Plus, the internal Twitter “reasons” for removing the twitter voice of an American president were, as follows,
The “offending tweets” were:
Lock down all towns
Everybody slow down
Give ’em everything you have
Mask up, vax up
Get your body trashed up
Better do what they ask
It’s alright, okay
Sorry, but ya can’t pray
Gotta keep the church doors closed
No superstitions
A saint politician
Will tell ya what you need to know
Citizen fools
And brand new rules
Make everyone a hero now
So keep your distance
No resistance
Only do what you’re allowed [continue reading…]
I know that some have their doubts, but for now, sit back and enjoy the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning.
My up-close and personal relationship with Saturn is brand new. Sure, I’d seen the pictures and the “artist’s conceptions” all my life. I’d read the stories, both science and fiction, and I believed. I believed in Saturn. I had faith.
I had faith that Saturn existed and that it had the rings that made it the single most miraculous object in the solar system, save Earth — which may also be, except for our belief and faith in numbers, the single most miraculous place in the universe.
But my belief in Saturn and its rings was just that, “belief.” After all, I had never actually seen Saturn — only pictures and paintings. Saturn to me was only hearsay. That all changed a month ago thanks to a friend with a passion for astronomy and actual possession of a serious telescope, coupled with a moonless night at the edge of the pacific here in Laguna Beach.
With the events of the last year, I’ve often taken to mouthing a phrase picked up from someone else to give people a snapshot of my current take on our world. It goes, “I try to become more cynical every month but lately I just can’t keep up.” It’s so arch, so deftly faux-ironic yet yielding a bouquet redolent with a whiff of the flaneur and just a smidgen of edge. It’s a fine whine of recent vintage that’s just about as toxic to the truth about my inner life as a fresh, chilled pitcher of Jonestown Kool-Aid.
We often take up catchphrases like the one above and use them as an Etch-A-Sketch display of our souls; our means to signify ourselves to others without really having to engage them. If we do it too much, who we are fades out of sight to others and we are like the sailor on the far horizon flapping out semaphore code about our inner self. Then we become distressed when others only see the code and not the man in full. But it is of our own doing and sometimes we get so far inside the code that we can’t step out of it, step closer into the light, stand and unfold ourselves. Sometimes, it takes something the size of a planet to knock us out of orbit and back down to the surface of the planet we inhabit.
I needed a planet, and for my sins, I got one.
My friend and I had had one of those solid guy meals composed of good wine and a choice of pizza. Then we went outside on the terrace where a shrouded shape stretched up against the backdrop of ocean and night. His house is on the edge of the town overlooking the beach and the sea so it affords, except for the part of the sky taken up by the house, a fair chance of seeing what’s up there.
Light pollution is a problem I suppose since we are surrounded by a busy highway and a town whose other houses and street lights stretch up the hills around and behind, but the seeing is better than it would be in, say, my last home in Brooklyn Heights. Besides, it didn’t have a serious telescope pointed up at heaven. Telescopes are popular in New York, but they are seldom pointed up.
The evening haze had peeled off the sky and there was no moon. I looked out at the sea as he took the covering off the telescope and went through the rituals required to prepare the instrument. If this had been a decade or so ago, there would have been a long period of lining the telescope up, but this is the computer/GPS age and it was merely a matter of him entering some figures into a keypad and pressing “Enter.” The instrument hummed and swung across the sky through a small arc and stopped.
He bent over the eyepiece and moved the focus knob, then he stepped aside and let me take a look.
I pressed my eye against the mounting and saw…. well, I saw a pale, yellow smudge in the center of a dark circle. Then I moved my thumb and forefinger just a bit and in an instant, the smudge became a sharp, golden shape. And then, because it had rings, what the shape was became known to my mind — the planet Saturn. Real-time. Real sky. Real life. . . . .
Beautiful sunrise touches Maroon bells peak at Maroon lake, Aspen, Colorado. Fall color of Aspen and reflection of Maroon Bells
Rendering Rockwell: from — ILLUSTRATION ART: NORMAN ROCKWELL PAINTS THREE KINDS OF GOLD This painting is on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts: Look at how lovingly Rockwell paints three different kinds of gold surfaces. The gilded wooden torch:
The letters on the boy’s banner:
The metal wreath on the boy’s head:
Rockwell didn’t just dip his brush in gold paint three times. He went back to the beginning and re-learned the nature of gold three times.
Images from the First Colour Publication on Fish (1754)
Tallgrass Prairie Bison – Strong City, Kansas
Vintage Photos Show Japan’s Old Art of Soba Noodle Delivery on Bicycles, 1900s-1950s
Everyone knows that anger can destroy people.
What is less understood, especially among modern Christians, is that the inability to feel proper anger spells disaster. The man incapable of anger is almost dead inside. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/UipcpmdzBf
— The Chivalry Guild (@ChivalryGuild) October 30, 2022
The remains of Richard III, killed at the battle of Bosworth 1485, discovered beneath a parking lot. Leciester, England 2012.https://t.co/nn3wG4qcnt pic.twitter.com/MWnuAYTXQf
— Laocoon of Troy (@LaocoonofTroy) November 13, 2022
Eye Candy for Today: Whitler’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver The painting is barely a whisper of blue-gray brushstrokes on a gray ground, simple horizontal and slightly diagonal brush marks indicating the calm water of the Thames River just before sunset. This calm field of color is punctuated by small dots of light in the vague silhouette of the city, each accompanied by their vertically smeared reflection in the water.
Aside from the small dot of color in Whistler’s icon-like signature — inspired by Whistler’s fondness for Japanese woodblock prints, which is also quite evident in the composition of this and other paintings in a similar vein — there are only two small areas of the painting with color: a yellow-orange light on the distant shore, and its reflection, and an echoing yellow-orange light on the skiff or barge in the foreground. [more] . . . .
In a comment to Obese Drag Queen in Ballsgown Proclaimed “Fairest of them All!” Mike Austin takes up the challenge issued by Lance de Boyle to elucidate on:
The de Boyle asked, ”What factors led to a particular “revolutionary event”— the outcome? I’m thinking. . . .”
Maybe chance is a big factor. “They killed the wrong guy.” “We had a conservative general waiting in the wings.” I no longer care much about day to day abuses and usupations. I’m interested in the end game and the next stage.”
Mike Austin:
Quite a list! To respond properly would take many hours and many words—too many hours, too many words. It would strain a normal man’s ability to concentrate for an extended amount of time. I should add that such a skill can be learned, but one must have the desire to learn it—like any other skill. In my 69 years, I have met few who have an interest in such things.
Normal men are beset on all sides with interruptions, busyness, children, nagging wives, mortgages, multiple responsibilities, financial issues, and on and on. But by my own definition, I am not a normal man. I will answer your queries in “short form”—let’s call them “drive-by answers”. Some of my answers will certainly ruffle the feathers of many, something I am very good at — a lifetime of practice and all that. Too bad, so sad. So…
1. Hitler is everyone’s bête noire, the worst person in History, a monster of monsters, Satan himself. You get the idea. But—surprise, surprise—there is nothing about him or his actions that had not been done for 2000 years by the Germanic peoples.
Burning people to death, conquering Western Europe, slapping around the French, annoying the Russians, militarism, delusions of world conquest, invading Austria, chopping up Poland, and so on. Even the Holocaust was nothing more than what Protestant founder—and German—Martin Luther recommended be done to the Chosen 400 years before. His “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543) has this charming nugget from chapter 11:
“What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians.”
(Luther did not just hate Jews, he had an astoundingly filthy mouth—his favorite word was “shit”—he was overly concerned with feces—not always his own—and recommended that if a man sins, he must “sin boldly”. No thanks, Marty. I’ll pass.) [continue reading…]
[Note: A commenter over at The New American Digest reminded me of this essay. It makes a kind of bookend to yesterday’s “The Shoes of No Fisherman.”]
Outside the ancient offices of the Houghton Mifflin Book Publishers that I once worked in at 2 Park Street in Boston, an old lady stood with her back to the old bricks on every working day. A square yard of sidewalk was her office. Eyes behind thick glasses were watery-gray. She stood hunched in a permanent flinch like some dog who’d been struck too many times for nothing. She dressed in clean, shabby, but not too shabby, clothing — warm enough for the winters and cool enough when summer came around at last. To all who passed by her office she repeated her Bostonian-inflected mantra:
“Spare a quarta?”
“Spare a quarta?”
“Spare a quarta?”
She stood to the left of the entrance for part of the day and to the right for the remainder. You didn’t know when she’d shift, but she always seemed to be in your path as you came out of the building.
Going for some coffee?
“Spare a quarta?”
Going to lunch?
“Spare a quarta?”
Going to skip out on the afternoon and catch a matinee?
“Spare a quarta?”
I once spared her a quarta and went into the Boston Commons with a newspaper and watched her work at her job.
Now that the heat of the summer has relocated to my feet for the winter, I think I can tell about that strange hot, flaming hot, day in August when I gave my sandals away.
For some years now my small affliction has been something called “peripheral neuropathy” aka “The Hotfoot.” Without going into the “woe is me“ details it’s an affliction of the nerves that makes your brain feel as if your feet are burning when no such thing is happening; think “fake news from your feet.” It’s a mystery and it has no known “cure.” It’s persistent and it can be annoying, even painful, especially at night when trying to sleep.
As a result, shoes have become important to me. Of late, the shoes that work in the hot, hot summers of Chico, California, are sandals. I wear them all the time and as a result, I often have to buy new ones. I did this back at the beginning of August when the days in Chico averaged 99+ degrees — with the highs coming in at around 110. Ordered online the sandals came in two days and I was pleased to have them. They fit well and gave my feet a little less heat even when walking across the asphalt parking lot in the midday sun. The brand-new sandals were a “win,” as the kids say.
New sandals on I got into my car and drove off to the Safeway market about two miles down the main road in this part of town. The car was, of course, air-conditioned as was the apartment I left and the store I was bound for. Inside it was around 72 and outside it was well above 100. The sidewalks of the summer town looked hot and were hot. Very hot. Even in the shade, which was sparse at midday. Sparser still were the people out on the burning sidewalks at midday.
Except for him.
I was heading south on the road to Safeway, music on the radio, and nicely cooled thank you.
He was heading north on the sidewalk. No music and no anything else. He looked previously young and had a large and food-stained white beard. Below that, his chest was bare and smeared with the caied grit you get from sleeping rough for months. He wore a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts pulled out of some pile of rags and caked with the kind of grime you get from sleeping rough for months.
That was it. He had nothing else and, on the broiling sidewalks of Chico in August, he had no shoes on his feet. And although I went past him at more than 30, I could see from the wincing that he was feeling every step.
No matter. I shrugged that observation off — don’t we all? — and continued on my way to the Safeway to top up my supplies of fresh fruit and ice cream. In a blink, the man hobbling on the street in bare feet was forgotten — aren’t they always. [continue reading…]
True Colors of Ancient Greek and Roman Statues – For centuries, we’ve assumed that the clean, white surfaces of ancient Greek sculptures were the standard of beauty; during the Renaissance, artists strove to emulate this simple aesthetic in their own art. Even today, we expect truly beautiful classical and ancient art to be pure and unadorned – but Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann have spent over two decades proving us wrong.
https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1550502532434231296
davidthompson: The Pretending Can Get Competitive A man in Norway is sparking outrage on social media after he was sympathetically interviewed about his decision to begin identifying as a disabled woman…In the interview, [he] stated that he had always wished he had been born a woman who was paralysed from the waist down. So not just a woman, but a woman in a wheelchair, which confers bonus points. So many intersections. So many opportunities to impose on others. The gentleman in question, Jund Viktoria Alme, is a 53-year-old senior credit analyst for Oslo Handelsbanken. He is of course able-bodied, if a tad high-maintenance. [continue reading…]
From the most underappreciated YouTube channel in this arm of the Milky Way, Neal Foard.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. — Hebrews 13:2
[November 2011] They tell me to always try to do “more,” but never do “too much.” When you are recuperating from coronary arrest and a subsequent two-week time-out in the ICU these are difficult quantities to judge. My solution is to try to add more to what I did yesterday. Once around the block today means one and a half times around the block tomorrow. Tedious but true. Never a lot. Always a little more.
So anyway. . . .
Step by step, one by one,
higher and higher…
And sometimes that extra step leads you to a moment of strange revelation; revelation in which you do not know what it means other than that it may mean something; that it must mean something. Maybe something labeled in invisible ink “To Be Revealed Later.” Perhaps this life is just a series of encounters of matter moving randomly in the dark. Perhaps this life is something else entirely; something designed in some subtle way to keep you moving — climbing,
Step by step, rung by rung,
I’m climbing Jacob’s ladder.
So anyway… [continue reading…]
When reflexes get the better of we.
Or. . . . should you prefer a smoother groove, a more produced roll out there is always. . . . [continue reading…]
What we are experiencing is a new strategy. The left cannot, will not allow the great news of a red wave to seal the deal. So the press froze it in play.
Their tactics have broken even the strongest of hard-core right men and women. At some level we wanted,we demanded that excitement from that Red Wave. We fucking earned that wave, dammit. Yet the media and the blue team stole even that.
The outcome will be the same, the excitement of The Red Wave was suppressed. Brilliant actually,
Look at the spin on the events past few days, the Right’s wicked pissed,and is fighting. What was and will be gained in the end, when TOTALS of vote counts are in will be tainted by our fighting, our anger.
A very small example is I was initially wicked pissed off at Trump. Yet after I saw the correct numbers, Trump was wildly successful, I was pissed that Trump went after Desantis, how dare he attack the most successful politician this election.
Florida went the distance and shut the left-wing nonsense down before it was allowed to happen. Not so in the other states. Florida shut down the lies pre-election allowed for zero wiggle room, zero room for the left to talk shit, to continue what their strategy plans been across the nation.
Again brilliant actually. Look at the outcomes in every other state. Pandemonium. . . wicked pissed-off right-wingers, calling bullshit on everything, everyone.
WE WON!, no matter how you look at it, the numbers don’t lie.
This ain’t over until it’s over, so pull your heads out of your asses, quit talking nonsense, or psychobabble, lies, half-truths, and straight-up bullshit. While the blue states play silly games, go PT, shoot another mag, pop a target in the head at 1000m. Quit overreacting. When we do we are doing exactly what the left has programmed us to do. They’re laughing at our ignorance. They’re playing us. But a lot of blues got kicked to the curb, and a lot more blues about to get kicked to the curb.
The red team did an outstanding job, I believe when vote counting was done and said, we will be in a good/er spot, certainly much better than 24 months ago.
NOTHING pushes my button more than Biden on TV with that smirk that bullshit line, “ I’m not changing a thing”. The fuck you’re not president douchebag. You and the Dems got owned. We The People just don’t realize it yet. Because the conservatives got owned by a blue prank.
Lastly: Here in Oregon bill 114, the anti-gun bill is 50/50, was picking up a few shotguns yesterday, and the gun store was flooded with customers, buying guns to be under the date, should it break bad.
I scored a Beretta 303 semi-auto shotgun 12, an 870 shorty 20, and a Winchester model 12, 12 ga. Ten pounds of Varget.
Elsewhere a court in Texas has overturned ATF on the 80% lowers ban. The courts explained that ATF doesn’t make laws, they enforce those laws. The window for 80% purchases of Mrs and any 80% pistols is open again. If you didn’t stock up, now is your opportunity.
Happy Veterans Day, to my brother and sister Vets.
Dirk
Julia Carpenter, 11, sits at her grandmother’s grave, World War II United States Marine Corp veteran Mary Winston, at the National Cemetery in Bourne, Mass., Friday afternoon, Nov. 11
At last, at long last, a real “Derry Queen.”
Losing Contestants were overcome with enthusiasm
Makes one wonder about the sexual orientation of the Judges in Derry, New Hampshire. I imagine the town had some sort of interviewing process in selecting the judges. I mean they didn’t just drag a naked teenage boy through the Derry Gay Bar and see what came out stuck to him, did they?
The display of the new Derry Queen to an adoring public was a triumph!
Losing girls just loved losing to a drag queen.
Brían has become the first trans winner of the Miss Greater Derry beauty pageant. “I am ecstatic to be the FIRST transgender woman to be a Miss America local titleholder,” Nguyen writes on Instagram.
And how is a queen to be a real Derry Queen without a coronation?
Brían Nguyen became the first transgender to win a title under the Miss America Organization. He was named Miss Greater Derry 2023, landing him a crown and scholarship, as announced this past Sunday. The Miss Greater Derry Scholarship Program provides scholarships to “young women” between the ages of 17 and 24.
Just this week, the U.S. Court announced that Miss United States of America LLC cannot be forced to include transgenders as contestants since it would obstruct the organization’s ability to express the “ideal vision of American womanhood.” According to the ruling, they should be allowed to enforce their “natural born female rule” because the First Amendment enables them to do so.
Well, that didn’t come fast enough to stop the heartbreak of the real girls who got run over by this hippo. I still fail to understand why the fathers of real girls aren’t waiting in the nearest alley with baseball bats and Pelosi Love Hammers to have a meaningful “discussion” with the judges who voted for this. Why do people expect this sort of thing to stop when they will not stop until they fear you.
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Feel like a commercial refrigerator, walk like an elephant
Time for another kind of meeting, men.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
— Eliot/Quartets/East Coker
The outcome of the recent nationwide popularity contests is, looked at rationally, good for the red and very bad for the blue. It was not, as many suggested it would be, GREAT! for the red, but it was — taken all in all — a good showing. It was not a showing that finishes the work to be done, but one that takes the red several solid strides forward. And it remains a day that was very bad for the blue.
It was a day that was not as yet bad enough for the blue to shed true blue believers. But soon the bad will become bad enough for many blues to turn red. Right now, though, right now… it’s sad that it’s just not bad enough in the blue. Make no mistake, it’s terrible but not terrible enough.
Indeed, we need some guerilla Americans ready to slide into blue bureaucracies to increase the speed of the bleeding. We need to make the blue rulers load greater, MUCH GREATER, pounds of pain onto the backs of their “loyal” bluepers. The only way to stop it is to make it go faster; to smack them harder. We just have to realize, to paraphrase Sean Connery, “Sometimes there are blue voters who take it to the wire. That’s what they’re looking for, the ultimate confrontation—they want a smack.”
And a smack might work because at this stage voting blue is a sexual fetish and not a healthy one.
Like battered wives, the blues keep “forgiving” and crawling back to their abusers. Even though most blue cities have been developed into open-air thieves’ markets, fentanyl shooting galleries, and soft coil sidewalk sewers, the bluepers still — somehow — think things are fine. Or if not “fine” at least still at the stage where when their leather daddies lash their asses it will still be stimulating and satisfying to their ideological libidos. Why do the blues keep voting for democrats that consistently rob them while riding them like sweating weasels in heat? The vote blue secret is the same secret that powers the pummeling that bluepers take just before those magic moments of make-up sex.
“Oh to make me feel really good my lad,
You gotta make me feel really really bad. . .”
— Lady Gaga
Make-up sex is one of those things that goes on but doesn’t call out too much conversation. The Battering of Babes is discussed to death, but makeup sex is one of those silent secrets that everybody knows and nobody says. For those that have had it after a long dry spell, make-up sex has a lightning bolt inside it that will make you pay almost anything to feel it strike again. It’s easy to get hooked on make-up sex.
Bluepers get that sex hit all the time in their sewer cities. If you are blue you will, as we all can see, suffer a doddering drool cup senior-Senior Citizen for a pretend president. You will, as you do every day in the city of New York, avoid being shoved onto the subway tracks by walking in the streets where you risk being shot in the head. Whew! In Los Angeles, every trapped in your auto commute between home and office and the reverse is fraught with lethal risk. That makes every successful passage fill you with the endorphins of sexual excitement. When that happens and you keep coming back for more makeup sex, you have gone from just plain blue to True Blue.
If you are True Blue in a Blue city you have your ideological sex life set. Especially if you are a masochist with a background in bottoming. As a blue bottom, you find it easy to be happy in your prison of perversion for the present, but only for the present.
Going forward the problem of blue policy continues to increase in intensity. Once the ideology of woke wins the blue policy has to run to the last bus stop. And beyond. There’s no reverse. There’s no repentance. The policies that keep a place blue are the same policies that slowly reduce the area to a crime-soaked, inequality-ridden, unsafe transportation network, with slums next to penthouses, all overrun with junkies and killers. And at some point, these areas become so lethal that the True Blues have to decide to kick their blue habit. That or die. And either outcome simplifies the voting map.
But that time is not yet.
Yet that time comes closer.
Hard times for all are already coming in the door. It’s going to get harder, much harder, in the blue zones. It’s going to get worse, much worse, in the blue zones. If you are in one, get out if you can. If you can’t, hunker down. If you are outside a blue zone, relax, kick back and do what you can to make it worse. When it comes to handling the bluepers of the nation, let your motto be:
“You want it darker?
We kill the flame”
Herman Hesse
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—
—Eliot / Four Quartets / East Coker
Once upon a time, in the Gone World of 1943, Herman Hesse wrote The Glass Bead Game. It’s a very long, very literary and, frankly, very tedious novel about a far future in “a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum.” It’s a book of vision and a book of literary indulgences, many of which are fortunately lost in translation. The Glass Bead Game is a deep book that, deep down, is boring to our modern teeny-tiny TikTok tastes. Much of the book centers on and predicts our “modern tastes” and the slow-rolling decadence that is pulling down statues, smearing great paintings with soup, and mangling words, families, and friends; all in a great grist mill determined to grind us all down into a compostable powder. Yes, “all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death” and come to this — the “Age of the Feuilleton.”
The Age of the Feuilleton has now gone beyond the point where this descent into the vile, the average, the mundane can be reversed. We shall have to get used to the idea that a large number of our fellow citizens have minds that are either colonized, stupefied, or Satanic. Our “arts” are degraded smears and lumps, our educational institutions overrun with Wokeism, and our “culture” is, of necessity, about to be transformed into “Gun Culture” (with a side of “kind words.”)
All because of the Internet and its constant tsunami of feuilletons such as Twitter and TikTok. The “Age of the Feuilleton” is our age and it becomes less beautiful by the second. It is an age obsessed with “Starting a Conversation” as if having conversations rather than debates somehow humanizes our increasing animalistic estrangement from each other. I always have a slight inward cringe when I read or hear the word “conversation.” It always brings to mind the line from John Cage, “We no longer have time for the ‘good’, the ‘beautiful,’ or whether or not something is ‘true.’ We have only time for conversation.” We have time for Taylor Swift, but no time for Bach.
We have become increasingly more stupid and there seems to be no bottom to such stupidity since we have, evidently, decided to lionize the Stupids.
Here is, I apologize in advance, the number-one song on Planet Earth in the Stupid Year of 2022:
Stunning in its stupidity, “Shape of You” is a moron’s masterpiece made for the marching morons and has made the forgettable Sheeran a formidable presence on this dying planet right down to his Sumo fat suit.
We can’t reverse this global slide into imbecility, but we can — for a moment — hear the echo of the greatness of Bach across a three-hundred-year gulf as we reflect on how we came to be mired in our swamp of stupidity. It began quite simply with the feuilleton and continued to deepen our innate simple-mindedness. Here Herman Hesse explains it all to us . . . after a bit of explaining about what it is that Hesse is explaining.
The Age of Us, as Seen by Herman Hesse Hesse’s book is credited to be the first and only science fiction novel to receive the Nobel Prize (for Literature — wouldn’t it be cool if it won for chemistry?). The book takes place in a distant future where people take perfecting art, particularly music, to be the only true and worthwhile calling. According to the premise of the book, “the Age of Feuilleton” is essentially what we live in now at the end of the 20th century.
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
Gerard Van der Leun
Your Say