36

Fire in the Soul: Nick Lyons

Edward Curtin

With lilacs in the dooryard blooming a week ago, I was struck by a sense of synchronicity so strong that I stood stone still and sniffed the air for its direction.  I had just written a little essay about my youthful days and the first fish I caught at the age of ten and my subsequent basketball obsession.  Now I was out for an early morning walk up the hill by the lake above the town across from the railroad tracks.

As I dawdled in the intoxicating fragrance of the lilacs, it transported me to other springs when my blood raced a bit wilder and I met a brown-eyed girl.  In another bush a catbird sang a song I did not recognize at first.  For some odd reason, I associated it with Van Morrison’s tune, The Beauty of the Days Gone By. 

I want to write these words for you, and like the singer, raise your spirits high, so please listen to the song before you keep reading.  I’ve heard that these are the days of miracles and wonders, so it is possible to pause, listen, and then continue reading.

Flow  with me.

So let me tell you about my old friend Nick Lyons whom I’ve never met or talked to.  Sometimes a friendship is forged unbeknownst to the friends. Lives that have intersected without meeting.  I heard about his writing on fly fishing when I was reading something my forgettery has gratefully forgotten.  Forgetting is a lost art.  As that other fisher of intangibles Henry Thoreau said in Life Without Principle, “It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember.”  It takes desire to forget the inconsequential.  And desire to remember the profound.

The article said he had written a memoir that sounded interesting to me, for reasons I can’t explain.  So I got and read the book, Fire in the Straw: Notes on Inventing a Life.  It was published four years ago and moved me deeply for many reasons.  I felt we had met long ago in some parallel reality, two city boys, one Jewish, the other Catholic, Nick from Brooklyn and I from the Bronx, different in age and other particulars, but joined by a passionate intensity tied to great literature, basketball, and most especially by a mutual sense that life’s deepest truths lurked beneath the surface, and in order to catch them, we had to develop an art of playing life well, whether that was in sports or teaching or writing.  An art that could lure meaning out of the deepest depths into consciousness.

Fire in the Straw is just that.  It is a beautiful and masterful book, lit up by such pellucid prose and unsparing self-examination that only an emotionally dead reader would not be deeply touched. Lyons writes in his introduction:

Except for a moment or two, my life I suspect is rather ordinary in its details – and I have persuaded myself to write about parts of it in this brief book only for several reasons: the selfish one of wanting – sometimes desperately – to understand what I did and what happened to me, what it might mean and why, and in the thought that some of my odd journey will interest people who have lived with similar events and strivings.

That is an understatement, for the tale he tells is universal, despite all its particularities.  Or perhaps because of them or the brilliant way he makes them so.  The ordinary concealing the extraordinary.  A life told in luminescent sentences that vibrate in the reader’s mind because they were composed by an artist’s loving hand.

Call it a memoir, an autobiography, or anything you like, if you are into categorizing books by content alone.  Goethe wrote of the “open mystery” of every form, and although it is often assumed that form and content comprise two separate aspects of writing (and this is true for most mediocre work where readers generally concentrate on the content exclusively), the finest writing consists of a marriage of form and content that ravishes the reader in unassimilable and mysterious ways. A marriage of true minds.

Homer said it best: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

Nick Lyons heard the Muse and sings his life in this book.

It is a story, told by a man nearly ninety years-old, of a boy emotionally abandoned by his perpetually smiling and good-looking mother who sent him to a boarding school at age five; a boy without a father but with a step-father whom he disliked and a mother whom he couldn’t love; a child aware of adult phoniness who discovers in fishing a mysterious source of solace and sustenance; a student bored by school but in love with basketball who practices obsessively and competes fiercely in the Brooklyn schoolyards; a young man who earns a prestigious degree at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania only to find it hollow; a soldier in France who discovers his love of reading and his basketball talent; then a young man trying to find himself and his vocation who holes himself up in a cheap, tiny Greenwich Village apartment with the great books of literature that light a fire in his soul; the professor of literature who takes on a second job at a publishing company to support his painter wife and four children and constantly struggles with debt; and later an independent small press book publisher and writer about fly fishing; a self-questioner always trying to find meaning and a pattern in his life, a life that seemed to race ahead of him; a devoted husband and loving and protective father who was lonely even when only one child was away; a man wildly juggling many balls for many years who finally found “success” and the cushion of money when he sold his small publishing company; a contemplator of his soul-mate wife’s paintings where he sought the manifestation in color and stroke of something that he felt he lacked; an artist always trying to answer a Sphinx-like riddle: Who am I? How did I become who I am today? Did I become whom “you” wanted me to be?

None of this is ordinary because Nick Lyons is not ordinary, and with Fire in the Straw he has written an extraordinary book.

Sitting in his dead mother’s apartment waiting for the police to arrive, she a lonely seventy-four year-old that he never truly knew, his mother stiffening on a toilet seat, a sight that he only glimpsed and then avoided, he waits and waits cataleptically for the cops and the medical examiner (who, like Godot, never comes), looking at old photographs and musing about his parents’ lives and deaths, a father, Nat Ress, whose death preceded Nick’s birth, a mystery man, a pleaser with a “good heart” that he also never knew and never once asked his mother about but longed for still, a hole in his heart seeping sadness, thinking of photos of these two intimate strangers when once they seemed happy and in love. For his father had died when Nick’s mother was six months pregnant with him, and the fact that both mother and son had survived a very difficult childbirth was a miracle.  Ah, to exist!

I did not find myself a part of the life seeping from the prints at first, then, as the images begat other more fluid, moving, images in my mind, as I sorted through them in some nagging urgency to make sense of them all, some meaning of them, I found the racing of my mind slow and slow again, just as I once had to slow down my life, which had been slipping steadily, inexorably, through my hands.  I had not been able to control it once.  I had been rigged up, like a puppet, playing a role that had been written out for me, a hostage to an alien script.

Hadn’t there been something small and mysterious, like a small flame in damp straw, hidden inside me?  I had scarcely known how to fan it forth.  And why?  For what reason?  I had always done what I had to do, little more.  I did what I was told.  I smiled when I was supposed to smile.  I tried desperately to remove those bands from my chest, that extraordinary, constant, unyielding pressure.  I kept looking at the little curly-haired boy in those photographs, now one, now four or five, now almost in his teens. . . . I looked at the photographs and they were part of some drama I could not quite understand, scattered and inchoate, and they were part of me and not a part of me and I tried to let them come closer but I still had a passive center, a place that could let an arrogant police captain swipe some of my mother’s few possessions and say nothing.

But the passive puppet becomes the man who keeps fishing in words.  I dare anyone to not be caught by them.  He flicks them out softly, like a fly over a running stream, and although some seem innocuous and part of a pedestrian telling, they suddenly flash and a crack opens in a mystery that stops you, that sends a shiver down your spine.

He tells us about his mother’s burial with these words:

A couple of diggers leaned on their shovels, a discreet distance to the left.  The rain had turned all of the exposed soil to mud.  I turned my head slightly, to the stone just to the left of where my mother’s stone would go, and there, with some dates, the last one in March 1932, three months before I was born, was my name, Nathan Ress [Nick’s original name before the hated step-father changed it].

It was just an old stone, with some dates and a name.  It wasn’t much and I’m not sure why, but I felt a heavy shock of disbelief and recognition and felt that the drama was done.

But it wasn’t.  His story continued and continues still as he approaches his ninety-second birthday.  We learn of his last journey to the basketball court to try to revive his youthful hoopster dreams, an amusing but futile effort; the death of his half-sister Annie, who suffered abuse at the hands of her father Arthur, Nick’s hated step-father; and the last dreamy years with his beloved wife Mari, to whom he was married for fifty-eight years, whose presence, stated or not, remains a light-motif throughout the book.

At one point about twenty years ago when they were in Montana and he was modelling for her, he writes:

It is a rainy day and Mari is painting her Big Enigma, a brown hump like the mountain, me.  She painted me, nearly forty-years ago, naked, in college.  She was always partial to cheap models who did not have to be flattered – herself, me – and I was cheap as dirt, thin then, and would sit for a smile though I couldn’t hold the pose for three minutes.

Now I am a mountain of a man, graying by the hour, but I can sit for days, reading or fussing with a few sentences.  Mari says under her breath that I have everything her regular models have, only more of it. . . .

Flashes of the forty years we’ve had of it together, the tensions and the falling-offs, the quiet moments, nights of passion, delusions, illusions, and, with our children, the great hungry city, the endless pressures of money, of a life crying, like the house of D. H. Lawrence’s rocking horse loser, “There must be more money.”

But with the ease that more money eventually afforded them, life – their lives – went on as they tend to do, softened by money but still the same.  The years passed and Mari died, as did one son, Paul.  Nick sits by “the sorry little pond” he built on the Catskill hillside near their summer house in Woodstock, New York.  He keeps fishing, always fishing, always fishing.

I like to sit on the dock in the heavy dusk and toss food pellets or pieces of bread to who will have them.  Sometimes I think of Nat, Rose, Arthur, or Annie, and a fire, and classrooms and offices and books and a tiny, snot-green room in Greenwich Village, and sometimes I think of Ice Pond, which I first fished more than three-quarters of a century ago, a close friend or two, and fish in the murky waters of my past.  And always now I think of Mari and Paul. . . .

I am flooded with questions I cannot answer. . . . She was here and she is gone, and Paul is gone, and their absences are raw and pungent and their memories precious. . . . Tonight I lumber back from the pond – a bear of a man, garrulous, bearded, often impatient with myself, walking with a rolling gate and a cane, with titanium hips and too much belly. . . . In the darkened glass of the studio [Mari’s], suddenly mirrorlike, I catch a glimpse of an old fellow with a beard and uncombed hair; he looks a little like a badly tied trout fly, but not someone who once thought he had no life. I smile. . . . There is a noise below me, in the sloping field, a whirring of wings.  It is merely a flock of crows rising from the high grasses, making the air tremulous in their departure, like all those years of fear and doubt and striving, of joy and love, rising, fluttering, and then, in a crazy crowd, gone.

“Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.”

Yes, the beauty of the days gone by.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.

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Howard
Howard
May 28, 2024 4:57 PM

Everything was beautiful back when we were beautiful. Perhaps not beautiful in the aesthetic sense; but in the youthful sense. Everything was new – shiny and new; and everything new is beautiful until it’s finally seen for itself and not as an extension of our own egos.

But even then, did it lose its beauty because we finally saw it as it really was – or because we simply grew weary of looking at it?

If only we could choose our youthful beauty more carefully, its beauty might not fade. I have a theory that what separates an artistic temperament from something else is the ability in youth to distinguish things having transcendent beauty from things simply put out to give the public something to look at or read or listen to.

One of my most prized possessions, which I never tire of seeing, is a vase I bought some 60 years ago at a G. C. Murphy Five and Dime Store. It wouldn’t pass muster among the elites who determine what has value; but that’s quite alright. It might get broken; but only a fool would steal it or pay a fortune for it.

Johnny
Johnny
May 27, 2024 4:24 AM

Speaking of reminiscing:

https://www.winterwatch.net/2024/05/the-hidden-truth-about-jesse-owens-experience-at-the-1936-berlin-olympics/

It is an Olympic Year after all.
How many lies this time?

judith
judith
May 27, 2024 12:40 PM
Reply to  Johnny

Would have read it but you have to subscribe.

ariel
ariel
May 27, 2024 4:10 PM
Reply to  judith

I just read it for free???

judith
judith
May 27, 2024 5:13 PM
Reply to  ariel

I mean the link about Jesse Owens.

ariel
ariel
May 27, 2024 11:08 PM
Reply to  judith

Exactly. That’s the one I watched, from that link.

judith
judith
May 28, 2024 12:21 PM
Reply to  ariel

Tried it again. Thanks.
Disturbing story about the real snub. And war.
But heartwarming story about friendship. And excellence.

Johnny
Johnny
May 28, 2024 1:07 AM
Reply to  judith

Just click past.
‘Continue reading’

Johnny
Johnny
May 27, 2024 2:58 AM

Reminiscing can be addictive, especially as we grow old.
The good times are gone.
Or have they?

Apparently the JAB can be addictive too:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/addicted-covid-19-vaccine-injections/5858090

tonyopmoc
tonyopmoc
May 27, 2024 1:39 AM

She is not an XL Bully, but she is extremely fast..She can literally from a standing start…jump 6 feet (2 meters) in the air and catch a fly with her paws and eat it before the fly knew it was born. We all love her to bits. She knows her job – no mice, rats or vermin in our house.

Foxes – No problem – they keep their distance and no longer try and come in through the cat flap….and she looks so sweet and innocent.

She is 9 months old now.

She is a pussy cat…

https://youtu.be/q_i1YSa9xww?t=79

Ernie
Ernie
May 27, 2024 1:02 AM

Sometimes this world just deeply disgusts me. Everything has become so perfidious, neurotic and sick. Where have the old carefree times gone? You can only remember them in movie format and on records. You have the feeling that you are surrounded only by disturbed people and strangers. Why is everything only getting worse and worse? Has it always been like this? Is it due to the increasing stupidity of people? Why is everyone working on exacerbating conflicts instead of finding solutions?

The only salvation from all this incomprehensible nonsense is escapism or emigration, but where is it not just as sick? There seems to be no escape, only death can save us, but who wants to be dead? So we endure it with gritted teeth and clenched fists, with heartburn and nightmares, with “inner emigration” and indifference, every day anew, and ask ourselves: when will it all finally end? One single imposition, life has lost its value. What is there to fight for if in the end it was all in vain and will fade away like dust in the wind? Now I finally know what “Weltschmerz” means.

les online
les online
May 27, 2024 1:27 AM
Reply to  Ernie

That’s why in my next life i’m gonna be a psychologist.
Think of all the money i’ll make out of all the misery.
Why, it’ll be the next best thing to being a politician…

underground poet
underground poet
May 27, 2024 12:05 PM
Reply to  Ernie

Someone proved that the English language is the most dangerous language of all the languages, toward the end, you reap what you sow.

Ernie
Ernie
May 27, 2024 7:03 PM

Interesting theory. How do you want to measure that? Is English more dangerous than Russian or Chinese, or even (I hardly dare say it) than German? Imagine if America had chosen German rather than English (Muhlenberg legend) as its official language. Would that have led to less madness and more culture instead of chewing gum, Coco Cola, McDonalds and NATO terror around the globe?

“Thank God Hitler was defeated, otherwise we would all have had to speak German!” Indeed, a worse fate could not befall any highly cultured people in the world. And all of them would have become Nazis in the end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Don%27t_Speak_German

Perhaps, because not everyone would have been able or willing to learn the other languages as easily as English. English, or what is understood by it today, is, in contrast to what Shakespeare spoke, a kind of consumerist slang in baby sounds with no more than five words per sentence (restricted language code), which possibly contributes as a vehicle to the total idiotization of the world to a not inconsiderable extent.

Ernie
Ernie
May 27, 2024 7:15 PM
Reply to  Ernie

I admit that I also had my problems with Russian and Chinese. By the way, it’s not that German was always as demonized as it was during and after the two world wars (which in reality was a single war that hasn’t ended to this day). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_place_names_changed_from_German_names

Leaving aside Mark Twain (who was actually a genius, but incompetent in foreign languages), German was the number one language of education in the world before the First World War, and didn’t have a bad reputation in Britain either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language

On the contrary, most British academics at the time were probably familiar with a large part of the German vocabulary, and many of them studied at German universities. German was probably not an infrequently spoken language in the British royal family either. However, Charles already spoke much less eloquent German than his father.

Ernie
Ernie
May 27, 2024 7:48 PM
Reply to  Ernie

Had Twain traveled to northern Germany instead of southern Germany, he might have found that learning the Low German language caused him far fewer problems, as it still bears certain similarities to English thanks to the absence of the sound shift.

High German is in fact a standardized artificial language that goes back to Gutenberg’s printing press, which brought Luther’s Bible into circulation as the first generally available book. This was ultimately the death knell for all dialects that have been slowly but surely dying ever since.

In this docu about Yello, which I watched yesterday, you can see that Swiss German is usually translated into High German, which I personally think is quite exaggerated, because reasonably linguistically gifted High German-speakers will understand about 70 percent and figure out the rest. But today, every standard is geared towards the absolute stupidest, and thus deprives them of the challenge of having to learn for themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmYE6xGDAuk

Now the poor British are even being robbed of their Anglo-Saxon legacy. Thus, while the artificial language described by the Jews as today’s “Hebrew” is not considered dangerous, “Anglish” would certainly suggest a strong “Nazi connotation” to common Germanic ancestors among globalist ideologues.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13401749/Anglo-Saxon-Cambridge-pandering-Americans.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11235473/Anglo-Saxons-24-English-study-reveals.html

Ernie
Ernie
May 27, 2024 8:18 PM
Reply to  Ernie

Mr. Blank says he is blind in one eye. It’s amazing that he can still see anything at all when he’s wearing his typical sunglasses. You have to cover one of his eyes and imagine having to go on living like that from now on. It’s a horrible idea, you feel like a cyclops.

Some time ago I had a build-up of water in the eardrum of one of my ears, probably caused by ear irrigation. After that, I could almost only hear in one ear, I almost had a panic attack and went to hospital straight away. The time until I was released from it was quite a horror trip.

This is a purely mental phenomenon, because when you put earplugs in your ears, you can’t hear anything either, but the fact that your brain can clearly assign the reason for this doesn’t make it frightening in any way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghGa8uSkmPQ

But it is also frightening to imagine losing one of your limbs forever. And now you have to realize how many thousands of children in Gaza are being deliberately mutilated into lifelong cripples, if they survive at all.

Ernie
Ernie
May 28, 2024 12:33 AM
Reply to  Ernie

As the documentary proves, the underaged girls who often appear in the early Yello videos are not promoting pedophilia, but are their own offspring. I have to admit that I was skeptical myself. This could also be misunderstood today by certain people who declare that even a father bathing his daughter together is an “attack and assault on her intimate sphere”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgm9nyGYRX0

Exposing their pre-pubertal souls to a permanent bombardment of homo propaganda, surgically and irreversibly removing their genitals and poisoning them with hormone injections is of course not an attack on the children’s intimate sphere, but a particularly humane act. Who could have thought up this diabolical twisting and perversion of the world?

Ernest
Ernest
May 28, 2024 4:31 AM

Indeed, when one considers that the British Isles have been beset by an incessant influx of foreign continental invaders for some time, the question arises as to why they would want to go to this small, place-less and inescapable island instead of Poland or Romania?

Indeed, when one considers that the British Isles have been beset by an incessant influx of foreign continental invaders for some time, the question arises as to why they would want to go to this small, place-less and inescapable island instead of Poland or Romania?

So the reason can only be the English language (and thus the already extraordinary existing non-British “community” on the island), which is now becoming a suicidal guillotine. Someone must have deliberately diverted the good intentions of the British and turned them against themselves, who could it be?

Since nature strives for survival, it would be sick to accuse the British themselves of suicidal intent. Of course, it is clear to anyone who deals with history outside the “official narrative” where this destructive force can be traced, namely precisely where murder is being committed at the moment without the world public reacting appropriately.

The same thing ultimately happens in America. In this respect, it can be stated that the English language is indeed the most dangerous in the world, not only for all those “contaminated” by it, but above all for the disseminators and senders themselves. As Goethe said: “Reason becomes a sham, beneficence a worry”.

Ernest
Ernest
May 28, 2024 4:38 AM

And even now, we Germans do not feel the slightest schadenfreude about the tragic fate of the British, as it is ultimately also our own. Above all, it is tragic because the British apparently have no racial (today, to avoid using a “historically loaded word”, we would say “national”) will to survive. The curse of the (supposedly) “good deed” haunts them without fail.

Ernest
Ernest
May 28, 2024 4:51 AM

Anglo-German love has always been subject to the hostilities of historical currents and political interests. But if Britain continues like this, there will no longer be anything that can be described as her own endearing character. And none of us can see this tragedy as “belated justice” either, because the British were never evil, but always naive, that is, easy prey for those who do not have their best interests at heart, but persuade them that they must confuse stupidity with intelligence.

Paul
Paul
May 28, 2024 9:49 PM
Reply to  Ernie

Read Revelation.

tonyopmoc
tonyopmoc
May 27, 2024 12:00 AM

Only occasionally do Craig Murray’s moderators allow what I write to appear on his blog.

“DunGroanin, About 4 years ago you were writing stuff on a lovely summers day, sat it some pub on the edge of Leicester Square – some massive protest about C8ViD…

Well, I have been through the Mill since then and never even got jabbed. I think wahat nearly did me in, was well we didin’t have any masks, and we did not have any plastic gloves, I got drunk, fell asleep whilst boiling some rice at about 3:00 am.

Neither the Smoke nor The Carbon Monoxide Detectector went off, but I needed a pee and wentoh fuck me. Iwas so embarrassed burning the pan yjay I got Mr Muscle Chemical Pan Cleaner out from under the simk.

It cleaned up the pan mess, I put on the Extractor Fan…

but Mr. Muscle Chemical Pan Cleaner (not any jabs) seriously compromised my (which had been brilliant since I was 8) – My immune sytem starting with my skin.

All the NHS Medical Staff, from the girl who answered the 999 Call, to the girl, who did everything she could possibly think of (and organise – like make things work)…”Anthony is Determined to Go Home – He Says his Wife who visited me every Day” will get him fit – even though he (me) can;t walk more than a step and has yet to make the commode but can do the bed pan, and is very polite and nice.

After an hour, she asked me what I thought of her. I said you are highly Intelligent – but she knew what I really thought – so I gave her wife’s number…

Lets get Anthony out of here..and she did

NHS 1 Rest of the World 0

Slim, Sexy, about 23, and has a way to engage her mind with an old man who she is doing her best to get fit and well and back home

George Mc
George Mc
May 27, 2024 10:15 AM
Reply to  tonyopmoc

Reads like one of the more enlightening posts on Craig Murray.

Give my regards to dear old Dungroanin.

George Mc
George Mc
May 27, 2024 10:18 AM
Reply to  tonyopmoc

Pending again for reasons unknown.

tonyopmoc
tonyopmoc
May 26, 2024 10:06 PM

Don’t Frighten the Children

tonyopmoc
tonyopmoc
May 26, 2024 10:04 PM

Is it OK to confess, that I almost completely stopped watching TV, 30 years ago, and then like 10 years ago, I used to stay with my wife’s mum and dad..and there was almost no way, I could not watch “the news” on the Telly which was such nonsense (looking at it, was like feeling I had been hit in my face with a really large wet fish)…

Well the news, has got even more bizarre, whilst out 3 grandkids camp in our back garden in their dads tent…He asked me, have you got any tent pegs Grandad

So Goldilocks(not her real name) our 2 year old started asking – why are we camping in Nana & Grandad’s Back Garden??

I asked has our kitten joined you yet – cos she will

We are family, and all the news is complete nonsense.

The extremely rich people made it up.

They don’t know about the Ukraine and Palestine yet, and most of their friends at school are really nice.
Tony

Pelle
Pelle
May 26, 2024 7:36 PM

“Detroitization”: Frankfurt in the early 60s
and today, a difference like “night and day”.comment image

While the stupidity personified by Merkel, who grew up under communism, pushed the door wide open to mass immigration and also decided to shut down all of Germany’s nuclear power plants, even though they met the highest technical standards and fulfilled the best safety norms in the world, the green eco-communists’ wrecking ball has demolished the rest of Germany with their “energy transition”, now crippled by inflation.

Germany, a country without a future that has to import horrendously overpriced energy from abroad. From a former success model to a beggar and failure state, no longer competitive on the world market. The left-wing ideologues and their globalist supporters are producing a structural underclass society. The massive deindustrialization of the former world export champion into a poverty-stricken agricultural country is in full swing.

But agriculture does not mean agricultural growth, because the farmers are also being driven to ruin. Germany is being degraded to the poorhouse of Europe. The country is gripped by a tsunami of bankruptcies, with thousands of companies filing for bankruptcy every month. Educated young people are not growing up either, because the schools are full of foreigners who don’t understand German.

Those Germans with a university degree in STEM subjects are emigrating abroad to seek their fortune there and those companies that have been able to position themselves internationally due to their sheer size are relocating their technical equipment and resources abroad, especially to China and America, as they are only doing loss-making business in Germany. This is followed by massive job cuts at home. This also applies to the chemical giant BASF, a global player with a long tradition.

https://www-focus-de.translate.goog/finanzen/news/gastbeitrag-von-gabor-steingart-basf-hat-keine-lust-mehr-auf-deutschland-die-gruende-sind-beschaemend_id_259965347.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en

nima
nima
May 26, 2024 6:05 PM

OH WHATTA WONDERFUL WORLD
OH WHATTA WONDERFUL WORLD
May 26, 2024 4:23 PM

In the fertile womb of Ghana, a genius saw the light of day, a true offspring of traditional West African high culture. Ace-Liam Nana Sam Ankrah, a name that will make a name for itself. This child prodigy, with his painterly compositions of motley dots of color, proves that all claims that Negroes have a below-average IQ compared to the rest of the world are mere malicious prejudices of white racist liars. Ace-Liam Nana Sam Ankrah already intends to found a university named after him, which will focus on imparting knowledge of the delicate art of finger painting.

It is expected that a completed work of art by the talented African Mozart will fetch around two to seven million dollars at major auction houses and art galleries around the world, and the list of prospective buyers is already endless. Even Joe Biden, the most aesthetically tasteful president America has ever produced and an intimate lover of children, is considering decorating the White House with a painting by Ace-Liam Nana Sam Ankrah, which bears the groundbreaking title: “Uncle Joe Brandon loves me”, depicting a tender touch of the Negro child by the great American president.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/24/one-year-old-record-worlds-youngest-artist-ghana-ace-liam/

Edwige
Edwige
May 26, 2024 11:37 AM

Van Morrison was one of the very few musicians openly critical of lockdowns.

As for burial, well that’s just so toxic:
https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2024-05-22/human-composting-green-burials?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

Actually, given the amount of toxins most of us contain by the time we expire or are euthanised – it probably is.

mastershock
mastershock
May 26, 2024 11:10 AM

mastershock
mastershock
May 26, 2024 11:08 AM

Bread and circus now costs more 
on top the the price increase in March then April and again now incoming.
Not forgetting the price increase that happened three times in 2023

Bread, Beer and Biscuits prices could rise due to wet weather

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0x0d0zxpnqo

Weirdpeter
Weirdpeter
May 26, 2024 10:59 AM

Strangely depressing, but invigorating. You were correct to have Van Morrison set the stage. He opened to door halcyon memories and put me in a long forgotten place. Your words, and excerpts from Fire in the Straw opened a part of me that had been locked for 65 years. It’s a place of youth and tranquility and imagination that was superseded by adulthood and the harshness of reality.
Thank you giving it back to me.

Grafter
Grafter
May 26, 2024 10:47 AM

Sleep now.