on the Isle of Skye
a Very Long Time Ago.
bloginafog
NEO-NIETZSCHEAN NOTES
Dingo the Dissident
Friday, 4 April 2025
Thursday, 3 April 2025
Wednesday, 2 April 2025
Liminality.
"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things,
the honest thief, the tender murderer."
~ Robert Browning.
Tuesday, 1 April 2025
Monday, 31 March 2025
Sunday, 30 March 2025
Speed culture.
It's not just North Americans
who seem unaware that the faster you speak
the less your audience will hear
and retain.
Saturday, 29 March 2025
A beautiful but microscopic resistance to consumer-capitalism.
About half of the hundreds of garments he finds are in perfect condition. He collects what he can and adds them to the two-ton pile of clothes he has stored at a friend’s house.
They are then 're-sold' for the price of the postage...
[more]
Friday, 28 March 2025
Typical Disinformation
The rapid expulsion from Paradise
that has been reported to us
is worse than a parody
of the immeasurably-long
development of human self-consciousness.
Thursday, 27 March 2025
Art and A.I.
At one time it was normal
for a picture's frame to cost
more than the picture.
*
You don't yet actually have to wheedle
information out of a computer.
I have a hunch –
just a hunch that
human stupidity
is more often learned
(by rote or by example)
than inherited.
Wednesday, 26 March 2025
At the Red Hedgehog - Zum Roten Igel
a bar, restaurant and chamber-concert venue
(see below)
frequented a generation later by Brahms
(who had his own barrel of Tokaj)
on this day. also a Wednesday, in 1828,
Franz Schubert gave his only public concert,
which included his second piano trio.
The entrance charge of 2 florins per person
made him rich for the last nine months of his life.
Another of my Most Admired Men sold only one painting.
None of these three heterosexual beauty-makers had a wife.
- Parterre and 1st floor of a residential building.
- Address: Tuchlauben No. 12.
- Also: Rother Igel.
- 1822 The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde rents premises within a building on the Tuchlauben in Vienna, “Zum roten Igel” (same complex).
- 1829-1870 The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde buys “Zum roten Igel”, the building it had formerly rented, planning to replace this with a new building bringing the diverse activities of the Musikverein together under one roof.
- Also visited frequently by Robert Schumann (1810-1856), Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847), and Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Brahms refused to eat anywhere else.
Tuesday, 25 March 2025
Bureaucracy +
Big Technology = Technocracy.
Bureaucracy depends on literacy,
numeracy, and – most basically –
on hierarchy and its progenitor,
the family.
On Self-help.
"Often it haps, that sorrowes of the mynd
Find remedie unsought, which seeking cannot fynd."
~ Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1590.
Monday, 24 March 2025
Only in retrospect
can we observe
that The Age of Aquarius
would slowly 'transition to'
The Age of Resentment.
A life of serendipity
is an existence worth
the living, while the quest
for perfection creates
hell on earth.
Sunday, 23 March 2025
The silent dark is mother to us all.
Diane Seuss wrote that
Silence has a roundness like an apple
which is why Eve and Adam were expelled
to shout and shriek and scream and bawl
and moan and whine
and ululate and sing and bellow
and talk and speak poetry
to their wretched hearts' content
from generation unto generation.
Pomme is French slang for oneself or favoured fellow
human being, a pal, or dog.
For me, silence is solid, never hollow,
my life-support, my exaltation.
The silent dark is mother-end of all.
More on apples from another American woman:
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Saturday, 22 March 2025
Friday, 21 March 2025
'Dear Fellow-humans',
perhaps the only one of us
who is not criminal
and does not tread
on misery
is the most deprived –
and s/he is already dead.
Thursday, 20 March 2025
The International Movie Data-base
(or IMDb) is scarcely more international
(let alone internationalist) than Donald Trump.
Its highest-rated film is a Batman production,
and its second-highest is a woodenly-acted,
totally-predictable (guns, violence, sex)
prison-movie, which is a horrific (but very cleaned-up)
view of American jail-culture, considerably less honest
than Genet's sentimental little film, Un Chant d'Amour.
I reckon that to judge how good a film is likely to be,
you should add a point or two for a "foreign" film,
and subtract a couple of points for any film
made in the USA.
Sieg Heil !
French scientist denied US entry
after officers find phone messages
criticising Trump...
US Environmental Protection AgencyTrump administration may fire more than 1,000 EPA scientists and scrap research office, Democrats say
Wednesday, 19 March 2025
Socrates believed
that the unpatented pharmaceutical
Conium maculatum, commonly known
as Hemlock, 100% natural
(may have contained honey))
was the medicine which would
cure him of the condition
(and to many the affliction)
of life.
Not many people know
that Chopin was introduced to George Sand
by Victor Hugo, poet, painter and author
of Les Misérables.
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Hugo: My Destiny |
Tuesday, 18 March 2025
Lateral Thinking
but, interestingly, in these days
buzzing with tales of 'Artifical Intelligence',
lateral thinking seems to have been forgotten –
A.I. cannot think sideways.
Monday, 17 March 2025
More an æsthetic
(or even a religious) question
than a horticultural one:
why do variegated plants
appeal to us so much ?
*
And so inspiringly to Gerard Manley Hopkins :
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
I have always preferred Gauguin's command of colour
to his compositions.
But I am very pleased that he was not
the syphilitic colonialist paedophile that over-
passionate feminists have tried to make out.
How could a man who painted this
be other than kind ?
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Manao Tupapau, or Spirit of the Dead Watching. |
Sunday, 16 March 2025
Did the Rhinoceros
precede the Elephant in the room ?
Wikipedia does not tell us the answer
to a question and a story worthy of
the great Irish writer Flann O'Brien.
Long before Ionesco's 1959 play Rhinoceros
Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein
had an intellectual tussle in 1911
about Empirical Knowledge
in which Russell mentioned the pachyderm
being or not being in his Cambridge living-room.
Saturday, 15 March 2025
Back in 1952
the philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote
in a novel that Language is a machine
for telling lies.
(Such a pity I did not come across
Under the Net in the late 1950s,
or at any time between then and, say,1980 !)
Friday, 14 March 2025
Thursday, 13 March 2025
Wednesday, 12 March 2025
"...in our family
we simply pack it in when we can't face tomorrow's laughter,
never mind tomorrow's misery,
when we feel we've had enough."
John Gledhill, quoted in Earth to Earth by John Cornwell.
Film treatment of book on youTube (28 minutes)
Tuesday, 11 March 2025
Decades ago I wrote
'Sometimes I get the feeling
that I'm on the ceiling of feeling'
(like a Swami in Darjeeling);
but now when I am alone
(which is much of the time)
and I am stronger
in my head, I have the same
sensation of soft elation
for much longer.
A Guru from Nauru
has e-mailed to say
that my surge of elation
is probably due to
reduced human contact
and absence of urge
to attempt masturbation.
Are we surprised ?
Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis,
study finds, threatening millions with starvation.
Researchers say problem could increase number of people at risk of starvation by 400m in next two decades.
Monday, 10 March 2025
My trusty e-friend
Slim E. Mould, communicating
from Alpha Centauri, lets me know
that Intelligence
(which is not intellect nor mere
factual, organised memory)
is not the property of an individual,
but a kind of grid or miasma
that can be plugged into, a bit
like the world wide web, but infinitely
less toxic. Alas! few people connect.
To do so you need first to disconnect.
Individualism (the long, lonely
night in a sleazy motel)
may be
the opposite of 'individuation'
which is the slipping in and out
of the unperceived cosmic gel.
Let us remember that all life on earth
derived from a single, haphazard cell.
Sunday, 9 March 2025
Language and Desire.
“First you try to understand what people
will like,
and then you hand it to them in the form of a lie.
But what
people want is for you to hand them
the same thing packaged as the
truth.”
– Viktor Pelevin, Babylon.
Lie? Truth? Russian dolls.
Both come from Zombizon in the same parcel
ordered by Zombiphone.
Haven’t you noticed? Same brand. Same factory.
Same ingredients. Same nonsense. Same QR-code.
All issuing from the deep well of words,
capitalist intercourse
that never dries up.
The more that’s extracted, the deeper it gets.
And it’s Open Source.