Wednesday, May 27, 2009

power magic, cntd.




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Sunday, May 24, 2009

ARLANC 1.80

A Thousand-Yard Stare (5mb)

purey






Before her, in overly luxuriant rows, was a host, so to speak, of golden pharmaceuticals, plus a few technically less indigenous whatnots. The shelves bore iodine, Mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, anacin, Bufferin, Argyrol, Musterole, Ex-Lax, Milk of Magnesia, Sal Hepatica, Aspergum, two Gillete razors, one Schick Injector razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, a bottle of Fitch Dandruff Remover, a small unlabelled box of glycerine suppositories, Vicks Nose Drops, Vicks VapoRub, six bars of castile soap, the stubs of three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy ('Call Me Mister'), a tube of depilatory cream, a box of Kleenex, two seashells, an assortment of used-looking emery boards, two jars of cleansing cream, three pairs of scissors, a nail file, an unclouded blue marble (known to marble shooters, at least in the twenties, as a 'purey'), a cream for contracting enlarged pores, a pair of tweezers, the strap less chassis of a girl's or woman's gold wristwatch, a box of bicarbonate of soda, a girl's boarding-school class ring with a chipped onyx stone, a bottle of Stopette - and, inconceivably or no, quite a good deal more.

JD Salinger, Franny and Zooey, Penguin, p.50

Friday, May 22, 2009

biosphere 0.999h

Als siebenunddreißigjähriges Mädchen hatte sie den durch seinen exzentrischen Antisemitismus bekannten Dr. Bernhard Förster geheiratet, um als seine Gattin, gefolgt von einer Schar deutscher Kolonisten, der von Förster in Paraguay gegründeten deutschen Kolonie Nueva Germania vorzustehen. Beide kamen bei ihrer Abreise nach Amerika, Ostern 1886 nach Berlin, Förster im strengen Inkognito, da er allerlei Beleidigungen gegen Minister und andere staatliche Würdenträger auf dem Kerbholz hatte. Die Kolonie nahm einen glänzenden Anfang; Eli Förster-Nietzsches Briefe, welche, wenn ich die Mutter in Naumburg besuchte, vorgelesen wurden, wußten nicht genug zu erzählen von der arbeitsreichen, aber hoffnungsvollen Kolonie, von deren Mitgliedern sie und ihr Gatte wie König und Königin verehrt wurden. Ich freute mich dann dieser Nachrichten, mußte aber im stillen diese Kolonie mit einem Pflänzchen vergleichen, welches in einen fremden Boden versetzt wird, und von dem man mit teilnehmender Spannung abwartet, ob es emporblühen oder hinwelken und zugrunde gehen wird. Leider war nach kaum drei Jahren das letztere eingetreten. Dr. Förster, überaus rührig und energisch wie er war, hatte, von einem anstrengenden Ritte erhitzt, ein Bad im Flusse genommen, wobei ein Herzschlag seinem Leben ein Ende machte. Mit getäuschten Hoffnungen, wie eine Schiffbrüchige, kehrte Eli in die Heimat zurück, gerade um die Zeit, wo der Bruder einer unheilbaren Geisteskrankheit verfallen war.

Deussen, Mein Leben, S. 264.

As a girl of 37 she married Dr. Bernhard Förster, known for his eccentric antisemitism, and shared the command of the colony Nueva Germania, which Förster had founded in Paraguay. ... The colony had an impressive beginning. Eli Förster-Nietzsche's letters, which were read out aloud when I visited Nietzsche's mother in Naumburg, were full of the hard-working, high-hoping colony, whose members worshipped her and her husband like king and queen. I was glad about these news, but had a quiet suspicion whether this sapling would flourish in a foreign soil. After hardly three years it sadly proved true.
Dr. Förster, active and energetic as was his nature, had taken a bath in the river after a long, hot ride on his horse. He suffered a hear attack and Eli returned to her home country, her hopes shipwrecked, just at the time when her brother fell into incurable madness.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

biosphere 0.999g

Wie die Sprache, so ist auch die Religion der Iranier der altvedischen auf das nächste verwandt; viele Götternamen, wie Ahura (Sanskrit Asura), Mithra (Sanskrit Mitra), sind beiden Völkern gemeinsam, und das iranische Homaopfer entspricht dem indischen Somaopfer. Aber seltsam und höchst auffallend ist es, daß nicht nur manche indische Götternamen in Iran zur Bezeichnung von Dämonen dienen, sondern daß auch das fast allen andern indogermanischen Völkern gemeinsame Wort für Gott, deva (lat. deus, altir. dia, altnord. tivar, lit. devas), in der iranischen Form daeva nicht einen Gott, sondern einen bösen Dämon bedeutet. Diese Tatsache, so befremdlich sie auf den ersten Blick zu sein scheint, ist doch nicht ohne Parallelen. Als die christlichen Missionare im 8. Jahrhundert p. C. die heidnischen Deutschen bekehrten, da wurzelte der Glaube an die alten germanischen Götter zu tief im Herzen des Volkes, als daß man sie für nicht existierend hätte erklären können. Man beließ ihnen die Existenz, erklärte sie aber für böse Dämonen und verlangte vom Neophyten, sie abzuschwören;

Deussen, Paul. Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, Bd. 2, S. 134

Like the language, the religion of the Iranians is closely related to the old Vedic religion. Many names of gods are the same [... ]. But strange and most remarkable is not only that some Indian names of gods are used in Iran to denote demons, but that the word for god, common to almost all indogermanic peoples, deva, in its Iranian form refers not to a god, but to an evil demon. This strange fact is not without parallels. When the Christian missionaries turned the heathen Germans to god in the 8th century, the old Germanic beliefs still had deep roots and could not be declared non-existent. They were deemed to exist, but only as evil demons and the newly initiated had to reject them by oath.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

ARLANC 1.80

"Kobresia"

Karl Nikolajev: a "biocommunicator" who sits in a room trying to "see" what kind of object is placed on a table in a room two floors up.

"It is either metal or ... If it's metal, it is painted... Cold surface. It is either metal (painted), or, maybe, plastic. Colored. There is... Bright. Looks like... Maybe, it's a toy? The surface is smooth, but here are some projections. Finger sticks. Maybe it is... Some kind of dents... or... or it is letters... or just projections... Looks like a toy. Multicolored metal or plastic, painted metal. That's it. Stop."

Boil 2.10

People who habitually sit on the first seat in the bus | pillion hogs | He says he has received many emails; he still needs to check them all | One only has to "ask the computer" | "it knows everything" one would ever want to know. One would never have to ask people again | Old Arts | Quadrangle First Floor | A mouse scurries along on the carpet under the Emergency Exit Only sign | Freud = Prospero, Jung = Caliban, Anna = Miranda | Karbolineum

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

biosphere 0.999f

The analyses which I shall make in later chapters will show that Bruno was an intense religious Hermetist, a believer in the magical religion of the Egyptians as described in the Asclepius, the imminent return of which he prophesied in England, taking the Copernican sun as a portent in the sky of this imminent return. He patronises Copernicus for having understood his theory only as a mathematician, whereas he (Bruno) has seen its more profound religious and magical meanings.

Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago 1964, p.155

Sunday, May 10, 2009

File 2.03

A Greek woman who puts on her lipstick to go to the cemetery to tell off the dead. A gay couple who, in scouring the atlas for possible locations for a country cottage, regard Estonia as "a kind of very, very outer London suburb". The Jamaican woman who returns home twice a year to luxuriate in the "real" house she has built there but cannot bear to live in full time. The church organist who keeps every greetings card she has ever been sent, delving for the meanings in every commercial set of verses. The man who says he grieves constantly over the ghosts of the seventy left dead when, as a mercenary, he blew up an arms dump; he seeks consolation in online pornography. The woman in her early twenties who is tattoed and pierced in every conceivable place, and sees pain as part of her "sense of control" of her life.
Paul Barker, "Mince Pies and a cane", TLS September 5 2008, p.5

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Thursday, May 07, 2009

biosphere 0.999e

The sun, of course, is always a religious symbol and has always been so used in Christianity; but in some passages in the Hermetic writings the sun is called the demiurge, the "second god". [...] The admired Egyptian religion includes sun-worship, and the sun is among the list of the gods of the Egyptians given in the Asclepius.
These Egypto-Hermetic sun-teachings undoubtedly influenced Ficino's sun-magic, and they connected philosophically with Plato on the sun as the intelligible splendour or chief image of the ideas, and religiously with the Pseudo-Dionysian light symbolism. [...] the concentration on the sun in the astral magic, led upwards through the Christian Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius to the supreme Lux dei, and in this way the sun very nearly is for Ficino what it is for Hermes or for the Emperor Julian, the "second god", or the visible god in the Neoplatonic series.
The De revolutionibus orbium caelestium of Nicholas Copernicus was written between 1507 and 1530, and published in 1543. It was not by magic that Copernicus reached his epoch-making hypothesis of the revolution of the earth round the sun, but by a great achievement in pure mathematical calculation. He introduces his discovery to the reader as a kind of act of contemplation of the world as revelation of God, or as what many philosophers have called the visible god. It is, in short, in the atmosphere of the religion of the world that the Copernican revolution is introduced. [...] One can say, either that the intense emphasis on the sun in this new world-view was the emotional driving force which induced Copernicus to undertake his mathematical calculations on the hypothesis that the sun is indeed at the centre of the planetary system; or that he wished to make his discovery acceptable by presenting it within the framework of this new attitude. [...]
A recently discovered text tells us that Giordano Bruno, when advocating Copernicanism at Oxford, did this in the context of quotations from Ficino's De vita coelitus comparanda. This famous philosopher of the Renaissance thus saw the Copernican sun in some close relationship to Ficinian sun magic.

Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago 1964, p. 153-155.
Link

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Boil 2.09

I found him standing over a battered filing cabinet with a hammer in his hand, and immediately had a good feeling.
H. Williams, "Freelance", TLS July 4 2008, p.16

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biosphere 0.999d+

Er hatte keine Lust. Ein vitaler Mensch kann nicht aufgeklärt sein. Wie viel Schwäche ist nötig, damit einer aufgeklärt ist?
Alexander Kluge, Lebensläufe, S. 739

He wasn t motivated. A person full of vitality can t understand the world properly. How much weakness do you need to come up with intellectual clarity?
Alexander Kluge, Lebensläufe, S. 739
transmogrified by the compy-fuscator

Saturday, May 02, 2009

his mukkil oobin laagh

The Bloomsbury Rhyming Dictionary is "an essential research tool" that no "poet or lyricist" should be without. The main pleasure is derived from the found poems which emerge from the lists of rhyming words. Try this one, which we call "Night on the Town":
frolic
shambolic
hyperbolic
melancholic
[...] We close the Bloomsbury Rhyming Dictionary (£8.99) with a cautionary tale of the casting-couch:
starlet
varlet
scarlet
harlot
J.C., "NB", TLS, March 28 2008, p. 36

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