Bogblog

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

appraise v.t.; appraised, pt., pp., appraising, ppr. [ME. appraysen; OF appreiser, appretiere, aprisier; LL appretiare, to value, esteem.]

1. to set a value on; to estimate the worth of; to value officially.
2. to estimate the quantity of.
3. to judge the quality or worth of.
4. to praise; to speak well of. [Rare.]

Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary
Deluxe Second Edition

Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp. gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie ©1983 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.

The Unordered Standards

Recently from staff:
The Quarterly Draft Bogmetric

And:
The Revised Authorized Standard Bogblog Bogmetric Bookmark

Added sign of validity:

Coming soon in the comic American Adventure series:

"Baghdad Funnies"

Our recently rescinded first editon (featuring The Mage of Baghdad!) has been replaced for the time being in our prospectus by:

featuring The Mage of Baghdad!

Or alternately, time permitting:

featuring The Mage of Baghdad!

October ball

The full given present of the human way, compacted into the summary moment of all human motions, say here or here along the continuous unfolding expression of the aggregated acts of that kind, that welter of attainments, corruptions, advances and mischances of humanity, so called, has its seasonal equivalent, October, October the month conventionally purported by name to be the eighth month of a year, but well-known to those of us here at HCE to be the tenth by actual count, inclined as we are to follow the vicissitudes of the famous Roman Calendrics in this respect.

The full rounded present of the human way offers up its continuous ongoing immediacies from moment to moment, the month October long weeks to replicate the feat ceremonially in the ritual pause of harvest.

All the bother of human acts gathered, all parsed and processed: distilled, remade by combination of the rededicated elements of it all. To the city, or to the village, its rural representative, the haul comes in from all the human regions.

October 31, 2005

As a further if belated profer of industry here at HCE we offer for immediate review the most recent redaction of the Bogblog for October 2003 on this page.

Anciently at midnight recurrently on a given day these depicted stars known now as the Pleiades would culminate, would reach the highest point above the horizon their yearly round would take them, formally marking the end of the harvest time and the beginning of the new year to the sort of people like the Barry Family who traditionally held to this view.

Not that the Barry Family, deployed as they were under the depending clouds of Northern Europe for all those many millennia, often witnessed personally this fact, which nonetheless eventually came to be accepted into the bogknowledges of the Barry Family by the constant repetition of its telling on the part of those surounding them that this was indeed the case;— on rare occasion when that quadrant of the sky at midnight on the indicated day was clear enough for keen Barry view, it proved to be true: the Pleiades in fact and indeed were up there high as they would ever likely get above the horizon on that day's midnight, just as those with the better view surrounding the Barry Family always insisted.

At that culminating moment of midnight in the archaic calendar shared traditionally by the Barry Family, the long harvest is given over to willful longings for the transformation of its gathered stuff. Just then the two worlds jut and join together, the gathered and the makings of it, as all the willfully gathered matter of the harvest is whisked off to its transformation by all the continuingly willful acts of humans.

Off in the new building of the de Young Museum in San Francisco is the one wide wing of it reserved for the displayed niceties of New Guinea, Oceania and Africa, the new building actually working to the great advantage of the stuff collected there, being the only wing of the museum to present its gathered wonders in what those of use who follow the Barry Family persuasion in this age would consider well-complemented rooms, unlike the blankly receptive mere spaces that mostly pass for galleries in this age, as so liberally given elsewhere in the new building. In that wide wing of the recently opened thing there in Golden Gate Park's Concourse, just there in the new de Young Museum building, the idea of a nice room for its objects is pleasingly carried out.

Naturally we here at HCE, given the undeterred chance to see what a new museum looks like, will obligingly enough go by the place and look around, many ages having passed since the Barry Family owned to any but the most pacific intentions on visiting museums, even new ones, in spite of the great intrusive public gestures they alway manage to make, museums, in the Barry Family view.

We have at HCE our own unearned nostalgia brought on by the bad loss of the eponymously word-originating Museum that housed the Library of Alexandria, the unhappily destroyed place in the Delta of the Nile in those distant days of yore.

Down the ages in Alexandria the developed Egyptian penchant for permanently staffing the required social instituion was assiduously applied by the Greek–inflected handlers of the Museum, promoting the permanence of the stuff collected there, a permanence desired and long effectuated in those parts by that able staff but finally denied for all the reasons, the Museum and its gatherings utterly and convincingly destroyed in the end as the story came down eventually to the Barry Family in the centuries following the catastrophe. Naturally what did not come down the years along with the story, what did not survive the telling of its own destruction there, was the now–inexistent matter of all the items collected under the permanent care of long–term Egyptian–quality civil service now gone for good and ever, sadly enough.

The Barry Family never knew the stuff in that museum, The Museum of Alexandria, until the stories of it came. With the stories a curious longing among the Barrys emerged, a longing for a return of that which had never come to the Barry Family in the first place, a longing to have back what hadn't ever been for them in fact, an abiding unearned nostalgia for the forever unknowable loss collected in that dismade Museum they had never known.

Down from the hills and in from the far pastures had come the cows and sheep to the bulging tumbrels of the byres and pens where they would be assembled for their many uses. All the many weeks of drawing in such bounty as could be gleaned from tree and bush and weedy field were done as well, completed for that year by all the busy acts of gathering.

The Pleiades rode high above as the world turned to its shrivelling subtractions and the new year began for humans, balanced there between the gathered offerings of earth harvested by them and the inevitable chill undoings of that harvest as transformed by their chosen uses.

October 27, 2005

We here at HCE who follow the game of baseball note without comment that there may be those for all we can tell who follow the fortunes of the Chicago White Sox as closely as we follow the fortunes of our own chosen club the San Francisco Giants, and who have had some cognate of the fondest hope we once held for our own team's realized success satisfied this year by the play of their own chosen club, the Chicago White Sox, champions this year of Major League Baseball.

October 19, 2005

Of the ideas that were to fashion the twentieth century in ways for the most part disastrous, one that stands out above the others, so far-reaching and indeed immense were its consequences, is the idea of the good community, where relationships between individuals are strong and a powerful solidarity is founded on common feeling.

— Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, Knopf 2003, pg. 53

In one widewandering statement of a sentence Roberto Calasso finds against the acknowledged Barry Family Standard in a community, making it out to be far and away the most disastrous of all the many disastrously effected ideas fashioning the well–known global disaster of the twentieth century. Directly Mr. Calasso goes on to mention the established Nazi and Stalinist social orders, pernicious proofs of the postulated disastrousness of the enacted idea of the good community. The idea of the good community doesn't get off easy in his way of telling it.

Nor should it, from the Barry Family perspective.

Those seeking good community may well submit to an order claiming to impose such good as they are seeking. Then they're in for it, in the Barry way of reckoning. The ordered good an sich falls somewhat discounted into the Barry Family estimate of good community, per se. A lot of unordered good is what the good community is made for in the Barry Family view, by whose bogmetric the good community is based on the unlikely thing, the unordered good it gives, rather than the likely good any order will give it.

The good community may have as much order as needs be to promote the unlikely but always pleasant appearance of the unordered good, for all the Barry Family cares, but imposed estimates of just how much order that may mean have been wildly off the mark down the ages, at least from the Barry Family's own bogcentric perspective, even discounting the long–held Barry Family grudge against the Romans for showing up in the Paris Basin and dislodging the lot from its millennia in that favorable place.

And yet the ancient drift of boglore of the Barry Family admits the practiced inclination of its members among themselves over time to settle for Good anyway, whatever its provenance, and to seek to settle for Good with extrafamiliar others whenever presented the opportunity as well, as recounted elsewhere, resulting in a mixed lot of success down the ages in either case, but supporting in the main the continuing reflexive application by the Barry Family of its rule of thumb: the Good sufficient to the day, should it come to that.

Good is the preordained value arbitrarily but consistently consigned by the Barry Family to the day's desired outcome. By the known Barry Family bogmetric of the mean, there is in that pleasant and sufficient promenade between quite, quite good indeed and near good enough in practice, some middling meander through the valued stuff itself, commonly understood good, through which the Barry Family must inveterately seek to slog.

The good word, the good commonly understood word, is naturally sought by the Barry Family.

For all the many millennia the dragon was the good word answering the wonder of some prior beast's bones, discovered evidence of the sort members of The Barry Family itself slogged by often enough during the gradual course of its own discovery, unearthed skeletons whose enormity articulated easily with their usual word for the presumed beast that once clothed those very bones: dragon. Of course it was never a dragon they'd seen the bones of, those Barrys who'd come across the surviving skeleton of what has become by now to be understood as a dinosouar of some kind instead, except for the middling standard of good under which they unstintingly operated, which encouraged the practical association of the word dragon with such evidence until some other word for it bested it for all the reasons in meaning Good.

The dragon is of the flying things, which dinosaurs, coincidentally, managed successfully to become themselves, the birds of the air the heirs of dragons after all, as is said.

That dinosaurs came to fly and dragons are said to fly makes them at least rough cousins for the purposes of common discourse. The enormous winged reptile substituted in the sentence for the wing-related dinosaur, but pointing as near as needs back to the bones: this meets the relaxed standard of good usage in the word of the Barry Family.

And the dragon is the fire–spewing thing, and coincident with that is the known reptile's poisoned spittle. The dragon's imagined fire serves as rough cousin in speech to all the true spewable poisons associated with the realized reptiles of the world.

But, with the matter of the dragon's paws left to the imagination of the word's utterer, a dragon lacking paws, a snake with wings might be ushered into conversation. For technical reasons the Barry Family denies the existence of dragons without paws and deplores their every mention. The Barry Family does not believe in dragons without paws, and rebukes each entered countenance of a snake with wings in conversation.

The admitted dragon of the Barry Family is credited with fearsome paws.

What use the admitted dragon of the Barry Family conversation in this age of the fairer worded dinosaur articulating the boney remains of the indicated thing? Commonly now in the Barry Family gab dinosaur fits all the evident cases, and dragon fits the not evident cases up to but not including the snake with wings, which as noted the Barry Family forbids the credence of a name at all.

The properly admitted dragon makes fair rhetoric of that which is not in evidence, and as it has pleased the Barry Family down the ages to indulge in an innate fondness for both rhetoric and that which is not in evidence, naturally dragon and dragon–equivalent talk has featured prominently in the ongoing Barry Family conversation all that time. What's undenied as evident has dinosaur for its new name, and what's not evident and undenied is properly a dragon.

Calasso's conception of good community is, like the snake with wings, anathema to the Barry Family.

Good community though not yet evident, is yet undenied by the Barry Family, by the approved rule of the dragon. The conception of it offered by Calasso deserves some other name entirely, in the the Barry Family view.

October 16, 2005

A list of those appearing at the nightclub on Fillmore Street in San Francisco known as the Matrix between 1965 and 1973.

October 16, 2005

The reasonableness of the agency of the national courts in cases in which the State tribunals cannot be supposed to be impartial, speaks for itself. No man ought certainly to be a judge in his own cause, or in any cause in respect to which he has the least interest or bias. This principle has no inconsiderable weight in designating the federal courts as the proper tribunals for the determination of controversies between different States and their citizens. And it ought to have the same operation in regard to some cases between citizens of the same State. Claims to land under grants of different States, founded upon adverse pretensions of boundary, are of this description. The courts of neither of the granting States could be expected to be unbiased. The laws may have even prejudged the question, and tied the courts down to decisions in favor of the grants of the State to which they belonged. And even where this had not been done, it would be natural that the judges, as men, should feel a strong predilection to the claims of their own government.

— The Federalist No. 80 (Hamilton)

Who shall decide disputes between notionally independent entities? When the judiciary of one state of a federal system has adjudicated as best it can some self-serving circumstance of law before it which conclusively opposes some other state's likewise adjudicated conclusion of the matter, Hamilton will have the federal judiciary look in.

Hamilton singles out the "adverse pretensions of boundary" animating the best of argument over grants of land ladled out disparately by adjoining states in support of his case.

In that early age of America when Hamilton sent out his address, the adverse pretensions of boundary flared heatedly in the sad example of that suffering space sought by North and South Carolina both.

The known thuggery in that contended land ended in the notorious straight line still separating the two states, laying low the claim to grants of land belonging to people on both sides of the bitterly contested thing. Hamilton's contemporaries were entirely familiar with the recent benighted playing out of the consequences of the pretensions he so lightly but pointedly addressed in The Federalist No. 80.

October 12, 2005

Point of Order: Infraction of the rules, or improper decorum in speaking. Must be raised immediately after the error is made.

The same issue contained an equally angry letter from Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Linda Nicholson stating that “the element of vituperativeness in the essay is disturbing”—but the only comment they made about the substance of Nussbaum’s argument was that “Nussbaum raises some worthwhile questions.” There’s just no engagement whatsoever with the quite specific claims Nussbaum makes.

— Alan Jacobs in comment at The Valve

Roberts Rules of Order creates a way to be done with argument in public in a reasonable amount of time while still allowing for all the generously deployed rhetoric the matter at hand may provoke if fully aired.

Understandably the argumentative blather of people in public may go off in any direction if undirected, breaking off into the isolated fistfight here and there or coagulating into the debilitating contests of warring camps among all the other possible consequences of tongues unleashed in public. Thus the handy framework constructed by Roberts, which constrains users to argue about the same thing for as long as it takes to be done, and then, formally finished, move on to the next arguable matter at hand.

It is not necessary for groups of people to explicitly use Roberts Rules to run out to the orderly end of an argument, but cognates of the processes of Roberts rules will be found in the argument's best chance for an orderly way out if one is to be had in public.

The rules of Roberts are based on a canny analysis of the generally endless nature of unordered argument and a clear set of orders for circumventing that endlessness. Roberts Rules propose an argument seen out to its end, rather than swept over into the wider currents of unended contentiousness among the humans which is the promised fate of most arguments when broached: to go coursing out endlessly along with all the unended rest of them into the currents of conflict of our present age.

This is not to say that argument may only end if addressed in some orderly process equivalent to Robert's rules, no. Many another end may be had by any argument, whose disputants may wander off from the matter at hand for all the many other reasons, none the least of which may be some more robust argument being entertained elsewhere which attracts away for good the few gathered around the matter at hand in the first place. Lack of a quorum is the blessed end of many if not most arguments.

By the logic of Wittgenstein what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence, providing a lower bound for the existence of an argument, and in fact this must be the case in the world at times, the case of silently passing over what we cannot speak about, even admitting to ourselves and recognizing in others all the express general leaning in human conversation toward baseless conversation which otherwise contradicts the possibility of passing silently over anything at all in practice. Baseless human conversation always manages the wealth of words for it, however ill–applied.

Wittgenstien's logic nevertheless concludes with the practically demonstrated lower bound of argument, wordlessness, that horizon where eventful words for good and ill never come to be or finally fall away exhausted from the argument at hand.

The rules of Roberts derive their authority from an arbitrary but explicit claim imposed on Wittgenstein's required wordlessness: in a group, in a public place, in the slash and jab of argument, silence is consent. Silence is consent. Wordlessness is made to authorize whatever may come of the endable argument imagined by Roberts rules. Wordlessness does not disagree, what does not disagree, agrees, it is said. This, it goes without saying, is the fundamental axiom of argument in public. Silence is consent.

This ancient concise self-authorizing prior condition of endable argument is found in the rules of Roberts and its equivalents.

By the rules of Roberts, starting with some minimal measure of silent consent the end of argument may be provoked with authority in the acitve and orderly exhaustion of words evoked in argument's behalf, reaching at last by such exhaustion the functional equivalent among argument's disputants of the a priori wordlessness of those said to have silently consented all along.

When the presumed consent of the silent greets the newly assumed silence of exhausted disputants the lower bound of endable argument has been reached. The argument may now be passed over, point taken in common silent consent. The upper bound of argument is undefined. In that direction unending argument flows freely into the encompassing contentions of the humans. But at least by the rules of Roberts and its cognates it is concievable that argument with sufficient attention to best practice may win through to its lower bound and end.

The point of order in a presumptively endable argument may be made by even the most casual attendant at a public argument. Anyone at all has standing to immediately demand a return to the settled standard of decorum (however ill–managed a standard it may prove to be) should that recognized standard be breached. A point of order requires immediate address, instantly deferring the rest of the argument at hand until the point is adequately hashed out.

From its excerpted matter the letter of Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Linda Nicholson seems intended to raise the rhetorical equivalent of a point of order and therefore cannot be faulted for requiring that the argument at hand, which they admit brings up interesting questions, be immediately deferred while the question of Nussbaum's decorum is adressed.

Alan Jacob's criticism of the letter is inadmissable. The focus of the missive is a call for decorum. Claims of decorum made in a timely manner take precedence over the arguable merits of Nussbaum's specific claims (claims which are themselves attached to yet another go at an particular argument presented at customary length by Professor Holbo of the Valve entitiled Precluding Untheoretic Afterword to the Philosophic Figments to which our keen editorial attention was drawn by some mischance of the internet the other day, and which itself entailed a sequence of comments in which we spied the words of Alan Jacobs excerpted above), and the letter was timely.

Argument gains authority from wordless consent. The silent are by nature so decorous that their assumed consent may be confidently announced at the outset of any endable argument.

For the wordy on the other hand it's the project of decorum that signals consent, consent to reasonably well–understood rules for reaching the orderly end of argument by those who have anything at all to say about the matter at hand. Argument gains authority from the wordy by the measure of decorum they adopt in pursuit of argument's end. The wordy are not decorous by nature, but by subscription.

When decorum fails, the rules for getting to the end of argument have likewise failed. A lack of decorum announces the discouraged prospect of ever ending argument as proposed by any rule similar to the rules of Roberts. The discouraging word is a known feature of conversation everywhere among humans, who may foreswear at any time the prevailing decorum in favor of the ever–availing pleasures of unordered argument instead, which can offer no end in spite of the many other admitted satisfactions.

The point of order may not be silenced by a call for a return to the matter at hand, which for Alan Jacobs appears in the copious argument made by Professor Holbo at the Valve. It is particularly inapt, on the basis of the admittedly ongoing argument about all the rest of what Nussbaum has to say about Butler, to retrospectively evaluate a timely letter objecting to Nussbaum's percieved asperities.

Instructively enough, the very string of comments trailing after the argument of Professor Holbo at the Valve from which the words of Alan Jacobs given above have been extracted reveals just such an episodic interruption of decorum.

The string of comments records the forcible disappearance of undecorous participants gathered in by the argument of Professor Holbo at the Valve, participants whose comments must be shut up in partnership with those whose silent consent already authorizes the orderly end to the argument of Professor Holbo at the Valve if it's to have any hope of ending at all.

Note that those willing to entertain the argument of Professor Holbo, to see it out to its proposed end, must agree to put aside the matter at hand momentarily for the more immediately existential point of order: will there be an end to this argument, or not?

If so, the veil of decorum will shroud the achieved and authorizing consent of the silent and the silenced, and the attendants will see the argument to the end of their own words on the matter.

If not, if the argument is willy–nilly made undendable through some surpasssingly effective deployment of intercessionary elements grabbed from the commodiously stuffed toolkit serving the needs of human contentiousness down the ages — of which endable argument is but one small self-limiting device —, then, unendable, it may join for whatever it's worth the unending stream of other ongoing contentions of humans preceding it, or, by consent, adjourn till a more propitious time to seek its premised conclusion airises.

The string of comments at the Valve trailing after the argument of Professor Holbo reveals disruption of decorum and its forceful silencing by those intent on soldiering on to the end of the matter proposed by the Professor, which depends in some sense on Nussbaum contra Butler as all will allow.

October 10, 2005

Gull shadow coasts across the diamond, bird above joined to brisk air sinking off the high rim of the stadium.

The pitcher, influenced by the bird's swift shade, steps down off the rubber. Beneath the bird the shadow tails a smooth path into the outfield.

The centerfielder barely tilts his head, containing the bird in his field of view but attentive to the advancing shade in the grass to the right of where he's planted. The shade, bare index of the bird, passes behind the centerfielder before the peripherally flying thing leaves sight, remaining in his view even as he returns his fuller attention, released now from the passed shade, to the middle of the diamond where with any luck the pitcher might resume the game as such, committing the next autorized instance of actual baseball, the pitch itself, should it finally come to that.

The incidental gullshade belongs to that inexorable continuum of intermediary events unmeasurable by baseball's precise rules forever padding the sum of time it takes to finally finish play. Played, the game of baseball consists of all the acts of baseball recordable by its rules amidst all the acts of such incidental gullshade equivalents that take up so much of the actual time of game. In the continuum of time of game, the acts recognized as baseball by its rules are discrete events. They do complete eventually, as does the game (in practise if not necessarily in theory), even given the arbitrary inevitable intrusion of gullshade.

October 4, 2005

KPFA, long–conflicting radio station of Berkeley, California, pauses in its regularly scheduled programming each October to raise the money needed to continue.

The continuance of KPFA is recommended by those of us here at HCE who have listened to its signal coming at various times from every far direction but west, which only by some accident of sailing could we imagine ever experiencing.

But north, yes we have been reached north far and distantly as two hundred miles along the California coast by the broadcasts of KPFA, and east as well in the high line of sight of the Sierra, and of course, south the eighty miles to the next bay down along the California coast, the Monterey Bay and the current location of HCE itself not far from 37°N 122°W (in the common scheme of measure) which itself is said to be exactly depicted in the image of it left, and of course and chiefly reached by its broadcasts in the near–west of its Berkely hills origin in San Francisco for the many years.

Founded with the aide of a Rockefeller grant in the last years of the 1940's, KPFA was given its liberal allowance of broadcasting power in a time when the FM band of radio frequencies was nearly unoccupied (unsurprisingly, since almost no one at the time who owned a radio, and almost all did, owned one capable of recieving that band). At the time the strong signal granted KPFA meant very little, since in that whole vast area scant few were inclined or equipped to listen in.

Over the years the inclination to listen to KPFA and the equipment on which to do just that have spread widely. It is now among the most easily accessible institutions of the Barry Family's home region. At least one of the many internets recently referred to by the reigning President of the United States carries the signal of KPFA out to the computer–enabled world as well.

KPFA formally abjures the profit that might come from a more acquisitive business plan, which we here at HCE can certainly appreciate from our own equally profitless position. In our case admittedly, profit itself is absent only as a conditional necessity of the beta stage of development in which we currently find our enterprise, but in no case is it the expected or desired condition of the enterprise once fully launched. Far from it, in point of fact. We here at HCE in a position to speak with any authority at all have often endorsed, ultimately, profit, and continue to do so, along with all its consequences, however virtual the enterprise, its profits and its consequences may be at this time.

Such is not the case with KPFA. For the half–century and more of its existence it has depended on you, the listener, to send along the money needed to operate the thing, particularly in October during its interruptive but necessary pledge drive.

Give then, listeners. Give now.

October 3, 2005

To arrive eventually west at the world's best–made bog (the San Francisco Bay Area) should come as small surprise to those of us here at HCE given the Barry Family's long–acknowledged inclination in this regard.

That the Barry Family's aspirations, the inherently bog–leftward leaning of the lot of them, should so neatly marry the requirement of precipitate removal from that southeastern portion of Ireland (itself not unwelcoming, on balance, in the seven hundred years of the Barry Family's stay) at precisely that moment in history when the San Francisco Bay Area welcomed uncritically entry of their kind there proved the happiest of conjunctions indeed from the Family's well–known present point of view.

The likeliest spot for Barrys, this bay area, the home range of the Family at this present date, this bay area and, some would claim, the next nice bay down the coast as well, the Barry Family's present range, as revealed by the suggestively slurred shoreline of the place in the accompanying illustration.

October 2, 2005

In the long fumbling generations of them complicit in the Discovery of the Barry Family there were those who stood out (as much as the ever–levelling inclinations of the bog allowed for in that age) as staunch proponents or intransigient opponents of some one particular detail of the Discovery that had the floor in the given moment of the continuous meandering exploration of the matter leading to the settlement of it all there in the Paris Basin. Always as well there were the others of them, trying to contain the charged controversy of robustly diffeing views or ideally have them all shut up about that and move on to the other talk entirely.

The proto-Barrys possessed the basic toolkit of the bog, and with it the suspicion that the lot of them had come gradually west along the smooshy path bounding the receding glacial ice to that great intermediating region where the Rhine negotiates its entry into the raging sea, where lively land and lively water are offered up to each other in all concievable combination all along the lowish leavings of the glacier. The Rhine bringing from the south all its distillations of waters landed there to the newly emergent stretch of northern sea, now uncapped in the absense of the previously glacial ice.

And a comprehensive and a thoroughgoing confluence of the two it was and is in those low lands, to the evident benefit of the lively interests of any animated enough to enter there, as the precursors of the proto–Barrys had done, the so–called "pre–putuative" Barrys in the proto–lexion of their beliefs, which held that they, considered as a group (which consideration was of course the whole purpose of that profound impulse of Discovery), had been travelling consistently westward for a considerable period of time. It was something they knew about "themselves," whatever themselves might eventually come to mean as a result of their common exploration of the many quite knotty considerations of that very question brought forward during that era of Discovery.

As a group, they wandered west, carying with them the trusted knowledge of their overall directionality so that even after all their many millennia in the Paris Basin, the Barrys remained profoundly convinced that fundamentally, over time, the lot of them were inclined to the west, or left, if looking north.

Removed from the Paris Basin as a result of incompatibilities introduced there by the arrival of the Romans, the Barry Family shifted to Brittany for a time, and then, consciously rejecting their own espoused inclinations, headed scandalously east to join up with the Normans.

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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