(saved and not posted, from Wednesday)
Get me the fuck out of here. I'm stagnating in Charlottesville- this has been a terrible day: I could stand not seeing another flower for a good long time, the weather's nasty, the power's out, and on top of all that it's hit me like a ton of bricks that I'm only getting bitterer and more ingrown here. I think I'll go to California; calculations need to be made to figure out how much I need to get there and get set up.
Yesterday's list: systematic governmental oppressions of the 20th century
:: Turkey against the Armenians, 1915-1917
:: Japanese internment camps, California, 1942-5
:: Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, 1956
:: Stalin's Great Purges, USSR, late 1930's
:: Preliminary stages and Endlösung der Judenfrage, German-controlled territory 1933-45
:: South African apartheid, 1948-1994
:: Israel's attitude toward the Palestinians, 1948-present
:: Darfur conflict, 2003-present
:: US-supported Contra activity in Nicaragua, 1978-1988
:: the Argentine National Reorganization Process, 1976-83
:: Yugoslav and Serbian repression of Kosovo, 1981-98
:: Treatment of dissenters during the presidency of Augusto Pinochet, Chile, 1973-90
:: the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, 1975-9
more, suggest
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Monday, November 20, 2006
One way to suggest the possibility of infinity
After raiding the kitchen and retreating successfully I felt better; talked to Danny, felt even better; Uli called and we went out for a drink. We had a really great conversation and didn't spare gestures, either vocal or manual: so the range of angles to which my wrist will swivel grows daily. As for the conversation's alphabet, there were discussed actuarial exams, boyfriends, China, Danish royalty, English literature, fur coats, Gilgamesh, Heidegger, India, Japanese, kinky sex, luxury, Monaco, nasty, the Odyssey, playerhaterz, queens, Ryan, Shakespeare, turncoats, Uli, Vedas, women, existence, young men, and zillions of other things besides, each of which must displace one of those I've just listed.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
More pressing dilemma
now: i am hungry. have hermited all day; stayed up all night in a furious whirlwind of myth and ritual, still. there is so much to collate and sort, and it's just now that i'm up to the task. so then i took a nap, and i'm famished. BUT it would prompt a fatal error if i were to run into another human and have to speak to it. about half an hour ago, jaime was wandering around the house- 'HALLOWWWWW? HALLOWWWWW?' and i just don't want to deal. she's still upstairs; the folks upstairs spend their leisure time sliding heavy wooden or rubber furniture against the grain of the floor. do you think i can go cook something and dart back into seclusion without being seen or heard? hiding from your housemates is only legit if you're not caught.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Autism
We're so comfortable, we want a callus around ourselves that protects us from the awful shit that's going down, or going to. I point out the fact that the people who make words (Romans and the rest of history) only inserted an 'o' to get to 'callous.' I have, and have had for a while, this dilemma rolling around my mind. There are close to seven billion people in the world- India and China can make the twisted boast that a billion persons walk or beg inside their borders. Most of the persons I know are fortunate: we have food at as many meals as we want, we have beds in heated rooms; I don't fine mine well-heated enough. That I can even make that complaint!
An argument for concern seems redundant to me- my clearest thoughts always push me to kindness. And the ideal assumes that each human life is infinitely valuable, which is also to say that each human life is worth the same as every other. They deal in potential- within himself, every human has at least the potential to consider his existence valid. Most probably do. We're not up against it yet, but there's enough disaster looming ahead of us in time that we might come up against these assumptions in a way we haven't so far. There are many possibilities that arise with ignoring global warming, for instance; the Stern Review indicates that allowing the 2 to 3 degrees centigrade rise in global temperature will correspondingly jumpstart the biggest market failure in human history. One upshot: 200 million persons permanently displaced, a good number from several of the world's largest cities, as the Greenland ice sheet and other huge blocks of ice melt and raise sea levels. These aren't the kind of natural disasters that take people's lives by their own force, though- people are going to fight over what's left as crop yields fall and the land on which they've lived is covered in water. This is just one problem, and I don't expect governments to give it more than lipservice before the effects are irreversible- apparently, the nature of this problem makes it pick up speed of its own accord. There are others: last year we had a good time with a book that gloated over oil running out and pitched a similar story, except with disaster coming from within the bounds of human activity. Unrest, combined with rogue groups in possession of nuclear weapons, adds another angle to this picture.
In light of these things I can see how we want to get our fill now, and how the Lord's Resistance Army and Darfur and other 'third-world' concerns don't really move us. But the commodification of human life makes a more willing partner to a surplus of it, with the outcome that it won't be shameful to have second-class citizens. My question is (I address this first to America on immigrants, and then to Israel, for introspection's sake) how are they chosen?
An argument for concern seems redundant to me- my clearest thoughts always push me to kindness. And the ideal assumes that each human life is infinitely valuable, which is also to say that each human life is worth the same as every other. They deal in potential- within himself, every human has at least the potential to consider his existence valid. Most probably do. We're not up against it yet, but there's enough disaster looming ahead of us in time that we might come up against these assumptions in a way we haven't so far. There are many possibilities that arise with ignoring global warming, for instance; the Stern Review indicates that allowing the 2 to 3 degrees centigrade rise in global temperature will correspondingly jumpstart the biggest market failure in human history. One upshot: 200 million persons permanently displaced, a good number from several of the world's largest cities, as the Greenland ice sheet and other huge blocks of ice melt and raise sea levels. These aren't the kind of natural disasters that take people's lives by their own force, though- people are going to fight over what's left as crop yields fall and the land on which they've lived is covered in water. This is just one problem, and I don't expect governments to give it more than lipservice before the effects are irreversible- apparently, the nature of this problem makes it pick up speed of its own accord. There are others: last year we had a good time with a book that gloated over oil running out and pitched a similar story, except with disaster coming from within the bounds of human activity. Unrest, combined with rogue groups in possession of nuclear weapons, adds another angle to this picture.
In light of these things I can see how we want to get our fill now, and how the Lord's Resistance Army and Darfur and other 'third-world' concerns don't really move us. But the commodification of human life makes a more willing partner to a surplus of it, with the outcome that it won't be shameful to have second-class citizens. My question is (I address this first to America on immigrants, and then to Israel, for introspection's sake) how are they chosen?
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Symphony orchestra
As Jaime-jin plays the viola, the rest of us made a tacit pledge to go see her play in yesterday's orchestra concert. I was torn at every fork where I met a decision. The definition of having fun is this: an engagement enough that I don't notice myself yearning for elsewhere. Of course the auditorium teemed with old white people- a few of them were less terrifying than the others. One woman had her face painted all silver: an operatic mermaid or Medea. I think I managed not to catch death. There was so little elbowroom that the ushers had to shove a few walkers and their walked between the organpipes, or corral them at a corner of the ceiling.
I wonder idly how you go and get involved to become Music Director in the first place. Sinews in this process aren't very clear. She had an aureole of white hair and the benevolence of a harvest king in all her candid shots, to be located in the program. More feverishly I wonder how you go and write music for an orchestra. Well, for starters, you learn enough that you can shoot off the lingo of artistic sound and strain it thin enough that it floats in the vapors of the symphony hall. And then? Before us we have so many crazed little Mozarts and then Beethovens seized up in an august fury. They choose to decline for the greater good of their creations. Haydn looks too stately for the fever, and Bach looks too jowly. But maybe, given that each artist gets a finite volume of charisma, there falls into place a balance and its compensations. The composer is fashioning a fantastic creature who might not even fit in the animal kingdom, and he bleeds himself for it. The creature's made to dance an absurd dance. You first glimpse life in the twitching of the violinists' bows, all together, like a school of fish swimming under a battle of navies. The cellists enact a more sober, horizontal motion. He gives his life to funding this creature; he whinges and stumbles, collapses satisfied, and kicks it in the street.
A small critic objects. How do Bach and his seventeen-odd children allow this model? But surely Philip Glass is skulking around here somewhere, sniffing out gas leaks. We sigh and say, 'and yet it moves.'
I wonder idly how you go and get involved to become Music Director in the first place. Sinews in this process aren't very clear. She had an aureole of white hair and the benevolence of a harvest king in all her candid shots, to be located in the program. More feverishly I wonder how you go and write music for an orchestra. Well, for starters, you learn enough that you can shoot off the lingo of artistic sound and strain it thin enough that it floats in the vapors of the symphony hall. And then? Before us we have so many crazed little Mozarts and then Beethovens seized up in an august fury. They choose to decline for the greater good of their creations. Haydn looks too stately for the fever, and Bach looks too jowly. But maybe, given that each artist gets a finite volume of charisma, there falls into place a balance and its compensations. The composer is fashioning a fantastic creature who might not even fit in the animal kingdom, and he bleeds himself for it. The creature's made to dance an absurd dance. You first glimpse life in the twitching of the violinists' bows, all together, like a school of fish swimming under a battle of navies. The cellists enact a more sober, horizontal motion. He gives his life to funding this creature; he whinges and stumbles, collapses satisfied, and kicks it in the street.
A small critic objects. How do Bach and his seventeen-odd children allow this model? But surely Philip Glass is skulking around here somewhere, sniffing out gas leaks. We sigh and say, 'and yet it moves.'
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Hello,
I have three mod little dots in lieu of a name or title. You don't even know what that means, how that thrills me- I'm broke for omens recently. I thought there was a really good one the other day, the kind I'd want most living in a civilization that valued haruspices and readers of birds: was cooking a pair of eggs. I broke one and two yolks came out. In the interval, I wondered whether the other would come out a twin as well, and that's it. And where it could be creepy, hormones weren't involved- these were, of course, vegetarian hormone-free cage-free free-range treehugging chickens from whom these eggs came. But then other eggs came out twins as well, something like six of the dozen, so really all the upshot there was was that my eggs came out yellower than usual.
I also have a kind of boil on the side of my face. Last night we went dancing and I would try and be smooth, or something, but the boil set out to sabotage my efforts at dancing instead of player-hating (come on, I'm white) by making faces and undercutting my comments at every turn. Were I a saint, a hero or the Ubermensch, I wouldn't even know what I was saying, and the boil would never have existed.
I also have a kind of boil on the side of my face. Last night we went dancing and I would try and be smooth, or something, but the boil set out to sabotage my efforts at dancing instead of player-hating (come on, I'm white) by making faces and undercutting my comments at every turn. Were I a saint, a hero or the Ubermensch, I wouldn't even know what I was saying, and the boil would never have existed.
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