more bling (all trinkets and trade goods from Value Village junk jewelry grab bags which Daphne's sisters have already gone over)

"More than once, from this account, the First World War emerges not just as an inevitable clash between imperialist forces but as a great conspiracy of the rulers everywhere to rid themselves even if only temporarily from the intolerable demands of their subjects..."


from Paul Foot's review of the 1997 reprint of George Dangerfield's 1935 The Strange Death of Liberal England,long sought after & eagerly anticipated by this blog, acquired at Literacy Nanaimo yesterday along with Eric Bentley's "Thirty Years of Treason", a vast collection of testimony from the House Unamerican Activities Comittee--including those who named names (Sterling Hayden, Lee J. Cobb) and those who didn't (Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel) Walter Bagehot's "English Constitution" (with a 60 page intro by Richard Crossman) & vol 2 of "The Diplomats" featuring Moltke, Bullitt & the slide into WWll & a book called "The Pocket Venus" about a Victorian sex/horse-racing scandal...with change from a twenty!

lovely memoir of John Wieners

"Pain and suffering. Give me the strength
to bear it, to enter those places where the
great animals are caged. And we can live
at peace by their side. A bride to the burden

that no god imposes but knows we have the means
to sustain its force unto the end of our days.
For that is what we are made for; for that
we are created. Until the dark hours are done.

And we rise again in the dawn.
Infinite particles of the divine sun, now
worshiped in the pitches of the night..."

Capital

"What has happened is that a few very intelligent people (mostly advertisers, political consultants and assorted zealots) have, over a period of decades, figured out how to co-opt the ideals and enlightened thinking of both East and West and turn them into fertile ground for manipulative mischief that trumps the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and even material well being of the whole. While the enlightenment of the West becomes a pretext to justify a nihilism and hedonism used to promote a shallow, cynical, politically apathetic but shopping friendly populace (we can look back to the Marquis de Sade and advertising for the roots of this trend), the enlightenment of the East is used to justify an anti-rationalism that fixates on swarm politics and sacrifices critical thinking at the alter of individual conformity – all for the sake or social order, security and the prosperity of the whole (we can look back to Mao Zedong and advertising for the roots of this trend). Both bastardizations of the enlightenment agenda can be found in the rhetoric of globalization and the realities of a rule of capital that is fundamentally fascistic in its outlook. It is the rhetoric and rationale of advertising, pollsters and focus groups, of cynical linquistic manipulators for both the nihilistic hip and sound bite fundamentalists, of fear and desire quite effectively massaged in the mindless march toward material progress which in its wake leaves incredible waste and destruction to the planet and many of its inhabitants not only unfulfilled but in a blanket state of perpetual – and perpetuated – misery. And all of this to make a few hundred billionaires..."

Bling

Isola di Rifiuti

"Cold morning, rocketing in (bicycle), surly brakes keeping me honest, ur-reckless. I’m like a man digging out goutweed (Aegopodium), sifting the roots, seeing how it choked out the perennial columbines along the fence. The invasive runners shooting out under the pines, into the yard, snarling up my fleet traffic of avoidance. That faintish coffee color of the crow’s head, wary, bleeding into the landscape. That enormous blue housefly of work debilitatingly there. The mind’s train’d shoots and slips cast the ropes off of—thrust free of—all the inimical blunt caveat and guide-rail, goes its own furry way. Bishop’s weed. Snow-on-the-mountain. Surely there are many other names for it. I learn'd my history in a fruit cellar. Dud of dodged cogito."

YouTube - Arcade Fire "My Body is a Cage" nicely mash'd up with the climax of my favorite movie, Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"