April, 2025

April 19, 2025: Whenever I return to Proust, as I have been doing for the past year and change, reading the man intermittently, it is like reengaging an old friend with whom one has mild disagreements but whose opinions one, nonetheless, values. Long-winded sentence, but go short and punchy all the time, and one’s brain gets to rattling. Moving on, see below,

Or what underscores the fact that I am a barbarian is that, in the course of a long expatiation on Proust’s part, with respect to family names, family lineage, and I am nodding off. For sure, Proust is only talking to “Time” philosophically, not bending the knee for aristocrats, but names of apparent distinction – what do I care for them? Blood lines? What do I care for unmerited, unearned bragging rights? Anything in this worth dying for? Well, I suppose if one is the scion of a dragon king….

And, coming from the For What It’s Worth Department a caution of sorts, a different philosophical viewpoint perhaps, and that not all privileged sorts are entirely lacking in self-awareness: … …. A name: That very often is all that remains for us of a human being, not only when he is dead, but sometimes even in his lifetime. And our notions about him are so vague or so bizarre and correspond so little to those that he has of us that we have entirely forgotten that we once nearly fought a duel with him but remember that, when he was a child, he used to wear curious yellow gaiters in the Champs Elyseés, where he, on the contrary, in spite of our assurances, has no recollection of ever having played with us. … …. From The Past Recaptured by Marcel Proust, and because the quote struck a chord. And also because, see below,

I was in a fight with a schoolmate once on a military base. He did mean to gut me with his switchblade. I cannot recall, for the life of me, his name, but I can still see his bent nose. (He had been hanging out with GIs who boxed.) I can still see the hate in his eyes. Does he, who had been the aggressor, have a working memory of the episode? Or has he long since met a bad end, his cheeks shiny with repeated blows to them? The boy had a problem with math. He had come to me for help. I inadvertently caused him to feel stupid. No wonder I have avoided politics. (The art of politics? To make the voter feel he or she is a smart cookie, or go bust at the polls, knife at one’s throat.) Moreover, North America is a haven for snobbery, be that snobbery in the loop or not. And the Snob-in-Chief has got a sweet tooth for gold. How would he have fared in one of those cathouses that Proust’s M. de Charlus liked to frequent in pursuit of his masochistic means to an end? (Perhaps only Moscow knows the answer.) Would a cabbie on the premises instinctually recoil from the paunch and the glam and the locker room banter not come by honestly, perv trying to buy himself bonhomie? Or would a cabbie suspend his crap detector and offer up a cigarette and a tip on the horses?

And what does Proust make you feel, if anything, by way of his characters? Are they not just a little spectral? Time that Proust makes organic is the one true presence throughout the seven volumes of his opus. One follows the scent of a slowly rotting peach. There is Swann. Authentic enough soul who got rolled by his obsession for Odette. M. de Charlus who stayed true to his lusts even as the bombs fell… Young-old Marcel whom one starts seeing through a BBC lens, the passage of time a fetish for on-again off-again versifiers doffing boaters… Albertine? Some who have commented on Proust’s work say she is a cut-out, a covering entity for Proust’s real life male lover, but even so, I buy her image as portrayed by Proust. He had her down as predictable, given her commitment to her appetites which mostly did not include Marcel, but that she was fond of him, and did not really wish to give him the old heave-ho, and then she died.

And from the Getting-To-Be-A-Peeve Department: in flick after flick, TV show after TV show, and can anyone deliver dialogue without there being a question mark after every word, as if one has no faith in what one is saying; as if one does not wish to appear definitive (which would smack of elitism)…. As if one cannot be authentic without emoting in a halting manner… A few minutes of this nonsense and one is put off one’s feed. Conversely, there is another peeve competing for notice: the character of either sex (but mostly male) who speaks with false authority, with a ‘don’t-f—k-with-me-edge’ so as to purge the environs of all the Doubting Thomases and Abigails (usually of a liberal inclination) such as make the most stilted Shakespearean actor the acme of naturalism, metronomic stress counts notwithstanding.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar has it thus: … …. ‘A society that seeks to remove all suffering is a society that will ultimately cause far more suffering.’ … …. And as we can never have enough of “thus”, therefore: … …. ‘There is always something [about bees that] I never knew, the latest being that every beehive has its undertaker bee. There is only ever one such bee no matter what the population of the hive is and it flies the corpse, its own weight, well away from the hive. Maybe this makes a welcome difference from the usual misery one reads.’ … …. Otherwise, “pink fascism” has been exercising the man of late: … …. ’Remember, we have a PM who was reluctant to say men did not have a cervix … …. Idiocy rules and so what we get as a response are the M’s of this world, confused and angry and horribly unfocused unless, of course, you are going to tell me [M] has sat himself down and written War and Peace II. … …. You have Jordan Peterson over there who is now operating some kind of celebrity machine. He was sane to begin with. So yes [like I said], insanity and idiocy rule. We've got a few parallels over here and, like JP, they end up disappointing.’ … …. Now do I need a vacation? An escape from the 24/7 9 days a week and double-time on Sundays? Lunar hands me a bus ticket: … …. ‘Let's go. It's only 700 trillion miles away, the planet that scientists reckon can sustain life. It can't be worse than this one, or is it? Anyway, pirates. I was absolutely outraged: a section of the exhibition devoted to "Queering Piracy"... pirates transgressing the boundaries and therefore having "gay resonance". The "woke the plank" is not my witticism, by the way, but from a review I read later. Don't get me wrong - I'm not against people wanting to be whatever they want to be, as long as it is an adult decision. … …. So now one can be tasered for protesting at a Majorie Taylor Greene speech.’ … …. And yes, apparently, one can, and one may wear it like a badge of honour, all the way to the hoosegow in El Salvador where it is best not to wear yellow, where three major ethnic groups greeted the first Spaniards according to their customs, due process not yet an issue to swat out of the air like a shuttlecock.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you have got a fiver for this or that ex-deputy chief of staff who has learned the hard way that fame is transient and power is a bitch: … ….’My all-time favorite film critic is Bosley Crowther, writing for the NY Times beginning in 1940 and [going] on for 27 years [to do his worst]. The man loathed sentimentality and deployed his hatred of it in countless reviews. Boy could he ever gut the living daylights out of a movie. I love how Wikipedia handles the issue: "some of his reviews of popular films have been seen as unnecessarily harsh." Yes, well, I’ve got nothing to say about politics just now. I howled at the moon and it turned its face away. … …. I assume Lincoln's “gay resonance” came from his sharing a bed with men, which was common in those days, and finishing letters to some men with "Love," also common. Gay activists have used both as prima facie evidence of Lincoln's "gayness," as though it was some kind of trophy for the cause. … …. [U]nfortunately, that way of thinking has dictated how most history is now written. It's a generational thing, the next one will come along and "discover" political history, something like that, and it will be hailed as revolutionary.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Why August, 1914? (Solzhenitsyn’s tome. One of them, at any rate.) Could instead talk about the ghastly taste of some soup brand, talk about gastropods and roly-poly bugs (bugs being the misnomer in this instance) in this part of the world, the chances of the Blue Jays winning the pennant if not the lottery, though I could give a toss about any sport save for ping pong. One of Solzhenitsyn’s characters name of Roman would’ve been a socialist but for an extortion racket as practiced by apprenticing apparatchiks… Such as puts one in mind of Trump’s meatheads. One chapter early on in the book concludes with a few pages of newspaper headlines of the day. About the same in essence as our own. Which is not really that surprising. Just that an ad for mail order guitar lessons really did touch me. Creedence Clearwater Top Ten hits for the west Siberian plains… By the way, to “faff” can mean to stutter, to stammer, to “flap in the wind”, though I doubt Dylan (as in Zimmerman) would’ve attempted a faff-Piaff rhyme in his “Blowin’ in the Wind” so long ago it was only yesterday. Regards from Percival first goat among equals on this island.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘We went out to the new regional library and then I took to the gallery in the old Caraffa prison and [granddaughter] got talking to the art teacher lady who is a curator there. We admired one [of] the exhibits, a Jana Rychvalska, whose abstract paintings have something of the Czech painter Frantisek Kupka whose work I discovered on my last visit. The other exhibit was very amateurish. I went to the "vernissaz" and J was all professional courtesy and we had a good discussion of her textures and materials. The other painter was a petite blonde with a slave of a husband darting about here and there with trays of canapes trying to suck up to those his dominatrix had identified as important. Her watercolour or quarelles were quite competent, but her work in acrylic should not have been attempted. Oils or tempera would have been better. (Mary might confirm that acrylic is very difficult to work with.) My book of translations of the cantankerous Eva Luka is in customs. A publisher in Kosice, Horska lucerna, run by a former [ ] of mine who is now 52 (all those years ago!), wants to publish a bilingual selection of poems from the last fifteen years. It would appear next year. I would also like to get a pamphlet that M published fifty years ago translated and re-published here as a bilingual event chapbook. Otherwise, spring has sprung. Faff-paraph? Would I stoop that low for a rhyme? Would I sprain my wrist to embellish my quatrains as a hedge against someone who might copycat my verses? Imagine it: samba in the Urals.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Cupcakes in the oven. Trump’s in his heaven. And I know diddlysquat about faffing. Sounds menacing. If it has something to do with wind, could be my French horn knows a thing or two about windbreakers. Going to take it riverside soon and play for the perch and the pike. Talking the St Lawrence, of course. Talking blue skies when it’s not cloudy all day and the meatheads in Washington aren’t dining out on deny, deny, deny, raise you Panama.’ For my Easter rites, as ever, Bach, salt peanuts, and Madame de Sévigné, but just a few pages in which a transactional world at the level of kings hasn’t seen anything yet, on the way a much more distilled sort of cynicism fresh from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue stills, the fumes of which alone cause grown men to cry and women to beg for mercy (or to implore ‘do me, do me’), it’s that noxious.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … ….’So what’s my job description? Roving correspondent? Restroom attendant? In Big Bad Love (2002) which is a movie based on a book of short stories (Larry Brown, “grit-lit” man), there’s a reference to Virgil having stolen from Homer, and that I was partial to the movie, despite its faults, solidified. Me being such an antiquarian who likes the blues… You were going to write a poem called “Man Among the Caryatids?” Now you’ve gone and done it. Hexed yourself with pentameters to spare. But I can see the conceit. Man among women who’ve been burdened. No? That’s not at all what you had in mind? Faffer is a rhyme that slants across “laugher” as when a baseball teams beats another by three touchdowns plus points after, the coach of which winning team wears ruffled shirts and sips grenadine in west Texas bistros. Contemplating analytics as if they were cherubims and seraphs… What did you say I was supposed to do again? Cause havoc amidst litterateurs? Not me, bud, because I’m too modest for all that. But hang on to my number. You never know when I might have something worth resuscitating.’

April 13, 2025: A busybody’s truism on what Time has to do with corruption, Proust the source: … …. for the dairymaid does not see things in the perspective of Time and does not know that the men who receive the incense of praise from this morning’s newspapers were yesterday in disgrace and that the fallen politician, who at this moment feels the shadow of prison bars upon him and yet perhaps, as he thinks of the dairymaid, cannot find within himself the humble words which might win her sympathy, will one day be extolled by the press and sought after by duchesses… …. And I can almost hear Proust saying, after concluding these remarks: ‘Just saying.’ Perhaps Proust knew full well that society is politics, even as, politics as such, is kept to the outer edges of the Proustian salon, as is only polite. In any case, the quote is from The Past Recaptured, last volume of Proust’s seven volume opus entitled À la recherche du temps perdu. And was he happy to have come to the end of his Herculean thirteen year labour, a million and a quarter’s worth of words put on the page, or was he panicked? What on earth was he going to do now? What encore? Some might say he went and died.

I knew a man for whom “society” was the only human value worth taking seriously.

And he too kept politics to the edges, politics a kind of absurdity in his view, good only for getting an invite to the table, after which you renew your pledge to do this or that so as to get a return invite, or else, you put yourself in a position to be the one who gets to issue the invitations as one might writs of clemency…. But then 9/11 came along and he turned on me, saying the catastrophe was all the fault of liberals. Apparently, I was one of those. So, what do you think, we fell out, the rancor all on him, the Prozac, in this instance, insufficient for the maintenance of a sunny disposition that despised vast swathes of humankind.

He would kiss anyone’s ring if it got him squatter’s rights at any high-end banquet, and he mocked my disinclination to fawn: ‘What’s being manly got to do with anything?’ Perhaps he had limits beyond which he would not go. Or painter that he was, he might well have deferred to the Nazis so to keep himself in the game (as a number of artists did in 30s Germany). Or he would have worked up a Trump portrait in the hopes of garnering cachet in some quarter or other, however Mar-a-Lago, fame fleeting. He was a better student of art history than he was a painter. On that score, I learned from him.

‘Y’ayess,’ he would say, dragging out his “yes” beyond any point of viable elasticity, ‘Cezanne. After which it all goes to shit.’ We had a discussion group back in the Neverland days that met once a week in a Greek restaurant by the railroad tracks, Vancouver docks. And he did a Rembrandt on us, painted us up as a group. Satirized our intellectual pretentions. It was probably the only decent thing he ever painted, rough as it was, as he knew too much about past glories in art for his own good. And perhaps, if the restaurant still exists, the painting still has pride of place in the nook where we sat, jawed, drank ourselves silly. One of the barmaids went on to become a successful actress in various “hit series”. It was that kind of place. Generated form and content. I suppose that, for Proust, society was an arena, its participants gladiators, satin gloves up to the elbows, diamond pins at the ready, society shallow but everything, success transient, failure the sum of it all, which gave the women their ‘I-told-you-so’s’ and the men their rationales for caring less….

I give shows written for TV plenty of go. Most of the time, I will come to a show long after whatever fuss it stirred up has simmered down. With exceptions, there does seem to be a formula by which these things get cranked out. Maximized conflict. And if there is no twist in the plot, then there is no sizzle on the grill. And the dragging out of backstories one after the other, endlessly, is like yarding out the intestines of a very large, hairy mammal. The “imagination” has its universal parameter: some pendulum swinging from invincibility to ‘Oh my god we’re so fucked’. The American gamut. In other dramas, action thrillers, fantasias which I have a look at from time to time with no serious intention of viewing to series’ end, I note that there is often an embedded debate about how to best view life and consequently how to live it. The ubiquitous hard-ass seems to carry the day. For him or her, lovingness is a betrayal of common sense. Love is a construct as artificial as empathy, or so it goes in the neo-Christian playbook that might possibly have taken in some French or feminist theory with all the elan of one sucking up a strawberry shake. But rom com requires lovable villains and beatific grins. Which brings me to The Philadelphia Story.

The Philadelphia Story (screwball romantic comedy, 1940) is a movie I watch from time to time, once every three years or so. It is preachy in a couple of places which dates it. It is an apology in a couple of places for male misbehaviour, which certainly dates it. It is set in a mirage, a world that never existed. And always, with the super-rich, a little patience. But otherwise, the movie holds up across some 80 years, inasmuch as the wit therein sustains itself and the peccadillos ring true throughout eternity. As when, in the Lord mansion, James Stewart, ace reporter, identifies himself as the Voice of Doom, calling on the line from the south parlour. As when Ruth Hussey, ace photographer, talking about the (phone) line to the stables, says that this allows the people of the house to talk to the horses without having to go outside. The movie, along with John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana, is my required viewing every so often, seeing as people are going to insist on charitable views of human frailty in a pro forma sense, if in no other, such views as are seemingly disappearing by the minute, no matter where you get your shoes shined on the political spectrum.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘Suffering, why do humans suffer more than creatures or do the latter simply keep themselves together more? Will those lunatic scientists you mention unleash the wolves of war? [See previous post???] Will they gobble us all up? It may be an apt kind of justice.’ … …. ‘Well, re. your wolves, may as well bring back the dinosaurs. I mean, hell, there's only two of us left.’… …. Otherwise, he (Lunar) would go on about yet another judge buckling to the whims of You-Know-Who, enabling his trashing of the decencies, for what they are worth in a world that permits Gaza. And You-Know-Who and his You-Know-What are going to get a lot more innings in. Otherwise, according to a large segment of the population of a drifting continent called Academia, men are good only for drones and being UFC fighters. Payback, perhaps, for centuries of men belittling women. But between the pushback to the pushback to the pushback and You-Know-Who, and what is there to choose?

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, everything in freefall, honk if you are a paraglider with a taste for end-of-the-world shagging, and that the limerick is the highest form of poetry, along with a few quatrains of the Rubaiyat, and, in addition, apropos of nothing, these words: … …. ‘Which is odd, since politics is society, and liberals are part of both. But no, you're not bonkers nor are you alone in seeing USA USA in a Roman mass grave of the 2nd century AD, unless Trump speeds us along to the 5th century. Besides, aren’t young men into the ancient Rome stuff these days? Who would’ve thought what a taste for pain would bring them? Trump materializes at some extreme fight spectacle. He is Caesar bringing his thumb to a gory gladiatorial fest. Up or down, eh, the empire going sideways….’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘You’re scaring me, Sibum, with your mordancies. And you’re guilting me out: I don’t like dwelling on politics. It only encourages the bastards. Hence August, 1914. Solzhenitsyn. Which I’m reading because it’s there, and it’s voluminous enough that it might provide me with a heat shield. Early days for it though here on the island. There’s been a train ride. Russian vistas. A discussion of books qua books. The books that contradict books so that truths contradict truths, but let’s not get all French about it. And, early days still, but this novel is beginning to reel me in, and I should know better. A rich peasant’s acres described in not too intimidating detail, familial tensions, paintings of Tolstoy on the manor walls… Would Tolstoy have minded being compared to St Paul as I did in the previous post? Five will get you ten… The two most powerful warriors are patience and time…. unless you’ve got a timer on an egg. Alright, I’ve had my fun. Hello, from Percival. I’m trying to wean him off eating paperbacks. Just kidding. Perfectly happy to let him eat S Kings and M Atwoods….’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Got Cicero in mind, things darkening for him though perhaps he refuses to notice as he maneuvers in the senate for the best possible outcome for his interests and those of Rome, as much as they or may not be aligned, beyond that of Cicero playing to own his vanity, not just Julius Caesar’s. Which Cicero was. That is, Cicero was vain, and even more so after Caesar charmed him. And yet, despite all that, Cicero was fairly wise to himself. Knew he’d be cowed by threats of physical violence, having run afoul of Mark Antony. Silly cow, he insulted that man one too many times. Perhaps his fear led to the fact that his hand did wind up nailed to the senate door, or perhaps this amputation (on Antony’s part) was Cicero’s reward for facing down his fears. These times, late American times but in Eastern Europe somewhere: cheap gas, manured fields, apricot brandy on the breezes… (I’m trying out my impressionism.) Woke up this morning, kissed the wife, had coffee, had my breakfast roll, saw the news of a man deported (from America) simply for having views, and I tied my shoelaces…. And that’s how it is, and in one fell swoop of derring-do, and it’s more shocking than if Putin had decided to have my house swatted. It’s become the air we breathe, even here’….

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘I don’t know about young men. I generally give them a wide berth, although I’ve come across a few who are just adorable. Otherwise, it’s that time. Cupcakes in the oven. French horn staring down some sheet music. “Bohemian Rhapsody”, wouldn’t you know. I had some thoughts in mind for this post’s particular concerns, but they’ve fled, flown the coop, lit out like banshees with firecrackers affixed to their hindends. Because…because… because I don’t want to generalize, but anyway, I’ve always thought the poolside scene in The Philadelphia Story a humdinger, beyond reproach. You’ve got your basic class analysis, your basic fatal attractions, your basic drunkenness as a higher state than that of your basic Samadhi, and then Hepburn, at the end, with a nudge from Jimmy Stewart, lets herself be the queen among women she’s meant to be rather than some bitch who harangues everyone, carping on them for their shortfalls. Mirage? An oasis, rather. Political? Don’t get me going on politics. I want to pass one morning, at least, without that on my mind, who’s on first, and is there a plan? Young men? I know one fairly well. He’s dropped out. Lives on the margins, holed up in some rooming house. In his last job, he was a vampire “scare person” in a fake haunted house, tourist trap warrens, Niagara Falls. One might rightly say he’s alienated from just about everyone and everything, his favourite writer Robert Louis Stevenson. I sense a novel in the mix, but let’s not jinx him. I think he’s one of the few who sees our world for what it is: contending sets of moral ascendancies, and no one’s all that effing moral. Timer bell just dinged. Out with the cupcakes! No, not all for me. I wish. Going to bring some to a men’s shelter. See ya.’

April 7, 2025: Blooms that occur late in the course of empire, the luminescence of some Golden Age still strong in one's rearview mirror, are the most flowery of flowers, so I remember reading in another lifetime. But when the rot, at last, kicks in, it spreads swiftly, with gusto, with a view toward setting the tone for the next generation of weed lots to come. A certain Sod’s white-orange hair and late night rococo rants on social media, and there you have it: efflorescence... Whereupon it seems as if more poets breed in these conditions than engineers (who perhaps require less maintenance), the soil too hyped up with fertilizers and on a path to exhaust itself. A Sod surrounded by lesser shrooms who, even so, cast shadows and gloom across any forest floor… This morning, I read of a mass grave found in Vienna consisting of the bones of Roman soldiers (circa some 2nd century AD enlistment tour) and a few rusted dagger blades… By way of a process of disassociation, I saw USA, USA all day-glo glow on a rough stone wall, and the follow-up thought was as follows: “Death is a late bloomer too”. As when we are talking organ failures: law, education, general health concerns, the designated hitter rule, another ancient point of contention. Readers of previous posts on this site may have concluded by now that we are going bonkers here, and it may well be true. I would not put it past me.

And Barcelona was once the anarchy capital of the world. Lunar fancies himself an anarchist at bottom, but he has never expressed, so far as I know, any urge to go there. In fact, he will lay it on thus: ‘Barcelona might chat up anarchy, but Naples is it.’ Then a discussion of modernist architecture as a Barcelonan fluke… Then the ghost of Leopardi in an ice cream wrapper… Mayans and toucans and white lotuses (not as per the infamous TV series )… But For the Hell of It Department: (from the book Barcelona, Robert Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992): The most famous moustache in nineteenth century Barcelona belonged to the king of the local gypsies, who was simply known as En Bigotis – Mr Moustaches. He was a tall, robust man whose whiskers (his fans claimed) brushed against both walls of certain alleys in the Old City when he walked down them. … …. Or, from the same book, and with a view toward dying well: Realizing that no reprieve was coming and that he had nothing to lose when the metal ring of the garrote was round his neck, Salvador pulled off his mask and shouted ‘Long love anarchy!’ The noise of the gears that tightened the ratchet, a witness recalled, was exactly that of a bank clock being wound. At the end the botxi rolled up Salvador’s tongue like a small carpet and stuffed it back in his mouth. … …. That would be tough on a man who liked to carry a point, be it in Barcelona on the advent of the aeroplane or Fifth Avenue, present day, law firms there getting mugged retributively and with prejudice.

Back to Proust or Proust-Montcrieff – author-translator tandem, and I have arrived at a pass in The Past Recaptured where “old” Marcel, in attendance at a party, is lamenting lost beauty, and he does so without once mentioning either the word “lament” or “beauty’. And he goes so far as to suggest that aging is a crime the victim commits against his or herself. The white hair, the dark shadows around the eyes, deep lines (and in some cases corpulence) are Exhibits A, B and C and so on, the old woman who once waltzed so beautifully as a girl now a prime candidate for the witness box. (To add insult to injury, there is this fifty-ish looking man who only seems to be getting younger as he gets older perhaps because he has given up alcohol and salt and possibly sex.) Old Marcel finds the prospect of old age and death troubling, and why can it not be Penny Lane forever? Whereas we, we are generally too busy for mortality, or we only think on it in passing, between giving at the office or watching something on Netflix. Not that there is anything wrong with “in passing”, but you know, the ancients carved better epitaphs on their tomb stones than we do on our best seller lists….

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: … ….’B was well enough despite [the] anaesthetic to attend the concert, Prokofiev and your favourite, Shostakovich whose work you have insufficiently explored. Igor Levit is one of the finest pianists out there but surrendered the limelight to his protégé, a young and brilliant pianist Lukas Sternath who won most of the applause, an act of artistic humility and generosity such [as is] rarely seen. S's 10th Symphony transcribed for double piano. I was so relieved I treated ourselves to the overpriced wine at the concert hall. I am rather with you on the gains for the soul to be had from a depression although yes, we know who'll get it in the neck… …. So, will [it] be a return to 1929? Maybe 1929 won't look so bad compared to what is to come. Or maybe, as you say, people will see "the light" and what? Wait till the next election? […long wait…] … …. Watched one of those Monsieur Hulot comedies by Jacques Tati [ ] Playtime which wasn't exactly a laugh a minute - in fact I did not laugh once - but there is some manner of weird genius at work. What one sees is an orchestra for the eyes. Certainly I felt the sense of complete alienation and it is meant to be a satire but a satire without words. Hulot just bumbles along from situation to situation and I've got to say the lengthy section about a new restaurant where everything goes wrong on its opening night was a superbly orchestrated spectacle, all the people moving like clockwork. It might be the most sublimely boring film I've ever seen.’ … … And that’s an affirmative on that affirmation. And throw in a little metamorphosis and we have a recipe for a bunch of Roman satire and perhaps even Atellan farces such as originated in the Campagna, but long before pizzas and espresso machines were commonplace.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see investment capital headed for a construction site, or tariffs galloping down the main drag like Jumanji rhinos, but: … ….’That's a tough break, your brother-in-law and sister's ailments. I'm certainly surprised or despondent about mine, since I did it to myself. What we do to our bodies when healthy is probably the most myopic trait of humans, as though we'll never need to pay up for all the fun times, although I don't recall mine as very much fun. I'm guessing you appreciate L's assessments of your poems, even though many others might disagree. Nonetheless it's good to have a tough critic. [And switching topics], there's that, too, the jailbird factor: [You-Know-Who’s campaign to keep his short hairs out of a jail cell]. [And] I suspect the Rs will accomplish what they wish by increments, death by a thousand cuts. Baby steps no one will really notice until it's all too bloody clear: game over.’ … …. Alas, too true, say I because I am deep in the execution of a shrug, as in ‘what else is there to say? Pick up your scorecard here, have yourself a nostalgic whiff of a hot dog and mustard and the reek of beer.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘The friend of a friend of a friend left behind what is perhaps the only copy of Solzhenitsyn’s August, 1914 ever to be seen on this island, and I’ve got it now, and I’m thinking I’ll read it so you don’t have to read the thing, perhaps as payback for your travels through Proust so I don’t have to read all that – all seven volumes of his opus with, as you say, its cinderblock prose (which at least suggests a little airiness, not a massive weight altogether). So far, and it’s early days yet with my prize contender, I’m dealing with tug and barge prose in choppy harbour waters. An early reference or two to Tolstoy on the part of Solzhenitsyn, and I thought to myself: “Tolstoy as St Paul?” Just saying. An historical sweep, for sure, somewhat hazily at first, on the horizon… A war on… No one talking against the Tsar at first, though I suppose that’s still to come... Everybody talking against Trump except those whose voices count for anything – you get the picture… A “hi” from Percival. Yesterday, he ate some John O’Hara – Butterfield 8, which I’d plucked from the Recycling Depot eons ago. I think it gave him a mild tummy upset. On a serious note… no, scratch that, I can’t be serious, today, or I’ll shoot myself, and yet, picture it – the ruins of Gaza. Got it? Now, for an instant of time as are two goat bleats strung together, I see our world as being likewise – in shatters, given Trump’s Liberation Day. The message is: we no longer have to care. You know what I mean. Because the I-Could-Care-Less-Chief gives us his permission to shrug and scuffle our feet. By the way, if you’ll forgive me the vulgarity, and believe me, this is the most political insinuation I’ve ever made in my adult life and in my now on, now off career as a novelist, but as for a certain Hall of Fame sex act, could be the tariffs are Trump’s revenge on the world for the Stormy Daniels case, which will make it the most expensive blowjob in the history of the human race. Am I petty in this? Natch. Oh and, between you, me and a dickie bird, from what little I’ve read of Proust, and randomly at that, I reckon I can insert some Proust passages into a Dear Abby column and no one will notice, the man so down home about dispensing dating advice. Later, TA.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘A book for our times? Oh my. Well, without further ado: The Satyricon by Petronius, 1st century AD. Or The Golden Ass (Apuleius) which was written a little later... I won’t spell out all the reasons why one should read the books. Then again, if one is looking for Roman analogies to American sleaze, and without the pharmaceutical ads… In the one book, there is the famous banquet party thrown by a rich-as-Croesus parvenu who wouldn’t have been out of place in Mar-a-Lago. There is also, on the part of the hanger-on hero, his attempt to restore flagging sexual prowess. In the other book (critics will deem it a text, don't you know), a man has been inadvertently transformed into an ass of the animal kind, and undergoes various adventures before he’s restored to his human form by way of Isis and so, all along, it’s been a spiritual quest, against a backdrop of all sorts of villainy and lunacy… Now piss off. I mean, you can look this stuff up. But mightn’t Mailer have wished he’d have written something along the lines of those “texts”? Impressionistically. Or lean and hard-hitting? How did Latinate longs-and-shorts come off in a Manhattan bar? Would Angie Dickinson have helped translate? That’s what I want to know.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: ‘What are you guys on about now? Barcelona? Was there, and not so long ago either. No disrespect intended, but at first sight, Gaudi’s Basilica de la Sagrada Familia put me in mind of Disneyland. So who stole what from whom? And when did CGI sleight-of-hand know it? I’ve got my cupcakes in the oven. Got Mahler set at The Fifth Symphony, fourth movement. My French horn show signs of throwing off its winter doldrums, no matter that it’s drizzling out there. Actually, I was out and about the other day, and on the bus, a guy went mental. He had it in for cell phones, and I was about to second the motion, when he started slagging women as the chief source of the scourge. He had very unflattering words with which to describe my sex, though one quick look around the bus should’ve told him that there were as many hairy males with cell phones in hand, either talking into them or playing Solitaire on the screens, and with the concentration worthy of snooker players. The mental guy was rabid by now. But then he disembarked and disappeared, marching into a Polish deli. To obtain ham? Custard-filled pastry? Another off-his-meds episode in the life of our civilization, such as it is on this side of the Atlantic, the coast of which isn’t as far away as all that from NDG-Montreal. Five, six hours to Gloucester, Mass., were a crow to fly not due east but on a slightly diagonal verticality, along, say, the I-89, headed for the Delphic turf of an American oracle. The timer bell just dinged. Cupcakes to perfection. My French horn says, “Shostakovich? Must we? Alright, if we must.’