Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Tuesday 31 January 2017

Monday 30 January 2017

Sunday 29 January 2017

Hygiene-harpies

in the hospital
wiped my armpits
in May 2014.
Since then,
I'm glad to say,
they haven't been.

Saturday 28 January 2017

Misery

comes in all forms and intensities.
Our dog Oscar howled heart-stoppingly
when his ball was stuck in a bush.

Friday 27 January 2017

The weather in Caylus

Perhaps taking after my mother,
who was a meteorologist during World War II,
I love weather-maps and clouds.
This winter, the weather in Caylus
has been extraordinary: most days
being bright and sunny,
and warm in the sunshine,
most nights being cold and often frosty -
since the beginning of December.
Yesterday's West Europe satellite pictures
looked like this:

click to enlarge

















Much of France is cloudless except for the Mediterranean coastline
and the Massif Central.  Caylus (the blue X) remains sunny
and dry - for there has been no significant rain
since early last summer. I guess lawn-watering will not be allowed
in 2017. The waterfall at Caylus is just a trickle.
Of the British Isles (most of the Balkans, and the Baltic)
 only part of Scotland is free of dense cloud.

Thursday 26 January 2017

Capitalism

like Christianity, its Satanic father,
is as strong as cities.
Pagan originally meant rural,
when there was countryside to hide in.

Wednesday 25 January 2017

R.L. Stevenson, he say:

It is better to travel than to arrive.
This is certainly not true literally,
not even nowadays,
but boy! isn't it true sensually.

Tuesday 24 January 2017

Monday 23 January 2017

Sunday 22 January 2017

Inscrutable

is how "Orientals" were most often described
by the British. I find everyone
inscrutable.  I have only 'vibes'
to go on, and they are not at all reliable.
People, alas, are not as readable as dogs.
People are like cats - inscrutable.

Saturday 21 January 2017

Mindless,

almost literally mindless
are the millions whose behaviour,
attitudes and thoughts are governed
by Tweets, Facebook, other media,
family, religion, peers and employers
- amongst others.

Friday 20 January 2017

President Trump

will likely not be worse
than (and maybe not even as bad as) Presidents
Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Reagan,
George W. Bush, and JFK
(who slid the USA and allies
into the Viêt-Nam débâcle)
- so what has all the moaning and groaning been about ?

listen to this >

Thursday 19 January 2017

The preposterous vanity of 'Human Dignity'

is daily mocked by millions
whose lives are ruled by fear and cheap desire :
a vague promise of heaven and the much-more-detailed threat of hell.

Wednesday 18 January 2017

Truth to tell,

'truth' is
not necessarily
'serious' -
which is why good jokes are good.

Tuesday 17 January 2017

I hold these truths to be self-evident:

Intelligence is no guarantee of being right.
Imitation is a stronger force than innovation.
People who think that they think are usually just thinking that they think.
(I am one of them.)

Sunday 15 January 2017

Paradox

In streets over-bright
the modern flâneur
can find freedom
only at night.

Saturday 14 January 2017

Words are addictive.

Invented to dupe,
they promise connection,
are pushed on us early
so we'll always use them
like opium,
them and no other
form of disclosure,
because we're asleep
until we are corpses.

(Rudyard Kipling wrote:
Words are the most powerful drug used by Mankind.)

Friday 13 January 2017

George Herbert, he say:

"Give me simplicitie, that I may live."
That's quite a tall order,
especially when we regard simple people
as backward in one way or another.

Thursday 12 January 2017

I'd rather be unpleasant

than false -
which is why most people
sooner or later
do not think I am pleasant.


Wednesday 11 January 2017

My problem with Socialism

is that there is so little
in all those publications
and protestations
and enunciations
about the rights of dogs.

Tuesday 10 January 2017

Yesterday

I went to see my future
and pissed on it :
my grave which overlooks the river
is surprisingly empty.
And no snowdrops yet.

Monday 9 January 2017

Silly Willy Blake

"The Tygers of Wrath
are" most certainly not
"wiser than the horses of instruction."

Saturday 7 January 2017

On reading another excellent novel.

When the best in thousands of people
is what they write
why bother with actual human beings
in the flesh ?

Friday 6 January 2017

The problem with moralities

is that
if they are elastic they are hypocritical
and favour the rich and powerful,
while if they are rigid
they're cruelly totalitarian.
So...?

Thursday 5 January 2017

Einstein, he say:

'We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that we had when we created them.'
- which is why we continue to create problems.

Wednesday 4 January 2017

Lines written while listening to Jeremy Irons reading T.S. Eliot

There are no cocktail smells in bars,
and, regrettably, no sumptuous odour of cigars
- just noise. People are so noisy
even when they think that they are being quiet.
They talk of mortgages and diet.
So little of our noise is musical
and much of our music as banal
as the talk in "rest-rooms" or in bars
where no-one is allowed to smoke cigars.
If "conversation" were banned instead
just think how stammerers could get ahead.

Tuesday 3 January 2017

Sleep

is Grace from the Great Above,
Sanctuary of the Sensual,
Protection from Ambition,
the Busy and the Toxic:
the tireless and dreamy
Companion of Love.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-cure-for-insomnia-is-to-fall-in-love-with-sleep-again

Monday 2 January 2017

More from Seneca

on why the rich hate the poor:
Hoc habent pessimum animi magna fortuna insolentes:
quos laeserunt et oderunt.


Those favoured by fortune hate those whom they have wronged.

Sunday 1 January 2017

What is there to celebrate ?

In olden days, what people celebrated at Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving, was their survival. For most of the population the feasts of Christmas Eve and the Eve of St Sylvester were the only time of the year that they had meat, the pig - fed on the plentiful acorns of the oak forests - having been killed at the beginning of December, and every part used "except the squeal".

In remote parts of France, where there was no wheat or even rye flour, they baked a whole huge loaf of chestnut-flour at Christmas, and ate it throughout the year, dunked in thin soup or acidic wine.  This was their staple, and its communal baking was a special event at a special time.  They were surviving.  Chestnut bread is much more nourishing than wheat bread (which is nearly as toxic as sugar), but rather hard to digest.  The rest of the vitamin intake came from turnips, rutabagas, leeks and wild food such as nettles.  Even today, people can be seen scouring the woods for insipid fungi, and the roadsides for edible herbs from bryony to wild asparagus and fennel.

Now, of course,all has changed.  The remote parts of France have, like everywhere in the parts of the world run by pinkish-grays, become obscenely rich.  The old feasts have become meaningless, retained like the living dead by the necromantic necrophilia of Commerce.  All that can now be celebrated is Trade.  Adam Smith's "Nation of Shopkeepers" has become the planet of shopkeepers, willing to use any ploy to increase profit.  Since we live in luxury unimagined by Roman Emperors, we celebrate in like fashion : jadedly, neurotically or maniacally.  And we haven't the cultural wherewithal even to have orgies.  Christianity and Islam killed them a long time ago, and the orgiastic in our brains has simply been converted to greed.

What would Jesus have done at Christmas ?  He would have begged to be crucified.  Or at least smothered by another "towel-head".

Or he would have drunk hemlock from the roadside.