Thomas_More
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Some P.O.D. publishers must be taking the mick.
Someone bought me (not cheap) a book listed as a work by Mark Twain billed as “Good quality book.”
When it arrived, it was thinner than a brochure, was a few photocopies badly glued together (bad photocopies too: illustrations and text barely visible), no pagination, text disappearing off the pages, and every alternate leaf completely blank. And, on the flimsy cover glaring at me in large letters: GOOD QUALITY BOOK.This has to be the worst of the worst, and the damned thing cost £14.95, and the description was obviously mocking the buyer.
P.O.Ds are now the first items which appear on book-buying sites. They are obviously considered good enough for the likes of us who don’t want E-books, almost as though to discourage us from print editions of books (but I won’t go that far because i’m not a conspiraloon).
However, I now never buy a book unless i’m sure it’s a book and not a “book.”
P.S. I have also seen some for sale online which have the wrong author pictured on the cover and the ‘blurb’ full of misspellings.
And so I felt sick when told that a closing-down bookseller in this town was throwing piles of good hardback books in a rubbish skip for destruction.
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/c6bk9z
The very gentle and compassionate artist and writer Maurice Heine was the man who pulled the Marquis de Sade out of obscurity to be read and studied in the 20th century.
Heine was a friend of Gilbert Lely, from whom I have a postcard sent a few days before Lely’s decease.
Lely was of Jewish family and hid in Provence near Sade’s former chateau of La Coste throughout the Vichy years and Nazi rule.
Heine died of starvation in 1940 since he used all his rationing allowance to ensure his numerous cats were regularly fed.” Which is historically responsible for the most deaths and misery, religion or capitalism?”
***
Capitalism, obviously. In countries where religion is still strong, it is adopted and exploited by nationalism for capitalist ends. Nationalism (also called patriotism, there is no difference) is in fact the strongest “religion” of today, and the most dangerous. The violent sectarian aspects of religion are harnessed by states and state-sponsored movements in the less secularised parts of the globe as allies of nationalism. Religious pacifists are drowned out, and even sometimes killed.
Past attitudes, as remnants of old superstructures, still linger in countries such as Ukraine, and these are also exploited (like Luther’s hatred of Jews fuelling Nazism), and Ukraine has a bloody legacy from these too – being one of the old buffer states between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. (The Uniate churches being Catholic in Orthodox guise).
The Crimean Tatars are also victims today of a lingering legacy.https://images.app.goo.gl/g5xaKFWjGytXiLAs5
https://images.app.goo.gl/31K94gL8aTUj329f7
“To him who hath, more shall be given, but to him who hath not, even what he hath shall be taken away.”
The Bible’s connivance with capitalism.
Mme. de Stael had to keep fleeing the tyrant from land to land as Bonaparte’s armies marched through Europe.
Napoleon had overthrown the bourgeois democracy anyway, and made himself military dictator, so why would he be interested in communism?
He was the enemy of the working class. He crushed the free press, arrested critics, roped young men into his war machine, had thugs sent across borders to seize or murder political opponents. A real hero! Granted, he didn’t execute deserters, just re-drafted them. But the youth of France was collectively in dread of his press gangs.
No, I don’t think communism would even register on his radar, except to pounce and incarcerate.He also re-instituted slavery.
I remember a humorous scene from an old movie about a slave revolt, whereby one of L’Ouverture’s men is asked to give the password by a Napoleonic sentry. The slave replies, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” The sentry says “That’s not the password”, to which the slave retorts, “It should be!” and clonks the sentry unconscious. 😀Napoleon also banned La Marseillaise, so Tchaikovsky was wrong to include it in his 1812 Overture.
The Discovery of Australasia by a Flying Man.
Thanks for this.
Just as utopian thinkers were anticipating socialism (communism) in the 18th century, they were simultaneously anticipating Darwin.
Not just, obviously, Erasmus Darwin and Buffon, but also Rousseau, at the beginning of his Discourse on Inequality, and Restif, in his The Flying Man. In the latter work, Restif proposes the opposite to violent colonisation, namely mutual aid and friendship toward newly discovered peoples.Movimiento, don’t leave the forum. You are invaluable and give us insights from your experience many of us don’t have.
Don’t let yourself be bullied. Ignore the bullies, but please don’t leave, comrade.If you don’t want to know anything about Sade, fair enough; but don’t begrudge me opening a thread on him, which I may. You jump straight in and tell me I “need help.”
I have always liked Sade, and that doesn’t mean I am somehow ill.
I have many interests and like many writers, artists, musicians (did you know Sade wrote musicals too?) and other great thinkers.Your words show any knowledge you have of him to be paltry.
Prostitution is sadly part and parcel of class society, both in Sade’s day and today. I say this because there is no proof Sade ever engaged in non-consenting sexual activity, not in rape, nor kidnapping.
Rose Keller was as hard-nosed a woman of the streets as they come. Her story was proven false and another attempt on her part to extort money, for which she was notorious.
Are those today who pay “dominatrices” for sex games guilty of a terrible crime?I doubt I would have liked Sade personally, but he was no Jack the Ripper or Gilles de Rais.
