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
six, n. …to be at six and seven or at sixes and sevens; (a) to be in disorder or confusion; (b) to be at odds; to disagree. [Colloq.] 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.
Naturally we attend every game required by our alliegance to the team, the famous National League Champion San Francisco Giants. We have the needed tickets to today's contest at Pacific Bell Park, for example, the first of the playoffs between this year's West Division Champion San Francisco Giants ballclub and the wild card entrant in the fray, the Florida Marlins.
What long and careful preparation over the years should harvest us these tickets, happy product they are, need not concern us now. We have them in hand, the needed things, embodying the sweet promise that our wish to see with our own eyes the utter victory so long preferred for our local squad may yet be fulfilled. That promise still lives this year.
Adjacent integers do no measure one another: six does not measure seven; the two numbers are instead prime to one another in the classic Greek formulation, as all adjacent numbers are, incommensurable one to the next, though naturally in combination capable of all manner of comingle. In raw number seven sixes gives us what six sevens gives: forty-two, the multiple of them both, or thirteen, answer to the oddity of their addition, as example. In practice however most often seven sixes is quite the other thing entirely from six sevens, as we've often seen.
(To review; when plotting dog and bark, we plot the six of them against their night-disrupting seven barks.
(Six dogs bark their seven barks, at night, each in kind offered with truly sounded alarm to our reluctant attention.
(We save aside such needed extra disgruntlement for whichever of the beasts has added that bonus trill of irritation to to our measure of the whole, little coda to the applied rule of one dog, one bark it gives. That dog, by extra bark, stands out, as does equally that other dog entirely, that unbarking one when seven dogs bark their six barks instead, as in our other count of it.
(Distributed under such conditions seven sixes and six sevens are not the same, however much the inclination to rise up and address them as such remains our constant perogative.
(Judging them a contravention of our relaxation, yes, lying there wishing for their cease, yes, to rise and walk with measured plod out into the surrounding land murmuring a low unsatisfied address the while, blackthorne at hand, yes, this sums our scheme of action. We all know that night here at HCE)
The equable disposal of the issue of the distribution of the integers, so conditioned, leads us to put the one of the dogs to rest or to rouse the other one entirely from it, as seen fit.
Whenever conditioned, six sevens and seven sixes are not the same. Unconditioned, or lightly so, at play among the integers, they make up forty-two, or thirteen, for example, equally and always.
The baseball season, that marvelous annually organized dispute, ends today.
The assembled teams by direct contest of the issue over the months of the baseball season have thus resolved in a preliminary fashion, the question of the best of them.
The defending National League Champion San Francisco Giants ballclub has made its case, winning practically five of every eight games scheduled in taking this year's West Division title in its league. One hundred games the Giants have won, and lost sixty-one. The ballclub advances by right of that to the playoff round leading to this year's World Series, where the Championship of baseball will be made known to one and all.
Winning five of every eight games played is a rare rate for the club, a rate seldom approached in the record of past seasons. Few enough times we've ever witnessed such success as this ourselves, much as we would like to every year.
We can't deny we wish a higher rate of victory on the lads than even this admirable amount, one hundred. Each time they take the field in fact we yearn for the happier result, suffering through a season's many scores of failed effort in this regard, even in this best of seasons, eduring sixty-one losses as we've been made to do, (one and threescore sore scores it is this year alone) each an injuring lash against our exposed hopes.
Paramount in standing of our hopes for the club from year to year is the desire that it best the Dodgers of Los Angeles on the field of play.
Other, seemingly loftier goals are ancillary to this fierce wish, we do admit. But in truth many an otherwise soured season among fabled decades of lackluster play in San Francisco was made palatable only by the sweet fact that the Giants did well against the Dodgers that year, winning the season series perhaps, or administering the one defeat that denied that despised club its savored goal.
Today the season ends with a pleasant nine-run daunting of those Dodgers, deservedly fallen minions of Murdock they are.
Early in the course of the good song's first hearing we are not properly aware, distracted as we so often are in our attentions by matters at hand.
Soon the proper listening is established, of course, and forever familiar afterward, is restablished in our curious ears on the sounding of the good song's first note. It goes that way with us and music here at HCE.
We listen to Heany speaking his way along the word-road of the famous Beowulf, life of the great brave Geat written out for us so long ago and marvelously preserved in manuscript all this time.
Heany entitled by previously achieved laurel to word it how he will, in the view of those of us here at HCE who have any opinion whatever on the matter.
We have the book in hand, as well, the nice bilingual Beowulf of Heaney's verse translation printed by W. W. Norton. We follow his words with eye and ear.
Occasionally his speaking of it diverges from both the Anglo-Saxon printing of it on the left-hand page, and his own written wording on the right.
Why this should be is not known to us. Perhaps it became necessary that the poem be condensed to meet the limits of the capacity of the recording format being employed. Perhaps Heaney, overfamiliar with the material after all that labor on it, left his notes for it at home and simply said his sense of it into a microphone one day there in the studio, as would certainly be his right, bard he is. We can hear what came out, and it is not, as spoken, the same wording as he offered up to print.
Either makes a fine word-road going after Beowulf.
Some rise, some fall, in September's summing. The planet reaches for, then through, the place of equinox, where the earth's angled axis lets fall in equal measure both the light and the dark of it for that one day.
Constrained as we are by the Barry Family Standard in this regard, we will on the day of the equinox fomally acknowledge the need to give the nod to night in this respect from here on out this year. Nearby night's sixmonth of preeminence begins.
As the day has its day and night, so the year, the annual round of sun by earth, at least as experienced by the Barry Family during those periods of their many millennia in the northern west of Europe when the climate held long enough for them to make such distinctions, will have its sixmonth of greater light followed by its sixmonth of much less of it, the border of which distinction, the equal measure of night and day, that day, is the equinox.
The Barry Family has long since aquiesced in the wry facts of Kepler's clever elipse laid out against the given sky. Their own anciently taken perspective on the matter is admittedly askew; in fact the earth's plain path is closest to the sun in dead of winter, and much farther away from it in full-flushed summer, countering a long-held Barry Family intuition by the workings of Kepler's celestial motions.
But what then of some unsaid day of September?
What of some unspoken day of it, some day unreferred? Has it not yet its effective powers, that day?
Oh, of course and assuredly it does have such powers, in the view of those of us here at HCE.
A region surrounds a city unequally. The region's implied relation to the city is that of Poverty, its disjoint measure of want and debt describing exactly and assymetrically the city's reach of need and wealth.
A region, to a city, has its relative poverty of things, its lack of the many, many things presumed of a city. The city has its handy money made to measure out the lack or surplus of it all there in the city, and its wealth of things gathered together there to count with its money, while the region surrounding it, unequal, is forever scarce anything much to count in that respect, save what raw stuff of itself it can offer up to the city towards relief of its habitual debt. The handy mine or swollen field of grain focuses this relation as well as the forested wood may do, or the teeming lake, river, bay, ocean. There the impoverished dwellers in the region gather up such stuff as can be offered to the city in its endless need.
The relation of the region to the city hinges on the city's own favorably self-made measure, money. Money reaches out from the city's measure of itself to measure the needed span of wood, of grain, of silver and the rest in the surrounding region. It passes ever briefly by the pockets of the people in the region, then turns back home trailing its bounty.
In fact the surrounding region thus defined extends deeply into what would otherwise be considered the inner precincts of the city itself, to unfavored neighborhoods where the inhabitants are similarly left with only the raw stuff of self to offer up toward the relief of habitual debt.
Point Not to Circle:
privation, n.
… the absence of or state of having lost some quality or condition, or the quality or condition implicit in this; as cold is the privation of heat.
Both circle and its privation are billeted on the unordered list we've made, the circle's circumsuccessful description going out just so far from the central idea and then completely surrounding it at just the needed distance, along with your other man, nextlisted with the circle's pointed place there in the billet, the empty thing.
It is a capacious nothing, the empty thing.
We may choose to read ∅ as meaning "not-a-circle," and it is that of course. That chosen meaning of ∅ stores easily in its vastly more vacuous tent.
It is comprehensively empty, ∅.
It denies not only magnitude and sequence, making its own enunciation problematic from the first, but also questions the one claimed quality of the pointed place itself: location. ∅ is quite empty of that as well.
The contradiction of location, magnitude, and sequence gnaws at the point's provided placing there in the billet. Is it existent, the point so placed, or only another necessary though irrelevant artifact of enunciation?
Are the two points legitimately there on the list, or only the one of them? Point not to circle.
Point to Circle:
The nomenclature of its location is the point's only true possesion.
The bullets themselves in the above list represent just that: locations arbitrarily named by the firmly objective standards adhered to by those of us here at HCE. We acknowledge that the looker's impression of the bullets so listed is influenced heavily by the need to give them irrelevant magnitude, however variously executed by the browsing machineries which bring the Bogblog to the looker's gaze.
It doesn't matter in the least how they are rendered by those machineries in fact; such bullets aren't mean't to have size to speak of at all in daily use. They are locations only: here, in the list, is the location of O. And here, otherwise, the location of ∅.
The bulleted list above is an unordered list by design, yet by it's very enunciation, irrelevant sequence is inevitably confered. There they are, the listed things. But one is not "first," and neither is the other, unlikely as it is that we may ever manage to speak of them otherwise.
Magnitude is the first and sequence the second of the necessary, though technically irrelevant adjuncts to the pure point. Pare as we might, we cannot well offer up our point without them, unavoidable features of announcement they are.
Magnitude and sequence are technically required of a circle on the other hand. What a circle means must always bend to their inexorable measure, or be no circle at all. Given the little hint of the one of them, say by radius or ratio, we may readily have at the rest of the circle's full description. Any distance out from the center of the thing, known, gives the rest. Any sequence of the path around the circle's edge, known, gives the rest.
The tangible residue of magnitude and sequence we lend to our announced point, located here, houses, by convention, the measure of any true circle we may mean. Being irrelevant, the point's magnitude and order are capacious enough to contain any good measure of a circle's meaning.
The listed circle may be any circle at all, or represent them all, for all we care here at HCE. The bullet itself represents a point, the point possessing some pure and only location where the circle or all circles so given are to be found, a place where curiously, though by design, nothing of their magnitude or order has true purchase.
The circle is here, is the clever argument of the listed bullet, here at this point. Its magnitude and sequence are adjuncts only now, but here nonetheless, the bullet claims.
The assignment to writing of an order to house needed staff, commonly military staff, in a given lodging, is the usual meaning of the word "billet." Billet, loosed on a sentence, can fairly refer to the note itself, to the lodging place, or to the very act of positioning the indicated class of individuals there themselves. Staff can be billeted in a billet by order of a billet. Freely, billet may mean any note, any lodging, any given position.
It suits the list above to call it by that name, a billet. Here is housed, assigned by arbitrary announcement, at this place given by the nomenclature of its location, the indicated class of things, the class of circle. Point to circle here.
It is now two years on since the startling catastrophe of September 11, 2001. Momentarily we pause in remembrance, dredging up this bleak image of the sad result, which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine and was posted on a wall soon after here in our workspace at HCE.
It is not to be imagined that each time we glance grazingly at the wall we fully see what the image has to offer, no. Most often it is subsumed in the general view, one of scores of items pinned, taped and hung there.
We know it's there, of course, and often, when the subject of what has become known as Nine Eleven is brought up, the image on the wall is the one that comes to us, reflexively responding to the naming. We regret any confusion which may result if this image disagrees with what the looker in the Bogblog has in mind when Nine Eleven is so named.
Last year, instead, we offered up these words:
Regarding September Eleven
Out along the grieving edge
Of the year since
the two holding hands jump
from the tower
down, holding, would choose
failing to fly
over Agni's bitter tongues.
Oh
What can we bring of them
with us
to our new age
but appalling knowledges?
Oh, this grief.
Oh
Where but in the blessed
can we find grief's end?
where but in the blessed
integration and release?
We must keep them
we must
hold in ours their free hands
as they hold each other forever
in memory.
Oh
We must bring them with us
we must grant them
death's irrevocable finality.
They go. Down, holding hands, past.
We go out along the grieving edge
of the year since.
—September 10, 2002
Clearly Tennyson's last voyage of Ulysses is the last voyage of Ulysses as given by Dante. Homer has no last voyage of Ullyses. It's something Dante imagined.
Borges points this out in his essay on Dante's last voyage of Ulysses called "The Last Voyage of Ulysses" collected in SELECTED NON-FICTIONS Viking 1999 ed. E. Weinberger.Señor, or as we like to refer to him, "mister" Borges has canny things to say in SELECTED NON-FICTIONS, none more cagey than his remarks on the way Dante equated his own journey as a writer of the Commedia with the tale of Ulysses' perilous last voyage, the tale he himself created and entered into the Commedia. Borges — and whose words should we rather attend to? — refers to "…Tennyson's admirable Ulysses …" here.
The valid argument is often our only refuge here at HCE, however much it may break down in our hour of need into disparate constituent elements, heated by contact with the containing conversation.
Oh, and even should it survive, the valid argument provides a pallid authority in most modes of speech, wan irrefutable gossamer of it barely sensible to the average conversation, in the Barry Family view. Often enough the valid argument the shroud around the corpse of some moribund point once thought worth making, now never taken up: true enough in and of, but no match for the stronger wordings of the general conversation. The point lies discarded, wrapped in its own good sound translucent logic, and the talk goes on around it.
In spite of this, loathe we are to be invalid here at HCE simply for the sake of being invalid. Little longrange good it may ever do us, but we do make some effort, consistent with those Barry Family Standards we are currently inclined to uphold, to seek and use validity on all those unavoidable occasions when it may be necessary, as well as on occasions where, by free choice, we hoist the futile flag of it into the fray of words it will surely never best. By default, the Barry Family Standard leans toward the valid.
Thus when we say the page the looker views here in the Bogblog is valid, we expect no greater significance need be attached to the fact, in the normal course of inspection, than that as adherents to the Barry Standard, it is our preference to lean that way, admittedly a peculiarity of style, a mannerism, like longish sentences and a taste for neologism, and which may with them be discounted equally as suits the looker's taste, with no fatal loss of comprehension of the general drift of the thing at all, we surely hope.
We hail life's glorifying motions, all glorifying motions of life.
Mad March's manic motions, yes, and all the comprehended foolishness of April, ha!, and the fullness of Semele's month of May, yes, and all of those first three months as they may be so measured and so hailed.
And all of the other three as well we so measure and so hail, that make up sixmonth: the falling full into it of June, July's advance, and the wanton weedmonth of August.
Comes some September, then, making what it may of the sixmonth of it, the half helping of the measure of the whole poured into September's containing retorts. The sixmonth of it into the full thing's seventh month, the sixes and seven of it, of a year.
The year's twelve months hard to parse from sixes and seven, discordant things they are. It will be one, the year, but how, from sixes and seven? The Barry Family has its own argument to make in this regard, based on the reluctant foundation of its boglore.
To be at odds, to disagree, it says in the Deluxe Second Edition, and for those of us with leanings one way or the other on the matter here at HCE, this could be no closer to the truth than if it had been drafted by the Barry Family itself on one of its better days.