Most Heroes

are 'Poster Heroes'
and all are heavily unbalanced,
even more flawed than ordinary folk.

« Religious ecstasy

made people callous
(so did causes)... » 

- Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway.

'Loneliest Continent' ?

Not Antarctica.

Epidemic of social isolation hits Africa.

Anti-sticker Sticker.

Geopolitics.

Trading and Financial sanctions rarely work.

They make regimes more resilient.

South Africa did not collapse because of sanctions
but, as with the USSR, the system became
politically, morally and socially unsustainable.

The only thing that will stop Putin's war
of destruction, war-crimes and terror
in Ukraine will be a geo-political or hubristic error.

Unbelievably revered,

(mainly in Catholic France)
the spongy spiritualism of Simone Weil
includes:

"The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter."

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

"There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction."

"Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity."

and reams of similar tosh, possibly as bad as my own,
which almost makes me Groucho-glad that I'm not revered.

HOWEVER, she did write some excellent epigrams, such as:

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God
the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

 – Christians do it religiously.

* * *

A less sententious philosopher >

She was one of the most odious types of poster-hero :
a preacher, a career-martyr and a
dishonest suicide who was not even a cat-lover
- let alone a resister (even by stealth)
against the Catholic patriarchy of Pius XII.

I get the impression that she would rather have died in Auschwitz, had she known of its existence.

Just as Facebook is not the web,

and as the web is not the internet,
so intimacy is not love.

 

Penultimately,

the only justification of power
is power.

Grasshopper

hitch-hopping.

'Artificial Intelligence'

White men's
Dreaming.

Interesting account...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle

 “Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms,” he said.
“If it’s a marriage, it’s not gay.”

also:

Note: I have been 'sexually inactive' since I was 80 !
Quite a relief ! - as musician and bon-vivant George Melly
remarked when he reached the same blessed state.

Arbor vitæ

My latest painting
with its title in Farsi.

Tree of Life

My 'studio'

Keeping our heads down.

I used to assume
that the reason why old people walked
with heads bent down was their arthritic
necks or shoulders.  Now I know that
at least some, like me, keep their heads down
to help them not to faint on the sidewalk or the street.

 

Susophily.

I love pigs.
So, when I read a Guardian recommendation
for an Aussie series on youTube
called Cooking for Seamus
(a very happy and highly-socialised bull),
and found this amazing hippy, happy video
of his almost-friend, an arthritic boar
called Danny Boy, I became a happy hippy
for eleven minutes - without grass or E
or psilocybe tea.

NB
There is a Pig-lovers group on Facebook.

What is he going to do with (or to) them ?

 

Meanwhile, in America,

I feel (even) older already.

 

'The Establishment'

is whoever calls the shots –
political or internet despots.

Brut

can be the best champagne
or almost-unacceptable art –

at any rate, remains apart.

Keeping Kool in Korea, and a Doorway in Sudan.

 (from 'The Guardian')

Couldn't get the people to move.

My nineteen-sixties.

I never turned on,
never tuned in,
because I was already
a drop-out who
listened to Sibelius. 

Death

(sui-cyanide)
The Deputy-Burgomeister's daughter (and parents) Leipzig 1945.

photo by the great Lee Miller

JAWS

 

Democracy

photo by Dean Lewins

"The stifling intrusiveness of Liberal Democracy
should not surprise us." – Ryszard Legutko,

The Demon in Democracy : Totalitarian Temptations

in Free Societies, New York & London 2006

"I have found from many observations
that liberals are incapable of allowing people
to have their own convictions, and immediately
answer their opponents with abuse or something worse."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot.

Netanyahu's Blasphemy

On the same day that Ghislaine Maxwell
declared that the unstable president Trump
"always behaved like a Perfect Gentleman",

Israel's mad prime minister denounced
the UN's and other agencies' reports
of true famine and genocide in Gaza
as a New Blood Libel.

(With allies like these, Europe has,
Dear Mr Putin, no need of enemies.)

Books banned in many American schools

include Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five,
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale & Oryx and Crake

Picoult's Nineteen Minutes
Khaled's The Kite Runner (made into a good film)
Morrison's The Bluest Eye & Beloved...

(I have read all these books
and found them superb.)

Jodi Picoult has said that her book was banned
(in a state awash with pornography) because
the word erection was printed on one page.
What a Spirit of the Age !

Common Sense

 
it seems to me pretty likely that it is due to
the Alimentary Industrial Complex, aka
Food Manufacturers replacing real ingredients
with plastic-packaged microwavable concoctions.

The limits, like the habits, are in your head.

 Not really practical.

Oh dear, I'll have no career

as a postie.
So it's back on the dole for me...

In Chains.

The legendary Australian 'bushranger' or bandit
made even more famous by Sydney Nolan,
here shown in (an improved) police photograph.

There is nowhere

without a McDonald's.
Not even delightful suburban Dudley,
Warwickshire, England. 

Music in the car.

Bach on the piano
can be as banal as a beach.

'Beefsteak Nazi' :

Brown on the outside,
Pink in the middle.

Times change.

Now we have Colonic Liberals
and Social-democrats:
transparent-pink on the outside
and shit-brown in the middle. 

If Zelenskyy and Putin meet in Budapest

(which is unlikely), here, for the Press Pack,
is a brief guide to Hungarian politeness.

 

and for my many Magyar readers, here
are my Maxims translated into Hungarian.

Another new word.

Rami Kaminski thinks everyone is born an otrovert,
but some resist the barrage of cultural conditioning
that makes kids 'social' and fit in with
various groups and identities,

thus retaining intellectual and emotional independence. 
He has written a book about it
(very nice cover).

Believe it or not,

Toads don't have jewels in their heads,
nor, ensorcelled, will they go back
to being princes if you kiss them, but

one species of toad secretes
a defensive poison which contains
the 'powerful' 5-MEO DMT,

an illegal substance taken for Astral Journeys.

.

Not a recording studio.

Execution Chamber, 
Nashville, Tennessee.

Hmm.

I must order up a few hundred thousand
heavy 'for-life' shopping bags-for life
to throw around the countryside
and do my little bit for the planet.

Well, of course,

since microplastics are everywhere,
they are in mammalian testicles.

Today's cartoon

by Nicola Jennings.

 

Today's beautiful - and threatened - animal.

Tajikistan used to be home to wolves,
leopards, tigers, bears and the almost-eliminated
gorgeous-eared striped hyena.

Hyæna hyæna

 

Even at the 'height' of the 'civilising'

Roman Empire, around 90% of its population
lived outside towns and cities,
thus leaving few traces in the archæological record.

Today, most of the human species is crammed
into cities.

 

Jostled but proud

holding their own in Liège.

photo by Martin on FlickR

Gutenberg invented

the printing-press, and about a month later
pamphlets such as A true and most horrifying account
of how a woman cruelly murdered her four children
and then killed herself at Weidenhausen
near Eschwege in Hesse were circulated.

About a week after the World Wide Web got going
pornography appeared.

(Perhaps I exaggerate a little bit.)

Theatre of the Bizarre.

Rummu, Estonia

Mechanical diggers perform a scene
during an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
where heavy goods vehicles and cars
take on the roles of the characters.

Photograph by Janis Laizans

Hand-me-down hideousness

that has probably cost
thousands of dollars
and, seemingly beheaded,
is flaunted as Beauty
to millions of crawlers.

Not many people know...

...that Donetsk in Ukraine was,
in the bad old days
re-named Stalino, just as Tsaritsyn
(now Volgograd) was re-named Stalingrad.

[I am like Oliver Goldsmith's rural schoolmaster in the poem
The Deserted Village in which people marvelled
that one small head could carry all he knew !]

Russia is where idealists die.

America is where they resurrect
as vampires.

A Performance Poem

by The President of the United States.

"I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole – water barely comes out it’s ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

from The Guardian.

Almost-Divine Truth.

'A nation without religion
is like a man without breath.'

~ Josef Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment
and Propaganda, Germany, 1933-45.

The beautiful

graveyard is near,
less than ten miles
...and more than one year ?

Maybe five. Maybe five days.

I was tired
of life a decade ago. A decade
before that, I chose
and planted my grave
almost out of reach
in the furthermost corner
in deep shade.

As a child I loved to visit
old graveyards and ruins.
I built ruins instead of sandcastles
on the beach.

One can be "dead tired"
but not dead.
Can one be "born tired" of life,
a dried date in the desert ? 

It certainly isn't self-refreshing.

But nobody "dies of boredom".
One has to make an effort.

A kind of eruption

known as a Mound Spring,
in (usually dry) Kati-Thanda
(Lake Eyre), Australia.

The Camera Does Not Lie.

Selfie on a Good Day.

Selfie on a Bad Day.

At prayer in Gaza.

The best-documented outrage in history.

 

photo by Abdelrahman Alkahlout

'They go together like a horse and carriage.'

The sexualisation of affection
and
the romancing of lust;

factory farming
and
mass extinction.

The Cliff Bookshop.

Hechi, China.

 

It would be fun

to create a blog consisting only
of details of famous pictures.

Here is a detail of a begging-bowl
from one of the first masterpieces
I ever saw (in reproduction): Bruegel's
The Blind leading the Blind.

French heat.

Today's temperatures.
I live in the purple zone.
I have a headache.

Kol Nidrei...

9 Tishrei.
There is no atonement.

Except suicide.

'Little Brown Jug'

I remember that there was a book of songs
kept in the Piano Stool in the Front Room
(along with the scores of Chopin Nocturnes) 

which included Sowannee River, Old Black Joe
(which made me weep),
Won't you buy my pretty flowers ?
(which made me weep),
a bowdlerised version of Hinky-Dinky-Parley-Voo
which was quite jolly,

and Little Brown Jug, which was sung
by many (including Bing Crosby) right up to WW2.

I was reminded of this by learning the other day
that the Dutch equivalent of a Kneipe in Germany
and an Estaminet in France
was called a Bruine Kroeg or Brown Jug.

The first verse as I remember it was:

My wife and I lived all alone
In a little log cabin we called our own.
She loved gin and I loved rum
I tell you we'd lots of fun...

Our Rosy Future.

 

'There was a bluebottle

crashing against the glass.
It explored the edges, and seemed
to search for an opening
and then went straight at the panes of glass
in a series of small assaults,
and then back to the edges again,
and then it rested,
and then it went for the glass again,
hitting itself, and it didn't stop,
but carried on with it,
trying to get out and not getting out
and trying again.'

– from The Outcast, by Sadie Jones, 2008.

Two Cities.

Warsaw 1940.

Warsaw 1945.

Gaza 2025.

I feel it calling.

• Astronomers have identified what could be
  the biggest black hole known in the universe,
  estimated to be around 36 billion times more massive than our sun, and  approximately five billion light-years away.

Gary Shteyngart :

'My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time.
Should my family now leave the US ?’  

Where would you go ? 
Finland is too close to home. 
Costa Rica might be too close to the USA...  

Aléxandre Dumas (the elder)

won 600 glasses of absinthe
in a double or quits game of billiards. 
But he didn't claim them.*

He estimated that they were worth 90 francs,
the equivalent of 12 times the coach-fare to Paris.

He was described as "fond of the ladies",
which probably means that he was a serial rapist.
He claimed to have 500 offspring,
but 'recognised' only five,
one of whom, Aléxandre Dumas (the younger)
was the author of La Dame aux Camélias
(converted into the opera La Traviata by Verdi)
and shared at least one of his father's 'mistresses'.

*Ce jour-là, pauvre père Cartier ! – je veux parler du jour de notre partie –
ce jour-là, pour me servir d'un terme de joueur, je lui arrachai une fameuse dent.

Nous jouâmes cinq heures de suite, et, toujours doublant, je lui gagnai six cents petits verres d'absinthe.

Nous y serions encore, et jugez quel océan d'absinthe Cartier me devrait, si Auguste ne fût venu le chercher.

Auguste était un des fils de Cartier ; son père le craignait beaucoup ; il mit un doigt sur sa bouche pour me recommander le silence. Je fus généreux comme Alexandre à l'endroit de la famille de Porus.

Je laissai Cartier libre, sans lui demander de gage.

Seulement, nous fîmes nos comptes, Gondon et moi.

Réduits en argent, les six cents petits verres d'absinthe produisaient un total de dix-huit cents sous, c'est-à-dire quatre-vingt-dix francs.

Je pouvais prendre douze fois la voiture de Paris, conducteur payé.

[from his published letters]

see also www.beyond-the-pale.uk/absinthe.htm

Hiroshima Day.

 Since 1945  the world’s nine declared nuclear-armed states have amassed a firepower equivalent to 145,000 Hiroshima bombs – enough to destroy the world many times over.

In Britain, Prime Minister Starmer recently announced plans to spend an additional £15bn on developing submarine-launched nuclear warheads, as well as the purchase of F-35A fighters from the United States to enable the UK to re-introduce air-launched nuclear weapons. This, of course, brings the prospect of nuclear war measurably closer – all in the name of making Britain, in his words, “a battle-ready, armour-clad nation”...

while Trump and Putin engage in sabre-rattling (such a quaint expression) with weapons of mass destruction.

The only countries to abandon nuclear weapons have been three former republics of the USSR, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus - plus South Africa.

CND was such a waste
of time and energy misplaced.

Faust is German for 'Fist'

and is the title of Goethe’s famous play about the successful but dissatisfied scientist Dr Heinrich Faust, who makes a deal with the devil. 

Faust has been performed, referenced and read in schools in the German-speaking world for more than two centuries.

The most tragic character in this tragedy is not the unpleasant protagonist, but his “love interest”, Gretchen.

She is a teenage girl groomed by Old Man Fist, impregnated and, of course, socially ostracised for his crime.
So she drowns her “illegitimate” new-born child, accepts her death penalty and rejects The Fist’s offer to save her from prison.
In God’s mercy, the Christian girl seeks salvation (maybe with the help of the criminal Catholic mega-business, The Sisters of Bon Secours. and off goes Dr Faust with the devil to new adventures in Faust, Part Two...

Rustic Car.

 

Rubus fruticosus & Parthenocissus quinquefolia

Feeding the brains of the old to babies in Palestine

How things seem is not so much how they are
than how we seem to ourselves, flatteringly
or not.
How they are is no more than partly-knowable,
fleetingly half-describable by
migrant world-devouring words.

Neutrinos. Galaxies of galaxies. People.

Like disappearing birds,
they exist somewhat insubstantially
until they threaten our hopes or health or habits
or our own seeming existence,

though there is no finale of seem,
just the apparent filth of fate,
the sheer meanness of annihilation,
the petty planetary scream
muffled by hereditary hate.

Thinking of Wallace Stevens,

Too conscious of too much

Too conscious of too much consciousness

To be too conscious

Doesn't mean too conscientious 

But could mean too contentious

Geronticus eremita

is listed as an accidental species
of African bird in Spain.
It may already be naturalised.
I know how your feel, dear,
even without a red rim 'round my eyes.

Northern Bald Ibis

History

"is best told as a story of organised crime."

Dr Luke Kemp

"I find it hard to accept

the contemporary view that [human] life of any kind
no matter how restricted and feeble
is better than no life at all.

The thing doesn't seem to me to be
worth clinging to at all costs, regardless of its quality.

Like an ancient Roman, I would prefer
to get out while I'm ahead..."

John Simpson (famous BBC correspondent and presenter)
in Strange Places, Questionable People.