CXX
Ah, the Circus Condomaximus! But tell me, where do they bake the bread of common sense around here?
And in the gray area between math and aftermath, the Real Estate section drones on:
ST.-DENIS, France – The assault began before dawn Wednesday at a decrepit squat in a close suburb of Paris where scores of French police officers stormed a third floor apartment… [“Paris Is on Edge as Fate of Attacks’ Organizer Is Still a Question Mark,” by Lilia Blaise, Liz Alderman, Amelia Breedan. NYT. 11/19/15. A1:1]
Since the “decrepit squat” was, essentially, destroyed in the police raid, the site, and, by extension, the surrounding area, could become the next up-and-coming neighborhood… comme Le Williamsbourg et La Bushweek…ripe as the white peaches you can buy at any little Parisian Arab grocery store at any hour of the day or night…
Finally, you figured out the taxonomic category to which you belong: Meanderthal
Sitting at one of the tables, dressed all in black, broad-shouldered coat, head topped by what looks like a beaver-felt hat, he’s got the pot dealers in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park agitated, disrupting business, shouting at who knows who.
“I ain’t no fuckin’ gangster! I didn’t come from the fuckin’ street – I come from North-fuckin’-Carolina! I grew up in a five-fuckin’ bedroom house…”
Is that a tribe or a promise?
Mendacity, audacity, bo-dacity!
“’For me it was about power and money, mostly power,” Asma said, switching to English to describe [her] motivation. “Since my relatives had all joined, it didn’t change a great deal to join. I just had more authority.’”
NYT, quoting the “wife of an ISIS jihadist on why she joined the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female morality police of the Islamic State.” [“For ISIS Women, Fraught Choices,” by Azaden Moaveni. November 22, 2015. A1:2]
Galileo was Jewish
That which is coherent, is by nature cohesive, in that it tends toward dynamic equilibrium and balanced flow. That which is cohesive is not necessarily coherent and can just as easily reflect malfunction as balance, e.g.s: a blood clot in relation to the movement of blood and fluids through the body, or Nazism in relation to the flow of history.
In short, the incoherent can easily be cohesive, and we can see from a thousand examples that when cohesion becomes over concentration, coherence is inevitably broken. In politics, too great a dispersion of energies, or a fundamental incoherence within the culture, is often “solved” by the imposition of cohesion at any price – a price which seems cheap until the hidden costs reveal themselves and take their claim.
A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines? Those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.
Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds out of your friends’ mouths?
No, the real words are more delicious then they.
Human bodies are words, myriads of words,
(In the best poems re-appears the body, man’s or woman’s, well-shaped, natural, gay,
Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)
Air, soil, water, fire – those are words,
I myself am a word with them – my qualities interpenetrate with theirs – my name is nothing to them,
Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would air, soil, water, fire, know of my name?
A healthy presence, a friendly or commanding gesture are words, sayings, meanings,
The charms that go with the mere looks of some men and women, are sayings and meanings also.
The workmanship of souls is by those inaudible words of the earth,
The masters know the earth’s words and use them more than audible words…
[from Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Book XVI, “A Song of the Rolling Earth”]
There’s no drama queen like… a straight white man!
The fire engine passes, flashing – its siren the wail of a great inconsolable child
Bake it and they will crumb
Mindfieldness training
The State is a bully who swears, and sometimes believes, that his job is to protect you from the worse bullies.
OK, so Galileo wasn’t Jewish.
But he thought like a Jew!
Eppes, si muove…
maybe a bissel, maybe a lot,
maybe not… who can tell?
In one of his translator’s notes for Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Alan Sommerstein writes: “I have used [Sir Kenneth James] Dover’s names Right and Wrong for the two characters who in the Greek text are called, literally, ‘the Superior Argument’ and ‘the Inferior Argument.’”
What can one say? By Zeus’s beard, it’s a trans-something alright…
Dover, btw, one of the eminent academics of the mid-20th century, and president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was knighted for his “services to Greek scholarship.”
Fascinating, always, the choices made: in Lysistrata, Sommerstein – working out of a British signification system – furnishes Lampito and the Spartans with “Scots” accents, to distinguish their speech from that of the Athenians. He invokes an “other” English to culturally migrate, by analogy, Aristophanes’ caricature of Spartans as rough, semi-wild, back country folk. In his rendering of another Aristophanes play, The Acharnians, the character of the impoverished Megarian (who thinly disguises his two young daughters as piglets and trades them for some garlic and salt) speaks in the kind of brogue used by the leprechaun in a Lucky Charms cereal commercial.
And the beat goes on: in a recent production of Lystrata, the director endowed the Spartans with an accent that fell between New Joisey, and classic Brooklynese. The audience “got it” – the analogy worked. How does one code for difference, and what is given and lost in translation?
You’ve almost convinced me I’m real
I need something more…
Did you really hear that lyric over the Le G. sound system?
Later you find out it’s from a song by Daft Punk. Which explains a lot.
A tale of 3 headlines:
“Pope Blasts Ills In Africa” (NY Daily News)
“Kenyans Thong as Pope Delivers Message of Humility” (NY Times)
“Pope’s Climate Warning” (NY Post)
As the English longbowmen said to the French cavalry at Agincourt: I got yew, babe.
In no sense innocence
Children of Panopticon Street
He’s a large man, standing in the lea of the subway exit, palms facing out, arms extended slightly away from his body. He pivots like a figurine on a music box intoning his mantra: Mirr-or, mirr-or on the wall: who’s the darkest brother of them all?
Calendrical Man
(F)all of him
Gallop on, O Horse of Babylon!
The organ with which we explore the body’s internal structures is not so much an eye as a synesthetic complex of all the senses. Thus “sight” also consists of touch, smell, taste, and sound.
Show me the border between sensing and knowing, and I will show you cut stone
Twas but a blowing glance…
Tumbling on steadily, nothing dreading,
Sunshine, storm, cold, heat, forever withstanding, passing, carrying,
The soul’s realization and determination still inheriting,
The fluid vacuum around and ahead still entering and dividing.
No balk retarding, no anchor anchoring, on no rock striking.
Swift, glad, content, unbereav’d, nothing losing,
Of all able and ready at any time to give strict account,
The divine ship sails the divine sea…
[from Whitman, “Song…Earth”]
Brother centrifuge
Sister spinning in
And this is what he said
Oh sweet nuthin’
She ain’t got nothing at all
Oh sweet nuthin’
You know she ain’t got nothing at all
Chanté Les Velours, oncet
Brother right now
Sister neveragain
Okinawan from Muskogee.
Huh!?
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth,
There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth,
No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth.
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth…
[from Whitman, “Song…Earth”]
