ta hiera grammata
...he claims that the curse is telling him to put kerdos (selfish gain) first, death afterwards (kerdos proteron husterou morou).
R. Seaford, "World without limits", TLS June 19 2009, p.15
Labels: TLS
File 2.05
It seems to me that not being wanted is a positive condition [...]
Penelope Fitzgerald, letter to F. Kermode, in: Ruth Scurr, "Shelf life", TLS Aug 22 & 29, p.5
Labels: TLS
Boil 2.11
Poetry babble, as defined by precedent in these columns, is the quote on the back of the book that purports to illuminate the contents, but in practice obscures them. For the Golden Age of poetry babble, you need to go back to 2004 [...] and Ring of Fire by Lisa Jarnot. A typical chunk of verse reads, "ding dong / dug dirt / ditch dub / chimp chore" - in which Alison Cobb found "both Dante's suffering and the Johnny Cash song's self burned away by passion".
J.C., "NB Taking Care", TLS Aug 22 & 29 2008, p.40
Labels: TLS
zemblan lists
Travellers who crossed Siberia in the eighteenth century noted the remarkable animals they saw - elk "of mounstrous size," fierce aurochs, wild boars, wild horses and asses, flying squirrels in great numbers, foxes, hares, beavers, bears. Of the swans, cranes, pelicans, geese, ducks, bitterns, and other birds, one traveller wrote, "After sundown these manifold armies of winged creatures made such a terrific clamour that we could not even hear our own words." Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swede captured by Peter the Great's army at the Battle of Poltava, in 1709, and sent with other Swedish prisoners to Siberia, wrote that the region had six species of deer, including the great stag, the roe deer, the musk deer, the fallow deer, and the reindeer. He also mentioned a special kind of bird whose nests were so soft that they were used for socks.
Ian Frazier, "A reporter at large, travels in Siberia", The New Yorker, Aug 3 2009, p.41
About two hundred and nintey years later in Siberia, I saw few or none of these marvels, except in museums, where some of the speciments are facing a second extinction from moths and general disintegration.
I. Frazier, ibid.
Stachelschweine
In Parerga and Paralipomena, published in 1851, Arthur Schopenhauer created a parable about the dilemma faced by porcupines in cold weather. He described a "company of porcupines" who "crowded themselves very close together one cold winter's day so as to profit by one another's warmth and so save themselves from being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another's quills, which induced them to separate again." And so on. The porcupines were "driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other," until they found a "mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist."
Schopenhauer's tale was later quoted by Freud in a footnote to his 1921 essay Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, where it was invoked to illustrate what Freud called the "sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility" adhering to any long-lasting human relationship [...]
Freud may have kept the true basis for his fascination with porcupines secret from his followers because exposing it would have meant conceding a familiarity with Schopenhauer, thereby contracting the boundaries of his own originality - and, perhaps, revealing the limitations of the scientific as opposed to philosophical authority of his claims.
George Prochnik, "The Porcupine Illusion",
Cabinet, Issue 26, 2007.
Et in Arcadia Ego, ctnd.
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 203 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"When Apollo was pursuing the virgin Daphne, daughter of the river Peneus, she begged for protection from Terra [Gaia], who received her, and changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo broke a branch from it and placed it on his head."
If Daphne is suffering a transformation so too is the god. We see in the expression of his eyes - how well the painter has capture it!- the desperation and dawning anguish of one about to experience loss, not only of this ravishing girl who is the object of his desire but along with her an essential quality of selfhood, of what up to this he believed was and now knows he will not be again. His sinewed hand that reaches out to grasp his quarry will never find its hold. Already Daphne is becoming leaf and branch; when we look closely we see the patches of bark already appearing through her skin, her slender fingers turning to twigs, her green eyes blossoming.
J. Banville, "Pursuit of Daphne, ca. 1680, Johann Livelb (1633-1697)", in: Athena, p.18
Labels: arcadia, film
americana - amerikaner
A melancholy man subject to depression, he entertained friends and strangers alike with a limitless fund of humorous stories and apt anecdotes. Awkward with women, he experienced many ups and downs [...] A man of generous instincts toward political adversaries who famously called for "malice towards none" in his second inaugural address, he had also written many anonymous newspaper articles cruelly satirizing opponents in his early career. [...] Gregarious and a good listener, he had few close friends and made his most important presidential decisions in lonely contemplation.
James McPherson, "Lincoln off his pedestal" in NYRB, Vol. LVI, Number 14, p.58
Labels: NYRB
utopians: apply within
I have frittered away the better part of my life. I did it all backways, starting out an achiever and then drifting into vagueness and crippling indecision. Now, becalmed in the midst of my decidedly unroaring forties, I feel I have entered already if not my second childhood then certainly my second adolescence - look at all this love stuff, this gonadal simpering and sighing; I shall break out in a rash of pimples yet.
John Banville, Athena, Picador, 1995, p.5
...or those wonderful new translating machines that can do it so much faster than a man or an animal.
Nabokov, Pale Fire, p.281
utopiste debout
Zembla, ctnd.
Gradus might be termed a Puritan. One essential dislike, formidable in its simplicity, pervaded his dull soul: he disliked injustice and deception. He disliked their union -they were always together- with a wooden passion that neither had, nor needed, words to express itself. [...] The generality was godly, the specific diabolical. [...] People who knew too much, scientists, writers, mathematicians, crystalographers and so forth, were no better than kings or priests: they all held an unfair share of power of which others were cheated.
[...]
I have considered in my earlier note...the particular dislikes, and hence the motives, of our "automatic man," as I phrased it at a time when he did not have as much body, did not offend the senses as violently as now; was, in a word, further removed from our sunny, green, grass-fragrant Arcady.
V. Nabokov,
Pale Fire, pp.152, 279
Zembla, cntd.
Sophrosyne
I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.
Nabokov,
Pale Fire, p.15
Charmides Place
zemblan
Zembla
Now "happy" is something extremely subjective. One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: the lost glove is happy.
V. Nabokov,
Pale Fire, Vintage, 1989, p.17
try again. fail again. fail better.
Spoil 2.04
When an Arts Council dignitary is reported to believe that Britain is on the brink of producing "the greatest art yet created", instinct tells you that things are in a bad way. When the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport chips in with the view that talk of a "Renaissance" comparable with that in Italy in the fifteenth century is "not an overstatement. It's exactly true", suspicions harden. Never trust a man who distinguishes between truth and "exact" truth.
J.C., "NB Lost translations", TLS January 11 2008, p.32
Labels: TLS
tunnel
File 2.04
In einer Zeit, in der eine zahlreiche Nachkommenschaft noch die Regel gewesen ist - Adolf Walser, [Roberts] Vater, entstammte einer fünfzehnköpfigen Familie - hat sonderbarerweise keines der acht Geschwister der nächsten Generation ein Kind in die Welt gesetzt, und von den gewissermassen miteinander aussterbenden Walsern hat vielleicht keiner die für eine erfolgreiche Prokreation erforderlichen Voraussetzungen weniger erfüllt als der, wie man in seinem Fall wohl mit Fug sagen kann, immer jungfräulich gebliebene Robert.
In an era when a numerous progeny was still the rule - Adolf Walser, [Robert's] father, descended from a family of fifteen members - oddly, none of the eight siblings of the succeeding generation brought a child into the world and of the Walsers who were becoming exctinct together, as it were, arguably none fulfilled the essential prerequisites for successful procreation less than Robert who, it may justifiably be said, remained virginal.
WG Sebald, "Le promeneur solitaire", in: Logis in einem Landhaus, Fischer, 2003, p.130, transl. mine.
How to be happy
[Herbert] Spencer and the future George Eliot soon got into the habit of accompanying each other to the opera, or taking the sea air together in Broadstairs. When she complimented him on his clear unwrinkled forehead he attributed it to the fact that he was "never puzzled" being blessed with mental abilities that "did not involve that concentrated effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling of the brows". [...] Before long, George Eliot concluded that he suffered from "excess of reason", and announced to her friends that "we have agreed that we are not in love with each other".
J. Rée, "How to be happy",
TLS November 30 2007, p.26
Labels: TLS
Werther at Marienbad
Labels: film
oz oz oz
belle et bete
The most brilliant Bourbakian was Alexandre Grothendiek. He was born in 1928 to an anarchist journalist and a one-armed street photographer, and his doctorate [...] contained enough discoveries for six seminal papers. "Naive and childlike", he wore tyre sandals and was an expert boxer. In the 1960s he broke from the group, advocating a foundational idea for all mathematics that is even more basic than sets - categories, in which objects have no essential existence at all. At this metaphysical exposure, mathematics started to fight back and drove Grothendiek mad. [...] He became convinced that the devil had meddled with the speed of light. In 1991, he burned 25,000 pages of his original writings and disappeared into the Pyrenees.
A. Masters, "The many in the one", ibid.
scholarium novum
Nicolas Bourbaki, one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century, did not exist. He was the collective name of a small group of boisterous French who determined in the 1930s to rewrite the moribund university syllabus, starting from the barest principles and definitions and working upwards: "Euclid for the next 2000 years." [...]
When an article by the non-Bourbakian Ralp Boas appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica explaining that the man was in fact a collective pseudonym, Boas received a letter from Bourbaki, from his "ashram in the Himalayas". "You miserable worm", it began, "how dare you say that I do not exist". "Here", observed Boas, "Bourbaki was displaying less than his usual precision of language, since I had not asserted his non-existence, only his non-individuality". Bourbaki then started a rumour that Boas did not exist.
Alexander Masters, "The many in the one", TLS April 18 2008, p.29
Labels: TLS
scholarium
His father served as Marylin Monroe's physician, while his mother appeared in many movies in the 1940s, and the family home was often visited by the novelist Henry Miller, whose fifth marriage took place there. Miller used to introduce young Siegel to new books, give him cryptic advice ("try to write with your left hand"), and then beat him at ping-pong. [...]
When he was writing a series of scholarly books about India, Siegel's fieldwork, for example, involved performing as a stooge for itinerant Indian street magicians, who gulled tourists with fake decapitations. [...]
The kind of verbal games this permits is best demonstrated by Siegel's first novel, Love in a Dead Language (1999), which is about the death of a Sanskrit scholar, Leopold Roth, who specialized in studying sentences made up of identically ordered letters, which differ only in terms of the number of spaces between those letters. Roth's dissertation is titled Oflyricheros, which, depending on the spacing, reveals either the disappearance of love, (O Fly Rich Eros), or a paean to poets (Of Lyric Heros) [...]
Stephen Burn, "Call me Ponce", TLS April 18 2008, p. 19
Labels: TLS
Projekte 0.1
DOCTOR: Hm, aufgedunsen, fett, dicker Hals, apoplektische Konstitution. Ja Herr Hauptmann sie können eine Apoplexia cerebralis kriechen, sie können sie aber vielleicht auch nur auf der einen Seite bekommen, und dann auf der einen gelähmt sein, oder aber sie können im besten Fall geistig gelähmt werden und nur fortvegetieren, das sind so ungefähr ihre Aussichten auf die nächsten vier Wochen.
DOCTOR: Hmm, bloated, fat, thick neck, apoplectic constitution. Yes, Major, you may get an apoplexia cerebralis, but you may only get it on the one side and then become paralysed on that side, or, best case, you may become mentally paralysed and vegetate henceforth, these are roughly your prospects for the next four weeks.
G. Büchner, Woyzeck, Reclam, 2005, p.21. transl. mine.
German History IX
Der nächste Film mit einem guten, weil irrtümlichen, Nazi ist bereits im Kino, seit April in Dland. John Rabe.
"Es ist ein Kreuz mit dem Hakenkreuz - keine Gelegenheit wird ausgelassen, damit zu winken. Als globale Brandmarke hat es Konjunktur. Der Vorleser, Operation Walküre, Defiance - die "anderen" Geschichten werden geradezu inflationär erzählt. Der Nationalsozialismus ist zu einer universellen Bildsprache geworden.
What's next? Romantische Liebesgeschichten im KZ mit aufrechten SS-Offizieren, die gegen Hitler kämpfen, der gar nicht in der NSDAP war, sondern in der Jugendfeuerwehr?"
Jürgen Kiontke, "Film des Monats" in: Konkret 4/2009, S. 51
power magic, cntd.
Labels: film
purey
Before her, in overly luxuriant rows, was a host, so to speak, of golden pharmaceuticals, plus a few technically less indigenous whatnots. The shelves bore iodine, Mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, anacin, Bufferin, Argyrol, Musterole, Ex-Lax, Milk of Magnesia, Sal Hepatica, Aspergum, two Gillete razors, one Schick Injector razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, a bottle of Fitch Dandruff Remover, a small unlabelled box of glycerine suppositories, Vicks Nose Drops, Vicks VapoRub, six bars of castile soap, the stubs of three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy ('Call Me Mister'), a tube of depilatory cream, a box of Kleenex, two seashells, an assortment of used-looking emery boards, two jars of cleansing cream, three pairs of scissors, a nail file, an unclouded blue marble (known to marble shooters, at least in the twenties, as a 'purey'), a cream for contracting enlarged pores, a pair of tweezers, the strap less chassis of a girl's or woman's gold wristwatch, a box of bicarbonate of soda, a girl's boarding-school class ring with a chipped onyx stone, a bottle of Stopette - and, inconceivably or no, quite a good deal more.
JD Salinger,
Franny and Zooey, Penguin, p.50
biosphere 0.999h
Als siebenunddreißigjähriges Mädchen hatte sie den durch seinen exzentrischen Antisemitismus bekannten Dr. Bernhard Förster geheiratet, um als seine Gattin, gefolgt von einer Schar deutscher Kolonisten, der von Förster in Paraguay gegründeten deutschen Kolonie Nueva Germania vorzustehen. Beide kamen bei ihrer Abreise nach Amerika, Ostern 1886 nach Berlin, Förster im strengen Inkognito, da er allerlei Beleidigungen gegen Minister und andere staatliche Würdenträger auf dem Kerbholz hatte. Die Kolonie nahm einen glänzenden Anfang; Eli Förster-Nietzsches Briefe, welche, wenn ich die Mutter in Naumburg besuchte, vorgelesen wurden, wußten nicht genug zu erzählen von der arbeitsreichen, aber hoffnungsvollen Kolonie, von deren Mitgliedern sie und ihr Gatte wie König und Königin verehrt wurden. Ich freute mich dann dieser Nachrichten, mußte aber im stillen diese Kolonie mit einem Pflänzchen vergleichen, welches in einen fremden Boden versetzt wird, und von dem man mit teilnehmender Spannung abwartet, ob es emporblühen oder hinwelken und zugrunde gehen wird. Leider war nach kaum drei Jahren das letztere eingetreten. Dr. Förster, überaus rührig und energisch wie er war, hatte, von einem anstrengenden Ritte erhitzt, ein Bad im Flusse genommen, wobei ein Herzschlag seinem Leben ein Ende machte. Mit getäuschten Hoffnungen, wie eine Schiffbrüchige, kehrte Eli in die Heimat zurück, gerade um die Zeit, wo der Bruder einer unheilbaren Geisteskrankheit verfallen war.
Deussen, Mein Leben, S. 264.
As a girl of 37 she married Dr. Bernhard Förster, known for his eccentric antisemitism, and shared the command of the colony Nueva Germania, which Förster had founded in Paraguay. ... The colony had an impressive beginning. Eli Förster-Nietzsche's letters, which were read out aloud when I visited Nietzsche's mother in Naumburg, were full of the hard-working, high-hoping colony, whose members worshipped her and her husband like king and queen. I was glad about these news, but had a quiet suspicion whether this sapling would flourish in a foreign soil. After hardly three years it sadly proved true.
Dr. Förster, active and energetic as was his nature, had taken a bath in the river after a long, hot ride on his horse. He suffered a hear attack and Eli returned to her home country, her hopes shipwrecked, just at the time when her brother fell into incurable madness.
biosphere 0.999g
Wie die Sprache, so ist auch die Religion der Iranier der altvedischen auf das nächste verwandt; viele Götternamen, wie Ahura (Sanskrit Asura), Mithra (Sanskrit Mitra), sind beiden Völkern gemeinsam, und das iranische Homaopfer entspricht dem indischen Somaopfer. Aber seltsam und höchst auffallend ist es, daß nicht nur manche indische Götternamen in Iran zur Bezeichnung von Dämonen dienen, sondern daß auch das fast allen andern indogermanischen Völkern gemeinsame Wort für Gott, deva (lat. deus, altir. dia, altnord. tivar, lit. devas), in der iranischen Form daeva nicht einen Gott, sondern einen bösen Dämon bedeutet. Diese Tatsache, so befremdlich sie auf den ersten Blick zu sein scheint, ist doch nicht ohne Parallelen. Als die christlichen Missionare im 8. Jahrhundert p. C. die heidnischen Deutschen bekehrten, da wurzelte der Glaube an die alten germanischen Götter zu tief im Herzen des Volkes, als daß man sie für nicht existierend hätte erklären können. Man beließ ihnen die Existenz, erklärte sie aber für böse Dämonen und verlangte vom Neophyten, sie abzuschwören;
Deussen, Paul. Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, Bd. 2, S. 134
Like the language, the religion of the Iranians is closely related to the old Vedic religion. Many names of gods are the same [... ]. But strange and most remarkable is not only that some Indian names of gods are used in Iran to denote demons, but that the word for god, common to almost all indogermanic peoples, deva, in its Iranian form refers not to a god, but to an evil demon. This strange fact is not without parallels. When the Christian missionaries turned the heathen Germans to god in the 8th century, the old Germanic beliefs still had deep roots and could not be declared non-existent. They were deemed to exist, but only as evil demons and the newly initiated had to reject them by oath.
Labels: by popular demand
ARLANC 1.80
"
Kobresia"
Karl Nikolajev: a "biocommunicator" who sits in a room trying to "see" what kind of object is placed on a table in a room two floors up.
"It is either metal or ... If it's metal, it is painted... Cold surface. It is either metal (painted), or, maybe, plastic. Colored. There is... Bright. Looks like... Maybe, it's a toy? The surface is smooth, but here are some projections. Finger sticks. Maybe it is... Some kind of dents... or... or it is letters... or just projections... Looks like a toy. Multicolored metal or plastic, painted metal. That's it. Stop."
Boil 2.10
People who habitually sit on the first seat in the bus | pillion hogs | He says he has received many emails; he still needs to check them all | One only has to "ask the computer" | "it knows everything" one would ever want to know. One would never have to ask people again | Old Arts | Quadrangle First Floor | A mouse scurries along on the carpet under the
Emergency Exit Only sign | Freud = Prospero, Jung = Caliban, Anna = Miranda | Karbolineum
biosphere 0.999f
The analyses which I shall make in later chapters will show that Bruno was an intense religious Hermetist, a believer in the magical religion of the Egyptians as described in the
Asclepius, the imminent return of which he prophesied in England, taking the Copernican sun as a portent in the sky of this imminent return. He patronises Copernicus for having understood his theory only as a mathematician, whereas he (Bruno) has seen its more profound religious and magical meanings.
Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago 1964, p.155
File 2.03
A Greek woman who puts on her lipstick to go to the cemetery to tell off the dead. A gay couple who, in scouring the atlas for possible locations for a country cottage, regard Estonia as "a kind of very, very outer London suburb". The Jamaican woman who returns home twice a year to luxuriate in the "real" house she has built there but cannot bear to live in full time. The church organist who keeps every greetings card she has ever been sent, delving for the meanings in every commercial set of verses. The man who says he grieves constantly over the ghosts of the seventy left dead when, as a mercenary, he blew up an arms dump; he seeks consolation in online pornography. The woman in her early twenties who is tattoed and pierced in every conceivable place, and sees pain as part of her "sense of control" of her life.
Paul Barker, "Mince Pies and a cane", TLS September 5 2008, p.5
Labels: TLS
biosphere 0.999e
The sun, of course, is always a religious symbol and has always been so used in Christianity; but in some passages in the Hermetic writings the sun is called the demiurge, the "second god". [...] The admired Egyptian religion includes sun-worship, and the sun is among the list of the gods of the Egyptians given in the
Asclepius.
These Egypto-Hermetic sun-teachings undoubtedly influenced
Ficino's sun-magic, and they connected philosophically with Plato on the sun as the intelligible splendour or chief image of the ideas, and religiously with the Pseudo-Dionysian light symbolism. [...] the concentration on the sun in the astral magic, led upwards through the Christian Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius to the supreme
Lux dei, and in this way the sun very nearly is for Ficino what it is for Hermes or for the Emperor Julian, the "second god", or the visible god in the Neoplatonic series.
The
De revolutionibus orbium caelestium of Nicholas Copernicus was written between 1507 and 1530, and published in 1543. It was not by magic that Copernicus reached his epoch-making hypothesis of the revolution of the earth round the sun, but by a great achievement in pure mathematical calculation. He introduces his discovery to the reader as a kind of act of contemplation of the world as revelation of God, or as what many philosophers have called the visible god. It is, in short, in the atmosphere of the religion of the world that the Copernican revolution is introduced. [...] One can say, either that the intense emphasis on the sun in this new world-view was the emotional driving force which induced Copernicus to undertake his mathematical calculations on the hypothesis that the sun is indeed at the centre of the planetary system; or that he wished to make his discovery acceptable by presenting it within the framework of this new attitude. [...]
A recently discovered text tells us that Giordano Bruno, when advocating Copernicanism at Oxford, did this in the context of quotations from Ficino's
De vita coelitus comparanda. This famous philosopher of the Renaissance thus saw the Copernican sun in some close relationship to Ficinian sun magic.
Yates, Frances.
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago 1964, p. 153-155.
Boil 2.09
I found him standing over a battered filing cabinet with a hammer in his hand, and immediately had a good feeling.
H. Williams, "Freelance", TLS July 4 2008, p.16
Labels: TLS
biosphere 0.999d+
Er hatte keine Lust. Ein vitaler Mensch kann nicht aufgeklärt sein. Wie viel Schwäche ist nötig, damit einer aufgeklärt ist?
Alexander Kluge,
Lebensläufe, S. 739
He wasn t motivated. A person full of vitality can t understand the world properly. How much weakness do you need to come up with intellectual clarity?
Alexander Kluge,
Lebensläufe, S. 739
transmogrified by the compy-fuscator
his mukkil oobin laagh
The Bloomsbury Rhyming Dictionary is "an essential research tool" that no "poet or lyricist" should be without. The main pleasure is derived from the found poems which emerge from the lists of rhyming words. Try this one, which we call "Night on the Town":
frolic
shambolic
hyperbolic
melancholic
[...] We close the Bloomsbury Rhyming Dictionary (£8.99) with a cautionary tale of the casting-couch:
starlet
varlet
scarlet
harlot
J.C., "NB", TLS, March 28 2008, p. 36
Labels: TLS
ARLANC 1.79
Boothby, Purblind and Canker / Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling / the three Brothers Falk / "wir Ekelexperten" (Winfried Menninghaus) / Colli and Montinari / Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus
power magic
[...] early movies are ghostly in general, and not just because their favourite subjects included split personalities, doppelgangers and revenants, extrasensory perception and other parapsychological phenomena, but also because of the way that for technical reasons the actors moved in and out of what was still the completely motionless scene around them like ghosts walking through a wall. Most ghostly of all, of course, is the quasi-transcendental gaze cultivated by the male stage actors of the time which found its ultimate expression in film, a gaze that seems to be bent on a life in which the tragic hero no longer has any part.
W.G. Sebald, "Kafka goes to the movies", in
Campo Santo, 2005, transl. Anthea Bell, p.165
Labels: film
