Mac the Nice: Blog

Liberty is a Bitch!

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 23:05:38 -0600

"Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses." --Louis Antoine L�on Florelle St. Just, in Year II of the Revolutionary French Republic.

The Frozen Blogger

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 01:40:33 -0600
As I sat down one evening,
In a small Internet Cafe,
A twenty-something waitress,
To me these words did say:

"I see you are a blogger,
And not a common bum,
For no-one but a blogger,
Laps his latte with his tongue."

[Bowdlerized from James Stevens, "The Frozen Logger". More to follow as inspiration inflicts.]

Original Lyrics

Frozen Logger in Time magazine

Deconstructing the Cranberry

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:52:11 -0600
Had a first chance to see the uncensored cut of *Deconstructing Harry* tonight, and I'm still undecided, though it's pretty interesting to see NY Times reviewer, Janet Maslin was totally tickled by it.

Others were not so thrilled, those in particular who experience a great deal of libidinal distress upon any mention of the "C-word"--something new for a Woody Allen movie.

Novel as that may be, there has been nothing in that to detract from the ongoing, most positive presence of that certain cult following Woody has gained among women film fans of an entirely different sort who experience thrills at each fleeting film frame showing a shot of Woody's bald spot. Needless to say, in case this is the first any have heard of it, this has been going on only since he lost his toupee down the back of a movie seat sometime in the early Eighies.

Back on the negative, or more 'serious' side, there is yet many a reviewer that show a penchant, most odd to my estimation, in making much of Woody's alleged "narcissism". But truly, by so charging him, do they not reveal nary a blinking acquaintance with what that really means? And is this not to confuse such a darkly obsessive sexual pathology as that with the mildly neurotic extroversion (and nothing more) which is the creative engine driving this artist-- whose ego is, in short, "the eggs" which the family of that crazy uncle in the Woody Allen story, "need"?

If you are a woman who makes use, on occasion, of the "C-word" or doesn't mind overly should she hear her fellow woman giving breath to it, but freaks out desperately any time it passes the folds of male lips--okay, there, don't you see, is an instance of narcissism.

A bit of study on the matter would show that clinical narcissism, surprisingly has little to do with the ego, and everything going with other deeper, darker, less well understood regions of the human personality, as it turns out that most of the narcissists you'll ever run into will tend to be the last you'd think to be egotists. Narcissism lurks in a regressive, defensive mode as a protective measure--and there is no critic of egotism more hostile to its appearance than the narcissist.

Woody is an egotist but not a narcissist. No narcissist would ever get caught dead on film in front of the whole world with a big, yarmulke- shaped bald spot showing--no matter what the cult following for it, real or ideal. As vanity is endemic to the complex, Woody would be wearing contact lenses rather than be seen as the sort of "egg-head" who wears glasses. Jokes that turn on self-deprecation are impossible to the narcissist. The insecurity, sense of inferiority and self-doubt that Woody suffers, is nothing compared to the monstrous sort of self-loathing that plagues the narcissist--plagues him or her even to the extent that it must always be concealed from a conscious ego beneath a veneer that is like a mirror reflecting images of self taken from without, from elsewhere to stand as a mask for the detested self within, where a seriously ill-formed truly personal ego is being kept in chains and in the dark.

No narcissist ever dares or desires to stand out in society in the mode of his or her own truly personal individuality. Rather, this is the personality that will find its expression, its talent in acting out a pretended self, whether on the job, in the club, the professional organization, the church, whatever the stage, the role, the expression; by dancing, singing or doing police work; whatever the setting, in the office for doing the business of accounting, or politicking--and it is all done in a mode and after a style that the narcissist sees as being the most respectable or otherwise, en vogue, and recognizable to the rest of society as what's chic, most acceptable and attractive.

No narcissist is ever equipped to go against the flow, to revolt (unless it's in fashion) and when it comes to any sort of identity, per self-image it is always associated with what the narcissist *is* at the level of the biological, the physical, the anatomical, ethnically, as to nationality, sexually, as to gender, and additionally, the social, as to class: there is a world of difference between the person who loves himself, and the other who is in love with himself, her own gender, his own nationality, his race, her social class, his wardrobe, her self and public image. It is not benignly neurotic to be *in love* with the furnishings of one's own apartment, or body, with the appurtenances of one's own gender or citizenship. It's quite more pathogenic: all super patriots are narcissists, every racist and feminist, every immaculately rigid conformist to a religious creed who is *in love* with a Bible or a flag, or stridently partisan political doctrine.

There is something deeply hidden in the psyche of the Narcissist that he fears and therefore loathes, and so by much help, as of gender, of flag, of gun possession, high fashion, the social register, strict practice of religion; narcissism constructs a false ego, a brittle, rigid personality that stands in contrast to a real personality, as a manikin in a store window to the artist who designed it.

The narcissist hates the person buried beneath the veneer, but is so in love with the veneer, the image, the mirror. The mere egotist who acts out, as the attention seeking extrovert is egocentric, consciously--not unconsciously, as the narcissist whose behavior is controlled by the darker, hidden demands of his sexual being, demands (of the libido) which are forever in conflict with the false personality, the social person he constructs, the ego he borrows from without, from expectations of the social ego, or "super-ego". The mere Woody Allen style egotist forever has the sense that his own ego is a nice one, but a persecuted one to the extent his perception is that others hate him, or sell him short, or disregard him because he is short, or Jewish, or Black, or a woman, or because she's bookish and wears glasses, is lousy at sports, likes to go bird-watching.

So, there's really nothing to it when Woody uses the C-word in one of his movie scripts, nor is there any reason that as an artist he should care about enflaming the ire of those rigid narcissists who are so utterly in love with their own self-image as church-goers or feminists, that they should feel so shattered by the word, and thus be so hateful in their reaction to it as to be utterly blind to the possibility that Woody has every right to feel a need to strike back by the C-Word against those very people who would most object to it; those narcissists who blame him for living in such rampant disregard to his own public image; those crazy people who live so in fear of their own sexual nature that when they see it on display in Woody's life and art, have no other desire than to persecute him just as they do themselves, and make him the scapegoat for it, to label him as "loser" and "abuser" or some such, for it all.

Of course Woody Allen loves only one thing more than having every sort of narcissist for the object of his satire--and that is having Woody Allen for it.

So, in spirit of the season, my fellow turkeys; whatever may be the recipe for that particular dressing of neurosis, howsoever spicy and/or exotic that we all got crammed up inside from the guzzle to the zatch, leave us never forget that We Need the Eggs right along with the bread crumbs and the sage.

Happy Thanksgiving to All, and to All a Good Cranberry!

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Understanding Kant

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 13:16:19 -0500
Open a copy of the *Critique of Pure Reason* sometime and just get a load of the length of some of those sentences, and of the thought that is contained within them, as the gist of it is seen to wind through clause and subclause to go diving ever the deeper into parenthetical equivocation upon this point and then that, before winding back out again to go seeking toward the original subject and whatever was being predicated of it.

One comes to a point of wondering what, if anything is to be gained by it all--other than a sort of gymnastic regimen of mental muscle building. So, for one thing, yes, it's worth it for that, just as it was for Kant when he was reading Aristotle--but other than that?

Yes. Insofar as Kant remains faithful (and he doesn't always) to a self-imposed regimen of being critic to his own process of reasoning, to his own judgments, and all the more essentially to his own inclinations which would otherwise favor, flavor, bias his judgments toward what he, personally, would like to be the case, in terms of what he might already believe. But as Kant would not permit for himself the luxury of that all-too-human and ever so despicably common, undisciplined indulgence in spoiled brat mendacity; so long as he holds to that, refusing to himself every stupid human trick of intellectual legerdemain, as he sticks like the shoemaker to his last, he is able to produce a few entirely remarkable discoveries concerning the question of what man can know, how he can know and how much, based not upon what man's senses show him, but strictly on a process of pure reasoning.

Pure reason is, first and foremost "pure" only if it is kept clean, to be ruled by logic untainted, unbent by the desire of the thinker for it to prove merely what the thinker already thinks or believes--or would hope to be true. Kant believes that thought, when given free reign, free i.e. from the desires of the thinker, may go where logic drives it toward a synthesis of new knowledge--not based on experience, experiment, evidence of the senses, but by means of man's rational equipment alone.

What sort of knowledge? Aside from mathematics, there is ethics, psychology, the metaphysics of justice, sociology, politics, fields of inquiry that are otherwise in an enormous mess either because of sloppy or dishonest reasoning or by application of empirical method to subject matter that will not support it.

But how can such non-empirical knowledge be derived? Quite simply, this is possible because the workings of human reason are governed by the same laws which give order to all the rest of Nature. Though Kant was writing in Pre-Darwinian times, he saw in what he calls "a science of metaphysics" the possibility for something quite like Natural Selection, where a naturally ordered synthesis arises by a selective process of critical judgments, by a survival of what works logically, what is 'fittest', most fit and in keeping with reason over against the whole slough of weak, ill-formed things that do not synthesize with the eco-system of what is already in harmony.

This is to produce by Pure Reason an evolution of human knowledge--but no Pie in the Sky was this! Kant was already seeing it in action, as he marveled over what his contemporaries, Descartes, Leibnitz and Newton were producing--whether they knew it or not--by this process for Natural Science, Mathematics and Geometry.

Kant was being given to understand, most especially with a view to Geometry, that by fixing upon certain indemonstrable First Principles intuited as being self-evidently true, if what follows from those things axiomatically is seen to be in accord with reason without fault and as such produces results in the real world then this is science just as surely as the empirical method is science. The proof is *teleological*--as from the 'tail' of the thing, the head is known, by the result the principle is seen to be valid. But other than that, unlike the facts and data of empiricism, these theorems cannot be proven by anything *prior* to themselves, or i.e. higher in priority of universality, or in causality, of time, position, motion, category, genus, etc. This is the meaning of that which is *a priori*, better known, or previously known.

Somewhere the process comes to that for which nothing is prior. And this is where we come to a concept, a theorem, a principle which like some star just radiates its truth self-evidently--but how? Because of something that the human mind already, concretely, congenitally knows, *a priori* as untutored by anything outside itself and the thing contemplated. Something the mind sees, naturally, in that thing, of what it is, in itself, *noumenatively*, it knows because something in the makeup of the mind is like that thing, or somehow, by Nature, *is* that thing and so has an affinity of understanding as to that thing.

Both things being natural, reason and the object of reason, the mind knowing itself, ineffably feels its own nature, thinks its own nature, works according to its nature, by which it intuits an analog of itself to the thing contemplated and understands what it is--mind to thing--without intervention of anything else.

Here in the self-evident truth, the mind is in synthesis with its object.

Now that is different, yet much related to what happens when the mind can intuit a synthesis of new knowledge between two or more truths or theorems that are not in themselves analytically related each to the other and cannot be derived deductively one from the other.

What Kant saw in the theorems, axioms and corollaries of Geometry, is how other truths, new truths, new axioms could be either axiomatic of or corollary to the "theorems" already known. There are axioms that were already in a theorem all along, as inductive or deductive analytical judgments a priori were engaged to understand that. Otherwise there were corollaries being intuited as a synthesis between two or more separate and otherwise analytically unrelated theorems by what Kant called the *synthetical judgment a priori*.

With the *synthetical judgment a priori*, the same form of intuition is taking place as that which judges a truth to be self-evident. Something about the Nature of the mind makes the synthesis possible because something like those two or more things and their relation has an analog in the mind, either as from prior knowledge of another like synthesis or its some purely unconscious Natural process of the reasoning mind that carries the analog.

The point of this synthetic form of reasoning however is that there is nothing in the one thing, of itself, to imply its connection with the other thing, in itself and that is the reason why a metaphor of catalysis might be useful. A catalyst effects a reaction without entering into it. Something about sunlight induces the chlorophyll in a plant to go into reaction with carbon dioxide to produce oxygen. Something about the mind, some light must enter in to produce the judgment that two or more objects of the mind are somehow related as the elements of some new, heretofore unintuited knowledge.

This, *but for one thing* is very unlike the analytical judgment a priori which requires nothing from the mind but strict observation, deduction, subtraction (nothing being added or multiplied by the mind) since the predicate is already in the subject, as the subject could not be the subject but for the possibility of that predicate. Yet, the "one thing" which is the same, is that the deduction or induction is *self- evident*.

Kant had recovered for the study of logic what had been lost from the work of Aristotle and had been confused ever since, as so it remains unto those who are not getting this central part of Kant's metaphysics. Logicians are still assuming that deductive and inductive reasoning are all Aristotle and Kant wrote, as the immense error is being taught that "inductive reasoning" is the same as Kant's *synthetical judgment a priori*. Nothing of the kind!

Both inductive and deductive reasoning are the result of analysis. As inductive moves from the particular to the universal, it is merely picking up the specific threads leading to a genus, a category that is already there. The species is *in* the genus. You look at this horse and that horse, this zebra and that jackass, so you intuit the genus, equus. That was inductive. Otherwise you are informed that there is the genus Equus containing all creatures with hooves, manes, elongated heads, upwardly protruding ears. You see an ostrich and you deduce that it is not a horse. The genus name *equus* merely means "horse", and once you've seen a horse race at Hollywood Park, next thing you know, you're over to the San Diego zoo looking at a Zebra and you deduce, by strict observation of the genus characteristics in that animal, "By god, that's a horse!"

Synthetical judgments a priori don't work like that. In this case, you might look at the zebra and say, "By god, that's the ugliest NFL referee I ever saw!" Or you think, "By god, there goes one jackass that should stay off the Santa Monica freeway when they're painting new stripes down the centerline!" In either case your synthetical judgment a priori was all wet, because the reasoning in the above two instances was proceeding not by synthetic analogy but by identity of a single attribute namely, stripes.

More along the lines of a synthetical judgment a priori would be to look at a penguin, and not to see something else of the same genus such as a least tern, or a barn swallow, but to see in terms of a prior knowledge about evolution-- something else.

Had you never in your life seen a zebra, but you had seen horses and then the day dawns when a zebra comes prancing down the street, you would say, "By god, that's the funniest looking horse I ever saw!" And your analytical judgment a priori would have been correct. You were looking at a horse, or to be less specific, recognizing, by induction, the genus of Horse.

Now just say that you had seen many a porpoise in your time, but then one day you found yourself with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine standing in line behind a penguin down at Ralph's, and you were heard to say, "By god, that's the funniest looking porpoise I ever saw!" It wouldn't be long before you were in the back of an ambulance on your way to the locked ward at L.A. County General. And yet, your synthetical judgment a priori, might well have been correct, while your psychiatrist, your analyst who can't stop thinking inside the box of deduction and induction is just not seeing the sense of your synthetical intuition.

Okay, you know about evolution and how reptiles evolved into birds, that there were reptilian birds, whereas the link, the possibility of a synthesis (evolution) from reptiles to mammals via birds is yet to have been understood, synthesized, judged. But you are a thinker outside the box and as you see that penguin, you see on the penguin what is not for the birds, which is outside the box for most birds--wings that cannot fly. You see that unlike another bird with useless wings, an ostrich, this bird's wings have evolved into flippers for swimming such as you would see on whales, seals, the walrus and the porpoise.

You have seen the way a porpoise can come flying out of the water like a bird, just as you have seen penguins come shooting through the surface of the sea up into the air like the porpoise, but up onto the ice-shelf, back to the land, unlike the porpoise. You have made note of the bird- like bill on the face of the porpoise, as you have even seen it on some species of whales, as you've seen killer whales like the porpoise seem to walk upright on the surface of the water just as a penguin does over the ice--and you have noted how very much like a penguin is the killer whale's tuxedo.

Here, outside of the Theory of Evolution, had you no knowledge of that, you would never have the analogies in mind to make the synthesis, as you would remain blind to any analytical identities between that bird and that mammal--of which there are none: all are intuited analogically.

But since you do know your Darwin, and because you know that not all apes evolved into humans, that some species never went through the chain of mutations, and remained behind to continue propagating as apes, you make the analogy to the penguin and see that not all of them had gone through the sea change to become killer whales and porpoises.

Despite the fact that much of this reasoning has depended upon observation, experience of being taught about evolution, how it works, even so there is no experiment you can think to perform to produce the empirical evidence you would need to prove, as you would say, "scientifically" and beyond a shadow of doubt that your hunch about the evolutionary synthesis between penguins and porpoises is so. Even in the event of some astonishing result showing the DNA of the two species is sharing altogether too many gene factors for any other deduction to be made; then all the better because what was at first judged metaphysically to be the truth minus the rigorous hard science from lab, was indeed the truth, hard science or no hard science.

This is what Kant is talking about when he proposes that there is most certainly, a *Science of Metaphysics* indeed. And just as certainly as there is the other form of hard, empirical science that can only obtain its body of facts inside the analytical box of empirical deduction and induction as an analysis of the hard evidence- -that end of empirical science is dead in the water without the synthetical judgments a priori that have first been arrived upon in theory.

Einstein's relativity was not changed one iota by the empirical proof of its truth obtained through observation of solar eclipse, and production of the atom bomb. It was valid as metaphysical science, as philosophy years before it ever came to be proven as hard scientific fact. And that's what Kant is talking about, as he's been saying that when reason is treated with a kind of sacred veneration, such that no mendacity or trick of rhetoric will be permitted to taint its purity, it can attain to a discovery of knowledge that is no less, if not more powerful than all the experimental accoutrements of purely empirical physics and chemistry.
--
"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness." Albert Einstein

Eye for Eye, 'Toon for 'Toon

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 01:08:02 -0600
Here we got this irate Iranian, who much less than any "president", looks more like some character off a New Orleans crackhouse doorstep, or maybe you like the Florida Keys and Norman's Cay? like right out of a frame from Blow and from beating the crap out of Johnny Depp, this guy? this Mahmoud Ahmadinejad we got here threatening to return eye for eye, ink for ink and paper for paper, a "holocaust cartoon" in retribution for every bomb-turbaned Muhammad in the Sunday Funnies.

What is this--kid's day at the fair? or politics of the world, Usenet-style?

At table tonight, over a dinner of chili and cornbread, and my own secret recipe for home-made French dressing on the salad (I defy anyone to say he or she knows so well as either Kraft or I, what the true secret to an orange and creamy French dressing really is); I was saying to my so very fine little ol' Sweet Mama, I was saying to her over a big bite of butter-drenched home-baked cornbread whilst watching the news, "Hey! Those Muslims really know how to jump up and down, don't they?"

"They sure do," said she.

"Up and down, up and down," says me.

"They do that a lot," she mused upon having herself a sip of tea.

"And every time you turn on the TV you see a bunch of Moslems jumping all over the place--look at 'em," I decried.

"Naw!" She just kept looking at me. "I already saw 'em a million times, already. And besides, all that jumping up and down would upset my stomach. I'm eating my salad with your famous French dressing, here."

But I was getting all carried away by a new thought, and so I said, "Shoot, baby; I mean, don't they see how this totally lets the air out of their only excuse for being all mad like that?"

"Whaddaya mean?" She was lustfully watching me eat my chili- -being on that diet like she is.

I told her: "I mean they just trashed their own case with this "Holocaust cartoon" threat. No sooner do they commit what they think to be the same crime . . ."

"Yeah," she said. "If they don't think twice about doing the same, like, horrible thing, then all that jumping up and down is just for show."

"Their rage is phony."

"They don't really believe it's as bad as they say, if they're willing to do it, too."

"Totally phony. And look what terrible aim they got. There they are jumping up and down against the Danes, but they are throwing cartoons at the Jews."
--

They can't make Jesus and Moses their target because Islam regards those names as objects of veneration and reverence. So the Holocaust is their only hope for retribution. They consider that the Holocaust is something sacred to Jews and to many Christians; something you can't poke fun at. And since something you can't joke around about is the very definition of the "holy", then why have we not as yet thought necessary to begin referring to the "Holy Holocaust"?

It's dead wrong, is all. The Holocaust is not holy, as indeed it is the end and the destruction of all things holy and sacred to the conscience of man. The awe in which the Holocaust is beheld is not of reverence but of horror and disgust. Even so, idolaters are forever amongst us, always falling to the error and heresy, the foolishness of making the unholy holy--as we go fearing to give breath to the word "Holocaust" right out loud in public, speaking that word as though it were one of the names of God.

But, as it takes an idolater to know an idolater, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would choose the Holocaust as his target. And of course he and all his jumping up and down brethren are indulged in idolatry, par excellence. Indeed! For haven't we heard it said just of late concerning their very 'Prophet', that by his commandment there were to be no images kept of him at all? No? Yes? Well, it's been about a year since I've last read the Koran, and while I'm not sure about that, it does not mean such a directive does not stand somewhere upon the pages of the Hadith, or elsewhere.

Presuming what we've heard about such a ban is so, then there could have been but one spiritually discerned reason for it, which would be to make emphatic the understanding that the true being or essence of Muhammad cannot subsist in anything made of matter. Thus, there can be no image of Muhammad; no image can capture the height and infinitude of his immortal holiness, and for that reason, it would be understood that by mocking an image supposed to be of Mohammed, Muhammad will not be mocked.

No true Moslem could take affront from such effrontery; every really with-it Muslim would only look at it and laugh to think that the author of such a cartoon could be so abysmally dim.

Unfortunately however, as we have seen, there is no such thing as a "true Muslim" who is presently out there laughing. No, they are all out there jumping up and down, while choking and puking on their own rage. They are not laughing, they are whining, howling and squealing like a bunch of stuck pigs. And there is a reason for that.

What all this reveals is the Achilles Heel of Mohammedanism, exposing the reason, the very reason, the one fundamental reason as to why Muhammad is a False Prophet. Observe, if indeed it be the case that somewhere either in the Qur'an or the Hadith there is such a proscription against any images of "the Prophet" then what ought that tell you about just who he really thinks--despite all outward sayings to the contrary--he is? For who but God, and God alone is worthy of commanding that no image can ever be made of himself? Who but God may be revealed and revered as having such a High Humility in regard of himself?

Who was it but God, JHVH himself, that said to Moses when Moses asked for the divine name, to go and mind his own business? It was God who said to Moses, "You have the nerve to ask for my name?" And Moses being dumbfounded could only stand there in his bare feet in front of the Bush that Burned and stare, as God went on to say, "Schlemazl! Nebbish! Oy! You ask me for my name? I'll tell you my name: my name is Jealous!"

Whoa. And do you understand what God meant by such High Wit as that? Well, he just goes right on to explain to Moses, in order to be understood. "I'll tell you who I am," said God, "I Am Who I Am!" JHVH. He Is Who He Is, and so his name, upon being asked for it, is "Jealous"!

Get it?

Myth and Reality

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:28:07 -0600
Before there were any such places on the map of the modern world as Israel and Jordan, at the close of World War I there was only this . . .

But Abdullah, brother of Sheik Faisal--that great sidekick on camel-back to Lawrence of Arabia--he wanted a kingdom just as nice and big and fat as was being granted in form of "Iraq" to his brother. So, how about that?

Well, that betrayed previous commitments in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to re-establish in the world a "Jewish Homeland" as that came due to an awful upsurge of pogroms in Russia, Yemen, Poland and elsewhere, to be mandated in 1920 by the League of Nations at San Remo, to British administration, as the protectorate of Palestine, above illustrated.

But what did that matter, some old promise to a bunch of Jews when there were people like Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to please?

There you see His Eminence during WWII with his friend Heinrich, some few years after being appointed to his post by the British in 1921.

And here he is again doing what he can with Uncle Adolf toward facillitating a final solution to the Jewish Question, the same question that his fellow Muslim Arabs of the region are still asking, and for which they are still finding the same rather nasty answer.

But the real answer to what is now the Israeli Question might start to be stated somewhat as follows . . .

From time immemorial, in this part of the former Ottoman province called "Southern Syria", Jewish people had been resident, living and worshiping at synagogues in Judea, Samaria and Galilee, in the four "Holy Cities" of Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem.

An ancient synagogue of Safed (Tzfat). . .

And yet, it was being argued in favor of the Arabs that there was no historical precedent for any such great promise of Jewish dominion here at all, let alone such as would extend eastward across Jordan!

Across Jordan? Who could argue? Indeed, all of Palestine had been much of an over-generous thought during those earlier Balfour deliberations. So, of course there was no such precedent. There was no need to be getting all land-greedy, when what was being called for was no more than what Jews had originally held as their own in this land. Besides, it had always been by necessity of pure survival only, that Jews had ever set out in conquest, as upon return from Egypt, when they were being prevented from settling anywhere at all; let alone back in the land of their fathers. All they wanted was what had been there for Isaac, Jacob and Joseph--and no more.

So, no big whoop! Let Abdullah have his kingdom east of Jordan, and let Jews once again settle in their little old sliver of an ancient homeland, and that would be cool.

Let everything across Jordan be "Transjordan" unto the Arabs . . .

And let Palestine be unto the Jews once again Israel, a nation brought back out of prayers and dreams and the mourning of nearly two thousand years; a place on the earth finally intended to be reinstated for the settlement of all or any of the many widely dispersed Jews who had so long been received unto a very bad welcome as the guests of other nations.

And so what, well might one wonder, was this with the big ragged chunks chewed from the map of Israel, but all that remained to the Jews following upon negotiations between the powers that culminated in UN Resolution number 181 of November 29, 1947.

You look, and you ask, and you start to wonder if maybe certain events of only two, three and four years previous, leading up to an Allied V.E. Day; if all that was being taken into account by the honorable gathering of envoys at Flushing Meadows, because who knew, but that they would figure such a reduced area was all the Jews could possibly use, now, seeing how the picture, demographically speaking, had been so drastically depleted and ravenously gnawed away over the past few years of World War Two?

Hard to say just what may have been in the minds of those many delegates, but oft-times events serve to speak much more frankly of man's mind than man is given to speak of it, himself. So, as to those events, just about the time Hitler was coming to power in Germany, the British Mandate of Palestine was then, officially, some 14 years on the map of the world, and at that, it had remained more or less in its secondary shape, as of 1922 (figure two, above), all but for a certain additional, particularly choice chunk of it to go missing in the "Metula" negotiations of 1923 when the area in the north surrounding Mt. Hermon at the headwaters of the River Jordan was lost so that now, the Golan Heights, the sole primary water supply to Palestine, is torn loose and dragged off mightily dripping and bleeding in the jaws of Syria, and this just a year after Abdullah, as already noted, had made off with that huge beefy side, the prime cut of Transjordan.

But, as we say, other than those not too totally minor mutilations of the overall look to the League's re-creation, "Palestine", it had begun to hold its shape by the time in 1934 when Shimon Perez . . .

. . . came, along with his family, 'up' to make their aliyah into "Eretz Yisrael", where they were finding it very much to their liking. And since there were as yet no Syrians digging around and about the slopes of Mt. Hermon to divert the waters of the Jordan River away from the Jordan Valley, as was being done in '67 during the months leading up to the Six Day War, the Perez family was just so glad to be out and away from the black and bloody pogroms of Russia, the ruinous taxation that was being levied by Stalin's Supreme Soviet upon all remnants of private enterprise, that those early days in the Mediterranean sun were to them so golden that not even the dark storms of stares that came faceless from folds of kaffiyeh to sting you as the wind whipped sand, not even that could dim the glow.

It's just as Peres puts it in his autobiography to compare the effect upon his own heart and mind, all that Arab resentment, with its counterpart in Poland and Russia where they had lived under perpetual threat of the Jew hunting "goyim", in a shtetl without power or running water that was always changing its status, being in a hinterland between the two warring nations. What he comes up with is to prefer by far the Arab to the Pole and the Russian because as he states it in his book, Battling for Peace, "The Arabs, who, though our enemies, were not our rulers."

For their money, they had got the better part of the deal, because all they had to do was have a look at the money to see it was so, for there it was printed right over the image of King George where it said, "Palestine E.I." which meant that at least on paper the deal, the promise was still good, as the abbreviation "E.I" meant "Jewish Homeland", Eretz Israel.

Teacher's Pet in Flagrante Delicto

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 17:47:14 -0600
YET ANOTHER Female Sex-Maniac school marm caught red-handed, panties down in a tangle of her own email messages about scalding hot schtuppings with a wee 14 year old baby boy!

And that ain't all; do the math: Here we have a 37 year-old middle school teacher from Arkansas, where in this progressive era of Bill Clinton and Wal-Mart, it is easy to see that not all women are yet being kept barefoot, pregnant and/or plain ignorant--obviously, but especially Ms. Deanna Bobo who, upon pulling up her panties to step back into those nasty, dirty Birkenstocks she's got, she took that little 'un by the hand and led him straight to church . . .

http://www.kfsm.com/Global/story.a sp?S=4165615&nav=menu151_2

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.as p?ARTICLE_ID=47544

"School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days.
Reading and writing and 'rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of a ________"

Fill in the blank.

Name that tune! Best entry wins the prize: a 14 year old schoolboy or girl of choice, complete with lollypop, braids, braces, plaid skirt, jump- rope and/or matched pair of real-looking Red Ryder Six-shooters.*
--
*Red Ryder Six-shooters: The unnamed molested male Lolita child who was victim in this most recent case strictly from the flipside of Nabokoville, was quoted as having said of his experience as Teacher's Pet to Ms. Humbert Humbert of Greenwood, that it was "embarrassing", going on to add how "unexpected" the whole thing had been, and he concluded to characterize it as a complete "freak out."

NOTE: This offer is limited by the stipulation that though it is tax-exempt in some states, notwithstanding, the winner may have to satisfy certain requirements associated with one or two years probation upon receipt of said prize, but only where local restrictions apply, and that depending largely upon gender of recipient, where if male, rather than probation, 25 years to life will be a lot more like it, as to the required consideration. In some cases where the winner is related by blood to the prize, depending again upon regional differences, disqualification either will or will not apply. All entries must be postmarked as of 12:00 midnight, December 31, 2005.

WARNING: Please be sure to address those entries c/o Lady Clare Quilty Contest, Greenwood, Arkansas 72936, being extra careful not to get them mixed in with the North Pole bound Christmas mail, because if by any mischance your letter should fall into the hands of Santa Claus, the patron saint of childhood innocence, he will come in his sleigh to your roof on the night before Christmas to stuff your butt into one of his empty sacks, and deliver you hence to the top of a mountain in Tibet, where a crew of Sherpas shall be waiting toward your further transport in tiny little pieces to the beaks of a bunch of hungry buzzards who every once in a while get to lusting--after all that saintly white meat--for a taste of rare pederast steaks, done to a turn in the dark as passed not even over a candle.

"Teacher's pet, I wanna be teacher's pet,
I wanna be huddled and cuddled
As close to you as I can get.

Teacher's pride, I wanna be teacher's pride,
I wanna be dated and rated
The one most likely at your side.

I wanna learn all your lips can teach me;
One kiss will do at the start.
I'm sure with a little homework,
I'll graduate to your heart.

Teacher's pet, I wanna be teacher's pet,
I wanna take home a diploma
And show Ma that you love me, too,
So I can be teacher's pet
Long after school is through."
--Words & Music by Joe Lubin, 1956
Recorded by Doris Day, 1958 --

"White middle-class girls at the elite colleges and universities seem to want the world handed to them on a platter. They have been sheltered, coddled, and flattered. Having taught at a wide variety of institutions over my ill-starred career, I have observed that working-class or lower-middle-class girls, who are from financially struggling families and who must take a patchwork of menial off-campus jobs to stay in school, are usually the least hospitable to feminist rhetoric. They see life as it is and have fewer illusions about sex. It is affluent, upper-middle class students who most spout the party line - as if the grisly hyperemotionalism of feminist jargon satisfies their hunger for meaningful experience outside their eventless upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one."-- Camille Paglia

What Have Women Got in Their Genes?

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:36:10 -0500

What Indeed Have Women Got in their Genes--at Harvard and Elsewhere?

*Medical Breakthrough: UCSF Discovers Liberal Gene*

http://www.chronwatch.com/content/ contentDisplay.asp?aid=13658
--

This past Saturday morning, some few people were tuned in to the weekly "Book TV" broadcast of C- SPAN II, to hear the reprise of a recent speech by Hip-Hop rap artist and ex-Harvard professor, Dr. Cornel West, venting a soulfully "Christian" profession of opprobrium against his "brother", the as yet to be completely disemboweled, dismembered, and/or merely disestablished, infamously Jewish, shamefully Pro-Israel Harvard president, Lawrence H. Summers. Do see his speech, *Address at morning prayers, Memorial Church: Cambridge, Massachusetts--September 17, 2002*, in which Summers addresses himself to the problem of a burgeoning anti-Semitism on American college campuses, an upsurge of infamy that in his view is not to exclude the very hallowed halls of his very own Harvard itself . . .

http://www.president.harvard.edu/s peeches/2002/morningprayers.html

For some, it's enough to raise a brow as to just how this whole Summers flap really got started in the first place, it should come to the point that his speech is being monitored so closely that a mere question about gender and genetics gets blown so far out of proportion to what it was: 'food for thought', an ever so slightly controversial morsel which, had it been heard in the conversation of someone other than Summers, just anyone innocent of ever having charged the Harvard faculty and student body of being susceptible to utterly the lowest class of stupidity known to man--well then?

Are "Women from Venus and Men from Mars?" Why is the author of that theme not presently out twisting in the wind a few miles northeast as the buzzard flies toward Salem, Massachusetts? Because such a question from the mouth of a person who has said, "J'Accuse!" to you and all your friends, *is* felt to be exposing you as a bunch of suckers for a certain political rhetoric, and the courage of thought his question would demand of you is just too much to ask. Far better that the accusation be turned against the accuser, that his question may be seen for a blasphemy, to be branded scarlet with an upper case 'S', as the sin which may not be forgiven.

When the stupidity charged is that low, and the evil implied so great, those who are accused will not face it and will not hear of it, and rather, they will seek their revenge. But that won't be conscious with them, because hate is a form of dope; people get high; they get clueless in the head off it and addicted, loving the cheap emotional rush that comes with it . It's an easy psychological trick for a hate-drugged junkie to pull, wool-wise over his or her own eyes, and it's just that they love the Allah-sent angels who are murdering the Jews--not that they hate the Jews. That's a caring thing, you see: so how dare any say otherwise?

Interesting it is to note that nothing can cause these people to hate the Jew more than having to be continually reminded of the last time people got so stupidly, self-servingly self-deceived as they are now, once again, about their own feelings--but that was back in Berlin, circa 1933. Accordingly, the word "Holocaust" has taken on the taste of castor oil in the mouths of these herd-trotting wet-behind-the-ears nerds, and they can't so much as bear the very sound of it.

Now as to Dr. Cornel West, of course he has a right to gripe, seeing how his new status as an "ex" Harvard professor is owing directly to his being for all intents and purposes fired by Summers from the faculty at Harvard. And while West had much to say against Summers in his account of all Summers had to charge him with during their meeting, even so, at no time, did Dr. West indicate, in his recounting of the words that were had between them, that anything like genetic issues were involved.

In other words, the issue never arose, as part of the Harvard President's list of complaints against West, that due to his being genetically, a liberal, he was just wrong for the quality of what should be the Harvard gene pool. This had nothing to do with it, and it was never stated outright nor even so much as hinted, that a genetic predisposition toward liberalism was at the bottom of Summers' negative evaluation of Cornel West's contribution to the academic ethos at Harvard, that he in fact saw West's work as sub-standard.

Okay? Here it is: Nothing was said about the often disputed scholastic value of an Afro- American Studies program at Harvard or anywhere else, nor was there ever a discouraging word from the President's lips about any proposed or prospective Norwegian-American, or Eskimo- American Studies program. No Latvian, Estonian or Lithuanian-American Studies programs were disparaged; no Jewish-American, Catholic- American, Haitian Voodoo-American, or Lutheran- American Studies programs were snorted upon by the faintest huff from the President's rather Goyischer looking nose in their conversation.

No, because according to the White Boy, Richard Bradley, whose book, *Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University* was the occasion of the presentation there at the Hue-Man bookstore in Harlem, first time it aired for C-SPAN on April 2nd of this year, and as he said in his introductory presentation, this explosive meeting between Dr. Summers and Dr. West was all about the manner of un-scholarly thing West had been publishing, whether by medium of print, or on CD to the accompaniment of bass runs ripped off from whatever James Brown or Beach Boys record.

For Summers, it had all revolved not around a stereo turntable being wiggled back-and-forth to a beat, or a quick grab and squeeze to the crotch for emphasis, *molto forte*, with a threatening motion of the hand as though it were putting to your face a 9mm Ruger, but around the question of whether that was the style of thing which was reflective of the high academic standards Dr. Summers was sworn as President to preserve at Harvard.

The question then was as it still remains to be asked: Is there a separation not only between church and state, in state and federally funded educational institutions of higher learning, but also between the culture of the street corner and that of the ivy-adorned college mall? That was Larry Summers' question. In other words, if Harvard professors of Philology and Classics are not invading the street corner to demand of every backward capped, floppy pants gang-banger in sight that they should all be sitting down on the curb reading Proust, Homer and Aeschylus, while arias of Puccini play into their heads from the earphones on their I-Pods, then what right has the gang-banger culture to invade the walks of Harvard demanding that their culture have its place, both there on that greensward and on the street? And isn't that just about as infernally inane as suggesting that Islam should be privileged to have it's holy sites both in Mecca and Jerusalem and Mecca, while the Jews on pain of death and torture, have to stay clear out of Mecca forever?

I don't think so. Looks like a stacked deck to me.

In essence were these the issues of a Separation of Street and School being presented to Dr. Cornel West, by Dr. Summers and as West was not willing to admit that the culture of gang-banging had absolutely no place anywhere near the Harvard campus, there was a failure to communicate, so West was sent on his way to find an academic setting more suited to, and tolerant of the so- called "Black" gang-banger culture--at Princeton. No offense to Princeton, but it is not the "Black" culture, as Bill Cosby has been at great agony to point out: it's bum culture. Black culture is Charlie Parker, Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Barak Obama, Willie Mays and Medgar Evers. There is nothing about being 'black' or 'cultured' going around in floppy pants and a backward cap with a hand in its crotch.

Now that is the background of the whole affair against which, as a backdrop, Dr. Cornel West let loose with his Saturday morning diatribe containing all the usual highly emotive, soft- spoken banter of liberal invective posing in faux astonishment and shock over the by now comically infamous statements of Summers' concerning genetics and gender, as it would respect an aptitude toward the hard sciences.

Though it's hard to say just how it happened, I only know that it did, while listening to the sentiments of Dr. West, that the idea suddenly dawned on me, or more like caught me broadside, as from a rolled up newspaper up-side the head, that there just might be such a phenomenon as a genetic predisposition to liberal viewpoints. Well! Not long after this thought had caught me unawares, so as to nearly knock me sprawling and kicking to the floor from the comfort of my computer desk chair, I was soon logged on to the World Wide Web and off on a Yahoo search for anything that might be found on the subject of "liberal genes", and the above link is the one link that turned up for me on the subject. Being pleased to see I am not the only person on the World Wide Web who is weird enough to be smitten by such an idea, I now feel confident enough (as I find strength in numbers) to present with all due candor, gravity and scholastic style bravado, the following question: what more, indeed is soon to be revealed through the discoveries of the Human Genome Project?

Let us consider it, how truly nothing could be more convenient, socially and politically than that a "liberal gene" should be found to exist-- or hang all the trouble of having to actually find the thing; let it be as we've see it being done right now for Gays and Schizos, let's just believe so much in the advent of the discovery that we take it for granted it's already been made and booked, so that right now, at this very moment, we can judge anything else than that gene should be defined as "mutant" if not pathological, and that conservativism is just a mistake of nature. Just look, for example, how handy such purely hypothetical, albeit anxiously anticipated little rungs (not yet discovered) on the human chromosome have been for psychology and Gay rights, that even before any such thing can be shown to exist, it's such a pleasant idea that so far as the social science community is concerned, they were seen already through the microscope yesterday.

Today in social science, nobody seriously disputes the existence of Gay and Lesbian genes. They are here in theory, and that's good enough: they are here to stay. Indeed, thanks to the wonders of statistics applied to "twin studies" and the like, they are treated as empirically established scientific fact. Just as a use of statistics in Quantum Mechanics are seen to demonstrate the possibility of "dark matter" and a putative "multi-verse", just as such mathematical fantasies as those are taken seriously in physics, so in the psychology department, we may feel free, like the cartoon bum, 'Wimpy', to "Gladly pay tomorrow for a hamburger today." It's been a real boon, this whole *Mutt & Jeff approach to modern science, and it's just convenient as anything, like a patent pending Reclino remote and motor for an Easy Boy chair on the stock market--chair or no chair, remote or no remote, factory and warehouse or nothing of the kind, because how much is an idea like that worth on paper of stock certificates, in terms of what the numbers can do for a shrewd investor's convenience?

Just look how much easier its made things for mental health professionals. While there is no specifically identifiable Bats-in-the-Belfry gene directly observable under microscopic scrutiny, even so, not to worry, this is nothing that a liberal amount of hypothetical clairvoyance cannot conjure, arrange by proxy, in the statistics lab of our cognitive neuro-science community. By a drop of chi-square here and a measure of correlation coefficients there, a jigger of consensus building media razzle-dazzle everywhere--and voila! As the red-eyed white lab rabbit emerges from the be-tasseled black cap in the white gowned lair of the Psych department, there is no need of any actual bio-chemical proof for the genetic "Plum Loco" pudding: we assume that the schiz genes exist--and that's all there is to it. Why? Because, pragmatically speaking, it's just so damned convenient, that's all, and besides, it looks so 'state of the art' and trendy as all get out.

So, consensus rules, in the media as in academe: if you are either gay or just plain batty, stop worrying about it because science, sure as God made little green apples is going to be able to show, sooner or later, somewhere down the road, a microscope slide that you were born that way-- look at it as money in the bank: we will pay for that hamburger, tomorrow, as now with our attitude of near certainty have come to believe-- sure as Newton inferred the aether, that those genes exist.

In lieu of the facts, academic consensus, like the divine Aether, rules. And with the tendentious, let alone pendulous weight of all that has petrified in the minds of the many for the "obvious", just so it remains, rock-solid, immovable even after somebody came along with the kind of audacity and the instrumentation it took to question it, subject the "obvious" to a test, and by that show that it was really nothing of the kind. That's what happened when failure (a null result) of the Michelson-Morley experiment should have left the 'obvious', the near mathematical certainty of the ether disproved.

Okay, even after that had been done by those two scientists, another physicist so brilliant as Lorentz, reverent as he was in genuflection before the rock-solid idol of the 'obvious', of that academic consensus, notwithstanding, he found a way, by an ingenious set of mathematical transformations, to let physics have the null result of Michelson-Morely and the Aether to eat, too. Wonderful. Utterly wonderful. But it wasn't right, as twenty years further down along the line, Einstein would show, by correcting the Lorentz math, thus to show the Newtonian Emperor was in fact naked of his Aetherial robes, and that contrary to the distinguished consensus of all academe, the experiment had been in reality a great success, proving for once and for all that the 'obvious' had been anything but that, and quite the opposite of what that time-honored consensus had held. Just so is the truly aetherial hubris of *academic* consensus revealed, as science is shown, time and again to think far too much of what it thinks.

As it was for physics during the first decade of the 20th Century, so it is now with psychology, as consensus in lieu of facts and hard scientific proof rules the day, allowing the academics of social science to state as infallible doctrine that the social environment may now be assumed to have little or nothing to do with human sexual orientation and mental illness.

Now if some of what's said above should seem to be prejudging the matter, seeing how we remain, on both sides of the question, in lieu of the genetic material facts, I choose, in all fairness, to render benefit of the doubt to the contemporary consensus on the opposing side. I shall opt now to argue their premises for them by suggesting for the side of the social science and mass media consensus that it just seems plain obvious, is all, based on the evidence of my own experience that there has to be in the human genome, along with the Coo-Coo in the Cabeza gene, the Screw Loose in the Caboose gene, the Gay and the Lesbian gene, a Liberal gene. I mean, what could be more obvious?

In other words, mental health and sexual orientation are aspects of the human personality just the same as Right-Left political orientation, and extremism and so how can politics be excused from the same psycho- biological determinism? Are we forming a consensus in this yet? Let's see just how *obvious* we can make this thing . . .

It is not hard to put together an empirical study and statistically test the validity of its hypotheses: numbers can be our friends when we treat them as our friends. First we must have our hypothesis, our "educated guess" Then if we can just simply *believe* strongly enough in the validity of the thing, we can feel righteously justified when we make the numbers come out right. In lieu of coming of the facts, that will have to do, and that's about as good as it gets-- but only if and when the consensus is all for it (otherwise forget it). You need the hypothesis, and the statistical score of validity for it, which even if it's a tat on the weak side, that's okay, just so long as by public relations a good showing of how convenient this genetic explanation (or whatever) can be, then damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead because the only thing you really need, your consensus is on the way.

But as to those elusive facts, that just don't come our way? Shoot! We just adopt an attitude of letting them come when they may, no different than any Baptist who believes in the Second Coming of Christ. Yea, brother! We lay our E Pluribus Unum money on it, as in Consensus We Trust. And what's the difference between a bag of gold, a greenback buck and a check, when for all intents and purposes there really is no difference--if they all work in trade to get you what's most convenient to your needs.

And what do you need? If you can say that your crazy relative has been like that since birth there is no blame for it to be laid at the door of your family. If the psychiatric staff at the hospital hasn't a clue about what to do about the patient's delusions, it's no fault of theirs-- it's all Freud's fault for saying that at least in some part, it damned well *is* the family's fault, their own neurotic hang-ups, their ignorance of proper child rearing methods, and as for those shrinks at the hospital? Their illiteracy in regard to the intricacies of the psychoanalytic method. But Freud be damned, slandered, demonized and rejected out of hand as old hat: now its become so wonderfully convenient to say, with all due true faith in our belief that it's all Nature's fault, "bad genes", as obviously the patient was born that way and there's nothing for it but Prozac, Librium, Valium and Haldol--hearing the patient talk is a waste of time, if not a big bore.

The hypothesis is: it's Nature's fault. The parents and siblings did all they could; they are without fault, angels really, if you think about it. Nature is the devil. And it's a fault of Nature than has given rise to conservatism: bank on it. Believe it. And now think about it . . .

How often have you had the enervating experience of trying to convince a person of the opposite political position, that his bias is wrong and yours is right? Granted, as it is with all things, there are exceptions to the rule, but more often than not, if not 99.9% of the time, the liberal will go away from the debate still a liberal, and the same goes for the conservative. You begin to think that political orientation is hard-wired into the human psyche, and that nothing short of a major blow to the head, a bolt of lightening or a good strong hit of Thorazine will ever serve to change the mindset behind a person's politics.

Is it not about time that some major Guggenheim Foundation funding was put forward to Harvard in order to get some "Twin Studies" going behind this new hypothesis that liberals are born good and conservatives evil? Take the recent flap when it came down to the question of what was in Women's Genes? You see how this thing must work then: so long as the genetic argument is in our favor, so long as it's convenient to believe it, we will believe it. If social science says that genes make us straight or gay, crazy or sane; that's just fine because it's convenient to think so. But the minute one of these conservative mutants comes along to suggest that there are genetic determinants that decide the difference not only between what's in a woman's pants as opposed to the man, but also in the head? Well! Just how convenient to what we want to believe is that? Not very.

So here's truth: convenience is the last word as truth is determined. You ask: is this idea convenient? If the answer is yes, the idea is acceptable, but if not, then not. If it is convenient to think you can embrace the murderers of Jews and be free of the accusation that your so-called "love" is only a convenient way to hate the Jews, and that you are believing, politically, only what is most convenient to believe, then . . .

Well . . .

Okay.

Antoine & Colette

Fri, 27 May 2005 01:48:36 -0500
What is there really in life, in the world, in all of man's experience to be cherished more than the things which serve to carry the heart, mind and soul of a person into a sense of ardent yearning, even if that must be, for a fellow such as me, into a mode of returning to a time when the world and one's life in it seemed so much more replete with possibility and impending discovery?

But yes! Speaking for myself, as I can for no other, I can think of a time in my life, in my world, not this world, but that world which now is gone; the world of my youth when my life-wave was cresting at its foamiest, while the 'surf' of my biological juice was most decidedly 'up'; in those days as I rollicked and rolled, lazily lolled on the sunny beach of existence, rarely, if ever did I suffer a moment, when a sense of promise in the exciting crash and roar of life's breakers could be calmed into a lull, quieted to a whisper, hard to be discerned above the rasp and rattle of the sucking under- tow that this late in the day for the likes of me, is grown ever the louder in its taunting presage to the final rip-tide rising, how it comes already sounding the depth of darkness in echoes of that hollow Mephistophilean howl out of a cold, moonless night unknown.

Well, that's what comes with the territory (if not, for some cowards, the terror) of increasing years, at a time when all the energy needed for the ecstatically romantic chase of youth has largely been spent--then it is at this time in life when I begin to see why art, the cinematic most especially, can be such a swell gift to the maturing heart, for reasons not easily or carelessly described.

Take, for example the two short films of Fran�ois Truffaut that I've been so serenely pleasured to see tonight, Les Mistons and Antoine & Colette, but the latter most particularly.

I have nothing to say of the plot, nor of the characters, but I would speak of the 'look', entirely of what met the eye behind and around the milk-smooth faces of Jean-Pierre L�aud and Marie-France Pisier. I am tempted to put it like this: I don't know that I can say what it was about that look of the early '60s in Paris that was so moving to the sensibility, for how shall I describe what it means to me, thus to be transported back in time to scenes that I so well recognize and recall as my home--even though I have never yet been to Paris in my life?

Ah! But I have been to the early '60s, to that 'Paris' and there is the thing, you see. That is the truly magical transport of cinema which does such a powerful thing to the soul, something that is really quite beyond the powers of verbal description, and so that is why there must always be movies.

The Disadvantage of Advantage

Thu, 26 May 2005 16:26:41 -0500
Roger Thornhill: Bulletin! Kaplan has dandruff.

Mrs. Thornhill: In that case, I think we should leave.

[Door buzzer sounds.]

Roger: Too late.
--

Yes, and now you have my dandruff, but just take it as Parmesan cheese to sprinkle on your linguine, if you don't like it, that just this past weekend, I was blessed, tickled, thrilled, moved many times to a point of tears (more Parmesan, anyone?) to see a play by Tennessee Williams which many people (myself included) haven't even known to exist. But such a fan of Williams as I've been, I thought I'd seen, or had knowledge of them all, both the stellar successes and the bombs? I was wrong.

It turns out that when Williams' exquisitely poetic romance, Summer & Smoke was going into production, he was just returning from Italy with a completely redrafted, utterly transformed version of the script which he felt was much to be preferred over the first. But the play in its original form having already been cast, was well into rehearsals, and there was simply no way for Williams' capricious demand to be met, that the original be thrown out in option for the revision. Thankfully, the producers would not hear of it, and so what posterity got was the two masterpieces for the 'price' of one--and they are indeed two entirely different plays, despite the conflation of character names, settings, and something of the overall scheme of action.

Imagine it! Eccentricities of a Nightingale, this later draft of Summer & Smoke went into a drawer, to be sadly regarded by its playwright as a mere redundancy, until by some mysterious process of discovery, it got out unto the amazed view of WNET/ PBS, thence to be produced via the astute direction of Glenn Jordan, for the crackling performances of Blythe Danner and Frank Langella-- and who knew that made-for- TV cops and robbers guy could act? Ah, but give an actor a fully fleshed role of great character depth, and every untapped talent is a spring to be brought gushing to the surface. That's just the thing about a play by Tennessee Williams, how he so often allows actors and directors to amaze themselves.

Those familiar with the biography of Tennessee Williams, especially via the excellent study of Lyle Leverich, *Tom: the Unknown Tennessee Williams* will easily recognize in the character of "Alma," the female protagonist of these two exquisite beauties of dramas, the personality of the playwright, himself--the poor fellow!

Alas, it would seem that the souls of some people are by providence bound to come gushing as fountains into humanity's view, ever so copiously overflowing with showers of rainbows refracting in prisms of poems, and it is ever such a wonder to behold--when seen at a distance from the poet, as from a seat in the theatre to the stage. But as to the man, that Promethean playwright himself and any chance for the close and lasting camraderie of friends? Forget it, they all only get drenched to the bone for the effort.

Tennessee Williams spent his whole life being regarded as an "eccentric" (if not an embarrassment) because of his extraordinarily effusive enthusiasms--but there it is: except you have that in a poet, you have no poet, no Summer & Smoke, or Suddenly Last Summer, and now, most magnificently, *The Eccentricities of a Nightingale* tells the tale.

Eccentricities of a Nightingale is available on DVD from http://www.kultur.com in their "Broadway Theatre Archive".
--

Roger Thornhill: What do you mean there's no such person as George Kaplan? I've tried on his suits, been in his hotel room; he's got short sleeves and dandruff. --Ernie Lehman North by Northwest