Ah!

Behold! George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, as painted by Peter Paul Rubens in 1625. If you had questions, and this portrait doesn't answer them, you're an imbecile.

I just realized that Rick Perry and/or Michele Bachmann is/are likely to be the next President of the United States!

Oh my fucking god....

Taking Care of Anatole

Being "content with that which comes with little effort" is one thing--and being a dead weight on society and its support services is another. Having just this last month wrested my food stamps out of the unwilling and non-feasant hands of an inimical case-worker, and while (at no cost to me) my apartment house, the Weinberg Hale, is being repainted and spruced up by barely intelligible ethnic workers from places like Truk and Bairiki, I was summoned this week to a general conference of those who, like me, have our otherwise unthinkably high rents paid by basically Jewish private charities, and told to have ready proofs of income (Social Security), food stamp allotment (faxed!), and list placement status with 'Section Eight' (Housing for the Elderly). About the last, I had entirely forgot--not given it a thought for a year or so. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I called the Section Eight phone number, and was politely and promptly informed that I am indeed on the "active" list, and should, sometime within the next year, be getting a proposal for a one-bedroom apartment in Kaneohe, on the windward side.

Then, just yesterday, my Medical Insurance Agent from OhanaCare called and got me into a new program with Dental Care--which, after a six months' lapse, will begin next month. I'm glad I didn't hang up on him. As we talked face to face yesterday, we discovered that we both know (love and revere) Dr. Chanida, and though he's younger than me by thirty years or so, Kali (such is his funny, somewhat blasphemous, Hawaiian first name) and I have both been diagnosed with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, and take the same medicine (amphetamines) for it.

So--my long life appears to be lengthening .

The Lessons of History

The discovery, so late in life, of my real direct roots with the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers of America has led me over the last several months to some very serious, intensive reading about pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary America--in the course of which I have discovered: Truths about the nature and character of the American Spirit, and about the character and substance of my own Mind.

Souvenirs for the Prurient Swine who Drink our Blood and Eat our Flesh

The Real Purpose of the War in Afghanistan

The remarkable thing about the photographs shown here en montage is that they were taken by U.S. soldiers themselves, after they had poured out of their night-raiding NATO helicopter, at about 1:30 in the morning, on the 26th of December, 2010, and entered the house in Kunar province where the nine boys, ages 12 to 18, lay sleeping, rounded them up, handcuffed them, and shot them dead. "Their guns kill without a noise." Then they took pictures of the boys' bloodied faces. As, I believe, sadistic serial murderers are wont to do with their victims: John Wayne Gacy called the accruing corpses in the crawl spaces of his house "trophies." But if we acknowledge that these sickeningly well-organized photographs are indeed, as they appear to be, mementos--who are they for? Not the soldiers themselves, I'll warrant. Nor even for their next in command. In fact, the meticulous way they're arranged and provided for suggests several "people" (cautionary quotes because I think they could very well be, as Louis C.K. says, flesh-eating lizards from outer space) with a liking for snuff porn, of at least the rank of General. Maybe even Chiefs of Staff. Maybe even Presidential Rank: There's nothing really very nice about Barrack Obama--no indeed, nothing at all--and it is, after all, his war. One can't help thinking about Hitler in his inglorious, infinitely protracted defeat, watching the movies that he'd had made of his generals (the ones who'd tried to kill him, and who didn't immediately commit suicide) being strangled to death with piano wire, over and over, for days at a time--his minions in the S.S. knew the Führer's (ahem) tastes, and could make a man's dying last three days, easy. And these photographs are like that, bespeaking prurience and lust, and the kind of sadism that's going, at some point, to have somebody's hot spunk shot all over them.

Should child-butcherer General Petraeus be strangled in Anders Fogh Rasmussen's Guts?

Or drowned in his blood?

António Damásio 'Self Comes to Mind' (and more Proust)

Just finished reading, then sat through several of Señor Damásio's charming and instructive lectures on the same subject on YouTube. In person, I find myself frankly and cruelly compelled to say, Our Author ineluctably reminds me of Mortimer Mouse, slight and squeaky, and utterly possessed by his subject--with which, of course, there can be no quarrel; not even with the 'Autobiographical Self,' somewhat over-compendious though I do find it, and though I might have preferred in honor of the living memory of the dead Sam D'Allessandro to have called it more súpply and simply the 'Narrative Self.'

But no, what the hell, it is in just such cavils and hesitations and stickings that our real selves and deepest convictions reveal themselves. Okay (we'll get back to mostly unexceptionable, polite and squeaky Señor Mortimer Mouse): First let's settle some hash with Marcel Proust and the 'Sonate pour Violon et Piano de Vinteuil,' which Swann and assorted convives are all the time hearing being performed chez Verdurin by the Young Pianist all by himself--even when he begins, as perforce he must, by rendering the opening "tremolos basses du violon," with no help from a violinist; one emotional "phrase" of which virtually delivers Swann into the arms of Odette de Crécy, every time he hears it or even thinks about it. Got that? Not only is Proust's description of the music perfectly flat-line appallingly stupid, and sickening in his apparent satisfaction at having so successfully rendered so ineffable a subject (which I, for one, would not say was at all successfully rendered), but he nowhere "gets" how perfectly dumb-shit it is to have the Young Pianist play the Vinteuil 'Sonate pour Violon et Piano' all by his stupid self. The French are so stupid when they talk about music. They really approach the imbecility suggested by Steve Martin when he said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

Back to Self Comes to Mind: Though dry, it does a fair job of estimating the relative importance of the untrammeled Narrative Self to Culture, and of Culture to the Mind. But:

In over-estimating the importance of the Homeric poems Our Author quite neglects the even more significant and thousands of years older Gilgamesh. And, in order not to rock the boat of what is currently deemed to be Tolerably Politically Correct Views of Creeping Evolution of the Development (By no means the Acquisition) of Language, he imagines (a kind of) music preceding speech, in a grotesque fantasy read-down of the Great Leap Forward--that only lacks, for utter noisome idiocy, a 'Dance of the Neanderthal Flower-Maidens.'