HCE Bogblog August.05

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 aggregating later would host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, set just upstream, rounded by the river on all sides, the favorably disposed cityisle of the anciently and continuously established beneficiaries of Paris, but seeing just then instead what they continue to maintain to this day was the previous place where by the wrestlings of chance and design those parts of present Paris would become. Two Bar.

The controversial
Barry Coat of Arms

space writer, a writer, especially a journalist, whose pay is based upon the amount of space occupied by his copy.

Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary
Deluxe Second Edition

The Unordered Standards

Recently from staff:
The Quarterly Draft Bogmetric

And:
The Revised Authorized Standard Bogblog Bogmetric Bookmark

And:
The Complete Belated Action Committee Report (Draft)

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Our recently rescinded first editon (featuring The Mage of Baghdad!)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!

August West

In the bog there is up, of course, the sky's place, and, naturally, down, down, down, the bogrealm reaching in the Barry Family view to some presumed, inferred, hoped-for level of solidity below.

Immemorially the word for sky and the word for cloud were ever the same word. This is known, and unsurprising, given in that age, above, the constant shroud. Tens of thousands of years of rain in point of fact, the barrier ice slumping into liquidity under the influential drizzle, uncovering the northern lands and all their proto-muck which would earn one day the name of Europe. All along the new edge of it the living stuff progressed, spoored and seeded and animated pioneers taking up the zone of fresh space shaped by the climate's marvelous wet turning. Down, the waterpath, down, the cardinal direction. From above, to below, time's arrow points along the waterpath, in the Barry Family reckoning.

And east and west, or right and left, or back and forth, as well. The bog has those.

Even with scant few days of climatic clarity in all those many millenia, over time it came to the Barry Family's otherwise distracted notice that light roiled out from one hot skyspot which could be counted on itself to have quotidian directionality as well, and tracked a path on a daily basis, as did the Barry Family (at its more gradual rate) toward the west.

August 31, 2005

The moment when this becomes that

New Orleans, done in by flood, is no more. An interregnum enforced by evacuation and ruin closes out the parenthesis of what it ever was. New Orleans was once, and just now no longer is.

Some would hope to reapply New Orleans to its former site, reintroducing its returned citizens to whatever possible sense of the previous place might willfully be reconstructed there.

But of course the death or permanent displacement of much of the prior population, and the introduction there of the usual freebooting newcomers attracted for their own opportune reasons to the aftermath of New Orleans, ensures that the required return of its considerable people to that same place shall be forever undone.

What once were the buildings of New Orleans will now be reimagined and replaced rather than reconstructed in what was once New Orleans.

It will not be the same mass of recapitulated people in the same mass of reconstructed structures at all, but, nearly as matters to its new makers, a newly construed thing still called, misleadingly enough considering the New Orleans it may never again properly evoke, New Orleans, just as Baghdad is still called Baghdad in spite of all its many extirpations, or just as San Francisco is still called San Francisco against all good evidence of being previously undone.

Baron Samedi is the one in the dark coat and hat with the dark glasses lounging on the path all dead must take past the Guédé.

It doesn't matter that the Baron is the Guédé; it doesn't matter that the Baron is not at all the Guédé which bestrides all paths the dead must take, but rather is that one who rules that last rude intercessionary transaction by which some residue of the departed is selfishly ehough denied those now forever done, retained, held back, reserved to the yet living in the recarnable memorializations of the graveyard.

The Baron reserves for his own what little may be reconstituted now, what may be again incarnated from what's forever done, from what may ever again be offered up now in the name gone grave of what they used to call New Orleans.

August 28, 2005

A mere detail of an image made by Jack Blake and posted on the internet for viewing.

It is collected there along with a number of other images in a set labelled "St. Croix, USVI – November 2004," a label we have no reason to question in the least here at HCE, having experienced repeatedly the fellow's nearly unvarnished veracity in such matters down the decades.

Knowing the fellow Blake as we do to be an assiduous photographer (whose work has graced the Bogblog from the very first, with the foundational image of the entire enterprise itself abstracted from what was originally photographed by the hand of Jack Blake himself long decades ago) we are unsurprised, given his assumed presence in St. Croix of all places, that the fellow would have both the inclination and equipment on hand to snap a few photos of things for the evident reasons.

Under the canopy of cloud cover they called sky it came to the Barry Family over time from certain indirect evidence that light roiled out from one hot skyspot and daily passed inexorably westward on what continued to seem a perpetual basis.

That the sun was unknown to them from direct sensible experience for the most part did not bar them from giving the thing as they understood it from their secondary sources a good crisp name which appeared far more often in their ongoing conversation than its referent ever did in their intractably cloud–capped sky.

Looking directly at the thing to confirm its expected presence was long rumored among the Barry Family to be inadvisable anyway as based on the overheard lore of others who for their own reasons had been in places where the possibility of doing just that presented its unsafe opportunity on a surprisingly regular basis. Don't look right at the sun became the byword among all the Barry Family early on even in spite of the opportunity's unlikelihood.

Based on these sources the boglore of the Barry Family came to include the point that any good lasting view of the sun involved gazing at a representation of the thing rather than at the thing itself, and that looking at the utterly diffuse grayed view of the sun common to their clouded lot down the millennia was in and of itself a relatively benign substitute for the blinding alternative sketched out in the lore of others.

The Barry Family has long sought radiant representations of the sun as suggested by others in song, story and pictograph as the only sensible means of fairly having at the sun, comprising the correct alternative to the inadvisable long look at the thing itself. In this, the image of the sun given by Jack Blake is entirely welcome, helpfully radiating this singular representative of sun our way as it does.

August 27, 2005

That quoted piece of Don Marquis ironically gives license to those readers who might think "Hey, that's just like something I'd have said, had I the wit!" and, proceeding entirely in the spirit of Marquis's own words, rightly amend the citeable matter of the individual responsible for the nice conceit therein purely for the purpose of furthering the fully accurate expression of their own truer selves just as Marquis suggests. The settled words of Marquis are remarkably exculpatory with regard to their own theiving, in this view.

He's not a front-line modernist, Marquis, but one of countless many who served up a vernacular version of the stuff as it coursed through its paces in the early and middle decades of the 20^thcentury.

Modernism is most often discussed with reference to its type, so that it's all about the Ulysses this or The Waste Land that or some particularly atonal music here or building or other there, but its most usual expression during the decades of its great florescence came in practice in the quotidian hashing out of the totalizing matter presumed to be addressed by the modern methods of modernity by all its legions of enablers cooperatively attuned to it and putting it through its regular paces on a daily basis. Modernism, ah! It was the going thing, then, overall.

Marquis was one of the many many talented practitioners of the stuff, a regular day–in–day–out user of the devices of modernism, like his fellow–sufferer Herriman, whose own casually drawn modernism illustrate Marquis to such profoundly happy effect in the fellow's poems of archy and mehitabel.

August 25, 2005

Style point

On this date staff proposed and on review the Editor approved and enacted certain fundamental alterations in the style sheet code which rules with its clever intimations the form in which the Bogblog is capable of being delivered to the various potential browsers reputedly lounging about the famous internet.

For some time before we bothered to do anything about the matter, it had become evident to those of us here at HCE who've bothered to notice the curious form assumed by the Bogblog on browsers other than that specific browser housed here on a specific machine and displayed on a specific monitor on which we have been compelled to compose the Bogblog, that certain deformations of our design were evident on those other monitors whose dimensions and resolution, set to the robust new standard currently advanced by the most modern monitors of our age, returned a jumble in the rightmost column of the Bogblog, rather than the true text, tincture and entablature of the rightmost items made so satisfactorily visible on the monitor available for our own special uses here.

The code sufficient to adequately represent the Bogblog on a 17 inch monitor set to 1152 X 870 pixels was stretched past its usefulness by the demands common to the larger more pixel–rich monitors of the current era. In short, the code made mess of what we'd hoped was rather not.

It was not trepidation at the prospect of altering the fundamental code of the style sheet that held us from the necessary work of reformation we realized was necessary if our own percieved Bogblog was to be properly delivered up to monitors other than our own in a manner properly analogous to what we commonly see here, no. Put it down to the well–practiced lassitude of staff which has for so long been a such signal feature of the corporate culture here at HCE.

Finally today, having been roused to act, and then in consequent fact and deed acting as a result, Bogblog staff completed the cunning remedial tasks long since assigned by the Editor as the evident and approved means of ameliorating the rightmost column's previously regrettable disparity of view.

The good look at the Bogblog as now provided, such as it is, falls upon the browsers of all modern monitors and on the presumed standard monitor here at HCE in just the same way for a change, and all as a direct result of the admitted efforts of Bogblog staff here at HCE, who will be praised just as highly, should it ever come to that, for completing any of the other projects long assigned by the distant but as yet not unforgotten words of the Editor ordering their completion but which have been for the most part successfully neglected as if unheard by staff for all the many months.

August 23, 2005

Intelligent Design II; Artifice as Substitute for Natural Selection

As seems almost inevitable, the park service has plans to eradicate the fallow deer, mostly because they compete successfully for food with the native black-tailed deer. With all due respect to the black-tailed deer, which I am certain are fine animals and special in their own way, it seems foolish to stand in the way of natural selection, particularly when the probable winners are, you know, really pretty.

— Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle August 23, 2005, pg. D10

The introduction of fallow deer to some acres in Marin County was done by design. Whether this was an example of intelligent design or yet another cautionary retelling of the sad cost of willful intercessionary introduction of species to parts of the world where they have never been before by humans we cannot say here at HCE, who have failed to follow at all down the decades the subject of the fallow deer, wherever they may be disposed.

Nonetheless we are not hard pressed to label the effects of selection following the introduction by design of some arbitrary element into any environment an artificial sort of selection rather than the natural one suggested by Mr. Carroll.

Human agency intercedes everywhere, intelligently or not, to make artifice of what would otherwise be the natural course of selection. Should humans prove to be naturally emergent features of the peculiar contingiencies of their home planet's evolution, then all this intercession by design they engage in can be understood as being expected of them, natural enough for all the good it does, perhaps. It cannot always be excused, but it can always be expected, humans being the way they are.

The black–tailed deer of West Marin actively proposed to live in West Marin in some age long past, and West Marin proceded to accommodate them as best it could, letting those live there who fit the foggy scheme of things best. This is the most the process of natural selection can do: fit the lifeform to its local platform and see how it all plays out.

The fallow is a nice design introduced to West Marin by purposive human acts, just as it's been introduced to much of its current range all around the world by the similarly disposed acts of other humans over the millennia.

Fallow deer are clubbable, in the British sense that they get on well in groups of others of their kind, and humans from time immemorial have taken all the suitable advantage of this fact that could be had.

It is said the Phoenicians reintroduced the fallow deer to Britain long after the end of the ice age that had killed off all the previous population of them there, where the beasts had once flourished in the benign clime until frozen out of existence by the exigiencies of that cold cold age. Once the clemencies of liquid water were again established as the norm in that land, it was human agency that designed and executed the reintroduction of fallow deer there. Even if it was the Romans who made the gesture rather than the reputed Phoenicians, the point remains.

The tactic of transhumance on the part of humans, of following after wide–ranging beasts for all the good reasons as they perform their naturally selected lawnmowing function precedes and leads directly to the more rigorously designed agricultural methodologies of herding that eventually fell to the lot of sheep and cows and goats.

Transhumance had always attended to a wider range of wider ranging animals than were ever successfully constrained by the domesticating processes of agriculture to a particular pen or paddock or pasture, although it may be assumed that the sheep and goats and cows that ended up there over time came originally from forebears who had been the subject of intensive transhumance before.

The claim of transhumance is essentially focused on the same range of free wandering beasts as followed nomadically by other more purely pastoral populations of people, with the difference that transhumance is based in a settled community somewhere nearby the home range of the things, from which settlement the claim to the beasts goes out.

The willful spread of fallow deer by humans who would like to have at them has all the settled intelligence of transhumance behind it. Forever wandering but never ranging that far off, fallow deer will naturally dispose themselves to mow the abundantly given lawn if introduced however artificially into precincts where such lawn is likely. Cunningly humans have so introduced them over and over again to fresh new ranges of such lawn down the millennia.

That the lawn is pretty and that the fallow deer by their acts prettily promote the continuation and extension of lawn over the reforestation that might otherwise be the naturally selected course of events in the acres where they've been introduced by humans is a notable feature of the compelling artifice selectively introduced to those acres by humans in the form of fallow deer.

August 20, 2005

We could be fans of Royals, but no. Fortunately for those of us here at HCE, who are no fans of Royals at all in any meaningful sense, we have at least the Royals to look down on this dark morning following the disastrous engagement of our own favored squad, the San Francisco Giants, with the ninth inning in St. Louis last night.

Aw, the ninth inning in St. Louis last night comprehensively drubbed our lads, in point of sorry fact.

Leading 4–0, entering the home half of the final frame, the Giants squad let sadly slip the needed victory. Giants pitchers in that inning so accommodated the lineup of St. Louis batters that they, a squad established in their competency at hitting the ball hard and fair this season when the thing is delivered up precisely to the place where they always hit it best, each in their turn successively impacting the fabled bayjayzus out of the poorly offered object until the 4–0 lead of the Giants shrunk, dissipated, and finally ceased forever on the completion of the grand arc of the game–ending, game–winning two–run double that settled the final score forever at 5–4 St. Louis. Gaaah! For the all the intruding disagreeable, we have but that poor sole rejoinder fashioned anciently for the purpose, Gaaah! We deploy it here naturally.

And yet. But. Still. We are no fans of Royals and never were here at HCE, even in the age when they enjoyed their greatest success, loosely following in this the previously established standard of the Barry Family regarding your other Royals entirely.

That we can even yet look down with justice on Royals at this moment is our good fortune still, considering all the sad fresh present circumstances of our own dashed hopes. We have that at least.

The Royals belong below, as do all the rest of the teams of baseball striving against our chosen squad for baseball's World Championship. Would that the rest of them would properly dispose themselves as well this season, no help in that regard the Giants squad itself was last night in achieving that result.

August 19, 2005

The Fellow's Great Bellow

Here in the portrait by the painter L (1757–1825) in the image as given in the Bogblog, the image itself admittedly copied from a secondary source and, owing to the known constraints of form forever imposed on the Bogblog by our at times reluctant yet nonetheless continuous adherence to the settled Standards of the Barry Family here at HCE, forced to undergo in addition the further forgings of the famous Photoshop itself on its passage into the Bogblog, and admitting that this further forging further removes the image as given here from its origin in the painted portrait made by L, still and all, in this image even as rudely reimagined by its passage from its origin to this place, there's enough left of it, residuum, for the good clean view of it, we claim.

So here's a heavily dressed man, the painter himself as it turns out, most remarkably expressed.

Is it the culminating moment of a yawn we intercept here in that irrepressible moment when the eyes reflexively shut against the mouth's full gaping? We cannot say for certain it is a yawn. Might not it be instead, this undeniably bald expression, an instant of communicated woe? A heartfelt wail, some comprehesive scream imagined forever at the high point of its communication? We cannot say for certain. We assume the uncertain modern view regarding the certainly figured face here at HCE.

This is an old painting as these modern things are measured, having been created by L nearly 200 years ago, and yet we who are so struck by modernity here at HCE cannot help but view the thing, old as it may be, as a passably modern work of art, for all of that. There is no background against which to adduce the motive for what the face expresses, no way of satisfactorily resolving from its setting the equivocal question of its quite plainly given expression. Those of us who look are given only the heavily clothed figure of the artist against a grayed ochre background.

The clothing itself might situate the fellow out of doors should we suppose a background helpful to our inquiry. The pictured clothes are just the thing for out of doors if we imagine the fellow in the sort of place where stategic heaps of the stuff are characteristically applied against the colder days of weather.

Should we seek a background judging from what the fellow wears, we would lean toward a street somewhere, but once we place him there we find we are left with further equivocation. What city would own that street, and what era again, exactly? For the plain clothes themselves, as certainly bound to the fellow as is his plain expression by the deft work of L, are of a sort known throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth by the sort of people in Europe who for good reason wouldn't be caught dead going outside without just that heavy getup.

We can situate our man in a tram in fin de siecle Vienna if we wish, or even just after the First World War, travelling back from work in the half–light of an early winter evening, letting out, just there on the bench by the window, oh, ah, a great unbidden yawn.

Or we may as easily put him in Paris in 1815, wailing publicly a custom common as a yawn in that place and time, bellowing out intentionally the fully concentrated whatever it is that escapes his maw just then.

Knapp smartly avoids the issue of whether the reader insidiates the author by assuming the unintelligibility of intent or merely founds her readings in the shifting sands of contemporary criticism.

— Scott Eric Kaufman, at the Valve.

Anciently insidiate was the word insisted on to describe the insidious ambush, the sound sign for marking the well–evidenced practice of skulking secretively just out of public view full of will to pounce should the targetable object chance to approach. The capacity of your idle crew of humans to form for just such insidiating purpose is well–established, reading being only one of the many venues where the inclination is consistently succumbed to by some portion of the audience making up the crowd around the targeted object.

Some portion of the audience of the author of the read piece of Knapp will naturally insidiate, given an audience of any meaningful size. Similarly some among the audience gazing at the equivocal image painted by L must likewise insidiate, inclined to lie in ambush naturally for just this sort of stuff.

To take the modern view of an object is to assume the modest mantle of uncertainty in so doing, to give to the thing the very benefit of the doubt that instantiates all the useful machineries of skeptical inquiry essential to the modernist enterprise. The modern looker at the portrait of and by L cannot fail to pay this least compliment to it, a willingness to greet equably the portrait with the all the appropriate self–acknowledged uncertainties of the looker put in play.

With best practice, skeptical inquiry demands uncertainty as a prior condition. Certainty is a boundary condition of skeptical inquiry; once achieved it obviates continued operation of the machineries that have been used to arrive there. Assuming certainty, the operations of skeptical inquiry may cease, perhaps to be run through again for the purposes of pedagogy, but, reduced to rote's sharply constrained recapitulations of the formally done deal there, not equipped to capture the full flavor of the essentially gregarious stuff, widewandering skeptical inquiry, luxuriating on its home acres of uncertainty.

What's equivocal makes the wheels spin off the machineries of skeptical inquiry, and the tempting engagement of what's equivocal with those machineries has been the somewhat puckish chosen practice of modernists from the first. If certainty is achieved, the machineries shut off. Their work is done. If uncertainty exists, the machineries of skeptical inquiry propose to run out all the way to certainty in time, and then shut off. But if the matter of skeptical inquiry is equivocal, there is no bounding end achievable by such inquiry. Sad thing it is in a way, the wheels coming off with all that casting about after the untenable certainty where it has no cause to be. But constantly entertaining to the modern view, the equivocal mashup.

Naturally what's equivocal may range in practice from what's seemingly equivocal all the way out to what's obdurately so. Tossing the matter into the machineries of skeptical inquiry as modernists are wont to do promises to achieve unsurprisingly enough on first pass one of three possible outcomes. In the first, what's seemed equivocal is now made newly certain, and no further action is necessary. In the second, the machinery itself is called into question, leaving open the possibility that the matter, though still seemingly equivocal might profit from the application of a better tooled inquiry, the uncertain possibility of which is itself susceptible to skeptical inquiry. Further action is presumably in order. Your other man the third possibility is the equivocal, where the wheels fall off so entertainingly to the modernists.

August 18, 2005

On the judicious application of facts

It is quite true that I have invented for myself a good many experiences which I never really had. But they were all experiences which belonged to me by right of temperament and character. I should have had them, if I had but had my rights. I was despoiled of them by the rough tyranny of Circumstance. On the other hand, I have suppressed a number of incidents which actually happened, because I did not, upon mature reflection, find them in consonance with my nature as I like to think it is—they were lies that were told about me by the slinking facts of life. Evangelists of various descriptions assure us that we can make the future what we will, if we can but attain a sufficient degree of spirituality. It has been my endeavor to attain such a degree of spirituality that I may be able to influence the past as well as the future. You may think the aspiration is a trifle too optimistic, but you can scarcely deny that it is a worthy aspiration. I should not care to have any notes written about my life at all, unless they were notes that had a tendency to redress these balances. If there are numbers of people, sufficient to justify a biographical paper, who wish to know the truth about me, I must insist that it is the truth which they get, and not merely a series of dislocated facts—facts which, but too frequently, have no logical relation to my character as I know it to be. And who should know it better than myself?

—from a letter to Christopher Morley by Don Marquis quoted in the introduction to The Best of Don Marquis (Garden City, 1946)

Intelligent Design, or, The Natural Selection of Happy Talk News, 1970–2005

kill social security with a smile on fox news

Roger Grimsby first practiced at the San Francisco televison station KGO-TV a wryly distanced don't–make–too–much–of–this urbanity that so became his style of newsgiving in the San Francisco market that he was soon assumed into the higher offices of the New York market by his network, ABC, where he held for some years the role of anchor of the local nightly news program in that city, from what we gather of his later career here at HCE, presumably in that time developing still further his witnessed penchant for at once lightly dismissing while at the same time loosely describing the material felt fit to offer up as news on a nightly basis by his station.

As urbane may not play in every market, being an attitude long associated in the lore of rural and suburban communities everywhere with the congenital slick practices forever visited on them by citydwellers, it became incumbent on producers of news programs in other locales around the country to find some substitutable attitude which would parlay their growing appreciation of the crucially attractive role of attitude in pulling a far greater share of the audience toward their offerings than the baldface facts of any news, left otherwise unadorned, could ever hope to draw.

But what other underlying attitude could any audience inexorably drawn to local television's nightly newsgivers prefer to sense in their newsgiver's delivery if not the urbanity so suited to urban markets?

Wrestling with this deep question brought forth for the benefit of suburban and rural markets for television news a nationally applied solution in the form known as Happy Talk. If the urbane framing of the local news of Roger Grimsby or the national news of his prettier cognate Peter Jennings could not be applied locally then this newly evolved substitute could.

Good cheer as orchestrated by the anchor of the local nightly news and supported by a chorus of other on–air reporters was the fundamental ground of this newly emergent standard in news delivery, with the scripted quip and the genuinely quick wit striving to suggest that the day's events however dire in retrospect might still find a cradle in the apparent happy optimisms of those who framed them. Happy Talk, ah!

Latterly the unquenchable market for news cast in a frame of resolute resentment has superceded that of Happy Talk in certain precincts. As is apparent in the attached image, a consilience of the two attitudes has yet to be properly reached.

August 10, 2005

What's well-said may well be gainsaid.

… The use of paper is of great antiquity. It is what the ancient Latinists call charta or chartæ. Before the use of parchment and paper passed to the Romans, they used the thin peel found between the wood and the bark of trees. This skinny substance they called liber, from whence the Latin word liber, a book, and library and librarian in the European languages, and the French livre for book; but we of northern origin derive our book from the Danish bog, the beech-tree, because that being the most plentiful in Denmark was used to engrave on. Anciently, instead of folding this bark, this parchment, or paper, as we fold ours, they rolled it according as they wrote on it; and the Latin name which they gave these rolls has passed into our language as well as the others. We say a volume or volumes, although our books are composed of pages cut and bound together. The books of the ancients on the shelves of their libraries were rolled up on a pin and placed erect, titled on the outside in red letters, or rubrics, and appeared like a number of small pillars on the shelves.

—Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D’Israeli

The author establishes the cousinhood of the Latin liber and the Danish bog on his own authority, each of the words giving deference to the same substantial thing, the treebark used for writing, for all their differential wording.

(Anciently red ochre was the stuff for swabbing a big wide swath of red on something, red ochre familiar to the earliest of proto–Barrys, before even the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, in that age when the argument for the necessity of adornment was first plainly associated with the pawful of red ochre, called by some "rubric," the paw left to swab plainly and intentionally for adornment some rubric, some red ochre, on the this or the that with the red stuff: rubric. Sure rubrics have marked the long recorded boglore of the Barry Family here and there with the red stuff from earliest times. The red has ever been the autochthonous mark of adornment of the Barry Family, firstgiven color if color is called for at all in whatever wan gesture of adornment the Barry Family has been capable of assaying down the ages)

August 9, 2005

That which cannot be gainsaid may well be said.

…In the progress of time the art of writing consisted in painting with different kinds of ink. This novel mode of writing occasioned them to invent other materials proper to receive their writing; the thin bark of certain trees and plants, or linen; and at length, when this was found apt to become mouldy, they prepared the skins of animals … The first place where they began to dress these skins was Pergamus, in Asia; whence the Latin name is derived of Pergamenæ or parchment.

—Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D’Israeli

The original parchment is said to be a product of Pergamus by the author of this piece. Certainly the word "parchment" originates in some claimed credit given Pergamus by the fashioners of the word for it among Latinizers of that earlier age.

The word was made up with that location in mind, however true in discoverable fact it may prove to be that Pergamus was the actual location of parchment's first manufacture. When people liable to make a Latin word for it encountered the useful stuff of parchment either as result of winds of Mediterranean trade or vicissitudes of military conquest in that part of the world, Pergamus, proud polis of Asia Minor at the time, undoubtedly figured importantly in that intial encounter.

Parchment was once new and yet unnamed by Romans, who leave word of it in Latin pointing to Pergamus as marker of their own original encounter with it, wherever the decisive turn toward dressed skin of animals as a writing surface first took hold.

The Romans, inexorable pragmatists as a rule, could not fail to recognize the unavoidable utility of parchment's permanencies. Parchment is your long–term man in that regard if you favor the sort of writing described by the author here as "painting with different kinds of ink," a tendency not at all unkown to the Romans, who might on the sinister hand scribe lines on wax or metal or clay or stone but also dextrously on the other hand entirely press paint on leaves or barks or papyruses with all the fully known self–extinguishing temporalities of those surfaces relative to your new man the parchment. They took up the favored practice of Pergamus and paid with the new–coined name.

August 5, 2005

Moaning for Giants

Most of the end of Beowulf is the long low moan going out from the Geats at the laying down the body of that best of men of theirs, of the Geats, of the Geats of the notorious northern rabble of Danelandia all that long time ago, grounding it out there on a headlands by the sea where all who pass in future can't fail to glimpse from ship or shore the permanent local marker made with proud purpose in reference to him, Beowulf.

Even among the Geats, so the story goes, one among them managed to embody those same excellences everywhere anciently admitted in the lore of other humans occupied in cultivating for their own reasons their own better names as being among the most worthy of excellences achievable by men. He was a great guy, Beowulf. World class stuff we recognize he had, even allowing for the hard truth that the Geats themselves as a class amounted to little more than a local expression of the taste for criminal enterprise that all the roistering gangs of them to the North of Europe foisted on the rest of the place in coming ages. A model for all those gangs, in its ways, just as their best man Beowulf is a model for the modal leading man of them.

Aw, but the Bonds, man. Incomparable, the ballplayer Bonds. Peerless, surpassing legend for legend the very best who've ever played the game. We give him that freely. Say what you will about steady–stroking Beowulf, we'd have Bonds at the plate over him any time.

Lost to the Geat–like Giants for the season by injury, the ballplayer Bonds —; more an Achilles type himself retired for now from the field with his his raw injured sensibilities than a completely disposed of Beowulf, in point of fact. But still, as with the moaning Geats or farmeandered Greeks, for the mired Giants ballclub of this season who must fend without, we moan, alike, lost to us he is, that best of them all, Bonds.

In season each ballclub must daily contest with its opponent for the desired victory, goal of their mutually invested willingness to win.

Naturally in play there is the contrary willingness of the other club to contend with, and concurrently all the difficulties entailed in successfully enacting just those timely practices as are necessary in the moment to promote the desired win.

In best games, best practices are most difficult to enact and constantly called for: transposing will to action in the given instant, realizing in practice the intended act, effectively or ineffectively influencing as may be the future course of the contest toward that desired goal of victory, all that is immediately, contingently and continuously required of its player in pursuit of that win in best games.

In the game Tic–Tac–Toe, there is a procedure requiring little training which ensures that the readied player will never lose. This is not at all the case with best games, although it says a lot about best play.

With best play in best games, the player stands an even chance, though daunted by the difficulty of delivering best play at every turn. It's the failable task that makes the best of games. It must be less than certain that best play may ever be deliverable in every instant by a player of best games however adequately trained or talented for the task, though stranger things have happened in the memorable course of best games, where people manage to engage consistently in best play.

A fellow may rise up as example out of the sorry dugout this season of the Geat–like Giants and play infallibly, or as nearly so as to match the flawlessnesses offered by his opposite number on the other willful team, flawlessnesses which are a commonplace in that opponent's wide-ranged fame.

And yet by dint and daunt, the thing may be done, the best play as near as possible equalling that of the expected excellence of the opponent in that one favorable instance.

August 4, 2005

The abrupt expressive north/south line of hills deployed there in the hundred or however many kilometers from the very limits of the City of Santa Cruz in the south to the inner precincts of your other man entirely the famous City of San Francisco to the north sketches a comprehensive cartography of the redundantly steepening topology of the mountaintype.

These hills are topped by a road called Skyline, which complements with its smoother passage the north/south running ridge described by those hills as so disposed.

Falling from the ridgeline to the east are the lands leading down to the famous San Francisco Bay.

To the west hills hold all the few miles to the beaches of the famous Pacific Ocean, home of the water-laden, eastward–tending air. Water–laden air is strained of fluids all along the gradient reaching up to the ridge where Skyline runs, continuously strained and just as continuously settling out and down in all the permanently refreshed densities of eastward–tending fogged air from coast to ridge. The ridgeline, which only a prodigously gifted cloudform might surmount, is in season surmounted as a matter of course by the congenitally capable storms of the North Pacific.

Freshly frothed from foams of Ocean, the vapors of good water flow east along the airpath, meeting immediately the mountaintypical altitudes of hills and hollows of that land, and then passes, as all air must, resolutely east, having delivered whatever toll of moisture is typically charged for that journey by that land. The famous redwood tree grows there, in those wet mountains west of that ridge.

Oh, and of course the redwood tree is not unknown east of the ridgeline as well, where it once grew to comfortable heights in great accessible clumps. But the home range of the plant is in those wet hills west of the ridge. To the east the redwood defers to woodland oaks and manzanitas on the hillsides leading down to the Bay and to the west, at the ocean, to cypresses and other pines readier to recieve the immediate bracing tang of salted air which withers redwood, famed though it may otherwise be for its formidable livelihood nearby.

August 1, 2005

Minded of the earlier name for it: Wœdmonð it was.

Wœdmonð, sure: the month of the weeds, imperative extrusive growth of things even in the frosted north from which its namers came, crowding against and overwhelming the chosen field of the Barry Family and their like in the busy millennium before the Naming.

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).

Bogblog