This month’s collection of thoughtful, or laughable, quotes encountered.
Do the characters we inhabit in dreams have dreams of their own when we’re awake? Are we characters they inhabit?
[Brad Warner]
Tony’s parents had settled in a flat a short walk away at Clarence Terrace, a dubious blessing in their son’s view, but a long lease on the new house would scarcely have been possible without help from his father. “I suppose one oughtn’t to grumble as he does cough up quite a lot of the necessary,” Tony eventually conceded, “but he has a wonderful air of conveying that he is a mixture of General Gordon and Saint Francis of Assisi and that one is a compound of King John and Titus Dates.”
[Hilary Spurling; Anthony Powell]
The life of the series is generated within it … Less original novelists tenaciously follow their protagonists. In the Music of Time we watch through the glass of a tank; one after another various specimens swim towards us; we see them clearly, then with a barely perceptible flick of fin or tail, they are off into the murk. That is how our encounters occur in real life. Friends and acquaintances approach or recede year by year … Their presence has no particular significance. It is recorded as part of the permeating and inebriating atmosphere of the haphazard which is the essence of Mr Powell’s art.
[Evelyn Waugh on Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time]
Sheldrake plays accordion in a band called the Gentle Mystics, whose tracks include a trance epic called “Mushroom 30,000”, and whose musical style might best be described as myco-klezmer-hip-hop-electro-burlesque. Once heard, bewildered. Twice heard, hooked.
[From https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web/amp]
Trying to control leads to ruin. Allow your life to unfold naturally, knowing that it too is a vessel of perfection
[Lao Tzu]
There is a mysterious place
Behind the Great Pyramid’s face
Which physicists found
By looking around
Assisted by muons from space.
[@Limericking on Twitter]
We are cast by chance into an age in which nothing is worse than to be openly ignorant, nothing more rare than to be fully learned.
[John Donne, Introduction to Catalogus Librorum Satiricus, ca.1600]
Most content in the news media consists of propaganda generated by the rich and powerful. But when the launch of an advert becomes the news, the mask falls off entirely.
[George Monbiot on Twitter; 10 November 2017]
[Trump] got elected when I was two years into the album [Utopia] and I felt like, OK, it’s really important now to be intentional. If you feel this world is not heading the right way, you have to be DIY and make a little fortress, over here to the left.
[Björk; https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/12/bjork-utopia-interview-people-miss-the-jokes]
Scientists are skeptics. It’s unfortunate that the word “skeptic” has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it’s just thoughtful inquiry.
[Michael Shermer]
They were not life forms. They were … non-life forms. They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell. And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.
[Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time]
Rates of sexual offending go down as people in a society have more access to pornography. This is research that has been replicated in the United States and around the world. People don’t talk about this because they don’t want to acknowledge what it means. Porn is good for society. A society with more access to porn is a sexually safer society.
Access to pornography may decrease rates of juvenile sex offending even more. If pornography were a moral-altering thing, turning weak-minded people into rapists and paedophiles, it would have a greater negative effect on teen boys. And it doesn’t. Just the opposite. Gay men watch more porn than straight men. But rates of rape and sexual violence in gay men are lower than in heterosexuals.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
All posts by Keith
Five Questions, Series 10 #3
Here we are at the halfway point, at question three in this series of Five Questions.
Question 3: Do illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?
Can illiterate people even know what alphabet soup is?
Clearly if you’re totally illiterate you can’t get the full effect because you don’t even know what letters are let alone identify them.
Although, who knows, there may be a deeper hidden truth.
Something for the Weekend
Rosé!
At long last, after years of hunting, I have finally run to earth a seriously good Tavel rosé. Well actually almost any Tavel!
Never heard of it? Well that’s hardly surprising as Tavel is a small village in the southern Rhône, between Orange and Avignon, which produces only its eponymous Rosé.
I blame my father. He discovered this wine in the mid-60s when he worked near the then Peter Dominic’s main wine vault in Orange Street, just south of London’s Leicester Square. I don’t remember a lot about the wine we had in those days, but my father had obviously started to appreciate good wine as things picked up and the country had recovered after the war – and I guess as he started feeling more financially secure.
How or why he came to try Tavel is a mystery, but he appreciated it as it is a very dry rosé, unlike the sugar water which often seems to masquerade as Anjou Rosé. It was never cheap, so we enjoyed it only occasionally, until the day came when it was unobtainable as Dominic’s gradually died and was taken over.
We did, subsequently, find Tavel stocked by Balls Bros (famous for their City wine bars) who had an outlet opposite Noreen’s work. And Noreen and I had their Tavel at our wedding, although looking back that Tavel was something of a disappointment. Once Balls Bros retrenched it has been about as scarce as hen’s teeth.
That was until last week when, quite serendipitously, I happened across The Wine Society. And lo and behold they stock a Tavel. I also found a small handful of other very up-market wine shops who stock it, but they sounded equivocal and were considerably more expensive.
I’ve always been suspicious of The Wine Society, but this looked like a deal too good to miss. Yes you have to join, but that is a one off £40 (yes, for life!), with a £20 discount off your first order. They’re a large organisation, who aim not to make major profits but plough the savings back into their prices. So their wine is mostly a couple of quid a bottle less than the same wine at somewhere like Majestic. The Wine Society’s Tavel (shown right) was a sensible price, and described as
An outstanding example of Tavel, the Rhône appellation that produces only rosé wine. Of a deep pink hue, this is round and richly flavoured, brimming with fruit and touches of spicy complexity.
…
Domaine Maby is found in the heart of the village of Tavel in the southern Rhône. There are some 60 hectares covering Tavel, Lirac and Côtes-du Rhône, with excellent wines produced in all three colours. The Tavel and Lirac vineyards have the same round pebbles (galets roulés) as are found in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. These are precious for the region’s winemakers as they conserve heat accumulated during the day and then restore it slowly to the soil during the night which helps the grapes attain even better ripeness.
…
The individuality of the famous Tavel rosés lies in their great structure and fruitiness, aptly displayed here at Maby, where the style is even chunkier … anyone tasting [Maby] rosés blindfolded would be hard pressed to know whether the wine was pink or red … “Prima Donna”, made from older vines, is a little fuller and more complex than the standard bottling.
Well that sold me on it. I ventured forth, credit card in hand, and took the plunge, ordering a case, knowing that at worse we’d have drinkable plonk.
It arrived today. So we had to try it this evening. I said it would either be very disappointing or really knock one’s socks off. And wow it did the latter alright! It is a gorgeous ruby red, a very dark rosé, almost a pale red. It’s strong, at 14.5%. Lightly chilled it is a full-bodied rosé, very dry, with some amazing flavours of strawberries and raspberries. We were eating pork and venison sausages, and it stood up to the strong meat really well – this is not a feeble rosé which is going to be in awe of good meat. But it isn’t so robust that one couldn’t happily sit on a sunny balcony quaffing it all evening as the sun sinks in the west.
It slipped down so well. We debated drinking a second bottle, but sadly we decided to be good.
Yes, it is seriously good. Tavel is called the “King of the Rosés” with good reason.
Five Questions, Series 10 #2
Let’s have a look at question two in Series 10 of Five Questions.
Question 2: What determines the fate of each individual?
Pure biology. Think about it. Life is fatal. That is our fate – nothing more, nothing less.
More thoughts on "Me Too"
Earlier today my friend Katy (@thevoiceofboo) retweeted Louise O’Neill (@oneilllo):
Men who choose to respond to the emerging stories of sexual harassment with “But I’m not like that” are the embodiment of a patriarchal society that teaches straight, white men to believe that their experiences alone are the most valid and important.
That may indeed be so, but look at the other side of the coin. If I say “But yes, I am like that” I get vilified. Men have been put in a lose-lose situation (yes, OK, by their own stupidity), so no wonder some are pissed off and feel hunted.
I know there have been times I’ve overstepped the mark, either physically or verbally. I can call a handful to mind, but no doubt there are others I’ve forgotten. I can’t find the right words to describe how I feel about this, but they include: sorrow, mortified, distressed, depressed, demoralised, upset, worried and fearful.
This is despite, right from my teen years, having a personal code of conduct that I don’t touch people (especially females) and I’m very circumspect about saying anything – which is why, girls, you won’t generally find me complimenting even your attractive frock. I’ve spent my life being almost afraid, certainly too insecure, to engage with females on anything but a very superficial, purely business, level. There are very few I have known well enough to even begin to rise above this level; one reason, no doubt, why I’ve never had very many girlfriends.
To give you an example, at a fairly innocuous level, of how insecure this made me feel … If, at work, I was lunching alone in the restaurant and there was a group of female colleagues I knew already at a table, I would never join them (unless they spotted me and beckoned me over). I always felt that to do so would (potentially, at least) be imposing myself into their possibly girls only conversation and that this was inappropriate. I had many fewer qualms about joining an equivalent group of guys.
And yet I can still do stupid things, at least on an odd occasion – in spite of being able to think about these things and remaining vigilant.
But the sad thing is, I suspect, that the vast majority of blokes, who don’t think and drift through life relying on their Neanderthal instincts, are just going to say “Err … Yer wot? … Fuck off” and carry on regardless; probably despite wondering why they feel that womankind is against them, which just reinforces their attitude.
It’s all very sad.
Something for Cat Lovers Everywhere …
Ten Things
We’re returning to our normal, fairly run-of-the-mill themes for this month’s Ten Things.
Ten Things which should be Large
- Pine trees
- Steaks
- Mugs of tea
- Gin & tonic (well, at least the gin should be large!)
- Joints of meat
- Beds
- Tax rebates
- Lottery wins
- Bouquets of flowers
- Bottles of Champagne
The Cat as Bagpipes …
Rosie cat fast asleep on our bed the other evening
Click the image for a larger view
Five Questions, Series 10 #1
So here we go with the answer to the first question in Series 10 of Five Questions.
Question 1: What is the nature of the universe? Does it function by itself or would it degenerate into chaos without some kind of intelligent control?
As a scientist, I tell you: We haven’t got a clue; it’s being worked on although we don’t believe in intelligent control (or intelligent design).
As a (sort of) vaguely Buddhist-cum-Taoist, I tell you: No-one has a clue, nor ever will have.
As an “ordinary Joe” in the street, I tell you: Nothing the fuck to do with me, mate.
So yeah, basically, search me!