Weeks

 Politico: “They are within weeks — literally within weeks — of potentially really losing a lot of territory,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to NATO. “Everybody should realize that a Ukrainian defeat brings the possibility of direct military conflict between the United State and Russia closer.”

 Doug Feith and John Stewart.

So effen sad.

 "Like Kafka in a plane of goo." Song writing strategy: take some piece of your literary writing and turn it so that it means something to others.

Bird at night

 Bird at night, which is odd and reminds me of the bird I'd heard in the parking lot of the memory care place earlier in the day. The parking lot machine had eaten my ticket and despite several interactions through the call button I remained trapped in the lot. While I waited I kept hearing a sound that was like one that would come from my Iron Man watch, but I continued to look at my watch as the sound occurred and I concluded it was not coming from there and must be some kind of bird. In fact, this unusual bird I am hearing right now is also not a bird: it is the dog at the door, whining, whom I'd forgotten I'd let out. 

Transmission interrupted by ants

 Trying to figure out: was my question about whether the dog and I would complete our circuit of the neighborhood before the ants, which were on one side of the kitchen, discovered the dog food I'd left out, which was on the other side, or not, related to my realization that I was wearing a dark jacket with dark gloves -- the same situation which, on the bike path the previous day, had caused me to think I approached a man without arms?

 Enjoyed this: Goerge Jones and Randy Travis playing live together.

 Also: U.S. intelligence also warned last month that terrorists could attack a Moscow synagogue. A day after receiving the warning, on March 7, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it had prevented an attack on a Moscow synagogue by an ISIS-K cell.

[...] Three days before the Crocus City Hall attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin had dismissed the U.S. warnings, calling them “outright blackmail” and attempts to “intimidate and destabilize our society.”

Putin and other Russian officials have made no mention of the U.S. intelligence supplied in relation to the planned synagogue attack.

Crocus City Hall

 Man (WP) -- More than two weeks before terrorists staged a bloody attack in the suburbs of Moscow, the U.S. government told Russian officials that Crocus City Hall, a popular concert venue, was a potential target, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. [...] The high degree of specificity conveyed in the warning underscores Washington’s confidence that the Islamic State was preparing an attack that threatened large numbers of civilians, and it directly contradicts Moscow’s claims that the U.S. warnings were too general to help preempt the assault.

The U.S. identification of the Crocus concert hall as a potential target — a fact that has not been previously reported — raises new questions about why Russian authorities failed to take stronger measures to protect the venue, where gunmen killed more than 140 people and set fire to the building.

---------------

If it is true that Mahler’s music is worthless

 Wittgenstein: “If it is true that Mahler’s music is worthless…. [what then should he] have done with his talents? For obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his symphonies and then burnt them?”

Clouds in a maze of ropes

  “The loose upper canvas blew out in the breeze with soft round contours, resembling small white clouds snared in the maze of ropes. ” (Conrad, Narcissus.)

To drop seeing into the square

 “… and came up, not even looking at him but past, over his head, toward the Square as if looking could make a lofting trajectory like a baseball, over the trees and the streets and the houses, to drop seeing into the Square… (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust)

What should the Republican Party actually be about?

 This sounds right. If there were a real Republican party out there, it would be about -- let's build and let's be for the people who want to build. Instead from the party you have irrelevancies about culture war and conspiracy theory, etc. 

Maybe all it takes to turn it around is one great leader who establishes the proposition -- we have to build and can't afford not to.

 Find myself asking what happened to Joe Lieberman. I guess it was his support of the second Iraq War that led many Democrats to think he was a bad guy. When they tried to punish him for that stand, he instead punished them -- but now he was really alone with a stand that didn't make any sense. He ended up with No Labels, which also doesn't make any sense.

More and more apparent

 Politico. Donald Tusk: “I don't want to scare anyone, but war is no longer a concept from the past,” Tusk said, "It is real [...] I know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger generation, but we have to mentally get used to the arrival of a new era,” he said. “The pre-war era. I don’t exaggerate. This is becoming more and more apparent every day."

The Assistant, Robert Walser

 This was a very enjoyable book. I'd found myself curious if this "assistant" had anything to do with the assistants that populate Kafka's novels (Kafka having been a reader of Walser), which I would say is not the case at all. But this charmingly tells the story of what has been my own life -- of being an employee at a small family enterprise.

 NYT: "The tentative agreement between the Kushner team and the Serbian government would grant Mr. Kushner’s investment firm a 99-year lease, at no charge, and the right to build a luxury hotel and apartment complex and a museum on the site of the former headquarters of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense in Belgrade, which was bombed by NATO in 1999."

The success of Clinton's Air Wars

 Dipping into "Fiasco" about the second Iraq War... author speaks in the opening pages about the success of Clinton's bombardment of Saddam's Iraq with cruise missiles in Desert Fox in 1998, (this was the one that people were saying was supposed to be a distraction from his impeachment.) And it reminds me of how much flack Clinton caught at the time for not committing ground troops and restricting himself to air campaigns when in fact these air campaigns (a la Kosovo) were quite successful and the right decision.

 Bernie Sanders: "In my view we have got to do everything we can to defeat Donald Trump and to re-elect President Biden, no excuses."

A dream experience

 I've often had the experience in waking life of seeing a stranger in a crowd and thinking I recognized him, then taking a second look and finding it was someone else.

Last night a similar occurrence happened in my dreams: only in my dreams, this figure I saw and recognized  really was the figure I saw; and then, when I took a second look, he really wasn't that figure I'd seen, having been replaced by a total stranger I didn't recognize.

Point is: in the dream, the figure didn't seem to be one person then another; rather, he was one person then another. This happened to have been a deceased friend.

Don Scott

 I heard Virginia Speaker of the House Don Scott on CSpan the other day, and found him a really compelling speaker. I’m guessing he has got a future in the party.

As a criticism I would say that he used the phrase “In closing, I’ll just say” three times, to introduce three separate remarks, before he actually closed. But I guess people always do that.

Hector

 This essay makes me want to focus on Hector as I reread the Iliad in coming months.... a person for whom there is no possibility of success or escape from failure, the unchosen son, as it were, --- and the terrible dread with which he encounters his inevitable end.

Nationwide public access channel

 Idea that a television station / youtube channel dedicated to the best and most interesting in local politics across the nation might generate greater public interest in same.

But also: the idea of a nationwide public access channel, as they were once and are maybe still called. The democracy of whoever might want to present themselves on TV.

A literal failure of imagination

 In my dream this morning, there was very tall young man threatening to beat me up. The interesting thing about this was that when I asked him why he became completely unintelligible, as in barely making human sounds, let alone speaking a language.

My interpretation of this is that it indicates a literal failure of my imagination to produce a response to my question: like my imagination had brought us to a certain point in the dream, then it didn't know how to proceed, and went haywire.

Something similar to this, I would say, is when you've dreamed that you've written something really wonderful but when you strain to see what is exactly on the page you can't identify a single word. Your imagination isn't able to come up with it and your wonderful writing is revealed to be a mere actor's prop in the staging of the dream. 

To ask for something one needed an irrepressible trust in oneself and others

Robert Walser, The Assistant. Translator, Susan Bernofsky.): 

"Silvi was incapable of asking for things, she was too shy and disingenuous, she never quite dared; in order to ask for something, one must have an irrepressibly, powerful trust both in oneself and others. If one is to find the lovely courage to utter a fervent plea, one must from the outset be firmly, indeed adamantly convince that the request will be fulfilled, but Silvi was convinced of no one's kindness, as she had been all too soon and incautiously inured to quite different sort of treatment. A beaten-down slovenly little creature like Silvi can easily become more disagreeable to endure and more unsightly to behold with each passing day, for a small person like this will not only abandon all self-discipline and care, but indeed will exert herself -- motivated by a secret, painful defiance no one would expect of such an undeveloped child -- to goad the antipathy and disgust of those around her to ever higher levels by means of ever more loathsome conduct. In fact, the case of Silvi was most peculiar: it was almost impossible to feel love for her when one was looking at her. One's eyes always condemned her at once. Only one's heart, provided one had one, would later speak in her favor, saying: Poor little Silvi!"

Neurotransmitter: Acetylcholine

My experience with people with Alzheimer's is that they sometimes seem to operate in a dream state. Yesterday I randomly discovered -- first in a Washington Post article on dreams, then on Wikipedia's Alzheimer page -- the same neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, is involved in both. I'm sure that means nothing whatsoever, but I found it an odd coincidence.

My Life as a Writer

 Remembering this interview with Philip Roth from a few years back --

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. It was also my good luck that happiness didn’t matter to me and I had no compassion for myself. Though why such a task should have fallen to me I have no idea. Maybe writing protected me against even worse menace.

Now? Now I am a bird sprung from a cage instead of (to reverse Kafka’s famous conundrum) a bird in search of a cage. The horror of being caged has lost its thrill. It is now truly a great relief, something close to a sublime experience, to have nothing more to worry about than death.

Behind the gates of the wealthy

Behind the gates of the wealthy
Food lies rotting from waste
Outside it’s the poor
who lie frozen to death.

–Du Fu (tr.)

Another chunk of the memoir

 The memoir I’ve been writing has three big categories: things about the shop, things about the walk to the shop, and things about sitting at the computer after I’ve walked back from the shop. Here is another big chunk about the walk to the shop, which is about as good as I can make it without someone else looking at it.

I jokingly think of it as a haiku that has gone way over the syllable count (it is about 5000 words) but like a haiku it is about nature I write, “nature where there is no nature but our own.”

Heavy large strong

 Asyndeton, in which conjunctions are omitted. The spear of Achilles is “βριθὺ μέγα στιβαρόν” heavy large strong. No one else can wield it but Achilles. (Something similar here about the fir bolt that locked the gate to his compound. It takes three men to pull it in place but Achilles can do it himself.)

I don’t know if it’s interesting or not that Murray’s translation adds conjunctions (is polysyndentic): “heavy and huge and strong.” Pope avoids the phrase altogether.

Achilles’ heel probably post-homeric invention

 I’d been curious about this — how does it work exactly that Achilles was killed by getting shot by an arrow that hit his heel?

Answer seems to be that the whole “Achilles’ heel” myth was the invention of a later time, so we might safely imagine Achilles, in the Homeric universe, as getting shot in some more vital bodily part.

Air that is "the opposite of stuffy, the inverse of stale." TNR.

Hills going out v. hills returning home

That odd experience on longer runs where the big hills, returning home, when one is tired, are easier to take than the big hills going out, when one is fresh. It’s true that the very last hills, when one is really extremely tired, can be pretty hard to take returning home.

Noble joys

“Even pain dies once the churn of feelings is subdued Under the influence of noble joys.”(*)

One single sentiment

 “One single sentiment, that of fear for his young and happy life, possessed his whole being.” (War & Peace).

Etymology: "schwa"

 Hebrew word, it turns out: "The term schwa was introduced by German linguists in the 19th century from the Hebrew shva, the name of the niqqud sign used to indicate the phoneme. It was first used in English texts in the early 1890s."

I looked this up trying to recall how the schwa a sounded -- like the a in "about."

Cape Sounion, 1961. (*)

Cocaine and Rhinestones / Rusty Kershaw

 Courtesy of Cocaine and Rhinestones I’ve really been enjoying this Rusty Kershaw record, Cajun in The Blues Country, in particular the song The Country Boy.

Grape Vine / telephone cord

 hadn't thought til seeing it visually spelled out here how the "grape vine" might be a telephone cord

Identification with texts

 So interesting: to complete a minyan (quorum of ten men), a Torah scroll can stand in for a tenth member.

Bored because they don't have minds

 The bigger the stadiums the greater the intellectual poverty... People in America are bored -- bored because they don't have minds. (Restating this.)

It's interesting how publicly accepted watching sports is. (Seems like playing sports should be publicly accepted and endorsed, but why watching sports?)

A rose by it’s own rose is its own paradise of luminous folds

 Rae Armantrout & Mary Ruefle …. “a rose by it’s own rose is its own paradise of luminous folds.”

What if Achilles is K.?

 I guess you could make the case that just about anything that is both real and impossible of attainment could stand for ‘The Castle.’

A person who wanted to change the U.S. Government, for example, might think of the U.S. Capitol as The Castle, and D.C./ Arlington as the village. (Actually, maybe I should seriously look into that, and myself qua villager.)

Another possibility is Sacred Troy, as conceived through the prism of The Iliad, is The Castle. What if Achilles is K.? What if Homer, who can’t, in The Iliad, get into the sacking of Troy as a subject, is K.? (I don't think you could say Odysseus is K.)

Thoreau: my coat of arms will be a cluster of potatoe balls

 “Why not for my coat of arms — for device a drooping cluster of potatoe balls.– in a potatoe field.” Thoreau, Journals, 1851.

A fetish for calling each other 'man'

 I'd never looked into the origins of people calling each other "man" and assumed it was something ancient. Robin D.G. Kelley says in his biography of Thelonious Monk: "And in a world where whites commonly addressed them as 'boy,' young black males made a fetish of calling each other 'man.'" (Well, those things can both be true: that people have forever been calling each other 'man' but young blacks in the 1940's made a special thing of it.) He has a footnote for this which leads to three different cites.

Online etymological says it arose in Middle English but became "especially popular" in the early 20th century. 

This point  or insight by Yglesias that, following the Hur / Comey precedent, prosecutors in Trump cases need not actually convict of Trump of a crime, but simply slander him with implications about his age and mental health.

 This was good on The Abraham Accords (post). 

Comey Moments

 Comey moment is exactly right. Hur and Durham and Comey of a stamp. (qv)  ... Democrats need to be good faith actors, they don't need to signify that they are good faith actors by appointing those who do not (who probably cannot) act in good faith to higher offices.  Robert Gates another instance of this.

McCarthy Crowing

 I made the prediction earlier that House Speaker Johnson was liable not to be a very good Speaker, on the basis of the principle that when you choose a person for ideological reasons you tend to lose out on competency. This has not played out in quite the way I thought, but certainly now there have been at least a couple embarrassing votes, and McCarthy is crowing.  

θρῴσκω

 Potentially something going on with this verb θρῴσκω that I haven’t been attentive to — in this citation and this one. Usually meaning to leap or spring it can also describe beans “tossed” from the winnowing shovel. Here’s Cunliffe.

 Made so sad by this story , what a trying arc to a life, then this beautiful Joni Mitchell performance, Both Sides Now.