pretext. He himself declared, as we

One is thus inaugurating another word, in sum, a homonym that must be put forward cautiously between quotation marks. Another word-concept is thus staged whose event one causes to come about.”¹⁶

Whereas Sontag concerns herself with how quotation marks make camp, or camp the quotidian, Marjorie Garber, in her essay “ “ ” (Quotation Marks),” highlights authenticity as a central problem for quotation. Garber notes that “paradoxically … quotation marks, when either written or spoken, can convey both absolute authenticity and veracity, on the one hand, and suspected inauthenticity, irony or doubt, on the other.” ¹⁷

The crowd to her, so
many marks

*

Individious

*

“Fabulous, fabulous”

*

If smoothness is to be a criteria
Then you’re definitely inferior

The researchers quoted prominent jazz critics, such as Barry Ulanov, in support of the thesis that the musicians’ supposed lack of training in moral philosophy and the liberal arts contributed to their “immaturity and disorganization.”⁴ Moreover, displaying extreme naivete concerning black musicians’ access to white media, the two scholars maintain that the jazz musician was “relatively illiterate in respect to the verbal expression of his own art … the musician has remained silent and allowed others to do the talking for him,” thereby colluding in his own isolation from the world.

Up until then, everything had been for me one of a kind. I could not conceive of different examples of the same thing existing simultaneously in more than one place at once. Thus in my dream, all bananas belonging to the class of bananas had had to be contiguous. Bananas existed at my behest and without that there could be no place for them. Annie Sullivan expresses concern in one of her letters about my number obsession:

June 12, 1887
I am teaching Helen the square hand letters as a sort of diversion. It gives her something to do, and keeps her quiet, which is desirable while this enervating weather lasts.

Zygogynum trees produce many flower buds, but only a few open each day. Consequently one small tree may remain in flower for months, despite the fact that each blossom lives no more than two days. This is a common flowering strategy of many tropical trees, as we saw in chapter 1. Each flower usually has two rings of stiff petals. The petals of some species have a pinkish tinge while others are yellowish-orange or a deep burgundy.

The pollen-making stamens and seed-making carpels live together in the same Zygogynum flower, but they mature at different times…. By isolating the sexual organs from each other in this way, Zygogynum trees avoid accidental self-pollination.

In the 1920s, Blue Tit birds in Southhampton learned to tear the tops off milk bottles and drink the cream inside. Soon, Blue Tit birds more than a hundred miles away were exhibiting the talent -- even though the birds rarely flew more than fifteen miles -- and by 1947, the habit was universal among the species. This owed to morphic resonance, a collective memory held within a planet’s morphogenetic field, and passed on to each new generation of life. The same effect was witnessed in monkey creatures four million years in the future, on the planet Endarra.⁸¹⁴

*****

1 - Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

2 - Charles Bernstein, The Sophist. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987.

3 - George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

4 - Madeline Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa. Santa Fe: Burning Books, 1994.

5 - Peter Bernhardt, Wily Violets and Underground Orchids: Revelations of a Botanist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

6 - Lance Parkin, Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe (2nd Edition). Des Moines IA: Mad Norwegian Press, 2007.

You mustn't forget about spiders.

“Garrett, let’s hear from you.”

“Well,” Garrett said, but declined to elaborate.

“They keep the money,” Rondo reminded them, “in banks.”

“Listen, guys,” the Bear began.

“Don’t say. A fucking. Thing,” Hatwell warned him.

The Bear deferred, and they drank some so-called beers.

The logical response was to substitute other forms of international liquidity. The problem to which this was a solution was not a global liquidity shortage but the need to substitute a new reserve asset for the dollar in order to prevent the process described by Triffin from destabilizing the Bretton Woods system. As mentioned above, this was favored by weak-currency countries and opposed by their strong-currency counterparts. Discussions were complicated by the fact that the dollar was both weak and strong.

Those words kept going through my head, and I just kept on walking. That man sort of followed me, shouting that he needed directions. Finally, the man yelled, “What are you, deaf?!” And I stopped, and I just gave him the directions, and that’s all he wanted, after all. But I was scared to death of him!

After the first day, one of his fellow smugglers suggested he get a fishing rod and pretend to be fishing so as not to arouse suspicion. Muscles went to a sporting goods store, bought seventeen rods and assorted tackle, and returned to the pier. He sat there for hours, trying to figure out how to put everything together.

After two months of struggle, I concluded that I could not solve these problems. It seemed it was in part because of the terrible privations of postwar life. Soon, however, I made some lucky discoveries: it was not the result of my limitations that I could not solve these problems; they are unsolvable! For various reasons, which I no longer remember, my conviction grew.

This doesn’t mean that for Menocchio the book was incidental, or a pretext. He himself declared, as we shall see, that at least one book had moved him deeply, encouraging him to think new thoughts by its startling assertions. It was the encounter between the printed page and the oral culture, of which he was one embodiment, that led Menocchio to formulate -- first for himself, later for his fellow villagers, and finally for the judges -- the “opinions … [that] came out of his head.”

Have you ever tried such a thing? I have, and it’s impossible, something only a few natural writers or journalists can do, be talking about politics, for example, and at the same time writing a little article on gardening or spondaic hexameters (which I can tell you, boys, are a rare phenomenon.) And that was how she spent her days at the general’s office, and when she had finished her work, sometimes quite late at night, she would say goodbye to everyone, gather up her things, and leave on her own.

***

1 - Rafi Zabor, The Bear Comes Home. WW Norton (NY) 1998.
2 - Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History Of The International Monetary System. Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ) 1996.
3 - Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years. Dell (NY) 1994.
4 - “Roy Graham”, COWBOY MAFIA: The Finest Story in True-Crime History. Roy Graham 2000.
5 - Mariko Yasugi and Nicholas Passell, Memoirs of a Proof Theorist: Godel And Other Logicians. World Scientific Publishing (Singapore) 2003.
6 - Carlo Ginsburg (tr. John and Anne Tedeschi), The Cheese And The Worms: The Cosmos Of A Sixteenth Century Miller. Penguin (NY) 1982.
7 - Roberto Bolano (tr. Natasha Wimmer), The Savage Detectives. Picador (NY) 2008.

Knowledge of these conditions cannot begin too early.

Indeed, it seems to me that the art of our country has for many years past been introduced to the public of Europe and America in all sorts of ways, and hundreds of books have appeared in several foreign languages; but I have been privately alarmed for the reason that a great many such books contain either superficial observations made during sightseeing sojourns of six months or a year in our country or are but hasty commentaries, compilations, extracts or references, chosen here and there from other volumes.

The masks represent the Himalayan atmosphere of awe-inspiring mighty peaks and deep-sounding river gorges, of eerie rustlings of haunted forest leaves in the valleys and desert-like mirages appearing among the giant mountain landscapes. When the cult of the Devi captured the people’s imagination, and more and more temples were erected in almost every hamlet, these masks were in great demand because the local temples which could not afford to commission a complete idol of the goddess could still do her honour through such symbols. With the passage of time, the practice became a custom so that even when the temples were more prosperous and their imagery more resplendent, masks still occupied the principal altar – and were no longer made of wood or clay, as in the past, but cast or beaten in metals such as copper, silver and even gold.

We admire their terracotta colour, at the same time as our incurable anthropomorphism leads us to classify them as repugnant, disgusting, slimy and other equally unjust epithets. Actually, they’re very beautiful slugs, with a smooth and shiny front part followed by a dorsal section that looks like the work of Piza, our friend the Brazilian painter, I mean a surface filled with little gathers and grooves that look hand-made, although it’s hard to imagine a hand working on a slug, and much less Piza’s. As is their custom, this cohort of slugs advance millimetre by millimetre, giving the clear impression they’re not going anywhere, except where pedestrians and vehicles will irrefutably crush them; but we’re falling back onto anthropomorphism because slugs know better than us why they leave their woodland shelters and make their entrance into the rest area, although it might also be ingenuous to imagine themselves so sure of themselves, poor little things.

“You mustn’t forget about spiders,” Carol reminds me after I’ve consulted her regarding certain details about slugs in Canada.

“I’m inclined to think he does,” said I; and Fritz, who had been by my side, dropped respectfully behind.

CHAPTER IX
A NEW USE FOR A TEA-TABLE

If I were to detail the ordinary events of my daily life at the time, they might prove instructive to people who are not familiar with the inside of palaces; if I revealed some of the secrets I learnt, they might prove of interest to the statesmen of Europe. I intend to do neither of these things.

“How do you account for what my father saw and heard there?” asked Leo.

“Coincidence. No doubt there are bluffs on the coast of Africa that look something like a man’s head, and plenty of people who speak bastard Arabic. Also, I believe that there are lots of swamps. Another thing is, Leo, and I am sorry to say it, but I do not believe that your poor father was quite right when he wrote that letter.

Since his map is not a descriptive, but an analytical and selective representation of Istanbul, it certainly reflects the city vision or concept of the 16th century Ottoman intellectual such as Matrakçi Nasuh, who was a typically educated Ottoman military man. He wrote books on history and on mathematics and he was a calligrapher and a painter. Before carrying out any analysis, however, we have to remember that there are rules imposed by the size of the pages, by the nature of the miniature painting itself, such as the lack of perspective, a lack of realism in depicting the correct shape of the site and the almost total absence of motivation for a representation of the third dimension.

The most remarkable characteristic of Matrakçi’s map is the absence of roads, streets and open public places. His map is directionless.

******

1 - Henry P. Bowie, with prefatory remarks by Iwaya Sazanami and Hirai Kinza, ON THE LAWS OF JAPANESE PAINTING, Dover (NY) 1952
2 - Madanjeet Singh, HIMALAYAN ART, Macmillan (NY) 1971
3 - Julio Cortazar & Carol Dunlop, tr. Anne McLean, AUTONAUTS OF THE COSMOROUTE, Archipelago (Brooklyn) 2007
4 - Anthony Hope, PRISONER OF ZENDA, Penguin (NY) 2007
5 - H. Rider Haggard, SHE, Penguin (NY) 2007
6 - Dogan Kuban, ISTANBUL AN URBAN HISTORY, The Economic And Social History Foundation of Turkey (Istanbul) 1996

******

float, but pre-digested.

Names collect their own crowds. They are greedy and live their own separate lives, scarcely connected with the real natures of the men who bear them.

The crowd which the seeker after fame envisages consists of shadows, that is, of creatures who do not even have to be alive so long as they are capable of one thing, which is to repeat his name. He wants them to repeat it often, and to repeat it in front of others, so that as many as possible may hear it and learn how to say it themselves. But what these shadows are apart from this -- their height, their appearance, how they live and work -- is a matter of total indifference to the man whose fame they spread.

Another question was presented which was yet more perplexing: It had been decided that thirty-six women should be admitted to the royal table. But in what proportion should they be selected for the municipal banquet from the new nobility, which held their titles by the terms of the Charter, and the old nobility, which had regained theirs? This was the problem to be solved. The new nobility was confounded when it saw that only five places were reserved for it. The common citizens considered themselves still more humiliated, since, among all the thirty-six ladies, there were only two who did not belong to the nobility, and because at a fete given by the city the municipal body was not represented by any woman.

Following is the list of the thirty-six ladies, as it appeared in the Moniteur: The Duchess of Fleury, the Duchess of Duras, the Countess of Blacas, the Marchioness of Avaray, the Marchioness of Boisgelin, the Countess of Escars, the Marchioness of Breze, the Duchess of Serent, the Countess of Damas, Madame de Choisy, the Duchess of Vauguyon, the Princess of Beaufremont, the Countess of Narbonne, the Viscountess of Narbonne, the Duchess of Maille, the Countess of Durfort, the Countess of Nansouty, the Marchioness of Lagrange, the Marchioness of La Rochejacquelein, the Duchess of Rohan-Montbazon, the Princess of Chalais, the Duchess of Coigny, the Duchess of Mouchy, the Duchess of Rohan, the Princess of Solre, the Princess of Wagram, the Countess of Bournonville, Madame Ferrand, Countess Maison, Marechale Suchet, the Duchess of Albufera, Marechale Oudinot (Duchess of Reggio), the Princess of Laval, the Duchess of Harcourt, the Marchioness of Tourzel and the Baroness of Montboissier.

Resignation is the salve for wounded self-love. Difficulties of etiquette are arranged according to inexorable laws. The fete takes place on the 27th of August. It is very fine.

We shall explain later the situation of these women.

It should be recalled that every time the Inca kings wanted to promulgate a new law, they always attributed its authorship to their ancestor Manco Capac who, they said, had promulgated certain laws during his lifetime and left others dormant in order that his successors might make them public whenever they proved to be necessary. They added that all of these laws had been taught him by his father the Sun, before he was sent to the earth.

This fact makes it doubly certain that knowledge of these conditions can not begin too early.

The principles governing confinement and recovery are so simple to-day, compared with the past, that we are confident that we shall see the day when the laborious child-birth will be looked upon as proof of a mistake. Among other great reforms may be mentioned the limitation of offspring, the defects of heredity, skin troubles, etc.

Foremost in these movements stand the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

1- Elias Canetti, tr. Carol Stewart. Crowds and Power. NYC: FSG, 1984.

2- Imbert De Saint-Amand, tr. James Davis. Famous Women of the French Court. NYC: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892.

3- Garcilaso de la Vega, tr. "A.G." The Royal Commentaries of the Incas. Orion Press, 1961.

4- Mary R. Melendy, M.D., Ph.D. ("Graduate of Hahnemann Medical College, Chicago; Graduate of the Bennett Eclectic Medical College, Chicago; Student at Rush Medical Clinic, Cook County Hospital; Lecturer on Diseases of Women and Children in the American Health University, Etc., Etc."). The Ideal Woman: for Maidens-Wives-Mothers: a book giving full information on all the mysterious and complex matters pertaining to women. E.E. Miller, 1915.

We should all love a great picture.

***

Inside Rampart Cave was a mound of dung deposited, he and his colleagues concluded, by untold generations of female sloths who took shelter there to give birth. The manure pile was five feet high, 10 feet across, and more than 100 feet long. Martin felt like he’d entered a sacred place.

When vandals set it on fire 10 years later, the fossil dung heap was so enormous that it burned for months.

***

61. KITTENS IN THE STUDIO

Madame Ronner loved any kind of cat, but she adored that furry, sprightly, roguish spark of life – a kitten. She watched the ways of kittens until she could paint them better than any other artist. Here we have a delightful example of her art. Leaving her room for a few minutes, she came back and found her mischievous little models playing in her paint-box and disarranging everything. Instead of being angry, however, she sketched the kittens and their mother, and so obtained a prettier, livelier, and more amusing picture than the one she had intended to make.

***

Tears came to her eyes. I felt I’d best not ask why. I kissed her hands across the table: “You’ll be beautiful whatever.”

After the meal I hurried off to the bathroom (the normal proportion between what I drink what I excrete has yielded to a magic process that produces a liter of piss from a glass of anything, and vice versa); once alone I remembered these pages waiting to be filled. Not only filled but provided for. A full account of my life requires a full life. Example: I can’t report what I read unless I read. Having scribbled these paragraphs, I’m going to do precisely that. Young Days in Bratislava – not comparable to Goethe or Henri Beyle, but good enough to make me want to write memoirs of some sort. I’m no writer, but if I ever became one, what greater gift to readers (at least I’m a reader!) than that of past times judiciously salvaged in the written word?

***

THIS BOOK
Is the growth of a lifetime. Portions
have been written: portions dictated
through the years of blindness.
Always has rung in my ears the
wail of that old Greek threnody:

Ai! Ai! Ai!
The dead that come not back!

***

In a book I am reading Fellini says that and that
Augustine never advocated caprice
An unknown woman says to my mother
I’m so sorry for your loss

***

“Since you possess the sum I ask for, sir, and my guarantee is sufficient, why do you refuse me?”

“Because men have their caprices as well as women, madame.”

“But what is this caprice, which makes you act thus against your interest? for, I repeat to you, make your conditions; whatever they may be, I accept them!”

“Your grace will accept all the conditions?” said the notary, with a singular expression.

“All! two, three, four thousand francs – more, if you will; for I tell you,” added the duchess, frankly, in a tone almost affectionate, “I have no resource but in you, sir – in you alone. It will be impossible for me to find elsewhere that which I ask you for to-morrow; and it must be – you understand – it must be absolutely. Thus, I repeat to you, whatever condition you impose on me for this service, I accept.”

In his blindness, he had interpreted in an unworthy manner the last words of the duchess. It was an idea as stupid as it was infamous; but we have already said that sometimes Jacques Ferrand became a tiger or a wolf; then the beast overpowered the man. He arose quickly and advanced toward the duchess. She, thunder-struck, rose at the same moment and regarded him with astonishment.

***

“Well then, and now I want to tell you what Mendel Teichmann had to say about Pechmann: that he was an attempt on the part of nature to make a good man. There are a million such attempts. Inexhaustible Nature is patient in its inventions. That’s what Mendel Teichmann said.”

“Yech,” said Pepe, bored, “we can’t use good people right now. What we need are heroes, fighters, executioners, knife-grinders, desperadoes.”

“You will need all sorts of people,” I said, “when the revolution has taken place.” I gasped—it wasn’t me speaking, it was Mendel Teichmann speaking through me. What had Teichmann done to me? What had Pechmann done to me? And what would Pepe do to me?

***

1 - Alan Weisman. The World Without Us. NYC: St. Martins, 2007.

2 - Arthur Mee and Holland Thompson, eds. The Everyday Library for Young People, Volume V: Plays, Pictures and Poems. NYC: The Grolier Society, 1916.

3 - Harry Mathews. The Journalist. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997.

4 - Joseph P. Widney ("Author of: Race Life of The Aryan Peoples; The Lure and the Land; Genesis and Evolution of Islam and Judaeo-Christianity; The Faith That Has Come To Me; The Three Americas. In Preparation: LIFE AND ITS PROBLEMS AS SEEN BY A BLIND MAN AT NINETY-THREE"). Whither Away? The Problem of Death and the Hereafter. Los Angeles: Pacific Publishing Company, 1934.

5 - Laura Solomon. Blue and Red Things. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2007.

6 - Eugene Sue. Mysteries of Paris. NYC: A.L. Burt, no date but probably late 1800s.

7 - Fred Wander, tr. Michael Hoffman. The Seventh Well. NYC: Norton, 2007.

Link Of The Week

I have often believed that book dust contains a brain toxin that slowly makes people crazy in a particular way. If you have met a lot of used book dealers, you probably know what I'm talking about -- anecdotal evidence suggests that the longer you hang around old books, the nuttier you become...

And so I refer you to today's SITE OF THE WEEK:

The main point is that, looking carefully to the mechanism of dust accumulation on the books and the way it transfer to our respiratory organs; makes the case of books dust special and needs new revision.

The new findings reveal that the problem is beyond our current knowledge about dust mite or allergy and asthma due to dust. The health damage is more serious than we would want to ignore because of economical concern. This problem is of concern not only to librarians but anybody who keeps books at home or deals with books. We clean everything carefully in the house except books. The study shows that, long time exposure to books dust can create many illnesses like lung cancer, heart attack, allergy, asthma, skin problem, depression etc. This site is created to sensitize the public for taking action against this serious health hazard.

This is the result of two entire years working for days and nights. I did this for the love of people and science. I did my best. I did my part. I cannot do anything alone. I now need your help and support.

The spirit of the place / as dogma, the heart / I cannot cite

I first learned the word orthoepy when Keith Waldrop, at the San Francisco Poetry Center in 2003, held up a placard, in lieu of reading the word aloud, when his poem contained it, on which the word was spelled:

Jacob Delafon locates the word orthoepy, meaning the “correct pronunciation of words.” The Word seems to him unpronounceable.

Two years later, at a library sale, Tyler Carter came across a copy of that grand old book: The Orthoepist: A Pronouncing Manual, containing about three thousand five hundred words, including a considerable number of the names of foreign authors, artists, etc., that are often mispronounced, by Alfred Ayres. Some months afterward, forgetful that we already had a copy in our household, I checked another copy of the same book out of the same library. We stayed up late that evening, drinking ouzo and discussing pronunciatory varietals until our own slurred speech rendered all one. “Dude,” I said, “The more things change.”

I am sometimes fond of a radio show on which the host likes to say

These are troubled times we live in. There are some strange things happening out there.

in response to almost anything. I once grew accustomed to arguing with Jenn Guitart about the need to distinguish between Dawn and Don, or lack thereof. When I recorded her own pronunciations and played them back to her, she could not say which were which. But later I found this map:




Whereas today I found, on my desk, a copy of Alfred Ayres’ later (1883) book, The Verbalist: A Manual, devoted to brief discussions of the right and the wrong use of words, and to some other matters of interest to those who would speak and write with propriety, which states quite clearly on page 109:

“However, my dear James, let this strong and striking instance of the misuse of the word it serve you in the way of caution. Never put an it on paper without thinking well of what you are about. When I see many its in a page, I always tremble for the writer.”
Jeopardize. This is a modern word which we could easily do without, as it means neither more nor less than its venerable progenitor to jeopard, which is greatly preferred by all careful writers.
Just going to. Instead of “I am just going to go,” it is better to say, “ I am just about to go.”
Kids. “This is another vile contraction. Habit blinds people to the unseemliness of a term like this. How would it sound if one should speak of silk gloves as silks?”
Kind. See POLITE.
Knights Templars.

Mencius, whose philosophical attitude is not entirely unlike that of Alfred Ayres, says this:

If prevented by statutory regulations from making their coffins in this way, men cannot have the feeling of pleasure.

Erle Stanley Gardner, who likewise enjoys rationalizing death, presents the following image in The Case of the Screaming Woman:

“A ray of black light,” Mason said. “It’s fixed so that, when they swing one of their cars in the driveway, the garage doors all open....”
“But, Chief,” Della Street said, “doesn’t that make the garage vulnerable to any prowler or--?”
“They can undoubtedly turn a switch on the inside of the house and shut this mechanism off,” Mason told her. “The fact that it’s been left on indicates they intend to be back within a short time.”

Embleme XXXIIII of The Theater of Fine Devices, containing an hundred MORALL EMBLEMES, a facsimile of the unique copy of the book of emblems published by Richard Field in London 1614 and now in the collections of the Huntington Library starts with the motto

Some that in knowledge diue most deepe
know least from hurt themselues to keep

, continues with a crude etching of a bird falling, belly up, from a tree, and concludes with the following verse:

The Nightingale hath such a daintie note,
No other bird the harmonie can mend;
Sometimes to sing she straineth so her throte,
That therewithall her song and life doth end.
Eu’n so likewise some students do so dote,
When others do their prose and verse commend,
      That to attaine vnto more perfect skill,
      With studying too hard themselues they kill.