3 Sep 2010
reactionry
Musical Interlude: I Have Seen The Future Of The Happy Days Of Sunlight & Freedom
And It Sucked
Send not for whom the Ringtone rings, it rings for the Communist Party cell.....
"I awoke one morning to a surprised sense of a vast, relaxed peace, and also to the realization that I was surfacing from a dream in which I had been singing. In fact, after I was awake but before I fully surfaced, my mind continued to sing through a stanza of the song. It was in German:
Bruder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit,
Bruder, zum Lichte empor,
Hell aus der dunklen Vergangenheit
Leuchtet die Zukunft hervor.*
You may have heard it, though without knowing what it was. It is a Communist marching song, an unusually good one."
- Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday, page 212
The following sillier version brings to mind the
"Stop that worrying and moping,
Take a knotted stick and rise,
Come a-tramping in the open
With the good, the hearty guys!"
of VN's Cloud, Castle, Lake
* "Brothers, to sunlight, to freedom,
Brothers, upward to light,
Bright from the darkness of the past
Beacons the future"
3 Sep 2010
reactionry
Kind Heart* & Communists
"Tags:.....The Aurelian"? As in "Happy Days are here again, the skies are blue and I'm Aurelian"? Nope, "cerulean" would be more like it, given the Karner Blue and my gutless chum on the cover of Time Magazine, Jonathan Franzen and his "cerulean warbler" and the purported derivation of one of Julius Caesar's (erstwhile NER writer John Derbyshire had a different translation, though not as funny as Mary Jackson's allusion to Monty Python's "Biggus Dickus" et al) cognomen as "blue-eyed" from a rather racist website found after googling Mr. Fitzgerald's "Ex Septentrione Lux." HF was probably not semaphoring VN's "The Aurelian," though "Paul Pilgrim" does attempt to light out like Alfred Waring, albeit not with a pilgrim's "staff and scrip." Or should I say, "staff and pouch," as in Chambers' account of the abduction of General Kutepov, who inconviently died* with the application of chloroform? :
"In the end, the little monster took control. He sent the quivering Ambassador about his business, and ordered his broken spirited thugs to lug the body into the Embassy basement. Then, into the night, three or four of them set about dismembering General Kutepov with a view to burying him compendiously in quicklime below the basement. But in order to prove to headquarters that General Kutepov was at least dead, it was decided to cut off his head and hands and dispatch them to Moscow in the diplomatic pouch. This happy thought stirred in one of the agents a last flash of zeal. Perhaps he thought to recover a last shred of his professional competence. Should they not, he suggested eagerly, along with the head and hands also send the General's heart? The little monster fixed the questioner with a freezing stare. 'What do you think we are?' he said slowly through clenched teeth. 'Boyars?' " (Cold Friday, pages 201-202)
Just Hanging Around For A Finite Jest,
David Foster Wallace
"Boyars"? Head, heart and hands? Sounds like that revenge upon the "Whites" was a dish best supped pre-Cold War. I'd like to take this opportunity to note that, folk etymology notwithstanding, neither my name nor that of my French "bistro," is of Russian origin, and that while I didn't make it into VN's cinematic "The Assistant Producer," (see the abduction of General Miller) my work is, as is also said in film making, "in the can."
- Chef Boyardee
* "I incline to think that, on balance, he [General Kutepov] must have been more good than bad by measurements quite beyond our power to make, because at the instant of final need and horror in General Kutepov's human experience, God was so extraordinarily good to him." (Cold Friday, page 194)
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