Fort du Médine

In April 1857, Umar Tall declared war against the Khasso kingdom, and marched on Medina Fort, their nearest outpost, with an army of up to 15,000 riflemen. He laid siege to the fort and its adjoining fortified town. He launched three assaults that resulted in hundreds of casualties for the Toucouleur army. In the 97 days that followed, the defenders' food supplies soon ran low and the fort was on the verge of surrendering when the Governor of French Senegal, Louis Faidherbe arrived by steamboat with supplies and 500 reinforcements, breaking the siege.

By the pricking of my thumbs,

something wicked this way comes.

The Tennis Court Oath

What had you been thinking about
the face studiously bloodied
heaven blotted region
I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . .
I worry

the water beetle head
why of course reflecting all
then you redid you were breathing
I thought going down to mail this
of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard
you come through but
are incomparable the lovely tent
mystery you don’t want surrounded the real
you dance
in the spring there was clouds

The mulatress approached in the hall—the
lettering easily visible along the edge of the Times
in a moment the bell would ring but there was time
for the carnation laughed here are a couple of “other”

to one in yon house
The doctor and Philip had come over the road
Turning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on
reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified
the blood shifted you know those walls
wind off the earth had made him shrink
undeniably an oboe now the young
were there there was candy
to decide the sharp edge of the garment
like a particular cry not intervening called the dog “he’s coming! he’s coming” with an emotion felt it sink into peace
there was no turning back but the end was in sight
he chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others
The person. pleaded—“have more of these
not stripes on the tunic—or the porch chairs
will teach you about men—what it means”
to be one in a million pink stripe
and now could go away the three approached the doghouse
the reef. Your daughter’s
dream of my son understand prejudice
darkness in the hole
the patient finished
They could all go home now the hole was dark
lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you

Ashbery

Channel Z

White to play and win

1.e4 c5

2.Nc3 d6

3.Bb5+ Bd7

4.Bd3 Nc6

5.Nf3 a6

6.0-0 h5

7.Ng5 e5

8.h4 Bg4

9.Be2 Nf6

10.d3 Be7

11.Nd5 Qa5

12.Bd2 Qd8

13.c4 Nd4

14.Qa4+ b5

15.Qa5 Nxe2+

16.Kh1 bxc4

17.dxc4 Nxd5

18.cxd5 Qxa5

19.Bxa5 Rb8

20.b3 Bxg5 (!) White is down a knight

21.hxg5 Rb5

22.Bd2 h4

23.Kh2 Ke7

24.f3 Bd7

25.Rae1 Nd4

26.f4 exf4

27.Rxf4 Rh5

28.Ref1 Be8

29.Kh3 Rb6

30.Rxh4 Rxh4+

31.Kxh4 Bb5

32.Rf4 Ne2

33.Rf3 Rb8

34.Rf5 Bd3

35.g6 fxg6 (!!) the winning move by White

36.Bg5+ Kd7

37.Rf7+ Kc8

38.Rf8+ Kc7

39.Rf7+ Kb6

40.Rxg7 Rh8+ (?) a mistake by black

41.Kg4 Bxe4

42.Bf6 Rh2

43.Bd8+ Kb5

44.Rb7# 1-0

Mister K

Font based on the notebooks of Franz Kafka

A NEW TAX SYSTEM (GOODS AND SERVICES TAX) ACT 1999 - SECT 165.55

1. For the purposes of making a declaration under this Subdivision, the Commissioner may:

(a) treat a particular event that actually happened as not having happened; and

(b) treat a particular event that did not actually happen as having happened and, if appropriate, treat the event as:

     (i) having happened at a particular time; and

     (ii) having involved particular action by a particular entity; and

(c) treat a particular event that actually happened as:

     (i) having happened at a time different from the time it actually happened; or

     (ii) having involved particular action by a particular entity (whether or not the event actually         involved any action by that entity).

The Great Catsby

Typography Scrabble

Looking forward to the single font editions. 

Nabokov on Chess Problems

It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and while the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer.

The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often have I struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connection with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks and carbon, and blind throbbings. 

In case of problem composition, the event is accompanied by a mellow physical satisfaction, especially when the chessmen are beginning to enact adequately, in a penultimate rehearsal, the composer’s dream. There is a feeling of snugness (which goes back to one’s childhood, to play-planning in bed, with parts of toys fitting into corners of one’s brain); there is the nice way one piece is ambushed behind another, within the comfort and warmth of an out-of-the-way square; and there is the smooth motion of a well-oiled and polished machine that runs sweetly at the touch of two forked fingers lightly lifting and lightly lowering a piece.

Problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.

So, 'aitch' vs 'haitch' is apparently a thing.

I think I say 'haitch'.

Australia, it seems, is divided between those who merrily sing 'The haitch bone is connected to the thigh bone' and those who sternly retort that, on the contrary, It is the 'aitchbone that is connected to the thigh bone', whatever the aitch bone may be.Of all the grizzles we receive about grammar and pronunciation, complaints about the letter H, like Abou ben Adhem, lead all the rest. Forget the contention between Melbourne and Sydney, workers and management, cantaloupes and rock melons, Patrick’s and wharfies: these are as nothing compared with the Great Australian Divide—between those who pronounce the letter H as haitch, and those who pronounce it as aitch.

The Haitchers, bless ’em, are not the ones who complain. The Aitchers, however, are a different kettle of cod. They see the spread of ‘haitching’ throughout Australian society as a measure of its linguistic, even moral, disintegration. In short, they believe, it is barbarous and ab(h)ominable.

H AS AN AB(H)OMINABLE LETTER

Which brings me to Shakespeare. In Love’s Labour’s Lost the silly pedant Holofernes, a schoolmaster, rages against those who mispronounce English words (‘rackers of orthography’ he calls them). The ‘racker’ is one who would ‘speak "dout" fine when he should say "doubt"; "det", when he should pronounce "debt"; d e b t, not det ... this is abhominable, which he would call "abominable" ’.

It is clear from this that Holofernes wants the /b/ sounded in doubt and debt. As a pedant he knows that doubtcomes from Latin dubitare where the b is indubitably pronounced. What he does not know is that the word came into English from the French and the French word is b-less to the eyebrows: hence, as the early fourteenth-century Cursor Munditells us of Doubting Thomas the Apostle, ‘lange he dutid’ (‘long he doubted’). Likewise, the word debt was borrowed into English from French as det, the b being artificially forced into the word by sixteenth-century pedants like Holofernes himself because its Latin etymon was debitum. And, triumphantly, he wants an /h/ (or a /h/) intruded into and sounded in abominable. Again, this is on etymological grounds. As a Latinate pedant, he thinks that this word ultimately goes back to Latin ab homine (‘away from man’, hence ‘beastly’), when in fact he is wrong—it comes via French from Latin abominabilis,‘deserving of imprecation or abhorrence’, from abominari,‘to deprecate as an ill omen’. The passage demonstrates the precarious status of those linguistic pedants who appeal to the history of the language. Linguistic history is a double-edged sword. Or, as a famous mixer of metaphors once pointed out, by appealing to linguistic history, one can be ‘hoist on’ one’s ‘own petard’. (Apropos of nothing much, I wonder idly whether Shakespeare knew that petard, ‘an explosive device or bomb’, derives from the French verb peter ‘to fart’.) Holofernes is Shakespeare’s great warning about linguistic history—beware of linguistic pedants, even if they do know where petard comes from!

'You Must Die' in Chinese is pronounced 'Facebook'

Kindle Touch

I don't understand people who think, 'wow, I have nice, slim and sleek device here. I'm going to put an ugly sticker over it and shove it into a huge bulky, ugly cover that completely hides it.'

Furrier?

courtesy of Samizdat (cool name).

CYOA

Great analysis of these books. Especially this one where there is:

a catastrophic ending seen in the third row from the bottom. This was a punishment page that could only be reached by cheating. Unlike most other endings in the book it does not offer to let you continue the story from a few pages back but instead calls you a cheater and leaves you with no choice but to start over from the beginning

Outer Space

Talk about prolific: Dude can't stop writing books

Latvian Jokes

Is dead dog in road. Is dead Latvian in road. What difference?
Dog have fur keep warm. Also, freedom. And dog try eat poop for pleasure not just survive. So many thing!

Man is hungry. He steal bread to feed family. Get home, find all family have sent Siberia! “More bread for me,” man think. But bread have worm.

Aurora: This ain't your grandad's space 4X

George Saunders: CommComm

Tuesday morning, Jillian from Disasters calls. Apparently an airman named Loolerton has poisoned a shitload of beavers. I say we don’t kill beavers, we harvest them, because otherwise they nibble through our Pollution Control Devices (P.C.D.s) and polluted water flows out of our Retention Area and into the Eisenhower Memorial Wetland, killing beavers.

“That makes sense,” Jillian says, and hangs up.

The press has a field day. “air force kills beavers to save beavers,” says one headline. “murdered beavers speak of air force cruelty,” says another.

“We may want to PIDS  this,” Mr. Rimney says.

the New Yorker

O'Hara: Appointment in Samarra

A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles, where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

Gaffes. This was written in 1984 - 28 years ago.

We have reached a political nadir of some sort if the Democratic Party candidate for the leadership of the free world is chosen on the basis of a casual remark about New Jersey. Yet it seems possible history will record that Gary Hart lost his chance to be President when he stood with his wife, Lee, on a Los Angeles terrace and uttered these fateful words: “The deal is that we campaign separately; that’s the bad news. The good news for her is she campaigns in California, and I campaign in New Jersey.” Lee Hart mentioned that in California she’d held a Koala bear, and the Senator added in mock rue that in New Jersey he’d held “samples from a toxic waste dump.”

The TV networks played this incident very big, the analysts of the print media went to work on it, and it appears to have blossomed into a gaffe. This could cost Hart the New Jersey primary—and therefore, everyone agrees, any hope of the nomination.

The “gaffe” is now the principal dynamic mechanism of American politics, as interpreted by journalists. Each candidacy is born in a state of prelapsarian innocence, and the candidate then proceeds to commit gaffes. Journalists record each new gaffe, weigh it on their Gaffability Index (“major gaffe,” “gaffe,” “minor gaffe,” “possible gaffe,” all the way down to “ironically, could turn out to be a plus with certain interest groups”), and move the players forward or backward on the game board accordingly.

Hart’s Jerseyblooper contained both of the key elements of the gaffe in its classically pure form. First, as explained in this space three weeks ago, a “gaffe” occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth. The burden of Hart’s remark was that, all else being equal, he’d rather spend a few springtime weeks in California than in New Jersey. Of course he would. So would I. So would Walter Mondale, no doubt, along with the vast majority of Americans, including, quite possibly, most residents of New Jersey. This doesn’t mean that California is more important than New Jersey, or even a better place to live and raise a family. It certainly doesn’t mean that people who live in California are superior to people who live in New Jersey. Quite the contrary. Just as youth is wasted on the young, California is wasted on Californians. Hart’s remark just means that California is more appealing than New Jersey as a place for someone from neither state to spend a few weeks.

The second element of the classic gaffe is that the subject matter should be trivial. Political journalism has evolved in somewhat the same direction as literary criticism, which is now dominated by people called deconstructionists. Deconstructionist criticism is indifferent to the literary value of the “text”—novel or poem or whatever—it is analyzing. The “text” is just grist for arcane and self-referential analysis. A work of no special merit is even preferable in a way, since it doesn’t distract from the analysis, which is the real show.

Similarly, political journalism dwells in its own world of primaries and polls. If necessary, journalists can take a significant fact such as Jesse Jackson’s continuing embrace of the repellent Louis Farrakhan—drain it of all its moral implications, and turn it into a gaffe. But campaign mechanics make for preferable subject matter. And the ideal “text” for political journalism to chew on is an episode of no real meaning or importance—such as a small joke about New Jersey—which can then be analyzed without distraction exclusively in terms of its likely effect on the campaign. The analysis itself, of course, is what creates that effect: a triumph of criticism the deconstructionists can only envy.

Once the press certifies that a gaffe has been committed by any candidate, the rules call for a quick round of lying by all of them. Here too, Jerseygate followed the classic pattern. Walter Mondale, in his patented serial-monogamy style, proclaimed “I love New Jersey” and swore there’s no place on earth he’d rather be. Hart asserted preposterously that all he’d really meant to complain of was having to fly across the country to meet his wife in California, rather than allowing her the pleasure of flying across the country to join him in New Jersey.

Journalists—stern enforcers of political etiquette—require politicians to tell these whoppers in order to put the campaign back on its proper course. Should a politician fail to lie at the first post-gaffe opportunity, the punishment would be headlines on the order of HART COMPOUNDS JERSEY GAFFE or MONDALE SPURNS JERSEY TOO.

So you can’t blame Mondale for following the script. But you can blame him for a repeat performance the next day, when he began by saying he was “not going to press the point” regarding Hart’s insufficient love of New Jersey, then repeated Hart’s remark, repeated his own demand for an apology, and spent several minutes doing variations on the theme. Mondale happened to be in New Jersey at the moment of Hart’s gaffe. But Mondale is spending nearly twice as much time in California as in New Jersey in the period leading up to both state primaries. What a sacrifice! And what should we make of what Mondale told a group in San Francisco in mid-May? “I saw this beautiful morning,” he said, “and for one sane moment I thought I would withdraw from the race and spend the rest of my life right here.” Right here? In California? Mondale seems to be saying that if he were sane, he would never step foot in his beloved New Jersey again. I think he should apologize. Sounds like a gaffe to me.

Daniel King analyses Game 4 of Anand - Gelfand World Championship Match

Onto a vast plain

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

Rilke, Book of Hours, II 1

John Cage on boredom

Cage: Boredom is not so bad, and not really boring you know? This is something I've known all along from Zen Buddhism. You know that story, if something's boring after two minutes, try it for four. After four, try eight et cetera. Eventually you'll find that it's not boring at all.