Respect to Shuntaro Tanikawa

I was saddened to learn recently of the passing of Shuntaro Tanikawa (1931-2024), a writer whose whimsical yet profound musings on the consequences of a living as a temporary guest in a universe constantly at tug-of-war with itself inspired millions at a time when poetry in Japan was, by all accounts, in a marginal state. He was also an acclaimed translator, rendering the "Peanuts" cartoon and various works for children into Japanese. His work found an entirely new audience via Japan's burgeoning manga and anime industries, composing the lyrics to songs featured in popular series such as Astro Boy and Big X (music by Isao Tomita); later on he penned the words to the theme song to "Howl's Moving Castle" directed by famed auteur Hayao Miazaki.

Frustratingly most of Tanikawa's printed works seem to be nearly impossible to find in the United States, and even online the pickings look slim. You might have better luck at a university library. In the mean time, we'll have to content ourselves with this trio of sonnets over at the online literary journal Asymptote. I particularly like the middle one, "Yearning", with its frank philosophical honesty that seems to suggest a tearing of a veil of illusion that stops us from seeing the eternal resonances in everyday things.

Salty dogs

Both Merriam-Webster and the OED say "salacious" derives from salax, a variant of salire ("to leap"; the origin of the English word "desultory", among others), but it seems almost inconceivable that its roots are not shared with Salacia, or do not involve the ocean and seafaring culture generally by way of the prefix sal-, meaning "salt". While Salacia, the female divinity of salt water or the sea in Roman mythology often depicted in frescoes as a beautiful nymph adorned with seaweed, doesn't seem to have been particularly associated with lust or sex, the English word "salacious" came into usage at a much later date. "Salty" language is not always salacious, but frequently is. Sailors are traditionally said to often use such language: that is to say, they talk dirty, perhaps making frequent references to acts or lifestyles polite society might not wish its youthful members to entertain. Urban areas adjacent wharves occasionally developed reputations for unsavory characters and unwholesome activities. Salacious overlaps near-synonyms "earthy" and "crude" listed in definition 3b ("the salt of the earth"?), but carries an explicitly sexual connotation other descriptors may not. At any rate, the historical connection between salaciousness and salt bears a closer reading.

Lou Donaldson 1926 - 2024: In Memoriam

Heads they win, tails you lose

The inimitable Professor Noam Chomsky presents a timely analysis of how we got... 

here:

CorruptionFest '24 wraps up

...with fairly predictable results. I won't even dignify the mainstream media's facile "analysis" of this election (let's just be content to mention that the majority of non-white voters still favored the Democratic candidate), and despite all of those oddly satisfying translucent red and blue circles of various diameters sprinkled over the maps, perhaps the most conspicuous thing about them remains the fact that they're only available in two colors. 

Anyway, here's a link to Sirota's Lever essay from this past week to tide you over: https://www.levernews.com/election-2024-how-billionaire-avengers-destroyed-democracy/ 

 

Ok David, where's my cut? ;)

Enter Phaedra

As long promised but never delivered, here are some photos of my cat Phaedra:

Brutalist architecture

Lest we be blindsided by the onslaught of further developments, here's something to remember: Since October 7, 2023, the United States has spent over $17.9 billion to reduce Gaza to a smoking ruin, forcibly displace its population, and murder over 42,000 people, including over 20,000 women and children. While it's great to see the sitting administration championing their welcome legislative support of women's health domestically, their message is in grave danger of being overshadowed by the vexing question of why taxpayers are continuing to finance a violent and illegal humanitarian catastrophe halfway across the world in which women seem to represent more than half the fatalities. But numbers alone don't tell the whole story.

There can be no adequate explanation as to why Palestinian hospitals, schools and universities have been systematically targeted and destroyed; entire neighborhoods erased and buried in rubble just to smoke out a handful of "militants". There can be no conceivable justification for blowing up whole blocks of apartments - evidently - for fear of what a few might contain. And it should go without saying that under international law, there is no threat that warrants the targeting of defenseless refugees or humanitarian workers. Yet all of these atrocities have been carried out in broad daylight by the state of Israel with only a smattering of disapproval from the chattering classes and the acceptance of much of the political establishment of the United States, who have not only bankrolled the operation but provided weapons and tactical support.   

Enough is enough. End the wars now. Arrest Netanyahu. The evidence is clear: these are the actions of a war criminal. Send him and his co-conspiritors to prison. We've been hearing a lot from politicians about how history will supposedly judge their various contributions. That's awfully rich. Leaving aside the inherent unpredictability of the future for a moment, how exactly does this gaggle of latter-day Neros plan to be remembered as anything more than a pack of unlicensed butchers? We'll have to elect ourselves instead. The future of humanity may well depend on it.