“We need to account for the fact that we chase after disgust. Our attraction to disgust is hardly modern. The grotesque fascinated painters from the Renaissance to Goya, with his visagesof Saturn, and Francis Bacon, with hisdistorted portraits.” – Nautilus
Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dare
Disturb the sound of silence
"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence
“
ON THE CULT OF PERSONALITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES”:
Most speeches by politicians don’t say much, and what they do say often
isn’t true. But on this day in 1956, First Secretary of the Soviet
Union’s Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev shocked the members of the 20
th Party Congress by doing something completely novel: He laid some truth on them about their late leader Joseph Stalin:
Stalin acted not through persuasion,
explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by … demanding
absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept … was
doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral
and physical annihilation. …
…
Lenin used severe methods only in the most necessary cases …
Stalin, on the other hand, used extreme methods and mass repressions
at a time when the revolution was already victorious. … It is clear that
here Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his
brutality, and his abuse of power. …
…
Stalin’s willfulness vis-à-vis the party and its central committee became fully evident after the 17th party congress, which took place in 1934….
It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the
party’s Central Committee who were elected at the 17th congress, 98
persons, that is, 70 percent, were arrested and shot ….
The same fate met not only the central committee members, but also the majority of the delegates to the 17th
party congress. Of 1,966 delegates with either voting or advisory
rights, 1,108 persons were arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary
crimes, i.e. decidedly more than majority. This very fact shows how
absurd, wild, and contrary to common sense were the charges ….
(Note that there are different versions/translations of what Khrushchev said. This is one of them.)
The speech was intended to be secret. But it was leaked. Its effects
were shattering all over the Soviet Union. Riots in Stalin’s homeland of
Georgia had to be suppressed.
Here in the United States, its effects among Communists were sweeping. In a 2017 New York Times article entitled “
When Communism Inspired Americans,”
Vivian Gornick (a red diaper baby herself) wrote of the devastating
effect the speech had on American Communists: “Night after night the
people at my father’s table raged or wept or sat staring into space.”
Gornick reported that within weeks of the speech’s publication in the
West, 30,000 members of the party in the United States had quit.
Note that Khrushchev’s speech has been criticized (and for good
reason). What he said about Stalin was true, but he concentrated on the
horrors of Stalin’s actions against party members. What about the
millions of non-party members who died at the hands of the party? And he
repeatedly contrasted Stalin with Lenin, whom he praised, when both
deserved to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Still, it was a
step forward for a nation that had seen nothing but horror from its
leaders for decades.
INDIGENOUS HOUSING: The framework sets
out the goal of meeting demand for 27,000 additional Aboriginal households by
2036.
Since 1945, Syrian company Pearl Soap has
been using traditional centuries-old methods of making “Aleppo soap”
from olive oil and laurel oil. Here’s how they do it (I love the
contraption they use to cut the soap)
