other kinds of berets

1. blueberry beret: like the kind you might find at a health food store 
   
2. apricot beret: like the kind you would surely find at a Ukranian thrift store (*)
   
3. adamantine beret: like the kind that binds you in a Miltonian epic (*)

(from the prince song, heard this morning)

joycian dishsoap

I saw some dishsoap at duane reade today and made a realization of a portmanteau word in plain sight:

palmolive: palm + olive

I'd like to think the namers tried out several variations before landing on the right combination: palmacado, palmanana, maybe even palmlemon.

art project corner: q and a

x-acto knife and a ripe, juicy apple.

keats corner: indolence part ii

Let's continue spinning the indolent urn -- stanzas 2 and 3:

(full text here)

How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?
How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?
Was it a silent deep-disguised plot
To steal away, and leave without a task
My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb'd my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower.
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but - nothingness?

Now the unsettled, Phidian-steeped Keats is asking himself some questions using the rhetorical trick of hypophora. He's asking the question in order to supply the answer, which he does in the form of another question in the 3rd line. Keats asks why he didn't know about the urn's images already and wonders how he started thinking so much about them in the first place. This whole stanza is crammed full of questions.

Our boy Keats is a repeater.  He's been spinning the urn around in circles and now he's asking himself how he didn't know what he knows now before he knew it (channeling a certain secretary of defense's known unknowns, many years later) and how this information arrived. How came ye, shadows? It might also be worth noting that he is asking how rather than why, where, or when.  

And then Keats comes up with imaginary, paranoid answers to his questions: it must be due to a secret plot, the shadows are trying to steal his time (!)

This stanza is the experience of indolence.  

Keats can't feel pain or pleasure here. He is numb. He wishes he never saw the damned urn in the first place and wishes for nothingness.  Oh yes, we've all been here before.   

A third time pass'd they by, and, passing, turn'd
Each one the face a moment whiles to me;
Then faded, and to follow them I burn'd
And ached for wings, because I knew the three:
The first was a fair maid, and Love her name;
The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,
And ever watchful with fatigued eye;
The last, whom I love more, the more of blame
Is heap'd upon her, maiden most unmeek, -
I knew to be my demon Poesy.

The repetition continues, like a spinning, shifting urn. Keats is able to stop asking himself questions long enough to pay attention to the shades this time, and he's able to make out the faces within the images. He recognizes the faces and names them descriptively: fair maiden Love, pale cheeked Ambition, and Poesy (poetry), a most unmeek maiden. 

Let's say Keats is taking his own prior notions of these 3 things and attaching 'em to the images he's seen in the shades of the urn.  That is, maybe he is creating something new here using both old notions and new shady information.  It's curious that he 'knew' the three: the past tense of the verb seems to indicate a feeling of his knowing what he just made before he made it. Hmm indeed.

And it is also curious that he knew all three; love, ambition, and poesy, but he repeats that he knew poesy twice, in the 4th and 10th lines.  That is to say he doubly knows Poesy. Maybe he's gone back and forth with her a few times before? Oh naughty unmeek maiden! It's also curious that he loves Poesy the more blame is heap'd up on her, and curious too that she is a demon: an evil spirit thought to possess someone in hell (cf. os-x dict). 

Oh unmeek blameful demon maiden Poesy!  

The narrator is revealing more about himself here than simple indolence. He loves Poesy the more crap is thrown at her, and perhaps also loves her maiden-most-unmeek style. Oh Poesy! One wonders if Fanny is jealous much.

The state of indolence has allowed Keats to create several new images in this 3rd stanza. Indolence has its benefits (as well as its whiny, sometimes deranged questions). He's aching to follow the images farther: and to follow them I burn'd and ached for wings.

We'll see if Keats gets to be like wax-winged Icarus in the remaining stanzas ...

keats' indolent corner: ode on indolence

Things I most enjoyed this year? Writing letters to Fanny - oh vanity and vexation! - and of course writing the ode to Indolence.

       -- Keats in 1819 (paraphrased and misquoted)

The Keats odes are great because of the connections you make while gaining an understanding of the subject of the ode.  You can't just read it and walk away with anything more than a sense of pretty words, vague, shadowy images and maybe feeling like a smarty pants for having read a Keats poem.  

You have to talk about it, you must tear into the formal syntax and language.  You must meet the poem halfway (or more) to really take it in.  You really must, after meeting Keats, invite him into your house and allow him to put new pictures on the wall, and maybe ask him to help you add several built-in bookshelves in the parlor as rent for his stay.  

This is to say it's important to do the tearing necessary to let the ode work on you.

Let's start tearing on the first stanza (full text here):

'They toil not, neither do they spin.'
One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced;
And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced:
They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

Okay, so what is happening here?  The narrator sees 3 figures.  They have downward-bent necks and joined hands.  Let's pretend the narrator is Keats himself; he's slacking and daydreaming about figures he saw on a marble urn a few days back.  Maybe he is even sitting in front of the urn right now: he's spinning it around, tilting it to one side with one hand and spinning it with the other.  You could never get away with this in a museum; maybe Keats is at his rich friend's house.

Our boy Keats is looking damn close at this urn: he sees the placid sandals and white robes of the figures painted on it.  He sees these figures at first, but after spinning the urn, he now sees the shades.  That is, he sees the differences in color, the darker and cooler shades that are sheltered from direct sunlight.  

And these shades are unsettling to him: and they were strange to me, as may betide with vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.  This part is a bit trickier.  Phidias was the main guy behind the Elgin marbles (stolen a long time ago and are now in a nice museum), so let's say if you're the type of fellow who is all about old Greek stuff and know what a frieze is, you're probably going to be excited if you see a vase.  Keats is unsettled and also excited by these shades.

The epigraph is from the bible, in the book of Matthew, where Jesus talks about the lilies: And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.  

That is, the flowers grow without toiling or spinning, and yet they're so pretty, so why take thought for clothing? This makes no sense right now, but maybe we'll come back to it at the end of the ode.  5 more stanzas to go.

binary categories corner: cp snow

There is a tension I feel on most days, between the analytic/logic [rational] and felt/artistic [emotional] worlds. 

It turns out that a fellow named C.P. Snow called out one form of this tension a long time ago:

Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”

^^^ via nytimes, a short time ago

the very best of david brin

Quite possibly the best backhanded compliment you will read today, as told to Leonard from someone awhile ago:

If you have read his books, you have experienced the very best of David Brin.

repurposed vending: cigarettes and candy

^^^ from a parking garage in alexandria, last weekend

(new uses for old abuses)

snow day

^^^ it's snowing a lot outside right now, although it ain't isn't visible in this photo

paper title corner: recent academic writing

Ishmael, Advocate with a Cause: Observation and Experience in Moby-Dick

Stigma and Distortion: The Source of Richard’s Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Schools for Making Mules: The Diagnosis on Education in Williams’ White Mule

revealing definition corner: hope

hope |hōp|
noun
1 a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen :
I had high hopes of making the Olympic team.

2 [archaic] a feeling of trust.

One wonders how the 2nd definition became archaic ...

(via os-x dict)

notebooking

The notebooks of writers, including Whitman (above), H.D., Langston Hughes and more.

art project corner: this was my dream

A somewhat large building, several stories high.  On the ground floor there is a retail(ish) establishment with large open windows.  There are drawings of pies, set out to cool.

Inside the store were more drawings, I don't remember them.

Walking to the back of the store revealed a garden, 2 or 3 acres.  There was a drawing of a scarecrow mounted on a large stick.  There was cabbage, corn, grapes, and carrots, but all were drawings instead of real crops.  

There was a petite asian girl who asked if you wanted help with anything, she was very polite.  

I felt like buying some cabbage and a pie.

deep sea thinking: keats on knowledge

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people ... the difference of high sensations with + without knowledge appears to me to be this - [without knowledge] we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep ... with all of the horror of a bare shouldered creature. [with knowledge] our shoulders are fledged, and we get through the same air and space without fear.

   ^^^ Keats, in a letter to Joshua Reynolds

   ^^^ May, 1818

inevitable question corner: dfw's unfinished manuscript

A long, worthwhile, and heart-rending piece of writing in this week's New Yorker--

It's the first story - as far as i am aware - to answer the question of David Foster Wallace's unfinished work:

From 1997 on, Wallace worked on a third novel, which he never finished—the “Long Thing,” as he referred to it with Michael Pietsch. His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration.

The story also redefines the notion of a 'volatile relationship':

His relationship with Mary Karr was volatile. She inspired a character in the novel—a radio host named Madame Psychosis who ends up in the halfway house. Wallace got a tattoo of a heart with Mary’s name on it. He signed his letters to her “Young Werther.” He proposed to her. They fought. “Someone you get sober with is like someone you were in Vietnam with,” Karr remembers. They split up. One day, according to Karr, he broke her coffee table. She billed him a hundred dollars. He paid her and said that the remains of the table were now his. Karr told him that she’d used them for firewood, and that all he’d bought was “the brokenness.”

Full story, over at the new yorker.

adventures in lo-fi

Two things re: playing of music with friends, often observed:

1. laptop volume turned up, listen from the tinny (and tiny) speakers [girls]
2. laptop hooked up to an all-in-one thing, ie bose waveradio or similar, that just works and can play loud and presents little in the way of hassle [guys]