This mystery Islay (we don’t know the distillery) doesn’t live up to the packaging hyperbole — I can’t figure out who the target demographic is. I don’t think that there is such a thing as an “entry level” Islay — if one is going to try one for the first time, one might just as well go for the full qualic experience with of the big three: Laphroaig, Lagavulin or Ardbeg. Anyway, Smokehead is way too “thin” but if you like Islays then this just about falls within the range of what to expect but very much on the less intense side of the spectrum. Would go well with chocolate tasting which is what I’ll do.
Eliot and Swinburne: Idealism and Decedence
Eliot and Swinburne have been part of my consciousness for many years but for different reasons. The former I primarily knew for his Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (his Harvard dissertation) and the for latter, my curiosity was piqued through my walking regularly past 11 Putney Hill, Sw15 on my way to Putney High Street where he died, close to where I lived. Needless to say, that a movement called the decadent movement was bound to attract my attention and I spent much time in the old British Library perusing original copies of The Yellow Book when ostensibly I was there to do other unrelated research.
The faults of style are, of course, personal; the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly mind. But the style has one positive merit: it allows us to know that Swinburne was writing not to establish a critical reputation, not to instruct a docile public, but as a poet his notes upon poets whom he admired.
— Eliot, T. S. (1998). The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays. Mineola NY: Dover Publications. p. 10.
Speaking of Eliot hat-tip to Troy Camplin for pointing me to this write-up in The Guardian.
WALKER PERCY WEDNESDAY 59
Women are mythical creatures. They have no more connection with the ordinary run of things than do centaurs. I see her clearly, gin fizz in one hand, the other held against her sacrum, palm out, pushing herself rhythmically off the wall. Women! Music! Love! Life! Joy! Gin fizzes!
. . .
It is true. Women are so smart. In truth I am suffering from simultaneous depression and exaltation. So I tell her about it: that this very day I perfected my invention and finished my article, which will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the three great scientific breakthroughs of the Christian era, the others being Newton hitting on his principles and Einstein on his field theory, perhaps even the greatest of all because my discovery alone gives promise of bridging the dread chasm between body and mind that has sundered the soul of Western man for five hundred years.
. . .
It is easy to understand how men do their best work in prison or exile, men like Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Bonhoeffer, Sir Thomas More, Genet, and I, Dr. Thomas More. Pascal wrote as if he were in prison for life and so he was free. In prison or exile or a mental hospital one has time to watch and listen. My question was: how is it with you, fellow patient? how is it with you, fellow physician? and I saw how it was. Many men have done that, seen visions, dreamed dreams. But it is of no use in science unless you can measure it. My good luck came when I stumbled onto a way of measuring the length and breadth and motions of the very self. My little machine is the first caliper of the soul.
Jonah Lomu — The Greatest
Sad news reported in The Guardian. Try facing him with no helmet and padding/armour a la North American football and coming at you at serious sprinter speed carrying 262 pounds and with the presence of mind of a terrier. I saw his finest hour in a pub in La Baule during the World Cup ’95.
Syd Barrett
Much ink has been spilled over SB but viewing the two documentaries below (they do overlap) one is touched by how Pink Floyd kept his story alive and because of his absence, gave them new purpose. What other band that has lost a key member that has been so elegantly elegiac about their past colleague? Each band member is very articulate musically and in interview mode at helping the viewer piece together who this mythological (at least in rock) person was. As great an album Dark Side of the Moon was (it cast a long shadow over the 70s like no other), it was Wish You Were Here that I thought was the better album in many respects — this despite PF panicking about a follow up to DSOTM. From what I recall the reviews of the day while not bad were, not surprisingly, sucked into spurious comparisons with DSOTM. These two documentaries fill in a lot of the detail about the PF story which is quite different from most other mega bands of the day — even Bob Geldof now gets it! Nick Mongiardo’s assessment of WYWH is in accord with my view, the whole album being an elegiac lament to friendship.
Once you’ve checked out these rather unremarkable two pieces, the real gem is Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, 1972. This is what is special about this band: they weren’t R&B based nor were they rock stars. Can you imagine there being a momentous broadcast such as the as the moon landing having a young band involved?
Tintin in London
My all time favorite Bande dessinée. Tintin as a gay icon? — he’s as asexual as Shaun the Sheep! Though in many ways it reflects its time, I think it has aged remarkably well (it embodies that timeless and comforting modern-retro style that is now the rage). Each new book to one’s collection was so much more exciting than even going to the 70s’ blockbuster Saturday matinee in Leicester Square. But as any Tintin fan will tell you, the animated version(s) really is so flat in comparison — however closely the script is to the original hardcopy books.
What happened to left-wing libertarianism?
Far too many people on the left want to put government in charge of everything, and far too many people on the right want to put God in charge. Why are we so reluctant as a species to embrace freedom, so keen to (in the words of the poet Hilaire Belloc): “always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse”?
Who is Big in Computing?
A collaborator, the very excellent Ted Lewis, looks at this question via network theory.
More than 70 years into computing, Moore’s Law keeps on doubling performance of the basic engine of the post-industrial information age. Looking back at this incredible progress makes me wonder, “Who has had the biggest influence on computing since electronic digital computers were designed and built for the first time in the 1940s?”
In the Penal Colony
Of all of Kafka’s pieces I’ve always have been of the view that In the Penal Colony was the only one that could be plausibly rendered in film — but as an opera? And with no machine and with an homoerotic spin? The Boston Globe thinks it works.
LSU Press marks the anniversary with a new edition of A Confederacy of Dunces
Here’s a small snippet from Louisiana Public Broadcasting hosted by my ever enthusiastic chum James Fox Smith commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of CoD along with a lovely new CoD related book by Cynthia Cynthia LeJeune Nobles.
manwithoutqualities 
