The Wayward Tycoon

You can't go home again ...

2011-12-22T12:58:00.003-05:00

“What I am about to tell must be the experience of very many in this nation where so many wander and come back. I called on old and valued friends. I thought their hair had receded a little more than mine. The greetings were enthusiastic. The memories flooded up. Old crimes and old triumphs were brought out and dusted. And suddenly my attention wandered, and looking at my ancient friend, I saw that his wandered also. And it was true what I had said to Johny Garcia -- I was the ghost. My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of rememberance -- and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory”.

... John Steinbeck (1902-68), American writer. Excerpt from ‘Travels with Charley: In Search of America’.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be ...

2011-12-17T13:56:00.004-05:00

"Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked".

.... Peter De Vries (1910-93), American editor (The New Yorker), satirist and novelist.

American "exceptionalism" defined

2011-12-08T11:11:00.011-05:00

"Many thousand years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe,
developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidently crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere.
As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific -- that is to say, back almost to the cradle of the race -- thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man".

... General Arthur MacArthur (1845-1912) justifying to the U.S. Senate the invasion and occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century when he was serving as military govenor of the Philippines, overseeing the wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives. He was the father of General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) of WW2 fame.

Unknown love

2011-11-25T17:19:00.002-05:00

"To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses -- that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things".

.... Pablo Neruda (1904-73) Chilean poet, diplomat and politician

Facelift anyone? ...

2011-11-05T10:53:00.007-04:00

“Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character”.

... Clarence Day (1874-1935), American writer.

The unselfish giant ...

2011-10-28T09:41:00.002-04:00

"You came to me to learn the pleasure of life and the pleasure of art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful ... the meaning of sorrow and its beauty"

... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), author and wit

Atavistic piety ...

2011-10-08T10:11:00.003-04:00

"... from time to time, capitalist economies exhibit inflations and debt deflations which seem to have the potential to spin out of control. In such processes, the economic system's reactions to a movement of the economy amplify the movement – inflation feeds upon inflation and debt-deflation feeds upon debt deflation."

... Hyman Minsky (1919-96) American economist

A very funny man ...

2011-10-07T11:04:00.004-04:00

"The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are"

... S. J. Perelman (1904-79), American humorist, author, and screenwriter

Eccentricity plus ...

2011-09-25T12:37:00.003-04:00

"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it."

... Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), British poet and critic.

Motherly intuition

2011-09-02T04:14:00.008-04:00

My mother never wrote me a letter, ever. Father had on occasion. Both were not much into letter writing. When I did receive a letter from her, it was a complete surprise. It simply stated my father had some minor physical ailment, the nature of which she was not precise nor did she, so I thought, understand. But she sensed it was a death knell without really saying so. It was a quality which she had that hinted at folksy wisdom which I respected, one of the few qualities she had I did respect. It was a “heads up” letter that proved out.

Ulysses ... easily the epic of the age!

2011-08-16T23:57:00.003-04:00

"The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce’s genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it – this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time."

... Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.

Where facts end, fiction begins ...

2011-08-11T11:22:00.007-04:00

"What is, if not easy, almost always possible to do is for members of the private detective school of literary criticism to prove that the writer of fiction written in the first person could not possibly have done everything that the narrator did or, perhaps, not even any of it.

When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and his experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do."

... Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), "A Moveable Feast (the restored edition)"

Suicide, Gonzo style

2011-07-23T12:11:00.007-04:00

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

... Hunter S Thompson (1937-2005), American journalist and author, in a note left for his wife four days before he shot himself in the head.

... the Earth is full

2011-07-01T18:16:00.001-04:00

“The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave inpediments to the nation’s economic and social development.”

... Zhou Shengxian (born 1949), China’s environment minister

... on the face of it

2011-06-28T01:33:00.008-04:00

"Look at these eyes. I'm dead - behind these eyes. I'm dead."

... Laurence Olivier (1907-89) from the the John Osbourne (1924-94) play "The Entertainer"

The Lost Generation

2011-06-19T19:42:00.002-04:00

Interviewer: Do you mind if we ask you about Gertrude Stein's (1874-1846) remark, “You are all a lost generation”?

Cowley: Oh, it's simple as all get-out. Gertrude Stein was having her Model-T Ford repaired at a garage in the south of France. The mechanics weren't very good; they weren't on the job—in fact, I think they were on strike. The proprietor said to Miss Stein, “These young men are no good—they are all a lost generation”—une génération perdue. So an unknown French garageman should get credit for that remark. Of course, Miss Stein deserves credit for picking up on the phrase.

... Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989), Noted American writer and critic.

"Fart" etymology

2011-06-14T12:45:00.002-04:00

... emitting an explosive bout of flatulence!

You know how it is when you love somebody terribly but you can’t describe why?

2011-04-05T00:55:00.011-04:00

"Suddenly I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw that Monty’s car was coming much too close to my car. I got the idea he was going to play one of his practical jokes – he was going to give my car a little nudge. He never did bump my car, but I had the feeling he might, so I put my foot on the gas and went a little faster. Monty’s car seemed to be almost on top of me. I wondered if he was having a blackout. I got frightened and spurted ahead so he wouldn’t bump me. We both made the first turn but the next one was treacherous. We were careening now, swerving, and screeching through the darkness. Behind me I saw Monty’s carlights weave from one side of the road to the other and then I heard a terrible crash.

A cloud of dust appeared in my rearview mirror. I stopped and ran back. Monty’s car was crumpled like an accordion against a telephone pole. The motor was running like hell. I could smell gas. I managed to reach in the window and turn off the ignition, but it was so dark I couldn’t see inside the car. I didn’t know where Monty was. He seemed to have disappeared.

I ran and drove my car back and shone the headlights into Monty’s car. Then I saw him curled under the dahsboard. He’d been pushed there by the force of the crash. His face was torn away – a bloody pulp. I thought he was dead.

I drove back to Elizabeth’s shaking like a leaf and pounded on the door. “There’s been a terrible accident!” I yelled, “I don’t know whether Monty’s dead or alive – get an ambulance quick!” Mike Wilding (1912-79) and I both tried to keep Elizabeth from coming down to the car with us but she fought us off like a tiger. “No! No! I’m going to Monty!” she screamed, and she raced down the hill.

She was like Mother Courage. Monty’s car was so crushed you couldn’t open the front door, so Liz got through the back door and crawled over the seat. Then she crouched down and cradled Monty’s head in her lap. He gave a little moan. Then he started to choke. He pantomimed weakly to his neck. Some of his teeth had been knocked out and his two front teeth were lodged in his throat. I’ll never forget what Liz did. She stuck her fingers down his throat and she pulled those teeth. Otherwise he would have choked to death".

... excerpt from Patricia Bosworth’s Montgomery Clift: A Biography. Kevin McCarthy (1914-2010) describes the tragic car accident that almost killed Montgomery Clift (1920-66) and ruined his face.

2011-02-08T12:02:00.017-05:00

This man was a loser. Known informly as “the Auk”, in his role as chief commander in North Africa confronting the Germans and the Italians during WW2, he was summarily dismissed by Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the foremost military advisor to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as providing "nothing less than bad generalship”. The Auk ignominiously and abruptly exited the world stage to be replaced by his subordinate Bernard Montgomery who said of him “when I served under Auchinleck ... I cannot recall that we ever agreed on anything”. This all occurred at a crucial pivotal moment in the war, for there soon followed the so-called decisive Battle of Alamein (1942), the first major Allied victory over the Germans in North Africa of which Churchill later observed “we had neither a victory before it, nor a defeat after it”.

This assessment of “the Auk” arguably may be unfair, his being perhaps a hapless victim of circumstance with a goodly dose of elitist military politics thrown in for good measure. But his checkered military career was also encumbered before by questionable command adroitness in Denmark against the Germans and then dogged after by meddlesome intrigues in his various commands in India. Nonetheless, he certainly was the man of the moment at a crucial time in the last world war and is saddled in history as being a key player who might well have lost everything for the Allies had he continued in his command. [ and the 3rd Reich's boast that it would endure for a 1000 years might well still be a valid possibility].

[work on process]

As time passes not only is life turned into history, but the contours of history itself change.

Historians today are thinking about WW2, for example, in challenging new ways reflecting the the growing distance between the country that fought the war and the country that remembers it. Of the 16 million Americans who fought in the “good war”, today some 60 years later, only some 1.5 million remain alive.

[work in process]

The face that launched a lonely ship ...

2011-02-05T13:27:00.042-05:00

The young woman photographed here in an unassuming but strikingly sublime pose, in her early 20‘s at the time, would hardly bear any notice today being dead now some 125 years, except that she was the love interest of an extraordinary man who clearly made his mark in history as an inveterate adventurer in the heyday of wind-powered "Tall Ships" and "Clippers" before they were overwhelmed by steam and eventually oil powered ocean transport.

The little we do know about her is that Joshua Slocum (1844-1909) a Canadian-American seaman and venturesome entrepreneur (and noted writer), the first man to sail single-handedly around the world, met her in Australia (1871), courted, married and carried her off all within a month’s time. Born Virginia Albertina Walker (the result of an interracial paring of a Scotsman and an American native Indian), her family had migrated from America to settle in Australia. She sailed away with Slocum never to return home.

Like her husband, she loved adventure, nature and the outdoors. As a girl in Australia, she was trained to ride horses and on weekends would ride into the Blue Mountains region outside of Sydney. She would take long horseback expeditions in the Mountains, exploring and sleeping on the ground much as the natives did. She was spectacularly well suited to the strenuous life she had chosen.

Slocum commanded many "Tall Ships" with Virginia at his side and she would give birth to 4 children on various ships. His largest command was a 200 foot clipper ship, the "Northern Light". He was destined to become famous later for his feat in a thirty-six foot Sloop/Yawl, the “Spray”, making the first single-handed voyage around the world. He wrote a book about it, "Sailing Around the World", now a classic of nautical literature, and still in print.

The children, who were raised and educated in a devoted, responsible manner on the high seas, remembered that their mother played the harp, guitar, and a piano which was anchored to the floor in the main cabin, and that she was also an excellent dancer. Virginia was a dead shot with a pistol too. When mutiny flared on the ''Northern Light ", and the first mate mortally stabbed by the ringleader, she sprang to the aid of her husband, covering the crew with a revolver in each hand.

On a trip aboard the "Aquidneck" to Buenos Aires, Virginia became seriously ill. She was in bed, seemingly recovering when the ship reached the Plata River and anchored in the outer roads. Slocum went ashore to organize prospective shippers of freight for a trip to Sydney. Before he left they agreed on a signal for his return if needed. The signal was the blue and white flag letter "J" to be hoisted. Early one morning, while Virginia was up busy salting butter for the voyage which she hoped would take her home to Sydney, she suddenly told her son to hoist the letter "J" at once.

Slocum returned and was at her bedside as she breathed her last. Virginia not yet 35, was dead from heart failure. He arranged to have her buried in the English Cemetery in Buenos Aires with a stone memorial monument [pictured right in 1884]. In 1892 the cemetery was made into a plaza, so today her remains lie somewhere under the stone slabs of a public square, unmarked and forgotten.

It took Slocum a long time to get over Virginia's premature sudden death, if ever. One of his sons wrote that “Father’s days were done with the passing of mother. They were pals…”. Another son said that “When she died, father never recovered. He was like a ship with a broken rudder.” However, some years later, aged 52, he was suddenly inspired to set off on the three-year solo circumnavigation of the globe which was to earn him fame and a modest fortune. It's not hard to imagine that Virginia's spirit accompanied him in some form on this and other lonely sojourns on the high seas. He ultimately disappeared in 1909, last seen sailing his beloved Spray in the West Indies, alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVw8axe10QI

Existentialism defined ...

2011-02-03T07:15:00.013-05:00

Continuing to live -- that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries --
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise --
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death
begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

... Philip Larkin (1922-85), English poet

An environmentalist's lament

2011-01-28T12:59:00.002-05:00

“I have always considered that the substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.”

... Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British politician and statesman.

An expansionist’s rant ...

2010-12-08T10:34:00.005-05:00

"If we’re going to be here as a species 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billon people".

... Ted Turner (b. 1938), American media mogul, comments on the impact of demographic trends on future greenhouse gas emissions, a little discussed subject given its political sensitivity.

Pattern recognition

2010-12-01T16:46:00.004-05:00

"I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations".

... Godfrey Harold “G. H.” Hardy (1877-1947), prominent English mathematician (number theory), an excerpt from "A Mathematician's Apology" (1941).

The great divide

2010-11-30T16:45:00.008-05:00

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had."

... C. P. Snow (1905-80), English physicist and novelist, excerpt from his published essay "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" (1959).

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day ...

2010-11-25T07:05:00.011-05:00

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."

... Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-American novelist ... excerpt from his memoir "Speak Memory"

Epitaph for a dead waiter: "God finally caught his eye.”

2010-11-07T12:44:00.007-05:00

“Do you have any unexpressed thoughts?”

... George Kaufman (1889-1961), American playwright, humorist & social commentator ... comment made to a woman endlessly chattering at a dinner table.

From Here to Eternity

2010-11-02T11:47:00.002-04:00

"It had to have rocks in the distance, so the water could strike the boulders and shoot upward -- all very symbolic. The scene turned out to be deeply affecting on film, but, God, it was no fun to shoot. We had to time it for the waves, so that at just the right moment a big one would come up and wash over us. Most of the waves came up only to our feet, but we needed one that would come up all the way. We were like surfers, waiting for the perfect waves. Between each take, we had to do a total cleanup. When it was all over, we had four tons of grit in our mouths--and other places".

... Deborah Kerr (1921-2007), referring to her famous romantic beach scene with Burt Lancaster (1913-94) in "From Here to Eternity"

A strangeness of sentiment ... a constituent element of all great art

2010-10-23T19:50:00.005-04:00

"I was only interrupted by my work on a new painting representing the exterior of a night café. On the terrace there are small figures of people drinking. An immense yellow lantern illuminates the terrace, the facade, the side walk and even casts light on the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone. The gables of the houses, like a fading road below a blue sky studded with stars, are dark blue or violet with a green tree. Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colours itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. But I like to paint the thing immediately. It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night with poor pale whitish light, while even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges".

... Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), Dutch painter. Excerpt from a letter to his sister about his painting “Cafe Terrace at Night”.

A recent photo of the same scene in Arles, France
[note: "the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone"
are gone, replaced by dull pavement, sadly]

Popular music in our time

2010-10-20T11:22:00.009-04:00

"What does our popular music say about our society? Not much that is admirable, I would venture to suggest. Its aggressive banality, irritating repetitive beat, emphasis on ear-destroying volume, obsession with sexuality and violence, and almost total lack of nobility or intellectual content, creates a pitiful contrast to the music of previous centuries.

It is probably futile to struggle against this phenomenon, for it is only a symptom of the spiritual and moral emptiness of our civilization. Lust for money has ruined the arts, just as it has ruined so many other things. Schubert and Van Gogh poured out their hearts on paper and canvas, displaying an expertise of craftsmanship developed and handed down over centuries expecting - and in their particular cases receiving - little or no remuneration. The new pop stars, on the other hand, have almost no technical abilities - other than what may be supplied by their producers - and are inflated mostly through promotion, gimmicks, manipulation and an unwholesome desire to thrusts themselves before the public and earn obscene amounts of money".

... Anton Kuerti (1938-), Canadian musician and concert pianist

The essence of consciousness

2010-09-24T23:00:00.001-04:00

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”

... Charles Bukowski (1920-94), American poet, novelist

Acceptance is relative ...

2010-09-22T16:05:00.006-04:00

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal"

... Albert Camus (1913-60), French Algerian author, philosopher and journalist

Thinking and language ... the cart before the horse.

2010-09-01T00:09:00.002-04:00

“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”

... Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), Russian linguist

... very large numbers have very large implications

2010-08-24T14:32:00.012-04:00

"The large numbers hypothesis concerns certain dimensionless numbers. An example of a dimensionless number provided by nature is the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron. There is another dimensionless number which connects Planck's constant and the electronic charge. This number is about 137, quite independent of the units. When a dimensionless number like that turns up, a physicist thinks there must be some reason for it. Why should it be, well, 137, and not 256 or something quite different. At present one cannot set up a satisfactory reason for it, but still people believe that with future developments a reason will be found. Now, there is another dimensionless number which is of importance. If you have an electron and a proton, the electric force between them is inversely proportional to the square of the distance; the gravitational force is also inversely proportional to the square of the distance; the ratio of those two forces does not depend on the distance. The ratio gives you a dimensionless number. That number is extremely large, about ten to the power thirty-nine. Of course it doesn't depend on what units you're using. It's a number provided by nature and we should expect that a theory will some day provide a reason for it.

How could you possibly expect to get an explanation for such a large number? Well, you might connect it with another large number - the age of the universe. The universe has an age, because one observes that the spiral nebulae, the most distant objects in the sky, are all receding from us with a velocity proportional to their distance, and that means that at a certain time in the past, they were all extremely close to one another. The universe started quite small or perhaps even as a mathematical point, and there was a big explosion, and these objects were shot out. The ones that were shot out fastest are the ones that have gone the farthest from us. That explains the relationship (Hubble's relationship) that the velocity of recession is proportional to the distance, and from the connection between the velocity of recession and the distance we get the age when the universe started off. It's called the big bang hypothesis.

There is a definite age when the big bang occurred. The most recent observations give it to be about eighteen billion years ago. Now, you might use some atomic unit of time instead of years, years is quite artificial, depending on our solar system. Take an atomic unit of time, express the age of the universe in this atomic unit, and you again get a number of about ten to the thirty-nine, roughly the same as the previous number. Now, you might say, this is a remarkable coincidence. But it is rather hard to believe that. One feels that there must be some connection between these very large numbers, a connection which we cannot explain at present but which we shall be able to explain in the future when we have a better knowledge both of atomic theory and of cosmology".

... Paul Dirac (1902-84), British theoretical physicist (interview excerpt, 1970)

A curious conjunction of giants

2010-08-22T10:16:00.051-04:00

This rather jocund-looking gentleman pictured here in 1858 is the famous Italian composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) who wrote 39 operas before he was 40, and retired thereafter to a leisurely life in Paris where his house was a centre of artistic society. His best-known operas include the The Barber of Seville and William Tell. He was also a well-known gourmand and an excellent amateur chef his entire life. Even to the present day there are dishes named with the appendage "alla Rossini" that were either created by him or specifically for him, probably the most famous being "Tournedos Rossini".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OloXRhesab0

It was in Paris around the time that the above photo was taken that Rossini was visited by a much younger Richard Wagner (1813-83) [left], the only time these two giants of the music world would ever meet. Even though Rossini maintained a rather ambivalent view of Wagner's works, amid a wide-ranging conversation when they lingered on the subject of another music giant, Beethoven (1770-1827), they both readily agreed he was the most influential composer of all time. Rossini shared with Wagner vivid recollections of the great composer having paid him a visit, also a one-time event, some 35 years earlier in 1822. He was then aged 51, deaf, cantankerous and in failing health. At the time the operas of Rossini were the rage, and Beethoven [below] was both irritated and fascinated by the phenomenon, curiously a somewhat similar stance that Rossini held for Wagner's music, famously observing it "has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours”. What seems to have struck Rossini most in his visit with Beethoven, was the exceeding sadness expressed in the composer’s face. Even then, he was received kindly but with characteristic brusqueness, Beethoven opening the conversation by complimenting him on the “Barber” while also making condescending remarks about Italians, and telling him with sarcastic candor (communicated in writing) “never try to write anything else but opera buffa; any other style would do violence to your nature.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsRLV5BKFtg

Shocked by the squalid living conditions in which he found Beethoven, Rossini talked with Wagner about how he had tried unsuccessfully to organize a subscription for funds to assist the man. Apparently potential donors were skeptical about the practicality of such a generous gesture, given Beethoven’s legendary erratic irascible nature.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfXIruW81oI

... the last classical liberalist

2010-08-13T13:44:00.008-04:00

"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists".

... Noam Chomsky (born 1928), linguist and political activist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-A9GDnDHxc&feature=related

Lifestyle versus political views ...

2010-08-06T13:56:00.001-04:00

"The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many spare evenings"

... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

God is not great ...

2010-08-06T13:13:00.007-04:00

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist…. I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

... Christopher Hitchens (born 1949), author, journalist, and celebrated atheist who wrote the best seller "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (2007)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4s1nVm3mO8&feature=related

There is no cure for curiosity ...

2010-08-04T14:14:00.005-04:00

"How like me, to put all my eggs into one bastard"

... Dorothy Parker, American poet and satirist (1893-1967)

Man's tragic flaw ...

2010-08-02T19:44:00.003-04:00

“We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.”

... Cicero (106 - 43 B.C.), Roman philosopher, orator and statesman

No matter, never mind

2010-07-19T05:14:00.001-04:00

... the birth of the 'American Empire'

2010-07-11T15:04:00.084-04:00

The noble Indian pictured here in full native regalia is the legendary Sitting Bull, a Sioux war chief during the years of resistance to United States government policies in the latter 1800s. This remarkable photograph was taken in 1885. He was to die violently five years later at age 59, apparently in a bungled arrest attempt, but more likely part of a deliberate elimination scheme by government authorities bent on suppressing every last remnant of native Indian resistance to a land grab of unprecedented proportions. It was the end of a remarkable life full of trials and tribulations, sadness, and tragedy.

Sitting Bull gained lasting notoriety in the infamous battle at Little Big Horn (1876), in which General George Custer (1839-76) [pictured right striking a strident pose as a cadet at 20] and his entire contingent of some 300 men were annihilated. The battle ("Custer's Last Stand") came to symbolize the conflict between new settlers and native Indian culture over lifestyles, land, and resources. The incident itself was nothing but a side-show compared to the willful slaughter of hundreds of starving, desperate native Indians who were being harassed by the likes of many a Custer. These self-styled agents of American “progress” marauding about in territory considered sacred by native Indians and solemnly promised to them in perpetuity in sham treaties, pillaged and killed innocents wherever they could be found, at will and with impunity.

Sitting Bull’s leadership skills and resilient dignity proved to be such a powerful obstacle to federal forces endeavouring to break Indian resistance that attempts to persuade them to sell their land were made in order to save the government the embarrassment of having to break treaties to get it. The attitude of the Indians was captured in a defiant gesture by Sitting Bull, picking up a pinch of soil and releasing it to the wind. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government – not even as much as this.” With regal contempt, he taunted government bureaucrats who demanded the turnover of coveted land for “acting like men who have been drinking whiskey”.

Although they were definitively not beaten on the battlefield, the Indian people were eventually broken through terror, political pressure, and the relentless logic of demographics, and finally reduced to abject poverty and starvation. The Americans were too numerous to repel, their government too powerful to resist, their rulers entirely without pity or scruple. Indians were subjected to harsh government controls over every aspect of their individual sovereignty. They suffered the indignity of having to accept government handouts just to survive and then insulted with the thought of needing to be grateful for it.

For his defiance, Sitting Bull was upbraided to his face by a powerful republican senator from Illinois, John A. Logan (1826-86) who was also a Presidential hopeful at one point, and whose legacy is still recognized by several prominant statues sprinkled throughout the land. His arrogant diatribe delivered to a totally defeated yet still proud Sitting Bull was nothing short of a mean-spirited bigoted totalitarian rant:

“You are not a great chief of this country. You have no following, no power, no control, and no right to any control. You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all that you have and are today is because of the government…. The government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.”

... and thus was ushered in the birth of the American Empire (quite literally, because it was a term used unblushingly in triumphalist literature of the period) which now girded the entire North American continent, its rulers ominously free to confer the blessings of civilization on untutored masses beyond its shores. [http://thewaywardtycoon.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-post_05.html]

In striking contrast, the sublime noble serenity of Sitting Bull so delicately captured in the photo [top] conveys a tale of a vanished way of life and a proud people unceremoniously and cruelly wiped out ... a shameful loss, but just the way things are when there is unbridled growth and mindless exploitation, rife with ignorance and careless insensitiviy to consequences.

Dignity in disgrace

2010-07-05T13:21:00.022-04:00

This iconic 1960s portrait of 21 year old English “party girl” prostitute Christine Keeler [b. 1942] relates to one of the 20th century's biggest political scandals known as the Profumo Affair [1963]. Her liaison with a prominent British government minister, 27 years her senior, entirely destroyed an illustrious and promising political career, and brought down a government, earning her fame and fortune and a jail sentence in the process.

The encounter was as brief as it was casual and the matter might have ended without public awareness, but for a bizarre set of circumstances. The affair advanced not by public disclosure but via a grapevine of rumour that got considerably bigger until the truth could be concealed no longer. It had all the alchemy of a TV soap opera and then some, quickly mushrooming into a media frenzy given a toxic brew of salacious high society shenanigans involving weekend house parties, call girls, and pimps in high places, with MI5, Russian spies and senior government ministers thrown in for good measure, against a backdrop of Cold War paranoia.

In the late 80s, Keeler's autobiography and the film, Scandal in which she collaborated revived interest in the events and raised doubts about the perjury charges made against her. Her latest book, "Christine Keeler, The Truth At Last (2001)" continues to raise questions about the case even after almost 40 years, which cannot be verified until 2046 when official papers will be released.

John Porfumo, who died in 2006 at 91, suffered scandal without reply. He made a vow of silence and never opened his mouth again to answer any criticism or misrepresentation, however unfair. Buffered from financial concerns by an inherited family fortune, he and his wife, the former film star Valerie Hobson (1917-98), disappeared from public life and London society, and cloistered themselves in their country estate. He quietly assumed a new identity and purpose through charitable community service work for the rest of his life. He did not cooperate with the inevitable books and movies about the scandal. A friend said of him, "No one judges Jack Profumo more harshly than he does himself. He says he has never known a day since it happened when he has not felt real shame."

Curiously, despite Profumo’s devastating fall from political grace and shameful loss of social respectability, his enduring legacy may well have been his vote in 1940 (some 20 years before the scandal) against his own party... a vote which led to the downfall of Chamberlain (1869-1940) and the arrival of Churchill (1874-1965) as a wartime prime minister. Profuma's prospects some years later for the Prime Minister role were arguably within his grasp had events turned out differently.

Survival of the fittest?

2010-07-05T12:54:00.008-04:00

''It is not clear yet that intelligence has any long-term survival value''.

... Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist

Male anxiety of the home

2010-05-12T23:16:00.013-04:00

"Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man"

... James Thurber (1894-1961), Humorist/Cartoonist

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1teJjX-smdE&feature=related]

Imperialism's legacy ... at least an important snippet

2010-04-26T23:04:00.027-04:00

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

... Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), British Prime Minister at the height of British Vistorian imperialism. Indeed, the man was idolized by Queen Victoria herself. It was also the heyday of the mechanical industrial revolution, but well before electric power grids, instant communications, and the car with its all pervasive infrastructure and inherent oil dependence. Even then, the very seeds of present day political turmoil in Asia and the Middle East are arguably linked directly to the policies of his government almost 150 years ago. Curiously the British at the time, yielding to imperialist prerogatives, were stridently meddling in Afghanistan with a massive invading contingent of some 30,000 troops, stultifying and dismantling the fledgling country's established order, deepening the fractious tribal nature of the region that persists to this day.

A stage too big for the drama

2010-03-14T00:57:00.006-05:00

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama”.

... Richard Feynman, Physicist (1918-1988)

A rose is a rose is a rose

2010-01-26T15:32:00.016-05:00

"Everybody gets so much
information all day long
that they lose their common sense"

... Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

In a flash ...

2010-01-17T09:54:00.011-05:00

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."

... Hemingway's (1899-1961) answer when challenged to make a story out of just six words.

... an anti-intellectual take on age

2010-01-02T20:10:00.012-05:00

"At fifty everyone has the face he deserves"

... George Orwell who died at 46

Life imitates art ...

2009-12-21T15:39:00.024-05:00

The remarkable visionary 1968 science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey" suggests that the entire history of humankind from the ape-like creatures foraging and fighting in the opening scenes to a climatic ill-fated odyssey to the planet Jupiter, has been the result of manipulation by extra-terrestial forces.

The picture above of actor Keir Dullea in the role of an interplanetary astronaut, remains as a photo icon of 60-70's pop-culture lore. In a perilous bid for survival, he matches wits with “HAL”, a spaceship computer gone amuck, only to become ensnared in a surrealistic Einsteinian curved space-time realm where in a remarkable sequence, he ages dramatically before our eyes and then is transformed into a heavenly "star child" ... a fascinating rendering of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke's existential metaphor for being and nothingness set in the vastness of space. This particular movie scene is depicted here, synced with Barber’s Adagio for Strings affording a curiously haunting atmosphere of dignity and wonder:

This scene has prompted controversy largely concerning confusion between the imaginary world depicted and the real; but in truth, the same drama is being played out today as portrayed by the gracefully aging Mr. Dullea himself, pictured below some 40 years later, caught as all are, in the same curved space-time realm, albeit not traveling in a speeding Jupiter-bound spaceship, but essentially beset on a speeding planet in a holding pattern around the sun.

Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive director, apparently destroyed all the props for the movie because he didn't want them reused for lesser movies or sold as memorabilia.

... the pleasure principle

2009-12-16T14:24:00.011-05:00

"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil' -- and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."

... Baudelaire [pictured in 1863 at 42]

... the ethics of ambiguity

2009-12-07T21:19:00.048-05:00

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting"

... Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86)

The great love of de Beauvoir’s life was arguably not Sartre but the American novelist Nelson Algren (1909-81). She would visit him in Chicago, finding his small rundown apartment in the Polish section to be “refreshing, after the heavy odour of the dollars in the big hotels and the elegant restaurants which I found hard to take.” His friend, the photographer Art Shay, took a snapshot of her just after she had emerged from a bath, seen nude from the rear, with her rather elegant upper half and sturdy buttocks and legs. He wrote: “She had taken her bath. It was while she fussed at the sink afterwards that I had the sudden impulse. She knew I took it because she heard the click of my trusty wartime Leica Model F. ‘Naughty man’ she said”.

de Beauvoir observed of Sartre that he was “a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed”; but of Algren, her “Division Street Dostoievski”, she readily admitted that, at age 39, she had entered into the first sexually fulfilling relationship of her life. Their affair though intermittently intense over some 17 years was fitful. Algren was moody, undisciplined and insecure, and his literary star blazed briefly and then fizzled, while de Beauvoir moved on to enormous success.

The relationship had a nasty aftermath when de Beauvoir wrote about it in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, to Algren’s fury. Until his death in 1981, he was recalling the affair bitterly, although upon de Beauvoir’s death five years later, she was buried beside Sartre wearing a silver ring that Algren had given her nearly forty years before.

"Nevermore!"

2009-12-03T07:58:00.130-05:00

"Vainly I had sought to borrow … surcease of sorrow. Darkness there and nothing more.”

... Poe (1809-49), "The Raven"

The fairy tale image of the friendly giant found dead in his orchard lying under a soft blanket of tree blossoms by bewildered, adoring children conveys a wondrous sense of beauty in profound sadness. Such poetry, if we can call it that, attempts through sheer force of will to burst the fetters of aching pain, or at least to alleviate it through absorption in a happy past. But not just in fairy tales; these attempts happen in music and art too ... however, alas, all in vain! The clear and present reality is agonizingly stark, for the heart does not lose something -- it loses everything.

Grief is not date-stamped. Lines written by John Donne (1572-1631) or Ben Jonson (1572-1637) or Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) cannot be surpassed in controlled agony, nor can Poe's anguished "nevermore" lament resignedly muttered repeatedly in his poem "The Raven". But where words leave off, music begins as in Chopin's (1818-49) magnificent Nocturne Op.48 No.1. It was described eloquently by a contemporary as a work whose “chief subject is a masterly expression of a great powerful grief ... told in an agitated recitando; celestial harps come to bring one ray of hope, which is powerless in its endeavor to calm the wounded soul, which sends forth to heaven a cry of deepest anguish. There are fevers and cold sweats in this music; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be performed in a robust manner, but rather rendered almost as if in a somnambulant daze, with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing whose nerves were being operated upon, where every touch might mean life or death”:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_vZtpjNKVE&feature=player_embedded]

Perhaps Beethoven’s (1770-1827) weighty "marcia funebre" of the Eroica Symphony plumbs the pathetic depths of grief as powerfully as any ... so much so that people reportly were unnerved, even spooked by it in early concert performances ... a work considered then in 1805 to be a dramatically "new", even "revolutionary" kind of music:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJj9EydBM5g&feature=player_embedded].

In this noble and expressive passage of fugal music we might well be present at the actual obsequy of a renowned and deeply loved person, with all that is good and great looking on as bodily remnants of insensate dust are respectfully and ceremoniously dispatched; and the motto might well be Tennyson's (1809-92) eloquent words:

"In the vast cathedral leave him,
God accept him, Christ receive him."

Oscar Wilde: "Do you mind if I smoke?" . . . . . . . Sarah Bernhardt: "I don't care if you burn".

2009-11-29T14:34:00.064-05:00

''Alas, poor Yorick! ... Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?''

Pictured above in the gravedigger scene in the Shakespearean play "Hamlet" is the actor (err ... actress) Sarah Bernhardt at 56, one of the few women to play the role, and arguably the most famous actress of the 19th century. Her Hamlet tour opened in 1899 in Paris, and continued for two years showing in London, Scotland, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. The tour attracted considerable attention in the literary press at the time. An interesting piece of contemporary published criticism has “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity ... so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration of the tour de force of the actress”.

The gloves are off though as the same critic blasts the very scene pictured above:

“This skull, too, which had “lain in the earth three and twenty years,” instead of being brown, discolored, was of a staring and indecent whiteness, as of bone boiled and bleached. It was not pleasant to see the grinning object handled so callously. Some of the dramatic effect, too, went by the board in this; for what’s the use of bringing in the ironic emblem of mortality if it is treated as lightly as a lap-dog? Indeed, I feel sure that Madame Bernhardt treats her lap-dog more considerately, for it would be strange if she made gestures with it as unconcernedly as she does with the skull. If my eyes did not deceive me, she tapped the grinning teeth with her finger; and she certainly is far from objecting as genuinely to the odor of mortality as Shakespeare makes Hamlet when he asks if Alexander “looked o’ the fashion i’ earth, and smell so? Pah!” Here the actor is expressly directed to “put down the skull”, but Madame Bernhardt could not only endure to hold it without “Pah!” she seemed to forget what it was she had in those eloquent hands of hers, as she emphasized feelingly the lines on imperious Caesar by gesticulating with a skull of a former acquaintance.”

Bernhardt began touring internationally in 1880, travelling in special luxury railway cars and appearing for big money in cities across Europe and the United States. Reportedly not the most beautiful or even the most talented, she knew how to cultivate her stardom. She worked like a pack horse, her French patriotism made her a national emblem; her wit, temper tantrums and willingness to try new things ensured that her worldwide super stardom would last from her first hit in 1869 through to her death in 1923.

Sarah was as famous a personality as she was an actress. She painted, sculpted and wrote; she engaged in violent feuds and equally violent love affairs. Oscar Wilde apparently held her in awe, “throwing lilies at her feet” when she arrived in England, but curiously in a sonnet represents her as a “vampire from hell”, the recipient of kisses from “the loveless lips” of dead men. She obligingly slept in a coffin for photographers, though she used a normal bed for more private slumber. Her romantic conquests were legend involving royalty [presumably Edward VII of England for example], and countless famous artists and actors of both sexes. She is famously quoted as saying "We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing, remain indifferent a great deal, forgive often, and never forget."

... a precise duty

2009-11-22T15:00:00.013-05:00

"If we are honest—and as scientists honesty is our precise duty—we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination.... I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another...". Paul Dirac, antimatter progenerater, Solway Conference 1927 [pictured centre in 1947 with Oppenheimer, developer of the atomic bomb at his right].

... the delicate art of seduction

2009-11-20T01:35:00.015-05:00

"It wasn't the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it.''

Gloria Grahame (1923-81)

The greatest thing you ever learn ...

2009-11-10T01:48:00.038-05:00

Nat King Cole recorded "Nature Boy" in 1948 which was an immediate major hit. Rumour had it that the lyrics were apparently written by a homeless man who tried without success to present them personally to Mr. Cole, who did receive them in due course and was impressed enough to want to meet the author, but alas, the man was never heard from again.

Turns out that Nat King Cole did indeed track the man down. His name was Eden Ahbez* [pictured right with his wife and son in the 40's], a songwriter and recording artist who was something of a personality in southern California, living a bucolic life, traveling in sandals and wearing shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He became the focus of a short-lived media frenzy when Cole's version of "Nature Boy" became a hit song. He continued to live on the street, or in his van or with friends. He died in 1995 at 87 of injuries sustained in a car accident.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bReW4LQ3Yc&feature=related

*Reference: http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.hoohoohouse.com/.a/6a00e55395d127883301156e8e2b07970c-800wi&imgrefurl=http://www.hoohoohouse.com/hoohoo_house/2009/03/eden-ahbez.html&h=542&w=432&sz=61&tbnid=yPjxNdp0ywApuM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=105&prev=/images%3Fq%3DEden%2BAhbez&hl=en&usg=__eLAJlN-syKANvKR_LU_V96ogCow=&ei=oG75Sp7DL83jlAeYy9G7DQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=6&ct=image&ved=0CBMQ9QEwBQ

Why aren't people more interested?

2009-11-03T09:03:00.054-05:00

“It's biology. Those who remember are dying, and the young are brainwashed by black-and-white versions of history which, in reality, is multi-coloured, like life".

... observed recently by Poland's Jaruzelski (its last communist leader) pictured here in court at 86. He was commenting on why Poles don't seem to be interested in his take on the country's liberalization history and his role in it.

Some 25 years earlier, Jaruzelski imposed martial law, initiating a brutal 19-month crackdown on the pro-democracy Solidarity trade-union movement, an event which apparently disturbed Pope John Paul II (himself a pole) sufficiently enough to prompt a visit. The poignancy of the moment captured in the iconic photo below is palpable.

... the inner music that words make

2009-10-29T05:37:00.007-04:00

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act".

... Truman Capote (1924-84)

"The only way you can control people is to lie to them" - L.Ron Hubbard, Journal of Scientology

2009-10-28T14:16:00.021-04:00

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.

This wonderful dog
Was Dame Hubbard's delight,
He could read, he could dance,
He could sing, he could write;
She gave him rich dainties
Whenever he fed,
And erected this monument
When he was dead.

Capucine's complaint

2009-10-25T09:10:00.005-04:00

"Men look at me like I'm a suspicious-looking trunk, and they're customs agents".

La Vallée d'Obermann

2009-10-14T11:43:00.074-04:00

This is Franz Liszt (1811-86)
seemingly larger than life, photographed an old man at 74, warts and all, a year before he died. In contrast the younger Liszt is pictured below as he appeared in his prime at 47 (1858). In the time between, this remarkable man was transformed from a renowned brilliant pianist, and an important and influential composer, adulated everywhere he went, to a disconsolate person increasingly plagued with feelings of desolation, despair and death occasioned by a period of severe catastrophes in his private life. Music critic Robert Cummings writes of Liszt: "he was the only contemporary whose music Richard Wagner (1813-83) gratefully acknowledged as an influence upon his own. His lasting fame was an alchemy of extraordinary digital ability — the greatest in the history of keyboard playing — an unmatched instinct for showmanship, and one of the most progressive musical imaginations of his time. Hailed by some as a visionary, reviled by others as a symbol of empty Romantic excess, Franz Liszt wrote his name across music history in a truly inimitable manner”.

Perhaps Liszt’s “La Vallée d'Obermann” is as good an example as any of the man’s musical legacy, arguably the most profound work in an extraordinary collection of piano works entitled “Années de Pèlerinage” apparently initially inspired by scenes or moods associated with Liszt's travels with his one-time lover, Marie d'Agoult (a popular writer) throughout Switzerland and Italy during the period 1835-39, but in gestation for some 20 years before publication. This piece usually runs close to fifteen minutes and is the longest in the set. A quotation from Byron prefaces the music:

"Could I embody and unbosom now that which is most within me --could I wreak my thoughts upon expression, and thus throw soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, all that I would have sought, and all I seek, bear, know, feel and yet breathe --into one word; and that one word were Lightning, I would speak; but as it is, I live and die unheard, with a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword”.

According to recent biographical research, Liszt in later life resisted hearing his Vallée d'Obermann. Apparently whenever a student brought the piece to play he declined to hear it ... "his music seemed to be burdened with memories for him, some too painful to bear".

There exists a superb recording of the work in a remarkable live concert performance (Carnegie Hall, 1966) by a celebrated virtuoso pianist which subtly captures the wonderful essence of the work, its power, deep pathos, and sheer majesty. It is fascinating because due to the exemplary skill and mature muscianship of the artist, it almost seems like a surreal time warp sound-bite from somewhere in the distant past, conceivably conveyed directly and serendipitously from the great master himself:

http://youtu.be/mfaWzhhZZZ8

"I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land"

2009-10-05T10:44:00.014-04:00

"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish-American War, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land".

... Mark Twain (1835-1910) describes [in 1900] his political awakening from being "a red-hot imperialist'' in the context of the Philippine-American War.

"Wait for me, Ellen: No one ever loved you as I love you!"

2009-09-29T23:56:00.064-04:00

"Yet one guesses that there was something more than an accelerating Catholic fanaticism in her resolute and zealous devotion. She was perhaps trying to expiate a little the horrors and griefs of Georgia, and her son's dedication to the priesthood was perhaps the price paid by his father for the reckless elation of the March to the Sea. In the remarkable painting of Ellen [pictured below] by G.P.A. Healy, the cross that hangs on her bosom, unobtrusive though it is at first sight, comes inevitably, as one looks, to draw attention as the center of the picture.

Ellen died in 1888. When her husband was called to her bedside, he came running upstairs, calling out, 'Wait for me, Ellen: No one ever loved you as I love you!'. He fell immediately after her death into one of his abysmal depressions and survived her only three years. He died in February, 1891; he had collapsed just after his 71st birthday, which he had spent in the room in which Ellen had died. He had been sitting in a rocking chair in front of the fire, rereading 'Great Expectations'."

... Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) comments about William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-91) and wife Ellen. "Patriotic Gore"

Miss Mary who?

2009-09-03T03:10:00.047-04:00

Clear evidence indicates Mary Jo Kopechne died an agonizing cruel death. John N. Farrar, a scuba diver with the Edgartown Rescue Squad which recovered the woman's body from an upside-down vehicle in eight feet of chilly water, testified she most likely stayed alive in an air pocket for several hours:

"Farrar thrust himself through the open window and into the car. Looking up, he found the body of a young woman. Her head was cocked back, her face pressed into the footwell. Both hands gripped the front edge of the back seat to hold herself in conformity with its upholstered contours. It was not the position assumed by a person knocked unconscious by the impact of a crash, Farrar said. "If she had been dead or unconscious, she would have been prone, sinking to the bottom or floating on top. She definitely was holding herself in a position to avail herself of the last remaining air that had to be trapped in the car.

Farrar took hold of the woman's thigh, and as soon as he touched the body he knew she was dead; the flesh in his hand was hard as wood. "Instead of life-saving, I realized I was now evidence-gathering," Farrar said. "Because I was the only person who would be able to observe this situation, it behooved me to pay attention to what I saw underwater to be able to report it."

(Grand jury testimony, 1969)

Ted Kennedy (1932-2009) who had driven the car off a small bridge in the middle of that fateful night in 1969 and had managed to free himself and swim to safety, abandoned the scene and his hapless trapped 28 year old "companion". Inconceivably, he didn't call for emergency help. Instead apparently, he squandered precious seconds, minutes, and hours conferring with Kennedy family operatives as survival chances for Mary Jo ebbed, and then went to bed. He only reported the mishap to authorities the next morning, some 11 hours after it happened, by which time the upside down car had been discovered. When he finally completed an accident report, he didn’t even know her name, referring to her simply as “Miss Mary ___.”

personification

2009-08-24T15:37:00.010-04:00

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

"I'm jealous of the old generation that has social skills and role models instead of TV and computer screens!"

Figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object. An example is "The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare" (William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," 1807). Another is "Death lays his icy hand on kings" (James Shirley, "The Glories of Our Blood and State," 1659). Personification has been used in European poetry since Homer and is particularly common in allegory; for example, the medieval morality play Everyman (c. 1500) and the Christian prose allegory Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan contain characters such as Death, Fellowship, Knowledge, Giant Despair, Sloth, Hypocrisy, and Piety. Personification became almost an automatic mannerism in 18th-century Neoclassical poetry, as exemplified by these lines from Thomas Gray's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard": Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown:Fair science frowned not on his humble birth,And Melancholy marked him for her own.

truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are

- most media are dominated by acting ... people watching people act ... a flimsy surrogate for the real thing, at best.
- idiosyncracies of the actor; certain mannerisms contrived or inherent
may intrigue the viewer but are an adulteration of the “truth”, the thing
immitated.
- there’s a gap between a sense of what is real and what is contrived
- the gap in itself is innocuous , unless it shrinks to nothing, as the act
becomes reality in peoples mind

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kamtekar/papers/personification.pdf

[Note: this entry is a work in process ... exploring the concept of personification as all perversive/Plato's identification of it/dramatic arts and acting/social interaction and communication/language structure and evolution/peer pressure behaviour/etc]

terrible passions in red and green ...

2009-08-06T22:46:00.014-04:00

"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green" van Gogh wrote. Yellow walls give on to blood-red walls that lead to an obtrusive green ceiling, and lining the walls are the locals at the bar tables, hunched over in late-night stupor. Lamps hang from the ceiling, surrounded by Vincent's wheels of curving yellow strokes. A stark black and white clock looms in the background, impossible to miss. It is almost a quarter past midnight in this desolate scene.

"Night Café" painted in Arles in 1888 is, in the artist's own words, "…one of the ugliest I have ever done" ... a collection of clashing colors in the dreariest atmosphere with fully two-thirds of the painting the floor of the café, executed in sulphuric yellow with exaggerated lines of perspective that yank the eye into the painting. A green billiard table, outlined in heavy black, stops us cold. Beside the table stands a figure in a light-colored coat, staring out at us without expression, perhaps the cafe owner for whom allegedly the painting was made to pay off a debt.

A case of superficial vitality ...

2009-08-06T09:03:00.008-04:00

"He projected a superficial vitality; both women and men were drawn to him by that alone. Closely observed, however, one sensed a secret fatigue, a lack of any real optimism. His wife was severely aware of it, and why not? She was its principal cause."

... Music For Chameleons, Truman Capote (1924-84)

Rememberance of things past and the chaos of clear ideas ...

2009-08-04T00:36:00.086-04:00

I marvel at the vividness of early childhood memories, and the immediacy of their intricately woven sensations ... a chaos of clear ideas that form the very essence of being and consciousness. The memory, for example, of summer languidnous on the last day of a school year in an empty classroom, windows flung open to the bright sunny freedom of a cooling breeze, mingled with the sharp anguished lonely dismay of sudden release from routine. These memories linger as vivid mood pictures imbedded in the mind, involving feelings which in manifold variety shape individual personalities. The subtle nuances and flavors of a whole culture and way of life long past can and do haunt the cavernous corridors of reflective minds in repose, curiously shaping en masse the character of a whole community.

Czech composer Dvorak (1841-1904) [pictured right with his wife in 1886] captured with uncanny musical genius the sense of such a time past … wide open country settings languishing under vast cathedralic canopies of pale blue skies and billowy wisps of pure white clouds, coalescing with the rapturous intricacies of simple rural life. His music* conveys a sense of this bucolic past with such delicate knowing intimacy that tears might easily well up in one's eyes … for there is profound sadness in this music, a compelling intuition that Dvorak was driven to capture a thing of wondrous beauty knowing full well it was fleeting. This was a time of ancestors long gone and forgotten, their remnants buried in little country church cemeteries, slowly succumbing to nature’s inexorable disintegrating forces:

*audio sample:

Gadgets and copycats

2009-07-07T09:24:00.045-04:00

"Fat Man", the atomic bomb pictured above was dropped on Nagasaki 9Aug45 by the US B-29 Superfortress Bockscar [right]. It was modeled on "the gadget", the very first experimental atomic bomb detonated just a month before at the so-called "Trinity test"* (Socorro, New Mexico). The mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki [upper right] rose 18 km (11 mi, 60,000 ft) into the air from the hypocenter. 80,000 were killed, half on the first day.

So porous was the security at the Manhatten Project where all the intense work was done to accomplish the deed, that the first Soviet bomb, RDS-1 pictured below (a.k.a. "Joe-1" in reference to Stalin) was almost a direct copy, even in its external shape, of the US-developed Fat Man bomb. It was test-exploded a mere 4 years after the Nagasaki drop in Aug49.

Theodore Hall (1925-99), one of several physicists working at the time on the Manhattan Project eventually fessed up some 50 years later, to divulging critical intelligence to the Soviets. He believed strongly (along with others, some caught much earlier, and executed for their deemed treachery) that an American monopoly on nuclear weapons was dangerous. He explained it this way in 1998, just prior to his death:

"I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as ... as Nazi Germany developed. There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do. The right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly".

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* This rare photo was taken at ground zero of the Trinity test site, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some time after the actual test. Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, appears at the center in a light colored hat:

The ruins of the noblest man

2009-07-07T08:48:00.104-04:00

This only known photograph* of Chopin at age 39 taken by Bisson in 1849 clearly reveals the ravages of the degenerative stages of tuberculosis which took his life only a few months later. Despite the carefully posed positioning, it is quite apparent his face is bloated from the inflammatory effects of his illness, and his whole countenance is rather pathetic and tragically sad. Pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles, a music contemporary, provided a precise description of him in better days:

"He was of slim frame, middle height [apparently 100lbs/5'7"]; fragile but wonderfully flexible limbs, delicately formed hands, very small feet, an oval, softly outlined head, a pale transparent complexion, long silken hair of a light chestnut color, parted on one side, tender brown eyes, intelligent rather than dreamy, a finely-curved aquiline nose, a sweet subtle smile, graceful and varied gestures."

Curiously, the death mask below, inflammation clearly vitiated in mortal suspension, ironically provides perhaps a more realistic semblance of what the man must have looked like in Paris high society at the pinnacle of his fame as a strange, wonderful composer and musician for the piano, capturing a delicacy and a certain sublime aristocratic bearing that people of his day certainly witnessed, an essence of which pervades his works for which he is very much exalted today as indeed he was in his own time.

"Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of time".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjHzX79sdc&feature=related

*NOTE: Apparently this is a 2nd Chopin photograph (c.1847), sourced at the Fryderyk Chopin Society, Warsaw. I cannot vouch for its verity.

A grief observed ...

2009-07-04T14:59:00.007-04:00

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

... the living and the dead

2009-04-12T23:41:00.004-04:00

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead".

... James Joyce (1882-1941) "The Dead" Dubliners

The American Dream

2009-04-09T10:35:00.028-04:00

Guiseppe Zangara's failed attempt to assassinate U.S. President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) demonstrated how the frustrations of financial misfortune in the Great Depression (1929 - early 1940s ... the longest, most widespread, and deepest depression of the 20th century) could lead to desperate and mindless acts of violence.

Zangara was born in 1900 in Italy. His mother died when he was two and his father remarried to a widow with six daughters. The expanded family, already poor, endured severe hardship and soon food became scarce. When Zangara was six his father took him out of school and put him to work digging deep ditches and hauling heavy bricks and stones. The strenuous work and poor nourishment was a contributing factor to his slight build and a burning stomach ache, and the pain began to drive him mad. His entire life began to revolve around his stomach pain and his health.

Zangara hated his father and blamed him for the horrible stomach pain he endured. He believed that his father should be punished, but the lousy capitalists in Italy were too busy to help him. Thus he developed a deep hatred for everyone who was rich or worked in government. Driven mad with pain, he came to believe that if he could kill the leader of the capitalists, his stomach pain might go away. He plotted to assassinate King Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947), but left for the United States before carrying out his plan. He secured a job as a bricklayer in New Jersey. He and his uncle lived together for a year until his uncle married. Zangara and his new aunt did not get along well, so he moved out. He lived very frugally and saved most of his money, allowing him some freedom to travel. He traveled to Panama and California in hopes that the warmer climate would help his stomach.

Finally he moved to Miami, Florida and again was working as a brick layer. In 1926 he went to see doctors about his stomach, who removed his appendix hoping that would solve the problem. However, it did not. In 1932, as the Great Depression had started to affect him, his stomach pain grew progressively worse. He decided that if he were to assassinate President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) the problem would be solved, because everyone said Hoover was to blame for the Depression. However, Hoover lost the presidential election to Democratic candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

On February 13, 1933, Zangara bought a .32 caliber pistol for $4 at a local drugstore, and planned to take a bus to Washington D.C. the next day. While walking to the bus station, he saw newspaper headlines reporting that President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was visiting the Miami area the next day. After giving a short talk at the Bayfront Park from the rear of a convertible car, FDR had just finished shaking hands with visiting Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak (1873-1933) [pictured here to the left of FDR] when Zangara fired upon the president. However, being only five feet tall, he was unable to see over other people, and had to stand on a wobbly folding metal chair. After the first shot, people grabbed his arm, but he fired four more shots wildly. He missed the president-elect, but five other people were hit, including Cermak. The Chicago mayor suffered an abdominal wound [pictured below]. En route to Jackson Memorial Hospital in the presidential convertible, Cermak allegedly told FDR, “I’m glad it was me and not you, Mr. President”, words now inscribed on a plaque in Bayfront Park.

After Zangara's arrest, doctors examined him and discovered severe ulcers as the cause of his chronic pain. He was put on trial and sentenced to 84 years for injuring bystanders during his attempt to kill Roosevelt. He pleaded guilty and showed no remorse except for missing Roosevelt. Cermak's condition deteriorated and he died some three weeks after the assassination attempt. Zangara was then put on trial for his murder and was sentenced to death in the electric chair at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. When he heard his sentence he yelled at the judge, "You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You're one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!".

On March 20, Zangara walked to the electric chair unaided and not afraid. He yelled and cursed at the guards. After a shroud was placed over his head, he screamed, "Lousy capitalists! No picture! Capitalists! No one here to take my picture. All capitalists lousy bunch of crooks. Go ahead. Push the button!" The guard pulled the switch and Zangara was no more. He had no family or friends present, and his unclaimed remains were buried in an unmarked grave at the prison.

Art for art's sake ...

2009-04-08T17:39:00.005-04:00

"Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists...And many centuries after their core, whether we call it Rembrandt or Vermeer, is extinguished, they continue to send us their special rays".

... Marcel Proust (1871-1942)

the surest poison is time

2009-03-08T14:53:00.006-04:00

"From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost".

... Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), “Old Age” in The Atlantic 1862.

Yeah .. bring 'em on!

2009-02-19T12:51:00.004-05:00

"In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

... H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Raunchiness par excellence!

2009-02-11T10:01:00.021-05:00

American writer Henry Miller (1891-1980) [pictured here in the mid 30s] celebrated Bohemian ex-pat life in Paris in the early 1900’s, as deliciously depicted in such novel-memoirs as Tropic of Cancer.

Another ex-pat in Paris at the time was the Hungarian artist Emeric Timar (1898-1950) who was inspired enough by Miller’s accounts to create expressionist lithographs with a surrealist edge capturing the raw sexuality that permeates pretty well everything Miller wrote. They were made in 1949.

Presented here (right)
juxtaposed with a sombre looking Miller is Timar's “The American Girl” in water colour.

Miller reportedly disliked them, perhaps because
for the title page vignette Timar drew Miller with a penis for a nose.

The Union endures!

2009-02-01T16:08:00.006-05:00

“… there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which … will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality”

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)

The sedge has wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing

2009-02-01T15:22:00.009-05:00

"Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendations, I hope I shall never marry: though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, and the curtains of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet’s down, the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winandermere, I should not feel, or rather my happiness should not be, so fine; my solitude is sublime—for, instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through the window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract Idea of Beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.... I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a King’s Body-guard: “then Tragedy with scepter’d pall comes sweeping by:” according to my state of mind, I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, “I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage,” I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content to be alone.”

... John Keats (1795-1821) from a letter written 29Oct1818 to his brother George. Keats was 23.

The dreadful face of unfeeling ignorance or evil or both

2009-01-30T20:18:00.013-05:00

In March of 1857, a case before the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney [pictured in 1855 at 78], concerned Dred Scott, a slave who had appealed to the Court in hopes of being granted his freedom. Taney wrote in a majority opinion that the framers of the Constitution believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it”. Referring to the language in the Declaration of Independence that includes the phrase, "all men are created equal", Taney maintained that "it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration. . . ."

Shakespeare certainly had a way with words!

2008-12-23T14:44:00.017-05:00

In his poems and plays, Shakespeare (1564-1616) invented thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French and native roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, includes such words as: arch-villain, birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore, hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn, watchdog, and zany.

The following phrases are also attributed to Shakespeare´s uncanny way with words:

“... has seen better days” (As You Like It)
“... hasn’t slept a wink” (Troilus and Cressida)
“... foul play” (Hamlet)
“... dead as a doornail” (Henry VI)
“... beggared all description” (Antony & Cleopatra)
“... set my teeth on edge” (Henry IV)
“... it was early days” (Troilus and Cressida)
“... as good as luck would have it” (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
“... laugh yourself into stitches” (Othello)
“... a foregone conclusion” (Othello)
“... one fell swoop” (Macbeth)
“... the game is up” (Cymbeline)
“... tell truth and shame the devil” (Henry IV)
“... to give the devil his due” (Henry V)
“... he knits his brow” (Henry VI)
“... what the dickens” (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
“... make a virtue out of necessity” (Two Gentlemen of Verona)
“... bated breath” (The Merchant of Venice)
“... neither rhyme nor reason” (As You Like It)
“... in such a pickle” (The Tempest)
“... playing fast and lose” (King John)
“... living in fools paradise” (Romeo & Juliet)
"... wanting too much of a good thing” (The Merchant of Venice)
“... in the end truth will out” (The Merchant of Venice)
“... melt into thin air” (The Tempest)
“... love is blind” (The Merchant of Venice)
“... tower of strength” (Richard III)
“... green-eyed jealousy” (The Merchant of Venice)
“... to be cruel only to be kind” (Hamlet)
“... more in sorrow than in anger” (Hamlet)
“... more sinned against than sinning" (King Lear)
“... be that as it may” (Henry VI)
“... the devil incarnate” (Titus Andronicus)
“... a good tongue in his head” (The Tempest)
“... don’t stand on ceremony” (Julius Caesar)
“... pomp and circumstance” (Othello)
“... not budging an inch” (The Taming of the Shrew)
“... making a laughing stock” (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
“... the be all and end all of it” (Macbeth)
“... brevity is the soul if wit” (Hamlet)

Fame ... dotes the more upon a heart at ease

2008-12-20T11:48:00.014-05:00

Michel de Montaigne was a noted writer of the Renaissance, living from 1533 to 1592, in a France dominated by bloody and miserable civil war. Even then, his inherited wealth shielded him from personal adversity allowing for a largely leisurely private secluded life. He wrote essais (“tries”). They were supposedly not meant as pedantic treatises, but as “sincere” attempts or experiments.

He was privileged, and he wrote extensively because he was carefree at a time when most struggled simply to survive. He wrote about the experience of being lazy, or brave, or indecisive; about lying, about living up to one’s responsibilities (provided one could afford to), about obsessive fears of death or illness, and the way they seem to recede as one’s level of actual misfortune rises. He often described the sheer pleasure of being alive - a sensation he could enhance simply because he was in a position to do so unfettered by practical living matters or concerns.

For some reason, he had quite a following in his time and beyond. The likes of Descartes, Emerson, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and perhaps Shakespeare were supposed to have been influenced. Even more contemporary writers like Isaac Asimov and Simone de Beauvoir had time for him.

Here’s a Montaigne sampler:

> "Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness."
> "Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to."
> "If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved."
> "When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? "
> "Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it."
> "The continuous work of our life is to build death."
> "If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I."
> "Kings and philosophers deficate, and so do ladies."
> "I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind. "
> "Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them."

"Sorry, Charlie"

2008-12-19T20:54:00.012-05:00

Apparently this is Charlie Chaplin 's (1889-1977) "true" first love. It is said he fell madly in love with her and asked her to marry him (she was 15, he 19). When she refused, he suggested it would be best if they did not see each other again, and was reportedly crushed when she agreed. For years, her memory would remain a fetish with Chaplin. He was devastated in 1921 when he learned that she had died of influenza during the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918 (age 22). Some speculation lingered for a while over whether they had a child.

Wealth of Nations

2008-12-12T15:05:00.003-05:00

The total value of all wealth worldwide is some $100 trillion (US).
Two thirds of that is held by Europe and North America, each holding
some $34 trillion.

Individually, millionaires worldwide (about 10 million, comprising less than 1% of all households) hold one third of all global wealth. The five countries having the most millionaires (in order) are the US, Japan, the U.K, Germany, and China.

[Source: BCG]

The one that got away ... maybe.

2008-12-11T21:47:00.023-05:00

"Frank Harris was an objectionable little man. He was sallow as a gypsy. He had bat ears, dark hair with a crinkle in it that grew low on the forehead, and a truculent mustache. People remarked on the richness of his bass voice. His charm was great, particularly for the opposite sex. He had the gift of gab to a sublime degree and a streak of deep scoundrelism that was the ruin of him.

A natural storyteller, tall tales so permeated his private life that his biographers were hard put to it to disentangle any facts at all from the web of fiction he spun about himself. Particularly in the twenties, when he was editing Pearson's Magazine in New York, there used to be considerable journalistic searching for "the real Frank Harris." One wonders now if such a creature ever existed. He wrote some good short stories. He might have developed into a first-rate novelist if he hadn't been such a damn liar."

     ... John Dos Passos (1896-1970), American novelist

''Arriving in London at the age of twenty-six (1882), unknown, half educated, penniless, he was within two years editor of the Evening News. Very little later as editor of the Saturday Review, then a very powerful Tory paper, he was entertaining in his house in Park Lane many of the most prominent social and political personalities of the day. He went everywhere and saw everyone, and yet found time and energy both for his own writing and the conduct of innumerable intrigues. It had been suggested that his rapid progress was based like Maupassant's "Bel-Ami" on his success with women, and his first wife was a wealthy woman. But he was more than just another adventurer. He was a man of immense potentialities: yet it was all ruined - or mainly ruined - by the lie within himself.

Wilde said of him, 'Frank has dined in every stately home in London ... once.' He could capture ground with a sudden assault, but he could not hold it. He lost his friends, betrayed their trust - no one could rely on him; and that same noisiness, that ill-bred forcefulness that made him socially intolerable, spoilt him as a writer. His actual writing is poor. I did not realize quite how poor it was till I compared the French with the English version of My Life and Loves. His books are only readable because their subject matter is sensational. He had in The Man Shakespeare something new and definite to say. In several of his short stories he struck an exciting plot. In his Portraits he wrote intimately and indiscreetly of persons about whom one is inquisitive. Unfortunately you cannot believe a word he says.

His anecdotes about Maupassant's priapism and Carlyle's impotence are typical. He takes two rumours which probably have a basis in fact and makes them the subject of a confession. The men who are reported to have made these confessions are no longer in the world to contradict him or defend themselves. And who could believe the scene where he pretends to have been completely ignorant of Wilde's inclinations until the scandal broke? His memoirs are valueless as history. If he survives as a legend, as part of a pattern, as a motif in die mosaic of literary history during the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth centuries - that is the most that can be hoped for. But his effect in 1906 on a twenty-year-old poetess must have been apocalyptic. He was then in the middle fifties. Though his political career was ruined, his literary reputation was still untarnished. He had not yet alienated many of his more worth-while friends. He was, however, conscious of the tide's turn against him. He needed the adulation of the young to restore his self-esteem. He took trouble over the very young.

'Did you always lunch at the Café Royal?' I asked her.

'Except the last time. We lunched at Kettner's then.' She paused, hesitated. "Is Kettner's going still?' she asked. It was very flourishing, I told her.

'Is it still the same kind of place?'

'I suppose it is.'

'He took me to a private room.'

'I'm not sure if you'd find those still.'

Dinners in private rooms in restaurants went out with the modern flat. I saw the tail-end of their vogue. They would seem very unhygienic to a generation that is used to the centrally heated amenities of the modem apartment building, but there was a rakish rococo air about the whole procedure - the curtained stairway, the discreet waiters, the eighteenth-century engravings, the chaise-longue - that provided its own special stimulus; married couples got a kick out of going there and being mistaken for what they weren't.

'If that was your last lunch, I gather it wasn't a success,' I said.

She smiled, then flushed. 'I'm afraid he must have thought me very childish; girls weren't so sophisticated then. Ann Veronica seemed a very daring book. And besides, that room; it was tiny; I felt so big and clumsy. He was a little man, you know.'

She paused, smiled wryly. 'I must have been a disappointment to him. He never asked me out again. But he printed my poems: the poems I sent him afterwards. I was very happy about that. I should have been miserable if I'd thought he only accepted them because lie had thought I was the kind of girl who might-' She checked; there was an abstracted look upon her face. 'Did you read My Life and Loves'?' she asked.

I nodded.

'They say, don't they, that the things which you regret in middle age are not the things you've done but the things you haven't done. That's not always true, you know. I was so glad I hadn't, when I read that book. I used to wonder sometimes when I read his other books and when I read about him, whether if I had behaved differently he might not have been a different person. There was so much that was fine in him. It all seemed to be going to waste. I might have saved him. But when I read that book, oh, it was all so materialistic, all that love-making and no conception of what love might be. I realized that I couldn't ever have made the slightest difference. It was too late, or I was the wrong person. I don't know which. Anyhow, I was very glad I hadn't.'

'You never saw him again, not after that last lunch?'

She shook her head. 'Very soon after that I went out to India: my sister was married to a civil servant.'

'You did not say good-bye?'

'I didn't tell him I was going. I dramatized myself. I pictured myself writing a tremendous poem on the way out. He'd be astonished to get an envelope in my handwriting with an Indian postmark. Then he'd read the poem. He'd be even more astonished. He'd feel guilty and ashamed. "I never realized she was capable of that," he'd think. My next poems would be better still. He'd be impatient to get me back. He'd write me beseeching letters. I'd go on postponing my return. That's how I'd punish him, for his own good. You know how a young girl daydreams.'

'And it didn't turn out that way at all?'

She laughed. 'The third day out I met the man I married.'

'And you wrote no more poems?'

'I wrote no more poems.' ''

     ... Alec Waugh (1898-1981), British novelist [excerpt, "My Place in the Bazaar"]

Being and nothingness ... on a very small scale!

2008-11-27T14:36:00.005-05:00

"An atom has a diameter of about 0.00000001 cm. The nucleus [at the centre] has a diameter of about 0.0000000000001 cm. If we had an atom and wished to see the nucleus, we would have to magnify it until the whole atom was the size of a large room, and then the nucleus would be a bare speck which you could just about make out with the eye, but very nearly all the weight of the atom is in that infinitesimal nucleus."

... Richard Feynman (1918-1988), theoretical physicist

Tender is the Butterfly

2008-11-25T13:26:00.009-05:00

"… his talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

... excerpt from A Moveable Feast (posthumus 1964 edition), Hemingway (1899-1961) on Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

The Moving Finger writes ...

2008-11-20T13:13:00.011-05:00

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

... Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), Persian poet

All About George

2008-11-02T01:42:00.010-04:00

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

... George Sanders (1906-72), actor [suicide note]

Forrest Gump in drag … with red lipstick

2008-09-27T12:59:00.020-04:00

If this photo (above right) had been doctored (as the film clip inset above left from the movie Forrest Gump) it would be an amusing lark perhaps found in the back pages of a cheap tabloid magazine .. certainly not in the mainstream media, even momentarily. But it’s there alright, and real … even surreal, but soon (hopefully) to be relegated to the dust bin of historical mementoes of the fleeting bravado of a naïve mind suddenly thrust into the public limelight, totally mesmerized while incapable of entertaining a single serious thought.

A clean, well-lighted place

2008-08-13T00:20:00.007-04:00

"It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

"What's yours?" asked the barman.

"Nada."

"Otro loco mas," said the barman and turned away.

"A little cup," said the waiter. The barman poured it for him.

"The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished" the waiter said.

The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.

"You want another copita?" the barman asked.

"No, thank you," said the waiter and went out.

He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it."

... Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

The ultimate defensive weapon ... a screwdriver.

2008-07-01T09:58:00.005-04:00

Asked in a closed Senate hearing room "whether three or four men couldn't smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city",Oppenheimer (1904-67)responded, "Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York." When a startled senator then followed by asking, "What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?" Oppenheimer quipped, "A screwdriver" [to open each and every crate or suitcase]. There was no defense to nuclear terrorism and he felt there never would be. ... "

... American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer"

A Darwinian take on the evolution of new ideas

2008-06-29T12:48:00.016-04:00

Max Planck (1858-1947) pictured here presenting Albert Einstein (1879-1955) the Max-Planck medal in Berlin (1929). whose prescient and revolutionary notion of “quanta” arguably launched the whole mystical, radically new and innovative field of Quantum Mechanics, had this to say about the Darwinian-like evolution of new ideas:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Einstein never wholly embraced the implications of this new field of physics, Quantum Mechanics ("God does not play dice"), curiously bearing out Planck’s observation.

It’s a sad historical note that Planck’s second son to whom he had been particularly close was implicated by the Nazis in the failed assassination plot of Hitler and died a horrible death at the hands of the Gestapo. Planck died a broken old man two years later at 89.

The smudged remnant of a famous name and the rage of a great mind!

2008-06-15T16:28:00.018-04:00

Beethoven’s original title page of his monumental Eroica symphony bears the evidence. The great composer's assistant Ferdinand Ries tells the story in his contemporary biography of Beethoven:

"In writing this symphony Beethoven had been thinking of Bonaparte, but Bonaparte while he was First Consol. At that time Beethoven had the highest esteem for him and compared him to the greatest consuls of ancient Rome. Not only I, but many of Beethoven's closer friends, saw this symphony on his table, beautifully copied in manuscript, with the word 'Bonaparte' inscribed at the very top of the title-page and 'Ludwig van Beethoven' at the very bottom. …I was the first to tell him the news that Bonaparte had declared himself Emperor, whereupon he broke into a rage and exclaimed, 'So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!' Beethoven went to the table, seized the top of the title-page, tore it in half and threw it on the floor. The page had to be re-copied and it was only now that the symphony received the title 'Sinfonia eroica'."

A particular trauma for Beethoven occurred during this period in 1809, when the attacking forces of Napoleon bombarded Vienna. Beethoven, very worried that the noise would destroy what remained of his hearing, reportedly hid in the basement of his brother's house, covering his ears with pillows.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on ...

2008-04-07T10:14:00.005-04:00

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

... Shakespeare (1554-1616) The Tempest

There is always something wrong ...

2008-03-11T19:44:00.009-04:00

We can get a pretty good impression of what this man was like from the way he was excellently portrayed in the popular movie Amadeus. It’s probably safe to say that, more than anything, it was his careful, intelligent nurturing of his son Mozart (1756-91) as a child prodigy that was responsible for providing the world the benefit of this supremely gifted composer's exquisite profound genius. The following laconic missive to his daughter just a few months before he died at 68 captures the practical essence of the man:

“You always want to hear that I am in excellent heath. You are not allowing for the difference between an old man and a young man. I don’t have time to write a long letter, suffice it to say that for an old man there is no such thing as excellent health. There is always something wrong, and an old man declines just as youth grows and prospers. In short, one must mend as long as there is something to mend” (24Feb1787).

Frivolous "love" and double jeopardy

2008-01-18T01:31:00.005-05:00

We didn't find her - she found us.
She sniffed us out.
She sat there
Slightly filthy with erotic mystery.
I saw the dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her, and I soon knew it. Ted Hughes (1930-98)

This woman, Assia Wevil, killed herself (gas) in a suicide that made sure that her young daughter by Hughes died with her, declaring in a suicide note she simply couldn't leave little Shura behind, explaining: "She's too old to be adopted."

The essence of "left" versus "right".

2008-01-17T21:49:00.043-05:00

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), one of the greatest scientists of all time, sometimes referred to as the "French Newton" or "Newton of France", with a natural phenomenal mathematical faculty possessed by none of his contemporaries, remarkably propounded the idea of black holes over 200 years ago.

However his notions of public office were not so profound. The great man's very short tenure as Minister of the Interior was terminated abruptly by Napoleon (1769-1821) with the following insightful practical assessment:

"Geometrician of the first rank, Laplace was not long in showing himself a worse than average administrator; since his first actions in office we recognized our mistake. Laplace did not consider any question objectively: he sought subtleties everywhere, only conceived problems, and finally carried the spirit of "hair-splitting" into the administration".