Great for questions about Prohibition

and World War One,
but not about the Holocaust
or the Moon Landing.

A wet morning.

Cacti in the rain.

And Fatshedera, Pieris...

'Womaniser'

is a term applied to men,
though it could, in theory, be applied
to voracious queer women.

The female equivalent
seems to be man-eater.

Need I say more ?

In 1945

the Germans had a magic word:
Endsieg
(much better than the English
'Final Victory').
Of course, it never came.

And the misbegotten concept
has almost vanished from the earth,
even in Iran, even in the USA,
and (almost) even in Russia.

Moonshit.

'Transit'
in French
often has an intestinal meaning.

The Transit of Venus
springs to mind,

and through confused
but linear thinking
I imagine
this afternoon
that we might be
transitory results
of transits of the moon.

Outside

The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York.

photo by Shannon Stapleton

Capitalism is, essentially, gambling.

So why should anyone be surprised that

'Almost every writer

changes my mind – that’s the point of reading.’

- Katie Kitamura.

*

Also from today's Guardian
two interview-questions for actor Juliet Stevenson:

An apparently neutral word

can fire up a nasty industry.

Adult movies implies
that you're an adult
if you watch them.

'To have the jitters'

in French
= avoir les jetons,

which, going back to the 12th century,
= 'to have the shits'

but jetons are also tokens,
or chips used for roulette or poker :

another (and not the most ancient) connection
between fæces and lucre.

Jews attacked in London.

Christians attacked
in Israel.   And so it goes. 

One rarely sees

happy dogs
on leads.

Great Statue -

 

by 'Banksy'

but of course it will be removed.

Three Kings.

Proud Guardians of our Rubbish
at a "Waste Disposal Facility" near Istanbul.
Turkey is the largest recipient of European plastic waste.
Others include Malaysia and Indonesia.

photo by Sedat Suna

The British Empire when I was born

within it.

Ah, the good old days before WW2 !

The French prison-van

was called panier-à-salade
not just because of the criss-crossed
bars but because, horse-drawn
on rough roads, the prisoners inside
were tossed about like lettuce
in a salad-shaker.

The Catholic Church in Ireland.

Irish travellers to eastern Europe before the fall 
of the Berlin Wall in 1989 
were struck by the sense of familiarity they felt 
in cities such as Warsaw, Prague or Budapest. 

read more >

And I, on the other hand,
a welfare-cushioned
Northern Irish Protestant, rather liked
a similarity of atmosphere in
Belfast and East Berlin.

*

How Proust can Change your Life is a brilliant book
by Alain de Botton.

How Priests have destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives
doesn't bear thinking about.

Not all old codgers are 'vulnerable'

(except to insanity).

 

Wolf-thoughts and Nuclear Power.

 (At no time a good idea for Iran.)

Cocaine.

(after a famous poem by Nina Cassian) 

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you
that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening
like carp-mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear
your blood singing though your genitals,
your nipples and your brain;

and you’ll feel sunbeams sliding
across your eye like the glitzy train
of a Hollywood dress. For the first time
you’ll be aware of gravity
like a rusty nail in your foot,
and your shoulder-blades will ache
for want of silly wings.

Call yourself alive? I promise you
that you’ll be deafened
by desert dust and filmy things
falling on the wormy furniture.
You’ll feel your eyebrows turning into two gashes,
and every false memory you have
will begin a sickening vibration of eyelashes,
a false regeneration.  

Call yourself alive ? When we die we join
yet another queue, a line
signposted Utter Devastation.

some poems by Nina Cassian >

on psycho-active drugs >

The doorbell went at 5am. Six masked men were outside...

Rasmus Munk has been concocting a dish at his two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen that will taste of detention under an authoritarian regime, the subject of the entire installation.

A scent has been commissioned, too: it will smell like a freshly dug grave in the Belarus countryside in late August, laid with rotting flowers.

Photograph: Anna Liminowicz/The Guardian

‘It’s a rereading of the Sisyphus story’ … 

Nicolai Khalezin from Belarus with his sculpture of banned books for the Venice biennale.

Atlas said :

before there were humans
the world was a pleasure
on my shoulders.

Now they have sprouted
silly wings, and my mind moulders.

 

The two westernmost European nations.

Ireland has a small army
but is not a member of NATO.

Iceland is a member of NATO
and has no military at all.

What is 'feeling' and what is 'self' ?

I really don't know

if I feel that

I have a self.

I think that I only have

an intermittent consciousness

which exists on different planes,

each one a narrow shelf,

connected by very intermittent memories

like draughts of air or breezes.

Is that 'self' ?

*

"the line between fiction and reality has been diffuse in my life" >

What is the relationship between the constructs
of personality, character and our narrative histories ('pasts') ?

Not to mention continuous earworms and tinnitus.

In a mahogany cupboard

I have hundreds of CD and cassette

compilations that I no longer play

because I like to live in silence

though silence is as relative

and varied as regret.

Tehran :

 The Iran Mall.

smartphone photo by Ali Zolghadri

BLOOD-BATH

I wonder if anyone ever

has bathed or could

bathe in blood ?

I like this digitally-treated collage

(though I say it myself).

portrait of Malcolm

On the 40th anniversary.

 

Chornob'l

WTF !

 

God's Work :

Child grooming, human trafficking, and psychological and emotional control, with former members saying that the wealthy world-wide organisation  used private confessions as leverage against members, and drugged those under its sway – claims which Opus Dei categorically denies...

more >

Many must wonder

if we'll ever hear

of an Epstein or Savile

who is or was queer.

'Cries pf De;light'

as Sumatran orang-utan
crosses a road
using a canopy-bridge.

I camped here overnight

with a beautiful man
in the summer of 1981.

Beaghmore, county Tyrone.

Below the bogs and fields of the general area lie
"dazzlingly valuable seams of gold",
as well as significant reserves of silver, copper
and 'critical minerals including antimony & tellurium'. 

At current prices, the known gold reserves alone are worth
at least £21 billion.

There may well be a connection with the many megaliths round about,
because there is also copper in the stone-circle country
of West Cork and Kerry.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand...

Back to basics ?

The short life of the world-wide web
will soon be ended by the hackers
and scammers...and other attackers.

The latest event

in 'The Columbian Exchange'
is Terminal Progressive Infantilism
from the U.S.A.

On a terrible, long-lasting dictator.

(There have been quite a few.)

"He was so evil
that I believe if he had been bitten
by a poisonous snake,
the snake would have died."

On the suicide of one of his
tens of thousands of prisoners:

'After yet another day of torture
he was dragged to his cell,
where he waited for his mother to go to sleep;
then he bit and chewed through his skin
and through the veins and artery,
to the bones of his right wrist.'

Before he died, not by suicide
but in a bloody coup, a dictator cried
"What have I ever done to you ?"

They greeted me on the balcony this morning.

Mesdemoiselles Rebutia and Echinocereus
were not quite the first to bloom this year.

 

Today I talked to a chat-bot about Yeats and Innocence.

It wrote:

Your claim that “innocence is the first casualty of acceptable socialisation” aligns with a reading where custom/ceremony strip or manufacture 
innocence—socialization replaces spontaneity and innocence

Indeed. Well put, Mr Botty.

Red and White Ibis at war:

much more picturesque
than humans.

Age and 'wisdom'.

It took seven decades
for me to realise
that people are not as they seem.

And another decade
to realise that many people
are the opposite of what they seem.

Next: a Population Explosion ?

 

Part of the General Moral Collapse

of the USA.

"Having already wrecked CBS News, pro-Israel MAGA billionaires Larry and David Ellison are now on the verge of adding CNN to their right-wing media empire.

"As if one Fox News wasn’t enough.

"Let’s be clear: American media has entered an era of complete moral and institutional collapse. And it’s not just TV news: Jeff Bezos is gutting the Washington Post — including laying off every correspondent and editor in the Middle East.

"But here at The Intercept, we’re fighting back.

"We’re doubling down on the hard-hitting, adversarial investigative journalism that has earned us a long and proud list of powerful enemies..."

A five-o'clock in the morning thought.

Google will soon be providing a
Find the Tune (maybe not so finely-tuned)
service whereby we will be able
to hum a scrap of melody
into a smartphone and have it identified
as the main theme of the second movement of
Sibelius' Violin Concerto (my favourite)
or the Brahms Piano Quintet (another favourite)
or the tenth variation of Rachmaninov's
Paganini Variations...
then play the original back to us,
directly into our brain, like an earworm.

Awesome!

Another thought, an hour later:
Earworms are poor music for the deaf.

Living in the Middle

of the End of the World
is much more fun than it was
at the Beginning,
when I was a child,
though we are slowly roasting.

'Kingdom of the Blind'

numbers 5, 6 and 7.

by Hew Locke

The longest word in English

used to be antidisestablishmentarianism
(being against the unique constitutional status
of the Church of England).

But pseudoneuropsychopharmacologist
gets pretty close
and is more readily comprehensible.

"Pessimism

is the only wisdom."

- Jean-Noël Orengo,
author of 'You are the Führer's Unrequited Love'.

The plant fair.

A little paradise for me,
full of temptations.

Opus Dei, Vatican Gossip,

and the oaths of chastity & confidentiality.

The Cardinal said
to his sexy psychiatrist

'Down by the quays
the semen of seamen
sets me ablaze
makes me a real demon.'

(Has a large whiskey,
gets down on his knees
and urgently prays.)