Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Thursday, 13 February 2025

Museums

belong in museums...
where they soon will
scorch and flood and crumble
in the sad museum of the Earth.


A painting, a sculpture and a photograph.


'Paule Vézelay': Landscape 1946.



















? by Rimantas Izdelis

Jerzy Durczak: Autumn in a Polish Forest

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Russian Dolls.

To live
in the moment
you have to live
in a bubble
in a bubble
in a bubble...


The current PotUS

is so beyond-words
bizarre that I would not be surprised to learn
that there is a thriving market for his
preserved and authenticated turds.


Tuesday, 11 February 2025

He wanted to show my pictures

in his unreliable gallery. But
for even a small space
they are not 'appropriate'.
They are too intimate.

Prophetic self-portrait, 1988.









Many paintings look uncomfortable
in galleries, especially Van Goghs
in Amsterdam, permanently tortured
in a vicious concrete box.

But alas, poor prisoners!
there's nowhere else to place them.


Dear God, we

give thanks to Thee
for the invention of L.E.D.
because we
in our advancing senility
have an unfortunate tendency
to leave lights on
from dusk to dawn
and even longer.


Monday, 10 February 2025

The Unruly Mind.

Last night, lying in bed
listening to ABC Classic's
thrown-together
early morning programme,
I calculated
(using my fingers and my
ever-pullulating head
and my bedside clock,
plus the not-too-competent
continuity-announcements)

that Adelaide
(for a while, at least)*
is 10½ hours ahead

Then switched to
the occasionally-excellent
Medi-1 (ميدى1 طرب) 
DAB radio Tarab instead.


*depending on unsynchronised time-tinkerings
in different hemispheres according to season.


For millions

in The Christian World, now, near The End,
alcohol* is a friend, not an enemy;
and The Government is an enemy,
not a friend.

*or similar easily-obtained mind-comforter


Sunday, 9 February 2025

Confession of a child

of a 'Welfare State'.

"It's not so much that I
'would like to die'
as that I feel that I
am lacking liveliness
& would like to slip
forever and conveniently,
easefully into soft emptiness. 



Saturday, 8 February 2025

Thursday, 6 February 2025

"Reality is a trance.

Your reality is a trance of your own making.
Or someone else’s making who doesn’t have
your greatest good in mind.”

This wise observation was made by one of the many bogus gurus
from India who have abused minds and bodies in Europe and North America since the 1950s - and, along their way, inevitably have said many wise things.

On the same theme,
even the nastiest dictators can spout wisdom:

"It causes me some anxiety that the world is controlled by childish North Americans."  

Generalísimo Francisco Franco


Jerusalem, 1942.

 "It looks like there will be trouble here ere long
because of the 'illegal immigrants' who keep arriving
from Europe, scuppering their boats
and wading ashore."

~ from To War with Whitaker, the diaries of
Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly.


Wednesday, 5 February 2025

The way of things.

Although the first snowdrop
     (which flowered on my near-future
      grave 10 days ago)

like the last rose of summer
     (which dropped its petals in January)
is celebrated in words and music,
the last snowdrop languishes
amongst the crocuses and daffodils.


Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Sri Lankans don't

'see their civil war or their tsunami as traumatic –
in fact, when an army of coubsellors descended upon the nation 
after the tsunami of 2004, the University of Colombo pleaded with them to cease seeing suffering as traumatisation, because it was undermining people's resilience.
Sri Lanka happens to top the charts for 'well-being' in the Mental State of the World in 2023 report, despite such denial of the Gospel of Trauma.

'Individuals experience the world according to how they are taught to experience the world.'

~ Niklas Serning


In a hyper-individualistic culture there is a tendency to experience the world through resentment.

Monday, 3 February 2025

The only irrational animal

uses its intelligence mainly
to create hierarchies
in order to conquer and control
its surroundings, 

and now to create
and control more powerful
and competitive intelligences
which it will inevitably,

at last powerlessly, hate.

*












'A man walks on the Kolyma highway, nicknamed “the road of bones”. It was built in the 1930s by political prisoners held in the gulags, and links the port town of Magadan to the town of Nizhny Bestiakh.
The construction, which lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953, claimed between 250,000 and 1 million lives.
They are buried next to or directly under the 1,219-mile (1,961 km) road, part of which is still not finished as it is an extremely difficult project despite modern equipment.'

Well, well -

isn't that just great ?









Sounds to me a bit like
fiddling while Rome burns.


Sunday, 2 February 2025

Poets

are people whom posh people
choose to make them
feel acceptably exceptional.

The Museum of Empathy

One of these photos
disgusts me and makes my flesh creep.
Both were published on the same day
in the same article
in the same newspaper.

Adam Pearson.
















Kim Kardashian


Crunch Time.

This insane clock
(here photographed on my 1960 tiled floor)
was free-on-the-street
in Caylus yesterday.
I couldn't resist it.
Note the squiggly second hand.



Saturday, 1 February 2025