Dingo the Dissident

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

Wednesday 30 September 2020

Beyond reason,

humanity thinks itself better served
by sending vehicles to Mars
than anti-malarial vaccines to Africa.

Peacock Mantis Shrimp, planet Earth.

















It was well over a million years ago that the Martians,
having exhausted their planet's atmosphere,
took off for a more comfortable location.

Tuesday 29 September 2020

‘The human brain secretes thought

 like the liver secretes bile.’ 

-  Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis (1757-1808)



Simple-minded Walt

wrote: The earth never tires.
But it's exhausted by us
the billions of vampires
who suck it dry in concerted assault.

Monday 28 September 2020

Jumblyism.


Existence is the sieve

in which all life rides
upon the sea of non-existence.

Sunday 27 September 2020

Dear Willy,

I guess that you have long since realised
that your best friend is my hand.
Once upon a time there was a certain human entity
who made you feel wonderful,
but alas! was highly unappealing to the rest of me.

Saturday 26 September 2020

I think that it is time


for Misanthropes to come out of the closet.  

We are more numerous than the sexual deviants or dissidents
and also include some sexual anomalies  - such as myself. 
I think also that some “Anarchists” are misanthropes
who are attempting to deny their deepest feelings.

The problem is:
Donald Trump is quite obviously a misanthrope.

Friday 25 September 2020

Like most people (!)

I think that abusive pornography
- especially kiddie-porn -
is more obscene than ostentatious wealth.
But it is worth pointing out that
we are constantly programmed
(even before school)
to adsmire* the rich for being cool,
and capable, and so we rarely investigate the seediness
and obscenity of affluence.

*my portmanteau word: admire + aspire.

Thursday 24 September 2020

Hustler Banana Slicer: no home should be without one.

 Sorry, that should read Hutzler.








Read the reviews  >


With a few exceptions,

I have found travel books tedious.
The few good ones tend to be by people with an anthropological sensibility,
or actual anthropologists such as Colin Turnbull and Nigel Barley.
Often they are just a chronological list
of White Mens' experiences in exotic places.
But in one such book (by William Dalrymple)
I came across this wonderful paragraph:

Good looks have been shared out unevenly among the Turks. 
Their men are almost all handsome, with dark, supple skin and strong features:
good bones, sharp eyes and tall masculine bodies. 
But the women share their menfolk’s pronounced features in a most unflattering way. 
Very few are beautiful. Their noses are too large, their chins too prominent.
Baggy wraps conceal pneumatic bodies.
Here must lie the reason for the Turks’ easy drift out of heterosexuality.


Tuesday 22 September 2020

Monday 21 September 2020

Sunday 20 September 2020

Leucocracy.

Although it seems that the Greeks and the Romans
were not obsessed by skin-colour,
the Chinese and Indians were - and are.
Skin-lightening products are big business in India
whose rulers have for long been pale.
White has forever been associated with clean
and pure; stains are dark. Stains on character,
stains on souls, stains on underwear, stains on walls...
Christianity glorifies white and light and illumination.
Hell and the Devil are black, as were Moors, Muslims,
Blackamoors blind to Salvation in outer and utter darkness,
while doubters and atheists suffer the soul's Long Dark Night.
Aztecs awaited pale saviours who came and destroyed them.
White even starts with advantage in chess.
Depressingly, it always claims to be right.

Saturday 19 September 2020

An Introduction to the Rigidity of the French Mind.

"You cannot serve raw with cooked."
(Very Claude Lévy-Strauss!)
Only a foreigner like me in France would eat salad
together with something hot.
It is a gustatory crime
which I commit all the time.


Friday 18 September 2020

Jesus, in paintings,

never looks cheerful, always looks thin,
a bit gaunt, sometimes emaciated, his skin
colour that of the painter's countrymen*.

But his mother is quite a different
kettle of fish - almost always simpering
teenage soft porn.  So I was pleased
that a Valencian furniture-restorer
gave some earthiness to a copy
of a painting by Murillo (a painter of the Sentimental
School of art) which he volunteered to restore
(for a fee).




On the left you can see
the original (copy of the) cute little
porn-Queen of Heaven,
and on the right, the two more-convincing
(if badly-painted) imaginings of the restorer.

Why would Jesus' mother have conformed
to some European male fantasy ?  Why would
she not have been 'ugly', scrawny from hunger,
perhaps even bruised by
her fraught relationship with her husband ?

more here >

*Being bearded and skeletal, though not circumcised,
 I was once proclaimed Saviour
as I gave suck to a sweet and impassioned
(perhaps over-wrought, too-religious)
young man in a corner of Venice at night.

Thursday 17 September 2020

The Insistence of Memory.

Time is ripe and short,
an illusion, a curve,
a line, a dimension,
a wheel within wheels
an invisible beast.

Zero, like time, is not nothing,
is the world without us,
unfeeling, unseeing,
without numbers or data,
without urgency, timeless
for the time being.

Wednesday 16 September 2020

My best friend

is silence
who lolls voluptuously
beyond the grave, behind the veil
of time and hope, beyond the pale.

Tuesday 15 September 2020

Sparisoma cretense says hello.



And by the way, everything that is not human matters more.

"Great White Hunters"

loved to kill the finest specimens
of Big Beautiful Animals,
thus weakening the species.
Because of their particular æsthetic
they tended not to include hippos
in their collections of trophies.

Monday 14 September 2020

Just say NO.

Human credulity
is matched only by the
human capacity for distrust.
"Our Common Humanity" ?
No, thanks.

Sunday 13 September 2020

The tee-shirt.

(reblogged from somewhere)

Imagine that you are part of a tiny minority

engulfed by a criminal majority whom you have defined
not according to 'race', 'ethnicity' or colour or accent
but because of your belief that the eating of meat
has become a crime against nature -,
especially the raising of animals and birds in horrible conditions
solely to end up in abattoirs,
sometimes ground into sludge to feed other animals.

The more unconventional and downright dissident you are
the more tolerant of the majority you have to be.
In my case, not just the thoughtless breeders and meat/fish eaters,
but also the police, people in any kind of uniform,
beer-swilling sports enthusiasts,
tv-watchers, Facebook-slaves, mindless 'holiday-makers'
(trippers who trudge through mediæval villages gazing at their screens),
dog-dislikers, plant-destroyers, water-wasters...almost everyone
outside my moral twilight zone.

Thus I (who could almost be an anti-natalist kind of Jain)
feel sad, impotent and ashamed when I wake up each day.
But I cheer up as I realise how splendidly tolerant I am (if inclined to whine
about these matters in this blog)
as my snot-green age surpasses seventy-nine.




Saturday 12 September 2020

It goes without saying

that - introduced and spread
by the travelling and ski-ing rich -
The Virus most affects the destitute and poor.
But to what extent it is spread by cash itself
will we ever know - or care ?

There is only one word for 'time'

in most languages. But Japanese
has several.  We can't be freer than thought -
and thoughts depend upon words.

Friday 11 September 2020

Oh! it's sad and it's sad...

...and it's sad...to be (like me) an intellectual
without much intellect. Such people
(Hitler, Qaddafi, Mao, Pol-Pot, Assad)
can easily go mad -
unlike real intellectuals such as Nietzsche
who contracted syphilis instead.

Thursday 10 September 2020

The sad thing about Google

is not Google's fault
but the stupidity of millions
who - even if they choose it
to verify or find something out -
only half-know how to use it.

Wednesday 9 September 2020

Bossy, vulgar - and thus comforting.

"I can't stand religion," Meg said. "It's so bossy, 
so pointless, so vulgar." - Elizabeth Buchan, The Good Wife.

"And grief should stop while it is still genuine."

Tuesday 8 September 2020

When a tiny number

of the astounding ancient Greeks
began to consider The Good Life
and how it should be lived,
they (all, except Diogenes, of course)
were not thinking of slaves or women,
Persians, Italians, Jews or Phoenicians,
but of the privileged young men of Athens
or Corinth, Mycenæ or Rhodes.

Epicurus wrote a splendid recipe
for living 'appropriately',
without excess, kindly - but he was not
considering the lives of women,
slaves, dogs, donkeys, captured enemies,
peasants or unwanted children.
                             
Few human beings
experience life as a pleasure - far less a gift,
and for most, living is not even an option
but a duty to others. It is only when living stops being
dutiful that it becomes an option - for the privileged -
to be crafted, ignored, explored or renounced.

'Intensive Care'

- a contradiction in terms,
otherwise known as an oxymoron.

Monday 7 September 2020

This is the age of the portmanteau word,

one of the most ubiquitous being internet - which includes spam
(originally spiced ham in cans, a cheap-meat standby) - and which
would not have come into being without the transistor (transfer+resistor).
    Lewis Carroll invented several, but only chortle (snort+chuckle)
and possibly slithy (slimy+lithe) has entered common speech.
As with Lear and his limericks, Carroll's inventions were poor,
but since his time more-felicitous, less-manufactured portmanteau-words
have entered the language, among them: mizzle (mist+drizzle), smog (smoke+fog)
ruckus (ruction+rumpus), seascape (sea+landscape), soundscape,
sitcom (situation-comedy) and newscast.
    More recently: horrible Brexit (succeeding Grexit)
at which many word-sensitive souls like myself futilely grumble,
chugger (charity-collector + mugger), churgle (chuckle+gurgle),
brunch, and my favourites: flump (jump+flop),  thrumble (thrum+rumble)
and cremains (cremated remains of a mammal, usually human).
    I have of course invented my own: the delicious plumble (plum+crumble)
and, from snore/snort+gargle, to snore throatily rather than nasally - to snorgle.

    Note that the best of the portmanteau words end in -le.
I think that to toddle may well be a portmanteau of totter and dawdle or waddle...

    Portmanteau is not a portmanteau word, because no other words have been truncated.  It is an early example of franglais, coming from the hyphenated porte-manteau (=cloak-carrier).

Meanwhile, at the moment,
in the francosphere there is a sort of chronic diarrhœa (diarrhée) of franglais, or franglarrhée
which could fill a fair-sized booklet...hmmm...]

Sunday 6 September 2020

Monstrum.

A monster is not hideous -
but on the contrary
a horribly attractive
display - like the movies,
entertainments,
events, demonstrations
and gew-gaws
that shape and haunt
our awestruck, degenerate culture.

Saturday 5 September 2020

I dislike anniversarism

- but, on this warm September day, 150 years ago,



Léon Gambetta, Interior Minister of the new, third, French Republic,
fled Paris (which was surrounded by German troops) for Tours,
to try and re-group the defeated Imperial army of Napoleon III.

Man's Tortured Friend.


A good time to die

is when one can no longer
step (while standing) into or out of one's
underpants, panties, long-johns, pyjamas,
shalwar, trousers, shorts, skirt, lederhosen or socks.
That is to say: before one becomes vulnerable
to Corona-virus attacks.

Friday 4 September 2020

Thursday 3 September 2020

Tourists.

Most of us have been tourists at some time.
My neighbour's father
called them 'tout-tristes' or 'tous tristes' -
Sad People.  There are still a few about,
gazing into smartphones, or at nothing in particular,
devoting their attention to marshalling the kids,
or walking briskly to get the visit done and over.

Love the Logic !

"I really don't like the culture of consumption,"
says my widowed neighbour as she opens the door
of her huge stainless-steel
double-coffin-sized fridge.
"I got rid of my grandmother's jewels."

The least we should do,
in our world-weary,
world-devastating luxury,
is be perfect.

Tuesday 1 September 2020

Masks (and arabesques).

I took my mask off in the almost unpopulated gloam
of the cinema while I watched a feminist Saudi Arabian film.
Of course I hadn't realised until mask-wearing
became obligatory how horrible it must be
to have to wear the niqāb outside (sometimes even inside) the home.

After ten minutes in a shop behind a mask
I start to panic, hyperventilate, my glasses steam up,
I drop things, I can't see or hear how much I owe,
I offer too much or too little money,
I leave my purchases behind, I stumble through the door...

I can no longer help my scrambled hearing
by lip-reading, and if I put in my mini-hearing-aid
it can easily fall out when I rip off my mask.
It's worse even than the seat-belt in a car
which I cannot bear and for the not-wearing of which
I have paid obligatory fines. I know this is bizarre*.

But I have the choice.  And life is much worse
for the disabled and elsewhere.
I should pull myself together.
My problem with the anti-virus mask
is solved  by not going out to public places
which, anti-social in my incipient senility,
is my inclination, anyway.
In any case I panic long before I smother.
But if I had been born a woman in Arabia I'd have soon died
in one unpleasant fashion or another.

*And goes back to my anxious schooldays 
(at Cabin Hill Preparatory School, Belfast)
where I was occasionally sat upon, tied up, 
gagged, half-choked and spat upon 
by Happy, Wholesome Rugby-players -
some of who later Played for Ireland 
in what is now their glorious past.

Jesus' last post

on Facebook:
Survivors are the Biggest Losers.