2016 — 6 February: Saturday

My enjoyment — usually quite reasonable, as I sup my initial cup and listen out for anything from the dawn chorus — of "Beatus vir qui timet Dominum" by Johann RosenmÃŒller (if you believe the BBC's scrolling info bar) or by Konrad JunghÀnel and Carsten Lohff (if you prefer to go with their web page) is very much un-enhanced1 by knowing only too well that the 'friend of a friend' with whom I twice enjoyed a "Pie Night" at the "Wheatsheaf" in Braishfield is now nearing the end of his brief and bloody final struggle against the sort of leukaemia more generally found in youngsters, not in ex-IBM pensioners.

Speaking obliquely of which...

Hello, pension!

You will make a welcome addition2 to the fund by which I live my Micawber-esque life in these Dickensian days. Actually, you will be dwarfed later next month by the snailmail arrival of a warrant from Uncle ERNIE rendering unto Caesar (erm, that would be me) what is Caesar's — the Premium Bond holdings that were dear Mama's, and that I kept in the prize draw (to give them a final chance to develop some winning ways) for the permitted 12 months after her death. They will be coming home to roost, briefly, while I think of something to do with them.

John's already had his share... and is driving around in it!

More tea, vicar? Don't mind if I do, thanks.

Ouch!

I hadn't given Mr Bachardy a single passing thought since watching, and very much enjoying, "Chris & Don" six years ago:

And Don Bachardy, the artist and longtime lover of Christopher Isherwood, then a reigning figure on the L.A. literary scene, recalls their ardent pursuit of Isherwood. "They were both highly ambitious, and Chris was a rung on the ladder they were climbing. I don't like to tell on Chris, but he wasn't very fond of either of them. I think he found her clammy." (Isherwood already told on himself. He makes numerous unflattering references to Didion and Dunne — "Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All" — in his diaries.)

Lili Anolik in Vanity Fair


I am not...

... the only chap who hangs on to elderly SF paperbacks, it seems!

DiGriz

Though I would say my copy is slightly less foxed than the one that Zeno propped against his iMac yesterday for me!

Oh, good grief!

Much as I appreciate the once-a-week web freebie from the TLS it can sometimes be exasperating. Here, for example, we see yet another variant of the ghastly "trickle-down" theory:

The desire for greater status leads the rich to crave the production of luxurious but useless commodities, and in return to give to the makers of those commodities all the things that are really useful for human life, and thereby (as Smith famously put it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) ensure "nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants".

Richard Tuck in TLS


I confess I've read Rousseau's "Confessions", but nothing by the original Adam Smith :-)

And I heartily recommend this piece to Big Bro.

Aspects of...

... our modern world can make it hard not to be a cynic:

... psychologists secured enormous financial gains by collaborating in 
official torture, while also having clear evidence that it was ineffective.

This documentary...

... probably won't do much for my blood pressure:

Catholic fiddlers

The BBC programmes available here, by comparison, should soothe. I've just downloaded the 30-minute film, by Reyner Banham, of "A City Crowned with Green" (monochrome, naturally, back in 1964, but downloadable as a 720p MP4a file.) Excellent.

I stopped watching...

... Gibney's documentary 41 minutes in, with an hour to go. I just could not take any more tonight without my head exploding. Had I continued, I might have felt compelled to firebomb any Catholic church I could find.

Ironically, by reverting to the radio I was then just in time to catch the last fragment of a news bulletin soundbite about Peter Saunders (a member of the Pope's advisory commission on sexual abuse in the clergy) and the Vatican's abject failure to tackle the problem of child sexual abuse in the church. Tonight's lesson: I learned of the setting up, in 1947, of the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete.

  

Footnotes

1  I find religious music generally sounds beautiful no matter how abhorrent its underlying sado-masochistic sentiments. (Nailing chaps to pieces of wood. Worshipping ghosts. Where's the fun in that?)
2  Even though you won't finish materialising from cyberspace until Monday.