A proportionate response to the bad news we are inundated with every single day?

By Jack Brummet, Old Media Ed,

I am reading a post apocalypse novel before starting book two of Proust (not cleansing the palate, just taking a breather).  This passage from TW Brown is one of several reasons I can no longer watch broadcast news, or, often, read the local newspaper.

Thinking of the recent spate of beheadings, offshore, and now onshore, it feels like we no longer have a proportionate response to the outrages.  The two hundred still kidnapped girls, the thousands of civilians who have died as "collateral damage" on our missions mostly in the Middle East, and Ebola running virtually unchecked seem like far better targets for our compassion and outrage than three people decapitated by extremists.

I get it; beheading is dramatic, it's really f'ing sad, and generates a visceral response and far more airtime, web hits, and ink.  I've veered wildly from my intention to post a quote from TW Brown.  I have to use a bitmap....Kindle doesn't support text clips, or at least by any method I can figure out.

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Search Engines and All This Is That

By Mona Goldwater, Computing Ed.

Traffic (a/k/a readers) into All This Is That is heavily skewed to Google, mainly, we assume, because Google owns blogger and Blogspot, where this blog is located.  

According to Searchenginewatch, current search engine popularity is :

• 67.6% Google
• Bing 18.7%
• Yahoo 10%
• Ask 2.4%
• AOL 1.3%.  

Wait...that's 100%?? I guess that means that Apple's Safari, Mozilla Firefox, etc. are statistically irrelevant?  We are guessing that, although Bing is at an 18.7% market share, they tend not to refer to Google-oriented sites?  Or maybe it's just us!

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Faces No. 914 - Beards

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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Getting through Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

By Jack Brummet
20th Century Fiction Ed.

I just finished Swann's Way, Book One of Seven in Marcel Proust's novel In Search Of Lost Time a/k/a Remembrance of Things Past (about to page 550 or so of a 3,600 page book). I don't think I've spent two weeks reading a book before except maybe Lord of the Rings or Ulysses. I haven't read a book in a long time that aroused joy and frustration in me like this. Swann's Way has vast passages of brilliant, machine-gun prose and incandescent writing, focused on memory, time, obsession, and brilliant psychological analysis.

As a kid who grew up poor, I have some of the same problems reading this as I had with, say, Jane Austen or other writers who focus on the dapper and lovely lives of the upper classes. I had a pretty visceral reaction to some of this. But for the most part the book is so densely poetic with some of the most beautiful descriptive prose I've read in my life, that I give it a pass. It made me realize why I prefer Charles Dickens or Dreiser Hemingway or Joyce or even Rabelais to the more mannered novels of the upper crust. But then--why do I love Shakespeare so much when he also mostly wrote about the upper crust and whose best works are almost all focused on Kings and the nobility? 

painting of Marcel Proust by J.E. Blanche

I am meeting with a group of people soon and we are going to be a sort of ad hoc book club that focuses on Proust's great novel. This should be very interesting. We'll be meeting at Café Presse, so even if it fizzles (I don't think it will), hey, good eats and good Bordeaux.

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The rapture that never happened, May 21, 2011

By Jack Brummet

The rapture that never happened, on May 21, 2011, actually generated a huge amount of humor and speculation on the internet.  I created a series of collaged images in the week before the rapture, and a day or two afterwards.  Here they are:

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Painting: A Sunflower And Zinnia

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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Painting: The first map

By Jack Brummet

This is the first map I ever drew and painted.  They got better as time went on, but this one's special because it was the first, and because I used an old window from our house as the frame.

click to enlarge

Details:

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ATIT Reheated [from 2006]: Calvin Coolidge,The President of Cool

By Jack Brummet, Presidents Ed.

They say he wasn't actually frosty. . .he just rarely showed emotion. In fact, when President Harding died, Coolidge was awakened after 2:00 A.M. He took the oath of office in his sitting room. He was sworn in by his father, who was a notary public. Thirteen minutes after he took the oath of office at 2:47 A.M., Calvin Coolidge went back to sleep. To sleep! His President (Warren Harding) had just died! He was The Top Banana! And he went to sleep. In that same position, I would have done something. Like:

Drink some whiskey!
Raise up a glass to the shade of Warren G. Harding.
Give orders to round up some of my enemies and have them held at The Tombs.
I would legalize something.
I would declare martial law on Detroit.
Drink more whiskey!
Declare the Roman Catholic Church a subversive organization.
Ask for the cabinet's resignations.
Order in naked dancing girls.
Throw a feast.
Make a collage.
Drive a tank through the streets of Washington.
In a radio address to the nation, quote Putney Swope: "I am not going to rock the boat; I am going to tip it over."
Watch the sunrise and the birds take to the sky on my first day as Czar  King  President.

Then, maybe, I'd go to bed.

Coolidge kept a poem hung on the wall in his living room, and it both illustrated how he felt and the image he wanted to project:

A wise old owl lived in an oak
The more he saw, the less he spoke
The less he spoke the more he heard
Why can’t we be like that old bird?

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Poem: Sailing to Athens

By Jack Brummet

In a pale grey fog,
I see the ghosts

Of ancient Helleniki mariners
Sailing phantom steamships, sloops,

Prams, dories, catamarans, dinghies,
Trawlers, purse-seiners, frigates and tugboats

Across the cerulean blue sea,
Trawling for missing fish.
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Only: an English game

via Radio One Lebanon :

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Photo: Guerillas Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the early days, up in the Sierra Maestra Mountains

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the early days of their guerrilla campaign, holed up in the Sierra Maestra Mountains.

#85075079 / gettyimages.com

Much later - Che tourist postcards on sale in Havana:

#98877483 / gettyimages.com

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Four James Richardson aphorisms

What I'm not changes more than what I am.

So many times I've made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.

The wound hurts less than your desire to wound me.

Think of all the smart people who are made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn't fine long when used as a hammer.

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