Racism--much as I dislike most forms of Negro Music and Culture--is not something that I can relate to:

I do not get the connection, for example, between monkeys and Negroes, that real racists find obvious, and always refer to in their racist rants.  Nor do I have the least notion, despite my inveterate habit of mocking the Prophet, what the vulgar-many hate about "towelheads."  The recent, infamous Tweet of Roseanne Barr which confounded anti-Islamism with "Planet of the Apes," as an insult of a black woman, completely escaped/s me.  I perceive the attempt to vilify--but I don't get it.  And when I say I loathe and despise and don't consider black culture and Hip Hop worth mentioning, I still go on diligently practicing the "rags" of Scott Joplin, and allowing to myself, that if charm be the gauge of music's inherent worth, Mr. Joplin still wins the Cakewalk for this country's most beautiful music, along with, maybe, Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, and Duke Ellington's Deep Purple.

Ben Crystal talks about Original Pronunciation

This is so incredibly valuable. Ben Crystal and his linguist father, accomplished geniuses that they are, have given us, not only the great gift of the original Shakespeare, but the sound, and heart (projected through the abdominal cavity), and living tempo of that golden age that he--whoever he may have been--compounded into poetry.  Several things to note:  (1) The first evidence of the validity of the Crystals' "Original Pronunciation" is that it is quicker, by at least five minutes on the hour, than the odious Received Pronunciation foisted on us by classism, snobbery and o'erweening pedantry during the 18th and 19th centuries.  Or perhaps that's the second evidence.  The very first evidence of the likely validity of "Original Pronunciation" might, rather, both more cogently and more viscerally, be that, because of the stronger and more varied stress pattern and deeper placement of the vowels in early modern English, it is louder when declaimed (as in an outdoor theater) than the pharyngeal/diaphragmatic centering of Received Pronunciation will admit of.  Simply, it is more readily heard and easier to understand.  Plus, to have back Shakespeare's puns and rhymes (both smutty and--oftenest--bizarrely metaphysical) is to have a world restored. 

Now let's turn this piercing new light on Marlowe, Sydney, Spenser, Bacon--even the Queen herself, for example, we know had an idiosyncratic and distinctively personal style, Latinate and spare, with an avoidance of the double or multiple negation and redundancy indulged in by so many of her subjects.

But think how beautiful The Tragickal History of Dr. Faustus would be in O.P.!

                      Her lips suck forth my Soul; see where it flies!

Memorial Day 2018

I had thought that this was just a day to remember the dead--a day on which one gathers a big bunch, of the many flowers available in these climes at this time of year, and goes to the cemetery to decorate the graves of family  and friends.  That's what it meant to my mother, long ago in the 1950's: She had no idea (or certainly never communicated it to me) that Memorial Day had anything specifically to do with the peculiarly named Armed Services, as, according to the Wikipedia which I just consulted today, it does, or is supposed to. And now that I know that Memorial Day is officially almost exclusively about "honoring the memory of those members of the Armed Services who have died for their country," I feel rather sick.  It is 73 years, by my reckoning, since anyone fell defending my Homeland; most of them are buried overseas.  To say, as it is apparently expected that we should say (think and believe), that those who died in the Korean "War" or in the "War" in Vietnam (which were, by definition, war crimes, not wars)--or Mosul or Kabul--ought to be honored in the same way that we honor those who fell in World War II, is fucking blasphemous.

Why are Cougars a "Protected Species" in Washington state? Why has the state not, rather, attempted to exterminate them?

Given that cougars have killed two human beings in Washington since 1925--the more recent killing occurring just a couple of weeks ago--and on at least fifteen other occasions in that time, they have viciously attacked and injured citizens of Washington, without quite killing them.  Are two citizens' lives not worth any number of animals' lives, "Protected Species" though they may be? Stand up straight and answer the goddamned question.

And if you were thinking, with slack-jawed hesitancy, about those 50,000 citizens, more or less, of India who die yearly from cobra bites--What conclusion did you come to, Little Snowflake?

That perhaps emergency response services are somewhat deficient in the Indian subcontinent?  Yes, certainly they are. But how is it that the extermination of cobras isn't something that Indians--or you--even think about?

il Cantico delle Creature

When I expressed my astonishment and ravishment, at this lovely poem of Messer il Santo Francesco d'Assisi's, to an actual Friar (who was wearing street clothes, so I didn't know that he was, in fact, a Friar Minor), and, in my innocence, exclaimed (meaning no insult whatever), "This is pure Pantheism!"--he responded with horror, "It is nothing of the sort!"  Still, that's the way I hear it, and I imagine that most hearers of the poem, who, like me, have not been annealed with infant baptism, will also admit that the "Altissimu, onnipotente bon Signore" is seen by us simply as the World-soul, having nothing whatsoever to do with the ridiculously fictive Christian triune godhead. And, when we get to the end, we have already accepted that our death, from which no man escapes, is just part of the larger plan, and find the obsession with mortal sin, and "second death," in context, quite absurd--further evidence, if we needed it, that Christianity starves in the midst of plenty.

Hanging tough, alone but not afraid, Iran goes on doing the best it can, against formidable odds.

Ordinarily, one ignores what her religiously impaired leaders have to say about anything: One recognizes that they're in a tight place, geopolitically speaking, and one expects usually that such constraint favors neither eloquence nor good sense.  But occasionally one of their leaders lets off a good one--like today, when Prime Minister Khameni said (I paraphrase), "The United States is a failing power, and Trump will soon be forgotten."  I agree with the first part of that statement--the United States is indeed on the decline--but I doubt that fools as egregious as Trump are so easy to forget:  Even austere, high-minded clerical statesmen are likely to remember Heliogabalas, or the perfectly silly son of Marcus Aurelius.

Philip Roth is dead...finally, at age 85

I have never read anything that Philip Roth wrote, except in excerpts of invariably laudatory reviews of his work--and I have always found the reviews singularly unpersuasive, and the excerpts repulsive: Always something about being obsessively heterosexual, East Coast Jewish, and masturbating. Schadenfreude for Zionists. Was there more?  I'll have to read the obituaries to find out--if I care to.

Holy Shit!

The revelations on Twitter recently by Edward Snowden, about what tortures Bloody Gina Haspel actually did inflict on her victims are sickening/appalling/horrifying.  She needs, soon, to be be assassinated... Just kill her.

You don't bring a beast like this to trial.  You shoot it out of hand.

I would like to impress upon my irrational theist and non-atheist friends and foes that I'm as upset, perturbed and disgusted, as a rational atheist, at having to believe in a Bang that was Big as they could ever possibly be:

What the hell good is a universe that is less than infinite in all directions?  And what is all this caca about "Dark Matter" and "Dark Forces"?   Even Black Holes, if you ask me, are suspiciously like metaphysical acting-out in a cosmos which is simply refusing to grow up and act like a material reality.  The fact that I believe in such things because I have read and understand the science behind them makes them only slightly more palatable to me than, say, apparitions of Shiva or Kali-Durgha.  Behind it all, something in me is saying, "What utter horse-shit."   Join hands.

S.Ossetia: Post-War Resurrection (RT Documentary)

So much sadness in the world of late, the top two items being: (1) the U.S.Senate's confirmation of "Bloody Gina" Haspel as head of the CIA; and (2) the frightful, unspeakable massacre of some 59 unarmed Palestinians, including 7 or 8 children, murdered in cold blood by the Israeli army.  I thought I'd stick them in here, as a sort of counterpoint to the happy, truthful news of what's happened to south Ossetia.  I might have included the truly heart-warming good news of the completion of the Kerch Strait bridge from Russia to Crimea, with the glad images of our friend Vladimir Vladimirovitch himself driving the first truck in the convoy across the 12-mile (19 kilometer) long bridge.  "God, yes!" I exclaimed when Putin annexed Crimea--as I had also, first, exclaimed when Catherine II did so.  How fucking irresponsible it was to have left Crimea in the hands of a turbulent, fascist, corrupt Ukraine; just as it would have been to have left South Ossetia and Abkhasia in the clutches of fascist, predatory Georgia. 

But so now, Dear Lesbians, that Gay Marriage Equality has been granted Legal Sanction (and with it the Right of "Gay People" (i.e., both Gay Men and Lesbians) to exist and to have sex with whichever sex they prefer--

Now perhaps we can examine some of the fundamental differences between us:  Primum factum being that sexual orientation is largely a matter of choice for women, while for men it never is.

Secundum factum being that Marriage, as such, is a peculiarly female institution (even in heterosexual unions) to which gay men (for all their natural attachment to their shield-bearers and companions in arms) are as ill-suited as would be liaisons between dogs and cats.  We must remember that there is more genetic difference between men and women of the species homo sapiens sapiens than there is between male humans and male bonobo chimpanzees.  I think I did not make this up.

And now, the real problem with Japan--as it has been ever since the ruthless and totally unwarranted Invasion of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1853--is the Restoration of Japanese Moral Autonomy.

because that's really what Japan lost under the Meiji Restoration--and has been losing under the U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II.  Losing now especially with the U.S. refusal to grant freedom to okinawa, but in many cultural and societal norms as well.  The adoption of Western dress by the Japanese has been particularly foolish of them, degrading and unnecessary, and is now, among Japanese Millennials, undergoing a well-deserved reaction, very distinctive, nationalistic and fantastically inventive (Most young Japanese men, as I write, now use a full panoply of cosmetics).  Which reflects and does stylistic justice to the Shintoist/Buddhist Atheism which has but lately (once again) become the predominate philosophy of Japanese citizens, and which opens up in my view the long-awaited restoration of the pragmatic ethos and estheticism of the Edo Period.  Let us hope.  

And now, Dear Netflix--I know you're trying really hard NOT to be dipshit sexist heteronormative stupid--but I'm going to have to explain to you that

its being dipshit sexist heteronormative stupid is exactly why I'm not going to watch a movie that you think I should watch.  I refer to Je ne suis pas un Homme facile.  I've read the reviews.  Maybe if its director were a man--a gay man--I'd give it a chance.  But probably not, even so.

The Real War Crime for which the Nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was Condign Retribution was, of course, the Japanese Military Rape of Nanking, in 1937....

There are no official records of the number of Chinese civilians murdered--babies bayoneted--by the Japanese in this protracted atrocity, which began on the 13th of December, 1937, but most best-estimates put it at something between 200 and 300 thousand--which is (I would just like to point out) the same number, more or less, as the combined civilian dead in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  So let's forget about these as the (Divine) Retribution for the bombing of Pearl Harbor--however sneaky that may have been.  What always matters in the murder of civilians is the number of civilians slain, not the sneakiness or forthrightness with which it was done.  And there ought to be, every year, public memorial demonstrations in Nanking (now, I think, NanJing), staged by the so-called government of China, and the surviving citizens of Nanking, just to show that you can't do something so horrible on so vast a scale without its being forever remembered and infinitely abhorred.

But thinking of Flagrant, seemingly Ineradicable, Evils--the DEA

was founded on July 1, 1973 by Richard Nixon, as I just discovered on Googling it, wondering ¿Why can't we just abolish it?

And that's why we could never in a million years even think of abolishing it.

Of course, come to think of it, that's not really an answer for why we can't abolish the DEA, is it? Although it might be for those who voted for Nixon and are glad that Ford pardoned him.

Did any man, except maybe Henry VIII, using mostly Constitutional means, and motivated apparently only by sheer instinctual malice, ever do more harm to more people than Richard Nixon?

Netflix is being kind

The new Australian movie, bitterly and vehemently pro-medicinal marijuana, is refreshing and overdue.  How did Australians wind up imitating US drug enforcement for all those years?

But the real treat is The Man Who Knew Infinity, about Srinivasa Ramanujan, with the reputedly homophobic Jeremy Irons doing a wonderful job portraying the quintessentially gay G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan's sponsor and mentor at Cambridge, and with the ever-gay Stephen Fry, in a bit part at the beginning of the movie, incredibly good as a sympathetic British civil servant under the Raj. God these Brits can act!  Not to mention our eponymous hero, played with flawless verisimilitude by Dev Patel.  I think it'd break my heart if Dev Patel were gay.

Trionf! as the little Dragon-slayers declaim over the swooning Tamino, in the first scene of die Zauberflöte:

I have just, in the last couple of days, played straight through every goddamned one of the preludes and fugues in the first book of the Wohltemperierte Clavier.  Skipping none because it was too hard.  Maybe by the time I'm eighty I'll be able to play 'em right.  Of course, I continue dinging away at the second book, which in a funny way (it being more emotional) is easier for me than the first book--even in weird keys with lots of double flats and sharps.

New in my life, just arrived this morning, from Assam, India,

is Doomni Gold, Second Flush, Assam Breakfast Tea, which is so goood, even half-way through my morning pint-mug, that it's still giving

me goose bumps and shivers of delight.  The plan is to alternate this with Ruby Darjeeling, morning after morning, so that I never tire of either.

Thanks, Lesbians. "Gay marriage" was just the issue to persuade everybody--the majority of straight people anyway--that "gays" (gay men and Lesbians) ought not to be discriminated against.

Now, please go away.  Do whatever it is you do. Pay your taxes, keep your yards up, and, as you are wont to do, have relationships and marry one another.  But, now that everybody--except, maybe, trannies--is equals, can we just drop the absurd fiction that gay men and Lesbians have anything in common?  Unless, of course, you'd care to come by, say, once a week, for a few rubbers of bridge. Dunno what it is, but I like playing bridge with Lesbians.

New Ground by Henry Purcell

This exactly (tempo and ornaments) is how also I play this perfect piece of music.  Good on us, girl, that we are twain of the same mind and heart.

But it's not as if I grew up with no religious convictions--while early and formally renouncing the Christian God--although, truthfully, I didn't know that religious convictions were what I was adhering to (I thought they were simply principles of Natural Philosophy):

I learned at an early age, because my parents and grandparents believed it--I absorbed from them and the community I grew up in, one might say rather--the conscious precepts: (1) that Conscience/Reason is at once the kernel of one's individual identity, and the Voice of God/Nature (the Universal Oversoul, if you will) within each of us, and (2) that Remorse (disobeying one's Conscience) is Hell.  I never doubted, and never had to learn, or unlearn, these precepts when I became, consciously, later, an American Transcendentalist and a Mahayana Buddhist, because, in simple fact, those are the basic tenets of both those philosophies.

What then of Compassion?  Compassion is the recognition that most individual sentient beings (men anyway) accord to the One Self (God/Nature/Sentience) in others.  It is, therefore, in men's natures, essentially benevolent or disinterestedly friendly.  But, as the philosopher Schopenhauer points out, in women's natures the same impulse, of the recognition of the Self in Others (towards other women), is often coldly indifferent, jealous and envious.  It need not always be: Think of the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine II of Russia (who were friends and accomplices, not enemies). But, generally speaking, the Sex lacks just that generosity of spirit which can view a successor as anything but a rival.