Patterns

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the splashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon—
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday sen’night.”
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” l told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

Amy Lowell, “Patterns” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell.

lo posted:

not finding it super compelling just yet

i remembered one way it fell short was a lack of exploring the freikorps violence perpetrated in german colonies pre-ww1. in trying to find more info on this i ran across a short critique that expands on this and also highlights how theweleit treats rape more in abstract than as an embodied act. here's a link to the article in case some of the info might help flesh out your reading.

Gssh posted:

lo posted:


not finding it super compelling just yet


i remembered one way it fell short was a lack of exploring the freikorps violence perpetrated in german colonies pre-ww1. in trying to find more info on this i ran across a short critique that expands on this and also highlights how theweleit treats rape more in abstract than as an embodied act. here's a link to the article in case some of the info might help flesh out your reading.

this looks interesting, thanks. i am still reading it, i'm finding it more interesting now although it is probably more thought provoking than actually convincing if that makes sense. i don't really have any background in psychoanalysis, so some of the more indepth references to reich and freud and the stuff about deleuze and guattari critiquing freud went a bit over my head. i thought that some of the analysis of the fascist texts was interesting and that he was slowly and carefully teasing out what it might mean, and then he seemed to shift up a gear or three and drew out quite a few things all at once that didn't seem to follow as clearly from the texts. i do like how he'll just go off on tangents and digressions, like at the moment he's been rambling about the development of bourgeois ideology in early modern europe and how it pertains to the position of women for like 30 pages. this is interesting although some of it does feel a bit like a just so story probably because he's painting with quite a broad brush. there's a few very 70s things that pop up too like the one off reference to the aquatic ape theory(which i didn't actually know was formulated by one proponent as a specifically feminist alternative idea of human evolution) which are fun even though they're probably not correct.

zhaoyao posted:

wait why are you using the family plan thing to learn klingon or logjam or whatever instead of taking the french course along with your spouse so you can practice together and learn better

Maybe gay swimmer knows Italian and can therefore speak a reasonable approximation of French when their mouth is full of food

gay_swimmer posted:

Bad news. Wife asked me where they speak Esperanto and when I explained it's a constructed auxiilary language she said 'oh, so it's like Klingon' in a sarcastic voice. Says if you can't use it to order in a restaurant it's not a real language.

Sorry that I think some languages are too valuable and important to be the complement to a national cuisine. 😮‍💨

there has to have been at least one restaurant run by insane esperanto utopians at some point.. and if not, here's your chance to break into the world of gimmick restaurants!

When the productive social capital of any part of the world is obliterated, the potential value of private capital elsewhere is enhanced—especially when the chronic problem faced today by western capitalism is one of overcapacity. Every agricultural base destroyed by western aerial attacks (as in Iraq) or by WTO "free trade" agreements (as in Mexico, India, Africa, and elsewhere) diminishes the potential competition and increases the market opportunities for multinational corporate agribusiness.

To destroy publicly run Yugoslav factories that produced auto parts, appliances, or fertilizer—or publicly financed Sudanese or Yugoslav plants that produced pharmaceuticals at prices substantially below those of their Western competitors— is to enhance the investment value of Western automotive and pharmaceutical companies. And every television or radio station closed down by NATO troops or blown up by NATO bombs extends the ideological and communicational dominance of the Western media cartels. In a word, the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia's social capital served a rational class interest.

NATO's attacks revealed a consistent pattern that bespoke its underlying political agenda. The Confederation of Trade Unions of Serbia produced a list of 164 factories destroyed by the bombings—all of them state-owned. Not a single foreign-owned firm was targeted. As I observed on a trip to Yugoslavia shortly after the war, the huge, state-run Hotel Yugoslavia was made uninhabitable by NATO missiles, while the corporate owned Hyatt Hotel, with its all-glass facade—as inviting a target as any mad bomber might want—suffered not a scratched windowpane.
Buildings that displayed highly visible rooftop signs that advertised Panasonic, Coca-Cola, Diners Club International, and McDonald's, the latter replete with immense golden arches, survived perfectly intact.

Other political targets were hit. The Usce business center was struck by several missiles, rather precisely hitting the headquarters of Slobodan Miosevic's Socialist Party, along with the headquarters of JUL (Yugoslav United Left), a coalition of twenty-three communist and left parties, closely allied with the Socialist Party. Buildings used by the ministries of defense and the interior were also demolished. NATO destroyed or seriously damaged fuel storage facilities, oil refineries, chemical factories, roads, bridges, railway networks, airports, water supply systems, electrical power plants, and warehouses. This destruction paralyzed the production of consumer goods and added more than a million people to the ranks of the unemployed. Kragujevac, an industrial city in Central Serbia, suffered immense damage. Its mammoth, efficiently state-run Zastava factory was demolished, causing huge amounts of toxic chemicals to spill from the factory's generators. Zastava had employed tens of thousands of workers who produced cars, trucks, and tractors sold domestically and abroad. NATO attacks left some 80 per cent of its workforce without a livelihood. Publicly owned Zastava factories exist all over Yugoslavia. The attackers knew their locations, and destroyed many of them. Those not bombed were out of production for want of crucial materials or a recipient for their products.

It has been argued that the Yugo, the inexpensive state produced automobile, could never really compete with Western European or Japanese cars. But the Yugo was the most frequently used vehicle in Yugoslavia itself. It also sold some 180,000 in the United States in the 1980s, and many more in other countries. But by 2000 it was almost entirely out of production and gave no competition to overseas auto markets nor to whatever market remained in Yugoslavia. In Nis, cruise missiles pulverized the tobacco and cigarette production plant, one of the most successful in Europe. Numerous state-run food-processing sites were leveled. A report by NBC has confirmed that NATO bombed the pharmaceutical complex of Galenika, the largest in Yugoslavia, located in Belgrade's suburbs. Our delegation was told that one worker managed factory was contaminated with depleted uranium.

The city of Aleksinac and additional socialist strongholds in southern Serbia were bombed especially heavily, resulting in many civilian deaths. Leaders from Aleksinac and several other cities in Serbia's "Red Belt" were convinced that they were pounded so mercilessly primarily because they were socialist, a suspicion reinforced by the fact that the region contained almost no heavy industry.

In Novi Sad, worker-managed factories that somehow had survived the pitiless years of sanctions were reduced to ruins, along with bus and train depots. Major bridges were knocked down, blocking all shipping on the Danube, contaminating the river's bottom with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, and severing most of Serbia from the rest of Europe. Because of its depth, the Danube was judged nearly impossible to clean.

Yugoslav electrical and construction firms used to be competitive with Western ones, winning contracts abroad on a regular basis. The NATO bombing eliminated that competition quite nicely. Heating plants and the entire oil-processing industry were badly crippled. Missiles that explode only after penetrating the earth's surface (being designed to destroy subterranean bomb shelters) were used to rip apart underground transmitter cables at an electrical power transformer station on the outskirts of Zemun. There was little hope of repairing these since international sanctions deprived the Yugoslays of the replacement parts made by Westinghouse.

NATO attacks also were intended to terrorize and demoralize the civilian population. Libraries, theaters, hospitals, clinics, maternity wards, sanitariums, and geriatric homes were destroyed or badly damaged, with serious injury or loss of life to occupants. Schools attended by several hundred thousand students were destroyed or damaged. NATO bombed historic sites, cultural monuments, museums, and churches—something not even Hitler did.

The inability to rebuild their power supply transmitters left many towns and cities throughout Serbia bereft of sufficient heat in the winter, and without drinkable water supplies for certain urban populations. There is no shortage of water in Yugoslavia, but water distribution and purification systems were badly damaged and not easily repaired. As of the summer of 1999, whole sectors of the city of Novi Sad were without drinking water (although water was available for washing clothes and waste elimination). Clean drinking water for Belgrade was also getting difficult because the drinking water facility at Zarkovo had been bombed.

Sometimes the NATO attackers carefully selected their targets; other times they unloaded seemingly at random. I visited a housing project of some seventy units that had been destroyed. The surviving occupants had lost all their possessions, and most were without money to pay for new residences. Many of the survivors had sustained injuries, and many were suffering psychological shock and depression. An adjacent elementary school, named after Svetozar Markovich, identified as "the founder of socialism in the Balkans," was seriously damaged.

A village outside Novi Sad containing nothing remotely resembling a military or infrastructure target had ten homes destroyed. Some of the structures, looking like stage sets with front walls and rooftops missing, were occupied by Serb refugees from Croatia. They were without jobs and funds to buy the materials needed to rebuild. Nor were building materials readily available. So they made do with plastic sheets over shattered windows and an outdoor cooking stove. In various towns there had been deliberate attacks on residential areas. In one day in Nis, twenty-three people were killed and seventy wounded, mostly by cluster bombs—our tax dollars at work. (Cluster bombs cannot destroy structures, only people.) Members of our delegation met with individuals who still shook with fear when talking about the attacks. Most had no hope of rebuilding.

i'm getting that same raging feeling i had when reading Killing Hope.

tears posted:

BOOK REView: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik is an awful book, but then most of them are. i read it because i am indulging in extreme displacement activities. unfortunatly the joke was on me. it did make me think a bit, but mostly about what it is about the "fantasy YA genre" that means i keep referring to it as bad and making fun of it, and saying that cnn viewers are YA fans, since the idea of "young adult literature" is not inherently bad, in fact it is good, but the foetid coagulation of YA fiction, of which this is a prime smear, is terrible. this book is undoubtedly the following: trash.

the problems were multiferous, but i can home in on a few: firstly, the book is mostly famous book "harry potter", but none of the interesting bits - most chapters are just the previous chapter, but again. secondly: the main character is in love with a christmas cracker caricature of a lunk, a literal 0-dimensional gymbro, but, get this he's the harry potter of gymbros. if harry potter was a zero-point singularity who worked out he would have more substance. three: the MC has sex, i strongly disagree with this on principle. 4: the main character is so mary sue that i have the need to use the term mary sue to describe them which i feel is appalling violence by the author against me. six: the story meanders everywhere, and the author seems to forget what gave the previous book a modicum of compulsion (see point 1: every champter is the previous one, but again). the combination of the meandering, the repetition ad nauseam, the sue to end all sues and all the other bits and pieces mean something something something i forget.i skimmed the last few chapters in the hope that something would happen to provide any sort of hook to draw me back for my YA coma (i didnt)

thank you for reading my review.

as a "young adult" & presumably the target audience I skimmed the beginning of famous book "harry potter" once. kid finds out he has hidden superpowers, shuttled off from his drab life into a world of fantasy and so on, awkward setup for it & not very creative but makes sense for the target audience. Then I flipped through another few pages and found out that the secret childhood power fantasy of famous author "J. K. rowling" is to be a little boy who is forced to go to school like any other kid, but specifically a school where the men running the place seem right away like they want to have sex with him.

tears posted:

i still got to read all the other brumaires louis bonaparte wrote

brumaires 1, 2, and 18