Friday, June 18, 2010

Sebastian Horsley dies ...

I'm depressed and devastated.

It's no more than a month since I was in a concert in London's HMV with Current93 and his guests.

The concert announcer was famous English celebrity and artist, Sebastian Horsley.

See his intro:





He died two days ago...

What more could I say...



Few day passed and our sorrow is no less.
What we know now is that he hasn't take drugs for long time recently, but the funeral of his long friend Michal Wojas turned him into it: „The 47-year-old reportedly hadn't used heroin for several months but the death of his close friend Michael Wojas triggered a fatal drugs binge.”

Let me add Sebastian Horsley's own quote:


„I have been punished by a God I don't believe in and he has thrown me off the cross for impersonating his son, for being an atheist, and for being a disaster. I have made a complete fool of myself.”

[9news: Horsley generated a storm of controversy after he had himself nailed to a cross in 2002. His hands were torn during the process after the foot support he had been standing on collapsed.]



Sunday, June 13, 2010

Reading Lakoff ...

It is really amazing, but by some sort of luck I started to read George's Lakoff „The Political Mind”.

(It was while reading Les Miserables when my player went astray and I had to switch to an older one and I could not continue on Hugo (for some another strange reason). So I switched to Lakoff — don't ask me why :-) )

George Lakoff is one of greatest living linguists. Pupil of Noam Chomsky, he first tried to extend Chomsky's theory of grammar by unification with formal logic. But later, he started to build his alternative theory. He developed or elaborated on several important concepts like „embodied mind”, „conceptual metaphor” or „strict father model” (the later in relation to political science).
He was also in a fierce dispute with Steven Pinker — the another linguists I admire ...

The Political Mind has significant subtitle: „You can't understand 21-st century American politics with 18th-century brain ...”

This is not a review yet, this just a harbinger of, I believe, one of the most important books of the beginning of XXI century....

This is what I see just from the first chapters....

Sunday, June 06, 2010

A breath of fresh air over 150 years old Book ...

I'm reading, in fact — re-reading again (first time in my school years) Victor Hugo „Les Misérables”. And it is a very good reading. I sometimes marvel over old classics literature — what makes its reading experience so fresh ?

Trying to justify this phenomenon, I could perhaps say, that what makes it universal is a kind of fundamental dilemmas, choices and tragedies that face humans and are described therein. The time — XIX century, and the place — post Bonaparte France are, in this respect, no different from the present time, and from any place of the today's world...

I'm now deeply in the book, just have finished Volume I... So this is not a review yet... I'm also not sure if I would dare to write one for such a book !!!

So there may come some short notes ...

If one of you read it — I would be happy to know your opinion.

How Trump can drag us into an even bigger war ....

This is a translation (which I made with help of AI to do it fast) of an extremely thoughtful article by Marcin Wyrwał - Polish war correspo...