Probably because young males

have been fed better, and with more meat,

and women may well like that.

Parent, Peer, Pædophile...

To feel shame
you have to be made
to feel ashamed.

Or are we all born
with the shame that Jehovah
put into Adam
who passed it on to Eve 
– or is that merely guilt ?

I have started painting again.

This is the second of a series
of calligraphic paintings.

Solitude, January 2025.

Too many thoughts.

Pensive, inexpensive, I write down 

two or three ideas every day.  

A few weeks later

I throw most of them away.

I am not a good communicator.

The constriction of Luxury.

How limiting to have been born
into a family and a home with
running water, indoor water-closet,
bath or shower, electric light and power,
the telephone...the internet and to
take them all for granted,
not to know frugality !  Since 1965
I have acquired all these things,
and now wonder at the cost
to the environment.

 

Be careful what you read

in Medical Journals and the 'Yellow Press'.

In 1914, The Lancet and various popular newspapers in the UK republished an article by the doctor Edward Huntington Williams on cocaine in the southern United States. Williams claimed that any Black man who took up the Cocaine Habit was ‘absolutely beyond redemption. His whole nature is changed by the habit. Sexual desires are increased and perverted; peaceful men become quarrelsome and timid ones courageous.’

Sidney Felstead, author of The Underworld of London (1923), claimed to be similarly appalled by how often ‘some pleasure-sated girl dies from an overdose of cocaine or morphia, supplied to her by some black or yellow parasite.’

And so it continued...and, presumably, continues.

Linguistic coincidences

are legion, some felicitous,
some unfortunate, many 
misleading or confusing.
Famously, Gift is German for poison.
More to the point, Fear in English
spells in Irish (a different
pronunciation of) man.

My new E-friend

and her human friend.

 

I still don't quite know what they meant

when they told me that I was
letting myself down. I felt
middling. Nor could I think
of what to be (other than myself)
when I grew up. I never grew up.
They wanted me to
do something with my life.
This meant getting a degree in medicine
(I didn't get any degree at all)
and, presumably, a classy and comely wife.
What I mostly did was to appal.

Counter-intelligence.

Because of Hollywood,
intelligent films lie in a basement
underworld of 'eggheads' and 'aesthetes'
lest they infect the general stupidity.

Socrates Wept.

 from The Guardian today:

  How Europeans see the world has for centuries been shaped and controlled by mega-influencers: not least by the churches and their monastic schools; more recently by 'Enlightenment' educators and their successors, whose practitioners ignored Greek philosophy almost entirely.

   Where you get religion you get brainwashing.
Capitalism is a much less divided religion than Christianity or Islam.

Eyes squeezed into the banal gaze,

there's just a hair's breadth where 'humanity' exists
between the trivial and the terrible.
We act relentlessly in an educated daze.

The Conspiracy-

-theory of everything:
ownership of land.

Asexual human power.

 

This man by any name

 

would smell as sweet.
The first part means “land of wood and water”
and was the name given to modern-day Jamaica
by the Taino people, early inhabitants of the island.
The second part is Yoruba.
I always wanted to have an exotic name,
and this would have perfectly expressed
the pride in my feeling of no-kin
difference at any time of my life...
not to mention
the delicious colour of his skin.

Two photos

by Pau Buscatós,
both taken in Kolkata.

Urban bovine

 

.

A good line from a bad thriller.

 "People will spend whether they have money or not. 
That is the basis of consumer capitalism."

There is also the economic requirement for inequality
in a post-feudal system.

Content but complaining!

It's all very well for people like me
to condemn aspiration and ambition
for their destructiveness, but millions
of people from Gaza to Haiti,
Burma to Sudan, quite reasonably
want to improve their lives,
have somewhere to shit
(nothing posh)
even somewhere to wash.

Basically, what drives humans
more other animals, is the imagined need
or aggravated desire for comfort, not greed.

Before Adam

there was Play
amongst fish and wolves
and octopi and gulls

which God disapproved of
and so created Man to stop
animals from enjoying themselves.

(for Peter Godfrey-Smith)

'Education, Education, Education...'

that is merely a means to an end is soulless
if not soul-destroying – for teachers especially.

In the forthcoming production of King Lear

 

in Washington DC (January 21, at dusk)
both Regan and Goneril, his majesty's daughters,
will be played by acting sensation of the year,
Elon Musk.

Ceiling of the Month,

intricately jointed and decorated
using Arab techniques then unknown in Europe,
Peterborough (Cambridgeshire, England,
twelfth century.

More on My Criminal Tendencies (09/07/2024)

When at 40 I was finally and demonstrably persuaded
by a sexy Mexican that I was queer,
I had yet another thrill in the pure realisation
that it was a crime in both parts of the Hibernosphere.

Bad graffiti.

 

National Dress is a Wonderful Thing.

There should be more of it about.

To cheer us up in winter,

Montenegro in summer.

Epiphany.

I am a smooth beast ambling
waywardly
towards death's infinite understanding.

 

The past week's "viral tweet"

amongst Iranians:

"The Islamic Republic was born with Carter.
Let it end with Carter's death."

Unchanging humanity

The evil corporations are satanic,
the few good people are deranged.
There's no way that the climate
can ever be unchanged.

More love than hope.

Planting acorns in Kharkiv's bomb-battered forest.

Literature,

whatever transcendental claims are made for it,
is just part of the entertainment industry
like music and drama, painting and ballet,
except that words don't admit to being
barriers against communication and sympathy.

The Great Democratic Ideal

was manipulated by the British and French empires*
to engineer racial difference
and rationalise colonial domination...
thus helping to civilise many peoples
through legal systems no better
than the one that now operates in Russia.

*and within the USA

Equality before the Law ?

"Uselessness

is what makes human life
so exciting to live."

– Paul Auster (author, on BBC)

One reason why I prefer

to kiss a mouth surrounded by hair
is that I can be pretty certain
that there isn't a slick cosmetic curtain.

Maybe that is why more than just some
straight men like to kiss cunt or bum ?

Maybe that is why they're not rare or sparse,
the straight men who like to kiss cunt or arse.

Bach: my New Year Treat.

I saw these two small menhirs first about 10 days ago when I went to collect plants from a specialist and inexpensive nursery (dry stony soils).
I didn’t have camera or phone with me, so I went back yesterday, the first of January, a beautiful day. The area is a whole département (Lot) of limestone karst, as in Dalmatia or (in miniature) the Irish Burren. There are chasms and splits and pavements and lots of perforated boulders. I live just where the southern edge ends.

A pair of pillar-stones, male and female, stand 2.5 metres apart, the female with large (and largely-natural solution-pit/cup-mark + groove (artificially enlarged ?).

Male and female paired stones are rare in France if they exist at all (in Brittany ?) though there are several in Ireland. The name of the commune is Bach, pronounced Bash. 

The stones are 250 cm apart, and 120, 130 high. and never seem to have formed a gateway. Rubble has been piled behind them, so there is a faint chance that there might be a chamber.

I have marked them on Google Earth.

On my way, I found the marvellous perforated Spoon Stone which I posted yesterday.

Cacti in a Storm,

southern Mexico.

A Good Day was had by One.

New Year's Day, 2025:
Bent Spoon Day.
On the roadside near Mouillac
(Tarn-&-Garonne, Occitania)
as found.

The Ugly Vulgarity of Riches

Boucheron emerald + diamond necklace,
and Hermès bag stolen in a recent burglary.