A terrible beauty

"The east stands for lost causes,” he writes, “you can sense the immense power of emptiness.”

~~~

"They may not know my name, but they’ll know who I am.”

Kobayashi ate 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes. It was almost a religious experience said another competitor. This is their chance to pretend to be a professional athlete for one day a year.

“If you’re anywhere near New Orleans, you’re going to go to Mardi Gras. … There are certain traditions around the country,” he said. “This is a tradition. I don’t know why. But nobody would argue that it’s not. Stuff just happens, and it builds, and here we are. "

~~~

~~

___ ___ ____________

winter sunshine

The piers of the city

In the sea. Here are whole buildings

Razed, whole blocks   

Of a city gone

Among old streets

And the old boroughs, ourselves

Among these streets 

Ceremony of innocence that was drowned.   

Of streets boarded and vacant where no time will hatch.

This Earth 

Looking at the ground;

This England;

[This life]

lost girls

“In this moment” “before” “anyone, ever” “died” “before we were born?”

“in this moment forever before” “before we went to a war”

“Before we died” “In this moment, now” “In this moment before, it is

not before” “In this very moment” “where is it” “where we

haven’t died” “or died inside” “In this moment we haven’t” “in this

moment, no one” “in this moment, no one has ever, died” (“But I have

been born”) “in this moment” “where, where is it” “in moment” “who’s here”

“Catch it catch it” “moment where we are” “merely as it is autonomous,”

“autonomous moment” “Without a war” “without a guilt,”

“Can we exist” “Outside of what was?” “in the air of our thoughtless,

female, moment” “the air of our moment” “not grievous not iron”

“moment, not air” “but air of our moment” (“woman-made?”) “faithful,

faithful & boundless” “reticent & light” “fond, & kindly” “not reticent

but shiny,” “morning-starry, not bloody” “not bloody, in the morning”

“in the star” “it is a star” “it is autonomous” “star & it’s mild” “Is

it a little” “of us” “from before” “we were born?” (“that was

never”) (“I know”) “It is now” “autonomous” “moment of white,”

“white flowers, stars & white flowers,” ..

whose heart has been lost/which poem will be read over the body

some line about loss or a song that holds it in its silence

they way your hands used to be [..]

or words from the Qur'an, solemn and mournful/ancient rhythms ,

the dark wells abandoned in the desert, your heart stopped,,,your face for all to see. singularity entering the universal phenomenon. the old script, told slant. the call was whispered in my ear, first words unknown setting the path, talsimans around the bare neck, for safekeeping, Finders keepers. you looked back and up and found. your father, your jew, looking out for you. 

there was a time, there was time, always time, he said. his father, now in heaven, loved the shade and oddly wore a hat even in bed; there were enough angles to find God anywhere? now? when was that again, when was he or anyone around?

The great stone

Above the river

In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,

Which loves itself

the coffee is bitter. on [y]our tongue/life. don't kiss that much. her striped green cardigan inside out in the morning: "I don't care"..i couldn't give...words in the heart of the book, the figs of our imagination, my friend.

[it] was a dream. what? This. theatre of amazement. "theatre".[exit ghost]. a cat, in 1/9 mode, imagined my life, wasn't surprised at all, went back to sleep, the sun on its back. in summer, our life, a leap across still points. & still. hard-won breadth/second-hand nature, human this moment, and not just a code, man.

~~~

the way things were and the death of art(ists)

~~ ~

The training was professional, and so was the work it produced. Expertise—or, in the mantra of the graduate programs, “technique”—not inspiration or tradition, became the currency of aesthetic authority. 

Professionalism represents a compromise formation, midway between the sacred and the secular. A profession is not a vocation, in the older sense of a “calling,” but it also isn’t just a job; something of the priestly clings to it. Against the values of the market, the artist, like other professionals, maintained a countervailing set of standards and ideals—beauty, rigor, truth—inherited from the previous paradigm. Institutions served to mediate the difference, to cushion artists, ideologically, economically, and psychologically, from the full force of the marketplace.

In the arts, as throughout the middle class, the professional is giving way to the entrepreneur...

The institutions that have undergirded the existing system are contracting or disintegrating. Professors are becoming adjuncts. Employees are becoming independent contractors (or unpaid interns)...

Coleridge, for Wordsworth, was not a contact; he was a partner, a comrade, a second self.

What we see in the new paradigm—in both the artist’s external relationships and her internal creative capacity—is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth...but rather many shifting interests and directions as the winds of market forces blow you here or there...

taste must be developed by a long exposure,...Prizes belong to the age of professionals. All we’ll need to measure merit soon is the best-seller list...

 an experience, what’s more, after the contemporary fashion: networked, curated, publicized, fetishized, tweeted, catered, and anything but solitary, anything but private...

---William Deresiewicz.

~~ ~~

Old patterns, barely discerned, continue their after-life in the deep recesses of our minds, like a distant memory brought to the surface by some chance word, some exactness about the quality of the light, though we cannot name it, put our finger on it (is touch our first, our best sense of contact with what is real, which is to say, with something that is other than a mirror? The hands in Rembrandt's Jewish Bride, for example).

Saturday afternoons and the usual tussle over who will get to watch the box. Ubo, rushing upstairs to catch a glimpse of the wrestlers whose personalities he had over time come to believe could be understand by some special insight. Some old, universal gesture or familiar grimace of the face, the world-weary trudging back to their corner, all these were signs that he could comprehend or that reminded him of the old-world (some of his family had been wrestlers). He'd read into the fate of his favourites not the chicanery of the entertainment industry but the vagaries of life itself, as if the wounded were ancient heroes, resilient or malicious, their success and triumphs a vindication of why we came to this bloody country in the place!

And the dougal, dreamily watching the old black and white romances with their brilliant, sharp dialogues, their simple, eternal stories.

And you, of course, out of everyone's way, behind the sofa, where the long windows in this corner house either looked out onto the relatively new and open main street or to the older, darker, back street with its private lives and links to old Wales and the old way of life.It was on the latter that you once saw-perhaps for the last time-the old rag-and-bone man in his cart, one of a number of a dying breed. You'd sit there and catch the latest scores on the radio, follow the excited voices, knowing that everything could change in seconds. Even the dull passages of play were quietly reassuring. Lots of the time you wanted nothing to happen. Buckle down, resist any expansiveness, quietly see it through to the end, past the high times. 

journals

Fiction may struggle to hold us spellbound in the manner of music, but its prompting of more diverted states of mind, and its depictions of the richness and freedom found in the sloppiness of drifting thought, suggests how constricted a world can be that treats attention as its own end.
---The New Yorker.

~~~

anton drew my attention to this and, as always, I'm indebted to her for sharing stuff she's interested in. 

The little book fair in the main courtyard on a cold and dry morning was a disappointment-not that you need any more books, but I suppose you're always hoping to stumble across something, some book or sentence that will do..what, precisely? Illuminate your thoughts, somehow throw some weight behind them, or offer a new perspective?

In ten days is the real thing, towards the ring road, out in the backwaters, past the railroad tracks, shanty town, 'Namak' restaurant and towards the cancer hospital.

Why journals and their intimate private small world? I think we look for a literary form that resonates with the times we're living in, a shape and style that is less constructed, less concerned with plot and that can dispense with all that bagginess and inessential detail. But one that also avoids the coldness, fake cleverness and 'fragmentariness' of sharp sentences.

 Not a story, in the old sense of some magical fabrication, but a personal story in which quiet moments of reflection emerge naturally from a life that is lived-if not to the full, for such a thing is not possible, but from a life that is not superficial. 

And when you think about it, that's why you like John Burnside's Spell book so much: the quality of the writing is a reflection of a generous spirit, and not merely the distillation- through years of a mind tortured and tutored by institutions- of the ideas or "thought" of an academic or an intellectual who aims to put a spell on you with his narrow, obscure, dry-as-dust abstractions and second-hand marginalia.

Private, personal, small-scale meandering impressions have their own kind of glamour, out of the dazzling glare of the world, that is the world.

Stranded

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."

--Strand.

~~

It is Monday, and still the skies are not clear. There is winter when the sun should be opening up, but it is increasingly apparent that it is becoming a little less generous in its old age, or maybe it is just saving its energy for a moment that no-one will expect, no-one will be able to read, a Carrington event, a late flaring on a dull summer evening of the mind that will make people look up and think of all the time they've lost. what to us will seem a chance event will to it be a kind of law.

It is Monday, and still there is no clarity. Who said what?

The first ghostly lecture, replete with stunned silence and infinite boredom. "Are there any questions?" you throw at them, a goodwill gesture, before they shuffle out and back to the warm and easy slumber in a mid-morning library. "Why are we here?", your thinly worn existentialism, devoid of any anger or irony, plain as the paper in front of you, your prompts, your hurriedly scribbled lines to remind yourself of what to say and when to say it-of little use in real life, of course.

What preparations do you make? Wrap yourself around with the words of others, a modern-day mummy, a heart encased in glass and a stilted intelligence that in the final book will mean very little, a footnote to the times you lived in.   

Lost girls and the shock of the new

Shock, it has to be admitted, is not chic. It is so often seen as juvenile, meretricious, boring. Even in 1865, shock was passé.

---The Guardian.

This was from an awfully written article but it did at least remind you of a point Robert Hughes raised in 'The Shock of the New': what happens when we're not shocked any more?

To think that the images (the ones that were released, anyway) of the abuse at Gitmo and other dark sites didn't really shock anyone. Or Steiner's question: what happens when there are no more limits to push up against? Against a background frat and porn culture are there any images that would truly disturb? What counts as extreme nowadays? You can bet your bottom dollar there's already a niche market for it out there.

To always revolt, to always seek out the other path seems, to me, to be less a matter of genuine choice and more a mechanical act, at best; at worst it is an approach that dovetails with, or is manipulated by, the forces of late capitalism.

The death of so many children in Gaza? Turn your face away (out of boredom, not out of horror). In the blink of any eye it will be replaced anyway, since no image is allowed to inhere in our lack-of-attention economy. 

Guenon, years ago, posed the question: in an age where the carnival is the norm what is the meaning of the carnival? 

Duchamps or Serrano: you're taking the piss!

But the question remains: when there are no settled convictions to dislodge what, exactly, is the point of the shocking, abrasive image? Does deviation make any sense without any norms? Does mockery count when the real power-today-is one that encourages us to "blacken all that shines"? And you can't but help connect this desire to shock, to tear up the past, with capitalism's need to turn the tables, uproot everyone and everything: "all that is solid..."

Grayson Perry:

I mean art in many ways, contemporary art, is almost synonymous with the idea of novelty..

By about the mid-60s, early 70s, you know most things have been at least sort of tried or suggested, and now we’re in a state where anything can be...But revolution and rebellion and this idea of upheaval is no longer what I would think of as a defining idea. You know if you’d have gone back a hundred years, art was almost synonymous with this idea...

And the art world sort of looks down and sort of goes oh yeah, nice rebellion! Welcome in!

We’ve accepted a lot of the things that were weird now are normal. 

And if you think about it, all the things that were once seen as subversive and dangerous like tattoos and piercings and drugs and interracial sex, fetishism, all these things - they sort of crop up on X Factor now on a Saturday night on family viewing..

And the creative rebel - they like to think they’re sticking it to the man, they’re sticking it to the capitalist system,.. But of course what they don’t realise - by being all inventive and creative, they’re actually playing into the capitalism’s hands because the lifeblood of capitalism is new ideas. They need new stuff to sell!  

But realness is a thing, you know that has a high currency.

~~~

Rebel Sell.

Of course, in our own way the university's "cutting edge" falls into the same paradigm. Not just in the way that research is now tailored to, or used by corporate interests, but in the more day-to-day or prosaic way in which the idea of research is largely drawn to the fake thrill of debunking or tweaking what had for large periods of time seemed quite obvious. 

One must start with the presupposition that all those who came before you were either wrong, limited in their analytic skills or plain buffoons. Then through a series of marginal notes which are trumped up as a "groundbreaking" analysis, it is hoped that the whole bleedin' Establishment will topple down-except there isn't much of an Establishment beyond the institutionalized need to keep the ball rolling in order to convince ourselves that we are, at least in some sense, free.

~~~

What struck you in the Grayson lecture was how, on the one hand, there's a craving for what's real (not: the Real or even 'the Real') and yet how on the other hand that realism soon becomes a commodity, true grit against the showy fabrications of prime time t.v. and all the fake "reality t.v."

~~~

Grayson also claims that in one of the cave paintings two horses were painted in very similar styles but that the carbon dating indicated that the paintings were done separately over a 5,000 year gap.

Now, if that is true that raises a number of questions. Firstly, ability: did they have the same technical ability to repeat the original style? Secondly, why would they want to actually do that, for what purpose? This desire to stay close to the original, the first image, the first word, what, exactly, is that?

~~~

Lost girls: 

an overgrown path

I take a step in a desert. Where am I? In each direction you, the moment, can be blown around, turned sharply away or steeply downwards. You walk, with an inner compass that has rusted with time. There is a small corner of truth, loosely held together in your memory; or it is a line you cannot find in a book of poetry.

Human beings are full of many shadows. I remember.

A word, a thought, a feeling comes to the surface: one against the world; the myriad roots lie hidden.

A spring light in winter, time stitched into the fabric. The gentle warmth on our backs, like a child holding on; each step I take makes me wonder: is there somewhere else?

'In New York it was winter still
But the wind was full of Spring.'

At the talk a clumpish student asks: if you find God will all dualities be eliminated? Thought has a way of killing things, neatly placing things in a coffin/box. Everything is seen from the outside: the smoothness of the wood and not the decaying body. Tick the boxes, complete the ritual: we are in thrall to our evasions.

"I'll tell you when I get there!"

The folly of thinking one can or should talk directly or publicly about what one holds dear. Every second line must be skipped, erased. Unloosen and untie. One has to have lived more intensely to reach any precision.

'Beyond the house, open ground. Once a garden, now grown over. Stationary breakers of weed, pagodas of weed, welling text, upanishads of weed, a viking fleet of weed, dragon-heads, lances, a weed-empire!'

---Transtromer.

What paths our lives take is a mystery. A bright clear patch is soon drowned out, remembered as held still in the mind's eye. The road out is not the road back. That first step takes you down two universes. In your diary the blank pages are accumulating and fewer words are shared. 

'The darkening leaves
in autumn are  as precious
as the dead Sea Scrolls.'

You sit in the car, between two white lines, and switch off listening to Lark Ascending, the drum of the world suddenly stopping, the gravel quiet by the warm engine. 

An empty space, a tree, bird shit like a Pollock painting richly illuminating the dark floor.

~~~

[A, in California: are you still around? Knock once for Yes...

a spell on you

The book arrived at the last minute. Others were lost or returned because they couldn't be found. Or a glitch in the system, or some malevolent demon. the masks we wear, the masks we need. There is something perverse in the desire to see everything naked, without veils. 

That made you think of the(French?) oriental pictures/postcards of "exotic" women from the east and the current desire to rip the veil off women or...why can't any image be put up in public and ridiculed (because it's any image we're democratic; because we have no settled natures nothing can be allowed to stand. And what would freedom be if it wasn't a freedom from the spell of power: religion, the state, family, love?)

No more spells, no more enchantments, only laughter at the ridiculous fictions we've conjured up-or, instead, Voltaire's smile of reason, as we congratulate ourselves on our spectacular intelligence, our maturity that allows us to see though everything, say what we mean. We, we latecomers live on the surface, having dispensed with the ancient dichotomies, such as culture/nature, time and the end of time, and appearance and reality. From now on there is only "sovereign becoming" so jump in.."just do it" and "go with the flow".  

No more masks, no more distances to traverse or strange worlds to discover, no more grand flights of escape: this is where we are, and this is where it's at! (and old Neil Simon line). We want to colonize every experience, reveal and unravel every mystery (through reason, laughter). Nothing is sacred and nothing must be allowed to be and herein resides our freedom! Deathworks,as Rieff once wrote, spell the end of bewilderment, fascination, and mystery.

~~

J.B. writes superbly, mixing popular music with reflections on growing up and how the words we are given, like words for loss,say, can follow us about through our lives.

black-hearted

...


Not to have but to be 
The black heart of the poppy 
O to lie there as a seed. 

 To become the beloved 
As the world ends, 
to enter the last note of its music. 
 ---Denise.

Lost and found

You found your hat, miraculously recovered after it spent a day on the rail tracks, below wind-swept clouds, rain and cold stars. Of course, things come and go and it took you forty minutes to think through this (a bit like Klingsor in Hesse: grit your teeth and it will pass, you'll be through).

You hopped on and off the trains haphazardly, not following the set ways, as if on the spur of the moment some great idea had struck me. At one station-I forget which-there was a terribly sad video image projected onto the curving wall. The image didn't flicker but it was so faint that it gave the impression of being a distant message from some unknown place. And there it was, the tragic story of an old woman who's been missing for at least two weeks. Has anyone seen here, know of her whereabouts? She was probably suffering from the onset of dementia and though I don't know her (though her Welsh name sounds familiar) I felt immensely sad. Since I always try and distance myself from real life by reading or writing this blog I immediately thought of the profoundly sad opening third of Dora Suarez. 

After being mugged last year I now sometimes walk home late at night and if I see a woman on her own walking past me say something to myself, like, 'God protect her'.

That night-have I written about this, I wonder- I survived by sheer good fortune (or what we'd call kismet). On the floor, my head spinning, the world and time standing still and yet also whirring around me, I somehow managed to pull myself up and run for safety. All that was lost was a library book, The Third Concept of Liberty. 

Increasingly I'm beginning to understand 'the east'(as it used to, or at least I imagine used to, exist): an acceptance that there is nothing to do, nowhere to go...a dislike of venturing out, an unexplainable gladness on reaching home and settling down to a hot cup of tea and a novel.

In the world everything is lost and found-except, perhaps, my book. Love, too. The great lines from Neko: Nothing lasts forever, but/and I will always love you. There can be no end to the flux of the world, of course, no time regained. But at least there can be casual moments of forgetfulness, a temporary stay order. 

Absurd

For Bob.

We think there will be a time when we are true to ourselves and that we will recognize that moment on our own..it will "come to us". A word, a sentence spoken or retracted, so that after years of stumbling through life and of viewing the world with blurred eyes all that has passed before us will suddenly make sense. But without discipline or love, what felicity can there be, what image will inhere and be seen with clarity? It is absurd to think life has no meaning; equally, it is absurd to believe it will all be brought into focus when you ask the wrong questions. What resolution is there to be had in the time(s) we live in? What understanding do we merit?

From Frithjof Schuon:

If every man lived in the love of God, the monastery would be everywhere...

Islam aims to carry the contemplative life into the very framework of society as a whole...

A world is absurd exactly to the extent that the contemplative, the hermit, the monk appear in it as a paradox or as an "anachronism". The monk however is in the present precisely because he is timeless. We live in an epoch of idolatry of the "age"... 

Monasticism is there to remind us that man exists only by the virtue of his permanent consciousness of the Absolute and of absolute values, and that the works of man are nothing in themselves...

In our age man is defined, not by reference to his specific nature-which cannot be defined otherwise than in a divine context-but by reference to the inextricable consequences of a Prometheanism that has become secular...

The relevance of monasticism is that it incarnates, whether we like it or not, precisely that very thing in religion that is extreme and absolute and is of a spiritual and contemplative essence...

The vocation of the monk is perpetual prayer, not because life is long, but because it is only a moment...

The great mission of monasticism is to show to the world that happiness does not lie somewhere far away, or in something situate outside ourselves, in a treasure to be sought or a world to be built, but here where we belong to God. The monk represents, in face of a dehumanized world, what are true standards are; his mission is to remind us what man is.'

Some Merton:

'To be contemplative is therefore to be an outlaw. As was Christ...

the more busily men dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities-- "selves," that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them that they are real).

He [the last man] looks in the mirror and sees that he no longer resembles anyone . He searches madly for a photograph of people as they were before the big change. But now humanity itself has become incredible, as well as hideous..

Ionesco portrays the absurdity of a logically consistent individualism which, in fact, is a self-isolation by the pseudo-logic of proliferating needs and possessions.

Collectivity needs not only to absorb everyone it can, but also implicitly to hate and destroy whoever cannot be absorbed. Paradoxically, one of the needs of collectivity is to reject certain classes, or races, or groups, in order to strengthen its own self-awareness by hating them instead of absorbing them.'

~~~

These last lines struck me as being very pertinent today. Of course there is hatred for the fundamentalists and extremists-and rightly so! (to state the bleedin' obvious). But is the hostility to Islam not at least in part the hostility of capitalism to a way of life that stubbornly resists thinking the question of 'giving to Caesar' is a foregone conclusion?
  

From je suis... to l'etat, c'est moi

This is the dope:

'In an echo of Bush’s rhetoric, the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared a “war of civilisations” in response to attacks on “our freedoms”...

But just as there is a blindness in sections of progressive France about how the secular ideology used to break the grip of the powerful is now used to discipline the powerless, the right to single out one religion for abuse has been raised to the status of a core liberal value...

The absurdity was there for all to see at the “Je suis Charlie” demonstration in Paris on Sunday. A march supposedly to defend freedom of expression was led by serried ranks of warmongerers and autocrats: from Nato war leaders and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s foreign minister.'

---S.Milne, The Guardian.

The mention of the word 'discipline' got me thinking about Foucault's 'Society Must be Defended' and how Nazism could be seen as an extreme form of state racism. Here we need to understand how Nazism is a modern phenomenon and trace some of its roots to colonialism (not just the Camps, of course). For example, what is colonialism with its civilisational mission, its categorization of inferior races, if not state racism? If biopolitical power is about the management of life, then one way in which power can be exercised is to weed out all those who make 'life' unhealthy, unclean and less pure, polluting the body (politic): which is why the Jews were "vermin". 

And so to Charlie and all the hullabaloo over 'The Republic' (and, therefore, the fifth columnists who oppose it and true allegiance, loyalty..the "cancer" that is in our midst). 

In previous times it was the lepers or the mad or the poor..the degenerates, the irrational, the barbarians who stood (or were made to stand) in the shadows, who-in a perverse way-showed us what it means to stand in the light. Cavafy: how we need those barbarians.

Of course, we will hear nothing of the colonial practices and ideology of the French (or the Belgians or the British) since racism is no longer a problem..the problem has to be fashioned into a war of civilisations. No-one-and I mean no-one-wants to talk about the Camps, the Gulags, the Trenches, and the Bomb because that throws us back to the difficult question of how the "civilized" state powers have unleashed so much violence in the modern world. 

~~~

Walking back from Denmark street, past St.Giles, one look back to the sanctuary that is Foyles. The light rapidly dimming, breaking in the last hour, you keep your hands in your pocket and your memories of listening to Dylan in winter. I put a spell on you is too expensive, one for later, perhaps.

The faint smell of tobacco in the air is immensely comforting, a sign that the old ways still persist in a quick-changing world. Merton's essay on Ionesco and rain is wonderful: the usefulness of useless things, the uselessness of so-called useful things. Monasticism and freedom from the system. One has to either be expelled from it or accept one's defeat and 'get with the times'. To be expelled today is a kind of internal displacement, to be forgotten. Walser and the small, marginal life is another type of refusal. 

~~

He [the Pope] said: “If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”

Birmingham, the 4th holiest city in Islam

I remember 'the east', but it was nothing like this..or maybe I just never got invited to the right places!

~~~

After Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, there is the mystical city of Birmingham to visit. God willing, I will save up and visit the holy shrines of this revered city one day (or at least their world-famous tandoori restaurants). If you are a non-Muslim-one of the kuffar- and want to visit, don't worry, I will ride with you.

~~~

The expert on terror (or was it terrorism) was on the Beeb last night and they couldn't stop laughing at him. "I didn't check my facts" the plonker said. To compound it all he apologized to everyone saying Birmingham was a beautiful city. And what does he know about the city, now he has been "educated" (as the Yanks are wont to say): "Well, I think it has a lot of good pubs". The most amazing thing is that the New York Times calls  him one of the foremost experts on terrorism (will look up the quote later).

Just visited aunty last week. What a building! Of course, the BBC is full of 'old hands' who are more subtle than this bumbling fool. But one day I'd like someone to turn around and actually ask them: how did you become an expert? (In a similar vein, it is funny to see the ignorant call themselves "shaikh". Something similar to 'every man's a saint' kind of thing. That's a reformation for you!)

Gellner: Muslim society:

~~~

Similarly, in academia there are many who pose as having expert knowledge (which in fact often amounts to nothing more than having a highly specialized command of useless details). When will they understand that true knowledge is -as the great natural philosopher once said-about "hearts and minds"?

~~~

'I still remember the bad old days of the 1970s, when Birmingham was controlled by Quakers. Oats were all there was to eat, and the only drink was lukewarm drinking chocolate in a chipped mug with a picture of the pig from Pipkins on it'

--The Londonistan Times

how b got his groove back

I can't take any more discussions about "free speech" or how I must speak up for or against anything. I've got nothing to say, and I don't know how to say it.

When you cross the bridge none of this will be here. So...


  No mournful flutes for the people of Gaza, no playing of Barber's Adagio with lowered heads and saddened hearts for the kids of Peshawar. Nada. Lest we forget is really lest we remember. In the land of the brave up to six million people are in the prison 'system'. You don't have to guess the colour of most of them.But now we have this ridiculous 'I am Charlie' baloney. Jesus! Kashmir isn't even on the radar.I think I'm going to throw up if I hear another Frenchman harp on about how we, you know, represents ze, how you say, freedom, equality, fraternity. It's like they've been brainwashed! Er..like try watching some Monty Python for fuck's sake: "We're all individuals...I'm not!" And then there was this: child

John Lennon - Imagine by hushhush112

 We die from a lack of imagination 
---Isak D.

~~~

The Roding, at its limit in this early part of the year; you wonder how old it is, how long it's been flowing before any human eyes set sight on it. And when we're gone?

The Roding at this late hour, dark as a ribbon or thread, flowing as if it's been untied, freed from any burdens..just because it wants to, the way a cloud's just a cloud (Denise).

~~

In the late afternoon, the dying of the sun in the lost suburbs,in what seems like a final hour, an hour of departure, the beauty of the day in this crumbling light reminds you of something unspoken. The remarkable thing is that the light at dusk can sometimes give the houses a strange appearance, these lonely houses that hold our brief lives against the fierceness of the world. The quality of this grey light, seen by you, at this particular moment, with all those words and half-formed stray thoughts in your head, is no different from the morning light, which no-one sees.

__

You lost your wool hat today, blown away onto the rails of the central line. From now on: it's only the northern, my heart having already strayed north by north-west.

~~~

Charming!


Gopnik in the New Yorker writes:

"They worked instead in a peculiarly French and savage tradition, forged in a long nineteenth-century guerrilla war between republicans and the Church and the monarchy." 

I think there's a point to be made here: it's not easy for anyone else to get that 'tradition'.  In a similar vein, it is probably difficult for lots of moderns (Mulsim or otherwise) to really get how any kind of (religious) person can be venerated and get people so angry and upset ("why can't they just laugh it off" is the type of thing one often hears). Nothing is sacred kind of thing.