JM: " ...said Dreyer, trying to do
as Franz was doing - to flatten his oars over the water, swallow-like on the
backstroke... trying again to feather his oars, and again failing" (CCC
pages 910,911). What does this mean and what kind of movement is described
here?
EDNote: as a sometime
rower (not what Dreyer was doing, but the terminology is the same), I'll try to
describe: "feathering" is twisting the oar-handle(s) toward oneself, so that the
flat part of the oar-blade is parallel to the water, rather than perpendicular
(the position needed to grip and drive through). The main goal of
feathering is to reduce wind resistance, although if rowing downwind, one might
prefer to keep the blades unfeathered. The "swallow-like" refers to the
way the flattened blades mimic the low, swift passes of a swallow over water--a
remarkable sight worth pursuing, for those who've never seen
it.
JM: Thanks,
again, SB. May I ask something else? Is the "feathering" particularly
connected with a reversion of the oars ( twisting the oar-handles toward
oneself), of any motion of inverting the direction of the boat, or does it
simply apply to the reduction of wind resistance?
( What a lovely eery
experience with the tall witch spindles
of fog!)
Returning to the apostrophal "notes for further use", I'd
like to thank SS for the wonderful examples:
SS:
(a) In the "Poem without a hero" by Akhmatova (Poema bez geroia, 1946-65)
Somewhere around this place (...) wandered the following lines but I did not
include them in the main text...(the lines follow)...and THIS IS THE MAIN TEXT
of canonical edition. (b) In the poem "Hammeln" by Tsvetaeva (1925) : "here
begins a little diversion concering buttons"/"here ends the ode to the buttons
and the story continues"
Also thanks to JF for bringing up "The
Book of Ephraim" by James Merrill , that "is indeed poetry,
or at least verse, and section N (beginning with the word "Notes") is mostly in
the heroic measure, a lot of it being couplets. So there is an answer to
Carolyn's challenge..."
JF observed that "I
didn't quite say that Shade's "Disjointed notes" or "Man's life as
commentary..." /is/ the book or the poem. I'd say the reader can take both that
way, though, ironically, and thus they're linked as you'd been saying... That
word "is"--very tricky. I agree with JF, and again when he adds
on the subject of BW and CW: "So which /is/ it? In my
opinion, you lose nothing by imagining it as a CW as long as you remember the
existence of the BW (and the nonexistence of /B. shadei/). (Isn't this a modern way of understanding "fiction", as described
by Frege?)