Neo-Nordic Design ?

 

Katerina Kamprani

The shadow-flame

within me is my death.
I am not a moth.

In my last moments of clarity

I hope that I'll remember to say:
Well, so far, you survived your own stupidity.

Haiku.

In love with entropy,
I encourage sweet April woodworm.

(But because of 'unseasonable' weather,
they may not appear till May.)

Une pensée pour l'Ukraine.

The French for thought is pensée,
likewise the word for pansy, the flowering plant.

Simple logic.

Since mankind has always treated
'Nature' as an even greater enemy
than other humans, it follows
that the creation of humans
is (as the Catholic church would put it)
Contra Naturam.

Self-portrait

in the Romanesque abbey-asylum
at Saint-Rémy-en-Provence.

The corridor of the priory-become- asylum
where Vincent van Gogh was detained for a while,
after cutting off his ear-lobe.

Vincent's bedroom (imagined and tidy and surely inauthentic)
at the former priory at Saint-Rémy-en-Provence.

My bedroom, tidy and authentic, Caylus 2023.

The painting on the right is of my childhood bedroom in Belfast.

Literature and Politics.

English literature had a profound effect
on politics.  The writings of Pope, Addison, Steele;
of Dickens, Shaw, Cronin and Orwell
influenced the course of British
society and history.

Similarly in France.
But Russia's great tragedy
is that writers (even Gorky)
went unheeded, censored
and imprisoned by the deaf
and blind autocracy.

Tsar Nicholas II

was called Our Little Father by the poor and pious.
Nevertheless, Russians are not the only people
who like a Big Brother ruling them.

Between two points

a line can be drawn.
Between two people
only a smudge.

C.O.T.T.I.

After the (American) Cult of the Individual

comes (via algorithms, Wikipedia, A.I.)

the Cult of the Totalitarian Impersonal.

Fathers, rape and fantasy.

Psychology and psychiatry
have been blighted
by a crackpot
(father of psychiatry and Anna)
who could not,
or claimed that he could not, believe
that respectable middle-class fathers
could sexually abuse (and abusively deceive)
their young daughters

– yet insanely thought
that those daughters' brothers
wanted subconsciously
to kill their fathers and marry their mothers.

'Workism'

is rooted in the belief that employment 
can provide everything we have historically expected
from organized religion.

– Derek Thompson

Well, not quite – and certainly not to the lowest paid,
such as imported sex-slaves and abattoir-employees –
not to mention prison warders/guards in the USA.

Careerism is an opiate of the middle classes.

Team Games and Sports

have always made me feel
somewhere between
a eunuch at an orgy
and a skeleton at a feast. 

They asked me

what I wanted to be
when I grew up.

I said: A doctor,
because that was what
they wanted me to be.

But what I really wanted
was to keep on being me.

A rapidly-filling and already much-extended Russian graveyard.

 Most of the graves are those of concript convicts.

Bakinskaya, Krasnodar.

All states

are police states

– including states of mind.

On a cubicle wall :

AI=BB

Wherever religion rules

Big Brother is watching.

The Emergence of Life:

the worst thing that could happen
on any planet ?

The Crucifixion

of the Islamic Penultimate Prophet
a.k.a. the Christian Son of God,

involved the felling, chopping and
crucifixion of a tree.

Oh, the tastelessness,

the irredeemable vulgarity
of optimism!

Another part of our war against the world.

Japan declares war on pollen
as hay-fever epidemic grips the nation.

Misheard.

Psychopaths
for
Cycle-paths.

Being a World Leader

can be EXTREMELY challenging.

Nobody noticed.

Capitalism
abolished
'Enough'.

(pronounced Ee-Nuff, sometimes En-Uff)

Quote of the Day.

 by Ai Wei-Wei.

 We see everything and we don’t see anything.

We naively thought

that the Internet would celebrate
and increase, enhance
all kinds of diversity.

But it has turned out to be
a vast totalitarian machine
for narrow global uniformity.

There is Organised Crime.

And there is Organised Medicine.

It wasn't Nietzsche who said:

Being wise
is depressing.
Being happy
stultifies.

The following Nietzschisms come from a quotations website:

Wisdom maybe arrives in the world like a raven lured by carrion.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Scholarship has the same relationship to wisdom as righteousness has to holiness: it is cold and dry, it is loveless and knows nodeep feelings of inadequacy or longing.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged precisely by the diminution of ill-temper.

Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.

My wisdom has long accumulated like a cloud; it becomes stiller and darker. So does all wisdom which shall one day produce thunderbolts.

Birds, of course, are a kind of fish.

It's not surprising

that, 'hot on the heels' of Trumpism
comes a new McCarthyism

in the domineering nation
that the rest of the world
hears far too much of and from.

Yet another linguistic/racist state.

It is impossible to study Arabic
at universities in Israel!

This is wrong.
See comments below.

The situation is much subtler.
Dr David J. Heinemann writes to Haaretz:

'Sadly, it has been forgotten that when the State of Israel was first formed Arabic was accepted and endorsed by the forming agreement as an equal language along with Hebrew. All road signs were to be in both languages, and Arabic was to also be the language used together with Hebrew as a SPOKEN language of the Knesset.

That this has all changed is the result of the prominence of the Ashkanazei over the Sephardi, together with the dominance of the culture of the U.S.A. May this use of Arabic continue!'

Israel's main problem, really, is not other Middle-Eastern states or the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, but the Ashkenazy immigrants (pouring in from Eastern Europe and Russia since 1990), backward-thinking, bigoted, right-wing and anti-democratic.  They are Israel's Trumpeters, who may actually destroy the overpopulated country in which they have 'pitched their tents', to use the Biblical phrase.

Human history in a [nut]shell.

Every time there is a shooting by assault weapon
in an American school, disco or other venue
Good Citizens go out and buy (over the counter)
assault weapons 'to protect themselves'.

Untold millions have been sold.

see also
 https://www.thetrace.org/2018/09/how-many-assault-weapons-in-the-us/

Guilt

is peculiarly comforting,
which may be why I am ashamed to be human.

But Œdipus, the legendary detective,
stabbed out his eyes with two pins from his mother's dress
after she hanged herself.

Our beautiful species.

The head of the World Food Programme
talks of '350 million people marching towards famine'.
Surely not marching,
but crawling, drifting or immobile...

Millennia of drought and flood
inevitably follow centuries of guns and blood.

But-butting.

Perhaps
every statement
should be followed by
but...

The most honest political slogan, ever ?

'Vote for me
so you won't ever need to vote again.'

– Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 1995.

Professor C. Roach in Moscow.

 

GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCEMENT

NO OTHER RELIGION CAN COMPETE!

photo by Hugh Malyon

After watching the famous French film 'Jean de Florette'

I am less exercised by the damage to the world by cars
than by the terrible history of suffering by horses, mules and donkeys
for centuries before the invention of the internal combustion engine,
and subsequently in appalling wars.

The Religion of Work.

As an atheist,
I couldn't believe in Employment.

In many a region

the loudest Christians
are those inspired by hate,
and they are legion.

The Great Totalitarian Tool.

Never having had the slightest urge to play video-games,
I listened to alleged adults discussing them
on a 40-minute radio programme.

I went online to see if I could find one that could interest me.

They turn out to be no more than glorified pop-up books
for barbie-doll people –
infantile, restrictedly-'interactive' cartoons,
in which small, competitive, Hollywood-moulded,
monetized minds diminish themselves
and their manufactured awareness even further. 

Assassin's Creed : Ancient Greece !

When I was a child

I sometimes went to bed,
banged my head a bit,
like the hammer on the gong
and asked God to ‘take me’ in the night.  

I didn’t believe in God for very long.

The good thing about Germans

(generally speaking)
is that they don't keep on talking
about how they 'civilised' the world

– unlike the English, the French,
the Americans, the Russians...

PS – not quite à propos – According to Victor Klemperer, Jews in Nazi Germany found the many public expressions of sympathy as painful as racist abuse.

PPS – 'Civilise' is hypocri-code for 'shamelessly exploit for commercial gain'.

On Autocrats and their Imitators*.

The grim truth is that, too often, the only people who can bring down these terrible men are the ones who put them there in the first place. 

– Jonathan Freedland

* Putin, Assad...Erdoğan, Netanyahu, Trump, Modi...Johnson, Macron...

The Tragedy of Marx and Engels

is that, though their analysis
of capitalism was (and continues to be)
largely correct, their (and their followers')
suggestions for changing it were
transparent recipes for totalitarianism.

Flimsy

people deceived by bad actors
do evil things for short-sighted reasons. 

'Good nature, or what is often considered as such,
is the most selfish of all the virtues.
It is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.'

– William Hazlitt, On the Knowledge of Character, 1822.

Dead or dying

plants in supermarkets
are one of several reasons
why I visit them briefly
and only for food that I can't get elsewhere.

No comment possible.

 

A remote kissing device called “Long Lost Touch” 
displayed on the table at its owner Jing Zhiyuan’s home, in Beijing, China. 
Photograph: Tingshu Wang/Reuters

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