Never let it be said that there are no class divides in Irish America, or that the mutual contemptuousness of every class of Irish people for the other has not been successfully transplanted from the old country to its primarily urban and now suburban home in America.
Mark Wahlberg's Boston Irish character in Martin Scorsese's movie The Departed has naturally a deep contempt for the Boston Irish character played by Matt Damon for precisely these reasons, and expresses his natural contempt with succinct force from the first, as people of his station so often will.
When I first came to regard William Buckley, courtesy of his television program Firing Line and appearances on other talk shows of the time, I recognized in myself the upwelling of the sort of contempt for the man proper to my class of Irish Americans toward a man of his, and carried that contempt with me down all the years till now.
I say farewell to William F. Buckley, Jr., and to my contempt for him as well, satisfied that it no longer has its proper target. I reserve the right to my contempt for what he's left, however.
February 27, 2008
February 25, 2008
Beyond the Valley of the Shadow of the Parthian, Or, Delenda Est Su Madre Forever!!!1!
A useful visual schematic laying out the roles of participants in longstanding internet flame wars has come to my attention.
I make no warranty about the veracity of this image. It came along an email chain to me recently. It could have been cobbled together for fun by someone on Fark for all I know, or it may capture the actual visual fact of the matter in the instant it transpired, the little dog's dead buck fuck I care to call it. Likewise, I have no idea if it's at all timely. Years may have passed since it first joined the stream of Hey Look at This that sloshes through the inbox of every email user, fated to arrive at each and every one of them on the internet eventually, and to return there again and again over time at the merest click of a Forward button. Or, again, it may be pretty new; I don't know.
You might think there'd be no further degradation possible following the summary insult of intentionally inflicted death, looking at self's end from a purely personal perspective, thinking, well, if it were me I'd be dead and wouldn't know or be capable of caring so what the fuck, but you'd be wrong, this picture says. Things can go downhill from there with the remains. Insult can be always added by the littlest fucking dog to the burden of the terminated thing, is what this image indicates.
The fellow crouches down by the beast he's killed, holding the buck's rack. He's violated the buck's right to live there in the time honored way of the hunter, having apparently offered up the terminal injury with the rifle resting there on the buck's midsection. The hunter appears nonplussed by the little dog's addition to what he must have thought was already going to be a compehensive image of the buck's bad last day. He leans untriumphantly away in the scene, with his own ass low to the ground.
The connection to longstanding internet flame wars is left as an excercise for their makers.
I make no warranty about the veracity of this image. It came along an email chain to me recently. It could have been cobbled together for fun by someone on Fark for all I know, or it may capture the actual visual fact of the matter in the instant it transpired, the little dog's dead buck fuck I care to call it. Likewise, I have no idea if it's at all timely. Years may have passed since it first joined the stream of Hey Look at This that sloshes through the inbox of every email user, fated to arrive at each and every one of them on the internet eventually, and to return there again and again over time at the merest click of a Forward button. Or, again, it may be pretty new; I don't know.
You might think there'd be no further degradation possible following the summary insult of intentionally inflicted death, looking at self's end from a purely personal perspective, thinking, well, if it were me I'd be dead and wouldn't know or be capable of caring so what the fuck, but you'd be wrong, this picture says. Things can go downhill from there with the remains. Insult can be always added by the littlest fucking dog to the burden of the terminated thing, is what this image indicates.
The fellow crouches down by the beast he's killed, holding the buck's rack. He's violated the buck's right to live there in the time honored way of the hunter, having apparently offered up the terminal injury with the rifle resting there on the buck's midsection. The hunter appears nonplussed by the little dog's addition to what he must have thought was already going to be a compehensive image of the buck's bad last day. He leans untriumphantly away in the scene, with his own ass low to the ground.
The connection to longstanding internet flame wars is left as an excercise for their makers.
February 21, 2008
Son (de Castro)
In the wake of Castro's retirement, lots of Whither Cuba chatter.
Officially, the U.S. has a bone to pick with Cuba's Castro, and the next few months, the twilight of George Bush's presidency, should witness a ramping up of rhetoric on the importance of doing something to Cuba, given this administration track record. Doing what it will to Cuba has been bedrock U.S. government policy over the past hundred years at least, a policy so consistently expressed in vigorous episodic outbreaks of doing something to Cuba down the decades that it has become ingrained in the public consciousness as an existential feature of What America Stands For. Doing something to Cuba, well, how can you be against that, and call yourself an American?
What the relationship between Cuba and the United States seriously lacks is a trade agreement. China, communism's other famous redoubt, has been granted whatever dispensation is needed for its past and current cruel communist practices and encouraged to enter into a notoriously profitable relationship with the United States over the course of the last few decades. But this waiver of What America Stands For has never been extended to Cuba. Much the reverse.
Surely Castro's intransigent refusal to knuckle under to what the United States has long been willing to do to Cuba impoverished his whole nation. Although the Cuban people are entitled to the benefits of public health and education programs denied as a matter of course to the poor in America, the people of Cuba pay the price in lack of abundant goods and services for Castro's harsh and unflinching obduracy with respect to who is in charge of that country. Castro has stepped aside now, in a presidential election year in the U.S., ensuring that the enduring impulse to do something to Cuba will find its expression in the platform of every contestant for the office, and perhaps resound in public discourse with all the malignant force of the wave that swept that famous little boy on the dolphin onto our shores some years back.
Officially, the U.S. has a bone to pick with Cuba's Castro, and the next few months, the twilight of George Bush's presidency, should witness a ramping up of rhetoric on the importance of doing something to Cuba, given this administration track record. Doing what it will to Cuba has been bedrock U.S. government policy over the past hundred years at least, a policy so consistently expressed in vigorous episodic outbreaks of doing something to Cuba down the decades that it has become ingrained in the public consciousness as an existential feature of What America Stands For. Doing something to Cuba, well, how can you be against that, and call yourself an American?
What the relationship between Cuba and the United States seriously lacks is a trade agreement. China, communism's other famous redoubt, has been granted whatever dispensation is needed for its past and current cruel communist practices and encouraged to enter into a notoriously profitable relationship with the United States over the course of the last few decades. But this waiver of What America Stands For has never been extended to Cuba. Much the reverse.
Surely Castro's intransigent refusal to knuckle under to what the United States has long been willing to do to Cuba impoverished his whole nation. Although the Cuban people are entitled to the benefits of public health and education programs denied as a matter of course to the poor in America, the people of Cuba pay the price in lack of abundant goods and services for Castro's harsh and unflinching obduracy with respect to who is in charge of that country. Castro has stepped aside now, in a presidential election year in the U.S., ensuring that the enduring impulse to do something to Cuba will find its expression in the platform of every contestant for the office, and perhaps resound in public discourse with all the malignant force of the wave that swept that famous little boy on the dolphin onto our shores some years back.
February 20, 2008
February 17, 2008
The Bugle
John Oliver is familiar to those who watch the Daily Show. He's the slight, very laughable, owlish-faced guy with glasses ignorant Americans might say speaks with an "English" accent, though there's really no such thing as an "English" accent, each person on the British Isles being gifted with a vocal delivery that sounds out with remorseless GPS-like precision the given geographic and social position of its speaker to anyone who pays attention to that sort of thing. Is John Oliver a native of a particular six-square block of inner London? Only his linguist knows for sure. Nevertheless, he's trained his voice, like all the people on those islands over the years, to pronounce a lot of biographical and cultural information about himself whenever he uses his words. These niceties are wasted on most Americans, who in general have no idea where people from that part of the world are coming from or why that should make any difference to an American anyway.
This makes comedy hard, since relating the funny topical thing about England or Scotland or Ireland, or even about inherently laughable Wales at times, which Oliver and his partner Andy Zaltzman valiantly set out to do each week in a half-hour podcast from timesonline called The Bugle—an audio newspaper for a visual age, must depend on a familiarity with those places with which the average American audience is famously ill-supplied. Oliver and Zaltzman have solved this problem for transatlantic listeners by taking special pains in each program to make plenty of understandable fun of America as well.
This makes comedy hard, since relating the funny topical thing about England or Scotland or Ireland, or even about inherently laughable Wales at times, which Oliver and his partner Andy Zaltzman valiantly set out to do each week in a half-hour podcast from timesonline called The Bugle—an audio newspaper for a visual age, must depend on a familiarity with those places with which the average American audience is famously ill-supplied. Oliver and Zaltzman have solved this problem for transatlantic listeners by taking special pains in each program to make plenty of understandable fun of America as well.
February 15, 2008
Space, The Final Frontier
From the New York Times:
Some time in the next two weeks the U.S. is going to try to intercept a misbehaving spy satellite with a missile fired from a ship stationed in the North Pacific and smithereen the thing before it falls to earth. Doing so will represent a field test of the U.S.'s anti-ballistic missile system.
The Chinese will be watching. Like the United States, China is gung-ho on militarizing space. It shot down a satellite last year without feeling the need to give the test of its ballistic missile capabilities the humanitarian spin the United States seems to feel so necessary as it goes forward with its own forthcoming test. The implied position of the United States is that it is doing the world a favor by attempting to rid it of the danger posed by the satellite, destroying it there before it destroys us here, which is a known inclination of its foreign policy lofted up to space in this instance.
The rationale for shooting at the satellite instead of letting it descend to earth on its own inevitable path trades on the supposed danger of allowing the fuel tank, full of hydrazine, to crash to earth unimpeded. Hydrazine is a colorless toxic liquid with basic properties similar to those of ammonia, though 15 times weaker. In nature hydrazine is ready to do chemical business at a moment's notice with a wide range of commonly available elements, recombining rapidly in air and water with other loose molecules to form a characteristic batch of less toxic compounds and give off a lot of energy to boot. Well, it's an explosive. Prolonged exposure to hydrazine is bad. Acute exposure to a bunch of it is definitely not recommended.
Those of us who remember the equanimity with which the United States greeted the anticipated reentry of the 83 tons of Skylab back to earth in 1979 will appreciate the marked shift in official U.S. policy represented by this new approach. Back in the day, technology and the ABM treaty did not allow for the deployment of missile systems capable of blasting satellites out of the sky. But Ronald Reagan gave the giddyapp to the technology by his Star Wars initiative, and George Bush removed the United States from the ABM Treaty in 2002, so that now, fruit of all that effort, the United States is going to give itself a few tries at plinking the satellite as it passes overhead, a defining moment in its march to space.
In the Times article, David C. Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists allows as how the proposed missile strike could create 100,000 pieces of debris, some "small as a marble but still dangerous to vehicles in space." It's unquestionable that if the satellite is destroyed by a ballistic missile strike, some of its debris will be propelled into higher orbit around the earth, though presumably not into the path of working satellites up there (speed up an object in space and it assumes a higher orbit. Slow the thing down and it goes to ground. This rule of thumb is repeated over and over again in some novel or other of Heinlein's). Should the test succeed it remains to be seen how long it will take for the sky to rid itself of these 100,000 or so pieces, which will presumably slow and fall to earth of their own accord sooner or later, creating in the meantime their own little region of danger for any object that might care to cross it, a new neighborhood of space populated by small marbles of material traveling in some alternate direction at relatively great speed. Travel is likely to be harmful in that neighborhood for some time.
The worst case of course would be for the ballistic missile to merely wound the tank of hydrazine, causing it to spit its load of caustic liquid in a fine mist onto the ozone layer below, although I'd be willing to be told that this is chemically and indeed astronomically impossible.
“If we fire at the satellite,” he said, “the worst is that we miss. And then we have a known situation, which is where we are today. If we graze the satellite, we’re still better off, because likely we’ll still bring it down sooner, and therefore more predictably. If we hit the hydrazine tank, then we’ve improved our potential to mitigate that threat. So the regret factor of not acting clearly outweighed the regret factors of acting.”
Some time in the next two weeks the U.S. is going to try to intercept a misbehaving spy satellite with a missile fired from a ship stationed in the North Pacific and smithereen the thing before it falls to earth. Doing so will represent a field test of the U.S.'s anti-ballistic missile system.
The Chinese will be watching. Like the United States, China is gung-ho on militarizing space. It shot down a satellite last year without feeling the need to give the test of its ballistic missile capabilities the humanitarian spin the United States seems to feel so necessary as it goes forward with its own forthcoming test. The implied position of the United States is that it is doing the world a favor by attempting to rid it of the danger posed by the satellite, destroying it there before it destroys us here, which is a known inclination of its foreign policy lofted up to space in this instance.
The rationale for shooting at the satellite instead of letting it descend to earth on its own inevitable path trades on the supposed danger of allowing the fuel tank, full of hydrazine, to crash to earth unimpeded. Hydrazine is a colorless toxic liquid with basic properties similar to those of ammonia, though 15 times weaker. In nature hydrazine is ready to do chemical business at a moment's notice with a wide range of commonly available elements, recombining rapidly in air and water with other loose molecules to form a characteristic batch of less toxic compounds and give off a lot of energy to boot. Well, it's an explosive. Prolonged exposure to hydrazine is bad. Acute exposure to a bunch of it is definitely not recommended.
Those of us who remember the equanimity with which the United States greeted the anticipated reentry of the 83 tons of Skylab back to earth in 1979 will appreciate the marked shift in official U.S. policy represented by this new approach. Back in the day, technology and the ABM treaty did not allow for the deployment of missile systems capable of blasting satellites out of the sky. But Ronald Reagan gave the giddyapp to the technology by his Star Wars initiative, and George Bush removed the United States from the ABM Treaty in 2002, so that now, fruit of all that effort, the United States is going to give itself a few tries at plinking the satellite as it passes overhead, a defining moment in its march to space.
In the Times article, David C. Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists allows as how the proposed missile strike could create 100,000 pieces of debris, some "small as a marble but still dangerous to vehicles in space." It's unquestionable that if the satellite is destroyed by a ballistic missile strike, some of its debris will be propelled into higher orbit around the earth, though presumably not into the path of working satellites up there (speed up an object in space and it assumes a higher orbit. Slow the thing down and it goes to ground. This rule of thumb is repeated over and over again in some novel or other of Heinlein's). Should the test succeed it remains to be seen how long it will take for the sky to rid itself of these 100,000 or so pieces, which will presumably slow and fall to earth of their own accord sooner or later, creating in the meantime their own little region of danger for any object that might care to cross it, a new neighborhood of space populated by small marbles of material traveling in some alternate direction at relatively great speed. Travel is likely to be harmful in that neighborhood for some time.
The worst case of course would be for the ballistic missile to merely wound the tank of hydrazine, causing it to spit its load of caustic liquid in a fine mist onto the ozone layer below, although I'd be willing to be told that this is chemically and indeed astronomically impossible.
February 14, 2008
February 12, 2008
A Glade in a Gleam of Light
A discussion of the photos of Rarindra Prakarsa at Metafilter leads to this linked article by Mark Hobson at The Landscapist.
I'm not enough of a photographer to know how K manages to acheive the effects visible in his idylic images of children poised in their customary frolics. The golden shafts of light, yes, I can see that happening in an air full of dusts, although I don't live in land that sees much of that kind of weather. But there's the chance, implicit in comments by some of the Mefites, that the photographer has postprocessed the image to bring out an unnatural amount of goldenness in his images, a rejected Thomas Kinkaid level of painter of light romanticism that the landscape never really owned in the first place, for whatever reason.
So, over at the Landscapist, the host hosts a couple of K's shots, and the comments there tend off in the same critical direction (comments at Metafilter being comparatively brusque, as fits the established rhetoric there, but similarly inclined), suspecting that these images, however capably produced, are in a word, aesthetically speaking, corny.
So the Landscapist posts a few pictures of the sorry land around Jakarta, a peopled urban midden of the sort that is the handmaiden of massive urban environments everywhere around the globe.
And a couple of the commenters bite. Oh, yah, that's more like it. See, this is Indonesia here.
And then a communication comes from a fellow in Indonesia, expressing as best he can in English the immensity of the place, the vast variety of scene and experience embodied there, how a person in Indonesia can see the urban desolation but cannot deny the children and goats and lanes and ponds and trees breaking all the light to little golden bits as it refracts off of countless leaves, that exist there at the heart of Indonesia as well.
I admire Rarindra Prakarsa for being able to retain the color of objects in the foreground of his images. Because I can't do that I wonder how he does. When I shoot directly into a light source, objects in the foreground take on a heavy shadow not visible to the naked eye. This image of the sky above Hetch-Hetchy has that in spades:
The solitary tree and the abrupt cliff on the side of the road were swathed in midday light when I took the photo, but the camera, given the settings I inflicted on it I suppose, winced at all the brightness overhead, and the tree and cliff are left in darkness in the image as recorded, as is the telephone pole to the right. I don't know how to avoid that, but Rarindra Prakarsa does, I'll give him that. Maybe it's some f-stop thing, or an adjustment of the ISO speed or white balance or something or other that if I knew my camera better I'd be able to allow for. Or, maybe it's something that's best left to Photoshop, selecting and enhancing from the shadows of the image the colors masked in shadow but retrievable by that powerful program's intervention.
When I first looked look at Rarindra Prakarsa's photos I was immediately immersed in questions I have about technical aspects of picture taking without any regard whatsoever to the corniness so many find there.
I see by his photos Rarindra Prakarsa has found some satisfactory solution to the problem I have with shadow-filled foregrounds. I like that.
I'm not enough of a photographer to know how K manages to acheive the effects visible in his idylic images of children poised in their customary frolics. The golden shafts of light, yes, I can see that happening in an air full of dusts, although I don't live in land that sees much of that kind of weather. But there's the chance, implicit in comments by some of the Mefites, that the photographer has postprocessed the image to bring out an unnatural amount of goldenness in his images, a rejected Thomas Kinkaid level of painter of light romanticism that the landscape never really owned in the first place, for whatever reason.
So, over at the Landscapist, the host hosts a couple of K's shots, and the comments there tend off in the same critical direction (comments at Metafilter being comparatively brusque, as fits the established rhetoric there, but similarly inclined), suspecting that these images, however capably produced, are in a word, aesthetically speaking, corny.
So the Landscapist posts a few pictures of the sorry land around Jakarta, a peopled urban midden of the sort that is the handmaiden of massive urban environments everywhere around the globe.
And a couple of the commenters bite. Oh, yah, that's more like it. See, this is Indonesia here.
And then a communication comes from a fellow in Indonesia, expressing as best he can in English the immensity of the place, the vast variety of scene and experience embodied there, how a person in Indonesia can see the urban desolation but cannot deny the children and goats and lanes and ponds and trees breaking all the light to little golden bits as it refracts off of countless leaves, that exist there at the heart of Indonesia as well.
Me and my generation still struggle to fix poverty in this country. But hence..there's a lot of time when we were felt very sad about what happened in our country. Mad And loose the spirit to change the way our goverment rule. Tired on corruption and lazy people.
When that times come, looking in some Rarindra's photograph give us good feeling.
Still. Rarindra may dont have any clue about what he has done. I think he's just want to make a beatifull portrait of Indonesia and represent it in dreamy way. The reality sure is not good as the photo. But looking at his portofolio give me sense of pride. We love this country. And will do something to make it remain loved.
Call it third world fake realism. But for me it worth something.
I admire Rarindra Prakarsa for being able to retain the color of objects in the foreground of his images. Because I can't do that I wonder how he does. When I shoot directly into a light source, objects in the foreground take on a heavy shadow not visible to the naked eye. This image of the sky above Hetch-Hetchy has that in spades:
The solitary tree and the abrupt cliff on the side of the road were swathed in midday light when I took the photo, but the camera, given the settings I inflicted on it I suppose, winced at all the brightness overhead, and the tree and cliff are left in darkness in the image as recorded, as is the telephone pole to the right. I don't know how to avoid that, but Rarindra Prakarsa does, I'll give him that. Maybe it's some f-stop thing, or an adjustment of the ISO speed or white balance or something or other that if I knew my camera better I'd be able to allow for. Or, maybe it's something that's best left to Photoshop, selecting and enhancing from the shadows of the image the colors masked in shadow but retrievable by that powerful program's intervention.
When I first looked look at Rarindra Prakarsa's photos I was immediately immersed in questions I have about technical aspects of picture taking without any regard whatsoever to the corniness so many find there.
I see by his photos Rarindra Prakarsa has found some satisfactory solution to the problem I have with shadow-filled foregrounds. I like that.
February 06, 2008
Update
I guess it's time to see about those Zogby numbers.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo points to Zogby's mixed success on Super Tuesday. Missouri, yeah, he got that one. It was close, just as he said it should be. But in California, whew…
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo points to Zogby's mixed success on Super Tuesday. Missouri, yeah, he got that one. It was close, just as he said it should be. But in California, whew…
February 04, 2008
Surging Continues Apace On the Eve of Super Tuesday
A few weeks ago the United States military dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on the Arab Jabour region south of Baghdad: 100,000 pounds. 50 tons.
Tom Englehardt outlines the other terrorism in Iraq at TomDispatch.
Don't hold your breath, Mr. Englehardt. Artists are exhausting themselves in other pursuits, and journalists and bloggers have a presidential horse race to follow.
Tom Englehardt outlines the other terrorism in Iraq at TomDispatch.
Maybe then, it's time for Seymour Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.
Don't hold your breath, Mr. Englehardt. Artists are exhausting themselves in other pursuits, and journalists and bloggers have a presidential horse race to follow.
From The Who'da Thunk It File
The game tasted like one of Sophocles’ better tragedies; divine gifts made too much of, then hubris brought low. That’s coming [at] it a bit high... but a few of those football plays managed to wrench the audience’s attention away from good company and doggie antics and really outstanding food. Which is all Sophocles ever asked of his plays, I bet.
— Tim Bray at ongoing
My own Super Bowl prediction fell equally flat. Up by just thirty at game's end, and then hand after hand of unplayable cards. Two hours worth of feeding antes into the pot and in return cards not even good enough to lose with. Ante and fold, ante and fold. Meh. Admittedly I wasn't 18-0 going into the game, but still.
February 03, 2008
Zogby Numbers
Does anyone else share the impression that Zogby's numbers are often the crazy outliers of numbers distributed by the good graces of the science of statistical sampling when the mood of the public is being tested before an upcoming election? Are Zogby numbers ever really that close to the results they attempt to foresee in retrospect? Or are they useful because they are so predictably off? Maybe I'm ignoring all the good work Zogby numbers do at other times and places I'm not aware of, I don't know. I do recall what seems a pretty long list of tallied returns that delivered a good crumpling to the Zogby numbers that foreshadowed them.
The season of the horse race is upon us, at least according to Zogby the pollster, whose numbers show "Clinton, Obama Neck-and-Neck in Key Super Tuesday States."
We'll see shortly.
[via…]
The season of the horse race is upon us, at least according to Zogby the pollster, whose numbers show "Clinton, Obama Neck-and-Neck in Key Super Tuesday States."
We'll see shortly.
[via…]
February 02, 2008
This Year's Super Bowl Prediction
I predict that while playing poker during tomorrow's Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants, I will win more than two hundred dollars American from people whose efforts to guard against just that eventuality… will be to no avail!!
February Is Black History Month
Once dead last among the listed months of the Roman calendar, February was relegated to second place in the early reshuffling of the calendar's values by command of Numa, fabled second king of the many, many kings of earliest Rome.
Abrupt, brief thing, February.
The word February is rooted in the original formal tendency of the Latins to end the calendar year with a brisk period of review devoted to the expiation of that forgone thing, the past year. Such expectably dour ceremonies as were thought necessary to get the job done drew an uncomfortable crowd no doubt, and thus understandably came to be replaced to the relief of discomfitted Latins by the more mirthfully disposed inclinations embedded in the newer calendar said to have been made by Numa, second king in the fabulous pack of kings of the Latins, who proposed a space at end–year called Saturnalia where all manner of communal merriment could see the old year off and the new one in instead.
Numa decreed December last and January first from that day forward, and joined them in Saturnalia, moving February and its ceremonial expiations to the second month of the Roman calendar from its culminating position of before.
In passing through February such Latins as might be inclined would naturally continue to endeavor in the course of that brief second month, time permitting, to assay the duncity, destructiveness and depravity that was the honest Roman share in the recently completed year past, should any decent memory of it linger in the saturnalian fizz of merry January's wake.
The other, alternate, calendar supplanted by Numa's took the month of the spring equinox as the firstmonth of its year, and thus the month previous to the equinox (call it February for the purposes of expiation) was the last month of any fully seasoned calendar. This widely understood calendar, with its ultimate month meaningfully reserved for expiations, came to be supplanted, as did so many other local customs, when the Romans took Numa's calendar on the road.
By moving truncated little February to second place, the subtle hand (suggested to be Numa's) lifted up the period of expiation and transferred it as compactly as possible to second place as well, while moving it not at all with respect to the seasons, cleverly synchronizing the timing of its dutiful reflections, and thus the whole Roman calendar, with the other alternate supplanted calendar known by the wide range of people to Rome's north and west for example, and thus the month previous to the equinox (call it February again), last month of the cycled seasons, continued to be the reserved space it was meant to be for the judgment and summary enactment of hopefully corrected coursings all along.
Overall it was a downgrade for February's rectifying expiations. February, once the fraught conclusive month of judgment and compensation at year's end, became the stuff of second thoughts in the calendar's second month of the now comfortably inhabited new year of Numa's Roman calendar. Judgments which were February's preserve were mooted by the prior festive accommodations of January. And as for compensation, the rectifying gesture, the corrected course, the learned use of the unmade misstep in future, all of which are entailed by the judgments left to February, oh, yes, of course. All well and good. But secondary to the concerns of the calendar of Numa, which is already well on its way before it gets around to that.
Abrupt, brief thing, February.
The word February is rooted in the original formal tendency of the Latins to end the calendar year with a brisk period of review devoted to the expiation of that forgone thing, the past year. Such expectably dour ceremonies as were thought necessary to get the job done drew an uncomfortable crowd no doubt, and thus understandably came to be replaced to the relief of discomfitted Latins by the more mirthfully disposed inclinations embedded in the newer calendar said to have been made by Numa, second king in the fabulous pack of kings of the Latins, who proposed a space at end–year called Saturnalia where all manner of communal merriment could see the old year off and the new one in instead.
Numa decreed December last and January first from that day forward, and joined them in Saturnalia, moving February and its ceremonial expiations to the second month of the Roman calendar from its culminating position of before.
In passing through February such Latins as might be inclined would naturally continue to endeavor in the course of that brief second month, time permitting, to assay the duncity, destructiveness and depravity that was the honest Roman share in the recently completed year past, should any decent memory of it linger in the saturnalian fizz of merry January's wake.
The other, alternate, calendar supplanted by Numa's took the month of the spring equinox as the firstmonth of its year, and thus the month previous to the equinox (call it February for the purposes of expiation) was the last month of any fully seasoned calendar. This widely understood calendar, with its ultimate month meaningfully reserved for expiations, came to be supplanted, as did so many other local customs, when the Romans took Numa's calendar on the road.
By moving truncated little February to second place, the subtle hand (suggested to be Numa's) lifted up the period of expiation and transferred it as compactly as possible to second place as well, while moving it not at all with respect to the seasons, cleverly synchronizing the timing of its dutiful reflections, and thus the whole Roman calendar, with the other alternate supplanted calendar known by the wide range of people to Rome's north and west for example, and thus the month previous to the equinox (call it February again), last month of the cycled seasons, continued to be the reserved space it was meant to be for the judgment and summary enactment of hopefully corrected coursings all along.
Overall it was a downgrade for February's rectifying expiations. February, once the fraught conclusive month of judgment and compensation at year's end, became the stuff of second thoughts in the calendar's second month of the now comfortably inhabited new year of Numa's Roman calendar. Judgments which were February's preserve were mooted by the prior festive accommodations of January. And as for compensation, the rectifying gesture, the corrected course, the learned use of the unmade misstep in future, all of which are entailed by the judgments left to February, oh, yes, of course. All well and good. But secondary to the concerns of the calendar of Numa, which is already well on its way before it gets around to that.
Groundhog Day is Back!
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, which would make him 126 years old today and just about finished fiddling with his next big book, not doubt, had he lived.
One day, the Spanish painter César Abin came to do a sketch of Joyce for transition, Eugene Jolas's journal which was publishing portions of "Work in Progress". Abin drew a conventional man of letters, sitting on front of his books, with his pen in his hand, his eyes visionary. It was a tolerable if awkward likeness. The books, the pen, the entire drawing seemed to Joyce too solemn, too simple. He began telling Abin what to draw, and presently he was involved in a collaboration. At Joyce's instruction a different picture was drawn: Joyce was shown in a large semicircle as if he were doubled up by cramps, with his feet dangling among wisps of cloud. His body ended up shaped like a question mark the eternal enigma he regarded himself to be and was to himself as well as his audience. His blinker-like spectacles were on his nose and the tip of his nose collided with a star. Under Joyce's dangling feet Abin drew a terrestial globe labeled "Ireland". The globe was made to become the large dot completing the question mark. On the head of this free-floating Irishman among the clouds, suspended over Ireland and a large Dublin drawn as Ireland's heartland, was placed a battered cobwebbed Irish derby. There were cobwebs in the hollow of Joyce's chest that is, near the region of his heart. Shoved into the left pocket was some sheet music. The title printed on it was "Let Me Like a Soldier Fall." There were patches at the knees and a patch on the sleeve. Joyce's mouth is turned down. Stuck into the front of the bowler is the portentious figure 13.
— Leon Edel, "Psychopathology of Shem," pp 112-115, Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology, 1982, as quoted here at Finnegans Web
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