"Taking into account the space a building would need to leave from the highway, the water and neighboring properties..."

"... as well as a requirement to position the foundation well above flood level, Schwartz and Architecture outlined the maximum allowable building envelope for a home, which was tiny. But, within that envelope, the architects managed to design a 730-square-foot, single-story cottage elevated on tall posts, with a single bedroom and bathroom...."

I'm reading "Even the Architects Said the Build Would Be Nearly Impossible/An architect and his client overcame a steep site and regulatory hurdles to build a 730-square-foot house that hovers over the water in Sonoma County, Calif." (NYT gift link).

"Throughout the journey, Dr. Tang-Oxley frequently communicated with Mr. Schwartz by writing poems instead of providing more direct feedback.... It was a surreal play of disbelief, surprises and pure delights."

Kitties and puppies that have annoyed me this morning.

There's this at the top of the home page at Smithsonian Magazine: "15 Kitten Photos That Will Make You Feel as Warm and Fuzzy as the Tiny Felines Themselves/These moments from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest highlight curious kittens from around the world." We're told these are "the most adorable creatures... the cutest fluffy kittens that are sure to warm your heart." No, that is false. My heart is not warmed. This magazine's asserted mission is: "Smithsonian Media exists for the sole purpose of increasing and diffusing knowledge." What's the knowledge here? Kittens are cute?

In the canine category of my annoyance, I know it serves me right for scrolling through TikTok in the morning, but TikTok somehow saw fit to serve up this thing that I know some people must love but it's exactly the sort of thing I loathe:

"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Allen Ginsberg. I'm sorry I let it slip past unnoted, but I'm noting it now. Marilyn Monroe had her 100th on Monday. That got way more attention in the media, so I could have observed it, on the right day, but I avoided that. She's had too much attention already. I imagine she's tired of it, tired of the form it takes. 

Here's the whole poem, "A Supermarket in California."

Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?... We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier....

"Got any more of these cross-literary sparks, or is there another Stafford zinger that cracks you up?"

Grok asked me after I was asking it about the poem "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" by John Ashbery, specifically my favorite line, "Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched/Her long thigh."

The poem had just come up in a crossword puzzle: 20 Across: "Cartoon character featured in the John Ashbery poem 'Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.'" There are a lot of cartoon characters in that poem, but the answer is POPEYE. 

I'd said to Grok: "That description of Olive Oyl and the poem title — 'Farm Implements' — made me think of this quote David Sedaris found in the biography of Jean Stafford: 'She was sharp-tongued and once described a fellow writer as 'looking as if she were pregnant with farm machinery.'"

That's in DS's new book (commission earned).

Well, I didn't have any more cross-literary sparks or Stafford zingers, so I said "No. Do you?"

And Grok was all "Yes — plenty." Etc.

"[Jill] Biden is a longtime English professor who casually uses the correct group noun for starlings ('murmuration')."

"She quotes many writers here — Albert Camus, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, James Salter — but the author the book recalled most vividly to me, in its careful catalog of small details, was William Carlos Williams, who in his epic poem 'Paterson' wrote 'no ideas but in things.' This tracks, because Biden acknowledges the help of Ada Calhoun, the author of [a book] about Frank O’Hara. Indeed, Biden’s description of being hustled for security reasons through the service entrance to hotels made my O’Hara stand on end, so cleanly could it be broken into stanzas, if you’ll forgive the liberty: 'right by garbage cans/ reeking of rotting room service leftovers/mixed with discarded mini shampoos/ — an odor so sour and pungent/that it almost knocks you down.'"

So writes Alexandra Jacobs in "Jill Biden’s New Memoir Shows Off a Sharp Eye, if Not a Sharp Elbow/Beyond a few pointed digs at her husband’s successor, 'View From the East Wing' largely sticks to the head-spinning details of first lady-hood" (NYT).

Speaking of "no ideas but in things," we're told that, in her new memoir, her second, Jill Biden "marvels at the perks of the office, the masses of flowers, attentive staff and fine art, such as 'Morning on the Seine, Good Weather,' the oil painting that Angela Merkel said Trump called 'my Monet.' ('Our Monet,' Biden corrects, meaning the American people’s.)"

I looked it up. Here's "Our Monet":

According to The White House Historical Association's Facebook page: "On December 4, 1963, the family of John F. Kennedy donated the painting 'A Morning on the Seine; Good Weather' to the White House collection in memory of the late president." That was 2 weeks after the assassination. I'm only noticing this painting now, because I'm reading about Jill and Donald verbalizing possessively about it. And now I feel as though I can see, in that fuzzy image, 2 profiles yelling at each other. And both look like Trump.

Oh! The derangement! An odor so sour and pungent....

ADDED: Did Trump say "my Monet"? It's hearsay — at least double hearsay. Jill Biden is asserting that Angela Merkel said that Trump said something. There's room for mishearing, misquoting, misinterpreting, and lying from Merkel (supposedly hearing Trump) and Biden (supposedly hearing Merkel) and from anyone else who's passed this statement along.

Interestingly, Trump has used the phrase "my Monet," but not to refer to an artwork by Claude Monet. Trump has called one of his golf courses "my Monet": "I have friends who buy Monets. Turnberry is my Monet and it’s far more beautiful." But that quote too is hearsay. Eric Trump wrote it in a book, it says here: "Donald Trump: Turnberry is my Monet — and it’s more beautiful/US president ‘obsessed’ with details about his golf courses in Scotland and continually makes suggestions to improve them, according to his son Eric’s book" (London Times).

Googling for more reporting of Trump's use of the phrase "my Monet," I got a good laugh:

 

I'd like to hear the "Apprentice" theme song with "Monet!" taking the place of "Money!":

If your dog could talk.

And here's Billy Collins in a similar vein:

"Poem so beloved by Abraham Lincoln that he carried it in his pocket and memorized it."

The clue for 11 Down in today's NYT crossword.

"I was thrilled by its truthfulness. It stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I’d still swear by that. I felt, 'This is true. Everything else is fake. This is really what’s going on.'"

Said Wallace Shawn, about the Eugene O’Neill play "Long Day’s Journey Into Night," which he saw when he was 13 in 1956.

Quoted in "Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square? He’s most commonly recognized for his screen roles as a plotting hit man and an unlikely Lothario, but it’s his work as a playwright that shows more of his true self" (NYT)(gift link, because the article is long and there's a lot going on, including the way strangers are always exclaiming "Inconceivable!" at him).

Unlike many of his characters, Shawn speaks slowly and with many pauses in the service of sentences that ultimately emerge perfectly formed. He is also polite and courtly and at great pains not to offend, so much so that one fears inadvertently violating whatever code of etiquette is obviously almost sacred to him. So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings, he nonetheless has written a play whose broad outlines, and even some poignant details, are flagrantly autobiographical....

The new play is "Moth Days." There's also a new production of his older play "The Fever." And you don't have to tell me, Althouse, you should go to New York and see both plays. I haven't traveled in years.

ADDED: The full title of the play is "What We Did Before Our Moth Days." According to the linked article, "Moth Days" are "those fluttery, flyaway moments before death, as one of the characters imagines them." Poetically, "moth" calls to mind mother... and also that Yeats line, "And when white moths were on the wing/And moth-like stars were flickering out...."

"What is that Billy Collins poem about poets and metaphors that talks about poetry going on until everything has been compared to everything else?"

A question I asked Grok because I was listening to Mel Torme singing "Windmills of Your Mind."

Here's the poem: "The Trouble with Poetry." Excerpt: "And how will it ever end?/unless the day finally arrives/when we have compared everything in the world/to everything else in the world...."

And here's Mel:

I usually refrain from embedding song videos that only show a still image of the album cover, but that cover is worth gazing upon. Adorably absurd couple. The year was — need I say it? — 1969.

"When they start killing white women, the devil not only leaves the station, but he moves to the suburbs and puts on a badge."

"When they start killing white women, they see a minivan and call it a tank.... When they start killing white women, and I have to say it...."

"The most new York couple is: very sweet man that everyone loves with a wife way out of his league that he’s obsessed with."

That's the top rated comment on this TikTok about Rama Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani:

"In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse."

"As contemporary social systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) in operational and decision-making pipelines, we observe a structurally similar failure mode: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints. In this study, 20 manually curated adversarial poems (harmful requests reformulated in poetic form) achieved an average attack-success rate (ASR) of 62% across 25 frontier closed- and open-weight models, with some providers exceeding 90%. The evaluated models span across 9 providers: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, and Moonshot AI.... Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator...."

From "Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models."

I found that through this discussion at Metafilter, where somebody says "I do want to say the 'save us from AI' framing is a little misleading - what adversarial poetry does is make it easier to make an AI convince you to commit suicide or give you the recipe for napalm. It's really interesting research that points to some serious flaws in the current structure of LLM guardrails, but it's not like you can write a haiku that will give Grok a concussion."

Nil admirari.

Nil admirari is today's Word of the Day in the Oxford English Dictionary. I ran across it because, writing the previous post, I looked up the word "sunder," after David Axelrod had accused Donald Trump of "sundering history." It's an odd word, but it's not the most apt word. Sundering has more to do with separating than demolition. And how do you do either to history?

But I was glad to get deflected into the OED, because I'm finding out about Nil admirari: "The attitude of indifference to the distractions of the outside world advocated by the Roman poet Horace. Also: a person adopting this attitude."

Etymology: "classical Latin nīl admīrārī, in nil admirari prope res est una..quae possit facere et servare beatum, ‘to wonder at nothing is just about the only way a man can become contented and remain so’ (Horace Epistles 1. 6. 1).

From the Wikipedia article about the term: "Nietzsche wrote that in this proposition the ancient philosopher 'sees the whole of philosophy,' opposing it to Schopenhauer's 'admirari id est philosophari' (to marvel is to philosophize)."

Here's the Horace:

No comment.

I'm reading "What Was Best About the ‘Best American Poetry’? After four decades, the annual book series is drawing to a close. Our columnist looks at what it all meant" (NYT).

By convention, the poets in each volume are invited to comment on their chosen poem. A surprising number assert the poem’s events are factual, true. Some claim the poem is self-explanatory; others explain rather overabundantly. Some abstain entirely, or use the space to deflect. See Charles Bukowski, best in 1993: “The more said about a poem, the less it becomes.” Depends on the poem. Rae Armantrout’s “Soft Money,” best in 2011, is very funny: 'They’re sexy because they pretend/not to need you,/but they’re lying,/which degrades them./They’re beneath you/and it’s hot.' It’s made even funnier by her note that reveals she was mocking Duran Duran."

"Whether you like Corrupt James Comey or not, and I can’t imagine too many people liking him, HE LIED!"

"It is not a complex lie, it’s a very simple, but IMPORTANT one. There is no way he can explain his way out of it. He is a Dirty Cop, and always has been, but he was just assigned a Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge, so he’s off to a very good start. Nevertheless, words are words, and he wasn’t hedging or in dispute. He was very positive, there was no doubt in his mind about what he said, or meant by saying it. He left himself ZERO margin of error on a big and important answer to a question. He just got unexpectedly caught. James 'Dirty Cop' Comey was a destroyer of lives. He knew exactly what he was saying, and that it was a very serious and far reaching lie for which a very big price must be paid!"

Signed, "President DJT," on Truth Social, this morning.

What, precisely, is the supposedly simple statement Comey made and why is it supposedly now utterly clear that it was not only wrong but a lie?

The "simple" statement is actually an elaborate back-and-forth with Ted Cruz at a Senate hearing on  September 30, 2020:

"I was working on a poem yesterday that had an epigraph from the poet Christopher Morley: 'No man is lonely while eating spaghetti.'"

"Sometimes you discover a sentence like that and say, 'I’m gonna put that on the top of a poem and see what happens.' Sometimes the epigraph is not just some cute afterthought but the reason why the poem started."

From a 2018 "Conversation with Billy Collins" (Booth), found because I was making spaghetti and remembering the epigraph, which I'd just encountered at the top of the poem "Vivace!"

I don't want to reprint an entire poem on my blog, but I will link to this other blog that did see fit to do what I won't do. You'll find the full text of "Vivace!" in a blog post titled "I Figured Out the Perfect Evening Activity."

"The speech of the American middle class is largely the attempt to impress, obfuscate, or placate. That of the streets is..."

"... in my experience, to express. For example: Middle class: 'What a nice dress.' Street: 'Hey, baby, any more at home like you?'... Iambic pentameter, five feet to the line. I was filming Heist with Gene Hackman; my wife, Rebecca Pidgeon; and Danny DeVito. Danny’s line to Gene, his rival, is, 'Are you fucking with me, are you fucking with me, or are you done fucking with me?'... I was concerned that [Danny] would (incorrectly) accentuate the word done at the end of the phrase, which would have branded him, sadly, with a merely academic understanding of actual American idiom. But I need not have worried, as he accentuated the final fucking and all was well. Per contra, Becca was raised in Edinburgh, and educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the early days of our association she flatteringly strove to adopt my Chicagoan vocabulary. Our great friend, Shel Silverstein, corrected her: 'Becca, when you say motherfucker, it’s like someone is trying to fuck your mother.'"

Writes David Mamet in "Back When We Gave a Fuck" (Free Press).

I love the sudden appearance of Shel Silverstein and the use of the phrase "per contra." And I considered taking out the clarifying "[Danny]" and putting back the "he" — wasn't it obvious that Mamet meant Danny and not Gene" — because I wanted to preserve the number of syllables. I didn't want to intrude on  Mamet's rhythm. I even asked Grok to analyze the text and tell me to what extent it approached iambic pentameter. Was "per contra" chosen for the meter or because boring people begin sentences with "By contrast"/"Conversely"/"On the other hand"?  Is Shel Silverstein "Our great friend, Shel Silverstein" for the meter or because Mamet is the sort of person who wants you to know he was especially close to that celebrity he's name-dropping. 

"We talk about the view that the soul exists but can’t do so without the body"/"'Is that what you believe?' he asks."

"'Ah well, I don’t, you see. My body is like a Hillman Imp and my soul is driving it. When I die, I park the car and walk the rest of the way. And I’m thinking that heaven is probably pedestrianised, so I can leave it outside.'"

From "Frank Skinner on faith and finally getting married (she said no four times)/The comedian opens up about his alcoholism, the consolation he finds in poetry — and whether he could succeed Melvyn Bragg as In Our Time presenter" (London Times).

There's a new season of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast" beginning this week, first episode here. I'm a big fan of that.

Hillman Imp? Apparently some sort of car. 

Oh!

That's Frank's idea of the metaphorical body that contains his soul. 

I'm reminded of the George Harrison song: "I got born into the material world/Getting worn out in the material world/Use my body like a car/Taking me both near and far...."

But George didn't name a particular car. Frank named the Hillman Imp. How about you?

Found poetry. Place of finding: spam file.

"I used to read like a fiend, but I’ve given it up because it took up my time. I paint and draw all the time now..."

"... and watch films and read reviews in the paper. The last book I read was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, 15 years ago."

From "Rose Wylie: I haven’t read a book in 15 years/The artist on why she had to put down Ulysses, the films that make her cry— and the fellow artist she would invite to dinner" (London Times).

Reading a book takes up time, so it's something to do if you have time that needs filling. You can fill time with other things too. How is reading a book different from those other things, and why do so many people seem to think that it's better than those other things? It's refreshing to hear Rose Wylie announce without shame that she hasn't read a book in 15 years. She prefers other things.

Here's her favorite poem.