MDMD2: The Usual Requests
Dave Monroe
davidmmonroe at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 23 10:30:45 CDT 2001
"There are the usual Requests. Does the Dog know
'Where the Bee Sucks'? What is the Integral of One
over (Book)d(Book)? Is he married?" (M&D, Ch. 3, p.
19)
A quick one, in anticipation of being able at long
last to deploy the bulk of my research over the next
day or so (but if someone's on deck for Ch. 4, by all
means, go right ahead) ...
"'Where the Bee Sucks'"
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslips bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bats back I do fly.
After summer merrily:
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
William Shakepseare, The Tempest, V.i.88-94
http://www.bartleby.com/40/99.html
Ariel to Prospero upon being freed ...
I'm guessing the crowd's asking, flints held high, for
the Thomas Augustine Arne setting, but ...
http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/s/shakespeare/bee.html
http://www.geocities.com/aressel/recomms.html
But I'm not so sure there's not some off-color joke
being implied here, either (cf. "There's this Jesuit,
this Corsican, and this Chinaman," pp. 15-6) ...
"the Integral of One over (Book)d(Book)"
Rewriting the equation on p. 450 of Gravity's Rainbow
(New York: Viking, 1973) as above yields ...
the Integral of One over (Cabin)d(Cabin) = Log Cabin +
c = Houseboat
Therefore ...
the Integral of One over (Book)d(Book) = Log Book + c
= well, Log Book, I suppose ...
If anybody wants actually to explain why integrating
the inverse of a variable with repect to the change in
that variable yields the logarithm of that variable
plus some constant, please, by all means ... but I
didn't notice a ring on the L(ight)E(mitting)D(iode)'s
paw, so ...
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