Saturday, August 28, 2021

JIM TREACHER: The Elites Dance and Feast While You Close Up Shop

 There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always of new things  …


There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all.

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.


We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.


Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.


 The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.


In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk



Hold Still For Fifteen Seconds

Maybe older (as in, century-old) cameras have something to offer. - CBC

Some Detective Work: Company Says It’s Figured Out The Deepfakes In Bourdain Documentary

If the company’s analysis is correct, the deepfake Bourdain controversy is rooted in less than 50 seconds of audio in the 118-minute film. - Wired

Often using the phenomenon of pareidolia, Helga Stentzel arranges common household items to resemble faces, animals, and other fun characters. You can find prints of some of her creations on her website.

I’m in my kitchen 

peeling potatoes; water running from the tap

almost drowns the children’s voices

in the yard.

 

Children’s calls to each other 

almost drown the birds 

singing in the trees 

and the songs of the birds 

almost drown the whispering of the wind 

in the leaves.

 

The whispering of the leaves

though quiet 

almost distracts from the stillness

of the glowing sky.

 

Its glowing light is

almost a fiery aura 

like that of the atom bomb, 

at least a little



IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: One Rule For Them, Another For You. “One thing Flu Manchu had made even more abundantly clear is that our leftwing political elite feel free to impose on ordinary people laws that they themselves feel under no obligation to obey. Like 1970s Hollywood convincing themselves that they deserved cocaine because they just worked so darn hard, our ‘betters’ believe rules are for the little people.”

JIM TREACHER: The Elites Dance and Feast While You Close Up Shop.


John Quiggin  - Obituary for Catallaxy 

  1. Club Troppo is the only survivor from 2000s group blogging, though mostly a group of two these days with a few guest posts.


Blistering temperatures’: Dark roofing banned on Sydney’s urban fringe