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| Now is the Time! |
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| "LA FÊTE A PAPA"
A Sweet French Father's Day Greeting & Le Bon Marché ~ advertising card Thanks to my friend Jes for this little treasure! |
Sons Of
Sung by Judy Collins
Sons of the sea, sons of the saint
Who is the child with no complaint;
Sons of the great or sons unknown
All were children like your own
The same sweet smiles, the same sad tears
The cries at night, the nightmare fears
Sons of the great, sons unknown
All were children like your own
Sons of tycoons, or sons from the farms
All of the children ran from your arms
Through fields of gold, through fields of ruin
All of the children vanished too soon
In towering waves, in walls of flesh
Amid dying birds trembling with death
Sons of tycoons, sons from the farms
All of the children ran from your arms
Sons of your sons, sons passing by
Children were lost in lullaby
Sons of true love, sons of regret
All of your sons you can never forget
Some build the roads, some wrote the poems
Some went to war, some never came home
Sons of your sons, sons passing by
Children were lost in lullaby
Written by Jacques Brel (1929 - 1978),
Eric Blau, Gérard Jouannest, & Mort Shuman
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| A. C. Grayling (b 1949)
on amazon / pdf |
"Almost everywhere one looks among present societies, race and racism make angry welts and deep wounds on the body politic. It is an irony that although racism is a reality, and a harsh one, race itself is a fiction. The concept of race has no genetic or biological basis. All human beings are closely related to one another, and at the same time each human being is unique. Not only is the concept of race entirely artificial, it is new; yet in its short existence it has, like most lies and absurdities current among us, done a mountain of harm. . . . But advances in genetics have demolished such taxonomies, by taking DNA [and species] as the criterion of classification. . . . ‘Race has no basic biological reality,’ says Professor Jonathan Marks of Yale University; ‘the human species simply doesn’t come packaged that way.’ Rather, race is a social, cultural and political concept based on superficial appearances and historical conditions, largely those arising from encounters with other peoples as Europe developed a global reach, with the slavery and colonialism that followed.
. . . The physical diversity of human populations today is purely a function of geographical accidents of climate and the isolation of wandering bands. The distinctions which have since been drawn between peoples are therefore arbitrary and superficial, even those relating to skin colour – for as a moment’s attention shows, there is simply no such thing as ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘yellow’ people; there are people with many shades and types of skin, making no difference to any other aspect of their humanity save what the malice of others can construct."
~From Sections 68 & 69
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| Check out this mystery
~ and review in The Guardian ~ for numerous fun allusions to James Joyce's Ulysses. Quirke even sees a "lanky-looking galoot in a gabardine raincoat" (148). [also on KL] |
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And so close, he nearly had it: " . . . the cedar-shingled roof of Martello Tower #3 was destroyed by fire on June 6, 1857 by fire and replaced with a metal roof. The tower was demolished in 1904 to make way for a hospital pavilion."
Appropriately, a Martello - themed answer -- about Canada rather than Ireland -- constitutes a classic "Bloomism", which is "a term coined by scholar Richard Ellmann to describe a characteristic mental habit of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses: 'an uneasy but scrupulous recollection of a factual near-miss.' It refers to moments when Bloom accurately recalls the gist or context of a fact, name, or phrase, but gets the specific detail slightly wrong, resulting in a funny or almost-correct error."
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| Update 2025:
The Forty Foot & The Martello Tower |
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