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Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; 'She once pulled up an onion in her garden,' said he, 'and gave it to a beggar woman.' And God answered: 'You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.' The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. 'Come,' said he, 'catch hold and I'll pull you out.' he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was

Bollettino Writing as hell The casualty report, today, is all autobiographical. It has been forty days and forty nights since LI was last paid by a major client. They float us, and they don't care, and that is ... life. We wrote, in good faith, reviews that were as good as we could make them, to deadlines that the newspapers laid down, and in return we get... this. The Sunday before last we begged a hundred dollars from our brother. That check came on Thursday, and foolishly we deposited it, where it was eaten by the money that we owed the bank from bounced checks. Since then, we�ve had nothing. It is now Tuesday, July 8, 2003. Hmm. The rent check will bounce in two days. The phone isn�t paid. And the electrical company is going to put a 24 hour notice on the door in about a day. We went to the store today, and took stock of our wallet. Five dollars. We bought a can of peas. What to do? We don�t have a clue. The money that is coming in might as well not, by now.

Bollettino Casualty report: Reuters reports three U.S. injuries yesterday, one from a land mine. Another mortar attack last night in Balad, no injuries. And two more Saddam tapes have popped up, although no Saddam to go with them. LI is reminded of the numerous pretenders that appeared in the time of troubles in Russia. Berlusconi Viewing the most rightwing leaders in the world right now -- Bush and Berlusconi -- one has to wonder if it is necessary to be quite that stupid in public. But of course, stupidity in public is actually a shock technique of power. It is a way of suddenly casting a light upon what is said and unsaid. Power over the distinction is power, indeed. And so misspeakings, or crudeness of various sorts, acquire the fascination of a dirty joke -- taboos that run just beneath the surface, employed on the surface, have the power to make us laugh, and in that laughter crystalize both disgust and complicity. Comparison between Bush's "bring em on"

Bollettino Stephen Nadler, in a review of Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment, Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650�1750 published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, expresses the core idea of the Radical Enlightenment as being derivative, ultimately, of the thought of Spinoza -- or at least an interpretation of the thought of Spinoza: "As Israel demonstrates at great length, and through the examination of a large variety of thinkers and an enormous body of published and archival material, �the essence of the radical intellectual tradition from Spinoza to Diderot is the philosophical rejection of revealed religion, miracles, and divine Providence, replacing the idea of salvation in the hereafter with a highest goodin the here and now�. The providential God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is an anthropomorphic .fiction, and sectarian religion nothing but organized superstition. And then there is the secular conception of eudaimonia, along with

Bollettino Casualty report this morning: 3 Americans have been killed in the last 24 hours. 2 Iraqis charging American troops have been killed. 4 Americans were wounded in Ramadi. There's a very nice article in the LAT this morning about Iraq's 'minister' of telecommunications, one Shakir Abdulla. Abdulla is a guerilla of the peaceful kind: a man who, with ad hoc equipment and an ever changing plan, is trying to put the telephone system back together again. With minimal help from the Americans, even though, presumably, some American slug is serving as an "advisor" to the group. As the article puts it: "Like many Iraqis, Abdulla cannot understand how the governing U.S.-led occupation authority has allowed things to crumble so utterly. "The coalition has a responsibility to create security. They created the situation that eliminated it," he said. "They must replace it." In the meantime, the man must deal with a system th

Bollettino Casualty report this morning: 3 Americans have been killed in the last 24 hours. 2 Iraqis charging American troops have been killed. 4 Americans were wounded in Ramadi. There's a very nice article in the LAT this morning about Iraq's 'minister' of telecommunications, one Shakir Abdulla. Abdulla is a guerilla of the peaceful kind: a man who, with ad hoc equipment and an ever changing plan, is trying to put the telephone system back together again. With minimal help from the Americans, even though, presumably, some American slug is serving as an "advisor" to the group. As the article puts it: "Like many Iraqis, Abdulla cannot understand how the governing U.S.-led occupation authority has allowed things to crumble so utterly. "The coalition has a responsibility to create security. They created the situation that eliminated it," he said. "They must replace it." In the meantime, the man must deal with a system t

Bollettino Here's an item from the NYT. " Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. Since major combat for the 150,000 troops in Iraq was declared over on May 1, more than 60 Americans, including 25 killed in hostile encounters, have died in Iraq, about half the number of deaths in the two months of the initial campaign . Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session. "They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart." And here is an item from Aristophanes : LYSISTRATA We will explain our idea. MAGISTRATE Out with it then; quick, or... (threatening her). LYSISTRATA (sternly) Listen, and never a movement, please! MAGISTRATE (in impotent rage)Oh! it is too much for me! I cannot k

Bollettino "A dearth of general information is almost necessary to the thorough-paced coffee-house politician; in the absence of thought, imagination, sentiment, he is attracted immediately to the nearest commonplace, and floats through the chosen regions of noise and empty rumours without difficulty and without distraction. Meet 'any six of these men in buckram,' and they will accost you with the same question and the same answer: they have seen it somewhere in print, or had it from some city oracle, that morning; and the sooner they vent their opinions the better, for they will not keep. Like tickets of admission to the theatre for a particular evening, they must be used immediately, or they will be worth nothing: and the object is to find auditors for the one and customers for the other, neither of which is difficult; since people who have no ideas of their own are glad to hear what any one else has to say, as those who have not free admissions to the play will very