The Ramones in the Morning

So I woke before the alarm, which is a good thing ince I forgot to set the thing.

Firefox crashed and I am doing this in Chrome.

I started the day with The Ramones:

Then I went to work on what I forgot last night and my email.

 What I forgot from last night:

S.G. Goodman – one of the singers I brought back from Philadelphia with me. Out of Kentucky, and not sure how to pigeonhole her – country, folk, rock? Doesn't matter, just give her a listen.

My Winter with Edith Wharton - The Millions - I like Wharton; it is fun to read about another writer residing in Wharton's house.

Margaret Atwood Gets Personal - The Millions - I like Atwood, I read everything there was to read of her in the prison library. Now she has a new collection of short stories. This intrigues me:

Contrasting with the tidy, realist narrative of Nell and Tig’s marriage, the stand-alone stories in the mid-section of Old Babes are wildly far-flung, though they riff on related themes. In “The Dead Interview,” Atwood herself interviews George Orwell‘s ghost. The transcript consists of lovely repartee as they touch upon disparate topics such as anti-vaxxers, the January 6th uprising, social “cancellings,” and Orwell’s disappointed father, who lamented that Orwell had “thrown away [his] advantages” by becoming a writer. Later, the world-weary ghost of Hypatia of Alexandria opines in “Death by Clamshells,” “Many in your world have the idea that there has been progress since my day… I don’t know how anyone who has been paying attention can hold such a view.” Ventriloquizing Hypatia, Atwood asks if progress truly improves the human experience, or simply moves the old problems around.

Maybe I should get it for KH. 

The Lupine Anxieties of ‘Wolfish’ - another review from The Millions; if I had time for a book on wolves, this would be the one I bought.

Beyond Shame: The Beauty of Lucan Poetry - okay, I thought Lucan meant something else. I skimmed when I saw it was not. Lucan refers to a region of Italy. Interesting when I got past feeling like an idiot (okay, I never quite get past that feeling!)

Kazuo Ishiguro on Life, Death, and the Movies - an interview from The Millions. Another writer I finally read while in prison. Tomorrow, we find out if he won an Oscar.

Stuff from this morning (pre-crash):

Giving Up Is Not an Option: Book Censorship News, March 3, 2023 - if book banning means anything to you, read this.

Firefox crashed, so I am seeing if I can understand what is going on using Chrome.

Black History Month is over, but DeSantis persists in censoring Black history. So do the Republicans (and anyone knowing American history ought to know that is the ultimate in irony). Therefore, let me point you to Boston Magazine's The Black Scholars Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Want Students to Read, and let me ask you to think about these two questions:

1. Is not Black history, American history?
2. Why are the MAGA Republicans scared of these writers?

Interesting Literature published The Best Short Stories by Latin American Writers. Of the writers, I have only read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I am not sure if I have read the stories mentioned in the article. I have read much of Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, and think I have learned much of writing from them. Do not be scared of the foreign writers!

From The Scottish Review I found the following:

Stuart Hannabuss's These are hard times indeed; a review of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century' by Helen Thompson (published by Oxford University Press, 2022):

Helen Thompson, in her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, suggests that to 'careen between the ideas of a technologically-driven salvation and an inescapable Gőtterdȁmmerung is a hopeless response'. For her, the key challenge is to look hard at the impact and future prospects of the energy revolution. This will be unavoidable geopolitical conflict, and involve Western democracies in real sacrifices (we can see that already with energy price hikes and environmental choices). This, she argues, could precipitate political disorder, and already has done if we think of populist conspiracy theorising, the rise of rightist coalitions, and climate denial and terrorism.

If we add to the agenda that we should worry about and face up to the many ways in which reliable, authoritative and objective information (the basis for all reasonable decisions) is now widely regarded as contestable, and that opinion substitutes for factuality, the topic of books like Sophia Rosenfeld's Democracy and Truth: A Short History (2019), then it seems difficult to imagine constructive consensus for policy-making and national welfare, the very thing democracy most depends on. The very denial of losers at the ballot box in the US and Brazil strikes at its very heart.

In the midst of all these cross-currents for Thompson lies the availability of energy resources, above all oil. All three of the main resources – oil, gas, electricity – are in danger of depletion, for a long time have been fought over, and as such deserve to come to the centre of popular debate. However diluted and simplified for a lay-person, economic and financial issues remain complicated (because they really are complex). Studies like Thompson's own Oil and the Western Economic Crisis (2017), along with similar works by writers like Vaclav Smil and James Barr, are not everyday reading, for all their importance.

Thinking on subjects we Americans are not (Transgender kids threaten the American future? Really?), and the reviewer is not optimistic:

Historians often like to reassure us by saying that we've seen it all before, and of course, unlike Pangloss, we don't really live in the best of all possible worlds. There is constant deconstruction and reconstruction. Let's call it 'disorder' and examine the causes and effects of what's taking place in the world. Thompson does this in a clear and comprehensive way – the book is for both the specialist and the general reader, even though it operates at quite an abstract level once we reflect on 'what we can actually do about it ourselves'.

Knowing clever Soviet/Russian energy initiatives in the past won't help us deal with modern tyranny. No surprise to learn that Italy is divided north and south, and that its ephemeral coalitions speedily shift from technocrats to populists, nor that monetary sovereignty will shift from the all-powerful dollar to China's renminbi and yuan by 2030, urged on by new geopolitical and economic alliances like Xi's Belt and Road initiative, China's new economic (and cultural?) hinterland. You can see how such tours d'horizon as Disorder can induce a helpless despair in any small nation, let alone one persuaded to believe that small is beautiful if only it is feisty and efficient as well. Hard times indeed, with Darwinian overtones. Dystopias always make us think hard.

Thinking seems to be in slight demand in these United States; politics seems to be pandering to adults never having escaped being toddler. 

Wreckless Eric stopped in from next door.

Am I wrong thinking that the style and the content of Joseph Farrell's The two forces in statecraft is not what we would find in a general interest American publication? The subject is the end of Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland's First Minister. (You may also want to check out A watershed moment for Scottish politics)

There are other deeper views expressed by Nicolò which, in the light of her recent decision to step down, Nicola might find it sobering to consider. These concern a wider view of life, not only regarding the exercise of power. There are, Machiavelli writes, two forces in statecraft which bring a person to power or prominence but are also decisive in the course of social and individual life as such. These forces he identifies as virtu or fortuna. The former certainly does not mean virtue, but it would appear Nicola has exhausted her store of both.

In earlier times, virtu could have been translated as manliness, but that notion will not pass muster today. Perhaps charisma, individuality or even personality render the idea more clearly since the term indicates the purely personal qualities which a man or woman possesses, or fails to possess, and which will make them a success or failure in life. These are qualities of mind or character and would include intelligence, shrewdness or foresight but could equally indicate cunning, ruthlessness or brutality. They could be the virtues of a saint but equally the vices of a scoundrel or even psychopath. They certainly did not require to be moral, although that is not excluded.

Nicola's virtu has in recent years faltered, especially over gender recognition and the de facto referendum issue. Nicolò thundered against flatterers, and Nicola expended her own credibility pushing through the gender recognition reform, listening only to her own advisers and ignoring public concerns.

But these leadership qualities will only permit an individual to go so far unless they are buoyed by fortuna, which is easier to translate and does indeed designate fortune or luck. The circumstances permitting a person to rise in life or in their career have to be right, and they can be controlled only to a certain extent. Those who rise to power by luck will find it easier to attain authority, but will have the devil's own job to maintain it. Liz Truss? There was a vacuum which she filled, but since she lacked virtu and believed in fairy gold, or something ethereal called 'growth' to pay for unfunded tax cuts, her days were short. Her career will be subject to critical, or derisive, scrutiny for years.

I will bring it all back home with saying Trump may have had personality but he lacked foresight or intelligence. This guy still wants to play footsie with Putin.

Nor would we find anything like Manfredi La Manna's Revelations and hoaxes which takes on organized religion. It is logical, it is cool-headed, and it may be right - logically. As another Scotsman recognized a lot time ago, religion is not rational. I quote the ending, the whole argument needs read and shrinking it into quotes is not easy. I did have to look up Kate Forbes.

Notice finally that logically there is absolutely no necessity for a true revelation to imply the establishment of a class of people whose task is to manage the effects of the revelation itself, but the creation of a priestly hierarchy is the very essence of a successful fraud.

Perhaps the problem with the Kate Forbeses of our age is not so much their abhorrent views on equality and on women's rights, but the very fact that acting on evidence-denying beliefs is not considered sufficient ground for disbarment from public office.

The same writer also wrote Vermeer's power to move, a review of an exhibition. Which probably sounds dull, but the writer enlivens the thing to where it should be read:

I should come clean: I am a near-complete ignoramus of art history and cannot draw the simplest of objects, but I do have a deep if unexplained passion for Vermeer. My hope in visiting the exhibition was to try to find out what exactly in Vermeer's work stirs feelings in me like no other painter. My track record for this journey of self-discovery is poor: why does Mahler's 5th Adagietto move me in ways none of Beethoven's symphonies do? Why do Don Giovanni's opening three chords inexorably make my heart beat faster? I have tried to answer these questions with a singular lack of success.

What follows is the honest account of my personal quest for an explanation of Vermeer's power to move.

I suspect the exhibition's curators had a difficult decision to make: whether to show Vermeer's paintings in context by juxtaposing his work with his contemporaries' or to let them speak for themselves, unadorned. Luckily, they chose the latter, dispersing the 28 paintings across nine very large and high-ceilinged rooms, mainly in chronological order. This decision does not imply that little can be gained by comparing Vermeer's works with other Dutch masters, but that this comparative analysis is best carried out beyond the exhibition walls (for example, using the excellent and bulky catalogue that accompanies the show).

I did not expect a history of women aviator's from Mary Simpson's See the world differently, but it was quite entertaining and I did not know of  Winnie Drinkwater.

 Back stateside, The Drift's ninth issue is out. Same with Unlikely Stories, a new edition is out. I just don't have time to read them in detail.

The Reverend Horton Heat brought over a friend:

The email inbox is down to 8. Two are videos of sermons.

It is 8:53 am

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