Offensive words

Mother-tongue
Migrant
Motherland
Patriot
Fatherland
Pure
Identity
...and a hundred others.

For me, white
was always the meanest
most demanding
and least attractive colour.

What was Theseus' problem ?

Surely
whichever way he was construed
the Minotaur was vegetarian
and imprisoned.

Those men who like kissing

even more than ejaculation
may help just a little bit
to reduce overpopulation.

Somewhat like the stay or corset

in Europe, the burqa
in Afghanistan was (for centuries)
not just protection
but a status-symbol showing that the wearer
was not a mere peasant in the poppy-fields.

from "The National Geographic" magazine.

"The Hadza do not engage in warfare.
They've never lived densely enough to be seriously threatened by an infectious outbreak.
They have no known history of famine;
rather, there is evidence of people from a farming group coming to live with them during a time of crop failure.
The Hadza diet remains even today more stable and varied than that of most of the world's citizens.
They enjoy an extraordinary amount of leisure time.
Anthropologists have estimated that they "work"—actively pursue food—four to six hours a day. [Rain-forest 'pygmies' "worked" even less.]
And over all these thousands of years, they've left hardly more than a footprint on the land."

read the entire article >>>

The past was always tense

and the future even tenser.
Starts and finishes,
beginnings, endings
roost only in our minds and grammar.
Nothing is ever clear, or cut,
or clear-cut...shadings and shadows,
clamour and ignorance,
mass-graves and meadows,
plague-pits and glamour,
no good, no bad.
Newborns are angry.
Why should women not be sad ?

The right that is so marvellously right

for right-minded people
is the right to be right
about everything
and forever
at the right hand of God
righteously gazing down at the throng,
the millions of those who were utterly wrong.

No, not a Moral Lesson.

The less love-making you do
the better (often) is the orgasm -
or (on the other hand,
for many sad humans
of the masculine persuasion,)
the more premature
the next ejaculation.

All we need to know

about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Europe
and North America, is in a novel by Zadie Smith:
White Teeth.

A Muslim Radical or Islamist
is usually someone who feels closer to 'his' or 'her'
(usually recent version of ) a Supreme Creator
than to his or her employer or family
or nation or nationality.

To believers

God is
and is certainty.

But we are all just a stumble
or burst blood-vessel away from
being uncomprehending
parodies of our former selves.

Happiness is

(briefly)
(sometimes)
- or has been...

This I did Yesterday :

I went to youTube
online
and started listening to Stephen Montague's
Haiku for piano, tape and electronics,
a piece I like very much,
and which sounds to me like a commentary
or a reflection, a discussion
on a piece by Jánáček
in his On an Overgrown Path suite for piano.
Staying on the Montague recital,
I opened youTube in another window
and started listening, simultaneously,
to Richard Pohl, live in Brno (once Brünn),
playing Jánáček's Stationary Owl
(a beautiful sensation)

while reading the comments on the latter's
excellent interpretation.

It's not hard to see

how the 'work ethic' came to be.
In much of the world
outside our natural and original
East African environment:
human beings die of cold
if they don't keep moving
(if only to chop firewood)
or if they don't have others moving on their behalf.

By and large

a book-cover is a much more
reliable guide to content
than a wine-label.

Homage to Yeats on St Valentine's Day.

"Wine comes in at the mouth,"
and lies come in through the eyes.
"Love has pitched his" old torn tent
in the well-worn "place of excrement."

Companionable Silence

is the sign of a true relationship
this side of the grave.

If you cannot see the bars

you can believe or pretend
that you are not in a cage.
Upbringing generally
deprives us of sight.

Heaven

is where you meet again
all the unpleasant people from your past
who haven't gone to Hell
- because there is no Hell
worse than Hell on Earth
just as there is no Heaven.

Crime against Humanity.

The Chhattisgarh Police arrested a goat on Monday for raiding a senior bureaucrat's garden in the Korea district. The animal was later granted bail after being produced in court, reported NDTV. The goat has been booked under charges that carry a two-to-seven-year prison term and a fine. The complaint against the goat was filed by district magistrate Hemant Ratre's gardener.
The police said that the goat was a "repeat offender". Assistant Sub Inspector RP Srivastava said, "The judge's bungalow has an iron gate and the goat used to jump over it and enter. The peon who maintains the garden had warned the owner of the goat many times. So, [on Monday], he filed a complaint and we arrested the goat and its owner."

The goat was accused of grazing in Ratre's garden and eating plants, flowers and vegetables. Its owner, Hassan, also faces charges of criminal trespassing and mischief causing damage. The court is set to rule on the case this afternoon.

Self-regard and vanity

are sure preludes to insanity.

As the great and disappointed Marcus Tullius Cicero might have said :

It is better to test
your friends before a crisis
than to find out, too late,
that your friends are pitifully few.

Politics

in the last analysis
is merely a function
of self-advertisement.

Storms in the British Isles

have only very recently been given names,
just before a whole series of them arrived in quick succession.
I have thought it would be a good idea to name migraines -
perhaps after characters in The Ring of the Nibelungs, to begin with:
Headache Hagen, Brunhilde, Siegfried, Fafnir, Loge,
Alberich, Fricke, Wotan, etc.

Joyful Solitary Masturbations.

Lay
and laid-back recluses, anchorites and hermits -
atheist, agnostic or innocent
of pointless 'spiritual' considerations
- are misanthropes to be admired
far more than the religious kind
obsessed with afterlife
and sins and sex and their purgations.

'The Way of the World'.

Money
has no mercy
and millions
of friends
(not to mention
hangers-on).

Throughout my life I have made friends easily

but I have lost almost all of them and not-unwillingly.
Now I am happier than I have ever been before !
Upon reflection I must say that I cannot read people
at all well, nor connect with them, though I have imagined
deep connection when making love, a bond, a linking
which was of course sheer fantasy - wishful thinking ?

Mimetically, almost-mechanistically,
'other people' seem to think one thing,
say another, and do a third thing - or nothing. This perplexes me,
and the distance I feel from them in my perplexity
they also feel, translating it as wayward unsociability.
"You always have to be different from everyone else," my aunt used to say
to me - as Eddy Bellegueule's father also said.
I didn't have to try. I simply seem to have a different perspective,
- "at an angle to the social world" as Cavafy said -
which adds an extra layer of thick glass between the two
already between me and them, me and you.

Riposte to Langston Hughes.

Abandon dreams !
(especially the American one)
- for when dreams die
life need not become
a bird that cannot fly,
nor an unfertile field frozen with snow -
but the basis for a satisying work of art
that you'll be happy to let go.

Is everyone a snob who snubs another ?

I think so.  And there are different kinds of snob -
social, intellectual, religious, racial, inverted...
I am of the æsthetic kind, and, like Oscar Wilde
have been to prison (but only 3 months, and not hard labour).
He was not a snob, however - though he chose
the reprehensible son of a staid
Marquess and not simpler, albeit rougher, trade.

The only art that's 'true' is the art of living -
happiness - contentment not run aground -
which most people seem to have no interest in.
One of its skills is knowing how to separate
the erotic from the æsthetic both ways round,
and not waste your time with the messy, unattractive psyche
of someone merely - and for the moment
or for a few years - sexy.

"The Liberation of Mankind is the...

[click to enlarge]

- from John Dewey's essay Means and Ends, in Leon Trotsky's 

Their Morals and Ours: The Marxist View of Morality

Hmmm....

Mere Statistics

Weekly Stats Report: 25 Jan - 31 Jan 2016
Project: Masturbation
URL: http://www.beyond-the-pale.uk.masturbation.htm

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	13	15	14	19	2	11	8	82	12
Unique Visits	10	10	12	15	2	8	8	65	9
First Time Visits	10	6	11	14	2	8	8	59	8
Returning Visits	0	4	1	1	0	0	0	6	1

 * * *

Weekly Stats Report: 25 Jan - 31 Jan 2016
Project: Bektashis
URL: http://www.beyond-the-pale.uk/albanian4.htm

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	11	9	2	5	6	3	8	44	6
Unique Visits	10	6	2	5	5	3	6	37	5
First Time Visits	5	6	2	4	5	3	6	31	4
Returning Visits	5	0	0	1	0	0	0	6	1

 * * *

Weekly Stats Report: 25 Jan - 31 Jan 2016
Project: Shoplifting
URL: http://www.beyond-the-pale.uk/shoplifting.htm

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	2	0	0	6	4	3	2	17	2
Unique Visits	1	0	0	3	2	1	1	8	1
First Time Visits	1	0	0	2	2	1	1	7	1
Returning Visits	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0

* * *

Weekly Stats Report: 25 Jan - 31 Jan 2016
Project: Rumi
URL: http://www.beyond-the-pale.uk/rumi.htm

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	2	0	6	0	1	1	2	12	2
Unique Visits	2	0	4	0	1	1	1	9	1
First Time Visits	2	0	3	0	1	1	1	8	1
Returning Visits	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0

* * *

Weekly Stats Report: 25 Jan - 31 Jan 2016
Project: Sapgir
URL: http://www.beyond-the-pale.uk/sapgir.htm

Summary

	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total	Avg
Pageloads	3	1	2	0	0	0	1	7	1
Unique Visits	1	1	2	0	0	0	1	5	1
First Time Visits	1	1	2	0	0	0	1	5	1
Returning Visits	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

---

...AND SO ON...

SO WHAT ?