Nowadays what isn't worth saying is sung.
he may have a point...
My lifestyle's wild I was living like a wild child Trapped on a short leash paroled the police files So yo, what' s happening now?
then again sometimes something stupid can bring happy memories.
whose to say?
The Golden Bough begins like a good mystery. It offers a riddle, some tantalizing clues, and a striking description of long-forgotten scenes and events. Frazer explains that along the Appian Way, the ancient road that runs from Rome to the villages of central Italy, there is a small town named Aricia; near it, in a wooded grove by the lake called Nemi, stands the ruin of a temple dedicated by the Romans to Diana, goddess of the hunt, as well as of both fertility and childbirth. In the happy days of the empire, this lakeside shrine with its woodland was both a country resort and a place of pilgrimage. Citizens of Rome traveled often to the site, especially in the midsummer, to celebrate a yearly festival of fire. It was too all appearances a restful, civilized, and lovely place. But the woods at the lakeshore also held a secret.
The Roman poets told of a second god, Virbius, who was also worshipped at the temple. He was sometimes identified with the young Greek hero Hippolytus, who, according to other myths, had been murdered by one of the gods in a fit of anger, only to be restored to life by Diana, who then chose to hide him here at her temple. Virbius was represented by a very mysterious figure, a man who was understood actually to live in the woods and was said to be both a priest and a king. He took it as his duty to keep constant watch not only over Diana’s temple but also over a sacred tree that grew in the forest—an oak with a distinctive yellow branch, or “golden bough.” The man bore the title Rex Nemorenis, Lake Nemi’s “King of the Wood.” Though obviously a human being, this king was thought also to be a god; he was at once both the divine lover of the goddess Diana and the animating spirit of the sacred oak tree around which he stood guard.
Strange as this King of the Wood himself may seem, the way in which he acquired his position was still stranger. It came by way of a murder.
Legend held that this priest-king had taken over the wood by putting to death the previous one, and that he too would keep his power only as long as he remains vigilant and strong, ready in a moment to defend his very life against other would-be kings who might try to seize his place and power. To keep his life and rule, the king had constantly to walk the temple woods, sword in hand, waiting for the approach of any would be a assailant. should his guard fail or his strength weekend, and intruder might at any moment breakthrough, duel the king to his death, and tear away the golden bough, which then entitled the victor to both the sexual favors of the goddess Diana and the priestly rule of the Woodland. On the victor also, however, feel the same weiring burden of self-defense-- the need to guard the oak without rest and to search the forest for the threatening form of any new rival who might approach, ready to kill, and eager himself to become the next King of the Wood.
...[Frazer's] purpose was rather to set the stage for his study by unfolding a single, sharp contrast—one that discloses the outline of an earlier, more brutal state of humanity lying just below the surface of the cultures we like to think of as civilized.
How, he asks, could there be a place as beautiful as the grove at Nemi, a temple and grounds so loved by visitors for its peace and healing renewal, yet at the same time so steeped in a heritage of savage brutality? How is it that a center given over to the comforts of religion could be the stage for a ritual murder? That is a riddle we should very much like to see explained.
In searching for solutions, however, Frazer tells us that we will get nowhere if we keep only to the evidence available from the days of classical Greek and Roman civilization. The pastimes of cultivated Romans who visited Diana’s temple offer no clues to explain the shadowy, foreboding personage of the King of the Wood. To account for such a figure, we must look elsewhere—into the deeper prehistoric past, when savage ancestors of the Romans walked the very same woods and shores centuries before Diana’s temple was ever built. If it should be that among these much earlier peoples we can find an obscure custom or belief that continued down to Roman times, if we should discover one of Tylor’s “survivals,” then we might very well have a way to identify the King of the Wood and solve his deadly mystery.
apologies, usually i try to keep the posts as pithy as possible; this is as concise i could.
double apologies, but you will have to seek out the answer to the intriguing legend of the king of the wood and the golden bough all on your own.
hint: the north remembers.
Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.
... I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ...
Si el hombre es polvo Esos que andan por el llano Son hombres.
Now what...?
the sound is sucked out of the room. all great crests herald terrible valleys and here the paragon of american maximilism is left shellshocked at his estranged mother's death. with integrity and impeccable narrative prowess we move through a dialogue stitched seemingly together from memories. but the truth is that neither the forgiving child nor consoling mother exist in the moment-- these are not flashbacks. this is a moment between ghosts. and ghosts have nothing to fear and nothing to hide.
the machine beat drips slowly, the steady drip of chemo poison unravels in the blood. a haunting voice. lingering synths. reverb's echo. all these elements merge and give rise to catharsis amidst resignation, and perhaps, even more, a sense of dignity to it all.
there is a reason this psychologist won the nobel prize for economics. this engaging book presents a compelling case for the rational, somber mind as anything but. scores of examples reveal how our ability to judge, scale, and forecast are all biased disastrously in predictably irrational ways. at the surface it is a trove of curious insights, but upon reflection we are left with questions about the troubling implications, and worse yet, a newfound understanding that our mind is an uncalibrated instrument incapable of answering them.
as a child of a border town, i reflect often on the idea of culture and nationalism. if i had to begin a conversation on latin american culture with one word it would be "baroque", a culture in-stasis by a partial birth, marooned from history for centuries, the last vestiges of a by-gone century. latin culture, language, architecture, religion, art, and even familial relationships all share in this common thread of pageantry and excess. everything is colorful. everything is elaborate. everything is life. even death.
but in the mid 20th century that began to change and this book sits at the inflection. juan rulfo's novella of a man who returns to his mother's literal ghost town is a beautiful work that is uniquely latin. the product of a culture simmering and ready to breathe. the themes, the people, the very motivations are familiar of romantic baroque heroes-- but the mechanics, the nagging doubts and hopes of its characters all pull elsewhere, tearing from within into a new style, birthing a new era of latin american identity. you can feel the warmth of a new dawn rise from this ghost story. compare with edgar lee master's approach to "spoon river anthology" and there alone you have a raison d'etre. the cold puritan steel vs the white hot hispanic forge.
for me, "cien años de soledad" is the titan of spanish literature that will be remembered for lifetimes to come. here we witness the fever dream that inspired it.
thank you for reading.
until 2016.
"Birdie."
"Say what you always say."
"Everything's gonna be okay."
The statistician George Box once remarked: ‘All models are wrong, but some models are useful’. It is a common, albeit understandable, mistake by empiricists to think that a model is flawed if it does not incorporate all the features known to influence an evolutionary or ecological process. When such an argument is taken to the extreme, it is easy to see why it becomes untenable.
My own favourite example is a map of a countryside. Maps are models that are designed to help us grasp certain features of the landscape. For example, a map might consist of contour lines which help us predict which way a river will flow once we stumble across it. But a map would become completely useless if it had every tuft of grass marked on it...
In other words, staring at a too detailed model teaches us nothing more than staring at the original ecosystem, with its complete mess of evolutionary and ecological detail.
"We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all."
The theory of quantum electrodynamics has now lasted for more than fifty years, and has been tested more and more accurately over a wider and wider range of conditions...
...
To give you a feeling for the accuracy of [this theory], it comes out something like this: If you were to measure the distance from Los Angeles to New York to this accuracy, it would be exact to the thickness of a human hair.
The Bible is a book. It's a good book. But it is not the only book.
And as the credits role, Tristan turned to Iseult, said, “What did ya think?” “It was okay, I guess. That story’s pretty old. It’s a bit clichéd and hackneyed, I thought; I thought.”
...
So, today, we live with the disastrous results of the ego, which, according to nineteenth-century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature and that if it does not fight nature it will not be able to maintain its status as an intelligent fluke.
Therefore the geneticists and many others are now saying that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, unintelligable processes of nature to develop him any further; he must intercede with his own intelligence...This, I submit, is a ghasltly error, because human intelligence has a very serious limitation.
It is a scanning system of conscious attention that is linear, and it examines the world in lines, rather as you would pass the beam of a flashlight or a spotlight across the room.
...
However, the universe does not come at us in lines. Instead it comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether everywhere at once...The computer may greatly speed up linear scanning, but it is still linear scanning.
i'm on (meta)physics kick. the likelihood of metaphysics quotes from charming hippie alan watts and disarming physicist dick feynman has increased.
... For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling— my darling— my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well...You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
And if my thought-dreams could be seen They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.
my favorite dylan song and lyric.
there have always been two bob dylans: the poet and the musician-- and this song represent the former at full fire power. the lyrics do not let up. masterful.
my favorite of dylan the musician's work is "Don't Think Twice It's All Right".
that they both have the "It's Alright" (sp?) in them is coincidental. i think.
I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.
Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.
After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided...that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.
the great lisbon earthquake of 1755 plays a role in voltaire's "candide", setting the backdrop of a devastated city at the edge of madness, burning men at the stakes to avoid another cataclysmic natural disaster. that earthquake is mostly forgotten these days but it took the lives of hundreds. interestingly enough, most of those deaths occurred about fourteen minutes after the earthquake first hit.
lisbon, a port city in portgual, was hit by a tremendous earthquake. the result of the massive tectonic shift was that the tides receded, pulling back from the shore an unprecedented level.
people gathered at the city's docks and saw, for the first time ever, the muddy ocean floor that went out a kilometer or so from the shoreline. among the items they could see treasure's long forgotten: gold, weapons, skeletons, and more. many ventured out not knowing of the incoming tsunami that would soon hit.
and hit it did. fourteen minutes later to be exact. the tides that had receded returned and washed not only the treasure but the curious living.
"Would you do something for me now?"
"I'd do anything for you."
"Would you please please please please please please please stop talking."
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,lady)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
"and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart."
bertrand rusell, philosopher and mathematician, is asked what advice he has for the future. relevant and pithy.
PS. my favorite work of his is "marriage and morals", a beautiful well-thought out treaty on relationships and gender roles. it touches on the ethical constructs that guide relationships beyond religious traditions and ultimately the importance of seeing a partner for who they are and can be-- and not erasing their identity for who you wish they (or you) were.
or in the words of one of my favorite musicians...
Don't you cherish me to sleep.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
it took me five years to finish this one book. and i still don't understand half of it.
The thief left it behind: the moon at my window
god damn.
If you've got a spare half-a-million You could knock it down and start rebuildin'
Well, nobody's perfect!
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light
'We think differently at night.'
she told me once
lying back languidly
And she would quote Cocteau
'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am constantly shocking'
Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise
and stretch
her sweet anatomy
let fall a stocking