I have just read the last two words of D.M Fraser’s Ignorant Armies, a book that has besotted me these past two weeks, but based on those final words I must now begin all over again since I find what I had understood to be changed, changed utterly.
Co-incidentally a Chopper bike, lower to the ground than the traditional Chopper has just passed the window decorated or rather drowned in an overflowing lambskin. As a child I associated the owning of a Chopper with the immediate promise of adventure without actually ever having to get on it.
I’d like to personally thanks the makers of Thunderbirds (and VPL) for making a no-sleep-overnight-puking-his-ring-up Friday manageable by taking us into an alternative realm.
Vomiting is brutal on small folk. Though I commend myself for my Sidney Crosby moves around the toilet bowl. Hockey mum encouragement: this too shall end dear one.
Day fell into night fell into day fell into night and apparently it was a beautiful sunny one.
Vancouver teachers voted in favour of a proposal to give 10 more days off per year. These days will include an extra week at Spring Break. The requirements of the BC Curriculum will be met by extending the school day.
I am beginning to think, after the day and night that was in it today that perhaps the solution would be to overhaul the BC Curriculum which consists of some of the barmiest conceptions of learning invented. Completely unfathomable maths texts that even the teachers complain about (yet still somehow on), a dated relationship with technology (except in “technology schools” where they’re designated) for starters.
The concept of extending the school day will not be popular in this abode. School days are long. They often extend far into the evening if you attempt to complete the homework. When are children supposed to decompress? i.e lie on the carpet and stare vacantly at the ceiling. Being forced to tutor your child yourself puts stress on a parent/child relationship. All this work requires a professional coach not an average bleary eyed mother.
The strange thing is, though it’s pointless to reflect since we live in a different era, at age 10 I’d just about come to terms with Paddington Bear and have no memory whatsoever of homework until Secondary School.
Also the language that’s creeping into education is dismaying: projects are discussed along the lines of “criteria”, children are anxiously propelled towards meeting “criteria” rather than a wider or deeper engagement. They’re basically being instilled in systems “to get through” and these kinds of systems are to fill up charts that insist people are “meeting expectations” with no considerations of whether those “expectations” will instill any kind of a love of learning and curiousity.
COLAB: All Color News Sample (1978)
All Color News Sampler (1978)
A remarkable collection of clips from the feature news program for cable TV. Hard, gritty, this is the early political and socially oriented work by artists now well-known as sculptors and filmmakers. Includes John Ahearn, Tom Otterness (Subways, Golden Gloves Boxing and Rats in Chinatown);Scott and Beth B (NYPD Arson and Explosions Squad vs. FALN); Charlie Ahearn (Bums Under the Brooklyn Bridge). Also includes Virge Piersol and Alan Moore (Bombing of JP Morgan) and Michael McClard.
crisp
Lovely morrow listening. With the gentle hiss, is it a record needle? “This is a little description of something that happened once and it is very interesting.”
Crisp as her diction.
Gertrude Stein reading extracts from The Making of an American
Gysin leg lamp
Yesterday when I was doing some unfortunate stomach exercises on a strange contraption that requires you to go up and down sidewards, everytime I twisted down there was a man’s leg right in front of my eyes. His whole calf had a tattoo wrapped around it which had a medley of colours and perhaps a buddha, who became a frog and then had a bit of a fairy in him.
It was the closest I’ve come to Bryan Gysin’s lamp he invented, the dream machine…. eventually the wrapped around canvas on his leg starting turning in front of my eyes just like Gysin’s lamp did. Live, vivid, no electricity required. It proved a limited exposure since the exercise is loathsome and I never wish to prolong it beyond five.
Image of lamp is here
I keep thinking of the trains in that Zola novel with Beast in the title. (Bete Humaine is it?). I wonder if I imagined there to be more trains than there are in it. Somewhere I read something about the Lime Quarry Workers Strike on Quadra Island in the 1930’s (1937 I think), I don’t know where I read it and each time I search for it I pull up nothing. Is it possible I imagined the entire thing? Most perplexing since I was captivated by what I read of it.
So my mind is awash with trains and non locatable viaducts and quarry and lime in locatable Island where I eat a ham sandwich once a year and sometimes swim while waiting on the ferry.
Snips
“There is for example no job market for sympathetic madness”
“I was telling Joan what little I could summon back of that, how I was the asshole who actually wrote the actual words, drunk one night when our love was leaving us; the words were meant to be an unspeakable message to you Devon, but you misunderstood and thought they were a poem — and that’s how, as if by accident, they became the text of the most notoriously unperformable opera in the world.”
D.M. Fraser: Ignorant Armies.
Oh dear I probably should not have looked….
Last post for Roonagh office
(note radical overuse of rolling adjectives and wanderly upward prose in article no reflection on the Post Office where the crisp stamp was the order of the last sixty years)
Recently I have come across male arrogance (and it’s conjoined force dismissal) on a towering, leaning tower of Pisa level. It’s just remarkable how such individuals could possibly find themselves so unquestionably interesting on everything, even that which they have no hope of ever knowing and systematically continue to plough their unfertilized mental fields with the delusion their every thought and winkle is sublime. Now the curious thing is how such individual males manage to draft themselves together into neat, hermetic gatherings, which facilitate further squatting on oxygen to then intoxicate each other further. What follows is back clattering during which it’s a miracle none sustain a collapsed lung.
When exposed to this trying scenario, I am reminded that no granny would be proud of such specimens and then imagine such a granny giving him a good clout, in the way that only a dignified granny could deliver it verbally or with the back of dustpan.
If such arrogance were to be bottled it might be capable of powering small vehicles that would alas be prone to back firing and loud clutch problems.
God save us from the patriarchy, just as you think things have long changed, voila Jello! you’re looking at the same old pudding.