August 2024

August 29, 2024: The garbage collectors were joshing with each other as I came around the corner, headed home from my local café. Banter. Insults. It got even more ribald. In the attempt to chuck a sack into the truck’s hopper, the sack split and some liquid or other nearly soaked the ‘chucker’. Momentary silence, then guffaws. The driver revved the engine, and the crew was off, men who had just looked at some abyss and laughed about it. Homeric rather than Proustian. For a moment there, I had been put in mind of Proust’s street vendors who were, in Proust’s ear, operatic, as opposed to crudely hyperbolic. Just as I was rounding the corner mentioned above, I had exchanged a wave with a one-legged retiree who often occupies the bus bench there and watches the world go by, his prosthetic shiny in the sun. He sees the world as a conglomeration of fools. He would happily include himself in the mix.

A few days ago, I had a dream of some seashore, seagulls gathered on it. They were transparent, as if made of sea water, albeit water of a gossamer nature. The birds seemed pleased with themselves. The Democratic National Convention? The imagery was so startling that I woke from it racking my brain. Was there a literary source for it? How could my brain have cooked this one up? And of course, what was the dream saying? There were no drugs involved.

Very unlikely, but perhaps Proust’s mention of Albertine (recently read) and her ices early on in The Captive, volume five of the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu might have triggered some association with the water birds…. It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure may be the beginning of beauty. Proust shadowing Plato, but as if Plato were writing ad copy for cosmetics….

And this: Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains forever insatiable. Proust with a Baedeker? And he had me looking up ‘flavescent’ with respect to a young woman’s hair, only that the dictionary entry has to do with leaves turning yellow, getting low on their chlorophyll content. And then he had me running after ‘anacoluthon’ which word harkens back to a Greek word for ‘inconsistent’, or that I am banging these words out on a keyboard, and Le Dernier Chouan was written in 1829 by Balzac. But in any case, within the same sentence: two unrelated thoughts and actions that belie anything that you think should come next…. As already implied, I have been reading Monsieur Balzac in addition to the Proust.

For instance, as Balzac would have it: He would concentrate simultaneously on learning and love; he would become both a clever lawyer and a man of fashion. He was still a child, and did not know that these two lines are asymptotes, and can never meet. And perhaps, as it referred to himself, our protagonist, Eugène de Rastignac, looked up the meaning of the word ‘asymptote’ and it hurt his brain, his understanding of the word approaching infinity and yet, no capiche. Or this: … If there is one feeling innate in a man’s heart, is it not pride in perpetually protecting someone weaker? If to this you add love, the lively gratitude that all honest men feel toward the source of their pleasures, then you will understand a host of moral oddities. I read; I laughed; and there was no topping that – what Balzac wrote. But then, Gaza slid into the picture.

Or: … …. “a man of experience who’s examined the problems of the world and sees that there are only two courses open to a man: stupid obedience, or revolt”. And then a man contemplates getting into the slave trade while regarding himself as a great poet…. There is always politics, as Balzac himself might have noted, as a fallback position. And what makes a strange world even stranger is the Little League World Series and the fact that I watched some of it, drawn by the joy with which the games were played on the part of twelve year-olds. Sometimes, though, boredom set in. Overwhelmed by overpowering pitching, a lot of the hitters never moved the bat from their shoulders; they simply hoped they would gain first base by way of being walked…. Passivity, I suppose, has its uses and virtues. The Comptroller of the Universe, still maintaining her love of the game, wearied of the screeching parents.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar has been glum. However, he did say, as follows: ‘The one bit of news that did put a glow on my face was this burglar in Rome who was caught because he was so deeply intrigued by a book on the Iliad as told from the perspective of the gods that he sat down to read it. Apparently, the author wants to send him a copy so that he might finish it. … …. The only other news of note on the BBC website is that one of a gay pair of penguins has died. Oh, and I think some country has slipped into the ocean. Atlantis.’ … …. I do not always appreciate Lunar’s capacity for irony, even as, asymptotically, it would approach justice.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaigne-Urbana, which is a major conduit in the American psyche: … …. ‘[And] I doubt America ever really comes to grips with its past. Has any nation? I'm not even sure what coming to grips would sound like if it were to prevail. On the other hand, it might sound like something very close to what we hear from the multicultural young’uns these days. On the other, other hand, there are millions of little Trumpers growing up and many who already have. They'll never concede, mostly because they adore ignorance. If they'd just stop voting. That's all I ask.’ … ….

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘I suppose that in the greater scheme of things isolation is not so bad. It hurts, yes, it is sobering, true, a little defeating, to be sure, and, like getting old, reminds you yet again that you are becoming invisible and of ever diminishing consequence, relevance, and interest to people decades our juniors who, in many cases, are the very ones wielding editorial power over us. The indignity. I hate them. I don't know, maybe it's the Hungarian in me, but I often feel fuck it, just die, it's all a grim joke anyhow.’ The man, so I understood, was gearing up for a trip to the metropolis where he hoped to steep himself in some Victorian architecture….

August 20, 2024: Proust would tell you there is a shadowland between wide-awake-time and deep sleep. Depending on where you are in this wake-time dream-state continuum is the extent to which you will feel life as a revelation or merely a repetition of all the same-olds. At the moment there is a convention in the works (Chicago), a lot of rhetoric flying around (those Dems), not that this is necessarily bad or altogether devoid of shadowland poetry, but that, against this backdrop, Proust comes off more modern than you might think with his conflation of ‘reality’ and ‘dream’.

Still, as we have it (from Proust’s book The Captive early on) the image of a man lying on a bed in a semi-doze condition, as he takes in the voices of the street vendors below his window, as he likens these voices (ones hawking wares) to various operatic riffs and Gregorian chants, what might have been realism for his day is a tourist draw in ours, and one measure, among thousands of measures, of how our world has changed over the course of a century. Who most wants to rid the street of its romance? Quick answer: tyrants who are control freaks. Hard-headed so-called progressives who only see exploitation in the romance. Tourists bureaus who would close the street to vehicular traffic and bring on ‘street performers’ in a ‘safe environment’ – well, it might be diversion of a kind for tourists with deep pockets, but it is not the same as say, for example, the everyday chaos I saw in Naples once upon a time in another lifetime, everything on a street corner intermingled: the demands of ‘reality’, of survival, the incursions of dream desires, the outright paganism overlaid with a Catholic veneer.

More than one university professor has told me that if one thing has changed over the past few years, it is the condition of ‘romance’ in the classroom. Apparently, one no longer sees students who, flush with their attraction for one another, have obviously paired off, who might even be holding hands. I am not a professor; I have never been a professor; I have not set foot in a classroom for decades, but if what I have been told has any truth in it, sure, I might wonder what has changed. Sexting? I suppose it has its charms. In Proust’s The Captive, we have Proust taking out to the shed romantic and erotic love, and while it is all very touching – the sentiments that pass between lovers, Proust leaves the reader in no doubt that, at bottom, it is all rather heartless, and one might subsequently regard Proust as being, himself, fairly creepy. One understands that eventually, Proust will get around to other forms of ‘love’ that do not involve the ownership of someone’s mind, heart, body, mostly body, but it seems a long time coming….

And so, yes, Proust’s young Marcel will tell Albertine that he ‘loves her’, but it is a lie, one designed to manipulate her behaviour, and she, in turn, has her own lies to tell, as, so it would seem, and in the crass vernacular, she gets her jollies elsewhere. One is looking at the burnt-out shell of some architecture as was once a genuine attraction, perhaps somewhat dismissible as an ‘infatuation’, but that it had the lovers going for a while. Or, and here is Balzac in his novel Pere Goriot: It’s quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman dancing.

The words immediately above were put into the mouth of Balzac's young protagonist Eugène de Rastignac, by Balzac. He was born into impoverished nobility, and his ambitions may well ruin him as the novel proceeds. I read the words and felt the full force of the imagery inherent in them, and then, it occurred to me to ask: in what world are a sailing ship, a galloping horse and a dancing woman a reality any longer, unless the situation be somewhat contrived – as on a movie set? The other day, waiting to catch a bus, I sat myself on a bench and regarded the passing traffic. I recalled how, when a boy, I would spend hours identifying the various brands of automobiles going by on the nearby highway, the Chevvies, the Chryslers, Mercs, Buicks &c, and in what year they had been manufactured, but that now, as all cars look alike (‘like cheese wedges’ so a woman painter from Minnesota once said to me – derisively), that particular romance has long since gone off. Between a Honda and a BMW I could care less....

You will hear it in Dante; you will hear it in Plato: the purpose of romantic and erotic love is to bring one to a more ‘spiritual love’, a better understanding of what love is &c. Perhaps it is only exhaustion that brings one there, if at all, and what with the young Marcel’s insane jealousy of Albertine and the desires he imagines she is hiding from him, exhaustion is most likely going to catch him up. We were resigned to suffering; thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow, and its object is only to a very small extent the girl with the raven hair. Ah, there is a pop song or three in this from The Captive, volume five of the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu by one Marcel Proust circa the turn of the last century. That was when a mere glimpse of an aeroplane took both the young Marcel and Albertine outside of themselves and their anxieties as does, perhaps, a landing on Mars for us. ... ....

Meanwhile, I have been reminded by Heather Cox Richardson, in one of her Letters from an American, that at the heart of so many far-right shenanigans is a penchant for corruption financial and otherwise, and that this has been decidedly true since the Reagan years. It became so obvious with Trump that it slipped one’s mind, as it were, hiding as it was in plain sight. As for Gaza, I recently read something a local rabbi wrote, something to the effect that thou shalt have no other gods before me, and he insisted that extreme ‘Zionism’ was one such idol. Moving on…

Postscript I: Carpenter (The man has a recent screed on Musk and Nietzsche that is well worth the visit.)

Postscript II: Lunar: ‘Well, I am still recovering from your "didn't academe in a way invent him" remark re. Kafka. Who, ultimately, will survive your execution list? Emily Dickinson is already a goner, Milton, Pope back in only by the skin of his teeth. Watched episodes 3 and 4 last night [of the Kafka biopic] and it continues to startle. I hadn't realised Kafka was part owner of an asbestos factory, which may have been largely responsible for his contracting TB, and that, worse still, he saw off a couple of health inspectors who expressed concerns about safety. The ironies mount. K. worked for an insurance company dealing with workers' injuries and the like and was known to be brilliant in litigation cases, spinning circles around any opponent, which begs the question: how much was he part of the ghastly system he exposed in his writings? ... .... Upton Sinclair he wasn't - those were metaphysical forces he describes. … …. Well, the coolest actor after Bogart, Alain Delon, but I never knew he was such a right-winger, Marie Le Pen supporter etc. Still, do you remember him putting on his hat in Le Samourai? What they call an iconic screen moment.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champagne-Urbana: ‘Damn, I ran across a wonderful quote about poets being full of themselves a day or two ago and meant to forward it, and then forgot. … …. Sorry I implied [that] postmodernists "invented" skepticism. As you note, it's ancient, and then of course Montaigne made a religion of it — the only congregation I belong to. I see no conflict between skepticism and mysticism, as long as one remains skeptical about the latter. But yeah, diving headfirst into mysticism would make quite a splash. … …. I thought of the universe when you mentioned "nature." I once listened to an astronomer musing about people who go on and on about how lovely the universe is. His reply: "The universe is out to kill you!" Meteors, asteroids, colliding galaxies, black holes, he went on. So it seems we live in an inhospitable universe on an inhospitable planet, what with hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, all God's gifts. … …. As for a soul or whatever it might be, I told my brother a while back that I've decided, like Kierkegaard, to just believe with no evidence whatsoever that it lives on. I can't accept that all this time on earth will have been for nothing; that a certain level of wisdom is finally gained and then, poof, it's all gone.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: The man has barricaded himself against reruns of Two and a Half Men and the Booker Prize. Although he allowed that for the former, he could see some wisps of continuity between it and a couple of Romans – Plautus and Terence, and even the Greek more Greek than they, or Aristophanes, the Booker Prize sounding like something Sophocles might wear.

August 14, 2024: No oubt, Trump would say that, were he president, those wildfires in Greece would think twice. They would not dare to blaze away and trouble Athens. And squirrels will do his bidding, as will a kazillion sparkles in the waves breaking on a Florida beach at sunset. A la Xerxes. (Caligula and King Canute to a lesser extent...) Lunar predicts that Gaza will become something more than an irritant for the ‘west’; a major problem brews. Is it not already the crowning metaphor for what rots in all the Denmarks? I watch the news, Palestine the focus, and I feel myself suspended over a chasm by a very frayed bit of rope. Vietnam, The Bush-Cheney years – all that pales in comparison. The use of the word ‘moral’ has gotten more than ludicrous. It is surely quaint when a far-right cabinet minister says it is a moral act to eradicate all those people you-know-where, bombing the shit out of them. Odds are high that there is nothing inherently moral in the structure of the universe; the universe, such as it is, does not concern itself with what is moral, immoral, amoral, but I find myself, out of what one used to call ‘sheer cussedness’, insisting on it to the point of saying that what is taking place in Gaza is so very wrong. My apologies for the editorial.

As I believe I stated in the previous post, I have started in on volume five of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, two more volumes to go. At the end of which I may be whistling dixie. Which is to say: “Hallelujah, I’ve finally read the damn thing, all of it!” But is there something morbid in the exercise? In this steeping oneself in a world where nothing but gratification matters or even exists to any profit but the gratifications, and this in volume after volume? Well, one says: ‘Proust wrote about the absurdities of romantic love’. One says: ‘Proust wrote about erotic love and the concomitant jealousies and the toll all that exacts on the psyche’. Promise and disillusionment. Disillusionment and promise. It is a shooting gallery. One duck pops up and is shot down as the other duck pops up only to be knocked over… Still, it is as if Proust wrote with a pen exuding a fine whisky. To which Balzac (even though Balzac preceded Proust) is the beer chaser. The brass tacks? The brass tacks are money. All other realities get in line. From Balzac’s Pere Goriot (1835): If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down. … …. Or: Petty minds gratify their feelings, good or bad, by unceasing petty acts. Or, I suppose, one can warm one's cockles watching Cher in the movie Moonstruck.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar on dining with an old friend, one with whom he has had many arguments: … …. ‘She said something though that touched me deeply. She expressed the belief that everyone must be permitted, right up to the last moments of existence, the possibility of redemption. That is the deeper woman I love, which is at such a variance to her bundle of received notions. At heart I suspect an old-fashioned girl. [As for the] expensive restaurant, it was not so much the expense that offended me, but the incredible meanness of the portions as if this were some jihadist version of nouveau cuisine. When the cheese board arrived it was all I could do not to guffaw, four tiny slivers with four thin wafers that were made to stand at their edges. Presentation is all.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana in a sanguine phase, very sanguinary as he would praise Sulla (brutal hombre) and his attempt, in one of his more mellow moments, to shore up the Roman senate: ‘An interesting question: What is decadence? I suppose a psychiatrist would say the first thought that pops into one's head is what one believes. Mine was a lack of curiosity — and all the evil that stems from it. Look at the Trumpers, utterly barren of any wonder about the world, the nation, what and who their demigod really is. I see skepticism as inherent in curiosity; one wonders because the easy answers, generally encased in some ideology, don't cut it. Christ, I sound like I'm delivering a lecture to freshmen in a Phil. 101 class. What's odd about curiosity and philosophy is the former seems to have killed off the latter; its practitioners exhausted the supply of answers. I think by the time Bertrand Russell began "solving" major philosophical questions by analyzing the grammatical structure of sentences, the jig was up and philosophy croaked. … …. And so now there are only 87 days to go. Then a new circus comes to town… …. I'd add that her (Harris) win will be (should be) 90% of the battle. If nothing else, I can't see most R pols any longer defending Trump's post-election idiocies. He will have cost them three elections: two presidential and one congressional. That, I'm pretty certain, will permanently alienate the Rs from Trumpism — it's that or watch their party die. And I really can't see an actual civil war. Americans aren't Serbs and Bosnians. I can see small groups making some real fuss, possibly violent and possibly bloody, but where would Trump get 50 or 100 million soldiers to fight his battles? That's what he'd need to win. And they just aren't there.’ … …. Alright then, good sir, we will hold you to those words….

Postscript IV: Whereas Talking Avocado, he would be getting more tight with the mudstone that is his island and the passing of the seasons there. Still, he manages this: ‘Look, I saw this flick the other night. About this assassin’s mindset. His interior monologues get down to cases immediately, sweeping away all the pieties. Strong beginning. As he brings his weapon to bear, as he trains it on his target, it’s as if he’s the only human left on the planet who’s not a hypocrite. Howsomever, as the flick progresses, his assertions get more cheap, as do the conclusions one draws from what he’s been saying and from his actions. By flick’s end, we’re in the hands of a six-year-old. We need a rigorous flushing by way of Kant. (As in the Brit pronunciation of can’t.) We need those lines again that one just doesn’t cross. Kubrick’s apes carried the day, don’t you know, but smug astronauts aren’t going to save us. And one has to wonder whether they care all that much.’

The Knock-Me-Over-With-a-Feather Department: Alfred Whitehead: … …. The fact of the instability of evil is the moral order in the world… ….

August 8, 2024: Proust’s ‘people’ even when they are not up to much, are often at their most unattractive when we meet them on the page. Non-stop petty, egoistical, punitive. As if: just like people everywhere. So much so that episodes of lust seem like bursts of innocent behaviour that hang suspended in the air like fireworks, and then the tailing smoke trails of flame, and what, the scent of sulfur? And Proust is speaking of the early years of 20th century France and the upper crust, not MAGA America. The opening salvos then of The Captive, volume five of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. They come with some discussion of fashion along with the suggestion that if Balzac could go on about what women wear, so could Proust…

Who would have the young Marcel turn out Albertine in some apparel or other recommended by a duchess, even though the young Marcel is no longer in love with Albertine whom he has installed, seemingly on general principles, in the apartment which he occupies with his mother. But even so there is this: I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep… ….

Which is to say, a la TV comedy script-ese, that the young Marcel was on top of his bed alongside his ‘girl’ whom he either loved or did not love; but that he was in a ‘spooning’ position in relation to her body, that he was feeling the rhythms of her breathing and listening to her breathing as he might the waves of the sea on their approach to a shoreline; that she, as anyone would be regardless of gender, class, and place in life, would be at his or her most unique self when sleeping, less put upon by any other being; and that viz. eyes closed, hence a continuity of the lineaments of the face, there are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes. Proust as an Elizabethan looking for the Sydney in his Spenser?

Moreover, and: …. by escaping thus from the crushing weight of matter to play freely in the fluid spaces of the mind … …. One more quote then from The Captive, the implications of which Proust looks like he intends to explore. If Proust revelled in the play of his imagination, somewhere I believe he said something to this effect as a kind of caveat to his own capacity for self-indulgence (as when one might say that spirituality is easy, religion and boot camp are hard): that the imagination is easy whereas introspection – now that is something else… ….

Otherwise, political limbo. And by that, I mean years of doom and gloom getting darker by the hour, and then the onset of something like hope, and then the distinct possibility of a turnaround, if not necessarily a thorough-going answer to so much that could go, in a word, fascist, just that one has no idea which way the rabbit is going to jump next. And speaking of unattractive characters, as I tend to like authors who talk directly to their readers, based only on what little I have read of the man so far, Balzac certainly liked to get his two cents’ worth in, even to the point of coming off mouthy, a conversation hog. The opening pages of his Pere Goriot featuring a boatload of rooming house worthies, that is to say, life’s losers, is what I have in mind. Paragraph after surging paragraph chockful of detail (right down to the cracks in the plaster) as to the immediate environment of those impoverished and shunted out of the way of the movers and shakers of a more upscale world; as to the quality of their teeth. How poverty has made such plebs touchy &c. As opposed to, say, people who are reasonably affluent but whose families are ‘dysfunctional’, assemblages of fault lines; who are always pumping a fist when some little thing goes right (because not much does even when one’s cash flow is healthier than that of a skid row rubbie); who do see life as something of a lottery; who are petty, egoistical, punitive, but man, it is all a journey, say what, pass me some mazel tov?

So now and then I revisit the question: what is decadence, the Real McCoy of that condition? Sexual profligacy? Failure to address abuses? Silence, the wrong kind of silence, that is. The failure of the imagination to grasp what ‘condition my condition is in’? The failure of the imagination to do anything but to celebrate itself for being, what, imaginative? Well, I tend toward the latter malaise for a definition of what rots in all the Denmarks. The ‘fascists’ (and give credit where credit is due – if it quacks and all that) are always on about hard work, self-discipline, family values, the frontier spirit, oh, and zero tolerance, and every day there is a news item somewhere about someone in that brotherhood, sisterhood of the Jesus-loves-me-and-even-if-He-doesn’t-I’m-making-a-bundle-am-pretty-cool-crowd going to jail for, well, lapses, errors in judgment, bad hair days, their knickers twisting the nights away. And this is not fake news; it is old, old, old news. You doubt what I say? Read up on your Plutarch, to pick a name at random from the classics hat….

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar in London: ‘I am seeing something here I've never seen before. It is deeply upsetting me. There is always an extreme rightwing, no matter where you go, but never, never has it been made so manifest as in recent days. What in God's name is happening to this country? It could become uncontrollable like a wildfire. Years ago, there were members of the National Front in Hammersmith selling their newspaper. My daughter was still in her pushchair, and I know it was deeply irresponsible of me, but I went up to the newspaper vendor, one of these skinhead morons that are a cliché in themselves. I tore his papers in two right down the middle and he just stood there gawping like a landed fish. It was, in some way, a great moment. The police came after me, calling me an idiot and threatening me with arrest next time. That, however, was the moronic element that has always been everywhere at all times. What we are seeing now is markedly different. It is organised by social media. There may be deaths.’

And again: ‘What's happening here is utterly bewildering. I don't know if you have witnessed those ugly scenes. I thought we saw the backs of those far-right people years ago, although of course they are always there, but to get them in a public forum such as we have witnessed the past two weeks. Some of these shaven-headed thugs are making the Trumpites look like sissies. They tried setting fire to a hotel accommodating asylum seekers. This is ugly beyond imagining and I wonder too if it is not in part due to the Labour victory which, after all, went against the grain of what is happening in Europe at large.’

But then this which puts some hair on the chest of the adjective countervailing: ‘Last night we went to an almost local opera company at Holland Park. It has been going for years but we'd never been there. Two short operas by Leoncavallo, Il Segreto de Susanna, which is gossamer-thin but not musically uninteresting. In other words, once is enough for a lifetime. And then, I Pagliacci and, good lord, it had to have been one of the most visceral, emotionally and psychologically true, productions I've ever seen, superbly sung and acted, a complete powerhouse of a performance.’ But other than to review the occasional opera performance, in light of the Olympic season, I do not believe Lunar has ever extended his energies to long-distance cycling or the hammer throw or artistic swimming. Table tennis?

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana is suddenly enthusiastic, or that he wishes me to get hold of a Dictionnaire Infernal by which we might, as a tag team, sort out, at a metaphorical level, present day politics by way of demon images. And he goes on to suppose that we’re all in a weird sort of limbo for which we have no Virgil as a guide. ‘It'll probably be a month before we can get a handle on 2024's outcome, but even that is perhaps too optimistic. Could be another Clinton-Trump down-to-the-wire brawl, in which case all we can do is cross our fingers. It's the absence of any personal control in political direction that's so unsettling; like a passenger on that Lufthansa airliner the co-pilot rammed into a mountain as the pilot despairingly tried to re-enter the cockpit. A gory metaphor, I know, but if psychotic co-pilot Trump wins, he'll destroy the lives of millions, not 150.’ It seems I do not have a comebacker for Drake’s unease, perhaps because I am not exactly free of unease myself….

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘In the midst of my little island’s tourist season, I have little mental energy to spend on U.S. politics.’ Colour me taken down a notch, but I do think the man just told me to go where the sun has little influence. He has no patience at the moment for what makes American politics American and Canadian politics Canadian and British politics get up to muster…. At the moment, he is all about ‘sorry, mate, but there is more than one reality in reality and unless you can pound a nail straight, get off my lawn….’

Postscript V: Some Truth in This Department: … …. And it is a constant and general proposition that timidity, cowardice, and weakness take pleasure in being accompanied by cruelty, by inclemency and pitilessness and harshness of behaviour and actions etc. (The fact that fear is naturally cruel, because it is supremely egoistic, and cowardice, etc., too, I have pointed out in various places… …. From Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, written over the course of 16 years (1817-32), a 4000 plus page manuscript mostly to do with how ‘language’ constitutes what is ‘human’, but that the quote just cited seems to explain why Trump and his minions are Trumpy.