Tuesday 3 February 2015

by special arrangement or jesus and mary chain

As the press and public are starting to have misgivings and doubts concerning the real agenda and who’s to gain and who’s to loose over a trade deal that’s been couched in no real debate, shrouded and perched on high above the law of the land, the Holy See has also made known its stance, sharply criticising this polarizing trend that comes at the expense of the poor, the environment and any hope for mobility. The treaty’s secretive drafters, however, apparently have listened to the outcry and have made concessions—providing heads of state and high officials with special visiting hours to inspect the contents of TTIP, by appointment only, during a given window of time, in US embassy compounds and under the constant watch of consular staff (according to a .PDF leaked to Der Spiegel).

magical mystery tour

After the box-office success of HELP! there was a pitch to the legendary film director Stanley Kubrick to cast the Beatles in a production of the Lord of the Rings saga. The Tolkien estate eventually rebuffed the proposal, but just imagine how our conception of the characters would have been otherwise, not to mention the scoring. Incidentally Carl Sagan had approached the band about including the track Here Comes the Sun on the golden records carried aloft on the Voyager space probes. The Beatles were enthusiastic and honoured but for whatever reason, their record label refused. That would-be first encounter would have been surely even more monumental and definitely immortal.

Monday 2 February 2015

speech is silvern but silence is golden

The superlative Brain-Pickings shares yet another absolute jewel from the desk of Lewis Carroll (Charles Ludwig Dodgson) in his short pamphlet, probably written as a more sensible and kinder counterpoint to the thicker, authoritarian guides to correspondence of the day, called “Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing.”

While it is true, especially among the shrapnel of sharing, that for some, words are little projectiles to shout out demands and twice-divorced from communication—and of course contextual communication, sometimes only requires a gesture, a sort of disembodied body-language but that’s not the courtesy and consideration that Carroll is concerned with, I believe. Despite how some bookkeeping techniques might sound dated and the epistolary arts might be a moribund thing, Carroll’s advice rings surpassing true, even today. Careful reading and restraint is emphasised.  Sometimes—day-to-day, I guess, we only need such short barking dispatches or confirmations but I think what we write, say day-to-day is not just a reflection but is the same as what we hope to compose in a thoughtful and polite way. This excellent analysis is also a point of departure for exploring what else the don thought about politeness and good, humanising manners.

there is no there

Surely it would be a grave injustice to try to put post-modern sentimentalities on the expatriate artists, patrons and personalities known as the Lost Generation—like saying that among that clique there were no great campaigners for social change and no champions. There were certainly members of distinction but Ernest Hemmingway and F Scott Fitzgerald vis-ร -vis contemporaries like John Steinbeck and William Faulkner can seem absolutely dissolute. The same criticism might hold with the grand lady and benefactor of the group, Gertrude Stein, because she was staunchly apolitical and living in Paris during the interbellum years, I am sure that it never occurred to her that the dull cares and prejudice that never touched her or her friends might impose inconvenience and even persecution for other souls not so lucky.
 It is also a very modern thing to pry into the moral conscience of others and to expect more—or salaciously less of our celebrities, however fame is measured, but it really strikes me as detached and maybe selfish to proclaim “We always pass our wars in France” retreating to an estate in territory held by the Vichy government, and as a Jewish lesbian couple surrounded by Nazis as rather irresponsible and careless. Stein and her lover, Alice B. Toklas, had their protectors and for whatever reasons, choice to remain in their stronghold—serenely snarky, I suppose. Stein’s genius was not only limited to recognising nurturing the genius of other, which is by no means something to diminish since she helped Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and many other luminaries, but established herself in the literary world by penning the autobiography of her lover—as a memoir from her perspective, arguing that Toklas wouldn’t never get around to writing her own story. Toklas, who managed Stein’s schedule and kept up the housekeeping business, did however, in the form of a cookbook with recipes for hash brownies and alcoholic chicken intermingled with memories of their lives together. Most of the other writing projects of Stein were consigned to experimentation if not outright nonsense (studying under stream-of-consciousness advocate Henry James at university maybe left Stein without any filters) but importantly, I think, questioned what exactly was sense and convention then by harnessing its opposite. Ultimately, I think that is also a worthy pursuit. 

Sunday 1 February 2015

link roundup: five-by-five

fantasy killed the sf-star: vintage, prescient eulogy to the genre

birdazzlers: the falcons’ hive falconry accessories

you’re doing it wrong: insights into meta-cognition

h.p. lovecat: at the litter-box of madness

civics class: JF Ptak’s wonderful blog is entering its ninth year of prolific publication

jubilee

The Washington Post reports that the government of Croatia has spent around twenty-seven million euro to forgive the financial obligations of some sixty thousand of its poorest citizens. Thousands of families caught in an unending cycle of indebtedness—that could well be inherited across generations have been given the chance to start anew, and it does seem a very small price to pay to restore a degree of dignity and independence as well as probably being more of a bargain in the long-term over paying benefits that only enrich the lenders. What do you think about this bold and unique act?

jenny don’t change your number, i’m gonna make you mine

Although the object of his affection extolled in rather cheesy verse was won over as a woman to be respected in her own right and a constant companion in the fight for his cause, the love poetry—looking forward to Saint Valentines’ Day, that Karl Marx penned for his beloved, Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen can make anyone proud and secure in his or her romantic overtures.

As a philosopher, author and theatre-critic (recalling how Marx later expounded, ideally, that every man ought to have the luxury after an honest day’s labour to be a critic in the evening) in her own right, Jenny Marx was swooned by such lines:
See! I could a thousand volumes fill,
Writing only “Jenny” in each line,
Still they would a world of thought conceal,
Deed eternal and unchanging Will,
Verses sweet that yearning gently still,
867-5309.