burnt blogs.

Belatedly travelling the scorched net you will find the ones with wisdom. Recently reformed sprezzatura offers this in the New York Times: "Seriously, the blogosphere strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion behind it" and notes that bloggers "vent out of the pain of being unacknowledged." Much more humbly and beautifully, this one bids farewell with "I will leave this post as the tombstone for this ugly little blog that brought out the vilest in me and has now left me in deep shame for the rest of my life."

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for 'transgressive' insert 'edgy' throughout.

Why does the entelechy of the force of critical thinking invariably turn into its own caricature? In our triple-dub times of World War "W" the strategic values of deconstruction are being used to dismantle the very idea of democracy and our C-in-C condescends to practice a Brechtian sense of politics as the arrogant theatre of performative artifice. Oh, that ancient Chinese curse - may you live in the most "interesting" of times. Will it ever not be true?

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meanders.

To get lost in this world means looking for le temps perdu while muttering obscenities in Esperanto: "Fragmented and splintered into incomprehensible facets of nothing. As well as this, alongside, comes a sense of complete loss. All suddenly becoming none, it as not. Though awareness persists: the absence of death, of, of, of. Intangible, alright, but when it is yourself, are you not allowed? Of course not, how stupid and infantile that would seem. To take yourself apart, to examine that which isn't, to realize what is of the essential importance. To watch it depart. Is it a route." Bujholej, putinfilaĉo - what in the dickens is this?

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nothing, and so be it.

Oriana Fallaci (1929 - 2006)

The second death that leaves me wistful and saddened this week. She was such an important figure in the art of journalism - a sharply critical, compassionate, and brilliant woman, whose skills of observation we would desparately need now. Unfortunately, it seems that she, like so many others, could no longer comprehend the difficulties of our age towards the end of her life and just plain lost it. But her book on Vietnam (Niente e così sia, translated as Nothing and Amen, which is a must-read if you can find it) and her Un uomo on Alekos Panagoulis remain masterpieces of 20th-century journalism. Both had a tremendous impact on me. This woman was fierce.

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look at what passes for the new.

"Begin again.

          It is like Homer's

                    catalogue of ships:

it fills up the time.

          I speak in figures,

                    well enough, the dresses

you wear are figures also,

          we could not meet

                    otherwise.  When I speak

of flowers

          it is to recall

that at one time

we were young."


This from William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.

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