Kevin Baker on Dolchstosslegende

"Yet in demanding so little, Bush has finally uncoupled the state from its heroic status. It is not a coincidence that modern nationalism dates from the advent of mass democracy--and mass citizen armies--that the American and French revolutions ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century. Bush's refusal to mobilize the nation for the war in Iraq has severed that immediate identification with our army's fortunes. Nor did it begin with the Bush Administration. The wartime tax cuts and the all-volunteer, wartime army are simply the latest manifestations of a trend that is now decades old and that has been promulgated through peace as well as war, by Democrats as well as Republicans. It cannot truly be a surprise that a society that has steadily dismantled or diminished the most basic access to health care, relief for the poor and the aged, and decent education; a society that has allowed the gap between its richest and poorest citizens to grow to unprecedented size; a society that has paid obeisance to the ideology of globalization to the point of giving away both its jobs and its debt to foreign nations, and which has just allowed one of its poorer cities to quietly drown, should choose to largely opt out of its own defense..."


 

looking greatly forward to uncrating Sam Peckinpah's The Legendary Westerns Collection later this afternoon...

 

detailed assessment of late singer/songwriterGrant McLennan's career has samples, etc....

"I recall
a schoolboy coming home
through fields of cane
to a house of tin and timber
and in the sky
a rain of falling cinders
from time to time..."


 

The Guys Get Shirts

Paul Anka rallies the troops...

(NSFW)
 

Doug Messerli on Colin MacInnes' "London Novels", including "Absolute Beginners"--

"So I went out of the Dubious to catch the summer evening breeze. The night was glorious, out there. The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars were peeping nosily beyond the neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in their jeans and separates, were floating down the Shaftesbury avenue canals, like gondolas. Everyone had loot to spend, everyone a bath with verbena salts behind them, and nobody had broken hearts, because they all were all ripe for the easy summer evening..."


 

What's an Iraqi Life Worth?



"Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians -- and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally -- are expendable. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim's death helped clarify her brother's perspective on the war. "God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here," he declared after the incident. "They have no regard for our lives."

He was being unfair, of course. It's not that we have no regard for Iraqi lives; it's just that we have much less regard for them. The current reparations policy -- the payment offered in those instances in which U.S. forces do own up to killing an Iraq civilian -- makes the point. The insurance payout to the beneficiaries of an American soldier who dies in the line of duty is $400,000, while in the eyes of the U.S. government, a dead Iraqi civilian is reportedly worth up to $2,500 in condolence payments -- about the price of a decent plasma-screen TV..."

farewell Syd Barrett--

"Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees-- crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.

`This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. `Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror--indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy--but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

`Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. `Are you afraid?'

`Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. `Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet--and yet-- O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

As they stared blankly. in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi- god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before..."

from "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter of
The Wind in the Willows





 

long essay on Kevin Davies' Comp. which I'm going to have to read again...

"In other words, it seems like Davies is suggesting that grammar and syntax, even when tinkered with, speciously incite the syllogistic production of readerly meaning--and that the function of having learned to read produces not self-reflexive insights about language use but, well, readings of the available language. He stresses, in the haughty tone of adolescence, how he learned this all in the first grade: language governs itself. While this is the exact claim a critique of linguistic transparency attempts to rebut, in evoking early childhood education (as opposed to post-secondary education), the voice Davies adopts situates the reader of Language writing as an expressive subject in social space, with problematic results. That is, the point here might be that Language writing can't possibly teach us to unlearn certain lessons when we come to it at ages of decreasing neural plasticity..."

absolutely stormin' whiteface YouTube - Bob Dylan - Isis (Live)--

"I married Isis on the 5th day of May..."


& where's that Renaldo & Clara DVD??
 

Karl Marx's Unknown Masterpiece--

"To do justice to the deranged logic of capitalism, Marx's text is saturated with irony - an irony which has yet escaped most scholars for the past 140 years. One exception is the American critic Edmund Wilson, who argued in To The Finland Station: a study in the writing and acting of history (1940) that the value of Marx's abstractions - the dance of commodities, the zany cross-stitch of value - is primarily an ironic one, juxtaposed as they are with grim, well-documented scenes of the misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice. Wilson regarded Das Kapital as a parody of classical economics. No one, he thought, had ever had so deadly a psychological insight into the infinite capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious or indifferent to the pains we inflict on others when we have a chance to get something out of them for ourselves. "In dealing with this theme, Karl Marx became one of the great masters of satire. Marx is certainly the greatest ironist since Swift, and has a good deal in common with him."


 

piece about Fried Chicken in Brooklyn includes a visit to Ruthie's in Fort Green, where I happily dined one October night back in the twentieth century...

"Like Ruthie's, Mitchell's fried chicken (half-chicken with sides and cornbread, $9.50; leg "sandwich" on Wonder Bread, $3.50) is also made from scratch, so it may take 20 minutes for the bird to arrive. It's well worth the wait. Cooked a little longer than Ruthie's, the skin is rendered darker and crisper. On my last visit, one of the sides was a sweet succotash made from fresh corn, okra, and tomatoes. It was so good I almost fainted with pleasure..."

Heaven knows I'm an Islamist now


"Twenty years ago, adolescents who listened to The Smiths found a pop cultural justification for putting off adulthood. For today’s Muslim youth, Islam plays a similar role. Indeed, first-generation Muslims have often expressed surprise that their sons and daughters have become so religiously minded. But this has little to do with the influence of Islam - radical or otherwise; rather it has become a kind of conduit for the I-hate-the-world frustrations of adolescents. The nihilistic posturing of Muslim youth has a lot in common with expressions of the same in British popular culture, whether it’s Jimmy the Mod’s suicide scooter leap in Quadrophenia or Billy Fisher’s fantasies of machine-gunning people down in Billy Liar.

Yet the question remains, how is it that whereas Morrissey sang ‘burn down the disco’, the Muslim men arrested a few months ago allegedly discussed actually doing it? The difference today is that Blair and the government promote a similar fear and loathing to grown-up society as adolescents do. The constant bemoaning and belittling of pubs, football crowds, supermarkets and shopping malls has all the nihilistic hallmarks of the leave-me-alone teenager. A political centre based on the common good could (and did) pull young people out of their nihilistic phase and into society. A political culture based on hating and berating the masses is unlikely to do the same."

TV note for Shawcable subscribers tonight at 1900 on "Encore Avenue" is Withnail and I and at 1215 on TCM there's Tokyo Drifter...


 

Pussy's Port o' Call

Pussy's Port o' Call, originally uploaded by Mongibeddu.

in Belfast--where savvy Mainers stash their cats.

David Hare on the screenplays of Harold Pinter


"You could argue that it's hard to judge the overall flavour of Pinter's work without the realisation of the script on which he worked longest - A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, completed in 1972 - and on which he said he never felt he had wasted a moment, in spite of the fact that it was never made. But even without that finished film, it's possible to say Pinter has found himself writing repeatedly about class. The three films he made with Losey - The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between, are all, surprisingly, about aristocracy. And in the cheerless fuckpad in Betrayal, in the half-felt, half-meant location romance of The French Lieutenant's Woman, in the boozy, donnish watchfulness of Accident, in the repellent modern partnership between Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers, and in the all-out marital war of The Pumpkin Eater, you see finished portraits of a queasy bourgeoisie, whose values and convictions - whose very sense of identity - seem to wobble about in a murky plasma of whisky and deceit."


 

Yard.

Looking west. 

Pond. 

Another one, looking west. 

One of mine. South Wellington last New Year's. 

bio and discography of beloved Lancashire contralto Ferrier, Kathleen (1912-53)

(the smiling pianist is dean of accompianists Gerald Moore, whose autobiography "Am I Too Loud?" is very funny) 

sad farewell to great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

"Like Ferrier, Hunt was unpompous in rehearsal and unfussy on stage. She seemed almost bewildered by the sound that emerged when she opened her mouth, yet the effulgence of her ``Who May Abide'' in Handel's Messiah was volcanic, an irresistible eruption. At an indelible Wigmore Hall debut recital in London, she emulated Ferrier's love of English folksong with a rendition of ``Deep River,'' an American spiritual.

Like Ferrier, Hunt will achieve posterity on records, though sparingly -- some Bach, Handel, Purcell and a shimmering set of songs by her composer husband, Peter Lieberson. Once heard, never forgotten."


 

global warming = Polar Bear Jail Expansion--


"Bears that are locked up are normally released only when the ice returns, although if the jail gets crowded before then, some bears are flown by helicopter far away from town and released.

The five extra cells should reduce the need for pricey helicopter rides, Bobier said.

The expansion of the jail may be timely, because climate change is expected to drive polar bears in western Hudson Bay near human settlements more often.

Polar bears need a long winter so they can hunt seals on solid ice, and the ice in that part of Hudson Bay is not what it used to be.

"Over the last 30 years, the average date of breakup has come approximately three weeks earlier than it was," said Ian Stirling, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service who has published several studies on polar bears.

"Hungry predators . . . don't tend to lie down under a tree and just starve to death, so if they start to get hungry, they're going to look for an alternate food source.

"What we see is that as the breakup gets earlier, there are more and more bears seen in the vicinity of Churchill or in the settlements up the Nunavut coast.""

 

"A Collection of Candle Holders"  

friends should just be arriving at the incredible Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre in southern Alberta , to my mind Canada's best museum--the only other place I have ever felt so close to the ancient world was at the stone-age village of Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands. A "buffalo jump" was a short cliff pre-horse owning peoples would chase buffalo over--the museum is INSIDE the cliff...

via bookslut this fine list of 101 Crackerjack Sea Books


(above the destroyer HMS Bellona, one of the ships my dad served as a telegraphist ("sparks") on during & after WWll)

"The Town Pigeon", from below

 

"World Book Day" from British photographer STEPHEN GILL's excellent site.

"Stephen Gill's photographs have all the naive gusto of the field studies series of old. Mercifully lacking in sarcasm and malevolent irony, they are also wise and modern and beautifully laden with tiny, understated details about the way we live today."


 

new Sy Hersh

“Rumsfeld and Cheney are the pushers on this—they don’t want to repeat the mistake of doing too little,” the government consultant with ties to Pentagon civilians told me. “The lesson they took from Iraq is that there should have been more troops on the ground”—an impossibility in Iran, because of the overextension of American forces in Iraq—“so the air war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force.”