Mr. Yang admitted that in the 1980s and early ’90s, before emigrating to Australia and then moving to New Zealand to teach at a university, he studied and taught at two Chinese educational institutions run by the People’s Liberation Army, China’s armed forces.
Hemingway Writing Advice
Posted: November 13, 2017 Filed under: Florida, Hemingway, writing, writing advice from other people 2 Comments
one of the descendants of Hemingway’s messed-up, inbred, extra-toe cats in Key West
In a 1935 Esquire piece, Hemingway, already playing the preening dickhead, gives some writing advice that I think is clear-eyed and well-expressed.
Writing room in Hem house in Key West
The setup is a young man has come to visit him in Key West, and Hemingway has given him the nickname Maestro because he played the violin.
MICE: How can a writer train himself?
Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exact it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had. Thatʼs a five finger exercise. Mice: All right.
Y.C.: Then get in somebody elseʼs head for a change If I bawl you out try to figure out what Iʼm thinking about as well as how you feel about it. If Carlos curses Juan think what both their sides of it are. Donʼt just think who is right. As a man things are as they should or shouldnʼt be. As a man you know who is right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and enforce them. As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.
Mice: All right.
Y.C.: Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Donʼt be thinking what youʼre going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When youʼre in town stand outside the theatre and see how people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people.
Mice: Do you think I will be a writer?
Y.C.: How the hell should I know? Maybe youʼve got no talent. Maybe you canʼt feel for other people. Youʼve got some good stories if you can write them. Mice: How can I tell?
Y.C.: Write. If you work at it five years and you find youʼre no good you can just as well shoot yourself then as now.
Mice: I wouldnʼt shoot myself.
Y.C.: Come around then and Iʼll shoot you.
Mice: Thanks.
This article is behind a paywall at Esquire but I found it reprinted on the website of Diana Drake, who has story by credit on the film What Women Want.
The story of Profumo
Posted: November 12, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, heroes Leave a commentIn the early 1960s Michael Profumo was the British minister of defense. He was also banging a party girl who was also banging a Russian spy.
at like big swinging sex parties.
He had to resign, disgraced. But he handled it well. Wife stuck by him. Spent the next forty years cleaning toilets and working in East End soup kitchens.
Shortly after his resignation Profumo began to work as a volunteer cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London, and continued to work there for the rest of his life. Peter Hitchens has written that Profumo “vanished into London’s East End for 40 years, doing quiet good works”. Profumo “had to be persuaded to lay down his mop and lend a hand running the place”, eventually becoming Toynbee Hall’s chief fundraiser, and used his political skills and contacts to raise large sums of money. All this work was done as a volunteer, since Profumo was able to live on his inherited wealth. His wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, also devoted herself to charity until her death in 1998. In the eyes of most commentators, Profumo’s charity work redeemed his reputation. His friend, social reform campaigner Lord Longford said he “felt more admiration [for Profumo] than [for] all the men I’ve known in my lifetime”.
Right before he died the Queen invited him to dinner and had him sit next to her.
Like forty years of solid, humble repentance.
From his obituary:
Profumo’s dedication and dignity won him enormous admiration from people in all walks of life. The author Peter Hennessy, a fellow trustee at a charitable foundation associated with Toynbee Hall, described him as “one of the nicest and most exemplary people I have met in public or political life; full of the old, decent Tory virtues”. Margaret Thatcher called him “one of our national heroes”. “Everybody here worships him”, a helper at Toynbee Hall was once quoted as saying. “We think he’s a bloody saint.”
The scum of the earth
Posted: November 10, 2017 Filed under: war Leave a comment
(c) English Heritage, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
A French army is composed very differently from ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class — no matter whether your son or my son — all must march; but our friends — I may say it in this room — are the very scum of the earth. People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling — all stuff — no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children — some for minor offences — many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it really is wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.
Christopher Plummer played Wellington in the 1970 movie Waterloo, an expensive flop:
Final costs were over £12 million (GBP) (equivalent to about U.S. $38.3 million in 1970), making Waterloo one of the most expensive movies ever made, for its time. Had the movie been filmed in the West, costs might have been as much as three times this. Mosfilm contributed more than £4 million of the costs, nearly 17,000 soldiers of the Soviet Army, including a full brigade of Soviet cavalry, and a host of engineers and labourers to prepare the battlefield in the rolling farmland outside Uzhhorod, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union).
To recreate the battlefield authentically, the Soviets bulldozed away two hills, laid five miles of roads, transplanted 5,000 trees, sowed fields of rye, barley and wildflowers and reconstructed four historic buildings. To create the mud, more than six miles of underground irrigation piping was specially laid. Most of the battle scenes were filmed using five Panavision cameras simultaneously – from ground level, from 100-foot towers, from a helicopter, and from an overhead railway built right across the location.
Happened to tape the film onto a VHS off Boston’s TV 38 in my boyhood and thought it was pretty good.
is a very compelling book on the topic. Another great one by Howarth.
Wellington said a bunch of cool quotes:
As quoted in A History of Warfare (1968) by Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein: “Sir Winston Churchill once told me of a reply made by the Duke of Wellington, in his last years, when a friend asked him: “If you had your life over again, is there any way in which you could have done better?” The old Duke replied: “Yes, I should have given more praise.”
The phrase “scum of the earth” turns up in some translations of 1 Corinthians 4:13.
On this Veterans’ Day I like to remember unlikely veterans like Larry David:
He wrote a funny essay about his experience in the Army Reserve here. And:
He was drafted into the United States Army in 1970. He trained as a medic and was stationed in West Germany. After being honorably discharged he used the benefits of the G.I. Bill to enroll in the California Institute of the Arts, and received a BAdegree in drama from The Evergreen State College in 1975.
Thomas Ricks of course has a Veteran’s Day guest post worth reading.
Albums
Posted: November 10, 2017 Filed under: music, the California Condition Leave a commentThis album was recorded in Ireland:
from wiki:
Although the band liked the demo, it was difficult for them to record the song. Bassist Adam Clayton said, “At the time it sounded like a foreign language, whereas now we understand how it works”. The arrangement, with two time signature shifts and frequent chord changes, was rehearsed many times, but the group struggled to get a performance they liked. According to co-producer Daniel Lanois, “that was the science project song. I remember having this massive schoolhouse blackboard, as we call them. I was holding a pointer, like a college professor, walking the band through the chord changes like a fucking nerd. It was ridiculous.” Co-producer Brian Eno estimates that half of the album sessions were spent trying to record a suitable version of “Where the Streets Have No Name”. The band worked on a single take for weeks, but as Eno explained, that particular version had a lot of problems with it and the group continued trying to fix it up. Through all of their work, they had gradually replaced each instrument take until nothing remained from the original performance.
So much time had been spent on “screwdriver work” that Eno thought it would be best to start from scratch. His idea was to “stage an accident” and have the song’s tapes erased. He said that this was not to force abandonment of the song, but rather that it would be more effective to start again with a fresh performance. At one point, Eno had the tapes cued up and ready to be recorded over, but this erasure never took place; according to engineer Flood, fellow engineer Pat McCarthy returned to the control room and upon seeing Eno ready to erase the tapes, dropped the tray of tea he was carrying and physically restrained Eno.
This album was recored in Joshua Tree, CA:
Weighing the heart against a feather
Posted: November 8, 2017 Filed under: how to live Leave a comment
find the image of having your heart weighed against a feather after you die very powerful.
How do you do on the 42 Negative Confessions?:
The following are translations by E. A. Wallis Budge.
42 Negative Confessions (Papyrus of Ani)
From the Papyrus of Ani.
-
I have not committed sin.
-
I have not committed robbery with violence.
-
I have not stolen.
-
I have not slain men and women.
-
I have not stolen grain.
-
I have not purloined offerings.
-
I have not stolen the property of the gods.
-
I have not uttered lies.
-
I have not carried away food.
-
I have not uttered curses.
-
I have not committed adultery.
-
I have made none to weep.
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I have not eaten the heart [i.e., I have not grieved uselessly, or felt remorse].
-
I have not attacked any man.
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I am not a man of deceit.
-
I have not stolen cultivated land.
-
I have not been an eavesdropper.
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I have slandered [no man].
-
I have not been angry without just cause.
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I have not debauched the wife of any man.
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I have not debauched the wife of [any] man. (repeats the previous affirmation but addressed to a different god).
-
I have not polluted myself.
-
I have terrorized none.
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I have not transgressed [the Law].
-
I have not been wroth.
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I have not shut my ears to the words of truth.
-
I have not blasphemed.
-
I am not a man of violence.
-
I am not a stirrer up of strife (or a disturber of the peace).
-
I have not acted (or judged) with undue haste.
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I have not pried into matters.
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I have not multiplied my words in speaking.
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I have wronged none, I have done no evil.
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I have not worked witchcraft against the King (or blasphemed against the King).
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I have never stopped [the flow of] water.
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I have never raised my voice (spoken arrogantly, or in anger).
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I have not cursed (or blasphemed) God.
-
I have not acted with evil rage.
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I have not stolen the bread of the gods.
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I have not carried away the khenfu cakes from the spirits of the dead.
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I have not snatched away the bread of the child, nor treated with contempt the god of my city.
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I have not slain the cattle belonging to the god.
Definite no from me on 31. I’m always prying into matters! Something for me to work on.
I wonder how E. A. Wallis Budge himself would do on this quiz:
Dispatch from Down Under
Posted: November 7, 2017 Filed under: Australia, New Zealand Leave a comment
Asked our correspondent Barcelona Jim in Sydney to sum up of what’s up down there. He writes:
Australasian Politics has had a dose of Trump style mix ups, send ups, controversies, ejections and elections and chaotic decisions in this last week.
In a short period that involves New Zealand as much as it involves scandals, the new Prime Minister of NZ was told by the media she had won the election whilst painting her back fence in her track pants.
Ardern got straight to work, looking seeming bored when receiving a congratulatory call from President Trump, but had an enjoyable conversation with a journalist phoning her team to ask the correct pronunciation of “Ardern” – only to get straight through to the PM herself to have a genial chat.Meanwhile – Australia is in an uproar about a long forgotten amendment to our constitution, Article 22.This states that members of parliament cannot hold dual citizenship.Beginning with a right-wing party calling out a left-wing member the news achieved enough attention to call the deputy PM of Australia, Barnaby Joyce, along with several others into question.
(Barnaby seems like a real prize pig)
In a decision handed out yesterday by the high court of Australia, Barnaby and four other senators are foisted out, leaving the opposing party with no longer a majority.Meanwhile the previously mentioned party organised a federal police raid on the opposing party’s Australian Worker’s Union, but was tipped off by media leading to a Federal Investigation and a resigning of at least one staffer and possibly a leading member.Many members, senators, leaders of parliament are in a current flutter of back-stabbing, investigations, constitutional rediscovery.If this sounds confusing… It is.Best of wishes to Mueller.
Asked for a follow up with a summary of the Manus issue:
Meanwhile, in New Zealand:
Charlotte Graham in the New York Times reports that a former member of the Chinese Communist Party got elected to Parliament:
He said he had not named the Chinese military institutions on his application for New Zealand citizenship, and had instead listed “partner institutions” as his employers, because that was what the Chinese “system” had told him to do.
Mr. Yang conceded that he had taught English to spies, but said he had never been a spy himself, was no longer a member of the Communist Party, and had been contracted and paid only as a so-called civilian officer.
Mr. Yang has not been officially investigated in New Zealand or charged with espionage.
But Nicholas Eftimiades, a former officer with the Central Intelligence Agency with extensive experience on China matters, said the title of civilian officer was a fluid one in China.
Mr. Eftimiades, now a lecturer at Penn State Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, said officers moved seamlessly between military and civilian assignments to include Chinese army units and work in the defense industry, think tanks and universities.
Is China getting its spies elected to parliaments? Gotta respect the move if so.
Will World War III be an Info Wars?
Has it already begun?
And:
Plus you must follow Australia’s Parliament House on Twitter:
That’s what’s happening in Australasia
where the constellations change but the mind stays the same.
World’s biggest Jeep
Posted: November 7, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, Middle East Leave a comment
That’s owned by Hamad bin Hamdan Al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. He also once carved his name in kilometer-long letters on his own island:
(It’s since been erased.)
Bases in the desert
Posted: November 6, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment(vid taken by me during a demonstration on a tour of Fort Irwin)
From 1942-1991 the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines built enormous bases in the desert.
Partly this was to train for the coming war in North Africa.
Indio, California. A half-ton jeep rolling over the desert at the desert training center June 1942.
Farm Security Administration Office of War Information/Library of Congress. Source.
Fort Irwin, built in 1940, deactivated 1971, returned to active status 1981.
China Lake Naval Weapons Center, which is, to use the tiredest comparison in American geography, bigger than Rhode Island.
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twenty Nine Palms, growing and growing since 1949
Edwards AFB. Those are just some of the ones in California alone.
We built the bases, and then we found reasons to have wars in the desert.
Is that interesting?
Melancholy
Posted: November 5, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, presidents Leave a comment
Put it to the test; leave a king entirely alone quite at leisure, with nothing to satisfy his senses, no care to occupy the mind, with complete leisure to think about himself, and you will see that a king without diversion is a very wretched man. Therefore such a thing is carefully avoided, and the persons of kings are invariably attended by a great number of people concerned to see that diversion comes after affairs of state, watching over their leisure hours to provide pleasures and sport so that there should never be an empty moment. In other words they are surrounded by people who are incredibly careful to see that the king should never be alone and able to think about himself, because they know that, king though he is, he will be miserable if he does think about it.”
from Pascal’s Pensées, quoted by Laszlo Foldenyi in his book about melancholy, quoted by Dan Wang!
Mama Irene Mural
Posted: November 4, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
The street art in my neighborhood is good.
There’s always something wild at the Taschen store.
This one I walk by all the time, and I got to wondering, who is Mama Irene?
Some local Latina community leader? Is she wearing gardening clothes? A pioneering urban farmer?
Seen here with my colleague Ted for scale:
Turns out, this is the mother of EDM impresario and Electric Daisy Carnival founder Pasquale Rotella:
from EDM.com
The mural was unveiled after Mama Irene’s funeral at nearby Hollywood Forever cemetery. It was commissioned by Kaskade.
Raddon is married and has three children. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[30]
Mystery of the Joshua Tree Missing Hikers
Posted: November 3, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Early on Thursday, July 27, these two people entered Joshua Tree National Park.
At 4:50 pm that day, there was a ping from the guy’s cell phone that put them in the park.
That was a darn hot day in the park:
On Friday, July 28, says The Hi Desert Star, the person who took care of the Air BnB where they were supposed to be checked out found their stuff. So they started a search.
Their car was found near the Maze Loop trailhead, one of the closest trails to the West Entrance of the park:
With terrain:
Here it is on Tom Harrison’s map:
For perspective, here is the whole park, which is, in our nation’s tiredest comparison, almost as big as Rhode Island:
All the more tragic to think these folks weren’t too far from a road. The Maze Loop looks like this:
It’s trippy and weird and spooky and cool:
The trail is pretty well marked but it’s easy to get lost if it’s a hundred degrees and you’re out of water.
All day that Saturday, July 29, there were helicopters over the park.
Walking along the northern edge of the park that evening I ran into a search and rescue team, who told me the troubling tale of the missing hikers. They had crossed up from the trailhead looking for these folks. They’d found a water bottle, weren’t sure it was related.
There was strange weather in the desert around this time. On Sunday July 30 a monsoon blew through:
An interesting detail that emerged, again from the Hi Desert Star, that the young man had been out to the park a few weeks before, on “a scouting trip,” with a friend who could now not be found because he was in Japan.
“Interesting,” I thought.
Perhaps someday they would be found alive like this lost couple.
Time passed.
The search was downgraded from “search and rescue” to “search and recovery.”
But the persistent searchers, including the missing man’s father, kept at it.
On Sunday, Oct. 15:
The cause of death was a twist: gunshot wounds.
A curious case.
The absolute source I would want to get on this story would be Desert Oracle, and wouldn’t you know it, Desert Oracle radio came in with a strong take. Let me encourage you to listen to Desert Oracle, Episode 12, to which I award a spontaneous Helytimes Prize for Best Podcast Episode, California Division, 2017.
You can subscribe to Desert Oracle print quarterly here, and at $25, you’re crazy not to.
Water Dreaming at Kalipinya
Posted: November 2, 2017 Filed under: art history, Australia Leave a comment
Says the 2001 NYTimes obituary of painter Johnny Warangkua Tjupurrula:
He died a penniless alcoholic. In 1997 one of his paintings, ”Water Dreaming at Kalipinya,” which he had sold in 1972 for $75, changed hands at a Sotheby’s auction in Melbourne for $263,145, setting a record for any Aboriginal work of art. Mr. Tjupurrula’s request for 4 percent of the sale price was refused by both seller and buyer.
Not cool! From a 2010 Smithsonian article by Arthur Lubow:
The Wilkersons’ costliest board was the 1972 painting Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, a dazzling patchwork of stippled, dotted and crosshatched shapes, bought in 2000 for some $220,000—more than twice the price it had been auctioned for only three years earlier. The painting was done by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, an original member of the Papunya cooperative and one of its most celebrated. Sadly, the artist himself had long been overlooked; in 1997, an Australian journalist found Warangkula, by then old and homeless, sleeping along with other Aboriginal people in a dry riverbed near Alice Springs. Though he reportedly received less than $150 for his best-known painting, the publicity surrounding the 1997 sale revived his career somewhat and he soon resumed painting. Warangkula died in a nursing home in 2001.
Here’s his 1972 painting Potato Dreaming:
Considering John Kelly
Posted: October 31, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history, heroes, history, statues 2 Comments
Compelled by John Kelly, Boston Marine turned Trump babysitter / White House chief of staff.
John Kelly, like Robert E. Lee, is brave, self-sacrificing, dignified, and wrong.
It’s possible to be noble and admirable and honorable and really wrong. Like, a force for wrongness.
Watched his entire press conference re: presidential respect for fallen soldiers. Found it very moving. He mentions walking for hours in Arlington National Cemetery to collect his thoughts. Maybe he should send the president.
In one of the infinite amazing connections of American history Arlington National Cemetery was built on the grounds of Lee’s wife’s house.
INTERVIEWER
What about General Robert E. Lee?
FOOTE
The single greatest mistake of the war by any general on either side was made by Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, when he sent Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s divisions across that open field, nearly a mile wide, against guns placed on a high ridge and troops down below them, with skirmishers out front. There was no chance it would succeed. Longstreet told him that beforehand and Lee proceeded to prove him right. Having made this greatest of all mistakes, Lee rode out on the field and met those men coming back across the field— casualties were well over fifty percent—and said, It’s all my fault. He said it then on the field; he said it afterwards, after he’d gotten across the Potomac; he said it in his official report a month later. He said, I may have asked more of my men than men should be asked to give. He’s a noble man, noble beyond comparison.
(from the Paris Review interview with Shelby Foote)
Henry Lee, Robert E.’s father
Why did people love Robert E. Lee so much? He was handsome, for one thing. Here’s Elizabeth Brown Pryor going off in her Six Encounters With Lincoln:
“Matinee-idol looks.”
They liked Lee too because he reminded of them of George Washington.
Is this interesting?: two of the most prominent American slaveholders, Washington and Lee, only owned slaves because they’d married rich women.
Lee’s wife was Martha Washington’s great granddaughter.
Anyway: whatever, it’s time for some new statues!
John Kelly made his most recent remarks about Lee on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News.
During that appearance, Kelly says something not true, that the events in the indictment came from well before Manafort knew Donald Trump. Not true, if we believe Slate’s helpful timeline. Manafort and Trump have known each other since the ’80s.
Didn’t Manafort live in Trump Tower off the money he made as a lobbyist for dictators?
Kelly also says that the part about where got wrong what Fredrica Wilson said at the FBI dedication, that part “we should just let that go.”
Also brooooo! What is American history up to the Civil War but a history of compromises?
Happened to read an interview in PRISM, a publication of the Center For Complex Operations, with John Kelly yesterday. He’s talking about his career leading the Southern Command, ie Central and South America.
This was not my experience talking to Latin Americans. More than one South American has pointed out to me that in their countries, “the troops” are not assumed to be good guys or on your side.
Didn’t love this:
We need more Marine generals like Smedley Butler:
I wish John Kelly would also remember the time Henry Lee put himself in harm’s way to defend the freedom of the press.
During the civil unrest in Baltimore, Maryland in 1812, Lee received grave injuries while helping to resist an attack on his friend, Alexander Contee Hanson, editor of the Baltimore newspaper, The Federal Republican on July 27, 1812.
Hanson was attacked by a Democratic-Republican mob because his paper opposed the War of 1812. Lee and Hanson and two dozen other Federalists had taken refuge in the offices of the paper. The group surrendered to Baltimore city officials the next day and were jailed.
Laborer George Woolslager led a mob that forced its way into the jail, removed the Federalists, beating and torturing them over the next three hours. All were severely injured, and one Federalist, James Lingan, died.
Lee suffered extensive internal injuries as well as head and face wounds, and even his speech was affected. His observed symptoms were consistent with what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Need to learn more about this!
Maybe a statue of James Lingan, outside Prospect House?:
source: wiki, photo by AgnosticPreachersKid
One last bit from Shelby Foote:
Bud, history always has bias! You don’t think this guy
thought Lee was cool, if only because they looked alike?
Does Ta-Nahesi Coates get tired of having to say the same stuff over and over?:
“History’s history,” says John Kelly on The Ingraham Angle. Is it?
Personally, when I think about John Kelly’s life, I’m prepared to cut him some slack, but man. I can’t say he “gets it.”
Thomas Ricks, as always, has the take:
A must read.The comment of Kelly’s that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves is when he half-jokingly suggests (around 26:41)
that they’re gonna replace the Washington Monument with Andy Warhol.
Brain surgery
Posted: October 29, 2017 Filed under: brain Leave a comment
(from The Economist)
isn’t there something obscene about the human brain studying itself?
Looks like Karl Ove Knausgaard looked into this theme, with pictures, for The New York Times.
(Talk about a brain studying itself!)
Boston (England)
Posted: October 27, 2017 Filed under: Boston, New England, writing Leave a comment
There’s a lot of crime fiction about Boston, America, but is there any about Boston, UK? I went looking and was directed to the works of Colin Watson, who writes about a fictional town, Flaxborough, which is based on Boston (UK version)?
I can’t say it was totally compelling to me but cheers to Colin Watson.
Watson was the first person to successfully sue Private Eye for libel, for an article in issue 25 when he objected to being described as: “the little-known author who . . . was writing a novel, very Wodehouse but without the jokes”. He was awarded £750.
Trump: Our First Mexican President
Posted: October 26, 2017 Filed under: Mexico, the California Condition, Wonder Trail Leave a commentAn inflammatory clickbait headline but I have a point.
Excerpt from Trump’s presidential announcement speech, as transcribed by Time:
Did he say “they’re rapists” or “their rapists,” as in “they’re bringing crime, their rapists”?
The latter seems to me the kind of way Trump talks. We in the media (everybody) hurt the anti-Trump cause if we do anything that could remotely be considered exaggerating. It’s not necessary, the person who gave this speech obvi shouldn’t be President, whether he said “they’re rapists” or “their rapists.” Why not give him any margin calls to avoid accusations of unfairness?
Whatever — the point is Trump’s candidacy was driven by fear of Mexico / Mexicans, South America and Latin America.
Concern that the Anglo-Protestant tradition of America was about to be overwhelmed or subsumed or at least weakened by a Mexico-Catholic-Hispanic tradition is as old as Anglo-Protestants and Hispanic-Catholics sharing a continent I reckon. It’s a theme in this book, for instance.
My suggestion here is that what could be more Latin American than electing a bullying gangster/businessman who talks like this?:
Trump might build a wall, but Latin American style politics has come to us.
My Chilean buddy mentioned that when he saw Trump at the U. N., he thought, “oh he’s Chavez.”
One of the reasons why Mexico sucks is their presidents have been guys like Trump: nepotistic bully-gangsters who care about nothing but enriching themselves, their family, their idiot sons-in-law, and creating enough chaos and division that the “order” appears necessary.
Pinochet of Chile
Something I tried to get at in my book
is that Los Angeles is at least as much a part of the South American world as it is a part of the Anglo world.
It’s the northernmost city in South America, as much a part of this world:
and this world
as it is of this world
and this world
This doesn’t have to be bad, duh. It’s part of why Los Angeles is one of the most dynamic, exciting, creative, and appealing places in the country. (That along with trans-Pacific partnership, which Trump is also fouling up.)
Trump voters should be less worried about Latin Americans coming here, and more worried about a Latin American-style president.
Worry less about Mexicans, and more a breakdown into Mexican style corruption, disregard for rule of law, one party rule, and a generally more cruel, ugly, hopeless and depressing politics.
Worry less about Mexicans coming here, and more about the United States becoming more like Mexico.
Trump voters should be doing a lotta things different, if you ask me!
Did not know
Posted: October 26, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, music, women Leave a comment
That one Jody Miller, no relation to Roger Miller, did a response to his song “King Of The Road” entitled “Queen Of The House.”
Carey
Posted: October 25, 2017 Filed under: food Leave a comment
INTERVIEWER
How did you manage the historical setting?
CAREY
Well, I’m a bloody colonial, aren’t I? London is not my place and Britain is not my country. How was I going to have the authority to invent London in 1837? First I had to know something that’s different from what anybody ever thought about the period. I couldn’t steal from literature even if I wanted to—for the most part metropolitan literature takes the place for granted. So I spent a lot of time reading about people visiting London from abroad. They’re going to see things that would not occur to the Englishman. There was a German visitor to London, for instance, who spends all this time describing this weird English breakfast that turns out to be toast. That was terrific—the familiar defamiliarized. I was trying to imagine—what was it really like? We generally think of London in that period as gloomy and sooty and filthy, but in the New York Public Library I found an account by an American visitor who described London as ablaze with light. That’s not how anyone thinks of that period, but if you came from Australia or America at that time it was bright. I thought, that’s it—this story will start at night, and it will be blazing bright. That’s the first way in which I can colonize London for myself, take imaginative possession of the territory.
from the Paris Review interview with Peter Carey
On My Mind!
Posted: October 24, 2017 Filed under: on my mind Leave a commentThe Scarecrow Festival
is underway up in Cambria.
What the hell are we doing in Niger?
This is where four US soldiers died. Why?
What the hell were our boys doing waiting for the damn Frogs?! The damn French Air Force has to bail out our boys? When we have the best goddamn Air Force in the world? We better anyway, we’re paying for it to the tune of $132 billion a year.
For that matter, what are the French doing in Niger? They haven’t exactly cloaked themselves in honor in the region:
Following the 1885 Berlin conference during which colonial powers outlined the division of Africa into colonial spheres, French military efforts to conquer existing African states were intensified in all French colonies including Niger. This included several military expeditions including the Voulet Chanoine Mission, which became notorious for pillaging, looting, raping and killing many local civilians on its passage. On 8 May 1899, in retaliation for the resistance of queen Sarraounia, captain Voulet and his men murdered all the inhabitants of the village of Birni-N’Konni in what is regarded as one of the worst massacres in French colonial history. French military expeditions met great resistance from several ethnic groups, especially Hausa and Tuareg groups.
If you’re gonna be in Niger, you want to be near the river.
Source taken by diasUndKompott.
The rest of it looks rough!
Dinner in the desert
Attended a fun dinner.
Book I gave up on
Incredible title. But what the hell is this guy talking about?
Bought it after I read this bit in Girard’s NY Times obituary:
Professor Girard’s central idea was that human motivation is based on desire. People are free, he believed, but seek things in life based on what other people want. Their imitation of those desires, which he termed mimesis, is imitated by others in turn, leading to escalating and often destructive competition.
His first work, published in French in 1961 and in English in 1965 as “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,” introduced this idea through readings of classic novels. Over time, the idea has been used to explain financial bubbles, where things of little intrinsic value are increasingly bid up in the hope of financial gain. It has also been cited to explain why people unsatisfied by high-status jobs pursue them anyway.
And:
Mr. Thiel, of PayPal, said that he was a student at Stanford when he first encountered Professor Girard’s work, and that it later inspired him to quit an unfulfilling law career in New York and go to Silicon Valley.
He gave Facebook its first $100,000 investment, he said, because he saw Professor Girard’s theories being validated in the concept of social media.
“Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic,” he said. “Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it’s about our natures.”
Scene in Los Angeles
A guy at the East Side Food Festival was demonstrating a machine that’s basically a Keurig for marijuana.
How Many
copies of the Blu-Ray of Baywatch Extended Cut does Paramount expect to sell?
Xi
From Wiki:
In May 1966, Xi’s secondary education was cut short by the Cultural Revolution, when all secondary classes were halted for students to criticise and fight their teachers.
Never forget how crazy the world is.
Xi as a boy, left.
The President of China sent his daughter to attend Harvard. That, to me, seems like a good example of American “soft power.”
Xi’s wife is famous singer Peng Liyuan.
Excerpt
and then Bobby added the “S”
(from Vulture’s oral history of SNL’s David S. Pumpkins sketch.)
What?
Somehow this was up on my phone when I picked it up.
Atlas
Satisfied with my purchase of a new atlas
I’m always trying to get new views.
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