Without Lifting A Finger

Or a few Musil-bullets: "How things might turn out! That's always the way with you; it would never occur to you to wonder how things should be." It was essentially the same conversation he had had with Diotima, with only superficial differences. Nor did it make much difference which woman happened to be sitting there facing him; a body, introduced into a given magnetic field, invariably sets certain processes in motion. "Why on earth should I feel called upon to write a book?" Ulrich objected. "I was born of my mother, after all, not an inkwell." In this fashion Arnheim spoke with disapproval of desire, even as he felt it struggling like a blinded slave in the cellar. The moment we speak, certain doors begin to close; language works best for what doesn't really matter; we talk in lieu of living. . . ."

  [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers ]       The illustration above demonstrates the law of large numbers using a particular run of rolls of a single die. As the number of rolls in this run increases, the average of the values of all the results approaches 3.5 [the average value of all faces: (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6)/6]. Though early on in the run (at left) the mean value may fluctuate wildly, over a large number of rolls (at right) the mean value will move closer and closer to the expected (theoretical) value of 3.5.     

     At this point Gerda's resistance tried to break through. "Are you trying to explain progress to me?" she cried out, doing her best to sound sarcastic.      "But of course," Ulrich came back at her, without breaking stride. "It's called the law of large numbers, a bit nebulously. Meaning that one person may commit suicide for this reason and another for that reason, but when a great number is involved, then the accidental and the personal elements cancel each other out, and what's left . . . but that's just it: what is left? I ask you. Because  you see, what's left is what each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average, which is a "something," but nobody really knows exactly what . Let me add that efforts have been made to find a logical and formal explanation for this law of large numbers, as an accepted fact, as it were. But there are also those who say that such regularity of phenomena which are not casually related ...

Imperial and Royal The German phrase kaiserlich und königlich ( pronounced [ˈkaɪzɐlɪç ʔʊnt ˈkøːnɪklɪç] , Imperial and Royal ), typically abbreviated as k. u. k. , k. und k. , k. & k. or Hungarian: cs. és k. (in all cases the "und" is always spoken unabbreviated), refers to the Court of the Habsburgs in a broader historical perspective (see below). Some modern authors restrict its use to the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary from 1867 to 1918. During that period, it indicated that the Habsburg monarch reigned simultaneously as the Emperor of Austria and as the King of Hungary , while the two territories were joined in a real union (akin to a two-state federation in this instance). The acts of the common government, which only was responsible for the Imperial & Royal ("I&R") Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the I&R Ministry of War and the I&R Ministry of Finance (financing only the two other ministries), were carried out in the name of "H...

Gustav Jagerspacher: Portrait of Peter Altenberg 1909 , a photo by deflam on Flickr. A portrait I dug up on Flickr. No idea (yet) who Jagerspacher is. Very interesting and, yes, the hands are creepy.

From The Man (re the relationship between Walter and Clarisse): Actually, she owed him a lot. It was he who had brought the news that there were modern people who insisted on plain, cool furniture and hung pictures on their walls that showed the truth. He read new things to her, Peter Altenberg, little stories of young girls who rolled their hoops in the love-crazed tulip beds and had eyes that shone with sweet innocence like glazed chestnuts.   *** Peter Altenberg (9 March 1859, Vienna – 8 January 1919, Vienna) was a writer and poet from Vienna , Austria . He was key to the genesis of early modernism in the city. Biography He was born Richard Engländer on 9 March 1859. The nom de plume, "Altenberg", came from a small town on the Danube River . Allegedly, he chose the "Peter" to honor a young girl whom he remembered as an unrequited love (it had been her nickname). Although he grew up in a middle class Jewish family, Altenberg eventually separated h...

The stage/world thing intrigued me for about a minute (I kept hoping for that trick to disappear but it never did). At some point I wondered if I wasn't watching a spoof on Anna. I guess I'll have to wait some more (or check out the other versions I haven't seen -- that'll keep me busy) -- or better yet: just reread the perhaps unfilmable masterpiece again. It's on my list. *** Forget the glossing over of Levin's essential intellectual meanderings, how can you film this?      She looked at the lower part of the carriages, at the screws and chains and the tall cast-iron wheel of the first carriage slowly moving up, and trying to measure the middle between the front and back wheels, and the very minute when that middle point would be opposite her.      "There," she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, at the sand and coal dust which covered the sleepers--"there, in the very middle, and I will punish him and es...

What can I say? A small piece of incidental music. Combing through the "archives" (looking for cats and horned prophets), I found HER: an anonymous muse from the fall and winter of 1992/93. Back then it seemed she followed me everywhere (from Germany to Italy to Austria). 

     Someone pointed out that a man was a mysterious innerspace, who should be helped to find his place in the cosmos by means of the cone, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cube. Whereupon an opposing voice made itself heard, to the effect that the individualistic view of art underlying that statement was on its way out and that a future humanity must be given a new sense of habitation by means of communal housing and settlements. While an individualistic faction and a socialistic one were forming along these lines, a third one began by voicing the opinion that only religious artists were truly social-minded. At this point a group of New Architects was heard from, claiming leadership on the grounds that religion was at the heart of architecture, besides which it promoted love of one's country and stability, attachment to the soil.

The Moses (c. 1513–1515) is a sculpture by the Italian High Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, housed in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome . Commissioned in 1505 by Pope Julius II for his tomb , it depicts the Biblical figure Moses with horns on his head, based on a description in the Vulgate , the Latin translation of the Bible used at that time. Description The marble sculpture appears to depict Moses with horns on his head, though some modern artists and historians claim that there were never intended to be horns. [2] The depiction of a horned Moses was the normal medieval Western depiction of Moses, based on the description of Moses' face as " cornuta " ("horned") in the Latin Vulgate translation of Exodus . [3] The Douay-Rheims Bible translates the Vulgate as, "And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of th...

Meanwhile Moosbrugger was still sitting in a detention cell at the district courthouse while his case was under study. His counsel had got fresh wind in his sails and was using delaying tactics with the authorities to keep the case from coming to a final conclusion.      Moosbrugger smiled at all this. He smiled from boredom.      Boredom rocked his mind like a cradle. Ordinarily boredom blots out the mind, but his was rocked by it, this time anyway. He felt like an actor in his dressing room, waiting for his cue.

Juliette Binoche et Laura Morante - Egéries Lancôme , a photo by anneso_cachemireetsoie on Flickr. Ok, they're aging -- but who isn't. The Binoche has always been a favorite of mine. Enjoyed Laura just the other night (along with Javier) in rewatching Malkovich's The Dancer Upstairs .

cats at the Protestant Cemetery - Cimitero protestante: Rome , a photo by mermaid99 on Flickr. Not mine (mine were more numerous and had a buffet of milk and open tins) but close enough. Not sure if I ever found Keats' grave.

Michelangelo's Moses statue (1515) , a photo by Niroshan Sothilingam on Flickr. I was looking for something else (cats in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome) and found "my Moses" (too lazy to digitalize and post it so this one is surrogate) from circa 1992. I believe the "horns" are due to a mistranslation of the Hebrew text. When I was there the church was under repair, scaffolding and draping canvas everywhere, and it was very dark: had to put a few lire into the box for lighting.

Harold and Maude and Me , a photo by Larry He's So Fine on Flickr. * Ruth Gordon Jones (October 30, 1896 – August 28, 1985), better known as Ruth Gordon , was an American actress and writer. [ 1 ] She was perhaps best known for her film roles such as Minnie Castevet, Rosemary's overly solicitous neighbor in Rosemary's Baby , as the eccentric Maude in Harold and Maude and as the mother of Orville Boggs in the Clint Eastwood film Every Which Way but Loose . In addition to her acting career, Gordon wrote numerous well-known plays, film scripts and books. Gordon won an Academy Award , an Emmy and two Golden Globe awards for her acting, as well as three Academy Award nominations for her writing. [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Gordon ]

Michigan Theatre, Ann Arbor , a photo by sjb4photos on Flickr. When I was in A-squared it seems like The Rocky Horror and Harold & Maude were playing all the time. Am I wrong? Who knows. I saw neither then. I finally got around to seeing H & M and I loved it. Will watch it again soon. The last time I had a chance to stop in to the Michigan it was La vie en rose .

     Digression Three or Answer Number Four: The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball--which, once it is hit, takes a definite line--but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is a certain going off course. The present is always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer counts as a house in town. Each generation wonders "Who am I, and what were my forebears?" It would make more sense to ask "Where am I?" and to assume that one's predecessors were not different in kind but merely in a different place; that would be a move in the right direction, he thought.

A few things I've inked in The Man lately: "Now please don't think," he said, turning to her in all seriousness, "that all I mean by this is that everyone wants what is hard to get, and despises the attainable. What I mean is this: Within reality there is a senseless craving for unreality."   ***       "And what would you do," Diotima asked irritably, "if you could rule the world for a day?"       "I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality." ***   If we ask ourselves dispassionately how science has arrived at its present state--an important question in itself, considering how entirely we are in its power and how not even an illiterate is safe from its domination, since he has to learn to live with countless things born of science--we get a different picture. Credible received wisdom indicates that it all began in the sixteenth century, a time of the greatest spiritual turbulence, when peo...

Like her (love a lot of her) but I wasn't really crazy about "Some Like Poetry" when I first read it. Part of what nettled me was the ending (variously translated). Anyway, I found the original and a few "versions" (see below), and may (I have a Polka in my house) eventually include a version of my own. * Niektórzy lubią poezję Niektórzy - czyli nie wszyscy. Nawet nie większość wszystkich ale mniejszość. Nie licząc szkół, gdzie się musi, i samych poetów, będzie tych osób chyba dwie na tysiąc. Lubią - ale lubi się także rosół z makaronem, lubi się komplementy i kolor niebieski, lubi się stary szalik, lubi się stawiać na swoim, lubi się głaskać psa. Poezję - Tylko co to takiego poezja. Niejedna chwiejna odpowiedź na to pytanie już padła. A ja nie wiem i nie wiem i trzymam się tego Jak zbawiennej poręczy. * From Google Translate: Some like poetry Some - that is not all . Not even the majority of all but a small minority...

According to the Wiki on Golconda , Scutenaire gave Magritte the idea for the title: Golconda (in French: Golconde ). Supposedly one of the larger "raining men" in the painting (I could never blow it up to pinpoint which one) has Scutenaire's face. ***     Life   Louis Scutenaire is chiefly remembered as a central figure in the Belgian Surrealist movement, along with René Magritte , Paul Nougé , Marcel Lecomte and his own wife Irène Hamoir . He studied law at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel ) and was a criminal lawyer from 1931 to 1944. In 1926 he discovered surrealism and was a primary contributor to the Revue surréaliste . He was sympathetic to communism during the 1930s and 1940s but as the truth about Joseph Stalin 's regime became more apparent, he grew disenchanted with it and became an anarchist . After the Second World War he became a civil servant in the...

From The Man Without Qualities :      Precision, as a human attitude, demands precise action and precise being. It makes maximal demands on the doer and on life. But here a distinction must be made.      In reality, as we all know, there is not only an imaginary precision (not yet present in reality at all) but also a pedantic kind, the difference being that the imaginary kind sticks to the facts and the pedantic kind to imaginary constructs. The precision, for instance, with which Moosbrugger's peculiar mentality was fitted into a two-thousand-year-old system of legal concepts resembled a madman's pedantic insistence on trying to spear a free-flying bird with a pin; this precision was concerned not at all with the facts but only with the question of whether Moosbrugger could be legally condemned to death, the psychiatrists were absolutely precise: they did not dare say more than that Moosbrugger's clinical picture did not exactly correspond ...

        From:   http://www.academia.edu/1121616/Dreaming_Moosbrugger_The_Other_versus_Modernity_in_Musils_The_Man_Without_Qualities         

  [Image from Photobucket] 

In The Man Without Qualities she's mentioned in the same breath as Tolstoy: Take Tolstoy, for instance, and Bertha Suttner, two writers whose ideas were equally discussed at the time -- but now, Diotima thought, can mankind even have a roast chicken without violence?   ***     Bertha Felicitas Sophie Freifrau von Suttner (Baroness Bertha von Suttner , Gräfin (Countess) Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau; 9 June 1843 – 21 June 1914) was an Austrian novelist, radical (organizational) pacifist , and the first woman to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.   Biography  Suttner was born in Prague , Bohemia , the daughter of an impoverished [ 1 ] Austrian Field Marshal, Franz-Josef Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau, and wife Sophie von Körner, and governess to the wealthy Suttner family from 1873. She had an older brother, Arthur Franz Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau. She became engaged to engineer and novelist Arthur Gundaccar Freiherr von Suttner (...

And so Count Leinsdorf thought: "Things can never again be what they were, the way they were," and as he thought this he was quite astonished. For one assumed that if there was indeed no voluntary going back in history, then mankind was like a man driven along by some inexplicable wanderlust, a  man who could neither go back nor arrive anywhere, and this was a quite remarkable condition. 

Magritte Your World a video by gamabin on Flickr. Only because I think I ran into a little Magritte magic this week. Impossible to explain.

But a shared bedroom, with the lights out, puts a man in the situation of an actor having to play before an invisible house the rewarding but by now worn-out role of a hero impersonating a growling lion. For years now, Leo's dark auditorium had not let slip the faintest hint of applause, nor yet the smallest sign of disapproval, and this was surely enough to shatter the strongest nerves. In the morning at breakfast, which the couple took together in accordance with time-honored tradition, Clementine was stiff as a frozen corpse and Leo twitchy with nerves. Even their daughter, Gerda, noticed something of this every time and had come to imagine married life with dread and bitter loathing, as a catfight in the dark of night.

Without a pen I had to dog-ear a page (regrettably), turning in the smallest triangle possible.      It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world ready-made, apart from a few minor personal details, and there is no disputing that whatever endures is not only conservative but also the foundation of all advances and revolutions; but it must be said that this casts a feeling of deep, shadowy unease on those who live according to their own lights.

But first a few lines from Musil that deserved a vertical Hogarthian stroke (blue, in the margin):      But the man without qualities was now thinking. One may draw the conclusion from this that it was, at least in part, not a personal affair. But then what is it? World in, and world out; aspects of world falling into place inside a head.   *** Now to just a few of Musil's interesting titles: 3: Even A Man Without Qualities Has A Father With Qualities 7: In A Weak Moment Ulrich Acquires A New Mistress 9: The First Of Three Attempts To Become A Great Man 10: Second Attempt. Notes Toward A Morality For The Man Without Qualities 11: The Most Important Attempt Of All 13: A Racehorse Of Genius Crystallizes The Recognition Of Being A Man Without Qualities 17: Effect Of A Man Without Qualities On A Man With Qualities 22: The Parallel Campaign, In The Form Of An Influential Lady Of Ineffable Spiritual Grace...

My little poem, "Feels Like It," went up today at Right Hand Pointing . https://sites.google.com/site/57rhpissue/rl-swihart

"We're all socialists at heart" was one of his pet sayings, meaning no more and no less than that there were no social distinctions in the hereafter.   ***   In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something she had previously not really known she had: a soul.      What's that? It is easy to define negatively: It is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series.