eye of the storm

aces or queens?

of course, i support legalizing same-sex marriage. and if you were me, you would also support an absolute ban on opposite-sex marriage. it's fucking unnatural.

as y'all know, i'm at work on the american radical abolitionist nathaniel peabody rogers. here's a passage from his 1842 review of cobbett's american gardener.

    This work on gardening is a modest, unpretending book, like all sterling productions. It is written in a style as beautiful as the subject, and as natural as a garden ought to be. It is worth buying for the style of it, aside from the information it contains. Every body can understand it at a glance, without a dictionary. And the book that can't be, ought never to be read. These books that abound in dictionary words, are learned nonsense and imposition. Cobbett's Gardener is full of short, every day words, which the people can understand, as readily as they can tell an onion stalk, or a cabbage plant. It is like Pierpont's poetry in that - abounding in monosyllabled words. You will find whole lines of them uninterrupted, every one as full of meaning, as it can hold - the beautiful, strong, old Saxon - the talk-words - words for use, and not for show. Every young man and woman, who has been injured in their talk and writing by going to school, ought to buy Cobbett's Gardener, or some other of his works. A young collegian should read it twice a day, till he gets well of his pedantry. Cobbett will cure him if any body can.
     "Do you teach your sons Latin, Mr. Cobbett?" asked a gentleman. "No," said the common-sense sage - "but I learn them to shave with cold water!" A bit of learning worth more to a man with a beard, than all the Latin the Monkery ever preserved from the ruins of Rome.
   You can understand the "Gardener" with once reading, just as readily as you could talk of a sensible gardener himself - and those who have followed it, say it turns out to be true - contrary to the fact of most agricultural books, which are mere speculations and theorizing, which no body can afford to practise. The subject of this book is a beautiful one to read of and talk of, if you have not any ground to work it out  on. Gardening - nothing is more interesting or profiting. We associate Paradise always with the idea of it. The great Lord Bacon (by the way not half the man that Cobbett was) said "Gardening was the purest of human pleasures." One of his famous "Essays" was "Of Gardening," if I remember the title.  But he wrote of a garden for kings and princes, - Cobbett's gardens are for men - for families - and that speaks of the difference between the two authors . Bacon was a worshipper and slave of kings, - Cobbett a friend of man. The learned world call the one "The great Sir Francis Bacon," and the other Cobbett or Bill Cobbett.
    A glorious garden, whether small or large, is a sort of Eden, and it is a fine idea, whether it was a literal fact, or an allegory merely, to show God's kindness to the man and woman He had made, that He put them, at their beginning, into a garden, "to dress it and to keep it." We fancy Eden was every thing a garden could be; but I dare say it would not have hurt Adam and Eve to have put into their hands a copy of Cobbett, written in the primeval language of humanity, which, whatever it was, they spoke, no doubt, in the same style Cobbett writes.

the people contesting the libertarian party nomination are former senator mike gravel, wayne allyn root, and former representative bob barr. they're scheduled to debate friday (may 16) on fox business channel. barr is best remembered for grimly trying to nail bill clinton during the impeachment. for a libertarian he's awfully trad conservative; i don't see him talking about drug laws, and he's all about closing the borders. root is very trad libertarian: anti-tax, pro-gun. i just sent gravel $20; one thing i dig about what he's doing is a very elaborate set of proposals to bring about a direct democracy. but it would refreshing to have a leftish libertarian: the movement is, or should be, multi-ideological.

i've been re-working the 2-cd soul list.

sorry to have had to pull down "demographics." it's in this morning's la times.

here is an excellent piece from reason on the bizarre way we've come to think of our presidents.

hey brian put up the first bit of the soul list on seeqpod. that is cool. gotta figure out how to use it.

speaking of political aesthetics: behold the pc colossus and despair!