I've finally encountered videos of Harold Bloom, which I could not refuse to view--painful/embarrassing though I do find Bloom's shallow punditry to be...

But look, O obscenely fat person: There are indeed a certain number of exemplary things and works of genius scattered throughout the history of any culture, which, as they lie, may be summed into an (ideally, representative) Canon. And that's what us Johnny-come-lately, Byzantine tiers-up snd classifiers, literary critics--late-comers (skeptics and satyrists) to the feast of a dominant ancient culture--have come into the world to do. Not you. You are, for my money, an embarrassingly incompetent canonist: You include things in your prescriptive canon, such as the Hebrew Bible, which have no place in any well-thought-out canon; and you exclude things, such as the comedies of Marivaux and Goldoni, which any decently educated canonist would include.

I asked Google ¿Is the Pluperfect disappearing from modern spoken English?

And I got a lot of puzzled and puzzling answers. I was glad I had not asked about the Imperfect Subjunctive, or ¿Why does it seem that no one knows how to write (confidently) a plural possessive "s'"? Our language is being made for us by Baboos and Mandarin-speaking Geeks--any old how. Not unlike what happened to Attic Greek in its respective time.

Understand: I do not say this in a dismissive or disapproving sense. Pure Attic Greek survived, flourishing nicely, it seems to me, through Lucian and subsequent Byzantine history, right up to the mid 15th century and the fall of Constantinople, as a scholarly, canonic and standard form of Greek.

Even so will standard English survive, for so long as there will be readers willing to master its absurd traditionalist orthography.  Yet I hope and believe that someone soon will do something about the present utterly chaotic state of spelling and phonetic representation of the English language--something maybe, hopefully, as elegant and graceful as the medieval Byzantine diacritics and orthography of Greek that one sees pictures of, written in silver ink on purple vellum, to represent the minute gradations of stress, and unstress, accent in spoken standard American English. 

Deepak Chopra and Friends Meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Rubbing noses like two four-year-olds, bespeaking perfect doctrinal/dharma purity. I hadn't realized Deepak Chopra was this woke and evolved; wouldn't have believed it had I not seen this (if I'm using the new word "woke" correctly).  

Real Frenchmen are Stereotypical to a Fault.

They all agree, as ordained by their wonderful state-regulated traditionalist education system, that Andromaque is the most beautiful thing in creation, followed closely by the (three major examples of) fenestrations of François Mansart, and the château and gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte. If Racine said it, or used a grammatical construction like it, it's French--what though nobody in the modern world understand it. Ditto for Molière. Double ditto for Voltaire. And if you are, as I am, nauseated by Bérénice, you may have un coeur de pierre--but if, notwithstanding, like me, you understand and approve of Claude Perrault's (existant) design of the east facade of the Louvre (over [fastidious mou] Bernini's), by itself this makes you a member of the Real Frenchmen Club.

Confronted with this massive native consensus, the non-native, or cousinly, devotee of French Culture would be best advised to concur immediately, totally and unreservedly,  in what may seem even its bizarre, arbitrary and rather unnecessary shibboleths. Because if you don't, you risk horrid, ironic Gallic Censure--of the sort where the whole world is laughing at you.  Myself, I can manage snails, such as you find in Parisian restaurants and are given special tongs and a little fork to deal with--though I should probably vomit if I had to eat them in the Spanish fashion, spearing them randomly with toothpicks--but I fucking draw the line at raw meat and raw eggs, and will not eat them, even though Real Frenchmen, on account of this idiosyncratic distaste of mine, call me sissy, and urge me to get psychotherapy.


Notice, if you please, the (admittedly) somewhat archaïc use of the subjunctive mode (or mood) in this nonsensical little essay: which must be virtually unintelligible to speakers of the castrate dialect of Received Pronunciation; but which will be perfectly comprehensible to Speakers (and Thinkers) of  (in) the Standard American Dialect of the English Language. I notice that RP speakers tend to be rather vainglorious--perhaps somewhat self-congratulatory--about their disuse of the subjunctive mode: As if it were a good thing to have eliminated the possibility of nuance and the distinction of being and purpose in their own language. It has to do, perhaps, with the habitual sarcasm and foul-mouthedness of Her Majesty's subjects, and is the parent of their inability, when at table, not to talk about vomit or shit.

In my late teens--through to my middle twenties--but especially when I was 18 or 19 years old,

I was, besides being a Mozart worshipper, peculiarly ideologically susceptible to a kind of Generational Supremacy, in which I perceived, in my own generation (in Maynard G. Krebs, and in Beatniks), and gloried in, an intellectual and ethical superiority to all previous generations. Dropped into my local land-grant college in my freshman year, I was a buzz-saw: consistently making the Honor Roll, while drawing a steady hour per Quarter of F in ROTC (and, significantly, having destroyed--rendered unusable--a Rifle, when it was given to me to dismantle, clean and re-assemble). I recognized perfect Goodness and Righteousness when I met it in the person of Donald Egbers in the third quarter of my freshman year, and vowed within myself to dedicate myself to it. To it, that is to say, and, as I perfectly understood, through him. And  I was absolutely right to have done so, crazy as it sounds. Nutzo, yeah perhaps. Carlo Goldoni describes a very similar case in his life. How sorry we should all be if he hadn't taken off with a shipload of actors, to be a player and a theater person, rather than the lawyer his dad wanted him to be. Anyway, so my course was set when I dropped out--and, while having fun, and often getting high, I lived through the horror of the Vietnam War and the terror of the Drug War, without being inducted into the military, or contracting the HIV virus, or being incarcerated for more than a few days. I was smart, yes, but most of all I was lucky. And, occasionally, I had good (fun and no regrets) sex.

Le Misanthrope

pièce en vers de Molière, is, finally, in my considered judgement, the most stupendously witty thing I've ever read. Along with, of course, in witty truthfulness, The Rape of the Lock. Followed closely by The Way of the World, a dozen or so of Fontaine's Fables and, of course, Candide. But first of all, Le Misanthrope. I haven't read it for dozen years or more, but it lies at my heart.

Why Japanese Are Angry with Foreigners On Tokyo Train

The Japanese People, like Bertie Wooster's Dragon-Aunts, are impossibly civilized. Their mildest overt censure is beyond severity, revealing a witches' cauldron of suppressed fastidious revulsion at the barbarity of "foreigners"--reminding one, for all the world, with its tone of sniffy distaste, of the periodic sumptuary edicts that were issued by Tokagawa Shogons against the display of too-fine fabrics in mere townspeople's kimonos.

It is to remember that, while Japan withdrew in upon itself, Louis XIV was being the opposite of restrained elegance in France. The creation of Tokyo (with an efficient waste-disposal system!), I think, has the same éclat as the creation of the palace at Versailles. The difference, I imagine,  must be something like underlying Japanese Confucianism and Zen Buddhism--Bushido.

But, as an aesthetician (funniest word I ever coined for myself), and of course a Buddhist, while I know it to be my moral duty to hand the palm to Basho, Ryokan and Ihara Saikaku, I can only grant them, barely, equal status with Fontaine, Molière and Couperin.

 ¿And koto Vs. harpsichord? Be real.

"Are Traps Gay?" | ContraPoints

This dude's good.

The sixth sense - David Eagleman, Baylor College of Medicine

2015 Worlds Javier Fernandez FS +Backstage + Interview NBC

so straight and so pretty. Javi at his most adorable.

GOD vs NO GOD - And the Winner Is?

Yes. 10,000 galaxies.

Javier Fernández in FaoI Nagano 2016 - Interview and "Barcelona"

The barbarous noise of two samisens, you would think, could scarcely be expressed by moves so graceful.

I don't, you'll notice, split my infinitives--

I just don't.  Usually because split infinitives bespeak different things from what I mean. For example, I promise, almost always not to; it would sound (to me) as if I were equivocating to not. I delight to apperceive the underlying rocky ribs of Old Norse (whence infinitive-splitting cometh), not Old Saxon, as we had heretofore wrongly supposed those ribs to be, in my own language, whether I split my infinitives--though I don't, usually--or end my sentences with detached prepositions. Which I like to do, as a stylist fond of what I imagine the Greek-like pith and subtlety of Old Norse (as opposed to Old Saxon) to have been.

Thinking, still, of the the English and why they sometimes make my flesh crawl:

Napkin Rings: A whole majority class of people who could see nothing whatever amiss in using the same napkin at table for two days running.

Of course, to be fair, one knows that restaurants in Paris in the 19th century used to offer their preferred customers their own hook by the door to hang their napkins from--I read about it in Simenon. And we have Lord Russell's personal memoir of what a pooey mess the world was before the automobile.  

Liking the English, and Disliking them

I hate snobs, and anything Posh--and I absolutely detest resolute anti-snobs. English feminists are the bloody worst.  English vulgarity, such as "fanny" and "trumps" for "twat" and "fart," with its echo of upper class smart-ass, is the world's stupidest and nastiest.  

We admire Dr. Kieber's Honesty in saying that Drug Addiction is, properly, a Medical, not a Legal, Issue

But we are still wondering what gave him the goddamned right to say anything at all about a matter so entirely personal.

Emily Dickinson seems to be getting a vengeful besmirching lately from the Slut-Lesbian (more than fully) Half of us,

Who say things like, "Her poetry was not successful till after her death."

Crassly ignorant things, beslimed with nasty Lesbianism.