Motley Kamuka

I couldn't disagree more with Elon Musk's graphic of the left going further left. He's not owning his drift right. The right has done nothing but win lately, and if you think Biden is left you're crackers. He's smack on center. Once again the right is gaslighting you. The move the goalposts and then say their lying blather.  Biden has barely reset things back to the middle, his lag is a right move. Someone fixed it And then there’s this one.

I choose to blog when I have an appreciation moment. What I like about Still Life is the interplay of art and world. Some observations seemed to try to hard, and this is her first book, so it's not going to be her polished style years later, but there is sometimes better work in the earlier years, when people took more pains to make it. I'm fairly ambivalent about mystery, and crime fiction, procedurals. I know there is a long glorious tradition. My mother, stepmother and stepfather like the genre. I'm a fan of deduction but I don't think they give enough clues, and they have decoy clues, so that it's all ishkabibble. And in modern times, there's an unfolding of the story, which can be glorious.  I don't like the focus on figuring out a killer's psychology, I've never been interested in forensic psychology, I'm more interested in liberation psychology. I suppose it's good to know the dark side, not deny the dark side, get in touch with the sh...

 

I'm reading Bate 's biography of Wordsworth , and he recommended The Prelude , by saying it was his greatest work. I started reading it today. Thick old library book from 1959. "Trances of thought and mountings of the mind Come fast upon me: it is shaken off That burden of my own unnatural self" I guess American Transcendentalists were influenced by Romantic poets. I'm not taking the heavy The Prelude camping to read but I want to. It's a 1959 book that is not mine, so I won't risk taking it.  Reads like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass . I guess Wordsworth wrote Prelude first 1799, to Leaves of Grass in 1855. Wikipedia : According to Monique R. Morgan's "Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth's Prelude," "Much of the poem consists of Wordsworth's interactions with nature that 'assure[d] him of his poetic mission.' The goal of the poem is to demonstrate his fitness to produce great poetry, and The Prelude itself...

Spoiler. I don't know how to really talk about a show without spoiling. I read the New Yorker profile of  Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein and that made me want to give Russian Doll  another try. I didn't really think all the quips and lines were that great, but I get it that she's a kind of enfant terrible of New York now. I heard the line, "Nothing is easy except peeing in the shower." I didn't really know her background and career until Orange Is The New Black, and I didn't really pay attention when I watched through this show the first time. Sometimes it takes a profile in the New Yorker to get someone. She said this line too fast in episode 5: "Sexualizing self hatred is the hallmark of any relationship that begins with extramarital infidelity." There was an interesting theory, that art sucks now because all the interesting critics died during the AIDS Crisis of the 80's.  The show is like her, jaded, mostly mundane but occasionally in...

Ip Man is about the invasion of China by Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War . 3,800,000–10,600,000+ military casualties after July 1937 (excluding Manchuria and Burma campaign).  Over Ten million military people died. 22 million total estimated.  Covid will up to a million in America, and I think that's undercounting for political reasons, and no overcounting for political reasons. The movie portrays China as a place of honor and Japan as a place of no honor. I would ask if the Chinese have honor in their treatment of the Tibetans and Uyghurs. Ip Man would fight for them, not for the Chinese. Ip Man is about martial arts, and the whole hidden and not boastful approach to martial arts. It's about virtue, humility and justice.  The real  Ip Man  trained Bruce Lee. Ip Man has the air of Seven Samurai , the 1954 film by Kurosawa . The use of martial arts to pursue justice against robbers. Martial arts movies have more in common with choreographed dancing th...

The true legacy of the Soviet Union is authoritarianism not socialism. Talibangelicals, Covidiots and Spreadnecks like authoritarianism, support the "legitimate discourse" that killed 5 people, and would rather get their way than live in a democracy. The like liberalism where everyone has the right to... but only those they like. Like the Supreme Court Justice who refused to follow rules and wear a mask, things are all cattywampus.  Tucker Carlson enjoys influencing people but successfully argued in court that he is not real news and merely engages in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.' His argument states no reasonable person would take him seriously. Russia has been fighting a war on information for quite a while to go on top of the literal murder they are doing in Ukraine right now. The Americans who support the freedom to murder by Russians in Ukraine fit right in with the murder cult.  With globalization scrapped in favor of a alliances new order...

It's a rainy day, I was wondering what I could look forward to as I walked home from dropping off my daughter at school. I thought about how Zooey tries to articulate preciousness, how she dislike Freudian analysis, how she dislikes English professors that dismantle a text, and sell it for parts. Her boyfriend Lane is on top of the world, he got an A for a paper about the need for masculinity in fiction, a friend wanted him to publish it. Lane punctures his good feeling, he had the right girl at the right place for lunch and he was feeling great for his defense of masculinity being rewarded with an A, and Zooey just isn't buying it, and he loses that special feeling he had.  Maybe I'll read some more, but I wonder if you can really neutralize criticism with that start of a novel.  I watched Carrie Pilby , and she says that's a favorite book she likes to read. The movie is about a prodigy who graduated from college at 19 and was lost. She's seeing a psychotherapist. ...

The artists Tyler Miles Lockett is doing a Hesiod read through on his discord server. I happened to have the book on hand. I've really tried to winnow down my library, but I've kept my Hesiod.  Hesiod lived between 750 and 650 BCE, around the time of the Buddha.  The Works and Days is a didactic poem of over 800 lines which revolves around two general truths: labour is the universal lot of Man, but he who is willing to work will get by. This work lays out the five Ages of Man . Golden Age by  Lucas Cranach the Elder  (1472 – 1553) “Do no let a fancy-assed woman deceive your mind by guilefully cajoling you while she pokes in your granary: whoever trusts a woman, trusts swindlers.”  I like that image of a woman poking around in the granary.  He's not a huge fan of women, Wikipedia calls him a misogynist. He says get a woman to run your home, but not a wife, buy her. He had slaves and other workers, so he wasn't grunting out the most difficult existence...