The Boston Tea Party

The enraged British lost all patience with their American brethren after the Boston Tea Party and enacted punitive measures. One especially irate member of Parliament, Charles Van, said Boston should be obliterated like Carthage: “I am of the opinion you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.”

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

'windstorm'

What a fucked night! With a capital ‘F’.

I should have believed the weatherman. He spoke of extraordinary winds and warned about loose objects becoming projectiles. I'll call it a 'windstorm'. Yet, it was so warm and perfectly calm throughout the day and late into the evening. I gambled and left the cats outside. I don’t think I slept for more than ten minutes straight, at least not before five in the morning. You would think that at least I must have scored a lot of time with “Marilyn at Rainbow’s End”, but the truth is that I was stubbornly optimistic that sleep would fall hard on me at any minute. I need to lose that, and to go ahead and try to read myself into exhaustion. On the other hand, I was probably too worried about the cats. I didn’t get them all inside until about four. Like I said: a real fucked night.

PIcs

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The New York Stock Exchange

The New York Stock Exchange - "the longstanding symboll of American capitalism" - is being bought for eight billion dollars and change. WTF?! I am not sure what is going on, but it looks like a new level in the consolidation of wealth - more and more in ever fewer hands.

I like one reader's comment: "I notice the big players have enough money to do everything they want, except create worthwhile jobs and pay employees for their work."

And so the world runs away...


(Source: New York Times)

Pakistan

What a piece of work is Pakistan! Not being content with gunning down girls seeking to get an education, Islamist militants are now gunning down women relief workers trying to minister polio vaccinations. It is as though they are doing their damnest to try to keep Pakistan from rising above third-world status. They are obviously doing a pretty good job.

(Source: New York Times)

Lo Blog (1,4) A Stray Canary

How deep did the unconsummated love of Annabel sear into Humbert’s romantic soul?

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I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today.

Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) [when they were eight or nine years old] a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries.

Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!

-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The comparisons and contrasts between Humbert’s relationships with Annabel and Lolita will probably always pay good dividends for the thoughtful and analytical reader. Humbert certainly loses himself in the mystery of it, in seeking the key to understand his life and the tragedy of it - the WHYs of it all.

Of course, the truth behind Humbert’s pathology are probably not to be found with Annabel, but don’t we often focus on our own obsessions in thinking about our lives, being rather more poetic than scientific?