larvatus prodeo
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Below are the 30 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Michael Zeleny" journal:[<< Previous 30 entries]
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10:34 am
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better not to have been
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„Niemals geboren zu werden wäre das beste für die sterblichen Menschenkinder“, „Aber“, setzen die Weisen der „Fliegenden Blätter“ hinzu, „unter hunderttausend Menschen passiert dies kaum einem.“
Der moderne Zusatz zum alten Weisheitsspruch ist ein klarer Unsinn, der durch das anscheinend vorsichtige „kaum“ noch dümmer wird. Aber er knüpft als unbestreitbar richtige Einschränkung an den ersten Satz an, kann uns also die Augen darüber öffnen, daß jene mit Ehrfurcht vernommene Weisheit auch nicht viel besser als ein Unsinn ist. Wer nie geboren worden ist, ist überhaupt kein Menschenkind; für den gibt es kein Gutes und kein Bestes. Der Unsinn im Witz dient also hier zur Aufdeckung und Darstellung eines anderen Unsinns wie im Beispiel vom Artilleristen Itzig.
—Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, Deuticke, 1912, p. 45
‘Never to be born would be the best thing for mortal men.’ ‘But’, adds the philosophical comment in Fliegende Blätter, ‘this happens to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand.’
This modern addition to an ancient saw is an evident piece of nonsense, made sillier by the ostensibly cautious ‘scarcely’. But the addition is attached to the original statement as an indisputably correct limitation, and is thus able to open our eyes to the fact that this solemnly accepted piece of wisdom is itself not much better than a piece of nonsense. Anyone who is not born is not a mortal man at all, and there is no good and no best for him. Thus the nonsense in the joke serves to uncover and demonstrate another piece of nonsense, just as in the example of Artilleryman Itzig.
—Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, translated by James Strachey, W.W. Norton & Co., 1990, pp. 65-66
I got a real depressing letter from my folks about two weeks ago, because I haven’t been taking real good care of my money. They said, ‘Sam, we can’t send you any more money. You’re out of control, and you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing with your cash. And… you’re old enough to be on your own.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay’… and I called them. I said, ‘Mom, get dad on the phone too, wake him up, I know it’s late, but I want you both to hear this. You know, before I was your little son. Before I was your baby—before I was your loan—I was a free spirit in the next stage of life. I walked in the cosmos, not imprisoned by a body of flesh, but free, in a pure body of light. There were no questions, only answers. No weaknesses, only strengths. I was light, I was truth, I was a spiritual being, I was a God!!! But you had to FUCK and bring my ass down HERE! I didn’t ask to be born! I didn’t call and say: ‘Hey, please have me so I could work in a fuckin’ Winchell’s someday!’ Now you want me to pay my own way? FUCK YOU! PICK UP THE FUCKIN’ CHECK, MOM! PICK IT UP!
—Sam Kinison |
This year’s winner of the Bookseller/Diagram prize for the oddest title of the year is Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. Other finalists included How Green were the Nazis?, Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, and the book I’m reviewing here. The title is indeed odd. But it isn’t intended merely to be catchy, another one of those volumes appealing on the cover but deadly dull within. Benatar appears genuinely to believe that we are all harmed, and fairly seriously harmed, by being brought into existence and that it would really be better, and better for us, had we never been born. There are two important and immediate objections: how can something that odd, that strange, possibly be true? And, if it is true, why don’t we all, or at least those who believe it, go and put an end to things now? Why is Benatar still with us? Is he still with us? He is, and he thinks he has an answer to these objections. I’ll come to these below.
[…]
So, give Benatar a charitable reading and there are still objections to be made. Give him what may in the end be a fairer reading, and the objections are stronger. Both in the paper and the book he argues thus: suppose you have to choose between two packages. The first contains something good and something bad, while the second contains something good and something neutral. The second package is to be preferred. But the first package is one in which we exist, and where our lives involve both goods and bads, or pleasures and pains. The second is one in which we don’t exist, and so there are no pains—something good, and no pleasures—something not bad, or neutral. So, on balance, existence is worse than non-existence. This is a dreadful argument. It’s most obviously dreadful in taking no account of the quantities of pleasure and pain involved. You might think that Benatar must at least anticipate this objection. Certainly in the paper he doesn’t. Not so in the book. There (pp. 45-47) he does attempt to address this challenge. But as he appears almost altogether to misunderstand it, there is just no force in his reply.
— Reviewed by Christopher Belshaw, The Open University
David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 45-47:
[…]
Quadrant (1) must be negative, because it is bad, and quadrants (2) and (3) must be positive because they are good. (I assume that (3) must be as good as (1) is bad. That is, if (1)=−n, then (3)=+n.) Since (4) is not bad (and not good either), it should be neither positive nor negative but rather neutral.
Employing the value assignments of Figure 2.4 we add (1) and (2) in order to determine the value of A, and then compare this with the sum of (3) and (4), which is the value of B. Doing this, we find that A is preferable to B where (2) is more than twice the value of (1).35 [Where (2) is only twice the value of (1), A and B have equal value and thus neither coming into existence nor never coming into existence is preferable.] There are numerous problems with this. For instance, as I shall show in the first section of the next chapter, it is not only the ratio of pleasure to pain that determines the quality of a life, but also the sheer quantity of pain. Once a certain threshold of pain is passed, no amount of pleasure can compensate for it.
But the best way to show that Figure 2.4 is mistaken is to apply the reasoning behind Figure 2.4 to the analogy of H (Healthy) and S (Sick) mentioned earlier.
Following Figure 2.5, it would be better to be S than H if the value of (2) were more than twice the value of (1). (This presumably would be the case where the amount of suffering that (2) saves S is more than twice the amount S actually suffers.) But this cannot be right, for surely it is always better to be H (a person who never gets sick and is thus not disadvantaged by lacking the capacity for quick recovery). The whole point is that (2) is good for S but does not constitute an advantage over H. By assigning a positive charge to (2) and a ‘0’ to (4), Figure 2.5 suggests that (2) is an advantage over (4), but it quite clearly is not. The assignment of values in Figure 2.5, and hence also in Figure 2.4, must be mistaken. 36 [To take the implications of the value assignments in Fig. 2.5 for Fig. 2.4 as evidence that the analogy between the two cases must be inapt is another instance of treating the avoidance of my conclusion as axiomatic.]
To recap, David Benatar argues that uncontroversial symmetry between the presence of pain being bad and the presence of pleasure being good does not seem to apply to the absence of pain and pleasure. On the contrary, it strikes him as true that the absence of pain is good even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, whereas the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom that absence is a deprivation. Consequently, the absence of any possible subject of pain and pleasure would amount to an overall good in the balance of his absent pains and pleasures.
It is equally uncontroversial, and uncontested by Benatar, that absence of pleasure in an extant subject does add up to a deprivation, whence the traditional recognition of acedia, a condition of sloth or torpor leading to listlessness and want of interest in life, as one of the seven deadly sins. It might be argued that the absence of any possible subject of pain and pleasure would amount to a deprivation to his potential creators. Thus within the same framework of sin and salvation, potential parents may suffer from a lack of progeny required to honor them pursuant to the Fifth Commandment, just as God may suffer from a lack of humans required to honor Him pursuant to its predecessors. But this teleological account preempts the utilitarian reckoning of the presence and absence of pain and pleasure. Likewise the human duty recognized by Socrates in the Phaedo at 62b-c, to live as a ward (κτῆμα) of the gods, consigned to their care (ἐπιμελέομαι). The key consideration here is that utilitarianism arises as an exclusive alternative to imputations of human duties or purposes and narratological construals of human lives not lending themselves to a scalar summation of pleasures and pains. It is therefore pointless to bring up such imputations and construals as conclusive rebuttals of Benatar’s utilitarian argument. There are good reasons for rejecting utilitarianism, but the spirit of charity requires the philosopher to set them aside in assessing the merits of arguments made within its tradition.
In this context belongs a critical response to a passage from John Bunyan cited in an earlier discussion of Benatar on Crooked Timber:The figure in the Sermon on the Mount, contrasting the straight and narrow way to salvation with the broad highway to destruction, has been the basis of a number of sustained allegories, the best known being Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. To keep the figure of a way going for a whole book, the course pursued has to be a very labourious one: this is theologically defensible for Bunyan, even though we can see that the difficulty of the journey is a technical as well as a religious requirement. Toward the end of the second book Bunyan says:Some also have wished that the next way to their Father’s house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over; but the way is the way, and there is an end. [fn. 41 See John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come, ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 355 (pt. 2).] One wonders if there is not a suppressed voice also in Bunyan’s mind asking why we have to be stuck with this spiteful and malicious God who puts so incredibly difficult an obstacle course between ourselves and himself. In the great danse macabre with which the second book concludes, the dying Valiant-for-Truth says, “Though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am,” [fn. 42 Pilgrim’s Progress, 397 (pt. 2).] where the suppressed voice is almost audible. When there are dissenting voices like this murmuring in the subtext, one wonders if the author does not feel some difficulty about his choice of metaphor.
—Words With Power: Being a Second Study of ’The Bible and Literature’, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 26, University of Toronto Press, 2008, pp. 90-91 Northrop Frye’s apprehension of a suppressed voice in Bunyan’s mind belongs to the spectrum of legitimate reasons for purging ethical thought of duties and purposes along with narratives that give rise thereto, reducing it to a dispassionate calculus of scalar values. As a famous philosopher pointed out, there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Accordingly, saying that an argument is bad without a thought to back it up, amounts to nothing. Likewise gainsaying a premiss in the calculus of utility, in so far as it amounts to its thoughtless contradiction. The utilitarian project may be a failure, but it begins and ends in rational thought, and deserves to be addressed by rational means.
Insisting in response to Benatar, that some pleasures are worth the pains, let alone recognizing the existence of masochists taking pleasure in pain, gets us nowhere near an argument as an intellectual process comprising a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. The correct utilitarian response to invocations of sadomasochism is reflected in Harsanyi’s distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding utility functions and preferences. Benatar’s argument would stand after discounting all social and empathetic factors. All such factors ought to be discounted in considering, of an individual life, whether or not it is worth being brought into existence. After all, the masochist patient does not take pleasure in any old pain, but revels in being inflicted pain by another agent. So the pain of natural suffering, as distinct from the social kind, suffices to motivate the top half of Benatar’s Figure 2.4. Pain is bad and pleasure is good; whereas lack of pain is bad, but lack of pleasure is indifferent, unless it is a privation. In the balance, better not to create a potential subject for such privation.
It might be objected that a masochist before God could take pleasure in the pain of cancer, as a means of proving himself equal to the challenges raised by his heavenly Father. This is the position of John Bunyan’s Valiant-for-Truth, shored up by many modern luminaries. Thus George Bernard Shaw:All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: “Tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither,—yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get them.” The heart vibrates like a bell to such an utterance as this: to turn from it to “ Out, out, brief candle,” and “ The rest is silence,” and “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded by a sleep” is to turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunken nightmare.
—“Better than Shakespeare”, in Dramatic Opinions and Essays with an Apology by G. Bernard Shaw, New York, Brentano, 1906, Vol. 2, p. 147 And thus Robert Louis Stevenson:Last and most remarkable, ‘My sword,’ says the dying Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom Great-heart delighted, ‘my sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.’ And after this boast, more arrogantly unorthodox than was ever dreamed of by the rejected Ignorance, we are told that ‘all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bagster’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’”, in Sketches, Criticisms, etc., New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1898, p. 215 The anticipation of trumpets sounding on the other side may well inspire the faithful to withstand the pains of earthly existence. But merely pointing out that the ultimate pleasure of reuniting with God, or some interim ersatz thereof, would be worth the pains that precede it, is irrelevant in the setting of Benatar’s decision matrix. For this point amounts to a postulation that foreclosing the possibility of future pleasure in an as yet unrealized subject always already amounts to a privation. While this postulate is well suited to a hopeful narrative of posthumous salvation, it is less apt for a pure spiritual being about to be imprisoned by a body of flesh, and bears no relevance to a reckoning of worldly utility in prospective lives.
While social and empathetic factors are essential constituents in a worthwhile life, their role in evaluating whether an ongoing life is worthwhile does not find any counterparts in deciding whether a prospective life is worth being brought into existence. There may be no grounds for disputing that all social and empathetic factors ought to be discounted in considering, of an individual life, whether or not it is worth being brought into existence, just as there may be no actual lives having been brought into existence in complete disregard of these factors. In other words, while people invariably have children for selfish reasons, the only good reason to have a child is for its own sake. Some variety of methodological solipsism is indispensable as the correct framework for such deliberation. It may be impossible to understand a person in separation from other people or in separation from his environment. But there is a crucial difference between understanding an actual person in his connection with other people and his environment, and deliberating on the merits of bringing into existence a potential person with merely conjectural interpersonal and environmental connections.
In this regard, Benatar’s observation has devastating consequences for the utilitarian assessment of the choice to bring a new life into existence. If there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, whereas there is something bad about coming into existence, it is always preferable to choose a scenario that involves nothing bad. The same conclusion extends to the voluntary acceptance of bad pains in order to achieve greater pleasures, pursuant to Benatar’s analogy between existence versus non-existence and sickness versus health, as reproduced above.
Reproduced for, and summarized from, a discussion on CHORA; also see an earlier discussion on Crooked Timber.
Tags: bacchylides, classics, comedy, death, freud, game theory, herodotus, philosophy, shakespeare
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11:59 am
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r.i.p., c. l.-s.
De la constellation initiale du poème, formée par les amoureux et les savants, les chats permettent, par leur médiation, d’éliminer la femme, laissant face à face—sinon même confondus—“le poète des Chats”, libéré de l’amour “bien restreint”, et l’univers, délivré de l’austérité du savant.
The cats, by their mediation, permit the removal of woman from the initial assemblage formed by lovers and scholars. The poet of “Les Chats,” liberated from love “bien petit, bien restreint,” meets face to face and perhaps even blends with the universe, delivered from the scholar’s austerity.
—Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, “« Les Chats » de Charles Baudelaire”, L’Homme, 1962, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp. 5-21, at p. 21
Tags: baudelaire, death, french, language, philosophy
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12:11 am
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the edge wounds, the point kills
Accounting for the fighting arts that enabled his countrymen to dominate most of the known world, Roman strategist Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus explained that a sword stroke with the edges, though made with ever so much force, seldom kills, as the vital parts of the body are defended both by the bones and armor. On the contrary, a stab, though it penetrates but two inches, is generally fatal.[1]
POMPEII-TYPE GLADIUS, TINNED BRONZE SCABBARD AND IRON SPEAR HEAD
THE AXEL GUTTMANN COLLECTION
Roman swordsmanship doctrines took root among the erstwhile barbarians dedicated to besting their cultural laggards and social inferiors. Thus the Nineteenth Century Gauls agreed with the Eighteenth Century Britons: “le tranchant blesse, la pointe tue,”[2]—“the Edge Wounds, but the Point Kills.”[3] The sword lore of the day was rife with fears of the “Stabber”, an uncouth but dangerous creature possessed but of the rudiments of sword-play, who inflicted himself upon the most prominent swordsman present, by drawing his sword-hand as far back as he possibly could, putting his head down, rushing upon his opponent, and stabbing at him with his foil as hard as it possibly could, regardless of aim or outcome.[4] Far beyond the bounds of Christendom, Japanese ronin agreed with the lesson dealt by Renatus: their swords, fashioned for expert cutting, served the novice best as stabbing implements:[5]
“…and that’s how you kill a man.”
“The pen is mightier than the sword,” gushed Cardinal Richelieu in the eponymous play penned by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. But could the same be said of the pencil with its ephemeral traces? Lord Coke, treating of a deed, wrote: “And here it is to be understood, that it ought to be in parchment or in paper. For if a writing be made upon a peece of wood, or upon a peece of linen, or in the barke of a tree, or on a stone, or the like, &c. and the same be sealed or delivered, yet it is no deed, for a deed must be written either in parchment or paper, as before is said, for the writing upon these is least subject to alteration or corruption.”[6] For the same reasons, argued his successors, a writing ought to be made with materials least subject to alteration or corruption. Yet this presumption was rebutted when the Court of King’s Bench ruled on 6 February 1826, that “a bill or note may be drawn or indorsed in pencil as well as in ink.”[7] Thus the stage was set for the lowly pencil besting the noble sword.***On 30 March 1858, U.S. Patent Office issued Patent Number 19,783 for the combination of the lead and india-rubber or other erasing substance in the holder of a drawing-pencil, to Hymen L. Lipman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1862 Lipman sold his patent to Joseph Reckendorfer of New York City, New York, for $100,000. On 4 November 1862, Reckendoffer received another patent for an improvement upon the invention of Lipman.
He then sued the pencil manufacturer Faber for infringement.[8] In 1875 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against Reckendorfer in Reckendorfer v. Faber, 92 U.S. 347 (1875) declaring the patent invalid because the invention was actually a combination of two already known things with no new use. As Justice Ward Hunt put it on behalf of the Court:A combination, to be patentable, must produce a different force, effect, or result in the combined forces or processes from that given by their separate parts. There must be a new result produced by their union; otherwise it is only an aggregation of separate elements.
A combination, therefore, which consists only of the application of a piece of rubber to one end of the same piece of wood which makes a lead pencil is not patentable. But contrary to this ruling of the highest court in our land, a conspicuous new result was indeed produced by the union of a piece of rubber with the piece of wood that made a lead pencil. This novelty was to manifest itself in the wake of a case that came up before the U.S. Supreme Court over eighty years later. ***It is said that early in the XXth century, when The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme “What’s Wrong with the World?”, the contribution of Gilbert Keith Chesterton took the form of a letter:[9]Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton Not satisfied with exhausting the subject matter by a pithy witticism, Chesterton followed up his missive with a book-length treatment that included a fantasy of “the Universal Stick”: Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one speciality; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs; and while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins. The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man’s house and that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.
Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with a little screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will even boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have my doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils; and about hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other requirements that these institutions answered, there opens before us the whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; where a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man must try to toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the surface of hot water pipes.
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What’s Wrong With The World, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910, pp. 146-148 In at least one of its respects, Chesterton’s adaptationist vision was not too long in coming. Not a half century later, in a case styled Scales v. United States (1958-1962), the U.S. Supreme Court considered the membership clause of the Smith Act, which prohibited membership in organizations advocating the violent or forceful overthrow of the United States government. Junius Scales was criminally charged with membership in the Communist Party of the United States. The criminal charge arose because the Communist Party advocated the overthrow of the government “as speedily as circumstances would permit.” Challenging his felony charge, Scales claimed that the Internal Security Act of 1950 stated that membership in a Communist organization shall not constitute a per se violation of any criminal statute. After failing in both a district and appellate court, Scales’ appeal to the Supreme Court was granted certiorari to consider the question of whether or not a Communist Party member’s conviction under the Smith Act, which made a felony the knowing membership in organizations advocating the violent or forceful overthrow of the United States government, violated the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause in light of the apparent protections afforded to such members under the Internal Security Act. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court held that the Security Act protected “per se” members of an organization from criminal prosecution. By contrast, the Smith Act went beyond “per se” participation by targeting those, whose membership in an organization entailed their knowing and deliberate participation in criminal activity. In light of this distinction, the Court noted, the two Acts were not conflicted. Since Scales, at the very least, knew, encouraged, and provoked illegal Party activities over the course of his eight year membership, he became the only American ever to be convicted under the Smith Act’s membership clause, of complicity in the commission of criminal activity.
Witnesses to Scales’ complicity in the commission of criminal activity included a certain Charles Childs, a paid informer of the FBI from the age of 18. Childs testified that he had been taught at a Party school how to kill a man with a sharpened pencil. In 1952, Childs attended a “Party Training School” of which Scales was a director. The school was given “for outstanding cadres in the North and South Carolina and Virginia Districts of the Communist Party.” It was held on a farm and strict security measures were taken. The District Organizer of Virginia instructed at the school. He told the students that “the role of the Communist Party is to lead the working masses to the overthrow of the capitalist government.” With respect to the preliminary task of gaining the “broad coalition” necessary to achieve this task, he stated that,… the Communist Party has a program of industrial concentration in which they try to get people, that is, people who are Communist Party members, into key shops or key industries which the Party has determined or designated to be industrial concentration industries or plants. This is so that the Communist Party members in a particular plant will be able to have a cell, or a Communist Party group in which they will be able to more effectively plan for such things as attempting to control the union in that particular plant. And, in a compulsory recreation period, this same instructor gave a demonstration of jujitsu and, explaining that the students “might be able to use this on a picket line,” how to kill a person with a pencil. According to Childs’ testimony,what he showed us to do was to take our pencil, … just take the pencil and place it simply in the palm of your hand so that the back will rest against the base of the thumb, and then we were to take it, and the person, and give a quick jab so that it would penetrate through here [demonstrating], and enter the heart, and then if we could not do that, we just take it and grab it at the base of the throat. Thus the Communist homicide technology repurposed and redeployed the lowly pencil after the fashion of Chesterton’s Universal Stick. Regrettably, the record of Childs’ testimony left the details of this deployment to the readers’ imagination. It took several more decades for detailed instructions to surface in the U.S. media. No one was better qualified to spell them out, than G. Gordon Liddy.
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal resulting in Liddy’s conviction and imprisonment, rumors of his martial prowess circulated through various channels. Muckraking journalist J. Anthony Lukas recounted his demonstrations of how to kill someone with a freshly sharpened pencil by bracing the eraser end in your palm and ramming the point into the victim’s neck.[10] Upon his release, Liddy supplemented this rumor with a boast in an interview given to Playboy:Playboy: What are the most effective ways to kill a man without employing a conventional weapon?
Liddy: Well, they are innumerable, depending, of course, on the skill of the practitioner. For someone with no special training, our old-faithful pencil is very efficient, just your common garden-variety standard wooden pencil with a good sharp point and a strong, substantial eraser. The eraser’s quite important, actually. With those prerequisites, and if you can reach your opponent, any novice could kill his enemy in one second or less. But I don’t want to go any further into the details, lest we have a sudden rash of pencil killings in junior high schools across the country. Assuming, of course, that adolescent males concentrate on Playboy’s Interviews.
—Eric Norden, “Playboy Interview: G. Gordon Liddy”, 1 October 1980 Enterprising adolescent males were served the details in Liddy’s contemporaneously issued autobiography, which disclosed his contemplation of killing star witness for prosecution John Dean by driving up a pencil through the underside of his jaw, through the soft-palate and deep into his brain.[11] Another of his journalistic nemeses, Jack Anderson, eventually spelled out the last piece of the puzzle by quoting Liddy’s warning: “Be sure the eraser is in good condition. It will protect the palm of your hand when you drive the pencil into an attacker’s throat.”[12] Thus the patents of Lipman and Reckendorfer received their belated vindication.***It bears notice that the Latin term for pencil, peniculus, is a diminutive of, and a euphemism for, penis. This derivation affords an insight into wishful aggressive deployment of that modest writerly implement. Lasting cultural impact of notional penicular homicide remains periodically attested in our day. Thus in his 2008 autobiography, William Shatner recounts his summer camp meetings with “kids who had survived the Holocaust, kids who had seen their parents slaughtered, kids who just as easily could kill you with a pencil as become friends.”[13] More pointedly, Steve Geng, the brother of writer and editor Veronica Geng, writes in a memoir of his drug addiction, imprisonment, and bodily decay, intermingled with tributes to his sister, of his response to being stabbed in the calf with a pencil in the course of resisting a jailhouse rape attempt:I knew I’d have more trouble with Slim, so I carefully plotted my revenge. That night I would take a sharpened pencil, now that I knew what an effective weapon it could be, creep up to Slim’s bunk while he slept, carefully place the point of the pencil into Slim’s ear, and drive it into whatever tiny brain he had with a quick stroke of the flat of my hand. Along about two in the morning when everyone was asleep, I actually did tiptoe over to Slim’s bunk, pencil in hand, but discovered him sleeping with a blanket over his head and I couldn’t determine exactly where his ears or eyes were. It was one of the most fearful and rage-ridden nights I ever spent, and my determination wavered as I put it off until the next night. There was an off chance that I might actually kill him, but I’d read somewhere that such an attack, if done quickly and efficiently, would produce no outcry from the victim, leaving me to creep back to my bunk undetected.
Fortunately, my new friends from the mess hall persuaded the assignment captain to move me to another dorm before I got a chance to test that theory.
—Steve Geng, Thick as Thieves: A Brother, a Sister—a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives, Henry Holt and Co., 2007, p. 95 But the pride of place in imaginary penicular slaying belongs to Derek Raymond:‘You’re not very good at it, are you?’ said Gust, ‘they ought to have sent heavies in.’ He thought the man very likely could have got a job playing Hess in this new TV series they were doing on the war, and he would have had a word with a few directors he knew in Soho if he had been a mate of his. But, as he wasn’t, Gust kicked him in the stomach as he tried to drag himself up on one leg with the help of the bar-rail, then turned back to the other man.
‘You all right?’ he said. ‘How are you feeling now? Chipper?’ He took one of the man’s ears in his thumb and forefinger; the ear was tiny, considering the size of his head, and it had little hairs inside it. Gust picked up a cocktail stick out of a dirty glass on the bar and jabbed it down into the eardrum as far as he could; when he pulled it out the stick was half-way red, and there was some grey stuff in it as well. He shouted down his ear: ‘I think I just broke your foot!’ but the man wasn’t making sense any more; he was wailing with his hand clapped to the side of his head, swaying up and down from the waist like a bereaved widow, or else perhaps he just didn’t hear, or maybe the music was too loud. Gust realised then that he had pushed the stick in too far and that the man would probably die. Dirty cocktail-stick in the brain? What a bleeding way to go! Now the man with the broken leg tried another naughty stroke; although he only had one hand free because he was using the other one to hold onto the rail, he still managed to smash a glass and try putting it in Gust’s face.
‘This is just self-defence after all,’ Gust said to himself. He stamped on the man’s feet again; this time he definitely felt bones go and the man screamed, dropped the glass and let go of the rail; but instead of letting him fall Gust took him round the waist, ripped his fly open and searched inside his pants till he found his testicles, which he yanked right out into his hand. Their owner can’t have been much into baths because they smelled like something tepid from a canteen counter. Gust wrung them like the devil having a go at a set of wedding bells with all the grip he had, until the man was shrieking on the same D minor as the music.
‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Gust, ‘but I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn to fuck all over again.’ He wiped the blood off the man’s prick down his face, then pulled the face towards him and drove his nose into his brain with his head. The music boosted into E major on a key change, and the man doubled up under a bar-stool, leaving a lot of blood behind him while Gust receded into the half darkness towards the black drapes on the walls.
—Derek Raymond, Not Till the Red Fog Rises, Time Warner Books UK, 1994, pp. 86–87 In the realm of homicidal devices of opportunity, there is no difference between G. Gordon Liddy’s common garden-variety standard wooden pencil with a good sharp point and a strong, substantial eraser, and Derek Raymond’s cocktail stick picked up out of a dirty glass on the bar. Indeed, both of these devices answer G.K. Chesterton’s vision of a world where a man gives up trying to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener, to stab his neighbor’s throat with a freshly sharpened pencil. As Monty Python’s criminologist helpfully pointed out, after all a murderer is only an extroverted suicide.
And that’s all she wrote. ( Footnotes: )
Tags: communism, death, persiflage, violence, writing
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07:40 pm
[Link] |
in memoriam
This picture was taken on 5 July 1913. It shows a newlywed Jewish couple, residents of Uman. The man kept books. The woman played a piano. Their daughters were born in 1923 and 1925. The man succumbed to a cardiac arrest in 1938. The woman carried on.
Uman was occupied by the Wehrmacht on August 1, 1941. On Wednesday, 15 August 1945, Oberlieutnant Erwin Bingel recounted the events of 16 September 1941. He was under orders to set up guards on all railways in the area, and around the Uman airport, which contained the town’s Jews, assembled there on a census roll call posted throughout the region. The shooters of Einsatzgruppe C, led by Otto Rasch, holder of two university doctorates in political economy and philosophy, ordered each successive row of Untermenschen to move forward to a row of tables where they had to undress completely and hand over everything they wore and carried. They were made to stand in line in front of the ditches. The Einsatzkommandos then marched in behind the line and mowed it down with submachine guns and Parabellum pistols. Thereupon, the Jewish men in each successive row were ordered to step out and take shovels with which to heap chloride of lime upon the bodies convulsing in the ditch. At last they returned to the tables and undressed to embark on the same last walk.
On the following day, Oberfeldwebel Renner and another man under Bingel’s command were taken to the Lvov field hospital with “complete nervous breakdowns”. In his postwar deposition, Bingel estimated that 24,000 Jews were killed in his sight on that day. This woman and her mother numbered among them.
Two Formal Elegies
For the Jews in Europe
1
Knowing the dead, and how some are disposed:
Subdued under rubble, water, in sand graves.
In clenched cinders not yielding their abused
Bodies and bonds to those whom war’s chance saves
Without the law: we grasp, roughly, the song.
Arrogant acceptance from which song derives
Is bedded with their blood, makes flourish young
Roots in ashes. The wilderness revives,
Deceives with sweetness harshness. Still beneath
Live skin stone breathes, about which fires but play,
Fierce heart that is the iced brain’s to command
To judgment—studied reflex, contained breath—
Their best of worlds since, on the ordained day,
This world went spinning from Jehovah’s hand.
2
For all that must be gone through, their long death
Documented and safe, we have enough
Witnesses (our world being witness-proof),
The sea flickers, roars, in its wide hearth.
Here, yearly, the pushing midlanders stand
To warm themselves; men brawny with life,
Women who expect life. They relieve
Their thickening bodies, settle on scraped sand.
Is it good to remind them, on a brief screen,
Of what they have witnessed and not seen?
(Deaths of the city that persistently dies…?)
To put up stones ensures some sacrifice,
Sufficient men confer, carry their weight.
(At whose door does the sacrifice stand or start?)
—Geoffrey Hill, 1959
Tags: death, family, germans, jews, poetry, russia
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04:48 am
[Link] |
siren song
She sings incessantly every waking moment. She has long since ceased to recognize faces. There is no knowing whether she is suffering. Never a whiner in her full, she gives no sign of complaining on this slide. Her erosion is a lot to envy. Five years ago being scorched into slow extinction seemed the worst lot available to man. All love meant then was wanting to assume it upon oneself. That old longing is back in force. How can she consume this degradation? Why must it remain hers alone? This privacy of laggard death is beguiling. It is worth reaching for. It will not elude your grasp forever.
Tags: death, failure, father, love, mother
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02:54 am
[Link] |
the next round
The last time I stood next to my father, he was ringing your doorbell and telling you that we loved you. The next day you scraped our child out of your womb.
Leonardo da Vinci, Feto umano nell’utero, 1511
That was nearly five years ago. Now you complain that I am harming you. You have failed at forcing the issue. You are begging me to desist. But I am not doing anything wrong. Nor am I harming you. If you want me to do your bidding, you must understand my reasons and convince me of your understanding. If you can feel remorse, we may benefit from conversation. If you stand on your rights, we have nothing to discuss.
You offer my survival in some good memories. You offer kindness and a possible friendship. But how you remember me is your business. Your kindness last screeched at me amid 57th Street. Neither of us is good at friendship. I am sorry to hear about your father’s recent death. I offer you my condolences and appreciation of your effort to be responsible. But responsibility is impossible without remorse. You will be responsible for people who love you; you are sorry if you have hurt me; you are deeply sorry for the baby; but you obsess about your reputation. You will say anything to forget our catastrophe. Is that what you call making peace with the past? You seem to be susceptible to shame. Think of it as your medicine meant to elicit remorse in regard to our common history.
There are two innocent victims in our story. Neither of us is one. But my guilt is not an issue in what you want from me. Refusal is my right. You have two ways of getting past it: either persuade me that satisfying you is the right thing to do or offer me something I want in return. You want to move on. You claim that my account deters you from doing so. It does nothing of the sort. I am nowise deterred by Usenet libel claiming that I fucked a dog. You are displeased with my versiculi. But pleasure is not your right. You need to be jarred from complacency. You have cancer of the soul. Your anguish is its symptom. I live with your disparagement. You could live with my diagnosis. Your discomfort stems from recognizing its truth. You suffer from a spiritual malignancy. Seek to cure the disease, not to palliate the symptom.
I mean to be therapeutic for both of us. I could be wrong. But you haven’t begun to persuade me of my error. As to your offers, I doubt that you have anything I want. But it doesn’t hurt to try. This is not an issue of sexual deviance. Your love of pain was entertaining. Its frustration of your own aims did not stand between us. Nor am I concerned with your failure to live up to your role models of Sex in the City, that bevy of time-worn bags traipsing around Manhattan in search of a steady regimen of penetration. You relate to women even more tenuously than you do to men. You could have friends through interest in people for their own sake, or through interests shared with other people. Neither of us is good at caring for people. But you also lack concerns that might ally you with others. You fail at concentration. Your attractions are notional. You imagine yourself in life and work without realizing any role. You have dabbled in marriage and yearned after motherhood, just as you have dabbled in design and yearned after commerce. You avoid sustained effort. You must work for a living, and you are content with the minimum of work that will keep you alive. Millions of others live like that. Unlike them, you refuse to make peace with mediocrity. You admire the drive towards betterment but fail to keep up on its path. Things get too complicated. Progress is too much to bear. It’s fun to whine about aimlessness and regret childlessness. It’s a drag to create a business or stay the course to become a mother.
Johanna Schwarzbeck, AFTER ABORTION, 1993
You might look up Johanna. She is your kindred soul, supplementing sex in the city with syringes. Even closer to your home comes a movie about a Chinese woman who seeks to reverse the effects of aging by consuming her own foetus. The only side effect of her success is a fishy body odor. George Orwell observed that in the West we are divided from our downtrodden fellows by our sense of smell. As an exile from ideology, I prefer to divide myself from the advocates of class struggle and gender privilege. Tyranny stinks. I accept the attribution of foetal cannibalism to domination by the Chinese Communist regime. The party rules you to this day. In your doctrinary moods, you always had issues with my material comforts. But the roots of your resentment may be more ancient. Think of Euripides’ Medea 1396, which David Kovacs translates as: “Your mourning has yet to begin. Wait until old age.” The Greek original is twice as concise:Μήδεια οὔπω θρηνεῖς: μένε καὶ γῆρας.
[not yet adv] [sing a dirge, wail verb 2nd sg pres ind act]: [await, expect verb 2nd sg pres imperat act] [and conj] [old age noun sg neut acc] You may have fancied yourself unwittingly, Medea to my Jason. Perhaps you deserve to address me as ψευδόρκου καὶ ξειναπάτου, breaker of [my] own oath and deceiver of a stranger. For my part, I broke nothing and deceived no one. Perhaps you fear running out of chances upon reaching your fifth decade. For my part, every day brings new beginnings. Your dirge is unripe. Oupô thrêneis: mene kai gêras.
Perhaps Latin will suit you better than Greek. As Cicero wrote to Atticus, ut aegroto, dum anima est, spes esse dicitur. It is said that for a sick man, there is hope as long as there is life. Set aside the rest of the story, from Pompey’s flight from Italy to the display of Cicero’s hands and head on the Rostra in the Forum. You may yet redeem your errors. If you could save three lives, you would restore the balance. Let me know how it goes. If you can take my help, I will give it.
Tags: death, doggerel, insanity, love, memory
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05:25 am
[Link] |
in memoriam
John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919, Imperial War Museum, London
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
—Wilfred Owen
(18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918)
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
edited by Edmund Blunden
New Directions, 1965, p. 55
Henri de Groux, Masques à gaz, etching,
Royal Army and Military History Museum, Brussels
REPRODUCED FROM ART OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
LA NUIT D’AVRIL 1915
À L. de C.-C.
Le ciel est étoilé par les obus des Boches
La forêt merveilleuse où je vis donne un bal
La mitrailleuse joue un air à triples-croches
Mais avez-vous le mot
Eh ! oui le mot fatal
Aux créneaux Aux créneaux Laissez là les pioches
Comme un astre éperdu qui cherche ses saisons
Cœur obus éclaté tu sifflais ta romance
Et tes mille soleils ont vidé les caissons
Que les dieux de mes yeux remplissent en silence
Nous vous aimons ô vie et nous vous agaçons
Les obus miaulaient un amour à mourir
Un amour qui se meurt est plus doux que les autres
Ton souffle nage au fleuve où le sang va tarir
Les obus miaulaient
Entends chanter les nôtres
Pourpre amour salué par ceux qui vont périr
Le printemps tout mouillé la veilleuse l’attaque
Il pleut mon âme il pleut mais il pleut des yeux morts
Ulysse que de jours pour rentrer dans Ithaque
Couche-toi sur la paille et songe un beau remords
Qui pur effet de l’art soit aphrodisiaque
Mais
orgues
aux fétus de la paille où tu dors
L’hymne de l’avenir est paradisiaque
—Guillaume Apollinaire
(26 août 1880 – 9 novembre 1918)
Œuvres poétiques
édition établie et annotée par Marcel Adéma
Gallimard, 1965, pp. 243-244
Guillaume Apollinaire, 1916
кавалерист Моисей Исаакович Зелёный (1889-1934)
пехотинец Иосиф Моисеевич Зелёный (1920-2000)
артиллерист Исаак Моисеевич Зелёный (1923-2004)
Tags: apollinaire, death, french, memory, violence, war
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11:53 pm
[Link] |
и мальчики кровавые в глазах
Давно я тебе не писал. Сейчас вспомнилось. Сидел я вчера за столом с двумя новыми друзьями и подругой средней давности. Как ты уже догадался, все кроме меня ― китайцы. Мужчина из Гонконга, его подруга из Даляня, моя из Тайпея. Познакомились, обычное дело, на мужских основах, на стрельбище. Теперь ходим стрелять по разу в неделю. Из пистолета Вонг кстати попадает получше меня. Зато тарелочек разбил больше я. А из винтовок пока не пробовали. Его отец умер от рака полтора года назад. Его мать живёт рядом, в наблюдении пока не нуждается. Сам же как ты и я, дамский угодник. ( Read more... )
Кстати, ты будешь смеяться. Меня заочно записали в гомосексуалисты. Причём сам же виноват. Вечный онанист принялся шантажировать бывших коллег, якобы на основании перлюстрации их электронной почты, якобы содержащей компромат в связи с нетрадиционной сексуальной ориентацией. Тут и я, известное дело, предупреждаю его об уголовной ответственности. Типа, можно доиграться до статьи, а тогда его отношение к представителям сексуальных меньшинств встанет с совсем другого конца. Он же в ответ не в бровь, а в глаз: “Вы педераст?” Я думаю, человек с философским образованием, написал дипломную работу о Платоне. Отвечаю: “Не более, чем Сократ.” Тут мне и позорное клеймо и виртуальная опала. Вот и хожу весь оплёванный. А что, так мне и надо. За сетевое притеснение моносексуалиста. ( Read more... )
Tags: death, father, russian, sex, stupidity
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12:32 pm
[Link] |
in memoriam
Beslan, Russian Federation, 1 September 2004
Tags: death, memory, politics, russian, terrorism, tough guys, violence
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08:35 am
[Link] |
fuckhead favor
Eventually Georgie said, “We better get some milk for those bunnies.”
“We don’t have milk,” I said.
“We’ll mix sugar up with it.”
“Will you forget about this milk all of a sudden?”
“They’re mammals, man.”
“Forget about those rabbits.”
“Where are they, anyway?”
“You’re not listening to me. I said, ‘Forget the rabbits.’”
“Where are they?”
The truth was I’d forgotten all about them and they were dead.
“They slid around behind me and got squashed,” I said tearfully.
“They slid around behind?”
He watched while I pried them out from behind my back.
I picked them out one at a time and held them in my hands and we looked at them. There were eight. They weren’t any bigger than my fingers, but everything was there.
Little feet! Little eyelids! Even whiskers! “Deceased,” I said.
Georgie asked, “Does everything you touch turn to shit? Does this happen to you every time?”
“No wonder they call me Fuckhead.”
“It’s a name that’s going to stick.”
“I realize that.”
“‘Fuckhead’ is gonna ride you to your grave.”
“I just said so, I agreed with you in advance” I said.
– Emergency, in Jesus’ Son: Stories by Denis Johnson, HarperPerennial, 1993, pp. 83-84
Billy Crudup as FH in Jesus’ Son
Jack Black as Georgie and Denis Johnson as Terrence Weber in Jesus’ Son
When a fuckhead friend does you a favor, be thankful you are not a bunny.
In French, with inverted species relations:
Rien n’est si dangereux qu’un ignorant ami ;
Mieux vaudrait un sage ennemi.
— Jean de la Fontaine, L’Ours et l’Amateur des jardins
Illustration by Gustave Doré for Jean de La Fontaine, L’Ours et l’amateur des jardins
Хотя услуга нам при нужде дорога,
Но за нее не всяк умеет взяться:
Не дай бог с дураком связаться!
Услужливый дурак опаснее врага.
— Иван Андреевич Крылов, Пустынник и Медведь
Tags: asshat, bullshit, death, degenerates, friends, violence
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12:05 pm
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letter from moscow
The next afternoon [after the raid on Garry Kasparov’s office], Sunday, brought glorious weather, and thousands of people took advantage of it to do some shopping. Many of them ended up in Red Square. Workmen had placed a giant skating rink between Lenin’s Tomb and Christian Dior’s new flagship store at GUM. Hundreds of young parents stood in line holding their children’s hands as they waited to skate. They seemed happy. The gray, thousand-yard stare so representative of Soviet life was gone, replaced with, of all things, a smile. It was not difficult to see why so many Russians—more than seventy per cent, in most polls—seem to support the President. Since Alexander Litvinenko’s death, there has been much public discussion of what Putin will do next year, when his term concludes. He has promised to step down, but he has also said that he intends to “retain influence,” and people have speculated on the many ways he could do that: as Prime Minister, for example, or as chairman of Gazprom. Nobody knows, perhaps not even Putin. Russia today, and not for the first time, has wagered its well-being on the price of oil, and, as long as salaries continue to rise, people seem untroubled by the future and unwilling to dwell on even the most compelling warnings from the past. Oil prices have crashed before. In recent months, they have fallen more than twenty per cent. At some point, if the fall continues, it may no longer be possible to ignore Russia’s dead Cassandra.
“I have wondered a great deal about why I am so intolerant of Putin,” Politkovskaya wrote. “Quite simply, I am a forty-five-year-old Muscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. … Putin has, by chance, gotten his hands on enormous power and has used it to catastrophic effect. I dislike him because he does not like people. He despises us. He sees us as a means to his ends, a means for the achievement and retention of personal power, no more than that. Accordingly, he believes he can do anything he likes with us, play with us as he sees fit, destroy us as he sees fit. We are nobody, while he whom chance has enabled to clamber to the top of the pile is today Tsar and God. In Russia we have had leaders with this outlook before. It led to tragedy, to bloodshed on a vast scale, to civil wars.” For her part, she said, “I want no more of that.”
— Michael Specter, Kremlin, Inc., The New Yorker, Issue of 2007-01-29
Tags: death, politics, russian, violence
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09:45 pm
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in memoriam joseph brodsky
| Памяти отца: Австралия |
In Memory of My Father: Australia |
|
Ты ожил, снилось мне и уехал
В Австралию. Голос с трехкратным эхом
Окликал и жаловался на климат
И обои: квартиру никак не снимут,
Жалко, не в центре, а около океана,
Третий этаж без лифта, зато есть ванна,
Пухнут ноги. “А тапочки я оставил”,―
Прозвучавшее внятно и деловито.
И внезапно в трубке завыло “Аделаида! Аделаида”,
Загремело, захлопало, точно ставень
Бился о стенку, готовый сорваться с петель.
Все-таки это лучше, чем мягкий пепел
крематория в банке, её залога―
эти обрывки голоса, монолога
и попытки прикинуться нелюдимом
в первый раз с той поры, как ты обернулся дымом. |
You arose―I dreamt so last night―and left for
Australia. The voice, with a triple echo,
ebbed and flowed, complaining about climate,
grime, that the deal with the flat is stymied,
pity it’s not downtown, though near the ocean,
no elevator but the bathtub’s indeed an option,
ankles keep swelling. “Looks like I’ve lost my slippers”
came through rapt yet clear via satellite.
And at once the receiver burst into howling “Adelaide! Adelaide!”―
into rattling and crackling, as if a shutter,
ripped off its hinges, were pounding the wall with inhuman power.
Still, better this than the silky powder
canned by the crematorium, than the voucher―
better these snatches of voice, this patchwork
monologue of a recluse trying to play a genie
for the first time since you formed a cloud above a chimney. |
Voice’s residues, cracked disquisitions,
Burnt collateral stowed in a vessel:
Faint redemption in decompositions,
Just this tug since you went evanescent. |
| ―Иосиф Александрович Бродский, Континент, 61 (1989г) |
―translated by the author, in The New Yorker, 5 March 1990 |
―traduced by MZ |
Crossposted to ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) larvatus and about_poetry.
Tags: death, jews, memory, russian, translation, yohrzeit
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01:14 pm
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regicide
Two more Saddamites await execution.
( Read more... )
Tags: death, terrorism, tough guys, violence
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05:43 pm
[Link] |
distinction with a difference
In an “ontological fantasy,” characters from “our” niche interact with sentient beings from other niches, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The reader is not at liberty to doubt the existence of trolls, orcs, and elves, even if a character within the fiction does. Often the interaction borders on the sacred, as in Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost. Walter M. Miller Jr., in a passage from A Canticle for Leibowitz, makes a clear distinction between ontological and epistemological fantasy. Dr. Cors and Abbot Zerchi are debating the merits of euthanasia. The skeptical doctor speaks, “If I thought I had such a thing as a soul, and that there was an angry God in Heaven, I might agree with you.”
Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. “You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body temporarily.” (W.M. Miller 242) Given leisure from hagiography, the abbot might enjoy an ontological fantasy. Dr. Cors might read an epistemological fantasy, though he would likely prefer psychological realism.
—David M. Miller, “Mommy Fortuna’s Ontological Plenum: The Fantasy of Plenitude”, in Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Michele K. Langford, Greenwood Press, 1990, pp. 208-209
Tags: death, fantasy, soul
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04:48 pm
[Link] |
on est toujours troup bon avec les femmes
Frank Morrison Spillane
(March 9, 1918 - July 11, 2006)
R.I.P. ( Read more... ) “How c-could you?” she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
“It was easy,” I said.
—Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947
Tags: death, memory, noir, sex, tough guys, violence
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11:25 am
[Link] |
amours de voyage
 — for Rachel Y.... W... cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens;
nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratro est.
— Gaius Valerius Catullus, carmen 11, 17-24 City bustle. Fading light.
You’ll have company tonight.
At your service, all your men.
They will make you whole again.
Rig your hopes and tell you lies.
Bust a nut between your thighs.
Fart and snore and pay no heed
While dreams dwindle and recede.
Others not so long ago
Lit you up and made you glow,
Nights fulfilled you, but the dawn
Found you wan and woebegone.
Lest your gloom ensued in spawn
Its conclusion got withdrawn:
Scrape the foetus from within,
Glom more solace for your skin.
................................................
City bustle. Fading light.
You will sleep alone tonight.
One good woman, no good men.
Love can’t make you whole again. “Amours de voyage I have allowed myself to call them, as distinguished from the love we may have for localities wherein our everyday lot is cast.” — Vernon Lee, Genius Loci, 1898
Tags: catullus, death, doggerel, insanity, love, memory, sodomy, traducement
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03:18 pm
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metagraph redux
— for Chien-Ling Liu  In a Time of Cuisine
A fact the gourmet
euphemism can’t silence:
vegetarians eat sex,
carnivores eat violence.
— Les Murray, April 2004
Fair Play
Herbivorous scruples
betoken the coward —
men eat flesh on credit
ere they get devour’d.
Tags: death, doggerel, food, les murray, metagraph
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10:11 am
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torkel franzén is dead
Looking back over fifteen years of Usenetting, I gratefully recall one man selflessly expending his time and effort on making it a better place. Torkel’s learned and benevolent presence single-handedly made up for a myriad ephemeral and persistent sophistical frauds striving to overwhelm our forum with self-serving nonsense. I am proud to have benefitted from his learning and character.
Torkel Franzén earned his PhD in philosophy in 1987 for work on provability and truth, available online and in hard copy in the imprint of Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, deposited at university libraries worldwide. He was a world-class expert on incompleteness and inexhaustibility and an able and tireless expositor of the use and abuse of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Torkel will be remembered and celebrated for his incisive contributions to logic and his magnanimous bestowals of honesty and wisdom in public discourse. My condolences for this untimely loss go out to his friends and family.
Tags: death, logic, memory, usenet
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06:11 pm
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sprint pcs is searching for service
He lies in bed recovering from a cold.
He is holding a watch. He gave it away as a gift twenty-four years ago. Now he has it back. Its plastic crystal is melted away. Its face is scorched.
He shakes the watch. The self-winding rotor turns and ratchets. The watch starts ticking.
The phone rings. The voice is instantly recognizable. It resumes a conversation long since broken off.
— Who is this?
The voice carries on.
— Who is this?
Its rhythm remains unabated.
— Is that you?
The connection breaks up. The line is silent.
Tags: death, dreams, father, memory
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08:14 pm
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extracted from correspondence
― for Fred Rexer
I have long believed that love must be pervasive or bogus. The kind of love that generates bereavement must also be permanent. On several occasions I have been cured of living love by dint of its object proving itself unworthy. The rule of “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” ensures that that cannot happen with the object of love gone beyond the pale of all change. ( Read more... )
Tags: death, love, memory
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08:08 pm
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quasi-terminal grief
Martin McDonagh is the author of the 2003 play, The Pillowman, which ran on Broadway last year to uniform, adjectivally laden reviews. More recently he has distinguished himself as the first-time director of Six Shooter, a 27-minute splatterfest of filial, spousal, and parental bereavement. McDonagh’s latest opus went on to win the 2005 Academy Award for best live-action short. Watch it here. Hear lead actor Brendan Gleeson and co-producer John McDonnell discuss its Oscar coup.
Tags: death, movies
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06:08 pm
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looking for loopholes
SITTING ON THE BENCH
(Fortune Theatre, London, 1961)
Yes, I could have been a judge but I never had the Latin, never had the Latin for the judging. I just never had sufficient of it to get through the rigorous judging exams. They’re noted for their rigour. People came staggering out saying ‘My God, what a rigorous exam’—and so I became a miner instead. A coal miner. I managed to get through the mining exams—they’re not very rigorous. They only ask one question. They say ‘Who are you?’, and I got 75% for that. ( Read more... )
Tags: comedy, death, memory
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04:10 am
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dantean theology
In reference to an ongoing discussion of soteriology, herewith a representative sample of Dantean scholarship grounding his infernal cosmology in Thomistic theology: ( Read more... )
Tags: dante, death, hell, poetry, sin
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01:55 am
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new slogans for new democrats
 ( Read more... )
Tags: death, gerbil-clap, sex, sodomy, stupidity, tasteless
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07:51 pm
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vers d’occasion
A topical traducement:
Tags: death, doggerel, memory, traducement
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11:35 pm
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petit mort pour rire
― in memoriam Cosmo of the Magnificent Sunrise
February 26, 1994 ― January 6, 2006
| Petit mort pour rire |
A small death for giggles |
Va vite, léger peigneur de comètes !
Les herbes au vent seront tes cheveux ;
De ton œil béant jailliront les feux
Follets, prisonniers dans les pauvres têtes… |
Take off, agile currier of comets!
These weeds wind-swept will stand in for your fur;
Your gaping orbs will shoot forth will-
o-wisps, locked up inside the noggin of a cur… |
Les fleurs de tombeau qu’on nomme Amourettes
Foisonneront plein ton rire terreux…
Et les myosotis, ces fleurs d’oubliettes… |
The ornaments called lilies of the valley
Will burgeon over your terrestrial woof…
Emboldened mice that trace your hillside grounds… |
Ne fais pas le lourd : cercueils de poètes
Pour les croque-morts sont de simples jeux,
Boîtes à violon qui sonnent le creux…
Ils te croiront mort ― Les bourgeois sont bêtes ―
Va vite, léger peigneur de comètes ! |
Let’s go, friend: the crate that shelters poets,
A worn-out plaything proffered for a proof,
A violin boxed up, its echo thrown aloof…
They think you dead ― mistaken for a goof ―
Take off, agile currier of comets! |
| ― Tristan Corbière |
― traduced by MZ |
Tags: animals, cosmo, death, doggerel, friends, memory, poetry, tough guys
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06:53 am
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william s. burroughs lays down his last words on sex and death
Calico Jane the cat, named after Jane Bowles
Thursday. This is November 14, 1996
November 10, Calico was killed at 19th and Learnard. I heard about it the 12th from José. Tom had seen the cat by side of the road.
In the empty spaces where the cat was, that hurt physically. Cat is part of me. Mornings since, I break into uncontrollable sobbing and crying when I remember [where] she used to be—sit—move, etc. No question of histrionics. It just happens.
So dream remembered: Oh, it was also a cat. I wasn’t sure it could find its way.
*** ( Read more... )
Tags: burroughs, death, sex
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05:31 am
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a coat, a hat and a gun
I lay on my back on a bed in a waterfront hotel and waited for it to get dark. It was a small front room with a hard bed and a mattress slightly thicker than the cotton blanket that covered it. A spring underneath me was broken and stuck into the left side of my back. I lay there and let it prod me. ( Read more... )
Tags: death, diversion, noir, poetry, tough guys, violence
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05:06 pm
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whining or withstanding
τὸ μὲν οὖν ταῦτα διισχυρίσασθαι οὕτως ἔχειν ὡς ἐγὼ διελήλυθα, οὐ πρέπει νοῦν ἔχοντι ἀνδρί: ὅτι μέντοι ἢ ταῦτ’ ἐστὶν ἢ τοιαῦτ’ ἄττα περὶ τὰς ψυχὰς ἡμῶν καὶ τὰς οἰκήσεις, ἐπείπερ ἀθάνατόν γε ἡ ψυχὴ φαίνεται οὖσα, τοῦτο καὶ πρέπειν μοι δοκεῖ καὶ ἄξιον κινδυνεῦσαι οἰομένῳ οὕτως ἔχειν―καλὸς γὰρ ὁ κίνδυνος―καὶ χρὴ τὰ τοιαῦτα ὥσπερ ἐπᾴδειν ἑαυτῷ, διὸ δὴ ἔγωγε καὶ πάλαι μηκύνω τὸν μῦθον.
― Plato, Phaedo, 114d |
Now to insist that these things are just as I’ve related them would not be fitting for a man of intelligence; but either this or something like it is true about our souls and their dwellings, given that the soul evidently is immortal, this, I think, is fitting and worth risking, for one who believes that it is so — for a noble risk it is — so one should repeat such things to oneself like a spell; which is just why I’ve so prolonged the tale.
― translated by David Gallop |
( Read more... )
Tags: death, larkin, poetry, tough guys, unamuno
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07:06 am
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before the law
| Vor dem Gesetz |
Before the Law |
| Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter. Zu diesem Türhüter kommt ein Mann vom Lande und bittet um Eintritt in das Gesetz. Aber der Türhüter sagt, daß er ihm jetzt den Eintritt nicht gewähren könne. Der Mann überlegt und fragt dann, ob er also später werde eintreten dürfen. «Es ist möglich», sagt der Türhüter, «jetzt aber nicht.» Da das Tor zum Gesetz offensteht wie immer und der Türhüter beiseite tritt, bückt sich der Mann, um durch das Tor in das Innere zu sehn. |
Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at the moment.” Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. |
 ( Read more... )
Tags: death, kafka
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