Growing up, assimilating the wisdom of the past, is in great part learning how to organize the sensorium productively for intellectual purposes. Man’s sensory perceptions are abundant and overwhelming. He cannot attend to them all at once. In great part a given culture teaches him one or another way of productive specialization. It brings him to organize his sensorium by attending to some types of perception more than others, by making an issue of certain ones while relatively neglecting other ones. The sensorium is a fascinating focus for cultural studies. Given sufficient knowledge of the sensorium exploited within a specific culture, one could probably define the culture as a whole in virtually all its aspects.

Calendar pages for January from the Hours of Joanna of Castile

moving Fort Moore Hill High School

Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.

This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both.

www.youtube.com/watch thenearsightedmonkey:

Saigon Soul, late 60’s, early 70’s reminding us somehow of Alex Chilton.

Find it playing on juke box RIGHT NOW down here in The Near-Sighted Monkey lounge. Press F-8 to get a banana pellet. Press F-9 to play this song again.

What’s it called? Nhurng Dom Mat Hoa Chau or FIREBALLS, MAN!

 

The largest house in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Burton Constable is a romantic compendium, substantially Elizabethan but remodelled in the 18th century, set not far from the fast-eroding coastline of the North Sea. It is over this bleak strand, from Flamborough to Spurn Point, that the Seigniory of Holderness, a title held by the owners of Burton Constable, extends an eccentric fiefdom: the right – elsewhere ceded to the monarch – to “royal fish”. Any whale, dolphin, sturgeon or porpoise cast up on these shores (which have a long history of cetacean strandings) becomes the property of the lord paramount – of which [John] Chichester-Constable was the 46th.

Thus, when a 58ft male sperm whale was found on the beach at Tunstall in 1825, Sir Thomas Constable sent his steward, Richard Iveson, to claim it as a gigantic addition to his cabinet of curiosities. Relieved of its blubber, it was articulated on a metal stand in the grounds, alongside an avenue of trees. And there, over the decades, it slowly rotted and rusted into the earth, awaiting its rediscovery.

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The class is conducted very simply. You turn in stories, and I read them aloud — I don’t identify the author. One of the nice things about having a fairly sizable class is that it takes a long time before you figure out who’s writing what. These wretched little cozy classes in which you have five or six people, and after a while you know — I mean as soon as the first word is read you know who wrote it. And then you begin being very careful, you walk on eggshells, you don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings because you don’t want them to hurt your feelings, and it’s just a pain in the ass. The great virtue of a class of this size is that it really is anonymous.

So you’re not going to get at least personally offended by having your incapacity to write exposed to public opprobrium. That doesn’t help too much — I’m aware of that too. Because oddly enough, even though you’re not identified, you know who you are. And if you are — if your story is being made fun of, then you will take it that you’re being made fun of: your feelings will be hurt, you’ll be outraged and crushed, humiliated, depressed, and so on.

And there’s nothing I can do about that. I know there are a number of things that you want me to do. I mean you want me to be (as you might say) kind. The trouble with kindness is that it takes a long time. That’s really my only objection to kindness. If it were possible to be kind as quickly as it is possible to be cruel or funny, I would be kind all the time.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

HTML5 offers a glimpse of the freedom to define the Web publication the way it should have been defined fifteen years ago: as a more functional descendant of the magazine and the broadcast. But it can only do so to the extent that the content management systems upon which publishers have entrusted their livelihoods embrace, incorporate, and advance that vision. This is not a certainty; in fact, I fear it’s not even a likelihood. The CMS of today is a machine that produces blogs — that shapes and forms content to fit in equal-sized nuggets dropped onto a conveyor belt, the length of which constitutes the breadth of their natural lives. It’s about as prepared to embrace the full prospect of HTML5 as government is prepared to embrace ‘change.’ As long as Web publishers continue to rely on today’s CMS to define the nature of their content, they’ll remain stuck in deep space aboard the Starship Buy 'n’ Large.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.