Eyjafjallajokull

the voice of Borges

I remember when I read a biography of Oscar Wilde by Hesketh Pearson. Then there was a long discussion going on about predestination and free will. And he asked Wilde what he made of free will. Then he answered in a story. The story seemed somewhat irrelevant, but it wasn’t. He said — yes, yes, yes, some nails, pins, and needles lived in the neighborhood of a magnet, and one of them said, “I think we should pay a visit to the magnet.” And the other said, “I think it is our duty to visit the magnet.” The other said, “This must be done right now. No delay can be allowed.” Then when they were saying those things, without being aware of it, they were all rushing towards the magnet, who smiled because he knew that they were coming to visit him. You can imagine a magnet smiling. You see, there Wilde gave his opinion, and his opinion was that we think we are free agents, but of course we’re not….

Victoria area put on alert for book-loving ex-mobster

Described on the FBI website as the leader of Boston’s notorious Winter Hill Gang, Mr. Bulger is wanted for a variety of mob-related crimes including racketeering, money laundering, drug trafficking, extortion and as many as 19 murders.

He is also “an avid reader with an interest in history” and “is known to frequent libraries and historic sites,” the FBI website says.

Mr. Bulger was a key figure during the most violent decades of Boston’s underworld, an era that forms the basis for the 2006 Martin Scorcese film, The Departed, in which Mr. Bulger was played by Jack Nicholson.

He disappeared from the Boston area in January, 1995, after receiving a tip that FBI agents were about to arrest him. He has been on the bureau’s Top 10 Most Wanted list ever since.

An FBI task force dedicated to capturing Mr. Bulger has scoured five continents in search of the aging fugitive, who is known to be adept at using disguises...

Mr. Munro, who was out of town for the FBI visit, said the agents didn’t give his staff much information about why they were warning bookstores specifically in the Victoria area.

We're the scabs, and you're not!

The Rolling Scabs were a short-lived punk group fronted by two 13-year-old boys. The group played several gigs in and around San Francisco in 1988. They weren't brothers, but they acted like it, they were best friends, and were born the same day on the same year.

One of the kids, Giuliano, died two years later, crushed by an elevator when he was horsing around in an abandoned building in Connecticut.

The scabs first ever gig was at the legendary punk haven The Gilman Street Project in Berkeley. A cassette board tape of this was released by band member Li'l Mike on a limited edition of 500 7-inch EP on pus-colored vinyl...

(thanks TR)

JOSEPH SKIPSEY (1832-1903): the 'Pitman Poet'

"Get up!"

"GET up!" the caller calls, "Get up!"
And in the dead of night,
To win the bairns their bite and sup,
I rise a weary wight.

My flannel dudden donn'd, thrice o'er
My birds are kiss'd, and then
I with a whistle shut the door,
I may not ope again...

Basil Bunting:

It may be less easy for such city-dwellers as we have become to acknowledge the truth of the pretty incidents of pit village courtship, especially since there is a convention which must be observed. The things you may publicly admire in a girl, the things you may compare her to are fixed by what was originally a rustic tradition, withered in the towns and apologised for by villagers aware of town scrutiny, but not dead in the least. Only the ornaments change a little. The lad Skipsey's lasses admired for dancing and wrestling plays football now. It is in handling such matter that Skipsey comes nearest to the folksong, at times, like it, practically anonymous. But always he is very close indeed to the people and the life, as little embarrassed by its prettiness as by its pain. Burns sees Ayr and Dumfries vividly but from outside. He is not one with the people he observes. But Skipsey hardly sees Cowpen and Percy Main at all. He is inside the pit village, part of it, and but for a certain dignity of bearing, we might say he was the village itself composing...

Eyjafjallajokull

lots of splendid images at The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art at Tasveer Ghar

more local trees

Local trees

Arthur Rimbaud at 37?

(thanks Don Share)

Struwwelpeter has been reprinted...

Struwwelpeter stands or falls on the credo that children can bear to be scared by art and thereby grow. It addresses its youthful audiences as such. Understanding that children ought not be burdened with scenes or themes that go far beyond their own experience, Hoffmann draws deft, bright lines between each childish act and an extreme consequence. This matters today, when a generation of parents is being compared with hovering helicopters and snowplows. In this book, it is not the parents who are in control. They pronounce their interdictions and then, as Becket would say, things take their course...

Seven unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals

...In a departure from earlier roles, Fernandel was to play a bourgeois Marseilles soap manufacturer who, during his children’s holidays, assumes the costume and character of the Marquis de Sade....

Old New York in Colour

Dead Dogs

The state’s power over dogs expanded in tandem with its empowerment of the newly established societies for “humane treatment.” So too did claims of humanitarian enlightenment. Dogs were no longer as legally insignificant as before, but they continued to be subject to the rigor of law: judged as dangerous, accused of damage or injury, impounded or killed. Their representation and treatment—cared for, beaten, ignored—offer limit cases in the extravagance of status-making in law...

18 real and fictional characters in Warren Zevon songs

The Secret History of the Vocoder

“Of all the World War II cryptology experts I interviewed,” Tompkins writes, “none was aware of the vocoder’s activities in the clubs, rinks, and parks of New York City … Of all the hip-hop civilians I interviewed, none was aware of the vocoder’s service in any war...”

Bolano at Isola di Rifiuti

"Hamlet and La Vita Nuova, in both works there’s a youthful breathing. For innocence, says the Englishman, read immaturity. On the screen there’s only laughter, silent laughter that startles the spectator as if he were hearing his own last gasps. “Anyone can die” means something different than “Anyone would die.” A callow breathing in which it’s still possible to discover wonder, play, perversion, purity. “Words are empty” . . . “If you put that gun away we might be able to negotiate” . . . On a average of three hours’ sleep a night the author writes these threats by the side of a pool at the beginning of the month of October. Innocence almost like the image of Lola Muriel that I’d like to destroy. (But you can’t destroy what you don’t possess.) An urge, at the cost of nervous collapse in cheap rooms, propels poetry toward something that detectives call perfection. Dead-end street. A basement whose only virtue is its cleanliness. And yet who has been here if not La Vita Nuova and Hamlet. “I write by the pool at the campground, it’s October, there are more and more flies now and fewer and fewer people; by the time we’re halfway through the month there’ll be no one left and the cleaning service will stop coming; the flies will take over until the end of the month, maybe...”

Must the 'Big Smoke' Always Get Its Way?

Karen Anderson, the mayor of Hudson's Hope, thinks that the decision-makers behind the latest push for the Site C Dam haven't fully considered the costs that they are asking the people in her community to bear. "We don't feel that we should be ruining our valley, and our part of the province, in order to sell energy to the United States," she said. "They take our oil, they take our gas, they take our power now, you know? We don't get anything back from it, really." Bruce Lantz, the mayor of Fort St. John, is more pragmatic about the political calculus informing the decision. "If they [Liberals] lost every vote in northeastern B.C. because of Site C, they'd lose 22,000 votes," he said in an interview with The Georgia Straight's Matthew Burroughs last year. "If you put a major project elsewhere in the province, you could lose that many votes in an eight-block radius. So this is kind of an area that is acceptable losses, maybe, in terms of votes. And, of course, the communities are split. And I think that the deep thinkers in Victoria have figured that this is a good way to go."

1970 Interview with Laura Nyro

“The pop music of the ‘50s communicated those times ... these times are smashing and a lot of truth is being sought out, because you can’t live without truth . . . you can’t live, you can only survive, and I feel that there is a renaissance about it all now...

"The world is going through a moral revolution and, sometimes I feel like a mirror in a storm—a mirror that’s smashed against the earth. I don’t read newspapers, but I know what’s going on.”

YouTube - Peggy Lee--Is That All There Is?