Not a Moral Place

"As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling; there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy."

(William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, Before the Curtain, London, June 28, 1848)

Temerity

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escaped shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

(David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature)

To You

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why
should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

(Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, To You)

Oh Bama!

Relativism

At Mental Gardens I met Tist the Relativist. I gave him a hard punch in the face.

'You struck me with the fist!' he said.

'No, Tist, it was a caress,' I said. 'It all depends on the point of view, doesn't it?'

Back to the Futurism

Almost 100 years ago, on 20 February 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism was published on the front page of the Paris daily Le Figaro.

1 We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

2 The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

3 Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

4 We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5 We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.

6 The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.

7 Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.

8 We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9 We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

10 We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

11 We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multicoloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals; the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons; the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers; adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.Author's note: It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries. Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.

Experience vs Education

"Teacher's Pet" (1958). Clark Gable (James Gannon) is the hard-boiled city editor of a newspaper. He scoffs at the idea of journalism being taught in night school: hard knocks and shoe leather are his preferred textbooks. So he is not pleased when his managing editor orders him to help Doris Day (Erica Stone), a college professor, with her journalism class. Gable masquerades as an inexperienced student in order to prove her wrong...

GANNON: [referring to Dr Hugo Pine, Prof Stone's boyfriend] So he's got more degrees than a thermometer, so he speaks seven languages, so he's read every book. So what? The important thing is he's had no experience. He didn't start at the bottom and work up. That's the only way you can learn.

[...]

STONE: As my father used to say, a reporter has to do a lot of sweating before he earns the right to perspire.

[...]

STONE: Newspapers can't compete in reporting what happened any more, but they can and should tell the public why it happened.

[...]

DR PINE: To me, journalism is, ah, like a hangover. You can read about it for years, but until you've actually experienced it, you have no conception of what it's really like.

Great Voice, Great Hat

Aretha Franklin's rousing performance of Samuel F. Smith's "My Country 'Tis of Thee" in front of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. — celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States — was an extraordinary moment (and she certainly was wearing an extraordinary hat). But it was also one of many, many milestones in her long and illustrious career. [MTV]

Soul singer Franklin, "the greatest voice since Billie Holiday," also sang at Martin Luther King's funeral in 1968.

Souvenir

This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

(Barack Obama, Inaugural address)

The Day

[Newseum]

London Tabloid, Russian Money

Evening Standard or Evening Стандарт?

[The Times]

Remember the Acorn

I grew spiritually fat living off the souls of men.
If I saw a soul that was strong
I wounded its pride and devoured its strength.
The shelters of friendship knew my cunning,
For where I could steal a friend I did so.
And wherever I could enlarge my power
By undermining ambition, I did so,
Thus to make smooth my own.
And to triumph over other souls,
Just to assert and prove my superior strength,
Was with me a delight,
The keen exhilaration of soul gymnastics.
Devouring souls, I should have lived forever.
But their undigested remains bred in me a deadly nephritis,
With fear, restlessness, sinking spirits,
Hatred, suspicion, vision disturbed.
I collapsed at last with a shriek.
Remember the acorn;
It does not devour other acorns.

(Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology, Robert Davidson)

Life on Mars!

Life on Mars?

Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

(David Bowie, Life On Mars?)

Stop the Presses!

Editor: [reading Homer's review] Not bad, not bad at all! We're going to run this on page one... of section H-2.

Homer: Whoo-hoo! Stop the presses!

[Man hits stop button]

Homer: OK, start the presses!

Editor: That takes four hours.

Homer: Whatever, I'll be at Moe's.

[The Simpsons: Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner. Season 11, Episode 3]

Life

'Purification by suffering... Do you know what I mean?' I said.

'Purgatory,' she said. 'Not Hell nor Heaven: Purgatory.'

'Life,' I said, 'life.'

Soul Man (2)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Blues Brothers...

Soul Man

He may draw adoring crowds, but Pope Benedict XVI is not a rock star. He is a soul man.

The Divine Dazzle

St Paul is a universal type. It comes an hour in the life of every human, a moment in which one receives the divine dazzle, in which Jesus speaks distinctly. At that time one has to say: Domine, quid me vis facere?

It's all here, the rest is nothing. Even if we are killers, dishonorable traitors, poisoners of multitudes, slaves chained to the nastiest mob... journalists!

It's all in that precious moment. It can cause Resurrection and Light. But one has to reply like St Paul.

(Léon Bloy, Diary, 30 August 1894, trans. Léon Bertoletti)

Front Page for Sale: A Two-Century Story

Breaking with longstanding policy, the NYT on Monday placed its first front page ad, with media giant CBS taking advantage of the new opportunity.

The debate over front page ads is old, but still relevant...

"Page-one ads may net premium prices, but they're distasteful to many journalists who believe they violate the purity of page one and the sacred wall between news and business. From a design standpoint, they can detract from the flow and order of a page. They also eat up space that otherwise could be devoted to stories, particularly in an era of dwindling newsholes." [Donna Shaw, AJR, June/July 2007]

"To give the whole front page away seems to me a dangerous message to send to readers. The front page is for the news you consider most important to the community." [Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, NYT, Apr 17, 2006]

"Instead of treating the arrival of front-page ads as some sort of last straw for a distressed industry, newspapers would be smarter to treat it as the first step in their modernization. If they don't tell anybody that that their revolutionarily idea is a retread from 1800s, neither will I." [Jack Shafer, Slate, Sept 7, 2006]

Perennial Philosophy

Philosophia Perennis — the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing — the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in, the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being — the thing is immemorial and universal.

Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe.

(Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy)

In a War

This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren't, in a war. This will hit the world's Press.

(Graham Greene, The Quiet American)