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Serendipity: Two Armies

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Russian Spetznaz Special Forces Troops in Camouflage

Russian Spetznaz Special Forces Troops in Camouflage

I saw this passage in an introduction by Robert D. Kaplan, who was quoting French military writer Jean Lartéguy’s The Centurions:

I’d like … two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers … an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.

The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom … all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the army in which I should like to fight.

The first army would be huddled in the Green Zone or Bagram AFB, eating pizzas and drinking Cokes. Whenever they would venture out in force, they would be blown to smithereens without ever having seen the face of their enemy.

The second army was the one that bagged Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad and that will defeat ISIS if ISIS is ever to be defeated.

By the way, do not underestimate the French military. They are not all “surrender monkeys,” as some Americans would have it. It was the first army—the parade ground army—that surrendered at Sedan and Dien Bien Phu.

Favorite Films: The IPCRESS File

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Michael Caine in The IPCRESS File (1965)

Michael Caine in The IPCRESS File (1965)

Michael Caine co-starred with a pair of glasses (curiously similar to the ones that Rick Perry sported while he was still running for President) in a spy film that was most un-James-Bond-like, despite the fact that Harry Saltzman produced both The IPCRESS File and many of the classic Bonds.

(By the way, if you’re wondering why IPCRESS is in all caps, it’s because it’s an acronym for Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress, the brainwashing scheme used by Commie spies to “turn” British scientists.)

The IPCRESS File was Michael Caine’s first big shot at stardom. His spy is unnamed in Len Deighton’s novels, but you couldn’t very well have an unnamed character in a film who is constantly being directly addressed by his friends and co-workers. It was Caine who came up with the moniker Harry Palmer, and it stuck.

Palmer’s world of spies is much dirtier than Bond’s. You wouldn’t suspect M or Q or Miss Moneypenny for being a Russian plant; but in Harry Palmer’s WOOC(P) [SIC] organization no one is near as squeaky clean.

In the film, Harry accidentally kills one CIA operative in an underground garage who was tailing him too closely and is suspected of killing another whose bullet-riddled body is found in his flat.

Kidnapped from a train, Harry finds himself in an Albanian prison being brainwashed to forget everything he knew about the IPCRESS project. Some people, and Harry is one of them, just can’t succumb to brainwashing; and he comes out ahead.

Sidney J. Furie’s film direction is edgy and effective. I had not seen the film since my college days when I saw that it was being screened on Turner Classic Movies. Coincidentally, I had read Deighton’s novel just a couple of weeks ago.

 

“In the month of Athyr …”

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Mummy Portrait of Deceased

Early Christian Mummy Portrait of Deceased

One of my favorite poets of the last century was Constantine P. Cavafy, who lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt. I have just finished reading E. M. Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon: A Novelist’s Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages, which ends which a chapter on “The Poetry of C. P. Cavafy.”

In it, he talks about meeting Cavafy in the street and having a marvelous conversation with him:

It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.

What a wonderful line! “It too stands at a slight angle to the universe.”

The Poet

The Poet

In his book, Forster quotes (and, I suspect, translated) this fragmentary funerary poem of a young man who died one November (“Athyr”), probably not unlike the mummy facial covering illustrated above:

It is hard to read . . . on the ancient stone.
“Lord Jesus Christ” … I make out the word “Soul”,
“In the month of Athyr … Lucius fell asleep.”
His age is mentioned … “He lived years …”—
The letters KZ show … that he fell asleep young,
In the damaged part I see the words … “Him … Alexandrian”.
Then came three lines … much mutilated.
But I can read a few words … perhaps “our tears” and “sorrows”.
And again: “Tears” … and: “for us his friends mourning”.
I think Lucius … was much bloved.
In the month of Athyr … Lucius fell asleep ….

In case you have never heard of Cavafy before, he was a major inspiration for Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet.

What Do These Burmese Kings Have in Common?

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Put Your Thinking Caps On

Put Your Thinking Caps On

The four Burmese kings are: Uzana, Minrekyawswa, Razadarit, and (of course) Tabinshweti.

Uzana was trampled to death by an elephant in 1254; Minrekyawswa was crushed to death by an elephant in 1417;
Razadarit died while lassoing elephants in 1423; and Tabinshweti was beheaded while searching for an elephant in 1551.

Now if you were a king in Burma, that suggests you stay away from the GOP.

The above is courtesy of the Futility Closet.

Word

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Now Which of These Can Be Considered as Medioxumous?

Now Which of These Can Be Considered as Medioxumous?

I was always a word freak. Even from my middle school years, I studied vocabulary books to increase my store of words. Imagine my delight when, in 1968, as a graduate student in film at UCLA, I got a job proofreading two computerized transcripts of Merrian-Webster dictionaries.

One interesting wrinkle was that my predecessor in my job, a young lady, was murdered by a graduate student in film at UCLA. (It wasn’t me, honest!)

In the process of proofreading thousands of pages of dictionary entries, I collected a few interesting words that don’t make it into print much these days:

  • Septemfluous: “flowing in seven streams,” describing the blood of the crucified Christ.
  • Medioxumous: “of or relating to the middle rank of deities”
  • Rotl: “any of various units of weight of Mediterranean and Near Eastern countries ranging from slightly less than one pound to more than six pounds”
  • And, coming to us from Welsh, cwm and crwth (not misprints), meaning “valley” and “crowd” respectively, and pronounced “coom” and “crooth.”

I have a few words to add to these from the 1755 edition of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. They don’t seem to have made it into subsequent editions, though the Futility Closet managed to ferret them out:

  • Finger-flinger: “a pretender to astrology and prediction,” not to be confused with an irate motorist
  • Pissburnt: “stained with urine”
  • Centuriator: “a name given to historians, who distinguish times by centuries”
  • Longimanous: “long-handed; having long hands”
  • Overyeared: “too old,” like the writer of this blog

The illustration above is by the talented BurenErdene at DeviantArt.

 

So Much for Politics!

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My Ultimate Political Statement

My Ultimate Political Statement

I’ve had it with politics.

Every time I post something about politics, I feel as if I’m yelling at a bunch of kids to get off my lawn. Particularly with the presidential race for 2016, I really have nothing new to add. I think Trump is a Fuehrer in training; Cruz, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; and Rubio, a marionette dangling on a string. On the Democratic side, I distrust Hillary; and I like Bernie, but don’t think he’ll make it.

The next eight months will be a time of great ugliness and moral peril for this country. Before we get flushed down the commode of history, we will yet become the laughingstock of the world.

We’ve always overestimated ourselves, especially after we won the Second World War. After that magical moment, it was all downhill.

There, now I’ve said it all. I will vote of course, but have no further opinions about the race; and I don’t expect to be surprised. Why? I am deeply pessimistic when it comes to the American voter, who seems to look at the world around him as if it were a reality show on Fox.