JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo: “Catch of the Day” ad campaign by the Surfrider Foundation and Saatchi & Saatchi LA calls attention to the garbage polluting the oceans.

The Tutti-Truthy: JAY contest is now closed.

Winners of Jay movie posters signed by the cast: (1) Andalusian Dawg, (2) cismphils (who posted twice, but what the hell), (3) seymourglassisdead, (5) humanum777, (8) trinity, (13) jules, (21) sandler, (34) hellobilly, (55) xkg.

Everyone who posted a review of Jay gets a T-shirt. That means you, gladyr, aampineda, journeyoferos, thebaklareview, and rieziel_07.

If you haven’t already posted your name in Comments, please do (They won’t be published). In Comments, please, don’t send them to my cats’ email addresses as they don’t check them regularly.

Thanks to everyone who joined the contest, stay tuned for the next one.

I’ve been looking for a copy of the WWII documentary The World At War, particularly the episode on Stalingrad. In the meantime I watched the 2-disc documentary The World in Conflict: 1931-1945. It’s a collection of newreels and archival footage, mostly US Army propaganda—useful for historians, I suppose, but dry and unenlightening, with very little mention of Stalingrad.

The History Channel series Hitler’s War is more compelling: it contains interviews with survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad, both Russian Red Army and German Sixth Army. A German soldier recounts how early on, when they were winning, they saw Russian women and children gathered around a dead horse, cutting it up for meat. They regarded the besieged, starving Russians with disgust and contempt. A year later there were reports of cannibalism among the Germans, who were forced to hold on when they were surrounded. Only the very badly injured were airlifted out—one of every three planes was shot down—and one pilot recalls how the wounded were covered in newspaper in a vain attempt to keep their insides in.

Back in Germany Hitler was insisting that Stalingrad was a victory.

Afterwards I read Gert Ledig’s The Stalin Front (translated by Michael Hofmann), a harrowing novel of carnage and death, so intense it reads like a long hallucination.

The Lance-Corporal couldn’t turn in his grave, because he didn’t have one. Some three versts from Podrova, forty versts south of Leningrad, he had been caught in a salvo of rockets, been thrown up in the air, and with severed hands and head dangling, been impaled on the skeletal branches of what once had been a tree.

The NCO, who was writhing on the ground with a piece of shrapnel in his belly, had no idea what was keeping his machine-gunner. It didn’t occur to him to look up. He had his hands full with himself.

“His hands full with himself”. The breezy, almost droll way the author describes a man trying to keep his guts from spilling out magnifies the horror of his situation. The horror is so extreme that it’s absurd: the brain protects itself by resorting to black humor.

Then in the middle of bloody chaos, a quiet moment:The grass under her feet felt soft like cottonwool. The meadow was insanely green.

Later I will recover from this savagery by reading Jane Austen. (Nothing can be as good as Persuasion, but I hope Emma will be close.) Relationships are also a kind of warfare, but the protagonists usually get to keep their intestines.

Here’s a cardboard stool made to appear like a stack of books. It can carry up to 200 kg. It is not actually made of books.

My late friend Ruthie—whose birthday was yesterday, spooky coincidence—once tried to build a bed out of books. She arranged them into stacks and put a door on top. It can’t have been very comfortable; fortunately the discomfort didn’t last as the “bed” kept falling down. The solution would’ve been to glue the books together, but then she wouldn’t be able to read them.

For the generation that grew up in the Seventies and early Eighties, the primary source for movies was not video shops but a television program called Sine Siete. It aired every afternoon after the lunchtime variety shows, when good children were supposed to be having their siesta. Summer vacations were a daily retrospective of Fifties melodramas and war action flicks, Sixties musicals and romantic comedies, and Seventies parodies and teenybopper romances. While we were “sleeping”, we were taking courses in cultural anthropology. The sleep we lost may have ruined our chances of growing to be six feet tall, but we learned the right way to profess undying love: in an earnest stream of metaphors delivered with a straight face while standing under a mango tree in the middle of an open field, followed by a duet with the beloved. No wonder romance is dead: try finding a mango tree in the middle of Edsa.

The Archives of Your Mind in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. Adrian Desmond writes that while we regard On the Origin of Species as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason, Darwin was influenced by his fervent belief in the anti-slavery movement. Ironically he also justified colonial eradication. “To celebrate historical figures we have first to understand them,” and Darwin was a paradoxical thinker.

Shackled legs, thumbscrews used to crush the fingers of errant female slaves, a six-year-old boy horse-whipped for handing out water in a dirty glass: these sound like scenes from a modern horror story, but all were seen by the young Charles Darwin on his travels with the Beagle around the slave-owning continent of South America. You will find no mention of them in the proudly reasoned, scientific pages of On the Origin of Species. Glance at Darwin’s journals, private notebooks and family background, however, and you will find a man immersed in the rhetoric and fervent belief of the anti-slavery movement. Was the public man of science influenced by these private passions?