dicta

soon i will start traveling and maybe i will put travel updates on this blog if i can have something noteworthy to write about. tomorrow i will go to germany. i have to carry things on the plane to work on because i am an important person who is always doing things, important things that nobody can understand.

i remembered a certain word or phrase and then i remembered some time about eight years ago and a college apartment and ruth's description, something like: "he sits, he generates garbage, like a machine, he is disgusting, he is disgusting, because i took the ketchup bottle, the one with the benzocaine in it (because everyone took home the benzocaine that they synthesized in class, and i put mine in a bottle o ketchup), and he just kept eating his tater tots, and he was drooling a lot, and he didn't care, even when i told him he didn't care, he kept eating, he just ate it even more." now i don't remember what phrase. it is even a phrase that i use to this day, and that phrase is the only useful thing that survives from that time, eight years ago, in base circumstances, because everything that you are no longer is base.

but the real reason i am writing is to be able to publish two quotations, some might say taken out of context, which help to explain why the government only wants to manipulate you. the second one really made me recall a tour we got of a castle in Czesky Krumlov, and this situation was only two years ago, and so not nearly as base, but the tour guide showed us a dusty green glass container, like something you put cut tulips in with water, and it must have held a good liter, maybe two liters, and he said when there were guests for the king, the first thing they had to do was to fill that container with wine, and they had to drink it all without stopping, or else they would be thrown out of the palace. these things are coming from the famous florentine codex:

120. ihuan oc no ce tlacatl tlamacazqui, conitqui, cuappiaztli, ielpan contilquetza in malli, in oncan ocatca iyollo, conezzotia, huel eztitlan compolactia: and another man, and offering priest, carried the [hollow] eagle cane, set it standing in the captive's breast [cavity,] there where the heart had been, stained it with blood, indeed submerged it in blood.

637. ca ayac nicnocahuia ayac nicquixtia in macamo nicmaca in octli, in nictlahuantia, in niquihuintia, . no one do i except, no one do i release, whom i do not give pulque, make drunk, make besotted.

2. in cuauhtli: aixmauhqui, amixmauhtiani: huel quixnamiqui, huel quitztimoquetza in tonitiuh: . the eagle is fearless, a brave one; it can gaze into, it can face the sun.

tom petty

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

2-DAY SHOPPING PASS

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 Bola?o:

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

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 bola?o 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 bola?o 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

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

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

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

"...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

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

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.