illusions to die for.
Dustland fairytale beginning
Just another white trash
County kiss
Sixty one
Long brown hair and foolish eyes
Look just like you gone into some
Kind of slick chrome american prince
A blue jean serenade
Moon river what’d you do to be
But i don’t believe you
Some cinderella in a party dress but
She was looking for a night gown
I saw the devil warping up his hands
Hes getting ready for the show down
I saw the minute that i turn away
I got my money on a pond tonight
Change came in disguised of revelation
Set his soul on fire
She said she’d always knew he’d come around
And the decades disappear like sinking
Ships we persevere god gives us hope
But we still fear
We don’t know
The mind is poison castle in the sky
Sit stranded vandalized
The draw bridge is closing
Some cinderella in a party dress but
She was looking for a night gown
I saw the devil warping up his hands
Hes getting ready for the show down
I saw the ending were they turned the page
I threw my money and i ran away
Strait to the vally of the great divide
And were the dreams roll high
And were the wind dont blow
Out here the good girls die
And the sky wont snow
Out here the bird don’t sing
Out here the field don’t grow
Out here the bell don’t ring
Out here the bell don’t ring
Out here the good girls die
Now cinderella don’t you go to sleep
Its such a bitter form of refuge
Ahh don’t you know the kingdoms under siege
And everybody needs you
Is there still magic in the midnight sun
Or did you leave it back in sixty-one
In the of the cadence in the young mans eyes
And were the dreams roll high
[The Killers]
i don’t think that kindness is a weakness…
“The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no tickertape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our encouragement, who will need our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.” — Leo Buscaglia
so the song is by Reef – called ‘Consideration’ – listen to it here. 1997 was the year of my exchange to Australia. I discovered Reef then. Great band.
nobel prize speech.
Kann es sein,
daß die Frage nach dem Taschentuch
seit jeher gar nicht das Taschentuch meint,
sondern die akute Einsamkeit des Menschen.
read herta müller’s nobel prize speech here.
the photo shows my favourite sculpture from the rodin museum in philadelphia.
un estruendo (paul celan)
Un estruendo: la verdad
misma ha comparecido
avanzando entre los
hombres,
hacia el centro
del torbellino de metáforas.
cockaigne/cocaine.
Meaning: 1. Paradise, utopia, an imaginary land of luxury. 2 (Facetiously) The land of the Cockneys, which is to say, the East End of London.
Notes: Today’s Good Word has nothing to do with cocaine, despite the resemblance in spelling and meaning. Cocaine originates in the Quechua word for the coca plant, kúka. The first syllable of today’s word is [kah], not [ko].
In Play: In Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco wrote, “Everyone was seeking renewal, a golden century, a Cockaigne of the spirit.” Aren’t you glad the translator didn’t use the English slang equivalent, la-la-land? The second sense of today’s word refers (humorously) to the land of Eliza Doolittle, in whose Cockney accent Henry Higgins becomes ‘Enry ‘Iggins. This leads to the possibility of saying, in the right company, “Reliable carpenters in this area are as rare as Hs in Cockaigne.”
Word History: Today’s Good Word is capitalized since it is supposed to be a proper geographical name referring to a country. It is based on the Old French phrase pais de cokaigne “land of cakes” (Modern French pays de cocagne), referring to a country where good fortune abounds. The word takes on its current meaning in the Old French phrase trouver cocaigne “find a land where good things drop from the sky”. The word for “cake” at the root of cocaigne was probably borrowed from German Kuchen “cake”, a word sharing a source with English cook and kitchen.
Must re-read Foucault’s Pendulum at some point.
Apparently the word ‘cockaigne’ is not related at all to ‘cocaine’. that was my reason for looking it up in the first place. disappointing, really, though i am glad anaesthetics have moved on since the 1870s…
1874, from Fr. cocaine (1856), coined by Albert Niemann of Gottingen University from coca (from Quechua cuca) + -ine, arbitrary use of L. -inus, -ina for noun ending. A medical coinage, the drug was used 1870s as a local anaesthetic for eye surgery, etc.
cycles, ripples, patterns, shapes, rhythm.
the seemingly cyclical nature of knowledge formation.
Emergent structures are patterns not created by a single event or rule. Nothing commands the system to form a pattern. Instead, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes leading to some order. One might conclude that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts because the emergent order will not arise if the various parts are simply coexisting; the interaction of these parts is central. Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. For example, the shape of weather phenomena such as hurricanes are emergent structures.
It is useful to distinguish three forms of emergent structures. A first-order emergent structure occurs as a result of shape interactions (for example, hydrogen bonds in water molecules lead to surface tension). A Second-order emergent structure involves shape interactions played out sequentially over time (for example, changing atmospheric conditions as a snowflake falls to the ground build upon and alter its form). Finally, a third-order emergent structure is a consequence of shape, time, and heritable instructions. For example, an organism’s genetic code sets boundary conditions on the interaction of biological systems in space and time.
phew.
my yearning today is at least as great as when i was fifteen. it takes no effort at all, but my head is wobbly and i cannot make decisions or work properly. i am accompanied by that song ‘desireless’ by eagle-eye cherry that i once categorised as the sexiest song ever. i’m not so sure about that now, but it’s an awesome song. 
i want to laugh about it all.
deliverance. now. yes. please
progress.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana (1863 – 1952, Madrid) Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense (1905)
image: alexander cozens
grace.
Woke up to a milky white Bucharest bloc view. My headache was gone. Reason for rejoicing. This means I will actually get some work done today. Slightly comatose because of the splitting migraine, I watched a film last night. It did keep my interest and I must recommend it. The Soloist. I went into it not knowing the first thing about it, and was pleased that it appeared to be about Beethoven, whose work I adore. However, it was much more than that. A brilliant tale about contemporary America: an allegory of intervention and containment on one level, a moving story of friendship on the other. It was based on a book and so appears to be a ‘true story’ even though, as you probably know if you read this weblog, all stories are true somehow, if only to themselves (and to me, hehe). The man who wrote it and who is the narrator of the film, is Steve Lopez, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times who is chasing stories dispassionately. His idea of consent is rather limited and he is a self-righteous self-labelled do-gooder, although as the spectator you find him rather mediocre and very un-godlike. He is the typical journalist out for a thrill, turning off when he senses that in journalistic terms the story doesn’t flow. So when he gets interested in this person Nathaniel Ayers at first, he is in the same mode. He just wants a story, and he rings up Julliard School to see whether Nathaniel is deluded or not, and whether he had been telling the truth to him in order to judge this man. But then, of course, amid some truly spectacular visions of music, grace and madness and ranting and flags in curious contexts, amid how people live next to each other without ever engaging, things get more complicated. The cinematography is stunning, and I think I’d have to watch it again to make sense of all of Nathaniel’s rants and visionary talk and of all the subtleties of the script. So if you just watch one film this week, make it this one. And surrender.
knowledge.
Philippe Descola 2005. On anthropological knowledge.
it is quite early and i woke up much before the dawn, quite unable to get back to sleep. i like the quiet of the night and the way in which it makes my heart beat less wildly.
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