“Film is one of the three universal languages. The other two: mathematics and music.” — Frank Capra (1897-1991)
An interesting bio-paradox from the world’s premier papyrocentric purveyor of progressive performativity:
Vast stretches of roadside have been transformed. Where there were thick clumps of grass, there are low-growing wildflowers such as black medic, birds-foot trefoil and red clover. The verges are cut two or three times a year, not 12, saving the council tens of thousands of pounds. Butterflies and other invertebrates have returned in their droves. […]
The process is simple: cut infrequently, ideally, just twice a year in spring and then late summer once plants have bloomed and seeded; remove the clippings to gradually reduce the fertility of the soil and prevent a buildup of mulch; repeat, wait, and enjoy the resurgent wildlife and flowers. […]
“As fertility declines in a soil, biodiversity increases. At first that seems a little counterintuitive because you imagine the more you pour into a soil, the more plants that can grow. That’s not how it works in the natural system. In more fertile systems, a few species dominate and they swamp and smother everything else.”
Grass cuttings are almost always left where they fall along the thousands of miles of road verges that are maintained by law in the UK. Over time, the resulting mulch increases the fertility of the soil, meaning the grass grows with increasing vigour and needs to be cut more frequently. The cut and collect method breaks the cycle. — On the verge: a quiet roadside revolution is boosting wildflowers, The Guardian, 14iii2020
“Será tan breve que ya he terminado,” — Salvador Dalí, Con la frase “Ja soc aquí”, Dalí abrió una surrealista conferencia de Prensa, El País, 25×1980
Salvador Dalí […] once gave the world’s shortest speech – six seconds in duration. He said, “I will be so brief I have already finished,” and he sat down. — Edward O. Wilson
Previously pre-posted
• A Seriously Sizzling Series of Super-Saucy Salvadisms — more good quotes by Salvador Dalí
“Watching television is like taking black spray-paint to your third eye.” — Bill Hicks
Post-Performative Post-Scriptum
The title of this incendiary intervention is a tribute to the famous Variety headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix”. However, I mean “pixels” by “pix”, not “pictures”.
«Il vino è la luce del sole tenuta insieme dall’acqua.» — Galileo (1564-1642)
“Wine is sunlight held together by water.” — Galileo
THE SESSION OF THE POETS.—August, 1866.
Dî magni, salaputium disertum* — CAT[ullus]. Lib. LIII.
AT the Session of Poets held lately in London,
The Bard of Freshwater† was voted the chair:
With his tresses unbrush’d, and his shirt-collar undone,
He loll’d at his ease like a good-humour’d Bear;
“Come, boys,” he exclaimed, “we’ll be merry together!”
And lit up his pipe with a smile on his cheek;
While with eye like a skipper’s cock’d up at the weather,
Sat the Vice-Chairman Browning, thinking in Greek.
The company gather’d embraced great and small bards,
Both strong bards and weak bards, funny and grave,
Fat bards and lean bards, little and tall bards,
Bards who wear whiskers, and others who shave.
Of books, men, and things, was the bards’ conversation
Some praised Ecce Homo, some deemed it so-so —
And then there was talk of the state of the nation,
And when the unwash’d would devour Mr. Lowe.
Right stately sat Arnold — his black gown adjusted
Genteelly, his Rhine wine deliciously iced, —
With puddingish England serenely disgusted,
And looking in vain (in the mirror) for “Geist.”
He heark’d to the Chairman, with “Surely!” and “Really?”
Aghast at both collar and cutty of clay, —
Then felt in his pocket, and breath’d again freely,
On touching the leaves of his own classic play.
Close at hand lingered Lytton, whose Icarus-winglets
Had often betrayed him in regions of rhyme —
How glitter’d the eye underneath his grey ringlets,
A hunger within it unlessened by time!
Remoter sat Bailey — satirical, surly —
Who studied the language of Goethe too soon,
Who sang himself hoarse to the stars very early,
And crack’d a weak voice with too lofty a tune.
How name all that wonderful company over —
Prim Patmore, mild Alford — and Kingsley also?
Among the small sparks who was realler than Lover?
Among misses, who sweeter than Miss Ingelow?
There sat, looking moony, conceited, and narrow,
Buchanan, — who, finding when foolish and young,
Apollo asleep on a coster-girl’s barrow,
Straight dragged him away to see somebody hung.
What was said? what was done? was there prosing or rhyming?
Was nothing noteworthy in deed or in word?
Why, just as the hour for the supper was chiming,
The only event of the evening occurred.
Up jumped, with his neck stretching out like a gander,
Master Swinburne, and squeal’d, glaring out through his hair,
“All Virtue is bosh! Hallelujah for Landor!
I disbelieve wholly in everything! — there!”
With language so awful he dared then to treat ’em, —
Miss Ingelow fainted in Tennyson’s arms,
Poor Arnold rush’d out, crying “Sæcl’ inficetum!”‡
And great bards and small bards were full of alarms;
Till Tennyson, flaming and red as a gipsy,
Struck his fist on the table and uttered a shout:
“To the door with the boy! Call a cab! He is tipsy!”
And they carried the naughty young gentleman out.
After that, all the pleasanter talking was done there
Whoever had known such an insult before?
The Chairman tried hard to re-kindle the fun there,
But the Muses were shocked, and the pleasure was o’er.
Then “Ah!” cried the Chairman, “this teaches me knowledge,
The future shall find me more wise, by the powers!
This comes of assigning to younkers from college
Too early a place in such meetings as ours!”
CALIBAN, The Spectator, September 15, 1866
*Dî magni, salaputium disertum = “Great gods, an eloquent mannikin!”
†”The Bard of Freshwater” is Tennyson, who lived at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight
‡”Sæcl’ inficetum!” = “Uncouth age!”
Caliban was Robert Buchanan (1841-1901), later the author of “The Fleshly School of Poetry”, an attack on immorality and sensuality in the poetry of Swinburne and Rossetti.
The Great Beast writes:
I witnessed a remarkable sight on the road to Chabanjong, which was here a paka rasta (that is, a road made by engineers as opposed to kacha rasta, a track made by habit or at most by very primitive methods) wide enough for carts to pass. I had squatted near the middle of the road as being the least damp and leech-infested spot available and got a pipe going by keeping the bowl under my waterproof. I lazily watched a leech wriggling up a blade of tall grass about fifteen inches high and smiled superiorily at its fatuity — though when I come to think of it, my own expedition was morally parallel; but the leech was not such a fool as I thought. Arrived at the top, it began to set the stalk swinging to and fro; after a few seconds it suddenly let go and flew clean across the road. The intelligence of and ingenuity of the creature struck me as astonishing. — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (1929), ch. 52
“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.” — Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (1927), ch. 15, “The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics”
If you thought the keyly committed core componency of Covid-19 was bad, please park your peepers on the Satan Bug dot dot dot:
In its final form, the Satan Bug is an extremely refined powder. I take a salt-spoon of this powder, go outside in the grounds of Mordon and turn the salt-spoon upside down. What happens? Every person in Mordon would be dead within an hour, the whole of Wiltshire would be an open tomb by dawn. In a week, ten days, all life would have ceased to exist in Britain. I mean all life. The Plague, the Black Death – was nothing compared with this. Long before the last man died in agony ships or planes or birds or just the waters of the North Sea would have carried the Satan Bug to Europe. We can conceive of no obstacle that can stop its eventual world-wide spread… The Lapp trapping in the far north of Sweden. The Chinese peasant tilling his rice-fields in the Yangtse valley. The cattle rancher on his station in the Australian outback, the shopper in Fifth Avenue, the primitive in Tierra del Fuego. Dead. All dead. Because I turned a salt-spoon upside down. Nothing, nothing, nothing can stop the Satan Bug.
Previously pre-posted (on Papyrocentric Performativity):
• God-Finger — a radical review of Alistair MacLean’s The Satan Bug (1962)…
A fractal is a shape that contains smaller (and smaller) versions of itself, like this:
Fractals also occur in nature. For example, part of a tree looks like the tree as whole. Part of a cloud or a lung looks like the cloud or lung as a whole. So trees, clouds and lungs are fractals. The letters of an alphabet don’t usually look like that, but I decided to create a fractal alphabet — or fractalphabet — that does.
The fractalphabet starts with this minimal standard Roman alphabet in upper case, where each letter is created by filling selected squares in a 3×3 grid:
The above is stage 1 of the fractalphabet, when it isn’t actually a fractal alphabet at all. But if each filled square of the letter “A”, say, is replaced by the letter itself, the “A” turns into a fractal, like this:
Fractal A (animated)
Here’s the whole alphabet being turned into fractals:
Full fractalphabet (black-and-white)
Full fractalphabet (color)
Full fractalphabet (b&w animated)
Full fractalphabet (color animated)
Now take a full word like “THE”:
You can turn each letter into a fractal using smaller copies of itself:
Fractal THE (b&w animated)
Fractal THE (color animated)
But you can also create a fractal from “THE” by compressing the “H” into the “T”, then the “E” into the “H”, like this:
Compressed THE (animated)
The compressed “THE” has a unique appearance and is both a letter and a word. Now try a complete sentence, “THE CAT BIT THE RAT”. This is the sentence in stage 1 of the fractalphabet:
And stage 2:
And further stages:
Fractal CAT (b&w animated)
Fractal CAT (color animated)
But, as we saw with “THE” above, that’s not the only fractal you can create from “THE CAT BIT THE RAT”. Here’s what I call a 2-compression of the sentence, where every second letter has been compressed into the letter that precedes it:
THE CAT BIT THE RAT (2-comp color)
THE CAT BIT THE RAT (2-comp b&w)
And here’s a 3-compression of the sentence, where every third letter has been compressed into every second letter, and every second-and-third letter has been compressed into the preceding letter:
THE CAT BIT THE RAT (3-comp color)
THE CAT BIT THE RAT (3-comp b&w)
As you can see above, each word of the original sentence is now a unique single letter of the fractalphabet. Theoretically, there’s no limit to the compression: you could fit every word of a book in the standard Roman alphabet into a single letter of the fractalphabet. Or you could fit an entire book into a single letter of the fractalphabet (with additional symbols for punctuation, which I haven’t bothered with here).
To see what the fractalphabeting of a longer text in the standard Roman alphabet might look like, take the first verse of a poem by A.E. Housman:
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves. (“Poem XXXI” of A Shropshire Lad, 1896)
The first line looks like this in stage 1 of the fractalphabet:
Here’s stage 2 of the standard fractalphabet, where each letter is divided into smaller copies of itself:
And here’s stage 3 of the standard fractalphabet:
Now examine a colour version of the first line in stage 1 of the fractalphabet:
As with “THE” above, let’s try compressing each second letter into the letter that precedes it:
And here’s a 3-comp of the first line:
Finally, here’s the full first verse of Housman’s poem in 2-comp and 3-comp forms:
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves. (“Poem XXXI of A Shropshire Lad, 1896)
“On Wenlock Edge” (2-comp)
“On Wenlock Edge” (3-comp)
Appendix
This is a possible lower-case version of the fractalphabet:
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 