June 2025
waggle
1 June 2025, around 15.05.
Beata est ergo uita conueniens naturae suae
Happy, therefore, is the life in agreement with its own nature.
In the kitchen, the dog wags her tail gently, hoping for food or attention or the assurance that she is not alone. I am again trying to track where the time goes in the hopes that my attention will be sufficient snare to trap myself into habits.
The pile of books to read in the morning has become a bit absurd, although not yet reaching monstrous proportions. I think I will, however, have to set aside one of the two translations of the Pañcatantra that I had hoped to work through, not least because it reminds me of a student I encountered on the first day of a Finnish language class some years ago. She was in the class because somewhere in her family tree, someone had been Finnish. She assumed such a proprietorial air towards the entire language that one had little choice but to cede it to her by dropping the class (although it must also be admitted that it was an evening class, and I am never at my best in the evening).
word to the wise
2 June 2025, around 13.10.
In the case of most books, once we have read a few lines and looked at a few of the diagrams, the entire message is perfectly obvious. The rest is added only to fill up the paper.
woh of word oðer of werc
earthy
3 June 2025, around 18.25.
Early in the morning, before the sun is up, I go out and water the odd rectangle of dirt that I have reclaimed as a garden, although the only things that seem to want to grow are peas and buttercups. The dog politely respects the boundaries of the plot, perhaps because it does not smell particularly interesting. I like to check on the peas, to see if they are climbing the frame of twigs I have set out for them. They seem to be, but it’s a slow business, and I am rather impatient. I expect I will lose interest before they blossom.
verdant
4 June 2025, around 11.03.
regularities
5 June 2025, around 18.27.
If in the series of things to be examined we come across something which our intellect is unable to intuit sufficiently well, we must stop at that point, and refrain from the superfluous task of examining the remaining items.
Trouble getting up in the morning, mostly because of a long day yesterday of working and chores and driving and trying to keep the dog happy when she didn’t want to be happy. The sense of being unsettled. Got up anyway, although an hour late (at five fifteen or so), and still went out for a run or a jog or whatever one wishes to call forward motion that is not particularly speedy but is still something more than walk. It was light out, which I do not like (exercise is a deed best done in darkness), and it was odd to see the neighborhood gardens by daylight.
Citation (81)
6 June 2025, around 7.18.
It is only when a culture is breaking down, that is, only when crises, cultural and personal, are present that, generally speaking, an individual is prone to become sufficiently objective to examine the presuppositions, particularly the religious and philosophical presuppositions, on which his culture has been built. It is only at such times that real fundamental questions are likely to be asked by him and that disturbing doubts and fears arise. For that reason it is generally at such times that we catch a real glimpse into the nature of the personal religious experience and its philosophical implications and see it in all its multiform interconnecting aspects and varieties.
From Papyrus to Hypertext
6 June 2025, around 13.57.
Above all, by making it possible to combine writing, image, sound, and video, the new computer technologies are undermining the dominant position of language, stripping it of the aura with which it has been invested since ancient times when it was used to magically address the world, to express a relationship to reality, and to hold the tribe under its charms. (166)
Arranged in forty sections, each of which more or less concentrated on a theme (given in the headings), that are not intended to be read in any particular order (according to the author), but naturally tend to be read in the order in which they are presented in the codex. This seems to be an intentional comment on the medium and the mass-age, as well as encapsulating what makes the book somewhat annoying and less than illuminating. While anxious about the character of text on screen at the page level, as well as the permutations of text’s combinations with other media types (images, video, etc., as though illustrated scrolls or codices were somehow peculiar), it concerns itself too little with those in control of filling those screens (the author, it seems, is not quite dead here – only the publisher).
Originally published in French in 1999, perhaps what was novel about the book at the time had become commonplace by the time it was published in translation in 2009 and has certainly become so by 2025. Within its focus, prescient enough, but in terms of the broader implications there is a sort of willful blindness, a lack of desire to see the forest for the leaves.
In actual fact, there is no need for such a bill of rights [for readers] to be enacted, as it will eventually come about of itself. A text can attract readers and hold their attention only insofar as they feel respected. A reader who is not satisfied by a work will soon abandon it. (127)
smarts
7 June 2025, around 7.39.
For reasons I cannot quite explain to myself, I was reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a Town (which they, with some cleverness, call Foolsburg). It is an amusing and somewhat mean-spirited novel; like many political novels, it loses something in being read outside of its time (or outside of the reader stewing in the remnants of that time like an unfortunate marinade). I have nothing much to say about it, and certainly nothing intelligent, but a little passage early in the book did draw my attention:
The inhabitants exulted; not having seen the newly appointed superior yet with their own eyes, they were already telling anecdotes about him, calling him “a good-looker” and a “smarty.” (p. 28)
‘Good-looker’ is an oddity, but it was ‘smarty’ that yanked me out of the crowd of Glupovites awaiting their new mayor. Natural language translation is, naturally, a challenge, and the ignorant should perhaps not find fault with what they do not know or understand (but I will not, here, let that stop me). The unseen mayor is красавчик и умница, so the learned may think what they like about the conveyance of meaning, but I couldn’t help thinking of a another sort of ‘smarty’, which added a different twist to the scene:
feedback
8 June 2025, around 13.04.
The stack of morning books, to be read in ten-page increments, or as time allows.
The burden of personal weakness, heavier than a weighted blanket holding me in bed when I slept in (until nearly seven), was lifted when I recalled that I did not, for the nonce, intend to track the use of my day in fifteen-minute increments. I had done so for a week last February and recently edited a paper that discussed using the activity to teach time management, which led me to try again (the spreadsheet was already set up, so why not?). It is a tactic that should be used sparingly. A little structure, a little feedback of the acute sort – detailed and gimlet-eyed – can be helpful; when taken to extremes, or pursued past the point of utility, it becomes a trap, a cage, a burden. In short, it palls.
The temptation to build structure into the day remains strong, however. So I keep my stack of morning books (as shown) and my stack of evening books and my list of all the little thing that I would like to get done but don’t really care about, and I work through them little by little. Then it is time for a nap, which is especially pleasant on a warm summer day, but looks fairly dismal when tracked on a spreadsheet.
fabulous
9 June 2025, around 8.52.
Extract from fol. 13r of the Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, CC-BY-NC 4.0.
…it is true that I long syth haue redde and herde that the beste clerkes ben not the wysest men.
I’ve had to give up on one of the translations of the Pancatantra that I’ve been attempting to read. What with one thing and another, neither has been particularly enjoyable, so I’m abandoning the longer, chattier translation, although it is based on an actual manuscript text instead of a twentieth-century scholar’s ‘reconstruction’. Ordinarily, I would choose the more ‘authentic’ version, but, well, it is longer, and ‘the lyf so short’ as the man said.
Reading the Pancatantra is part of a longer ‘project’ – I use the scare quotes advisedly, as these reading projects I take on are loosely structured, haphazard, and rarely completed – looking at animal fables, which is probably the only reason I am continuing even with the shorter version. The History of Reynard the Fox first drew my attention to the genre as being suitable for further examination, and I then meandered through the Loeb edition of Babrius and Phaedrus, which was a bit of a slog, but at least the stories were short. Perhaps I should have continued with Caxton’s Aesop or Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, but as the latter was based on the Pancatantra, I thought I had best start with first principles. That might have been the wisest approach for the systematic or orderly reader; I much prefer, however, to graze freely as I wander from shelf to shelf. There is probably a moral in all that, for those with ears to hear and eyes to read.
dubiety
10 June 2025, around 8.09.
We are almost all blind curators, reluctant or otherwise unable to believe that things can change. We mistake the reality in which we are used to living for nature, for an order of things that it would perhaps be desirable but ingenuous to hope to change. We mistake the facade of what’s real for the only possible, definitive reality, without noticing what is constantly, incessantly pressing behind it and continually changing it—at times slowly, almost inadvertently, at other times at a sensational pace.
We don’t hear the worm gnawing the wood, we don’t notice the chrysalis that will become the butterfly, we don’t perceive the clogging of History’s arteries.
The heat of our heart is very great, but we do not feel it because it is usually there. The weight of our body is not small, but it does not discomfort us. We do not even feel the weight of our clothes, because we are accustomed to wearing them. The reason for this is clear enough: for it is certain that we cannot perceive any body by our senses unless it is the cause of some change in our sense organs…
torpor
11 June 2025, around 8.33.
The evening books differ from the morning books in that they are rarely part of a ‘project’ of any kind, except that of sufficiently distracting me from the state of the world so that I can go to sleep. A few half-awake reflections:
- Interior Chinatown. Started as an audiobook on the bus to the beach, because the paperback is set in courier, of all things, which might get points for verisimilitude (really?), but not for legibility. Unfortunately, the dappled flashing of the sun along the highway and the recirculated air led to a migraine, which then lashed on to the sound of the audiobook. The novel is good enough to finish despite these difficulties.
- The Book of Magic. Reads more like an annotated commonplace book than an anthology. One feels that Copenhaver has made his selection of what will illuminate the subject guided by what he finds interesting rather than what anyone else would think of as ‘essential’. Enjoyable, but slow going.
- Letters from Iceland. Perhaps the most peculiar travel book I have ever read. A mishmash of poetry, anthology, and different forms of prose; it says little about Iceland, as such, save in what it does not say. Straining the meaning of the word ‘letter’ to accommodate the oddest verbal contortions. Fun stuff.
- The Book Against Death. Canetti really does seem to be against death qua death – not just his own or those nearest to him. A rarity. Perhaps the most purely moral book I have read recently.
- Donne’s poems. A poem a day keeps the demons at bay.
- Brother in Ice. Started off strong and is particularly good when talking about very cold places. Less interesting when the narrator succumbs to hot-girl syndrome, which is the peculiar state of believing (common in books published by & Other Stories) that being conventionally attractive and emotionally awkward near a two-wheeled vehicle makes one interesting.
- Devotion. The narrator figure in Patti Smith’s essay is what the narrator in Brother in Ice is trying to be. Beautifully straddles the liminality between insider (author) and outsider (reader).
thorny
12 June 2025, around 10.53.
…saevire fortuna ac miscere omnia coepit. Qui labores, pericula, dubias atque asperas res facile toleraverant, iis otium divitiaeque optanda alias, oneri miseriaeque fuere. Igitur primo pecuniae, deinde imperi cupido crevit: ea quasi materies omnium malorum fuere. Namque avaritia fidem, probitatem ceterasque artis bonas subvortit; pro his superbiam, crudelitatem, deos neglegere, omnia venalia habere edocuit. Ambitio multos mortalis falsos fieri subegit, aliud clausum in pectore, aliud in lingua promptum habere, amicitias inimicitiasque non ex re, sed ex commodo aestumare magisque voltum quam ingenium bonum habere. Haec primo paulatim crescere, interdum vindicari; post, ubi contagio quasi pestilentia invasit, civitas immutata, imperium ex iustissumo atque optumo crudele intolerandumque factum.
the hours before midnight
13 June 2025, around 11.08.
To all the dictators who look so bold and fresh
The midnight hours, the soft wind from the sweeping wing
Of madness, and the intolerable tightening of the meshOf history. […]
We leave our age the quite considerable spark
Of private love and goodness which never leaves
An age, however awful, in the utter dark. […]And to the good who know how wide the gulf, how deep
Between Ideal and Real, who being good have felt
The final temptation to withdraw, sit down and weep,We pray the power to take upon themselves the guilt
Of human action, though still as ready to confess
The imperfection of what can and must be built,
The wish and power to act, forgive, and bless.
sic
14 June 2025, around 20.01.
Philosophy is about people in clothes, not about the soul of man.
glancing
15 June 2025, around 11.45.
Si causa peccandi in praesens minus suppetebat, nihilo minus insontis sicuti sontis circumvenire, iugulare: scilicet, ne per otium torpescerent manus aut animus, gratuito potius malus atque crudelis erat.
Perhaps the most enjoyable portion of my morning books is reading in Sallust and the Ancrene Wisse. That is in part because I do not expect myself to read much, a page or two at most. It is also because I do not expect myself to read well or carefully. Usually I do not look up the words I don’t precisely know, and I certainly don’t make an effort to ‘translate’ what I’ve read into anything like English. I get a sense, a feeling for what these authors are saying; sometimes that sense or feeling is less rather than more accurate, but usually it is not – when I have checked – that far off. Today, the parts I read in both books were about bad people; Sallust provided a partial inventory of Catiline’s calumnies, ranging from probable sexual assault to murder, while the author of the Ancrene Wisse relished the sensible signs of the wicked man (well, technically ‘þe lecchur i þe deofles curt’), who invariably has bad breath, dirty clothes, and ‘stinke to godd’. This superficial reading is perhaps a bad habit, but it does prevent my poor brain from becoming torpid per otium.
ascent
16 June 2025, around 8.31.
Bin guter Stimmung, habe wieder gearbeitet. Am besten kann ich jetzt arbeiten während ich Kartoffeln schäle. Melde mich immer freiwillig dazu. Es ist für mich dasselbe was das Linsenschleifen für Spinoza war.
I’m in a good mood, worked again. I can think best right now when I am peeling potatoes. Always volunteer for it. It is for me what grinding lenses was for Spinoza.