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
cucking stool, n.
[ME cokinge-stole , lit.,
toilet seat, from ME coken,
from ON kuka, to defecate:
the instrument was originally
made to resemble a toilet seat
to heighten the victim's indignity.]
a kind of chair in which
disorderly women, scolds,
dishonest tradespeople,
etc., were fastened and
exposed to public ridicule,
or sometimes ducked.
Webster's New Universal
Unabridged Dictionary
Deluxe Second Edition
Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp.
gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie
©1983 by Simon & Schuster,
N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by
Simon & Schuster, N.Y.
The full given present of the human way, manifest in the summing moment where all human motions gather, say here or here along the continuous unfolding expression of the aggregated acts (that welter of attainments, corruptions, advances and mischances) of humanity, so called, has its seasonal equivalent, October, October purported by name to be the eighth month of a year, but well-known to be the tenth by actual count to those of us here at HCE, inclined as we are to follow the vicissitudes of the famous Roman Calendrics in this respect.
The full present of the human way has its ongoing immediate harvest, the month October long weeks to replicate the feat.
All gathered, all parsed and processed, distilled, remade by combination of the gathered elements of it all. There in the city, or in the village, its rural representative, the haul comes in from all the regions it commands.
Anciently at midnight on this day these stars known now as the Pleiades would culminate, would reach the highest point above the horizon their yearly round would take them, formally marking the end of the harvest time and the beginning of the new year.
Not that the Barry Family, deployed as they were under the depending clouds of Northern Europe for all those many millennia, often witnessed personally this fact, although it came to be accepted into the bogknowledges nonetheless from the constant repetition of its telling on the part of those surounding them that this was indeed the case; on rare occasion when that quadrant of the sky at midnight on the indicated day was clear enough to check, it proved to be true: the Pleiades were up there high as they would ever likely get above the horizon on that day's midnight, just as those surrounding the Barry Family claimed.
Down from the hills and in from the far pastures had come the cows and sheep to the bulging tumbrels of the byres and pens where they would be assembled for their many uses. All the many weeks of drawing in such bounty as could be gleaned from tree and bush and weedy field were done as well.
The Pleiades rode high above, the world turned to its shrivelling subtractions, and the new year, balanced there in the minds of all between the gathered offerings of earth and its inevitable chill undoings, began.
"The inquiry focuses on whether one or more administration officials disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer who is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who publicly questioned the validity of some of the intelligence information used by the administration to justify the war with Iraq."
Richard Stevenson
New York Times
October 24, 2003
Three months on in the matter it would be best to harvest from any misty list of dependent knowledges the dry crisp facts derived from the thing itself and apply those arid facts forever after to our clear understanding of what's gone on. It makes for no motion in the argument at all if in so disputing the thing itself we continually roll back the conversation to a point prior to what is already convincingly established about it. What good is that?
There is no mystery in this part, that there were two people there in the White House who shopped to disparaging effect the reserved name of the CIA operative to a half-dozen journalists, one of whom, the famously engaged antagonist Robert Novak, deigned to show in public under his own far more purposely-known name the result of such precendent-shattering conversation.
Soon after, Novak's disparagers in their quickened denunciations of him for mentioning it had at the name as well, as did the cohort of supporters rallying to his aid, so that the presumptively unspoken name became, contrary to what prior law and previous custom called for, quite well-known to anyone who might want to have it for themselves.
Anyone at all could know the name, although like some wistful ghost of anonymity, relucant receding remnant of the cloaked thing as originally planned, the names "Victoria" and "Valerie" at first became confused with one another in the popular pronunciation of the first part of the once unsaid thing. Clearly Victoria's secret, another matter entirely, confounded here with the secret actually revealed in Novaks words.
It was revealed, the name. There is no dispute in this. It was done by Robert Novak. There is no dispute in this. It was passed on to him by people in the White House for their own reasons. All this is given.
So it is a curious locution to find in the New York Times, this phrase made by the writer Stevenson there:
"The inquiry focuses on whether one or more administration officials disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer who is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who publicly questioned the validity of some of the intelligence information used by the administration to justify the war with Iraq. "
This could represent merely accuracy in media. Perhaps the FBI, being gradully engaged, now focuses its inquiry on whether or not the famously reported Novak did in fact offer up the reserved name with its associations in the first place.
It would seem incapable of dispute that the words Novak gave out he did in fact give out. Even with time and all the vast and often quite formidable resources at the FBI's disposal, small chance exists it might make a breakthrough here.
Curious though, that it would take that vaunted body of investigators or even those who report them in the press more time than reading the words of Novak on it to establish what is needed to banish the willful "whether" from such constructions as the man Stephenson gives to it in the New York Times.
Quick as they must ever be, given the reluctantly assumed requirements of their craft, to unfailingly chide staff for the inartfully cast mistruth, going so far recently as to famously relieve from employment a fellow too well-practiced in the technique, it would behoove, if anything at all can behoove anyone in this day and age, the editors of the New York Times (standard of a newspaper for what it's worth here at HCE) to see to it that the facts as known, once known, are not repealed in their pages by the subsequent sayings of such stories as above.
Seasonably the strands of it conjoin, all the resultant stuff from all the regions commanded by the city heading there, hauled toward the great attractive gathering place of the agora, hauled there by the gravity of the city's given need.
In the Northern Hemisphere most familiar to the Barry Family since well before the time of its Discovery, it is the practice of the plants, from root to fruit, to be most succullently expressed, to reach the apotheotic ideal for which they ever strive, in those six weeks or so following the famous fall equinox of September.
It is commonly understood that the best vegetative bringings from all the plenitude around the city will be had in the agora in those weeks. It is the harvest time, just then, the time of taking in and having at the wealth so bidden to appear.
The great Fall Classic happens at this time in the land so well-known to those of us here at HCE as America. The World Series it is, culminating event of baseball's season, emptied now of any hope of having victory by the San Francisco Giants (winners of 100 games and the National League's West Division flag, but no more than that this year), thrust as they were off the field by the unfortunately remarkable play of the Florida club which now contests the famous and forever-reputedly formidable New York Yankee squad for possession of that glorious thing, World Championship of baseball.
As Hemmingway would have it, McKeon, the Old Man, has hooked the ultimate Marlin, the thing dragging him on an improbable journey toward some glorious or terrible end in the event, McKeon the manager of the Florida Marlins baseball club. He has his canny collected sense of the contest, the old man McKeon does, he makes the measured move when certain it is needed, the fish responding with remarkable play.
In yesterday's World Series game, in what seemed like the eleventh long hour of the thing but was only its eleventh inning, with but one out recorded to that point, with a Yankee runner on second base and one at third, the old man McKeon made a well-rewarded move, replacing not only the pitcher Fox with his other hurler Looper, but also, surprisingly, cunningly, opportunistically, his hot hitter Cabrera in right field at that same time with his other hacker Encarnacion.
This is the hallowed double-switch of baseball, as properly played in the National League, by which the departing pitcher's place in the batting order of the team is taken by the other fellow entirely, Encarnacion entered in the pitcher Fox's place in that lineup, and the later space in the batting order now evacuated by the right fielder Cabrera's leaving now staffed by the hurler Looper, so that first Encarnacion, then later hurler Looper, is listed to appear in the batter's box.
Thus in the next quite final inning, Encarnacion, being placed there by that switch in the batting order, in what had until then been the pitcher's spot, was scheduled to go to the plate second, rather than the newly called-on hurler Looper in the old man McKeon's revised scheme.
In the event the hacks of Encarnacion went unneeded, the game's issue settled by the batter just before him, Gonzales, there in that twelfth inning, who sent the determining home run beyond the left field fence to win the game for the old man McKeon's club. The double switch of McKeon was thus unneeded, nicely handled though it was by the old man. Looper, oh yes, Looper needed to be brought in just when he was, there in the fate-fraught eleventh inning of the thing. Oh, yes, a considerate and timely tactic, that. The double switch but a grace note, mark of the old man's art, a nice extravagance at no extra charge.
The agon will have its hero and that hero will have his leavings, swath of a path he makes seeking the agon's prize full littered with lost combatants for that same desired thing.
He will confront that one last denying obstacle impeding him from his realized ambition, the hero will, to reach conclusively the enormously agreeable result. One last great test of it, and then it's his.
Most similar to the Greek conception of the agon, satisfyingly public test of the best of men, is the present form called boxing, insufficient exemplar though it is of the art of injury to the human form in the Barry Family view, lacking as it does the necessarily knobbed shaft of wood so central to all Barry Family thoughts on the matter.
Boxing has its adherents, true, shifty lot they'll ever be, visceral exponents of what at its best is meant to be the sort of conclusively destructive argument so perfectly pleasing to a crowd's worst reason for ever gathering, as the Barry Family judges it.
Corwd and combatants alike far better engaged satisfying a more congenial amusement, is the confirmed reasoning, though admittedly when the two brutes are unleashed in the given ring it does make a captivating scene for which anyone might be forgiven petitioning to have a decent look.
In the land well-known to us here at HCE as America, baseball is the abiding agon. It is the advanced form of the old Greek competition which favored in its time (as does the conflicted boxing of our own age) rather the individually accomplished act than that of the team of them together advancing successfully through their shared complex of challenges toward some glory-giving goal, which is the basis of the American sport of baseball, fondly if perhaps overarchingly named "the national pastime" by those who go on about it at any length.
The essential involvement of the group or squad or team or club or pack of them in the glory-seeking effort is the prime scheme of the American line of competitions, expressed in that famous country's most famously created sports, which are baseball, football, and basketball.
The narrative of such collective sports does not deny the place of the decisive act nor the prospect of the disastrous gaffe, central as these matters are to the more individualized engagements found in boxing.
But the responsibilities of the acts required by the great and famous sports made in America, heroically accomplished or disastrously unmet, particularly with respect to baseball, are distributed cleverly among the lot of them seeking after victory there, instead of bunched in the soley responsible fists of the one you might have hoped would leave his chin less likely to be visited in boxing.
Is there any part of J.T. Snow still lying on home plate? Does Pudge Rodriguez still have the baseball in his right hand?
Bruce Jenkins, Sports Columnist, on the front page of today's San Francisco Chronicle Sporting Green:
Is there any part of J.T. Snow still lying on home plate? Does Pudge Rodriguez still have the baseball in his right hand?
Those of us here at here at HCE who are so disappointed in the final disposition of said Snow, and with him left equally daunted in our desire for continuance of the contest we have followed since the spring, find the man Jenkins' comments quite to the point.
Perhaps parts of Snow are still there, contributed by his extinguishing fall, the culminating event of it with him lying there undone for all to see: a smear of him embedded in the very spot.
Inconveiniently there is no linked image of the fallen man Snow appended to Jenkins' words as they appear on his newspaper's website, sfgate.com, although the site itself when searched reveals a sad trove of the things:
When the ball arrives at the given base before the runner forced by circumstance to take it, the defender of that bag, having secured the ball, must merely kick at the canvas pad or rubber plate of it to record the needed out.
We understand the out is forced if the defender of that bag stabs at it with his hoof. It is not clear to those of us here at HCE who attend to such matters if, e.g. the defender, lying prone beside the bag, having marvelously managed by some precise paroxysm of acrobatics to lead the ball into the glove that left him lying there next to the base he's meant to protect, if, in that case, with the runner forced to advance there, the runner would be out if the defender reached over with his throwing hand absent the ball and touched the bag.
Certainly the hoof, yes, either one as we have witnessed countless times, and of course the paw with the ball in it used to touch the thing; we know by long understanding that makes a proper out as well. The defender of the bag touches it with either hoof or balled fist, and the out is had.
And the knee, yes, we have seen that done, with the defender down on the bag when the ball gets there, and the out recorded. It is not at all clear, as we have indicated, how far up the human form the quality of proper touching goes, or in particular, whether it extends to the other paw beside the one bearing the ball in the circumstance of the runner forced to advance.
Contrarily,we do know in the case of the free-ranging runner whose motions are not so constrained as to be required to advance, but may chose instead, as whimsey or occaision dictates, to retreat safely along the previously taken path as well, the defender of the bag may not simply lash out with his hoof at the fellow to effect the needed out, no.
Only the pawed ball, demonstrably applied to the runner's form before the runner reaches base, meets the requirements of the moment.
Bumping or grabbing, procedural norms in many other contexts, are ruled out in such instance here in baseball.
There is always the chance that in play around home plate, by convention, the quality of proper touching rushes back out along your defending carcher's form, to include e.g. the forearm of the mitted hand so evidently placed against the driving Snow in the second picture of the sad and final moment shown above. There, surely, the ball has reached Rodriguez' mitted hand, though the glove does not touch Snow from what we make of it.
Perhaps the Florida man Rodriguez, defending against onrushing Snow, though touching him in a most resoundingly apparent manner, did not touch him in the requisite way.
There is no appeal of the umpire's propounded judgement in this, we know from long experience of the game. The indicated out, levied by the umpire's authorizing rule, may never be gainsaid.
The first picture above is our best basis for our own private guess on this, but, sore losers ever when confronted with the failed fortunes of our chosen club, we'll say we cannot tell from looking at it if the the ball being held with the one hand has reached the mitt being held with the other, glove plainly planted just there on Snow the runner's face as it is.
The season ends, the thing is done, the goal denied for yet another year.
It is our known practised casuist proclivity here at HCE, derived heirloom of the Barry Family rhetoric it is, drawn from the everrehearsed features of contentious pigarguing making up so much of conversation for all those many millennia in the Paris Basin after the Discovery of the Barry Family, that to the taste of others may be disparaged as mere quibble.
Those of us who would rejoin in any way to the ironizing efforts of such disparagements ask only that our casuistry be had for what it most forlorny is: wan forever subscribed hope that our perhaps subtly evasive reasoning in questions of duty might win out.
Casuistry the solving of special cases of right and wrong in conduct by applying general principles of ethics. Casuist the one doing the solving, seeking good judgement. Question of duty inherent in the search for that solution.
Conduct naturally abounds with special cases, it could be said to be comprised of them, loosely, and casuistry the useful tool to crack the ethical oyster in each instance. The provision for the special pleading in each case, so happily employed in the lofty professions of the law, has its long–cherished place in the Barry Family scheme of conversation as well, enabling as it does the introduction there of the slippery pig of admittedly bog-related standards so dear to the Barry Family way.
Anciently a known but disregarded fact, a fact of no moment whatsoever to members of the Barry Family in that glad early age, that they were surrounded in their chosen place by the contrasting views of a vast mass of many other peoples, views quite antithetical to their own bogknowledges in many ways.
That for many of that mass of peoples it would come down, as it so often did — constant niggling feature of their discourse it was in fact — to the matter of the pig, the great gulf dividing their own sensibilities on the matter from those held by the Barry Family since its Discovery, was driven home as the millenia progressed. They despised the pig, those people, surprisingly enough, and given that, despised the pig's propounders unsurprisingly.
The Barry Family, inately inclined to turn any number of other cheeks against the unfurled jibe, deflected again and again during that time the scorning sallies of such neighbors, often fashioning such casuistries as they might from the rude stock of materials then available to aid them in that purpose.
Sense of place, of course. Even with the everpresent standards of the Barry Family inclining us away from the many temptations of the quid nunc here at HCE, we cannot fail but note with curiosity report of a much, much wider world.
The usefulness of such knowledge of the much much wider world as we might gain from our attentions to it has long gone unquestioned here at HCE, currently disposed as we are to follow the Barry Family boglore in this regard.
The Barry Family, formed by the fateful controversy of Naming described below in the Bogblog, yet held to the fond hope all through that age of tribulation that there might be some stripling of fact to be found out there in the wider discourse of the human kind, which when weilded might provide some summary thrusted cudgel of correction halting forever the everpresent adversities of the Family's conversations.
They sought avidly for evidences, all the Barry Family did, scouring through the many useful facts laid bare by the wider discourse of the human kind, without avail.
Useful facts the unhelpful ally in a proper argument, the Barry Family came to understand, shared by all as they must be, and thus providing little traction in the matter at hand.
No sooner would the useful fact be trundled into position in their talk than by the conjoined agreed voices of them all they would pass it off to the sidelines of their debate bawling out, "Jayz! We knew that already!" or some such other truncated yet equivalent phrasing as "Gaah!" (that rough round all-dismissive sound, early wordgift of the Barry Family to the English language). Thus the useful facts accummulated, ringing round the everengaging argument, uncritically offering up their indecisive cheer from every side.
The well-formed facts of geography, so useful to an uncontradictable sense of place, a case in point. Given in the art the known lapse denying us the exact map in any case, we nevertheless reflexively substitute some rude sketch for the considered territory where needed, confident that we approach in the limit of our making of the thing the comprehending representation adequate to our given needs. Often it is the barest scrawl of line that serves us in this purpose.
Often in fact, it is the same scrawl, arbitrarily rotated and relabelled, which we freely reuse without any irony whatsoever here at HCE, satisfied as we are that the implicit inexactitude in either case yet makes a ready measure of all we need to mean by it.
In spite of all this, charges of, "That's not Florida, that's Korea!" and "Korea? You've got it upside down!" do on occasion punctuate the chosen discourse, we regret to say, casting unnecessarily into controversy what is to be understood correctly as the merely useful aside.
Multure not mulch, the litter left from harvest, but the little tax on processing its bounty: measure of grain given the grinder for his gristings is the multure. Multure in a money culture easily transposes what's due and payable from portion of the grain itself to its equvalent in cash, whatever that may prove to be in the long run.
Multure is both the grinding and the obligatory tax thereof, the little sack taken from each great bag of it when milled, saluted with its own fine word.
Sufficient cash, however defined, is the influential stuff capable of meeting multure's every obligation.
Cash, supple standard it is, serves equally the obligation of miller's meet and piper's play. The Barry Family is long settled in its accommodated aquiescence to the need to pay the piper(tptp). It has paid its cash for music for millennia.
Hardly a hindrance having to pay for the stuff, music being what the Barry Family likes to hear. To meet the miller's tax, however, we grit, a little, our teeth, regretful that the sack of it once ours, viewed with proprietary nostalgia, contains the taken measure of our harvest gone off now from us forever.
Life is underdog, with death's good odds and all. Death's due is collected, it is the given way. Certainly this sums the Barry Family understanding of the matter, as gathered during its Discovery, and explains its understandable partiality toward the underdog in all its undoings. This core favoritism of the Barry Family, disposed toward the underdog in the main, is well-known.
Thus we reflect sadly on the passing of P. pattersoni, largest rodent ever grown, underdog in any natural scheme of selection, placed against the pig in competition for the self-same turf, we suppose, wiley though doomed radiation of the rodent into the choice muds of what passed for Venezuela in that time it proved to be.
We could only wish the vasty rodent, given needed time, could have rolled into the waters there, had time to subscribe to that wetter life, a manarodentee of sorts, effectively continuing itself in some other context rather than so utterly vanishing until recalled just now by its recontextualizing unearthment.
Or, perhaps lifted by the helpful hand of some hurricane, the two of them, rafted away on some great bouyant weedy mat gathered then in the goings of the great Gulf Stream might have found themselves instead redeployed in the newmade muck of Ireland after all. That would be our preference in the matter here at HCE, given our fondness for the underdog, contrafactual fancy though it must ever be.
Ireland, so-called by those who have any reason to refer to it at all in this age, is set aside the largest island off the coast of Europe, just west of it, Ireland is, firstfavored of all the Northern European lands to receive the balmy deliquescences of the great Gulf Stream, as shown in the accompanying illustration. The inadequacies of such a rude mapping of the great Gulf Stream's effects on Ireland are well understood; the effects are manifold, — admittedly only roughly sketched by the summary suggestion of the arrow.
Who knows what wrack has fallen there on the intercepting shores of Ireland in all the ages that the great Gulf Stream has gone there? All the lively liquid leavings of the Carribean and its region are pointed there, sure some novel floting stuff must have made the journey over time.
This is not to suggest for any other reason than to deny outright the probability that Phoberamys pattersoni, denizen of the smooshy coastal marshes of Venezuela in an era long since gone and poorly understood, ever crossed the wide whalepond that was the North Atlantic in its time, rafted down the great stream's gradient by some hurricane's preemting force, to settle, more dead than alive given the rigors of the journey, on that soggy Irish shore. No.
Prodigous beast, P. pattersoni: from the evidence at hand a mega–gopher or an über–rat it was, although the illustration found recently in the San Francisco Chronicle, source of much of what passes for news here at HCE, proposes too vast a head for a thing of its suprassing size in our considered view. Little use it would be trying to lift that given noggin. The matter of the front tooth, critical in properly evaluating any rodent, goes unnoted by the illustration, as well, determining characteristic of the kind, the tooth, so much of its raison it is.
Nevetheless, we sense a sort of para-pig, perfected for the moist bogwanderings of its own Carribbean clime, much as the proper pig is constitutionally suited to meandering the cooler morasses of the loessy lands of Europe; each beast similarly disposed to slop up the loose rich leavings gone to ground in either case.
The Celts called the island the Pig Island, the Wooded Island, the this island and the that. They had their many names for the one thing we name Ireland now, the Celts, though they never named it for a giant rodent, as near as we can determine here at HCE.
Sterne's injunction, his exception to the ruling mode of the novel, which in our present age is the vehicle for the examination of the bourgeoise consciousness by way of its storytelling, as noted below, allows all other manner of documenting the given written thing, in lists and letters and asides beside the the point, in all manner of containers which are not in and of themselves stories, but have after the similar result.
So often, e.g., in that early strain of novel, the Gothic thing, vivid storyform it is, the action of the tale is given in a series of letters exchanged by its participants, the drift and weft of revelations and rejoinders there satisfying the needed motions of the tale. Frankenstein may well prove to be set out as just such a series of letters, for all we know here at HCE. Our normal reference for such literary leavings, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 2, hasn't a whit of Ms. Wollenstonecraft Shelley in it, odd omission that.
Transformed the Gothic thing, she did, took it up but turned it to the question of the age, the cankrous question of the scientific spirit and where it all might lead. Perhaps down some monstrously wrong path of crazed rationality where lurks the like of Grendel: here stands the monstrous application of our scientific seeking, eh?
Ripping yarn, as suits the Gothic in it, Frankenstein, yet evertroubling to the looker with that self-same opened question: the question of the science of the rationalist enterprise in all its busied workings in the looker's age as well. "How goes its fearful faring yet?" is the residuum of Ms. Wollenstonecraft Shelly's tale, which whenever after it is asked, asks after her making of it, Frankenstein.
Not finding it in Norton, though the effort easliy exhausts our desire to search it out, does not firmly resolve the matter of its formal composition, which if left to the meagre resources of our scattered memories might well be set out in letters as surmised, or be confused instead with any number of other examples of the art which are so disposed, the seeming sheaf of letter being the common enough trope throughout the ages of the novel's progress.
Sterne's dispensation applies, then, if not to Frankenstein itself, pending further review, at least or at any rate to the many other makers, too voluminous for brief citiation, of the alternative or ancillarily allowable methods of composition so championed there in Tristram Shandy.
As the canny looker will have long since noticed, clicking on the word Boglbog found both here and above left cleverly offers up for view the page titled About Us, containing the image here copied, along with such equivocal text as might identify the man and the dog in the back of car as well.
Perched there in its discomfort, the dog's capacity for bounding after quail curtailed, it looks to the photographer, firstlooker of the image, owner of the image and the car and the dog as well, as these things are measured, for some surcease from its sedentary travail.
It is hard for the dog to tell whether the human next over is as dismayed as the dog by their chance entrapment, or instead as curiously overhappy as that kind can be given the conditions.
Fey thing, Sterne's humor. Deployed in the risible Tristram Shandy, marvel of a book Sterne made during the introduction of the novel into English in the middle of the 1700's as calculated in the Roman calendrics.
Novel a new thing at that time in England; what it should consist of an open question, which question Sterne explored to the limit of its laughability. Novel not yet set by market and practice as the proper place for the exploration of the bourgeoise consciousness in some storied tale, firmly guided in the next century by Austen and her ilk in that direction it was.
It is a proper place for that, of course, that exploration of the bourgeoise consciousness by dint of storytelling. But Sterne quite early on demonstrated that the structure of the tale itself, burst by a bellylaugh, gave extra room to this new thing the novel to be about anything else as well, and to be told in any way. Loosed from the herding tale, Sterne could make of his "autobiography" of Tristram a shambles: hundreds and hundreds of pages of material leading up to but not actually including the life of the indicated fellow. Ha!
Nabokov saw what the novel was by his time, artful evoked expression of that which, by temperament and training being noble, he despised: the conscientious bourgeoise self-consideration of it all.
He had at his own noble self-consideration in Speak, Memory, reviewed in a dreamlike moment in his novel Pnin where the world lost to Pnin, summed in a simple episodic moment from his past, some people in a garden on a long-gone Russian day, breaks like a wave over Pnin's now wan environs.
He lent to the novel, Nabokov, offered up to its select audience incest, pedophoelia, homosexuality, all manner of delightfully nose-thumbing material to the bourgeoise conciousness being explored, the bourgeoise consciouness that is, of the reader of that sort of thing, for the novel is the reader's measured tool for just that sort of work in English. All the denied but operative enciters of entertainment in the reader's head, set out there by the sarcastic nobleman Nabokov's allowance in his texts.
The great dispensation of Sterne to the novel is his allowance that it can be about anything, and be told in any manner. Sterne was not without his critical apparatus, and in his Tristram Shandy he finds room to include a nice labelled line demonstrating the progress of his work thus far. This is the most famous line in English literaure, if you are asked, and known to those of us here at HCE as the "shandyline."
In our ongoing effort to incorporate the varying elements of the recognized rhinosophies of knowledge into our workproduct here at HCE, particularly as they relate to the dog vis a vis the Bogblog, we present the following:
(Snout Out Santa Cruz #1)
In the litter of reflected glee
near the Boardwalk by the sea,
a batch of newmade corndog smell
accents the salt and seaweed swell.
tumbrel, tumbril, n.[OFr. tumbrel, tumberel, tip cart, from tomber, to fall.]
1. formerly, an instrument of punishment, the cucking stool.
2. a farmer's cart or wagon, especially one that may be tilted for emptying.
3. any of the carts used to cary the condemned to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
4. a two wheeled military cart for carrying ammunition, etc.
5. a basket or cage of osiers, willows, etc., for keeping hay and other food for sheep. [Brit. Dial.]
Pigpeople admittedly, The Barry Family in its earliest encounter with the civil way looked on the city's agora, its gathering place for the redistribution of the city's rich takings, with an overmeasure of scorn, as if agora were simply an extension of the old and tried equivalent among the Barrys for bringing the sheep around which they'd favored with the word "tumberel. "
The Barry Family has its derisive standard with respect to sheep, long recumbent but never forsworn.
"Tumberel" perhaps too simplistically synonomous in the instance.
"Tumberel" meant at the time of its first misuse by Barrys conflicted with the urban way on the arrival of the Romans in the Paris Basin, the cart that brought the sheepfood in, its transportation to one place, and its little place of containment there where the sheep would know to find it.
The whole process was the "tumberelling," of course, simple set of rules the Barry Family had for wording things back then. The tumberel (cart) bringing along to the tumberel (basket) the stuff that's fallen (tumberelled) into their hands, to be redistributed there, redeployed among the sheep of them by the formal actions of the crowding beasts arrived for just that purpose.
The tumberel or fall of it all into place the general idea of it, the noun or verb form of it the particularized relation to the unchanged root formed by the primitive tools of syntax at their disposal in those early times.
By their inflections on the unchanged root, in speaking "tumberel'" the Barry Family as a grace note would attempt by long-held custom to replicate the given sound of the referred fall, entering not just its label but an audio report of it into conversation.
Literature lacks the lengths they went to with that word in their mouths to give out the property of the falling sound. There is no way to reproduce by lettering all they could do with the word, given their way with it, particularly the path they took through the sounding of the part of it said, "ber," making as they did the whole trip from harvest to basket with a sonic report which seems on the page but a syllable, but in speech would have at the sound of the precise cart and the road it took in and weather conditions if appropriate.
Down in the Barry Family view the cardinal direction, down ever its reflexive referrent gradient, down the precedented path of all its boglore, in fact (a persuasion gathered in the long millennia under the liquid skies of Northern Europe well before the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, taken up as part of the package of Discovery by them, the climate forcing the issue, constantly requiring of their discourse the finest of discriminations between kinds of down).
"Tumberel" of course a class of down, in the Barry estimate, of the phyla "falling" though of the order "purposely pushed that way", as distinct from the other order, of the banana skin, source of another fall entirely in the Barry family view, with its own pronunciations.
So used by the Barry Family, "tumberel" implicity made sheep of people in the marketplace, where the known needs of the crowd are provided for easy as you please by the agora's offerings, just as the basket brings the sheep together in one place.
The sheep will have their hay, and the people will have theirs, true. There is this broadest similarity between the two, the sheep and the people in their respective gatherings.
But "tumberel" must fall back against the needs of the full description of "agora," like a wave's weak way of wetting a whole continent, "agora" better said down a richer path of namings, however appropriate the underlying sarcasm of the Barry Family's first go at it.
In spite of all the fleecings and the muttonings of the beasts, which is ever the ulterior and avowed plan of such usages, the sheep do not resist their role, and gather round willingly enough when the tumberelling takes place. Ruled by their ever-timorous sensibilities, they are, the sheep, yet they willingly come around.
What's tumbrelled to the people in their agora? What's carted there for redistribution, redeployment, disposal among the crowd of them there?
Plainly people make a different herd from sheep, and what's in the tumberelling cart may well embody a feasting of an entirely different flavor. The crowd may have its other human needs to feed, and the cart contain the symbolic stuff of that need, some delectable designee for their devouring.
The unlucky ones who passed through Paris streets on their way off to the famous guillotine in their unfortunate tumbrels fed the rudest hungers of the gathered crowd there.
Davis, officially impugned governor of the California which surrounds us here at HCE, has been set on the cucking stool, cruel undignified tumbrel it is, by the truculent vote of his constituents.
It is not a representative form of government, democracy, unmediated appetite of the crowd it speaks. Joined in wrathful evaluation, the crowd of California people who cared enough to vote surged to the tumberelling stations of their polling places, had at their avowed leader with the massed retort of their given ballots, saw him off.
They put instead the monstrous fellow Schwarzenneger in his place, crowning their revulsion of derided Davis with the measured sarcasm of their choice for his successor, unlikely soother of their current disgruntlements he may prove in the event, and certain candidate for their next tumbrelling should the need to gather for such sating strike them.
The Sorrowful Mysteries
Beowulf, still as yet the great Geat all these fifty years since Grendel, at last has at the dragon.
Locked in the choices of a paragon, the fellow must go out, Beowulf, take on the beast that breaks and burns his people, put up against the incomprehensibly mighty foe what strength and will to overcome is left him.
It is the man's method to give full measure in this regard, paragon he is, however residual the powerful powers of one who'd mastered Grendel and his mom so long ago. Engage the worm? Contest it? Oh, yes, musn't he, being Beowulf yet?
The snake fang falls at him, settling his life's issue there in combat. Oh, and the snake, yes, the snake too, great monstrous dragon of a thing in fact itself destroyed, last conflicting goal of Beowulf fulfilled, determination of the matter imposed by the man himself in passing.
Sure a dragon for Beowulf is no happy trade for grieving Geats. Aw, the beast is done, but so's the best. There's sorrow in it, though he died as he must, demonstrating himself to be Beowulf to the end.
The challenge is consummated, it has its result: Beowulf is dead, and what's to balance that sad finality?
Oh, the dragon's extinct — a great good that — coming along with the hero's death. There is that great good, true, and the horde of treasure held by the dragon underneath, exposed now to be had by the grateful Geats, down where the worm's whole swollen lair of the very golden stuff of it is made theirs by the act of their fallen fellow Beowulf. There is that as well in balance for the hero's death, isn't there?
And, Wiglaf, young thane, assists Beowulf just then, doesn't he, brave lad he is? Little help the rest of them are, he himself stands steadfast beside his man Beowulf, his conduct truly pledged and executed. By Wiglaf's own brave meddling the dragon is distracted in its dreadful bite of Beowulf, giving time to wounded Beowulf, who musters with his last full might and delivers with his last eventful act what proves the extinguishing blow to end the geat bad thing forever.
Wiglaf blessed by Beowulf in passing with his own helm and mail and such, right symbols of succession earned by the true thane Wiglaf, and good for him. There is that as well, isn't there, in trade for the passing of incomparable Beowulf, eh? Not recompense, no, but something. Someone to fill somewhat the role that marvel of a man had filled for them for all those many years since Grendel.
And don't the Geats go out and make a great mound out in the headland by the sea where implications of a revered greatness will forever greet those travelling there? They do, those Geats, they make a lasting sign of their regard, the story goes, and there is that, too.
Seamus Heaney, whose every word is considerable in our longstanding estimate here at HCE, claims Beowulf for his own well-claimed English, having at with his well-made substitutions the poem made quite some time ago in that other tongue entirely, Anglo-Saxon, roughgrunted stuff of a language it is compared to English in our confirmed view here at HCE.
In his recorded spoken fine-voiced wording of it Heaney chances to elide the ancilary story of the subordination of Unferth from the telling, though it's observable in what he's had printed, the pages of which follow the Anglo-Saxon as given by Wren and Bolton in their Beowulf, with the Finnesburg Fragment (which added scrap we trust supports its own sweet argument for being there included).
Unferth in the text the fractious one among them in that group supporting Beowulf. Beowulf, paragon, embodier of all chiefest features of the grander sort of man, must bring unruly Unfurth back around, subordinate the errant fellow to the group's established goal, by the commanding suasions of the sure leader.
He does it well, so well, Beowulf, that Unferth gives up to Beowulf, in Beowulf's needful hour of preparation for his advance against the extreme mom of Grendel, to the grand contentious man himself does willing Unferth give up the famous rare and ancient-named sword Hrunting, signalling by such gift the sealing of the self-subordination that is his given leader's due.
Seamus Heaney's aural record referenced above does not recall the tale of Unfurth, reformed one under the firm hand of Beowulf in Heaney's printed text of it the fellow Unferth is. Does Heaney rather speak the Finnesberg Fragment there in that recording, mouthing instead the controversial addition to the text it may well be for all we know of the matter here at HCE? We properly leave the resolution of this question to the happy discovery of the new hearer.
It is a choice Heaney makes, and he pronounces a fully-voiced Beowulf for all of that, to the estimate of our given ear.
