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Loosely, A Star

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Word of the day is “asterism.” Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:

  1. A group or cluster of stars; a constellation.
  2. loosely, A star, or anything shaped like one.
  3. A group of three asterisks placed thus (⁂) to direct attention to a particular passage. Rarely, a single asterisk (*) so used.
  4. Min. (Also in modern Latin form asterismus.) An appearance of light in the shape of a six-rayed star seen in some crystals, as in star sapphire.

From the Greek ἀστερισμός, which means “a marking with stars, a constellation.”

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On the Subject of Routines

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

—Haruki Murakami, interviewed by John Wray in The Art of Fiction No. 182, for The Paris Review

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I Never Did Intend Murder

Monday, August 26, 2013

In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.

I have another objection; and that is, it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

—John Brown, from his last speech, emphasis mine

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Esprit de Bureaucratie

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Once effectively dehumanized, and hence cancelled as potential subjects of moral demands, human objects of bureaucratic task-performance are viewed with ethical indifference, which soon turns into disapprobation and censure when their resistance, or lack of cooperation, slows down the smooth flow of bureaucratic routine. Dehumanized objects cannot possibly possess a ’cause’, much less a ‘just’, one; they have no ‘interests’ to be considered, indeed no claim to subjectivity. Human objects become therefore a ‘nuisance factor’ their obstreperousness further strengths the self-esteem and the bonds of comradeship that unite the functionaries. The latter see themselves now as companions in a difficult struggle, calling for courage, self-sacrifice and selfless dedication to the cause. It is not the objects of bureaucratic action, but its subjects who suffer and deserve compassion and moral praise. They may justly derive pride and assurance of their own dignity from crushing the recalcitrance of their victims—much as they are proud of overriding any other obstacle. Dehumanization of the objects and positive moral self-evaluation reinforce each other. The functionaries may faithfully serve any goal while their moral conscience remains unimpaired.

—Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989

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A Marbled, Iridescent Text

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

In Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, the alternation is that of two pleasures in a state of competition; the other edge is the other delight: more, more, still more! one more word, one more celebration. Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure. Where is this elsewhere? In the paradise of words. Cobra is in fact a paradisiac text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here and each scores a bull’s-eye; the author (the reader) seems to say to them: I love you all (words, phrases, sentences, adjectives, discontinuities: pell-mell: signs and mirages of objects which they represent); a kind of Franciscanism invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again: a marbled, iridescent text; we are gorged with language, like children who are never refused anything or scolded for anything or, even worse, “permitted” anything. Cobra is the pledge of continuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss.

—Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text

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Did Not Anticipate Jogging

Monday, August 19, 2013

Always more slowly ahead. — Running on the street has the expression of terror. The fall of the victim is imitated in the very attempt to escape the fall. The posture of the head, which would like to remained raised, is that of someone who is drowning, the tense face resembles the grimace of torture. They must look straight ahead, cannot even glance back, without stumbling, as if the pursuer [Verfolger: follower, persecutor] whose sight would cause them to freeze were breathing down their necks. Once one ran from dangers which were too desperate to stand and face, and those who are running after a bus speeding away still testify to this, without knowing it. The flow of traffic no longer has to reckon with wild animals, but at the same time it has not pacified running. This last estranges the bourgeois walk. The truth becomes apparent, that something is not right about security, that one must constantly evade the unrestrained powers of life, even if these are only vehicles. The body’s habit of walking as something normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois manner of getting somewhere: physical demythologization, free from the bane of the hieratic step, the homeless fellowship of the road, the breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to the gait, a rhythm not drilled into the body by command or terror. Going on promenades, being a flaneur were private ways of spending time, the legacy of the feudal pleasure-jaunts of the 19th century. Walking is dying out along with the liberal epoch, even where autos are not being driven. The youth movement, which groped for such tendencies with unmistakable masochism, challenged the parental Sunday excursion and replaced it with the voluntary march of power, which they christened with the medieval name of trip [Fahrt: journey, travel], while the Ford model quickly became available to the latter. Perhaps the cult of technical speediness, just as in sports, conceals the impulse of mastering the terror of running, by turning it away from one’s own body and at the same time high-handedly outbidding it: the triumph of the increasing mile-marker ritually attests to the fear of being pursued. Whenever however human beings are told: “run,” ranging from the children, who are supposed to fetch the mother a forgotten handbag from upstairs, all the way to the prisoners, who are commanded by their escorts to flee, in order to have a pretext for murdering them, then the archaic violence becomes audible, which otherwise inaudibly directs every step.

—Theodor Adorno, aphorism 102 of Minima Moralia

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Only Ever One Gonzo Writer, and He’s Dead

Friday, August 16, 2013

I think some people who do this think they are being “gonzo,” but they are just being “asshole.” There was, truly, only ever one gonzo writer, and he’s dead. Even when he was alive he didn’t act like some overcompensating pseudo-macho prick in his writing. He insulted the powerful and deserving. He didn’t try to intimidate people with his connections and influence. But the only lessons modern gonzo writers learned from this man were “add funny swears to your writing” and “mention that you have done drugs.”

—from an essay by Alex Pareene in Salon entitled “Dear Internet Tough Guys: Cut it out”

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And Handsome, This Reader Too

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

INTERVIEWER: Do you imagine an ideal reader for your books?

BURGESS: The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.

INTERVIEWER: A very special reader indeed. Are you writing, then, for a limited, highly educated audience?

BURGESS: Where would Shakespeare have got if he had thought only of a specialized audience? What he did was to attempt to appeal on all levels, with something for the most rarefied intellectuals (who had read Montaigne) and very much more for those who could appreciate only sex and blood. I like to devise a plot that can have a moderately wide appeal. But take Eliot’s The Waste Land, very erudite, which, probably through its more popular elements and its basic rhetorical appeal, appealed to those who did not at first understand it but made themselves understand it. The poem, a terminus of Eliot’s polymathic travels, became a starting point for other people’s erudition. I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror.

—Anthony Burgess, interviewed by John Cullinan in the Art of Fiction, 48, in The Paris Review.

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The Horse, the Child, the Fruits of Your Labor

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Slumped there in your favorite chair, with your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array, and your hand never far from them, and your other hand holding on to the plump belly of the overfed child, and perhaps rocking a bit, if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was in those days, then it is true that a tine tendril of contempt—strike that, content—might curl up from the storehouse where the world’s content is kept, and reach into your softened brain and take hold there, persuading you that this, at last, is the fruit of all your labors, which you’d been wondering about in some such terms as, “Where is the fruit?” And so, newly cheered and warmed by this false insight, you reach out with your free hand (the one that is not clutching the nine drinks) and pat the hair of the child, and the child looks up into your face, gauging your mood as it were, and says, “Can I have a horse?”, which is after all a perfectly reasonable request, in some ways, but in other ways is total ruin to that state of six-o’clock equilibrium you have so painfully achieved, because it, the child’s request, is of course absolutely out of the question, and so you say “No!” as forcefully as possible—a bark rather like a bite—in such a way as to put the quietus on this project, having a horse, once and for all, permanently. But, placing yourself in the child’s ragged shoes, which look more like used Brillo pads than shoes now that you regard them closely, you remember that time long ago on the other side of the Great War when you too desired a horse, and so, pulling yourself together, and putting another drink in your mouth (that makes three, I believe), you assume a thoughtful look (indeed, the same grave and thoughtful look you have been wearing all day, to confuse your enemies and armor yourself against the indifference of your friends) and begin to speak to the child softly, gently, cunningly even, explaining that the genus horse prefers the great open voids, where it can roam, and graze, and copulate with other attractive horses, to the confined space of a broken-down brownstone apartment, and that a horse if obtained would not be happy here, in the child’s apartment, and does he, the child, want an unhappy horse, moping and brooding, and lying all over the double bed in the bedroom, and perhaps vomiting at intervals, and maybe even kicking down a wall or two, to express its rage?

—Donald Barthelme, Critique de la Vie Quotidienne, 1972

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Variations on the Horse-leech

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Google Ngram comparison of “horseleech” and “horseleach”: here.

And horse-leech, n., defined by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Pronunciation: /ˈhɔːsliːtʃ/
Etymology: < horse n. + leech n.1 < Old English lǽce, léce, physician. 1. A horse-doctor, farrier, veterinary surgeon.

  • 1493 in J. T. Fowler Memorials Church SS. Peter & Wilfrid, Ripon (1888) III. 165 Item Johanni Hors~leych pro medicacione j equo magistri Langton, 7d.
  • ?1518 Cocke Lorelles Bote sig. B.vj, Bokell smythes, horse leches, and gold beters.
  • 1529 T. More Dialogue Heresyes ii. x. 52 b/2 Saynt Loy we make an horsleche, and must let our horse rather renne vnshodde and marre hys hoofe than to shoo hym on hys daye.
  • 1653 Z. Bogan Medit. Mirth Christian Life 234 The horse..will not endure the hand of the horseleech.

Thesaurus: marshal (c1387-95), horse marshal (1508), farrier (1622), horse-doctor (1672), mule-doctor (1678), hippiatric (a1690), hippiatrist (1895)

2. An aquatic sucking worm ( Hæmopsis sanguisorba) differing from the common leech in its larger size, and in the formation of the jaws.
(In some early quotes. it seems to mean the common medicinal leech.)

  • 14.. in T. Wright & R. P. Wülcker Anglo-Saxon & Old Eng. Vocab. (1884) I. 706/26 Hec sanguissuga, a horsleche.
  • 1530 J. Palsgrave Lesclarcissement 232/2 Horse leche, a worme, sansue.
  • 1535 Bible (Coverdale) Prov. xxx. B, This generacion (which is like an horsleche) hath two doughters [Wycliffite The watir leche hath twei douȝtris]: ye one is called, fetch hither: the other, brynge hither.
  • 1573–80 J. Baret Aluearie H. 663 An Horse leach, or bloudsucker worme, hirudo.
  • 1581 J. Marbeck Bk. Notes & Common Places 503 The Horse-leach hath two daughters..that is, two forks in her tongue, which he heere calleth her daughters, wherby she sucketh the bloud, and is neuer saciate.
  • 1625 J. Hart Anat. Urines i. ii. 15 Horse-leaches were wont to taste of the horses dung.
  • 1813 W. Bingley Animal Biogr. (ed. 4) III. 412 Horse-leeches are..so extremely greedy of blood, that a vulgar notion is prevalent, that nine of them are able to destroy a horse.
  • 1880 Chambers’s Encycl. VI. 74/2 The Horse-leech..is much larger than the medicinal species..but its teeth are comparatively blunt, and it is little of a blood-sucker—notwithstanding the popular notion..It feeds greedily on earth-worms.

Thesaurus: horse-eel (c1400)

3. fig. A rapacious, insatiable person.

  • 1546 Supplic. Poor Commons sig. a.iiiv, Besydes the infinite nombre of purgatorie horsleaches.
  • 1608 J. Sylvester tr. G. de S. Du Bartas Deuine Weekes & Wks. (new ed.) ii. iv. 118 Thou, life of Strife, thou Horse-leach sent from Hell.
  • 1705 E. Hickeringill Priest-craft 14 Of all Priests, the Popes have been in several Ages the great Horse-leaches, and Blood-suckers.
  • 1836–48 B. D. Walsh tr. Aristophanes Clouds i. i, He has disregarded my advice, and stuck horse-leeches on to my estate.

Thesaurus: gorge (c1450), sanguisuge (c1540), harpy (1589), vulture (1605), leech (1785), sanguisorb (1884)

Derivatives

† horse-leech v. Obs. (trans.) to suck insatiably (as reputed of the horse-leech):

  • 1679 Protestant Conformist 3 They have thereby Horse-leach’d a great deal of the best blood in Europe.

† horse-leechery n. Obs.

  • 1688 R. Holme Acad. Armory ii. 149/2 Horse Leachery, or Leach-craft, is the Art of curing Horses of Diseases.

† horse-leechcraft n. Obs. veterinary medicine.

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