using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyone knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror, like God is a terrible simile for me but like God with his mirror, I use it
Whether deliberately orchestrated or by deliberate negligence blooger, the program and product, is sinking into suck at the same accelerating pace as every effing thing else. Besides the preview-post not updating after I edit the post before publishing (happening now) the most notable farts are the increasing number of sites on the blogrolls whose feeds won't update (though blooger insists the feed is live and active) - I know the Blog Days of Summer have started (commences every year after Spring college and university commencements) and the number of people posting and reading will slow dramatically, but there are people on the blogrolls posting (Naked Capitalism, for instance) whose new posts are not reflected in real time on the blogrolls' timelines. I cleared caches on my work and personal machines and tested other PCs in the Library, it's bloogle, not me. I mention this not as a hint of my future as a blegacider but as a simple but excellent example of abundant fine fucking metaphors' abounding. The enshittification epidemic be real. Be sure to spiral
New, that, go buy this at bandcamp. I'm gonna sue myself for ten million dollars then give myself almost two million dollars to drop the suit, I said yesterday to the unsmiling visage of my friend and former polisci professor (and Christopher Lasch apostle) who has playfully teased me for three decades for being a crazy canary, crazy weathervane, crazy Cassandra, and lunatic doomsaying fool. You win, he said, the times are as crazy as you. I did *not* recommend that split OOIOO/Lightning Bolt album to him (who shares Elric's given first name, one of three I've known, and adores Mahler), but you? YES! go buy that album at bandcamp for the new OOIOO but especially buy it for the new Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt comes highly recommended, I can't play them in the car when L is with me! a Swans-level vouch from her!
1/the story by williams is in her collection the pelican child
2/mark m. mattison's translation of the parable, which he has committed to the public domain, is
Saying 97: The Parable of the Jar of Flour
Jesus said, "The Father's kingdom can be compared to a woman carrying a jar of flour. While she was walking down [a] long road, the jar's handle broke and the flour spilled out behind her on the road. She didn't know it, and didn't realize there was a problem until she got home, put down the jar, and found it empty."
3/most commenters see this parable as meaning "don't be careless" - a contrasting view regards the emptiness of the jar as a good result, standing for the loss of the ordinary ego along the journey home - a kenotic and/or apophatic interpretation
4/the first paragraph of meghan racklin's review of the short story collection deserves to be hoisted - in the manual metaphor of yves smith - and displayed for your attention:
Truth, the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. Not so the fictions of Joy Williams, which are precisely strange enough to capture the uncanniness of reality. Case in point: I had just started Williams’ latest story collection, The Pelican Child, when my husband and I went on a road trip, him in the driver’s seat. We were heading south from New York City, straight through the Shenandoah Valley and on into the buckle of the Bible Belt. The first story in the collection, “Flour,” is about a woman on a road trip. Her driver is a man engaged in translating a story from the Gnostic gospels into English. He tells the woman that “[t]he verb forms and tenses of Coptic are interesting. For example, some tenses that we English speakers do not have are the circumstantial, the habitual, the third future, the fourth future, the optative, and tenses of unfulfilled action signifying until and not yet.” Williams’ story is a fable about a fable from the Gospel of Thomas about a woman carrying flour in a broken jar, the flour pouring out behind her; in Williams’ version, it is obliquely about translation, interpretation, and unknown and unknowable, enacting in its form a spiritual journey toward a nothingness of ambiguous quality. And here’s the thing: My husband spent the better part of the last year learning Coptic; he’s interested in the Gnostics. On the drive, we talked about conjugating verb tenses.
re story by joy williams, "flour"
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_empty_jar
1/the story by williams is in her collection the pelican child
Delete2/mark m. mattison's translation of the parable, which he has committed to the public domain, is
Saying 97: The Parable of the Jar of Flour
Jesus said, "The Father's kingdom can be compared to a woman carrying a jar of flour. While she was walking down [a] long road, the jar's handle broke and the flour spilled out behind her on the road. She didn't know it, and didn't realize there was a problem until she got home, put down the jar, and found it empty."
3/most commenters see this parable as meaning "don't be careless" - a contrasting view regards the emptiness of the jar as a good result, standing for the loss of the ordinary ego along the journey home - a kenotic and/or apophatic interpretation
4/the first paragraph of meghan racklin's review of the short story collection deserves to be hoisted - in the manual metaphor of yves smith - and displayed for your attention:
Truth, the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. Not so the fictions of Joy Williams, which are precisely strange enough to capture the uncanniness of reality. Case in point: I had just started Williams’ latest story collection, The Pelican Child, when my husband and I went on a road trip, him in the driver’s seat. We were heading south from New York City, straight through the Shenandoah Valley and on into the buckle of the Bible Belt. The first story in the collection, “Flour,” is about a woman on a road trip. Her driver is a man engaged in translating a story from the Gnostic gospels into English. He tells the woman that “[t]he verb forms and tenses of Coptic are interesting. For example, some tenses that we English speakers do not have are the circumstantial, the habitual, the third future, the fourth future, the optative, and tenses of unfulfilled action signifying until and not yet.” Williams’ story is a fable about a fable from the Gospel of Thomas about a woman carrying flour in a broken jar, the flour pouring out behind her; in Williams’ version, it is obliquely about translation, interpretation, and unknown and unknowable, enacting in its form a spiritual journey toward a nothingness of ambiguous quality. And here’s the thing: My husband spent the better part of the last year learning Coptic; he’s interested in the Gnostics. On the drive, we talked about conjugating verb tenses.