Glenn Gould Plays Contrapunctus XIV Art of Fugueing

Glenn Gould Plays Contrapunct XIV

Thus unfolding
This unfurled
Insignium of strange device
Revealed.
Transubstantiation
Resurrection of the body
Assumption into heaven
Dragged by angels laughing
At the corporal weight of what they would
Take from the dying
To give to the unborn.
The flight of the unknown
The leap of understanding
Your eyes.

See him now who died at fifty from new France
Circling like a bird of prey
Over a lake in the mountains
Breaking the bread,
Lifting it high. Hic est enim corpus meum.

B A C H
Beth Aleph Ghimel Heth
This is my body this is my breath
This is my life and this is my death.

Take, eat.

Edward G. Nilges 26 Oct 2009

Response to Facebook member re: civilization and the indigenous

This is in response to a discussion about Columbus and his infamous day at New York poet Carlos Andres Gomez’ Facebook page.

Mr. M. A.:

It is IMO a mistake to speak of indigenous peoples as a civilization, and this is a separate issue from the question as to whether it’s better to “be” indigenous (assuming that possible barring a worldwide socioeconomic collapse in which the weaker members of society would suffer a mass Holocaust) or “civilized”: whether as Brecht claimed to have believed, civilization is dogshit and it would be better to revert to more local and indigenous folkways (again assuming that’s an option).

There “was” a pre-Columbian civilisation: in fact there were more than one: the Aztecs, Inca and Mayan civilizations come to mind and the first two were destroyed by the Spaniards (but not by Columbus). Also, there may have been more that we just don’t know about because as African historians caution us, tropical lands (north South America and Central America) are unkind to archeological remains, unlike temperate zones.

But depending on how you define “civilization”, what “civilization” did Columbus destroy? I’m not in the business at all of telling you how to use words, and given Ghandi’s quote about civilization being a good thing and the West should try it, then perhaps you’re on to something if you conflate, which you seem to be doing, the indigenous and the civilized, using the phrase “indigenous civilised” without intending an oxymoron.

Perhaps the Carib and Arawak were more civilized in both an honorific and real sense while at the same time being indigenous. I have been using the terms as mutually exclusive, perhaps because I am a white SOB colonialist male after all, like Indiana Jones, or Aguirre, wrath of God.

I am not going to say that writing or the wheel defines civilisation, although my Dad would, being even more of a pain in the ass than I seem to be. This is, I sincerely believe, superstition, because you can do stuff without writing and the wheel. They are accidents. To define civilization as writing in particular is a mistake because the oral traditions of the indigenous in many ways are stronger, perhaps (and this was Plato’s fancy) because the absence of writing strengthens the memory.

Or, we could follow an historian’s politically neutral usage and distinguish between local, noncommunicating indigenous and civilisations with more territory. But as soon as we do, the “civilization” becomes something mortared in blood, it would seem, since unification over any distance usually involves conquest and enslavement.

I would personally prefer to define a “civilization” as one that evolves to the point that a las Casas or Bishop Oscar Romero emerges who using the professed ideals of the civilization itself and its holy books calls that civilization to account and calls upon what Lincoln called without “postmodern irony” (it being 1865) “the better angels of our nature”.

This the indigenous does not generally do.

I would (thinking on the late Derrida’s writing on what it means to welcome the stranger) define civilization as hospitality. ‘Course, that puts me into a heap of trouble, doesn’t it? For the Indians of Massachusetts, Virginia and Hispaniola gave the Pilgrims, John Smith and Columbus welcome, to be repaid with slaughter. Therefore “civilization” might be that which evolves to allowing self-criticism from within. It isn’t hospitality, although hospitality is part of the higher received meaning.

I’d say that we call relatively mutually isolated Arcadian communities without writing or guns “indigenous” intending no disrespect: I’d say we call expanding territories with more specialization of functions (starting with the division of social roles between laboring classes, priestly classes, warrior classes and rulers, which seem to have been a feature of preColumbian Aztec, Inca and Mayan “civilizations”) “civilizations” intending no, or only some, respect until they evolve to the Abrahamite point (rejected slaughter of Isaac), this being the point at which they question themselves.

We should intend minimal respect towards “civilization” because the Arcadian-indigenous societies probably evolved without the injustice named by Marxist historians such as Chris Harman in A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD: the crushing of small farmers and their enslavement, and the monopoly of grain by priests as seen in early Mesopotamia…and probably in pre-Columbian civilization as well.

Two cheers, then, at best, for civilization and its Columbus Days and other festivals which commemorate and celebrate horror.

But it’s always been like this. What we call the human condition

the Whips and Scornes of time,
The Oppressors wrong, the poore mans Contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d Loue, the Lawes delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurnes
That patient merit of the vnworthy takes,

what we know, are a human artifact, as Hamlet knew.

At the same time, you cannot run backward, and ensure that

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl’d vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

(Milton, Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity). It’s all one way, and I for one have no time to waste on romanticising the indigenous. Learn from it. Try to live more like it. But it’s gone, Flintstone, and no amount of dissing Columbus will bring it back.

Nor have I time to waste on Columbus. Heaping scorn on his memory is just amnesiac. It forgets the ethnic cleansing of Islam in Iberia: that was his patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella. The destruction of Mexican civilization: that was Cortes, wasn’t it? The destruction of Inca civilization: that was Pizzaro, wasn’t it? The colonization of Hispanic North America: that was Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, and Sam Houston, wasn’t it? The economic colonization of Cuba: that was Teddy Roosevelt, huh. The contra war: that was Ronald Reagan and Oliver North, isn’t that a kiss my ass.

The fact is that the European west in recovery from the Black Death was looking for a way to the shopping mall of its time, that being China, and Islam in the form of the Turkish Caliphate was in its way. It turned around, and the indigenous societies and pre-Columbian civilizations were in its way. And what the masses do when they are either starving or just bored outa their skulls is head for horizons for better or worse.

Now, all of this sounds like “shit happens” and is not meant to, M. A. It just means that as a person of European descent, I do not celebrate a goddamn thing. I don’t celebrate the fact that my German ancestors had no land because vast tracts of the north German plain were reserved for ducal purposes, mostly hunting. I don’t celebrate the fact that they took aim at Indians in Minnesota (and probably missed if my own experience with firearms is any guide).

But I do remember. I do commemorate. And I do believe that if Latin Americans romanticise the inaccessible indigenous, their wonderful post-Columbus civilization, Las Casas, Oscar Romero, Jorge Luis Borges, Diego Rivera, will disappear in a universal Starbuck’s.

Latin America is a civilization. I want to see it preserved. Latin Americans fought for recognition of the fact that they created, from nearly nothing, a civilization from the Mission de San Francisco to Tierra del Fuego, not by eliminating the Indians (that was the NorteAmericanos) but by fusion with them. For too long, my country has thrown its weight around Central America and ignored Latin America. It pulled the plug on Argentina in 2000 destroying Argentina’s middle class because to Washington, they did not matter. It tried to have Hugo Chavez killed in May 2002 when my fellow attendees at a computer conference were Chavez supporters even though they worked at oil companies.

This is, whether you like it or not, a postColumbian civilization and in the United States, Columbus day can recognize this while at the same time being brutally forthright and honest about what happened. Anything would be better than passing over Columbus and his infamous day with a sheepish grin or a knowing smirk, because if you do this, none of your students will become a Supreme Court Justice.

Global Artist Elizabeth Briel

Check out this interview.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer gal, since she has helped a lot of people with fellowship info, and exposure when she had a gallery on Lamma. She expresses herself well in person; fully formed thoughts drop as pearls from her. She even gave old man Karloff here recognition having discovered him posting art in response to the lads at the Lamma placeblog whilst fighting a battle *royale*. Well done, Elizabeth.

International Herald Tribune letter re: Yaron Bob’s “art”

Edward G. Nilges

10 Oct 2009

International Herald Tribune

To whom it may concern:

I find your coverage of artist and computer teacher Yaron Bob in “Along Gaza, a Quiet (But Still Tense) Life” (Isabel Kershner, IHT 8 Oct 2009) very objectionable.

Yaron Bob, it seems, fashions sculptures out of low tech Qassam rockets fired from Gaza at Israeli towns, and claims that his works are “an answer to death”.

Another Israeli answer to “death”, unfortunately, was the use of white phosphorus in an attack on January 15 of this year on UNRWA headquarters, and a separate attack on a Gaza school on January 9th. In each of these attacks alone, the casualties matched the total number of Israeli casualties from rocket fire since 2001, and thousands of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank have died as the result of Israeli use of high tech heavy weapons on civilians, weapons vastly more deadly than Qassam rockets.

The casualties from Qassam rockets are low not only due to their limited range and power. They are also low because Israeli civilians can be easily relocated during periods of attacks…or may leave Israel voluntarily. These options are simply not available to Gaza and West Bank civilians most of whom cannot leave the zones allocated to them by Israel.

Sderot, a town subject to the largest number of rocket attacks, was built on Palestinian land seized in 1948, Najd, whose inhabitants were forcibly expelled in that year.

For Israelis to act and to make art as victims is, I think, what Theodore Adorno may have been thinking about when he said “no poetry after the Holocaust”. A glance at Google Earth alone makes it plain that Israel adjacent to Gaza is a country club adjacent to a concentration camp. Let us have no more of this “art”.

Sincerely

Edward G. Nilges

Response to Fish’s The Andes Chronicles

In his latest blog post, Stanley Fish celebrates a idyllic little town in upstate New York for its lack of “crime” and its discussion groups. But it’s clear that the town is another Celebration, this time for liberals, where Celebration down in Florida is an “ideal” American town.

Here’s my response.

“Threatens to become a Mexican restaurant?”

Mr. Fish, this is a massive aporia, for it cracks open this pastoral…wide open, in my view.

What people seem to want from Andes are not discussion groups (which in my experience tend to end discussion once discussion gets interesting) or flower beds: I grew up on a pastoral idyll, in which the neighborhood bully, now a Chicago millionaire, destroyed the flower bed built by a neighbor’s child because, he said, boys aren’t supposed to plant flowers.

No, what they want is “no crime”, which is white American code for “no obstreperous minorities”.

They wish in fact to recreate a bourgeois pastoral which in fact never existed. It did not exist for my late mother, growing up poor on the lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s. It did not exist in Italy for my uncle, sent against the German lines in the last months of the war.

Even in the 1930s and the 1940s, the bourgeois pastoral was a cinematic fantasy, toward which people aspired because Hollywood ruthlessly destroyed the makers of alternative visions, or those who, like Orson Welles, showed the downside of the American dream.

Stanley, I’m almost as old as you, but I vastly prefer neighborhoods where there is life in all its diversity. My favorite neighborhoods where I live now in Hong Kong are Causeway Bay, one of the most densely populated places on earth, and Tsim Sha Shue, a diverse neighborhood of Chinese, Westerners, Arabs and Africans. My favorite neighborhood in Paris is the mixed Senegalese/French arondissement around the Gare du Nord.

I do not seek a white fantasy land as false in its liberal, progressive way as is “Celebration”, a Florida town constructed to be a redneck fantasy.

Sociologists have discovered that most people as they age prefer to live in vital cities because they cannot drive and can healthily walk to all needed services. While Andes appears to support walkers (except, perhaps, for American citizens guilty of Walking While Black, who may attract attention), life in Andes could easily become a nightmare for you once you are no longer able to drive.

If I were you, and I am not, I’d buy a flat on 72nd street opposite Central Park.

The upshot at Schott

At a previous entry I describe entering Schott’s Vocab at the New York Time with a real carpet bombing: a limerick on each of Schott’s suggested words. Alas, I was not recognized in Schott’s followup.

One of the other unrecognized members of the Salon des Refuses, one Christopher Michael Brunelle, posted this plaint:

The winners should follow the rules?
You silly! You’re one of the fools.
True rhythms and rhymes
Aren’t a sign of the Times;
“Good enough” is enough for their schools.

To which I replied at the blog:

Now, Christopher Michael Brunelle,
Don’t say oh damn and oh hell,
Remember Amadeus?
The Emperor said, “God Save Us,”
“You’ve overwhelmed us with notes! Not swell!”

Shaffer, who wrote that wonderful play,
Was trying, I think, to say,
That the winners of today’s trivial prizes
Will be in for some rude surprises
When the mill of the Gods grinds away.

Then, in response to other poets maudit who got stuck into a Gnu (don’t know if this will make it through moderation):

There was a jolly sailor who rogered with a Gnu
The reason why, no man ever knew
Perhaps he had a View, man
To sire a sort of Gnuman
That bestial sailor who rogered with a Gnu!

There was a Gnu in Gnome Alaska where the midnight sun does shine
And his Limericks were gnomic, and as such, very fine
Sarah Palign he did Malign he spared her not at all:
He made her cry he made her sigh, and she began to bawl:
Will no man rid me of this gnomic Gnu up where the midnight sun does shine?

Kundry Laughing at Amfortas' Suffering (detail) 2007 Edward G. Nilges

Two poems in ersatz Chinese style

NB: the style is necessarily faux-chinoiserie for a good reason, I do not know Chinese, and not enough about Chinese literature until the unknown Scholar who has checked out The Columbia History of Chinese Literature returns that book to the Hong Kong Public Library, after which I shall endeavor to become frightfully well-informed about T’ang poetry and such, but at this time in translation.

Instead, the style is only meant to be reminiscent of certain old, and probably highly inaccurate, English translations of Chinese poetry.

Running to Sok Kyu Wan from Wang Long on Moon Festival

Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Todt! – Hans Bethke

The way is unlit except by a shimmering moon,
Children carry electrical torches and sticks of light.
Then, above the beach, there are few people,
And the night is humid but rather cool.
Able, at first, to run the upward inclines,
Then laboring like one under a heavy burden
I walk up the steepest hills.
Water releases scents of many plants,
Rushing downhill to find salt.
For if the salt loses its savor, it shall be cast into the flames.

Sok Kyu Wan is deserted except for some kids,
Playing ball in front of its new temple.
I have no money for water with me,
And there is no public fountain.

But returning it is easier to run than to walk:
Walking I am a weary man burdened with water and salt
Painted curiously on a Chinese screen:
Running releases something, I know not what
As when the bird my son found, that he nursed back to health,
Was released by him to seek the sky.

The open, treeless area before the pavilion above the public beach
Is quiet, lit with blue and silver by the wondering moon.

Confusion in October

子游問孝 (Tsze-yû asked what filial piety was)

Philosophical ideas and philosophical ideas are like ancestors,
Ancestors can progenate saints, ancestors can progenate demons.
The first earthly branch may be blessed,
The second or ninth earthly branch may be acurst.
In Shenzen supervisors betrayed employees…
Who were ever only trying to please a supervisor
As they had learned from their own father.
From Shenzen I sent my father
A father’s day card, after I had taken care of him in an illness
From which he recovered. May he live ten thousand years.
These actions redress but do not reciprocate:
There can be no question, Bertrand Russell said,
That skepticism may pose to the filial.
Precisely, Russell said, that skepticism does not easily question
The needs of children, but so it is when the father is old,
That his needs are those of an aged wise child,
Such as would be encountered in a wood, in dreaming.

Plato holds us back Plato sets us free
Confucius you and Socrates me.

- 3 Oct 2009 Edward G. Nilges. Moral rights have been asserted. Nyah ha ha.

Entry at Schott’s Vocab in the New York Times

In this week’s limerick contest, Schott says bonus points will be given for all limericks that mention these words:

Birthers · Darwin · Surge · Olympian ·
Swine Flu · Clunker · Gubernatorial · Stimulus · iPhone · Madoff ·
Google · Blackmail · Uranium · Irony · People’s Republic of China · Extradition · Congress · Wikipedia · Euthanasia

The following uses each word in a separate Limerick, but stretches the Limerick strict form in a systematic way at times.

There was an elderly Birther
Whose belief occasion’d a lot of Mirth, or
Sniggers and smirks
From chaps he thought Jerks,
That unamused elderly Birther.

And what shall we do with Darwin?
No matter what we say, we can’t win
It is quite a Jape
To be descent from an Ape
Oh, alas, that unfortunate Mr. Darwin!

There was an ex-President who had an Urge
To win the unwinnable with a Surge
Our casualties went down
We declared victory downtown
Whilst the dead piled up despite our Surge.

Chicago is a mighty City of broad shouldered renown
Now, why does it need to be an Olympian town?
It needs schools and roads
This sports nonsense bodes
Ill for Chicago, that toddlin’ town.

There is an flu and it is no Joke
If you feel punk have the Doctor you prod and poke
Get vaccinated if you are Old,
And stay bundled up against the Cold.
And whatever else you do, don’t Smoke.

I had a Ford Escort bought new in ‘Eighty-Five
Boy was it hard to keep alive
So I turned in my Junker
Got some money for my Clunker
And it’s now a new car that I drive!

Said a Schwarzenegger Gubernatorial
Our fine State is no longer fiscally sound, at all
Taxes Ich should increaze
But dat would cause ze rich to never ceaze
Deinem attacks on my office in zee town zat is Sacramental.

There was a president who liked to smoke
And was also fond of an improper joke
He popped two milligrams of Nicorette Gum
And said, wow now that is a stimulus, and then some!
That Presidential fellow, who liked to smoke.

There was a young girl who had an iPhone
And thereafter, would never ever dispone
Calling her Friends,
Without reason…to no useful Ends,
That loquacious young female with her iPhone.

There was a financier named Bernie Madoff
Who was thought sound by many a grave Toff.
But when the books were actually audited
The Toffs did scoff and sob, they did,
Having been taken to the cleaners
And then to the barber shop
Oh they did skip and they did hop
Getting ten cents on the dollar
This “haircut” made ‘em holler
And this was thanks to Bernie Madoff;
I don’t think with a warning that gentleman shall get off.

Oh let me see am I on Google?
Let me blow my own horn, let me blow my own bugle
Like Emily Dickinson’s Frog
Announcing his presence to an admiring Bog,
The digital river, the swamp, that is Google!

There was a scoundrel he did me Blackmail,
Saying, give me money or such a Tale shall I retail!
But remembering the Duke, of Wellington,
I said, published and be damn’d, young un:
My name shall be unattaint! Trim your sail!

They say Iran has a lot of Uranium
Which Iran doth plan to put into a Bomb
I say so do we, and you see
What’s sauce for the fly is sauce for the flea:
Furthermore, are there no peaceful uses for the Atom?

There was an Ironic man of Providence
Who said, despite the Evidence
I shall speak the reverse of truthiness,
And to my wife, Ruth, I shall speak without ruthiness
Naught but ironic tripe, bunkum, poppycock, horsefeathers, and nonsense!

There was a dissident in the PRC
Who was locked up, and they threw away the key
For speaking the truth on the Net
And showing the Party that it was all wet
That daring young man of the PRC.

Whatever you say, it’s been a Tradition,
To punish lewd fellows with Extradition.
Lament it we may,
We cannot unsay,
The utility to governments of such manumission.

There was a member of Congress
Who sought with a gal, sexual ingress.
Of himself he made a spectacle
Of her, a lewd Receptacle.
That Republican member of Congress

And what will be done with wikipedia?
It is nothing more, and nothing less, than an expedia
A device to take knowledge without paying
From naive people who find themselves saying
Never again shall I work for wikipedia!

Rather than euthanasia
I’d quite prefer being sent to Asia.
There I shall age
And there I shall rage
Against any young pup who suggests euthanasia.

L’Envoi

Thank you Mr. Schott
My poetic bolt is shot
I shall quiver with Anticipation
To see if it receives Acclamation.

A Note on Peter Seebach’s Vicious Little Tirade

Peter Seebach and Clive Feather have written attacks on a computer author, Herb Schildt, characterized by a strikingly unethical misuse of logic and a complete misunderstanding of rhetoric construed as how we say things to be understood. For the complete picture, see below.

One of the most astonishing passages in Peter Seebach’s vicious little tirade about Herb Schildt’s work is this:

I am missing several hundred errors. Please write me if you think you know of any I’m missing. Please also write if you believe one of these corrections is inadequate or wrong; I’d love to see it.

Currently known:

This is followed by a grand total of 20 errors.

That is, Seebach is using McCarthyist and Stalinist tactics in this document. He presents 20 errors, some of which are trivial, and others of which are matters of interpretation. He then apes Senator McCarthy, who waved an empty sheet of paper in a Senate hearing on “Communists in the US government”, making reference to a “list”.

Seebach’s statement makes no sense, because he says at the end that “here are the known errors” [emphasis mine] but above he says “I am missing several hundred”.

This can only logically be construed to mean that “there must be hundreds but I do not know what they are, and I’d like you to join me in this cybernetic lynching”.

Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale & Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale & Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I will do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
…
Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?

- Joseph Welch, Army-McCarthy Hearings 9 June 1954

Philosophy versus Saturn

In the Herb Schildt controversy, the literal and reified meanings of words trumps the speakers’ intentions in a way that started with Stalinism’s understanding of words as “objectively” class enemies to the proletariat, a way that disregards the intentions of the speaker. In speaking in terms of the stack, Herb did not mean to say that a stack must be used to run standard C code any more than my friend’s father’s wearing a beret to work in a factory in Russia implied that he was a “bourgeois internationalist”, as he was accused of being.

As Husserl saw, over and above the dead things that are words (puffs of air, ink on paper), “words” are shared meanings: shared ideas. This presumes an ethical committment to try to understand the opponent’s case from his point of view, which means at least thinking using his language (where Schildt envisioned a stack in MS-DOS terms in 1991).

But in situations as diverse as the “Obama birthplace” controversy and computer book criticism on Amazon, people seem to take positive pride in their uncharity, incivility and hostility.

Ahmadinejad of Iran is saying that the government of Israel must be destroyed, for a good reason. It is a rogue state as hostile to the well-being of its own non-elite citizens (its policies are getting them killed on buses while the elite takes shelter). He is being translated as saying that the Jews must be destroyed by Israeli-owned translation firms.

My own book was attacked this week. It seemed that by claiming that .Net Visual Basic supports the “operators” OrElse and AndAlso (new operators usable in source code I “objectively” claimed that .Net IL (which corresponds to Java bytecode in Microsoft’s proprietary riposte to Java, .Net) there are OrElse and AndAlso operators. I’d actually shown how to implement these in a third form of byte code not with byte code operators but using jump instructions in my book, but was treated to a lecture on “how it’s done” in IL by someone either ignorant of my meaning or lying about what he understood.

In the Obama birthplace controversy, vast sums will be provided by wealthy strip-mine operators, unprincipled newspaper tycoons, and other near-criminals to make rubes, fools and yahoos believe no matter what the President’s defenders say, they either are lying or objectively mean other than what they intend to say.

My younger friends are in despair over how evil the world has become, since discourse ethics means a common willingness to share meanings in order to get to truth as opposed to winning. But I am willing to tear Western philosophy a new asshole, starting from computer science trivia, if that is what it takes to end this perversion of language and humanity.

Humpty Dumpty was nearly right. We all use terms of art and express ourselves through metaphors which when put under a merciless hermeneutic light can be used to convict us in the show trials of cybernetic mobs on the Internet. This is because language is inexact (details at eleven). It is literally true that when we use a word it means what we intend.

Fortunately, our meaning-intentions coincide with circles of understanding to greater and lesser degrees. I can see where Herb Schildt is “coming from” for the same reason I realized, in January 1970, that the assigned textbook for my computer science class described, as representative of computer technology at that date, the large, fixed word length scientific IBM 7094 and that our university had a small, variable word length business IBM 1401, and I mail-ordered a McGraw Hill book on the 1401 and its reference manual from IBM without whining…without charging the prof with deception…without holding him to some “objective” rule out of the Cultural Revolution (then in full spate) that profs must only assign textbooks about the available hardware.

This is because had I attended classes, I knew, I would have learned the facts, and I took responsibility for my nonattendance.

Today, nobody wants to take this kind of responsibility and thinks its an injustice to be spoken to in unfamiliar or “verbose” language…as if it was never an education, as it was when I attended the Catholic Tridentine mass in Latin while learning Latin in school, to be spoken to in a way that one doesn’t fully (yet) understand.

Instead, like Peter Seebach and Clive Feather, people start hounding computer authors and presidents online, in part out of naked envy that Obama got educated and elected, and that Herb has made a living writing best-selling computer books, and they never, ever stop.

I have found an Amazon setting that apparently allows me not to have to see further Comments from the two clowns that decided to slashdot my book, so this spares Amazon from megabytes of their jejune critique, and my lapidary and elegant replies. At the same time, dignified silence does not always work.

I may yet have to tear philosophy a new asshole, and show how computer technology has so reified folk philosophy of language that people will shortly lose language, like the latter-day Trogdolytes that the Jain religion prophesies will come to pass.

But Saturn is eating his children. The best of them are in despair. The best of them, like my own generation in 1970, don’t want to see 30 (and in my case I can assure them it was no picnic, and that I chose to live because “Peter Pan hads kids”). As an old fart all I can do is stand on Goya’s plain and say, over and over again, Saturn is eating his children, Saturn starts with their tongues.