A sharp line of thunderstorms rolled across us about 7:30 last night leaving only minor tree damage in our area and some much needed rain. At around 8:30 I noticed a bright orange glow out our west-facing windows, ran outside into the last tailings of the storm, and took this picture. Ten minutes later, it was pitch black.
Fortunately my iPhone is in a water-resistant case.
Just got here today: my February 1, 1932 edition of Contempo. No, the Post Office wasn’t that slow; I bought it off eBay (and the USPS was right on time).
I ran across this footnote in the life of William Faulkner while attending my daughter’s graduation from UNC last month. Minter’s 250-page bio, for example, doesn’t even mention that Faulkner visited Chapel Hill, much less that he contributed to this journal, and neither does his Wikipedia entry. The librarian at the university’s Southern Historical Collection, learning of my interest in Faulkner, retrieved their copy from the files, and I bought this one from John LaPine in Chicago (5 stars, by the way).
What is known is that the author visited Chapel Hill in October for at least three days (there is some controversy over the exact length of his visit), stayed drunk most of the time, and upon sobering up, learned that he had agreed to contribute to this journal, published by a couple of UNC students. It was a most unusual periodical, founded by a couple of young communists who also finagled pieces from such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Elliot, and Sinclair Lewis. The primary owner later moved to New York and became a highly successful stockbroker while never renouncing his left wing views. But that’s another story. (Click for a larger image)
The entire 2/1/1932 edition is credited to Faulkner, who gave the publication some poems and a short story that he hadn’t placed in more prestigious (and profitable) publications. Despite his binges, Faulkner was at the peak of his creative powers, having already published The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, having the manuscript for Light in August (my favorite) with him, and with his masterpiece Absalom! Absalom! only four years in the future. One of Contempo’s editors presciently wrote that Faulkner was “the most creative, most original and most potential writer that America has produced.” Such an opinion of Faulkner was not widely shared at that time, but 17 years later, he would win the Nobel Prize.
I had been living in Oxford about a year when the author died, so it’s possible that I saw him. I have no such memories, but I do have an original of the February 1, 1932 edition of Contempo and that will have to do.
[Note: the information on Faulkner in Chapel Hill and his association with Contempo is from “A week or 3 days in Chapel Hill: Faulkner, Contempo, and their contemporaries,” Jim Vickers, North Carolina Literary Review, Vol I, No 1, 1992. Available on-line from the NCLR site.]
The claim is often made that we invaded Iraq in 2003 to secure our access to its oil reserves, or, more cynically, to secure the profits of US energy-related companies. To me this policy made sense, at least in the short term. It was morally reprehensible and would probably hurt us in the long run but at least I could understand it. It made a lot more sense than the reasons the Bush administration announced: non-existent WMDs, non-existent cooperation between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, and fulfilling the non-existent desires of the Iraqi masses to adopt electoral democracy and become close allies of the United States.
If securing access to oil were our real strategy, I would have expected us to cordon off the oil fields, empty the region of its indigenous inhabitants, and pump the place dry. As I said, morally reprehensible but a coherent strategy. We didn’t do that, of course. So perhaps we had a more sophisticated plan to achieve the same results? If so, it didn’t work very well. The average price of a barrel of domestic crude in 2002 in March 2013 dollars was $29.49. For 2012, it was $87.68. So we invested some $3 trillion (up from the original estimate of $80 billion), and what we got for it was a tripling of oil prices. Some bargain. Continue reading
Mercury in the western sky, Saturn in the east, and this little fellow on the front gate post. Click for a larger view.
Somewhere in my college days, we read Aristotle. I recall that he droned on about truth and beauty, but for the life of me, I have no clue about what he said. Or maybe I’m just recovering snatches from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Regardless, as a defrocked mathematician, I have an ambivalence towards these two notions. This may strike you as strange, “beauty” not often associated with mathematics, so let me explain. In mathematics, we work from guesses called “conjectures,” which we then try to establish by a finite series of logical steps, reasoning from assumptions (axioms) and from results already proven to be true. Once established, they get promoted from “conjecture” to “theorem.” It all sounds so dull when you put it this way. Continue reading
ATLANTA, Georgia — May 27, 2018 — (NYSE:DUA) — DeltaUnited-American (DU-A), the country’s premier global airline, announced today that it is ending coach class service and retiring routes and aircraft that serve the coach market. In conjunction with the move, the airline rolled out a new ultra-premium “Imperial Class,” designed for customers who own smaller jets, are awaiting delivery of their own intercontinental jets, or who appreciate the elevated level of door-to-door service, amenities, and attention to detail that a big airline can provide.
The airline noted that although all-business airlines like Eos and Silverjet have been tried before, but none successfully, the economic climate today is different. DU-A has no problem, for example, selling business-class seats for five times the price of coach, even though the seats only occupy four times the floor space. Competitors like Lufthansa and British Airways profitably operate limited numbers of all-business class flights, and this move is seen as the next logical step. Continue reading
William S. Lind
Special to Slightly East of New
25 May 2013
So “the world simply didn’t develop along the lines it (4GW) proposed”? How do you say that in Syriac?
The basic error in Chet Richards’ piece of April 19, “Is 4GW dead?” is confusing the external and internal worlds. Internally, in the U.S. military and the larger defense and foreign policy establishment, 4GW is dead, as is maneuver warfare and increasingly any connection to the external world. The foreign policy types can only perceive a world of states, in which their job is to promote the Wilsonian nee Jacobin, follies of “democracy” and “universal human rights.” They are in fact, 4GW’s allies, in that their demand for “democracy” undermines states, opening the door for more 4GW. Continue reading
Now available on our Articles page.
These two briefings are elaborations of themes that Boyd introduced in “Destruction and Creation” and Patterns of Conflict:
We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in. If we can do this, we will be able to surface new repertoires and (hopefully) develop Fingerspitzengefühl for folding our adversaries back inside themselves, morally-mentally-physically—so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what’s happening—without suffering the same fate ourselves.
This is, incidentally, the only mention of the German word Fingerspitzengefühl in any of Boyd’s material.
Deletes references to d-n-i.net and belisarius.com. These URLs have been taken over by someone else and have no relation to the original sites.
As most of you know, Wagner, had he lived, would be 200 today.
As a kid in 8th grade, I had a connection to the master. My father commanded the 1st Recon SQDN of the 2nd Armored Cavalry at Christensen Barracks near the town of Bindlach, Germany. The barracks, actually a complete base with housing, school, and what I think was an old Luftwaffe airstrip, overlooked Bayreuth. From just outside the front gate, one had an excellent view of the city, including the Festspielhaus shimmering like Valhalla in the sunset.
Back in eighth grade, I couldn’t have told Wagner from Verdi (or Elvis), and it was not until a couple of years later that a high-school buddy (who went on to become chair of a university German department) introduced me to the wonders of Wagner’s music.
Turns out, it’s still highly innovative, just in other areas:
But Irish tax law only considers companies residents of the small European country if they are managed and controlled there. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service, meantime, only counts corporations as American if they are incorporated here.
The result: Apple pays little or no taxes to either country on much of its international revenue, according to the report.
–“Apple Avoids Overseas Taxes, Panel Finds,” WSJ (paywall)
As the article explains, Apple incorporates many of its international operations in Ireland, but “manages and controls” them from Cupertino. One subsidiary didn’t file a tax return, anywhere, even though it took in nearly $30 BN between 2009 and 2012.
Slightly East of New 
You must be logged in to post a comment.