I have recently sold a portrait
of a German guy who visited me,
with his partner, in 1985.
He had Parkinson's Disease
and had a serious mobility problem.
Around him is a quotation from Rilke
which is perfectly comprehensible
but almost untranslatable:
Nur im Raum der Klage darf die Rühmung gehn.
Praise/glorification can only come/arise/emerge
from within lamentation/sorrow/mourning/grieving/grief...
I wonder
if the rise of inane and infantile music
as serious culture
led to the rise of divisive populism
as serious politics...
under capitalism
we all live with the obligation
to celebrate its rottenness
and collaborate with corruption.
'As football fever takes hold,
one young fan is more interested in the cuddles
than the goals.'
In the same issue: nelson-mandela-gave-great-hugs
to declare that Life on Earth
is a Huge Mistake.
But we are doing our best
to erase it.
The very existence of so many languages
suggests that speech was designed to divide
rather than to unite.
'The great thing about a walled town:
no matter how lost you get,
you eventually come to a wall.'
– Tim Dowling
...the world is indeed run by cabals, conspirators,
autocrats and criminals.
You just have to identify the true conspiracies
– such as conspiracies to disseminate
conspiracy theories
is an obtuse way of saying
that we are intrinsically evil.
We are made even worse
by the wicked fiction
of redemption.
'The only good human being is a dead one.'
nose-picking in public
is less acceptable than
sodomy in private.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001df5x
I still find him unreadable
in either French or English.
He showed, at mind-numbing length
how odious are they who live in luxury.
He was pretty odious himself.
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| The Dead Proust, by Man Ray. |
(including colonels and counts)
who fled to Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution
drove taxis, just as Putin had to do to keep alive
seventy years later
when the Turbo-capitalist invasion
hung his country out to dry.
(The fabulously rich Russians were already there.)
is a good place to be.
I never lock my house,
nor my car, which I park
on a very quiet street
100 metres from my house
along with a trailer
currently half-full of firewood.
Yesterday I left 60 euros
on the front passenger seat
where I discovered them this afternoon.
Ericky Boniphace’s photographic project –
Even The Dead Can’t Escape Climate Change
– followed labourers disinterring the remains of those buried
in a cemetery near Dar-Es-Salaam’s Msimbazi River.
For several years in a row
rising water levels have eroded the land the cemetery sits on
and swept graves away.
CT215, a French street-artist,
is Doing His Bit for Democracy
with stencils.
"The Western News Media" are not mentioning
the inevitable (if small) Ukrainian atrocities...
that language
creates more conflict
than co-operation.
Evolution is not the same
as progress.
The Almost-Universal Brainwash:
that we should Like Other Sheople
(except those whom we are taught
to dislike or to hate).
One of the Etruscan bronzes
preserved in the mud of the hot baths
at San Casciano dei Bagni,
between Viterbo and Montalcino.
for the planet, at least
it is possible to say so.
But numbers cannot ever indicate
the catastrophe of numbers.
Independent Member of Parliament
and UNICEF Special Representative
for Humanitarian Emergencies,
wrote of the United States:
Of all the 90 countries that I worked in
[as foreign correspondent for the BBC]
it seemed to me. with the possible exception
of Equatorial Guinea, to be the most alien.
– Martin Bell, Through Gates of Fire, 2003, p.149.
thing the penis was! Half of them didn't even
work properly, and all of them looked pathetic
and detachable, like some wrinkled sea-creature
– like something you'd find goggling at you
and swaying in an aquarium."
– Paul Theroux: Doctor Slaughter, 1984.
A man in Kyiv
shows how, in the event of no electricity or gas,
he would erect a tent in his flat
and pass the nights in a sleeping-bag inside it.
Breathing inside a small tent, he said,
will keep me warm.
gullies formed by rainwater erosion.
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| Li Ping/TNC Photo Contest 2022 |
Anthropologists don't talk about sins,
but they do make value-judgements
which are largely Abrahamic
(or should I say Abrahamist ?).
If I were to consider flaws as sins
I'd say that the first sin was
to regard sex as other than fun;
and the second was
to view animals as other.
As for the third
and maybe subsequent sins
I'll need to ponder further.
are, surely, the tiny, harmless
naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber)
and the paler forms of naked human ape
(Homo sapiens amens var. pallidus).
Only the very corrupt
(and politicians)
can even imagine the corruption
of the very rich.
'Until women's constitutional right to abortion in the USA was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2922, no one gave much thought to Safe Haven laws.
These allow a mother to give up her new-born baby for adoption, at a designated site, anonymously and without risk of prosecution. 'Safe Haven' legislation first appeared in the US in 1999 in Texas, in response to a rise in the number of abandoned babies. Now it exists in every state. These laws were never intended as an alternative to abortion. But as the options for unhappily-pregnant women diminish, some are anticipating an increase in the number of babies left by desperate mothers in hospitals and specially designed Baby Boxes at local fire stations.'
(report from The BBC)
In earlier times, such drop-boxes, baby-hatches or niches were organised informally (if not always anonymously) by the Catholic Church. Here is one (no longer used) in my village of Caylus in SW France.
Permacrisis.
It should have been
the first word ever,
maybe even
the First Word of God.
