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.

coil The controversial Barry Coat of Arms

The controversial
Barry Coat of Arms

coil

March Madness

Without contradiction the Barry Family itself lays no claim to the notorious Barry Coat of Arms.

That distinction belongs to another group entirely which has — confusingly and somewhat arbitrarily to the Barry way of thinking — the same name.

Just this sort of confusion was predictable; was predicted in point of fact, by progenitor Barrys during the whole long harried controversy of the Naming.

The Barry Family had long been unnamed. It was a selective and serious unnaming, a public posture, that they might be called things, many things, by all the others, but did not name themselves. It was a relict thing, this posture, taken in the forgotten days before the bogs, even, but it was their posture and they had held to it all that time until Ireland. What a profound thing it was, that change, and what a profound and lengthy time they had of arguing it.

It was given to the Barry Family that naming was a religious act, the central act of the human ceremony, in which and by which object and symbology received their mutual blessing. Self-naming was a reserved act, acute and private, yet sympathies turned to doing just that, to naming themselves both anyway and publicly when they got there to Ireland.

During the entire engrossing crisis of it letters were exchanged, of course, and though the materials were primitive, and do not survive, the gist of them is recalled, as they expand readily from their famous slogans in three directions.

The slogan "No We Say," is broadly applied to a class of letters, their authors and adherents ranged in opposition to the plan of Naming. Overall this group might be described as traditionalists, if not doing something in and of itself constitutes a tradition, which in the given instance might be the case. The letters and those represented by them are commonly catalogued according to spleen, spanning the spectrum from those curt missives which tended overall to the mildest brief no, to the formidably voluminous expressions of opposition to which the Barry Family was more habitually inclined.

Counterpoised against "No We Say" in a rough triangle of sympathies were two other herds of thought and their defining slogans.

"Tell Me What to Say" was vertex C, let us say, in this triangle, and represented those growing numbers of them who had a Christian bent. The slogan was nothing if not scurrilous to their belief, of course, suggested by their opponents in a cutting reference to the slur known to all as offered by Nonnos against their Christ.

It will take longer to describe the slur than it did to raise the ire of their number on its pronouncement.

Nonnos is a bad writer: thus Nonnos with his customary inelegance may have blundered his simple way across the wordspace and into the cruel phrasing by mischance, a salient feature of his style being the serpentine circling of the point to be made without actually just going on ahead and saying it which afflicts his writing throughout.

He could not have said simply, it most likely never occurred to him to say simply, "Crucified, He then suffered."

No. Rather, he has it that Christ in his agony turns to no one in particular and says, "Tell Me what to say . . ." before his voice trails off forever.

Exactly how profoundly heretical is this nonce of Nonnos?

Very, very profoundly heretical indeed, whatever Nonnos' talentless intent, was the finding of those clumped with the slogan "Tell Me What to Say."

"Tell me what to say," indeed!

Oh, the imputing insult rankled, and was meant to, yes.

Like all their kind, members of the Barry Family were called publicly Pigfondler and worse. Undeniably and in stipulated point of fact they lived with pigs, becoming accustomed over the millennia to all the many and variously nuanced references to the embedded fact deployed in conversation of near neighbors and most of those happening by that part of the Paris Basin in that age as well. Without fail the Barry Family was called names based on the overriding dialectic of the pig, and in attending to their own interests in the matter with close if gradual attention over the ages came to the conclusion that there was great merit in much of what was said, shorn of the barbed accents of others.

The others, near neighbor or not, constantly ranged through their language for the exacting name for the comprised lot of them, that particular patch of patently pig-possessing people in that one particular portion of the Paris Basin. There was never a dearth of common pig-referencing phrases to be had in the common bin of parlance for the Barrys.

They had been named insultingly before. It wasn't that. "Tell Me what to Say" cut somehow closer to the quick than the standard they averred might be allowed. Considering the customarily garrulous and willful meanspiritedness entertained by all their neighbor's namings and the font of democratic insult of which the incident Barry Family was recipient of but a share precipitating everywhere in their speech, it was on the order of their first public service that the Barry Family so readily allowed such words to go unmet bt the corrective stave.

A profound effort was made by those among the Barrys bearing the brunt of this troubling wording to soften the slur, offering up an exegesis of the phrase in which "Tell Me what I Say . . ." (for so they had it) encompasses Christ's main new commandment: that, having taken up the Word of God, the communicant is —urged? implored? advised? enjoined? — to tell it back.

For who, inhabiting the place of one of those few gathered in witness of His duress, would not, even given the fact that they were not being directly addressed, that in awful truth no one in particular was being addressed, would not, out of whatever meager store of compassion was their share, hearing those sad last words, respond by offering back to him something of what He'd said?

"Blessed are the meek . . .?" you might say, for example, to see if it had some palliative effect.

In the event, Christ dies, and the opportunity to inhabit such a scene is removed forever from the human scheme, leading to the magnificent nostalgia of the lost and holy chance.

Exasperating juncture for the Barry Family, everything they talked about turning back and round to Him the way it did. This tendency thwarted the discursive aims of speaking freely warranted by the matter at hand in the firm view: the thing would not be done and the argument over Naming concluded without the attention of these quarrellers of Christ, but there they went off inevitably on their formidable sidetrack of exchange just beside the point among the Christians of vertex C just mentioned, some picking up the exegesis of the contested word of Nonnos and others who, finding Nonnos heretical from the go, wouldn't countenance the use or mention of his words in the least, even should it find employment to such gloriously self-serving end as the exegetes had made of it.

Settling this and moving on took quite some time, the whole exersize exacerbated by the prankish group of them, "Peekers Behind the Veil," who sought to discredit the exegetes by flauting the restriction against examining Nonnos' words directly and after doing so reporting back that the quote was in point of fact, "Tell Me What To Say . . .," not "Tell Me What I Say" at all.

The exegetes responded by direct refutation of the argument, denying that "to" replaces "I" in the formulation, although a telling number of them quickly began to prepare a second exegesis based on that substitution just in case.

March 27, 2005

March 27, 2005

Our Correspondent at last weighs in on the delinquent bogwandering of peter ramus:

True, true, true, it sipple out deh
So wha' fe do? mek we slide out deh, oh yeah
true, true, true, it sipple out deh
let me tell, we slide out deh
 — Max Romeo, War inna Babylon

As a condition of my service to HCE in the position of Bogblog correspondent I own imperfect tools: a computer with a fast internet connection and a robust wandering ignorance.

In almost every direction in which my interests have seemingly lurched on being appointed to the chair reserved for correspondence here at HCE, peter ramus has consistently carried the interests of HCE as sole measure proper action.

Yes it sipple out deh, chancey slidey the going on the internet. comprehensive little compression of the long–consonant perspective of the bogcentric Barry Family itself which informs all the proposed workings here at HCE. We slide out deh indeed, as the song would have it, and in keeping with that practice, I corresponded.

Off the curled lip of the Editor slips the comprehensive slight against peter ramus, charged with both inexusable inactivity and unorderly activity at once. On my own initiative admittedly, but consistent with the spirit of the evident joint enterprise of HCE, however virtual up until this point, I stand charged with intiatiating a program of correspondence.

As directed when first employed here I connected peter ramus to the internet with allowable motive ignorant curiosity using the vaguely post–lapsarian raft of computing equipment gathered here at HCE. Making myself familiar with that equipment and all the slogging through the internet to which that equipment became so attached (q.v. "it sipple out deh") was in perfect accord with the presumptive task of correspondence to which peter ramus was assigned.

Allowing room for ignorance in the early stages of that assignment, when the tools at hand are given their rude first uses and the slipped result is the well-known consequence of any new sought skill, it must be admitted that from time to time during the unavoidable learning process it must inexorably issue forth from the bench of any correspondent, preceding even any ribbon cutting ceremony of explicit instruction from the Editor, given the chance of correspondence, the given correspondence, ablurted something escaping the thumb-quashing sign of the Editor which must surely have been its fate had it flown in that direction instead of the inadverently public direction of the internet.

It's what a correspondent does [should the position of correspondent ever be occupied by even the most casual of staff, who, relaxing their rapt attention momentarily from other matters entirely, and by some arbitrary twist of luc familiar enough with the equipment after a full decade of looking into the computer at hand to in fact produce after all that absorbing attention the modest not to say meagre output desired of their fair share of the actual work of the position being occupied, and given lead time and constant encouragement as required to actually produce such correspondences as has been assigned directly by the Editor then and only then —ed.].

{Hey that's no fair. don't interrupt that way. Let peter ramus have his say}

[O.K. I will not interrupt, except in this anti–performative endpoint.—ed.]

{peter ramus will now raise against the Editor the ideally pacifying hand of Patrick in response, that hand the known agreed Celtic gesture whose alternative, consisting in reality of the sinistral suasions of the stout staff of wood so convenient to the bounds of any freely engaged conversation with its pleasing pointed antidote to the ills that may arise there, is immediately foresworn by the opposite instant upraised paw of peace. Under the sign of just that chosen gesture, peter ramus may demure in response to the Editor's implication that actions taken and declined by peter ramus failed of the charge accepted in taking to the bench of correspondent here}

Curiosity is the hopeful pilot project of ignorance. Setting out to correspond, I tested the formal requirements of the machineries of the internet to recieve such communications as might be deliverable. The utter public nature of the internet is notorious, and as would be expected in any public space, all the ranging expressions of public communication among humans are evoked there.

In and out of the wide range of public communications made possible by the internet weaves the web of the World Wide Web of deserved fame. And here and there along the weft of the World Wide Web the expected clumps of people who seem to know what they're talking about make themselves known.

It seemed the proper first target of our interest in corresponding to aim for the packs of presumed people who seem to know what they're talking about when they're talking about the internet itself (which did not simply happen at all, of course, but rather may be treated by users of it as if it did just happen largely through the concerted efforts down the decades of massed platoons of people so evidently working to realize the internet in the immediate precincts of HCE itself, the virtual site of which is near enough the epicenter of the remains of that global transvaluation of communications whose budding likelihood was so severely corrected recently as to result in the slumped fortune of the entire region currently inhabited by the Barry Family itself.) seemed at the time and seems still the proper course of any correspondence.

of a knowing pack of them will be found out, discernable by signs common to such a pack, a pack of people who seem to know what they're talking about, scuffling in their recognizeable ways over some scrap of knowledge common to them, but not to me.

I am not perfectly ignorant, more's the pity. This deficiency is well known to the Bogblog's gracious Editor and the few other correpondents I've ever directly addressed through the offices made possible by the admittedly pleasing confluence of a fast internet conection and the curious ignorant wandering it enables, which wandering I have been advised by the Editor's recent misssive contravenes the stated terms and conditions of my employment here at HCE in no uncertain terms. Nevertheless, I insist my actions do comport with the Standards of the Barry Family whose irreducible generalities have been transmitted to me on so many occasions by the Editor himself.

Uncontrovertably as a first condition in aquitting my agreed responsibility to correspond I must necessarily seek out signs of others to correspond with.

Independent of the explicit diretive of the Editor, but under what must surely be the standard goals of correspondence, I did seek out on the internet and give ear to the conversations of people who seem to know what they're talking about, the scuffling lot of them gathered as expected around some contested scap of knowledge, tossed out there on the internet

and to limit my attention to just those sorts of conversations in the main, is given as profer of my adherence to the goals broadly advanced by my terms of employment.

The innate inclination to drift off is known even to the Barry Family (whose agents admittedly we all are here at HCE, however causally as individuals we've adopted the required oath of allegience to whatever it is in the boglore of the Barrys we've signed on for as a condition of service here at HCE). Thus it counts as no surpise that I might in service to my agreed charge drift into correspondence on behalf of Editor of the Bogblog with precisely those people who seem to know what they're talking about which the internet is so famously said to be freighted.

Given my own resources and the equipment at hand, I cannot know unerringly on approaching every abitrary pack of people who seem to know what they're talking about who among them may have the goods except that often enough, thankfully, in the course of the to-and-fro of witnessed conversation, some statement is offered up from among those who chose to say anything at all that simply cannot be true.

The internet may be vast, and its encountered conversations endless, but it is bounded usefully enough in this way by the common lie of the solecism, false inwit or trip to errancy familiar to every level of rhetoric no matter how abstruse, so that even with my own preteratively endowed ignorance I can often enough get my bearings there, or go read Fafblog instead.

When in the recent age of print I looked in the letters part of the New York Review of Books for the great eviscerating exchanges among people who seemed to know what they were talking about, I couldn't help but be struck by the rigourously brandished learning fashioned in the peculiar jargon of that particular knowledge they proposed to have, each fact of which had its own barbed uses in their discourse.

Meandering about the internet one day I engaged in a reluctant chat with an enthusiast of the war in Iraq.

Word turned to the Lancet study, and I immediatedly recalled the remarks of dsquared, Tim Lambert and Chris Lightfoot on this subject, which passed the first test of a good argument, that people who seem to know what they're talking about have bothered to engage it.

Naturally having read their words in the spirit of expectant ignorance I'd looked forward to a fair engagement with what they argued, if there was to be one, from others familiar enough with all the epidemiology and practices in the field and standards of the discipline and weilding the chi square this and the regression of the other, until it became clear enough even to me that, no such engagement having been offered, their argument was not seriously challenged.

The war enthusiast had the unserious refutation: Mr. Fred Kaplan had the goods, he claimed, sniffing the MSM of propaganda around the corpus of the other three without otherwise bothering to investigate, I think.

Admittedly I'm become churlish in the presence of ignorance equal to my own. Over the years I've come to avoid as much the bother of the churlishness as the agreed ignorance engendering it. When the room in the rhetoric is cleared of its last fact the purely ignorant end of the argument may proceed. In my time I have lead my own way into that room.

I paused to still in my own fashion the churlishness agreed ignorance engenders in me. I suspected the purposes of the the enthusiast of the War in Iraq clenching fast to the unarguably ignorant views of Mr. Kaplan on the subject of the Lancet Study were as as sterongly appended thao that errant history as the intertidal limpet clutching needlfully to the somewhat arbitrarily given solid surface to be found amidst the swirl of waters of the shallowest conversations everywhere.

History is hardly ever excluded from public conversation, but proposes as a matter of discipline and under its own powers to exclude from conversation what didn't happen as a matter of form.

Allowing always for the odd momentous circurmstance down the ages in the course of human events when what didn't happen animates the further matter of human events as a matter of course anyway, and complicates its easy telling, History adjoins every syllabled breath of human conversation with its measured circumference about the very errancies so common to the ignorant.

March 5, 2005

March 5, 2005

David Brooks is a public intellectual in the weak sense that each member of the thinking class is a public intellectual. Any member of the thinking class shares the device of mindfully engaging in some specialized human function or other, and in that weak sense any thoughfully engaged task presents insistent evidence for the existence of the class of thinkers operating publicly among the humans.

The thinking class is almost as widely disposed among the humans as its works, its works, should they come to the point of a shovel, taken up there for what good it will ever do by that other widely dispersed set of actors of strong back and indifferent mind among whom those of us here at HCE, indifferent workers even when so disposed, have found ourselves on afterthought clumped as co-worker as if by rule all down the years.

But certainly even the meanest clerk wielding the most recalcitrant of equipment is of another sort entirely from the worker whose back is turned to shovelling. Without question the clerk, engaged however numbingly in the nominally thoughtful behavior at hand for what good it will ever do, belongs inherently to the thinking class, more's the pity, enlisted there publicly by occupation in the formally established necessities of the thinking class as a whole.

It is recorded that there is a life of the mind, and that members of the thinking class are eligible to go off over there and take part in it. That rare pleasing goal is offered up to all the members of the thinking class as a recognizable possibility of membership. It motivates the acts of large swaths of humans in the thinking class who would have just that sort of life for their own.

It is hardly the universally desired goal of the thinking class as a whole, however, to have after the life of the mind. The previously described clerk might as a means prefer the shoveller's chore to much more thinking, if truth be told. Palpably many so employed in the hard necessities of the thinking class would as soon foreswear the endemic sorrows of the scutwork of thinking they do for the rude alternative of indifference available elsewhere were it not for the hard necessary conventions imposed by the capitalism and all on the modern age. It's what they've been given to do, those meanest of clerks, thinking through the required mindful acts over and over and over again, and they grudgingly do just that — excepting from time to time the odd Bartleby.

Even from our observable distance here at HCE we can see that this perspective informs the vast majority of those enlisted in the workings of the thinking class. They have their practical loyalty to goals of the thinking class, this majority, autonomously hitched beside the proposed ideal of the life of the mind owned as that class's great self-justification. The life of the mind makes no nevermind to them. But it is by definition the nature of any majority, no matter how vast, to fail to include all members of its class, and there would always remain a residual should that majority released from the bondage of mindfulness they experience and be returned by some marvelous device to the indifference they honestly apire to.

is the ideal without loyalty as it is to the necessary formalities of mindfulness, though certainly current in the minds of , is the perspective of all. There is, as has been noted repeatedly, the life of the mind, and just short of that all the many occupations satisfyingly take the measure of their occupier's thoughtfulness. Many members of the thinking class, acknowledging the attractively proposed life of the mind, still find sufficient pleasure in

David Brooks is favorably disposed by his position in the thinking class to enter if he so choses into the life of the mind, but circumstances find him beached just short of that fair shore, positioned as he is as a columnist for The New York Times, our agreed standard in a newspaper here at HCE,

March 5, 2005

March 5, 2005

San Francisco Giants

The first stirring of it, the first bud of bush, spurt of shoot, surge of sap.

Spring nears the north of Earth.

Ball players assemble yet again with their clubs, readying themselves for the great annual American agon of the game of baseball. The championship, The World Championship of Baseball itself, stands offered to the successful team which with talent and good fortune might command that fabled prize this year, for all it's worth.

Our hopes, our fresh new hopes in this fresh new year, marvelously refreshed and returned, go with the San Francisco Giants, once again, as ever.

Go, Giants, say those of us here at HCE who have anything to say at all.

March 3, 2005

March 3, 2005

Happy New Year, as we say here at HCE.

squiggly

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 III: 03.03.05 to —;

Collected incompletions of the current year, by monthname.

Volume II: 03.03.04 to 03.02.05

Accumulated incompletions of the indicated annum.

Volume I: 03.03.03 to 03.02.04

A year's worth of freely sniffable Bog in one compact spot!

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