tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.comments2024-03-17T18:57:54.001+01:00Limited, Inc.Roger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comBlogger5984125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-33412261631319863982024-03-14T18:21:01.377+01:002024-03-14T18:21:01.377+01:00https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8317VVohgMo
- Sop...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8317VVohgMo<br /><br />- SophieAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-5460530465959192762024-03-09T11:36:22.235+01:002024-03-09T11:36:22.235+01:00Bruce, I'm with you in spirit, but I have to s...Bruce, I'm with you in spirit, but I have to say: haircuts are way more common, and way more repeatable, than lobotomies. If, in fact, the wealth of the bottom half (in the OECD countries, and those like China India and the countries of Southeast Asia with large manufacturing and exporting bases) increases at the rate it did in the fifties and sixties, and there is a negative rate of increase among the top 10 percent, including a telescoping of the .01 percent, I think a lot of projects could open up. I mean, socially, the question is the opposite - why give them a lobotomy when we could get to a much more equitable society with haircuts? Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-72996168138362845492024-03-09T00:30:22.236+01:002024-03-09T00:30:22.236+01:00Or, why give them a haircut if you can give them a...Or, why give them a haircut if you can give them a lobotomy?Brucehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02593856494794212834noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-31870910968251890682024-03-08T19:44:59.172+01:002024-03-08T19:44:59.172+01:00Bruce, I am all about fuck the rich, but I see a n...Bruce, I am all about fuck the rich, but I see a number of advantages in tackling the super-rich and making a theoretical discussion about how much inequality is really necessary for a 21st century consumer economy. I mean, why not ask for some numbers. It is like discussing how fast cars can go and transposing that speed to the public highway. I think, for instance, that tying the compensations of the top management of corporations to the compensations of the entire employee population would be an excellent addendum to corporate law. You know, I don't have to go all Karl Marx-y on cutting down the power of capital - I first can go all Teddy Roosevelt-y.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1512421991805635272024-03-08T19:14:50.998+01:002024-03-08T19:14:50.998+01:00Is this for Europe and the U.S. or the world? I do...Is this for Europe and the U.S. or the world? I don't see how this could happen, beyond theoretically, anywhere, but especially not for the whole world. And, if this is possible, why stop there? Fuck the rich.Brucehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02593856494794212834noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-62304724379748471562024-03-08T09:48:13.493+01:002024-03-08T09:48:13.493+01:00I put this up on Facebook and got many comments, w...I put this up on Facebook and got many comments, which all rehearsed some complaint or another about wokeness. Fair enough. Yet I was thinking less about wokeness and its griefs in everyday life but, well, more meta - what is the meaning in general of the transformation wrought by neoliberal culture. A few more remarks: Neoliberal culture does often seem like an excuse for windowdressing. Hence, the management of diversity in response to a broad history of various bigotries - like Hollywood diversity, which consists of hiring african american extras to populate ballroom scenes in historicals when we know, or should know, that african americans were violently repressed and would not have been invited in any shape or form to white people's balls in the nineteenth century, and most of the twentieth. Etc. The reformulation of the USA's jim crow and slave history into a showroom of diversity is mockable - but the question is, why does it exist at all? Why the elaborate fooling? This is the result, I think, of civil rights movements in the past, and the neoliberal synthesis of both the discursive victory of those moements and the emphasis on "private enterprise". This creates a certain problem, in as much as the state was the instrument that enforced civil rights legislation of all kinds. Since the state is the oppressor in the neo-lib imaginary, this requires some backstory to make it all come out right. End result is, there is only a small minority that comes out and self-proclaims themselves racist - a small minority, granted, that now has free run of twitter and certain reddit groups. Racism - the ur - form of bigotry, although one can well argue which oppression came first - is both systemic and denied in the theater of diversity and tolerance staged by powerful corporations and other orgs. It take "woke" to be not so easily assimilable to neolib culture - in fact, it becomes the standpoint from which to demonstrate its the injustices of its past and its present, and who profited from them. It is comic to see established power make wokeness into some grand terror, as though the woke faction was in charge of the guillotine. The guillotines, electric chairs, napalm, WMDs, and police are all on the other side. You will never get pulled over for driving while racist.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-70638228039941909402024-03-07T02:34:06.999+01:002024-03-07T02:34:06.999+01:00the door speaks. or squeaks. what can it say, open...the door speaks. or squeaks. what can it say, open or closed, when the house, the enclosure is blown away.<br /><br />- SophieAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-35267773039508025772024-03-03T03:13:27.087+01:002024-03-03T03:13:27.087+01:00Well, I was reminded of that song since you mentio...Well, I was reminded of that song since you mentioned the Stones. <br />You're right that the latest massacre of Palestinians will go down stream and disappear from the newspapers and the talk shows. But it won't entirely from memory even if forgotten, will leave a trace even if effaced. That's what poetry is for, going against the stream, bearing witness to the effacement and the forgetting, the effaced and the forgotten. <br />Have you read Dahlia Ravikovitch yet, who I mentioned earlier? She's amazing - even in translation. I don't know Hebrew so sadly cannot get a full sense of her genius in articulating the Hebrew of the prophets with colliqual usage. But even so one gets the sense that this is not a matter of rhetorical flourishes but a question - a call - of justice. <br />How can one not see, as you say, that the ultra right in Israel is ultimately leveraging antisemitism in a horrific way? How can one not acknowledge that they are abusing the Holocaust and its dead to do what: humiliate and degrade, imprison and torture, steal and confiscate land and water, starve and murder. Do that with impunity to a people, a population who had zip to do with the Holocaust. While the West which did have everything to do with the Holocaust now professes righteousness and lessons in antisemitism and finds the thing to do is provide more weapons for genocidal murder rather than food and aid, or god forbid a halt to the murder, and anyone who protests - which is to say, anyone with half a soul and slightest sense of morality - is obviously antisemetic. They can't shut us all up forever. Dahlia Ravikovitch is there - among others - to bear witness to that.<br /><br />Rachel is weeping aloud for her sons.<br />A lamentation. A keening of pain.<br />When thou art grown and become a man,<br />the grief of Jabalya thou shall not forget<br />the torment of Shati thou shall not forget,<br />Hawara and Beita,<br />Jelazoun, Balata,<br />their cry still rises night after night.<br />(Dahlia Ravikovitch, Lullaby.)<br /><br />- Sophie Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-29807353401361467182024-03-01T16:51:32.722+01:002024-03-01T16:51:32.722+01:00https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbmS3tQJ7Os
- Sop...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbmS3tQJ7Os<br /><br />- SophieAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-29036658850121505972024-02-26T17:54:06.416+01:002024-02-26T17:54:06.416+01:00This seems the crux of the passage from Cru: La gu...This seems the crux of the passage from Cru: La guerre elle-même a imposé cette définition fondée sur l’exposition au danger et non plus sur le port des armes qui ne signifie plus rien.<br />And as war and its map is extended, exposure to danger and death is not limited to soldiers or those bearing arms. And one can kill and murder not only with bombs and bullets but just as readily by starvation and disease. <br /><br />Thank you for the link to the Bushra-al-Maqtari book. How can one read the stories mentioned in the article and not feel a body blow? “My sister Sara and I, we did everything together,” a young woman called Sally Hasan Hizaa Salah tells al-Maqtari. “We’d dust off the windows, singing at the top of our lungs like two naughty children who’d never grown up.”<br /><br />As you say: the claim is simply to collate the voices of witnesses to combat - to what sociologists would later call participant-observers.<br /><br />And yet, this cannot be a simple task. One has to meet the survivors and witnesses - if there are any - and somehow allow them to speak, make speaking possible. It is not always possible to speak at a certain extremity of pain, trauma, grief. The article begins by mentioning that the book has the phrase "she cried" sixty times. A phrase that can be multiplied a million times over. No book could contain them all.<br /><br />- Sophie<br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-9665947027364040162024-02-26T17:26:03.702+01:002024-02-26T17:26:03.702+01:00Alas, the gimps are blind and deaf, too.Alas, the gimps are blind and deaf, too.Brucehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02593856494794212834noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-51439291403937443172024-02-26T13:36:23.127+01:002024-02-26T13:36:23.127+01:00oh, I should say I think Cru's method extends ...oh, I should say I think Cru's method extends from the 19th century urbanists, like Henry Mayhew, and goes forward to people like Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich. There's a review of a book about the Yemen terror famine reviewed in the NYRB that does the same kind of thing. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/the-weight-of-one-story-what-have-you-left-behind-bushra-al-maqtari/Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-33272877573845351062024-02-26T13:26:03.565+01:002024-02-26T13:26:03.565+01:00Sophie, I did not know that about Lyotard!
As for...Sophie, I did not know that about Lyotard!<br /><br />As for Cru, his introduction bristles with clauses, rather like a legal documents, of what he is including and excluding. This caused considerable controversy when the book was published - I should say, with his own funds, as no publisher wanted to handle it.<br /><br />Here's his definition of combattant.<br /><br />"Considérer tous les récits de combattants en donnant au mot combattant une signification différente de celle des lexicographes mais conforme à la pratique de la guerre de 1914-1918 : tout homme qui fait partie des troupes combattantes ou qui vit avec elles sous le feu, aux tranchées et au cantonnement, à l’ambulance du front, aux petits états-majors : l’aumônier, le médecin, le conducteur d’auto sanitaire, sont des combattants ; le soldat prisonnier n’est pas un combattant, le général commandant le corps d’armée non plus, ni tout le personnel du GQG. La guerre elle-même a imposé cette définition fondée sur l’exposition au danger et non plus sur le port des armes qui ne signifie plus rien. Les médecins de bataillon n’avaient pas d’armes, les officiers de troupe n’étaient souvent armés que d’une canne ; vivant au feu ils étaient combattants, tandis que les officiers de la 83e division territoriale (maintenue à Paris pendant toute la guerre) n’étaient pas combattants en dépit de leur sabre et de leur revolver."<br /><br />This, to my mind, makes sense. It is definitely not an all encompassing claim to have "captgured" the essence of the war. The claim is simply to collate the voice of witnesses to combat - to what sociologists would later call participant-observers. Because this discards the memoirs of the generals and the journalists, the war it shows was not recognizable to journalists and generals. So it ever is. <br />Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-14488776976051363982024-02-26T01:27:09.929+01:002024-02-26T01:27:09.929+01:00A question for you. From what one is told in the t...A question for you. From what one is told in the tales, in olden days Commanders were present at the battlefield with the grunts. That they no longer are in modern times has something to do with technologies doesn't it? Technologies that allow the Commanders to map a war, a battlefield, a city, a village, a trench, a hospital, a school, an apartment building, a wedding party and wipe it off the map.<br /><br />A bit like you dragging your feet to visit Versailles, I've been walking past viewing the Oppenheimer film, but recently did so upon repeated requests. I wasn't bowled over. It didn't leave much of an impression but I realize reading your post how bad a film it is: "the ways and means to write a history from the bottom up" is not a task Christopher Nolan has any sense of.<br /><br />A film that does take up the questions in your post is Kubrick's Paths of Glory. Both films feature trials, which is to say witnesses. <br /><br />I've been reading Amie's notes on another battlefield - the factory. She quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard and asks what quoting means. To quote Lyotard for instance, who for 12 years went in the morning to Renault-Billancourt not so much as an intellectual giving lessons but to listen and watch, as a witness. <br /><br />"I experience, to my surprise, what in Marxism cannot be objected to and what makes of any reconciliation, even in theory, a deception: that there are several incommensurable genres of discourse in play in society, none of which can transcribe all the others; and nonetheless one of them at least - capital, bureaucracy - imposes its rules on the others. This oppression is the only radical one, the one that forbids its victims to bear witness against it. It is not enough to be its philosopher; one must also destroy it." (Lyotard, 'Afterword: A Memorial of Marxism.)<br /><br />- Sophie<br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-90241585487259457272024-02-07T21:25:01.106+01:002024-02-07T21:25:01.106+01:00I thought of Marina Tsevetaeva. And of Rilke, who ...I thought of Marina Tsevetaeva. And of Rilke, who on Feb. 2,1922, was deep into the Duino Elegies. But I could not find a Feb. 2 anchor, so I decided to let it go. I also thought of Isadora Duncan and Esenin. But likewise.<br />Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-56788278410547473262024-02-05T02:58:06.236+01:002024-02-05T02:58:06.236+01:00Please do continue your "tea warming exercise...Please do continue your "tea warming exercise"!<br /><br />And I'm going to add to it - while cheating. You can cheat on a date right, falsify it, or keep it secret?<br /><br />So a man and woman meet in 1921 somewhere in Russia, hit it off, and as the script demands they get married. Except in Russia 1921 quite a bit is off-script. They do get married but the exact date is a matter of some dispute. Some sources date it as February 1st, 1922 in Kiev. Osip Mandelstam and Nadezhda Khazina. <br /><br />On February 2, 1922 a woman who knows them both is in Moscow where she is finding it increasingly untenable to survive and by the end of the month will risk a yoyage with her daughter to Paris. To join her husband who, unbenowest to her, turns out to be a double agent. Marina Tsevetaeva.<br /><br />The fraught history of the publication of Joyce's Ulysses did not begin or end on February 2, 1922. And that of the publication of Mandelstam and Tsevetaeva is is hardly less fraught. Or that of the posthumous publication of Kafka. The archive is not settled - even "today", february 2, 2024.<br /><br />"These are crossword lives.", as you write.<br /><br />- Sophie<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-58005827637370401512024-02-03T13:29:34.009+01:002024-02-03T13:29:34.009+01:00Matheson disliked the film even though he co-scrip...Matheson disliked the film even though he co-scripted it. He took a pseudonymous credit. Apparently they originally told him it was going to be directed by Fritz Lang.<br /><br />I'm still waiting to find a history of the 18th century plague (which I now see had that name - Magia Posthuma) that covers the event in detail. Usually it gets mentioned only in passing in more general histories of vampire folklore/genre, or, as in Paul Barber's book (still in the to read pile), a frame for talking about the lack of precision of the era's medical science in determining death.<br /><br />And now I'm wondering if Dr Van Swieten (apocryphally) took pains to explain his technique should be used only as an adjunct to impregnation, and not in its absence, for fear his patient might develop "Malthusian uterus", a phrase from Victorian medicine I came across years back in <a href="https://www.lesleyahall.net/factoids.htm#hysteria" rel="nofollow">this piece about the Maines' history of the vibrator debate</a>, and have yet to forget. They probably called it something else in the earlier century.Weavernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-32378802911161996522024-02-02T08:20:24.453+01:002024-02-02T08:20:24.453+01:00Interesting, Weaver, the overlap between these cre...Interesting, Weaver, the overlap between these creatures somehow - malefically - expelled from the usual line of descent. I'm also interested in the vampires of the 18th century - and the werwolves. Here's a bit I wrote about Marie Theresa's personal doctor, Gerhard von Swieten, who not only prescribed a good orgasm for the Queen, but was also given the mission of investigating a plague of vampires in a province of the empire: https://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2008/08/three-stories-about-gerhard-van-swieten.html<br /><br />I believe the FX for zombies changed their, so to speak, natural history. Vampires went the way of the romantic Byronic figure. They seduced. Zombies, though, became decayed and decaying mass beasts. You are certainly right that once Hollywood caught the zombie fever, they used the figure to concentrate the white fear of, and attraction to, the black planet. <br /><br />I should read Matthiesen's book, which I know is important in the genre. The film version sucks. <br /><br />That Hollywood (and UFA) picked up on sunlight as the enemy of the vampire is a perhaps unconscious solution to the decay problem. Nosferatu is certainly halfway to zombie - which was the result, as I understand it, of the fact that the heir os fhte copywrite to Dracula didn't want to sell it to the German filmmakers. All of these accidents on the way to the horror show! Still, I'm sorta gonna stick with my cockeyed thesis that zombies are the negation of the porn ethos. I really research whether there IS a porn movie about zombies, but I don't have the stomach for that. I'm only an amateur piker in these parts!Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-89225229524102274422024-02-02T05:57:57.328+01:002024-02-02T05:57:57.328+01:00Ah, but the "zombie" of our time precise...Ah, but the "zombie" of our time precisely <i>is</i> a vampire, deriving as it does from Richard Matheson's <i>I Am Legend</i>, a book about a modern dress vampire apocalypse with an SF approach to the epidemiology, and/or its Italian movie adaptation <i>The Last Man on Earth</i>, borrowed by George Romero for <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, but avoiding the V-word. We call them zombies because that's the title the Italians (again) gave to <i>Dawn of the Dead</i>. The zombie movies of the 30s and 40s are about the fact that white people are afraid of black people; in the 60s an excuse for the exploitation of young women. But the modern apocalyptic "zombies" are not slaves; they have volition (although arguably not much, given how the prestige television variants are treated much like bad weather, or their hordes are weaponised by warlords as WMD thrown against a rival community). Still, though, creatures acting on their own appetites, not running the errands of houngans.<br /><br />As it happens, the creatures hunted during the 18th century vampire plague bear a closer resemblance to our Zs than the befanged aristocrats of Gothic literature, when they were even risen corpses at all, rather than a sprite or an enchanted artifact. But no-one in Hollywood took non-sparkly vampires seriously, so even the remakes of Last Man swapped them for porphyritic Luddites and whatever "Darkseekers" are supposed to be (bad CGI, mainly). Even King made a bet each way in Salem's Lot: the turned townspeople might be a plague of braindead eaters, but their progenitor Barlow is straight out of Polidori and Stoker.<br /><br />Nevertheless: "zombies" are vampires not zombies is the ditch I will die in!Weavernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-52904912787637600442024-02-02T03:06:39.884+01:002024-02-02T03:06:39.884+01:00I'm all for your upcoming bestseller, For Moth...I'm all for your upcoming bestseller, For Mothers without Brothers. Our family has had no brothers for a few generations, so be good to get a grip on phantom penises.<br />And your new post had me thinking that you could also try a Zombie book, screenplay, etc. Admittedly, I don't know much about the 'genre', and the zombies I have trouble with are not the decaying bodies, biting kind. These zombies have fine bodies, cars, wives and mistresses, fine food, expansive houses in several locations, and everything else they have to have as advertised to stage the spectacle of happiness and success. Along the way they lost their heart and soul. They're dead. This would be a 'realist' screenplay, we've all seen them, we all are them to varying degrees. So the question you raised about going from death to ultradeath and come out - to live the sweetness of life, passion and the infinity of an instant. Who am I to know how, or rather don't we all know - precisely in our hearts and souls. The person I am channeling - if not exactly quoting - would call it the path of passion, of poetry, of song, of fire. The risk is that it all goes up in flames and all that remains is ashes. But maybe there's a chance a kindred spirit will come along and breathe on the ashes, make them glow again. Denn keiner tragt das Leben allein.<br /><br />Your could start with the story in Haiti and the African experience - and hey you'd have quite the music for a soundtrack<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMcilBWgo3w&list=RDMMcilBWgo3w&index=1<br /><br />- SophieAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-78913026412028301712024-02-01T08:43:15.170+01:002024-02-01T08:43:15.170+01:00Sophie, never be sorry for sending comments. I enj...Sophie, never be sorry for sending comments. I enjoy them! A note about the Plutarch - my son is in College, in first year, and is learning about the founding of Rome. So his test is going to be about Romulous and Remus. But the account they learn in school has no phantom phallus in it. He very much enjoyed the idea that a phantom penis was popping up in the house of an evil king. Boys. My wife doesn't understand this part of boydom. I do, I remember, and I've been thinking I should write a bestseller entitled: For Mothers without Brothers, about boy culture for mothers of boys who don't know about it. Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-48356055675900223202024-01-31T21:38:55.590+01:002024-01-31T21:38:55.590+01:00Damn, I thought I had deleted the above comment ra...Damn, I thought I had deleted the above comment rather than sent it, sorry! The long passage from Plutarch had me going in several directions which could hardly fit in a comment and besides I've the feeling I'm overstepping my comment allowance. One of the paths:<br />Freud and the murder of the father by the sons is rather well trodden, with Oedipus limping along. What of the mother? Well, she's there in Freud's Moses. And there's the very strange Three Caskets which starts with "an occassion for posing and solving a small problem" and ends with a tour de force interpretation of King Lear, while leaving aside that King Lear is a play, theater. Here's the conclusion of his text. 'three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man's life - the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.'<br /><br />In Plutarch's life of Romulus:<br /><br />To mix heaven with earth is foolish. Let us therefore take the safe course and grant, with Pindar, that<br /><br />"Our bodies all must follow death's supreme behest,<br /><br />But something living still survives, an image of life, for this alone<br /><br />Comes from the gods."<br /><br />-SophieAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1790366221192617652024-01-30T20:48:39.832+01:002024-01-30T20:48:39.832+01:00And in the times of Varro the philosopher, a Roman...And in the times of Varro the philosopher, a Roman who was most deeply versed in history, there lived Tarutius, a companion of his, who, besides being a philosopher and a mathematician, had applied himself to the art of casting nativities, in order to indulge a speculative turn of mind, and was thought to excel in it. 4 To this man Varro gave the problem of fixing the day and hour of the birth of Romulus, making his deductions from the conjunctions of events reported in the man's life, just as the solutions of p123 geometrical problems are derived; for the same science, he said, must be capable not only of foretelling a man's life when the time of his birth is known, but also, from the given facts of his life, of hunting out the time of his birth. 5 This task, then, Tarutius performed, and when he had taken a survey of the man's experiences and achievements, and had brought together the time of his life, the manner of his death, and all such details, he very courageously and bravely declared that Romulus was conceived in his mother's womb in the first year of the second Olympiad,18 in the month Choeac of the Egyptian calendar, on the twenty-third day, and in the third hour, when the sun was totally eclipsed; and that he was born in the month Thoth, on the twenty-first day, at sun-rise; 6 and that Rome was founded by him on the ninth day of the month Pharmuthi, between the second and third hour: for it is thought that a city's fortune, as well as that of a man, has a decisive time, which may be known by the position of the stars at its very origin. These and similar speculations will perhaps attract readers by their novelty and extravagance, rather than offend them by their fabulous character.<br />-Plutarch<br /><br />Thoth - Womb - Eclipse - Birth - Sunrise.<br />Naturally!<br /><br />-Sophie<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-20640092191364253542024-01-28T11:27:50.079+01:002024-01-28T11:27:50.079+01:00Sophie, thanks for this visit from Amie's spir...Sophie, thanks for this visit from Amie's spirit! Which brings a lot of nostalgia to my ticker. True, the music has been lacking around her. Although, funnily enough, my Karen Chamisso Claire poem is about muusic videos and learning how to deprovincialize yourself. So here's a shot back to the Annie Lennox eighties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6f593X6rv8<br />Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-38490631239995484462024-01-28T02:25:47.932+01:002024-01-28T02:25:47.932+01:00Please pardon another comment. I wasn't meanin...Please pardon another comment. I wasn't meaning to believe me, but somehow this thread made Amie's spirit make a visit and give me an earful. Which went something like this: Sophie, you know I never ever had a harsh word for you and not about to start now. But this thread is not exactly your best effort is it, not from the girl I heard recite a Baudelaire poem and shut up a bunch of drunk knuckleheads and their obscenities. I mean I'm kinda moved that you refer to the Salles and Nietzsche quotes you found in my notebooks, but you didn't mention that the stuff I'm forever returning to with Fred N. is the the stuff about Socrates, make music and believing in a God who could dance. Not suggesting that you take a deep dive into my notebooks on LI, god no. <br />Movies, music, dancing. Ring a bell? <br />And the thing is, if you're going to refer to yours truly on LI a music video is de rigueur. I know you've been through LI back pages so must know this. If you were to do so, I'd suggest not going the Pasolini/Bach or Godard/Beethoven route. And leave our beloved Catherine Ringer out of it this time. Something superficial rather and something that reminds you of me would be nice if I may ask - the two should be easy enough to bring together. Something that makes the trivial shimmer a little, breaks the everyday routine. If for a instant. We're only here for an instant. Music and song is how we fucking survive. So find something Sophie, you can do this.<br />Besides, it's time that LI had some comments with music, been a while. Just remember, it says on LI: always for love, never for money.<br /><br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPSrLXPb2PwAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com