Grethe Risbjerg Thomsen

was a Danish poet,
with whom I had a brief correspondence in the 1970s.

She wrote one of the most simple and 'stunning' poems
ever written, which I have translated:

ONE NIGHT, PERHAPS A MARCH NIGHT

With every passing moment
I die a little bit;
I carry death within me
through every year I live.

One night, perhaps a March night,
mild with mist and rain,
I'll step into the twilight,
bring dying to an end.

Måske en Martsnat

Jeg dør en lille smule
for hvert sekund, der går.
Jeg bærer døden med mig
igennem livets år.

En nat, måske en martsnat,
så mild af regn og tø,
skal jeg gå bort i mørke
Og holde op at dø.

Her 'crucial' last line, literally translated, is
And stop dying.

Alternative rhyming translations could be:

And stop the dying then.
And let the dying end.
And make the dying end.

Or the second verse could be altered thus:

One night, perhaps a March night,
mild with rain and mist,
I'll walk into the darkness,
invite death to desist.

Nick Turpin:

On the Night Bus #29

One of the great cultural failures

of our overpowering and fragile
'Western Civilisation'

is the inseparable coupling
of its grotesque sexual obsession 

and its infantile infatuation with love.

In this extraordinary photograph

let us marvel at
Pope Leo XIV formally accepting the papacy
and looking as if he is reading out the football results to
the Monsignor on his right who is looking across at
the bored-looking (or petrified) Monsignor to his left;

the adolescent-looking Swiss Guards in their swell get-up;

the insignificance of the line of five humans below
the vast bronze sculpture (?) of a perfect adolescent male
rising out of a shrivelled, climate-changed Amazonian forest
(or a tangle of dried giant seaweed),
wearing a tastefully-arranged gauzy robe around his hips,
genitals and legs, and a bizarre piece of dinosaur
skull on one side of his coquettishly-cocked head.  

He is very definitely not physically damaged by his
Crucifixion Experience – and definitely not dead.

Non-porn in Pompeii

Do micro-willies do less damage ?

 

In Roman society, painting was one of the occupations assigned to freedmen, slaves, women, and people incapable of political or military life.

People's minds

are no longer changed by rational argument
but by friends, acquaintances,
'social media' and personal charisma.

read more >

Integrity of Consciousness

is the self in silence.

 

"Retarded" -

an out-of-date term
(I remember it from the 1950s)
which aptly describes
the stupefied condition of most humans -

implies a retarder or retardant :
the education system or
normal family upbringing... 

Fabulous Rhine-maidens ?

Unfortunately not.

A glimpse of the Latvian entry for
the European Song Contest, all that remains
of the castrated European Broadcasting Union.

Over the limit.

Mallard flying at 52kph in a 30kph zone, caught by a speed camera in Köniz, Switzerland.

Photograph: Gemeinde Köniz

Vanished painter ? Where is he ?

 I was re-arranging my bookcase the other day and (amongst other art books) found a joint publication from the Dublin and Belfast governments of Ireland, showing paintings from a travelling exhibition (Beyond Boundaries) of Northern and Southern artists, which was at Downpatrick in October 2005.  

Most of the paintings were uninspired and uninspiring, but one which particularly caught my eye was a lovely fuzzy-mizzly 'treatment' of an Irish hillside in the rain, by a certain John Conway, born in Dungannon in 1967 and reportedly resident in Belfast in 2005.   I went to the web to see what else he had done...and there was no mention of him, no paintings to see.  No mention of the exhibition.

There is a millennial John Conway resident in Dublin whose pics are depressingly commercial, and a John Conway who produces Photoshop images (mainly of dinosaurs)  – but the chap in the exhibition that I saw is without trace on the web.  So are others from the same exhibition.  Likewise his gallery, The Cavehill Gallery, which I remember from the 1970s...no trace.

So now I am pleased to give him Presence on the Web (if my blog counts).

Excellent Amateur Photo

from Wolf_SD111 on FlickR (trimmed)

I cannot decide

whether the declaration of a wish
to leave the world a better place
is hypocrisy or arrogance.

"Chimpanzees use leaves

to wipe their arses
and clean up after sex,"
study finds.
One was seen to wipe another's willy.
But do they wipe each other's arses ?

The 'opium of the masses'

was never religion
but entertainment,
which, for most of human history,
religions supplied and controlled.

Donald Trump

 (with apologies to the late Norman Cameron)

He calls for worship and amaze;
he lines up his yes-men in a row,
reverberating that self-praise
found insufficient years ago.

He casts around for some new whim,
something preposterously more.
He orders Denmark to give him
Greenland, which he'll re-name as Magador.

Karl Marx never imagined

that the Bosses
would be algorithms.

The Can-can - what you didn't know.

'It started out as a dance for men
who risked arrest for indecency –
and grew into a legs-flying,
bloomers-revealing sensation.'

read more >

Considering Merleau-Ponty

(and Jawlensky).

Unlike speech and language,
the expressions and signals
of our faces, mouths and eyes
are limited to a small, personal
repertoire of masks,
or frozen lies.

Ceratoserolis trilobitoides

 

"Gone, but not forgotten"

used to be inscribed on tombstones,
a failed poem.

How I should hate to haunt
other people's memories
as the memories of other people
haunt me.

 

Magic Numbers

Seven is the most familiar,
but three is the most mythological.
However, we tend not to remember
forty, which in Middle Eastern cultures
meant 'many'.  Forty days and forty nights
in Biblical wilderness... forty thieves 
which reminds me of delightfully-simple
counting-systems which ran : one, two, three,
four, five, many (or a lot).
No need to get your head
round megawatt.

Poor Self-awareness.

Even though I see myself sometimes
accidentally in mirrors,
I have to keep reminding myself
that others see (or see through) me
as an old man, whereas my self-image
is frozen somewhere in my thirties.

The prime

quality needed
for the sublime
old age of a baby-boomer
is a sense of humour.

Stunning wallpaper

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An 'Artificial Intelligence',

using many megawatts
of electricity, is pathetically
crude and wasteful compared
with the pin-head-sized, amazingly
refined intelligence of a bee.

Today's photograph : very painterly.

 

In Golden Water by Rania Matar

The demon semen.

Not knowing or caring who my father was
until I was in my eighties,
I am glad to say that when I was young
there was no oppressive obscenity of
Fathers' Day to make me squirm ;
and springtime Mothering Sunday* had not been
so profitably raped and vulgarised by Hallmark. 
Now, as a happy three-times-failed abortion, I re-affirm
that while the celebration of fatherhood repels me,
there was no point in my crying over spilt sperm.

*The one day in the year, apart from Christmas,
 when an agricultural worker or a girl 'in service' could go home,
 with some of the money earned, and fond regards,
 if their mother was still alive and not far away.
 I now propose a 'Failed Abortion Day'
 with pretty pop-up cards.

AWOL

President Trump,
known to his friend Putin
as Agent Orange,
has proposed a 100% import duty
on foreign films
- which few Americans watch
because subtitles are too onerous for them.

It is over 100 years since Hollywood
started glitz-and-plush-bombing the world
with the American Way Of Life.

50 years  have passed since the end
of the American 'presence' in Viêt-Nam,
and of the 'carpet bombing', and the spraying
across great swathes of countryside of
dioxin-rich herbicide Agent Orange*,
whose toxic effects
will last at least another 50 years.

*Agent Orange was first used as a weapon of war in the 1950s
by the British in Malaya.

Pufuleti.

 

This is how your Temu sex-toy

comes to you.
Sometimes explosively.

A beautifully humble church,

suitable for the likes of Jesus.

St Pelagia's church, Pachia Ammos, Crete.

"Five a Day".

Today, for my main (evening) meal:

Radishes and Olives
Spinach and Quince
Smoked paprika, Guacamole.
Banana andCashews.
Plus Quinoa and Rice.

Local red wine.

From two different newspapers on the same day.

 

Mystery.

Modern standard English and French
owe their pronunciations to lisps,
speech defects and mannerisms of royalty.
English was also affected by a Dutch king
and courtiers who didn't pronounce 
final Rs.  Modern American* English is
highly gendered, with women in recent years
adopting a loud nasal whine which renders
their speech both unintelligible
and hard on the ears.

I relate to things

better than to people.
Their attractions never fade.
There are stones
I have treasured for half my life,
and a rug that my mother made.

Mystery.

Most people now seem
to take showers every day
rather than baths.  I do neither
almost never. My skin is flowering.
Why do they launder towels
which wipe clean water
from clean skin after showering ?

Long after the axe,

the worst human invention
was the door.

 

Some of today's headlines.

 

A soft warning.

I am living proof
that old men on their own
(probably in any society)
go more insane than others,
quietly.

Serpent Rescue Service

While tidying my cellar yesterday
I looked into an old bucket
and saw an exhausted snake.  

There are none where I come from.

The only snake I've seen in Africa
was a  beautiful green mamba.

It looks like Natrix natrix - but it doesn't have a collar. 

Is anyone surprised ?

 

Jeezer the Geezer

said, it is writ :

Rich people wash themselves in showers and bathtubs,
but behold! the Poor must make do with each other's spit.

The Bougainville Resistance Army.

"The most extraordinary aspect of the BRA’s resistance was the use it made of Bougainville’s erstwhile staple crop: the coconut.

Islanders ate its flesh, drank its milk and sealed their wounds with its leaves. They wove it into baskets and homes, burned it to ward off mosquitoes and even made music from the husks. 

They cooked with it and cleaned their guns with its oil, boiled it into soap, and when they fermented and cooked it, they distilled a fuel that yielded double the mileage of regular diesel.

Being Known.

Although an 'artist' whose name is familiar
is, in effect, already pretty passé, 
he or she can command tens
or hundreds of thousands
of pounds/dollars/euros for a single
work or piece, especially
if it has been shat upon
and pecked at by hens.

Meanwhile, in Central Ukraine....

 

doctors perform an endoscopic ovariectomy
on an adult female bear, named Lyubochka.
She was showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder,
which vets found was linked to her hormones.
She now faces two weeks of post-operative rehabilitation.

There are always tears from The Faithful

to mingle with the crocodile secretions of the cynical.

Unlike France, no part of the smug Anglosphere has a popular or honest and clearsighted 'left-wing' newspaper like the bold and doughty Libération in France, which yesterday published a sober assessment* of the late Pope, which I paraphrase:

« With his ambiguous messages and political contradictions, especially concerning the role of women in the church, the acceptance of non-heterosexuals, and institutional sex-abuse, Pope Francis was neither humanist nor 'progressive'.  

« His reign was a neat sliding of a fundamentally reactionary Catholic church behind a slick multi-cultural neoliberal image. » 

Britain's Guardian was unsurprisingly reverent. The Americanised and pseudo-multicultural BBC devoted several slobbering hours to covering the funeral, mostly praising him as much as it, in the past, eulogised Nelson Mandela...and Princess Diana...

I remember the funeral of Juan Perón.

*Avec sa communication ambivalente et ses contradictions politiques, François, pape, ni très social ni très humaniste, a été un symptôme du glissement du néolibéralisme multiculturel au fondamentalisme national catholique.

Многоуважаемый Владимир Владимирович

Most Estimable Vladimir Vladimirovich,

'A study shows...'
that half of the world’s CO₂ emissions come from
36 fossil-fuel exploiters...
and a quarter come from standing armies,
uprisings and wars.

And almost none from whores. 

As evil triumphs almost everywhere,

a pathetically small piece of good news:

Hot Historical Topic.

 « Historians dispute Bayeux Tapestry penis-tally after lengthy debate.

« Two Bayeux scholars at loggerheads over whether dangling shape depicts dagger or the embroidery’s 94th phallus. 

« George Garnett announced six years ago he had counted 93 penises on the embroidery but Christopher Monk believes he has found another...» 

...and some people complain about my website's obsession with the obscene!

Like Ambrosia, divine.

Back in the 1980s when I first encountered kumquats
in a posh shop in Holywood, county Down,
I grew a handsome and prolific bush from seed.

Now, small kumquat bushes are for sale in supermarkets.

They are too expensive for the lumpenbourgeoisie,
so they sit there, in the dark, unwatered,
and drop their kumquats...which I collect, take home
and eat with a square or two of chilled 8o%-cocoa chocolate, 

(which sits in my refrigerator for months and years),

and almost faint with pleasure...rise to heaven,
as befits an ageing Ulster Prod*.

Add a dollop of pistachio ice-cream
and you are happier than God.

*a non-Catholic in or from Northern Ireland,
the last British Colony of more than 100,000 hectares.

Sex-crimes and Art in France

have been getting full media attention.

The daughter of the French prime minister, François Bayrou,
has admitted that she was brutally beaten
at her (of course) private Catholic school
at the centre of a 'growing sexual abuse scandal'.

Mr Bayrou faces questions over what he knew
about the institution and it decades of depravity.

The man who organised regular weekly parties
to gang-bang his drugged wife has,
along with a couple of dozen of his pals,
been 'put away'.

But the fashionable and celebrated plasticien 
(installation/mixed-media artist) Claude Lévêque
has yet to face trial for assault and rape of minors
(delightfully called pédocriminalité) 
whom he involved in his Neon œuvres,some of which featured in the French Pavilion
of a Venice Biennale.

Protected, of course, by the putrefaction of the Art World,
he has more class but fewer victims
than England's rip-roaring but now
unlamented Jimmy Savile.

Francophone analysis        

Voices and numbers.

"There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’
There are only the deliberately silenced,
or the preferably unheard."

~ Arundhati Roy

In a world of seven billion, 99% of us are voiceless.
Not because we're silenced, but because big,
crude, crass voices drown us out -
even if we have the temerity to speak.

   https://wearenotnumbers.org/category/poems/

Those Chosen by God are 'numbered'.
Battalions are numbered. 
Victims are numbered - and divided into classes. 
It goes without saying that
40 killed in self-glorifying Paris
is much more shocking
than 40,000 in Sudan.

Graves are numbered
(mine, so far empty, is 1-C-64,
though I might well be cremated))
even when they are (that horrible expression)
"mass graves" beyond number containing the unnamed
once known only to a few, and the unnameable police.

I am a living, breathing little group of numbers - social security, passport, tax authority, smartphone, house number -
all these have to be quoted and produced,
and all but the last I forget, 

and then I have to go to an office
with my passport and birth certificate.

I have written 8876 blogs and they are 'preferably unread'.
On the 15th of April I got 850 views.
Good news! I won't even be a number when I'm dead.

All over the world they have burned and poisoned the earth,
are killing the sea and confiscating the sky.
Today is a good day for the weapons manufacturers,
God, guns and individualism.
Tomorrow is always another day
for the numberless to die.

https://wearenotnumbers.org/tunnel-for-hamas/

https://wearenotnumbers.org/still-stuck/

https://wearenotnumbers.org/shattered-serenity/

Human communication.

"Don't get me wrong," he said. Alas!
I get everyone wrong.
And/or they do the same to me.

This beautiful Greenlandic woman

was among thousands of 13-year-olds
who were compulsorily (if not forcibly)
made infertile by the insertion of an Inta-uterine Device
by the Danish authorities between 1966 and 1975.

It is, of course, not Greenlanders who have been
overpopulating the planet.

Only the best

liars are perfect.

Like 'Jesus on the Cross'

'History' shows
that 'Morality'
is self-defeating.

Stagnant Ponds

of 'crocodile tears' have just been shed
at the death of His Holiness, The People's Pope
(à la Princess Diana),
especially from such caring people
as Her Not-Quite-Ultra-Right Venality
Marine Le Pen of France
and Her Astuteness the not-quite-fascist
Prime Minister of Italy.
Maybe also not-quite-dictator Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

Lovelock would agree

that 'Nature' is neither
beneficent mother
nor savage opponent,
but WHAT IS  –
which is what human beings
are loath to accept.

Photo of the Day

enhanced, but not by me:
a public convenience in Tokyo.
Maybe Ladies Only ?

'Enlightenment'

is a fancy and fanciful word
for the realisation
that language, like money
is only a token of communication.

Perhaps

the only supernatural phenomenon
is human stupidity.

It is possible

that the reason why Diogenes left
no writing or scripture was that
he did not think much of language
as a means of communication, although,
of course, like all of us he thought
linguistically.  He also had no
writing implements, while Socrates
was shadowed by the idolising Plato.

Rotten Lambs.

While shepherding is now a rather rare occupation,
and wool no longer the staple fibre,
Christianity stays sheep-obsessed, 

though, as time passed,
rabbits, chickens and eggs have been introduced
to the Easter Stew.

Jews and Muslims will not eat pork or ham
because pigs (like us omnivorous) eat shit.
Christianity's fuzzy demigod is frequently called The Lamb
because the Israelites (aka Jews) were sheep-herding
nomads (like many in Central Asia and Baluchistan today)
who eventually descended from overgrazed hills
'Like wolves on the fold',

and took hold of a part of Palestine
until the latest wave of conquerors
threw them out for refusing to accept
the deity of Roman Emperors.

In modern times, groups of Lamb-worshippers
commit appalling acts
against other Lamb-worshippers, especially children.

These include Holy Orders, such as:
Opus Dei and the

Christian Brothers
Sisters of Bon Secours
Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul
Sisters of St John of God
Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd
Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary
Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy
Legion of Mary -

to name only the Irish gangs
guilty of kidnap, violence, torture and infanticide.

The long slow, bleating death of ritually-slaughtered lambs,
plus the reported long slow death of the Lamb of God,
has led Christians to prefer and praise
messy, tube-infested, terminal suffering to neat,
quick and assisted death, or planned suicide...
and is one ingredient of the Abrahamic
mountain-nomadic
(now world-wide)
obsession with eating meat.

The United States' Execution Racket

A doctor willing to participate in an execution
is a precious commodity, and states will pay dearly for it –
up to $20,000 in cash per execution in some places. 

read more >

Two photos

of the shallow Wadden Sea,
UNESCO-registered
and bounded by Denmark,
the Netherlands and Germany.

 

Deep in the rainforest of Sumatra,

one clever orang-utan has been observed making
and then applying a plant-based medicinal paste
to a painful wound – a paste which was anti-bacterial,
anti-fungal, and analgesic, thus enabling him
'to heal in record time'. 

Orang-utans are not unique.
Rakus the Clever was not a freak.

Neo-Jungian thoughts : Holiness and Happiness

The truly holy
are unappreciated.

Holiness is not religious. 

Nor can happiness
come from seeking,
or from application;

it's not a state
nor an emotion
but a realisation.

Scratch my card!

I guess I'm no longer
one of your deadbeats.
I won a million dollars
at Sandy's liquor store
in San Luis Obispo
and I can't wait
to get off the streets. 

Not the frontier of tourism :

a fairground rocket ride

to the end of the atmosphere

and the trashing of feminism.

Except

at the most enigmatic level,
language is lies.
But so also is communication
by touch and by eyes.

Tongues

in barbed wire.
Eyes in pale blinders.
Ears scared of silence.
Brains in the pickle
of taboos and desire.

 

The Antinatalist's Tale.

"A man goes into a tobacconist
and gets a packet of cigarettes....
Warning: smoking causes cancer.
No, give me a different pack...
Smoking causes impotence.
That'll do, thanks very much."

"Almost heaven, West Virginia...

Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River...

Life is old there, older than the trees,
younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze..."

Whitaker family, Odd, West Virginia

Prehistoric cave-painters

might regard art exhibitions
as outrageous and blasphemous.

On the other hand, the out-of-doors
rock engravers might not.

Just the sort of thing the Nazis would have done.

Israel’s military is organising hiking tours for civilians in newly occupied Syrian territory during the Passover holiday, local media has reported.

Holiness and Happiness,

Jungian thoughts. 

The truly holy
are unappreciated.
Holiness is not religious. 

Nor can happiness
come from seeking.
from application;

it's not quantifiable,
not achieved,
not a state,
nor an emotion,
but a realisation.

Probably, but too late.

Will the intelligence manufactured
by power-hungry, nuclear-fired
iron man become aware of the
inorganic irony of its existence ?

"the most distressful country"

It's the most distressful country

that ever yet was seen;

they're hanging men and women there

for the wearing of the green.

Ireland has barely escaped
from the blood-curdling clutches of the Catholic church,
only to fall victim to vampiric American employers
such as Facebook, Apple and (literally) hundreds
of other 'transnationals'.  Serve it right
if Donald Trump pulls the plug...and the rug...

Self-medication.

Deep in the rainforest of Sumatra, 
a wise orang-utan whom humans call Rakus
has been observed making and then applying
a plant-based medicinal paste to a painful wound. 

It was anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and it numbed his pain,
helping him to heal "in record time.
"This might be one of the more blatant
and sophisticated examples out there,
but Rakus is far from the only one."

Obviously,

happiness
should be communal,

though for me it is
hermetic.

For the economic system
it must only be cosmetic.

Would President Trump like to buy

Northern Ireland, which, according to
a British Government Committee

“recently held the world record
for prescribing the most anti-depressants
per head of population” ?

It has the highest public spending per person in the UK,
yet raises the least revenue per person...

but it's going for two songs,
and the USA would then own a scrap of Europe.

Perhaps it's due to diet ?

Primary-age child constipation rates
up 60% in England and Wales.

One small cheer for President Trump.

Having had, like any intellectual, some sympathy
with the writings (but not the actions)
of The Unabomber, I applaud The Great Donald's
brave attempt to dismantle Satanic Globalism
and the Evil Axis of Globalisation.

"...the blessing

which rests on humility :
an easy-going nature."

~ Sylvia Townsend-Walker, Mr Fortune's Maggot, 1927,
first page.

On page 32 is another splendid line :

"The air was thick with taboos." 

A Cat called Donald.

 

Poets should not be piffle-mongers

dispensing clichés of petty comfort,
descriptions of beauty,
or gobbets of private pain
to the normals. Poets should rage
against the evil of our species,
its bad judgement,
its monstrous brain, and the mad
perpetuation of our insane rampage.

A Theropod Walked

on the Isle of Skye
a Very Long Time Ago.

A 'Little Grey Rabbit' Joke,

with apologies to Margaret Tempest.

Moldy Warp dreams of Van Gogh's Chair.

Liminality.

 "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things,
the honest thief, the tender murderer."

~ Robert Browning.

I imagine

parenthood
as a hungry monster...

Out of the Fire.

 

Max Ayres: Self-portrait.

V.Z. How to look careworn - and sexy.

No wonder D.T. hates him.

Speed culture.

It's not just North Americans
who seem unaware that the faster you speak
the less your audience will hear
and retain.

The latest

nonsense sociological concept :

Genetic Talent.

A beautiful but microscopic resistance to consumer-capitalism.

Every week,

Bastián Barria ventures into the Atacama desert in northern Chile looking for items of discarded clothing in the sand.

 About half of the hundreds of garments he finds are in perfect condition. He collects what he can and adds them to the two-ton pile of clothes he has stored at a friend’s house.

They are then 're-sold' for the price of the postage...

[more]

Typical Disinformation

The rapid expulsion from Paradise
that has been reported to us
is worse than a parody
of the immeasurably-long
development of human self-consciousness.

Sheila Hancock,

 English actor and comédienne,

This was The Future

for a baby mammoth
in the Siberian cold
of 50,000 years ago.

"Who knows how
The Future will unfold ?"

Art and A.I.

At one time it was normal
for a picture's frame to cost
more than the picture.

*

You don't yet actually have to wheedle
information out of a computer.

I have a hunch –

just a hunch that
human stupidity
is more often learned
(by rote or by example)
than inherited.

Spectators ?

photo by Brian Grover

 

At the Red Hedgehog - Zum Roten Igel

    a bar, restaurant and chamber-concert venue
    (see below)
    frequented a generation later by Brahms 
    (who had his own barrel of Tokaj)

on this day. also a Wednesday, in 1828,
Franz Schubert gave his only public concert,
which included his second piano trio.

The entrance charge of 2 florins per person
made him rich for the last nine months of his life.
Another of my Most Admired Men sold only one painting.
None of these three heterosexual beauty-makers had a wife.

• Parterre and 1st floor of a residential building.
• Address: Tuchlauben No. 12.
• Also: Rother Igel.
• 1822 The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde rents premises within a building on the Tuchlauben in Vienna, “Zum roten Igel” (same complex).
• 1829-1870 The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde buys “Zum roten Igel”, the building it had formerly rented, planning to replace this with a new building bringing the diverse activities of the Musikverein together under one roof.
• Also visited frequently by  Robert Schumann (1810-1856), Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847), and Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) 
  Brahms refused to eat anywhere else.