every time I leave my house
Our lives are crowded with faces
that read like made-up languages
the minds behind them
as inscrutable as those of cats
and my own mind
mysterious to myself
like a fronded rock-pool
What happened where was I
in that first year of life
Was it fog-blindingly terrible
and why, in my
mother-agonisingly 'maladjustment'
did I not start wondering
till I was 81
and why did I never once mind being fatherless ?
Hallow E'en (Christian version: All Hallows Eve)
was, for Western Celts, the brief closing, once a year,
of the gap between the worlds of the living and the dead
(a bit like the Nordic ginnungagap),
and (for The Sensitive) the difference
between seen and unseen realities was blurred.
It had nothing to do with crude and childishly-absurd
ghosts and zombies, nothing to do with bats or masks
or pumpkins (which did not grow in Western Europe),
nothing to do with fireworks, 'trick or treat' (an American
capitalist insertion), or parties. Hallow E'en
was a hallowed, perilous, unstable time,
a flickering twilight of The Normal - the opposite
of the vulgar, stupid, profitable travesty it has become,
tawdry and spiritually obscene.
in an aeroplane
then a few stops
on a motor-bus
what is most clear
to my ear
is my tinnitus.
(Where do we get off ?
What did you say ?
Speak louder !)
is moral philosophy –
and even it is rife with
don't-rock-the-boat practitioners.
a film from 1967 which featured
a pudgy-puppy Dustin Hoffman
and close-harmonious Simon + Garfunkel.
Here is my IMDb review:
I wonder what I would have thought of this film when it came out...when I was 25. At 82 I found it completely baffling, and actually rather disturbing.
Is it a satire on the American Nuclear Family and the oppression of parents ? Or is it a comment on the mores of a country beyond decadence ? Or is it a simple horror-film to frighten queer men like me away from the hideousness of rapacious and compulsive heterosexuality ?
The epicene but randy wimp Dustin Hoffman is quite unbelievable. As an ex-autist I could quite understand the things he said and how he said them, but not his actions, which were Pavlovian.
The beginning was good: student almost driven mad by his ambitious-for-him parents and their rich white bourgeois friend tries very ineptly (and unbelievably) to avoid the ghastly celebrations they have organised to mark his graduation and his birthday.
Then came the Harpy: Mrs Robinson, one of the creepiest monsters in all cinema. Chilling, scrotum-freezing bedroom-scenes ensue.
The most distressing scene in the film, however, was that of the two traumatised chimpanzees trembling and cuddling each other in a hideous, brutal zoo which I hope has since been closed. (But it probably hasn't.)
I couldn't watch it through to the end. Any ending would have been bad, given the nasty story.
This sort of sneakily-sub-pornographic film (shown in the Kingdom of Iran not so long after it came out) was surely one small ingredient in the socio-economic-cultural-amoral-political entity which the Appalling Ayatollah called The Great Satan.
(I am actually a fan of Mr Hoffman, due to his brilliant performances in Midnight Cowboy and Tootsie.
I should add that I had to download via PTP from my favourite Russian website a version with subtitles, since the mumbly Ms Bancroft is totally incomprehensible to the partially deaf.)
that he called Scratch (Gratte)
and was reputedly fond of,
although he thought non-human animals
were mere automata, and presumably
had no access to anti-flea powder.
Biologist Javier Burgos with a painting he believes to be
one of a series called Monomania
by Théodore Géricault,
illustrating drunkenness.
is that (as with every other -ocracy)
there is no democracy of the sane,
or the accountable.
invited its readers to comment on an Opinion Piece
about Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the near-Stalinist
'leader of the French Left'.
Mélenchon and the Judeophobe left.
This whole complex and
tangled issue could certainly do without Walter-Ulbricht Mélenchon sticking his
rotting, anti-Jewish oar into the m
[Please can we stop
using 'anti-semitic' to mean anti-Jewish ? Most of the people of the
Middle East are Semites (Sons of Shem rather than Ham). Iranians are the big
Indo-European exception.]
It is very hard to be
pro-Jewish as I am, while being anti-Israel. Israeli policy towards the
Palestinians is not so different to that of people of the Western Russian
Empire towards Jews. After independence, Arabs were progressively
stripped of rights and protections. So now, little by little, Israel has
created a burgeoning world-wide dislike of its Jewish inhabitants (increasingly
right-wing and narrowly Hasidic as they have streamed from Russia and Eastern Europe
over the past 30 years) because of its anti-Palestinian policies, which are not
even 'inclusivist' - as is the mendacious pretence here in France.
is only part of time (if it exists)
sometimes, for some.
How can time be 'how you spend your love' ?
It can only be the series of illusions
between birth and death
and all the whens and whats and whys and wheres
and hows and whos that punctuate and puncture it.
more a complete change of diet:
'I finished the book feeling,
as I’m sure she wants us to feel,
that understanding is an overrated process,
merely an ersatz moment of empathy.'
– Julie Myerson on Shame (La Honte) by Annie Ernaux
Humans have introduced more than 37,000 alien species
to places they do not naturally occur.
– The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
I guess these include the Yucca, the Agave and the Beschorneria
below my balcony.
tell me on their wine-bottle stopper
that they are Smart Green and
'100% recyclable',
but don't say that the plastic 'cork' industry
is devastating eastern Portugal
where the cork-oak forests
and their fauna used to thrive.
Should I send them their stoppers for recycling ?
We conquer Fear,
each other,
The Enemy,
Everest,
Nature,
Space –
But not (of course)
the insane desire to conquer
for the sake conquering :
a defining attribute of the human race.
#teeming, scheming, screaming
It is a depressing fact
that those who have never suffered
from 'depression', the inner abyss,
cannot imagine it. For them
it is a mere abstract.
'In 1937 more than 20,000 bodies
had been found in the streets
or on the waste ground of the city.
'By 1938 with the help of the [Sino-Japanese] war
the number of corpses collected had risen
to over one hundred thousand
in the International Settlement Alone.'
– J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip.
From the same work:
'Let me give you and example, Jim, of what happens when cash and the idea of profit dtrike root in a country unaccustomed to them - like Burma.
It seems that there's a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less that "the cheapest will survive". This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-ecnomic values tend to be eliminated.'
is a kind of 'brainwashing'
based on the idea that our 'psychological problems'
come from 'unhelpful or biased ways of thinking'
rather than rational reactions to the conditions
and/or the global reality in which we are living –
not to mention the biased ways of thinking
of those who influence our lives and the world,
including those who practise or impose
'Cognitive Behavioural Therapy'.
The cpountries which embrace it most enthusiastically
are the United States of America and North Korea.
Those who do worst
in human societies
are those least capable of
(or least successful in)
subterfuge (hypocrisy).
(But there is a fine line
between subterfuge and strategy.)
laid down on the marble
its tortoiseshell back facing up.
We are not born with the dead,
as Old Possum the phoney philosopher said,
but of them and through them
and sometimes despite them,
prismatically.
Everything that we make derives
from the cruel reflections of our monstrous minds,
even more separate from reality than from each other,
and thus the Great Death arrives
climatically.
I once lived among humankind,
and found them in their generality
to be cruel and cold,
and yet could mention the names
of three or four that were like angels."
– Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture.
An epitaph for us all.
of consumerist pleasure
joy is an even greater anomaly
than despair.
 |
| from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam |
How does a feminist put aside all she believes
to cheer on a rapist? asks Howard Jacobson of 'Caucasian' Hamas sympathisers in Europe ?
about human life
because bare life is an accusation
against man's dominion of the earth."
– Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture.
should surely be something better
than women wanting to be
mere macho-men with wombs.
(Proxy-men as Howard Jacobson neatly put it.)
and there's Anorgasm
where nothing happens,
and there's barely-perceptible
Nanorgasm,
and then there's Onanorgasm
which is what you make it.
Two books I picked up recently:
The cover of the Allende is by far the best thing about it,
despite the fatuous title. The come-hither cover of the Gregory
belies a work of considerable depth, subtlety and scholarship.
Well, whaddayaknow!
One in seven adults and one in eight children
may be hooked on ultra-processed foods (UPFs),
experts have said,
prompting calls for some products to be labelled as addictive.
also:
Looking at your phone while crapping isn’t just unhygienic.
A gastroenterologist has warned
it could result in haemorrhoids – or worse.
The average phone screen is said to carry more bacteria
than a public toilet seat.
Coming across the Pomeranian place-name Stettin,
now (again) Szczecin in Poland (thanks to Uncle Joe Stalin),
I had recourse to the abovementioned
dully-variegated online encyclopedic resource:
From 1683 to 1812, one Jew was permitted to reside in Stettin,
and an additional Jew was allowed to spend a night in the city
in case of "urgent business".[55]
These permissions were repeatedly withdrawn between 1691 and 1716,
also between 1726 and 1730...
Some pictures by me at the Strangeness show at Caylus-Arts from today until the end of October.
 |
| Threshing Fish |
 |
| Sketch towards a never-completed portrait. |
 |
| SS Paul the Hermit and Anthony meet in the Syrian Desert |
 |
| In the corridor, Colin Castell, co-director of Caylus-Arts, with one of his paintings on the easel. |
We (especially men)
tend to say I think that...
rather than I feel that...
which is why one of humankind's
most famous, narcissistic
and influential dimwits wrote
in pompous Latin, Cogito, ergo sum
(I think, therefore I am),
rather than Sentio, ergo sum
(I feel, therefore I am)
– thus contributing in no small measure
to suffering on Earth.
Of course I do not exist! But maybe you
do for better, for worse, for nothing.
There are dreams and dream-clouds
but no dreamers. No dreamers exist,
only the dreams of no-dreamers drifting
dissolving, semi-sidereal.
There are gaps in the dream-clouds
and holes in the dreams.
I am one of those ethereal
holes, those lacunæ, those cracks
in the feeling of nothing –
a waste of good suicide-material.
the last emperors rush
like animated, empty jars
through caviar and champagne slush
to rule the moon and Mars.
'The Americans'
(who worship
成功 Success)
cannot forgive 'The Chinese'
for being successful.
