Arab market panic

From The New York Times:

"Hassan can watch, aghast, as databanks at NASDAQ graph hard data and chart a NASDAQ crash — a sharp fall that alarms staff at a Manhattan bank. Hassan acts fast, ransacks cashbags at a mad dash, and grabs what bank drafts a bank branch at Casablanca can cash: marks, rands and bahts. Hassan asks that an adman draft a want ad that can hawk what canvas art Hassan has (a Cranach, a Cassatt and a Chagall). Hassan can fast-talk a chap at a watchstand and pawn a small watch that has, as a watchglass, a star padparadschah (half a grand, a carat). A shah can pack a bag, flag a cab and scram, catch-as-catch-can."

Just kidding, it's from Christian Bök's Eunoia. Fooled you!

The Spirit of Romance

"Ezra Pound once remarked to me that Shakespeare of the Sonnets may well have been 'a public letter-writer':  that's writing poetry-to-order -- a trade.  Pound told me this during the time he was imprisoned in a mental hospital in Washington, D.C.  'Sometimes,' he added, 'the guards come to me, for a piece of verse to give their sweethearts.'  'And do you write it?' I asked.  'Oh, yes.'"  (Hugh Kenner, The Elsewhere Community, pg. 150)

Say gal, happy valentine's day!  Look, I wrote ya somethin.

Aw shucks Stanley, I didn know you wrote no poetry.

Yeah, well, for a swell gal like you...

...oh Stan...it's...

Like it?

Sure I like it, but now when did you learn italian?

Aw...eh, I picked up a bit in the service.  You know.  Learned it from Uncle Sam.

Oh...I...sure.  Say, what's "usura"?

Eh...dat's, like, I wanted to say "you sura are a...nice girl" and all.

But Stanley, it's doesn't...

Oh it's just a nice thing I wrote you, why ya always gotta...What?

Stanley, most of our friends in the building are Jewish, how could you say this part here?

Lemme see that... ah shit.  Ezra Pound wrote it, alright?  Happy?

Who?

U.N. Must Relax

"To the judicial observer such turmoil as was manifested in some of the amazing acts of the new governments had an almost pathological odor, suggesting that nations, like individuals, may at times need the soothing hand of the psychiatrist.  Indeed, it is an open question whether, if some method might be discovered magically to quiet the emotions of diplomats at certain critical moments, international complications might not frequently be lessened.

...

Without doubt, in countries now conquered, the peoples, deprived of liberties  and of material possessions, are in a pitiable nervous condition.  Many have lost all that they held dear - wives, children, relatives and friends.  The aims of postwar reconstruction for these unfortunates, assuming victory for the United Nations, should be more than material and political.  Organized medicine should aim to help their nervous disorders. ... It is to be hoped that physicians in each nation can be trained in time for medical reconstruction, for not only the conquered but also the conquering will need this treatment."  (Edmund Jacobson M.D., You Must Relax, 1946 revised edition, pg. 160-161)

More on this once I've had a chance to get back to some Fanon that I've been meaning to re-read.

How Pleasant? (Notes on Twee #12)

"There is no form poetry can take unworthy of our consideration, even our admiration. When a new edition of The English Poets on the Chalmers model appears, it would be incomplete without, for instance, the very representative work of Edward Lear… I find in them evidence of very painful emotional upset in the poet's mind; and the song of Calico Pie presenting grief in terms of childish invention is to me as poignant as the idea of Hamlet played by Burbage the actor as a comic part. Adoption of this pseudo-infantility of expression must surely denote suffering in an extreme form. I say this in all seriousness."

— Robert Graves, from "What Is Bad Poetry?" in Poetic Unreason, 22-23

Our starting point

"He was an aphorism writer, there are countless aphorisms of his, I thought, one can assume he destroyed them, I write aphorisms, he said over and over, I thought, that is a minor art of the intellectual asthma from which certain people, above all in France, have lived and still live, so-called half philosophers for nurses' night tables, I could also say calendar philosophers for everybody and anybody, whose sayings eventually find their way onto the walls of every dentist's waiting room; the so-called depressing ones are, like the so-called cheerful ones, equally disgusting. But I haven't been able to get rid of my habit of writing aphorisms, in the end I'm afraid I will have written millions of them, he said, I thought, and I'd be well advised to start destroying them since I don't plan to have the walls of every dentist's office and church papered with them one day, as they are now with Goethe, Lichtenberg and comrades, he said, I thought. Since I wasn't born to be a philosopher I turned myself into an aphorist, not entirely unselfconsciously I must say, turned myself into one of those disgusting tagalongs of philosophy who exist by the thousands, he said, I thought. To produce a huge effect with tiny ideas and deceive mankind, he said, I thought. In reality I'm nothing other than one of those aphorizing public menaces who, in their boundless unscrupulousness and impudence, tag along behind philosophers like horseflies behind a horse, he said, I thought. If we stop drinking we die of thirst, if we stop eating we starve to death, he said, such pearls of wisdom are what all these aphorisms amount to in the end, that is unless they're by Novalis, but even Novalis talked a lot of nonsense, so Wertheimer, I thought. In the desert we thirst for water, that's about what Pascal's maxim says, he said, I thought. If we look at things squarely the only thing left from the greatest philosophical enterprises is a pitiful aphoristic aftertaste, he said, no matter what the philosophy, no matter what the philosopher, everything falls to bits when we set to work with all our instruments, he said, I thought. All this time I've been talking about the human sciences and don't even know what these human sciences are, don't have the slightest clue, he said, I thought, been talking about philosophy and don't have a clue about philosophy, been talking about existence and don't have a clue about it, he said. Our starting point is always that we don't know anything about anything and don't even have a clue about it, he said, I thought. Immediately after setting to work on something we choke on the huge amount of information that's available in all fields, that's the truth, he said, I thought. And although we know that, we continue to set to work on our so-called human-science problems, to attempt the impossible: to create a human-science product, a product of the intellect. That's madness! he said, I thought. Fundamentally we are capable of everything, equally fundamentally we fail at everything, he said, I thought. Our great philosophers, our greatest poets, shrivel down to a single successful sentence, he said, I thought, that's the truth, often we remember only a so-called philosophical hue, he said, I thought. We study a monumental work, for example Kant's work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant's little East Prussian head and to a thoroughly amorphous world of night and fog, which winds up in the same state of helplessness as all the others, he said, I thought. He wanted it to be a monumental world and only a single ridiculous detail is left, he said, I thought, that's how it always is. Even Shakespeare shrivels down to something ridiculous for us in a clearheaded moment, he said, I thought. For a long time now the gods appear to us only in the heads on our beer steins, he said, I thought. Only a stupid person is amazed, he said, I thought. The so-called intellectual consumes himself in what he considers pathbreaking work and in the end has only succeeded in making himself ridiculous, whether he's called Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, it doesn't matter, even if he was Kleist or Voltaire we still see a pitiful being who has misused his head and finally driven himself into nonsense. Who's been rolled over and passed over by history. We've locked up the great thinkers in our bookcases, from which they keep staring at us, sentenced to eternal ridicule, he said, I thought. Day and night I hear the chatter of the great thinkers we've locked up in our bookcases, these ridiculous intellectual giants as shrunken heads behind glass, he said, I thought. All these people have sinned against nature, he said, they've committed first-degree murders of the intellect, that's why they've been punished and stuck in our bookcases for eternity. For they're choking to death in our bookcases, that's the truth. Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we've locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, my friend, that's the truth."

— Thomas Bernhard, The Loser, trans. Jack Dawson, 64-67

"All schools are bad and the one we attend is always the worst if it doesn't open our eyes."

— Thomas Bernhard, The Loser, trans. Jack Dawson, 18

Metaphor of the Week

"Rhymes properly used are the good servants whose presence gives the dinner table a sense of opulent security; they are never awkward, they hand the dishes silently and professionally. You can trust them not to interrupt the conversation of the table or allow their personal disagreements to come to the notice of the guests; but some of them are getting very old for their work."

— Robert Graves, On English Poetry, 89-90