terra nullis or cincinnatus

Previously we’ve explored how the origins of the American Revolutionary War were less noble than they are usually framed in stories like the Boston Tea Party or the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, and it was refreshing to see that history and scholarship revisited through tracking down a team of colonial surveyors in the 1760s and the charts that they produced that demarcated the boundaries between what lands could be settled and what was the domain of Native American tribes. Many of the maps included both UK and Native American signatories agreeing to rivers, peaks and other landmarks as border markers.
Quite earnest in their efforts to reach a compromise that would promote a harmonious co-existence, all the territory of course still belonged to the Crown but settlers were not infringe further into Indian lands. The colonial governors were not always willing to enforce these treaties and in some cases flagrantly encouraged settlement and coastal, seaboard European communities moved further and further inland and on-going disputes, punctuated with memorable riots and skirmishes, eventually precipitated into rebellion and war. Admittedly conditions for aboriginal people was less than concordant at all times in Canada and Australia and I admit that I haven’t done the research on how things played out differently in those territories, but I think their experience was very different from the systematic “genocidal dispossession” experienced in America.

grenfell tower, june, 2017

Our heartfelt thanks to Nag on the Lake for directing our attention to a moving and righteously outraged elegy by Ben Okri for the victims, families and the displaced of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June.
“If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower,” the Nigerian poet writes and fervently captures the hollow sense of disdain—contempt of a gleaning ever more profit at the expense of a disposable underclass illustrated by this tragedy. The recent additions to London’s skyline, rather than æsthetic and aspirational, turn revolting and shameful and repeat the demand that a system where austerity for the many means prosperity of the few must change for the better. “See the tower, and let a new world-changing thought flower.”

biblioclasm

Disturbingly, not only can US transportation security agents demand that travellers disclose the social media profiles and passwords but are now—after trials in select airports—making it standard practise to oblige passengers to remove books and other paper goods from hand-luggage for inspection, as Hyperallergic reports. Counter to the legal legacy of keeping reading habits out of prying eyes, this change surely means that a person’s literary tastes—to include research materials, titles and covers easily misconstrued by those deputised critics and censors, will become a criteria for barring entry and making transit a very difficult matter.

nature morte vivante

In response to an on-going paternity suit raised by a professional psychic, a judge ordered the exhumation of surrealist Salvador Dalí from beneath the stage of his hometown theatre and museum where his body is buried in Figueres, Catalonia.
Notwithstanding speculation whether Dalí in fact was disposed or capable of sexual relations by the fact he had no offspring inside his long marriage to his muse, Gaia, the tarot card reader is claiming that the eccentric artist had an affair with her mother whilst working as a chambermaid in the province of Girona. With no heir, Dalí donated his artwork and estate to the Kingdom of Spain but presumably, if fatherhood can be established, his daughter would have a claim on the artist’s legacy.