"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against
the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better,
but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse
than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking
primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions,
to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley
"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.
All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.
"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
Wow. What a wonderful piece. I hadn’t seen it yet.
What a coinky dink! This is exactly how I felt while I was strapped into the dentist chair yesterday. I managed to get off two jokes before he inserted a prophylactic membrane on my tooth. The man refused to laugh. The bastard.
Dear Ann, warm thanks for the repost on peoplesgeography.com, what a big honor again
99, I think Finkelstein’s being arrested and deported is just pathetic, and particularly outrageous since he wanted to go to the OPT and has to go through Israel to do so. On a group mail-out yesterday by one liberal Jewish American I was bemused to find in the responses that some so-called progressive American Jews supported Israel’s decision and that ironically it was an orthodox Jewish Israeli who supported Finkelstein, as well as the rest of us. The hostility Finkelstein aroused in these progressives-in-name-only was telling.
Ben’s work is like a lot of great art, it can resonate with a lot of situations :) Hope your headache cleared up, my friend, and Ressentiment’s tooth problem, too.
Thanks for coming by Graeme.
Dear Ben, the honour is all mine.
I’m hoping for a thought explosion of another kind, and to this end will be diving into some writing. Hope to see y’all back here in a coupla weeks.
xo
Very nice, Ben. Nice post, Ann.
___
Thanks, DT. Keep up the great posts. — Ann