Minority Reign

Posted on November 14, 2020 by JMN
[Mitch McConnell]

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
(Mitch McConnell, in October 2010)

OZYMITCHIAS
Regnant canker, excrescent knob, coonskin
gerrymandarin of the scrotal void,
inverted rictus of obstructionism,
hollowed be thy name! Where laws go to die,
malignant solon, turdiform conniver,
is in thy fiddlebusted, chambered morgue.

In the republic of the mean, the ornery,
fair, Ozymitchias, thou never wert.
Look upon his deeds, Democracy,
And weep the sacred trust his wiles pervert.
(JMN)

(c) 2020 JMN

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‘I Cut the Sky in Two’

Posted on November 13, 2020 by JMN

New York-born Jordan Nassar has Palestinian family roots. His show’s title “I Cut the Sky in Two” is from a poem by Etel Adnan, “the distinguished Lebanese-American painter and poet, and a touchstone for Mr. Nassar.”

He is best known for his embroidery work, some of it in collaboration with female Palestinian artisans.

Jordan Nassar’s “A Yellow World A Blue Sun,” from 2020, hand-embroidered cotton on cotton. Credit… Jordan Nassar and James Cohan.

… [Nassar] employs tatreez, Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery, to generate fields of ornate geometric patterns and interrupt them with insets of evocative, abstract landscapes — hills and valleys, the sun and sky..

Jordan Nassar’s “Bab Al-Zuhur (Gate of Flowers),” from 2020, hand-flamed glass beads, steel, wire. Credit… Jordan Nassar and James Cohan.

This exhibition adds a new form: sculptures of glass beads, handmade in a style practiced in Hebron in the West Bank and mounted on undulating steel lattices, that depict landscapes in the same vein as the embroideries.

(“4 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now,” NYTimes, 11-11-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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‘Explicit and Mysterious’

Posted on November 12, 2020 by JMN
Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s “gathering on 5th street” (2020) in the exhibition “Wind Rider,” the artist’s New York solo debut. Credit… Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Company Gallery.

I’m a child of ranchers. Because of how misshapen and reactionary mythic cowboy culture is in America, I’m a fool for painting that introduces what Roberta Smith terms the “subversive theme of the gay black cowboy.”

And as usual, Ms. Smith illumines her subject (for me) with her incisive descriptions of technique.

All motifs benefit from ingenious combinations of strident drawing and suave stained color; they are often simultaneously transparent and opaque, explicit and mysterious.

(“4 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now,” NYTimes, 11-11-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Opportunities to Panic

Posted on November 10, 2020 by JMN
Kenji Aoki for the New York Times.

Ben Ehrenreich writes:

The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it… The climate crisis, as it continues to unfold, will give us additional opportunities to panic and to grieve…

Here’s a posy of other opportunities mentioned:

… lack of “nimbleness” in governments
… lack of ability to migrate
… lack of collective action for common goals
… bloated bureaucracies
… bloated resourcing for military, prisons, and police
… inequality and popular immiseration

And a nosegay of specimens brought low:

Late Bronze Age
Minoa
Rome
Akkadians
Lowland Classic Maya
Chaco Canyon (New Mexico)

But maybe a few are wily, stubborn, and adaptable enough to keep crawling out from under our wreckage, Ehrenreich ventures.

… When one way doesn’t work, we try another. When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.

(Ben Ehrenreich, “How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?” NYTimes, 11-4-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Tom, Dick, and Harry

Posted on November 9, 2020 by JMN
[John Kerry. Photo Business Insider.]

There was a fun question in my daily Spanish Quora:

¿Existe en inglés el equivalente a “fulano, mengano y zutano”?

The consensus in the answer thread was that “Tom, Dick and Harry” was the closest equivalent.

I’m reminded of my college French teacher’s phrase “machin, truc et chose.” I’ve forgotten the context, but I intuited that it meant something like “fulano,mengano y zutano” — “so-and-so, what’s-his-name, and who’s-it.”

My summer school classmate in Mexico City, an American lady, complimented the instructor of French effusively on his fluency. The dapper Mexican man flicked ash from his cigarette and shrugged: “Que voulez-vous, madame? C’est mon métier” — “What did you expect, madame? It’s my profession.”

With some exceptions Americans distrust polyglots, especially in their politicians. Former presidential candidates Mitt Romney and John Kerry have to hide their French or be tarred as quislings.

Tut tut. Sancho Panza said it: “No se hizo la miel para la boca del asno”— “Honey is not for the mouths of asses.”

(c) 2020 JMN

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The Squat

Posted on November 6, 2020 by JMN
Image from Dictionary.com, “What’s the #’s Real Name?”

I learned the term “typosquatting” today.

Shortly after 2:30 a.m. on October 30, 2020, Twump tweeted the hashtag “#BidenCrimeFamiily” with no other context or link.

That extra “i” circumvented Twitter’s efforts to hide the hashtag in search results. Called #typosquatting, this tactic is often used by trolls and media manipulators to get around the rules of social media platforms.

(Emily Dreyfuss, “Trump’s Tweeting Isn’t Crazy. It’s Strategic, Typos and All,” NYTimes, 11-6-20)

The term “typo” is short for “typographical error”; however, if a typo is intentional, it’s no longer an “error,” is it? Food for thought.

I wonder if typosquatting is the best way forward in a healthy infosystem? Has “hashtagging” joined up with “swiftboating” in our mephitic lexicon?

(c) 2020 JMN

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Bookshop.org

Posted on November 5, 2020 by JMN

I buy an unconscionable raft of goods from Amazon, but I’d rather get my books from a bookstore. This article brings good news.

Bookshop.org allows any independent shop to customise its own online store front, select books to recommend and, any time a bookshop directs a customer to the site through one of its links, it gets 30% of the sale.

… Every time a reader buys a book from an author, publisher, magazine or influencer page, 10% of that purchase will go to the page owner and another 10% into a profit pool for independent bookshops.

… This new platform offers practical solutions to keep our indie bookshops thriving…

(Sharmaine Lovegrove, “Bookshop.org is what the publishing world has been waiting for,” theguardian.com, 11-5-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Hello, World

Posted on November 3, 2020 by JMN

I’m going into my 9th month of shielding in the Untied States looking forward to a beautiful South Texas winter. I take comfort from the life of the mind — reading, painting, music. I’m grateful for my roof, patio, pets, and groceries, and for nights of peaceful sleep.

Would that every creature of every God had at least as much.

To friends, and to persons I haven’t met, whether you take SARS-CoV-2 seriously, like me, or consider it in some other perspective, I love you and wish us all health and long life.

PS: Yes, I wrote “Untied.”

(c) 2020 JMN

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Joy Hiding in Plain Sight

Posted on November 3, 2020 by JMN
Photograph: Jeff Kaufman

Retired doctor Jeff Kaufman often visits an American elm that escaped the devastation of Dutch elm disease because of its isolation. The 150-year-old tree stands near the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, 95 miles from Egremont, the nearest urban area.

… Kaufman is thankful that the elm has survived to be appreciated. “Anyone can see it, anyone can walk up to it. American elms aren’t the most colourful, but this one doesn’t need to be bright to be special. Its joy lies in the fact that it’s hiding in plain sight.”

(Alex Mistlin, “Tree of the week: An American elm that survives all the more safely in its isolation,” theguardian.com, 11-2-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Iambo-Pentametricism

Posted on October 30, 2020 by JMN

Apothegm
How does a country get to see the back
of a leader who has only affront?
(JMN)

Iambo-Pentametricization of Codified Peroration
“So we have many exciting things that
we will be announcing over the next
eight weeks, I would say things that nobody
has even contemplated, thought possi–
ble, and things that we’re gonna get done and
we have gotten done and we’ve started in
most cases. We’re taking on so many
aspects of things that, uh, but you’ll see lev–
els of detail and you’ll see levels of
thought that a lot of people believed ve–
ry strongly we didn’t have in this coun–
try. We’re going to get things done that they’ve
wanted to see done for a long, long time.”
— Trump, on second term plans
[Quoted at Doonesbury, versified here]

The Party of Trunk
I’m no friend of conspiracy theory, but I like to believe that the mar-a-lagian operatives’ first step in decoding the secret message for the elephanatic cabal is to reduce the peroration to iambic pentameter.

A closely guarded algorithm processes the emergent stress pattern, extracting the day’s truthiness to be bawled by the Vulpine network. The huge tone and tenor of the vacuity-decoy tossed to the lamestream media is strongly kim-jong-unian, if not putinesque.

(c) 2020 JMN

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