Max and Daniel are bickering.
Max and Daniel are counting calories.
Jon and Max are at the table on their computers.
Jon and Max are yelling at each other at the top of their lungs.
Max listens to sucky music.
Max still listens to sucky music.
Still listening.
Not stopping.
Sucky.
Sucky.
Daniel reads over my shoulder.
Daniel comments on my blog: "are you trying your hand at 'Moldy Peaches' lyrics?"
Max sings sucky music suckily.
Max wonders what Jon and Daniel are laughing about.
Max sings some more: same kind of music; same kind of singing.
Daniel takes a seat: he's loving this post.
Daniel recommends this line:
Max still wearing clothes from two days ago.
Max is probably misrepresented in this blog.
Or, probably not.
Jon has a Tazmanian Devil mug full of chocolate milk.
Daniel corrects Jon on previous line. Editted, it should be:
Jon had a Tazmanian Devil mug full of chocolate milk.
Daniel eats Jon's cheerios.
Daniel does not count the calories for said cheerios.
Don't tell Max.
6.24.2008
6.23.2008
Quotation (etc.) of the Day:
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
This reminds me of the play Troilus and Cressida for no good reason. Maybe it's simply because I am shamefully enamored of Napoleon Bonaparte and shamefully enamored of the play Troilus and Cressida. Here's a funny bit from the play between Achilles, Patroclus, and Thersites:
Arbitrary Selection from a Play of the Day.
[Enter ACHILLES.]
ACHILLES.
Who's there?
PATROCLUS.
Thersites, my lord.
ACHILLES.
Where, where? O, where? Art thou come? Why, my cheese, my
digestion, why hast thou not served thyself in to my table so
many meals? Come, what's Agamemnon?
THERSITES.
Thy commander, Achilles. Then tell me, Patroclus, what's
Achilles?
PATROCLUS.
Thy lord, Thersites. Then tell me, I pray thee, what's
Thersites?
THERSITES.
Thy knower, Patroclus. Then tell me, Patroclus, what art
thou?
PATROCLUS.
Thou must tell that knowest.
ACHILLES.
O, tell, tell,
THERSITES.
I'll decline the whole question. Agamemnon commands
Achilles; Achilles is my lord; I am Patroclus' knower; and
Patroclus is a fool.
PATROCLUS.
You rascal!
THERSITES.
Peace, fool! I have not done.
ACHILLES.
He is a privileg'd man. Proceed, Thersites.
THERSITES.
Agamemnon is a fool; Achilles is a fool; Thersites is a
fool; and, as aforesaid, Patroclus is a fool.
ACHILLES.
Derive this; come.
THERSITES.
Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles; Achilles is a
fool to be commanded of Agamemnon; Thersites is a fool to serve
such a fool; and this Patroclus is a fool positive.
PATROCLUS.
Why am I a fool?
THERSITES.
Make that demand of the Creator. It suffices me thou
art.
6.22.2008
A [rather long (but with the way Jon drops pages of quotations, what do you expect)] story from the annals of Jon & Ben's roommatedom.
A story. (Maybe blown a bit out of proportion, both in length and in meaning.)
Opening Comment & Epigraph.
The previous post's title reminds me of a poem that Ben, my former roommate, introduced me to.
Here it is:
Prologue.
After Ben told me about this poem and read it to me, we talked at length about the poem: what we liked about it, what we considered the tone of the poem, the occasion of the poem, what we thought of poetry per se. We listened to a This American Life episode about the poem. We google-hunted for, read each other, and created our own imitations and spoofs of the poem. It was a fun night.
This nice night was the first scene in what would turn out to be a wonderful, improbable, and enigmatic episode in the roommatedom of Jon & Ben, (and would stylistically befit the thought-lives of both to boot!)
Act I.
The next day, a Tuesday, I went to teach my American History & American Literature classes. In American Literature my students were giving presentations on modern American poets. Two of my students had picked William Carlos Williams as their topic of presentation, and they both independently chose to read his famous poem, This is just to say.
"What are the odds," I thought to myself with discretion, as if one could think under one's breath. I generously attended to my students' biographical research, recitation, commentary; I became gradually drawn away in thought from their speeches, distracted by the contents thereof, quietly cogitating on how I like the poem, how I like imagism as a poetic movement. (Were this a conversation, and not a blog, I would most assuredly engineer here an interlocutor-prompted digression concerning imagism, exactitude in literature, italo calvino, etc.,. But this is not a conversation. I will conclude Act I here in a rhapsodic flurry.)
Ah, the strange permutations one meets with in life: to listen to a lazy yet earnest home-school high-schooler stutter through the very clause in a poem that had been so evocative of concrete images, so propitiously fruitful of playful thoughts and thoughtful play in discussion with one's thoughtful roommate the night before! Ah, to smile surreptitiously at this strangeness in the plain view of one's students--students one knows to analyze and wonder at such slight smirks from their inscrutable instructor as if the smirks were sphinxes. Ah, to smile the more in this knowledge--to smile at these little inspectors! Ah, a rigorously playful and rigorously thoughtful life!
Act II.
Once back at the homestead hearth, I talk to Ben about this irregular coincidence. Where does the universe get off plugging gratuitous William Carlos Williams references into my everyday life? Has the ghost of William Carlos Williams paid for ad space on the would-be website of Jonathan Charles Wright's consciousness? Jon and Ben discuss.
We got to talking about coincidences in general. Ben noted an interesting distinction: he reflected that often what seem to be coincidences are merely results of the phenomenon of one's attention catering to a given set of things given one's positions in life: e.g., when you own a white mercury you notice more white mercury's on the road, but this does not mean that by miraculous coincidence there ARE more white mercury's on the road; when you're looking for an ARCO gas station you recognize way more non-ARCO gas stations on street corners, but this does not mean that by miraculous coincidence there ARE more non-ARCO gas stations; etc.
HOWEVER, argues Ben, there are incidents that seem inexplicably coincidental in a more interesting sense. For instance: being met with a William Carlos Williams poem twice within a space of twenty-four hours---hardly a case to be simply explained away by talk of a narrowed field of attention. When it comes to very particular, non-equivocal ideas, works of art, quotations, etc., there's got to be something else going on. Such instances appear to refuse explanation via reduction to merely psychological oddities: they seem bona fide cases belonging to something like chance, fate, or some other word of equally murky and precarious sense.
Curiouser and curiouser!
Act III.
That evening.
Ben took me to the Nunnery; a shanghai operation that, as per usual, was either radically in or out (or both in and out) of tune with the secret, vibrating chords of desire within my heart. I was, as per usual, made generally awkward and stinted in my conversation at being in the Nunnery. All was right with the world.
I, characteristically having nothing but barbarisms to utter, turned to my book: The Professor at the Breakfast Table by O. W. Holmes. I read a selection, and then proceed to freak out at the selection. Here followeth the selection in question.
Holmes writes:
Here endeth the selection.
On reading this, I darted to Ben with cogs turning over each other in my mind. (He, meanwhile, ever an object of envy, was engrossed in his so-easily-generated conversational amicability with the fair and foreign Nunners.)
I demanded that he listen to me read aloud the selection I had just read to myself. I read. He listened.
He proceeded to freak out a bit.
It is one thing to be met with a rare coincidence: a new poem is flung at me from different and unrelated directions--Okay, that's weird, but I'll manage somehow.
It is another thing entirely to have my brain explode.
The general observation and intellectual wonderment in which Ben and I had previously engaged regarding the eerie and improbable repetitions of ideas became the object of one such eerie and improbable repetition! The very notion of how nearly inexplicable are these marvels, these flukes--this notion, by greater fluke still, offered itself up as one such inexplicable case! Through a fantastic concurrence of events, words, thoughts, and globules of blood, all surrounding Ben and Me, this bundle of excogitations transcended to an AUTOLOGICAL STATUS: it bore the property it denoted; it WAS what it described! IT WAS WEIRD!
Conceptual vertigo can hardly be avoided when a line of thought sprawls itself beyond the mind's scope thus. Words paled. Ben and I appropriately prattled a bit. My tongue, as if mimicking my mind, numb and swolen, clumsily billowed into my teeth, stopping up my incoherent speech with incoherent sound.
I soon evacuated the girls' house and my thoughts on the subject.
The universe had shown me up.
The universe scoffs: "My folds are more involute than your scrutiny meticulous--My profile obscure and my colors opaque to your keenest stare.
You will not audit my niceties; you will not interpret my smirks, my sphinxes, nor me.
Now blog about it, I dare you."
The End.
Opening Comment & Epigraph.
The previous post's title reminds me of a poem that Ben, my former roommate, introduced me to.
Here it is:
This is just to say-- William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
Prologue.
After Ben told me about this poem and read it to me, we talked at length about the poem: what we liked about it, what we considered the tone of the poem, the occasion of the poem, what we thought of poetry per se. We listened to a This American Life episode about the poem. We google-hunted for, read each other, and created our own imitations and spoofs of the poem. It was a fun night.
This nice night was the first scene in what would turn out to be a wonderful, improbable, and enigmatic episode in the roommatedom of Jon & Ben, (and would stylistically befit the thought-lives of both to boot!)
Act I.
The next day, a Tuesday, I went to teach my American History & American Literature classes. In American Literature my students were giving presentations on modern American poets. Two of my students had picked William Carlos Williams as their topic of presentation, and they both independently chose to read his famous poem, This is just to say.
"What are the odds," I thought to myself with discretion, as if one could think under one's breath. I generously attended to my students' biographical research, recitation, commentary; I became gradually drawn away in thought from their speeches, distracted by the contents thereof, quietly cogitating on how I like the poem, how I like imagism as a poetic movement. (Were this a conversation, and not a blog, I would most assuredly engineer here an interlocutor-prompted digression concerning imagism, exactitude in literature, italo calvino, etc.,. But this is not a conversation. I will conclude Act I here in a rhapsodic flurry.)
Ah, the strange permutations one meets with in life: to listen to a lazy yet earnest home-school high-schooler stutter through the very clause in a poem that had been so evocative of concrete images, so propitiously fruitful of playful thoughts and thoughtful play in discussion with one's thoughtful roommate the night before! Ah, to smile surreptitiously at this strangeness in the plain view of one's students--students one knows to analyze and wonder at such slight smirks from their inscrutable instructor as if the smirks were sphinxes. Ah, to smile the more in this knowledge--to smile at these little inspectors! Ah, a rigorously playful and rigorously thoughtful life!
Act II.
Once back at the homestead hearth, I talk to Ben about this irregular coincidence. Where does the universe get off plugging gratuitous William Carlos Williams references into my everyday life? Has the ghost of William Carlos Williams paid for ad space on the would-be website of Jonathan Charles Wright's consciousness? Jon and Ben discuss.
We got to talking about coincidences in general. Ben noted an interesting distinction: he reflected that often what seem to be coincidences are merely results of the phenomenon of one's attention catering to a given set of things given one's positions in life: e.g., when you own a white mercury you notice more white mercury's on the road, but this does not mean that by miraculous coincidence there ARE more white mercury's on the road; when you're looking for an ARCO gas station you recognize way more non-ARCO gas stations on street corners, but this does not mean that by miraculous coincidence there ARE more non-ARCO gas stations; etc.
HOWEVER, argues Ben, there are incidents that seem inexplicably coincidental in a more interesting sense. For instance: being met with a William Carlos Williams poem twice within a space of twenty-four hours---hardly a case to be simply explained away by talk of a narrowed field of attention. When it comes to very particular, non-equivocal ideas, works of art, quotations, etc., there's got to be something else going on. Such instances appear to refuse explanation via reduction to merely psychological oddities: they seem bona fide cases belonging to something like chance, fate, or some other word of equally murky and precarious sense.
Curiouser and curiouser!
Act III.
That evening.
Ben took me to the Nunnery; a shanghai operation that, as per usual, was either radically in or out (or both in and out) of tune with the secret, vibrating chords of desire within my heart. I was, as per usual, made generally awkward and stinted in my conversation at being in the Nunnery. All was right with the world.
I, characteristically having nothing but barbarisms to utter, turned to my book: The Professor at the Breakfast Table by O. W. Holmes. I read a selection, and then proceed to freak out at the selection. Here followeth the selection in question.
Holmes writes:
I have been a hundred times struck with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark with a crack of timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely pillow,--a widow.
Oh, these mysterious meetings! Leaving all the vague, waste, endless spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed for them in the waters from the beginning of creation! Not only things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these surprises, that if there were a reader in my parish who did not recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention, I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of children. For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or come across some idea. Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact or idea strikes you from another quarter. It seems as if it had passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank wall that shuts in the world of thought. Yet no possible connection exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact arrived. Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening in the course of a very pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons table-boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard of. Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short, in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the cavity of a geode.
Aphorism by the Professor
In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night. If old, it observes stated periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of high-water to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
The crucial experiment is this. Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established. If the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of maturity is no less clear.
--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commonstable.--Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place.--Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation. Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
I was going to let the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions. There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body than you think for. Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle. How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed, rounded disks, taking an active part in all your vital processes, part and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which warms your frame and colours your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow streaks, and counted the globules and then made a calculation. The counting by the micrometer took him a week.--You have, my full-grown friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery, running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live, sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions. Errors excepted.
Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? Listen, then. The number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in the world of thoughts illustrate those which we constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the presence of the young girl now at our table is the special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections.
Here endeth the selection.
On reading this, I darted to Ben with cogs turning over each other in my mind. (He, meanwhile, ever an object of envy, was engrossed in his so-easily-generated conversational amicability with the fair and foreign Nunners.)
I demanded that he listen to me read aloud the selection I had just read to myself. I read. He listened.
He proceeded to freak out a bit.
It is one thing to be met with a rare coincidence: a new poem is flung at me from different and unrelated directions--Okay, that's weird, but I'll manage somehow.
It is another thing entirely to have my brain explode.
The general observation and intellectual wonderment in which Ben and I had previously engaged regarding the eerie and improbable repetitions of ideas became the object of one such eerie and improbable repetition! The very notion of how nearly inexplicable are these marvels, these flukes--this notion, by greater fluke still, offered itself up as one such inexplicable case! Through a fantastic concurrence of events, words, thoughts, and globules of blood, all surrounding Ben and Me, this bundle of excogitations transcended to an AUTOLOGICAL STATUS: it bore the property it denoted; it WAS what it described! IT WAS WEIRD!
Conceptual vertigo can hardly be avoided when a line of thought sprawls itself beyond the mind's scope thus. Words paled. Ben and I appropriately prattled a bit. My tongue, as if mimicking my mind, numb and swolen, clumsily billowed into my teeth, stopping up my incoherent speech with incoherent sound.
I soon evacuated the girls' house and my thoughts on the subject.
The universe had shown me up.
The universe scoffs: "My folds are more involute than your scrutiny meticulous--My profile obscure and my colors opaque to your keenest stare.
You will not audit my niceties; you will not interpret my smirks, my sphinxes, nor me.
Now blog about it, I dare you."
The End.
An unapologetic apology.
Forgive me.
The last 50 or so days have been relatively replete with things worth blogging about, yet my blog for that period of time has been destitute.
"Why so?" you may ask.
Let us wax speculative:
Is this the sad case because my travel-plans for the last month, though having zigzagged me far across the globe, have refused to deposit me at a computer with internet-access for any blog-sufficient period of time? Is this the sad case because I have been occupied chiefly with friends both new and old in face-to-face interaction, and so deemed it prodigal to devote my thoughts to some online simulacrum of companionship/discourse? Is this the sad case because every time I would sit down to type out a blog, I would run against some daunting, foreign spectre of writer's block?
Is this the sad case for some other seemingly plausible and/or incisive and/or telling explanation?
I am afraid not, no. No.
It is, in fact, because I have been without fingers.
50 or so days ago, in the midst of rigorous and groundbreaking scientific research, a radium/dynamite-powered garlic press exploded in my hands--blew to smithereens. With it went my National Science Research Fellowship, my academic career, my wife, my children, my dignity, hope, faith, love, virility, the last of my garlic...and...
my fingers.
The last 50 or so days have been relatively replete with things worth blogging about, yet my blog for that period of time has been destitute.
"Why so?" you may ask.
Let us wax speculative:
Is this the sad case because my travel-plans for the last month, though having zigzagged me far across the globe, have refused to deposit me at a computer with internet-access for any blog-sufficient period of time? Is this the sad case because I have been occupied chiefly with friends both new and old in face-to-face interaction, and so deemed it prodigal to devote my thoughts to some online simulacrum of companionship/discourse? Is this the sad case because every time I would sit down to type out a blog, I would run against some daunting, foreign spectre of writer's block?
Is this the sad case for some other seemingly plausible and/or incisive and/or telling explanation?
I am afraid not, no. No.
It is, in fact, because I have been without fingers.
50 or so days ago, in the midst of rigorous and groundbreaking scientific research, a radium/dynamite-powered garlic press exploded in my hands--blew to smithereens. With it went my National Science Research Fellowship, my academic career, my wife, my children, my dignity, hope, faith, love, virility, the last of my garlic...and...
my fingers.
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