Thamus

Bastards and bitches, universally acknowledged

WHAT does Jane Austen teach us? A lot, according to author James Collins who lists, "self-knowledge, generosity, humility, elegance, propriety, cheerful orderliness, good understanding, correct opinion, knowledge of the world."
Who noticed that she also skillfully demonstrated, with much snide and prejudice, how to be a bitch.

Quote: "We can enjoy her heroes and heroines but will for sure remember, even more clearly, the moral grotesques who disfigured Austen's southwestern England early in the 19th century. Has there ever existed anyone in the world so dim as Sir Walter in Persuasion, or so lacking in self-knowledge as the Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride and Prejudice, or so self-important a toady as her acolyte, the Rev. Mr. Collins?"

Most of us could recount examples to prove that such social liabilities still abound, 200 years on.
Jane intensely disliked these people, and expressed herself by chopping them to pieces for our amusement. She does it so often in the novels that she acquires the characteristics not of a moralist but of a vicious gossip.
When she doesn't like one of her characters, she ceases to be the subtle, witty ironist everybody writes about and turns into a moral harridan.

Quote: "Of course, I'm aware that neither literature nor journalism could exist without vicious gossips, so I make that charge with only the deepest affection and fellow feeling."

And with that, I heartily agree, and love Jane even more.

Don't make my choices, you commie! Make hers!


[Center for American Progress. © Joel Pett, Lexington Herald-Leader, from the Cartoonist Group. ]

Some never awaken

YOU live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.
Then you read a book ... or you take a trip ... and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating.
The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure.
That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness.
Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children.
And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song.
The day comes when the risk to remain tight in a bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom.
And it awakens them and saves them from death.
Some never awaken.

[- Anaïs Nin. Thanks to nogoodboyo for sending it.]

The month of the bleeding fingers
IN case you haven't noticed, it's Novel Writing Month again. This bizarre exercise in self flagellation is now an established Internet event, a monumental celebration of online time-wasting. Last year, after criticising some of the inefficiencies on the site, I foolishly reacted to a jibe that it was easy for those who couldn't do it to mock those who could write a 50,000-word novel in a month. So I did it.
I must be even more senile this year for reacting to a comment that "of course, it's the sort of thing anyone can do once, but not twice in a row." Curses. And so it begins:

Thought Train by Thamus
THE wind is up today, a thin wind in the high plains, sending ochre dust down this red river valley. The sky is pink-tinged pearl with wispy cirrus overhead and darker piles of thick clouds to the north. If it rained, it would be the first time in eons.
Somewhere beyond Earth, are telescopes seeing a brooding dust storm growling in the dark green canyons of Valles Marineris. That's 1,000 kilometers south of here but we're not worried. The scientists radio that unless it evolves into a global phenomenon, it won't bother us.
It is cold, cold, but mid-afternoon's -16.67 Celsius is at least imaginable. A brief sniff we took of the thin air was dry metallic, rusty on the tongue. Let's get the science-so-far out of the way. Although we are now 200 million kilometers from Earth, we travelled 500 million kilometers to get here in a looping arc from Earth orbit to intercept Mars orbit, since we left quietly last December with barely a headline to mark the day. It was a boring seven months, and then everything happened in the last two minutes with the vessel 10 kilometers above the planet.
The mission at that point consisted of a parachute dangling a tin hat with little rockets, and below that, a giant beach ball full of the good stuff. One minute 56 seconds later, the tin hat fired its retro-rockets for two seconds, then it and the parachute left the scene of the incident.The beach ball struck Ares Vallis at 33 kilometers per hour, bounced 18 meters high, bounced again eight meters, then bounce, bounce, roll, roll, rolled to a stop. The deflated airbags unfolded three lotus petals, and the lander shot up its camera-on-a-stick to peer around and look for the sun. It fixed on that, calculated where Earth was, and swivelled its antenna.
ET called home: "The beach ball has landed." So who's alien now? This world, or us? Us, I guess, but aaw, we're friendly aliens. If the rover wandering outside found a Martian lizard, it wouldn't kill it and send it back to earth for an autopsy. Of course not.
Next time.
By now, you're hopefully wondering about the "we" and "us." Wondering, who "wus" is. Especially after those bits about hitting red rocks at 33 kph, the 18-meter bounces. You may have wondered even earlier about that "sniffing the -16.67C mid-afternoon air." Did we really do that, sniff the chill after arriving with a bang in a beach ball full of landers and rovers and things?
Goddam right we didn't. We came hissing comfortably into the valley on the only way to travel. Thought Train. Holy roller. We came on the Thought Train.

[PICTURE: Thought Train cover design by me. ©Thamus 200901105]

My god exists more than your god
THE Geneva-based International Coalition for the Advancement of Religion and Spirituality (ICARUS) has chosen to bestow a special award this year on Buddhism.

Quote: ICARUS director Hans Groehlichen [said] "With organized religion increasingly used as a tool to separate and inflame rather than bring together, we felt we had to take the unusual step of creating a 'Best Religion in the World' award and making a bit of a stir, to inspire other religious leaders to see what is possible when you practice compassion."

Best religion in the world award? Isn't that a bit like a best pedophile in the vestry award? Or the best suicide bomber in the café award?
And what is this starry-eyed sucking up to Buddhism that goes on all over the place these days? The Dalai Lama, much as I admire the man, has got a lot of pulling-wool-over-the-eyes to answer for.
Religion of peace, religion without a god, religion that never causes wars? Which planet is that on?
No god? What about the appendages of Hindu deities and angels attached to the Buddha, who is at least as big a god to most of his simple faithful as Jesus is to his?
No violence? What about the murderous Buddhist thugs in Sri Lanka? Anyone been to Burma recently? What's the rioting in Tibet about? And let us not forget the absolute vicious tyranny that the Buddhist monks of Lhasa once imposed on the Tibetan people.
I find it mildly amusing that the organisation proferring this ludicrous award is called ICARUS - a mythical superstition about a man of such narcissistic hubris that he thought he could defy the laws of nature. (He would of course be a block-headed creationist if he actually existed).
Enough of me - here is a delightful comment by a person called "Ailine" under the news story which this review links to.

Quote: "Gee, why not broaden the appeal and call it 'Best World Superstition' award? That would give a chance for the Greek, Roman and Hindu pantheons of crazy invented gods to square up to Jesus, the Trinity, Jahwe, Allah and the woodland spirit gods of Africa and native America. And who says Satanists, Wiccans, Tarot readers, Druids and the Giant Spaghetti Monster should be left out? They're 'religions' aren't they?
I despair of humanity ever growing up. Here we are in the 21st century and we still have 'priests' rambling aroung mumbling incantations and mumbo jumbo for the gullible masses. When the first colony leaves earth for other worlds, it will have to strictly expunge all superstitious beliefs among the settlers if we are ever to make a giant leap forward in civilisation."
[MONTAGE: My god is bigger than your god. Top - Buddha, Ganesh, Yahweh. Bottom - Zeus, Allah, Jesus. Don't worship them all at once! Being a Celt, I'm off to pay homage to a tree]

A thing of shreds and Patches (update)

"A wandering minstrel I;
A thing of shreds and Patches..."
(Gilbert & Sullivan, The Mikado)

I DON'T have three cats.
I didn't have any cats before Pointless befriended me on the street as a hot young kitty - even following me to a pub one night. She vanished for a year and then somehow reappeared, this time outside my door, four floors up. Hungry.
Suddenly, I didn't have one cat that wandered in and out, but mostly in.
Downstairs, Pointless started to hang around with a one-eyed tabby with a collar. It was a prickly friendship: "Just because we hang out, it doesn't mean you don't annoy me. A lot!"
Pointless was the testy half, but one-eye was a sweet boy with fur that felt like cashmere, friendly to everyone - even the passing dogs liked him.
It wasn't long before Pointless would tap-tap on the door and when it was opened, in would stroll four paws and three eyes, headed for the kibble corner.
Tabby lost his collar and acquired a name - Rufus MacDufus, the Legendary One-Eyed Laird of Glen Felix. Dufe, for short. Yes, now I didn't have two cats.
Well a guy needs a pal when his female friend is so hissy, and it wasn't long before we found good-natured Dufe rolling in the dust under a tree with a perky, gangly, orphan street kitten who liked to throw his long paws around the Dufe's neck.
Ere long ...
That's right. Pointless taps on the door, Dufe strolls in behind her - and leaping right over their heads streaks a long-legged black-and-white missile, racing them to the kibble. He soon also gained a name - Patch. Now I didn't have three cats.
Two weeks ago, Patch didn't visit for two days; no big deal, he's popular with the neighbours. Then we found him, shivering under a bush, in obvious pain. The vet said his back end was smashed to pieces with multiple bone and joint fractures. The vet talked of serious surgery, titanium pins, hospital cage, medication - of course, for a street cat, it would be humane to put him out of his ...
I'm not humane. So Patch had six hours of fine surgery, and three days in cat hospital, and on July 16 came home. So, I don't have three cats again (just an extra five eyes and 11 legs).
I also, suddenly, don't have as much money as I did last week, but the vet has more.
Update: Poor old Patch had a relapse, with a titanium pin sticking out of his foot joint, so it was back to the surgeon and the clinic cage for a few more days. Now he's started recovering all over again today, this time with a heavy leg plaster.
[PICTURE: Not a happy boy. Patch, back from a second round of surgery, complaining to me about the vet and the annoying leg plaster. And he says yellow isn't his colour either. ©Thamus 20090723]

Ashes to ashes
THE first time I ever used the "new" online book service Amazon was to buy Angela's Ashes. I was dumbfounded when the book traveled to me across two continents in only five days.
My opinion of Amazon has plummeted since it was in its salad days, but I am still in two minds (at least) about the Ashes.
I grew up in 50s-60s rural Ireland and while it was a poor place (no electricity in the early years, water carried from a well twice daily), and a hard life at times, it was not a miserable place.
I and my friends had a full, almost idyllic childhood, in the dying tranquility of Victorian ways, and that's not hindsight - I kept diaries.
But then, our fathers always had jobs and didn't drink their wages; our mothers boxed our ears, ironed our clothes and dragged us to church on Sundays; our teachers dragged promising pupils to their homes for extra lessons, and often taught us fishing, or rabbit hunting, or camping as well.
In the summer we voluntarily worked on farms or picked fruit for extra money.
I therefore found the relentless, unremitting, degredation and misery of Frank McCourt's book hard to swallow.
We always knew Limerick was a miserable dump of a city (and now notorious for gang violence).
But come on, so the 1930s were tough everywhere, but not really much different from the 50s in Ireland, which had been cut off from the world in a sort of uninvolved limbo during the world-war years of the 1940s.
That said, I do not begrudge the author his Pulitzer Prize, the millions his book brought him late in life, and his fabulous sucess and fame.
It is good he had it all, and sad he didn't live a bit longer to enjoy it more. I have no hesitation in regarding Angela's Ashes as literature in the finest Irish tradition.
Frank McCourt was a charmer and a raconteur and a fine writer. In short - a fine Irishman. We will miss him.

An economic crisis affects everyone