=jr051124 JOURNAL FROM 23 NOV '05 Preceeding journal: =jr0511f Preceeded by =jr05x17 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Sara Paretsky, 'DeadLock' (1984, Penguin 1987), a V.I. Washawski novel She having written also V.I. Warshawski short stories, and another Chicago novel. A real Chicago writer. Odd how private eye stories fit in the genre of socialist realism. Glorification of the working class, satire of the idle rich. This one depicts the Great Lakes grain shippers. A real writer, of lasting value, not a pop shlock escape throwaway -------------------------------------------------------------- Sci_fi short story anthology, 'The Stars around Us', ed. Robert Hoskins, 1970 --------------------------- The Listeners, by James E. Gunn (1968), has a nice collection of quotes, though not really woven of them. They're more nearly just high_class illustrations. PVK weaves articles of quotes in his Curriculum KIT's, and I try to do that sometimes too. --------------------------- Asimov, 'The Feeling of Power' (1957) -- Asimov is a Wittgensteinian writer, though he most likely evolved that approach independently and nearly simultaneously -- I first read 'Pebble in the Sky', which I thik was hie first novel, around 1950 or so, Wittgensteins 'Philosophical Investigations' was published in 1952. Asimov's genius is to be able to suppose himself in what Wittgesnstein would call a 'form of life' very different from our own -- Asimov is apt to depict it as another civilization, usually in anotehr galaxy -- and then reasonably work out in detail how some things would look from that perspective. In this short story, he imagines a culture in which people have forgotten the mental skills of arithmetic, since computers do all that for them. He then imagines how arithmetic would seem almost like magic to such people. ---------------------------------- 'The Helping Hand' by Poul Anderson (1950, Street and Smith, which happened to be Wittgenstein's favorite publisher of escape stories), is a parable of the USA cultural imperialism of mass_produced mediocrity. ------------------------------- 'A Work of Art' by James Blish (1956) This is a tour de force Music Appreciation of Richard Strauss.ù It is a 'chef d'oeuvre inconnu', but the writer really depicts a work that would exemplify the style of Richard Strauss, rather than (as in that short story, 'Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu' -- was that du Maupassant? ) -- supposing that such a work existed, but not attempting to imagine what it would be like. The gimmick of the plot, which is not important, is to imagine that Richard Strauss was synthesized by a future culture, and that the synthesis imagined himself to be a resurrection of Richard Strauss. So again, science_fiction serves as a metaphor for spiritual reality. For resurrection exists, but of course not on the physical plane. And of course there will be an apocalypse which no one can escape, and a Second Coming of Jesus to all who wish it (though Jesus warned, not all who wish it can get past that velvet rope and pass through the Pearly Gate. amd its no cash, all they take are credit cards -- teudot z'hut, as we say in Israel -- as_it_is_said "you can't take it with you when you go" (USA saying, 20th or maybe 19th century). "The old tricks came swamring back by the thousands, to be sure; the sudden, unexpected key-changes at the crest of a melody; the interval stretching, the piling of divided strings, playing in the high harmonics, upon the already tottering top of a climax; the scurry and bustle as phrases were passed like lightning from mone choir of the orchestra to another; the flashing runs in the brass; the chuckling in the clarinets; the snarling mixtures of color to emhasize dramatic tension -- all of them. ... [but] where had he gotten the notion, clung to for decades, that violins screaming out in unision somewhere in the stratosphere was a sound interesting enough to be worth repeating inside a single composition, let alone in all of them.'" This re_incarnated Richard Strauss then choeses to write a new opera, and picks a play: "the play was Christptpher Fry's Venus Observed [ rather a sexist title of course; the ladies do not write novelettes entitled 'Pan Sampled'-- and so Mary McCarthy replied with a travelogue titled, 'Venice Observed' ] , in all ways a perfect Strauss opera libertto .... though nominally a comedy, with a complex farcical plot, it was a verse play with considerable depth to it, and a number of characters who cried out to be brought by music into three dimesnions, plus a strong undercurrent of autumnal tragedy, of leaf-fall and apple-fall -- preciscely the kind of contradictory dramatic mixture whch von Hoffmannsthal [ an arrogant prat, but nicely sensual and sentimental about decaying leaves, rotting wood, and all that autumnal nostaliga -- rather like Truman Capote, before he became an arriviste evil queen, or like Ray Bradbury ] had supplied him in The King of the Rose, in Ariadne at Naxos , and in Arabella...the fire which ended Act II, what a gift for a composer to whom orchestration and counterpoint were as important as air and water. Or take the moment when Perpetua shoots the apple from the Due's hand, in that one moment a single passing reference could add Rossini's marmoreal William Tell [ and what the hell ]to the musical texture as nothing but an ironic footnote. [ but that's all post_modernism is, Chiz ] And the Duke's geat curtain speech, beginning: Shal I be sorry for myself? In mortality's name I'll be sorry for myself. Branches and boughs, Brown hills, the valley faint with brume, A burnish on the lake: ... [ not bad, but no doubt would be better in a German translation by von Hoffmansthal, "but bless you sir, he's dead" -- though come to think of it, now that Bliss has presented the possibility, why not start synthesizing all those dudes and cointinuing on with their opuses -- a nicely editted version of Pound's Canto's, for starters, whatever he might have done if he hadn't been half_mad. I mean, it ain't as if our contemporary brains are such hot potatoes that they don't need a bit of synthetic neo_classical spur ] THERE was a speech for a great tragic comedian, in the spirit of Falstaff, the final union of laughtter and tears, punctuated by the sleepy comments of Reedbeck, to whose sonorous snore (trombones, no less thanm five of them, con sordini?) the opera would gently end ... In passing he finds a poem by Pound, from Personnae, "..the souls of all men great at times pass through us ... thus I am Dante for a space and am one Francois Villon, ballad-lord and thief ..." "it would be fitting to make a little hymn of it, in honor of his own rebirth, and of the poet's insight. A series of solemn, breathless chords framed themselves in his inner ear, against which the words might be intoned in a high, gently bending hush at the beginning --- and then a dramatic passage in wich the great names of Dante and Villon would enter ringing like challenges to time -- " Well, that's two pieces of music that this James Bliss has sketched, in enough detail that someone could and should write them. ----------------------- The anthology concludes with an untypically bad story by Roger Zelazny -- an hasidic name, as I recall, for all that he was from Elyria Ohio -- maybe he went to Oberlin College and never moved away -- called 'The Great Slow Kings'. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 28 Nov '05 (Janet Maslin, reviewing books on Google) Search engines, including Google, need to make a lot more space for human intelligence, especially end_user customization. They must also shunt aside if not filter out commericial exploitation of the Search process. as well as exploitation of the search algorithms to generate high rankings. A search engine is of most value in intellectual if not necessarily academic contexts, but User interfaces seem to be written for lowest_common_denominator intelligence. Goo_goo indeed -- required baby_talk for adults. There should at least be optional alternative interfaces for precise searches in complex contexts. The Google CEO, may he be trapped in burning building with only a Google search engine to show him the way to the Emergency Exit, ia quoted as saying, "It's perfectly fine for Googoe to be run the way we run it as long as we tell you the truth. If you don't like it [ "Google's business practices", to use Maslin's phrase] , don't participate." Well, that's reasonable enough in a context of ideally free competition, where all who can and wish to do so can offer their product with adequate access to all potential customers. But it's not true in a practically oligarchic if not monopolistic context. In quaisi_monopolisitc contexts, a business, whether or not pbulicly funded, loses the right to "business practices" and instead assumes the obligations of a public utility. All this would by now have been produced were it not for closed source programming. So Google looks like a growing bubble, bound to burst. Goo_goo indeed. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Re: JP Int 25 Nov '05 -- Asher Meir , Ethics at Work. In the course of advocting that producers of Frankenfoods sold at retail be required to label their packages as such, Asher Meir remarks, in passing, "I cancur with thier claim (the prodcuers of Frankenfoods) that there is not a shred of evidence that genetically modified (GM) foods are any more dangeroujus to consumers or the the enfironment than traditional crops, or evne that the yre in any way substantively ddifferent than hybrid crops. (Fn 1) Well, as I have remarked, epistemologic scepticism is he last recourse of a scoundrel. 'there is no evidence' is the gambit of a lawyer, not a scientist. The criterion of 'evidence', must less proof becomes so strict -- as Hume pointed out, though without drawing the Wittgensteinian conclusion that this is merely a 'grammatcal' (Wittgstein's term in PI, publisehd 1952), or 'logical' WWittgenstein's term in his 'middle period') conclusion -- that the sun will rise tomorrow. (Indeed, in Campra, there is no undeniable evidence that it rose today.) This sort of argument was used against those who opposed a cesstion of atmoshpheric nuclear tests, it has been used by the tobacco industry, unsucsessfuly, to deny that smoking causes cancer, and is still used by Bush to deny that man_made air pollution is causing climate wraming. Evidence only in the limited case fits the simple linear model of 'necessary or sufficient casuse'. It is a far more complex and long_term matter. Even on the empirical model, which is very simplisitc, appropraite only to theoretic models of Newtonian mechanics, if that, it is acknowleged that evidence never conclusively proves, but only provisionally confimrs, subject to the sbusequent emergence of additional evidence that will tend to disconfirm that theory -- or more precisely, reduce the range of applicability of that theoretic model. As for GM and hybrids -- of course they are substantively different. GM is an artificial modification of the genetic code of a given species, a hybrid is a human produced natural modification. That is, the hybrid process works only on the commonplace level -- it places different species in proximity, often by grafting, but does not enter into the micro level of the actual DNA. Only in GM is the splicing done at the micro level. It may be that left to nature, other factors would enter in to prevent the creation of a hybrid species, as similarly they sometimes do in the case of athe miscarriage of a fetus. So a case could be made that GM foods constitute a human override of the laws of nature, and hence, for those who deen nature to be the working of the Divine -- in particular, Catholics and orthodox Jews -- that they should be unacceptable to those religious traditions. And this is similar to the ethical quandry of whether a terminally ill person who wishes or me be deemed to wish, if he were aware of his situation and could express himself, to die, should be kept alive by arificial means. Of course to support this point one must diginguish, if not precisely 'draw a line' between proper and imporper human intervention into natural processes. In most cases that may be a subtle distinction, and one that can be formulated not as general rule (since there is always "the excption that proves" -- ie, tests the limits of, not 'decisively confirms') "he rule". ----------------------------------------------------------------- And ammonium nitrate fertilzers are just a a less expensive form of bullshit. PVK remarked, and a few decades later scientific evidence suggested, that synthetic ferilizers, although chemically identical to the essential kind of crap in bullshit -- -- well, perhaps 'crap' is not quite thee mot juste: although with increasing physical if not emotional maturity I have had occasion to visit quite a few, I have yet to see a public Gents with an exceptionally large stall marked 'bulls' -- is potentially carcinogenic. In rebutal, somoenne remarked that synthetic and natural fertlizers are chemically identical. PVK then learned -- I htink that once he said, it was from Dr. Afif Rechtaffen -- that although they are chemically identical, they are -- in some sense which I don't know of -- "wound" in opposite ways -- one clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The Jews for Jesus seem to have a rather distorted form of Christianity -- almost idolatrous -- which is of course the risk, one of the limiting forms of, outermost variants of the continluum, as PVK would say -- of Christianity. So anyhow, on one of my New Mexico flipouts I get caught up in the wake of a traeling group of J's for J, and they tell me, you can accept Christianity and still be Jewish, and I'm sceptical, and I say, Can you say the Sh'ma, and he says yes of course, because Jesus is Lord.. Like R. Shlomo would say, It don't quite wash. I would now say that the zikr is compatible with the Shma. As for Christianity -- well, one must walk darned carefully. And like I say, stay away from the edges of that pond, that's where the thin ice is. I once asked Charisma to translate Christianity in Jewish terminology for me. She did, but I forget what she said. I want to say -- Chesed -- R. Shlomo has a Yakar teaching on just thatpoint -- that Hagar was straight Chesed, and that's why Abraham had to send her away, whereas Sarah was gvurah sh' ' Chesed -- the implication being, that's what we need in this world. Oy. Fry me a modified felafel. I just work here. ----------------------------------------------------------------- As far as I can see, Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' -- written davka in French, as if an anti_stylist had anything to gain there -- is mere crap. And I reckon that's Beeckett too. That's all he has to say -- life is crap. And without providing any details. Like those paintings that are all black, except that they at least show some aristry in harmonizing shades or shapes of black. I mean, this is not art, it's less than schoolboy petulance. And it can be said in one sentence. Krapp's Last Tape, indeed. First and last and stick it on your lips. Joyce maximized the potentialities of language, Beckett minimizes them. Waiting for Godot was quite the hit as I came of age, this is about 1957. Nobody could understand what he meant, so everybody assumed it must be something very deep. It's not, it's all sham and gesture, and not even good Barnum bunkum. Just a series of false starts -- "No question of it -- for the moment." ----------------------------------------------------------------- I keep coming back to those '6 things to remember' in the Siddur - - at the end of weekday Shaharit, Metsuddah siddur - the main edition, Ashkenazi I assume. They are all_of_a_piece: 1) You were slaves in Egypt (2) You stood at Sinai (3) Amalek tried to knock you off (4) You tempted the LORD (5) Miriam did wrong (6) Remember the Shabat, to sanctify it -- One emerges from enslavement -- "Of Human Bondage" to the 'passions', as Spinoza so aptly puts it -- such a Buddhist -- no wonder Wienpahl, so close to Zen Buddhism, is the exemplary teacher of Spinoza -- -- to revelation of what HIK and PVK, annd even, implicitly, and maybe as an intellectual influence, James Joyce ("Shem the Penman" in Finnean's Wake ) call 'The Message' -- -- and then forces of opposition emerge,, from within and/or from without, to "knock you off" as R. Shlomo puts it -- -- and those forces may first manifest aas an inner weakness -- rathter than taking the revelation of one's 'Divine Inheritance', as PVK terms it, as a Trust, one mistakes it for a personal privilege, and tries to exploit that gift for personal gain -- this is "it is forbidden to rely on a miracle" -- -- and even those whom one most looks upp to for leadership may sometimes fail -- for Moses almost refused to go back to Egypt to free his people, and Aaron made the Golden Calf -- for all that he says he merely facilitated it, and maybe even to dissuade them by saying, first break off your daughters' nose_rings -- but it was Miriam who saved the Jewish people by waiting, in a hopeless and heartbreaking situation, while the infant Moses was set afloat in the Nile -- -- and so we must go on, even without leeaders, and though we have fallen short of , even lost, that great revelation, we must make a start, with the simplest most everday matter -- remembering to keep the Shabat Well, as R. Shlomo would say -- "Heertbreaking". ------------------------------------------------------------------ Re: IHT 30 Nov '05 (Janet Maslin, reviewing Donovan's autobiography) Donovan had as fine an ear as any poet I think of. Only Pound comes to mind in comparison. And Donovan fused music and lyrics. "e-lectrIC-al bamamma gonna be a certain craze* how he savours each syllable of 'electrical', shifting the accent to the third syllable, aritculating each syllable of both words "too many years I spent in the City playing with Mr. Loss_and_Gain ... " and the way he turns Loss_and_Gain into a name, almost 'Larson Gaines' "the magazine girl poses on my glossy paper aer-o-plane" the shift in focus, perfect for a video, where the posing naked young woman turns into a folded paper airplane of her picture -- we go back from the burden of post_adolescent prurience to the freedom of childhood whimsy "armies advance" -- or "armies of ants" and his ironic perception of his own image: "'come__run__jump__skip_along__Sam' a very happy man I am to know you're well and doing fine surely sets at rest my mind" the sensuous slur of "on the fire_fly platform at sunny Goodge street violent hash_smoker shook a choc-o-late machine ..." the move from lugato rubato, to the muted stacatto of 'chocolate', with each syllable articulated -- and then the allegretto of "come take a walk down sunny South Kensington any day of th' week now .... " and then wistful nostalgia of sensitive person trying to hold the most -- sacred, really -- parts of his own space, without giving offensive, in a well_intentioned but boorish world: "last night I trod in starlight I excused myself with a grin .... " ---------------------------------------------------------------- Old Agae is not a chronologic state, it is a disease (Cf. PVK on the 'death gene') albeit one which, past a certain chronologic age, becomes increasingly closely correlated with chronologic age. --------------------------------------------------------------- To the IHT (not yet sent): On 2 Nov '05 the Basler Zeitung reported, on page 23, that from Freiday 4 Nov '05 flu vacine would not be available to the general public. I have read nothing of this story in the (unsupplemented) Zurich edition of the IHT. I have yet to hear an entirely coherent, much less convincing explanation of the situation from a pharmacist nor physician's office. Apparently flu vaccine is not available even to the elderly public. Apparently this is also the case in at least northern Italy. It appears that there had been extraordinary but unreported public panic purchase of flu vacine, due to an essentially irrational media_mediated fear of an epidemic if not pandemic of avian flu. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "STOP BY DUBAI" (Re: IHT 3-4 Dec '05: "Modern Luxury -- A Special Report") We will stop by Dubai on our Saturday afternooon shoppong spree. Dogpatch Marathon Swim Team Moshav Mevo Modi'in 73122 Israel ------------------------------------------------------------------- Alioto should be disqualified from the U.S. Supreme Court -- and from any judicial position -- because he is an ideologic anti_aboartionist. Not because he is anti_abortion, but because he is an ideologue. That is, because, like a good defense or unscrupulous prosecuting lawyer, but unlike a legitimate judge, he bends the law to support the position he represents. As for whether or not abortion is a form of murder or merely a matter of 'personal privacy' -- that is, of a woman's right to use her body as she will -- that rests on the philosophic definition of 'life'. And that philosphic definition, insofar as it is bona fide not arbitrary, rests on perception of what a fetus feels. And that perception reqires extraordinary spiritual acumen. ----------------------------------------------------------------- On his later poetry*: Reply to an imaginary critic: Yup, looks easy once it's said but I did it and you didn't.. "Matisse cuts papear dollies" et seq. ------------------------------------------------------------- One afternoon as we sat on the hillside drinking herbal tea she let her bare legs part beneath her proper skirt and smiled when she saw me see. That was 15 years ago I guess. Now she's maybe gone. I can't find her. --------------------------------------------------------------- The Poet stay several nights in an hotel room with an indoor privy and a television set: fragments for an apologia I'm not quite sure just where's the sin in watching women get it in and on and off with gentelemen (or extras paid for what they do) depiced through their TV screen if not at least my CRT I'm insulatedd nostalgia for my salad days T.S. Eliot, desperate for class said 'I'm only noved moved by an Anglican mass.' 'From cant to cunt' Pureswarden prays; that's the only real drama nowadays. that opera is the bachelor's bed "and sad enough" it's truly said Cf. Durell, via 'Pureswarden', in Alexandria Quartet, "Hail to thee, dream Albion, Pursewarden sends the greetings scant: thy credo he's turned back to front abhoring cant, adoring c_nt. " "sad enough" was a phrase often used by R. Shlomo Carlebach --------------------------------------------------------------- The Poet receives an E_mail that upsets his diction: Cousin Goober has mystic insight. We ain't met talked nor hardly written for 15 years but she knows what I need or so I'm told todyy is to surround myself with people now and pickle my brains in her favorite heavy metal so I no more go too high to fly or too low to know. That ain't natuareal and it ain't the American Way, Jose Nor clean neither: Cold beer, red wine, black coffee and a shot or two of whiskey from time to time do me just fine. (25 Nov '059 -------------------------------------------------------------- Sent IHT Letters via SwissCom, 25 Nov '05 and ain't been printed yet (3 Dec '05) Johann Hari ( IHT 25 Nov '05) fails to not the contradiction of the osentsibly anti_facist international (!) 'New Left' being ainti_Zionist, and hence pragmatically if not ideologically anit_Semitic. (Notes: Well, that ain't bad for fitting into the SwissCom 240 char limit, signature included. Johann Hari had reviewed a book on the 1968 Paris student riots. She noted that the 'Old [ ie, explicitly CP_ and especially CPUSSR__oriented] Left' of the 1930's was anti_facist; and that the 'New Left' -- Tom Hayden's brilliant isomorphic re_mapping of the CP_orieinted Marist_Leninism -- considers itself the heir of that international anti_facist movement. SwissCom does not allow an exclamation point, though I wanted to note the ironic parallelism with the Communist Internationale. It is the German publisher Alex Springer, in a pamphlet distributed by the Hebrew University (Jerusalem) Sasson Center for the Study of Anti_Semitism, who points out that to be anti_Israel is in effect if not in intent to be anti_Semitic, since that's where most of us Jews live nowadays. ---------------------------------------------------------------- "You know I don't like to talk business when I'm not wearing underwear." (USA SitCom show, 1990's; a yuppie husband tries to talk over a problem at work with his wife at the end of the day) As sexy a line as I recall. ----------------------------------------------------------------- My cup don't hold much. The pour in a lot of a lot sometimes. Well, let it spill, I can still drink from what's left. ---------------------------------------------------------------- re: IHT, ca. 25 Nov '05, reporting that the International Red Cross might finally allow Israel full membership if it changed its symbol from a red six_pointed__star (Magen David) to a red diamond, an intentionally meaningless symbol. Not yet covered in the JPost Int Don't know about the JPost daily and JPost Internet As we say in the USa, Israel should tell the International Red Cross, those ineffcutal anti_Semitic reactionarie,s what to do with their red diamond. It took them 6 years to work out that intentionally unsignificant compromise between righ and wrong. The symbol of the red cross is taken as a quasi_Christian symbol, even though the Romans and not known to have crucified midgits. The symbol of the red crescent is clearly an Islamic symbol.* So in short, Israel is entitled to use the Magen David Adom as its symbol, and the International Red Cross is blatantly discriminatory in opposing it. (Note) The crescent is taken as an Islamic symbol, to the point that an old USA cartoonist ("B.C." -- by Jon Hart, if I recall) who depicted an outdoor privy with a crescent_shaped hole on the door -- which shap was, for some reason, commmon in the 1900's -- was accused, in a passing flap, of being anti_Islamic. It took "Donnesbury" to point out tht this was a guy from a past generation who wouldn't have known the Koran from the Yellow Pages. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT, reporting that Austria was holding David Irving for trial without bail on a charge of 'Holocaust denial'. Note; Irving, said to have once been a well_regarded historian of Nazi Germany, has apparently become an intellectual supporter of the neo_Nazi movement. If memory serves, he is reportedly of partial Jewish descent. "Internalizing the oppressor", a basic Freudian defense mechanism. Look at Kreisky. Or Chomsky, Or all the traitors in the Middle Ages, who at least had something to gain from their betrayal. What Irving denied this time around, as I vaguely recall, was not the existence of the Shoah ('Holocaust') , but the accuracy of one of the generally_accepted details. Not the exact number killed -- which is obviously open to question, and will never be known, despie the popularly_accepted figure of six million -- but something else. He then issued, via his lawyer, a sort of retraction, but os heavily hedged that it became merely a methodologic qualification, not a withdrawal of the allegation for which he faces prosecution. Germany, and Austria, -- the former exemplary and the latter prefuctory at best in their oppoition to anti_Semitism -- are among the very few nations to have criminalized 'Holocaust denial'. Israel, of course, does not. Nor does the USA, really the only other nation beside Israel to hold a substantial and unintimidated Jewish population -- half the Brits have changed their names, and half would get nose jobs if they ever lifted up their heads (though as a matter of fact that 'Roman nose' or whatever you call it is not, despite all the carricaturs, a typical Jewish physiognomic feature; offhand I only recall one person who had it. Not even a typical Ashkenazi trait, as far as I've noticed. As for Waldheim,, who after WWII served as U.N. Secretary Genereal, and then as President of Austria, it seems now conceeded that in World War II ha was a high_ranking Nazi officer, responsible for the murder of at least many Jews in Greece. Northern Greece, if I recall. The notion of 'clear and present incitement' I take from the U.S. constiutional notion of 'clear and present danger'. This notion is also incorporated in Israel law, in rulings that abusive interrogation techniques can only be justified in a 'ticking bomb' situation -- paradigmatically, as in the Ashkelon Bus 300 incident, when a bomb has gone off in a passenger bus, , a perpetrator captured at the scene of the crime, and it is believed that this perpetrator knows the location of another time_bomb that has been placed on another bus with the timer set. So here's the latter I drafted but did not send: I drafted it for the JPost Int, which is the only JPost edition, though by far the least informative ,which I presently regularly see. I have not yet seen any coverage of this story in the JPost Int, though it reaches its readers about 3 weeks after the news it reports, and this news item was only a week ago. ------------------ Austria does us no favor in jailing nad prosecuing that wretch Irving for 'Holocaust denial'. They should indeed have hung Waldheim. Holocaust dential, even in whole much less dential of details, should not be a crime, unless it constitutes 'clear and present' incitement. History is inevitably inexact, and needs all the critics it can get. ------------------------------------------------------------- Drafted, not yet sent. This is another major story which I have not yet seen covered in the JPost Int. One could better make soup from used dishwater, and quicker too. ------------------------- Simply by relinquising final control of the Gaza border at one point -- Rafah -- Sharon. under Bush, has finally birthed the world's first terrorist mini_state. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Untitled fragment for an unimagined poem: " 'Ethel Rosenberg took longer to die.'" (from a news report of the execution of the Rosenbergs. It seems now a consensus of historians that the role said at the time to have been played by the Rosenbergs in helping the USSR build an atomic bomb , was largely played by Klaus Fuchs -- curiously, PVK in a KIT makes, in passing, some remark to that effect. At the time, the Rosenberg case was taken by the international liberal community as a typical example of USA hysteria. Picasso did a very moving pair of line_drawing sketches of the two of them. At least one of their children went on to live in Israel, under the name of the family who adopted him and his borther, and I think be somewhat active in ecologic issues. That name is neither a secret nor someting that one speaks of. Oddly, I met a chap on a train to Venice who lived on the kibbuty with one of the sons, or so I suppose. Even then and there, 40 years and 6000 miles away from it all, I spoke in guarded terms. Comes from having come of age during the USA Witchhunt of the 1950's, I suppose. ( And similarly, the unmaksing of U.S. agents which then Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger claimed in a pre_sentencing letter ot the the judge to have stemmed from Pollard's work -- which claim caused the judge to over_ride the plea_bargain and impose a life sentence -- is now generally agreed to have been caused by Aldrich Ames. But no U.S. President has had the political courage to commute the sentence. Clinton was maybe the only chance, with his last_minute pardons. One certainly expects nothing of Bushie that requires moral character nor a backbone. The last froma long line of child_beaters no doubt. If ever there was a frightened little boy, it's Bushie. --------------------------------------------------------------- 45 channels of TV and all that's worth looking at all the long night long for 3 days as a few 'black cat''s flashed by "tired eyes" Notes: 'Black Cat Press' was a division of Grove Press that specialized in books that had been banned a pornographic. the terms 'black cat' and 'flash' refer to the momentary unveiling of a lady's "usually private parts" "that's a sight for tired eyes" is a USA expression, early 1900's or maybe 1800's. ------------------------------------------------------------ fragment: gone gone long ago balls and all ------------------------------------------------------------ Read 'Best Science Fiction Stories 3' 1962m 1962, found in the Internet used bookstore, more than 40 years later. Editted, or rather, selected, by Edmund Crispin, who contributes a pretentious in introduction in which he says, Sci-Fi shows man congfronted with something bigger than man, and that's what these stories do. Well, No, not most. except in a most attenuated sense. 'The Gift of Gab', by Jack Vance, is seriously reasoned, it imagines in some detail what communication could be like for beings with 10 arms but no speech -- a matter of semphore_signs, rather. 'The Game of Rat and Dragon', by Cordwainer Smith, is a haunting fantasy of telephatic interaction Oddly enough, he writes of "something out there UNDERNEATH SPACE ITSELF which was alive, capricious, and melevolent" That's a practically_lost notion from Genesis, Phonecian I suppose, associated with Baal worship maybe -- all of which we censored out of the Bible thousands of years ago, thougb only a few traces remain -- the waters beneath, tohu_v_bohu -- I forget which term it is, in must be in Patai/Greaves, 'The Hebrew Myths' -- this story is very -- 'haunting ' -- which means, I sense that it means something deep, on a spiritual or at least psychic level, but I don't yet have inisght into what that is -- It is also deeply sympathetic to the soul of cats -- so sad that it has taken modern man sso long to re_recognize that, no doubt the ancient Egyptians knew it, with their cat_gods -- and Descrtes, that bewigged louse, ass Patia Rosenberg might have said, dropping cats out the window because he had concluded they don't have souls -- Murshida Vera Croder had a story about her cat, who was a lovely cat except that she caught birds, so Murshida Vera asked the Queen of the Cats -- the spirit of the cats, that is -- can't you stop my cat from killing birds -- and the Queen Cat said yes, but can you then promise that no cat will ever go hungry -- As I recall, I heard her say that, the one time I heard her -- it was maybe in Boston, thorugh the SO Boston Center, or else at the Abode -- all this is mid_1970's of course -- Oh well, here it is. Wasn't mystic nor even psychic. Just a fable of the subconscious. That light vanquishes darkness -- the Zoroastrain principle, the silver sword of the Hanukah, and of the knight -- our watchword -- well, that ain't predicated of mysticism -- that would be the Manichean heresy, the error that darkness is on an equal ontologic footing with Light, rather than Plato's insight that darkness is merely shadow -- for's'ooth, that darkness has not ontologic status at all -- and Atum recalls that when he first joined the SO, he asked PVK, 'but what about shadow' and PVK replied, 'oh, we don't deal with that'. Which then PVK, under the influence of AoK, and some say, especially of TIK, termed that 'the spiritual bypass' -- spiritualism as escape -- though later he conceeded, sometimes you need to take a bypass -- or at least, that it ain't all bad too take a bypass -- well of course, being a natural_borjn or leastways _bred Rousseu_ian, I want to say, the subconscious is but a wellspring of good -- not "vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordia idel itself, the volcanic sources of life" -- well, that is going a bit far -- Wittgenstein, in Culture & Value, a collection of notebook remarks finally published, more than 40 years after his death, by his ruddy literary executors -- and Rollins , or maybe it was Cavell, said, Geach used to introduce himself at meetings, 'I'm Geach -- Miss Anscombe's husband ' -- so Wittgenstein recognizes the rage and terror in the cry of a baby, but doesn't make all that big a deal of it -- and Wittgenstein says also, therein, If you think I'm anti_Freud just because I'm a prig, think again -- I just work here ---------------------------------------------------------------- First day of ski season Honest George beats a path to his door one shovel wide. ( Campra, Sunday 4 Dec '05 ) Note; Emerson: "If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beath a path to your door.2 " ----------------------------------------------------------------- Review of Garrison Keillor, "WLT: A Radio Romance" (pages 1-- 144): by the Bestselling Aughor of 'Lake Woebegone Days' Oy, Americana. After the first few hundred, his smary jokes become rather stale farts, and one prefers the Christian pieties he fails to mock. And tragi_comedy it ain't; his characters are carricatures. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Honest George the Businessman by bully and bluff got all the rooms here now, and so to Honest George you go or else sleep standing in the snow. If it snows or there's sunshine on weekends he does business. Honest George won'tmake it snow nor hustle customers for everything's from heaven. Last year he kicked me out of the Staff House into this Container at incoming ChristmasTide for fear I'd scare the clients and then for the rest of the winter the Staff House stood cold and empty but Honest George was ready if Lake Lugano rose to Bellinzona. If Honest George gets 2 roomers three times a week business is booming and Honest George has many empty rooms with fourty places for the pigeons. ---------------------------------------------------------------- As someone said, sex has been done for rather a while, so it's no easy to find something new to say about it. Or even something true, for reality rarely lives up to our fantasies, and "the giving famishes the craving" (T.S. Eliot) -- or rather, leaves it bored and vaguely disappointed -- "she smoothes her hair with automatic hand, and puts another record on the gramaphone2 (Eliot too),+ The IHT Gossip Column, "People" notes that an apparently rather hasty gentleman named Giles Coren won the Bad Sec in Fiction award from a magazine named Literary Review for a passage in his 'debut' novel 'Winkler', in which he wrote of -- what D.H. Lawrence called John Thomas -- "leaping around like a shower hose dropped in an empty bath". The award is for "crude, tasteles,s often perfunctory use of redundant" (come again?)" passages of sexual description". But that which they quoted was new and rather apt, as anyone who can recall both his overeager youth and trying to take a shower in one of those bathtubs with only a removeable if not continually attatchable rubber hose for a shower attatchment may recall. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ain't checked my Email in a week. Why do I need to be nudnik'd by ghosts. ---------------------------------------------------------------- I see in the Restoranteurs Journal that Ice Tea is on sale at 33 cents for a 1.5 liter bottle in cases of 24 bottles. The other day I was thirsty after a hike, so at the Restorante in Olivone I bought 2 drinks, 3 dl. each I think, at SF 3.50 each. That price is about par, though some might charge SF 3.00 or even as low as SF 2.70 Bit of a markup that. And in Switzerland, they never bring you water when you sit down, unless you ask for it, and then you must ask explicitly for TableWater, so they don't sell you bottled water -- called Mineral Water, though I doubt there's much difference here from what comes out of the tap, except some CO2, often artifically added. And they have the chutzpah to sell that as Swiss Gentility. Pay with an understated smile, or go back to Albania and eat roast Boar with your fingers by the firelight. Maybe we trashed Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Babylonia (they had their day in the sun 2000 years ago, and blew it) and almost all the American Indian peoples, but we sure do bring you water and bread when you sit down in a restaurant. "America: Love it or leave it." (USA 1960's Reactopmary slogan, in reaction to the End_the_War_in_Vietnam movement) I did a bit of both. "'My Country Right or Wrong' -- Right, I'll defend it; Wrong, I'll correct it" (Slogan I once saw on a picket line.) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Re: IHT 5 Dec '05 (Knowlton) -- Hadley undercuts Rice by defending US torture of suspected terroristsÿ Looks like Georgie Bush Jr. thinks that torturing people is one of the few perks of that lousy job his daddy made him take, when all he wanted was to sit back on his ranch a drink a few bears and be a good ol' boy. Because if he's a good boy his daddy won't hit him again. That seems the simpleset explanation of this administration's blatant disregard of European intelligentsia (if not precisely public) and government opinion . It completely stands athwart and insults and defies the emerging European Zeitgeist, and apparently only because the USA Reactionaries want to be tops even in that. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ================================================================ *** THIS SPACE FOR RENT *** "The old grey mare, she ain't what she used to be" Except as Honest George's Restorante "Ask for our Weekly Special -- It's all you'll get." Surly Service at Popular Prices Be sure to try our bottled water or drink from the horse_trough ================================================================ sa, Campra, Sunday 4 Dec '05 -- 2nd Sunday in Advent -- 4 KisLev -- 4? Dhu al Qi'dah About 20 cm. on snow on the ground, more falling tonight -- Walked up the road to Lucamagno today, back via Strada Romana about 7.5 hrs -- don't walk on a road in moonboots -- ================================================================ sa, Campra, 5 Dec 05 -- 2nd Week of Advent -- 4 KisLev -- snow settling down, clear day, about 4 below Centigrade and likely to stay about like that for the next two months =================================================================