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(Music)
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Vinicio Capossela – Signora Luna
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(Other Writ, Correctitude, The King of Terrors)
Under a moonless sky, the AmJap Corporation’s two top destruction agents were squatting in the dustbins outside Edward’s flat. ‘Let’s go,’ CL whispered. ‘He’s not coming home tonight.’
‘No,’ Bushido hissed. ‘This time we stay.’
‘We can always kill him tomorrow…’
‘A samurai of the AmJap Corporation does not sleep until he has done something violent. That is his art.’
‘For the last time, Bushido. Violence is not an art, it’s a science. And scientifically speaking, there’s not a hope in hell of killing Wilson if he’s not here.’
‘Violence is an art you will never understand, CL.’
‘It’s a science !’
‘It’s an art !’
‘Science !’
‘Art !’
Bushido stood up and hurled his dustbin lid at CL. A red-hot stream of lead spewed through the air, through the dustbins, through Bushido, through CL and across Edward’s garden, snatching scraps of flesh on the way and scattering them across the azeleas.
‘Violence isn’t a science or an art.’ Lunk lectured the steaming bodies. ‘It’s just a way of life.’
Richard Turner & William Osborne : 1998
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Like angels with bright savage eyes
I will come treading phantom-wise
Hither where thou art wont to sleep,
Amid the shadows hollow and deep.
And I will give thee, my dark one,
Kisses as icy as the moon,
Caresses as of snakes that crawl
In circles round a cistern’s wall.
When morning shows its livid face
There will be no-one in my place,
And a strange cold will settle here
Others, not knowing what thou art,
May think to reign upon thy heart
With tenderness; I trust to fear.
Charles Baudelaire : Le Revenant
Trans: George Dillon
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(High Germany, Music, Videos)
Dein ist mein ganzes Herz !
Wo du nicht bist, kann ich nicht sein.
So, wie die Blume welkt,
wenn sie nicht küsst der Sonnenschein !
Dein ist mein schönstes Lied,
weil es allein aus der Liebe erblüht.
Sag mir noch einmal, mein einzig Lieb,
oh sag noch einmal mir:
Ich hab dich lieb !
Wohin ich immer gehe,
ich fühle deine Nähe.
Ich möchte deinen Atem trinken
und betend dir zu Füssen sinken,
dir, dir allein! Wie wunderbar
ist dein leuchtendes Haar !
Traumschön und sehnsuchtsbang
ist dein strahlender Blick.
Hör ich der Stimme Klang,
ist es so wie Musik.
Lehar etc…
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(Other Writ, Correctitude, Poetry)
Burn all bridges
never look back
set the traps
let pillars of fire touch the sky.
Listen to no slaves
never look back
depth-charge the docks
let water flood the plain.
Ride equably away
never look back
then spur to the horizon edge
inaction is death foretime.
Johann Winterfelt : Never Look Back As You Ride Away
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COME, madam, come, all rest my powers defy;
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear,
That th’ eyes of busy fools may be stopp’d there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed-time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’ hill’s shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet, and show
The hairy diadems which on you do grow.
Off with your hose and shoes ; then softly tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven’s angels used to be
Revealed to men ; thou, angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven-like Mahomet’s paradise ; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite ;
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee ;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views ;
That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array’d.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
— Whom their imputed grace will dignify —
Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself ; cast all, yea, this white linen hence ;
There is no penance due to innocence :
To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man ?
John Donne : Elegy XX
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(Music, The King of Terrors)
Brahms wrote the Requiem for the death of his mother.
Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blume abgefallen.
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(Generalia)
It’s comforting that at least there’s always someone, Japanese in this case curiously enough, who will tailor a PC for the most forgotten and ignored in society.
The ERN005-PC (KANA).
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Two contrasting renditions of the French standard, ‘Si, Maman, Si’.
Compare the delicacy of the tribute to Line Renaud duetted by Vanessa Paradis and Muriel Robin, to the raw starkness of forlorn misery from the 16-yr-old singer from Montreal, Marie Pier Perreault
Tous mes amis sont partis
Mon coeur a déménagé
Mes vacances c’est toujours Paris
Mes projets c’est continuer
Mes amours c’est inventer
Si, maman, si
Si, maman, si
Maman, si tu voyais ma vie
Je pleure comme je ris
Si, maman, si
Mais mon avenir reste gris
Et mon coeur aussi
Et le temps défile comme un train
Et moi je suis à la fenêtre
Je suis si peu habile que demain
Le bonheur passera peut-être
Sans que je sache le reconnaître
Si, maman, si
Si, maman, si
Maman, si tu voyais ma vie
Je pleure comme je ris
Si, maman, si
Mais mon avenir reste gris
Et mon coeur aussi
Mon coeur est confortable, bien au chaud
Et je lasse passer le vent
Mes envies s’éteignent, je leur tourne le dos
Et je m’endors doucement
Sans chaos ni sentiment
Si, maman, si
Si, maman, si
Maman, si tu voyais ma vie
Je pleure comme je ris
Si, maman, si
Mais mon avenir reste gris
Et mon coeur aussi
Si, maman, si
Si, maman, si
Maman, si tu voyais ma vie
Je pleure comme je ris
Si, maman, si
Mais mon avenir reste gris
Et mon coeur aussi.
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(Other Writ, Generalia, Music)
5) Prairie Muffins improve their intellect and knowledge as they have opportunity, first by seeking wisdom from God’s word, then by reading good books and other materials which help them to make informed opinions about a wide variety of subjects.
6) Prairie Muffins dress modestly and in a feminine manner.
18) Prairie Muffins are fiercely submissive to God and to their husbands.
23) While Prairie Muffins seek to have a multitude of wise counselors, they are careful not to elevate mere men and women to a position where they are tempted to idolize those whom they admire. They also are aware that all have weaknesses, and they accept this reality without discarding the good teaching of those godly people who may occasionally stumble in their weakness or with whom we sometimes must disagree.
28) Prairie Muffins mind their own business. While that business may include encouraging other women “to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored,” it most emphatically excludes encouraging other women to run ahead of or resist the authority of their husbands or elders in pursuit of any PM distinctive.
29) Prairie Muffins are open to correction from proper authorities. They are responsible to submit to their own husbands, to their elders, and ultimately to God. If rebuked by these authorites a PM should receive such correction gracefully and gratefully. If rebuked by others, she should take the concern to her proper authorities.
43) There are many good things that Prairie Muffins love: their husbands, their children, their churches. But most of all, Prairie Muffins love their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and though those other treasures are precious, they hold them lightly, trusting in God’s providence regarding even those most prized possessions, knowing that to hold them too tightly would be replacing them with God in their affections, and that would be idolatry.
If female, are YOU a Prairie Muffin ? If not, why not ?
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Tom Brusky – Lesbian Polka
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(Other Writ, Poetry)
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;
and leave you ( inexpressibly to unravel )
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable
it is alternately stone in you and star.
Rainer Maria Rilke : Evening
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My favourite Italian Renaissance person…
I’ve seen a better picture of her though; also, she has been identified as the right-most grace in Botticelli’s Primavera, and — much more dubiously — as the Mona Lisa, joining a long list of candidates, including the artist himself. Leonardo, like the nazis, falls into that category of which any lunatic rubbish can be attributed or linked, almost at random.
Naturally enough most commentary is along the lines of her being some sort of warrior princess, studiously ignoring the fact that she was awfully unsuccessful in most of her battles; whereas it would be more fitting to remember her rare courage and grace — most famously when her foes threatened to kill her captive children, and she sweetly replied that God had given her the capacity to replace them, lifting her skirts on the battlements to prove this — and most of all her beauty.
Not that she was not a good mother who brought up her children well: Giovanni of the Black Bands made his first kill at the age of 12, which is earlier than in these degenerate days.
And of course, anyone who hated the unspeakable Cesare, who bestially ill-treated her in captivity, is basically on the side of Light.
Sort-of.
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(Other Writ, Charles I, Correctitude)
Jamie Saxt out of character:
He saw something of the terrible catastrophe of a war-torn Europe; he was distressed that it was his own son-in-law who had taken the step which was likely to reduce his peace policy to ashes. So strong was James’s belief that he should remain uncommitted that it was not until March that he gave his consent to the raising of volunteers and permitted the City loan to go forward. He worried incessantly and gave vent to his feelings against Frederick: ‘It is only by force that he will ever be brought to reason !’, he exclaimed. ‘If my son-in-law wishes to save the Palatine’, he said on another occasion, ‘he had better at once consent to a suspension of arms in Bohemia !. He would not allow prayers to be said for Frederick as King of Bohemia. ‘James is a strange father’, the Prince of Orange reputedly remarked, ‘he will neither fight for his children nor pray for them.’ No wonder it was reported that the King ‘seemed utterly weary’. ‘I am not God Almighty’, he was heard to mutter, a remark so out of character that in itself it demonstrated his depression. He busied himself with writing a meditation upon St Matthew’s Gospel, which he called The Crown of Thorns.
Online biography of Charles I by Pauline Grigg, though easier to read in the printer version…
So so… Usual querulous stuff about him, but well-written.
Good pic though
Charles in character:
Charles was to remain at Windsor until 19 January 1649, while his opponents discussed his fate. A strong party of soldiers still urged his trial and condemnation. Fairfax shrank from such a procedure and kept outside the discussions. Lilburne and his party continued to assert that neither Parliament nor Army had the legal right to try the King and that to do so would be to open the door to further arbitrary government. Cromwell hesitated; even Ireton hung back. The Earl of Denbigh was sent with a secret message to Charles at Windsor which could have paved the way to further negotiation. Charles refused to see him. He would struggle for terms no longer; he could not consult his wife; he would no longer plague his conscience to determine what was right; there was no need to prevaricate; as he had written, they had left him with but the ‘husk and shell’ of life; he merely had to make his peace with himself, which meant with God, and he was helped by the wide, grey river that symbolized the best of his life. He believed that, except for the betrayal of Strafford, he had acted well; he believed his son would reign after him; he believed his captors were evil men and he knew what to expect. It was consequently easy for him to wait. As he had written: ‘That I must die as a Man, is certain, that I may die a King, by the hands of My own Subjects, a violent, sudden, and barbarous death, in the strength of My years, in the midst of My Kingdoms, My Friends and loving Subjects being helpless Spectators, My Enemies insolent Revilers and Triumphers over Mee . . . is so probable in humane Reason, that God hath taught Mee not to hope otherwise.‘
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(Generalia, Videos)
And, I Can’t Stand It Anymore…
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Thus, having with no muted pride called the roll of what seem to me to be great men and women in American literary life today, and having indeed omitted a dozen other names of which I should like to boast were there time, I must turn again and assert that in our contemporary American literature, indeed in all American arts save architecture and the film, we — yes, we who have such pregnant and vigorous standards in commerce and science — have no standards, no healing communication, no heroes to be followed nor villains to be condemned, no certain ways to be pursued, and no dangerous paths to be avoided.
The American novelist or poet or dramatist or sculptor or painter must work alone, in confusion, unassisted save by his own integrity.
***
But universities and colleges and musical emporiums and schools for the teaching of theology and plumbing and signpainting are as thick in America as the motor traffic. Whenever you see a public building with Gothic fenestration on a sturdy backing of Indiana concrete, you may be certain that it is another university, with anywhere from two hundred to twenty thousand students equally ardent about avoiding the disadvantage of becoming learned and about gaining the social prestige contained in the possession of a B.A. degree.
Oh, socially our universities are close to the mass of our citizens, and so are they in the matter of athletics. A great college football game is passionately witnessed by eighty thousand people, who have paid five dollars apiece and motored anywhere from ten to a thousand miles for the ecstasy of watching twenty-two men chase one another up and down a curiously marked field. During the football season, a capable player ranks very nearly with our greatest and most admired heroes – even with Henry Ford, President Hoover, and Colonel Lindbergh.
***
There has recently appeared in America, out of the universities, an astonishing circus called “the New Humanism.” Now of course “humanism” means so many things that it means nothing. It may infer anything from a belief that Greek and Latin are more inspiring than the dialect of contemporary peasants to a belief that any living peasant is more interesting than a dead Greek. But it is a delicate bit of justice that this nebulous word should have been chosen to label this nebulous cult.
Insofar as I have been able to comprehend them — for naturally in a world so exciting and promising as this today, a life brilliant with Zeppelins and Chinese revolutions and the Bolshevik industrialization of farming and ships and the Grand Canyon and young children and terrifying hunger and the lonely quest of scientists after God, no creative writer would have the time to follow all the chilly enthusiasms of the New Humanists — this newest of sects reasserts the dualism of man’s nature. It would confine literature to the fight between man’s soul and God, or man’s soul and evil.
But, curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments. Oedipus is a tragic figure for the New Humanists; man, trying to maintain himself as the image of God under the menace of dynamos, in a world of high-pressure salesmanship, is not. And the poor comfort which they offer is that the object of life is to develop self-discipline — whether or not one ever accomplishes anything with this self-discipline. So the whole movement results in the not particularly novel doctrine that both art and life must be resigned and negative. It is a doctrine of the blackest reaction introduced into a stirringly revolutionary world.
Strangely enough, this doctrine of death, this escape from the complexities and danger of living into the secure blankness of the monastery, has become widely popular among professors in a land where one would have expected only boldness and intellectual adventure, and it has more than ever shut creative writers off from any benign influence which might conceivably have come from the universities.
But it has always been so. America has never had a Brandes, a Taine, a Goethe, a Croce.
With a wealth of creative talent in America, our criticism has most of it been a chill and insignificant activity pursued by jealous spinsters, ex-baseball-reporters, and acid professors. Our Erasmuses have been village schoolmistresses. How should there be any standards when there has been no one capable of setting them up ?
Excerpts from the Nobel Lecture given by Sinclair Lewis.
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(Music)
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Alabama 3 – God’s Unchanging Hand
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(Other Writ, High Germany, Literature)
“You must know, my own love, that there are beings in the elements which bear the strongest resemblance to the human race, and which, at the same time, but seldom become visible to you. The wonderful salamanders sparkle and sport amid the flames; deep in the earth the meagre and malicious gnomes pursue their revels; the forest-spirits belong to the air, and wander in the woods; while in the seas, rivers, and streams live the widespread race of water-spirits. These last, beneath resounding domes of crystal, through which the sky can shine with its sun and stars, inhabit a region of light and beauty; lofty coral-trees glow with blue and crimson fruits in their gardens; they walk over the pure sand of the sea, among exquisitely variegated shells, and amid whatever of beauty the old world possessed, such as the present is no more worthy to enjoy — creations which the floods covered with their secret veils of silver; and now these noble monuments sparkle below, stately and solemn, and bedewed by the water, which loves them, and calls forth from their crevices delicate moss-flowers and enwreathing tufts of sedge.
“Now the nation that dwell there are very fair and lovely to behold, for the most part more beautiful than human beings. Many a fisherman has been so fortunate as to catch a view of a delicate maiden of the waters, while she was floating and singing upon the deep. He would then spread far the fame of her beauty; and to such wonderful females men are wont to give the name of Undines. But what need of saying more ? — You, my dear husband, now actually behold an Undine before you.”
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué : Undine
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In modern foie gras factory farms, geese and ducks are confined, usually in either small pens or in tiny cages that virtually lock the birds in place. Thus restrained, the birds cannot escape the “feeder” and the mechanized feeding machine. One by one, the feeder grabs each bird and plunges the metal pipe of the feeding machine down their throats. The machine pumps a huge amount of a corn-and-oil mixture directly into their gullets in just a few seconds, equivalent to one-third to one-fourth of the birds’ own body weight each day.
This brutal treatment is devastating to the health of the birds. In a matter of weeks, their livers have swollen up to ten times their normal size. Breathing and walking become difficult as the liver pushes against other organs, causing respiratory stress due to decreased air sac space in their lungs, and forcing the legs to move outward at an unnatural angle. Ducks at foie gras farms have been observed panting and struggling to stand, using their wings to push themselves forward when their crippled legs can no longer support them. Struggling to move causes infection-prone open pressure sores to develop and fester on their hocks (legs) and keels (chest area).
fois gras
***
Sir Roger Moore, the actor, has spoken out against the despicable manufacture of fois gras, something begun by the ancient Egyptians, and handed down through both Roman and jewish cuisine — none of which peoples were greatly known for regard for animals — to present day Europe; narrated a DVD for PETA describing how this produce of disease injures the geese; and written to MPs urging a ban.
A wretched little fellow described as the ‘Animal Welfare Minister’ — and I swear to God, I wasn’t aware we had one, nor have I seen the remotest evidence of his being — stated earlier: ‘foie gras couldn’t be banned in the UK due to EU laws, but a public boycott could help put an end to it.’
Apart from the fact that both the two biggest players in the Union, Germany and France, quite sensibly manage to disobey EU law when the fit takes them, the implication that it can be left to public opinion to force an action is mindboggling. Even were it not for the fact that French public opinion might well be against ending the vice: that would be the same People Power that has so successfully always forced the immediate ending of slavery, torture, corruption and unjust wars since the beginning of time ?
