tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58843842011-04-21T17:28:52.237-04:00Lincoln Cat"...hip to the cool sweet groove of liberty, and solid sent upon the Ace lick dat all cats and kitties--red, white, or blue--is created level in front." lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comBlogger391100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1127763406844387732005-09-26T15:34:00.000-04:002005-09-26T15:39:27.236-04:00Four shopping days till Serenity:Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1100398213628731362004-11-13T20:40:00.000-05:002004-11-13T21:11:47.073-05:00Norm has shared a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger about Marx. Here's one by Enzensberger about the decade of my birth:
Remembrance
Well now, as concerns the seventies
I can express myself with brevity.
Directory assistance was always busy.
The miraculous multiplication of loaves
was restricted to Düsseldorf and vicinity.
The dread news came over the ticker tape,
was taken cognizance of and lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1100395981175996982004-11-13T20:30:00.000-05:002004-11-13T20:33:01.176-05:00More personally:
I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1100395713002660022004-11-13T19:55:00.000-05:002004-11-13T20:36:53.186-05:00No Comment
Tom Wolfe:
Note my definition of “intellectual” here is what you often find in this city: not people of intellectual attainment but more like car salesmen, who take in shipments of ideas and sell them on.
[...]
Among American writers, with few exceptions, you don’t say anything patriotic and you don’t say anything generally good about the country.
Jean François Revel:
One could lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1098752885437215622004-10-31T14:11:00.000-05:002004-10-31T14:13:35.820-05:00False Memory Syndrome: Soros on Post-war Japan
A few days ago I confronted the notion that, after soundly defeating Germany and Japan in WWII, the US then "treated them generously...and they responded positively" with Walter Russell Mead's overview of the postwar situation in Germany. But what about Japan?
Here's how that occupation looked to one of the occupied:
The harsh treatment of lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1099245760970039892004-10-31T13:25:00.000-05:002004-10-31T13:18:11.576-05:00Arte at war?
John Rosenthal has posted recently on how America is portrayed by Arte, a publicly-financed Franco-German channel I used to watch back when I lived in Belgium and had cable. I really liked their programming, which included films by some of my favorite filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Abbas Kiarostami. I haven't watched Arte since before 9/11, so I can't speak directly to his claim:lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1098388063992805042004-10-21T13:57:00.000-04:002004-10-21T15:58:02.626-04:00False Memory Syndrome: Soros on Post-war Germany
I stopped being a regular reader of Davids Medienkritik when it became partisanly pro-Bush. That's not what I'm into. The situation in Germany resembles the situation in Belgium, which I know all too well at first hand. If we are to avoid another century of war, we would do well to gain a clear picture of things. The fantasy ideology of the lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1086060302059490892004-05-31T22:51:00.000-04:002004-05-31T23:26:12.046-04:00Broken link
So, the last widow of a Civil War veteran just died. Her husband was a Johnny Reb. The last wife of a Yankee vet died just last year.
I remember when I was a child back in the 80's reading about the man who was then the oldest person living. He'd been born a slave, and emancipated at the age of four. I remember thinking how strange that was, that I was sharing my time with someone lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1081824958122767222004-04-12T22:46:00.000-04:002004-04-12T23:00:31.793-04:00Tasty Treats
Last year we had the book. And now the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld has been set to music. NPR has four tracks you can listen to for free, including this one:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The oneslincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1078977580311354602004-03-10T22:51:00.000-05:002004-03-10T23:03:51.750-05:003 of 9 or 3 of 16?
Today a 100-year-old man told me that we interrupted his listening to the third yesterday when we called him. Beethoven's third, of course.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1078976902192613942004-03-10T22:34:00.000-05:002004-03-10T22:51:30.903-05:00Lacuna
There's a short in my car stereo which causes it to turn itself off when there's a bump in the road (and sometimes for no reason at all). Today on the radio (but originally on April 27, 2001) Kojo Nnamdi said to Spalding Gray, "so, have you overcome your fear of drowing?" And then, just at that instant, the sound went black. By the time I got the stereo back on a caller who had once lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1078805166056523692004-03-08T23:04:00.000-05:002004-03-08T23:10:07.670-05:00Eye
I remember flying once; I was looking out at the desert and I wrote a poem about the barren desolation of the desert. I wrote a poem once about a great encounter I had with a deer early in the morning that was very moving.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1078372322921566602004-03-03T22:25:00.000-05:002004-03-03T23:03:14.233-05:00Voodoo Lady
NPR's Morning Edition (in collaboration with the National Geographic Society) had an interesting three-part series on Voodoo (aka Vodun) a couple of weeks ago. All the links are here. And there's music and video.
For more, try this. And Maya Deren, most of all.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1078369755926744742004-03-03T22:00:00.000-05:002004-03-03T23:10:53.983-05:00Ah, happy, happy day!
J. Cassian, not Cinderella Bloggerfeller. (Why he changed it, I can't say.) Special thanks to Ideofact for the glad tidings of great joy.
But this silken twine has its grief and pine: his archives are gone daddy gone. There's a hole in the Blogwelt. There is a darkness.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1077853282339599832004-02-26T22:29:00.000-05:002004-02-26T22:50:24.763-05:00A Thought
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.That's from Margaret Mead, and is quoted in The Buying of the President 2004: Who's Really Bankrolling Bush and His Democratic Challengers -- And What They Expect in Return, by Charles Lewis and The Center for Public Integrity (p. 478).lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1077594410249680422004-02-23T22:45:00.000-05:002004-02-23T22:50:04.076-05:00The music of chance in a world of ghosts
Here and here.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1077501753410480712004-02-22T20:52:00.000-05:002004-02-22T21:07:37.780-05:00Six Clear Channels or a half-dozen NPR affiliates
Agenda Bender found an mp3, and it's allegedly from Belgium:
This school girl choral version of Teenage Dirtbag would certainly be a hit record if radio wasn't such a pit of Clear Channel despond. Then there is the separate but equal horror of public radio's World Cafe(teria), which is produced a few blocks away from where I type this. Piping lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1077488169998543522004-02-22T16:55:00.000-05:002004-02-22T17:21:00.763-05:00A malignant little dot on the smooth, tanned flank of California
Back when Ghost World was coming out in the UK, the Guardian visited its creator:
Since the early 1990s, Clowes has drawn his own odd, misanthropic world from the Bay Area near San Francisco, first in Berkeley and then, after receiving his cheque for co-writing the Ghost World screenplay, from a house in Oakland he shares with his lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1076267829950951942004-02-08T14:16:00.000-05:002004-02-08T14:19:35.936-05:00To whom it may concern:
For the last several weeks, lincoln cat (me and a few of my selves) and Elephant-Rabbits (a group blog, but still a gang of one) have been regrettably inactive. We were in the midst of a labor-intensive move, westward to Maryland. (So long, Belgium, and thanks for all the croquetjes.)
Since we’ve spent the past six years in Europa, and since things have become, of late, lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1074550628300547882004-01-19T17:16:00.000-05:002004-01-19T17:19:07.046-05:00Life, art.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1074002429599888902004-01-13T08:58:00.000-05:002004-01-13T09:02:19.856-05:00Iraqi Music
The Mesopotamian has a link to IraqiMusic.com, which has got a bunch of mp3s.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1073481537688538132004-01-07T05:55:00.000-05:002004-01-07T08:40:10.146-05:00Abiola Lapite says he won't be watching Cold Mountain because he has no time for "entertainment that airbrushes out black people." He says that
it is the height of absurdity that an entire movie could be made about the American Civil War without putting any focus on the central issue at stake in that war - black slavery.But at least it is well known in the general culture--and frequently lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1073352098785910462004-01-05T20:02:00.000-05:002004-01-05T20:22:41.210-05:00Bad news and more bad news
Just as I'm about to return from mine, Cinderella Bloggerfeller--my favorite blogger--up and goes "on hiatus in 2004." Words fail. Buildings crumble. The ground opens wide.
And I have returned to a Leuven bereft of De Wiering, one of my favorite places here. Gregorian chant was always playing in the toilets. A friend of mine once asked for an ashtray and was told thatlincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1071420684524043492003-12-14T11:20:00.000-05:002003-12-14T16:59:26.993-05:00Back in the USSA
I haven't had television for two years, but since I'm over here for three weeks I got to see Operation Red Dawn in all its hyperreal splendor. Fox News kept showing footage of Iraqis celebrating, apparently oblivious to the fact that they were communists. Too funny. I'm not sure whether there's fixity in the pictures, but at the moment there's a photo of them next to this story,lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1070282515328751562003-12-01T06:40:00.000-05:002003-12-01T09:23:54.250-05:00In the meantime, an instructive contrast
This is how George W. Bush -- who speaks often of humility -- described what some are calling The Hundred Years War:
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.And:
I don't know how long this war will go on, but I do know this: However long it takes, this nation will prevail.Abraham Lincoln struck a rather different tone when lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1069767407741419642003-11-25T08:27:00.000-05:002003-11-26T07:54:30.770-05:00Lincoln cats ≠ Lincoln buffs
So, Mollpeartree dropped in for a visit and saw "a blogging Lincoln buff." But fireflies and shooting starsthingsthe owlsare not what they seem.
Lord Buckley, a cat who swung "with the rhythm of love of life," waslike "the great and precious American Saint Abraham Lincoln" himselfa great lover of humor and beauty. In the prelude to his translation of the lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1069587506522495752003-11-23T06:33:00.000-05:002003-11-23T06:48:37.360-05:00Age of Velvet?
In the midst of extensive coverage of the situation in Georgia, Cinderella Bloggerfeller thinks he glimpses a sea change:
Maybe it's too early to make generalisations but it seems there has been a major historical change over the past decade and a half. The role model for revolutions is now not the French or the Russian (i.e. revolution inevitably means a bloodbath, with the lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1069421756982315672003-11-21T06:06:00.000-05:002003-11-23T06:48:07.516-05:00Reconciliation
Glenn's post about the American experience of reconciliation prompted me at long last to disavow Thomas Pynchon's favorite deadly sin. Earlier in the day I had pasted some excerpts from The Education of Henry Adams in the comments thread of a post at A Fistful of Euros about The World in 1856 and the continuities one can see between that past and our shared present. Then I saw lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1069330213857215072003-11-20T05:56:00.000-05:002003-11-20T07:10:20.986-05:00Musée des Beaux Arts
André Glucksmann's words about politics and suffering and literature--in Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece on the anti-anti-Americans--brought Auden's famous poem to mind.
Glucksmann believes that the only worthwhile “political” project is the constant, unrelenting, and most probably futile amelioration of obvious suffering. “It’s very odd that the idea of the doctor, and of lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1069248293706100122003-11-19T08:09:00.000-05:002003-11-19T08:25:46.800-05:00Agenda Bender recently expressed a thought I've been thinking about (although the row of beans I'm hoeing lies on a rather different plot than the garden of demons or delights whose loss he laments):
Every era looks back on the obvious mistakes of previous eras with satisfaction. Until the realization sinks in that the mistakes must not have been so obvious then. Once you reach that level of lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1069196382506930692003-11-18T16:30:00.000-05:002003-11-19T07:54:06.436-05:00Ratcheting the rhetoric down
In contrast, here's a bit about old sweet long lanky non-stop Abe, from this book (pp. 179, 181, 184-5):
Lincoln recognized the evils of war even in the "best wars." The Mexican War was evil throughout. But the Revolution, the war of "the fathers," was also a dark and cruel transaction:
It breathed forth famine, swam in blood, and rode on fire; and long, long after, lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1069182943313278092003-11-18T13:59:00.000-05:002003-11-19T07:43:47.943-05:00Lincoln in London
George Bush, the most recent Republican president, is going to London, as I'm sure most everybody knows. Comments about the visit can be found at Harry's Place and the blogs of Oliver Kamm and Norman Geras.
Here's how the first Republican president was seen in London:
For some reason partly connected with American sources, British society had begun with violent social lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1067243371150338032003-10-27T03:24:00.000-05:002003-10-27T03:32:20.290-05:00Ideofact finds the present in Poe, in The Mystery of Marie Roget:
We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation -- to make a point -- than to further the cause of truth. The latter end is only pursued when it seems coincident with the former.
lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1066475418132863082003-10-18T07:06:00.000-04:002003-10-18T07:56:49.350-04:00Nature and Nature's law lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Newton be!," and all was light.
It did not last: the Devil howling "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.
--Alexander Pope, completed by Sir John Collings Squire.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1065200591683097032003-10-03T12:28:00.000-04:002003-10-03T13:03:11.846-04:00DOMINATION OF BLACK
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1065198443607600672003-10-03T12:26:00.000-04:002003-10-03T12:27:23.420-04:00We all feel better in the darklincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1065197367893337502003-10-03T07:33:00.000-04:002003-10-03T12:09:27.950-04:00" 'If it is any point requiring reflection,' observed Dupin, as he forebore to enkindle the wick, 'we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark.' "lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1065018042191352252003-10-01T10:01:00.000-04:002003-10-01T10:22:25.150-04:00"In the beginning--oh, long before that--when light was deciding who should be in and who should be out of spectrum, yellow was in trouble. Even then. Seems that green--you know how green can be--didn't want yellow in. Some silly primal envy, I suppose, but for whatever cause, the effect was bad on yellow, and caused yellow to weep yellow tears for several eternals (before there were years), lincolncatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5884384.post-1065015817311099012003-10-01T09:37:00.000-04:002003-10-01T09:53:23.706-04:00What's a Lincoln Cat? Dig.lincolncatnoreply@blogger.com