Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, just upstream, the citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.
The controversial Barry Coat of Arms
gradus, n. [from L gradus ad Parnassum, steps to Parnassus, a name for a book on prosody or poetry.] 1. A dictionary for aid in composing poetry, especially in Greek or Latin. 2. In music, graded exercises each succeeding one more difficult than its predecessor.
In the bog there is up, of course, the sky's place, and, naturally, down, down, down, the bogrealm reaching in the Barry Family view to some presumed, inferred, hoped-for level of solidity below.
Immemorially the word for sky and the word for cloud were ever the same word. This is known, and unsurprising, given in that age, above, the constant shroud. Tens of thousands of years of rain in point of fact, the barrier ice slumping into liquidity under the influential drizzle, uncovering the northern lands and all their proto-muck which would earn one day the name of Europe. All along the new edge of it the living stuff progressed, spoored and seeded and animated pioneers taking up the zone of fresh space shaped by the climate's marvelous wet turning. Down, the waterpath, down, the cardinal direction. From above, to below, time's arrow points along the waterpath, in the Barry Family reckoning.
And east and west, or right and left, or back and forth, as well. The bog has those.
Even with scant few days of climatic clarity in all those many millenia, over time it came to the Barry Family's otherwise distracted notice that light roiled out from one hot skyspot which could be counted on itself to have quotidian directionality as well, and tracked a path on a daily basis, as did the Barry Family (at its more gradual rate) toward the west.
A brief decampment, and following that, we must assume, staff's return from the Sierra refreshed, revived in their commitment, eager and able to face the multiplicity of tasks set before them. But it won't be August anymore then, will it?
In the late last words of Shakespeare as collected here at HCE, the popinjay is theoretically a character in Henry IV, Part I, should we take Hotspur at his word there. Amazing thing it is, that first set speech of Hotspur, which offers to imagination a character who does not in fact appear in the play at hand in the least, except as created just there in the dismissive mordancies of Hotspur's words regarding such a fellow, a type all too known in the audiences of that noble time: the popinjay come afterbattle.
Those gathered then to see the play might tittering glance at ones among them so witheringly described, we must suppose. Just there, look, ha!
By his antipathies we know him as the more engaged, this fellow Hotspur. We know what he's never liked, his self-describing disdains evident in the proposed popinjay of a character he evokes in that first long speech.
Just as his antipathies rule his first long speech, so they rule his character.
Well, "Hotspur," eh?
Out of the Ould Wan was the Da and the Uncle and your other one entirely.
Oh and the Da was always the singularly and why not say integrally apt and telling title of the one of them, though the name Uncle, non-specific enough in itself, being applied in any particular case as chance and need might require, immediately made your other claimants to the name all known individually and acutely and at once as your other one entirely, should there be any such non-Da, non-Uncle reference needed.
There is ever only one Da, as there is ever only one particular Uncle at a time being mentioned if at all, but there are pluralities of possible your other ones entirely. They clump and stew about the bogways, enumerable in their chosen packs, on close inspection containing each of them the Uncle, whose jarring appellation, transferable in full to every qualifying individual, can be found to be required of at least one of the seeming other ones entirely of any proper pack when a polling of the populace is made. Odd, that.
So of the Ould Wan, we have the Da, integrally numerable, the Uncle, with its pointed pronunciation in each case, and your other one entirely, however numerous, but always including, on close inspection, your other Uncle entirely.
Which recursive mathematics genially expresses the foregoing logical relation, eh?
During its classic age the Quotidian endured the squabble over the Uncle's proposed Sunday Puzzler pieces, submitted by the Uncle to the journal in confident anticipation of such argument as could only be had there in that golden time.
Of course no one wanted to have after the Uncle again, but the more they let him alone the more time he had to tinker with his Ratios and Sums, renewing his insistent need to render his announcement of the thing in every possible venue lax in the well-settled rules of such engagement.
The proposed Sunday Puzzler offered up an alarming new battlefield in the neverending effort to ignore the Uncle and his uncontrollable urge to rub their noses in his Ratios and Sums. All their great successes in the past had come from resisting from the first any and all cunning effort on the Uncle's part to turn the topic his own way. The Puzzler seen by them not as the brilliantly distracting feint it proved to be, but the main new thrust of the Uncle's continuing efforts.
At first as always they sought to take up only subjects well away from the numerable, however guised, monopolizing the Quotidian agenda and thus denying the Uncle his needed platform. They would talk heatedly, if need be, about some completely other thing until he took himself off from the precincts of its pages, is how they first envisioned it.
Surely those of us who are named Bartholomew must pause with regret on any August 24 to acknowledge the sad necessity of forever memorializing on St. Bartholomew's Day (for August 24 by common convention through the ages has been so named) the massacre that is so memorialized on it, however much an individual currently so named might wish more festive associations be linked to the accustomed word for purely personal reasons.
Often enough in the mathematics the name of the numbered is the number itself. "Five" as example is the well-known commodity, and in everyday use the count and the name are coterminous: Five is five of them, whatever we may or may not mean by "them."
At times when count can't be precise, embroiled in some necessarily endless process of expression, as is the case with the transcendents π and e, it proves necessary to provide in the mathematics a proper basket in which to place the never quite completely given quantity. The name of the basket is, for example, π; it is the name of the properly constructed container for the endless count of the given quantity. In the mathematics, the properly constructed container for π is constructed from the subtle cunning of the nicely behaved machineries of the craft itself. The basket to hold the thing named π is makeable by mathematics. Some simple rules, the proper fuel, and the whole accurate endless length of the quantity is contained.
Five, of course, is more directly done, discreet count it is. Complete and utter expression of the quantity it is, five, thank you very much.
If only there were a basket made by the machineries of mathematics which could make five as well as those machineries can make π. Irritating feature of the tantalizingly equivocal axioms of arithmetic that such basket as may hold five must forever remain translucent to our gaze. We can see what's contained in there quite well indeed: it's five, or some such integer. Unlike the famous industry of the machineries that make us π however, there is the mystery in the making of the integer that leaves its basket forever translucent to our gaze.
It is easier to make a basket named π than a basket named five.
The leveling course of water, in the Barry Family view, is down, down the watercourse and the cardinal direction. Admittedly the course of it tends generally east as well, subsumed in water's contrary way with the sunpath, drawing itself to and then past the famous hot skyspot each day. Though first and cardinal it is down, the watercourse goes a little east as well each time, in the main.
Bringing with it all loosed manner of stuff coming along the water's recently made way, sluiced from some previous securement and brought along in the overriding currents of the watercourse, the jumbled lot of it all going down and a bit east under the influential watermotion, then banked, deposited in some place, often aggregated by the deft chemistry of the journey on the waterpath into some one big clump all of a kind where the water took some other fated turning.
In the watercourse, the famous carbonate cliffs of Dover (that summed clump of material just there where the water put it, passing farther down and east itself).
Life's own chemistries pre-aggregate such carbonation, with all life's bony toothy shelly harvestings extruding first into usefulness the material under review, the concentrated calcite, and then along the waterpath in time a Dovered cliff.
Oh, and the aggregating watercourse of the hills so nearby us here at HCE, lair of the fabled Gold and the (if less fabulous, nevertheless indispensably) remunerative Silver, banked just there in no small part by the actions of the waters.
As to the Foraminifera, we cannot adequately express our admiration for the quantity of carbonate they process, the little invisible things. A fine carbonate mist of it they make, the relentless many of them over time raining down their calcite all along the waterpath's ecompassing aggregation. Though much of Dover may not be faulted them, having preceeded their appearance as a lifeform, from all we understand of the processes involved, some similarly inclined beast's preaggregations are well-evidenced there.
The lapsed text of the Standard Dictionary here at HCE, as previously referenced below, submits in the pictured example to the unfortunate pique of staff, who, tasked with making order of the foraminiferant family of words, fell off finally into some intervening ire as expressed in the last listed word as shown. Ms. Jean McKechnie, general editor of the book, beleaguered yet principally tasked with firmly excluding such nonce as this, let slip "foraminulose" as definition of "foriminulouse,"which as an alternate spelling may be all well and good, but gives no help in making sense of the thing, except as it may create in the looker's mind the self-same fahnicu-lee/fahnicu-lah sing-song which monopolized the final exhausted offering of staff.
The Quotidian takes up the question of a non-carbonated Mars, momentarily closest it has been to Earth in 60,000 years.
In the event, the batted ball has path, momentous singular thing without equivalent in theory. We can describe the range of possibilities deployed in that domain of where it might well go, being batted. It might go here or here, travelling this way or this, is what our calculus of it may show.
But in the event itself, the evidently done thing, the batting of it, having been performed, the range of possibilities and the whole domain of where the batted ball might go are dissipated, collapsed around the actual value of the act. The ball does go. There. There. There.
Meaning, that salutary freight, goes with the ball. They arrive together often enough, though one or the other might lag at times. So frequently have we seen the standard three-hopper to short that commonly its consequential meaning races on ahead of its destination in the padded paw of the player. The batter's out, we judge, before the ball is past the pitcher's mound, though, racing ahead, meaning may be scotched by mischance, the ball delivered up to some clump or pebble in the field perhaps, expanding again its range of possible paths, or perhaps booted in the mitting by the player we'd expected other of.
Alternately, of course, it is at times meaning that lags, falling behind the ball's progress, as in a curious moment in last night's game between the defending National League Champion San Francisco Giants and the Atlanta Braves. In the game's eighth inning redoubtable Giant Benito Santiago hit one high and hard and over the leaping left fielder Jones at the wall. The ball bounced back onto the field, unseen by Jones. Giant Santiago trotted his home run hitter's trot around second base.
But, no!
It was never a home run at all!
The umpire, by the required judgments of his job custodian of all meanings, never ruled home run. His contravening meaning, irrefutable by the tenets of the game, was this: the ball was still in play! Live! Giant Santiago still a baserunner, and left fielder Jones still a left fielder, each as yet with the assigned duty to perform, Santiago to find safely a base to stop on, Jones to notice, retrieve and return the ball from where it lay! Djah!
Even stopped safely at third, Santiago denied the arrival of the umpire's meaning, firmly offering up instead his own previously-held and in all respects more generous evaluation of the matter, that he'd hit a home run all along.
Having alternately ruled, the umpire firmly declined the offered substitution. Comprehension of thus–given meaning came to Santiago, and eventually (a perhaps-truculent) acquiescence in the thing. He took his base, and scored as good fortune would have it, driven home by the very next batter, the imposingly–constructed Giant Gallaraga, whose batted ball, suspended momentarily with its own meaning over the head of the suddenly sprawling second baseman DeRosa, fell to the field uncaught.
As the San Francisco Chronicle put it in today's Sporting Green:
"Second baseman Mark DeRosa slipped, and the ball but dropped as he fell."
Yes, the ball but dropped, meeting its meaning, and a good meaning, we are inclined to maintain here at HCE.
The primary allegiance of the Barry Family would be first to the Barrys, if that were at all possible. The acrimonies of the Naming persist, however, and much as we would like to take up cause with all named Barry, we find that, inculcated in the firm tropes of those from whom we descend, we cannot countenance the yet-varying views of the other strains of us so called, based on our forever unyielding commitment to certain core principles first announced during that famously contentious time. They have their ways, and we ours, however same the spelling. The matter of the coat of arms we find particularly galling.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, presented in significant detail in an image from the book The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish Origins of Christianity by Carsten Peter Thiede, Palgrave for St. Martin's Press, 2001.
It is always our hope here at HCE to have the adequate staff, much as must have been available to the famous makers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, such staff whose smart commitment to making good the threat of survival that every written word makes, has enabled the delivery of many of the fine words written all that long time ago to our very own age.
Here at HCE we find that our own annualized extinguishment rate, taken as time's tax on what generously might be described as manuscripts archived here, measured against wordage per acre-foot of archived page, exceeds that rate necessary to insure the entire trove of it will vanish quite early in this yet–young millenium, much as we would have it otherwise, for tactical reasons, here at HCE. Adequate staff would preclude such losses, busily securing the materials in question against the otherwise–disposed blandishments of time in our view.
The power of the collected words of the Dead Sea Scrolls is such that the author of the book whose page is reproduced in miniature here has spent his career in concert with many other men, trying to tease back into existence the manuscript from which this tattered scrap descends.
It is a cunning craft, and the logic of it, and its apparatus of knowledges, is well presented by the fellow Thiede, who, being a minister of that sect and by custom and requirement of of deference to even Episcopalians must necessarily be described as "the reverend," instead of the more pedestrian mister or the more equestrian señor, for that matter, which would be our usual practice here at HCE. The reverend Thiede, if we must, has an easy command of the arcana, and does not fail to edify the general reader to within an inch of that looker's entire interest in the subject.
Controversial shape of the circled letters pictured in the scrap catalogued as 7Q5 (in the 7th cave at Qumran, the 5th fragment).
Qumran the present name of the location of the fabled stash of scrolls, knowledge of which lay, if not entirely unremarked in the ensuing millenia, then unfamous, unattended for so long that the promise of utter decay was visited on much of what was put away there.
Clearly the threat of literature to survive is only made good with proper, continuous staffing, for which even the reconstituting ministrations of the scholiasts of our own advanced age are weak substitute. Every work that lasts well is staffed continuously down the ages. Words however generated are carried along by staff's constant attention to their written form. The Mahabarratta staffed, Homer's words staffed, the stuff of Confucius and all the other claimants to continuance ever put to pen, written out, made manifest by manuscript, all that grand proposed permanency secured in the end by staff over time. Or, not.
Much of what was left in those caves at Qumran is now gone forever, absent adequate staffing down the ages. Nevertheless, the clever papyrologists and their kind continue their learned surmise over extending what remains of it all with their intricately argued advances in such revelation as can be claimed into the nature of what's lost forever, leading to new vantages of dispute, resolution, and professional advancement, we can only suppose.
The San Francisco Chronicle once printed its fine pages on variously-colored paper stock. Wood products were plentiful and cheap in that stage of San Francisco's economic history. The whole first part of cutting down all the nearby trees was hardly done, with the meaning of "nearby" stretched by the new transportation technologies (bringing San Francisco daily into contact with what would have otherwise qualified as quite distant places): newsprint was plentiful and cost next to nothing, as we all remember here at HCE. The difference in the price of pink paper or green paper instead of the raw duff of the plain paper itself was negligible. Only a matter of arguable taste restrained many local publications from using the colored stuff instead of the regular newsprint on a daily basis.
The San Francisco Chronicle, along with the lamented and somewhat lamentable San Francisco Call–Bulletin, another publication of the time, chose to use the pink stuff, The Call–Bulletin on an everday basis, the Chronicle for a Sunday tabloid insert it called Datebook. The Call–Bulletin's front page an alarmingly desaturated red flag of the news, thrust on the public by an extensive home-delivery system in which we here at HCE played no small role.
Putting it that way, onto the proto-lurid reddishness of its front page, colored the news given there by the Call–Bulletin. Having no taste for news at the time, we let it slip unregarded except for trajectory from our young paws, though at times we did appreciate the sharp contrast it offered to the pallette of the natural world of color as we searched to retrieve the errant thing from some hedge or storm drain where we may have mistakenly delivered it.
The Chronicle's Sunday edition was an all-too colorful thing. The comics and advertising inserts tested the color presses of course, but The Datebook, as has been said, was printed on the same pink stock as the Call–Bulletin's front page. There was an unusually vivid yellow used, too, and the memorable green on which was printed the day's sporting news.
The Chronicle sports section was printed on green every day. Daily the newspaper's front page offered up its chosen enormities on plain newsprint, trusting in clever placement and the cunning turn of phrase to properly pronounce its news without the additionally sensationalizing hue favored by the eventually silent presses of the Call–Bulletin. The Chronicle did not choose to crimsonize its front page. But always there among the fresh bundled stacks of it could be spied the distinctive green tufted edges of its sports section, the section known as The Sporting Green (given the keen interest of its most fervid lookers, the obituary notices in the Chronicle — though never printed on color stock — by long custom have been known as the Irish Sporting Green in San Francisco. Not to be confused, the two, though at times of course the pronounced whoop of pleasure from the mouth of some elder on word of a particularly poignant predeceasment there was in fact mistaken for reaction to news of the fate of the local nine in the other Sporting Green entirely).
Called The Green, in fact, just as The Datebook came to be known as The Pink to the people who spoke of them in San Francisco.
Over time the price of newsprint rose, and the colored newsprint came to be no longer negligibly more expensive. Eventually only the outer sheet of The Sporting Green, containing its front page, was printed on green stock, though The Datebook done entirely in pink lasted awhile longer before surrendering all but its front page to plain newsprint as well.
Economics, assisted in the end by changing tastes, finally reduced the role of colored paper to nothing in the Chronicle, though it still prints as of this writing its various Sporting Greens, and on Sunday its Datebook as well.
The colonization of the South and Southwest of the United States of America by air-conditioning during the course of the last thirty-five years characterized one stream of the vast continuos internal migration of the nation that surrounds us here at HCE. It was air-conditioning and not the Conestoga they rode in on, all those people. Spirit-crushing weather it is there in the South and Southwest in the summer, little of it we've seen. But they have the full summer there, with all the sun's meaninful attritions, and the months leading to and from the season as well, with their own weeks of debilitation. A simulation of a proper climate was offered by the technology; installed, it lured a tide of folks to its favored substitution. Reality, by comparison, impaled.
Everywhere in these new cities are portals to more agreeable climes. Homes, cars, offices, shops, all the civil spaces are through these portals, where the weather has no say. Outside it may be heard lowly rumbling, "Leave, die — it's up to you," but inside the weather has no voice. Instead it's a machine entirely that sets the tone in the form of a simulation. Just the one of many simulations running at the core of the civil way, but the crucial one just there.
How many more such simulations, buttressed by the clever processes of their machineries, are at play in what reflexively we have come to think of as this modern age here at HCE? Many, many more such simulations it appears, as loss of power to fuel the bulk of them for a brief span of days recently in the Midwest, part of Canada, and New York City indicates.
Those fifty million affected did not have an easy time of it at all as, powerless, the simulations crashed, one by one, reducing citizens to unmediated unanticipated contact with their actual physical environment (no easy meeting, warned or not), a condition contrary to the core meaning of civility as we've come to understand it.
Mark of the gravity, that the San Francisco Giants and the New York Mets, previously scheduled to meet at Shea Stadium, could not play their game of baseball: the nation's pastime was cancelled in its largest and most powerful city on that day. Cancellation itself a familiar experience in baseball, what with the raining and the occaisional other inclemency and the rare but memorable intervention of the fans, pitched as they are evereagerly close to the activity.
None of that, though, caused the cancellation, but the same failure of the regional wiring that plunged all simulating norms of society into inexistence throughout that whole wide region of North America on that day.
In Letters to the Book Review in today's San Francisco Chronicle, comes a letter from Larry Crooks of Richmond, captioned "Physics of Criticism " by its waggish editor. The Quotidian takes up the argument there.
In all the years of it in that side yard we have here at HCE, the fennell has been, by policy if not in deed, forbidden. Opposition to its existence informed the purposive leaning of every foray we have ever sent into the field against it, we admit. If we have never announced, "It is forbidden," still, staff has been guided ever by our firm injunction, root it out.
Root it out of course a tactic of the bogways, and in the case of fennel, with its wiley deepspreading eversprouting rootways, and its lust for the turned earth made trying to remove it using the technique of the spade and pick and occasional imprecation which even to this day is the prefered tactic here at HCE, we find it both forbidden and florescent: a weed.
August, neveridle August, is the weedmonth, and fennel is its weed here at HCE.
Give it this, August: there's life in all of it, irrepressible. The wild idea and the profanation of another jostling with the perfectly sound one growing quite well right next to them in the folds of weedmonth.
The wild idea we might never tame here at HCE, though we've lent time to the effort on occaision. Perennially ripening, wild ideas don't need the additional impetus of August to appear. They are the equivocal weed, though waiting judgement in that regard all along the winding way to the discovery of their utter vapidity in any month, for the most part. Such is the case with Radio Bogblog, whose time never came, though great care was given to the preparatory materials necessary to interest in the least the sort of people who might fund it.
August Ides less than idle, in the Barry Family view. The weedy spread of all the lively life of it all along the bog, preparatory to its enrapturing harvest in the later months, this is your man August, named after memorable Cæsar of the famous and in some senses yet–lingering Roman Empire.
August, weedmonth, breeds thought of weedmonths past, and in particular, especially among those of use who follow such things here at HCE, thoughts of the New York Giants ballclub in August of 1954 beginning its dramatically successful quest to overcome a 13 ½ game advantage held by the even–then despised Dodger ballcub.
The San Francisco Giants find themselves defending a large lead this August Ides. Nine and one–half games over the Arizona club, an addtional few over the Dodgers (may evershrouding failure accompany them always –ed.).
It is our preliminary and undisguised hope here at HCE that the San Francisco Giants ballclub be successful in each and every contest it engages in against its opponents. We acknowledge the unlikelihood that the Giants will win each and every game, and yet there it is. We hope they will.
Yesterday the Giants were to face the New York Mets at Shea Stadium, but the game was cancelled as a result of the massive electrical blackout that shut off power to people throughout the Great Lakes region, and to the people of New York City as well, whose fortunes are apparently tied to those of Cleveland and Detroit when it comes to episodes like this. Such are the vagaries of the power grid that nuclear plants shut down all over the affected region as their supply of electricity from the grid ceased, since the power to run the plants comes from the grid, rather than the plant itself. With testing and inspection and all the startup procedures it will be most of a day after the power grid itself is fixed before the nuclear plants can be brought back online.
In a past age, goes the Barry Family lore, there were those of them who would come to be called Barry, but were not yet, could not yet, be so called. It is a question of stretching ampliatio just so far. Naming required first identity, and identity required first the age known as the Discovery of the Barry Family, in which the annunciation "We are divided along these lines," its reception and its resolution set those of them who would become Barry on their westering way to the Paris Basin.
They had already the bogknowledges.
They had all their millenia in the Rhine River's morass of a mouth (life's flat invitation to bounty in the lee of the retreating glaciers of that age).
The English for it, given, has the same nice ambiguity as the original, couched of course as it was in the pre-Celtic Barry Language. " We are divided along these lines," does not precisely say if we are divided from all others, as Barry, by the indicated lines, or one Barry from another by them, or both. It's the extremely flexible saying in this respect.
Little is known about what might have prompted the annunciation in the first place, but the weedy thought of it propagated in the bunch of them to become a regular theme of their interminable conversation, which itself was a proto-Barry Family feature even before the annunciation. In particular they liked to go on about the lines of it.
That "we" (however construed) are "divided" (however arrayed), confutes the base bogknowledges of the All of It, which till that time had seemed sufficient to the day. From wetgrey sky to wetgreen earth there was directionality, yes. Time's arrow pointed down, from Sky called Cloud to the mortal mire, enwrapped in the world's continuous undivideable waterpath, as the proto-Barry had it. To say, "we are divided," became the fashionable thing nonetheless. They had at it with all their willing wit.
Ah, and the lines! They made great sport of the lines.
Heaney well-laureled poet worth the time to find the time to look in.
Expecting any minute Heaney's words.
Loan from collection of your generous man Folger, CD of the poet Heaney speaking his making of the famous Beowulf, along with one bound printed volume of the same.
Test first to see if we can read as well as he can say, then let him go on with it, is the plan here at HCE, at least among those of us who look to such matters as literature with whatever attention we can divert from the precedenciary requirements of our many tasks at hand, as often described below in the Bogblog.
Matter of waiting for the thing meanwhile.
Capacity to be otherwise unoccupied tested daily and found operational, as expected.
Correction
On the jar, and the words following in the now-deprecated Clarification of May 2, 2003 below, are hereby rescinded.
In the logs of the compositors it is clear that another point entirely was originally being made, one spiralling regrettably out of reach when it became apparent that the credit slip referencing that very image needed to make the point had been (we must now assume irretrievably) misplaced in the rush to meet the issue's deadline.
The image in question was of a fellow squatting next to the old old jar. Drug up from the muck of the Pontus, the old clay thing, where it had settled all those many years ago. Some headway made in the questions that had settled with it, judging from the look on the fellow's face.
Seeing that credit would not be found, some one among the compositors whispered "fair use" to the one at the next bench over, who drafted from the image in question a substitution of its values to make a new thing, he said. It passed around among them for the inevitable round of comment, cut short by the need to get the thing done.
The words indicated in the Clarification, meant to further disguise the uncreditable source, had the unfortunate effect of making the revised image unnecessary, as the jar seems without dancers of any kind, though the words specifically require them.
As a result, no image at all was provided with the clarification, acknowledged as the whole point of the excersize from the first. HCE regrets the errancy.
The Cuban Bombshell is just now dead, as shown by her own obituary notice in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 2003, pg. A16.
When the great– great- grandmother of those of us here at HCE came to San Francisco in 1862, she pronounced it wicked, and moved on to Santa Cruz. Her appraisal has never been countered successfully. Indeed, offering up such wickedness as can be publicly provided has its long-hallowed history in San Francisco.
Wickedness, of course, attractive in any setting, but particularly when poured in precincts awash with similarly disposed proclivities, as was the case in San Francisco's wellremebered Barbary Coast, a notorious district where wickedness was the least of your problems, and in North Beach and in the Haight-Ashbury in their own time.
Delia Martinez died eight years to the day after another San Franciscan, Jerry Garcia, ceased.
To wickedness.
To excess.
The Uncle dreamed of the compositors. He saw the needed platoon of them in their subterranean vault, bent over their task with all the most advanced methods of their craft at hand, everready to shape the further fevered pages of his threatened opus, the Ratio and Sums.
His vantage shifted cinematically in his dreamstate.
Establishing shot: the vast long row of them at their machines with the all the bustling metallic susurrus of the operation successfully implied.
A listless green light in the low cavern, dust-laden.
The attire of them referencing if not exhibiting the formal wear of the professional, a rolled sleeve or two, but waistcoats, proper trousers. Shoes on every one of them, the Uncle knew somehow.
Here though, here.
Aaagh. What?
Closer shot: the middle fellow here. What? What's he up to now?
Is that a smirk there on the side of his lip, or just the rest of some other expression he's making that can't be fully spied?
Maybe he's just happy to have the steady work, maybe he's smiling for that.
Hard to say, dreaming. Can't move to the needed frontal view…
Even sleeping the Uncle sensed the unrestful presence of the rough nacreous lump of his suspicions, like the unforgiving pea of the princess.
He'd have come around to the front of the fellow, but the dream would not. He closed in from the side.
Perhaps a word with the fellow. What's the meaning of your mein, man? Explain why you'd be smiling given the hard labors and conditions and all, he thought to say.
Is it something I wrote, then?
The venue slipped, the cogged wheels of his consciousness revolving bothersomely from the Uncle's closing view of your man, but just before, in the fuller look at the fellow, yes, a smile (a smirk?) from the side so hard to quantify exactly as to cause oh and the lost chance to properly assuage the situation, going now, going, with perhaps only the forever-residual irritation moving on to its next somnolent playground.
It's said the Uncle often tossed, but rarely turned, in this respect.
Time has no good sum, it was reported recently in the press. See for example the release of Brooke Jones (Independent Communications Consultant Brooke.Jones@australia.edu) submitted only recently to the eurekalert.org website, and captured for redisplay in the argumentative pages of the Quotidian.
The 'Quote's pages starve for the good argument, its "raft in a sea of troubles," so-called. The 'Quote' was originally designed to be drunk with argument, either as a palliative or as an apertif, but as the endless controversy over the Naming drew few lookers, being alert to the public's resistance to its restricted interests, Barry Family editors early on took a turn for first principles, and opened up the publication to useful arguments of all kind.
The nature of time's motility a forever fecund field of dispute and counterclaim, in the Barry Family view, leading ever out into all the other main subjects of contention. Thus the pages of the 'Quote" have long been rife with rifts over time.
Any such general argument, whether it be over time or time or "time" or time, is indexed for convienience sake according to the scheme adopted here at HCE under the term conatus, the quality of time discussed below in the Bogblog, and explains the Quotidian's heading for the replicated article.
That the controversial Barry coat of arms should adorn the pages of the Quotidian (first dubbed the "quoteQuoteunquote" by its periodically rebellious staff) signals at once the continued, some say heavy-handed guidances of the Barry Family in all matters of editorial policy at that publication, and in addition the continued rankling of its staff under the yoke of it all, the ongoing discomfitures of which are referenced in the the subdued insult always implicit in the Barry coat's display.
With respect to time and calendrics, eight is not a likely cyclic. It is seven instead that is the basis for the periodic week of it known to us here at HCE, as well as for the round of the climacteric itself, the odd sevens of years by which some have tried to measure out the years of given lives, culminating in the desired grand climacteric of nine sevens, sixty-three years of age.
Nevertheless, eight is the given count of days from the first of any month, the day on which a vantage is established from which the varying claims to our attention may be reckognized, assayed, disposed of or perhaps put aside as circumstances allow. And eight is the count in months from the first of the Gregorian months to the weedmonth of August, in which the splurge of life's increase seems unconstrained, uncheckable, rampant in every field. And eight is the count in years now, on this last day of the eighth year of it, since the death of the famous Jerry Garcia, whose time is now and forever summed, as is the case with all the dead, and which we memorialized after our own fashion in the days following.
We acknowledge the multifarious nature of our interests in the various tasks at hand, each of which struggles with the rest to some degree for priority in time and trained attention.
We are multitasked, admittedly, although experience shows that doing the one thing at a time after another suits more our temperament and training.
As a result, paid in the coin of distraction from having to consider all the claims such tasks might make, at times we find it useful to fend of such claims entirely by attending closely to one and only one time-swallowing task instead.
Thus a recent communique from one of our valued beta testers (that everalert squad of evaluators standing on the rampart between perception and coding error), chanced to mention the matter at hand, a project which began almost exactly eight years ago, and which has, to our knowledge, never relinquished that title, however often it has been shared with other tasks: matter at hand.
Normally, in the calendrics adopted here at HCE (a somewhat extended version of the famous Roman calendrics as is discussed below in the Bogblog), the eighth day of the month is reserved for taking up or at the very least considering the prospect of taking up, each of the many tasks at hand. The matter of the fennell is never far from our considerations, and, as its presence in the plot of ground immediately surrounding us here at HCE precedes our own, it has the rued distinction of seniority. Its presence, introduced we suspect by an earlier owner's bit of bad gardening, has priority over our own here, and thus it has always been the matter at hand. There are other tasks of course which our own habitation has if not encouraged then at least allowed to pass uncompleted through the many many reviews on the many many eighth days of the months of the many many years since they first came to be dubbed the matter at hand.
Based on a review of the tasks at hand for signs of perceptible progress, on the eighth day of the month it is at the very least incumbent on those of us here at HCE who are authorized to make such judgments comprising such an exhaustively large portion of our work, to make such judgements as may be necessary to discern whether any certain or at the very least appreciable progress can be made out with regard to the matter at hand.
It is not as if we are unaware of the matter at hand.
The matter at hand is always in our mind.
“…yet in the present day it is not to be supposed that a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer from whom he adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, and then pick out from Virgil, Horace, Ovid or perhaps more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody them.”
—Samuel Coleridge, Biographia Literaria.
And
gradus, n. [from L gradus ad Parnassum, steps to Parnassus, a name for a book on prosody or poetry.]
1. A dictionary for aid in composing poetry, especially in Greek or Latin.
2. In music, graded exercises each succeeding one more difficult than its predecessor.
So that
…in the present day it is not to be supposed that Nabokov thought in English, though how the rest of Coleridge’s assertion might apply to him is problematic. Coleridge’s argument is against the undigested classicism of the followers of Pope, whose brilliant translation of the famous Iliad had the perverse effect on the generation following him of enslaving poets to the gilding phrases of the gradus, rather than wording directly from the expression of natural sentiments. Coleridge was not amused. He mentions Erasmus, said to have thought in Latin, and enumerates a gradient of fluency down through those whose command of the classical idiom is so shaky that their only appeal is to a previously crafted phrase. Among Pope’s followers are those who know enough to look through primary sources and those whose only hope is a compendium of rhymes and phrases — a cheat-book called gradus.
But
…Nabokov names the assassin in Pale Fire "Gradus."
And
…Nabokov, no thinker in English, by some mysterious means becomes one of the great writers of modern English literature. He writes a book named Pale Fire, which is ostensibly a poem named Pale Fire written by John Shade, though expropriated for his own purposes by its annotator, Charles Kinbote. Pale Fire, the poem, is the last, uncompleted work of Shade, assassinated by Gradus.
But,
…Coleridge has pronounced gradus the lowest enemy of poetry.
And
…gradus of course, our keyword, the poemkiller of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria being also the poet killer of Pale Fire.
From which
…the following observations are offered:
Nabokov was a noble. Let us admit, preparatory to any other consideration, that our understanding is untrained in knowing what this “being noble” meant to him. We may speak knowingly of the caste system supporting the institutions of regal rule, we can readily acknowledge that by custom and by law that nobility was apart from and above the rest of society, that society was both for and about this favored group of people.
Nabokov was born and flourished in the very last corner of Europe where nobility retained something closely resembling the form and status it had enjoyed all down the ages prior to the democratic spasms of the Napoleonic era. Throughout the rest of Europe the nineteenth century increasingly brought constitutional governance and the marginalization of nobility, and the unmitigated irony of Nabokov's personality was to have been honed to perfection for a role in this venerable (by its own standards) layer of civilization which with all its appendant apparatus disappeared from meaningful existence just as he was about to enter adulthood.
Unmoored he was, forever displaced.
Minded of the earlier name for it: Wœdmonð it was.
Wœdmonð, sure: the month of the weeds, imperative extrusive growth of things even in the frosted north from which its namers came, crowding against and overwhelming the chosen field of the Barry Family and their like in the busy millennium before the Naming.