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John Schupf

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be The scholar to whom his book is true,

to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning,

part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world.

In which there is no other meaning,

itself Is calm, itself is summer and night,

itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens"

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Obituaries

Obituary: Count Gottfried von Bismarck

The public may be willing to forgive us for mistakes in judgment but it will not forgive us for mistakes in motive.

- Robert W Haack

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.  The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings.  This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Von Bismarck's university career ended in catastrophe in June 1986, when his friend Olivia Channon was found dead on his bed, the victim of a drink and drugs overdose.  Von Bismarck admitted that his role in the affair had brought disgrace on the family name; 5 years later he told friends that there were still people who would not speak to his parents on account of it, and who told his mother that she had "a rotten son".

In the reunified Germany, von Bismarck managed several telecoms businesses and, armed with a doctoral thesis on the East German telephone system, oversaw the sale of companies formerly owned by Communist East Germany to the private sector.  By the late 1990s von Bismarck was working for Telemonde, Kevin Maxwell's troubled telecoms firm based in America, with responsibility for developing the business in Germany; the company collapsed in 2002 with debts of £105 million.  Von Bismarck eventually returned to London, where he became chairman of the investment company AIM Partners, dabbled in film production and promoted holidays to Uzbekistan.

Never concealing his homosexuality, von Bismarck continued to appear in public in various eccentric items of attire, including tall hats atop his bald Mekon-like head.  At parties he would appear in exotic designer frock coats with matching trousers and emblazoned with enormous logos.  Flitting from table to table at fashionable London nightclubs, he was said to be as comfortable among wealthy Eurotrash as he was on formal occasions calling for black tie.

 Although described personally as quiet and impeccably mannered, von Bismarck continued to live high on the hog, hosting riotous all-night parties for his (chiefly gay) friends at his £5 million flat off Sloane Square.  It was at one such event, in August last year, that von Bismarck encountered tragedy for a second time when one of his male guests fell 60 ft to his death from the roof garden.  While von Bismarck was not arrested, he was questioned as a witness and there were those who wondered - not, perhaps, without cause - whether he might be the victim of a family curse.

Sorry, Photo Missing

Sorry, Photo Missing

 Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen was born on 19 September 1962 in Brussels, the second son of Ferdinand, the 4th Prince Bismarck, whose own father had served in the German embassy in pre-war London until a feud with the ambassador, von Ribbentrop, ended his career.  As a talented young scholar, Gottfried had studied at what he described as "an aristocratic Borstal" in Switzerland and worked at the New York stock exchange before going up to Christ Church, Oxford.  Von Bismarck never fully recovered from the death of his friend Olivia, the striking 22-year-old daughter of Paul Channon (later Lord Kelvedon), then one of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet ministers.  To celebrate the end of their finals, von Bismarck and Olivia had taken part in a drinking bout involving excessive amounts of champagne, Black Velvet and sherry before she overdosed on heroin.  At the inquest her cousin, Sebastian Guinness, described how he and other revellers had repaired to von Bismarck's bottle-strewn rooms, where Olivia was found dead the following morning.  Von Bismarck himself was charged with possessing cocaine and amphetamine sulphate and was later treated at a £770-a-week addiction clinic in Surrey.  Following Olivia Channon's funeral, at which he was said to have "wept like a child", von Bismarck was ordered home to the family castle near Hamburg by his father.

His removal from Oxford was so abrupt that he was not given time to settle his bills; Prince Ferdinand sent a servant who did the rounds of von Bismarck's favoured watering-holes, restaurants and his tailor bearing a chequebook.  The tabloids quoted words of repentance from von Bismarck himself - "My days of living it up are all over.  This past week has just been too much" - but although he was reported to be leaving to finish his studies at a German university and eventually to enter German politics, in the event he was treated again for alcoholism at a German clinic.  He returned briefly to Oxford, where local magistrates fined him £80 for drug possession; he wiped away tears as his lawyer offered mitigation, pointing out that since the Channon affair von Bismarck had received a bad press in Germany.

Doubting whether he would be able to find work in his own country, von Bismarck was said to be planning to study at a university in Los Angeles while continuing to receive treatment for his drink problem.  Olivia Channon's death, his barrister said, would prove to be a shadow over von Bismarck's head "probably for the rest of his life".  So it proved.

He never married.

 

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A variation on a Poem by Louise Gluck

My Detachment

When I become a child again

And look at my own future life,

The one now past,

You know what I think? I think

Heartbreaking.  But also insane.  Also

Very funny.

November 2012

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 A progressive graduated income tax worked for fifty or sixty years until congress bowed to the power of the legalized bribery known as campaign contributions,while some took outright payoffs from the selfish rich.

The largest job makers are the smaller businesses, who not only hire far more employees than Fortune 500 companies, but also lay off workers at a much slower rate than larger, bottom line oriented businesses.

You've been brainwashed by the selfish rich and probably Fox too, as well as talk radio,which is part of a campaign against the working population started almost forty years ago by the infamous Koch Brothers and their ilk.

Did you know that depreciation ( a tax loophole) works so well for real estate investors that some can spend a life time without paying a nickle in taxes? The oil man's depletion allowance works the same way.

First they suck up the oil that belongs to this country, then they manage to make fortunes without paying taxes. "Leave it t the little people to pay taxes--we don't." Leona Helmsley, one of the super-rich real estate investors of New York, who, among other things, left her dog twelve million dollars.

Then of course, we also have the Ayn Rand cult, a sad adolescent  cult, whose Saint, Ayn Rand, made selfishness into a virtue, was an adulteress, and a back-stabber of her disciples. Most kids grow out of her seductive theories, but, unfortunately, it attracts many people who need to rationalize their selfish impulses.

youth & age --Julian Barnes

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"It strikes me that this may be one of the many differences between youth and age: when we are are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others." 

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending.

I've seen this few times already--I wish I knew who drew it.   It may be obscene, but we'll have to ask a pharmacist.

Buster,

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Important enough to re-post. Bob Herbert's last column.

From Sunday, March 27, 2011

Bob Herbert was a columnist for the New York Times, who could be relied upon to give the working man his due. This is what he wrote for his last column.
Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT 

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

 

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

 

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

 

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

 

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

 

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

 

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

 

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

 

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

 

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

 

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

 

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

 

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com 

Bickering:  Borges' observation on the Falklands War:

 It's like two bald men fighting over a comb.

Dangerous Fool.

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Goring, who was considered by the British ambassador to be 'dangerous fool', was especially furious, but mainly out of pique. He felt that he had not been properly informed.

Photos

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BusterStronghart@Gmail.com 

Horace Mann is an important milestone in my life. Now, in it's hour of need I am here.

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Old Friends

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Old Friends

I never cash their checks.

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Inspired by "Hedgehog," the movie:

Steve is prickly on the outside and soft on the inside; I am soft on the outside prickly on the inside. 

A neighbor's death, just a dip in the daily routine. Everything stops all of a sudden.

grammar

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Vito Aiuto on Sincerity

July 1, 2012 in Quote Rack | Leave a comment

“I’m really tired of irony. I’m tired of sarcasm. I’m tired of interacting with my friends, where we make fun of each other to show each other that we love each other. I’m totally scarred by that. I’m tired of it and I don’t want to do it. I really just want to make music that’s really honest and is almost embarrassingly sincere.”

via

Grammar : Joan Didion

June 28, 2012 in Quote Rack | Leave a comment

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture Nota bene: It tells you. You don’t tell it.”

 

-Joan Didion, from Why I Write

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why I have a few names: 

Names are like clothes. Sometimes you wear one type of garment, sometimes another according to requirements, according to circumstances. You don't go to a ball in jeans and you don't go to work in an office in a bathing costume, but you are still the same person inside your skin.


.mek

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Thank you for having me to dinner.

I apologize for my drunken behavior:

Throwing up on your silken divan, 

Using your towels to clean myself,

Disrobing in the living room while singing "This May Be the Last Time,"

Spilling wine on your Grandmother's Damask tablecloth, 

Ruining your lampshade by wearing it my head,

Opening and drinking by myself your single bottle of 

Chateau Lafite , 1960.

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Share

Confined Love Some man unworthy to be possessor Of old or new love, himself being false or weak, Thought his pain and shame would be lesser If on womankind he might his anger wreak, And thence a law did grow, One might but one man know; But are other creatures so? Are Sun, Moon, or Stars by law forbidden To smile where they list, or lend away their light? Are birds divorced, or are they chidden If they leave their mate, or lie abroad a-night? Beasts do no jointures lose Though they new lovers choose, But we are made worse than those. Who e'er rigged fair ship to lie in harbours And not to seek new lands, or not to deal withal? Or built fair houses, set trees, and arbors, Only to lock up, or else to let them fall? Good is not good unless A thousand it possess, But dost waste with greediness. John Donne

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From a blog:   "the Book Slut."  

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php

I get into the bathtub with a few novels, a bad self-help book, An Accident of Hope: the Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton, which makes me delighted not to be Anne Sexton, and some books of letters and diaries: Joseph Roth’s letters, Rosa Luxembourg’s letters, Spalding Grey’s diaries, John Cheever’s diaries. I notice that even when the letters and diaries are heavily-edited, they’re more plotless in a way than even plotless novels. Characters disappear. Relationships drift away without closure. People who are important become unimportant, things are left unchanged and untransformed and unresolved, things, some things, are left endless and meaningless, amounting to nothing. As a reader I feel like a creepy stalker, like a voyeur, I can force a plot and a conclusion around things when no plot or conclusion is there, I can get deeply inside these people’s lives and feed on whatever’s been revealed. Anything left private, I can invent. And as a writer. Well, as a writer I can take that sunny day in the movies and pin its wings down so it can’t move again. It might not make anyone bite their fists to suppress all their joy and glee, it might not make them lean out the windows and throw figs and apples onto the streets, but I can fix and freeze it. I can have it, even though I’ll never have it. It’s the most unsatisfying thing in the world, but there it is. Exsultate, jubilate.
One of the novels I bring into the bath starts with an epigraph, a Kafka quote: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside of us.” The death of one we love better than ourselves. The bad self-help book explains to me -- and I’ve already heard it -- that if we obsess about someone, that person can feel it psychically, even if we’re nowhere near them, and they will be completely turned off and repulsed. We have to love ourselves first, and better, says the bad self-help book. But I don’t not-love myself, I just already have myself -- do other readers of these self-help books really get satisfied having sex by themselves without another person’s body involved, or having conversations with themselves? I mean, I wouldn’t be Happy with Ivan or whoever if I weren’t here, I’m just already here, I want to be at the movies with Ivan and kissing Ivan and talking with Ivan with myself too, myself and Ivan. I’m not frozen inside either, I’m trotting and galloping and burning, I’m almost 100 degrees and even though I’m minor, there’s so much of me here that eventually each of my systems will give out and I’ll be inchoate atoms in the plotless universe again. Which happens to everyone. Would we really be happy with no books? Or writing ourselves happy books? Could Kafka have written a happy book, an Exsultate Jubilate, if he’d wanted to? Maybe he wrote a happy book and burned it, and we don’t even know about it.
I don’t not-love myself, but I hate the bad self-help book. The bad self-help book doesn’t think that my life, my beauty, my conversation, my ideas, my warm blood, that anything about me would have worth to another being -- the bad self-help book sees the only measure of my worth in another’s eyes as managing to detach and not want him, to go to the movies alone or with some guy I love less than Ivan, to have nachos alone or with someone who I’m less excited to talk with than Ivan, to have sex alone or with someone I want less than Ivan, to sit in the bath and, instead of obsessing about that day at the movies, think about astronomy or Austrian literature.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_03_018728.php