A.H. - the disease

unrecognised
and most prevalent
in the USA :
Aggressive Hedonism.
Now let us pray.

If only more commercial premises

advertised themselves so subtly!

 

Bathroom furniture.

A famous person is doubly so
for having a urinal in his house
because of the inconvenient height
of water-closets which are too tall 
for the health of our bowels
(bidets – good also for feet – are just about right),
and  too low for standing-up men
& 'the handicapped'.

Perhaps it is utilitarian like this:

or verging on the obscene like al-Fayed's:

But what's wrong with a washbasin, which
(too low for washing the face)
is just the right height for most men
to piss, and easy to rinse
with hot or with cold
before (in an act of extreme hygiene)
washing the willy and hands afterwards ?

Emotional ambiguity.

Petty pleasurable guilt I had,
and guilty pleasure on learning

that the domineering neighbour
I had come to dislike
had had a massive stroke. It will be fine
to see no more the weekly row
of six black underpants upon his washing-line.

Peculiarly,
instead of resentment that he had
succeeded in expiring before me
and (painlessly, swiftly as I hope
to exit) had 'pipped me at the post' –  I felt
a horrible triumph at outliving him.

I am as muddledly
mean-minded as anybody else.

One of his contemptuous autumn paintings.

Barbara Kingsolver

succinctly on Trump:

He's not even interested in the Presidency.
He's only interested in Winning.

Word of the Day:

Degrowth

 ? ? ? 

Another (unrelated) word:

(to) present (as in a film or other spectacle) 
seems to be much the same in all European languages
and comes from mediæval Latin præsentare, presumably from the presentation of the Host at Mass.  The modern French for a knick-knack or objets-d'art shelf or cabinet is présentoir. 

As for the noun: it came into English around 1200, from  Latin, 

The difference between present and gift is felt in the fact that one may be willing to accept as a present that which he would not be willing to accept as a gift : a gift is to help the one receiving it; a present does him honour, or expresses friendly feeling toward him. A present is therefore ordinarily to an individual; but in law gift is used, to the exclusion of present, as including all transfers of property without consideration and for the benefit of the receiver. [Century Dictionary]

Let us consider a new word and what it might mean: Depresent.
(After all, we have Degenerate.)

* * *

I recently bought a Stainless steel casserole with lid.

This description appeared on the packing in every official E.U.  language (plus Russian and Turkish) except Icelandic, Irish, Albanian, Catalan, Luxembourgeois, Nynorsk, Swedish and Danish.  

The following puzzled me: Dengta keptuvė su Dangčiu
(which I identified as Lithuanian because of the ė),  
Kastrolis ar Vāku (Latvian because of the ā) ... 
but Skirts Troškinimui and Karstumizturigs....might one of them be Maltese ?

It could be...as I read somewhere...

"The Bigger the Brains
The Tighter the Chains."

So much stuff, just stuff.

The over-washed people

in the museum :

are they there to gaze,

to worship or fill in time ?

The Individual (left)

and 'Social Media' (right)

Hymn of the American Republic

(to a familiar tune)

Amazing,
Gross

(indecency)

The breaking down

of gender barriers & stereotypes
would be a lovely and beneficial thing
if men became more womanly
and women stopped becoming
more and more like scary men.

Save the Soup : Just Stop Monocultures

of Sunflowers

and Rapeseed and Wheat and Maize...

The pipsqueak who sentenced the soup-throwers to many months in prison would not have acknowledged Van Gogh as a human being, much less bought one of his paintings. 
The sunflower series is the most popular and least interesting of his amazing output.  This action should make us think again about these paintings.

A writer in the Guardian points out that the great Vincent would not have wanted his paintings (other people thought of them as 'daubs') to be venerated, much less entombed in the terrifying concrete mausoleum of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

'During his lifetime, Van Gogh was a pariah. No one would buy his paintings, and he suffered from numerous untreated mental illnesses. He also lived in desperate poverty.'  

He wanted his pictures to hang on domestic walls, he wanted to share his uplifting and inspiring vision of landscape and people.
I think that he would have been appalled to learn where they have ended up.

Sad to relate,

where I live
in sterile Europe
there are no street-dogs.

Just passing...

Last here 5,000 years ago.

The comet C-023 A3
above a bank of cloud just before dawn.

 

Survivors.

Jews,
who have been persecuted only throughout
recorded history,
should spare a thought for wolves,
persecuted for at least ten thousand years.

Unfortunately, they spare few thoughts
for their nearest fellow-humans
who live their whole lives beset by howling fears.

Today's photo.

 Kathmandu, Nepal.

The Myth of Cerberus

Whereas we (mostly) can't 
tune into each other, dogs
can tune into shepherds,
sheep and other dogs
almost simultaneously.

Destruction before Discovery.

More than 100,000 plant species are thought to be undiscovered,
the majority of which are believed to be at risk of extinction...

Lying on the beach

on Easter Island.

The Moon and Dinosaurs.

Following my interest in little girls' groins,
long before Jurassic Park was dreamed up
and satellites were launched,
my earliest passions as a child

were Dinosaurs (1949, after seeing Brontosaurus
and, I think, Diplodocus
at London's National History Museum)

and Astronomy (1950, triggered by
an old book in the attic with a leather spine
about the solar system, written before
the discovery of non-planet Pluto).

So it was with some glee today
that I listened to a wonderfully insane
broadcast on the BBC World Service about 
Dinosaurs and the Moon.

A phone-stand:

something that you'll definitely
not be able to do without.

Write to Santa!

 

Muslims are taught

that the idea of Perfection
this side of Paradise
is blasphemy.

They would do well
to avoid 'Western' and Eastern
ethics and æsthetics,

and to respect young women
much more than old men
with prosthetics.

Word of the Day:

retro-futurist,

as in a description of FF Coppola's Megalopolis as
A strident retro-futurist folly. 

Dear 'Health-care Professionals',

Lives are not saved
merely prolonged.

(Length versus quality,
mumbles Robert's ghost.

Why bother ?)

Some people say that
only Jesus saves.

And no other.

At work or school,

it's not so much the bullying
that does the damage,

as the perpetual, even life-long
anxiety that it engenders.

It often happens

to most of us
when we look up something in Google.

I started by typing Baltrušaitis...
                                                 and ended with

1. The Weighing of a Soul (where ?) to find out
if its weight of sin is great enough
to send it to Hell;

2. The soul in eternal hellish torment.

And lastly, another capital
from the 12th century church at Saint-Révérien, Nièvre.

Seriously, though.

 

Doggerel.

I have been to Norway and Albania
To Central Africa and Canada
and the middle of the Baltic Sea.
Like most people, I've never been to Paradise*
– I've been too much, too long, in me.

*But where I live is pretty close.

Early War Baby.

When I was growing up in royalist east Belfast,
to talk about The South of Ireland
(at the time, officially entitled The Irish Free State)
in polite society was like
mentioning a 'French Letter'
or Cancer, the Duke of Windsor or syphilis:

The less said (in polite society) the better.

Of the Civil War, and the Free State's
handy neutrality in World War Two,
my friends and I were decent in our ignorance.

Climate Change in leafy Suburbia.

From calm to calamity
From here to eternity

Small vocal difference, big result.

Ein fester Berg;
Ein' feste Burg.

Luther suggested that
Jehovah (a.k.a unser Gott,
the Lord of few pities)

moved from Mosaic mountain-top
to impregnable town.

People are always leaving
the countryside for overcrowded cities.

Near Toulouse, France.

Protesters at a house in the path
of a motorway/toll-road
considered by many to be unnecessary.

Almost all you need to know

about the cultural level
of the 'Free World'
in the medium of cinema.

Not in Japan.

Underlying the strong disapproval of suicide
in Abrahamic cultures
is (I suspect) the sense that it is desertion
from the human army.

A Sea-angel.

 

Clione limacina, by Alex. Semenov on FlickR

"A thing of beauty,"

declared John Keats,
"is a joy forever" (to some)
but not in the constipated
bowels of a museum.

Empty vessels, mobile phones.

The more that people talk
the less they have to say.

The Midas Phenomenon.

        In America
    everything is gold,
everything is worthless.

Poor Old Joe.

I hear the choir
of angels singing...

No,

I hear their angel voices calling*...

Oh, no

it's just my tinnitus
both serendipitous and duplicitous.

Ol' Black Joe, retitled Poor Old Joe is one of (white sentimentalist) Stephen Foster's very popular, badly-written, and nauseating songs about black people. This one is probably the worst because it is a pseudo-Spiritual. They all, however, have great tunes, and include Way down upon the Suwanee River (Southern Georgia) and Old Folks at Home ..... I seem to remember also from my childhood Camptown Races, Old Dog Tray (which I wept over), My Old Kentucky Home...  

Paul Robeson sang it rather creepily. 

Listen here to a rendering from the 1920s. 

One of Mr Foster's black servants was called Joe.

*I was sure that my childhood version in the Stephen Foster Songbook had in the chorus:
"I hear their angel voices calling"

but most sung versions have "I hear their gentle voices calling" because, of course, there can't be black angels!

The most famous angelic tinnitus was that of an Alsatian teenager who became known as Joan of Arc.

The devilish genius of Christianity is the promise,
at the very least, the hope of a gorgeous afterlife

(Jesus Saves)

which helps greatly to keep people 
'in their place', especially as slaves.

I would not have imagined

back when I was amongst
the 'pioneers' of investigation
into Irish sweathouses,
that forty years later
I would still be contacted
by people interested in them.

All gone.

Norwegian gannetry 1970
- and last year.

The 'World Happiness Report'

seems (to me) a pretty dodgy fake statistic.
No French person would freely admit to being happy.
That's just the contrary and suspicious French attitude.

Our culture wants to measure/quantify everything.
Perhaps another way of vaguely measuring 'happiness'
(which is a fluid abstract in the same class as 'wisdom')
would be to poll people on their feelings of gratitude.

Or maybe not.

 

Roman Values.

Why can't two men
love each other and a woman ?
two women love each other
and a man ? or two men ?

'Love' that is restrictive and restricting
is not affection but desire for ownership.

Restrictive love is meanly Abrahamic.
Open love is generous,
welcoming, shamanic.

Rocket in the Room.

not by Oksana Maksymchuk

what the rocket has in common
with the room full people with
Down's Syndrome
is its current location

somebody thought the rocket
belonged to the room with the handicapped
and now it’s here

in time
someone else will come
and collect the pieces

of the rocket and of the handicapped
weeping and shouting insults
at the sky

but for now
this rocket and these retards
are an unsorted matter

a puzzle
awaiting a solution

• 

for 'Universal Human Values'

read
Totalitarian thinking/morality.

'Western Values'
are two in number:
Conquest (of the 'self', 'problems', the 'world')
and Hypocrisy

for which Merriam-Webster's Rhyming Dictionary
offers no rhyme,
nor for Theocracy.

SHAME

Into Europe came the religions
which made their solipsistic gods unearthly

Out of greedy Europe came the persecuted refugees

The unforgiving everlasting light of Hollywood
chosen by diasporic Jews
and the false god of profit
captured the new-born art of cinema
(and all art, all authenticity, all immanence)

and Hollywood hijacked the world
turned the planet into scenery
behind which wars raged
its inhabitants to extras
and wonder into artificial intelligence

Shame, Shema Yisrael ! שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל

AND SO IT WILL
by a strange providence
COME TO PASS
in a manner of speaking
THAT

Every place your feet will tread will be yours: 

The Desert and the Lebanon,
the Euphrates River [Iraq]
and the Western Sea [Morocco],
will form your boundaries.

and way beyond, even to the Moon.

כָּל־הַמָּק֗וֹם אֲשֶׁ֨ר תִּדְרֹ֧ךְ כַּף־רַגְלְכֶ֛ם בּ֖וֹ לָכֶ֣ם יִֽהְיֶ֑ה מִן־הַמִּדְבָּ֨ר וְהַלְּבָנ֜וֹן מִן־הַנָּהָ֣ר נְהַר־פְּרָ֗ת וְעַד֙ הַיָּ֣ם הָאַֽחֲר֔וֹן יִֽהְיֶ֖ה גְּבֻֽלְכֶֽם:

No man will stand up before you; the Lord your God will cast the fear of you and the dread of you on all the land you tread on, as He [already] said to you.

לֹֽא־יִתְיַצֵּ֥ב אִ֖ישׁ בִּפְנֵיכֶ֑ם פַּחְדְּכֶ֨ם וּמוֹרַֽאֲכֶ֜ם יִתֵּ֣ן | יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֗ם עַל־פְּנֵ֤י כָל־הָאָ֨רֶץ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תִּדְרְכוּ־בָ֔הּ כַּֽאֲשֶׁ֖ר דִּבֶּ֥ר לָכֶֽם:

DEUTERONOMY, CHAPTER 11

90% of men,

and over 95% of women
suffer from O.N.D.
(Obsessive Normality Disorder)
a recent study* shows.

*by yours truly

My Anti-gangsta Rap.

From the least abrasive
of North America's soft-power
broadcasters*  I learned that rap
is the (inevitably) sad and sleazy revenge
of the children of children of children
of slaves, whose transport and labour
was the bone-crushed, bloody, flesh-soft, very
foundation of capitalism.

Rap 'artists' were financed by 'drug-money'
and profits from transport of immigrant
labour to the USA
from central and southern America,
and is now a multi-billion dollar industry
supporting the system which has enslaved
and devastated the whole world
as it did the African continent.

*The BBC World Service, too self-promoting for me.

That's Life - Celebrated Failed Experiment of Earth.

The world is not, as MacNeice declared,
'incorrigibly plural' 

but the unimaginably complicated
single tortured victim
of irredeemably Totalitarian Man.

Billions of components
Trillions of connections in the head of every one
of 8 billion specimens of astonishingly
cunning stupidity...cupidity.

Now, Neo-Proustian Collective Intelligence
(Euro-American Inform)
combined with Climate Breakdown/
Restructuring/Interference

pushes little planet into Perfect Storm.