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, set just upstream, the favorably disposed 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
breviature n. an abbrieviature [Obs.]
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 Unordered Standards
Recently from staff:
The Quarterly Draft Bogmetric
And:
The Revised Authorized Standard Bogblog Bogmetric Bookmark
Added sign of validity:
Coming soon in the comic American Adventure series:
"Baghdad Funnies"
Our recently rescinded first editon (featuring The Mage of Baghdad!) has been replaced for the time being in our prospectus by:
featuring The Mage of Baghdad!
Or alternately, time permitting:
featuring The Mage of Baghdad!
February leapings
rom what remains of the well-regarded Barry Family standard here at HCE, February is the meanest month.
Once dead last in the Roman calendar, February was promoted to second place in the early reshuffling of the calendar's values ascribed to Numa, fabled second of the many, many kings of Rome.
Abrupt, brief thing, February.
The word February is rooted in the more ancient formal tendency of the Latins to end the calendar year with a brisk period devoted to the expiation of the forgone thing itself, but that expectably dour review, drawing its uncomfortable crowd, came to be replaced by the more mirthfully disposed inclinations of the newer calendar said to have been made by Numa, second king in the fabulous pack of kings of the Latins, who proposed a space at end of year called Saturnalia where all manner of communal merriment could see the old year off instead.
Here at HCE, where many of our faults and excesses (characterized so often by snide mention of friend and foe alike found lying everywhere about us here in the Bogblog) are certainly to be ascribed to our poor upbringing if not traceable directly to innate burdens of heridity, we yet recognize there comes a time to take account, to recognize and make whatever grudging gesture we might assay to rectify the errant damaging results issuing from our acts.
We acknowledge that right at the end of the freshly done act itself is, strictly, the proper moment to confront the requirements of such an accounting. The demanded immediacy of the rectifying motion has forever followed in the footstep of the Barry Family Standard, as reinforced in the shaping of our views on the matter here at HCE by the instructively interventionary acts of nuns from the earliest imaginable moment of formal education. Making it right when required is always the next step in any continuous progress of steps we might take in this view. The unmade misstep is the best next step, always.
Moving the expiations of February to the second month of the year may seem simply foward–looking on the part of the Latins after Numa (reputed maker of that move).
From the vantage of the second month the Romans were able to map out ahead of time all the good excuses for their conduct in the coming year (natural byproduct of any period of expiation, the good excuse is in the Barry Family view, and a thoroughgoing knack they had, the Romans, for prefabricating theirs).
They might, too, uncomfortably in the course of the passing month assay the duncity, destructiveness and depravity that was the Roman share in the recently completed year past, should any decent memory of it linger in January's wake, time permitting in that shortest of months.
But Numa's move of little February had its other use as well, for by moving the short month itself to second place the subtle hand suggested to be Numa's lifted up the period of expiation and transferred it to second place as well, thus cleverly synchronizing the timing of its dutiful reflections, and thus the whole Roman calendar, with the other alternate supplanted calendar (as previously adopted by the quite wide range of people to Rome's north and west for example) which marked the month of the spring equinox to be firstmonth of the calendar, and thus the month previous (call it February for the purposes of expiation) the last month of the cycled year, continued to be the reserved space it was for the summary enactment of hopefully corrected coursings all along.
By synchronizing expiations between the two schemes of calendar, the imposing Romans cleverly colonized the autochronous measure of a year once brandished by the Barrys.
February 28, 2005
Revised Quarterly Draft Bogmetric
Executive Summary
The proposals advanced in the Quarterly Draft Bogmetric for April 2004, having been reviewed by committee here at HCE it is claimed, although little prior notice or subsequent record of any such review can be found by the Editor on careful investigation of the ever–aggregating materials boxed or loosed piecemeal in what passes for our domain here at HCE (troubling the Editor to put aside the many concurrent duties necessary to see our currently virtual enterprise, so-called, at last into its long-envisaged state of actual existence, and instead engage in a direct, time-consuming and ultimately fruitless effort to uncover any evidence, none suasive enough to be entertained as it happens, that staff — directed as they were by what the Editor certainly took to be at the time a briskly worded summary of the assigned responsibilites and chosen personnel and given meeting place and times, the concisely formulaic path laid out in all the usual pocedures including comprehensive documentation of what is admittedly the dry but necessary work of a standards committee, on the part of that committee — did ever in fact in the intervening months at all assemble), are hereby nevertheless adopted in draft form.
Explication and Rationale
It will be revealed by the cursor in any current browser that the squiggly waveform topping each entry in the Bogblog unfurls the title of the piece of Bogblog below. Each entry gathers the first few words of itself, the first few strongly emphasized words in what follows, for the needed title.
Each title also gathers its easily calculable bogdate of creation as based on the calendric so glancingly described in the April 2004 Draft. As example:
bogdate 02.28.05 Revised Quarterly Draft Bogmetric
This notation inscribes both the first few strongly emphasized words in the instant entry, and also the last possible day of February 2005 in the truncated calendric form skecthed out in the April 2004 Draft. The end of February is the sought favor granted its achievers each year, mercifully shortened period of a month rushing toward the full madnesses of a new year's March. Scant few day it has, February, the better to get through.
The title is one of the many strongly recommended stylings championed by people who seem to know what theyre talking about when trying to devise some permanently described swath of something on the internet.
Here and elsewhere on the internet the cunning if arbitrary rules of these widely disseminated standards are somewhat laxly observed, though wherever we find it offered the promise of permanence is forever congenial to what we here at HCE plainly seek to achieve by the constant striving towards actual as distinct from virtual enterprise that is the presumptive byword of all our acts here. We cannot fail to be charmed by any arbitrary scheme of freely offered permanence promised by the convenienly adopted standard here at HCE, as shown by the familiarly simplified Unordered Standards of the Barry Family themselves.
We hope of course by this stratagem of adhering to such standards as championed by people who seems to know what they're talking about that our offering, formed from standards which by their ubiquity in the broadly concieved current scheme of the internet, may last well into the future for all we know, and remain readily accessible to those in coming times who bother looking from their vantage at the records of our day, however the internet or its descendent may subsequently move to define itself.
As ever we pray not be tied to the played–out sureties of the failed standard, as so regretably exemplified by the all-too proprietary plan for Radio Bogblog of unfortunate memory.
Thus, after due consideration, we direct staff to continue the practice of enfolding the referenced image of a squiggly waveform in the coded set of remarks intentionally cast in the standard notation of our day to permanently identify each bookmarked entry in the Bogblog going forward:
<a rel="bookmark" href="http://homepage.mac.com/bbarry/volume.02/April04.html#a04.18.04" ><img src="images/squiggly.jpg" alt="April 18, 2004" title="bogdate 04.18.04 An important note from staff" width="175" height="7" id="a04.18.04" class="sp" /></a>
The complete internet address of the entry is given, down to its hash–marked fragment identifier#a04.18.04.
It will be seen that the metric advanced by staff the in Quarterly Draft Bogmetric of April 2004 has been adopted for the purposes of creating a permanent bookmark for each enty.
The synchronization by this scheme between both the formally acknowledge Roman calendric and the bogstandard Barry inclination to begin anew in March is deployed in the hash–marked fragment identifier in the permanent bookmark and in the indicated id of the entry as well as in the title itself:
href="http://homepage.mac.com/bbarry/volume.02/April04.html#a04.18.04"
id="a04.18.04"
title="bogdate 04.18.04" An important note from staff
The unavoidable formulations of the Roman calendric, reluctantly acknowledged standard of the Barry Family for quite some time, are given thier due in the heading immediately below the squiggly waveform and in the suggested alt attribute of the image itself.
Conclusion
Staff will undoubtedly be relieved to discover that no change in current practice is advised by this directive.
February 27, 2005
The author of the post animating some argument on the internet may be faulted by popular comments as a feature of the software, or often enough as assisted by the redoubtable Holoscan, winger of messages in the current scheme of things between those who care to attend to what's been presented by making comment in the space provided by such a feature and the originator of the eliciting gesture who has enabled those disposed to do just that.
We have, of course the Quotidian here at HCE to serve in that capacity when the time is right to engage that aspect of our enterprise, so called. The Quotidian is forever at the ready for just the motive software.
The Quotidian grows out of that revanchist element of the Barry Family forever longing for that lost age when the good argument of the original Quotidian was pressed on paper to relieve the lot of them however fleetingly from the grueling bad argument called the Naming that mired them for all those many years following the Barry Family's appearance on the southeast coast of Ireland.
Djah, a good argument stood out in those times for its exalted speech and subject, heights rarely reached in the harried exchanges of the Naming to which Barry Family discourse was inexorably drawn in those disputive days.
Respected to the point of reverence by some Barrys, the good argument was the celebrated thing, with its adroit introduction of the marvelous satisfactions of an alternative to the inexorable interjections of the bruising dialectic of the Naming into any opening of the conversation at all.
Aw, it was refreshing, it was, to take the well–rounded path of the good argument to its delectable completion from time to time in contrast to the ragged endless bogwandering course of the bad argument offered by the Naming.
The Barry Family was nurtured by the good argument wherever it appeared.
When the Barry Family came by chance into the possession of the printing press in the early 1600's, it was proposed at first by its founders to direct the industry of its operators to the full fervid expression in print of all the bad arguments made available by the Naming, a crowd pleasing prospect among their kind if ever there was one, and sure path to a profitable venture given the known tenor of the times.
But it was proposed on a lark by one of them assembled that the press print the startling wonders of good argument instead.
Jayz, they laughed, the Barrys gathered there.
The practical matter of the largest possible audience was hooted down by the lot of them in the instant, and immediately the plan for the press turned its editorial aim over to the whole of the written gist of good argument, vasty enough domain to daunt the needs of even the most industriously applied press, which, given the lapsed interest in labor standard among the Barry Family, was never likely to result in practice. Measured against this standard there was enough good argument to last the press found by the Barrys forever.
The Quotidian, the venerable "Quote," was not the precursor of the daily newspaper some Barry apologists maintain. The Quotidian didn't train its attentions on tracking events, but trained instead on the marvels of the clearly setted thing proposed as the true gift of each good argument. However jokingly initiated, The Quotidian was seen as a chronicle hopefully and sincerely devoted to good argument, which all of its originators agreed was part of the joke, the joke on themselves the Barry Family has never freed themselves from favoring over all.
The Barry Family could have at the bad argument;— they could have at, and they did have at. It was the family's sad condition to have at the one about the Naming for generations. To gather around the good argument was the happiest of alternatives in those conflicted years of Barry Family conversation.
Admittedly, the roiling talk accompanying the Naming was the beneficiary of the very bad argument preceding it in the Barry Family conversation all those many millenia in the Paris Basin, the very bad and long-argued argument of the previously substantial but now ideally renounced pig, which was shown the door, if not seen off the property, as a consequential feature of the the very shift to Ireland that brought about the controversy of the Naming to begin with.
The Naming inherited all the many duresses of rhetoric developed down the millennia by the Barry Family in having at that bad argument for the pig.
The Barry Family had always argued about the pig, had armed itself with the bad argument for the pig as far back into the recesses of Barry Family consiousness of being a kind as their own Discovery allowed. Until it came to to Ireland, the coursings of the unended conversation of the Barry Family was littered with the effectual product of all the many rude tools its members had persistently weilded in that cause. Those rude tools were all taken up by their new rhetoric and idealized, allowing for the occasionally tangible stick of wood, into the uses of the fresh start at bad argument signalled by the just commenced controversy of the Naming.
The classic Quotidian strove to provide respite and refreshment to its willing audience, oh, all the wide ranging flavorful stuff of good argument from all the reaches of discourse everywhere, digested and dispensed on that daily printed sheet, dogged as the daily was all the while by this or that seemingly good enough argument for the Naming begging to be included there on its page as well.
Time passed and the seemingly good enough arguments began to appear there in the Quotidian, with all the full brunt of the essentially bad argument of the Naming behind them, and the classic era of the Quotidian passed.
Nevertheless, The Quotidian provides the ready template for what we have in mind here at HCE when we bother to consider unleashing the engines of comment by our enterprise, so called. Revived, retooled, The Quotidian might once more be the hallowed raft of argument in a sea of trouble of before, should we chance to get around to it here at HCE.
February 23, 2005
Out, out, brief bardo
'bout these '49ers,eh?
these 49 days worth of bardo for Doctor Thompson now, according to the Tibetan scheme,
49 an extravagant number by modern count but which at least proposes its reasoned limit
to what might be concieved as an endless wake
shared out among the community
freshly arrived
to grieve.
Hunter Thompson is decisively ended.
He's as dead as the dead do come, and they all do come,
forever and ever
amen.
February 21, 2005
Consider breifly your conterfactual incarnation as a dog.
You'd have a time of it moderating your inclination to growl, is what we're saying here at HCE, where from time to time we are obliged to consider the dog.
Often to your dog lips would spring the generously engaged growl so descriptive of your kind, a useful, naturally selected announcement normalized and then passed on by all your successfully antecedent dogs, the dogful announcement not long denied its challenging place in dogdiscourse.
Could you, being dog, hope to contain the proferred greeting of a growl which so readily suggests itself to you now?
February 19, 2005
Laboring under a design as we must here at HCE, influenced as we are in all we do by the acquired and accommodated lore and leanings of the unavoidable good Standard of the Barry Family, the standard dragged along all these 6000 years from the very Discovery of the Barry Family itself to the present day, we acknowledge that our every gesture is framed in that standard's imposing yet readily assimilable forms.
The English language is the unavoidable standard of the Barry Family when it comes to language, the standard we strive to accommodate as best we can here at HCE given the founder's interest of our kind in that language's continuous expression.
(The Barry Family made the proposed motion toward the new language at the very first indication of English there on the southeast shore of Ireland. As the Barry kind arrived there, so did the needed new language emerge, stirred by the wide-ranging wording of the heterogeneous pack of intruders (of whom the best it can be said is that the Barry Family was a good example) led there by the Normans)
The language was rolled out before our own eyes and ears at an early age. Before we knew it, we were reading. Early and often, reading, reading, reading. We scanted the writing as best we could, resistant to the firm herding in that direction imposed on us by nuns. Despite their suasions, we were often caught carving extra reading time out of that assigned to writing by those nuns, who might at times of temporarily failed vigilance not notice the adroitly placed book, pamphlet, periodical, or slipped or noted missive we preferred to entertain instead in those, our formative years.
Soon enough it became apparent that our view of nearly everything was accompanied by our reading, the perused image visited instantly by our stock of arranged meanings, from which we might select, often with great accuracy, the effective definition of that offered to our eyes.
Surely there was the actual sight, object of our reading, and just as surely there was our reading of that object. Conjoined they were, the reading coming along with us wherever we cared to look. On printed page or given image or across the plotted landscape of our home acres our reading would range over the possible meanings of the words we had in store, settling as the occasion required on some sense of what we saw in the unfolding page, the unfurled image, or the unfailingly familiar acres of our home.
Thus conditioned, when we here at HCE who look at this image of a painting named Man and Woman by Jackson Pollock (which hangs in a museum in Philadelphia, for all we know), to see what we can see of it, we cannot fail to read as best we can what is present to our eyes.
At times optometry and orthography are wedded perfectly, at times not. Sometimes we find no way to the proper word for it, the word being unstored or unavailing at the instant of our view, and our reading falls short of its purpose. At times glancing at the poorly defined we definitely don't know what we're reading.
In the main we get by. There it is, that object made out by the eye, rapidly joined by our ongoing inclination to read.
Drawn towards the center of the image of the painting by Pollock we immediately read the anciently acknowledged figure of the female form, just so.
We read the ascribed figure of the female form just there off center in the image of the painting by Pollock, same as it ever was in the most ancient imaginings of that figure. The readily spied archetype of the famous form of the female as imagined there by Mr. Pollock is read instantly by those of us here at HCE who attend to such matters, just as it was read in its way by lookers in the earliest of days, in that immemorial time before even a whisper of the Barry Family proto-language stirred on the breathe of the human tongue, when someone previous fashioned the form of the female figure pictured in the image at right, whose currency, to those of us who can read at all here at HCE, is immediately apparent in our reading of it.
We range over all the present meanings of our words for it just then, and yes, the figured female form is what we read.
There is an intervention in our easy reading of the painting by Pollock between our reflexively reached grasp of the female form as given and the other less readily understood elements of the fellow's imagining.
What's this or that in the painting, trailing after a vocabulary developed by Picasso or Braque or who's the fellow like your other man Kandinsky?
We fall well short of fluency in the acute dialect of words worked up over the years to decipher what's meaningful there.
The popular pidgin we command when wrestling with a meaning in our reading, ranging over the scant trove of words we've built up against the day such reading might behove us, serves to smoothly spy the commonly given figure of the female form, but is no match for the mass of added elements offered by the artist of the thing.
Thus the image offers up to our view all its unresolved immediacies along with the centrally located offering of the well-read female form. We range and range over all the rest of the image of the painting by Pollock, the stuff of it misread according to how heavily or lightly we're drawn along to some faulty perspective or other suggested by our rude navigation of the insufficient domain of words at our command.
Here now at left we have the misfortune of a detail of the painting forever subjected to a reading of some other thing entirely.
It stands, the detail, a bright thin rectangle edged sharply in black, with thin spaced lines ascending its interior.
Before, we could have taken it for Pollock's poeticized figure of the Doric order's thin fluted column, but no more.
In our plainest previous reading of the painting, what with the female form immediately established there, and recognizing the likelihood of the odd pilaster or draped something or other in a fairly standard arrangement of subject and object called, optimistically, a portrait, we here at HCE who've been dragged through the viewing of a wide range of the things in our time would have read the two figures, together, as a highly stylized argument about that long–established and occasionally adequate form of representation, the portrait.
Ah, and the good clean fun we'd have had with it here at HCE, contrasting the particularized portrait of a woman presumed of Pollock with the remarkably generalized figure of the female form noted above, a carved image of concretionary limonite said by Marija Gimbutas on page 103 of her book The Language of the Goddess (Harper & Row, San Francisco) to have been made in the Dordogne more than 20,000 years ago.
But now it is an image of the World Trade Center catastrophe of September 11, 2001, made by a painter who never imagined that day at all when he painted it.
All similarly disposed images are subsumed in our unended consideration of that day's unforgotten forms.
Reflexively for us now a bright rectangle with fluting lines suggests one of the two towers, and what's worse, the orange line edged on one side by black rising straight up from the column, and the riot of black and red strokes on top of that, evoke too well the antenna we recall from that day and the roiling pall of destruction that hung above the horrifying dissolution of that building.
To our poor vocabulary for reading Pollock's painting, we add all the imposing intercessionary readings unanticipated by the painter in his time which spring relentlessly to our mind, acknowledging that we will never see simply the form offered up there without regard to these other things entirely, things unsuggested in the painting by any fair reading, but made sadly necessary by our own.
February 6, 2005
See the near nether of below, Below, here continued…
Samuel Johnson submitted in his time with a curious mix of reluctance and haste the product of his fervidly practiced craft to all the many outlets for all the many genres of literature being practiced with such abandon in the London of those years. In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (W.W. Norton & Company New York London 1971), Paul Fussell points to the proof of this in all the words the man left written down, which survive Samuel Johnson in much better shape than ever allowed his own mortal frame, sad physical mess it was, the body of Samuel Johnson, for the whole time he had with it.
The printed word went out in that age from London in a new torrent along the improved paths of freshly laid post roads and shipping lanes under the famous dominion of that city.
The florescence of the written word in that age was certainly provoked by the synergy of the well-advanced technology of printing, in itself a development just then reaching its utilitarian maturity, with the complementary grand old idea of having regular roads meant for London.
The Romans for their part anciently had at the idea of the regular road, and did not dint London on that score when they arrived. They applied their earnest universal tendencies to the lasting task of making the regular road, the Romans did, when they took London. But did they have The Rambler to go with the road? No. Not a printing press to be found on the island in that age, even had some Latinate equivalent of that product been proposed. Contrarily, any number of printing presses, a plethora of them it's commonly agreed, greeted the articulations of the fresh–made roadways meant for London during the time of Samuel Johnson.
The mail we'll call the benificiary of this synergy. It was not only the printed word that advanced by mail along the eighteenth century's newly realized system of roadways meant for London, not at all. But, it was this crucial new use of the roadways for distributing all the freshly made material of the many, many printing presses of London that made the mail a great growth industry then. There was the continuous press of printed stuff by now to cart out of London in addition to all the hand–scribed writs and other material the mail had always anciently served.
The mail became a new thing then, the improved roadways opened to it becoming the conduit for the first rough go at a thoroughgoing national discourse, with most of the written parts of the discourse of course aggrandized by the incessantly availing words of the plethora of London presses as sent out everywhere aong those fine new roads. The mail just then, changing, gave birth to the modern era of communcation. However primitive the tools at its disposal from our present perspective, the discursive discourses dictated in London now for the first time could be communicated in a direct, continuous, and relatively timely manner to all its own nation in the modern sense.
And what a time Samuel Johnson had with that discourse in his day.
February 5, 2005
See nearly as far below as immediately below, Below.
February 1, 2005
Bogsniffings:
(Should our business plan here at HCE go not too far awry, this portal to the previous year's Bogsniffings will someday be attended by the necessary machineries of commerce, erected to collect the agreeable sum on the looker's entering there — something much like the estimable Paypal system, perhaps.
At present, the Bogblog is freely entered to whatever depth the looker may choose to reach.
Use the Volume control to descend to the desired annum).
Volume II: 03.03.04 to —;
Collected incompletions of the current year, by monthname.
Volume I: 03.03.03 to 03.02.04
A year's worth of freely sniffable Bog in one compact spot!
Up↑
One click away, the very top of the Bog to you.