AdamSmith

Well, there are many dubious references in 'Lycidas', Milton's watery ode to his college chum Edward King, drowned when his ship sank crossing the Channel: He must not float upon his watery bier... Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring... Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream... What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore, The Muse her self, for her enchanting son Whom Universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore... O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, Smooth-sliding Mincius... Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd... With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves... Now Lycidas the Shepherds weep no more; Hence forth thou art the Genius of the shore, In thy large recompense, and shalt be good To all that wander in that perilous flood. I have the feeling a couple of lines in 'Paradise Lost' are spot on, as it were, but senescence keeps them just out of mind. Other than the cheap shot 'regain the blissful seat' in the opening strophe. If they come to me...

Seems this echo won't leave my head until, irrespective of relevance, it gets posted... ...from those flames No Light, but rather darkness visible... Separately, small highjack in. re: horse pizzle -- in the last year one has discovered the pleasure of some light watersports before the main course. Perhaps to do with joys of infantilism, regression, etc. Scat though remains the uncharted land.

Choices, choices...

One of my idols, Arthur C. Clarke, turned 90 yesterday. Herewith part of his birthday message... ...I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we've learnt something from the most barbaric century in history – the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalisation… As I complete 90 orbits, I have no regrets and no more personal ambitions. But if I may be allowed just three wishes, they would be these. Firstly, I would like to see some evidence of extra-terrestrial life. I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us – or give us some kind of a sign. We have no way of guessing when this might happen – I hope sooner rather than later! Secondly, I would like to see us kick our current addiction to oil, and adopt clean energy sources. For over a decade, I've been monitoring various new energy experiments, but they have yet to produce commercial scale results. Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civilisation depends on energy, but we can't allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet… The third wish is one closer to home. I’ve been living in Sri Lanka for 50 years – and half that time, I’ve been a sad witness to the bitter conflict that divides my adopted country. I dearly wish to see lasting peace established in Sri Lanka as soon as possible. But I’m aware that peace cannot just be wished -- it requires a great deal of hard work, courage and persistence. * * * * * I’m sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I’ve had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer – one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well. I find that another English writer -- who, coincidentally, also spent most of his life in the East -- has expressed it very well. So let me end with these words of Rudyard Kipling: If I have given you delight by aught that I have done. Let me lie quiet in that night which shall be yours anon; And for the little, little span the dead are borne in mind, seek not to question other than, the books I leave behind. This is Arthur Clarke, saying Thank You and Goodbye from Colombo! Available on YouTube at: http://thilinaheenatigala.blogspot.com/200...h-birthday.html

Please: following the consulting industry, let us dignify the act as "value-add."

...et non conjuge equibus! (The formal if ungrammatical completion of Illegitimus non carborundum, you know.)

:lol: Viz. also "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass"... http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/824/

Isn't that the way to fix something in a message center -- challenge it, not censor it? Couple of decades ago, when the PC speech police were rampant on college campuses, Yale looked at the thing, and decided, contrary to fashion, that in speech, more is more: ...We take a chance, as the First Amendment takes a chance, when we commit ourselves to the idea that the results of free expression are to the general benefit in the long run, however unpleasant they may appear at the time... We have considered the opposing argument that behavior which violates these social and ethical considerations should be made subject to formal sanctions, and the argument that such behavior entitles others to prevent speech they might regard as offensive. Our conviction that the central purpose of the university is to foster the free access of knowledge compels us to reject both of these arguments. They assert a right to prevent free expression. They rest upon the assumption that speech can be suppressed by anyone who deems it false or offensive. They deny what Justice Holmes termed "freedom for the thought that we hate." They make the majority, or any willful minority, the arbiters of truth for all. If expression may be prevented, censored or punished, because of its content or because of the motives attributed to those who promote it, then it is no longer free. It will be subordinated to other values that we believe to be of lower priority in a university. The conclusions we draw, then, are these: even when some members of the university community fail to meet their social and ethical responsibilities, the paramount obligation of the university is to protect their right to free expression. This obligation can and should be enforced by appropriate formal sanctions. If the university's overriding commitment to free expression is to be sustained, secondary social and ethical responsibilities must be left to the informal processes of suasion, example, and argument. http://www.yale.edu/yalecollege/students/a...nts/speech.html OK, swatting flies with hammers -- daddys MC ain't New Haven. But the same idea here and daddys as there, no?

His style is maturing, I understand... http://www.tekstadventure.nl/branko/blog/2...something-awful

I think ncm is the reincarnation of Paracelsus! http://www.columbiagames.com/HarnPage/harn...homonculus.html

Absolutely. I've always wondered why the queer press does not slobber over Downey like they do so many blander, boring others. I certainly would.

ROFL! I have turned into an old coot. These days I find any TV besides Olbermann or 'Mad Men' just irritates me and drives my blood pressure up. Unfortunately the S.O. requires the TV muttering to fall asleep.

Far from little, to me this moves toward the piercing sweep of closing lines in late Whitman. The whole post is a model of discernment and expression, for my money. Come to think of it, this entire thread is how good political debate ought to go.

I think my pickles just met their match.

And now for something completely different... The Geography of the House (for Christopher Isherwood) by W.H. Auden Seated after breakfast In this white-tiled cabin Arabs call the House where Everybody goes, Even melancholics Raise a cheer to Mrs. Nature for the primal Pleasure She bestows. Sex is but a dream to Seventy-and-over, But a joy proposed un- -til we start to shave: Mouth-delight depends on Virtue in the cook, but This She guarantees from Cradle unto grave. Lifted off the potty, Infants from their mothers Hear their first impartial Words of worldly praise: Hence, to start the morning With a satisfactory Dump is a good omen All our adult days. Revelation came to Luther in a privy (Crosswords have been solved there); Rodin was no fool When he cast his Thinker, Cogitating deeply, Crouched in the position Of a man at stool. All the arts derive from This ur-act of making, Private to the artist: Makers' lives are spent Striving in their chosen Medium to produce a De-narcissus-ized en- During excrement. Freud did not invent the Constipated miser: Banks have letter boxes Built in their façade Marked For Night Deposits, Stocks are firm or liquid, Currencies of nations Either soft or hard. Global Mother, keep our Bowels of compassion Open through our lifetime, Purge our minds as well: Grant us a kind ending, Not a second childhood, Petulant, weak-sphinctered, In a cheap hotel. Keep us in our station: When we get pound-notish, When we seem about to Take up Higher Thought, Send us some deflating Image like the pained ex- -pression on a Major Prophet taken short. (Orthodoxy ought to Bless our modern plumbing: Swift and St. Augustine Lived in centuries When a stench of sewage Made a strong debating Point for Manichees.) Mind and Body run on Different timetables: Not until our morning Visit here can we Leave the dead concerns of Yesterday behind us, Face with all our courage What is now to be.

Somehow sounds like the latest political scandal! "Larry Craig's stall door has been nicknamed The Abrogate."

Insightful post. Re your point above, one hopeful note in Greenspan's memoir is the credit he gives Clinton for the effects of what he calls Clinton's "consistent, disciplined focus on long-term economic growth." (Clinton 42, of course. Could a Clinton 44 pull off anything similar, given macro conditions she would inherit, and her own proclivities?) Back to the China point. I heard an American economist who writes a newsletter from Shanghai observe that we've been lulled by China's economic weakness over the past three centuries or so. But, in the long view, that was a minor aberration -- for the couple of millennia before, China was a dominant global trading power.

Interesting article this morning on how the West is beginning to realize it had better stop condescending to China as of old... Understanding Mattel’s Mea Culpa Quick to blame its Chinese suppliers for a massive recall, the toy giant now apologizes for its own mistakes. Why Mattel—and other major American companies—must save face with China. When Mattel recalled lead-tainted toys in August, and earlier this month, the company was quick to blame its suppliers in China. It was as if Mattel weren’t responsible for the quality of products sold under its name. But today the toy giant changed its tune. An executive offered a public apology to China and Chinese suppliers. “Our reputation has been damaged lately by these recalls,†Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel’s executive vice president for worldwide operations, told a Chinese consumer-products safety official. “And Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys.†This kowtow isn’t a sudden outbreak of good manners or even responsibility at a Fortune 500 company. Rather, it’s a sign of how the balance of power has shifted between massive American consumer-products companies and their rapidly growing China-based suppliers. ... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20910045/site/newsweek/

You got the premium model. They could tell you were trouble.

All too true. We don't memorize, we retrieve; instead of concentrating, we multitask. In college I had one professor, himself already a throwback, who made us memorize a 195-line Milton poem ("Lycidas"). It was revelatory. Milton's long periodic sentences make a lot more sense when you know them from one end to the other -- almost impossible without memorization! And one section that he revised heavily after the first draft was much harder to learn than the rest; that it did not flow from his mind in the same stream as the bulk of the piece became evident. Ah, well. Now the world is like that sf short story where the government, to maintain control, implants some gizmo into everyone's head that causes a loud bell to be heard every three minutes, making it impossible for anyone to hold a thought and thus unable to rebel.

LOL! You memorized that? Hats off. Confession -- despite living in Boston, my having grown up amid the unholy trinity of Carolina, Duke and NC State made basketball the only pro sport that sends me.

Fuck Hester Prynne (as it were). THANK YOU for the new menu bar that includes MY CONTROLS and so on. The answer to my prayers. Or my whining, at any rate.

Maybe this is just a defensive deflection of Lucky's on-point rejoinder. But another exquisitely odd Bishop gem... Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying. In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals, please come flying, to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water, please come flying. Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags rising and falling like birds all over the harbor. Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing countless little pellucid jellies in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains. The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged. The waves are running in verses this fine morning. Please come flying. Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe trailing a sapphire highlight, with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots, with heaven knows how many angels all riding on the broad black brim of your hat, please come flying. Bearing a musical inaudible abacus, a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons, please come flying. Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan is all awash with morals this fine morning, so please come flying. Mounting the sky with natural heroism, above the accidents, above the malignant movies, the taxicabs and injustices at large, while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears that simultaneously listen to a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer, please come flying. For whom the grim museums will behave like courteous male bower-birds, for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait on the steps of the Public Library, eager to rise and follow through the doors up into the reading rooms, please come flying. We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, or play at a game of constantly being wrong with a priceless set of vocabularies, or we can bravely deplore, but please please come flying. With dynasties of negative constructions darkening and dying around you, with grammar that suddenly turns and shines like flocks of sandpipers flying, please come flying. Come like a light in the white mackerel sky, come like a daytime comet with a long unnebulous train of words, from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.

Ach! Thank you. Beautiful. I admit I fall into living as Bishop describes. How really could one hew to Hacker's good sense? (We have had this discussion before, around Himself, and will continue to do.)

The other day I spent time with someone whom I should probably spend either more time with, or less. More verse, but in (maybe) a lighter key than last time. One Art Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.