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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10:00 am
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for the anonymous troll
Over sixteen years online, I have received a broad spectrum of threats and pitches, and entertained a commensurate range of slurs and plaudits. This experience has crystallized two iron laws of online communications.
The first law is a corollary of Occam’s razor. No matter what you are promised or threatened on the Internet, the most you will get out of it is oral ministrations. In other words, there is no downside in moving virtual bluster to realspace. Yonder puffed-out sock puppet is as unlikely to escalate its verbiage to physical damage, as the heiress of an African potentate, to bestow her commission upon Americans paying their facilitation fees. By contrast, that virtual fellatrix yearning to reward your eloquence with expert suction may well come through as promised, especially if you overlook minor discrepancies ranging from mien to gender.
The second law of Internet intercourse is a corollary of the first. Only a clueless newbie responds personally to an anonymous troll. To illustrate its application, whenever one of the latter kind feels the urge to share its thoughts about anything but one of the former, it should take them instead to someone who can relate to its bogus persona. It makes no difference whether a figment of this sort touts itself as a public intellectual in mufti, or poses as a skank that services barnyard livestock for spare change. In the immortal words of Jack Nicholson, sell crazy someplace else, we’re all stocked up here.
A final notice to the insistent incognito. When you surpass words in punishing my excesses, make sure that your hostile deeds leave me unfit to retaliate. My reckoning will define the remainder of your life. It’s happened to your betters before. Don’t let it happen to you.
Tags: bullshit, stupidity, violence
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04:24 pm
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desperately seeking gypsies and nose rings
“Relocating bears is illegal in California, and a permit to execute a bear can only be issued to a homeowner if the animal has attacked people or livestock.”
ursi me comedant
Tags: animals, food, latin, persiflage, tasteless, violence
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10:33 pm
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l’homme aux rats
Anarchist, Symbolist, insubordinate dreyfusard, man about town, Octave Mirbeau is an indispensable maître mineur of the Third Republic. His most popular work, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, merited film treatment by the greatest Latin directors of all times, Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir. His most scandalous novel remains unfilmable. In Le Jardin des supplices, which appeared in 1899, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Mirbeau targeted fear and hatred, the twin foundations of bourgeois society, in a narrative arc traversing the terrain of desire and disgust to culminate in a strange sexual obsession. ( And what about the rats? ) As a rodent, the rat is both taxonomically and etymologically dedicated to gnawing, rodere. Its intelligence and tenacity culminate in omnivoracity tending towards the extreme forms of cannibalism, qualifying this potentially docile and easily trained animal as an exemplary consumer in the wild. Since its inception 110 years ago, Mirbeau’s conjuration of rodential ass torture has gnawed and wriggled its way through the margins of respectable culture. ( For example… )
In our own time, we find a more extroverted way of flaunting deceased rodents in a male posterior: ( TransRatFashion alert! )
…which after all, is only a contrapositive to the popular practice of not giving a rat’s ass.
Crossposted to ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) larvatus and ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) strange_tears.
Tags: animals, aristotle, cicero, french, gerbil-clap, latin, mirbeau, sex, violence, weber
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06:52 pm
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honor and dignity in the american soul
In his account of “the stark, enduring figure” of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence observes:He is neither spiritual nor sensual. He is a moralizer, but he always tries to moralize from actual experience, not from theory. He says: ‘Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.’ Yet he gets his deepest thrill of gratification, perhaps, when he puts a bullet through the heart of a beautiful buck, as it stoops to drink at the lake. Or when he brings the invisible bird fluttering down in death, out of the high blue. ‘Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.’ And yet he lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth.
It’s not good enough.
But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. A recent treatment of the essential American soul in an article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker discusses murder in America within the conceptual framework of honor and dignity, in reference to work by the late Eric Monkkonen and the ongoing Pieter Spierenburg. ( Read more... )
Crossposted to larvatus, history, and guns.
Tags: exceptionalism, guns, history, politics, sociology, violence, weber
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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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10:15 am
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sympathy for the devil
Double standards don’t work anymore; Germany has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Hitler’s scurrilous anti-Jewish tirades is as a provocation to focus people on the Jewish boycott against Germany, ever-increasing Jewish domination of European finance and professions, unrequited Jewish responsibility for German defeat and humiliation, and virulent Jewish contamination of Nordic races.
Iranian Nazi language can be vile, but any Islamist European peace — and engagement with Iran Germany — will have to take account of these points.
Tags: germany, iran, islam, jews, politics, violence
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09:05 pm
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the hunchbacks of the new york times
In the final days of the Great War, while the future architect of die Endlösung der Judenfrage was recovering in hospital from a gas attack at Ypres, Konrad Bercovici, a Jewish Rumanian anarchist scrivener, met a fellow tribesman, a financier and patron of the arts, in a swanky New York City hotel: ( Read more... )
In the land of the straight-backed, the virtual Russian Jerusalemite persona of l-u recites 10 reasons why he roots for Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In my translation, they run as follows:- In the struggle between drinkers and teetotalers I side with the drinkers.
- I prefer regimes in which a leader can be imprisoned to those in which a leader can only be killed.
- I have much more in common with men who pray standing up, than with men who pray doggie style.
- I prefer women in uniform to women in black bags.
- I do not want people who awaken every night to the shrieks of a muezzin to defeat people capable of setting an alarm clock.
- I have much more in common with men who, upon learning about the adventures of their daughters, grab their hearts, not their knives.
- I think that it is more appropriate to pay a lot of money to separate from your wife, than to buy your wives.
- I have more understanding for people who bury their murdered children at once, than for those who thrust their corpses at TV cameras.
- I have more respect for a society that ransoms their captives with hundreds of their enemies, than one, whose prisoners are valued at less than one thousandth of a captured enemy.
- I want to live in a world where no one kills women and children. And if that should happen, I would rater see military prosecutors hand out indictments, than a jubilant crowd hand out candy.
The only reason I would add is wanting to have nothing in common with brokeback burblings of Mr Cohen.
Tags: jews, jokes, politics, russians, violence
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05:25 am
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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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04:02 pm
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funny, he doesn’t look jewish
Head of the Tokyo office of the Russian Federal news agency РИА Новости, andrei-fesyun, reports that Kōzō Okamoto, the sole surviving perpetrator of the Lod Airport Massacre, announced his conversion to Judaism whilst in Israeli custody, substantiating his newly found faith by circumcising himself with his own teeth.
Kōzō Okamoto held aloft by Borat Sagdiyev Palestinian militants after his release by Israel in 1985
In unrelated matters, fellow frontbender Carol Liabos has declined to comment on rumors regarding her conversion to Islam.
Via allentown2007.
Tags: jews, politics, sex, stupidity, violence
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03:15 pm
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disraelia
Walter Laqueur serves up a stunning venture into counterfactual history. Although its premiss stands at odds with the analysis of imperial decay through ethnic strife by the founder of its genre, Laqueur’s narrative supports the underlying program of construing plausibility as the basis for understanding causation in history and political science. Curiously enough, for all current reaction to its conclusions, no one appears to have drawn a parallel with Tony Judt’s muchly maligned advocacy of Israel’s conversion into a binational and secular state. The take-away lesson is that bitter pills are better savored in wistful hindsight than grim foreboding.
Tags: history, jews, politics, violence
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08:57 am
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la barbichette
Je te tiens, tu me tiens, par la barbichette;
Le premier qui rira, aura une tapette!
Et puis, et puis encore ?
Tags: bullshit, french, movies, stupidity, video, violence
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12:32 pm
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in memoriam
Beslan, Russian Federation, 1 September 2004
Tags: death, memory, politics, russian, terrorism, tough guys, violence
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03:12 pm
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putin’s list
The manor house at Tsinandali, just outside the city of Telavi in eastern Georgia, is a small masterpiece of local design. ( Read more... )
Today, popular images of the Caucasus are not much different from those that were informed by the Tsinandali raid.[…]
If current trends continue, at some point in the next century Russia will become a Muslim-plurality, perhaps even Muslim-majority, society, a fact that Russian intellectuals, policy-makers, and the Orthodox Church have yet to comprehend. So far, the Russian approach has been to fall back on the policies that defined engagement with its Islamic South in the Imperial period: to keep the Muslim periphery inside Russia but outside Russian consciousness. Today, the peoples of the Caucasus — especially Muslims — are routinely denigrated as thievish and inherently rebellious, blanketed with collective responsibility for everything from organized crime to terrorism, and portrayed as the chief threat to Russia’s internal security and stability. That fear, not just of terrorists but of all Southerners, has played no small role in Putin’s consolidation of power, and the growing chauvinism of Russian society.
—Charles King, Putin’s list, The Times Literary Supplement, June 20, 2007
Tags: islam, multiculturalism, politics, russian, terrorism, violence
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06:33 pm
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three cheers for ethnic cleansing
Bernard Lewis […] alluded to how Muslims, five hundred years ago, were taught to view living under non-Muslim rule. And though Lewis has declared that Europe will be Islamized before the end of the century — he said this as a fact, as something inevitable, as something which the Europeans were apparently helpless to resist, said nothing about Muslim discussion of the same subject today, now that tens of millions of Muslims are living in non-Muslim nation-states in Western Europe and North America. Lewis gave no guidance, no hint of what might be done. He, who had lived through World War II and the movement, often forced, of peoples after that war, never thought to allude to the Benes Decree. I assume that like all educated Europeans he thinks that the efforts of Masaryk and Benes, by which 7 million Czechs and Slovaks managed to expel 3 million Germans, was justified, but why does he not hint that perhaps the same kind of expulsions like those which were required to reduce what at the time was merely a theoretical future threat posed to 7 million non-Germans in Czechoslovakia, could certainly justify the need to preserve the civilizational legacy — Plato and Spinoza and Hume, Leonardo and Shakespeare, Dante and Quevedo (from whom Lewis borrowed some affectionate Spanish for a dedication) — of the Western world, lest it be undone by the most inexorable, and entirely unworthy, of subversives — mere demography, mere migration and overbreeding. Nor did Lewis say anything, on what might have been an occasion for salutary truth-telling and not for the usual slightly off, never quite direct or forthright, conversation à batons rompus.
—Hugh Fitzgerald, Bernard Lewis: All That Glitters Is Not Gold, New English Review, April 2007
Tags: bullshit, islam, politics, religion, violence
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03:21 am
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dr. strangelove channels guy debord
The United States is actively dismantling its own paradigm of modernity. Someday we may understand what has been lost, but now we unconsciously celebrate our passing. Forever War makes the fall perversely satisfying as it becomes more necessary than modernity. ( Read more... )
We might take comfort too in being history’s greatest midwife to change, if also to our own undoing.
—Michael Vlahos, The Fall of Modernity: Has the American narrative authored its own undoing?, The American Conservative, February 26, 2007 Issue, via Arts & Letters Daily
Tags: bullshit, islam, politics, violence
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08:35 am
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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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12:04 pm
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craniorectal coincidence
The popping sound you never hear:
Your head departing from your rear.
Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac in Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac
Tags: asshat, bullshit, doggerel, friends, sex, sodomy, tasteless, violence
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03:13 pm
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devolving identity
God: Sum id quod sum.
Descartes: Cogito ergo sum.
Popeye: Sum id quod sum et id totum est quod sum.
Eminem: Et sum id quod legis esse me, si non, cur legam esse. ( Read more... )
Tags: god, latin, vanity, violence
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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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01:51 am
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american jews explain misha verbitsky
“I have frequently been accused of being a self hating Jew, and while it’s true I am Jewish and I don’t like myself very much, it’s not because of my persuasion.” — Woody Allen, Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind
“In this country, Jews don’t fight. I don’t know if you noticed that. In this country they almost fight. Every Jew I know almost killed somebody. They’ll all tell you. ‘If he had said one more word… he would’ve been dead today. That’s right. I was ready. One more word…’ What’s the word. Nobody knows what that word is.” — Jackie Mason, The World According to Me
Только так.
Tags: bullshit, jews, russian, violence
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04:48 pm
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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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11:11 pm
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4. terror and virtue
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Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as ‘right’ in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force.’ This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.
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In 1905, at the height of his renown as the creator of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud published a deceptively slight volume on the clandestine nature of jokes. According to Freud, jokes employ the methods of condensation, displacement, and indirect representation through allusion, absurdity, and substitution of trivialities for matters of profound importance, in the service of man’s repressed instinctual nature, epitomized in the instincts of sex and aggression. These instincts serve as the wellspring of all wit. In civilized society, they seldom wield direct influence over human affairs. Only owing to a momentary suspension of salubrious repressions that constrain them in the service of the super-ego, do sexuality and aggression enter into collective consciousness. Thus jokes enable the brief pleasure in discharging the energy of the anticathexis responsible for maintaining these repressions.
The nature of this discharge is best illuminated by example:[1]
| Itzig ist zur Artillerie eingeteilt worden. Er ist offenbar ein intelligenter Bursche, aber ungeschickt und ohne Interesse für den Dienst. Einer seiner Vorgesetzten, der ihm wohlgesinnt ist, nimmt ihn beiseite und sagt ihm: «Itzig, du taugst nicht bei uns. Ich will dir einen Rat geben: Kauf dir eine Kanone und mach dichselbständig.» |
Itzig has been declared fit for service in the artillery. He was clearly an intelligent lad, but intractable and without any interest in the service. One of his superior officers, who was friendlily disposed to him, took him on one side and said to him: “Itzig, you’re no use to us. I’ll give you a piece of advice: buy yourself a cannon and make yourself independent!” |
Freud goes to some trouble to explain the joke. The advice, says he, is obvious nonsense. Cannons are not to be bought and an individual cannot make himself independent as a military unit — set himself up in business, as it were. But in so far as the advice is not mere nonsense, but a joking nonsense, it merits scrutiny of the means whereby the nonsense is turned into a joke. And here Freud infers that “[t]he officer who gives Artilleryman Itzig this nonsensical advice is only making himself out stupid to show Itzig how stupidly he himself is behaving. He is copying Itzig: ‘I’ll give you some advice that’s as stupid as you are.’ He enters into Itzig stupidity and makes it clear to him by taking it as the basis of a suggestion which would fit in with Itzig wishes: if Itzig possessed a cannon of his own and carried out military duties on his own account, how useful his ambition and intelligence would be to him! In what good order he would keep his cannon and how familiar he would make himself with its mechanism so as to meet the competition of the other possessors of cannons!”
In this hasty reading, Freud seems disingenuous in decrying Itzig’s stupidity. After all, his underachieving artillerist hero, denied the opportunity to make a snappy comeback, shares his name with the quick-witted protagonist of Freud’s favorite joke: “Itzig, wohin reit’st Du?” “Weiss ich, frag das Pferd.” That other Itzig has no idea where he is riding to. All interested parties should ask the horse. In a hallowed equation, his self-deprecation compensates for his complacency. As an admirer of this tranquil rider, the physician who built his worldview on a painstaking investigation of ostensible coincidences is unlikely to have overlooked this instance of homonymy. The implication of Freud planting his tongue in cheek is borne out by the fact that the butts of each joke derive their shared name from an aphaeresis omitting the first letter of the German word Witzig, witty or jocular.[2] Through the silence of its protagonist, the joke evinces an elusive quality that resists interpretative closure, suggesting great deeds to come from this intelligent but intractable Jewish underachiever. Be it real or feigned, Freud’s confidence in the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force already rang hollow upon publication in 1905. The reluctant artillerist had come into his own. His self-employment inaugurated a new stage in democratic pluralism. No longer will this plebe be meekly carried along by the steed of History. ( Read more... )
Crossposted to larvatus, real_philosophy, and history in commemoration of Sigmund Freud’s sesquicentennial.
Tags: anarchism, french, freud, history, jews, nobel, philosophy, politics, robespierre, russian, terrorism, violence
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11:35 am
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yak or tiff
The way of the warrior is the complement of rhetoric in the practice of persuasion. Humans being rule-bound animals, as with discursive eristic, the knack of empty hand combat is to determine the main rule that constrains your adversary, and embarrass him into submission by breaking it. And since more training redounds to more rules, he who broadcasts his practice, does so to his own strategic disadvantage. Which is to say that there can be no such thing as a martial art.
ObBook: Gorgias
Monday, 3 July 2000, 12:00 am
Tags: persuasion, usenet, violence
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11:38 am
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hitchens in hindsight
Propping up the humanitarian case for regime change: “We could have been living in a different world, and so could the people of Iraq, and I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.” — Christopher Hitchens, Monday, March 20, 2006, at 2:06 PM ET
Notable predecessors:
- Jean Meslier (1678 - 1733):
Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre.
I wish, and this shall be the last and most ardent of my wishes, I wish that the last of the kings were strangled with the guts of the last priest.
- Denis Diderot (1713–1784):
Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre,
Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.
His hands would plait the guts of priests,
For want of rope, to strangle kings.
- Attributed to Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837):
Мы добрых граждан позабавим
И у позорного столпа
Кишкой последнего попа
Последнего царя удавим.
Tags: politics, violence
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04:31 pm
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friends in print: fred rexer
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“In self-defense, there’s no such thing as Overkill. The word ‘kill’ is absolute: you can be less than dead, but not more than dead. Dead enough. Other words that are absolute are malevolent,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘stupid.’ If a person is malevolent, dangerous, and stupid enough to try his luck while you’re toting your .45 Automatic, he ought to be absolutely killed… not wounded. Don’t set yourself up to argue in court with some lout who’s accosted you. Kill him! Dead men give no testimony. Let the bum’s morgue photos speak for him while you’re being no-billed by the grand jury.”
—Fred Rexer, Jr., Dead or Alive: A Textbook on Self-Defense with the .45 Automatic, IDHAC Publishing, 1977, p. 2 |
[John] Milius remains adamant — and persuasive — in his claim to the heart of the matter. “My whole career is justified by having written Apocalypse [Now],” he says “I wrote the screenplay in 1969, and based the [Martin] Sheen character, and some of Kurtz, on a friend of mine, Fred Rexer, who actually experienced the scene [related by Marlon Brando] where the arms are hacked off by the Viet Cong. There were six drafts of the screenplay — well over a thousand pages. At one point Francis [Ford Coppola] said, ‘Write every scene you ever wanted to go into that movie.’” The title, he recalls, came from a button badge popular among hippies during the 1960s — “Nirvana Now.” [Note: “My whole career is justified” is from author’s phone conversation with John Milius.] <…>
Melodrama pursued the production even in the comparative peace of the Sentinel Building. Fred Rexer turned up while they were looping the film, and regaled the sound engineers with stories of how, as a CIA operative, he had executed Viet Cong chieftains by squeezing his fingers through their eye-sockets and literally tearing their skulls apart. This colorful individual had presented John Milius with a rifle as a mark of respect for The Wind and the Lion, the film that had established Milius as the standard-bearer of the new machismo in Hollywood. In the basement studio he produced a loaded .45, handed it to Martin Sheen and said: “You could shoot anyone in this room. You have the power of life and death in your hands.” Sheen was stunned, and Coppola gaped in horror through the glass of the control room. The specter of the war continued to haunt Zoetrope long after Apocalypse was completed. One veteran tried to reach the upstairs offices, insisting that Coppola should make a film of his experiences and that if he would not, well, then he’d blow him away. [Note: “Fred Rexer turned up” is from author’s conversations with Richard Beggs.]
—Peter Cowie, Coppola: A Biography, Da Capo Press, 1994, pp. 120, 128, 271, 272
Fred Rexer at Long Tieng, Laos in 1967 The character of Willard, the army captain who toils up-river to terminate Colonel Kurtz and his renegade command, was based on Fred Rexer, whom Milius had met at a gun show soon after completing The Wind and the Lion. Rexer had been a Green Beret in Laos and had taken part in the Phoenix programme to subdue VC influence in the villages. Surreal by nature, he told Milius how he and his comrades had gone into Vientiane, ordered tiger-striped tuxedos from the local tailor and then dined together in their new regalia. Rexer had actually experienced the scene recounted by Kurtz in the film, where the arms of children are hacked off by the Vietcong. Sensing the symbiosis between Kurtz and Willard, Coppola wrote in one his earliest notes about the film in prospect, ‘if [Willard] can accept Kurtz, then he can accept himself’.
—Peter Cowie, The Apocalypse Now Book, Da Capo Press, 2001, p. 158
himself’.
According to Doug Claybourne, who was supervising the post-production process, there were between thirty-five and forty-five different recording sessions of the voice-over, interspersed with screenings. ‘We did it many, many times,’ sighs [Michael] Herr.
Martin Sheen would come to San Francisco, and we’d be in the booth for a couple of days, recording it, and putting it to picture, and trimming it. One cut after another, I think there were like eight or nine. At one point we left, my wife, and our baby, and I, and just split, after like nine months.
John Milius had also tried his hand at making sense of the narration. In a draft dated 26 January; 1979, he seemed finally to have licked the opening sentence: ‘Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon.’
While Herr was away in New York, Fred Rexer, a friend of Milius’s, joined the Zoetrope scene to help with the narration. A towering hulk of a man, with pale skin and blue eyes, he would regale the sound engineers with stories of how, as a CIA operative, he had executed Viet Cong chieftains by squeezing his fingers through their eye-sockets and literally tearing their skulls apart.
Doug Claybourne remembers Rexer as
the counterpart to Marty Sheen’s Willard in real life — he was the guy who was on a mission, to do whatever was needed to keep the war flowing the right way. It got really wild when Francis and Marty were down in the mixing room along with Milius and Rexer. Once Marty was on hand for the first or second narration, and he went out and did a lot of drinking. At about 2 o’clock in the morning I got this call from the police saying, ‘We have this guy Estevez and he’s in jail; come and get him.’ Marty had started dancing in a bar, and had been arrested and used his real name, Estevez. So we called out our lawyer and rescued him!
In another incident, during a break for food in the basement of the Sentinel Building, Rexer produced a loaded .45 and handed it to Martin Sheen and said, ‘You could shoot anyone in this room. You have the power of life and death in your hands.’ Coppola, understandably not wanting anyone killed on his watch, pulled Milius aside and told him that loaded firearms were simply not part of the editing process. Rexer did spend time watching raw footage, however, and would extemporize and comment on what he was seeing, from his perspective as a former Green Beret. He even dictated snippets for Willard’s voice-over:
Napalm is the answer to the grunts’ prayers…
I’m back in Vietnam. I can dream about times before Vietnam when I didn’t know the intensity of combat but the dreams part to a reality when you come out of it and you despise the fact that you have the intensity in you… but you want it… now that it’s there.
I’m sitting in this hotel room and Charlie’s beating my ass because every minute that I stay here I get weaker and every minute Charlie stays in the bush he gets that much stronger.
And, later:
Every day I lay here I become less of a soldier and every day he squats in the bush he gets stronger.
Pink-faced house cat… messenger boy for the lifers.
Bernard Fall once said that war was too valuable to be entrusted to generals and peace was certainly too valuable to be entrusted to politicians…
Charlie don’t surf but Charlie don’t fuck up by the numbers either.
Perhaps the jungle hasn’t corrupted Kurtz, perhaps it’s purified him. ‘Few readers of the novel are immediately aware that there is a double narration,’ Herr said in 1987.Marlow is only the second narrator. There’s a main narrator who listens to the story told by Marlow. All the problems connected to Apocalypse come, to my mind, from the impossibility of bringing Joseph Conrad to the screen. He’s a purely literary writer. You can’t transfer his sublime irony to the screen. —Ibid., pp. 107-109
Kurtz: I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.
—Apocalypse Now
[Nat Segaloff:] What the hell is Brando talking about in his colloquy?
[John Milius:] He’s trying to explain to Willard what Truth is. He’s trying to make him look into the pit that he’s looked in, and see the Truth. He describes the VC [Viet Cong] and how they fight—that they are capable of this barbarity, but they fight with passion. They have concern for the children. He says, “If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over very quickly.” They are not fighting a lie.21 One of the terrible things about the Vietnam War was that it was a lie between the president and the grunts. Prior to that, people knew what they were fighting for. Fred Rexer22 said that this generation, that was capable of the kind of heroism that he experienced when he was there in ’65 and ’66, will “never be again purchased so cheaply.” In other words, you used up not just a generation, but a nation’s ideals. And perhaps that’s at the root of a lot of our problems. [June 2000-February 2001]
21 The meaning of this scene was clarified when Apocalypse Now Redux was released in 2001, restoring a major plot point: Kurtz had warned, in a suppressed intelligence report to the Joint Chiefs, that “dilettantes” with one-year tours of duty were useless against a dedicated enemy.
22 Fred Rexer is a former Special Operations expert and frequent adviser on Milius’s films.
—Patrick McGilligan, editor, Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s, University of California Press, 2006, pp. 296-297
(Posted in reference to Euroweenie cavils.)
Tags: apocalypse, friends, texas, tough guys, violence
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10:54 am
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a middle-aged male debasement fantasy
Commissaire de la Marine:Madame, s’il vous plaît, n’étalez pas vos jupons au fumoir. Ils narguent déjà un futur raccourci.
Madame La: Soyez plus clair, Commissaire. On vous a mal compris.
Le Capitaine: C’est vrai. Moi non plus, je n’ai pas compris.
Commissaire de la Marine: Enfin ce fumoir n’est-il pas notre dernièr refuge contre les dames, fussent-elles nos épouses? Je vous cite de mémoire, Gouverneur.
Le Gouverneur: Eh alors, vous allez me mettre mal avec le capitaine.
Le Capitaine: Vous parliez jupons, je crois.
Commissaire de la Marine: Pas du tout. J’étais surpris par l’irruption de Madame La… là, au fumoir. Voilà, rien de plus.
Le Gouverneur: Rien de plus?
Le Capitaine: Dans le doute, j’apprécierais des excuses. Ici, tout de suite, à haut voix, que tout le monde entende.
Commissaire de la Marine: Volontiers. Je vous présente mes plus plats excuses, Madame, pour ce que vous avez cru comprendre, que je n’ai pas voulu dire.
Madame La: Viens, Jean.
Le Capitaine: Vous venez de perdre la face. Pour perdre le reste, il vous suffit d’un mot.
Madame La: Jean, s’il te plaît.
Le Capitaine: Non, je serais ravi que vous auriez le courage. Non? Tant pis alors, une autre fois peut-être.
Madame La: Au plaisir, messieurs. Enfin, si l’on peut dire.
Mme Commissaire de la Marine: Cet homme-là n’a même pas besoin de nous foutre pour faire cocus nos maris.
― La veuve de Saint-Pierre |
Superintendent of the Navy: Madame, please, do not spread out your underskirts in the smoking-room. They already defy our foredoomed future.
Madame La: Please clarify, Superintendent. You were badly understood.
The Captain: It is true. Me neither, I did not understand.
Superintendent: After all, is this smoking-room not our last refuge against the women, even if they be our wives? I quote you from memory, Governor.
The Governor: Ah, but then you will stand me in ill stead with the captain.
The Captain: You spoke of underskirts, I believe.
Superintendent: Not at all. I was startled by the intrusion of Madame La… there, in the smoking-room. There, nothing more.
The Governor: Nothing more?
The Captain: In the event of any doubt, I would appreciate your apologies. Here, right away, out loud, so that everyone hears.
Superintendent: My pleasure. I present my humble apologies to you, Madame, for what you believed to understand, which I did not wish to express.
Madame La: Come, Jean.
The Captain: You have just lost face. To lose the rest, it is enough for you to say a word.
Madame La: Jean, please.
The Captain: No, I would be delighted if you dared. No? Too bad then, maybe another time.
Madame La: With pleasure, Messieurs. At last, if I may say so.
Madame Superintendent: This man does not even need to fuck us to make cuckolds of our husbands.
― translated by MZ |
Tags: vanity, violence
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04:25 pm
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may bears gobble me
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )
Tags: animals, catullus, gerbil-clap, latin, sex, sodomy, tasteless, translation, vanity, violence
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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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10:37 am
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carl schmitt on friends and foes
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Section 3
The friend and enemy concepts are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and weakened by economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-individualistic sense as a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies. They are neither normative nor pure spiritual antitheses. ( Read more... )
Tags: friends, politics, violence
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