Author: geoplotsadmin

Most people can’t see beyond their own language, let alone language itself.  / La plupart des gens ne peuvent pas voir au-delà de leur propre langue, encore moins de la langue elle-même. / Die meisten Menschen können nicht über ihre eigene Sprache hinaus sehen, geschweige denn über die Sprache selbst.

Language is a barrier to  … reality. But a permeable, sieve-like one. One analogy is the blood-brain barrier (BBB)5

Speaking of hobbies, I just realized I gave up aikido for neuroscience

I had slways looked at us as a species, certainly not a gift of (or to) God.

Rebels without a cause always appealed to me more than rebels with one .  I did try out causes, of course. Not surprisingly, they didn’t work out.

Thr rightwing / the left a bunch of  swarmy wimps. Who do you think will win?  

“Swarmy” is not from Yiddish but I swear I’ve heard it yiddishized into “schwarmy”.

Reading neuroscience is like reading a foreign language I’m not proficient at. I tend get the drift but miss words, esp the acronyms and names of chemicals. When these lapses accumulate to the point I don’t follow anymore, I have go back and work on my vocabulary. Practice makes perfect. [𝕏’d on 25 Sep] 

Just as I was reading about the important roles sodium and potassium play in neurotransmission, I got a message from Kaiser showing that my test results for both of them, liver related, plus creatinine which is kidney related, are resolutely  normal. That is, Levadopa has not adversely affected my blood chemistry. Good news. [sms’d to nr 26 Sep]  

https://alteritas.net/pastis/headstone-2/  

Was I more psycho- than sociopath?
Hard to say. The twain do almost meet.
Cautiously, I trod the strait path
between, kept my missteps discreet.

Poetry is a tail trying to wag the dog of reality

Love weighs its price

I get vertigo when I think about my past life, and when I imagine the future lives  of those younger than I

The jargon of science ….

How much marijuana / cannabis / THC mangles elementary math. 

Austria is a delightfully alcoholic country but this does have unfortunate consequences

Ah age! When the seat of pleasure becomes source of pain.

Using my return to Montréal as a source of meditation abt my political stance then and now

Once I got over his hippie-like attachment to the idea of beards, a moment which ironically coincided with the physiologicsl  capacity of growing one.

What does it mean to be “born into”….

Sometimes an almost religious sense  of awe settles over me when I contemplate the neurological complexity of the brain, in which electrochemical machine consciousness is truly a ghost.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_machine  [X’d 1 Oct]

Putain becomes shit, shit fuck, in subtitled French.

[ X] is grateful to currently reside with his Anishinaabe husband in T’karonto (Toronto), the traditional lands and territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat Peoples and now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples..

Défaillance de l’âge

Son ocd? Compulsive disorder / trouble obsessionnel compulsifsfjgd kfc ,,,,

Add  mes adieux to Like a Log

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxRHP0IybX1/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Senility is the price of living for a long time.

Trans of … missing germanic words into poetry

Pic of Citroen

China practices capitalism with Chinese characteristics

Cog-wheeling

Things to do

Shots x 2

Toll Roads 9HLF989 JTMAB3FV9PD144636

2023 Toyota RAV4

Letter to Nancy Snyder

Dying in Africa to old Observ

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure….   < Enoch Powell

Jealousy implies rivalry, hence equality of contestants. To suffer from literary jealousy implies …   

etym of rival : [Latin rīvālis, one using the same stream as another, a rival, from rīvus, stream; see rei- get in Indo-mm

     

  

Mother always warned me about the Book-Fairies.
I held them in greater awe than even the Christian
God during the two brief phases in my life
When I lived in fear and trembling of Him.

A memorial  prosy-poem.

Based on true events.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CwYbirvOxSf/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==  cod in spocy miso sauce

One thing I love about my mother was that that she allowed that she was glad she had Parkinson’s, once her positive reaction to the dopamine supplements she’d been prescribed for neurodegeneration worked.  At least they knew what she had.

https://twitter.com/walkmontreal/status/1704885302559678600?s=61&t=u3KfCLKDYzNWBG_B9YfClg

The older you get the more time you spend on Treppenwitz (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Treppenwitz).

What percentage of your followers on social media are folks you actually know?

A History of Adolescence

The meaning of Beulah,,,

    

A friend mentioned her surprise at how lush the vineyards along the Mosel in northern Germany are. I flashed immediately on Ausonius‘ Mosella, a 4th century Latin poem I once set out to translate, until I found Christopher Kelk’s version, which does the job well. Though Mosella is about the river and its environs, the aura and lure of wine can be felt throughout its playful verses.

I taught at the University of Bordeaux in 1979-1980. This was just before I entered the wine business, a refugee, that time, from academia. Ausonius, like Montaigne, was bordelais. He is remembered in the illustrious St. Emilion grand cru Château Ausone, which sits on the site of his nidus senectitus, nest of old age, to which he retired once his patron the Emperor Gratian was assassinated in 383. Montaigne and Ausonius were both local cult objects of attention for the scholar I had wanted to be, as were to be sure the wines of Bordeaux themselves.

I had first learned of Ausonius in a 1969 graduate seminar in Edmonton by Ted Blodgett, of whom the poet was a favourite. In the memorial piece I wrote for Ted I opined

I owe Ted almost everything I know about Latin and medieval literature, in particular Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, and even Ausonius, whose poem on the vineyards of the Mosel, Mosella, Ted demonstrated dans le texte was a worthy successor to Ovid, at least the latter’s secondary works, Tristia. 

I recalled as well Ted’s dwelling…

… on what the coming of Christian cultural hegemony meant to the late Latin world, in particular how frustrating Ausonius found the “defection” of his dear friend Paulinius of Nola, who converted to Christianity in the 380s and cut himself off from classical Latin culture.

Ted found a similar tension within Augustine of Hippo, whose Confessions, of which we had to read extracts, recounts his ambiguous feelings for the passionate image of Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid once the good Father had renounced the world of sensual desire. So when I came to explain to Ted why in 1976 I admired Mao Zedong’s prescriptions for post-revolutionary literature, I compared Mao to Augustine, both writing from the other side of a cultural gulf in which the old high classical culture was to be sealed off for ethical reasons, but by someone who had mastered it. (https://alteritas.net/GXL/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/A_Tribute_to_Ted_Blodgett-1.pdf)

I was not a Maoist, in fact being a certifiable petty bourgeois intellectual I often suffered rhetorical slings and arrows from that quarter in the political trench warfare of the 70s. But I was a child of my times and bought into the illusion of revolutionary change.

Funny, now, that I bolstered that belief with a thread that began with Ausonius.