Thursday, October 27, 2011

Albrecht Haushofer

I have added a second poem from Albrecht Haushofer's posthumous Moabiter Sonette to poets.aule-browser.com

The poets Aule or site now has both Der Vater and Der Bruder.

His brother lived and is said to have found the poets corpse where he had been murdered outside the prison in the last days of the NSDAP terror regime.  His father later committed suicide.

The poetry markup is in MIT Curl from www.curl.com and requires their safe and secure RTE (runtime engine) browser plugin.

Curl is a trademark of Sumisho Computer Corp, Tokyo.

Romain Gary

A recent talk by a novelist at the English university of the bilingual province of New Brunswick was a talk premised on the audience being ignorant of the work of Romain Gary.

The talk began with an insult to those of the West who failed to grasp that "other Europe" of Milosz. We, the acquisitive, we in our striving for recognition, reward, we who have not read Hamlet (one supposes.)  Or not understood Hamlet.

And surely none of us in the audience displaced, dispossessed, unemployed ...

The one Lithuanian in the audience had not heard of Romain Gary (!) let alone read Education or Cerfs.  Some present may even have seen the film, "Madame Rosa", or heard of it.

In "La Parole" Ge. Gusdorf writes of how we must mistrust the speaker who is too aware of his audience - or perhaps too sure.

In fairness, the opening words which I heard concerned the trove of documents concerning partisans in the years 1944-1948 and the talk closed with an admission that our author had worked from secondary sources.

My initial reactions were posted on Facebook.  At the close of the talk I mentioned The Painted Bird, but this seemed to pass unnoted.  There is a parallel between the story of the re-submission  and rejection of that manuscript and the view Gary took of himself in the hey-day of his Emile Ajar personna.  The gap between 1944 and the 1987 Klaus Barbie trial is almost that which our writer invoked and that of Education and Cerfs.

But Gary was not simply a French novelist.

By 1953, no assassin came stalking Milosz. Or do the KGB records read otherwise?  And then came '54, then '56, '67.  Who are we supposing lived in the sunny light of ignorance? Children?

By 1980 there was no feigning ignorance of the role of Milovan Djilas.

By 1980 we had Nikolai Tolstoi's Victims of Yalta.

What is this requirement for historical documents and "distance". Reconciliation? Truth?

notes:

1945: Éducation européenne
1975 : La Vie devant soi (as Emile Ajar)
1980: Les Cerfs-volants

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Apple iTunes desktop app

If there is a worse desktop application for a better mobile device, I cannot imagine what it is.

The first oddity today was that suddenly my PC came up as "unauthorized".  Then an entire album could not be found.  I re-authorized the PC and was told that now 2 of a possible 5 computers were authorized for my account.  What!?!  I went to look at iTunes Preferences and decided to update address and phone number.  But country was a separate entry ( we are now living in Canada.)  Bad idea.  All record of purchases went poof!

In an effort to wake up the iTunes "store", I went ahead and purchased yet another tune for 0.99$ - a nice guitar rendition of an old blues number by the late John Fahey. And there it stands: my one music purchase.

O Apple!   Must I be driven to Amazon?  Must I use an Android?  What does the "i" in "iTunes" really mean?  Indifferent?  Inexplicable?  Let me see ... a word starting with "i" meaning "doomed" ... "idiotic" ?

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Unable to open TWAIN source

The annoying Canon scanner error "Unable to open TWAIN source" is usally caused simply by the PATH environment variable not containing the appropriate value such as c:\windows\twain_32\SOME-SCANNER-DEVICE_NAME

I would create a new env var named scanner and give it that string value. You can then add %scanner%; to your path variable and be able to change scanners withot messing with the path variable.

If you need the fix take immediate effect without a reboot, open a cmd session on the directory of your scanner and lauch its EXE file from there.

Under Windows XP, a left-click for the PROPERTIES of My Computer will give you access to env var's via the Advanced tab.