Triad 1 of 32 · 2026-09-24 · Difficulty 3 · Shared form or method, Conflict, Oblique/structural
The thread
Three books built out of other books that say so, and that disagree about what the store of already-said language does to the person copying it. For Burton the compiled cento is medicine (‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’); for Flaubert encyclopedic copying is the disease, ending in two clerks at the desk and a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas; for Mullen the dictionary and the thesaurus are partners in bed, and Flaubert’s stock phrase comes back emptied in ‘Elliptical’.
The three books
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton; 1621. Anchor: the cento. Compiling as cure; diagnosis of scholars’ melancholy.
- Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert; 1881. The copy: encyclopedic reading as comedy and disease; the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas as hinge to Mullen.
- Sleeping with the Dictionary, Harryette Mullen; 2002. The dictionary: the reference work as partner rather than pathology; the emptied cliché.
Notebook
- Omne meum, nihil meum: write a page made only of lines from your own commonplace notebooks, then the one ‘symptomatic dictionary’ entry (Mullen) that page is a symptom of. Where does the method stop being yours?
- Write ten Flaubert-style entries for the received ideas of theory (ARCHIVE:, RHIZOME:, THE OTHER:, LABYRINTH:, GESTURE:), then empty them in the manner of Mullen’s ‘Elliptical’. Which lasts longer, the stock opinion or the stock syntax?
- Heinsius’s ‘very lap of eternity’ vs. the clerks who ‘wanted to know the exact number of volumes’: describe a third posture toward a library as a single gesture.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Arikha, ‘As a Lute out of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy’ (Public Domain Review) https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/as-a-lute-out-of-tune-robert-burtons-melancholy/
- Robert Burton 1577-1640, Book Owners Online https://bookowners.online/Robert_Burton_1577-1640
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Project Gutenberg 10800 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10800
- Flaubert, Le dictionnaire des idées reçues (Conard, 1913), Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/ledictionnairede00flau
- Bouvard and Pécuchet pt. 1 (older translation), Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25014
- PennSound: Harryette Mullen https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Mullen-Harryette.php
- Jacket2: Harryette Mullen (PoemTalk #172) https://jacket2.org/category/commentary-tags/harryette-mullen
To carry
“Omne meum, nihil meum, ’tis all mine, and none mine.” — Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’
Themes
alphabetical order · cento · cliché · commonplace · compilation · copying · dictionary · encyclopedia · melancholy of scholars · received ideas
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