CXLVI
The Shaming of the True
(And other tails from the Land of Misogyne)
Arabs are taking over the Sinai – somebody better call the Copts.
No way Josue
People who cannot live in their own skins invent a million ways to rip other people out of theirs. And then weave stories as to why they had the right or obligation to do – a process that readily operates in a cycle. Which said, our survival as a species is often attributed to our cleverness with tools and capacity for abstract thinking. But without in any way mediating the horrors that are woven, inextricably, into our history, it seems to me that at least as important in our perpetuation and numerical expansion, is a capacity for that which the West calls love. Though this capacity need not be thought of in either moral or transcendent terms, but simply as a kind of infra-awareness of the relation among things and the tendency, however slight, to abet the generative processes at work in the world (and which, at some level, we recognize as having given us life), or at very least to permit their continued unfolding with minimal disruption.
I’d like an order of the spicy, collusive chicken please…
Lift and Separate: motto of the West…
…subjected as we are to the mediating assaults of modernity, such as meat locker-quality air conditioning on a moderately warm day…
It is a mistake to mistake the dispersive for the liberatory
O for a dude of fire!
Whorl Street
When is a semaphore a metaphor?
And vicesquad verso?
Viseobserva obversa
Bombsquad versa
Old school
New school
No school
Ingress Egress Negress Tigress Euphrates Uffizi Ingrate Mygrate Gyrate – ‘urp!
Gezundheit
It truly does sound as if the conductor is saying: This is an Eden-bound train…
Off the charts?
What if the charts are off?
Off the grid?
What grid?
Got spine?
In order to be registered, recognized, every gesture must be exaggerated
All age, no wisdom
My health insurance has a very high seducible
Ce n’est pas l’heur de mon calmant?
Hamm to Clov in Beckett’s Endgame (Fin de partie)
Thanks Denise
Let’s wait until the children are divorced before we get married
How to interpret for young folk Teddy Roosevelt’s signature epithet – Bully! – in light of contemporary standards of schoolyard appropriateness? Surely he did not mean it as an imperative, an encouragement in any way to act brutally…
Perhaps it’s best to change Bully! in the books so that instead, as he plugs a bear cub at a thousand yards, he exclaims Awesome!
If we don’t fix it, Bully! might be misconstrued, and, heaven forefend, bust some tender trusts.
Ain’t no plot
Momma’s got a brand new slot
Livre du monde calmant
Livre du monde, calmant
Me dio una sirimba un domingo en la mañana
cuando menos lo pensaba
caí redondo, como una guanábana, sobre la alcantarilla
será la presión o me ha subido la bilirrubina
Y me entró la calentura
y me fui poniendo blanco como bola de naftalina
me llevaron a un hospital de gente (supuestamente)
en la emergencia, el recepcionista escuchaba la lotería
(¡treinta mil pesos!)
¡alguien se apiade de mi!
grité perdiendo el sentido
y una enfermera se acercó a mi oreja y me dijo:
“tranquilo, Bobby, tranquilo”
[Juan Luis Guerra, “El Niagara en bicicleta”]
Calme toi!
Ne me derange pas!
Tranquilo, Bobby
In the Museum of London, evidence of world in which young people were seen as merely smaller, more easily used creatures than their elders. Here are documents relating to the Society for Superceding the Necessity for Climbing Boys, an organization founded circa 1800. The Society advocated the use of brushes on poles for cleaning chimneys, rather than lowering children armed with rags into the flu. A watershed moment for the Society was the 1834 act of Parliament forbidding the apprenticeship of chimneysweeps younger than fourteen.
Good luck will rub off when ‘e shakes ‘ands wif you…
Built like a brick shipwreck
Two shillings shy of a load
Brexit, pursued by a(n internal) bear
Two bricks shy of a strategy
Ursus ex deus
Promiscumouse meets Monogamouse
Swift-fingered Artful
Wine-dark Fagan
Golden Nancy the Cyprian
Or sounds to that effect
Book of the World, pleurant
Vive la divergence!
The rents are as high as an elephant’s eye…
Gaze or gazelle?
Or gazebo?
Ain’t no toy
Poppa’s got a brand new ploy
Choosing the right laxative is key to maintaining a well-regulated militia
The Night Watch
Have another look
a.k.a. Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, aka The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, a canonic painting from the Golden Age of Dutch, uh, Dutch…
For reasons unknown, but nonetheless welcome
Or gazpacho?
Incest.com®, the genealogy search engine for very close families
What is the beautiful (thing) if not singular? Judged apart.
Is it possible to speak of the beautiful in plural or in common terms?
Battle of Anghiari: a mid-fifteenth century clash in between the forces of Milan and the Florentine-led Italian League. Da Vinci’s very dramatic fresco immortalizing the event was destroyed in the mid-sixteenth century, but not before Rubens made a copy of it. According to Machiavelli, the battle, involving several thousand troops, lasted all day, and resulted in one fatality when a knight, probably exhausted (denied his habitual afternoon espresso) fell off his horse.
Everything visible is connected to a great web of imperceptibles, just as everything intelligible arises from and returns to a sea of mysteries
A well-dressed woman of middle years makes her way painstakingly down the subway steps at 23rd and 8th. She looks, as the argot used to have it, “dead on her dogs.” In addition to a large, posh-looking handbag, two reasonably filled-out glossy pink shopping bags dangle from her forearm on braided pink cords. Hmmm, who’s her vendor? The background color is similar to Victoria’s Secret, but the type is black and in flowing script. Ah, Agent Provocateur. Hmmm again.
Discovery of a new element: Blutonium!
Who moved my qi?
Plato wanted to ban poetry. But if we’re going to start proscribing, why not start with philosophy?
Wood is the new plastic
Excuse me, but your reality is getting in the way of my philosophy
Orange is the new orange
Terribilità: an effect or expression of powerful will or immense angry force – as in the sculptures of David or Moses by Michelangelo. This word was applied to him by contemporaries and also used (in the context of uomo terrible with reference to the neoplatonics of Marsilio Ficino, who had known and been influenced by Michelangelo in his youth.
The canicular is not the funicular
Sepulchritude
In writing of the ba gua, the circle of eight trigrams that signify the cycle of the fundamental or primary forces that organize life and which also represent the varying dispositions of interactive situations, Wang Bi [3rd century BCE] comments: Of things that make the myriad things move, none is swifter than Thunder. Of things that make the myriad things bend, none is swifter than Wind. Of things that make the myriad things dry, none is a better drying agent than Fire. Of things that make the myriad things rejoice, none is more joy-giving than Lake. Of things that moisten the myriad things, none is more effective than Water. Of things that provide the myriad things with ends and beginnings, none is more resourceful than Restraint [Mountain]. That is why water and fire drive each other on, why Thunder and Wind do not work against eachother, and why Mountain and Lake reciprocally circulate. [from The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. Trans. Richard John Lynn. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Quoted in Tom Bisio, Beyond the Battleground. Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2016. pp. 195-6]
