Jony Ive,

"a darling of Silicon Valley
since overseeing the design of the iPhone, claims that

'Humanity deserves better'".

Another nail in your coffin.

 

After five whole days

of a catchy theme from an early
piano concerto by Mozart, my ear-worm
changed this morning to a few bars
from Dvořák's 12th string quartet.

In days of yore, adolescents like me
would write to East European embassies
to ask for the freebies they lavishly bestowed.
From the Romanian embassy I was sent an LP
of music which they insisted was not
Romanian Gypsy Music which I had asked for,
because music was either Romanian or Gypsy, not both.

Accompanying the Supraphon LP
from the Czechoslovak embassy in London
was an irritated cold-war note to say
that they objected to the tag American
on Dvořák's loveliest quartet,
which he composed in the USA.

A long time ago

(just a few decades)
my poems and haikai were praised
by respected, pacifistic
writer, reviewer, translator,
poet and haiku-composer
James Kirkup,*
and I was invited to his Pyrenean home.
Unfortunately, he (famously eristic)
'fell out' with me soon after.
Why couldn't I for once
have been a 'brown-noser' ?

*who translated the Guinean
writer Camara Laye's disputed 
Radiance of the King 
(Le regard du Roi) into English.
It is the title of one of my paintings:

Summertime -

and the fishing is easy.

A Gatekeeper Moth.

photo by Wili Cave

 

After the last two

(if not three) Covid-19 vaccinations
my mood dropped considerably and unpleasantly
for at least two weeks.

"COVID-19 vaccination increased the risks of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and sleep disorders while reducing the risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Therefore, special cautions are necessary for administering additional COVID-19 vaccinations to populations vulnerable to psychiatric Adverse Effects." 

   
– https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02627-0

I will not be getting another.

But see here.

The phrase (or meme)

'I'm not dead yet'
has been uttered by all and sundry –
princes, billionaires and goat-herds,
(and Monty Python, more famously).
But it has never been quoted
as anyone's actual last words.

*

The actual last words
of a prisoner of conscience
to a torturer
in an Assad-period Syrian prison were:
I'm going to tell God what you did.

I was born to disappoint

my ravished-virgin mother,
and I never let her down.
Even better,
she never knowingly let me down,
and in due course she seemed
quite happy with her lot.

One of several coincidental factors

which led to the unfortunate success
of early Christianity was the laziness of the plebs*
who were first attracted by it. To be able
to stay put and pray and worship a conveniently
invisible god was a good deal easier than to traipse
from shrine to shrine, statue to statue, temple
to temple to offer money or petition for a better life
which was unlikely to arrive.  For much less effort
and ritual (apart from once-only baptism) they
could expect eternal happiness in an afterlife
in an overworld quite unlike the underworld that
Greeks, Romans and Germans expected.

* The demos of the Greeks, whose oafishness
will inevitably destroy demo-cracy.

Ne obliviscaris.

The Nazis,
occupying vast Eastern territories
could transport Jews (and others)
for extermination almost wherever they liked.
The Jews,
with selective tunnel-vision
and occupying only the coveted West Bank,
can only annihilate the (relatively
small number of) Untermenschen-

Philistines on-site in Gaza.

 

Circuses, no bread.

It is unpleasant to consider
the trillions of dollars spent
on making mindless entertainment
for well-fed millions, while
even more millions live
in misery and want.

 

'Bon secours', ha! ha! ha!

Bon Secours is satanic shorthand for
an ever-present help in trouble,
perpetual succour
for the needy and distressed.

The Sisters of Our Lady of Bon Secours order
is part of an international healthcare conglomerate
worth billions in the US,

and guilty of mass infanticide in Ireland alone.

The crimes of the Catholic church are global.
and perpetual.

Other churches also are active.

Memory

is a liar to itself,
as, often, is romantic love.

The Capitalist Dream.

Harmonious inequality.

It's a matter of opinion, really.

Which is more worth-while :
the memorising of accumulated facts
or the widening of awareness ?

It is rare to experience both equally
through education.

'Roomster'

was the model of a car
I saw today.  How long
before I see the ultimate model,
Doomster ?

Oh! me, of little understanding.

I have never had it.
I don't understand it;
I'm fairly sure that it is
cultural-parental:
Fear of The Other,
to which I've always been attracted.

Brilliant neologism.

Bring it on !

DE-DOLLARISATION.

Bad news.

There is no good news.

Bombastic Museum

diminishes the artefacts it houses.

The shame and the guilt

descend, not because I dribble
before and after,
but that I contribute even more
to ecological disaster
by changing my underwear every day.

Wealth won't buy you sanity,

much less happiness.

The world’s richest man regularly consumed ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms during his rise to political prominence, anonymous sources familiar with his activities told the Times. 

His drug use reportedly intensified
as he donated $275m to Trump’s presidential campaign. 
He later wielded significant power through his role spearheading the “department of government efficiency”,
or DoGE.

He is one of those joyless people with unlimited wealth, medicated health and depressing paucity of mind and spirit.

meanwhile, in another part of the forest of newsprint,

Azar Nafisi, Iranian-American author of Lolita in Tehran
and Republic of the Imagination,
says she is starting to feel the same fear
that she had in Iran before she fled.

Though wolves are not mentioned

hatred of them spread
in North America
like and with the Gospel.

*

Rarely since the death of Jesus
has the Catholic church taken
a moral stand on anything beyond
or above the height of human genitals.

'Half of the Tree of Life'

has died since I was born.

Haute-Couture

photo by Robert Wun

 

Dumpling for thought.

'Great talent can produce bad art.'

Anselm Kiefer, self-proclaimed genius.

Despite the lack of buccal interpenetration,

the good thing about solo sex
with prostate trouble or senility
is that you can daily enjoy
the excitement and expectation
of genital and nipple stimulation
without the disappointment
of ejaculation.

Snail-song.

It is of the greatest importance
to be unimportant in earnest
and at home in silence. 

Ah, Progress.

The paranoid concern
of 19th century European patriarchs
was Self-pollution, which now has,
due to them, become Global.

The worst thing

about hotels today
is that no mature and bearded groom
stretches protectively across the threshold
of my room.

Ireland's Empire

was its world-wide web
of missionary priests and nuns.
Now that we know of the lusts
and cruelty of psychologically-maimed
Sisters, Brothers and the ordained
in Ireland, it is reasonable to ask
(and ask journalists to probe)
what Christian abominations were inflicted
upon vulnerable people across the globe.

 

No nostalgia for the 1940s.

It's a long time since I could take my shoes to the cobbler
to be re-heeled ('They'll be ready Friday')
nor my jug to the milkman with his horse and cart
for milk and buttermilk sold by the quart;

nor give vegetable peelings to The Pig-Man
nor the scissors to The Scissor-Man for sharpening.

It's 60 years since The Old Shawlie
beggar-woman came to our door
and I was reprimanded
for inviting her in (she pissed on the floor).

Not even in this old French village
do kids play on the empty street...
I remember
skipping-ropes and hopscotch, whipping and guiding
a tyreless bicycle wheel along roadways with a stick;
being terrified while hurtling
down a hill in the go-cart that my cousin made
using roller-skate wheels with ball-bearings in them
(now I am incapable of more than hirpling).

I didn't rob birds' nests nor torture cats
nor join in bullying (I was the mildly bullied one),
though for a while I had a beetle-trap.

Nothing was organised.  In our free time
we had free movement,
almost unhindered comings and goings.
I liked to play in building-sites
and, alone, in ruins.

This man paints

many variations on the same still-life,
and seems not to get paint on his beard.

Claude Tournie, Montauban.

Bedint.

In a biography (of odious Upper-Class people,
notably Vita Sackville-West) which I am reading,
the very rare word 'bedint' (as noun or adjective) is used to describe a bourgeois or a 'respectable' person without 'class',
not 'well-bred' or superficially-sufficiently 'cultured'
to be acceptable to posh Edwardian society
and the post-war social whirl of the 1920s. 
Perhaps a 'naff' nouveau-riche or social upstart.
It does not appear in the etymological dictionary online,
but I found a wonderful if pedantic disquisition on the word here.

Was The Great Gatsby a bedint ? (It rhymes with 'pedant'.)

It rhymes with 'pedant'.

Herewith I add my own piece of pedantry:
the word is very similar to the Danish word Betjent,
which means an attendant or servant of the upper classes,
e.g. a maître d'hotel, or a servant of the government.  
Tjene means to serve.
(cf the Middle Dutch dienen, from the Old Dutch thienon, from the Proto-Germanic þewanōną and meant “to be of assistance to, to serve; to serve at a tavern.)
Danish Policemen are known as Politibetjente, or simply betjente.

I remember a restaurant in the early 1960s, formerly a warehouse,
latterly a night-club in Copenhagen, called Laurids Betjent...

from "The Lucyverse" substack.

 "I’ve always wondered how you become a model for Temu. Do you even have to exist? If they are human, though, I get the feeling that these people probably didn’t explicitly give their permission to be shown ejaculating oil from their belly buttons, wearing Creative Raw Sausage Tee or being the before picture for Crepey Skin Tightening Firming Cream (£8.93).

"I mean, do you think these two really understood that the afternoon of ‘work’ they did in an anonymous white-walled studio in 2022 would result in this? "

Isn't it FRIGHTFULLY interesting

that one can buy an anti-EU sticker online (in French)
but not an anti-USA one ?
Long live Freedom of Choice !

The Abolition of Dominion

will never happen,
because abolition requires dominion.
and dominion is self-perpetuating
until The End.

Meanwhile,
The anonymous author of the pamphlet Tyranipocrit Discovered (1649), condemned both ‘our Indian merchants’ for ‘robbing of the poor Indians of that which God and nature hath given them, and … mak[ing] them slaves’, and the English for ‘hunt[ing]’ the ‘poor Irish’.

The Royal Dingoes.

painting by Vincent Namatjira

 

My second-favourite ineffectual politician says

 

Meantime, my favourite ineffectual politician,
Jeremy Corbyn 
is 'being wooed' to co-found an actual
British socialist party in the Trump-Starmer
soon-to-be-yet-another-police-state.

Keeping him clean in Chemnitz,
formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt.

The primary function

of human memory
is selection
of what to remember.

What to forget
goes into
the mind's gas-chamber.

Ah, those were the days !

'Picture Post' 1945

 

Income-gaps.

In some human hierarchies
the poverty-stricken
can afford to employ
the destitute.

Dear Philippa,

Can climate change affect me bowels ?
Twenty years ago I shat (sorry to be crude !)
three times a week;
now it is twice a day. Occasionally three.
No blood.

– Anthony, SW France.

“Rich screams, wealthy whispers”

but billionaires actually run whole nations.

All of them are not just poisonous,

but also, between them, own

all sources of poison that are so far known.

European Green Lizard

 

"Death, Death to the IDF"

declared a performer at a famous English music festival.
The Israeli Defence Force is the most efficient
and soulless national killing machine outside Russia,
but the poor old BBC has got into trouble again
from Zionists, weapons-manufacturers and
slimy politicians for relaying the performance.
Hamas, quite rightly, is denounced daily,
but few whine about Islamophobia.

*

During the three-day jamboree, attended
by over 200,000 non-violent people at Glastonbury,
there was not a single riot or fracas.
So 'the gutter press' had to find something
to be outraged about.

*

Every army in history has been defeated
or betrayed. And still they arise
like dragon's teeth to defend motherlands,
fatherlands, third-cousinlands, civilisation,
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism...

Death! death! to every DF.

Here is the Dastardly, Vile
long-haired, half-naked Villain.
The BBC is again chastised.
The IDF is True unto God.

European and white American women wore

whole birds upon their heads
150 years ago. George Bernard Shaw
complained about a complete seagull
on a woman's hat,
but, more modestly, the St Kilda Wren,
unique to a tiny group of islands,
was in great demand.

Data

is a curious word, meaning no more
than Information Offered, or, in French
[informations] données, which may well be
or be compatible with idées reçues. 

But let's be clear,
data are like you and me.
If you torture them for long enough
they’ll offer up anything you want to hear.

Being a doom-nihilist, I hope not.

 

Israel is proud of its democracy and Rule Of Law.

 

Electronic Fossils are Impossible.

The plastic pen with which you write
your shopping-list could last
fifty million years.
Fifty million of them have been manufactured
in the last six months. 

Let's not bother to consider your
(largely plastic) electric car.

Only those who consume the most
have the time and education
(bur still require the inclination)
to reflect upon the Sixth Extinction.

Long after which
I hope I'll look as beautiful
and mature as this.

Homage to van Gogh.

 

Anselm Kiefer: Crows [in winter]

Crime and Virtue-signalling.

If the Well-fed of the World
were told that they could
Save the Planet
by wearing the same clothes
for a fortnight (as I do)
rather few would do it
(and certainly not to save water)
– and certainly not
by giving up internet porn,
their cars, their cats,
or (as alleged in ancient times)
their first- or last-born.

So let not the black pot of the bourgeoisie
condemn the black kettle of the arms
manufacturers, the oil behemoths,
the mining conglomerates
and the juggernauts of the food industry.

The problem for me is that I would eagerly
give my willy or my life to save the planet
– but not to save humanity.

Sometimes it is difficult

to cope with one's own consciousness
let alone other people's.

The Book

most-shoplifted
in Russia is

In the Water Wars to come

and the total war thereafter
they will bomb the dams
and free the rivers.

 

Job description.

My two political heroes:
the artist and the comedian.

Edi Rama & Volodomyr Zelenskyy

 

Two works by Edi Rama:

and a link here to a page of his watercolours.

If I want to feel

less bad about being human
I imagine that I'm just
a small root-ache of a tree.

Kraftwerk at Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire.

Not worth watching on youTube.

Poor guy!

Jarbridge (Nevada).
He looks worried.
Strange wording:
are his current friends not good enough
or has he none at all ?
Or has his best friend wandered off
like an errant cat ?

Even at the apogee of our advance*

alpha-males rule the roost.

*In the military-industrial sense only.

A recent piece of research commissioned by the UK's Channel 4 TV suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

BUT

Elsewhere I read that although there is an alarming trend towards the far right among young males (those that interest themselves in politics, which may be a smallo number), it is young women who stand out as the more politically interesting demographic, as they are turning in ever greater numbers towards the left.

MEANWHILE,

Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful. 

From plastic to paracetamol.

I got a headache from reading about
the process.

The lion replaces the lamb

and the sun still shines.

 

from Flags of Iran.

Ozymandias.

"I made America great again."

"...the lone and level sands stretch far away."
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have always loved maps.

Because I was interested in locating the mountain
under which Iran is falsely alleged
(by dangerous lunatics)
to be making nuclear weapons, I found a very fine
web-page with lovely maps, of languages, ethnicities,
and this historical one, showing areas
ceded to British India and the Russian Empire:

In Olden Times

the stupid and uninformed
knew they were stupid.  But now
most of the stupidest people
have been to and through university.

The only happy competitive sport ?

- probably.

to As, Shep, Oscar and Elektra

Human understanding is inferior to yours.
So perhaps you understood
and understand just now
just how I loved you. 
Love is prance. You prance
now only in my head.
Inevitable happenstance:
four dead (only a few)
and none to go but me.

I now talk to my plants
as I conversed with you.

No Harm Done

I don't really know what people mean
by Loss of Innocence.  Is innocence not
just a 19th century word for naivety ?

Or is it something more legal and stark ? 
For example:
is one innocent before genital mutilation
and guilty afterwards ?

I have my mother's naivety, and then some,
and I think I'm only now 'losing my innocence'.
It's a strange feeling, a bit like my insouciance
that I'm not able to come.

Monogamy

is terribly

unnatural

and has

inexorably

led to the

world-beating

catastrophe

of the

nuclear family.

"It is in the nature of betrayal...

"that it not only changes the present,
but that it reaches back with its dirty hands
and changes the past."

– Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate, 1994

Auden (Wystan Hugh) wrote:

Death is the sound
of thunder at a picnic.

For me, it is the silence
of lightning at a funeral.

Today's news, and probably tomorrow's.

Zionist Warmongers attack Terrorist Tyrants.

Temu offers cheap diapers for geese.

Discarded clothes dumped in protected Ghana wetlands.

CONSPIRITUALITY

A single conflated neologism
can say a great deal about
our self-obsessed and infantile
culture of 'individuality'.

Some cheerful news.

and some ordinary old
run-of-the-mill cheerless stuff. 

I'm not a fan of Leonard Cohen, but...

Everybody knows that the world's in trouble.
No-one cares what it's been through.
Everybody knows that the end is coming.
Let's fly to Iceland for the view.

Eighty years ago it was 'Now or Never'
and Never won for the profits it would bring.
Everybody knows that governments betray us
Deception's the most human thing.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking.
The smugglers and the coastguards lied.
Every time you hear a politician speaking
You know that another species died.

(to be improved/continued)

'POLICE STATE' EXHIBIT

CLOSED TODAY
DUE TO POLICE STATE.

 

Well, not exactly.

Three and a half days after Pussy Riot’s founder
occupied her "durational" installation,
entitled Police State,
the National Guard evacuated and closed
the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
The exhibit was a facsimile from memory
of a prison cell from her incarceration
for the group's tastelessly dissident
performances and anti-Russian behaviour.
She remained part of the installation.

Birds

don't just sing.

They also listen.

"Functioning autists"

probably don't suffer from
"impostor syndrome".

On Cushendall Beach

as a boy I carefully made
monastery ruins
and watched the incoming tide
wash them away,
no trace remaining.

What a grasp of things
I nearly had before
my painfully crude correction
from left-handedness,
the ugly start of my social training.

At school
we were encouraged to have
a Purpose In Life,
something worth attaining.
I never had one. Now knowing
that the best of Man is his ruins,
I would like to leave
life with no memory
of me remaining.

Co-operative inter-species art

from a Dordogne cave in France:
bear-scratching 'framed' by human engraving.

photo by Christophe Archambault

Just Two Words:

Ambition
Corrupts

'People are always saying'

that there are two kinds of people:
the These and the Those.

My contribution to the
painfully long list of such
simplistic contrasts is that

(apart from the primary distinction
between me and everyone else)
the most important division
is between those few
who have a sense of fairness
and 'existential balance',
and those multitudes who do not. 

As Armageddon advances

in the Middle East and Ukraine,
we can divert ourselves with the first photo
of the hairy bottom of the sun.

Hugger-mugger,

surprisingly,
has little to do
with rugby*
or with buggery,
but with complicity
and secrecy.

*also known as rugger.

Not quite the male gaze.

A very fine nude study of her lover
by Tamara de Lempicka, 1928.
It would have made a wonderful
sculpture, too.  Could it have influenced
Henry Moore ?

Rafaëla

Bogus photo

on Etsy, obviously generated by A.I.,
bears little resemblance to
what will arrive by dropshipping.

A Song for Those Who Know.

"something must be done right away
that much we know
but of course it's too soon to act
but of course it's too late in the day..."

read the rest >
of the poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

So much for our culture of individuality.

When I first checked my full name on Google
around 2002 (after uploading three websites,
but long beforeI had even heard of blogs)
I found only one other listed: a chap languishing
in Penal Servitude (Stateside).

But if I were to do it now, I would find that my name
is only slightly less common than John Smith,
Jean Martin or Kim Min-jun.

Beautiful Stalinist Architecture:

The main entrance of the Medea Sanatorium
in the Tskaltubo Sanatorium Complex, Georgia.

Power is always an orgy

of self-justification.

Just look at the U.S. of A.

Le Creuset

is the name of a snobby and totally impractical,
expensive cookware, made of enamelled iron.
I bought a saucepan in 1969 after reading
French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David.
The enamel stains and scratches easily, and chips
at the edges.  The handle is necessarily
short and stubby. A good-sized LC saucepan
or casserole is very hard to lift:

Their most practical item (which I bought for a euro
second-hand) is a frying-pan for a single egg.

Yesterday

he said to me:
I'm just not strong enough
to be as vulnerable as you.

 

Where are the hams, chops and sausages ?

Martin M. Miles: Noses & tails, Athens.

Myself: Shadows and stove,
two evenings ago.

Jaime Saldarriaga, Plaza Botero, Medellín.

Great first line:

The world is what it is; men who are nothing,
who allow themselves to become nothing,
have no place in it.

Pretty good cover, too.

Yeats was wrong;

there is now no widening gyre,
no falcon - just Munch's Scream
galloping along the burning, 
pavements irradiated by the ire
of the perfumed emperor of ice-cream,
and an ever-shrinking planet
consumed by thirst and fear and fire.

Solitude, not loneliness.

The blackbirds sing full-heartedly
in the dell below my balcony,
and I'm pretty sure that I'm the only
non-blackbird who listens. 

My ignorant attitude

to French Drama.

I do not care for Molière
but am quite keen on Racine. 

The Name of the Meme

is God, a swollen, totalitarian dream
– residing not in the sky,
but in the small eye of humanity. 
Stars are not what they seem.
Word is embedded in sword.
We are imprisoned by gleam.

We should listen.

Deeply
ascending
to the dark enfolding
by the stark unwoven tissue
of a near-infinity of
silently-absorbing roots,

we should listen to the news
that constantly emanates from silence. 

Silence is subtle
pure communication.
The beginning of deafness was Word.

The louder we get,
the smaller
becomes our awareness,
language turns to shards of regret
and false hope
and the forests
fall below silence.

Pictures I found this week.

Derek Jarman: Strange Meeting

Dog and Oarfish, Aotearoa

by Ralph Gibson, 1961

Not an eye-test! photo by Nick Bull.