John Cairns > Recent Status Updates

It isn't that men are 'so blinded by beauty' as that if a woman acts as if she's attractive they take it she is, as Johnny observed on Uphall Main Street, dreading becoming a fool on puberty. There is though 'nothing quite like an apprentice geisha from Gion.' 'I'd been afraid I'd have to find some way of pleasing him but... all I had to do was follow orders.' All I remember of the Tale of Genji is the smell.

If you like, 'Could you take out the garbage later?' 'There was no garbage in the entryway; she was talking about me,' this book is for you. Keeping an expensive geisha was a status symbol. 'Which, incidentally, was the manufacturer of the heater that killed Granny' amuses. A description of dandruff falling like snow reminded me of Alasdair Gray's rasping his brow (a footnote in the unpublished CORRESPONDENCE).

Which is better? 'Wherever he was taking us, I preferred it to being cast out alone into that great expanse of buildings, as foreign to me as the bottom of the sea' or '“Go with the nurse.” Does she expect me to do other? to run after her or past, into a strange city of huge buildings. The nurse, herself foreign, is my best option in an unfamiliar environment of which the hospital is most easily assimilable part.’

One king expelled the ephors and at once began plotting against the life of the other king. A friend had been the king's lover or inspirer as it was called it. One a dead king had 'inspired' slew himself over the body. With five thousand that king had outfaced twenty thousand Achaeans. Who murdered a king restored his brother and put him to death. Plutarch derides Spartan worship of death as that sort of thing.

A mistaken buy, from this book I've been able to see which lives I haven't already read and decide what to do about it. I've got as far as Agis leading his men up the hill and back down again.

The moon landing was a baby playing with its rattle. 'Sectarian Irishmen disputed the future of their country in the vocabulary of 17th century religious wars.' China's dictatorship is economically successful. Its racism against the Uighurs has been revealed. Its resentment of Soviet policy had to be expressed in Marxist jargon. 'Coloured peoples'! No prissy euphemisms for him! Vietnam muted American arrogance.

Traditional culture still is 'too limited in its exclusion of the resources...' which lie in the unconscious. I've read half Freud. Rationality isn't an illusion but is directed; we are un-'consciously motivated individuals'. Hitler had won the war by 1940 but continued it with Operation Barbarossa, after an emperor found dead by a river (maybe drowned). The Japanese were bound to lose after Pearl Harbour.

It wasn't sexual satisfaction Mum was pursuing without the obligation of marriage, more likely me. Grandma still had gas lighting when Aunt Nell had electricity. Why the Ottoman Empire joined in the First World War isn't explained. By 1917 France suffered 3,350,000 casualties. On Turkey's secularisation 'vikend' became Turkish. In 'An instance from which' etc, in Chomu's 'Dadaoism', I go beyond consciousness.

Filipinos complain of their colonial past that it was five hundred years in a convent and fifty in Disneyland. Because of the press, acts of terror had publicity value, now as then. Institutional sexism was worse than racism. Giving women the franchise was an issue in Switzerland in the late Fifties. New jobs gave women economic power, without which Mum could not have afforded me without being obliged to marry.

The US stated it would intervene in any state whose disorder might tempt Europe's intervention! The tradition of incompetence in the British army was upheld in the Boer War. Nine hundred British civil servants governed three hundred million Indians. If the latter all spat at once the former would be drowned. Bengal was split into a Hindu West and Muslim East to undermine nationalism. The Empire's impressive!

People were better off; grandma may have been born in 1868 and lived eighty-four years. Revolution was redefined as a rupture with the past. The French was caused by governmental impotence, social injustice, economic hardship and reforming aspiration. It, like feudalism, the Renaissance and the Reformation, passed Russia by. The English masses were not revolutionary, a fact distressing to left-wing historians.

The church quite correctly from its point of view put all Descartes' work on the Index. I read a copy of Engel's Condition of the English Working Class from the New College, Edinburgh Faculty of Divinity library. Our civilisation doesn't have a structure of religious belief as the industrial population was alienated from traditional authority. The USA constitution established the principle of popular sovereignty.

From smallpox and other diseases the population of Mexico fell by three quarters in the sixteenth century. The evil of slavery was compounded by the intrusion of Xianity.

Charles V co-ruled with his mad mother, Joanna. The life-expectancy of a French peasant before 1800 was - wait for it - 22! 'As new lands were annexed, their population passed into serfdom even if they hadn't known it before.' Peter had his own son tortured to death. That's Russia for you. The unlikely challenger for Indian Ocean supremacy was England. Flag followed trade, giving a structure to live under.

A protestant ethic doesn't explain capitalism because Scotland 'long remained backward, poor and feudal; nor did the proceeds of slavery finance the industrial revolution.

Transubstantiation was imposed from the 13th century, that Christ's body and blood were present in bread and wine - palpable nonsense. After Boniface the papacy was condemned for standing in the way of reforms, churchmen for failing in their religious task. St George's slaying the dragon arose from mixing him up with Perseus.

The only rivals in China to imperial counsellors were eunuchs. Foot-binding characterised women's place. Aunt Nell invited me to admire the small feet of a woman in Upper Middleton, size 2, so it's not only the Chinese.... Like Islam, death in battle was a way to paradise, for the Aztecs. The papacy faced hostility that called Xianity into question. Good! Hus was condemned and burnt.

A caliph was murdered by rolling him up in a carpet and trampling him to death by horses to avoid shedding blood. The Turks conquered as far south as Aden.

Han traitors were sawn in half at the hip. The sacking of Luoyang is poetically described. Nomads wanted the wealth of the civilised world to spend. On what? Mohammed drove rejecting Jews out of Medina. They weren't infidels, just hadn't seen god's new statement a la Mohammed. He assured paradise on death doing god's will in fighting the infidel, as true today if terrorism is thought in accord with god's will.

As today, 'many of the rich were exempt from taxation. Money may have fallen to one-fiftieth of its value,' by the end of the third century. Dacia's being held till 270 explains Romanian. Church fathers tried using the rationality of Greek philosophy to promote their irrational agenda. Constantine's to blame for founding Xian Europe, therefore our modern world. Destroying all lineage was a final Han penalty.

We are where we are today because some Jews affected to believe Jesus rose from the dead. Pontius Pilate must've been good at governing the ungovernable if procurator for ten years. There's no corroborative evidence for the gospels. His disciples' guilt at forsaking him is no excuse for lying they saw him after death and ascending to where they wishfully thought heaven and an after-life for themselves might be.

He finds it difficult to assess Ancient Greek tolerance of romanticised homosexuality between a young and older upper class man though women were as heavily segregated as Islamic women, and in Turkey there was/is a convention of young men being girls to be fucked. So long as you were the fucker, you were a man. Female segregation then is part of the explanation. In our prisons it's called secret lemonade drinking.

'There were about a hundred noble clans,' during the Zhou period, 'within each of which marriage was forbidden.' There's no explanation what's entailed by that. Marriage between clans? despite each clan being composed of families you'd think would intermarry. They wouldn't be marrying peasants who moved from hovels to encampments from which to guard and tend their crops, on whose backs civilisation was built.

The Indians didn't do history. The earliest, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, cities of over 30,000 inhabitants, is the most definite, based on archaeological evidence. An Aryan invasion put paid to them and three others. The rest is deduced from religious texts, deriving history from fiction as from Gilgamesh, Homer and the Old Testament, or like taking ours from Shakespeare and novels, the best he can do but not good.

Ancient Egyptians gave us a calendar of 365.25 days divided into 12 months (I suspect influenced by Babylonian astronomy) and castor oil. They didn't have cancer, rickets or syphilis but did have schistosomiasis. There's no evidence for Babylon's hanging gardens any more than archaeological for the existence of David. The Old Testament is shown to be unreliable though the Jews are credited with monotheism.

‘One city alone is said to have had 36,000 males’, an odd no except the black-headed people of Sumer used the sexagesimal system of counting we’ve inherited and that’s a hundred times the degrees in a circle. If true, their cities would be the size of our large towns, trading for metal with Iran, even India.

Shocked the historians don't even postulate the possibility of unconscious communication for homo erectus. When I played with Rex, chasing and being chased under the round table (qv 'the book', blogged at www.johnbrucecairns.wordpress.com) the game would not have been possible using conscious language, too clumsy and too slow to let us suddenly switch direction - and would the dog have immediately understood speech?

Buchenbach was saying prayers for Barbarossa after the 1st World War. 'Aspects of daily and national life are ...beyond the ...control of governments ...vulnerable to global economic, popular, technological and environmental forces,' not to mention diseases. The glossary explains things but not what 'aulic' means. Richard I had been conspiring with the emperor's enemies the useful chronology finishes that story.

75-100,000 peasants were killed in their war, 10 - 15% of all adult males in the worst areas. William III was blinded and castrated, making him unfit for kingship. Henry VI had prisoners sawn in half. Clemency no longer worked. The French abolished feudalism 1789 but couldn't define what it was till 1838. If Napoleon hadn't ended a 1,000 year old empire, the effect of capitalism and industrialisation would have.

Wenzel was deposed by the electors, like Trump. The Danish king invaded Dithmarschen, only to be routed at Hemmingstedt by peasants who pole-vaulted across the marshes and trapped the invaders.