“It was one of Rousseau’s psychological skills to persuade people, not least his social superiors, that common-or-garden words of thanks were not in his vocabulary. Thus he wrote to the Duc de Montmorency-Luxembourg, who lent him a chateau: ‘I neither praise you nor thank you. But I live in your house. Everyone has his own language – I have said everything in mine.’ The ploy worked beautifully, the Duchess replying apologetically: ‘It is not for you to thank us – it is the Marshall and I who are in your debt.’”
—Paul Johnson, Intellectuals
“At Neufchatel [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] was painted by Allan Ramsey wearing an Armenian robe, a sort of kaftan. He even wore it to church. The locals objected at first but soon got used to it and in time it became a Rousseau hallmark. During his celebrated visit to England he wore it at the Drury Lane Theatre, and was so anxious to respond to the plaudits of the crowd that Mrs Garrick had to hang onto the robe to prevent him falling out of the box.”
—Paul Johnson, Intellectuals
Mark Steyn on the growing, belated realization in Europe that tacitly supporting Palestinian anti-Semetic terror was an act not unlike suckling a wolverine:
But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: it's finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the "Palestinian question" has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon, and Syria, into the hands of a regime that's a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and co grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudocrisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it's now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever growing demographic advantage) are Iran's Shia enforcers. There haven't been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran's first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.
Unfortunately, this isn't just bad news for Cairo. This is bad news for everybody. It's hard to keep abreast of the news coming out of the Middle East and not be reminded of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." If you're not terrified by now of what rough beast is slouching toward Tehran, you have not been paying attention. For the first time since Stalin, we're rapidly approaching a historical moment when crucial players on the world stage are literally crazy. Blood-guzzling, apocalypse-adoring nutjobs. Concessions are probably not going to work well.
"NARRATOR: She saw a matinee with Arliss, who had recently discovered his girlfriend was married.
"ARLISS: Originally I was thinking she wouldn't let me over because, you know, she was messy. Now I'm thinking it's 'cause she's married."
—Noah Baumbach, Mr. Jealousy
I recently contributed some liner notes to the new Quiet Ones EP. The style is me having a go at the baroque musings found on vinyls from the 60s (Dylan's recordings are especially prone to this stuff); the result is probably overheated, but the record really does deserve high praise.
My latest reviews address that comic-book movie and that pirate movie; the latter allows me to revisit my long-cherished obsession with the giant squid:
If there’s one CGI beast I wouldn’t mind seeing more of, it’s the Kraken. Giant squid are scary. They live thousands of feet underwater, they have eyeballs the size of dinner plates, they inspired Lord Tennyson and H. P. Lovecraft, and they tried to kill Kirk Douglas. And when I was six years old, the Walt Disney World submarine ride I was on malfunctioned right about the time the giant squid attacked, and I spent a horrified five minutes among the fiberglass tentacles. So giant squid work for me. But this Kraken, while appealingly squishy and ooze-spewing, is too large to fit properly into shots, is filmed in the daytime (always a bad setting for sea monsters) and is generally another example of the distended special effects that are ruining the movies. So much for the giant squid, then.
But to reiterate: giant squid are really bleedin' scary.
UPDATE: They are less frightening when crocheted.