Bang and Whimper

Two days ago, in a fit of unrivaled clumsiness and stupidity, I managed to give myself a rather painful paper cut—on my eyeball. Please don’t ask me how I did it; the memories are far too embarrassing to relive. Trust, though, that YES it is possible to get a paper cut on one’s eyeball and YES it does hurt quite a bit. It is still quite bothersome today.

I am consoled, however, by my receipt yesterday of a package from Germany. My Blümchen CD arrived; for $10 I received an ultra-rare Verliebt Goldedition double CD and a bonus Blaue Augen single, shipping included (thank you, Bastian). I’ve been dancing all day. I think the people on the train this morning were somewhat annoyed…

NP: Blümchen, Achterbahn

Let us make haste, depart ; she will not dance.
Let us quaff our drinks and move to France.
She would not pluck the fruit from off the vine,
Nor help our Bacchanal one step advance.
How humourless she is! like hemlock wine ;
Yea, though we poured a thousand ants into her pants,
     She would not dance.

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[Taken from MetaFilter] Paul Krugman, in Tuesday’s New York Times [registration required, sorry], highlights Secretary of the Army Thomas White’s involvement in Enron’s fraud. Also of note is Cheney’s golden handshake from his pals at Halliburton. I don’t have anything to add beyond another link in the datasphere to keep the info alive. Just thought y’all should know about this stuff.

Incidently, MeFi-er michaelonfs pointed out that Secretary White’s résumé has been tidied up a bit since the Enron debacle broke. Look at his current profile and compare it to what it looked like on June 29th, 2001.

NP: Luna, California (All the Way) via KEXP

I’m having trouble breathing… I feel as if the air is made of lead, pressing in on my chest. It’s a very strange sensation, this inescapable dread of the next moment—even in my anxiety I am able to focus my attention on the sensation and observe my breathing, its shallowness, its timidity, its ineffectuality.

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1. All that is good in academic economics would include: David Levine’s work on intellectual property.
2. All that is good in music would include: Blümchen, whose rare Verliebt Goldedition 2CD set I just won on eBay.de for €2.5.

NP: Coldplay, The Scientist

There is no such thing as personal tragedy. If a tree falls, with no one near to hear it, it never made a sound.

NP: Marine Research, Parallel Horizontal

I killed my computer dead. I’ve been having problems with it for awhile; the CPU fans died most horribly, shrieking and groaning for weeks, so the CPU has been running hot for some time. I finally decided to do something about it, and tried to replace the fans, but it seems I shorted out the board or my memory stick (I had to take it out to get at the CPU fan screws), or I jostled the CPU into oblivion, or something similar, but the thing won’t boot. It just lets off a series of shrill beeps and won’t turn off. I can’t do a thing about it.

As a result, I won’t be able to post very often until I get it fixed. No computer at home means no writing. Nothing tragic to you, I suppose, but I’m in the midst of a terrible desperation. It’s horrible.

There are certain projects I’ve been meaning to undertake; I need to respond to my friend Ben’s comments, I’ve wanted to write several email letters for quite some time, and there are a couple of small pieces I need to finish. All will have to wait indefinitely.

I have to do some work while I’m at work now, but I did want to mention that just this morning I’ve begun reading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part I. I’m quite excited.

NP: Cocteau Twins, Lorelei

Thank you, Jimmy Carter. Former US President Jimmy Carter wrote a piece for the Washington Post (apparently buried on page A31) decrying recent changes he perceives in traditional US foreign policy. He suggests that Washington is now in the hands of some wiry belligerents, “a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.” Let us be quite clear about who these war-mongers are: the old hawks Cheney and Rumsfeld. A theory about what their ambitions might include can be found in this Salon article from June 17. Carter restricts his attention to changes in human rights policies, our turn from “good-neighbor” participation in the global community, and our rôle in the Middle East peace process. That’s no small umbrella—it shelters an alarmingly broad coterie of crimes. Carter writes:

Peremptory rejections of nuclear arms agreements, the biological weapons convention, environmental protection, anti-torture proposals, and punishment of war criminals have sometimes been combined with economic threats against those who might disagree with us. These unilateral acts and assertions increasingly isolate the United States from the very nations needed to join in combating terrorism.

…

Also from the Post: September 11: ‘American Idol’ Seizes the Day. I don’t think I have anything intelligent to say about this one. Just read it—and weep with me.

NP: Future Bible Heroes, From Some Dying Star on KEXP

I’ve just started re-reading Russell’s Unpopular Essays. I was torn between Russell and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which has been sitting unread on my shelf for far longer than I care to admit. Ultimately, I chose to re-read the Essays because in them Russell offers prescient and portentous arguments on the dangers of dogmatic authoritarianism, not unlike that espoused by the present Bush administration. While Bush and Co. haven’t exactly delineated their motivating principles (quite the contrary: they’ve been careful to mask them with some nominal commitment to vague “democratic” values based in weakly Christian “ideals,” whereby citizens may be held indefinitely, without charge, under unmonitored conditions and wars may be waged without congressional approval or sanction), neither have they eschewed the anti-scientific moralism that has been the biggest deterrent to critical liberalism for the past three millennia. In “Philosophy and Politics,” Russell notes that, “The scientific outlook… is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.”

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I have just made the most wonderful discovery. I was busy gluing some pieces on to a writing table I’m making and I had some old “goth” post-punk CDs in the changer. A bit of Bauhaus, a little Sisters of Mercy, some Siouxsie Sioux… I had also included one of my favorite bands, (Clan of) Xymox, which was on the 4AD label back when it had claim to Lush and The Pixies and the Cocteau Twins. It shames me to admit it, but I’d never really listened to a lot of the lyrics very closely—which helps to explain how I was surprised today to find that CoX quotes my favorite poet Swinburne in their song “Back Door,” which appears on the Medusa album.

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