'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.

 

TODAY

is ALEKSANDR SKOBOV DAY. 

"Never judge

a book by its cover."

I bought this book
mainly for its cover.

 

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 Agency

Trump administration may fire more than 1,000 EPA scientists and scrap research office, Democrats say

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.

Hugo: My Destiny

Lateral Thinking

became quite buzzy in the late 1960s,
but, interestingly, in these days
buzzing with tales of 'Artifical Intelligence',
lateral thinking seems  to have been forgotten –

possibly because, by definition,
A.I. cannot think sideways.

Or at all. It can only control.

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 ?

Manao Tupapau, or Spirit of the Dead Watching.

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.

Today's photo...from the White Sea.

Cyanea capillata by Alexander Semenov

 

The Religious

live in an infinite
Goditorium.

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 !)

Well, indeed,

glaciers are shrinking rather a lot.

The enjoyment of solitude,

like any other practice,
requires inclination,
training and awareness.

'Lenten Lily'

in one of my little 'guerrilla plantings'

Helleborus niger Midnight

Into the bin

patristic religions hurl
the possibility of paradise within.

Food preparation, Chennai, India.

 

"...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)

What to do with rhubarb-leaves,

 apart from cleaning aluminium cookware :

photo by Pia-Paulin Guilmoth

Fifty years too late.

 

'From Canada to Europe,
a movement to boycott US goods is spreading.'

Thought-crime in America.

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.

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.

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.

It's not all bad news...

This is a photo of an insect-friendly building in Helsinki.

Only damaged children

need soft toys. 
I still have mine,
a rag-stuffed bear called Dandy,
made by my grandmother
around 1925, and passed down to me.

If the Taliban come to my village

they will burn all my books and my paintings
maybe my photo-albums from the 1980s –
but they will respect my ceramics, maybe admire
my rugs, some of them made
in the west and the north of their homeland.

It the Russians come, they will steal everything,
maybe even my hearing-aids, my trowel,
my towels, my thirty-year-old espresso machine,
and my bed.

If the Americans come, I will be waterboarded
in vulgar fatuity with no route* of resistance,
because they already own
all forms of expression, all thought;
they will grab and monetize
everything in my head.

*pronounced to rhyme with shout and out and tout.

Education kills

curiosity in most, but not all
children.  I am curiously amazed
at how uninterested folk are
in their environment, never mind
the insides of other people's heads.
Even when they look they do not see.

I have almost stopped conversing
with other humankind.

Photo Archive:

People Men running the World.

I. Polish People's Republic, 1970...

...could be a scene from a John le Carré film.

This year, the Anarchist Olympics

highlights the ancient sport of
Butcher Rugby, in which players
run and kick and push and shove
with shorts and jock-straps
around their ankles,
and nothing worn above. 

Last night's haiku.

On its back
                   the moon
is like an infant
                         waiting to
be ravished by the sun.

From the wrong to the ridiculous.

While English usually borrows from French
pretty elegantly and fairly accurately,
the opposite is true
when French borrows from English.

An early example of wrong was Starter,
which is French for choke
(only cars as old as mine have them).
A recent example of the ridiculous
is Swiper* (the infinitive of a verb)
for which there is already Glisser.
There is no bon mot in French for cadge
(or fadge)
but the French for swipe-card, 
is, I'm sorry to say, Badge.

* Probably not pronounced 'sveep-eh'.

Given three choices

 as to who they thought is the greatest threat to world peace,
27% of Australian respondents chose the Russian president.
The same number chose the Chinese president.

Thirty-one per cent chose the US president...

but opinion-polls are not 100% reliable.

Vulnerable people

tend to like being with other
vulnerable people, because they feel
less vulnerable.  Some of them are bullies.

Quote of the Day.

Liberation,
another suspicious
piece of language...

Diane Seuss, Don't say Paris.

The Problem with Conversation

is that people say silly, stupid things;
and I, through fault of character,
reply with silly, stupid things.

My Great Conspiracy Theory.

The USA will become an oligarchic state.
Not under Trump, but his vengeful successor
JD Vance, who, with his soul-brother,
Vladimir Putin, will have arranged Trump's death
by Ukrainian assassin.

The president of Germany,

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said yesterday that he

“would never have believed that we would one day
have to protect Ukraine from the USA”.

But who is capable or bold
enough to protect the planet
against the enveloping Russo-American-Chinese
consumer-capitalist slime-mould ? 

A little bit of London.

by Mark Wilkins

 

The thinking Greeks

considered, sneered
that the Romans had an anti-culture
(or at best a sub-culture)
and they were not being too judgemental.

The Romans (fairly feared)
ran the southern European,
North African and Near-eastern world
thinking themselves invincible –
until they ran out of lead-poisoned
anti-culture,

as the Americans (like the British
and the French, though less revered)
are doing now
(sugar is the modern poison).

The Chinese, like the Ancient Greeks,
have an 'authentic'
indigenous culture
(that values tiger-penises but not tigers)
now lightly but fatally veneered
with American vulgarity.

*

The thinking Greeks also knew
that religions are crimes
against philosophy.

In Algiers.

I don't think that they are decorated like this any more!

photo by Yusuf Krache, 2014.

Show or shadow ?

A question of translation, both philosophical and kinematic.

Psalm 39:6-8

1599 Geneva Bible
Man walketh in a shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.

1611 King James Bible
Man walketh in a vain show and disquieteth himself in vain.

Only the rich

can savour High Culture,
but they are no more capable
than any of the multitude
of distinguishing good from
bad and mediocre
than those whom they exclude.

Frightening Bad Things Away

 in West Bengal.

photo by Sayan Bose

From my small perspective,

as rarely before,
'evil' is expanding exponentially,
while 'good' increases incrementally,
at best.

 

Sex and Love

"The only man
who showed me
any affection was
my abuser."

During the first term

of Trump’s presidency we talked of the post-truth era;
now we find ourselves in a world in which the truth
is taken out, tortured and shot.
This means that there will be no justice.
This means that anything goes.

Oleksandr Mykhed

 On the third anniversary
of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,
we had the scandalous spectacle
of the US voting with Russia
against a British-European
UN resolution in support of Ukraine.

Timothy Garton-Ash

Each new morn, new widows howl,
new orphans cry and Donald Trump 
passes a wild executive order.

Arwa Mahdawi

Entitlement.

Except in the bureaucratic sense,
nobody, not even presidents or priests,
are entitled to anything,
not even dominion
over the beasts.

Civilisation depends
(amongst much else)
on the concept of superiority.

Civilisation depends
on our belief that we are
intrinsically superior
to all other life upon the planet,
and that life is superior to non-life.

To dispute this is insanity:
you will exile yourself
beyond the cruel Pale of Humanity.