For two and perhaps three weeks, there has been in the gutter on Cal Young Road near its intersection with Gilham Road a rectangular piece of corrugated cardboard, perhaps five by seven inches or rather larger, on one side of which is writing, several lines of writing. When I first noticed it, it was half written side up somehow and half unwritten side up; over the course of time it has been both written side up and written side down. It is closer now to the intersection than it was weeks ago.
I have speculated of course about the contents of the writing: a note, a tiny 'for sale' notice, directions, a list for the grocery or hardware store, a poem, an entry into that 'worst first line of a novel' contest in... Maurice Baring's honor? no, no. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's. Was on the verge of thinking about bending over to pick it up and read earlier, and now I've memorialized it here: tomorrow, if it is still there-- how the rains haven't bedraggled it (it has been a cloudy early morning although Sol is bright now), or the street-cleaning machines torn it into shreds, I don't know-- I will read it in the morning.
From my own point of view "it was a dark and stormy night" and the rest of it doesn't merit opprobrium but then I'm not a writer of elegant 20th or 21st c prose.
Am listening later on to Amandine Beyer, violin, and Gli Incogniti perform Bach in Geneva: concertos for violin and oboe and the Brandenburg Concerto no5 (thus the World Concert Hall site; the Gli Incog site says they are performed a program of Vivaldi-- we shall see). And then at the Chopin Institute's International Music Festival at Warsaw, Yulianna Avdeeva plays Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition after two pieces of Beethoven's, Eroica Variations in E flat major op 35 and his Fantasia in G minor op 77.
***
I have a certain amount of patience for philosophy and politics and so on, and read at The Josias and Ius et Iustitium regularly, if occasionally without the proper attention. But my patience has its limits and I'll never be a philosopher or politician.
Pat Smith's post at the latter site, about the 'recovery' of the Etymologiarum libri of St Isidore of Seville caught my eye. It is a favorite work.
One cannot help but note that, here, Isidore anticipates certain modern
scholars—notably the author of a little tract based upon some lectures
given in Spain by an odd coincidence in 1962—who recognize that partisan
warfare has more in common with the universal war of an insurrection,
which is to say a criminal act to punished by the state precisely as a
criminal act, than the carefully governed war between states in a
classical sense. And partisan warfare, precisely because it is like a
tumult, is aimed at nothing less than the destruction of an existing
social order (however it may be defined). Isidore presents to the
classical legal tradition Cicero’s assessment of the real terror of an
insurrection or a partisan war: there are no exemptions from service.
The war against a social order—or, indeed, order itself—is total war
(now with the already appalling consequences of such a war are
exacerbated by modern weapons).
I'm sure I ought to know who the 'notable author of 1962 lectures' is but don't. Anyway, I emphasized the sentences that caught my fancy; of course Saint Isidore's and Saint Thomas's 'warfare' isn't blog posts or articles in newspapers but the passage is suggestive in the current circumstances. In any event, I feel quite justified in mocking every single bit of nonsense that the Woke and the Media pollute our society with: 'total war' indeed.
***
Waiting for the Bach in Geneva, the RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse) Espace 2 channel is broadcasting music per surdulina of the unknown-to-me Antonio Esperti. Cornemuse is the French term: it's the local version of bagpipes: the surdulina is 'a type of bagpipes utilized in the provices of Catanzaro, Cosenza, and Crotone, characteristic in particular of the Albanian community' (I believe the Italian albanesi is used for both Albanians and members of the historic community of Albanians in Italy). They are broadcasting the Introitus and Kyrie of Esperti's Instrumental Mass for Saint Dymphna. I love the sound, briefly.
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