Friday Morning Reading

Up early and spent a long while nursing my sore joints. I need some Ben-Gay, so I did no writing except here and one other blog post. This is what I did this morning besides tidying up the room. It is cold, again.

I started this post at 7:56 AM.

Does toppling statues really right the wrongs of history?

 I am staying away from Bing: Over the Course of 72 Hours, Microsoft's AI Goes on a Rampage

Full of libidinous loins and now mouldy, I can’t throw away D.H Lawrence .  I have trouble getting rid of books, how about you?

For those closer to Muncie, let me direct you to Downtown Farm Stand.

I have fun looking at the front pages of The Age and The Brisbane Times.  I really cannot understand cricket. Give them a look, expand your life and world.

From Orthodox Christian Laity:

 Russia’s Attempt to Weaponize Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine and Ukrainian Autocephaly and Responsibility Toward the Faithful (an unfortunate aspect of the Ukraine War is its effect on the Orthodox Church and the religious aspect of the war.)

BISHOP MAXIM’S HOMILY DURING THE AOB XII OPENING LITURGY:

It is significant because Saint Sava, with all the sensitivity that distinguished him, made the Serbian people understand something paradoxical—that the life of the Christians was a life lived between life and death. If one really loves people, one must identify oneself with them and share their difficulties and sufferings. Love means sharing the misfortunes of others. All these, my brothers, are characteristics of this great Saint whose memory we commemorate today. And this relationship of Sava with the Lord reveals to us that saying we love God, and our fellow man is not enough if we do not sacrifice for them.

This bloodless sacrifice is offered by the Church every time we celebrate the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. It brings us all together.

And this is no accident, my brothers. At this moment, when we are honored by the grace of the Lord to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, we feel St. Sava walking here among us and telling us the same words of Christ. To address these words first to us, the faithful Christians and especially the Orthodox. To understand that without love we cannot be faithful to his preaching and message.

Patricia Highsmith intrigues me, as eccentric and as a writer, I read some of her Ripley novels and saw the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. So I read On the Gender Trouble of “Loving Highsmith” by Rox Samer from The Los Angeles Review of Books. I think I have missed understanding most of what I have read by Highsmith. 

I knew the name Cantinflas without knowing there was a Golden Age of Mexican Cinema until I found Good, Bad, and the Complete Opposite: Cynicism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema, Cynicism, I also know. What I got was  an insight into America as well as Mexico:

Modern cynicism is the privilege of academia. A good cynic writes in thick, indigestible prose, gets published by way of an instant Great Novel, and categorically declines to watch television unless it’s to mock it. Diogenes’s barrel is a symbol of enlightenment only retroactively; today’s houseless are lazy bums, and if they’re dissatisfied with society, they should just work harder.

Starting in the 1940s, America was in great need of reinforcing this idea. A snappy war economy required a workforce that refused to listen to itself; questioning where and why the war was going was treason, not just to the nation, but to your fellow worker. Thus grew the artificial divide between thinker and laborer, a divide which found its way through México’s geographical and socioeconomic entanglements to root itself into the labor ethics of a “developing” economy. Take a look at 1951’s ¡Ay, amor, cómo me has puesto!, starring the equally enduring actor-singer-comedian Tin Tan: A poor baker earns the approval of his lover’s middle-class family. His relative command of language acts only in the service of highlighting what a presentable, hardworking young man he is. He can earn middle-classness.

Cantinflas’s opus is a distinctly Mexican testament against the myth of hard work. By appropriating the florid language ascribed to academia, crafting with it sentences both meaningless and slippery, Cantinflas manages to raise his godson, and enchant the titular Raquel. In an exploitative society, the great victory of cynicism is not to transcend, but to avoid lending your labor to be transcended upon.

Since I have been paying more attention to my Swiss ancestry, I checked out Schweizer Literaturpreise 2023. Nice pics. 

The Guardian newsletter arrived in my email.

Republicans take aim at risque jokes and romance novels with anti-sex bills. I  started a long quote and then decided my monitoring software might block me from accessing my blog, so go read the thing. Putting an age verification requirement onto providers I find attractive, but I cannot get away from the idea that all they will accomplish is making the material even more attractive. Make it boring, which it is, then there might be success. I can quote the following:

Historian Whitney Strub, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, doesn’t think these ideas are well-founded. “Framing pornography as a public health crisis is not driven by serious engagement with the social scientific literature,” he said. “They’ve even got fake peer-reviewed journals that give the imprimatur of scholarship … It’s been a very smart rebranding of evangelical Christian conservatism.”

It is 10 am. My pants remain damp from last night, but I need to make calls. My inbox still has too much to be read. So it goes.

 sch 10:01 am