Social Math — UK

Posted on April 22, 2018 by JMN

Eighteen minutes into Giles’s and Trevor’s trip for high tea with Felicity and Nigella at the Chancery Buttery near Vauxhall Mews, a lorry blocks their way for seven minutes in order to unload its bangers and kidneys at the Fox and Hound. Its driver gestures obsequiously.

“Uncouth villain!” murmurs Giles as they dawdle with engine idling.
“Indeed,” breathes Trevor, and discharges a cocked eyebrow at the lout.

Question: Giles’s monthly allowance is 4,000 pounds. He intends to ask Felicity’s hand in marriage on his twentieth birthday. That would give him her fortune straightaway. Posit what intelligence you would require, if you were a person of distinction, in order to estimate how many multiples of his pre-inheritance income, annualized, the lad would forfeit should Felicity spurn him.

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Adventures in Toponymy

Posted on April 21, 2018 by JMN

King Mswati III of Swaziland proclaims that his country shall henceforth be called eSwatini. It means “land of the Swati” in the siSwati language that predominates in the southern African kingdom. The king has reigned for 32 years over one of the poorest countries in the world. He’s tired of his country being confused with Switzerland.

Nearby Lesotho and Botswana are also countries that renamed themselves using the template “land of” followed by an ethnic linguistic designation.

On another renaming front, the article says the Czech Republic is now officially Czechia. I didn’t know that.
(Max Bearak, Washington Post, 4-20-18)

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Didactic Doggerel

Posted on April 21, 2018 by JMN

The Little Comet That Could

Note: “Kreutz” is pronounced “Kroits.”

Lovejoy, a Kreutz sungrazer, has just done
A death-defying feat, and kissed the Sun.

Stargazers shook their heads: “He won’t make it!”
Lovejoy said to himself: “I can take it!”

The road ahead led through the Sun’s corona —
It’s hotter there than June in Arizona.

The stellar surface loomed and threatened to
Turn little Lovejoy into barbecue.

Old Lovejoy said, “No turning back. Here goes!”
And tail-wagged past the star on tippy-toes.

The gazers cried, “He’s bigger than we thought!
“How else could he survive something that hot?”

“Tremendously traumatic.” “Likely weak.”
“May fragment any day. Here, take a peek.”

Lovejoy winked at the lenses and their clan,
Said, “Better get an eyeful while you can!”

Then he set sail, continued on his way,
Leaving the naysayers to have their say.

Reference
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/16dec_cometlovejoy/

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Written in the 70s — Maned Exeter

Posted on April 21, 2018 by JMN

MANED EXETER (Sontag, 219)
Maned Exeter, beleaguered metalunan

victor or the victim. The success of such spectacles indicates that most people identify with the victor; they are immortal. I identify with the victim. Screen violence is horrible because I am its object. Thus, a taste for distance and formalism in art (Sontag on Bresson). Porno, on the other hand, involves a similar, but titillating, projection. In this case, I am aggressor.
Screen gore is the successor of the public execution. Could the sex act replace the death act as public spectacle? Mores and censors overwhelmingly favor the latter. But couldn’t ceremonial and stylized execution proceed from erotic drive?
The energies must address a specific, delimited goal.

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

70s-9

Written in the 70s, 70s-9. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Written in the 70s — Sontag: There are

Posted on April 21, 2018 by JMN

Sontag: “There are spiritual resources beyond effort, which appear only when effort is stilled.”
Porno: passivity; easy [lack of] gratification. Sexual excitement accentuates vitality; an end in itself.
One does not know, and it is an agony, whether to fill the head or empty it.
“The ideal is neutrality, transparence.” Sontag
The object of my life is to avoid suffering.
I rejected the content of my father’s life, but not its form: compulsion and unrest.
The person with uncertain identity readily projects himself into other roles. In watching spectacles of violence, he will become the

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

70s-8a

Written in the 70s, 70s-8a. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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“Woman Hugging Boy”

Posted on April 20, 2018 by JMN

This gallery contains 1 photo.

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“Painting is a lie that tells the truth” (Picasso)

Posted on April 20, 2018 by JMN

“As Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, once put it, ‘Facts at times become the dire enemies of truth.’ Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ is a poor factual account of what happened in a Basque village on April 26, 1937, and a magnificent rendering of what has happened in every village that was ever bombed in any way. The painting is a perfect journalistic dispatch, if measured by how much universal truth it contains.” (Roger Cohen, NYTimes, 4-1-18)

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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From Memory

Posted on April 20, 2018 by JMN

“Dirge Without Music,” poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay
https://www.poetryfoundation.org

I’m attracted to the elegiac mode. This poem is formal, but with half-rhyming that doesn’t chime: “crowned” with “resigned,” for example. The speaker quarrels with how we handle death.

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“Lurchingly?

Posted on April 20, 2018 by JMN

I’ve read and admired Peter Schjedahl’s writings about art in the New Yorker for years. His recent article is entitled “The Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul Cezanne” (New Yorker, April 9, 2018).

The piece is unhelpful to me as an amateur engaged in people painting. Schejedahl lingers at the level of pronouncements that hover above practice. In “Self-Portrait With Bowler Hat,” I’m interested in how Cezanne handles the beard with its glimpses of underlying flesh, and the peekaboo lips with their highlight. In “Madame Cezanne In a Red Dress” I’m interested in the sketchiness of her facial features and her severe hairdo.

Schejedahl has a formidable eye and range. I would welcome more brush-to-canvas observations from him now and then. How precisely did Cezanne fall short, from a painterly standpoint, in specific instances, according to this eminent, highly readable critic?

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Banditry Repression

Posted on April 20, 2018 by JMN

I’m happy to learn there’s an institution in France named the Banditry Repression Brigade. It handles art theft. Mentioned in an article in The Guardian by Kim Willsher, 4-4-18.

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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