“When you talk about serious things,

you must not talk about them in a serious way,”
said Orest Pastukh, an Ukrainian comic actor...
“If we all spoke seriously about war and peace,
everybody would go mad.”

Duchamp the art-thief.

The famous Fountain
was the 'creation' of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
(R.Mutt = armut = starving)
who died in poverty in Paris,
and had lived in Philadelphia
where the notorious urinal was made,
to where she fled from a shoplifting charge in New York.

I always disliked Disney films.

I found them crude and sentimental.
The only animated (cartoon) films that I liked
were made in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

But here is an interesting Disney 'offshoot'.

A postcard home from a Franco prison
written and decorated by Fernando Izquierdo Montes
who was executed by firing squad in May 1943 at the age of 27.

An Australian Dwelling.

A pastel palace, Kew East, Victoria.  More here.

Growing-up

is like finding
a new-born puppy
in a bin.

 

Cities spawn cities

and devastate all countryside
with their incremental,
insatiable demands.

Woke up this morning*...

the first thought that came to me
was I can't believe that I'm one year short of 83.

I feel that I'm 12 years old
during a school holiday
with a slight pain in my knee.

*A common opening to a blues song.

The problem with the most intelligent

high-achievers
is that they don't go into politics,

but join the loonies
to plan motorways on the moon
(and perhaps an opera-house)
to ensure an ever more frightening future.

And the Name of the Beast

(of the Apocalypse)

with all its heads and horns and crowns

is The Future.

'French Window'.

French
because it opens inwards
like windows in France
(hence no need for window-cleaners).
But it's a door,
which in most places mostly open inwards.

It is now usually called a French Door.

Surrealogy.

 

Applied Artificial Intelligence.

Ambrosi: Tree.

 

"The Sexual Behaviour of Bats...

...never ceases to amaze:
 males urinating into wing sacs to attract females,
 males mating with torpid females,
 female relatives sharing sexual partners,
 fellatio,
 and now mating without intromission!”

said Professor Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol.

The British Isles in the 19th century.

 "There were no restrictions on who could come into the country:
no passports or visas required, no need to prove that you had means of support. Nobody could be forced into military service.
Nobody could be jailed for saying or writing something against the establishment. Nobody got extradited on political grounds.
Freedom turned London into Europe's beachcomber, collecting refugees washed up by political change: Poles from the insurrection of 1831; Germans and Hungarians from 1848; Italians who had fought alongside Garibaldi in the 1850s and '60s; French radicals from the Commune of 1871, even France's ex-emperor Napoleon III.
Britons took pride in their country's role as 'an asylum of nations', a beacon of liberty.
Only Switzerland was so permissive, and Switzerland didn't teem with the possibilities of the world's greatest city."

~ The Dawn Watch, a biography of Joseph Conrad, by Maya Jasanoff.

How has the mighty fallen!

The box jellyfish

has twenty-four eyes,
with four different types specialised for different tasks. 

Scallops have around 200 eyes of the same type,
which include pupils that can dilate
and two retinas...

https://aeon.co/essays

Wags and Wogs

Who would have thought
that the American word scalawag
originated from a term for Shetland ponies
from the island of Scalloway)
via Scalag, Gaelic for servant.
There may be an influence from the word wag:
a playful and/or witty male.

Polliwog is a dialect word for tadpole,
and thus a term for a sailor
who has never crossed The Line (Equator)....

...which perhaps influenced
the now rarely-used word golliwog,
for 'a type of grotesque blackface doll'
coined by English children's book author
and illustrator Florence K. Upton in 1895.

Many kids had golliwogs when I was young.
I didn't, though I always wanted to be black.
I had a hand-made, mid-brown teddy-bear
called Dandy who had two quite different eyes,
and had belonged to my uncle Mac.

A Post-it Note to Gladys Knight and Kris Kristofferson.

Night is for sleeping thru...away;
Lord, help me make it thru the day.

God is Change.

 – Octavia E. Butler.

A shameful statistic.

Less than 1% of the world’s discarded clothing is re-worn.

In prehistoric times, were wolf-skins ever thrown away ?

'@justnoxy tweets

I can’t watch TV / movies / without subtitles.
It’s just too hard to follow.' writes Raymond. 

It's not so difficult to get subtitle files from subtitle-sites. 
The only difficulty is getting ones which fit the lips on-screen. 
A lot of actors, like a lot of people, mumble.
Lip-reading (especially in French) can fail you. 
But people's conversation usually isn't worth hearing
and most films are bad because
most films are made in Hollywood, world capital of
loud Nothing Worth Listening To (or watching).

When you try to put the hearing-aids in the wrong ears
the panic makes you completely deaf.
But I have found that when you tell people you're deaf
they either leave you alone (which is best)
or write the Important Thing down...  
though it might be a telephone number.

Phones are the worst – especially
when people mumble or speak too fast. 
There are no facial expressions,
no lips to interpret, and panic can rise. 
If you miss a word (such as not or don't' )
you're scundered.

I have a sticker on my car which says
"I lip-read" (Je lis sur les lèvres)
though this doesn't stop the po-facedly gleeful
traffic-police from doing their fine job
of making you feel like a worm.

On the whole, though,
it's not so bad to be 'hard of hearing'.
The high notes are absent or faint
when I listen to music, but that's OK. 
It's just my way of hearing now.
It's no worse than having poor sight
and losing your glasses.
I don't get Too Much Information.

Raymond (a poet as safe for a syllabus
as Safe Séamus) might remind me that
I could hear the Archduke Trio quite well, once...
yes, but only (as Malcolm will tell you)
by getting or grabbing a seat at the front.
I had been going deaf for a long time,
unknowing.

What might be worse is the shyness
that comes with even slight autism,
the stammering, an inability
to stand up and speak, to perform,
to introduce or promote myself to strangers,
to small-talk.  Then there's  
Saying The Wrong Thing,
and judging people by their misleading faces. 
I have always skulked on the fringes of any group
more than four.  Skulking is safe, as safe as shoplifting.

I should add the good news
that there is aidar, rather like gaydar,
which enables people with hearing-aids
to find each other and talk
about their hearing-aids...and maybe more. 

Excuse me,

can you tell me where I can find the latrine ?

Cathar fortress, Puilaurens, Aude
(Southern France)

LONER

is a masculine noun. 
For a woman
it is much more difficult.

The cure is simple...

but, alas! no longer available.

Dear Ancestry.com

Thank you for the results of my DNA test.

If I send more money
could you make them show
that I have at least some
African/North African heritage ?
For seventy-seven years I have wanted to be black,
but the results show that I am entirely
of Scottish and Swedish ancestry.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Little White Tony.

From a song by Boris Grebenshikov.

Login, password...one two three.
And they're all burned from the inside out
And they're walking around with their heads screwed on.
Urbanised
Stupefied
Stacked up
Dehumanised

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zW8VZoEYWg

Господи, прости, ну и гад же ты

Ты и все твои гаджеты

Логин, пароль, один, два, три

И все уже выжжены изнутри

И ходят воцирковлённые

Обухотворённые

Штабелями сложенные

И обезбоженные

The Withering.

To add to the Israelis'

mostly self-inflicted woes:

since they returned to Palestine

the Jordan hardly flows.

Despised and rejected of men*

I think that it's fine to be rejected,
but to be universally despised as well
might make me suicidally dejected.

*Isaiah 53, 3

Unfortunately,

net curtains
are easier to hide behind
than dirty windows
(indicating Sloth).

Why not have both ?

Adjective.

 I have invented a new word:
Americanslick.

I thought of it while reading
some poems by the by-many-celebrated
poet Buddy Wakefield.

Three Politicians.

 

Salifou Lindo (Cameroun)

Armistice Day 2023.

The British and the French commemorate
the end of the First World War
in Western Europe. 
But it never ended
in 'the Middle East';
it just 'developed' through the land-grabs
of the British and the French.

Progress.

No path, nor romantic poet's winding stair,

just festering slope down to where

the tottering piles and pyres

and lakes of noxious slime

pooling in desert

will shortly be – and there 

in due or undue course

forget forgetting, forgo forgoing,

deny denying,

and, staggering past the treadless tyres,

and the endless slashing, mowing,

follow the faded peach-petals (plastic)

up the sewer of night fantastic

back to the whining end of amputated time.

I should be dead!

Old glass leaches very tiny quantities of lead,
and constant use, especially as vessels for alcohol,
could result in lead-poisoning.

Oh dear!  I have been drinking wine
exclusively from antique (Georgian/Victorian)
glasses and decanters since 1973.
I wonder what the long accumulation
of nanograms of lead have done to me ?

In the same newspaper I learned that

People [like me] who live alone and never see friends or family
have a 77% higher risk of dying from any cause,
and an even higher risk of dying from heart disease or stroke, compared with those who see friends or family daily,
according to a study.

Totalitarian.

The proportion of people
who have resisted smartphones,
facebook, X (formerly twittler)
and all the other 'platforms')
is much smaller than those
(mostly trade-unionists)
who actively resisted Hitler.

Death is less frightening

than living people,
most of whom seem
half-dead in their heads.

It could be so
much fun
to live with a crow.

有 歎

What Du Fu* might write today

my energy has ebbed and sobbed away
my grey beard straggles towards mortality
and war is raging everywhere on earth
where are the birds ?
over half the animals have died
mountains have been cut in two
or removed completely
great gorges have been drowned
and refugees are fleeing heat and genocide

*China's greatest poet, living when Beowulf was composed,
during the T'ang period.

Note: Scholars and academics should never attempt to translate poetry;
they are way too tied, too literal, too stuck in academic mud and literary mire.

On the occasion of her 80th birthday

I heard by accident a famous song* by Joni Mitchell
whom I had never heard before :
trite words, boring non-tune...so I clicked
on a youTube suggestion and got this

and I thought what a world! where relatively
talentless, crude and overblown
Americans are adulated, rich and famous,
while great musicians in most other places
are unappreciated and unknown.

* 'Both sides now'

Since writing this I heard her sing My Old Man
with great musicianship (and, of course, back-up.

Moralities

invented by men

are mostly weaponised

hypocrisies.

We are all owned

by 'enterprise'.

When I decided I was queer (aged 39)
I was keen to enter a 'community' of men who did not like sport
or competitiveness or noisy, banal music,
or 'the gutter press' or unpleasant virility...
a community of men like my semi-autistic self. 
What silly fantasy!

Now queerness has been taken over
not just by American vulgarity and vainglory
but also by the unplayful industry of sport.

The Asian Gay Games are now
making money in Hong Kong.
Maybe Qatar or even Saudi Arabia
will one day invest and make a fortune
out of promoting (if not hosting) Gay Olympics.

In Morocco

as elsewhere
tourists whinge
at being hustled. 

But I guess
that if you dress
like a tourist
you may thus be treated.

This is me in Morocco, photographed by Malcolm.

Won't you come into my bosoms ?

Tacca chantrieri

said the Bat-flower to the fly.

Often, the 'bitterest enemies'

(almost always anti-democrats)
help each other 'maximally'.

For example:
Ghazi Hamad (leader of Hamas)
and Benjamin Netanyahu
(prime minister of Israel).
play their intoxicating,
ecstatic, two-hander
while hundreds of thousands suffer,
and millions may yet be affected.

Autocrats and extremists
get on like a house on fire.

Not quite all anyone needs to know about Christianity.

An Edict issued by pope Nicholas V in 1452
granted the Portuguese king Alfonso V the right to
“invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue
all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever,
and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,
and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions,
possessions, and all movable and immovable goods
whatsoever held and possessed by them
and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”.

No surprise !

Large-scale warfare occurred in Europe
 ‘1,000 years earlier than previously thought’.

and maybe 1,000 years before that...

Jews and Israelis quite rightly

tell us all the time about Hitler's
Holocaust but don't choose
(or perhaps know) to mention
Stalin's, which more slowly disposed
of at least twice as many non-Jews.

In war

it's usually better
to be killed than to be maimed.

In England
it was usually better not to be Irish.