Kitty Red-Eye > Recent Status Updates

Rått#2: Tollundmannen har sår under føttene som passer eksakt med å ha fått spisse pæler i fotbladene. Spisse pæler utgjorde forsvarsverk, antakelig mot kvegtyver. Vi kan aldri vite det, men det virker jo skikkelig sannsynlig at han var en kvegtyv som ble tatt og gitt kvegtyvens straff! 😎 arkeologi, bitchez

Rått #1: I Asterix er det eneste gallerne er redde for at himmelen skal falle i hodene på dem. Stammer fra faktisk utsagn fra keltiske sendebud til Alexander den store. De ble spurt hvem de fryktet mest. Det eneste de fryktet var at himmelen skulle falle i hodene på dem, var svaret.

note to self: «Caries» is an awesome short story.

Not until we’re totally crushed do we show what we are made of.

Perhaps he was the one who, last year at the Holešovice slaughterhouse, put a knife to my neck, shoved me into a corner, took out a slip of paper, and read me a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside at Říčany, then apologized, saying he hadn’t found any other way of getting people to listen to his verse.

Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, “The highest law is love, the love that is compassion,” and I realized why Arthur hated strongman Hegel, and I was glad that Hegel and Schopenhauer weren’t leading opposing armies, because the two of them would wage the same war as those two rat armies in the sewers of Prague.

The Garden of Forking Paths is good

«The Library of Babel» is good.

Discovering reading: «Who were these men? Who was Joseph Conrad? Dostoevski, Moore, Flaubert, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Zola, Norris, Gorky, Bergson, Ibsen, Balzac, Bernard Shaw, Dumas, Poe, Thomas Mann, Wells, Gogol, Eliot, Gide, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Turgenev, Nietzsche? Were these men real? Did they exist or had they existed? And how did one pronounce their names?»

This book is hilarious. Brilliant. If you don’t care at all about philosophy/political philosophy, stay away from it. But if you do, read it asap.

Zitat einer alten Frau: «Unterm Russ' läßt uns der Führer nicht fallen, da vergast er uns lieber.»

Vom ersten Tag an forderte der Russlandfeldzug beispiellose Verluste. Waren dies auf deutscher Seite im Durchschnitt täglich rund 2100 Tote, so starben demgegenüber Tag für Tag mehr als 14 100 Sowjets. Getötete Soldaten, verhungerte Kriegsgefangene, ermordete Zivilisten.

S.35 og vi får vite at jenta som ble steinet for femti år siden var sju år gammel og at voldtektsmannen kastet den første sten. Ai ai ai for oppløftende lektyre.

Intro: forfatteren får en nær-voldtekts-opplevelse inne på sitt eget låste hotellrom, hvor en mann bryter seg inn.
Neste: steining av et barn. Dette er riktignok noe over femti år siden, men jenta hadde "brakt skam" over familien, og praksisen består, selv om akkurat steining visstnok er noe uvanlig.

Vi er på side 30. Dette blir en vanskelig bok å lese.

Does anyone else have a problem with the reading challenge updates? Books don't seem to register... :(

Only a few chapters in an am both captivated and cured of my delusion I'll ever visit PNG. I wouldn't be able to cope. But pidgin english, what a gift! And the INSANE stories from the villages! What a world we live in!

Treblinka memoirs also available online: http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik...

Rudolf Reder was his name, the Belzec survivor. He wrote a book, and though a bit hard to find, it's possible. His testimony given to the Red Army is available online, however: https://dunekglik.files.wordpress.com...

Reading this book generates a lot of googling. "Ok, so 82 people (82!!!) survived the extermination camps. That means it should be possible to find all their names, and testimonies of those who gave one." Google. Camp name + survivors. Turns out one, ONE, survived Belzec and lived to tell.

Yankiel Wiernik: Sonderkommando survivor (!!) from Treblinka http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik... - his story.

- but I wasn't quite as aware of their stories as I thought I was. I mean, I've seen Shoah, I've read many books about the HC, I thought I was... Dunno... Unshockable? Sweet Mary, was I wrong. It's bloody awful to read, and yet so difficult to put down. Talk about Heart of Darkness.

This is such a nightmare, it's hard to process the words of the tale. I knew of the extermination camps (though I always thought Auschwitz was counted among them and believed a lot of the Holocaust history was roughly the same as Auschwitz: wrong!)

3: Agunot: One of the short stories to make it into the Mid-East litterature class I took. Enigmatic, full of Bible references and Jewish tradition, but a pleasure (sometimes annoying, sometimes beautiful) to read, as you constantly feel there is a lot hidden here which you don't quite grasp. Human struggle, your name is futility!

2: Fable of the Goat: very short, Agnon's humor better recognizable. Very good.

1: The Tale of the Scribe: weird, a bit hard to understand. Beautiful language, quite poetic. Death, love and mitzvot.

Cool story, but it's a drawback that Boney M's song "Ra-Ra-Rasputin Russia's biggest love machine" keeps playing in my head while I'm reading it. Hard to avoid and not really the book's fault as much as my brain's. But still a bit tiresome.

... chimps and humans; Mongols and Cheyennes; murder rates among Bushmen and Eskimos (are those words bad words now, btw? They seem so old-fashioned); fallacies of early modernization theories and Rome seen as a banana republic.