Giants October Baseball Roundup

It's being reported that Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford is the first shortstop in Major League Baseball history to ever hit a grand slam in a post-season game, having stroked a round-tripper with the bags bulging, as they say, in tonight's loser-go-home NL Wild Card game vs. the Pittsburgh Pirates. It's actually being reported over and over, in fact, as if this statistical anomaly, Crawford being the first ever shortstop to hit one, multiplies the immense satisfaction of immediately plating four runs inherent in the grand slam itself, a satisfaction as maximally immense as the rules of the game will allow to begin with. It was a Pirate-slaying stroke in the instant.

September in Civilization

Saudi Arabia agrees to host training of moderate Syrian rebels

Something about the idea of moderate Syrian rebels cries out for a Monte Pythoning, I suppose. A training room somewhere outside Riyadh run according to the tenets of moderate rebellion.

What civilization hath wrought, given six thousand years and home field advantage: the Saudi royals underwrite a proposed replacement for the current Syrian government composed of "moderate" rebels, while the utterly compromised Iraqi govenment lies in tatters, suffering reconstitution just the other day by the newly installed Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, whose administration currently faces the loss of considerable amounts of territory once presumed to be Iraq but held, forcibly for now, by an entity called ISIS as part of its newly proclaimed caliphate, which entity is now targeted for bombing by the USA. Politically the situation could not be more fluid, if by fluid the full flavor of catastrophe might be conveyed.

Bloomsday 2014

A pint of plain for your only man, here on the sixtieth anniversary of him setting off with his confederates to trace along the shabby streets of Dublin the steps laid out for Leopold Bloom by Mr. James Joyce in his book, "Ulysses," creating the modern phenomenon of "Bloomsday," such as it is.

 

FLANN from Mick Mahon on Vimeo.

A Murderous Genius

Here's a fine essay on the life of the painter Caravaggio.

Here's a picture from Wikipaintings not included in the article:

Medusa by Caravaggio 1597  

Unopening

Passageway, May, 2014

Vermeer's Dog

A note on the gate

I've been thinking about boundaries and gates. This video cleverly investigates the bewildering complexity of international boundaries as they are drawn in the real world. The narrator himself speaks an English at the far reach of what most English manages to sound like these days. Perhaps there was a time when we all had to speak like that to be speaking English at all, but pronunciation, globally, has moved on from that kind of talk. He has not left English, he is still operating within it. But it is not call-center English. It is an enclave of the tongue.

A Churl Replies

Condoleeza Rice is a non-metaphorical warmonger. She hawked the own-goal invasion of Iraq concocted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. She was part of the full-court PR for US invasion, the tragic world-historical blunder that unleashed the current generations-worth of warfare in the Middle East. She is odious in that respect.

Why should any university grant the platform of a commencement address, its one last gesture of guidance to its assembled graduating class, whatever that might be worth, to a person who, when it came to the crucial self-defining passage of her life, did the wrong thing, the utterly, reprehensibly wrong thing?

The Sort of Gate Previously Open Below Reopens

Editorial

Brought to you for the sake of argument by The Quotidian

Daylight Savings Device

Before

After

Annals of Photography

The Second Coming of the Blooming Plant, March 2014

 The Previous and Heretofore Only Bloom, March, 2010

Police Procedural by the Golden Gate

 Anyone who grew up on Adam-12 reruns remembers this story. Good times.

A Sort of Gate, Open

The Opening in the Open Gate

Four Days Four Gates

A gate invites passage through an otherwise obstructed space. Less generously, it obstructs what otherwise would provide passageway. Attached to a fence or wall, a gate provides both discontinuity in and continuation of the given perimeter, contingently.

[On the First, a spare, elegant image of a gate scanned from a paperback called The Way of Chinese Painting(Vintage paper, 1959.), whose author, Mai-mai Sze, carefully culled its contents from her own The Tao of Painting, published in two volumes in 1956. Below this, a known sign meaning "gate" in three distinctive yet similar renditions, the first influenced by classic Chinese calligraphy, the second by an almost Gothic orderliness of stroke, and the third by the resource constraints on digital representation of the complex signifiers of East Asian orthography. On the Second, the gate is closed. On the Third, the gate is closed. On the Fourth, a word on gate].

Four Gates

But First, Happy New Year, Eh?

Four Gates