What was I thinking?

Well, she'll always be Janet (Dammit, Janet!) to me.  So, when Ms. Sarandon sent me an email asking $10 for Bernie Sanders, which I discovered in my morning mail, I got out my bankcard and sent it to her.  Then I read my spiritual alter ego Ted Rall's blog about Sanders, which if I had done first, I probably wouldn't have sent Ms. S. her money, because I would have known--O Horror--that Sanders supports the use of genocidal, baby-killing drones missiles.  

On Friday, January 23, 2016, the Secretary of War, Ashton Baldwin ("Ash") Carter announced the permanent deployment of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to Iraq, to complete and perpetuate the Torment, Murder, and Despoiling of the Innocent Civilians of Iraq, whom this Turd in a $5,000 Italian suit calls "Terrorists."

God damn the United States of America.  God damn the Secretary of "Defense."  God damn the 101st Airborne Division.  May these sadistic idiots meet swift, painful death in earth, and everlasting hellfire in the hereafter.

GOD SAVE THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN OF IRAQ!

I was having one of those crowded, busy dreams in the middle of the night last night...

When suddenly, standing right beside me was Bob Farrar, my best of friends, whom I hadn't seen since he died of bone cancer in March of 1999.  He said he'd been living in the Piedmont (where we were, or seemed to be) for the past half dozen years, and he invited me to come to dinner (roast goose) with him next week and to share an old bottle of Barolo.

"The Sheikh"

Is a 1919 novel by Edith Maude Hull, commonly described, at the time my grandmother bought the hardbound copy that I, as a ten-year-old-boy, read thirty-three years later, as "shocking" and "poisonously salacious."  I thought so too. That is why I read it.  My mother, passing through the room where I was reading it, stopped and said, "Well, that is probably the most passionate book ever written."  Her italics.  

In recent decades, the novel has been strongly criticized for its central plot element: the idea that rape leads to love.  But no, seriously, if you've been reading attentively, the plot is, rather: Rape--when your rapist is muscular and beautiful, and has cruel eyes, and says he doesn't care what you want, and smokes these intoxicatingly aromatic Turkish cigarets, so that the smell of him lingers even when he's not there--is love.  Or as good as.  Or even a helluva lot better than.

Sheikhs

Before the Internet, the National Geographic magazine was virtually the only source of pornography for the horny eleven-year-old white males of America.  Straight boys looked at pictures of the naked titties of ladies going into their menstrual huts in the upper reaches of the Orinoco.  Gay boys looked at pictures of Sheikhs, the indigenous nobility of the Middle East, riding ponies and hawking with raptors as stunningly beautiful as themselves.  They seldom took their clothes off--they didn't have to:  Just their faces, and their hands, revealed a world of virile beauty that any eleven-year-old gay boy in America would gladly have died for.

Guardian...Well, Gossiping Sylphs

Call them Sylphs like the Alchemist and the Poet do, or Familiars--The spirits of defunct social presences that hang around us, haunting us, imbuing us, partaking of our lives, resonating in our thoughts, and living through us--in a sense guarding us, but mostly, cautionarily reminding us, of what has been, and of what, in consummately evanescent fashion, is the Way of the World.  

I'm most conscious of my "Equipage in Air" when I'm least conscious--deep, deep in sleep, an hour or so before I wake--which is the time ordinarily that I have least to say about anything, and, without my interrupting them or ordering them around, my Sylphs are free to amuse themselves. They gossip idly about everything that occurs to them in that curious, sempiternal Beau Monde of theirs, whereof they seem to be both the tutelary divinities and arbiters elegantiae; things that they find interesting and funny, outré and preposterous.  This morning's Hour of the Wolf favorite topic for scandal-mongering among the fairy folk, that I overheard, was the world-freezing, party-planning agendas of Republican billionaires' third, fourth and fifth marriages to heartless, grasping bimbos. What struck my own little crowd of aerial Elsa Maxwells as hilarious beyond belief was that when one of the transporters of refreshments (who are, in the special world of Republican Billionaires, something like what FedEx is to us ordinary mortals) proposed to microwave coffee delayed 10 minutes by a glitsch in the delivery system, instead of ordering it fresh, this particular (It may have been Rupert Murdoch's) Republican Billionaire's Heartless Bimbo's Special Agent, speaking for the Bimbo, said "Call the Police!"  Gales of silvery, sylphide laughter ensued.  You can see why I don't stay awake for it. 

But as I turned away in my slumber, seeking deeper quiet, a dapper sort of johnnie with a monocle grabbed  me by the elbow and said, or seemed to say, "Arab Princes...." 

Lazy Sunday of the 3-Day Martin Luther King Weekend 2016

I awoke this morning, conscious of a Sin I have not expiated or atoned for, saying gravely, in expiation of it, "I take refuge in the Amitabha Buddha!" One of the looser definitions of a Zen Buddhist like me is: One who does not disbelieve in the efficacy of Pure Land Buddhism. Everything helps, cred'io.  And on this, the only truly Sacred Day in the American Leisure Calendar, I expect, nay demand reasonable concurrence.  Martin Luther King, Jr. (if that's what his name was) may not have been a for-real anything else--and, personally, I quite disliked him, and I was much embarrassed by the pilfered splendors of his unintelligibly grandiloquent, monkey-in-a-top-hat, plagiarized speechifyin'--but he was, for sure, a first rate martyr: Somehow he got himself persecuted, and murdered, by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who was, if anybody ever was, the creepiest, ugliest and meanest Epitome of Sheer Power-Mad Evil that the world had yet known, and whose envious, virulent, relentless hatred of MLK was undoubtedly based on the jinormous size of poor Dr. King's penis, and the jubilant success with which King wielded it among the female members of his congregation--as attested by countless extant FBI wiretappings from among the bedsprings of the beds in motel rooms where the good doctor liked to have sex with his faithful female flock, and the listening to which, over and over and over again, were the vile substance and gravamen of J. Edgar Hoover's malevolent, too-personal obsession with Dr. King.  The likelihood is that King, who was not an intelligent man, did not understand the neurotic personalities of Jay-Edgar's preoccupation with him ("Communist? He thinks I'm a Communist?"); but eventually he did grasp, in the last several weeks of his life, that he was about to be murdered, and his speeches from that time show an increasingly haunted awareness of the threat (that Hoover by this time was probably phoning in every other night), and evidence pathetic attempts to deflect it. 

There are a few things that aren't generally known about the Temple de l'Amour at Versailles and the statue that it was built to enshrine, so I'll stick these Lingering Reflections in here.  The statue, representing Cupid carving his Bow (with the Weapons of Mars) from the Club of Hercules, was the last and final masterwork (paid for with a till-then unheard of price of 21,000 livres) of Edmé Bouchardon, universally considered the greatest French sculptor of his day, and was first exhibited (1750) in the Salon d'Hercule at Versailles, and was a critical and a Succès d'Estime, but was popularly disliked by everybody else,  including the king, who found its too-faithful depiction of a recognizably French adolescent boy vulgar (trop novatrice).  Mme. de Pompadour, oddly, loved it, and ordered a copy made for herself, which seemingly was never delivered.  In 1778 a copy was made by a pupil of Pigalle's, Mouchy, for the exquisite Temple de l'Amour in the domain of the Little Trianon, designed by Richard Mique, with sculptural ornaments by Joseph Deschamps.  And god is it pretty.

But just one or two things I almost forgot, about myself, that I cannot leave out of My Philosophy:

My love, understanding, appreciation, identification with Music, Art, Nature.  It goes so far and so deep, that, to specify just one significant aspect:  The reason I am not a complete and total asshole misogynist is that I recognize that the female genius of music, particularly in the interpretation of the keyboard and violin music of Bach and Mozart, is every bit as profound, subtle and perfectly realized as the male genius.  Between Lili Kraus and Emil Gilels, playing Mozart, there is nothing to choose.  

But what then of Sturm und Drang, and Dangerous Liaisons, and Revolutionary Vulcanism?

What indeed?  Must you?  If you were not willful, crudely lustful, rudely egoistical--or a woman--would you even want to?

Ah, but so, as I reflect on it, everything about which I know anything,

Material and Mental Reality--which is, I read somewhere, the basic Cartesian Duality--is what it all comes down to.  Or, in another formulation, (1) That which Is, and (2) That which is Reflected--and (3) the Infinite Void which is Both and Neither.  Perhaps.  Well, so we can account for Vorstellung, which is everything about (something), referent (to something), symbolic (of something); i.e., language, logic, mathematics and the empirical (verifiable) sciences.

And having got so far, I evoke the images from the Hubble Telescope, and the music of Bach which is (arguably) congruent with those images: I am content that my philosophy is thereby rendered complete, and that, as a complete philosophy should, it contains and reflects the entire universe (except for the parts we're not just now examining, and)

Except, of course, for the special/lesser/human qualities/virtues:  of gentleness, sweetness, kindness, cuteness, benevolence, playfulness, forbearance, willingness to let things be, wit, grace, modesty, charm, delight and good-humor (the Spirit of the Rococo), which every human philosophy, however sublime, must somehow contain and account for, or else be found morally and ethically deficient.  I suppose that this is what is meant by Wille; it is, along with fairness and moderation, what I mean by Morality and Ethics.  It is to note moreover, that in embodying or manifesting the Spirit of the Rococo, it also may be held, on the one hand, to embody or manifest the Spirit of the Baroque, and, on the other hand, to embody or manifest the Spirit of Serene Neo-Classicism.

Gayburg

I have not been keeping up with the progress of Gay Rights in Italy--and it is only recently, on learning that Google had restored to Gayburg its non-obscene status in Italy (which had been lost, due to obscure, murky but powerful Forces of Fascist Darkness), that I've begun "reading" this very interesting and raunchily provocative little blog-gem of pretend-polite trash-journalism, and maybe, thanks to it, I've begun to understand what an enemy to gay rights (and to all our rights) real intrenched fascist conservatism--specifically Catholic Integralism--is. So  that's what happened to the infamous Dr. Joseph Nicolosi:  Moved to Italy, where he's thought quite a pundit, and gets his meretricious anti-gay twaddle published with howls of approval from the Catholic hierarchy. And Dale O'Leary, authoress of One Man, One Woman (Catholic Marriage), preening it and queening it at the center of the Whore of Rome's Implosive Netherarchy of Official Absurdity.

What Dismal Lights!

  And how Infernally Pervasive!

And yet, Truth to tell,

I have not a clue as to the actual meaning (in fact I doubt there is any) of die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.  And the more I read about it the less I understand it.  How can one who writes so intelligibly about women make such an utter fucked-up hash of mental and material reality?

'Tis said that our Great Misogynist actually instanced Gravity and Electricity as examples of die Wille operating in die Welt.  With his face hanging out, and not a blush on it.

Revisiting Schopenhauer, after a short pause for Reflexion and Reading what's been said about him since he died (1860)

Whatever else you may think about Arthur Schopenhauer--and you're free to think any damned thing you want--you've got to remember that his mother knew him first, knew him best, and probably said it first--and she was a helluva woman: among other things,  a best-selling novelist, a Saloniste whose Salon included Goethe, the Schlegel brothers, Grimm, Wieland and Tieck, and a damned fine, interesting and honorable character in her own right.  So, you may figure, that when Johanna Schopenhauer said to her son, in a letter, that she could tell him things, about the French invasion of Weimar, "that would make  your hair stand on end," but that she refrained, "for I know how you love to brood on human misery in any case," she had touched on something which those of us who love her son's philosophy might take into account as true and characteristic of it.

Not only was she not stupid, she was the one who urged her son Arthur, when he was 19 years old, to give up business for university studies--which, I think, no mother in the history of the world had done before.

Phonecall from Phil about the New Year's Kölnische Domplatz Riots,

which, while we talked, I was, natürlich, researching on the Internet--finding much (like absence of clear pictures of Perpetrators) that indicates, if not False Flag, CIA/MOSSAD organization and execution of:  Very like the February 2014 riots in Kiev.  Odd indeed, nay suspicious as bloody hell, the targeting of female, tourist, middle class victims; while incredible/beyond uncanny the concealment of "North African" malefactors.   I watched the videos over and over, astonished at how little they revealed; dead certain at the end that I had been watching the CIA in action, apparently trying to drive middle-class Germans  back into the US "anti-terrorist" fold.  Which would also mostly explain why these "outrages," which seem so much like parlor theatrics in Europe, are cooly barely noticed in the American media.  WTF?

But, as I woke this morning, a much larger picture began to unfold in my mind:  One knows, when one thinks about it, how utterly mistaken and wrong-headed was the Anglo/French World War I defeat of pro-active German/Austrian/Continental Democracy. 

Reading Schopenhauer on Women (for the first time actually),

I discovered this:

"...Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie...Nature has provided woman for her protection and defence with the faculty of dissimulation...It is natural for a woman to dissemble at every opportunity; and they feel that in so doing they are only making use of their rights. Therefore a woman who is perfectly truthful and does not dissemble is perhaps an impossibility.  This is why they see through dissimulation in others so easily; therefore it is not advisable to attempt it with them...In a court of justice women are more often to be found guilty of perjury than men.  It is indeed to be questioned whether they should be allowed to take an oath at all. From time to time there are repeated cases of ladies, who want for nothing, secretly pocketing and taking away things from shop counters. "

Actually there's a lot more even than this--about what implacable despots the ladies are with one another, and how relentlessly hierarchical and cruel--but let's just stop with the astonishing, and absolutely true, observation that kleptomania is virtually exclusively a female peccadillo.  It is. Three to one, more females than males  commit it; though whether it's a very slight  or minor sin depends on whether you're a shopkeeper or not.  Our man Schopenhauer--whatever may have been his too-ruthless way with noisy sempstresses--was definitely onto some truths which much needed ventilating in his skewering of the ugly, unesthetic, short-legged and irrelevant sex.  Especially about the inveterate female habit of lying their faces off--which is where I wanted to make connection with my hero Tucker Max and his alter ego Dr. Geoffrey Miller.  Gentlemen, we are agreed.  Abit onus.

I didn't Gym, back in the Day when I was discovering Gay Liberation and I was already (we all were), though I (we) didn't realize it, dodging a Fatal and Incurable Disease--So how did I manage to get enough exercise to keep my body in decent enough shape to attract 3 or 4 (or even, possibly, 5) hundred similarly not bad-looking sexual partners?

Ben, identifying with the "Proletariat," as I did, in a general ideological ("Revolutionary") way, and being determined, in principle, not to pay taxes if I could help it, I mostly held low-paying, part-time, labor-intensive jobs that paid under-the-counter and didn't interfere with my collection of welfare, and which kept me extraordinarily fit, well into my late forties.

Anna and the King (1999)

of Siam.  I read this book about sixty-three years ago, and have cordially disliked all the the movie and (especially) the goddawful musical versions of it that I've since encountered.  Ms. Foster's gratingly Lesbian take on the old-old sexist-sexist revisionist history is somehow the least offensive and the most plausible.  You can tell that this scrannel creature doesn't like any sort of male (her embraces of her own supposed movie-son are this close to making her puke), but somehow this works in her non-relations with King Mongku.  And the production values are high.  

I've seen Jodi Foster speaking normal conversational French, which she does effortlessly and perfectly, and I like her then too.

32% of those who attended Broadway Theater Productions in New York City in the year 2013 were Men....

Which is to say that 68% were women.  And that's over-all, for all Broadway musicals generally. Anybody wanna guess how many men, on the one hand, and how many women, on the other, paid money for tickets to the musical version (Imagine!) of The Bridges of Madison County in particular?  Would it surprise you to know that it attracted so few male attendees that it went bust? What's funny, kind of, if you think the Heterosexual (Cunt Indulgent) Tyranny is funny, is that you may not say aloud, exactly that, without the fucking roof falling in.  Because to acknowledge that only [dipshit, short-legged, fat, unblinking, vulgarly and tastelessly sentimental] females  read the ghastly book, or watched the clit-flick made from it, or could bear to sit through the fucking musical based on it, is to zone in on a thrillingly painful (for the ladies) aspect of the Great Divide between our dimorphic sexes:  One that really quite justifies an impatient, off-hand, dismissive--though of course not necessarily punitive--misogyny. 

Mes Chers Maîtres Philosophes

Evaldas Nekrasas and Jean Baudrillard:  The one for quietly unpacking Thomas Kuhn (and putting him within the paradigm of Logical Positivism/Empiricism where he belongs; the other for having deconstructed much that is absurd and nonsensical in modern theories of value and meaning, and for having written The War in the Gulf did not Take Place--for, assuredly, it did not.

Horribile Visu!

The U.S. version of 'Being Human' morphed into a nauseous chick flick, with vaginal secretions and predictable love interests all over every goddamned thing....

A development I began to dread as I watched, in the ever more girl-assertive Credits with trepidation, more and more females taking over the story-line and the production.  Poor Sam Witwer!  Poor pop-eyed Sam Huntington!  But especially poor Sam Witwer, whom we had seen grow ever gayer and gayer, like a buff, blood-smeared Charlie's Aunt ("This is how we do it in Brazil!"), to see him sunk at the end into a mere wraith of twat-juice domesticity was fucking heart-breaking.  Or would have been if my heart had not been surgically removed at birth.