2013 — 16 August: Friday
An overnight Antipodean email exchange assures me that my chum and his family have all survived the 6.6 earthquake near Wellington, and a cold call1 equally assures me that some other parts of the globe are unpleasant "business as usual", too. I shouldn't read so late, I guess, as it delays the return to what passes for consciousness these days. Still, the cuppa is helping / has helped.
And, unless it's my vivid imagination, Brian the Plumber yesterday set the kitchen hot water to an even hotter level. Yikes.
There's a cool irony...
... in reading an interesting essay about truth and journalism in a portion of the Murdoch-owned media space:
[Janet] Malcolm is famous for saying that, by way of reportorial self-defence, "the more pompous talk about freedom of speech and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about having to earn a living"... The journalist has the temerity to make his or her version of events the public one, the one with the best odds at distribution and posterity. But, given our anxieties about what we can ever really know about another person, how can we ever have any confidence that the journalist's account deserves to become official? The best we can do is make sure the journalist is playing by the rules. It's a sociological solution, not an epistemological one...
And another here:
Tolerant, politically liberal individuals shrink from using violence under almost any circumstance. Most, however, accept the protection of the government and its military and police forces,
paying taxes to support the systemic violence that preserves their comfortable lives. And in the international realm, by opposing violence, they are effectively condemning many others to live
under tyranny.
Thus, like it or not, violence often is the answer to our political problems.
Recall that 1970 Ron Cobb cartoon — one of his rare six-panel strips — showing the inevitable resort to violence only after exhausting all peaceful overtures.
Sacre bleu! (Link.)
A rainy morning...
... has given way to a somewhat sunnier afternoon. I shall depart, methinks, in search of the legendary dark chocolate hob-nob accompanied by the cuppa from the amiably permanent urn at Ye Figge Tea Shoppe. But what book shall I select for the proprietress this time, I wonder? (I did eventually remember that I'd taken "Perfick, perfick" recently... an HE Bates compendium of the five titles in his "Darling Buds of May" sequence.) [Pause] I went with my newest version of the "Snark", illustrated by Mahendra Singh.
One of the books...
... from which I shall never be parted is a battered, much-annotated, 50c paperback by W. Somerset Maugham that Christa bought in November 1963 during the year she spent in Gothenburg, Nebraska. It's his 1948 set of introductory essays to "The World's Ten Greatest Novels". At the end of his assessment of "Pride and Prejudice" Maugham quotes from an unpublished letter from Fanny Austen-Knight (Austen's favourite niece). This niece, who on marriage became Lady Knatchbull, spoke in this letter to her younger sister in response to that sister's concerns about things that reflected on their Aunt Jane's gentility.
As Maugham summed it up: "It just shows that you may make a great stir in the world and yet sadly fail to impress the members of your own family." Now ain't that the truth! :-)
I like to kid myself...
... that I can learn from experience, and correct mistakes. Pah! I was browsing through some email exchanges with my friend Carol that are now just shy of their 20th birthday:
For some years, now, I've had a tendency to sing "I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go" or variants in the car on the way in each morning. Yesterday, on viewing Snow White (one of four LaserDiscs picked up2) I discovered that by far the longest song sequence is the one in which the seven vertically-challenged individuals sing "home from work" rather than "off to work". Another illusion gone.