I khev difeeted Kommred-Kownt Tolstoy een Grodgemetch

well, it seemed an ever-distant horizon, but early this morning I finally finished edits on & submitted my translation of Lev Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilich. I mean, just look at this booger-eater. not my most cherished figure (tho he was this guy's) , but the book has real interest, real content, real language. his work (not totally unlike Repin's, which I like even less) has a kind of trickily-concealed richness, under the confetti of its bland noble exultant seriousness, that is itself more than a dead end. anyhow, it shld hit stores in early January, is what they're telling me. buy me vodka! месяц был очень и сух.

my heart's just like that pumpkin

very often I do not listen to pop music or care about it. yesterday a rock band made a record that I liked very much and that I think I do care about. in fact I am in love with this record. I buy the lovely flowers for the record. I buy the boxes of chocolates for the record. I comb the hairs on my head for the record. I cook my special chicken and potatoes for the record. the record may have a harpy for a mother but I do not care because of how close the record and I are going to become. I write my name as Mr. Vanja This-Record because of desiring so to marry the record. I ride in a gondola with the record with a gondolier who is singing arias from very classical italian operas. I use the binaca before I see the record. I beat up anybody who says anything coarse or insensitive about the record. I do not go out with my friends if the record thinks that we should be alone together. I take the record to the concerts of the musicians who sing slow, romantic music, and who probably wear tuxedos at the concerts. I take the record out to see the movie casablanca, or better yet I rent the video of the movie casablanca and watch it with the record on the same night that I cook my special chicken and potatoes for the record. I tell special or affectionate secrets to the record. late at night when the record is asleep I reach out and hold the hand of the record and then go back to sleep that way because I prefer to be in physical contact with the record. I raise our acetate offspring in the religion of the record. I give the record a very long backrub every time the record would like one, without ever complaining or expecting anything in return from the record. when the record is sick I take champion care of the record, fixing the record's blankets and adjusting the record's snot-rags. when I am offered a great promotion at work that means we have to move farther from the record's harpy mother I turn down the promotion but then I work extra hours just so the record can have the same nice things as if I had got it. I hand the remote over to the record. I pay for a babysitter and take the record out someplace nice. I ride the horse over the field to the record. I for the record endure extremes in climate. if I go to art museums with the record, I do not make the record feel snooty if it understands the tricky contemporary paintings, and I do not make the record feel stupid if I understand the tricky contemporary paintings. I call the record when I am going to be late. I have special affectionate names for the record, some of them usable in public and some for when we are alone. I help the record. When I am grumpy or foul I do not act as though this were the fault of the record, even though in certain circumstances, let's be realistic, it may be the fault of the record. I learn Spanish so that I may say to the record te quiero. I draw portraits of the record that manage at once to be formally innovative, uncannily accurate, and deeply affectionate. I allow my ideas about the infinite to get mingled in with feelings about the record. If I work in an office I put a picture of the record on the desk in my cubicle and, when instead of the promotion I had to decline I receive several years later a promotion for which I don't have to move farther from the record's harpy mother I celebrate by getting an even bigger picture of the record and putting it on the wall in my new bigger office.

your heart is like a bigger office you get moved to after passing up a better promotion; you shld put flowers in it & take long lunches. it's also the only place thoughts ever come from.

trotsky at barbizon

as you might recall from last week's episode...

you are lodged without complaint.
you dream you are going down deep and wearing a red shirt.
you bring everywhere things you find.
you are afraid of someone, the hooded one, you are afraid of what's under the hood.
you fall & speak like an engine.
you go down.
you take a fiercely insane plunge into dissipation
you who cannot straighten are straightened.
you dream you are looking into one hundred faces.

slow morning, a nice morning listening to the music of Steve Swallow (thank you). finally the world is rushing with autumn garments, a cotton in the air and my heart goes all scandinavia like always. if you are a person I will make you pumpkin somethings. pumpkin, like dumpling, is as made up as everything but especially actually seems like it.

wind tearing
heart of the street
in a blackout

the clumsy force of irene was a thing that attracted me

thinking about politics has at few moments been less rewarding than it is right now. of course the leaders of states and statoids have been mostly monkeys & egregious buttwads forever, but something about the speed with which their buttwaddedness gets simulcast to the entire pulsing universe (or at least the discouragingly small & inescapable (&, perhaps, deadly) part of it with wifi) makes me queasy. I can imagine Hammurabi, whom basically I like, claiming there were no homosexuals in Babylonia (tho would he want to make this claim? I know nothing of the Babylonian sexes), but the reception would surely be staider. so, even tho it's, like, funny, I sorta don't want to see shit like this. it's annoying. I have trouble pronouncing things too, and the problem with GW Bush is that he's a piece of shit homicidal mamzer lunatic, not that he finds himself with the unique handicap of some difficulty wrapping his jaw around the names of his colleagues. dignity, anyone? anyone?

not everything is about the zodiac, she snarled.

but generally things are, sexfoil, interruption of columns.

the meaning of gleipnir essentially is magnets, a gash in the ricercar. you might feel stupid trying this, but it's worth trying. every night it's always my wife. she holds a feather out. intolerable.

the word in that sense is a sort of cement flake, a braque thru glass pox and the holding air. just take anything chipped off, for instance, a rockface? speaking a low torque off aztec, or norman, air winding with heat from tents in the sinai, sweet cottages of the galilee (Jesus, mebbe, was a greek-speaker) all this being et cetera et cetera. all this being!

the slavic languages are easily absorbed because they center on a void. I mean very straightforwardly. it goes on & on, you stop breathing, a horse in pain or not, but the russians for example don't believe anything. unerring encounter -- this is part of their famously big embrace of the negative, and of the relative, in politics (cccp), philosophe (bakhtin), the arts (malevich, stravinsky, khlebnikov), &c &c. among no ppl I know is the unknowable so gladly central to living.

more to the point --
when we say "Ancient Greece"
we are referring to a geography
fairly commensurate with the sum
of today's Turkey & today's Greece.
it was full of Greekish ppl, speaking
Greekishly. I mean pretty Greek,
basically Greek.
the two main groups who came in
were Turks & Slavs.
the Turks did not learn Greek,
spoke Turkish, for which reason
the part of the Greek world
were they built farms & shipyards
and low stone houses near mountains
now speaks Turkish;
where the Slavs came
they learned Greek right away,
for which reason it is still spoken there,
& for which reason their ethnos
gave us the english word slave.

"The aesthetic regime of the arts," in which "the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making... but is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products," "is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social occupations. The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity." autumn may be coming to new york, and for new york.

just as true:
when the dgews first came from what's france
to what's joimminy, they dropped their lingua pronto.
they had spoken a normannish romance thing,
but presently adopted a heavily germanic sense abt tawking.
the language became yiddish; a few romance words
(like bentsh) survived into it. but mostly just
jerrmin jerrmin jerrmin.
they even called it taytsh sometimes.
as they moved east always further,
met the slavs.
liked how the slavs tawked
& took a bunch of words. but they never never
dropped things out the german frame
as they had the romance.
paskudner & tshaynik & a heft of the syntax
without question are slavic,
but somehow it never seemed useful
to drop what was being sed
& tawk like the locals.
I find this curious, abt the Slavs,
who are among my major language-heroes.

after substantial hiatus of a year or more, I have returned at least somewhat to blogging.

über dem nichts : über dem fluss : über sinn : über den frauen : über den broten : über der strassenbahn : über knoblauch : über wörtern

a thing no one much agrees is how to call Jerminny.

the Latins got their name for foreigners from the Greeks, who heard them saying barbarbar & so calld them barbaros (why too we have babies who babble). & Germania they calld the place above Gallia & near Helvetia.

a Germanus is a kind of foreigner, pluck from a host of Germani, which name may be from old Celtic (this is when Ireland was still in France) gar, for neighbor, or germ, for battle shriek.

the Western Latins got ranged around a melee between the Franks & the Allemani -- two fibers in the pithy funis, dancing a slow decrease -- which the Franks won in 496. Allemani may just be "the everyone-people"; either way, as they steadily cannabilized Remus's wonderous table & it became a navy, the Franks came to identify themselves with their Frankland (Alsace was the first France) & the borders with their vanquisht : of course they calld it Allemania. the name has since spread to Arabic &, somehow, Welsh.

the Slavs, meanwhile, who knew a flax from a fuck & took any Rome hard, calld them, like barbari, nimy, literally the mute. (this contrasts possibly, & as I've sed, with slav's derivation from the Slavic slovo, word, cross-hatcht with slava, glory, a people, after all, of long reasonless dusty talks, a people whose ablution is the vital wild word loost upon thought -- not, as we tend to have it, the converse.) so the contemporary Russian for a Joiman is nemjets, and an osmotic dowry is the Hungarian Németország -- in all cases, this meaning "speechless" or "dumb". I'm not sure, given the (Russian, at least) attitude toward knowability -- red shift in the sense meaning dissolution into pronouns -- blue shift in the sense meaning miraculous hollows at the core of the thing -- this wld be pejorative.

or from gar, a jectile weapon of the Gaels, when our garlic -- spear-shaped leek.

themselves the Germans have always calld just plain folks -- deutsch from teuta-, literally "the people". that became theodisk, a German, which became Italian tedesco, English Teuton & Dutch, German Deutsch, &c. contemporary Chinese deguo, implying the sense orderly nation, hopes to borrow the sound of that.

the Estonians have it at Saksamaa, from the Saxons, who famously dissolved like a losenge into the -sexes of England. on the downway thither, they rubbed badly against the Irish, whose name for them still survives as a caustic call for an Englishman, sasenach. Saxon probably started as a name for a wielder of seax knives, as Rus', below, for oarsman.

the Letts call it Vacija, possibly from volk, also the people.

what we call each other makes a patchwork history of intentions. paludal people unenvying bloodlines. beneath the burden of innuendos, beneath the burden of the pleasure of innuendos, any leaf of the infinite: all intention is sunwardness. name a land for its enemy to punish it. name a land for its founder. China is famously Middle Kingdom, but nobody mentions what Netherlands means. leadership is easily bruised; a despot is rounded like a heart.

among noteboooks

descended

hanging journey

derelict garden

by no means unknown

if form is a net

strident stray valence

pallid glint on the orange temple

derelict gloom

left captured

this is a monacle boiled in copper

cut below sand

braying oilmen

aubergine mashed & heaped onto bread

love fills me with words for colors

masooka

resident goddess

or

obituary surfeit

peloria

bud robed in

rose at the augury

the march soft as pearl

or

plea

pleading

cicatrix

my woman was a barren

my hand

reliquary

bead is count or fester

bid the swallow

blueness

you were so arid

a throbbing stench

eats metal

back into me

with this letter I take my pronouns

my many-throated bird

( flag stone : date stone )

and 'oud

nothing knows never, but we're always all talking abt it.

to stick ; to adhere ; ( fat ) -- synaloepha ; relay ; delay {aleiphein:toannoint}

the trajectory of most song is : what did Arepo grow ?

English , with its double-wide blue , with its shame that does not protect us , is big enuf that all its frailties are our every category : catechism , flora , synapse , strake . ( the former pair are one thing ; the latter pair are one thing )

but scham is helpful to Teutons ,

the Japanese speak when they speak of love (ai) with Po-Chü-i's Han tongue , &

the aloha of Hawai'i is too Samoa's arofa -- we'd translate it love -- that calls louder for strangers than kith .

from a letter :

"mal suereg targan tavtaiyuu?" is a Mongolian greeting. it easily approximates our "how's things?", and means literally "I hope your animals have been fattening nicely." I like it for two reasons: firstly, I seem to have become utterly a yeoman of awkwardnesses, raising on my own plot a cabbage-n-taters of what-to-says, fractured domestic potteries, &c -- whole 9, you know the type -- smiles and nods, that what-do-you-say of it, ugh. so I think it might make a nice freshwater inquiry to sluice afield in one of my interminal processions of polite serenities and concerned others. "no really, how ARE you?" "fine, you know, cows fat as Olmec heads far as a Datsun'll sputter."

second, and what's more, it's actually beautiful, that connection; "goodbye" in English is literally "God be with you," in Amharic you ask how one's spent the last night, the Russian for hello & Latin for goodbye are both "be healthy." but these horizonless people live in such a way that anyone knows exactly what to inquire about in a friend's or stranger's life -- it's specific without being disingenuous, relevant but not needling or cute. it's a same kernel on which the Forbidden City is built, where the Helmsman once slept; the same one that started the Canterbury Tales; that gave us our talk. I suppose it's to be expected that a confident, sturdy thing shld be stone in the parturition of so much, but I'm floored by it, and that they still have a same word for "yurt" "house" and "home" -- even "place" -- so "yurt", which is our pronunciation of the Mongolian "ger", is the same word they'd use to describe where you or I live, and if we were headed home on the F train they'd say we were headed yurtward, and if we met up at the Carnegie Deli it wld be, in Mongolian, an eating-yurt. all of which is to say, it seems to me a pure way of approaching things, to envision the world as a pasture, to attend to its circus of relevances as pastoral, and manage, as the Mongols clearly have in history, not to be dampened out of reality by it.

interstet : recently some genetic demographers working with an exceptionally grand sample of men from across Asia -- Tashkent to Kamchatka , el nueve entiro -- discoverd a prodigious fleck of Y-chromosome , minim on the seminal Word , a single genetic peculiar to a full 16 million Asian men . since the Y is passt identical thru the seed , this meant : 16 million men with a single common ancestor . the branch-out was estimated as being 1,000 years ago ( sevral hundred as a margin of error ) , and was traced back to , all the way to , all the way to , all the way to , Mongolia . the only person this seems liable to have been , then , is Temujin -- sunspot in the sense meaning great justice -- whom we know best as Genghis Khan . science wld guess an average man wld have 800 direct descendants living today ; Temujin makes Raamses II look like Isaac Newton . a last piece of evidence sadly can't be got well -- our bastard uncle Djugashvilli deposed the last reigning grandson & had the Ikh Korg -- Temujin's burial spot -- razed from the minds , and Temujin's spirit banner -- watch-keeping remnant -- purloind from the land , of this man who is history's Great & Gentle light . two teams search now -- one for good Genghis , the other for Khublai , who founded the Yuan & first cast the prohibitions up which China ( still in Russian calld by the name of the Western tribes the Mongols conquered to get in , Kitaj ) trellised itself to firstness , that private firstness whose call it still attends . two other words in Russian that come from the Mongols : bogatyr , the heroic horsemen of the old Slavic epics , who ulaan is red so ulaan bataar is the city of the Red Hero , a name as beautiful as Addis Abeba , the new flower ; & dengi , the form ever plural , from the Mongol for gold , meaning money . by all accounts Temujin wept often & readily .

friend is an interesting word -- it, like most languages' words for friends, is from love, but, and what is less usual, all the words related to it have disappeared. Fried and Fred, when they're used as parts of names, mean friend, friendly, or peaceful. (So Frederick means king of peace, rick being the Germanic for king, cognate with the Latin rex and too with the English reign and regnal -- interestingly, Vladimir can also mean King of Peace, tho I think its mir is more aptly the world.) The Romans called Friday Veneris Dies, "Day of Venus". When the Germans came pithing thru, besides absorbing the wonders of spaghetti cookery and Catholic guilt, they became pretty keen on the days-with-names business as well, and so translated "Veneris Dies" as "Frigedag", which means Frigg's Day, "Frigg" being the Germanic goddess of love, her name from the same root. This is why Friday was originally Buy A Friend A Fish Day, before everyone realized fish deserved friends and friends don't deserve fish.

but what I'm really getting at may be Richard Feynman, the physicist who demonstrated that, at the sub-atomic level, the dynamic balance on which matter is perched -- an atom being best understood, after all, not as a system of discrete motions but rather as a cloud of conflicting probabilities of configuration -- exists between forces of torqued passage not only back and forth thru space, but back and forth thru time as well, with any particular subatomic particle accelerating into the near future and then braking hard into the recent past, unendingly, thru all time. this is obviously a strange phenomenon, but real, and, in addition to physicist and story-collector, Feynman was obsessed with Tuva, politically a republic of the Russian Federation but culturally Mongolian. to read his correspondence, he saw with a shocking, cudgel-like unity: he cld intuit the role of bizarre particle physics the way most of us intuit gravity, and his sense of Tuva -- horizonless, relevant but uncute -- was, somehow, crucial to his ability to trellis the vines of a reality made medusiform by uncommonly nuanced understandings into a cohesive, glyptic, manifold world. and that is certainly related to what beautiful is.

life is the thing that includes itself . we start as fish & make our own landfall ( landfall in the sense meaning loss of hysteria ) ; because of continuity it is literally the case that each of us was a reptile . we emerge into a language shaded by technology -- 4 ages , a fylfot , over us , like Temujin , a kind of safety , a terebinth -- and understand the magics around us accordingly . or : it's obvious once you've traveled that frommage ain't cheese . Jeremiah talks abt circumcizing the heart of Israel . all the cognates of our word black mean usually white , occasionally blazing -- belyj , bianca , blank , bella . that's why Uncle Izzy writes :

We set up mast & sail on that swart ship

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping

from the Nahuatl :

And so I the singer gathered

Blossoms to bedeck the nobles,

Cover them with beauteous garments,

Fill their noble hands with flowers.