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.”
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.
fantasy killed the sf-star: vintage, prescient eulogy to the genre
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.
The always splendid and visionary BLDGBLOG presents an excellent survey of the coming electromagnetic moats that are being created to thwart off the remote controlled cat burglars known as drones.
It ought not come as any surprise that constellation of technologies that enable the good guys to keep us safe also comes off the shelf for the potential deployment and home- invasions, casing the joint from a safe distance. The number of black sites for GPS navigation devices is growing as are signal-jamming equipment create permanent and impromptu force fields. I suspect, however, that whatever counter-measures are implemented, new methods for getting around those drawbridges and portcullises won’t be far behind, including navigation by more traditional methods, orientation without being tethered to a human operator and completely autonomous missions (replete with exhaustive demographics) with no need to report back. I wonder how the the physical faรงade of suburbia and gated communities, exposed and set apart from the concrete jungles that might provide some natural defenses and more barriers to overcome, might change to support this firewall fortress.
I am not sure what impression that I had formed of Grigori Rasputin beforehand other than him being some creature of the court of the Romanov’s—maybe a charlatan, and spiritual-healer and advisor to (and perhaps lover of) the Russian queen. Aside from the biography presented in the lyrics of the Boney-M song, I only based my knowledge of the so-called Mad Monk from the passages in The Tin Drum where the little hero’s mother is similarly enchanted by Rasputin’s story and led down the road to ruin.
It really struck me, however—given that the belligerents of the Great War were almost all a part of one big family feud—oh bother, there’s Cousin Willy sounding off again, no member of the royal houses were heard to say a word to stop the fighting, save for Rasputin, who foretold the end of the Empire—though perhaps already obvious to the neutral observer. I had also assumed that Rasputin was executed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries along with the rest of the Romanov family, but—and again, the true reckoning is obscured—His Majesty’s Secret Service, it seems, either pulled the trigger or at least provided the weapon in the assassination of Rasputin in the thick of the war in 1916. Rasputin’s warnings to the Romanov’s maybe were dissuading the Russians from entering the war, and with the tide shifting in favour of Imperial Germany in that year, the British knew that they could not hope to contain them if they were only challenged on their western front.
