COURAGE yet, my brother or my sister!
Keep on—Liberty is to be subserv'd whatever occurs;
That is nothing that is quell'd by one or two failures, or any num-
ber of failures,
Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or by any
unfaithfulness, Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents,
Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is
positive and composed, knows no discouragement,
Waiting patiently, waiting its time.
TO A FOIL'D EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONAIRE. -- Walt Whitman
My summer reading, so far
I had rather high expectations for this book: well-known and highly regarded author, possibly with a refreshing, feminist views, and so on. But I found it somewhat disappointing. It is not clear no me what the focus of the book is: it is at some level a general story of Rome; then it is a story about the decline of the republic - but neither story seems to come to an end or be very complete. Also, why does she not discuss the clientela theory at all? It may out of fashion, but it is central to the discussion about the decline of the republic.
Michael Steinberger: Au Revoir to All That
A bit of a strange book. Well-written and knowledgeable about all things French food. It is, however, also clearly a collection of not-too-connected pieces that originated somewhere else. Sure, he loves France well-enough - but is there some sort of political undertone, very anti-statist and quasi-libertarian? But, nevermind. What is interesting is that his doomsday vision now seems to be something from a very specific period in time. Yes, there are young French chefs that do molecular (even if that is a bit dated by now). The locavore movement exists there. So does lots and lots of influence from the Far East as well as from the Middle. The bistronomy movement revives and reinvigorates the traditions, and does it at fairer prices. Even though the Frenchies love them some Mickey D's, there are also genuine American BBQ joints. Right there, in gay Paree. What is going away is probably the stuffed-up and dusty old palaces of gastronomy where you had to mortgage your sould to partake of food that was reasonably unspired and uninspiring. But if you so desire, look no further than Le Cing. You can still get it. As for the book: an easy enough read, but as time moves forward, less and less relevant.
Adrian McKinty and John Connolly
Irish noir, I suppose. In the rainy season that they call summer here in Denmark, I had plenty of time to go through all of McKinty's Sean Duffy novels, as well as the first four of Connolly's Charlie Parker series. They are surprisingly different. McKinty benefits mightily from setting his stories in freont of the rich tapestry and the Troubles around 1981, and placing his Papist protagonist in the RUC and all-proddy Carrickfergus. But Duffy is, in the end, a younger, less jaded Rebus, and there may redemption for him at the end, and marital bliss. Connolly sets his stories in a dark America that still reeks of the Old Religion and is really weird. As the series move forward, it is less of a crime or detective series, and gets into being a moral fable about compassion, revenge, redemption, et cetera. It ever there were a flawed hero, Charlie is it (as well as his merry entourage of Louis and Angel). But lots of suspense and technically well-crafted, albeit the themes get a little monotonous with time.
Just something I found on the internets and I thought you would perhaps like it too, but who knows?
- Matgamna vs Minogue: “Is Socialism Dead?”
- The lack of demand for equality
- Michael Lewis and the parable of the lucky man taking the extra cookie
- The evolution of punk rock in 200 tracks (1965 to 2016)
- Hear 2,000 Recordings of the Most Essential Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Education
- The French Far Right and Génération Identitaire.
- On salient identities
- Neoliberalism Was Supposed to Make Us Richer: Three Reasons Why It Didn’t
- Benjamin Kunkel reviews ‘The Birth of the Anthropocene’ by Jeremy Davies, ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life’ by Jason Moore and ‘Fossil Capital’ by Andreas Malm
- In Search of a Better World: Karl Popper on Truth vs. Certainty and the Dangers of Relativism
- Inequality as feudalism
- The Frankfurt School In Our Time
Quite eclectic, I know, but enjoyable all of it nonetheless.
“The Time of Day in Giorgione”
The sun is always setting in my heart
Like the time of day in Giorgione
The days drift beyond reach and… poof they are gone
René Ricard
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
John Rocque's Map of London, 1746 is used quite brilliantly by Locating London's Past.
Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly modernizes them, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to take advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
He is already there reading the sayings of Mao and then — splash — the Parthenon explodes. The Germans make love. Crazed truck drivers armed with pirate's sabers throw empty cans of red paint on the University of Nanterre. She is killed by Australian aborigines. At mad speed to Flins, Pier Paolo Pasolini catches the train and speaks. Two men kill everybody. He reads the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Sade throws a bomb at Madame de Sevigné. He goes away. He watches a Chaplin movie. The natives arrive.
Whatever the legal or business reasons why Musto ended up with majority control over Arduino, there is no justification to have him in control of the foundation. Musto has shown us that he cannot be trusted. It is bad enough that he has gained control of Arduino Holding. We must not allow him to control the foundation.
Arduino's new CEO has spent years pretending to have an MIT PhD and an NYU MBA :
They dug into it and found that neither NYU -- where Musto claimed to have earned an MBA -- nor MIT had any record of his attending their institutions. Called on this by a reporter from Wired, Musto deflected, first claiming that he occasionally misspoke about his credentials, then, when it was pointed out that his Linkedin profile and official bio listed the credentials, he blamed his underlings. He claims he was an exchange student and took a few courses at both universities, but neither can confirm even that.
Today, Musto's Linkedin profile lists a single academic affiliation: Montessori Kindergarten, 1971/72.
Hmmm, and haha.
ninastenknudsen, painter.
The UK is home to some fairly well-known examples of glaring health inequality. One of the most shocking was exposed in a report from the World Health Organisation in 2008, which stated that Calton in the East End of Glasgow has a male life expectancy of 54 – nine years less than in India. Another well-known fact is that if you get on the tube at Westminster, life expectancy declines by one year for every two stops as you travel out towards the East End. Less well known is that the most spectacular drop in life expectancy in London happens between Victoria and Vauxhall, two stops on the Victoria line: in that journey of just over a mile, life expectancy declines by nine years.
Japan had it all, except, it seemed, tolerance for those middle managers among its ranks seen as hindering the Japanese economic miracle. But a solution was at hand. For managers perceived as soft, indolent or otherwise incompetent, and would-be junior executives not quite ready for prime-time, the answer was a ticket to jigoku no kunren: Hell Camp.
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are
Sting
A new kind of science.
1994 to 2017 and still counting. Also, I never knew this: BECOMING LEVI ASHER. So: goodbye, Levi, hello Marc?
Like a time capsule. But it is for the cool kids (that explains why I was never invited nor even knew about it). Paul Ford is involved. There is some background info.
But the party seems to have ended circa early 2015. Damn. Never the trendsetter I am.
A total metamorphosis isn’t possible in my case. I can write in Italian, but I can’t become an Italian writer. Despite the fact that I’m writing this sentence in Italian, the part of me conditioned to write in English endures. I think of Fernando Pessoa, a writer who invented four versions of himself: four separate, distinct writers, thanks to which he was able to go beyond the confines of himself. Maybe what I’m doing, by means of Italian, resembles his tactic. It’s not possible to become another writer, but it might be possible to become two.