All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly [...]
On a recent weekend trip to the Lake District I read Martin Amis’s ‘Korba the Dread’, a sobering exploration of the free pass given to the Soviet Union for far too long by the West’s Intelligentsia , especially during Stalin’s long dictatorship.
Amis tops and tails his vignettes of starvation, torture and death with personal reflections [...]
After I found an excerpt from Jean-Phillippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes I played it repeatedly for several days until Helen bought the DVDs of the William Christie-directed production by Les Arts Florissants. Patricia Petibon is magnetic in the Fourth Entree, Les Sauvages; what a voice.
I read an suggestion that the depiction of the ’savages’, Les [...]
I think there’s a strong strain within British liberal thinking, which sees muslims, darkly, through a bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight. They think of muslims as noble savages, and applaud when they find one who is ’semi-civilised’. Because that’s their conception of muslims, they only really recognise people who meet that stereotype as ‘authentic’. Muslim [...]
…As I like to call it. We’re off down to London again to see the winners of Digital Camera Magazine’s Photographer of the Year competition. Helen’s photo of Coventry Cathedral’s Baptistry Window, which she entered on spec, got a highly commended and so is on display at the Mall Galleries, home of the Federation of [...]
Ben Hammersley links to his mate a random bloke, Adam Greenfield:
This goes back to the joke I always make about opening a chain of coffeehouses called Faraday’s: under the condition of ambient informatics, we will need to consciously create platforms for the specific kind of conviviality we recognize as animating our “third places,” [...]
We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no “vision thing” as our ex-president would say, or, as our current president would say, we have no Hillary.
All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other [...]
Castro
Has outlasted nine American presidents
Fantastic achievement. Let’s not mention that US presidents are 2-term limited and democratically elected, eh?
