The thin blue records that opened up musical horizons for Soviet youth Pressing Plant
Taxation Of NFT Transactions
Generalized tendency to make extreme trait judgements from faces. Funny how no one seems to mind this, perhaps it is too hard-wired? How much is it that this tendency serves the interest of the media class overall? After all, most stories about people have photos of those same people.
Poland’s Coming Economic Collapse: A Story in 8 Tweets
Why Poland is on its way to becoming an economic basket case.
“BookWyrm – Social Reading and Reviewing BookWyrm is ad-free, anti-corporate, and federated. You can seamlessly follow and interact with users on other BookWyrm instances, and on services like Mastodon.
THEY DO SEEM TO GO TOGETHER: Technocracy and Totalitarianism.
The saddest, most comic and melodramatic domestic scene in all of literary history: Tolstoy, Lear-like at age eighty-two, secretly flees his wife, Sophia Tolstaya, and his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and lies dying in a railway station in the provincial town of Astapovo.
'Come, Gentle Tripe, the Hungry Carter’s Joy'
No form of writing is so evanescent as journalism, unless it’s blogging. True to its etymology, most of it evaporates within a day. We can think of rare exceptions – Mencken, Liebling, Kempton. As a newspaper reporter I wrote millions of words, thousands of stories, columns and reviews, now reduced to moldering clips, stray electrons and unreliable memories. I recall none of this in sadness. I knew precisely what I was getting into.
In Innocent Merriment: An Anthology of Light Verse (1942), Franklin P. Adams includes a poem by J.B. Morton, “Tripe”:
“Come, gentle tripe, the hungry carter’s joy,
Drayman’s delight, conductor’s second course,
Passion and dream of every errand boy,
Vision of every rogue that holds a horse,
Bane of all titled ladies, bishops’ dread,
Doom of the softly nurtured, peers’ despair,
Was it for this the tall Achilles bled,
For this that Agamemnon tore his hair?
Was this the food that launched a thousand ships
And tore the heart of Dido, as she stood
Above the feast, wiping her royal lips,
And called her love again—was this the food?
“(The answer is, in a sense, no.)”
In a restaurant long ago, I worked with a Puerto Rican/Italian cook from Chicago. This guy was the Toscanini of the griddle, maintaining masterful control in the kitchen on the most frenzied of nights. He never raised his voice, never broke a sweat. We became friends and he was forever threatening to prepare for me a pot of menudo – pancita, as it’s known in Houston. It became a joke between us. I’m not a finicky eater but just the thought of certain foods triggers my gag reflex. My father relished unthinkable things – pigs’ knuckles, souse, head cheese – straight out of the Upton Sinclair cookbook. The toughest paragraph for me to digest in all of Ulysses is this:
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
So when I saw “Tripe,” I had to read it. I knew nothing about J.B. Morton. His poem is about tripe, yes, but more about class-based food snobbery. The working people of England relish eating stomach of cow. The upper classes disdain it. My father was an ironworker. I inherited his contempt for “foodies” – ridiculous word – but could never eat most of his favorite foods. I don’t remember him eating tripe, but perhaps memory is being merciful.
Now, about J.B. Morton (1893-1979): He spent a year at Oxford and hoped to make a living as a poet. He fought at the Somme during the Great War. Like many of us when young and without direction, he became a journalist. From 1924 to 1975, he wrote the “By the Way” column in the Daily Express under the pen name "Beachcomber." Until 1965, he produced six columns a week. The most I ever had to write was two per week, on top of features, news stories and the occasional review, and there were weeks when that seemed impossible. I admire good writers who are industrious, so long as no one mentions Joyce Carol Oates, and journalism certainly remains the best boot camp for learning how to write.
Is anyone familiar with Morton’s work? He seems to have written some twenty books but I haven’t located any in the libraries where I have lending privileges. He sounds like a writer worth remembering.
“What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”
“‘Right now America may be the only country in the world for a writer,’ he says without prologue. ‘You help your writers by ignoring them in every conceivable way. I must say I do like that. If one has no professional existence, one is free to come and go as one pleases . . . be what one pleases. Anonymity - to be no one everywhere – it’s a delicious condition, don’t you think?’”
What Language Is This? 5 Tools to Identify Unknown Languages MakeUseOf: “If you’ve come across a language you can’t identify, it might drive you crazy until you figure out what it is. Even if you don’t speak multiple languages, it’s useful to know what a language is just by looking at it. Let’s look at some language finder services to help you identify which language you’re looking at in an image or text.”
