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May 14th; Balint mentions his camera hire business.
May 13th; A nifty graph about American government spending, via Zdravko. Seemingly military spending has proportionately halved over 40 years - in other words, all the other spending has gone up even more quickly than it has. Such a clever infographic stops short of being really good - why not scale each bar to also show the absolute size of government spending in those three years?

May 12th; Eerie image of our sun looking like a large bacterium. Finish Marion and Paul's copy of 'A Very Short Introduction - Ancient Philosophy' by Julia Annas. She dives into an ancient (Greek) philosophical debate about moral conflict as a way of avoiding the usual timeline narrative. A chapter on how Plato's 'Republic' got reread in the 19th century as a book about an ideal state, despite that being a small part of the text, is interesting. Annas in the middle mounts a good defence of Aristotle as much more open-minded than later Aristotelians made him seem. Her closing summary mentions a lampoon by second-century AD satirist Julian, he of the 'True Story' adventure about travelling to the moon. In 'The Runaways' Julian compares Greek philosophy to other Oriental traditions as a wild goose chase by the gods - not particularly favouring Greek ideas.
May 11th; The mysterious Josh in England tells me that this Australian poster was not real. It mocked another Australian poster with the same meek cartoon Jim, this time not putting his feet on the seats. Perhaps a bit too good to be true.

May 10th; Finish Robin's copy of Dion Fortune's 'The Mystical Qabalah'. A clear walk through the Tree of Life diagram so central to this Jewish tradition. Ideas are explained in crisp, precise prewar prose, so much less apologetic or anxious to please than English writing since the 1940s. Fortune sorts out some of the muddling differences in terminology between Crowley and Waite. Less bewildering than the last time I looked at this.
May 9th; This advisory advert from an Australian railway network seems authentic. Especially enjoy the meek way Jim is sitting.
Solomun: see how in the photo the blissed-out producer dude with the name of the wise king gazes inward, grooving with the ineffable. Presumably, he transcends through the beat. Or something.

May 8th; I'm not sure why, but during last week's day-into-night-back-into-day picture-editing session on the book it was helpful to play this track again and again - indeed for much of the night. More of a mantra than a tune. Somehow doesn't sound so bad when you haven't slept and aren't thinking normally. This morning finished Robin's copy of 'Nemesis' by Peter Evans. This is a book by a dogged journalist from England who seems good at getting people to talk to him (perhaps he seems so dull & harmless his interview subjects underestimate him). He wrote a biography of Aristotle Onassis in 1986, but afterwards got told by some of the family & men close to the rogueish shipowner that he had "missed the real story". So he went back and did it again in 2004. The real story turns out to be that Onassis loathed Bobby Kennedy with a passion and paid to have him assassinated. I've never read a book about the colourful plutocrat before and was always mystified that with the pick of the world's women any healthy man would want to marry the unappetising Kennedy widow, but this book at least explains that. Onassis hoped for political & commercial leverage in the US and also just couldn't resist the showiness of marrying the world's most famous woman. She in turn liked his money very much indeed, wanted to leave America for a few years in case she got assassinated as well, and for all his rather serious faults Aristotle Socrates Onassis does emerge as having been quite a lot of fun to be around. Still, the assassination claim is the book's crown jewel. The problem with it is that the second Kennedy's killing so much has the fingerprints of an intelligence agency on it that all we really learn is that Onassis and his Greek colleagues were naive enough to think he had had Bobby offed for money. The sly PLO terrorist Hamshari who took his cash to "organise" the killing seems to have read Onassis like an open book. Either the Arab heard Bobby didn't have long to live, or just had the neck to touch Ari for money the same way he "called off" a threatened bombing of Onassis's Olympic Airways that was probably never meant to happen either. The fact that the PLO themselves finally passed a death sentence on their man Hamshari for misappropriating funds, as Evans dutifully reports, itself rather suggests the wily extorter didn't have the reach to get the second Kennedy taken out.
Overall reads like Onassis, devious to the point of gullibility, repeatedly pushed his gambler's luck. He sounds constantly full of himself, buffoonishly out of his depth with his grand plans for taking over Monaco or Haiti, yet almost touchingly sure that he was the sneakiest hoodlum on the block. It's clear that compared to the Kennedys or the CIA he was a bumbling amateur. Sweetly, most Americans thought Jackie was marrying down to pair up with the dwarfish billionaire who fled Pontic Smyrna aged 14 in the 1920s. This book unwittingly makes clear that, for all Onassis's vices, he was the one scraping the bottom of the barrel to be marrying her. Indeed, for such a famed seducer of stylish women, Onassis obviously had something of a tin ear for what women actually want. He repeatedly misjudged the point when he'd pushed a girl too far. His first couple of women sound like decent people and if he had to move on he should probably have stopped with Maria Callas, who seems to have been both exciting and genuinely devoted to him right to the end. Likewise, though he piled up cash from lots of very big deals, he repeatedly came to grief on a handful of even bigger deals. Bobby Kennedy doesn't emerge well from the story of how Marilyn Monroe died. No clear link between the Palestinian Hamshari and either Sirhan Sirhan, the hypnotised Palestinian shooter of RFK, nor one of the hypnotists who might have programmed Sirhan Sirhan, is shown. (Mind you, Evans hints so cleverly you think he's proved his case unless you read closely.) I'd have liked some diagrams showing who married and divorced whom & when. Like many good researchers, Evans writes slightly confusing prose. He knows all these names so well he keeps forgetting to remind the reader. Many pages of complicated sequences like her-lover-met-her-cousin-before-she-married-that-other-man... whose-uncle-who-had-earlier-married-the-younger-sister-of... could have been edited into a more readable state with only a little work.
Poignant to think of Onassis & his cronies racked with guilt and anxiety in the shipowner's final years over their big scary secret: a crime they all thought he'd commited - but almost certainly hadn't.
May 7th; Work much of day in Robin's studio doing a pen & paper translation of the prosthetic-hip article. Jellyfish seem to be fashionable, but are the ones in this short film being shown upside down?

May 6th; Several of us sit much of the afternoon on wooden chairs in the long grass in the garden with beers chatting about this & that. I suggest Constantine, as an aid to his trading, try to psychically tune into a commodity with some ancient resonance, such as silver or wheat. Having already kindly given me a fern in a pot, Georgina also has found a rather lovely old copy of a magazine for me from 1975 called 'Elet es Tudomany' ('Life and Science', in the broader Continental sense of "science" being any body of organised knowledge, from engineering to history, even literary scholarship ....to my slight surprise the journal seems to be still going). Rich in line drawings and black & white photographs, this exercise-book-sized publication has a remarkable range of content. There is an article about identical twins, an article about Ethiopia, a comprehensive profile of the small Hungarian town of Abony, an article on passive heating & thermal design of school buildings, a piece suggesting cancer is a disease of the immune system (If I'm not mistaken quite up-to-date for 1975?), a piece on the physics of weights suspended in glasses of water, and a long lead about some 19th-century radical called Oszkar Jaszi. The back pages have shorter articles, including a sample of written Carthaginian script, a crossword, a small column about an English Nobel Laureate for chemistry noticing his wife's diabetes caused gold jewellery touching her skin to make it go dark, and lots lots more.
May 5th; Letty's school-leaving ceremony goes well at church and school hall afterwards. Constantine & Edit are there. So are Robin, Georgina, & two of the other children. In the big hall we have to stand again because, as with the church, we are too slow to grab seats. Interestingly, most chairs face the long side of the school hall, but Letty's classmates having the leaving ceremony are seated at right angles to the main audience in a narrow strip along that wall. The 18-year-old school leavers, all girls, are in perhaps twenty rows - each row maybe 4 chairs wide - ten rows facing one way, ten rows the other, a lectern in the middle, halfway down that wall. The effect is as if just the seating from two buses or aeroplanes nose to nose with the lectern in between has been extracted and set down in the hall. The proud parents in the main body of the hall therefore can see their very pretty daughters in profile, all dressed in dark short skirts, 3"-heels, and matching jackets, creating a strong air-hostess effect. There are many flowers. We all get some bouquets to give Letty at the end, who has too many to carry really. Then we return in several cars to the house, where Marika and Georgina have prepared a huge buffet spread of sliced meat, salads: a groaning board of provisions.

May 4th; Having worked all night on fusion book, am in slightly strange state of mind by late morning. Sleep one hour around lunchtime, meet Nationalism Bea, buy train ticket, print out prosthetic-hip text, get on train. During half-hour change of trains at Kecskemet, look high up on the walls of the station's ticket hall. It has 1950s/60s tiling with multicoloured panels, each of which is made up of hundreds of half-inch-square pseudo-tiles of red or white or yellow or blue or green or black etc. Instead of the exciting Mondrianesque mood this was supposed to evoke close up, the overall effect is strangely drab. A number of Hungarian railway stations got these subtiled tiles (for example, the tiny waiting room at Lakitelek) and the effect is that of public lavatories or urine-scented underpass tunnels on British housing estates built by socialist local councils. Somehow, modernist municipal use of Krazee Kolor just adds insult to injury. It removes even the remnants of dignity from attempts to give clean usable buildings to the less well off. If you have to live around decor like this, you're subconsciously having it rubbed in that it is provincial plonkers who are patronising you: the people who rule your life don't even have taste. Nonetheless, in Kecskemet station hall, if you squint a bit, the tiny randomly-arranged squares of primary colour almost disappear and merge into a sort of shimmering beige. Looking up I see that most of the height of the hall is taken up by three tall windows at front and back, just blank walls at the sides. In one corner near the ceiling the sunlight of early evening makes three much smaller yellow lit-up versions of the front windows writhe on the blank (though tiny-tiled) walls. These golden projected window shapes fidget and move gently, as if in the wind, because there is a park filled with trees outside. You can almost hear trees moving while looking at the light effect, though there are really just station noises inside the building. Blurred blobs of light inside the window lozenges stir slowly back and forth on the inside wall as leaves & branches in the park move about softly. I go outside. The light rays of sun stretch across grass, only getting in among the trees in a few places. I cannot immediately see how it is that the sun makes smaller windows of light on the back wall inside the ticket hall. Perhaps it is that not the sun, but a patch of sunlit grass, is what is shining light so oddly through the big windows. But something, maybe chance placement of trees and the setting sun, would have to accidentally shape a sort of reversed cone of sunshine pointing inward. How else could big windows cast smaller, higher silhouettes of light? Strange effect.
May 3rd; I think yesterday woke from extraordinary vivid dream about stripy aeroplane. Work rest of day on fusion-energy book.

May 2nd; Ugly image hopes to make fingerprint-based biometric security seem safe & cosy. Of course in reality it's deeply unsafe and utterly creepy. Like having your bank cash card PIN tattooed on your forehead, only not as sensible. Notice how the clever-clever picture unwittingly admits that biometric authentification makes your home cramped & deformed, condemning you to squirm through claustrophobic darkness like a cockroach in a wall cavity. Actually quite an accurate metaphor for homo database: forever trapped inside the maze of your own whorls & ridges.
May 1st; Everything is very shut. Sun shines. Intriguing story from a US May the 1st in the 1970s.

April 30th; Sunshine today could officially be described as "hot". In recognition that tomorrow is May 1st, everything is shut today. One of those parsimonious tunes built out of an ultra-deep bass line, high breathy vocals, and a black-and-white photograph: Sweeter Than Sweet by Lulu Rouge. English friends recommend this green business portal, which looks rather natty and comprehensive on the content side. I really should be able to build that kind of site by now. Must learn to code. So lazy. Delicious dinner at Marion & Paul's. I manage to fling one of my cufflinks across the room while re-enacting being stung by a wasp in Robin's car. Marion says two of the boys she teaches at school have as parents an Italian porn actor who married a Hungarian porn actress. She adds that the mother seems, in the decade plus since this picture of the husband and wife was taken, to have become even prettier and almost Hepburn-like. Apparently both lads are very sweet & utterly charming at all times.
April 29th; Meet Salih for green tea. With Tatiana's help, fusion-book page loads quicker, and now has space-age line-drawing instead of colour photo. A few days ago, all-afternoon Diplomacy game at Jeremy's (I am Turkey, Austria-Hungary, & Germany). He describes one Christmas years back on duty at his police station, all the boys in blue playing Escalado and Pit, adding it got loud enough the fire station across the road asked them to keep the noise down.

April 28th; Lily finds some truly fascinating research: people think more rationally in a 2nd language.
April 27th; For anyone who didn't know already, Women Prefer Arrogant Men: someone checked. Still reading Robin's fine book about the French Revolution. Here's a print of the extraordinary moment called the Tennis Court Oath. Due to a misunderstanding, the indignant deputies of the Third Estate have crowded into an indoor tennis court (now 'Real Tennis', then 'Royal Tennis') on the Versailles complex. They drag in a couple of tables and, agitated, open debate. It's morning on the 20th of June, 1789. Believing (incorrectly) that Louis XVI just an hour earlier snubbed them and might even be about to dissolve the session, in high dudgeon they open what was to be a meeting with the king, but in his absence. They improvise and make history there and then. Passionate deputies' arms outstretch in what for us strikingly resemble stiff-armed fascist salutes as they swear jointly, from their hearts, that they shall be in session wherever they might meet together from then on. They will assemble wherever they can until a new constitution for France has been created. However dark the consequences proved to be not long after, hard not to feel the thrill - just from the picture - of that hour when 576 Frenchmen (out of 577, one man abstained) reinvented England's Long Parliament. Meanwhile a link from Lily in Oxford, a chatbot with remarkably lifelike facial movements and an endearing squint, called Evie. The AI element still as dire as ever though. Evie, despite looking like a pleasant young desk clerk from anywhere in Britain, is all over the place in terms of rational discussion. Several of my questions she/it completely mismatched ("misunderstood" would be giving her creators far too much credit, there's nothing approaching understanding going on in there). All that has changed since the days of Eliza in the 1960s is that her coders have put in some more aggressive tricks for Evie to change the subject when the bot cannot handle the incoming text strings. I type "What does this mean? markgriffith@yahoo.com" and Evie types & speaks back "Marry me." Cheeky little hussy.

April 26th; Moody Sapphic musings from Chinawoman, a sort of torch singer: I'll Be Your Woman / A Woman's Touch / Party Girl.
Surveillance State update:
"The NSA Is Lying" says former NSA official / New US Law CISPA / hotly followed by CISPA Strengthened & Voted Through Ahead of Timetable / How To Delete Yourself From The Internet / Flying Zappy Things.
April 25th; Haircut, sunshine, chores around town. Good radio chat about Neoplatonists.

April 24th; Skippy little tune from a man letting a woman go: 'Man Of My Word'. Apparently you need to spell out for a girl that you have standards. Their famed intuition doesn't detect this, I've noticed.
April 23rd; Update webpage for physics book.

April 22nd; Diverting ten-minute film claims that a smallish but still big dinosaur (a sort of scaled-down brontosaurus) still thrives in the jungles of Cameroon, central Africa. Naughtily, the film-makers paste animations of the creature ("mokele imbembe") into re-enactment footage without writing 're-enactment' on the screen, so if you don't pay attention you might think the creatures have been filmed. They haven't. Charming idea some might still be around. Professor Challenger lives on.
April 21st; Green tea with Nationalism Bea, back from San Diego.

April 20th; More management-training work with Jeremy. Finally check the RAF airmen sketches I've heard about ("Not like Gracie Fields, she mings bad.") Intriguing effect - not always clear which bits are different from how people talked off the record in the 1940s, when 'chap' rang closer to today's 'geezer' or 'dude'. Subtly show that slang changes mostly matter where they reveal changed attitudes. A few of them do. Also raises the question of whether British humour is coming full circle from the first RAF pilots comedy scene. That celebrated moment where Jonathan Miller & Alan Bennett on stage at the Edinburgh Festival in the late 1950s, and again on television in 1960, mocked reverence for British wartime bravery just 14 or 15 years before.
April 19th; Jerry Ganey covers Righteous Brothers song with film-theme horn section.

April 18th; Bogus graph claims reading of books has doubled since the 1940s. Based on lumping together several separate poorly-designed self-assessment studies of course, with an unremarked 33-year gap in the middle. Classic misleading chart.
April 17th; Quite tight animation sync to 'Once I Was The King Of Spain'.

April 16th; Slightly stressful drive back into Budapest for Robin & Bela to catch a cross-Continental bus to England. A traffic jam a couple of miles outside Pest has Georgina jumping out and persuading a lorrydriver to back up about five feet to let Robin squeeze the car through the gap and off onto a slip road. At the coach station which we reach with two minutes to spare we park in the central loop where traffic is banned. Georgina runs in one direction to sweet-talk the cashier, Robin & Bela set off in another direction with luggage, and I stay behind with the car to chat to the irate official who turns up to berate me for being parked there. When I tell him it's not my car and I have no driving licence, he looks frustrated. Georgina strolls back, gets in, sits behind the steering wheel, and seems to genuinely not even notice the speechless official standing by the car glaring in at us.
Here's a beguiling but ultimately unsuccessful idea - represent philosophies as simple graphics. I tried this a couple of decades ago: it's hard. Click on the page to get the full set of twenty-odd images.
April 15th; Gloomy cloudy weather continues as I answer Bela's questions about physics. Find two curious books hiding in corners of Robin's house.

April 14th; A friendlier introduction to app-writing. Take three connecting trains out to Robin's village in the Great Plain. Dull overcast day, until deep in the countryside a feeble sunset appears on one side of the train, and on the opposite side of the train a deep cornflower-blue sky appears behind trees & farmhouses, hanging down just out of reach like a mid-to-dark-blue curtain. While looking out of both sides of the carriage, on the 2nd & 3rd train get a strangely vivid set of pictures in my head for a peculiar low-budget film - a sort of Tarkovsky-style film in English, set in England for three male actors.
April 13th; More about Amazon megalomania.

April 12th; Amusingly, four days ago on Easter Monday I accidentally, that is to say completely unintentionally, dyed some eggs. Not easy for Gentle Reader to imagine perhaps, but I decided to hard-boil my last couple of eggs in the same boiling water that was softening some pasta. For a few years now I have been gently singeing the dry spaghetti sticks on the hot-plate before putting them in the water, creating blue puffs of smoke, and filling my flat with a curiously pleasant scent halfway between the smell of burning toast and the aroma of baking bread, but not really either. Slightly overdid this, and the boiling water became brown-grey. My eggs emerged gently tinted darker, as if seen through the 70s-style brown-tinted sunglasses of the tea expert Rob once described meeting in Gyor. By night a delicious dinner at Terri & Alvi's. Alison & Stephen Zeigfinger join us, and I see videos for Alvi's alarm-clock smart-phone app.
Sometimes ethereal, quite dreamlike, here is some music by 'Burial'. Seems they take themselves desperately, from the name to the strenuously grim record covers, not to mention Nouvel Gloom song titles like 'Fostercare', 'Wounder', 'Homeless', 'Untrue', 'Stolen Dog', 'Ashtray Wasp', 'Etched Headplate', it just goes on. Here is their almost upbeat 'Loner', 'Near Dark', and the positively cheery 'Shell of Light'.
April 11th; Forthright author declares "Let's not make deadly supergerms that could wipe out humanity!" Hard to disagree, really, for anyone who remembers this film. Watch for depixelating one-eyed man part-way through opening credits.
Lovely dinner with Writers' Group at Esther's, where we watch a curious DVD of 'Showgirls', with a voiced over commentary by David Schmader. Schmader is a self-appointed expert on the film who lives in Seattle. He explains why he thinks this is the ultimate film-so-bad-it's-good, and his observations on the dire plotting, wooden acting, & atrocious writing of Verhoeven's Vegas-set dance extravaganza are surprisingly funny & sharp. In the interview section of the DVD I get to see the face of highly-paid Hungarian-born Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Am oddly shocked to realise he really is a Mitteleuropan oik. Resembles the overweight but cunning truck driver who works out how to rob the warehouse.

April 10th; Easter Tuesday. Intriguing, very bold two-hour film about an American mythologist, or folklorist, as they'd call him round here: David Talbott. I read a couple of Velikovsky books from the public library as a small boy and found them fun but not backed up by anything else I'd heard, but it seems some people never gave up on the renegade Russian scholar. Dr V thought that the catastrophes of many/all ancient civilisation's legends were literal accounts of close approaches by our local planets that today seem to sedately trundle along calm orbits. Talbott has a worked-out theory that surprisingly recently, perhaps even just 7,000 or 8,000 years ago, the planets had different positions. A hauntingly beautiful suggestion is that the golden age remembered in ancient myths of every culture was a literal reference to a time when Saturn appeared huge in the sky and hung there 24 hours a day. He claims that Saturn's older name was the name of the 'sun god' in many languages (for example 'helios' in Greek originally meant 'Saturn' not 'sun') and that other evidence from myths suggest it was very large in the sky, revolving at the pole-star position. Perhaps at latitudes like the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean a big disc could reflect enough sunlight or even warmth at night, like today's moon times ten, to ensure a kind of mild summer all year round. Some of the texts call the Jupiter era, if that's what it was, a time when each year had many harvests and the northern hemisphere was warm & pleasant. Talbott has found a couple of astronomers who say the gravitational dynamics are possible. Certainly a refreshingly clear yet unorthodox theory, and a very enjoyable couple of hours. For anyone interested by this, there are other films where Talbott asks plasma physicists about glowing signs in the sky the ancients reported which might be electromagnetic effects of large bodies passing close to earth.
April 9th; Easter Monday. This pseudo-spring is toying with us. An hour of warm sunshine here and there, but also chilly winds, and strange dark afternoons. Almost as bad as England. The neon light tubes got a note attached to them addressed in a handsome feminine script to 'Dear Somebody' asking them to be removed, and about four days later they vanished, leaving only a plaintive hand-sized scrap of wrapping plastic on the walkway, like a feather after a bird fight. More irritating news on the civil-liberties front: President Barry appears quite chuffed with the new American remotely-kill-anyone-anywhere approach. Balint comes over and we chat about strange collective nouns in English, like a 'parliament of owls'. Could that phrase have started out as a mis-remembering of Chaucer's 'Parliament of Fowls', almost certainly a loose English adaptation of Attar's 'Conference of the Birds'?

April 8th; Lunch with Jessica at the Alfoldi restaurant, so she can enjoy (apparently) the best fish soup in town before leaving for Brussels tomorrow. I finish Jeremy W's copy of 'Enter Psmith' by P.G. Wodehouse, the 2nd of his books I've read. Very readable, and plotted with artful simplicity. Striking how knowledge of cricket is simply assumed of readers before the Great War. Also interesting to see how Wodehouse started off with a straightforward leading character called 'Mike', but the cameo role of Psmith (the P being silent of course) comes to later demand whole books to himself. Since Jeremy explains Psmith to me as a blend of Wooster & Jeeves, the obvious thought is that Wodehouse first brought Psmith into the foreground as a character, and later had another idea. That he could create more narrative tension and natural plotting by then splitting Psmith into two separate people, a likeably foolish toff and an unflappable high-IQ butler.
April 7th; Instal & try QT Creator. African film from a couple of years ago: described as a sci-fi satire set in Cameroon in 2025. Pic by photographer from down the road again, Xenia. The girl in this picture holds a tiny picture of a girl ...which I think is a cigarette lighter.

April 6th; Tea with Jessica. Hear about a new US film distributor. Magazine illustration from half a century ago. Looks quite fresh & sharp compared to now.
April 5th; More role-playing for Jeremy W's management students. Another week of sunshine, though still a slight chill in the air. Mermaids ahoy. Funny how just two colours, that dusty blue & orange, date a printed illustration.

April 4th; Fat cat with steely will defies snowscape.
April 3rd; Got teeth descaled at the dentist few days ago. Next chore: haircut.

April 2nd; Quick coffee with Jeremy W who is in good spirits. On an unrelated topic, no-one who uses "private number" to hide their phone number has any right to expect that people will answer their calls, and they don't deserve to be picked up. I answer only calls from numbers that identify themselves to me. Semi-detailed article bravely tries to get to bottom of McKenna's timewave-ish novelty-theory thing. Yet I still see no proper algorithm showing how one spiky line turned into a whole set of jagged sawteeth apparently soaring across billions of years, and yet still somehow fractally working when you zoom in on one century or one year. As the arithmetic teachers say, show us the working.
April 1st; In this little musical film, Lykke Li hunts down a man over open country until the poor wretch collapses from sheer exhaustion, suggesting Nordic girls are formidable and to be treated warily.
I finish Jessica's copy of a book by Pat Buchanan, who is apparently a well-known politico in the United States. This is his very recent 'Suicide of a Superpower' and reprises themes of the demographic shrinkage of the white European Christian core nation making up almost all of the US as recently as 1950. It is replete with those four-or-five-word sentences American editors and speechwriters like so much. One sentence dongs through the text - "We were a people then" is repeated at intervals through the book at weighty moments, perhaps five times altogether. His case is simple and not unreasonable: 1) other nations believe in ethnic nationalism, and it's no shame for the USA to embrace it too, 2) the rapid diversification of America's ethnic mix came from immigration encouraged since the mid-1960s by the political party which stood to gain from reducing the previous homogeneity of the country (namely the Democrats at the moment when Nixon's Southern Strategy was upending the old link between the Democrat party and white segregationists in the Dixieland states), 3) the US is overextended internationally and should cut military spending, 4) economic protectionism is no shame for the USA and was how the US and every other other country got rich originally (he sees the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs to the Far East as also damaging the core nation of thrifty, white, English-speaking Christians who previously gave the country its main identity), 5) all of this can (still... just about...) be reversed & repaired because the Democratic party's strategy is more fragile than it looks at first, especially during a recession, when government vote-buying largesse has to be cut back. There are a few signs the book was written in a bit of a hurry. "Ours is the world's oldest constitutional republic, the model for all that followed." (No, actually the Swiss Confederation is much older, and earlier republics like the Netherlands or the one-and-a-half-thousand-year-old Republic of Venice were in fact the models followed by recent republics like the US and France.) He quotes Goethe saying something "well over a century ago", which is lucky since the German poet turned 63 years old two centuries ago in 1812. A typo turns an ethnologist into an ethologist. The bit where he reveals himself as a loyal Catholic at the same time as apparently regretting the passing of a 99% Protestant USA is curious. Given how he dates the whole downfall to Lyndon Johnson, one can imagine a Protestant WASPish version of Buchanan setting the start of the decline two or three decades earlier and saying it was the Catholics who had been the thin end of the wedge. Nevertheless the whole thesis makes sense on its own terms. It's a coherent argument for economic & ethnic nationalism. Probably only embarrassment stops most Americans from agreeing with him.

Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact me and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?

We do - otherlanguages.org is gradually building a reference resource for over five thousand linguistic minorities and stateless languages worldwide.

Thousands of unique language communities are becoming extinct. Out of the world's five to six thousand languages, we hardly know what we're losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now.

So?

We may soon regret the extinction of thousands of entire linguistic cultures even more than we regret the needless extinction of many animals and plants.

The planet is increasingly dominated by a handful of major-language monocultures like Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali - all beautiful and fascinating languages.

But so are the 5,000 others.

These are groups of people?

Linguistic minorities are communities of ordinary people whose native tongue is not their country's main official language. Swedish speakers in Finland, French speakers in Canada, Hungarian speakers in Slovakia - and hundreds more - are linguistic minorities.

And totally stateless languages are the native languages of some of the world's most intriguing, little-known, cultures. Like the Lapps inside the Arctic Circle, the Sards in Sardinia, Ainus in Japan. Cherokee in the US, Scots Gaelic in Britain, Friesian in the Netherlands, Zulu in South Africa. There are only a couple of hundred recognised sovereign states and territories, so more than 5,000 languages are the native tongues of linguistically stateless people.

How could I help?

You don't need to learn an endangered language - any more than go to live in the rainforest to help slow its destruction.

A good start is to just tell friends about websites like this.

Broader public interest makes it easier for linguists to raise funds and organise people to learn these languages while there's time.

That's right. There are people who love languages and are happy to learn them on behalf of the rest of us, but they need support, just like zoologists, botanists, or historians.

Fewer languages still sounds good to me

Depends what you think languages are for. They're not just a tool for business. We never said you should learn three or four thousand rare languages - or even one. And which ones we make children learn in school, or whether we should force children to learn languages at all, is another question.


Typical scene in a European city; Chances are, folk here speak some sort of foreign language *5

A century ago - before we understood ecology, and when we cared less about wilderness, most educated people would have laughed at the idea of worrying about plants or animals going extinct. Now we understand how important species diversity is for our own futures, we are more humble, and more worried.

In the same way, linguistic triumphalism by English-speakers who hated studying foreign grammar at school is dangerously ignorant as well as arrogant. Few of us know what we are losing, week by week. How many people realise these languages have scientific value?

Scientific value?

You can think of these languages across the planet as beautiful cathedrals or precious archeological sites we are watching being destroyed. That should be motive enough.

But these five thousand languages may also hold clues to the structure of the human mind. Subtle differences and similarities

Wireless radio can be a great comfort to those unable to leave the textbooks in which they live *6
between languages are helping archeologists and anthropologists to understand what happened in the hundreds of centuries of human history before written history. And that is one of our best chances of understanding how human brains developed over the thousands of centuries leading up to that.

Study of the mind and study of language go hand in hand these days. The world's most marginal languages are actually precious jigsaw pieces from an overall picture of who we are and how our species thinks and evolves. Every tiny language adds another brightly-coloured clue to this academic detective story.

Yet researchers have hardly started sifting through this tantalising evidence, and language extinction is washing it away right in front of us.

And worst of all, most people have no idea that there is this fantastic profusion of cultures across our world, let alone that they are in danger of extinction. Even just more people learning that there are still five thousand living languages in the world today (most of us would answer five hundred or fifty) is already a huge help.

We English-speakers hardly notice English - it's like air for us. But every other language is also an atmosphere for an entire cultural world, and each of these worlds has people whose home it is. Each language encapsulates a unique way of talking and thinking about life. Just try some time in a foreign prison, being forced to cope in another language, and you'll realise how much your own language is your identity. That's true for everyone.

Minority languages are a human-rights issue?

One of the most basic.

Dozens of millions of people worldwide suffer persecution from national governments for speaking their mother tongue - in their own motherland.

Many 'ethnic' feuds puzzling to outsiders had as their basis an attempt to destroy a linguistic community. Would the Northern Ireland dispute be quite so bitter if we English had not so nearly stamped out the Irish Gaelic language, for example? Almost nowhere in the world does a language community as small as the few thousand Rheto-Romanic speakers - the fourth official language of Switzerland - get the protection of a national government. Next time you see some Swiss Francs, check both sides of the banknote.

But outside exceptional countries like Switzerland or the Netherlands, speakers of non-official languages have a much less protected experience.

Speakers of minority languages are often seen as a threat by both the governments and the other residents of the countries where they were born, grew up, and try to live ordinary lives.

They experience discrimination in the job and education markets of their homelands, often having no choice but to pursue education in the major language of the host state - a deliberate government policy usually aimed at gradually absorbing them into the majority culture of that country.

Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, of course *7

Most governments are privately gleeful each time another small separate culture within their borders is snuffed out by a dwindling population or a deliberately centralising education system.

The United Nations is no help. It is an association of a couple of hundred sovereign states based on exclusive control of territory, almost all of them anxious to smother any distinct group or tradition that in any way might blur or smudge the hard-won borders around those pieces of territory.

The usual approach by sovereign states is to deny their linguistic minorities even exist.

-

Mark Griffith, site administrator / contact at otherlanguages.org

back up to top of page

*1 image from , with thanks
*2 "Al-Araby" in written Arabic (read more)
*3 "What?" in American Sign Language; image from , with thanks
*4 "Big" in written Chinese (read more); image from , with thanks
*5 image from , with thanks
*6 image from , with thanks
*7 image from 'B?ume', with thanks to Bruno P. Kramer, and Franckh-Kosmos Verlag

useful:

.languages of the world
.Internet free speech
.weights & measures
.5000 English words
.2000+ Chinese char.s
.persian/english dictionary
.currency rates 1 2 3 4 5

other web diaries:

.enigmatic mermaid
.languagehat
.billy
.francis
.samizdata
.patrick
.rainy day
.varangy
.diaries abroad
.hereinside
.samuel pepys
.hasanpix
.ehsan
.cora
.mychronicles
.openbrackets
.whump
.sargasso

also useful:

.country domain names
.language-learning 1 2
.find old websites
.fine HTML tutorial
.webhost
.minimalist websites

reviews: .................

books {...or films here}

1 metrologie historique
2 postmodernism & the other
3 disaster (news on sunday)
4 money unmade (russian barter in the 1990s)
5 the sleepwalkers
6 e
7 the kruschev era
8 the end of science
9 don't you want me?
10 the carpet wars
11 zelator
12 life of thomas more
13 faber book of science
14 gilgamesh
15 out of it
16 guns, germs & steel
17 words & rules
18 figure in the landscape
19 life without genes
20 bede's history of the english
21 the nothing that is
22 zoology
23 journey by moonlight
24 heavenly serbia
25 ratkay endre
26 the handmaid's tale
27 the selective eye
28 a megismerese epitokovei
29 intention
30 thirty nine steps
31 princess
32 the pyramids
33 the etruscans
34 moonchild
35 paradise news
36 culture of time & space 1880 to 1918
37 szimmetria
38 babel orokeben
39 astro-archeology
40 a history of islamic spain
41 high gothic
42 among the believers
43 the renaissance
44 augustine
45 mcvicar
46 atomised
47 tangled wing
48 da vinci code
49 nature via nurture
50 termeszet szamai
51 decline & fall of roman empire
52 practical cheesemaking
53 the sufis
54 fra angelico at san marco
55 the cryptographer
56 they have a word for it
57 szamok valosan innen & tul
58 artistic theory in italy 1450 to 1600
59 darwin's black box
60 indiai ejszaka
61 cleopatra: histories, dreams & distortions
63 what mad pursuit
64 language, the learner & the school
65 writing the romantic comedy
66 the blank slate
67 dougal & the blue cat
68 diego velasquez
69 horse nonsense
70 a certain chemistry
71 deterring democracy
72 textiles
73 thief of time
74 bloodsucking fiends
75 right ho, jeeves
76 generativ grammatika
77 1st time i got paid for it
78 galapagos
79 othello
80 understanding media
81 mysticism
82 short history of french literature
83 best on the market
84 art of seeing
85 culture & imperialism
86 food of the gods
87 arabic-islamic cities
88 the alchemist
89 verbal learning & memory
90 building a successful software business
91 don't make me think!
92 memory
93 the u.s. & the arab world
94 hard times
95 spells for teenage witches
97 the pig that wants to be eaten
98 encyclopaedia of stupidity
99 seventy eight degrees of wisdom: part i
100 beach watching
101 the ancient greeks
102 brainstorms
103 seventy eight degrees of wisdom: part ii
104 utopia
105 technical writing for engineers & scientists
106 alphabet versus goddess
107 writing on drugs
108 news from somewhere
109 isp survival guide
110 petrus hispanus mester logikajabol
111 art of seduction
112 stet
113 penguin by design
114 the sense of being stared at
115 the golden ratio
116 dinamikus emlekezet
117 margins of reality
118 hopjoy was here
119 bump in the night
120 box of delights
121 color atlas of immunology
122 fashionistas
123 pi in the sky
124 a new kind of fool
125 one man's meat
126 greek fire
127 the buddha in daily life
128 beginner's dutch
129 private life of the brain
130 solar ethics
131 pedant in the kitchen
132 knots
133 the planets within
134 encyclopaedia of ancient & mediaeval history
135 consilience
136 the age of scandal
137 fashion: the 20th century
138 the tipping point
139 design literacy
140 the silent partner
141 hamlet
142 1421
143 the 1890s
144 godel's proof
145 rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead
146 beyond reason
147 little book of music theory
148 q-basic
149 alone of all her sex
150 social studies
151 eternal darkness
152 drawn from memory
154 a guide to elegance
155 medea & other plays
156 the future of money
157 cheese
158 grammars of creation
159 aquarian conspiracy
160 the climate crisis
161 true fiction
162 the making of memory
163 why most things fail
164 genetikai abece
165 finding fulfilment
166 genome
167 the broken estate
168 inigo jones
169 flashman & the dragon
170 from bauhaus to our house
171 100 great paintings
172 kis spanyol nyelvtan
173 the historian
174 tomorrow's gold
175 charting made easy
176 life after life
177 spanyol igei vonzatok
178 the eclipse of art
179 fire in the mind
180 the human body
181 out of control
182 possession
183 simplified chinese characters
184 the generation of 1914
185 intellectuals
186 world of late antiquity
187 riddle & knight
188 informacio kultusza
189 napoleon of notting hill
190 secrets: palm-reading
191 meet yourself as you really are
192 cat's abc
193 intro to spanish poetry
194 rise of christian europe
195 philip's guide to electric living
196 sins for father knox
197 celtic twilight
198 myths of love
199 snobbery with violence
200 just like tomorrow
201 7 basic plots
202 experiment with time
203 vile bodies
204 icons & images: 60s
205 fisher king
206 new jerusalem
207 born on a blue day
208 surveillir & punir
209 trial of socrates
210 how to catch fairies
211 conversations on consciousness
212 mind performance hacks
213 conscience of the eye
214 beau brummell
215 evolution
216 the outsider
217 raja yoga
218 rise of political lying
219 occidentalism
220 colossus
221 secret teachings of jesus
222 blue murder
223 nostrodamus the next 50 years
224 homage to catalonia
225 charity ends at home
226 palace of dreams
227 discovering book collecting
228 beyond the outsider
229 the last barrier
230 that hideous strength
231 indian sculpture
232 small world
233 evolution & healing
234 in search of memory
235 campo santo
236 llewellyn's 2007 tarot reader
237 dream of rome
238 why buildings fall down
239 the empty space
240 england made me
241 greek science in antiquity
242 science, a l'usage des non-scientifiques
243 utmutato tarot
243 hunt for zero point
244 william wilberforce
245 viktor schauberger
246 untouchable
247 the vitamin murders
248 straw dogs
249 elizabeth's spymaster
250 the hard life
251 the god delusion
252 the intellectual
253 undercover economist
254 quirkology
255 chasing mammon
256 early mesopotamia & iran
257 the strange death of david kelly
258 the pilgrimage
259 origin of wealth
260 maxims
261 the finishing school
262 the shepherd's calendar
263 islamic patterns
264 lost world of the kalahari
265 german short stories 1
266 electricity
267 liber null & psychonaut
268 born to rebel
269 wittgenstein's poker
270 will the boat sink the water?
271 romeo & juliet
272 why beautiful people have more daughters
273 the crossing place
274 the turkish diplomat's daughter
275 missionary position
276 lust in translation
277 teaching as a subversive activity
278 how german is it
279 empires of the word
280 warped passages
281 the power of now
282 ponder on this
283 sword of no-sword
284 narcissism
285 blink
286 shock of the old
287 basque history of the world
288 truth: a guide
289 who shot jfk?
290 newtonian casino
291 power & greed
292 the world without us
293 5-minute nlp
294 concise guide to alchemy
295 evidence in camera
296 4-hour work week
297 the rosicrucian enlightenment
298 de-architecture
299 how to lie with maps
300 a book of english essays
301 a time of gifts
302 the occult philosophy in the elizabethan age
303 le pelerinage des bateleurs
304 alchemy & alchemists
305 greenmantle
306 the hero with 1000 faces
307 goethe's parable
308 rhedeyek es fraterek
309 letter to a christian nation
310 the tryst
311 7 experiments that could change the world
312 mill on the floss
313 metastases of enjoyment
314 the isles
315 between the woods and the water
316 secrets of the great pyramid
317 life in the french country house
318 the china study
319 tarot: theory & practice
320 the roger scruton reader
321 alchemy & mysticism
322 picasso's mask
323 the rule of four
324 triumph of the political class
325 arts of darkness
326 neuroscience & philosophy
327 the art of memory
328 mind wide open
329 mud, blood, & poppycock
330 society of the spectacle
331 lila
332 de imaginibus
333 electronics
334 giordano bruno & the embassy affair
335 temporary autonomous zone
336 the human touch
337 the fascination of evil
338 the king of oil
339 dowsing
340 the book of j
341 the west and the rest
342 story of my life
343 plain tales from the hills
344 under the influence
345 modern culture
346 50 mots clefs d'esoterisme
347 giordano bruno & the hermetic tradition
348 development, geography & economic theory
349 das kapital: a biography
350 strange days indeed
351 hegel: a very short introduction
352 reflections on the revolution in france
353 history of sexuality: an introduction
354 why we buy
355 origins of virtue
356 the holographic universe
357 a dead man in deptford
358 obsolete
359 137
360 in your face
361 7 spies who changed the world
362 the noetic universe
363 why beauty is truth
364 imagery in healing
365 the craftsman's handbook
366 futurism


films ..................................

1 k-pax
2 very annie mary
3 wasabi
4 gosford park
5 arany varos
6 minority report
7 amelie
8 bridget jones' diary
9 arccal a fo:ldnek
10 monsters' ball
11 cube
12 man with no past
13 talk to her
14 szerelemtol sujtva
15 bowling for columbine
16 matrix3
17 zoolander
18 anything else
19 farenheit 9/11
20 8 & 1/2 women
21 madagascar
22 kill bill 1
23 dude, where's my car?
24 the woman in green
25 the hunger
24 nightwatch
25 de battre son coeur s'est arrete
26 wicker man
27 v for vendetta
28 courage the cowardly dog
29 casino royale
30 power of nightmares
31 charlie's angels
32 full throttle
33 foxy brown
34 paths of glory
35 airplane
36 between iraq & a hard place
37 mutiny on the bounty
38 flashmob the opera
39 octopussy
40 bakkerman
41 kiterunner

....................................................................................................................................

March 31st; Terence McK burbles intriguingly but also a bit suspiciously about "novelty theory", which apparently he invented soon after messing around with the I Ching in 1971. However, contrast the faux innocence with which he deprecates himself in the first three minutes as "an Irishman" just fooling about, amazingly stumbling on a timescale which ends on the very same month and very same day as the Mayan calendar he knew nothing about ...with the section on this page which claims McKenna found his first timescale ended in November 2012 but later on he retrofitted it to coincide with 21st December 2012. Not the impression we get in the little video talk. Naughty Terence.
March 30th; Alarming photograph: how moments of imminent doom feel to nervous types like me. Zdravko alerts me to a nasty dispute between angry acolytes of Chomsky and some unfortunate linguist who thinks he has found a language with no subordinate clauses. Finish a book I bought and started a decade ago: 'Magikus Talizmanok' ('Talisman Magic') by Richard Webster, translated to Hungarian by Balazs Kecskes. This is a working guide, well explained in steps, to creating magic squares both as mathematical amusements and for purposes of divination or protection. Though he covers some other systems, he mainly draws on Indian tradition, where the magic square (rows, columns, and diagonals adding to the same number for a given array) is called a yantra, a specific kind of mandala. Much fun to be had, needing only pencil & paper and a little time.

March 29th; Wake in glorious sunshine on Carolyn's sofa, warm under a couple of blankets. Carolyn's flat is where Jessica is staying while in town.
Mr McKenna, his nasal lilt here fed through a ghastly talking mask of the High Seventies psychedelic album-cover variety, sums up in just nine minutes why he thinks DMT trips are such a special type of drug experience, different from any other. Meanwhile, the clear tones of Alan Watts, Buddhism explainer, (I've never heard his voice before) calmly sets out the old idea, vaguely parallel to but unlike McKenna's drug-based viewpoint, that the self is an illusion.
March 28th; Meet Jessica again to discuss common projects.

March 27th; A shop in London with ideas above its station. Meet Tim by evening on business. If you were photographing Kate Moss at the Ritz in Paris, you probably would make her stand on the mantelpiece at some point.
March 26th; Finish Sound-Studio Zita's Michael Wood book 'The Domesday Quest' about, intriguingly, what William the Bastard's detailed Domesday survey of the assets of England in 1086 can tell us about preceding patterns of taxation and land cultivation in Saxon, Viking, and Romano-Celtic areas of England through the six or seven centuries leading up to the Norman conquest. Only after finishing the book did Wood's name come back to me as that of a then-young historian presenter of a BBC TV series on Dark Ages England I saw in the 1980s. He does a good job of showing how actual history is done: by trying to compare different scraps of textual evidence such as land bequests, tax documents, notes surviving from court statements; seeing where they overlap; and trying to trace persisting patterns through successive centuries revealed by this mosaic of evidence, however thin. A couple of quiet mentions about the by-today clearly wasteful county-border changes and decimalisation of English money in the early 1970s show he feels, as any historian must, sad regret. Completely unnecessary vandalism to what was a living fabric of continuity between past & future.
In the evening, find some interesting 10-minute talks by a rather serious man who has written about narcissists, the psychiatric type de jour. This one is about "inverted narcissists", people seeking the reflected glory of a narcissist they "serve".

March 25th; Tea & cakes with Jessica, back in town after 8 years. She is now not only a film-maker, but a trader of houses. She has useful ideas about selling my house.
Listen to one of Terence McKenna's early-1990s talks again. He was a good raconteur. At one hour forty minutes he slides from being an open-minded reader of hermetic history to John Dee's Enochian alphabet, to 1950s CIA interviews, on to a very funny & interesting after-dinner anecdote about one of his DMT trips. A terrific set of semi-humorous speculations about how octopuses think & communicate at two hours forty one minutes is very stimulating. This emerges from a slightly dodgy theory of his about spoken languages requiring "a congruence of internal dictionaries", and he insists on mistakenly calling them "octopi" with false erudition. On the other hand, his enthusiasm and curiosity are wonderfully infectious. A sadder close to the whole recording has him ranting at around three hours fifty minutes about the vital urgency of population limitation. Despite being a clever & open-minded man, he is convinced people haven't thought through the virtues of depopulation and the nature of capitalism, whereas in fact he is the one who hasn't thought through demography or economics. The twenty years after this talk turned out to have fewer wars than all century with fewer people starving, fewer shortages, and more of the global poor rising to health and material self-improvement than ever in history. "Let's go to one [child] and save the earth," he says, self-assuredly, unaware that right as he spoke sharply rising populations all over the world were becoming more affluent, more civilised, and more peaceful. Not something the DMT elves explained to him it seems. "It would be a very interesting world where populations were dropping" he says, having just failed to even guess at the growing welfare burden of caring for an ageing population this entails. Strongly assertive blind spots like these arouse second thoughts about his reliability on the topics he seems more informed and thoughtful about. It also undermines his claim that the psychedelic experience brings humility.
March 24th; Couple of beers with Mr Saracco, whose hand is now healing after a freak accident at a ten-pin-bowling alley.

March 23rd; In the afternoon at a shopping arcade (This one is helpfully called 'Arcade' / 'Arkad') meet IT Attila. He challenges me to a game of Nine Men's Morris, which apparently Hungarians call 'Mill' ('Malom'). He draws the board out on a page of his exercise book, and we play with coins for counters. He tells me he wrote a script in QT to solve the problem of fitting the most queens on an empty chessboard so none can take each other. Later, scrambled eggs across town with Nationalism Bea.
March 22nd; In the evening at Sound Studio Zita's, she recommends this website about languages. Rest of day do sound recording, from 9am to 7pm at a studio. All afternoon I wear a chemical-protection mask. This is so as to sound as muffled as a virtual-reality character in a sci-fi film set inside a quantum machine should sound.

March 21st; Another old Zappa song - what Scruton would call a melody with (almost) no melody. Contrary to the extreme American assimilation credo that anyone can become anything, equally extreme Zappa says no, on the contrary, you are fated to remain what you are. Contemptuously expressed as ever. Not so far from some radio shows by the Goons, also clear from this tunelet how much of Zappa is vaudeville or music hall.
March 20th; A sweet image for what books do.

March 19th; The web seems to be crammed with long sound files of Terence McKenna talks in days of yore. This one here is over seven hours of the great sage, chortling away in one of his monologues about psychedelic mushrooms in the history of the human species. While undoubtably a broadly-read man, Terence is unfortunately not deeply-read enough for the majesty of his historical claims, and the first sign of his unacknowledged Rousseauist faith in or yearning for noble savages pops up at 11 minutes in. Very much a public thinker for post-1960s hippies, he is entertaining and his speculations are stimulating. A bit of an Alistair Cooke for a later generation, instead of musing away about peculiarities of a large industrial country across the Atlantic, he updates his listeners about the quirks of primeval forest people from humanity's deep past. McKenna describes the Garden of Eden incident as "history's first drug bust", arguing persuasively that The Fruit of The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil sounds very much like a hallucinogenic plant or fungus such as the psilocybin mushroom which gives its takers experiential insight, a new perspective on life, and in some sense (as a worried Jehova remarks in Genesis) makes humans who take it like unto gods. Yet already with his second big idea - that primeval mushroom supplies started to thin out, and less & less frequent festivals entailed storing dwindling supplies of dried psilocybin fungus in jars of honey, causing over a thousand years a mushroom religion to gradually become a fermented-honey alcohol religion - McKenna emerges as a man who doesn't let lack of evidence stop him from unfurling bold, thrilling guesses. His whiny, nasal voice has a hypnotic insistence which pulls the listener in. A sing-song lilt helps him to stroll down long, multi-clause sentences, and there is artful combination of long clever-sounding words and slang. He describes Descartes' experience as a young man fighting in the Thirty Years' War at Ulm as him being sent "to kick some ass" in Eastern Europe, relates Descartes' dream revelation that he was instructed to work on the superstructure of materialistic science by angels, and casually drops in that Ulm was later the birthplace of Einstein. The sly effect of mixing words like 'prestidigitation', 'mycological', 'polymorphic', 'perturbation', 'heterodox' with newer hip-to-the-scene terms like 'kick ass', 'drug bust', 'shot its wad' and also cosily old-fashioned slang of previous decades like 'malarcky', or 'whole kit and caboodle' is to intellectually flatter his audience & emotionally snuggle up to them at the same time. This old story-telling technique of mingling archaic, high-falutin' words with rowdy street humour is a way of bamboozling listeners much favoured by Irish writers and speakers, and McKenna brings his Irish American identity into the story. He describes the spirits of the psychedelic plants as akin to Gaelic elves, he mocks his own provincial US "Catholic choir-boy" upbringing, and he opposes Celtic earthiness with English coldness, to the approval of his audience. For example, Celts & Czechs are peoples (he says) comfortable with mushrooms, they pass the mycological test. Whereas the fungus-hating English are apparently more likely to say "Put it down, you don't know where it's been." The overall effect is charming and quite intoxicating - which he might think of as a good thing (at least under the guidance of the right toxins). However it involves huge amounts of what mathematicians dismiss as 'handwaving', which translates as breezily asserting you've proved something when you haven't. Nonetheless, his speculations are fun, and his reminiscences of the effects of various drugs on him interesting. There is a fascinating section about how one forest people's intoxicant gives the taker not just any old synaesthesia, but the vivid impression of seeing sentences of language he or someone is speaking as three-dimensional structures, like intricate little machines with jewelled movements. This other tape of his is four and a half hours. He has read Frances Yates on hermeticism in the Renaissance, and seems able to stay off the topic of psychedelic stimulants for longer stretches of this shorter set of talks. Here he takes aim at European Christianity's concern with guilt, the Fall of Man, and Original Sin, contrasting it with the liberating expansiveness of hermetic magic in the mediaeval and early Renaissance periods. He has the bold suggestion that dating by 17th-century scholars revealing Hermes Trismegistus to be centuries newer than previously assumed damaged the magical tradition so decisively that this was what allowed science to take centre stage philosophically from the 1650s to the present.
March 18th; A long thin cardboard box of four neon light tubes is still leaning upright against the wall outside exactly halfway between my front door and Neighbour Nikola's front door a few feet down the landing. It's been there six or seven days now.
Curious tale of how programmers regard their own. The strange disappearance of a Ruby advocate known as _why.

March 17th; Quite a long time since I heard this song. Now I listen to it again, it almost sounds like a kind of country & western music for maths students.
Saturday streets basking almost baking in hot sun. Actually too hot for my thin pullover when I go out. I pop into a corner shop I don't usually use, finding myself at the till behind a slim yet curvy girl, perhaps half-Gypsy, with blonde highlights. She is trailing a relatively unbratty, well-behaved four or five-year-old boy. I say hello to the girl. She turns round cheerfully and looks me right in the eye, declaring she knows me from somewhere. I tell her that either yesterday or the day before yesterday she & I were in another shop when... She remembers before I finish. It was at the Ulloi street shop about three streets away from here and two nights ago. She had brassily asked "Whose idea was it to put this chewing gum stand here at the till?" (A 24" x 18" grid of white-wire shelves holding lots of flavours of chewing gum that blocks most of that shop's till area.) The son of the Egyptian owner sitting on a stool in one corner had sleepily owned up it was his idea. The perky little blonde had then told him how obviously daft it was to block the till area like that. Back at the sun-filled shop today, Saturday morning, she looks me in the eye again, nods and says firmly "Day before yesterday." She then relates this story of two nights ago to the easy-going Hungarian man, perhaps late 20s, at this shop's counter. Chat turns to the general chore of minding a 24-hour shop like this. "I've even heard of armed robberies at night round here," she continues chirpily, talking both to me and the shop manager. "Oh here too," he replies with a weary smile. "No!" she chuckles. "Oh yes, a couple of times," he goes on with a mild half-shrug, "I just tell them to sod off and they do." She clucks sceptically, yet clearly delighted at the story. "No, really," the man at the till nods, looking extremely laid back. "I've got one of them on film." "How?!" she squeaks. "Oh, I took it off the security cameras here," he murmurs, pointing at the ceiling while fishing out a mobile phone from a pocket. The Gypsy-looking blonde & I hunch together to peer at the little screen of his iPhone or Android phone. Swiping two fingers, he casually pulls up a snatch of CCTV footage and we see him there, alone in this shop at night, mopping an empty aisle. Screen right, a bulky male appears in the doorway, pointing a handgun at him. We see our shop manager, back to the camera, leaning on his mop conversing with the man with the gun. A couple of times he turns his back on the robber and starts mopping again, and we can see - though his face is just off the image edge - the bulky man with the hand gun carries on talking from the way his body & the gun keep moving slightly.
After about forty or fifty seconds, the man with the gun goes away.
March 16th; Ten or eleven days since I took this photograph of Tarot cards laid out in a mandala shape on the floor, following instructions in Jodorowsky's book.

March 15th; Clear landlady's desk and bring it back into action over by big window. 2nd chair now painted a sort of tzatziki green (Slightly eerily, Margaret Thatcher smuggles herself into the photo, picture right). Give or take a final sand-down and one or two last licks of paint, Chair 2 complete.
March 14th; Signor Peruggi will see you now.

March 13th; Get more things done. Cloud looms over houses. Very like those corporate ads that wish to imply some Godlike insurance firm or biochemical concern will dominate you benignly.
March 12th; One of the very few pictures on this multi-artist illustration & photography website where a girl is allowed to be a bit pretty & feminine. Elsewhere on the site, a host of gaunt, leggy, English-looking mannequins with very short haircuts do ridiculous or vaguely nasty things like bathe in custard or eat an ice lolly shaped like a kitten. If she has long hair, then she'll be a drawing, not a photo, and there will be some blood, snakes, or other macabre element in the picture. Do all these art students prefer the grotesque so as to stand out in a crowded marketplace, or does it reveal a fear, even hatred, of beauty? Perhaps just a dislike of girls.
Regina & I do more work on book cover.

March 11th; Not sure if these are trees, but they're peculiar.
March 10th; Women with hollow faces? Owls wearing boots? Here you are.

March 9th; Adorable: Dutch artist makes indoor clouds.
March 8th; Stress mounting.

March 7th; Lovely warm sunshine. Talk to Regina about book cover. Finish attaching back to chair.
March 6th; Yesterday, or the morning before, I wake out of a dream so vivid it is actually boring, in which I am one of several analysts in a conference call about the silver market. More like 2 weeks ago one of the landlady's chunky tall glass tumblers finally exploded inside the kettle, ending an epoch where I boiled eggs inside her tumbler inside my kettle. After months of heat-stressing, it broke neatly into three pieces without the slightest trace of an extra splinter, though I did wash the kettle out carefully to be sure.
Today, meet Buttons Sylvia & Gabriella for tea again, discussing possible joint work and learning that a year or so ago elegant Gabriella made a bag for herself, got offered cash for it, and so drifted into designing and selling women's bags alongside her film job. There's me thinking those stories were never really true. She & I go a distance by trolleybus together, discussing detail moulds & craft materials.

March 5th; Bizarre Forbes list of jobs they seem to relish being phased out. No. 18: Florists?
March 4th; Over at Franc's for dinner & natter.

March 3rd; Meet Buttons Sylvia at Italian Institute for tea, bumping into Gabriella.
March 2nd; Friday. Get paid. Scrambled eggs with Nationalism Bea, green tea with Sound-Studio Zita. How to get people to vote you in for a second presidential term if you are a Kremlin apparachik? Perhaps target voters too young to remember your Soviet-era secret-police career.

March 1st; By night finish a Tarot book of mother's, 'Reading The Tarot' by Leo Louis Martello. This is a curious book because it presents itself as something very ordinary & humdrum. He briskly tours through the 78-card pack, with a page (and a cringe-making little rhyme) for each card, and seems to say that all swords are bad, and all cups, wands, and pentacles are good. The book comes with no author photo, and he styles himself the kind of Tarot writer who tells you that if you see the Chariot card upside down, you might need to take your car to get repaired at the garage. These very facile, daytime-TV-style readings (the Queen of Pentacles is a flashy showgirl type, probably more into luxury than love) seem to fit a man who is not just content to be a witch and write about witchcraft, but is even a flamboyant American witch, the type who founds a public lobby in the 1970s called the Witches' Anti-Defamation League and gets Wicca established as a mainstream denomination. It all sounds quite glib, though him spending a year in Morocco in the early 1960s researching the Tarot only half suits this image. He mentions his grandmother & great-grandmother being witches in Sicily in the introduction. One or two remarks - such as the High Priestess being the highest card in the pack in the view of "adepts in the Old Religion" jar with the parlour-game flavour of most of it. Might be one of those odd texts where an insider feels obliged to hide lots of meanings according to the occult principle that harmless superficial knowledge can be disseminated freely, but that important stuff needs to phrased opaquely so that only wiser folk will spot it and look more deeply. However, if that means the book is in some clever code, then I failed to decipher it.

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