That said,

(Tackling now the big, big subject of voting rights and democratic [a first principle being that every society ought to be as democratic as it can be] reforms--), I adopt from Mark Twain the suggestion that votes ought to be calibrated according to the competencies of the voters.  For some votes, of course, such as the ratification of constitutional amendments, or declarations of war, every vote of every citizen (at least six years old) ought to be considered equal.  [I am assuming that voting will be done via the Internet, and that no more than two weeks, for the most serious issues, should pass between canvassing and taking of a vote.]  But for votes upon matters which require specific knowledge and acquaintance with issues, academic degrees and work experience, should determine the weight of particular votes.  This is virtually to require of all citizens that a certain amount of time be spent online deliberating and attending to the affairs of government--I should think, minimally, about 4 to 12 hours a week per citizen--and that this "government work" ought to be recompensed according to its determined value and necessity.   This also is virtually to define citizenship as computer access to governmental websites.  I foresee many objections to these proposals from the slow-witted and hide-bound (particularly as regards privacy and security of communication), but I  am confident that most of these objections can be met with encryption and and other security safeguards--the same as they are for commercial and credit card transactions.  And thus,

I am perfectly amenable to the notion that I should go online 4 to 12 hours a week for the rest of my life (with my awards, degrees, and scholarships to determine the weight of my vote) to undertake the business of governing the society I live in, and to be remunerated for my participation.

Any questions?

Anent Welfare, the Stipend I have lived on for most of my Life--

Bill Weaver--knowing, with what brooding, conscious malice towards the Powers That Are, I obtained, and with what convoluted, cynical tenacity I retained, over the years, this staple of my existence--proclaimed prophetically (in the mid 70's, I think it was), loudly, in the midst of a Family Party, that I would come to regret it, and curse the day that I had ever extorted an unearned income from the State,  with all the bother that it entailed of hanging on to it.  I thought at the time that he said this, partly as a sop to his wife's nagging Jugement de petite Bourgeoise upon me, and partly as a caution to me not to get cocky.

I did not get cocky.  I lived and survived through the 80's and 90's--through AIDS, home invasions by negro gangs, and the deaths of friends--all the while retaining that ridiculous, never-adequate monthly stipend of money and food stamps.  Until 1999, the year I turned 57 and went [back] to college, and found that student loans, plus my never-ended welfare supplement, (neither of which had to be explained to, or reconciled with, the other) together, made one, quite comfortable, combined income.  I took to dining out at least three times a week, usually with a partner, always with wine.  I went on camping trips by myself.  I rode the train from Eugene to Seattle and back every so often to buy dope (i.e. marijuana, usually an ounce of bud, at $300.00 per) from the brother of a friend.  I went to concerts, and sometimes to the theater.  All while acquiring a first-rate education, that included seven glorious months in Europe, and in the course of which I learned many wonderful things, including the essentials of Geology, Astronomy, Latin, Italian and Old French.

Now about those Student Loans...I think that every civilized society that is a civilized society ought to provide educations suited to the abilities and capacities of its members.  At whose expense?  Let us say that any society which, through its institutions of learning, confers on its citizens academic degrees or awards for scholarship, is fully repaid thereby, and that, any debts or charges accruing thereto, should be paid out of the General Fund.  

You will notice, Lucy, that

Mitsuko Uchida, esteemed by many, has no place in my blog--despite her superficial, much applauded proficiency.  This is because, having heard the seemingly nice woman speak enthusiastically of the Schoenberg piano concerto, and with satisfaction of her performance of it, I actually listened to a recording of it--and to say, that I was appalled, horrified, disgusted, and filled with burning hatred and furious contempt, barely begins to describe the paroxysmal and frenzied toxicity of my reaction to that unwise exercise in esthetic tolerance.  Fortunately, I was paralyzed with astonishment, else I would surely have broken something--as, I fear, I yet might, if anything were to remind me of the dreadful, never adequately to be be obliviated experience.

Vladimir Horowitz. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Concerto №23

Alicia de Larrocha - Mozart Rondo in A minor K511

Mozart, Piano Concert Nr 25 C Dur KV 503 Rudolf Buchbinder Piano & Co...

Mozart, Piano Concert Nr 22 Es Dur KV 482 Rudolf Buchbinder Piano & C...

Reading, reading...

So on my way out of the library yesterday, having just reduced my fines to a licit amount, and scanning hurriedly (with but couple of minutes of check-out time left) the New Arrivals, I saw an appealingly middle-sized The Adventures of Henry David Thoreau by one (heretofore unknown to me) Michael Sims; which--nabbing, and hurrying, with but tens of seconds to spare, through the check-out line, and rushing out into the world with--has proved, in all my waking moments since, a perfect, quirky, scholarly delight.

Reading, Reading...And Watching Television

It's essential to understanding me to know that I'm one of that tribe of ultra-white, snails and pâté de foie gras and quiche-eating, quadrilingual, Mozart-loving, wine and beer and tea and coffee-drinking, Transcendental Americans who have never owned a television set.   So, with YouTube and Hulu and Netflix on my computer, the last several years, I've been catching up on much that escaped my attention during the last couple of decades of the last Millennium and during the first decade of this.  Recently (last week in fact) I discovered the charming TV series Angel, which began airing in the late 90's, and whose first nine episodes featured a brilliantly acted half-demon, "Doyle," portrayed by Glenn Quinn, who had been (yes, I remember) Mark, Becky's boyfriend, in the sometimes shatteringly funny series Roseanne.  So, like the intemperate Netflix addict I am, I watched all nine hour-long episodes within a couple of days.  And, still hungry, looking to see what else young Mr. Quinn had done, I found that he had died of a heroin overdose on the 3rd of December, 2002, at the age of 32.  I feel not a little like one who has just been slapped in the face.  

So, turning to library books at hand, I find that I've read all the dozen or so Maigret detective novels on the shelves at the main library (although I've just thought to check the catalog to see if there might be more in the stacks or at other branches)--and what a pleasure they all have been!--I thought I might enjoy the curiously bourgeois and Protestant young Gide's heterosexual adventures with similarly boring young Frenchwomen (after all, when at university, I did enjoy, or at least appreciate ["Belle analyse dans un style charmant!"] La Symphonie Pastorale); but I found, after a few pages of each, that I was slogging my way joylessly through them and reading them at arm's length (like one whom some nameless stench, that he doesn't want to recognize or acknowledge, is suffocating) both Isabelle and La Porte étroite):  So at last, much disappointed, expecting nothing, ready to drop it at the first glimmer of smug, heterosexual vulgarity, I picked up and started reading my final random selection, Françoise Sagan's  Musique de Scenes [goddamned accent grave is not functioning].  And Lo!--Enchantment:  What delight, nay breath-taking exhilaration, there is in good, clean, French, swift-as-lightning prose!   I would at any rate rank the eleven or twelve pages of 'Le Chat et le Casino' with any dozen or so pages of Voltaire, Mérimée, Flaubert or du Maupassant, as sheer, electric miniature perfection of telling phrase and compression.  Not even the divine Voltaire could have invented so exquisite a detail as "le parfum de l'horrible eau de cologne dont se couvrait Helena" which had given the errant husband "le plus grand mal a faire disparaître."  As one who has once or twice had to stand under a shower for hours to rid myself of the noxious odor of a cheap perfume, I am infinitely grateful to our observant authoress.

Quite Unnecessary Stupidity

For God's (Christ's fucking) sake why did it take until the year 1425   of the Common Era for the first painting using rational visual perspective to appear?  And, for yet another thing,  why did that farrago of superstition, ignorance, malevolence and mystifaction which is Christianity linger on into the fucking third millennium, disturbing the world's peace by elevating self-hatred and bigotry against others into a philosophy?

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Maria Callas - La Cenerentola - Nacqui all'affanno

I don't quite understand which of my friends' friends [on Facebook] posted this extraordinary treasure, along with the statement, "I used to think that Rossini was vulgar trash, and Maria Callas a mere shrieker--then I heard this."  It could have been me.

But seriously...

It's not that I don't take [the Gautama] Buddha seriously, or in any way disagree with anything that he actually--I know for sure--said; but I've always thought that Alice B. Toklas's and Gertrude Stein's deadpan advice to the annoying young woman who importunately besought life-guidance from them, to "commit suicide," sidesplittingly funny:  Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that Buddha explicitly said that that was the sort of advice we must never, ever dispense.  I think perhaps that the Ineffable One might, in all fairness, have phrased it--less as an adjuration not to--more as a general rule that will always have bad consequences if you disobey it.  

Like, for example, when I went to repay Douglas last night (the foodstamps that I had borrowed from him last week) in his little day-nest outside the 'Animal Shelter'--and finding him grievously afflicted with an influenza, and I said to him as I left. "Well, you should be thinking seriously of suicide."  And oh how funny that was not.  It no sooner fell from my lips than I was heartsick, and I immediately retracted it, saying, "No, I don't mean it.  That was a joke"--but watching my friend's pitiful attempt to laugh at it made it all so much worse.   My conscience has been pounding me like my own worst enemy ever since.

Catching up.

An event--if it's not a phenomenon--much blared in our faces these days is a film called Leave the World Behind, which is about the spectacular success and final breakup of a Swedish Electronic Dance Music Group (three DJ's) called Swedish House Mafia.  This was not so much news to me as the revelation of a whole appalling new world, whose existence I had surmised and anticipated but had not wished even to think about--since (sometime in the last decades of the last millennium) it crept up on me, then dawned on me, that the vast majority (of the poor, culturally impoverished, subliterate, and not very smart aficionados of popular "culture," which is most people) attribute musicality and originality, even genius, to disc jockeys.  God the implications of just that.  

But if you want to poke a little deeper into this undead cadaver, you discover such throbbing gobbets as "House Music," which is one kind of Electronic Dance Music, which is a specific kind of Electronica, the kind that is meant to be "danced" to.  Now let's just stop for a moment and consider what is meant by "dancing" in this sense.  

Anyway, what's interesting, in the sense of something being given away, or unconsciously betrayed, is the fact that all the reviewers, without exception, who feel something positive about the live "concerts" given (staged? perpetrated?) by these three disc jockeys, describe it as an "emotion," powerful and noteworthy because it is shared by a very large number of Electronic Music Dancers.  No fooling.