There was a famous-in-Scotland warlord

who hid in a cave and watched a stationary
spider, which taught him patience. Such a spider
adheres to my stairwell wall. I will not insult her
with a name. In the room below I attach myself
to the world-wide web of human utterance,
which depends upon an oceanic web of cables,
hundreds of thousands of miles of them
along the ocean beds,
most of them privately owned
by a few abominably-rich Americans
who are entangling us & trussing up the planet
with our shrieking insignificance.

Candle weather coming.

  

The above-normal temperatures in France so far this year have led to many vines budding early. In the early stage of budding (débourrement), the vine is extremely susceptible to colder temperatures, and in some cases severe frosts can wipe out a whole vineyard’s harvest overnight.

To protect their vineyards against spring frost, many French winemakers still rely on the ancient technique of using candles (bougies antigel) to warm the vines. Thousands of candles – usually metal pots filled with paraffin wax – are placed throughout the vineyard in order to raise the vines' ambient temperature. 

Winemakers are recommended to install about 500 candles per hectare, which can help raise the temperature of he vines by 2 to 3C, according to figures from the Bureau Interprofessionnel des Vins de Bourgogne, the official industry organization for Burgundy wines.

Farther east and south, in my Gaillac area and around Bordeaux it will, however, be warmer.

Doors of Perception.

Consciousness is a World Tree
of many branches, twigs,
leaves, flowers, seeds and roots,
not to mention parasites and lodgers.

But perception is the problem.
We perceive peculiarly,
through the lens of quantity
rather than of quality.
Our minds inflamed by number,
ever-number saps our sensibility,

carved cuckoos inside clocks.
we're trapped by sequence, narrative,
and contrapuntal melody.

'I saw one ship

go sailing by,
sailing by,
sailing by;
I saw one ship go sailing by
at 10 o'clock in the morning.'

Strait of Hormuz

The devil in the details.

'God forgive me!'
It is a bit off
to correct dead good men's books,
but the august John le Carré
seemed to think that women
were imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs
rather than in Holloway.

Assisted Dying, unassisted smoking.

Nick Auf der Maur was a Montreal politician, activist, newspaper columnist and career drinker who, in his youth, had been arrested for performing poetry in the street naked (with a gin and tonic in hand) and getting into a bar brawl with Jack Kerouac, who, he said, was a racist. He was also a heavy smoker. The lump that developed on his neck turned out to be throat cancer, which spread to his brain. When radiation didn’t work, he underwent an experimental procedure that cut out part of his throat and tongue, leaving him unable to eat, drink or talk properly. At home to visit him, Auf der Maur picked up the landline to make a call and heard her father’s voice on the line to a friend. He was saying he wanted to end his life, and he wanted help doing it. She put down the phone and then, later, spoke to the friend. If her father was going to end his life, she wanted to be there.

Strange quotation, strange man.

Ernst Jünger,
humanist-fascist.

'Le suicide fait partie
du capitale de l'humanité.'

sounds les strangled in English:

Suicide is part of human capital.

On Painting.

To create decent authentic art
it is essential not to care
a tinker's or other despised person's fart
if nobody comes to stand and stare.

Nostalgia.

My first 'sound-system'
which I played in the attic
in the late 1940s
looked exactly like this.

I played Grieg's piano concerto
recorded by Benno Moiseiwitch
on at least 4 old 10-inch records
with worn needles.

What better introduction to 'canned music' ?

Unsurprisingly,

I have been completely wrong
and probably crass
in my socio-genetic-anthropological
assumptions.

Progress.

As we have moved out of a period
where International Law largely applied,
so the Law of Unintended Consequences
has become the Law of Totally-Predictable
and Dire Consequences.

Viscous consciousness.

It's not like switching websites
or TV channels
from regenerating an Irish bog
to porn-site
to Facebook to Brahms...not at all.

Nor does it happen in Baudelairean
listlessness or soupy brain-fog.

Some of my days
are elevator-days
I pass instantaneously between floors
from plane to plane
no keys, no doors.

Lean Lion Kills Strange Monster.

 

Romanesque tympanum at Skibet in Denmark.

Tehran billboard.

 

One of the saddest paintings

that I have ever seen:
an early van Gogh of 1884
so reminiscent of Millet
(The Gleaners, etc.)
and so unlike his outpourings
just six years later
when he was accidentally shot
by teenagers with guns
out 'for a lark' or 'for a caper'.

  

Thanks to the underfunded BBC

Mr Nobody was born.

“When a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we could produce it and consume it – we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a nobody is more powerful than you think...”

...if he gets backing and fights his long way through.

https://www.catchupplayer.co.uk/episode/211129/Storyville.html

“In questo interregno...

 ..si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

- Antonio Gramsci

But that Goya should number owls amongst his monstrous
fenomeni morbosi or monstrosi makes his reason seem
somewhat somnolent.

Bargain of the Month

on Etsy: genuine Muammar Gaddafi wristwatch.

not in great demand

Meanwhile...

Nicolas Sarkozy appeared at the Paris court of appeal to face a fresh trial over allegations he conspired to receive illegal election campaign funding from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

To brighten us up...

...a Capetown street.

photo by Robby Ogilvie

Call me Hammurabi.

In his Code of Fairness, he declares that
the rich should pay twice as much
as the poor for medical treatment. 

So why is Hammurabi, priest and worshipper of Justice,
celebrated in the United States' Capitol in Washington,
bastion of acquisition and unfairness ?

After Camus

the ancient philosopher said
that the essence of senescence
is the little blobs of fæces
you find hardening
in your long-johns and arse-hairs
as you get ready for bed.

The philosopher heaved a sweet
sigh and said
there won't be any more
of that shit when your dead.

Without stillness

and simplicity of self,
we can no longer be
an adaptable species.

On 'Populism'.

"It’s against elites, but led and funded by the rich. 
It presents itself as a mass uprising,
but relies on low turnouts for much of its electoral success.
It talks a lot about freedom, but its policies are authoritarian.
It promises a glorious future,
but its social vision is “soaked in the brandy of nostalgia.”

– Liam Byrne, MP.

A statement of the unrealised obvious.

‘Deaf people can’t hide behind words!’ 

But they can hide behind and away from people,
which gives them great inner resources.

Satan's wet dream :

The erection
of Perfection.

Chant of the Minotaur.

In the maze
of existence no centre
of consciousness can hold,
much less endure
to the end of all days.

My mind is my coffin

is a hide-
covered currach
drifting out
with the tide

As the world seems to enter 'the beginning of the end time'

I'm not entirely ashamed to say
that I found this interesting
and helpful.

Around the Second Millennium

we thought that the World-Wide Web
was the best thing since electricity:
an exciting, liberating, egalitarian
empowering invention. 
But now, for millions,
it's like a slow, seductive garrotte
round the brain,
which, day by day, increases
its and our tension.

My aunt used to say

that life was
one disappointment
after another. 
Many were caused by me.
I remember her tears.
She lived brightly
and sprightly
in excellent health
with all her teeth
for over 90 years.

This blog is not a journal.

Nor is it a commonplace-book.
It's somewhere in between...
an outlet for a chap who has been
an aspergerish over-sharer/communicator 
and almost obsessive truth-teller
since he left school and no longer
had to tell pathetically-transparent lies
about his punishments
to his long-suffering mother.

Today's blog, however, reports on my reading
of a few pages of a poor novel
set in pre-independence,
pearl-of-the-East Ceylon,
re-named in 1972 Sri Lanka: Isle of Splendour
(overtones of Shakespeare). 

Before that
it was called, by some, Sarandib, which
by a curious route gave us the word
Serendipity – which I thought was American
because I came across it first in a Deep-South novel.

Arabic Sarandib comes from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa:
Lion Island. And behold Sri Lanka's National Flag.

Berthold alias Bert Brecht,

was a pretty important 20th century playwright,
very political. He wrote great songs, fine poems and
(my favourite) The Threepenny Novel.

He is still pretty important, since his 
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)
is pretty relevant just now. And has been
much performed in recent years.

The play is about a Chicago mobster
who gets control of the city’s wholesale
vegetable trade through corruption,
intimidation and violence and murder:
a clear allegory of how a certain nondescript Austrian
had climbed to power during the 1920s and 1930s,
and founded a Thousand-Year Empire
on sand and hate and submission.

It was not staged until 1958, after Brecht's death.
But Mother Courage and Her Children, about
an enterprising, child-collecting refugee/
asylum-seeker during the Thirty Years' War.
was frequently performed during his lifetime and since.

For me, however, Brecht is like Shakespeare:

better on the page than on the stage.
Unlike Ibsen.

Here is his poem on Hell (from a page of my translations)

Considering Hell,
my brother Shelley thought
it must be much like London.
Since I live in Los Angeles and not London
I think Hell is more like
Los Angeles.

In Hell, too, there must be luxuriant gardens
with flowers big as trees
which of course wither at once
if not fed
with rich people's water.

And fruit-markets where great piles of fruit*
have no smell, have no taste.
And endless convoys of cars
as light as their shadows, faster than impulses -
gleaming conveyances in which well-fed people
go nowhere from nowhere.

And houses
built for the happy, thus standing empty
even when lived in.

The houses in Hell, too, aren't
all of them ugly,
but the fear of being dumped on the street
oppresses the suburbanites
no less than the shanty-town squatters.

*Cultivated by semi-slaves in Guatemala and Honduras.

Which reminds me of this poem by MTC Cronin
about Hitler in Hell:

In hell, Hitler is forced
to protect his anonymity.

He paints walls and cadavers
and sniffs fumes of the dead;

he eats the ashes of children
and drinks blood from a funnel;

hammered into his mouth
are many pulled gold teeth; but mostly
he sits forgotten on the chair
just inside hell's door.

*

An illustrated note on Hell.

Thus end today's commonplaces.

The Irrefutable Truth.

Technology
creates far more waste
than it can ever reduce.

Ever the aphorismic practitioner, I wrote this after reflecting on all the 'Mixtapes'
that I made on cassettes in the nineteen eighties and nineties, and then all the Compilation CDs
(tapes and CDs that I can't throw away)
and now never listen to because the radio/internet waves support dozens of compilation channels which
are surprisingly good.

The phallic African banana

was, in medieval times,

sometimes called the Fruit of Paradise

...long before United Fruit

established plantations & régimes

in Guatemala and Honduras.

Reflections

by Richard Baker

 

'Those who restrain desire

do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained*;
and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place
& governs the unwilling.'

William Blake did not do much to restrain
his own libido. Moreover, he...

'...always found that the angels have the vanity
to speak of themselves as the only wise.
This they do with a confident insolence
sprouting from systematic reasoning.'

(from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell')

*Perhaps due to low testosterone levels.

God is more sad

than angry. Sadder and wiser ?
Poor God!  And so he has abandoned us
to Judaism, Christianity and Islam
in that order. Plus our other own devices.

Façade detail, Modena Cathedral.
(Doesn't Adam have lovely feet ? )

'Baking News'.

As usual, the News Organ spends

five minutes telling us what has actually happened

in the war between the Shahatollah

and what the late latter called 'The Epstein Class'

plus Israël, ancient antagonist of all,

followed by 50 minutes of intense 

speculation which will be quickly

superseded by events.

Today is, of course,

Fossil Crinoid Day

Human life:

release
from sweet confinement in the womb
into the sad captivity
of the world.
And then, if you are very privileged,
a tomb.

 

Beautiful ? I prefer Monet...

 ...and a good Monet would be much cheaper.

Scientists have captured in unprecedented detail
a beautiful image  of the vast Milky Way galaxy,
of which our own solar system is a part.

Or how about this, closer to home and from the same online edition of The Guardian ?

Tardy self-diagnosis.

 If – instead of having my tonsils
and adenoids removed in 1948 –
I had been given TRT (alias ART).
I might have gained the energy,
stamina, muscles and memory
that other boys had, and which,
in my case, have diminished more
and more with my advancing years...
...might not have had a shut-down
for a decade...might not have been
a slow-on-the-uptake slow thinker...
might not now have brain-fog,
high blood pressure & cholesterol,
a Pacemaker, fatigue, poor balance,
deafness and ringing in my ears.

I have no pain whatever, it must be said.
I'm sometimes just a bit lame.
No way will I die in a hospital bed.

Fiction, prediction.

There once was a writer 

who wrote far too much.

and didn't really want to be read. 

He didn't like people too much,

and most of the time he sort-of

wished he was dead.

His name was not Kafka

nor Borges, nor Beckett.

It might have been Fred.

My latest piece of 'folk-art'.

65 centimetres wide and placed
in the little niche on the other
side of the street from my house
(my smallest piece of garden),
this limestone sculpture of a
wild boar and his family
(sold by my friend, executor and
brocanteur David Poirier,
at a very reasonable price),
has no provenance, but is likely to have
been chiselled somewhere in Quercy,
Rouergue or the Albigeois, SW France.

from Twenty-nine Things

You can Do with a Penis.

Quixotic or idiotic ?

Had it been possible
I would have written a letter
of appreciation of his short stories
to Kafka, and of praise for his portraits
to Vincent van Gogh.  As it was,
I wrote to blind Borges, blind Tolkien
(secretaries replied)
and to the splendid Alice Neel
not long after she died. 

Portrait of John Perreault

In the evenings

only
I feel so good after dinner
and a modest measure
of wine, that my socialist
disposition makes me want
to share the pleasure.

The Fall.

Adam and Eve
dropping from a Tree
in Autumn.
Among withered leaves
and a sloughed-off skin,
no tomb,
Fall Guy and Fall Doll.

'If computers can surmise, can they surprise ?

Can Artificial Intelligence
be creative ?

Memoirs aren't improved by total recall.

Is Artificial Intelligence
capable of curiosity ?
(a faculty largely suppressed in humans)

It can't have fun, 
enjoy, regret, or suffer,
or incline towards impetuosity.

The times they aren't a-changing

 very much. 

Leigh Hunt (who might even now be called a seditious agitator, and be arrested for supporting the Palestinian cause)
was sentenced to two years in prison for libel against the odious Prince Regent (later George IV), after publishing a critical article and satire in his newspaper, The Examiner, in 1812. 

In gaol from 1813 to 1815, he continued to engage with
literary figures and maintain a vibrant intellectual life.

ex-Prince Andrew (the youngest of the Mountbatten-Windsors),
and almost never in line for the throne)
was arrested the day before yesterday = 213 years later...
and was soonish released.
He will not go to prison.
Although he has rubbed shoulders with literary as well as deeply-unpleasant and vile figures (some of them also literary)
he does not have a vibrant intellectual life,
and, partly because of his sad sexual adventures,
not even a current wife.

© Wofl McGonagall, MMXXVI

COTERMINOUS [adj]

 – as when Lent and Ramadan
endure for the same forty days,
or as nearly as dammit.

Though not necessarily when
Israel starts a religious war
at the al-Aqsa mosque
built on the site where
the earth was last trod
by M'hamed.