2016 — 11 November: Friday

As the years tick steadily past, the world goes steadily more insane, and my time with Christa recedes ever further...1

Christa and Peter, 1983

... so the "insight" expressed by Freud in a letter to a chum continues to ring true. (About the only thing of his that does!):

We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.

Sigmund Freud, quoted in "You'll get over it" by Virginia Ironside


But there's always Bach. In this case, the Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV1004. Glorious stuff.

Leonard Cohen...

... has just checked out. Perfect timing! And I gather California wants "out", too. Not so surprising after this last week or so. But the US Constitution is a bit like "Hotel California" by the Eagles, surely? — "you can check out, but you can never leave". In fact, wasn't there a spot of bother last time such a split was attempted? A civil war or some such? Golly, I wonder what Trumpkin would do then...

It's already time for another cuppa. [Pause] And Big Bro says jumper and beanie are now en route. Excellent news.

One has to smile

What other response is there?

Writing in 1988 — that is, after two full terms of Reaganism in the United States — DA Miller proposes to follow Foucault in demystifying "the intensive and continuous 'pastoral' care that liberal society proposes to take of each and every one of its charges" (viii). As if! I'm a lot less worried about being pathologized by my therapist than about my vanishing mental health coverage — and that's given the great good luck of having health insurance at all. Since the beginning of the tax revolt, the government of the United States — and, increasingly, those of other so-called liberal democracies — has been positively rushing to divest itself of answerability for care to its charges, with no other institutions proposing to fill the gap.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Chapter 4 of Paranoid Reading


Those were the days, heh?

There's...

... an excellent review, here, of Gleick's "history" of time travel. Source and snippet:

When it comes to the philosophy, and indeed the physics, it goes without saying that it's fascinating to see brilliant minds "taking up residence in Grand Hotel Abyss" (to borrow George Lukacs's crack about Theodor Adorno). What would be good, though, would be for someone to call us back when the thinking leads to something, anything, that we can see or feel or sense or even understand — because all this astonishingly brilliant thought and science and learning and history, all these amazing stories, as far as I can tell, have no consequences at all.

John Lanchester in NYRB


'Twas ever thus :-)

Although my search...

... in Soton for "Linux Voice" magazine was fruitless2 I did manage to pick up a couple of "deathday" goodies. This 2013 book by a stylish writer:

Steve Jones book

And a little Sony DVD player — made in China — just for playing CDs. It sounds excellent, and was 5% of the price of just one of my two failed high-end CD players. £31 isn't excessive!


Footnotes

1  She died on this date in 2007.
2  I'd already been warned it was doomed in any case as the magazine has just disappeared into one of its rivals.