The Middle East Media Research Institute drew up a short list of Arabic imprecations which the National Review Online has published. My personal fave, nazl 'depraved, despicable,' a reference to Dubya. Reminds me of Ash nazg durbatuluuk / ash nazg gimbatul / ash nazg thrakatuluuk / agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. Black Speech text as recorded by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.
I'm giving war a rest. Instead I've been looking around on the web at poetry and art blogs. Tom Raworth has a nice take on the au courrant and politically correct Francobashing in his Vive le France I. I've been interesed in modern, post-modern, and post-nauseum poetics since my high school years. There's something just so abstractly tactile and satisfying about getting your mind dirty up to its elbows in the greasy machine that is language. It's a blast to read through some of the poetics blogs out there: Ron Silliman and Jonathon Mayhew both have fun, dense, and (post)-literate [c|s]ites. I met Silliman years ago at Sonoma State University through a mutual friend, David Bromige. There were meetings, real and virtual, with language poets, Oulipans, and sundry others. Also, just stumbled across l-systems via a link at the Arras website. It's run by Brian Stefans who has a soon-to-be published book: Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics. Looking forward to it.
Compare this article in Reuters with this website in Germany. What would Charles C. Boycott [1832–97] of County Mayo have thought? Or, for that matter, his boss, the Earl of Erne? Freedom fries, salisbury steak, victory cabbage, and so on. Funny, and the Russians call sauerkraut kapusta (which is also a slang for money).
Kevin Sites, a war correspondent for CNN, had a war blog, but CNN asked him to suspend it. Christopher Albritton is also blogging about the Second Gulf War, and nobody's silenced him, yet.
There's a quotation that floats around the net in mail signatures and on numerous web pages. It starts out: "First they came for the communists ..." Professor Harold Marcuse at UC Santa Barbara has an interesting page on the origin of this quotation with a life of its own. Martin Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor who spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps. In the First World War, he had been in the German navy.
A readable rant on an absurd war. The (then) upcoming Second Gulf War is compared to ritualized tribal warfare in the New Guinea highlands. With references to von Clausewitz, the ex-Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge, etc. While on the other side of the IP (intellectual planet), a Gil Scott-Heron homage / parody crystalizes the reductio ad absurdum of the thousand year copyright. Mickey Mouse in the public domain: not bloody likely. Of course, not many people realize that Steamboat Willie was ripped off IP from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Junior. Luckily, Keaton was a drunk heading south in his career and Disney was a ruthless animator heading north towards his regal cryogenic end. Strangely enough, they both passed in 1966.
U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff (retired) blasts our idiot prince who will have his war. His views on the complexity of the "Kurdish" issue are refreshing after the junkfood soundbites from CNN et al.
I've been curious about the references in the media to depleted uranium. Here's what the World Health Organization has to say about it. Ramsey Clark's International Action Center is more skeptical. A bishop in New Zealand is severely critical. For the Federation of American Scientists it's all a bunch of hooey. Who knows? Is the military use of DU a war crime in the making or perfectly harmless?
Awe. sb. [ME awe < ON agi; akin to OE ege 'awe', Gk achos 'pain'] Dread or terror.
Shock. sb. [< MFr choc < choquer 'to strike against'] A sudden violent or emotional mental or emotional disturbance; something that causes such a disturbance; a state of being so disturbed.
Harlan Ullman uses the term shock and awe for his strategy on how to win the second Gulf War: his position and another view.
Yesterday, in San Francisco, I found an anti-war protest marching down 2nd Street between Market and Mission. There was a lot of chanting, plenty of handmade signs, and a person or two with kerchiefs over their faces. All in all, the slice of protest that I saw was peaceful. Not so the reactions I witnessed to it. The first hint of discord was a twenty-something woman in a business suit standing alongside her taxi, half-in, half-out, in the open door, screaming incoherently in the direction of the march at the intersection of Mission and 2nd. "Get the fuck out of my way," was the jist of her freedom of speech. Overhead, police and news helicopters flew.
Later, at GGU, where I teach on Thursday nights, on the plaza level, getting a coffee, I noticed through a window, a large screen TV in the student lounge: on it, surreally, was a shot from a news helicopter shooting down on the march. I couldn't hear what the voice over was saying, but it was strange that folks would watch an event happening about half a block from where they were on TV rather than walk over and watch it for real, without apropos soundbites.
As I sat sipping my coffee and eating a cookie, one of my students, an American citizen, sat down, said hello, and then asked nobody in particular, why none of these rioters demonstrated after 9/11. I answered innocently if there were in fact no demonstrations after 9/11. He looked at me shocked, as though I'd spit on him. He thought it was worse than a shame that these rioters were getting all this attention. I asked him if he had a problem with the US constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech, suggesting he move elesewhere if he was upset. This time he looked at me as though I'd landed from Mars and had just vomited on the flag.
Before class started, another one of my students wondered out loud in class about the violence of the rioters. I asked her if our anti-war demonstrations were more violent than political demonstrations in her home country of Peru (where I happen to have relatives). She started talking about how at home, the Shining Path (sendero luminoso) people don't demonstrate: they just blow things up. Things and people.
When I got home later that night, the news was all agog with ex-miltary consultants (who it seemed had all served in Gulf War I) explaining how Tomahawk cruise missles had improved in a dozen years of R&D. Shots of police facing off with angry, violent demonstrators in San Francisco looked more real than any of the folks I saw marching along, upsetting business women returning to their hotels in the early evening.
My rhetorical question: "Should people have demonstrated after 9/11, because their government was somehow involved in the acts of terror, as it is now involved in a war which they think is morally and politically wrong?"
Al Gore has joined Apple's board of directors. Ex-vice prez, late-blooming party animal (during his concession days), and now Apple guy with Steve Jobs.
Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs covers the world of American Islam. Took a look-see at the FAQ and a couple of the more recent entries in the blog space.
JoeUser's blog explains why he dislikes governments and idealists. Strangely enough, I see he has a paid ad on Google dot com, which makes one wonder.
Not much to report on this the first day of the Gulf War II (GW2), so I just copied a few links I went to in the course of the day. I also see a Where is Raed blog URL floating around the web, but the vote's still out on whether it's legit or not. I searched around for a US Army blog, but only found a ration of miltary blogs. Maybe later ...
An article in Reuters this morning about Turkey not letting US ground troops onto Turkish soil for an invasion of noethern Iraq, lead me searching for the etymology of the Kurdish word peshmerga "Kurdish freedom fighter". Googling for "peshmerga etymology" revealed a single article from four years back called "Science and Technological Glossary: An Issue Facing Technical Writing in Kurdish." [Peshmerga means literally 'those who face death' kind of like the Latin moritori.]
Kurdish is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian group, related to Farsi and Baluchi. Anyway, the mind boggles, we've given "permission" to the Turkish army to set up a buffer zone in northern Iraq which is inhabited by Kurds. The Kurds and the Turks do not get along with one another. They relations are almost as poor as the Armenians and the Turks. These are the same Kurds which the elder Bush promised to help fight the Iraqis in 1991 and later reneged on.
All in all, a difficult matter in a difficult time.
Tom Daschle: "I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war."
Bill Frist: "I think Senator Daschle clearly articulated the French position ... I thank the Lord that at this moment of testing, this great nation is led by this great leader."
Jacques Chirac: "L'Irak ne représente pas aujourd'hui une menace immédiate telle qu'elle justifie une guerre immédiate."
Erling Wold's latest CD, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil has gotten a rave review in the San Francisco Chronicle. And, best of all, the reviewer, Joshua Kosman, mentioned Sub Pontio Pilato. Let's hope he likes SPP as well. Girl is based on a libretto which Wold adapted from a Max Ernst collage book, and it has been performed in San Francisco (two times), Klagenfurt, and Brühl. My friends, Angelika Mollenhauer and Ralf Dietl, translated the original French text into German for the European performances. It's a beautiful composition.
Well, rehearsals for Sub Pontio Pilato are under way at Paul Dresher's industrial-zone studio in Oakland. It's strange to say the least to finally hear folks singing my words. I've been giving lessons in Greek and Hebrew pronunciation and explaining what it all means ™. Currently I'm working on less poetic translations for the supertitles than the ones I'd included before.
This one is quite amusing. Move your cursor over the image of al-Shrub ibn Shatan. On the other hand, music videos may be more your taste. Nice to see that Europeans haven't lost their sense of humor while America plays the role of schoolyard bully.
A month or so back, I ran across a song by this Beijing punkgrrl band called Hang on the Box. It gave a little thrill and I share it with you.
I can sympathize with the ex-dot-commer web designer at the bloggish fuck that job dot com. For the past two years, it's been getting harder to get the common courtesy of a return email, saying that no, sorry, but the job's taken. Most IT employees during the halcyon days of dot-commerie were not taken advantage of their employers, just as nobody was holding a gun to VC bankers' collective heads (no matter how far up each other's asses they were shoved) to invest in companies without viable business plans. But now, with fully erect schadenfreude, these weasels are beating the dead horses that IT wage slaves have become. A lot more readable than the similarly named fucked company dot com run by a guy named Pud.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, best known for her books on death and dying, will always have a special place in one of the dustier corners of my brain. As the Cliff Gorman character in All That Jazz says: "Dr. Kübler-Ross with a dash .... this chick, man, without the benefit of dying herself, has broken the process of death into five stages: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance ...." Well, the old girl herself has a website and under Contacts comes across a bit cranky near the end of her life. "I accept!"
Found this article while looking for some online information on Peter Handke. How are Kosovo/1999 and Iraq/2003 different? For that matter, how are Iraq/1991 and Iraq/2003 different? Other than the age of the Bushes involved. Watched Three Kings again last night. I wonder if Hollywood would have the temerity to produce and distribute this film today. Does it matter? Can art influence politics? We all know that politics can imitate art. Maybe it's time to emigrate ...
Well, I've been offline for more than a month it seems and feeling guilty about it. I could say that rehearsals and pre-production work for my opera Sub Pontio Pilato were eating up all my available time, but the fact is: I've been slacking. I've got to provide some new text for scene 17, which originally is an edited quotation from Lucretius, and the last one that Pilate sings. So, yesterday, I went into UCB campus and raided the stacks in Doe for more books. Always a fun way to spend an afternoon. I had to renew my library also, and there's still no way to do that online rather than in person.
I'm also helping out a friend Jesse at SFSU film school, by playing the part of Mr X in a scene from Eraserhead. You know the one: with the "damned little chickens."
Well, here's hoping that the blog train is back on its tracks.
