Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Thursday, 13 February 2025

Museums

belong in museums...
where they soon will
scorch and flood and crumble
in the sad museum of the Earth.


A painting, a sculpture and a photograph.


'Paule Vézelay': Landscape 1946.



















? by Rimantas Izdelis

Jerzy Durczak: Autumn in a Polish Forest

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Russian Dolls.

To live
in the moment
you have to live
in a bubble
in a bubble
in a bubble...


The current PotUS

is so beyond-words
bizarre that I would not be surprised to learn
that there is a thriving market for his
preserved and authenticated turds.


Tuesday, 11 February 2025

He wanted to show my pictures

in his unreliable gallery. But
for even a small space
they are not 'appropriate'.
They are too intimate.

Prophetic self-portrait, 1988.









Many paintings look uncomfortable
in galleries, especially Van Goghs
in Amsterdam, permanently tortured
in a vicious concrete box.

But alas, poor prisoners!
there's nowhere else to place them.


Dear God, we

give thanks to Thee
for the invention of L.E.D.
because we
in our advancing senility
have an unfortunate tendency
to leave lights on
from dusk to dawn
and even longer.


Monday, 10 February 2025

The Unruly Mind.

Last night, lying in bed
listening to ABC Classic's
thrown-together
early morning programme,
I calculated
(using my fingers and my
ever-pullulating head
and my bedside clock,
plus the not-too-competent
continuity-announcements)

that Adelaide
(for a while, at least)*
is 10½ hours ahead

Then switched to
the occasionally-excellent
Medi-1 (ميدى1 طرب) 
DAB radio Tarab instead.


*depending on unsynchronised time-tinkerings
in different hemispheres according to season.


For millions

in The Christian World, now, near The End,
alcohol* is a friend, not an enemy;
and The Government is an enemy,
not a friend.

*or similar easily-obtained mind-comforter


Sunday, 9 February 2025

Confession of a child

of a 'Welfare State'.

"It's not so much that I
'would like to die'
as that I feel that I
am lacking liveliness
& would like to slip
forever and conveniently,
easefully into soft emptiness. 



Saturday, 8 February 2025

Thursday, 6 February 2025

"Reality is a trance.

Your reality is a trance of your own making.
Or someone else’s making who doesn’t have
your greatest good in mind.”

This wise observation was made by one of the many bogus gurus
from India who have abused minds and bodies in Europe and North America since the 1950s - and, along their way, inevitably have said many wise things.

On the same theme,
even the nastiest dictators can spout wisdom:

"It causes me some anxiety that the world is controlled by childish North Americans."  

Generalísimo Francisco Franco


Jerusalem, 1942.

 "It looks like there will be trouble here ere long
because of the 'illegal immigrants' who keep arriving
from Europe, scuppering their boats
and wading ashore."

~ from To War with Whitaker, the diaries of
Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly.


Wednesday, 5 February 2025

The way of things.

Although the first snowdrop
     (which flowered on my near-future
      grave 10 days ago)

like the last rose of summer
     (which dropped its petals in January)
is celebrated in words and music,
the last snowdrop languishes
amongst the crocuses and daffodils.


Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Sri Lankans don't

'see their civil war or their tsunami as traumatic –
in fact, when an army of coubsellors descended upon the nation 
after the tsunami of 2004, the University of Colombo pleaded with them to cease seeing suffering as traumatisation, because it was undermining people's resilience.
Sri Lanka happens to top the charts for 'well-being' in the Mental State of the World in 2023 report, despite such denial of the Gospel of Trauma.

'Individuals experience the world according to how they are taught to experience the world.'

~ Niklas Serning


In a hyper-individualistic culture there is a tendency to experience the world through resentment.

Monday, 3 February 2025

The only irrational animal

uses its intelligence mainly
to create hierarchies
in order to conquer and control
its surroundings, 

and now to create
and control more powerful
and competitive intelligences
which it will inevitably,

at last powerlessly, hate.

*












'A man walks on the Kolyma highway, nicknamed “the road of bones”. It was built in the 1930s by political prisoners held in the gulags, and links the port town of Magadan to the town of Nizhny Bestiakh.
The construction, which lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953, claimed between 250,000 and 1 million lives.
They are buried next to or directly under the 1,219-mile (1,961 km) road, part of which is still not finished as it is an extremely difficult project despite modern equipment.'

Well, well -

isn't that just great ?









Sounds to me a bit like
fiddling while Rome burns.


Sunday, 2 February 2025

Poets

are people whom posh people
choose to make them
feel acceptably exceptional.

The Museum of Empathy

One of these photos
disgusts me and makes my flesh creep.
Both were published on the same day
in the same article
in the same newspaper.

Adam Pearson.
















Kim Kardashian


Crunch Time.

This insane clock
(here photographed on my 1960 tiled floor)
was free-on-the-street
in Caylus yesterday.
I couldn't resist it.
Note the squiggly second hand.



Saturday, 1 February 2025

Friday, 31 January 2025

Stigmata –

Jesus probably had no more than four
(maybe only two)
(plus a nasty spear-wound)

while women in their millions
from Alaska to China
since the beginning of time
have suffered the pains and the stigma
of the bleeding vagina.

No more-appropriate picture available 
from Google.



Texas, 1987

by Wim Wenders

 

Thursday, 30 January 2025

The Hookworms of Hope.

We are the only earthly animal
which can 'take the long view'
with our lazy brains and simple eyes.

[and also, or consequently]

we are the only earthly animal
to direct itself towards its own demise.


Shock and Awe.


Diogenes (reputedly and probably) did,
but he eschewed all property,
and would have considered 'selfies'
(and cameras) obscenely vulgar.




Wednesday, 29 January 2025

In 1788,

in Paris, under cover of night,
there began a huge operation
to remove millions of buried bodies,
dug up and loaded on to ox carts
that rumbled across the city,
each accompanied by a priest
to what were then the suburbs,
to what are now The Catacombs.










Might this have contributed to the quasi-Revolution a year later ?

Little café, big ice stupa

storing water for the dry months,
Gya, Ladakh.



Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Some human brains











have survived longer than Stonehenge.
the Pyramids, etc., that is to say,
no longer than the twinkling
of a crocodile eye.

Quote of the Day :

 "I'm not a macho film-maker."

- Mike Leigh

And so he is one of the best...ever,
along with Kiarostami, Bergman,
Tarkovsky, Fassbinder...


Monday, 27 January 2025

Not only Europe.

"Europe has chosen false prophets at every opportunity."  

Jens Bjørneboe


Today, I stumbled

(indeed I fell)
upon another hero:
a pub-haunting
grungy 'common labourer'
who painted in his sitting-room
and never sought to sell.



















Only his immediate family knew.
So, after he died and his house
was open to visitors, there was a queue.









This is his jacket...

















This is his bedroom...










.

..and these are some of his paintings :























I admire his modesty 
at least as much as
his ability, his sheer
and sympathetic honesty.

He was once a boxer.


Read more in the Manchester Evening News
and the Guardian.



It's Chinese New Year.

Everyone has yet another face.
Everybody has a phone.
Not everybody has a place.



Holocaust Day, 2025

As Kings and other heads of state
gather to remember the liberation
of Auschwitz 80 years ago,









'

Internally displaced'  Palestinians
stream along Al Rashid road in central Gaza
towards their bombed-out houses
in the ruined north.












Meanwhile across the Atlantic...>


Sunday, 26 January 2025

End of small, peculiar episode.

If environmental collapse doesn't destroy us
algorithms will,
'to punish our arrogance' super-Biblically.
Maybe Sisyphus and his as yet
unnamed bomb get up the hill
and explode in super-volcanic effulgence.
Maybe, from Pandora's box
Prometheus pulls out
not Hope, not frankincense, 
but Artificial Intelligence.

17-10-2024


Saturday, 25 January 2025

The good art

of making friends.
The bad art
of making bad friends.
The poor art
of making 'useful' friends.
The sad art
of losing friends constantly.

I never had imaginary friends,
for I had books and a teddy
and no imagination.

Old friends are like old
or fading enthusiasms.
Most of my few friends
are dead - some twenty years ago.

Of friendship
I always had too-high an expectation.


And now to the Vomitorium.

The popularity of Carl Bloch's
'masterpiece',
Prometheus Unbound
would make you
more than weep.



Friday, 24 January 2025

People are fascinating –

more for their pathologies
than for their lamentably
few interesting interests.

Unfortunately, you need
to know them for a long time,
or too intimately, to discover
their fascinating pathologies.


Branding.

All dreams
are henceforth
American.


Thursday, 23 January 2025

Jesus said

Leave your job, your restricting family,
get up (if necessary from your bed)
and follow me.  A long time later
Paul came, turned Jesus on his head
(he of the thorny crown)
and invented Christianity.

Allegedly,
Peter was crucified upside down.


Wednesday, 22 January 2025

Jottings of the Day.

If you have pretensions,
ambitions to be phatic,
you need to be more than
slightly charismatic

*

Deft I never was
in anything.
Deaf I am
becoming.

*

Inner-auditory
involuntary
creativity:
when you have earworms
all the time
occasionally they
get confused.
(Apologies, no rhyme.)

*

Money
demeans us
and makes us
(even if we weren't already)
mean.

*

If novels and newspapers
are not total rot,
the richer you are
the more nervy you get.

*

To call a Spade a Spade
has less to do with horticulture
than with skin-colour;
and Clubs are often
bruisingly exclusive.
(It was only today that I learned
the composition of a Club Sandwich.)

*

With only a little weed, a sneeze
becomes an orgasm in the nose.

*

We didn't need 'science' to tell us
that we are an environmental curse;
on the contrary, science ensured
that our damage gets worse and worse.

*

Did I hear correctly ?  'They' of the Israeli nation
were vaccinating Palestinians against polio
so that they can better endure
stinking-camp starvation.

*

The problem, Senator Yeats
(Ireland's supremely-phatic scrawler),
is that the Gyres don't widen;
but get smaller.



Tuesday, 21 January 2025

Probably because young males

have been fed better, and with more meat,


and women may well like that.

Parent, Peer, Pædophile...

To feel shame
you have to be made
to feel ashamed.

Or are we all born
with the shame that Jehovah
put into Adam
who passed it on to Eve 
– or is that merely
guilt ?


I have started painting again.

This is the second of a series
of calligraphic paintings.

Solitude, January 2025.


Monday, 20 January 2025

Too many thoughts.

Pensive, inexpensive, I write down 

two or three ideas every day.  

A few weeks later

I throw most of them away.

I am not a good communicator.


Sunday, 19 January 2025

The constriction of Luxury.

How limiting to have been born
into a family and a home with
running water, indoor water-closet,
bath or shower, electric light and power,
the telephone...the internet and to
take them all for granted,
not to know frugality !  Since 1965
I have acquired all these things,
and now wonder at the cost
to the environment.

 

Saturday, 18 January 2025

Be careful what you read

in Medical Journals and the 'Yellow Press'.

In 1914, The Lancet and various popular newspapers in the UK republished an article by the doctor Edward Huntington Williams on cocaine in the southern United States. Williams claimed that any Black man who took up the Cocaine Habit was ‘absolutely beyond redemption. His whole nature is changed by the habit. Sexual desires are increased and perverted; peaceful men become quarrelsome and timid ones courageous.’

Sidney Felstead, author of The Underworld of London (1923), claimed to be similarly appalled by how often ‘some pleasure-sated girl dies from an overdose of cocaine or morphia, supplied to her by some black or yellow parasite.’

And so it continued...and, presumably, continues.


Friday, 17 January 2025

Linguistic coincidences

are legion, some felicitous,
some unfortunate, many 
misleading or confusing.
Famously, Gift is German for poison.
More to the point, Fear in English
spells in Irish (a different
pronunciation of) man.