Another hero of integrity and justice dies.

The obits are readily out there outlining her life but here's a post from last year that illustrates her spirit:

www.champs-elyseesblog.com/arch...atre/
A concentration camp operetta
June 6, 2007

An uplifting experience last weekend: seeing the world premier of an operetta written in the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Adding to the poignancy: the fact that the author, Germaine Tillion, is still alive and indeed has just celebrated her 100th birthday. The story is hard to beat. Germaine Tillion was a resistance member betrayed in '42 and sent to Ravensbruck a year later. In October 44, concealed by her comrades in a packing crate, she composed the operetta-revue which she called "Le Verfugbar aux Enfers". It means "The camp-worker goes to hell" -- Verfugbar being the German term for "available" workers, i.e. ones not assigned to major projects. The piece is certainly odd. It begins with a character called The Naturalist, who conducts a quasi-scientific analysis of the life-form that is the "Verfugbar". Behind him are a chorus of female slave-workers (Ravensbruck was almost exclusively for women) led by professional singers who break periodically into song. Tillion was no musician, so she resorted to snatches of popular tunes from pre-war days: operetta, chanson, even advertising jingles. To these she put words that mix burlesque with a very black humour. "Once we were known for our sex-appeal, now our batteries are well and truly dry," two inmates sing to the tune of Au Clair de la Lune. The operetta was never performed of course: it would have triggered a terrible punishment. But in the evenings Tillion would read out sections of her script to raise morale. It became a survival mechanism. In 1945 Tillion learned that her mother -- who was also at Ravensbruck -- had been killed in the camp gas-chamber. She herself managed to leave shortly before the end of the war. For years the script of "Verfugbar" lay hidden in a drawer. Tillion, who became a well-known ethnologist, feared that it would be misconstrued. How could she have written something "humorous" in a concentration camp? But now that it has been resurrected, it stands simply and movingly as a testament to the human spirit of endurance. Sadly Tillion was too frail to attend the performance at the Theatre du Chatelet, but the cast sang for her at her home in Paris. It must have been an extraordinary moment.

Yes, finally after so much time keeping it under wraps, I present this theory to you. And I ask: why do so many people waste good time chasing reports of sightings at Area 51 and such, when there's perfectly good evidence readily available in the CD bins at Barnes and Noble or downloadable from itunes, of an unearthly being having lived among us ?

True, I have no facts, but what are facts really, except close-ended linear thinking, what is logic but arguments lined up in a narrow straight tunnel, pointing to one another? Besides, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, when it comes to us conceiving of life beyond our planet, to assume that there's any way of conclusively thinking out that which we can scarcely imagine. Yes, "proof by example" is wholly unacceptable by scientific measure; nevertheless I argue by example here, since for this topic that is all that anyone ever does.

I first got this idea, um, received this information about Bach many years ago when listening to the Mass in B-minor. There's no way a human could write that.

Just listen to a few minutes of the opening Kyrie -- here's a link to a rendition by Jeffrey Thomas and American Bach Soloists:

www.magnatune.com/artists/a.../hifi_play

C'mon, that supposed to have been composed by a human? No f**king way! And that whole bit about Bach driven by religious fervor? That's reverse logic in that it already presumes he was human. More likely, I think, that he was using the Christian canopy for cover -- after all, it wasn't exactly safe back then for a brother from another planet to be flat out of the closet.

For my second argument, I submit Bach's Magnificat. Listen to a couple of minutes of this version by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra led by Ton Koopman:

www.youtube.com/watch

Now, aside from the possibly mind-blowing experience of seeing so many open-mouthed Dutch people at once, here again Bach is resplendent, demonstrating musical powers far beyond the reach of any earthling.

Note the comments at that youtube post - one person states that Bach is a demonstration of existence of God. Now this is silly. Why complicate matters by bringing in both the immense question of God's nature and existence, and some murky notion of Bach as some sort of angel or messenger? Let's apply Occam's Razor here -- the simpliest solution is the best. Agreed: The music is so sublime, it is unworldly. Mathematical probablities favor the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. Ergo, Bach must have come from outer space.

There's a plethora of other examples (Bach wrote over a thousand works while fathering twenty children), but I believe this next and most powerful piece of evidence is all that is necessary.

Here is a selection of Goldberg Variations performed by Glenn Gould, who quite possibly was an alien or at least demi-alien himself, to be able to express Bach's music as he did:

www.youtube.com/watch

Convinced? You should be. But if not, I'll just leave you with this one last item to contemplate. Why, you might ask, would Bach, if an alien, choose to write such amazing music; indeed why did he compose at all? Well, really, how should I know? But maybe, just maybe, he was propagating, via a language known to extraterrestrial beings, the energy needed to traverse galaxies. And if that sounds ridiculous, compare our clumsy manner of space travel with the sheer levitational power of a Bach prelude, as illustrated here by number 30 of the "32 Short Films about Glenn Gould":

www.youtube.com/watch

...Grace Paley, author, activist, vibrant inquisitive wholehearted considerate human being, died yesterday.


one day we were selling them
so much killing hardware
their governmental teeth
were eroding with the metallic grind
but their appetites increased...

— Grace Paley, excerpt, "Leaflet"

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From the dedication of Grace Paley's "Collected Stories":

“It seems right to dedicate this collection to my friend Sybil Claiborne, my colleague in the Writing and Mother Trade… we talked and talked for nearly forty years. Then she died. Three days before that, she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, Grace, the real question is – how are we to live our lives?”
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Anti-Love Poem — by Grace Paley

Sometimes you don't want to love the person you love
you turn your face away from that face
whose eyes lips might make you give up anger
forget insult steal sadness of not wanting
to love turn away then turn away at breakfast
in the evening don't lift your eyes from the paper
to see that face in all its seriousness a
sweetness of concentration he holds his book
in his hand the hard-knuckled winter wood-
scarred fingers turn away that's all you can
do old as you are to save yourself from love

I haven't had the time yet to write a decent few words of homage. So much critical appreciation have been written by others over this last week, particularly about Bergman; perhaps I have little to add but I've just begun to contemplate anew the corpora of these two penetrating and immensely influential directors.