“Silas Marner” monostich

~

~     ~

The tears fell,   and Nancy  ceased to speak

~     ~

~

Eheu ... !

[Source:  George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861). 

 You probably read it -- or were made to read it -- in high school; 

 but at the time, you did not realize how good it was. ]

On the same cat, sunning herself, on the same spot, again

  On the same cat, sunning herself, on the same spot, again

    Will you look at that cat … !

    Can you top that ??

    I can’t !

[Appendix from English literature]

The lady-mother of the kitten  sat sunning her white bosom

in the window,

and looked round  with a sleepy air of expecting caresses,

though she was not going to take any trouble for them.

-- George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861)

And, with the sunlight itself  being depicted as a cat:

All the windows in the villa were open.  Sunlight made itself comfortable in unexpected corners of the room.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave (1968), p. 227

Today's hot topic : snow

Here/now in Snowzillastan, it is subject numero uno.
So if you're snowed in, and would appreciate some warming reading,
here is our list of posts  on this endlessly fascinating subject.

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/snow

Wheeeeee !

So -- Put on your bunny-slippers, brew up some cocoa, and enjoy!

A Spicilegium of Sequels

For the literature-loving public, our cup runneth over.

First, a long-lost novel by Harper Lee, a sequel (or prequel) to To Kill a Mockingbird:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/07/scholars-cast-doubt-on-status-of-newly.html

Then, a previously unpublished fragment -- no more than a fragment, but how fine! -- of Mr Charles Dickens

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

(Though scholars have raised questions concerning these, we believe them both to be genuine.)

And now, a new story from Ms Beatrix Potter,  queen-mistress of bunny-love!

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35407846

Unfortunately, not with her own inimitable artwork, but that of a journeyman; as, this:

This rediscovery of a beloved English children’s-tale, is the best news since a couple of years ago, when the Incunabula Department of the World of Dr Justice (headquarters:  Geneva)  managed to unearth this previously unpublished gem, featuring the world’s greatest linguist ever, Doctor John Dolittle:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/exciting-story.html

Mystery Monostich

.

~ ~  Elizabeth’s voice had a door in it.  ~ ~

That line -- that string of words, with a period at the end -- was scooped with a teaspoon from Richard Brautigan’s … novel? booklet?  anyhow a bunch of pages between covers,  A Confederate General from Big Sur, published in 1964.  I might quote a bit of context, in an attempt to make that fragment less strange; but the context is pretty strange in its own right, so I’d have to contexualize that;  and before you know it, I’d have quoted the whole book, which itself is still pretty strange, in its entirety.

I read the book in college, along with some others he wrote;  and before you know it, there he was, right at our college, giving a reading -- this was circa ’68.   He looked as though he had just stepped out of a dust-jacket photo of a frontier hippie;  he read in a soft voice.  He also looked (and kind of acted) strikingly like my freshman math teacher Robin Hartshorne.   Hartshorne was (and is) an elf;  and I have written about him here. -- Winsome;  the word is “winsome”.  -- Some of the things that Hartshorne told us, or wrote on the board, were even stranger than what Brautigan wrote:  for example, the Ham Sandwich Theorem.   And no, I’m not just trying to be funny and making stuff up;  there really is such a theorem and that is what it’s called:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem

Well, that’s about it for this paragraph.


Hartshorne and Brautigan -- separated at birth.

.

Kantian ethics in a pinch

Two items from the morning’s press, illustrate the difficulty of finding guidance in the Categorical Imperative, when the snow hits the fan.

Always keep a copy in your glove-compartment!

(1)  The tragedy of the commons

An op-ed in the wake of “Snowzilla”, followed by a reader’s comment.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-snow-parking-20160125-story.html

Note to Baltimoreans: That parking spot you shoveled out isn't yours

The message was taped to the windshield of a pickup truck parked on a public street:

"This parking space did not magically shovel itself! Be considerate of your neighbors and other people in the neighborhood. DON'T steal parking spaces that people worked for several hours to clear."

The parking space didn't magically pave itself, either — the taxpayers, presumably including the owner of the pickup truck, paid for that — but that point seems to have eluded the anonymous author of this angry missive.

And how can it take "several hours" to shovel the snow out of a parking space? What was the author using to remove the snow, a thimble?

Every time it snows in Baltimore, I am reminded of the words of noted philosopher and humanitarian (and former Sun columnist) Kevin Cowherd: "God forbid we ever get a real emergency around these parts. We'll be eating our children before the sun goes down."

You know the drill. People get out their snow shovels and clear just enough snow to make room for two wheel tracks. Then, after pulling the car out into the street, they put their chairs down in the parking space, to protect the results of "hours" of backbreaking labor, and incidentally making it impossible for snowplows to get through. Then we have a thaw and a freeze, and everything turns into solid ice, with only half as many parking spaces there would be if people had concentrated on getting the snow out of the way instead of guarding "their" parking spaces.

---------

[Comment] Boston dealt with the place markers by picking up everything that was left on the street and carting it away. The natives were outraged but the city stuck to their guns and cleared everything away. Remember too that the mountain of snow they piled up did not melt till last July and it included hundreds of lawn chairs.

Potzteufel !  Who the hell parked in my space ??

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-great-post-blizzard-parking-struggle-pleas-threats-and-lawn-chairs/2016/01/26/16826218-c464-11e5-8965-0607e0e265ce_story.html

In Washington, Nate Bergman spent 96 words stating his case, laser-printed and sealed in plastic.

He’d spent hours digging his car out of a parking place on a Capitol Hill street. He duly acknowledged the legal right of other drivers to take the public space. He appealed to their better natures not to. If that didn’t work, he promised to shovel the snow back to its “original place around your vehicle.” In all, a measured treatise touching on individual liberty and shared responsibility.

In Philadelphia, an unnamed shoveler made the same claim more succinctly: “If you park in my space, I’ll break your [expletive] windows. Have a nice day.”

The death struggle for post-blizzard parking is playing out in different ways in different places all along the East Coast. But few have escaped the plunge into anarchy that erupts when two feet of snow smothers already limited on-street parking.

To the diggers, the moral high ground is clear: Shoveling 300 pounds of snow from a patch of public pavement is like homesteading on the frontier. I cleared it — I own it.

Not so, say the defenders of the commons. Those lawn chairs, pylons and sawhorses standing guard on city streets are squatting on taxpayer property.

“No one owns a parking space,” D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said at a news conference Saturday, appealing to citizens to keep their furniture off the streets.

Before the storm even hit, Philadelphia police used a spoof of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” to urge residents to report any illegal cones or trash cans blocking parking spaces. They dubbed it #NoSavesies.

In Boston, which has a long history of snow-related parking disputes, an umbrella group of several South End neighborhood associations banned space saving last year. Now the South End Forum is raising money to compensate drivers when their cars are vandalized by angry space diggers. There were scores of confrontations over parking this week all over the city, including a nonfatal shooting Monday in Dorchester

The moral hair splitting baffled even experts. When does a private citizen earn a claim to a public resource? It’s an ethical whiteout.

Die angewandte "Metaphysik der Sitten"

(2)  Poster-children vs. free riders

That which is held in one half of the brain, is simultaneously rejected in the other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/world/europe/corsico-italy-school-lunch-fees.html

CORSICO, Italy — After being elected last year, Mayor Filippo Errante found that this town, abutting Milan, had accrued an “alarming” debt of more than a million euros in unpaid school lunch fees. So he decided to take what he called an iron-fist approach.

Children whose parents were up to date on payments would be allowed to eat cafeteria-prepared meals. Children whose parents had not paid would not.

“The era of the ‘furbetti’ is over,” Mr. Errante said in a statement on social media last month, using a term that translates to cunning, akin to gaming the system.

Some called the decision a form of blackmail. Others criticized it for creating what they said was a schoolroom apartheid, where some children ate hot meals while the others snacked on homemade panini or a slab of cold pizza.

Petitions and protests ensued. Teachers, principals and many parents rallied in support of those children who would not be given lunches, even as nearly all agreed that school fees should be paid.

The children most affected by the provision belong to families whom Mr. Tortoreto described as “lemons that have already been squeezed dry” by life.  Some are the children of foreigners without legal permission to remain in Italy, others of parents with a history of mental illness.

The Wonders of Nature

“How each unique frail flake

of coldest snow  most white,

no one another’s like --“

"(I am uniquely meee ...)"

--  The hell you say.

Right now there must be a billion of them out there,

covering everything like a slab of sludge.

Seen one, you seen them all.

-- Susie, hand me the shovel.

Blizzard in Mid-Winter

falling and flailing

bright flakes of ice-light

sabre the air.

the wind-whip  whistles

in leaf-lorn twigs.

beasts flee,  slink or scamper,

seeking any hovel or hole.

side-slanting downstreams  as the wind shifts;

upgusting snowblows  from the snow-drifts.

the slate-gray day

darkens with descent of dusk;

all bleaches to a blur --

blate white, bleak black.

[Note:  To appreciate the structure of this poem,
you need to know  that it is stress-timed,
not syllable-timed --
in accordance with the tastes
of our Saxon ancestors. ]