* term used in Vietnam for the act of throwing a fragmentation grenade into the accommodations of an unpopular commanding officer. Here used in its literary sense.
(See Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus for more enlightment on the subject).
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Vonnegut reminded me that writers of fiction might be something of a coward, hiding under the heavy cloak of literary theory, which postulates that the narrator is not the author, thus avoiding direct criticism to what the narrator in turn postulates. Mind you that “to postulate” is no direct reference to Vonnegut’s age. Nor “to affirm” has anything to do with countering the aging process of the male sexual organ. That’s my affirmation. And to attack someone on account of age is as idiotic as praising someone on account of beauty, or at least as silly as hoping we won’t age ourselves and as hopeless as hoping we can become beautiful without undergoing plastic surgery.
The keyword here being “plastic.”
* * *
A minister exhorted citizens to perform voluntary service. That's okay. But isn’t the same minister thus confessing that work for remuneration is a system that is insufficient to solve many society’s problems? And isn’t it true that he’s a minister for and of that very same system? He was disministering himself, from my perspective. And mind you, Mr ex‑minister, I wrote this voluntarily.
* * *
Scientific or traditional knowledge is becoming more and more specialized, and so it is increasingly difficult to master more than one of its areas of research. You’ve probably heard of multidisciplinary teams: that’s a consequence. Knowledge is then becoming more confined. Bye, bye, Savant Of All. This means that you cannot trust people’s advice on more than one subject, that what people have to say is of less value, and that I’m the sole expert on the subject of my bedroom.
* * *
Lightness of spirit is something that at least sounds good. Now imagine an author of dozens of books, hundreds of essays, thousands of papers, one or two poems, and with a persistent pimple on the left nostril waking up every day and remembering every single line he wrote so far. He was the one talking about lightness of spirit. He taught me that lightness of spirit might be the ability, perhaps, to forget everything he ever wrote. Is then reading a pleasure of the moment, nothing else?
