fates not worth opposing

tom petty

2009-09-12T18:50:00.001-07:00

i was driving, must have been today, turned on the radio and they played tom petty's breakdown. it was stuck in my head so i listened to it at home, and found that he seemed to have a strange accent in the first verse.

to wit,

-he syllabifies so as to avoid coda /z/ in is and it's, pronouncing it as [s] in the next onset.
-/o/ is usually lowered
-/schwa/ in away is hypercorrected to [e]
-some diphthongs in stress position have their first portion significantly lengthened, and the second part is pronounced weekly, to give the impression of a monophthong. most notably in like i do, where both diphthongs are simplified to [a].

the net effect is that he sounds partly mexican.

I am addicted to Parle G

2009-09-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

2-DAY SHOPPING PASS

2009-07-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

at one point i intended to toil the summer away like the animals of a particular fable that i saw in cartoon form. the lazy animals are bailed out because the hard-working animals hold a monopoly on virtue and they are also charitable. still there are books on my shelf, some of which are my sick idea of pleasure reading, some are generally known as pleasure reading in some circles, and one or two would be considered by all to be pleasure reading.

i just finished one of the first column, which led me to make a series of interlibrary loan requests which, if fulfilled, will have a very long shot at being honored by my reading the whole thing or even any significant part thereof.

i got armagnac for my birthday. since i am not quite the lazy animal but only the animal who just manages answer to the consequences of his idleness without a bailout, for unmerited occasions i only drink the cognac that we got for deglazing, which is still a highly respectable and often rapped about mark because everything had to be perfect.

which shows that if i am to use time less than optimally, i want to at least be somewhere on the target, which is why i read the neglected books whose reading would be wreckless indulgence during the proper work season, but whose reading in the aorist sense is considered to be an enrichment.

i mean to confess that i shot and posted on youtube a cat video and played grand theft auto in two fruitless hours of trying to shoot down the helicopter of the woman who betrayed me, catalina.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño:

==================

after this novelist's death and the heavily publicized release of the english translation of his posthumous novel, i wanted to read the spanish edition (which did not enjoy the wide distribution and publicity of the english translation) and ended up recalling it from a fellow library patron who, i calculated, is also a graduate student. this person never counter-recalled it, so maybe it was just sitting on their shelf and they didn't want to call my bluff. i read 100 pages or so then put it down for a few months, then this week read another 100 pages until i got to a section break.

there are some literary critics who are all single and who have flexible work schedules and ample savings. this is why they freely travel within europe. they are all interested in the same novelist, and three of them have a menage a trois. there is one part where two of them (at this point everyone had travelled to mexico on a whim) decide to stop waking up early and stop eating breakfast in their hotel and they go to breakfast on chilaquiles and beer.

although i have never participated in a menage a trois with literary critics, i did have the good fortune to find at the grocery store the kind of sale where you know that it is so below cost that someone is intentionally losing money, and you wonder why. a brand of beer normally retailing for $7 the six-pack was going for $1.50 the six pack. i brought home ten, and after learning about the characters' breakfast, even though i intentionally kept the beers at room temperature to prevent myself from drinking them, i could not stop myself from obeying product placement, even if it meant drinking beer with ice cubes.

by strange coincidence, while at the store i also bought ingredients to make chilaquiles, all this well before having read about the critics' breakfast.

i read a collection of stories by the same author and the characters of these stories always visited prostitutes and their real problem was not knowing how to pass the time, because they never had a job. i think it is important to represent this kind of challenge in literature, so that when i have a vacation i can be informed of real or imaginary techniques for passing time when no one will notice if you're not working.

also the characters, in 2666 and the short stories, face opaque personal crises. the author only portrays the outward symptoms of their personal crises, as if he were reporting on these imaginary people scientifically and wanted to only report the facts and leave out all speculation. we only know that fulano ate chilaquiles and woke up late and seduced a working class woman and promised to mary her and one time felt tired, and previously felt sick. there is no indication of what causes him to behave this way. other writers might instead spend the whole time writing about the thousand natural shocks and how they jostled their protagonist's thinking, and what he was thinking and how his feelings caused him to eat chilaquiles, etc. i can't say which style i prefer, but i find that bolaño handles this technique with skill. i the reader feel like a voyeur and i don't feel omniscient like readers of other works of fiction might.

the narrator of the bolaño stories is above it all. in the works of onetti i have read the narrator is more or less ignorant of the contents of the characters' minds, but still has some kind of opinion about them, though he bases it on things he has fabricated.

things that can disturb the peace

2009-07-14T21:35:00.001-07:00

some practice translating from Walsingham's Historia Anglicana (vol.I p.450 of Riley's 1864 ed.)

The Derangement of John Wycliff

At the same time, that old hypocrite, the angel of Satan, harbinger of the Antichrist, not to be called "John Wycliff," but rather "Wykbeleve" (wicked belief), the heretic, his derangement continuing, has seemed to devour Jordan, and plunge all Christians into hell: reconsidering even the wretched opiniones of Berengari and Oakleaf, has worked to build upon them: after having been consecrated in Mass by a priest, the true bread and wine, as they were before, become at that instant Christ, as it has always been. But more specifically, this bread is worth no more than any other unless it is given the true blessing of a priest. Yet if this were the body of christ, he has professed, the neck of his God could be broken into pieces. He has additionally confirmed that Christians are mistaken in venerating that Sacrament, saying that bread is an inanimate thing, and one would rather venerate a toad, or whatever living thing, rather than that, because it is much better to praise an animate thing than something lacking a soul: and with such ravings he has seduced many into the same error.

de uxoribus

2009-07-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

NYTimes' Judith Warner is a columnist for the New York times who writes about the issues of mothers. In her most recent column, she talks about a woman who was charged with crimes for having left some children, the oldest of which were 12, at a shopping mall. In another, she talks about how mothers are the subject of unsolicited criticism about their parenting by strangers.

Her theory is that mothers and professional women are under attack by the population in the US. I have noted that in the anecdotes she reports, it is usually women who are the aggressors. In the shopping mall story, the police were called after children 8, 7 and 3 years were left at a perfume counter while the 12 year olds were trying on clothing. I am imagining that the attendant at the perfume counter is the one who called the police, and I would even go out on a limb and guess that the perfume salesperson was a woman.

Warner suspects that the aggression against mothers is part of backlash against improved rights for women in the US. It is important to note that in earlier times it was a good and reasonable thing to do to allow children, even very young children, to go into public by themselves and to run errands for their parents. Now this is not so. It is a great scandal to leave a child alone, and I think that the scandal mongers are conservative women and insurance underwriters. They are the great criars of kidnapping and accidental injury.

I am saying all of this because as a gentleman and the ambassador of men, I would like to make sure that I am not getting caught up in Warners indictments. I am blaming women and insurance underwriters.

detective work

2009-07-10T11:54:00.001-07:00

here is the specimen:

"...niquintlalia itzintla in itlathocachicahualitzin inthohuei tlathocatzin in icaamoaquiqui ynhuayolqui..."

the first six words follow from standard forms found in dictionaries and come out as "I seat them at the feet of his eminence our great lord". "his eminence" is not ideal but is at this point OK for "i-tlathoca-chicahuali-tzin", where the root is chicahualiztli (the essence or abstract property of strengthening, in one dictionary "force du courage"), modified by tlathoca (ruler, lord), then i- is a possessive prefix and -tzin is an honorific suffix, so the closest thing to the actual meaning of itlathocachicahualitzin, i am guessing, is "his esteemed lordly eminence", which should be an appositive epithet for inthohuei tlathocatzin (our great lord).

the trouble comes with icaamoaquiqui. i have to wander in the dark and make a few educated guesses. my first guess is that it should be broken up as ica-ahmo-aquiqui. ica (with) and ahmo(not) are no problem, but aquiqui does not appear in any dictionary. however, google reveals that it is found in one Spanish-Nahuatl entry in Molina's 16th century dictionary, i.e.

Enriscado. ... mouican aquiqui motexcalhuiqui

enriscado (risky, one who takes risks). ... he takes himself aquiqui he throws himself from a steep precipice.

now it becomes very likely that aquiqui is a spelling-variant of aquihqueh (who, whoever), so Molina gave as one of his definitions of enriscado as "whoever goes and jumps off of a high cliff". this kind of definition is very common when you ask someone randomly to explain a foreign word to you. they'll give you a highly specific example of what sort of situation would apply to that word.

now it is coming together. ynhuayolqui should mean "their parents, their relations"

the final product is:

"I will seat them at the foot of his eminence our great tlatoani, though not along with their escorts."

more usury

2009-07-09T20:21:00.000-07:00

"...Soto allows that lucrum cessans can be asked in delay, theft, or compulsory loans; in all these cases an external force prevents the victim from the opportunity of laboring with his money. It is remarkable that in none of these arguments does Soto attempt to answer Summenhart's contention that one is held to compensate a man voluntarily ceasing from work if the paying of such compensation is the condition under which he forgoes his work . . . His stubborn denial of the right to compensation for damage voluntarily occurred . . . must be ascribed to a fear that to admit lucrum cessans was to abandon the usury prohibition. As he believes, "this ghost of lucrum cessans not many years ago opened that chasm and whirlpool of usury."

Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury

lucrum cessans = foregone profit

brenne to scamelliche askes

2009-06-30T12:14:00.000-07:00

here is the phrase:

...inozequin intechmonequiz, ipan Incahuitl chicohuazen mextli...

the first four words should mean "additionally thereupon is needed a period of time"

chicohuazen does not appear in any dictionary nor in any google book
chico- according to one dictionary is a prefix usually meaning "to one side, perversely"
chicohuia according to another, means "to do things unfairly, to favor one side", but the form we have doesn't exactly match any inflection of chicohuia
cem means "one," and at the end of the word [m] becomes [n], but this particular scribe we have noted that sometimes he leaves off written 'n' at the end of a word, and -cen normally doesn't appear as a suffix, if i remember correctly
mextli, according to the first dictionary, is a variant of mixtli, which all sources agree to mean "cloud." additionally the second dictionary includes this example phrase from the florentine codex "intlâcahmo tleh mixtli," (if there aren't any clouds => provided that the weather is favorable)

so we'll just have to guess and say

"additionally thereupon is needed a period of time to allow for inclemencies"

and the record does not indicate whether this is a guess or a certainty, when all is done.

traducing the speaker

2009-06-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

to waste time but not prodigally i like to read things in middle english. what i was supposed to be doing instead of reading middle english was translating from nahuatl a document that is nothing but variations on scamel. here is a passage from Langland's Piers Plowman (14th century), where he explains the meaning of Job 15:34 in the vulgate bible:

ignis devorabit tabernacula eorum qui libentur accipiunt munera, &c.
Amonge this lettered ledes, this Latyn is to mene
That fyre shal falle, and brenne al to blo askes
The houses and the homes of hem that desireth
Yiftes or Yeres-yyves bicause of here offices.

the trusty oxford english dictionary says:
lede = race, group of people
brenne = burn
blo = a dark-blue color, like a bruise, or lead
askes = ashes
yifte = gift
Yeres-yyve = a new year's gift

the latin is, more or less, "fire shall devour the tabernacle of those who please to take gifts"

munera is usually translated as bribes in english language bibles

Langland's elaboration is from having to write in a type of alliterative verse, and his description of munera (Yiftes or Yeres-yyves) is a more accurate description of the concept than "bribe" is.

whoever has tried to translate Piers Plowman to modern english and keep the alliterative verse must struggle, since lede, blo and yeresyeve are extinct as english words. even if yeresyeve were revived, it would no longer start with the same sound as gift. one would have to set out looking for new pairs.

for thise aren men on this molde that moste harme worcheth

2009-06-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

now we have a kitten, because i am a pragmatic person.

a controversial claim from Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English:
"There has, in other words, been little change in lexical representation since Middle English..."

i also have a playstation 2 controller that plugs into the computer.

these are things that i can do in the summertime.

in texas it was warm, over 100 degrees every day. there were many people there, all familiar with each other. at spiderhouse coffee shop, they now offer table service, which makes it difficult if you intend to go there and buy nothing. as i understand it opened in 1995. in the year 2000 i used to go next door to sell plasma and the homeless teenagers were one time lying there talking about how with these fifteen dollars apiece, and the thirty dollars we can borrow from X, and Y, who can front it to us at the lowest quality, we can rent a motel room of the seediest variety, far from the shelter where they don't allow alcohol, and we each have a seven dollar 175mL bottle of jack daniels. i think the plasma place is shut down now. i best remember that i was taking physics 2 and it was difficult. and this very skinny girl told me that i should join her to study at spiderhouse coffee shop, where you don't have to buy anything. this was the year 2000 and i decided to not go to spiderhouse, but only to stay at the plasma center, because at this time i had it calculated to where i would get one hamburger ($2.50), one order of french fries ($1.25), one glass of ice water (free), four times a week at either 1am or 1:30am, which would be $15, then i'd have $20 left for the weekend, and buying a cup of coffee would throw everything off in multiple ways that are so distant from important now in 2009. when i went i ordered a coffee. the oldest man at the table paid for everything, because he is powerful. you might think that i now regret it, because i could have ordered a cucumber margarita or anything else to BEAT THE HEAT, but in fact i was hung over.

i brought that coffee with me. it was cold, but i was even able to take a sip from it ten hours later. this was after i had finished overseeing the grill.

Shakespeare in the park is a feature of summers in Buffalo, NY. residents bring camping chairs and sip wine from their coolers and give out one dollars to the poor players who strut and ask for donations to keep our beloved festival free. the time that i went we saw the Tempest. the tempest contains the word

scamel

which i think is a very nice word, with a delicate nuance of a meaning that helps people to share their feelings. scamel will cause you to have feelings you never had before. the Oxford English Dictionary defines scamel as follows:

Meaning uncertain: the statement in quot. 1866 is of doubtful value. Some have proposed to read staniel.

below are two quotations of the only attested uses (outside of metalinguistic or lexicographical discussion) of scamel. the first quote is from the Tempest,

"And sometimes I'le get thee young Scamels from the Rocke."

the second quote, as we are told, is of doubtful value.

i started to feel a bit dizzy when i was reading the Tempest, and came across a word i didn't know, and looked it up in the dictionary, and the dictionary told me it didn't know what the word meant. we only know that a scamel is a living thing that is edible and found among rocks on beaches. a staniel, which "some have proposed" as the reading for scamel, is a type of falcon, e.g.

i digress. sometimes, even the dictionary doesn't know. one theorem of classical logic is known as ex falso, quodlibet which means "if shit's fucked up, fuck it."

the kitten is always sleeping. if the kitten were grown, it might be able to go hunting for young scamels. perhaps scamels became extinct due to overharvesting before anyone could write down what exactly they were.

this summer i liken my job to the mystery of the scamel. i have to determine something that nobody, at the moment knows yet. and the things that i determine through careful investigation and long hours of study, will be of such interest to the general public as scamels are.

addendum:

From the London Daily News, printed in New York Times, 25 June 1892: A Norfolk man observes that "young bartailed godwits are in Autumn called scamels on the north coast of Norfolk."

giggling

2009-06-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

"The verbs to mother and to father mean very roughly 'to act as a mother/father toward someone', but are entirely different in the exact actions that count as relevant."
Jackendoff, Foundations of Language

solutions to the problem of things that formerly appeared to have no name

2009-05-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

...money rented ad pompam. In such a contract, ... money was transferred to a bailee for the specific purpose of display so that he might impress others with his wealth. The money was not consumed, but used, and the charge was for its use. The Gloss's treatment here seems to assume that the fundamental distinction between this contract and a loan is the incidence of risk.

Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury

usury

2009-05-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

là dove di'che usura offende la divina bontade, e il groppo svolvi.
-Inferno

wherever usury disturbs, divine grace, and difficulties, dissolve

2009-05-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

these headphones are like a bridle. if i am not watched i will convulse my head and spit them out. still they are necessary for me because when i am wearing them i cannot go off the path and eat the sweet grass that would only give me indigestion. one time the person talking retracted his tongue blade too quickly, but the tongue body was still in place. the sound produced was still quite close to the target.

the cochlea (latin for snail) is shaped like a snail's shell. if you uncoil it then there is a triangular cross section through the middle dividing it along its length into three compartments. the acoustic properties of the tube cause the fluid within to to swell at different locations along its length for a given frequency of vibration. within this triangular ridge there are hair cells connected to neurons. the neurons fire in a random pattern, but if a swelling is localized near a particular cell, then its neuron will fire differently. the hair cells send a signal to the brain, but there is also a fiber through which the cells receive feedback. nobody knows exactly what this feedback does. this is how people are able to perceive sound quality. the cochlea of a cat or a dog is just as complicated. most of what is known about the cochlea was determined by killing cats and dogs.

i have found what i suspect may be an honest mechanic in this city. the asian store proprietress told duylinh, "sure there's a viet mechanic, but there's only one, and he's had my car for a month now, so i can't say i'd recommend him." we had to tentatively revise our racial theory of honest auto mechanics to include certain types of people with polish names.

other muscles in the inner ear act to dampen the intensity of sound. it seems that they evolved that way so that animals' hearing would not be damaged by their own cries. i would like to develop a theory of speech production that is centered around the pleasure of hearing oneself talk.

if people are to peaceably decapitate animals and scrutinize their internal organs, they should have a clean and well-lighted place to do it, and they should not be subjected to too much mental distress or physical distress outside of the workshop.

be on your guard

2009-05-07T13:50:00.001-07:00

"We do not, of course, know exactly why colonial varieties of English around the world have the characteristics that they do ... but we do have very strong evidence that they are as they are because of the way in which people behave linguistically in face-to-face interaction. That is, whole new language varieties, many of them eventually spoken by millions of people, grow and develop out of small-scale contacts between individual human beings."
-Trudgill, Dialects in Contact

rectitude and turpitude

2009-05-05T11:20:00.001-07:00

Investigators say 24-year-old Joseph Jimenez fatally shot 25-year-old Scott Riley after they argued over a game of beer pong at a party Friday night in Bridgeport, about 15 miles outside Philadelphia. (AP)

all young mothers reading, i urge you to encourage our legislators to reinstitute dueling, if our children are ever to be safe. nowadays it is important for young men to go out gambling, and beer pong is the greatest responsibility for the dominant male. if his authority is doubted, then it could endanger the entire band. he must act decisively.

to aim for the head, however, is not appropriate. that only one man should be armed, that they did not have seconds, that they did not wait until noon the following day, etc. the whole fabric of society is crumbling.

in nature it is a poison

2009-05-01T21:02:00.001-07:00

It has been argued that the deaths of the ill-fated balloonists in the Swedish 1897 Andree balloon expedition to the North Pole were due to consumption of polar bear liver when they were forced to overwinter on White Island on their return journey south from the Pole.

Aitken, Dietary Interventions in Autism Spectrum Disorders

new incidents.

2009-04-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

as a marathon runner participating in the boston marathon, i am concerned that i may be murdered in an upscale boston hotel room while working as an escort. naturally i demand accountability from the authorities.

long words in nahuatl

2009-04-05T18:50:00.001-07:00

cozticteocuitlaquixtiloyan : gold mine

pertinence

2009-03-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

cleaning out the fridge can sometimes be better than cleaning out the cracks of your sofa. i found a quarter pound of goat cheese from several months ago. now it is part of a quiche. this is the first in a series of stories about how you can reduce your carbon footprint.

1. eat old leftover food whose mold you can scrape off instead of eating beef.

burdens

2009-03-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

further along in history they will consider our writings. they will be fascinated at how emotional we were about things that nobody will ever understand. and how we really struggled nobly. some few, they will say, did not indulge in moments.

"A few words should be said about privately cast types of the Yi dynasty. There are many records and printed examples in witness of the existence of privately made movable types throughout the Yi dynasty. They were mostly made of wood, but clay and metal were also used. These private types are not so neat as those made by the government. It must be noticed, however, that many small country schools at the end of the Yi dynasty had wooden types to print text books for their own use.
In old Korea, official printing was done by several specialists on the basis of a division of labor under a printing official. The printing official had the entire responsibility for the whole process of printing, and had to be alert not to overlook any misprints in order to avoid the corporal punishment of beating the hip."
-A history of the Korean alphabet and moveable types

clack clack

2009-03-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

"It is une bwEhE."
"Then why were you saying une bwense ?"
"une bwense... Now that children [go] to school, they like to change words."

Interview with a speaker of Munken

toxic assets

2009-03-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

Dicimus ergo quod nullus effectus superat suam causam, in quantum effectus est, quia nil potest efficere quod non est. Cum igitur omnis nostra loquela - preter illam homini primo concreatam a Deo - sit a nostro beneplacito reparata post confusionem illam que nil aliud fuit quam prioris oblivio, et homo sit instabilissimum atque variabilissimum animal, nec durabilis nec continua esse potest, sed sicut alia que nostra sunt, puta mores et habitus, per locorum temporumque distantias variari oportet.

Dante, De vulgari eloquentia I.9.6

l'elan acquis

2009-03-23T18:22:00.000-07:00

opening line of Bolaño's El Retorno

"I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (or something like it) after death. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac."

news in words

2009-03-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

i am delighted to see, for the first time, the use of "straight up" as a discourse particle in an essay.

"I straight up don't understand this woman or her popularity." My beef with ann coulter

let's analyze what "straight up" contributes in this context. since it is an adjunct, it can be removed without altering the sentence's grammaticality. we will compare these two sentences:

(1) I straight up don't understand this woman or her popularity.
(2) I don't understand this woman or her popularity.

(2) employs a common politeness tactic (indirect criticism via self-criticism) so that what is said (2a. This woman may be reasonable and deserving of her fame, but I have yet to determine exactly how) is different from the meaning inferred by adding pragmatic information (2b. This woman is unreasonable and undeserving of her fame). someone who said (2), asked to account for her remarks, could plausibly claim that she really meant 2a.

(1) differs in that it does not permit someone having said (1) to claim that she really means 2a. so it has interesting metadiscursive properties.