Glob-a-log

There are many times that words are not enough – but, in a real sense, they are all we have. We use words to sell deodorants and presidential candidates.

Einstein grappled with the meaning of things, not through his most famous equation, but with words, like ‘God’ and ‘dice’.

Words are the building blocks of our communal dreaming, of our philosophies, and our religions. No sermon, no parable, no enlightenment without words. The Bible: a collection of words, in which it is written that in the beginning was the word.

So, words and language are important. Without language, no structured thought; without organized thought, no civilisation.

Of course, if words are important, then so our are public dreamers: our writers. The ones who tell us stories, the ones who illuminate the linings of our caves, the inside of our skulls.

One of these dreamers died last week – and I think he would have appreciated the irony that it is impossible to find the words to describe this loss.

Other than the observation (and the lamentation) that we need our dreamers to give flesh to the bones of mere existence.

We need writers like David Foster Wallace, who died last week, to tell us things like this:

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

(Photo by Jeff Werner, from his site)

(The Mark Twain house)

“It was here in the third-floor billiard room where America’s greatest humorist used to hole up when the bustle of his house, and the nursery one flight below, became too great, leaving strict orders not to be disturbed.”

So begins a June 2008 New York Times article about the Mark Twain house, which was – and remains – threatened with closure because of money problems.

In that article we learn that what would be needed to turn things around is $5 million. Not exactly chicken feed but we are talking about a true American treasure, Mark Twain being one of the country’s most famous and most cherished authors.

Of course, the USA has a history of being careless with its national icons, and treasures, and symbols. You may remember, for instance, that, not long ago, it looked like the bald eagle would go the way of the dodo.

The bald eagle seems safe, for now. We can’t say the same of the Mark Twain house, I’m afraid, as yet another New York Times article shows:

Mark Twain’s house remains under water, financially speaking. But if it was three fathoms deep, it’s now roughly two — that is, perfectly deep for anything associated with a man who spent much of his life in similar trouble, only to end up on dry land. Public and private donations this summer gave the Mark Twain House a few months of breathing room, but one wouldn’t know it from the staff, who look like they could use some donors, volunteers and a handful of anti-anxiety medications.

Now, I’m not saying that individual states, or the nation as a whole, should always play the role of the Caped Credit Carrying Crusader, coming to the rescue of each and every failing project. It’s very tempting to stare over your crumpled newspaper and mutter, ‘Something really ought to be done about this,’ - always meaning that someone else, and anyone else than us, should do any of the real and often costly work.

Still, this is the Mark Twain house we are talking about. Would England allow the home of Shakespeare to crumble and fall? Would Italy treat the birthplace of Michelangelo or Leonardo with such disrespect?

Where should the Mark Twain house stand in America’s consciousness? Somewhere beteen Lenin’s tomb in Russia and India’s Taj Mahal…?

Yes, to ask the question is to invite a host of meaningless answers – but surely it would be worth $5 million, and maybe quite a bit more, to make certain that the house will remain open to the public?

Isn’t the idea of a cultural and historical heritage that we accept it humbly from our predecessors and deliver it proudly to the ones who come after us? Isn’t that what the whole concept of ‘caretaking’ is about?

I know that it’s easy, and quite cheap, to make comparisons like the following one but still: Compare the cost of saving the Mark Twain house to the cost of bailing out our greedy, stupid and corrupt financial institutions…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration on Friday laid out a radical bailout plan with a jawdropping price tag — a takeover of a half-trillion dollars or more in worthless mortgages and other bad debt held by tottering institutions.

I know that many people would consider it nonsensical to compare these two projected investments.

Still, it’s not quite like comparing oranges and apples…

Granted, no financial institution has ever given us anything worthwhile and lasting as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but the creator of these great literary figures did have something in common with our modern traders and bankers: He made incredibly stupid and catastrophically bad investments throughout his life.

This from that first New York Times article:

“The author’s signature financial misstep was a huge investment in a printing-machine that didn’t work — but Twain made lots of bets like this. And if his autobiography is to be believed, he got them all wrong. In 1877 an agent for Graham Bell’s budding phone company practically begged Twain to buy stock, but the author, temporarily flush with cash, refused. Four years later Bell’s agent was rich, and Twain’s money was gone.”

So, if it’s okay to spend half a trillion dollars or more of the taxpayers’ money to rescue these modern financial institutions, surely it would be no more than fitting to cough up a measly $5 million to bail out America’s founding father of all failed investments…?

(Just another failed investor…?)

(British Chancellor Alistair Darling)

I can’t say I know all that much about Great Britain’s finance minister (apart from the fact that he looks a bit like that ‘Tomorrow never dies’ Bond villain, Elliot Carver) but he sounds even more foolish than he looks.

In fact, if the papers have quoted him correctly, I’d say he’s dumber than Bush and more insensitive than Cheney:

The world economic crisis must be fought like the war on terrorism, the British Chancellor is preparing to say. In his speech to the Labour Party conference, Alistair Darling will say that Britain must lead the world in efforts to fix the international economy, which has been severely damaged by the credit crisis.

“Just as one government alone cannot combat global terrorism, just as one government alone cannot deal with climate change, one government alone cannot deal with the impact of globalisation,” Mr Darling will say.

The war on climate change?

You mean the only bloody war the Bush government is not dying to start?

Anyway, back to that more appropriate War on Terror simile…

So, we’ll open an illegal concentration camp for dodgy dealers and bankers on Cuba – after we have declared war on a country that has fuck all to do with the problem, like, let’s say, Peru – and then we take away even more civil liberties from our own citizens…?

Oh yes, and we’ll spend between $1,026 billion and $2,239 billion (and rising) on the problem, while making things progressively worse?

Yup, excellent plan, Chancellor.

(Bond villain Elliot Carver)

(The former Hanoi Hilton)

There’s not much justice in this world – so we have to be satisfied with anything that even resembles the real deal.

So, some people believe in a thing like poetic justice. Of course, what’s poetic to one person is no more than mangled prose to an other.

To many disgruntled Hillary voters it would seem like poetic justice if Obama would lose in November, because of Sarah ‘Hockey mom’ Palin.

Others would suggest real poetic justice would consist of Sarah Palin getting shot by a moose while she was putting on lipstick (or by some raving Left-behinder who thinks lipstick is one of Satan’s tools.)

Anyway, I’m not sure if the following story qualifies - the one about McCain’s old Vietnamese prison having been torn down to make place for a high-rise…:

For most Vietnamese McCain’s story is an obscure artifact of a receding history. In a week of interviews around Hanoi, neither his imprisonment nor his presidential candidacy seemed to arouse much excitement. While McCain wins points among some Vietnamese for having supported the normalization of relations with the United States in 1995, his story, for the most part, has taken on an aura of wartime kitsch in Vietnam, like the self-parodying propaganda posters that are now sold in galleries, or the “Good Morning Vietnam” T-shirts popular with tourists. Only a little chunk of the prison was preserved as a museum when the rest of the building was razed to make way for a high-rise, with its half-hearted and anachronistic wartime propaganda.

I guess it’s not truly perfect poetic justice.

With McCain flogging his past in order to become a president – while selling his soul to the religious right – maybe a museum, a place where old relics come to gather dust, is not the perfect make-over.

When I see McCain offering the memories of his younger flesh to any comer, I can’t help thinking that, maybe, it would have been more fitting if the Hanoi Hilton had been turned into the Hanoi Whorehouse.

God knows McCain is turning enough tricks, these days, to make even the greediest madam blush.

(Without a condom IS extra…)

So, Disney is trying to – excuséz le mot - reanimate The Muppets Show:

Disney is giving it another go by revving up the full power of its culture-creating engines. Instead of the take-it-slow approach, this time the Muppets are getting the “Hannah Montana” treatment, being blasted into every pop-culture nook and cranny that the company owns or can dream up.

“We think there is a Muppet gene in everybody,” said Lylle Breier, a Disney executive who is the new general manager of Muppets Studio.

I’m pretty sure they will succeed too. The Disney company is as good at revamping and promoting stuff as the Republican machine.

The Rove team took the family firm and gave it the Pharaoh treatment. So, the son (and the vice-president) of the man who said ‘Read my lips, no new taxes’ got duly elected – twice.

Whatever you may think of the eight years that followed (like Pharaoh’s curse), in terms of restoring, or resurrecting, a brand name, operation Bush was a grand success.

So, now, Disney thinks it can do to the Muppets what the Republican machine did for the Bushes. Well, why ever not?

Not just because the Disney company is as efficient as the Republicans when it comes to selling even the most unpalatable stuff – and it is: They turned uncle Walt from a personal Hitler fan and Nazi sympathiser into everybody’s favourite uncle.

Hell, even Karl Rove never tried to sell Cheney as a born-again Santa.

Anyway, as I said, I have total confidence in the selling power of Disney – and, in all fairness, Kermit & Co. are a Hell of a lot easier on the eye and mind than the Bush and Cheney ticket ever was.

(Ángel González: 1925-2008)

Ah well, it’s a lazy, early Saturday evening where I’m writing this. I still can’t be bothered with the clamouring world and all the attention-seeking news stories.

So, let’s just close the curtains on the world and settle down with some poems. Five great love poems by five great 20th century poets. They are, respectively:

- Ángel González
- Jane Hirshfield
- Robert Graves
- Anna Akhmatova &
- Pablo Neruda

I’ll shut up now and leave you with these poems:

l

They’re Sea Gulls, My Love (by Ángel González; original version here)

They’re sea gulls, my love.
Slow, stately sea gulls.

Winter sea. Grey water
daubs the rocks with cold.
Your legs, your sweet legs,
touch the waves.
A dirty sky turns
above the sea. The wind erases
the sketch of hillocks
made of sand. The tedious
pools of sand and cold
copy your light and shadow.
High above, there’s a cry,
you, absorbed, do not hear.

They’re sea gulls, my love.
Slow, stately sea gulls.

(Jane Hirshfield: 1953- )

ll

For a wedding on Mont Tamalpais (by Jane Hirshfield)

July,
and the rich apples
once again falling.

You put them to your lips,
as you were meant to,
enter a sweetness
the earth wants to give.

Everything loves this way,
in gold honey,
in gold mountain grass,
that carries lightly the shadow of hawks,
the shadow of clouds passing by.

And the dry grasses,
the live oaks and bays,
taste the apples’ deep sweetness
because you taste it, as you were meant to,
tasting the life that is yours,

While below, the foghorns bend to their work,
bringing home what is coming home,
blessing what goes.

(Robert Graves: 1895-1985)

lll

Counting the beats (by Robert Graves)

You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I ?

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day,
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.

Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I ?

Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie

(Anna Akhmatova: 1889-1966)

lV

And as it’s going (by Anna Akhmatova)

And as it’s going often at love’s breaking,
The ghost of first days came again to us,
The silver willow through the window then stretched in,
The silver beauty of her gentle branches.
The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure
To us, who fear to lift looks from the earth,
Who are so lofty, bitter and intense,
About days when we were saved together.

V

Sonnet LXXXI (by Pablo Neruda; original here)

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

(Pablo Neruda: 1904-1973)

Right, those were the five poems I promised you – but this is my blog and I can do what I want here, so I will leave you with one of my own:

The moments that we have

When I enter the cathedral,
touch its portals for good luck,
walk these isles,
where left and right
the dust of ages
dances in the light
that shines through stained-glass windows,

do I think of God,
some mad Creator?
Do I think of death,
eternal life?
Do my footsteps
follow some old prayer;
do I look for answers carved in stone?

Or is this just another way of saying:
life is short,
and beautiful, and cruel?
The moments that we have
we ought to spend in sacred places.
My love is my cathedral;
I enter her in silence and in awe.

(This post was dedicated to C. in Canada, M. in Prague & always R. in Tokyo)

You know, with all the talk about collapsing banks and apoplectic markets, you could be tempted to overlook the other real dangers that are out there.

So, markets can be bearish, or bullish – but they are paper tigers compared to the real thing.

Yes, they ‘didn’t come from outer space’ but simply from a pasture near you but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous (or disgusting):

Rositza Kasaboba , 68, was walking down a village road with her donkey and cow when the cow jumped on her as another villager looked on. The enormous beast sent her flying to the ground, leaving her “battered and bruised” but otherwise unharmed. As she recovered, however, she remarked “worst of wall - even my donkey collapsed afterwards on the ground, I am sure it was laughing at me!” She will make sausages for Christmas from the unruly cow, she said.

(You can see more pictures of the attack and the terrible aftermath here.)

Still you haven’t heard the worst of it…

… cause you may know think that you have a handle on things: You’ve met the enemy and she went MOOOO!!!

So, now you know what to look out for; when to make a stand and when to hoof it, so to speak?

Wrong.

The terrible thing about this particular enemy is that you won’t see it coming all the time, because some of them are invisible:

(”Party pastor” Joep Haffmans)

Loads of booze, loose women and lots of fast cars…

It reads like the title of a ZZ Top song – or the death certificate of a Seventies porn star but this is, in fact, the story of a humble, Roman Catholic priest, who was known for his old-fashioned views on sin and his Hellfire sermons.

So, a hippy priest our Father Haffmans was not – not in his official capacity, that is.

Of course, what he did when he was done with his daily sermonising, was, as is so often the case with RC priests, quite another matter:

The former pastor of the Catholic church in the village of Gulpen in Limburg stole €2.5m from church funds, reports Thursday’s Volkskrant. According to the church’s lawyer, Joep Haffmans spent all but €600,000 of the money on wine, women, cars, expensive clothes and foreign travel before his death last July at the age of 64.

What makes this story extra piquant is that our good pastor stole €1,25m from the poor box…

You will not hear me say this often but this dead priest almost makes his paedophile colleagues look good.

So, let’s hope that his public views about sin and the ultimate destination of sinners proved to be correct. A nice heap of coles among the Everlasting Flames sounds about the perfect destiny & resting place for a despicable thief and a hypocrite like him.

So, R.I.P, Father Haffmans – Roast In Peace.

(Taro Aso, Japanese war crime denier - and PM candidate)

Ever had one of those days that you can’t be bothered?

Me too.

So, another day, another full load of depressing news stories. For instance, the same day that a story appears about the escalating ‘toxic rice scandal’ now causing food and drink alarms in Japan, one of the country’s prime candidates to replace the current PM proves that Japan’s leaders still can’t deal in a convincing, let alone honourable way with their toxic past scandals:

“Taro Aso, who is likely to be installed as Japan’s new prime minister next week, today refused to acknowledge the use of hundreds of allied prisoners of war by his family’s coal mining business during the second world war.”

Then, there’s the usual election and corrupt bankers’ shit in the USA, more imbecilic postering by New Labour’s ever more desperate Brown hoodies – and, of course, all the usual and usually moronic preoccupations of the English populace at large. If it ain’t fox hunting, or knife crime, or drunk teen sex orgies, or Amy Winehouse (or Amy Winehouse stabbing a drunk fox and fucking it) it’s stupid stuff like this:

“A BBC art critic has incurred the wrath of women from an entire English county for daring to suggest that their ankles were anything but trim. Rupert Maas made what appeared to be a throwaway remark while musing over the work of a minor British Impressionist painter on the television programme Antiques Roadshow. He described the young girl in the piece, who was lazing in a hammock with her sturdy leg draped over the edge, as having a “Shropshire ankle”. But his remarks, which were heard by a television audience of millions, have landed him in trouble with women from the county, who accused him of holding stereotypical views.”

In other words, I’m fed up with all of it – for today, anyway. I’m sure I’ll be back tomorrow, fully energised like a fucking Duracell rabbit, waffling on about this social ill or that sordid economic and/or political scandal but, for now, I’ve burnt down all my online newspaper links.

I’m off to see the wizard – or, at least, to have some more tea, and then, perhaps, to watch some old Captain Kangaroo clips, count the flowers on the wall and gorge myself on Ren & Stimpy movies.

More Ren and Stimpy clips:

- Ask Doctor Stupid

- Rubber nipples

- Top five Ren & Stimpy moments

Oh man, you have to go see this on the Guardian site – like NOW…!!!

Beware the time-eater: Cambridge University’s monstrous new clock. It’s gold, features six patented inventions … and has fangs.

Here’s more info from the article – but go read the whole of it yourself. There’s also a video of the clock though I think the general facts are even more awesome than the clock itself, as beautiful as it is:

- The hour approaches. The beast’s jaws gape, its tail quivers and then snap! Another minute has been devoured, and the hour strikes with the ominous clonk of a chain dropping into a coffin. The creature blinks twice in satisfaction.

- The clock will be unveiled tomorrow by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.

- The work has involved 200 people, including engineers, sculptors, scientists, jewellers and calligraphers. It has taken seven years’ research and construction, incorporates six patented inventions, and is predicted to run for at least 250 years

- The rippling gold-plated dial was made by exploding a thin sheet of stainless steel onto a mould underwater: none of the team actually saw it happen because the only place in the world which could make it was a secret military research institute in Holland.

- The creature on top of the clock was inspired by medieval armour and gradually became more ominous: part-lizard, part-stag beetle, a Chronophage – time eater.

- From next weekend it will be a public clock on a street corner in the old doorway of the former bank, a listed building which became the shell of the library.

(As Death learned: Time is not our friend…)