Althouse

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• "At that time my lord Marduk told me in regard to E-temen-anki, the ziqqurrat of Babylon, which before my day was (already) very weak and badly buckled, to ground its bottom..."
• "Is the Forced Contraception Alleged by Britney Spears Legal?/The United States has a dark history of court-sanctioned sterilization, but more recent rulings and legislation suggest it would violate a basic right."
• "We wanted to evoke the local, from Van Gogh's Starry Night to the soaring rock clusters you find in the region.... The manner in which Van Gogh rendered Les Alpilles influenced the development of the exterior cladding of the building."
• "Surfside’s mayor, Charles W. Burkett, said on Friday that he was worried about the stability of the north building but did not feel 'philosophically comfortable' ordering people to evacuate."
• "In 1968, he bought his first Bob Dylan album, 'John Wesley Harding,' and worked backward from there."

"At that time my lord Marduk told me in regard to E-temen-anki, the ziqqurrat of Babylon, which before my day was (already) very weak and badly buckled, to ground its bottom..." Posted: 26 Jun 2021 09:35 AM PDT "... on the breast of the netherworld, to make its top vie with the heavens.... I had them shape mud bricks without number and mould baked bricks like countless raindrops. I had the River Arahtu bear asphalt and bitumen like a mighty flood. Through the sagacity of Ea, through the intelligence of Marduk, through the wisdom of Nabû and Nissaba, by means of the vast mind that the god who created me let me possess, I deliberated with my great intellect, I commissioned the wisest experts and the surveyor established the dimensions with the twelve-cubit rule. The master-builders drew taut the measuring cords, they determined the limits.... I fashioned representations of my royal likeness bearing a soil-basket, and positioned (them) variously in the foundation platform. I bowed my neck to my lord Marduk. I rolled up my garment, my kingly robe, and carried on my head bricks and earth...." From the inscription by King Nabopolassar at Etemenanki, the "temple of the foundation of heaven and earth," built in Babylon some time between the 14th and the 9th century BCE.  It may have been the basis for the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which I was reading about this morning not because of the fall of the Champlain Tower in Florida — blogged here at 5:43 a.m. — but because of "The Tower" by Frank Gehry — blogged here at 6:21 a.m. — which reminded me of an especially familiar painting of the Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I'll embed the Bruegel again... ... so you can compare it to a model of Etemenanki: Bruegel imagined a circular building, which Wikipedia tells us was based on the Colosseum in Rome. The 1927 movie "Metropolis" has a Tower of Babel sequence — watch the crisp clip here — that uses the Bruegel design. "Metropolis" emphasizes the extreme division between the elite who thought up the design and the workers who built it. The building falls because the workers revolt. By contrast, according to that inscription at Etemenanki, the King himself rolls up his sleeves and gets to work carrying bricks.  But that's propaganda, isn't it? An inscription. Perhaps the King showed up at the wall one day and carried a few bricks the way a President of the United States might pick up a shovel and do a ground-breaking photo op.

"Is the Forced Contraception Alleged by Britney Spears Legal?/The United States has a dark history of court-sanctioned sterilization, but more recent rulings and legislation suggest it would violate a basic right." Posted: 26 Jun 2021 05:27 AM PDT A NYT article by Jan Hoffman:  The scant law on the question in conservatorship indicates what an outlier the Spears case may be. In 1985, the California Supreme Court denied the petition of guardian parents of a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome who wanted her to undergo a tubal ligation. Typically, a conservator has temporary control over the finances and even medical care of an incapacitated person... If a guardian fears that a ward will make financially unwise choices, "the remedy is not to say they can't procreate," said Sylvia Law, a health law scholar at New York University School of Law. "It's unspeakable." According to experts in trust and estate law, the handful of cases in which a guardian, usually a parent, has asked a court to order contraception involved severely disabled children. "Such a child would lack the capacity to understand that a penis and vagina could make a baby," said Bridget J. Crawford, an expert on guardianship law at Pace University law school. "And that certainly is not the Britney Spears case." Britney Spears is 39-years-old, so the conservator's decision that she cannot remove the IUD is very close to a determination that she can never have another child. She does have 2 sons, and the breakdown that led to the conservatorship happened right after she lost custody of them. I'm seeing that she was led to believe at the time that the conservatorship would help her regain custody. They are teenagers now, 15 and 14, so the time for living closely with them is also ending: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Britney Spears (@britneyspears)

"We wanted to evoke the local, from Van Gogh's Starry Night to the soaring rock clusters you find in the region.... The manner in which Van Gogh rendered Les Alpilles influenced the development of the exterior cladding of the building." Posted: 26 Jun 2021 05:32 AM PDT Said Frank Gehry, quoted in "Frank Gehry unveils The Tower, a stainless steel-clad arts building for Luma Arles" (Dezeen). Here's Gehry's new building: Here's Van Gogh's rendering of Les Alpilles: Did Gehry evoke Van Gogh to good effect? Yes, beautiful! Yes, decently enough. No, it's kind of a miss for me. No, it's atrocious.   pollcode.com free polls ADDED: Gehry's Tower reminds me of the depiction of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (from 1563):

"Surfside’s mayor, Charles W. Burkett, said on Friday that he was worried about the stability of the north building but did not feel 'philosophically comfortable' ordering people to evacuate." Posted: 26 Jun 2021 02:32 PM PDT I'm reading "Engineer Warned of 'Major Structural Damage' at Florida Condo Complex/A consultant in 2018 urged the managers to repair cracked columns and crumbling concrete. The work was finally about to get underway when the building collapsed" (NYT). In retrospect, we naturally feel that the building should have been evacuated, and it seems perverted for the mayor not to have felt "philosophically comfortable" with ordering evacuation.  But how many mayors right now are on notice of major structural damage equivalent to that 2018 report on Champlain Towers? Will they order people to evacuate? Or will the "philosophical comfort" remain on the side of letting people stay in their homes? We're built to feel secure in the sense that things will remain as they are. We get into our bed at night and — most of us — trust that we'll arise in the morning. A meteorite or tornado or heart attack might make this night drastically different, but we need to expect another typical night. What a mess we'd be if we didn't. We'd be full of cracks and crumbling.  So do you think now the mayors of America will be ordering the condo dwellers out of their homes whenever there are reports of cracks and crumbling at the level Burkett saw in the Champlain Towers? FROM THE EMAIL: Kylos writes: Reading your post about the mayor's comments, I thought his opposition to evacuation came before the tower's collapse. But reading the article, it seems he is opposed to now evacuating a nearby tower built at the same time that is nearly identical to the one that collapsed. I'm not sure if the mistake is just mine but thought it was worth mentioning. Wow! You are right, and I am surprised to see that. I guess that answers my questions. Mayors will not be ordering evacuations.

"In 1968, he bought his first Bob Dylan album, 'John Wesley Harding,' and worked backward from there." Posted: 26 Jun 2021 06:03 AM PDT "He and his friends would sit around for hours nodding along to Dylan's obscure lyrics as though they understood every word. It was like a microcosm of adolescence, he told me, pretending to know while knowing nothing. Ishiguro wasn't just bluffing, though. From Dylan, as well as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, he learned about the possibilities of the first-person: how a character could be summoned into being with just a few words.... 'You probably work harder at your job than I do,' Ishiguro said one evening in early December.... 'Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: 'I don't have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I'm just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it's because writing wasn't my first choice of profession. It's almost something I fell back on because I couldn't make it as a singer-songwriter. It's not something I've wanted to do every minute of my life. It's what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don't.': From "Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us," a NYT article about the Nobel laureate by Giles Harvey, published last February. I'm reading it this morning because I'm getting around to listening to things I saved in my Audm app.  You probably work harder at your job than I do... I'm just not that dedicated to my vocation.... It's so rare to get that from a highly accomplished person. Usually what we hear is that success is mostly about the very hard work you put on top of whatever basic talent you have. Ishiguro has written only 8 novels. He works very intensely at times, but he also takes lots of time off.  Between the lines in that article, I'm reading that he's as good as he is because of all the refreshment time and because writing novels is not where he set his ambition when he was young. He wanted to be a singer-songwriter. It's the reverse of Leonard Cohen.  As for Dylan, there are many here among us who spent our early years absorbing his influence. We all started somewhere. Ishiguro's entry point was the album "John Wesley Harding." I went in through "Bringing It All Back Home."

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