, around 9.09.
‘…it is difficult to draw the line between idleness and dawdling over work. I dawdled from a mixture of mental infirmity, bad habit, and the necessity of thoroughness if I was to understand and not merely remember.’ —Mark Pattison, Memoirs
4.i.2021
4 January 2021, around 13.01.
‘The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood.’ —Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, letter xliii to the hon. Daines Barrington, 9 September 1778
rudimentary
8 January 2021, around 5.47.
The other day I happened see something about a fashion photographer’s memoirs and was bored and the ebook was available from the library, so I succumbed to the temptation of my phone and looked. It had the expected condescending, self-assured tone, with a rhythm to its prose like the jolting trot of a school-horse (willful, […]
Citation (65)
12 January 2021, around 8.22.
at the reference desk.
parenchyma
21 January 2021, around 5.24.
A passage from Homo Ludens, chapter VIII. The small points when reading for a project (arbitrary or intentional), when discrete facts from disparate sources align to form, in another text, a constellation, the resonances of which exceed the harmonics intended by the author. So in reading Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as part of a broader […]
21.i.2021
21 January 2021, around 8.09.
‘A State is never a utilitarian institution pure and simple. It congeals on the surface of time like frost-flowers on a windowpane, and is as unpredictable, as ephemeral and, in its pattern, as rigidly causal to all appearances as they.’ —Huizinga, Homo Ludens
21.i.2021
21 January 2021, around 8.19.
‘The periwig constitutes a chapter by itself not only in the history of dress but in the history of civilization.’ —Huizinga, Homo Ludens
strategic retreats
26 January 2021, around 5.31.
These are some of the latest things I haven’t read, with the excuses I made for abandoning them. Penguin classics edition of Epicurus. I had hoped for updated notes and bibliography, something that I could point students (should I ever get another course as adjunct) towards, but it was a reprint of a book published […]
other fish in the sea
30 January 2021, around 7.13.
Two quotations on games of chance and serious intentions in Jane Austen.
biblidion
5 February 2021, around 15.06.
The other morning I happened to finish reading a relatively recent translation of The Encheiridion by Epictetus (well, via Arrian), which is a text I almost always find to be a tonic (if not taken in excess). In addition to soothing my temper, though, the present reading also left me somewhat unsettled, not with the […]
arche-tecton
10 February 2021, around 5.08.
There is a passage in the third chapter of Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgeinstein, Austin, and Cavell that drew my eye: In many cases, then it is useless to spend time and energy trying to produce a sharp concept. To avoid meaningless work, we need to understand the situation we […]
12.ii.2021
12 February 2021, around 6.24.
‘They were old maids. They weren’t cranky because they hadn’t had a man but because they’d had too many old books.’ —the gravedigger, qtd. in Ronald Blythe, Akenfield
moonlit folly
14 February 2021, around 5.38.
Rebecca West, apostate of romantic love.
16.ii.2021
16 February 2021, around 11.50.
‘Think in moderation. Remain on your bed. Contemplate on the wall the daylight vanishing, and the balance of light and shadow pursuing one another insensibly towards the night. Simple time is a great remedy.’ —Paul Valéry, Dialogues (trans. W.M. Stewart)
16.ii.2021
16 February 2021, around 12.00.
‘Unravel me that miserable mixture of equivalent sensations, of memories without employment, dreams without credit, conjectures without consistency…Summon and rally all those little unfocused forces which are adrift in your fatigue. Your weakness is simply their confusion.’ —Paul Valéry, Dialogues (trans. W.M. Stewart)
the guest-room bookshelf
19 February 2021, around 14.22.
Not quite a guest-room bookshelf, ca. 2012. So many books enter one’s life through happenstance, rather than through the ordered chaos of book reviews or bibliographies or the propinquity of a library or bookstore shelf (each good in its way).1 This aleatoric approach to book selection is something I associate with travelling, and I like […]
18.ii.2021
20 February 2021, around 7.40.
‘And it is not worth the trouble of thinking of philosophy; all the more horoscopes! – more than spider-webs in a ruined castle.’ —Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce (trans. Kenneth Haynes)
coxcombry
22 February 2021, around 12.30.
I remember reading something about a chatterbox in a coach who left himself open to some devastating wit by asking his fellow passengers if he wasn’t a coxcomb and I have no idea where I read it but it was about a sixth of the way down a verso. I think. The witticism involved repeating […]
24.ii.2021
24 February 2021, around 17.25.
‘What would all knowledge of the present be without a divine remembrance of the past, and without an even more fortunate intimation of the future, as Socrates owed to his daemon?’ —Johann Georg Hamann, A flying letter to nobody, the well known (trans. K. Haynes)
human kindness, curdled
25 February 2021, around 5.23.
‘A plan of the cities of London and Westminster’, etc., by Johns Roque, Pine, and Pinney (ca. 1746) We disputed about some poems. Sheridan said that a man should not be a poet except he were excellent; for that to be a mediocris poeta was but a poor thing. I said I differed from him. […]
fits and starts
1 March 2021, around 8.35.
This a juxtaposition of three quotations about clothes, from Boswell, Hamann, and Thomas Carlyle.
whistling Lillabullero
3 March 2021, around 5.07.
What on earth does this Socrates of yours mean?
khndzor-esque
8 March 2021, around 5.21.
It was the mention of baklava that made me dubious. It was mentioned as quintessentially Armenian, yet baklava is a pastry I don’t recall encountering once in three years – except in Yerevan (admittedly, I don’t recall many weddings). I read the book quickly, enjoying the familiar but disoriented by details – famines and December […]
The Book
12 March 2021, around 7.12.
By Amaranth Borsuk, MIT Press, 2018.
Citation (66)
14 March 2021, around 5.43.
howling at the moon…
prosopopoeia
17 March 2021, around 5.26.
The question is, of course, whether a writer genuinely reveals anything, and whether a reader can discover what it is. —Philip Rousseau (‘Knowing Theodoret: Text and Self’, p. 277)1 It is difficult to know how to read books about psychosis. Unless one has also experienced abnormal mental states, sympathy – in the sense of feeling […]
the forest path
23 March 2021, around 5.38.
Sometime near the end of last November or beginning of December I managed to hurt my left heel. For the first two weeks or so I didn’t allow myself to think too much about it and kept my daily routine of walking (usually some three to five miles, depending on the weather and my inclinations), […]
recursus
29 March 2021, around 8.01.
Isaiah Berlin makes a decision.
unexpected
29 March 2021, around 8.26.
It is, somewhat unexpectedly, snowing. It is quite beautiful.1I am no longer sure what the definition of beauty is, as I have been reading too much philosophy, but by this statement I mean to indicate that the visual perception of the falling snow creates in me a sense of gratification and appreciation, this sense being […]
stalking horses and other specters
2 April 2021, around 5.31.
Paul Nash, Stalking Horse (black and white negative, 1941), presented by the Paul Nash Trust to the Tate in 1970 CC-BY-NC-ND. The experience in which we meet specters or let them come visit us remains indestructible and undeniable. The most cultivated, the most reasonable, the most nonbelieving people easily reconcile a certain spiritualism with reason. […]
apprehension
6 April 2021, around 5.20.
Tolstoy takes on the magic of secret languages.
in brief
9 April 2021, around 5.00.
Dear Professor ———, It was with great interest that I picked up a recent translation of one of your books, as I hoped that it would provide a fresh perspective on what could perhaps be called ‘the current moment’. Although your book failed to be helpful in this regard, it did provide food for thought. […]
implicated
13 April 2021, around 5.27.
Extract from Monet’s ‘Cliffs near Dieppe’ (1882), at the Carnegie Museum of Art — It’s a dialogue, of course. — What? — The book I was telling you about. — What book? — Paul Valéry’s Idée Fixe. — Oh? — I really liked it. It’s charming. — I thought it was a rush job for […]
13.iv.2021
13 April 2021, around 12.56.
But already we may speak of the body as an ever advancing boundary between the future and the past, as a pointed end, which our past is continually driving forward into our future. —Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (trans. N.M. Paul & W.S. Palmer)
household humors
22 April 2021, around 13.54.
I don’t think the illustrator got the phthisical phiz of Lorry Slim quite right in this dapper sketch of a portly parson. Idleness does not cause disease primarily and in itself, but by means of excess. For parts of the body characterized by idleness become weaker and less robust, as each excess comes about due […]
transitory
24 April 2021, around 21.22.
Near the end of the road.
Citation (67)
11 May 2021, around 9.39.
consciousness and memory…
29.v.2021
29 May 2021, around 18.10.
‘But come a little closer, darlings, that I may kick you a little harder.’ —Laura Riding, Anarchism Is Not Enough
29.v.2021b
29 May 2021, around 18.21.
The impossibility of satisfying even oneself; or, on having no clean linen in which to wrap things: Yes, I once knew a woman who spent all her time washing her linen, in order to be always fresh and sweet smelling. But as she was always washing dirty linen and thus making the linen she wore […]
the misanthrope
31 May 2021, around 23.53.
Laura Riding considers the tedium of the phallus.
untold runes
1 June 2021, around 14.05.
The conversion of nothing into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse of these rescued somethings. In discussing literature one has to use, unfortunately, the same language that one uses in discussing experience. But even so, literature is preferable to experience, since it is for the most part the closest one can […]
Crambe repetita (50)
9 June 2021, around 10.44.
Al-Nuwayri, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition.
pro forma
11 June 2021, around 5.51.
It is a foolish question – what book is the most formally perfect? – because it assumes, first, that there is an ideal form for a book, and second, that perfection is attainable.1 The only perfection possible is the heat death of the universe – frozen droplets of iron suspended, isolated, in a deafening void, […]
16.06.2021: morning
16 June 2021, around 15.20.
Awake at ten past four with the clear impression, through earplugs, that someone has spoken my name. Light of the lamp slowly dawning. The dog nudges the rattling doorknob, then click-click-click away down the hall. A trip to the necessary reveals nothing new, and a short doze passes the time before the alarum. One stares […]
bridging the gap
22 June 2021, around 10.56.
This a juxtaposition of two quotations about the philosophical necessity for cognitive leaps, from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Henri Bergson.
undae
25 June 2021, around 12.06.
It is supposed to be warm this weekend and, as usual, there is no air conditioning. Well, that is not quite accurate. There are two air-conditioning units, which may or may not work, that the previous owners left in the storage area, but there are no window supports and no instruction manuals and no one […]
byzantine
2 July 2021, around 9.37.
A view of Constantinople, ca. 1635, by Matthäus Merian Somewhat jokingly I said that I wanted the shelves to reflect the great arc of history, not a hodgepodge of regional narratives. In the beginning, this was fine. There was room, narrative room, to arrange the books in something like a chronology to present something like […]
10.vii.2021
10 July 2021, around 5.45.
‘The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.’ —Malthus, in the midst of being cranky about Godwin
11.vii.2021
11 July 2021, around 13.23.
‘The moment we allow ourselves to ask why some things are not otherwise, instead of endeavouring to account for them as they are, we shall never know where to stop; we shall be led into the grossest, and most childish absurdities’ —Malthus, ray of sunshine ‘Leisure is, without a doubt, highly valuable to man; but […]
re: vision
14 July 2021, around 9.11.
—All ideas come in some measure from misunderstanding, from a misreading of a situation or a text or an intention. Thinking, then, in its purest form, is a type of error – a constant going astray, or wander— —No. Too broad. —Most ideas— —No. —Some ide— —Some? Really? No. —There are ideas— —No. Too vague. […]
genteel
25 July 2021, around 6.47.
…the soul and body are joint-sharers in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloth’d at the same time; and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him—so that he has nothing to do, but take his pen, and […]
to the swift
31 August 2021, around 5.49.
This is a quotation from a writing manual about the tangled skein of thought, buttressed by two images of winding yarn.
a note on the translation
2 September 2021, around 14.33.
Книгу занимательную вы проглотите слишком скоро, она слишком врежется в вашу память и воображение; перечесть ее уже невозможно. Книга скучная, напротив, читается с расстановкою, с отдохновением — оставляет вам способность позабыться, мечтать; опомнившись, вы опять за нее принимаетесь, перечитываете места, вами пропущенные без внимания etc. Книга скучная представляет более развлечения. —Pushkin, ‘Thoughts on the Road/Journey […]
high places
22 September 2021, around 10.47.
They have started to appear along the forest path. First there was one, and the precarity was amusing; between one walk and the next the stack usually would have toppled, either gravity or other passers-by objecting. Now they line the path, darkling signposts, and the sight unnerves me – one such is charming, but seven or […]
the foyer inside
27 September 2021, around 7.00.
This a juxtaposition of two quotations about interior architectures, from Henry James and George Eliot.
rust unburnish’d
10 October 2021, around 18.17.
The sort of lazy Sunday on which one has to work because one was having a sort of lazy Friday and a lazy Saturday, but Monday will come with its deadlines, and one does not like to disappoint. Somehow, last week, I managed to write my to-do list on the wrong day in my planner, […]
bettered novels (55)
12 October 2021, around 14.44.
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844).
distant views
15 October 2021, around 10.53.
Amazing what one finds in old folders. So many possibilities. (ca. 2002)
with abandon
18 October 2021, around 5.34.
— Is it OK, do you think, to stop reading a book without finishing it? — What do you mean by ‘finishing a book’? — Getting to the end of it. — So you think that if someone takes up a book and turns all of the pages until he (the exemplar is invariably a […]
pseudaphoristica (22)
24 October 2021, around 6.22.
To describe a place requires more than the negative space of one’s impressions.
25.x.2021
25 October 2021, around 6.08.
‘Good carpentry can make a secret door in any wall.’ —William James, from Essays in Psychical Research
up the road
25 October 2021, around 9.22.
point d’appui
27 October 2021, around 6.16.
At Saint Sulpice. (Obvious limits to such an undertaking: even when my goal is just to observe, I don’t see what takes place a few meters from me: I don’t notice, for example, that cars are parking) —Georges Perec (An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal, p. 15) Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s […]
A view (53)
15 November 2021, around 17.10.
æquanimities
19 November 2021, around 14.30.
τὸ δὲ σκότος ἐκλείποντος τοῦ φωτὸς γίνεται. For darkness follows when light fails. —ps-Aristotle, De Coloribus (791a; trans. W.S. Hett) The sense of withdrawing into oneself, running to ground. A step away from easy definitions, the lineæ abscissæ of demographic plots, towards abscission – even so it shall be cut off, as someone said, and […]
24.xi.2021
24 November 2021, around 9.10.
Snow on the distant ridge (not shown).
mellowing
24 November 2021, around 9.47.
Knowledge of values, in fact, is a matter of direct insight, like seeing that the sky is blue, the grass green. It does not consist of pieces of information that can be handed from one mind to another. In the last resort, every individual must see and judge for himself what it is good for […]
quired
1 December 2021, around 8.44.
Looking up on the morning walk.
The Order of Books
2 December 2021, around 12.19.
By Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, Stanford UP, 1994 (1992).
(b)rambles
5 December 2021, around 14.06.
Another benefite of the village is this, that he shall haue tyme enough to al thinges that he will do, so that the time be well spent, tyme enough to studie, time to visite his frendes, tyme to go a huntyng, and layser when he list to eate his meat: the which layser courtiers commonly […]
slick
28 December 2021, around 8.37.
About two feet of snow have fallen since then, and the highway is slickly plowed, a layer of graveled white on which cars tend to go too fast, with little thought of lane boundaries or chance, but secure in the hope of their destination. Then one returns to the fireplace and the books, where comfort […]