Wednesday

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@lewolf tagged me to name my favorite or whatever song. I have a lot to say about it so bear with me. It's Sunday Morning by Velvet Underground (see below). The album itself with the Banana on the cover: it came with a little sticker that said "peel slowly and see" and if you did peel the banana which was a sticker on the original...
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oldernow:
@ferkixlll -- i meant Laurie Anderson, and her very powerful cd Songs from the Bardo - which is indeed the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Most of the Egyptian Books of the Dead are fragmentary and have only spotty or speculative translations with the exception of the Papyrus of Ani, which is pretty interesting.
ferkixlll:
They are. Have my copy of Budge ( ya, I know that the "Stargate" franchise ridicules him ). When Mourning find random chapters of either Egypt or Tibet of use. ** I wish that I had lifted it from the Kent State Library: they had a nice Folio of Ankhenaten's "Hymn To The Sun". Shows some of the roots of Hebraic thought.

a lil musical interlude

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just some old farts playin a tune

reading list for these times

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I picked most of these because they only work if you read them slowly--often out loud--and let the language become music. they are not really about plot, they are about flowing images, sounds, thoughts and perceptions:

Isolation reading list: Ulysses by Joyce; Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon; Tropic of Cancer - Miller; Baudelaire; Proust (all 6 books); Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon...
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oldernow:
@kaicito try it as a book on tape - but sample it first--there are at least two readers and one is pretty unbearable, while the other 'feels' like Proust.  (I have read a good deal of him in French, where the language absolutely soars...but there are a lot of words i have to look up on account of this not being the 19th century any more.)  He can be quite snarky - more so as the books go along.  for example "she looked at me as though  I were an oily stain on her favorite rug" --also if you know French a lot of the names are a hoot - like "Madam Fatass and Madamoiselle Bullshit &c.
kaicito:
@oldernow As my French is barely serviceable enough to find a restroom or to order an omelet, I'm reading what I can only hope is an adequate German translation. It has the plus of being annotated, which as you say helps the contemporary reader to get some of the hidden meaning. Guilty pleasure these days: the Founders series by Robert Jackson Bennett - loved the first volume "Foundryside" and have just downloaded to my Kindle the just-published 2nd one, "Shortfall". Good fun!

Saturday

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user119547201:
Beautiful mix.. Help us to keep up❤️

Friday

8

Watching America self-destruct is very close to unbearable; at the very least we must bear witness, and always, always watch and be ready for the moment grace allows us to act, and to act with neither hesitation, malice or fear, but simply to act as an expression of the essential and the enduring values of life, nature, and individual rights -- in that order.

musical interlude

5

these fine women:

grumpy thot of the day

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this will be getting worse and worse and worse for a few months, leveling the economies of the world, revealing the depth of politician's greed and the strength of soul if they have one; in 25 years it will only be an episode, in a hundred it will be half-forgotten, in 150 years it will happen again. we are a species that flat refuses to...
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ferkixlll:
@oldernow - one would think that current memory would be sufficient. Since 1968 we had: the Hong Kong flu, swine flu, bird flu, H1N1, HIV, The Ebola outbreak, SARS & MERS. Don't forget the Times Square Flu test back in the '50's when rate of spread was tracked to see how quickly a known Biologic would move through a population. As they say "this ain't rocket science". With ALL of this history Anybody NOT sitting up and making plans in January, when China locked down a city of 11.9 million people and built two 1,000 bed field hospitals in weeks; has no business leading anything.

ready or not...

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the interesting thing to me is the way various collective cultures are reacting to the unknown. panic basically. when i think of my father, who was a 4-year POW in WWII being told he wouldn't walk any more, it was as though someone had mentioned that today was Thursday... not so much numb or detached as integrated, able to navigate calm or stormy waters with...
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ferkixlll:
As usual an apt song. Back in the '70's Leo Buscallia's lectures used to get PBS air time during pledge week. One of his points ( of several ) that has stuck with me: If you want to see how much of an impression that you make, take a glass of water, stick your finger in & then remove it. ** The problem with T. P. is that the Industry was AT Capacity. The supply for Commercial T. P. Vs. Household T. P. is completely Separate. And now that so many are using their Home Toilet instead of Work or other non-Home locations means that there is a Surplus of Commercial T. P. and increased demand, not hording, of Home T. P.. When I was Over-the -Road there were times that I got a load of T. P. at a Paper Mill and took it to a Grocery Store Chains Distribution Center rather than a Center that all Chains could order from. As time goes on the Keg Beer vs. Bottle Beer devide will show up the same way. And other Commercial vs. Home use Items will track in a similar way. Carry on.
oldernow:
@ferkixlll you make an interesting point about the TP... my office building is on the other side of my driveway on 60 acres sandwiched between two massive vinyards -- so besides my employees, i am rather isolated to begin with (not counting the wife and cats, that is).  With 8 -- eight!! -- female employees ATM, I go thru TP so much that I switched to commercial supplies some time ago - hence not really noticing the change.  ironically, with all of them now working from home, i have a more than adequate supply for this millennia... or the year anyway.  our work is mostly on computers, so the work continues.... when this all went nuts a few weeks ago my wife went straight to our cleaning supply company and grabbed a few boxes of this and that.  I am on medications for a lung virus that zero out my immune system so--bad lungs plus vulnerable to illness = not good.  hence the employees working from their homes.  our area is moderately hit - about 500 cases in a town of 60,000 so far, but more every day.  the big problem is that all the regional hospitals are taking all kinds of overflow from downstate.  my doctor friend says they can't even get saline solution here, much less medicines, PPE, etc. --all the local eye doctors and dentists have given their stashes of such things to the hospital a while ago.  no medical people have succumbed yet - and that is the biggest worry, really.  50% of the town died in 1918 when the doctors died...

The center has not held

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Yeats and others have long seen the next collapse of the West... not the last by any means, nor the first (thank you Edward Gibon for detailing just how bloody, greedy and stupid "Christian" monarchs have been for millennia)... but a real tipping point in the mythic identity of American has occurred. simply put, for good and for ill, there is no more balance of...
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thebeliever:
It has been a depressing week... At some point I imagine that things will get better, but it's hard to believe sometimes.... Since about 2016 the world seems to have lost its collective mind. It's like watching someone exhibit suicidal behavior, but in this case it's global.
ferkixlll:
And tonight's democratic debate just adds to the misery. Two hours of the pot calling the kettle black instead getting to the real issues. I heard more lines to be used against them. There were better debates for class president when I was in High School. They keep this up and it's Trump uber alles.
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