Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
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December 31, 2013
2013: TiR's unblogged year in review: below: an incomplete list of items researched and contemplated but, mercifully for the already informationally overcrowded world, left un-fully-blogged on TiR during 2013. How much more minimal can we keep it in 2014? We shall see. ---------------- on missing one’s pre-internet brain -- and everybody else’s RIP Prince Jazzbo, Charlie Chesterman, Tabu Ley, Maxwell’s the late Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease’s Mr. Okonkwo on reasons to never throw away a piece of paper containing the printed word Bertolucci’s “Before the Revolution” (1964) on “the medicine of boredom” Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner on the boringness of opera: “To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness!” (from Turinese Letter of May 1888) on Jamaica’s remarkably (oddly?) peaceful “struggle” for independence; The Gleaner (7/15/12): “Jamaicans fought no heroic battle to achieve Independence. . . . all these steps were constitutional advances which were subject to prior discussion and agreement. This smooth passage ensured progress with certainty, but it was devoid of the dramatic lustre of a struggle for victory to create a focal point.” on “Surfin’ Bird” as Communist anthem: “"Rock and Roll which . . . has an electronic sound and is called ‘junk music’ such as ‘Surfin' Bird’ by the Trashmen is also by no means primitive"; from “Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership in Culture” by Henry Flynt (and G. Maciunas) (1966) “The nation state is the prison of the mind”: Philip Mansel quotes William Haddad mobile phone: philanthropocapitalism : : stopwatch: Taylorism? on Laurence Allard’s “Smart Power, Mobile Phone Technology and Philanthropocapitalism in Africa” Freud on how illness allegedly reveals the mind's crystalline structure: “If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal's structure.” (Lecture XXXI The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, 1923) “Bovaryism,” or words that take an entire novel to define them, and with every word in the book taken as a necessary part of the definition. See K. Burke’s eternally foundational (for TiR) "Litertaure as Equipment for Living" (1938) on Jules de Gaultier on Flaubert. the teenaged years 16 through 18 as “the age of ingratitude” (Radiguet’s preface to Cheeks on Fire)
poet Henry Vaughn’s “The Retreat” ode to the Backward Traveller
why television? to create a new medium for broadcast of US post-war anti-communist propaganda, of course know (y)our mercenaries: a rundown & overview of current names in the global private security firm field: Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, DynCorp International, Triple Canopy, Sabre International (Baghdad), Askar Security Services Limited (Kampala), SOC, Dreshak Group (Dubai), Beowulf Defense, Sterling Global Operations; all mentioned herein meet our new global biometrics wizards, for voting, passports, etc.: Giesecke & Devrient Gemalto, Morpho, Oberthur Seoul and / vs. Berlin: some parallels and connections
memo to Rand Paul at Howard University, on how hard the GOP worked to lose & alienate the voters of black America: some clear-eyed and devastating contemporaneous accounts, from the mid-60s pages of Ebony, Jet and The Crisis (Henry Lee Moon) . . .
. . . and for good measure: Norman Mailer, 11/64, in Esquire
the Whitney Museum’s 1980 “Light Show,” the 1982 lawsuit, and the Hon. Ralph M. Holman and wife vs. artist James Turrell; mentioned by the latter in passing in interview here
animal rights, and Macarius Magnes’s Apocriticus (4th cent. CE), book III, chapter IV, “Objection based on the incident of the swine and the demons”: “What a myth ! What humbug ! What flat mockery ! A herd of two thousand swine ran into the sea, and were choked and perished! . . . it may be left to babes to make a decision about all this.”
the rise of the robots, 1950s-60s style: James Boggs’ The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook (1963), chapter 2, “The Challenge of Automation”
Taban Lo Liyong: “English is a prostitute, and a big prostitute.” -- quoted in Janine di Giovanni’s “A civil tongue: South Sudan tries to learn English”
John Ralston Saul’s Dark Diversions on meeting Vaso Čubrilović: “[H]e had fixed his self-image in the 1930s, in early middle age. Men tend to do that, just at the moment when their public disguise crystalizes.”
on the “match nul” theory of politics
the DDR’s cult of Weimar remembrance, as reflected in stamp and coin collecting (Brecht, Kollwitz, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Thälmann, Tucholsky, Zetkin)
the quest for the world’s fastest pedestrians
Pinochet’s Secretary of Labor and Social Security, José Manuel Piñera Echenique, Chile’s Administradoras de Fondos de Pensionese, and the potential(ly (even) crapp(y/ier)) future of US unemployment benefits
on philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne and the “Muslim Bergsonians”
the Rev. Charles G. Finney (1792-1875): abolish slavery, usher in the return of JC
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