Thing is, I've never really liked Dali. It bugged me that Sewell insisted upon calling him 'the greatest of the surrealists', because to me, Dali wasn't a surrealist at all. For the most part his work was bubblegum whimsy laced with softcore pornography. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but it was not in keeping with the surrealist ethic.

Then again, it is wrong and very much anti-surrealist to try and bring definition to surrealism. One cannot play god with pure pyschic phenomena. Maybe I just don't think Dali was pure.

Take the Dutch. (Go on, take the Dutch. Niels too, if he's willing...)

I mean, 1...f5 -- does that look like a flat place, mostly polders, full of tulips from Turkey and rijstaffel from Indonesia and gold and diamonds from South Ifrika and coffee shops that don't sell coffee ...?

What's that boldly erect pawn on f5 meant to be, anyway? Can't be a, you know, erection thingy -- porn went out of fashion in the 1970s. Maybe it's a tulip. Or a periscope. Poking out of the Isselmeer, once the Zuider Zee.

Of course, 1.d4 f5 weakens the King: so the appropriate text is <The Rise of the Dutch Republic> by Lothrop Motley.

However, playing it cunningly as 1.d4 e6 2.c4 f5 lets the dreaded French in first -- just like bloody Louis XIV -- quick, flood the dykes! Ahem.

Moving on, <The Irish Gambit> 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nxe5 is predicated on the idea that the Irish are, well, how can I put this ... stupid.

As everyone knows, this is not at all true. The Irish were previously poor, simple, rural, superstitious and cunning. Since the arrival of something called the <Celtic Tiger> they've become like cream: rich and thick.

But not stupid, oh no. Why, one of us, or so it's rumoured, even has a higher-than-average IQ. The Irish average, admittedly, but still -- as you chess folk say, plus one is plus one.

Or is that 'one plus one is one'? Oh dear.

"I've forgotten the words of the songs -- they're in German and they're very dirty songs. One of them starts, 'It's so long since I've been with you, the cabbage is driving me away.'"

- Glenn Gould

Shakespeare correctly predicted the result of Aronian vs Carlsen, btw. "Aroynt thee, witch, the rump-fed Aronian cried"

[modern English: "B----r off, kid!"]

"My pretty chickens and their dam in one fell swoop?"

[mod Eng: "That young boy is in deep water"]

1. Death by Exposure.
2. Death by Celebrity.
3. Murder by Death She Wrote.
4. And that was All She Murdered by.
5. Death of 1000 Cuts.
6. Death by 1000 Island Dressing.
7. Death by 1000 Island Undressing.
8. Death by Insular Transvestism.
9. Near-Death by Peninsular Crossdressing
10. A punch in the Gob.

All of these are forms of advertising, and I imagine that most of them hurt.

This misconception is based on a brilliant disinformation coup, which persuaded the Chinese government that their real enemy was The Dealey Lama, a secret Buddhist who lives beneath Dealey Plaza in Dallas, and had John F Kennedy shot 44 years ago when he got too close to the truth...

None Dare Call it Conspiracy!

Fiction also retains its power in Iran, where you can be hit with a fatwa and killed for making with the wrong kind of mockery. The conceptual base of fiction is only loosely grasped, let alone the idea of metafiction.

But there is also a reason why Al-Qaida does not always travel well outside its original source in languages like Arabic, Pashtun, Farsi. In Classical Arabic Al-Qaida means 'the base' or 'the fundament' -- a word which has strong 'bottom' connotations in many languages.

In Papuan Pidgin, for instance, a base is 'arse' -- eg, 'arse-bilong-tri' means 'root of a tree'. Technically, Al-Qaida would have to be translated as Arse-bilong-Allah.

Thinking and giggling, as usual after reading your stuff.

I'm wiped and barely sentient, having finished work. Hopefully for good.

One quick point:

You are aware that <Manson> used to get his "family" together in a meadow, join hands in a circle, and dance/revolve while he led them in a chorus of

<'one plus one is one'>?

< Oh dear.> indeed!!

I know this because I saw it.

Manson had it filmed and I saw it on a documentary about him.

Were you aware of the slogan?

I posted about it "once" before.

heh

Jess of the eyes half shut. or wide shut.

Or <Eyals> wide shut.

So how is this possible since i spent all day working?

Are you deleting your own posts?

Is someone hacking into my ID and posting for me?

Argon and Selenium have an interesting relationship. So do Sulfur, Hydrogen, Iodine and Tellurium, although Titanium is more adjectival when it combines.

But it's the combination of Fluorine, Uranium, Carbon and Potassium that is especially volatile and although it's qualities are self evident.

The cutting edge of chemical research, especially when it's combined with the deep cosmological contemplation of the origins of the universe, viz: well, you know what I mean as I'm sure i don't have to draw a chemical or other diagram, become especially remarkable when Carbon Uranium Nitride is combined in a straight sequence with Nickel Lithium Nitride, the latter being in turn bonded with perhaps Gallium Sulfide or Germanium Sulfide.

Me, I had one of those minor, provincial, redbrick educations that leave you with a dodgy accent and some secondrate contacts among opposition politicians and bad actors. A little place called Alma Rana Mater Penistone Institute of Technology.

We know that Eyal can work magic. You sure he's not posting in your identity somewhere else, or hacking into the post-o-meter every night to raise your score? For weeks the gap between us was pretty steady -- then you had a wordbinge and I had a hiatus, which turned things round: but even so...

I officially concede. I was hoping to catch one of the Heavy Gang, the oldtimers, before you caught me. Oy... guess I can still aim for 2nd place.

<Seven Heads of Lenin on a Piano> looks more like <Seven Soviet Pennies on a Set of Wooden False Teeth> ...

<I just didn't anticipate being overtaken this week with quite such force.> Didn't I predict then on that day about the occurence of this inevitable thing, even with your 5800-5000 lead.. that is even with a 800 point cushion you had.

The Powers-What-Be warned me offa limericks before, but I like this one too much to obey:

There are men in the village of Erith
that nobody seeth or heareth,
and there looms on the marge
of the river a barge,
that nobody roweth or steereth.

If we went there, we might be Lilliputians or Brobdignagians. Or even, which heaven forfend, Blefuscudians. Though, given the maritime, sea-faring context of this observation, that might be the most accurate reading: it was the <Blefuscudian Navy> which Gulliver hijacks, by wading the channel between the islands and hauling all the ships away on a single rope. It looks like Swift had a direct link to those parallel universes.

Can chess be played across the great divide? Or do queens become pawns, and entire boards become subsumed into individual squares? A castling maneuver might take centuries, as vast Rooks and Kings, like Rilkean Angels, tumble past each other in the chessic stratosphere ...

Hmm. Maybe it's better to play Go, using dimensionless points. Avoid the question of scale entirely.

I'm aware that there's also a short story entitled 'Scale', by Will Self -- in which the narrator ponders questions such as these while under the influence of illegal (or quasi-illegal) drugs.

Leonard Cohen had a line that appeals to me (from his novel Beautiful Losers):

<"I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what twenty years of sitting on your ass does to your face.">

A quote for <Frogspawn Old Scholar Day>, admitting that Youth and Vitality have the edge on us, and so-called Experience is lousy compensation.

(1) Accept that Andre Breton was right about everything, that Surrealism was his gang, his game, his ball, and nobody could play without his say-so (or his papal Imprimatur: "Let it be printed", innit? Nasty concept, beautiful verb...)

(2) Ignore Breton and all other historical authority figures, and define surrealism as whatever people think it is. Fish jokes, TV adverts, melting pre-digital chess clocks.

Dali qualifies easily under definition #2 -- in fact, he *is* Surrealism, with Magritte in 2nd place and the field, Max Ernst and company, a long way behind.

Dali also qualifies -- or did qualify most of the time -- under definition #1. Despite the "Avida Dollars" anagram-dig, Breton understood that the mad mustachio'd showman had enormous PR value, whatever his shortcomings.

I don't know if shortcomings were among his perversions and/or sexual idiosyncrasies. I think I heard somewhere that his comings could be positively Kurtzian -- as painted by him in The Great Masturbator.

This explains what the diving suit was for.

Recall Nerval's lobster: "It does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep."

My own take on Surrealism leans to #2 -- I certainly wouldn't give Breton absolute authority, and I have no problem with the popularization of pseudo-surrealism via TV, movies, adverts, etc. I know it's all about 'startling' imagery and has little to do with probing anyone's unconscious, but I can live with that.

Apart from Duchamp -- never quite in, never quite out -- my favourite surrealist is Max Ernst. Europe After the Rain, plus the collages in <La Femme Cent Tetes / The Hundred Headless Woman> ... which came up before somewhere, didn't it?