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
climacteric, n.[L. climactericus; Gr. klimakterikos from klimakter, the step of a staircase, the round of a ladder, from klimax, a ladder.] a period in the life of a person when an important change in health or bodily function occurs, especially in the period of the menopause in women. The critical periods were held by some to be the years produced by multiplying 7 by the odd numbers 3, 5, 7, and 9. The 63rd year is called the grand climacteric. It has been supposed that these periods are attended with some radical change in respect to health, life, or fortune. any crucial period or event.
A long a low a lowly swooning comes across the year. Aw, isn't it the fennel's swooning rhythms, now, the arching up and back, saluting the passing of our chosen calendar's first trimester? March has come with all its engaging madnesses, with all its strivings after excellence and transcendant embrace, and April has occurred where all the strivings and transcendings receive due celebration as the stuff of fools, and Semele's Month, May, too, comes, completing the intentional embrace of that whole thing, the current year, which we here at HCE have so recently noted.
Nonnos has it in his Dionysaica that the people gathered to see off Dionysius on his way to India waved their customary fennel fronds to salute his going.
The practical associations of fennel being so invidiously arrayed against our interests here at HCE, the classic trope is hard to scan. They're waving fennel fronds across the length and breadth of classic literature, marking some moment's proper crowded celebration with what we would ordinarily be inclined to think of, based purely on personal observation, as the embodiment of all the profound nuisance of the world.
Fennel does us no favor here. It's said to have admirers, and the Barry Family, not yet loosed from the lore of pigs, to whose fate the Barry Family was so closely attached for the many beneficial mlllenia before the Naming, knows as fact, still, that pigs, for example, with their inbred indiscriminacies of ingestion, fully favor fennel. Root stalk and frond they'll have at the stuff, returning a bog for what was given as a greenery by the plantstuff.
The Barry Family, having loosed the pigs from its domain, though not yet all the accrued knowledges entailed by them, provides no certain guidance for those of us here at HCE who's fate it is to daunt the fennel's growth. Absent pigs, these knowledges are unavailing against the exasperations of the fennell's efflorescence.
Given our prejudices in the matter here at HCE it is with some effort we imagine Nonnos's scene, with Dionysius, the very measure of advanced late pagan godliness, being celebrated in this way.
To read the stuff, then, the classic stuff (which in its broadest sense and only without value judgement may be said to include the words of Nonnos), requires of us here at HCE great discipline of mind, forever readying the necessary transposition of values required if fennell's nuanced meaning is at stake.
The fennell is what we'd willingly give. It is what we freely and eagerly offer up to any disposed to have it. Our self-regarding relief in its release in no way diminishes the pleasure of those so curiously endowed as to feel honored by its offering. It is the disquiparant thing, this relation, of giver to gifted. We are happy to have over to them the aromatic fronds for our own good reasons, and presume the gifted gratified for their own good reasons as well, wandering their chosen path to or back from what glory they might seek, in the nearest sense we can make of the practice when we run across its mention in the context of the classic lore.
In the Norton Shakespeare (based on the Oxford Edition), Iago is said to say, ending Act 2, Scene 1:
Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me For making him egregiously an ass, And practising upon his peace and quiet Even to madness. 'Tis here, but yet confused. Knavery's plain face is never seen till used.
In the curious Shakespeare Complete made by the World Publishing Company in 1925, the words are these:
Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me, For making him egregiously an ass, And practising upon his peace and quiet Even to madness. 'Tis here, but yet confus'd: Knavery's plain face is never seen, till us'd.
The Norton glosses "practicing upon" as meaning "undermining," and this is good if sparse scholarship. Yes, "practicing upon" does mean "undermining" here. But there are actions direct and indirect which may achieve that end, and "undermining" does not give the flavor of it.
We look to the Deluxe Second Edition of Webster's New International Unabridged Dictionary to find, in the listed senses of the word practise, under items 7 and 8, the needed nuance of it.
Item 7 says, "a scheming; intrigue or trickery." Item 8 has, "(a) a scheme; an intrigue; (b) a stratagem; a manuever. "
We find the gloss of Shakespeare Complete much better.
Its note says, " 'Practising,' i.e., using malicious artifices;" and this, along with the delicacy of the contracted rhyme of "confus'd" and "us'd" it offers up as text, and the colon deployed there to bind them, makes it, to those of us who follow these thing here at HCE, the better version of what Shakespeare wanted of his words.
"Every player, in his secret heart, wants to manage someday. Every fan, in the privacy of his mind, already does."
—Leonard Koppett, quoted in Fitzgerald's Open Season column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Leonard Koppet died June 21, 2003. He wrote on baseball knowingly, and was taken up into baseball's Hall of Fame for his work.
It fails to escape our attention here at HCE that the joint voiced expressions of fellow fans are indeed offered up from that private reservoir of conviction referred to in Mr. Koppett's work. Privately each fellow fan believes he manages the event in very telling ways, a belief so firm that his privacies become public. Among the wonders of the myth that each fellow fan maintains is that remarkable certitude privacy bestows on willful thought, and, too, that remarkably common tone of voice such certainty engenders in its bearer.
Surely each fellow fan mouths what managerial offerings he might have a mind for, however much his blatancies may be at odds with a truer comprehension of events.
The fellow fan concatenates the happier measure of the moment with his broadly affirmative "yay." He excoriates the measured failure of fortune with his opprobrious "yeow." Of all the measures of the fellow fan's knowledges these are the widest, and most widely applied, in the confirmed, direct evaluation of the howlings of the crowd. The crowd, ah, the crowd, it manages the team through the contest's transpiring moments with the common meanings of its joint voiced messages.
A pause, a hush. The pitcher leaves the mound, relieved. The crowd stands, applauds in the unresolved moment of contest.
The pitcher's line is mostly done. The number of pitches is now known, the hits given, strikeouts achieved and bases on balls bequeathed. The inauspicious pitches, those pitches sent against the hitter's frame or lofted well beyond the catcher's hope of catching, they are numbered, too.
The pitcher, going, has not gathered all the inning's outs. It goes on, containing the residuum of runners he has left it, the continuum of consequence he has given to the game.
The crowd applauds. Fond–held hopes it has are brought this far by the pitcher's productive efforts. The way is yet open for the win, the ball now in some other hand.
The grateful mass of them applaud.
Clarification
Repeated below in the Bogblog are two stories with the same thematic element, one as told by Somadeva in his Katha Sarit Sagara in about the year 1250 of the Roman calendar, and the other as told by Russians to one another about two hundred years later. Lookers unfamiliar with the style of writing common to the Bogblog might suppose, erroneously, that these retellings are the product of our own belle-lettrist inclinations, the principled recasting of the well-travelled element in the mold of our own chosen way of saying it, but of course nothing could be further from the practice here at HCE. The words below are in fact simply-made copies of some others' work, which by the terms of argument adopted by the Barry Family during the long and acrimonious period known as the Naming, must necessarily be provided in full if appealed to at all in driving a point home.
Should attribution be required, as the prevailing view of contemporary copyright law might imply, staff of course will be advised to retrieve the given source materials from archives surrounding us here at HCE and provide at the very least such minimal information as to the identity of the true makers of the words as may be thought necessary to settle the issue.
We understand that by common usage attribution is properly appended directly to the source material as copied, following or leading (as the whims of typography dictate) the thing issued in the other writer's words. Staff, burdened as they are by all the wealth of their unfinished work, the undone business of the virtual corporation, preoccupied as they are with all their other duties as assigned, remain unflinchingly committed to providing rapid attribution whenever confronted by the raised question of the looker.
Somadeva's Katha Sarit Sagara was translated into English by C. H. Tawney in Calcutta and published by the Baptist Mission Society there in 1880–1884. Tawney's English is the source of the adaptation by Milton Rugoff of the story of Devabhuti and his unnamed wife on page 452 of the Vintage Compass paperback edition of his book A Harvest of World Folk Tales (New York, 1949) itself issued in 1968.
Tawney may have been that rare thing, for all we know, a good Baptist and a good storyteller. We acknowledge that a failed Baptist almost invariably makes a finer story, and admit that our confidence in Tawney's handling of Somadeva's material might increase with certain knowledge of his inclination in this regard. Taking up the adapted translation of Tawney as given by the editor Rugoff in his book puts us at a third order of distance from Somadeva's book: the words below called Somadeva's are an adaptation of a translation of the primary source.
Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales edited by Serge A. Zenkovsky in a Dutton Paperback edition (New York, 1963, pp. 371–374), is the original location of the words of the other telling of it called Shemiaka's Judgement found below. Editor Zenkovsky introduces the tale by making a few preparatory remarks, adapted below, about the origin and widespread popularity of the name Shemiaka, and concludes by citing the publication in the Russian journal Russkia povest XVII vekam (Moscow, 1954, pp. 140–142 by the presumably adept hand of M. Skripil) as the source of the translation he offers up in English.
The brisket the forepart of the beast. In the chinless bird and fourfooted swine and dog and horse, the breast of the thing, especially as it is prepared for cooking. The thing's chest, right there by the ribs, the word used for it in Brittany and Wales and all those parts of France left by the Barry Family in their long retreat from the Paris Basin following the arrival of the Romans. The Barry Family with the rest of them who had a word just like it brought the word to Ireland and between them all they found the agreeable compromise of sound for it ("brisket") and gave the sound to English.
Matter of the chin in humans. Although the brisket is the forepart for all the rest of them, on the human form it is the chin that contests for that distinction. From fisted paw to outthrust maw is the shortest distance between two arguments, as the Findings of the Barry Family show.
The chin leads the human frame, and "chuck under the chin" as found in the definition of the word sobriquet in the Deluxe Second Edition comes from that knowledge. Sou of soubriquet coming from sou, "under," and briquet of soubriquet coming from brusk, brysked, briquet "brisket." Under, that is, not the breast in this case, but under the chin, or leading human forepart. Under the breast, of course, we would expect the solar plexus, admittedly a fine enough destination for any exclamation, but hardly in the spirit of the thing, which, as noted in the definition, is to mock or flout rather than completely indispose. Other categories of address are the proper domain of such thrusts.
Brisket here in sobriquet a nickname for the chin as forepart, a form in rhetoric known as metonymy in its metaleptic phase, where the figurative meaning of brisket and the figurative meaning of chin being equally advanced, other distinctions are dissolved, and the two are interchanged in speech. Sobriquet, word for nickname, has its nickname for chin in it.
Shakespeare got his Odysseus from the Romans, who named him Ulysses and in truth found him a bit too Greek for their tastes, preferring the likes of Hector in Homer's other book to the troublesome wanderer of the Odyssey. Ulysses not a sobriquet, but the missaid sound of "l" for "d" in Odysseus (the best the stiff Roman tongue could do with it, though with such authority that it became the word in English for the fellow).
Virgil made a run at marrying the rectitude of Hector's kind to the coursing ways of Odysseus in his making of Aeneas, and his fellow, the very fellow for a model martial empire, made in a stiffer tongue than Greek by your man Virgil (who had the Latin for it), became the template for all the great goes at the heroic figure of a human in the literature, so-called, of the Medieval era in Western Europe: Orlando Furioso and Amadis of Gaul and all the other grandiosities of the form drunk in by your famous knight of La Mancha as made known by Mr. Cervantes and translated into English by Thomas Shelton in 1611.
Acute, unavoidable compassion for the travails of your man Quixote, naturally elicited by the perfect parody of a hero here. Cervantes makes a man, and, oh, yes, another fellow here, a follower.
Falstaff contemporaneously created for the stage in London. No less a true–made fellow, though of different aspect, than the two made by Cervantes.
Great irony then in the sobriquet Ulysses given as the title of James Joyce's famous book. The Roman, now English, misspoken saying of the fellow's name there the nickname for the fellow Bloom here, whoso delineated, with what art an author might hope to posses, is made forever distinguishable from any other imaginable Bloom. Joyce's man mocks Odysseus, Homer's Greek-made man, directly. The book's Roman name for him makes fond mock of Bloom right back.
Shelton made the first part of Don Quixote into English in 1611. We cannot know if Shakespeare ever read Shelton's translation, though it was printed there in London just as Shakespeare put up his pen, from which had leaked the storied characterizings of humanity for which, in English, his name shall ever be the byword.
Of the Blooms, it is Harold Bloom known for proposing that Shakespeare made our modern sense of self. It is that Bloom, Harold, who envisions a sensed competition, a need to better one great one who's gone before, fueling the engine of the writer striving after greatness. He sees James Joyce jousting on the field that Shakespeare owns, although, inconveiniently for his argument, it is clearly Homer the fellow had in mind in his lengthy and well known work Ulysses.
Homer made a man in his Odyssey.
He made a Greek man not to every person's taste, an aquired flavor of a fellow, a very Greek fellow indeed caught up in travel, forever diverted from his rearrival home.
"Odysseus," wantonwandering wiley one: "Nobody," he called himself, as Homer had it.
But he is somebody of course: firstfigured wording of a singularly human man of the Greek sort, a particular fellow we are anciently advised to watch out for in reports from many fine Mediterranean cultures.
A Greek traveller on the seas, a fleet foriegn finagler.
Falstaff is you other sort of well-written fellow made by Shakespeare, a fellow fondly known by Harold Bloom, a fellow of the vasty appetite and the exhuberant expression kind, your man the model of a dionysian.
Zorba is your Falstaff sort of fellow, too, brought back to Greece in the novel by the Nobel laureate whose name you should have at hand, according to the argument made by Alan Bloom, a distinctly other man than your man Harold.
Alan, having his own claims to scholarship (as does Harold admittedly) by our good fortune lived in a different part of the land, so that the two, though Blooms and scholars both, can be readily distinguished in action and precept by their location relative to the city of Chicago, known lair of the Alan of the two, while the Harold can be placed with confidence some good distance to the east.
Alan Bloom is you champion of the classics code. This Bloom would have us take up what we know as classics and make of them the proper basis of our common knowledges.
He looks, he sees a lack of looking at the classics in our culture, an ignorance of their bounty on the part of students otherwise educated and a populace otherwise entertained.
But what, hey? The great collective written wisdoms of the ages go unscanned! Unconsidered lay the precious fruits! No one knows their Nonnos! All this has been long understood by the Barry Family.
Zero Mostel plays Max Byolistock, Zorba as a New York Jew, a Falstaff of a dionysian in the movie "The Producers." Gene Wilder plays Leo Bloom, though not the wandering Leo Bloom of Dublin feaured in the famous book Ulysses by James Joyce.
Cervantes made Don Quixote, a sensation of a Spanish book in its first part, which soon found its way into French, and in 1611, the English of Thomas Shelton.
Shakespeare may not have seen it, Shelton's book. He may not have heard all the talk about the mournful knight and his squire as word of the thing Cervantes made errupted among the kind of people sttending to such things back then.
But just then, as it arrived in England's language, he left the lists of London for his second best bed in Stratford.
Medievally, they had mainly remnants of the Roman written record of the classics to go by, Latin versions of the humans Homer made with his words.
Ulysses was not to the Roman taste, but ah, Achilles, Hector, Diomedes!
The Romans had their man Aneas made up by Virgil, and despite the awkward stiffness of the fellow, he found great favor in the medieval mind, supplanting the superior host of Homer in the literary imagination, such as it was in those marginally literate times.
This stiffness was the true and symptomatic Roman stiffness, and Aneas a true enough measure of a Roman man. The Romans, bricklayers all, had their Virgil's fine-fitting tilework of a hero Aneas, and he, not some more suply-made man of Homer, became the model for the medieval heroic Romance.
How Cervantes unmade this line of heroes with his Don Quixote is well-know.
Shakespeare's Ulysses is made from the Roman Odysseus, called in Latin "Ulysses", of course, who the Romans had no taste for.
All during that period, throughout the acrimonious length of the controversy over the Naming, the Barry Family had "names" as likely as any, given by the others: "Pigfondler" fondly (and worse when out of range) was how they were known by the surrounding lot of others.
And as we know, the Barry Family would respond to these given names with an equanimity born of their indifference to such issue.
It was the controversy of the taken name they were embroiled in after all; the given name was cause for no more concern than any other mispronunciation. Saying "Pigfondler" would quickly bring the willing, attentive "eh?" of the Barry kind to bear on the sobriquet.
It was nothing for the Barry Family to acknowledge the propriety of the two or three names given them or even the many more when tempers rose. Having a number of terms for the same thing was quite all right with the Barry Family. It was the one name for the many things they worried over, not the many names for the one. They had never dared, on principle, the self-ascribing term.
Leopold Bloom is given to the imagination of all by the imagination of your famous writer James Joyce in his book Ulysses.
Alan Bloom is real enough, though also given in imagination by Saul Bellow, who wears the laurels of a Nobel Prize winner, in his book Ravelstein, from what we understand.
Harold Bloom would make of himself John Falstaff, the vasty outline of his own humanity sketched out in advance by the great Shakespearean character, though Falstaffs are never as learned as this Bloom.Leo Bloom is a character played by Gene Widler in a movie made by Mel Brooks, The Producers although Max Byalistock, played by Zero Mostel is the Falstaff.
Potential confusion of Blooms here at HCE.
Periodically as illustrated, month and date and day of week do so align that the indicated year's June 16th falls on a Thursday. Given that 1904 is done and will not now return, this triple conjuction of month and date and day of week is as close as we may ever come to the conjunction of our calendrics of Bloomsday with the one so amply provided us by the other work of your famous writer James Joyce: Ulysses.
We can scarcely celebrate as well as Joyce did the day in question, or those who people it.
Nevertheless, each June 16th we who have a taste for such things here at HCE make a special point to take up the great book and for some period of time, lasting for perhaps only the few hours it takes to glance again at a favorite passage or two, or perhaps, as will occasionally be the case, rereading from the first the whole thing once again, we mark our annual obeisance to the great work.
It would be unduly controversial to quote from the thing here in the Boglbog, given the current state of dispute among the scholiasts as to its proper rendering (the history of which is nicely summarized in Bruce Arnold's The Scandal of Ullyses).
We might chose to leaf through the clumsiness of the thing's 1922 edition reprinted by Oxford University Press, or instead have at the 1986 printing made by Random House from Hans Walter Gabler's critical edition . They each point to the same Dublin, in the main, on the chosen, seeming arbitrary day in question.
As recently as 1994, Thursday met June 16. Our token of the conjunction, shown above, is our only useful memory of that day, evidence that we lived it, however unremembered in its detail. We confess our memory of the day Joyce made is better. Art is the chronic thing, compared to the day gone by here at HCE.
sobriquet (–ka) n. [Fr., from sous, under, and briquet, brisket; of Celtic origin; lit., chuck under the chin; a mock or flout; a nickname.]
Also spelled soubriquet.
Forever minded of Ulysses around this time of year; natural result of the celebration, each June 16th, of "Bloomsday," so–called. Bloom your main man of the story of Ulysses, Ulysses your other fine book by the famous James Joyce.
Ulysses a soubriquet. Bloom dubbed "Ulysses" by his mocking freindly maker. Chuck under the chin for the likeable enough fellow.
Bloomsday celebrated each June 16th, the date on which, in 1904, or so the story goes, the events of the novel transpire.
In the book it is a Thursday, that June 16th. As month and date and day of week do not consistently coincide, given the standards of the calendrics, it is impossible to anniversarize Bloomsday without given short shrift to the weekday of it. We here at HCE do at least take note of the discrepancy: "Thursday" as given by James Joyce, is on a Monday this year.
The principle of its construction was the rain-slickable plywood over the rotting pine of pallet, an idiosyncracy in a path of smoother concrete walkway. It had its smaller growths of plants pushing green between its boards, interrupting the walkway's otherwise regular progress along the north side of the house here at HCE.
Many alternatives to its presence there were considered over the years, sometimes as a result of some fresh new incident, sometimes as a result of directing our attentions (as is our habit from time to time) to the long list of initiatives we have put aside for further review, where it would naturally come up. The fennell project is annual leader of this list, of course, but for seniority the crumbling walkway section matches it.
It was here from the first, some earlier owner's solution to a question that arises when the given run of concrete falls 10 cubic feet short of the needed distance to surround the house's side by continuous path. Just before the door to the garage which we here at HCE recognize as the center of our virtual activities, a third of the way along the path beside the house, its concrete ended and did not resume again for four and a half more feet.
Four and a half feet long and four feet wide, it gave interregnum to the presumed entry of your man. It demanded the careful consideration of the hoof for successfully passing, this stretch of path. And as well as any doorbell, the soft "gaah"" of the striding entrant would signal conveniently an arrival from that side of the house.
Over the ages, as the soft wood of the pallet returned to its rudiments by decay, the level of the crumbling walkway section shifted, and it became expedient to place an available rectangle of plywood over as much of the pallet as possible to conform in height to the otherwise uniform run of concrete on either side of its interruption. As it was considered useless to to nail the plywood to the near-dust of wood underneath, it rode free on the surface of the pallet, hydroplaning a bit in the fouler weather when the step came on it.
But, of course, that is all in the past, for the disjoint have now been unified, the crumbling place removed, and the promise of proper passage made concrescent by voluntary labor and considerable cement.
We congratulate our otherwise listless staff for their effort in seeing this project through.
"In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors."
— Colin Powell, Speech before the United Nations Security Council February 5, 2003.
We here at HCE who have been so recently excoriated for this Bogblog's glancing reference to Seceretary of State Colin Powell's speech in early February to the Security Council of the United Nations, do of course acknowledge the sardonic tone of certain of our organization's materials, which on a good day is as close as we are ever likely to get to expressing a sincere feeling at all, under the influence of the forceful ironies of the surrounding culture we have been so shaped by.
Point taken: we were being snide.
Nevertheless, and leaving this particular field of argument now and forever in the capable hands of those who wish to pursue it, as a memento, a diploma of dispute, a little keepsake for the grandkids, we insist that we'd like to have a photo of it, of the place referred to in the Secretary of State's speech above.
A photo. Just go there, to that place known then to be a facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, and take a picture of it for us here at HCE. It should be no more than a few hours' work to go to that place and take a snap or two; the invader's forces are in command of the country, after all. It is our understanding here at HCE that those invaders are currently so deployed that no part of the land is more than a lightning strike away.
In all the reams of information classified as intelligence which underwrote the Secretary's speech, there may have been some previous illustration of the place. We would prefer a fresh one, taken by whoever is handy to do the job.
It is a simple and straightforward claim the Secretary makes in this one sentence.
Twisted by the vissisitudes of rhetorical necessity, it does fail to meet the formal needs of oratory accepted for use in the Barry Family since its submergence in the art during the acrimonious period known as the Naming. The sentence, as spoken, does little justice to the hearer's senses. It is not well–made. There's a little bump there where "those experts" are re–inserted in its flow, a bar to the commoner forms of understanding the speaker normally might wish upon his hearers.
Nevertheless, the claim is clear. Whatever the experts, those experts, were expert in, however and in what sense the facility was related to weapons of mass destruction, there was a building. We want a look.
Should our request be granted, we will make some effort to revist this portion of the Bogblog and hew, using our skills at Photoshop, an image representing the prized photo into the space provided below.
(this space reserved)
"Aum" is that single word for it. "Aum" is that unitary spoken mondad for all the domain of Allstory, properly pronounced.
"Gaah!" doesn't do that. It engages the immediate. It says. "I notice …"
It is the useful leader of the Bary Family Conversation, firstword in the Barry Family view, considering the bog.
Myth incites all human acts, in the Barry Family view.
People take up stories to bear the archived knowledges of the myth they mean to have. In the Barry Family view, Allstory is that said series of stories satisfying all the human acts, and all the other acts of stories they are in.
The mild nettling hooks of story attach myth to mythbeliever. There are the many stories, and the many possible collections of them adequate to the needed myth. Story makes out what can be said about the assumed myth.
In theme and episode and effect the elements of stories may be similar. They may have the variously described locale or participant or age. All the likely acts of humans are told there in stories.
We look necessarily to the Katha Sarit Sagara (Sea of Story's Streams), Somadeva's immense chapbook of tales, jests, exempla and romances compiled about the year 1250, for a random example, some jape, some nonce, some light conceit.
There lived in Panchala, of old time, a Brahman named Devabhuti, and that Brahman, who was learned in the Veda, had a chaste wife named Bhogadatta. One day when he had gone to bathe, his wife went into the kitchen garden to get vegetables but found that a washerman's donkey was devouring them. So she took up a stick and ran after the donkey, and the animal, trying to escape, fell into a pit and broke its hoof. When its master heard of that, he came in a passion, beat the Brahman woman with a stick and kicked her. As a result of the beating, she, being pregnant, had a miscarriage. The washerman returned home with his donkey.
The woman's husband, hearing of it, came home after bathing, and, seeing his wife, went in his distress and complained to the chief magistrate of the town. The foolish magistrate immediately had the washerman brought before him, and after hearing the pleading of both parties, delivered this judgment.
"Since the donkey's hoof is broken, let the Brahman carry the donkey's load for the washerman until the donkey is again fit for work. And let the washerman make the Brahman's wife pregnant again, since he made her miscarry. Let this be the punishment of the two parties respectively." When the Brahman heard this, he and his wife, in their despair, took poison and died. And when the king heard of it, he put to death the inconsiderate judge.
—We note in passing the endorsement tag reflexively if lightly applied to the tale by Somadeva: the location, the Brahmin, and his wife are named at the beginning, although referred to generically thereafter, much as we might begin a story, "At the University of Washington, (or Virginia, say) a professor of physics asked his students to write a paper in answer to the question, 'Is hell exothermic or endothermic...?' " The endorsement tag excludes the imaginary by implication, and since people are capable of saying anything, and know that about each other, it's the formal equivalent of "Here's something that happened once...Really."
By contrast, consider the following:
Sven meets Ollie on the street and bursts out laughing.
"Oh, Ollie," he says when he finally collects himself. "You've got to start pulling down your windowshade! I was passing by your house last night and I looked in and saw you and the missus going at it hot and heavy."
"Well I guess the jokes on you!" says Ollie, "I wasn't even home last night!"
No endorsement tag, eh? Even though we know for a fact this story happens all the time. The presence or absence of endorsement isn't in itself a marker of veracity, then. Samadeva always includes one, but it's just a tic. He just can't help it. —
On the other hand, Shemiaka's Judgment comes from a seventeenth century Russian manuscript, doesn't it? And it's just one of countless prose and verse versions of this enormously popular story know throughout Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia, as we are all too well aware. Back in the 15th century, the historical Shemiaka, prince of the northern Russian town of Galych best known for his interminable feud with cousin Vasily of Muscovy, could not know that his name would become, oddly from our perspective here at HCE, not only one of the most popular given names of the era throughout all of Muscovite Russia, but become attached as well, justly or unjustly, to this tale.
But there you have it.
We do know Russian stories aren't properly under way until well into the second hour of their telling.In a village of Russia there lived two peasant brothers. One was rich and the other poor. The rich one for many years lent money to his poor brother, but could not end his destitution.
Once the poor brother came to the rich one and asked him to lend him his horse because he hadn't one for bringing in wood. The rich brother did not want to give him the horse, and said, "On many occasions I have lent you money, but I cannot improve your condition." But he did lend him the horse, and then the poor brother asked to borrow the harness. The rich brother felt offended, and began to abuse his brother, saying, "You! You don't even have your own harness," and he didn't give him the harness. The poor man left the house of the rich brother, took his own sledge, and attached it to the horse's tail. He then went to the forest and later returned to his house, but he forgot to take out the gate spike. The sledge got caught on the spike and could not move. He flayed the horse with the knout, and the horse pulled with all its might, finally tearing away its own tail. When the poor brother brought back the horse and the rich brother saw that it no longer had a tail, he began to abuse his poor brother for having ruined his horse. And he refused to take the horse back, but went to the city to lodge a complaint with the judge, Shemiaka.
And the poor brother, seeing that his brother went to court, followed him, because he knew that if he did not come of his own volition, he would be obliged to pay an additional fee to the court messenger.
And both of them stopped for the night in some township not far from the city. The rich brother went to pass the night with the parson of the township because the parson was an acquaintance of his. The poor man also came to the parson's, and, arriving there, went to sleep in an upper bunk. The rich brother began to tell the parson about the misfortune concerning his horse, and explained why he was going to the city. And then the parson began to sup with the rich brother. The poor one, however, was not invited. As the poor hungry brother looked from the upper bunk, to see what the parson and his brother we eating, he fell from the upper bunk, accidentally crashing into the cradle of the parson's infant son, killing him.
And then the parson went with the rich brother to the city to sue the poor brother for the death of his infant son. As they came to the city where the judge lived, the poor one was following them. They were walking over a bridge to the city. At that time one of the inhabitants of the city was transporting his father in a cart to a steambath under a bridge in order to wash him. The poor brother, who knew that he must expect the worst from his rich brother and from the parson, decided to commit suicide. He jumped from the bridge into the moat in order to kill himself; but the moat was dry, and in jumping he accidentally fell on the old man and killed him. He was seized and brought before the judge.
The poor man began to think how to avoid the misfortune of a penalty and how to bribe the judge. But since he couldn't find anything in his pocket, he took a stone and wrapped it in a kerchief and put it in his hat and presented himself to the judge. And now the rich brother lodged his complaint against him, requiring compensation for his horse, and began to explain the case to the judge. Shemiaka listened to the complaints, and told the poor man, "Answer." The poor brother didn't know what to say. He took out of his hat the wrapped stone and showing it to the judge, bowed deeply. The judge, thinking the poor man promised him a bribe, told his rich brother, "Since he tore away the tail of your horse, don't accept the horse from him until the tail grows back. But as soon as the tail grows back, at that time take from him your horse."
And then began the second trial. The parson began to sue the bother for the death of his infant son, because the poor man had crushed his son. The poor brother once more took from the hat the same bundle and showed it to the judge. The judge saw it, and thought that in the second trial the poor man promised another bundle of gold. And he told the parson, "Since he crushed you son, give him your wife until a child is born from him. And at that time take back from him your wife and child."
And then began the third trial, for crushing of the son's old father by jumping from the bridge. The poor one, taking the wrapped stone from his hat, showed it for the third time to the judge. The judge, hoping that the poor man was promising a third bundle of gold for this, the third trial, told the son of the old man, "Go onto the bridge, while the man who killed your father remains under the bridge. And you must jump down from the bridge and kill him in the same way in which he killed your father."
When after the trial, the plaintiffs let the court with the defendant, the rich brother began to claim his horse from the poor brother. But the latter told him, "According to the judge's decision, as he told you, I will return the horse to you when its tail grows back. So the rich one gave him five rubles in order to get back the horse, even though it had no tail. The poor brother accepted the five rubles, and returned the horse to him.
Then the poor one, according to the decision of the judge, claimed from the parson his wife in order to have a child with her, and having had the child, to return the wife with the child to the parson. But the parson began to beg him not to take his wife. For this concession the poor man took ten rubles from the parson.
Then the poor one told the third plaintiff, "According to the judge's decision, I will stand under the bridge while you go on the bridge and jump on me in the same manner in which I jumped on your father."
And the plaintiff thought, If I jump on him probably I will not crush him but myself, and began to plead with the poor man, and gave him some money in order not to be obliged to jump on him. In this way the poor man got money from all three of them.
The judge sent a servant to the defendant, ordering him to get from the latter the three bundles that had been shown him. The servant told him, "Give me the money which you showed the judge from your hat. He has ordered me to take it from you."
And the latter, taking the wrapped stone from under his hat, showed it to the servant. "Well, but that is a stone," said the servant.
The defendant said, "Yes, it is for the judge. I would have killed him if he hadn't tried me to my advantage."
The servant came back and told everything to the judge. And the judge, after listening to the servant, said, " I thank and praise God that I tried him to his advantage. If I had not done so, he would have killed me."
And the poor man returned home, being overjoyed and praising God.
"Take his wife, please," says the judge in each case, eh?
Must we choose, here at HCE, we take the extensive over the succinct. We like the way the Russian thing collects it, the little nugget of a story Somadeva gives, embodied with its other variants in the Russian telling.
We find in the judgemental snort of the Wife when these stories are retold an implicit criticism of the uses of woman offered up by each, aside from her usual dislike of being read to. The Wife has the keen ear trained for the offending passage. As ever, we are quick to assure her that it is not what she thinks, that instead it is thematic similarity rather than explicit content we measure here, the distant times and cultures coterminous in this telling respect.
Commonly we adopt the readily permissible measure of the occasion. If the Chinese half-yard will do, then use it and be done, is what we say here at HCE.
In the lore of the original India the general summing measure of it all, when voiced, goes, "AUM." By the utilitarian logic of the Chinese half-yard, should the voiced general measure of it be at all possible, the Barry Family adopts "Aum" as the standard spelling for it, while leaving its proper pronunciation to others.
That the word "Aum" might be well-made by the mouthings of a Barry fails likelihood for the two causes, more's the pity.
One, the interminable Barry Family conversation, which has been primarily conducted in the English language since early in the 13th century but is considered to be continuous since well before that time, by its inclusively interruptive nature forbids all singularities of speech from which a proper "Aum" might spring to lip before the countervailing commentary of the concentrated chat.
But as well two, and also, the Barry Family traditionally has its own word, the word, "Gaah!"
It is by no means the equivalent of "Aum," this "Gaah!" It falls far short of such inclusiveness.
But it brings with its saying from bog lore the Barry Family's founding word itself, the word whose sounding first wrenched them all into that consciousness of likeness that is the hallmark of any family's founding. "Gaah!" it was said, and the good word for it they all agreed, the Barrys there assembled.
It is not the all-summing "Aum," this "Gaah!" No. However, it measures inclusively the comprehended bog, and is in that respect the ever-useful tool.
"Gaah" it was said when hoof met muck, said singularly and fittingly of that disquiparancy of hoof and muck, of hoof in muck and muck on hoof, and the good word for it they all agreed, the Barrys there assembled with their humors.
The Barry Family has kept the word through all the time, and the good word for it they all agree for the readily permissible measure of the occasion.
Although the Bogblog itself presents no evidence other than certain discontinuities in its dating, the fact remains that we have many empty pages here at HCE. In the garage, which is by custom in these parts the home station of any virtual enterprise, we have the mounds of unused papers, some prized for their note-taking abilities, some for their receptivity to such longer sentences as we may from time to time be required to enter into.
We find for example on the nearby swivel chair whose broken casters make it unfit for human occupation, a handy pile of this second sort of paper from which we may, should the means of commanding the keyboard of our very capable computer elude us for a time, choose to remove a few sheets, and pawing left-handedly (our predeliction here) one of the many fine Pilot G-2 model pens which lie more or less evenly distrubuted throughout the workspace, go on about the task of transcribing at considered length what it is we sought to find a word for.
Given that our procurement efforts here at HCE have not as yet been rationalized by the stern dictates of regular business practices, we find that our store of empty pages of this second sort lacks uniformity: the pages are not all, as would be preferred, of the same size.
We refer of course, to the class of paper known as "college ruled" paper, to which our writing is thus inclined. One would assume that the commonly given standard of dimension in such pages, well-known by all to be 8½ by 11 inches, would be strictly observed by its manufacturers, but we find this is not so.
We have instead two distinctly-sized pages in our pile, for the most part segregated by kind so that the pages in the top third of the pile conform as nearly as we are ever likely to measure such things to the agreed standard, while below it and taking up the adjacent sixth of the mound reaching towards its center, sits what remains of a pack of paper which for its own reason is not made up of the samesized stuff at all, but is rather noticeably smaller in both length and breadth. Below, underlying all, the standard is again resumed by the pile until it meets its end in the cushioned surface of the once-adequate chair. We take a representative sample of each page size from the pile containing them for inspection.
The "rules" of the "college" rule are simple rules: straight light blue lines spaced evenly across each page's white front and back, crossed by the singular straight descending red line over to the left that marks the limit of the page's margin. Both pages have these rules.
For sake of comparison we arrange the Chinese half-yard against the two variously-sized pages and take their measure.
But first, of course, we retrieve from our collection of standards here at HCE our standard 8½ by 11 inch page, illustrated here. Our standard is a single sheet of white paper, on which, as is evident, has been printed our title, a stamp certifying that this of all papers we poses is just the required size.
(We take as axiomatic that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, of course. Why wouldn't we also accept as its porism that if one is equal to the third thing, and and two is not, then one and two can't match? Here at HCE we fully accept this consequence)
Thus moving each page to be considered into the closest possible adjacency, we find the difference we had suspected. One college ruled page is the size of our standard, one smaller.
The three holes punched in the red-ruled margin of each page match up in size and spacing to a marvelous degree of accuracy, serving the larger purposes of the three-ring binder which we are assured here at HCE provides the perfect host for collecting and organizing the documents such empty pages become when we have done with them.
It doesn't matter, really, the difference, when the page is under the pen. Then we have our other concerns. But otherwise we experience, as staff, a mild disgruntlement over the situation, which will not easiily be put aside until the pile's exhausted.
Sea of Story's Streams, or, perhaps rather Streams to Story's Ocean, is the best the Da can do with it, trying to transfer the sense of Somadeva's title to plain English. Somadeva wrote the Katha Sarit Sagara about 1250 (in the Roman calendar) over in the original India, no mean keeper of stories itself. That land has the prodigous Mahabarratta to its credit, where Allstory gets a proper run for the money. Somadeva was influenced by the structure of the famous Arabian Nights, and tried in his way to make a comparable bag to grab up Allstory in himself. His book is immense, a chapbook of jokes, tales, exempla and romances that has found at least enough favor to be preserved to the present day.
Stories run into one another in the Katha Sarit Sagara, the way they do in the Arabian Nights or the Saragasso Manuscript, or any of a number of other examples, not the least of which in our estimate here at HCE would be Finnegans Wake, of course, our previously endorsed standard in such things.
It is true that every story comes as some extension of what's gone before, picks up from somewhere in the telling of the other tale and goes on with its particular purposes. Story is the mingled child of Other Story, always.
Wherever it's going, it comes from somewhere (and at times it may in fact be required of the teller offering the intended thing to, first, instead of going right on about the story, as would ordinarily be the preference in most cases, to instead, reaching well back into the other story to which it is bound, tell what part of that previous tale might seem necessary to frame the proper perspective for the benefit of the the supposed audience. Tale-tellers have always known this, and Sterne gets a good laugh out of it in his Tristram Shandy, with his fellow setting out to give his autobiography but, mired in the endlessly digressive prior detail, scarcely arriving at the moment of his own birth by the close of the book. Ha!).
In the personal calendrics observed here at HCE, the date June 3 has its significances, yes. The matter of the birthday. Special sense of that day, June 3, the beginning of us who are human here at HCE. Start date, June 3, returned to again through the cycling passages of time as measured by the labelling of the paradigmatic roundabout of the Roman calendar system.
The Romans had their reasons for the details of their system, and time and the famous pope gave further shape to it, a comely concordance of name and place in sky of sun and moon, which through the many ages, with minimal adjustment, has proved the handy timepiece indeed for all its many users.
We have the Roman calendrics here at HCE; it is a standard long acquiesced to. The nuns and their administrations required its adoption on our part, with the explicit instructions for its use. The nuns were not the sort to consider other perspectives on the issues involved, as for example, the question of the first day of year. It was reported to be the first day of January in the approved calendric, and the nuns left little time for those gathered near at hand to wanderingly entertain the other alternatives.
March, of course, and classically, was the year's proper beginning. That was the way the Romans had it, and the Irish, too, with their other reason for celebrating St. Patrick as they so precisely do. The famous founding fellows of the United States of America which surrounds us here at HCE chose March as well to begin the four year term of office of their proposed president. It was a bow to the classic ages, great civilizers they thought the Romans and the Greeks to be, inaugurating the chosen one's rule on a date congenial to the ancient concept of a year's beginning.
Beginning the year with the birthdate of the measurer is an arbitrary standard, and the nuns soon disabused us of it's uses for all but the most local of cases. Endemic in us was the temptation to use it nonetheless, to measure it all out by our own personal progress through time.
As we yet lacked the capacity to successfully conceive of swatches of time much larger than the momentary, it proved difficult for the nuns to instill in us on a sound theoretical basis the choice of January rather than our own more personally satisfying June to begin the thing with, though this in fact troubled the nuns not at all, for they were constitutionally disposed toward the dispensation of knowledges by stern rote rather than building up from first principles as would have been our preference in the matter, had we been but able at the time to envision and then formulate a more coherent description of our position.
Our memory in those days was likewise limited such that whole regions of our own previous and recognized existence were unavailable for review. Somewhere in that unremembered space we began, at some arbitrary moment forever given just beyond the limits of our knowledges. An equivocal standard, admittedly, the day of birth, but the one standard common to all humans. Come what may, each, born, has that first day, without exception.
It will be noted that the Bogblog itself has its beginning precisely three months prior to our own celebrated date of birth here at HCE. We take no credit for the cunning resonances set up by its starting just then, the Bogblog. We had our other reasons for beginning it, and happenstance alone is responsible for what otherwise would seem quite clever in us. Synchronized by compromise in the calendrics of the Bogblog are our own preferred start date for a year on the one hand and the insisted measure of it provided by the inclined hand of the nuns on the other. At that point so nearly halfway between our June 3 and their first of January, which is to say, March 3, 2003, it begins, as is evident below.
Neither had we noticed at the time of its inception the tripartite symmetry of the Bogblog's dating. Later, during one of our periodic reviews, we chanced to see that March 3, 2003, on which date the first of the Bogblog was offered, forms by the other way of transcribing it this charming trio of threes:
.03.03.03
Neither then did we note the ready commensurability in whole months between its start date and our own. Exactly three months, it is, on closer inspection, to the very day, from the one date to the other, by curious and arbitrary chance.