HCE Bogblog May.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 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

imprimery n.

a print; impression; also, a printing house; art of printing. [Obs.]

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Our recently rescinded first editon (featuring The Mage of Baghdad!)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

May flies

In theory if not in practice the Barry Family Walk distinguishes itself from that of the much discussed and statistically significant drunkard's walk in being volitional, conditional and traditional.

The Barry Family hoof sets off at first with customary, certain, a priori regard for both the readily perceptible terrain and the hoof's known lofted capabilities, empirically understood to include of course, immediate to the hoof, a shoe should the precieved terrain and the lofted hoof need such pleasant assist, although admittedly in the long ages since the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, the critical tension between the Barry Family shoe in its application and the Barry Family shoe in theory was never easily reconciled in practice, the applied shoe being so often mismatched or absent entirely down the ages, and as often the other theoretical shoe, however necessary, unclearly evidenced as well.

Stepping it off the Barry Family walk apes in many of its particulars the drunkard's walk, admittedly. But the inebriate has little truck at any time with the consistently over-scrupulous intentionality notoriously granted by the Barry Family to its representative hoof. The drunk, who is of no mind in the matter, does not have that, however much the thoughtless plotted step of the drunk may in the end match the skeptically designed path of Barrys over time. The Barry Family walk, in principle, starts where it will and stops where it must under the direct vigilant authority of its owner; the undesigned passage of the drunk, not.

Thus we say the Barry Family walk is entirely volitional.

Severely moderated by an avowedly sedentary sentiment, the standard Barry Family formulation of its walk eventually took on the approximation of a hopeful slogan.

"We're not going anywhere, eh?" would be that slogan's cognate in English, though regularly down the ages it was borne instead among them by the tufts and furrows of the archaic alternative language of the eyebrow of the Barry Family, rather than with the famously usual language of the words the Barry Family had so regularly mouthed in their time. a sentiment customarily as rarely voiced as it was widely shared out among their kind wherever they ended up going down the ages.

Early on the proto-pack of them acknowledged, even before the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, that "gradually, west," was the truer statement of their walk's directionality. However much they may have cheered the sedentary standard evoked by "We're not going anywhere, eh?" and, amittedly, the Barrys with their eyebrows were always after the expression, and they were often within an eyelash of it, when they had at it often with their arched ranks of eyebrows, but even that small enough over millennia

All along the Barry Family knew "We're not going anywhere, eh?" for an approximation best expressed by the tufted ironies of the eyebrow.

Naturally the Barry Family walk was the bogwalk, the ever vigilant instransigently mistrustful oft-elided step made necessary by actually equivocal conditions on the ground in the millennia there in the Paris Basin. Frequently enough the better shoe was the canoe in those parts, free-ranging ubiquitous water in the low spot there requiring the necessary conversion of shod hoof to apt raft time and time again.

Shoe or canoe, brogue or pirogue?

In principle the Barry Family pragmatically enough chose to suspend all thought of shoes and hoofs and measured paces whenever conditions favored relinquishing such progress as could be wished to the boat's command instead, although the vexed question of the discriminator between the two domains was subject of otherwise desultory bogwide conversation rafting down the ages.

Thus we say the Barry Family walk is entirely conditional.

Naturally the Barry Family walk can be taught by performance, the various postures and poses entailed in its execution easily aped by the attentive student, their studied practices occasionally assisted by the corrective, "aw, not that way!" as circumstances indicate, but nevertheless, not difficult to learn, however painstaking in execution.

As performed in the Paris Basin, the hoof-move of the Barry Family walk was informed by all the muck its performers mastered over time, condensing for each student in the sway of its compendious gait the best-laid plans as empirically derived from what could be made of their mostly successful wanderings over the millennia in that place.

However conceived, however executed, however laid aside for the better ground of a boat in the Paris Basin, the practiced Barry Family walk suited the approximating sedentary slogan they had taken, which was, after all, the oft-acknowledged self-describing "We're not going anywhere, eh?" which stood roughly true as time transpired all down those many millennia.

Thus we say that the Barry Family walk is entirely traditional.

Volitional, conditional, and traditional is the Barry Family walk, in this view.

May 31, 2005

A Street. Cat chases Bird chases Worm. Across the way, Officer leans on lampost, snoozing

In fairly disposed strokes off the hand of Herriman comes this image, admittedly pallid substitute for the thing as it turns out printed on page 48 of The Best of Don Marquis, (Doubleday, Garden City 1946) where we can't help but be led to believe that it is meant to illustrate at the very least the last few words of Mr. Marquis's short work The Robin and the Worm, written in the characteristic voice of the cockroach archie of fond memory.

The willed swift procession of worm and bird and cat of Herriman's image artfully simplifies the mordant wording of Mr. Marquis's last few lines, illustratively digesting Mr. Marquis's words there at the end of The Robin and the Worm just as Mr. Marquis by his wording digests the canonical mordancy of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

By the wit of Marquis the reader of the piece is given the distance between the vermiform appendix and nirvana,as well–travelled as it is unregarded, rather than that contrarily derived distance between heaven and earth, horatio, which remains well–regarded and little travelled even in this age.

…for the worm listened and winked
at horatio while the skull and the
ghost and the prince talked
saying there are more things
twixt the vermiform appendix
and nirvana than are dreamt of
in thy philosophy horatio
fool de riddle fol de rol
must every parrot be a poll
archy

The simplicity of Herriman's sharply offered lines scales nicely, even in the grossly magnified version of the image here.

May 24, 2005

A contest is under way on the internet. The simple rules of it are found here, the straightforward goal of it to create from scratch a site which is the most most widely visited and linked to during the course of the contest: a pure popularity contest which, as all popularity contests of whatever purity, simultaneously reveals the range of the audience for such things at the same time as that audience, such as it is, ranges itself over the choice bits offered up for approval.

The popularity contest formalizes the intrinsically attractive charms of shameless self-promotion known to every human being, giving such self-promotion a context and a goal, which in this case is simply to attract the largest audience on the internet in a given period of time to the contestant's site.

Apprehending the largest possible audience for any site confronts its designer with a question whose answer is typically considered settled a priori: who exactly the site is being designed for is already given: it's being designed for this particularly needy client who desires that particularly attentive audience, of course.

In a popularity contest, the client remains at least formally obscure. The client may well be the designer's own good self-promoting self, but the client may also, alternately, be the audience, as near as anyone can tell in a well–formed popularity contest. It is trivial to prove that the curiously undefined client's needs and the needs of the largest audience, whatever those needs may be, go hand in hand in a well–formed popularity contest.

The entrant in the popularity contest is assured that the client, however loosely defined, will casually answer, "Give them what they want," whenever the client's needs are broached.

The range of what people want has lent itself to vigorous empirical study over the millennia and the many tested methodologies have arisen over time to take advantage of all the many commonly known wants of people as established in practise down the ages, gauging what people want and having it over to them always the most generously recieved gesture the designer of a communicated gesture may ever hope to make. It far surpasses by common consent the raised stick of opposition among the many mentionable gestures of human possibility, for example, as a means of drawing in the willing audience.

Admittedly, some caucus of a complete crowd would still remain for the proposed conversation should a stick or any of its metaphorical equvalents be raised, hoping by some droll chance to experience, perhaps at first hand, the clash of conversation taken to its formal limit, which has its own long–accommodated place among the serviceable gatherings of humans.

What will people visit and link to on the internet? Among other things, if a close analysis of email recieved here at HCE is any indication, the casual designer of internet messages will assume on first principles that perpetual promises of tumescence delivered arbitrarily to a crowd including humans males will for all the reliable reasons attract the attention of a bare minimum of males perpetually susceptible to promises of tumescence. It isn't surprising that the titles of entrants in the contest include cleverly crafted references to the known proclivities. On their own, people will visit and link to sites whose subject is something they're already intersted in from before.

This site, an entrant in the contest seeking visitors and links, is the canny effort indeed.

Amusingly enough, here the audience cleverly attracted to the site is obviously unaware of being among the audience for a popularity contest enticed to the site designed with the cunning display of what elicits a crowd of blog-specific internet users inexorably drawn as a regular course of their ongoing activities to fresh new blog-related messages such as the one contrived here. Blog folk are looking out for just this sort of message anyway, and it is clearly one of them: a small something or other calling "hey, you!" specifically and by name to the all blog–related folk.

This spare announced measure of celebrity of the authors of blogs, however simplisticly marked up, is a likely enough attractor of just that crowd, the blog–related crowd of the blog folk on the internet, many of whom author their own blogs and might have their own good reason for looking over the list.

The blog–related crowd on the internet may or may not be the largest aggregable crowd on the internet (for which see known proclivities) but it is one coherent bunch notorious for swiftly visiting itself on and linking to things, previously disposed as they are, the blog folk, to engage in exactly the measure of popularity being sought by the designer.

The site's designer incorporates into the planned success of the site in the popularity contest the multiplier effect of the previously established blog–related audience, already urged by temperament, training and past practice to visit and link to things on the internet. The designer transfers authority for the site's intrinsically self–promoting message over to the good graces of the blog–related internet of the blog folk, who will make of it what they will, given the known blog–related propensities.

The measure of celebrity of specific blog authors is a constant sore point for almost everyone among the blog–related folk. Sites such as Technorati and The Truth Laid Bear have already been established, each purposely offering up its own cunning measure of blog celebrity. The blog folk may well greet the new spare list of names on the designer's site with all the residual suspicion inspired by known previous attempts to agreeably rank the blogs, giving it far shorter shrift than the designer would desire.

Blog folk are not the only constant denizens of the internet by any means, not the only group likely to aggregate immediately around the odd new message as it appears there. The community of folks who staff the machineries of the internet itself, the IT crowd, those who see to it that all the visiting and linking to things on the internet can happen in the first place, are on hand around the globe and around the clock as well, and thus equally likely to enlist knowingly or not in an audience drawn naturally to a message about itself, just as blog folk likely will.

Some IT folk are blog folk, too, though by no means all IT folk are blog folk. IT folk have unsurprising instant access to new messages on rhe internet, given the overtly accessible nature of messages on the internet which IT folk themselves have so suavely built into whole operation from the go. Making IT folk the target rather than blog folk the target is done at this site entered in the popularity contest. Understandably the site collects more information that might seem strictly necessary in parsing its own popularity here.

Displaying an icon at the bottom of the page proclaiming the site valid HTML 3.2 according to the standards of the W3C is a good joke reserved for those who can stand it given by the IT folk to their own ilk. Whatever the eventual outcome of the popularity contest it has a least isnpired this good wit.

May 17, 2005

The territory practically covered by rhetoric stretches roughly all the way from just saying to just sayin'.

Putting aside as much as possible our own curdled view which leads directly but unfortunately astray of the main point of the matter discussed below, we here at HCE who naturally follow the fate of the English language as a consequence of our residual share of admitted alegiance to the long–held proprietary regard of members of the Barry Family for the fate of their favored speech, do certainly look upon the current academic throes of what's professed to be English with the attention it so briefly deserves.

Thus when it is proposed in institutions of higher learning that a thing called Theory has risen from the smoke and ruins of the English Departments of our current age, propelled by its own explosive petard of skeptical investigation to spread throughout the whole range of human grammars of communication with its lit criticisms, we here at HCE with any long–term investment whatsoever in the fate of the admittedly hobbled discipline of rhetoric must repeat our wan claim for primacy in that area of investigation as being previously and famously reserved for rhetoric's specialized attentions instead.

In schools as the Scholastics would generally have had them, and particularly as the Late Scholastics would have had them, back in the day when the late lot of them finally and conclusively caught on to what the previous per se Scholastics were on about in the first place, rhetoric provided the retort where all the ingredients of crafted human communication might meet their measured mix.

Ah, palmy days in the lives of those disposed to invest themselves openly in rhetoric, those days of the Late Scholastics were. Whole crude departments of rhetoric flourished everywhere under the order of the Late Scholastics, properly staffed things with the all latest appointments.

The civic impulse to reserve to itself an institution of higher learning was well–met all around Europe in that age, much as in a later age in an entirely different context, the civic impulse spread everywhere in America to construct a ballyard here and there to complement its beloved game of baseball. The Late Scholastics laid it on thick for rhetoric there in the model institution of learning common to all the marginally sufferable cities of Christendom.

Later, with the revolution in higher education occasioned by the arrival of the new sciences, institutions of higher learning foreswore in droves their previous alegiance to the discipline of rhetoric, unfunding staff and removing the whole shrunken enterprise offsite as much as possible.

Instead, in the pervasive American model of higher education, these institutions had their "Classics" and "Language" departments, and unavoidably in time their departments of "English" as well, to sop up what little juice remained of the matter previously covered by the now deprecated discipline of rhetoric.

The new practicum parted out as much as possible the useful bits of rhetoric to newly designated fields of study. Rhetoric's associated logic was sent off to the side of philosophy nearest science, its associated grammar remanded to the uses of the newly–fashioned "Language" departments. By the time "Communications" departments became the global norm in higher education, it may have been thought that all the matter of rhetoric had been well and truly spoken for by the modern dispensation of its classically defined interests.

English departments were a late development in the movement to revalue what was classically considered higher education. They came along in force in the popular American model of higher education only little more than a century ago, really, their subject, English, suddenly considered just as properly essential to education as rhetoric once had been, required generally of any aspirant to higher education according to the widespread American plan.

Ah, and the staff that might have been reserved for rhetoric, and the nice appointments of offices and classrooms elaborated by the American plan for higher education, went to the English department instead, among other beneficiaries of the newly fashioned practicum. In this age it is the rare department of rhetoric in any institute of higher education that's any bigger than the philology department say, or the semantics department in the unlikely event there are any of those still left, contrasted with more English departments than anyone could properly shake a stick at.

In higher education's long decampment from the trivium of the Late Scholastics some scholars emigrated logically toward the newly concieved department of philosphy nearest science. Some others gravitated toward that haven for grammars of communication locked in language. Rhetoric, though discounted, did not cease, and as the originally defined interests of the English department in higher education gradually wandered away over time to found more precisely defined disciplines of their own in modern institutes of higher learning, what was left for English to be about came seriously into question. Certainly the collected uses of the words of the English language still seemed home ground for the discipline, howevermuch intruded upon by the allied techiniques of archaeology, say, or bibiliography, or any of the other contributors to the library sciences, where the sum of the material retrievable over time equals the literary canon of the English language, such as it is.

From a somewhat circumscribed but defensible postion the remaining professionals of the discipline of English are left among their many other distinguishing duties to determine what is advisable to retrieve anymore from what remains retrievable at all by the intercessions of the library sciences in the way of a canon of the English language. But if the prime goal of the department of English is to be merely the advancement of a catalog of best expressions of the language, it seems surely destined as a discipline to fade in a concievable future dispensation of the departments of the institutions of higher education into complete adjunct subservience to the library sciences, home acres of the catalogues of literature.

In the modern practicum of higher education as so vigorously adumbrated in the American plan, the discipline of English, modelling the classic treatment by Scholastics of the texts of Latin and Greek, harbors a set of tools for understanding not only how but also why a particular text is meant to be read, placed peremptorily as it might be before even the perfectly reluctant gaze of the supposed looker after education in that language.

How is the arbitrary text meant to be read? The Latin grammarians, cribbing from the Greeks, and then assiduously emulated by the Scholastics, jury–rigged a formal scaffolding for their own language, its grammar. If the text was in Latin, climbing through the grammar would take you to the meaning of its sentences by and by, so it was implied.

But also, why is the arbitrary text meant to be read?

As reluctant as the supposed looker at any arbitrary text may be to initiate the daunting task of taking the firm grasp of the grammar of the thing and climbing by that means all the way to its supposed comprehesible meaning, irreffutable argument may be offered to explain the good reason for the proposed reading, satisfying the question. Or, given the good authority of the nuns, for example, with their established standards of compliance familiar to every supposed looker, the question may be snarty put off in the event for later more intensive investigation on the part of the curious student, satifying any residual interest in the question, should such remain.

May 16, 2005

Physical contact between players of the game of baseball is highly circumscribed by rules defining the few allowable instances where contact is countenanced in the least and, by proscriptive elimination, all the other contestant meetings disallowed by those defining rules.

We here at HCE who follow the game at all yet recall the mourned meeting of Snow and Rodruigez of recent memory as the sad thing perfectly allowed by the permissions of physical contact just there between the runner approaching home plate and the catcher athwart the thing, most utterly willed contact permissible in all of baseball that meeting forever represents.

Oh, and too there are allowed in baseball the unwilled physical contacts of ineluctably convergent teammates as played out from time to time.

There are the few permissibly allowed physical contacts of the game and the motley many of unwilled contacts of the game as well. All the the available rest of humanity's roisterous methodologies of immediate physical contact are disallowed for the agreeable purposes of baseball.

May 15, 2005

As an aside, the Ides of May pales before the Ides of March.

An aside, strictly spoken, must propose with some chosen few words the interesting other thing entirely, and the Ides of March has done just that almost everywhere behind the force of the purely literary effect established over and over again by followers of Shakespeare. The Ides of March is the bad sign, in the widely bewared words.

The Ides of May, as an aside, gives no easy access to another thing entirely, unlike the Ides of March. The bewaring in March is unmatched by the well-known anything of May.

Nonetheless, it is the nature of each Roman month to have a midpoint roughly two weeks along it course, its Ides. May will have one, being a Roman month, whatever the undetermined associations of the event.

The notion of the Ides came fashioned from the lunar calendar, recreating there in the Roman solar month that midpoint hinged half-way along the lunar month between beginning and end of the evident periodic range of observable luminosities of that big old thing. After about two weeks, the lunar month is halfway done, its subject suspended most brilliantly between the light–lacking moon of the start of the month and the moon's lacking light of month's end. The rough two weeks of the Ides performs this middling lunar service for the benefit of the Roman solar month.

As as aside, it is interesting to note that for all practical purposes the word Ides itself goes unused in English outside the ominous context of March in common conversation. Ides of March is now the irreducible lexeme of the thing, the smallest string of words in which Ides is ever likely to occur. It doesn't matter, and scant few care, what the Ides is about precisely, given the baleful turn of the rest of the phrase.

The Ides of course is like the fortnight, but tethered to measure of a particular month. The fortnight can be furled freely from any given startpoint to cover the arbitrary couple of weeks, little though the term is ever employed anymore. It is not the fashion of the age to hold time to the measure of a fortnight, or an Ides except as noted.

May 14, 2005

Ideally we imagine the ball a sphere. Close visual examination denies this ideal in every case, of course: the suface of a sphere is surpassingly smooth, the surface of the visible ball not.

The ball is not a sphere, though it is a sphere's close cousin, round, just as Earth is round, Earth for that matter much nearer being a sphere than a ball really, much rounder by honest measure than a ball even before accounting for any of the scuff of uses that might be marked off against either. Factory-fresh the circumambulating stiches of the ball form a singular track of slightly offset red chevrons which rise up over the bunched leather straps of the ball's surface as the stitches pass through the eccentric symmetry of one complete orbit of the ball. This elevated path of stitches on a ball would dwarf the Himalayas if brought to scale, Earth being so much smoother, rounder in the sphere-like sense, than the standard ball with its stitches is ever intended to be.

May 13, 2005

Provisionally, we entertain the ball, the ball being offered up as the whole point, really, of the nice argument elaborated by the crafted rules of baseball.

image of a baseball by Katrine Naleid ISBN1-57-88270004-9

This nice image of a baseball originates with Katrine Naleid, whose photograph was taken up by the Marcel Schurman Company and printed in full color on card stock. ISBN 1-57-88270004-9, it says, verso.

The image there on the card is near twice life–size, giving the immediate impression of an object seen from extreme close range —; the looker as it were having crawled to the spot allowed by the focal ministries of Ms. Nalied's photography to a place so near the thing that the whole of the ball goes outside the range of adequate view, filled as that view is from periphery to shining periphery instead by the most minute consideration of the surface of the object made available to the properly propinquitous eye.

Denied the ability to recreate that precise effect here in the Bogblog, we nevertheless choose to imagine that those aspects of the ball which may remain after the formally reductive tendencies of the Boglblog are taken into account are sufficiently illustrated by what's left as shown here of the original intent of Ms. Naleid and the Company she keeps that we may proceed to take up the imagined ball, provisonally given point of the whole thing, really, as if it were quite palpably present in our properly purposive paw.

Lost by our admitted misapropriation here is the finest evidence of the acute scuffed uses to which the ball of Ms. Naleid has been put in its time, which the ball imagined twice its size reveals instantly. All along the curved seam of the twice–size ball little holes in the leather accept the red thread of stitching which binds the ball to its proposed identity as a sphere. In Ms. Naleid's image these holes show clear signs of wear. Some scrape of use has torn at the skin punctured by these holes, leaving four or five of them ragged–edged, and just adjacent to that on the stretched surface of the skin there on the ball the associated marks of plain meeting with some intervening other thing altogether.

May 12, 2005

Though elemental to the well–formed argument of baseball, the good stick of wood is not sufficient in and of itself to make for much of a game of baseball at all without your other man the point of the argument itself ready at hand: It's not batball they call it, no. They call it baseball, because of the ball. Without the ball the good stick of wood may still join in many concievable arguments to which the stave or fescue might be properly applied, but it's just not baseball without the ball. Thus the stick of wood is the necessary condition without being the sufficient condition of the game.

The well-formed argument of baseball includes always the vaunted ball, prime object of attention of the very name of the game itself.

May 11, 2005

Featuring as it does the persuasive stick of wood offering its services in the contested resolution of a particularly well–formed argument, the game of basebal naturally attracts those of us here at HCE still sunk in the boglore of the Barry Family, who see and admire that similarity between the game of baseball and the allowable accoutrements for properly achieving the proposed termination of any well–formed argument imaginable to the Barry Family.

The ould deployable stick of wood and the good argument moving along to resolution, ah!

May 10, 2005

The swatting stick proposes a plane which intersects the place of the object moving in its own sweet path. The bat hits the ball.

The good stick of wood, forever the proper outlier of well-formed argument in the Barry Family view of the matter, is indeed integral to the game of baseball. Marked by occasional outbursts of invigorating activity, the game itself in every instance does tend potentially by grace of its rule-bound behavior toward its own natural conclusion, the termination devoutly to be wished of any well-formed argument, where stick of wood is forever properly at hand to help herd the thing along to resolution, as the Barry Family would have it.

The Barry Family's own long known model of vigorous conclusive public argument ideally allows for the good stick of wood among its proper tools, just as baseball does, though the Barry Family over the ages has inclined rather toward the tactic of interminable truculent suspension of argument than the more conclusive gestures of dispute available to the ash– or briarroot–bearing disputant in the most generously allowed model of good argument the Barrys have ever been capable of imagining.

May 5, 2005

The Natural History of Eluded Fate

A neighboring isopod, for instance, had our distant ancestor not adroitly avoided the beastly thing's known appetites, might well have lunched on all the possible predecessors of those of us here at HCE at a time well before anything remotely similar to us in the very least had exercised its chance to occur.

Perhaps there is some comfort in the denied catastrophe of that, howevermuch we choose to take what didn't happen at all back then for granted on a daily basis.

May 4, 2005

Water is coincident with life in the Barry Family boglore.

In the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family the lot of them eventually adopted what came to be the common definition of life among them for the purpose of moving the main discourse along its intending path, which was toward the intrusive act of discovery itself, that aggrandizing gesture by which the members of the Barry Family resolutely colonized themselves by acceding to certain crucially mutual recognitions of self-similarity, authorizing themselves by submitting themselves to discovery.

The Barry Family had the rough rule of thumb for what was meant by life, a rough rule suited to the empirical needs of the newly conceivable Barry Family being crafted early in that distinctly provisional era. Later, in all the millennia in the Paris Basin following its discovery, the Barry Family was not much bothered to revisit the rule of thumb, serviceable enough it proved to be.

The Barry Family accepted the view that for all practical purposes the stuff of life had water with it, water the motive accompanist of the mutable substances of life as the Barry Family cared to think of it. This view was common even in the "pre-putative" times of the Barry Family, before the era of the Discovery of the Barry Family itself can strictly be said to have begun, of course.

Given the influential drizzle of the scores of tens of thousands of years during which the predecessory population prior to Barrys pursued its primordial interests in the melted mush of glacier that would later come to be known as Northern Europe, it is unsurprising that water would figure as coterminous with the stuff of life among those who managed to follow along at all.

May 3, 2005

May is Semele's month, the first day of it her day, Semele the mother taken by Zeus to make Dionysius, Semele whose encompassingly answered request of Zeus is matched by Arjuna's request of Krishna; "Show it to me. Show me all."

Arjuna's vivid consequential response is well-recorded in the literature. Semele, willing encompasser of that provided all, gains entry into inexistence by her embrace of all, leaving back the little residual Dionysius perhaps, fond leaving gift on her departure.

Arjuna's striving is, for our purposes, the epitome of all consequential human acts: he gathers in his great engaging human motion all previously consequential human acts, authorizing by the great conscientious endorsement of his owned striving the consequence to come of all of it.

Semele's embrace reaches round Allstory, where Arjuna's significances can be plotted, to encompass and thus necessarily achieve extirpation in transcendence.

Arjuna's engaged striving is ever-consequential in the human scheme of Allstory. In it abides a reference to all motive acts of humans.

Semele's embraced transcendence leaves its residue, the wonderful new–named Dionysius, Dionysius a fond remark she makes leaving, perhaps, distilled residuum of something left when she goes perfectly off to nothing.

The first day of it is Semele's day, given to all the embrace of it all public dancing expressions can evoke.

We have in our one month the sense of striving and embrace, then all such madding acts of humans transformed by celebration into foolishness in the very next month. That would be your March and April in the given calendrics, as shown below.

By May all the endorsed activities of humans, all the contingent motions of their making, have been incorporated in the year. The first day of it celebrates the lovely surprise of embrace. It is Semele's day.

May 2, 2005

Dionysius is rudely understood to be Semele's, bestowed on her by Zeus and bestowed on the world by her as she passes transcendently beyond the memory of gods and men by her fully embraced extirpation.

It is not for us here at HCE to question, or even bother much at all about this usual line of lore of the Barry Family.

We accept the convention that May is Semele's month, howevermuch the month as it transpires may concentrate our attention on other sourer matters entirely.

Still, flies and all, it is Semele's month after all.

May 1, 2004

The flies analize the outliers of new life sprung up all along the month of April. They swarm profusely to the realized edges of life's pulsed offerings after equinox, flies, repulsing death by their repulsive lives in all the scenery of that month's heightened liveliness.

They will have at it, the flies, given May, all along the edges of that scenery.

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