weather

Pi says, “Get up, Monk! Come on, get out of bed!”

Why should I want to do that?

“At least just open your eyes and look out the window!”

Okay, for you, anything. Hey, it looks like the weather is clearing. Finally.

“Good morning to you, too!”

This could be just a tease. We’ll have to see how things look this afternoon.

George Orwell

“For the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.”

-- George Orwell

This revisits the point that Orwell was indeed a lefty, a socialist, despite the fact that his two greatest novels were hard-driving criticisms of communism. Orwell was a socialist, but he understood that totalitarianism is a fatal corruption of socialist politics.

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Like much of his later work - most conspicuously the much grimmer “1984” - “Animal Farm” was the product of Orwell’s engagement in the Spanish Civil War. During the course of the conflict, in which he had fought on the anti-Fascist side and been wounded and then chased out of Spain by supporters of Joseph Stalin, his experiences had persuaded him that the majority of “Left” opinion was wrong, and that the Soviet Union was a new form of hell and not an emerging utopia.

-- Christopher Hitchens, “On Animal Farm” in Arguably

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Donald Trump

A fun Trump fight.

Iran

An Iranian reformist has won the Iranian presidency.

Stunning News.

The Savage God

When first coming into the modern world, with the death of God and the absence of a clear, unquestionable standard of meaningfulness, one might think that artists would have a particularly hard struggle with where to find the purpose and direction for their song. Nihilism would be one answer.

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The raw excesses of Dada and its total rejection of all values were precipitated by the sense of universal bankruptcy which followed World War I. But this was merely the speeding up of the processes of doubt and disillusion which had begun far earlier. Almost fifty years before.

Rimbaud - aged seventeen but already far into a career that was to be the paradigm of the whole rejecting, contemptuous, exploratory spirit of the modern arts - had called himself a littératuricide.

Now, after four years of pointless slaughter which changed nothing but a few boundaries, the Savage God was no longer a vague threat on the horizon; he was a looming, ubiquitous presence, blocking every view.

[I think we may take this Savage God to be the ‘god’ of a world without god, along with a world of annihilative technology - a meaningless, suicidal world.]

Even Lenin seemed to have sensed him. During his exile in Zurich, Lenin occasionally visited the Cabaret Voltaire, where Dada began in 1916: “I don’t know how radical you are,” he said to a young Rumanian Dadaist, “or how radical I am. I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always be as radical as reality itself.”

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

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73. Cats and Moonlight

And the cats are out after another little spell of being homebound. It looked like it was going to turn into another one of those drizzly-pissy days, despite this morning's sunshine. But, no, it looks pretty good. And there is Sammy: sharpening his claws on mother’s little plum tree, getting ready for the night and a little mischief in the moonlight.

short stories

I am giving up on George Saunders's "Tenth of December". Too many clunkers. And I feel further resolved that short stories really are not my literary form.

Whitey

Fuck! Another stranger-cat.

Pi says, "Aww, but it is a pretty one."

Daimon says, "What, is it not, uh, Orangey?"

No, it is dark out, but I think this cat is largely white, and I am thinking probably attractive.

Pi asks, "So, why are you being mean to it?"

It could be a female: a breeder. And there is also the real potential for fights with our own little tribe.

Daimon says, "So you brought the food-plate inside."

Yes, but I don't know how I am going to handle this. I'm afraid of starving our cats. Just take it out when I do my bathroom runs? And hope I catch all three cats waiting? That is very inconvenient. Fuck. And this has to happen on the first night that I let the cats back outside. This... stranger-cat --

Daimon breaks in, "Oh, let us be creative and name this new cat Whitey."

Well, I am hoping that... Whitey will not be around long enough to need a name, but okay. Hassles, hassles. Well, no blood, no injuries, it is not the end of the world, or the end of an era, I guess. But hassles, hassles, hassles.