January 6, 2025

January 28, 2025: Roundabout this time in 1838, Abraham Lincoln addressed The Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. He was 28 years old and wise. And he said, more or less, that when the public begins to care little about the law, and feels entitled to act without restraint, bad things happen. As it were. (I paraphrase from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American as posted January 27th. She quotes Lincoln as saying): ‘Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.’ These words seemed so on point to me, especially that “jubilee” bit, what with Trump and his charismatics, that I figured they were worth repeating. In any case, the rule of law was the thing, even if not all laws were good. But bad laws could be “challenged”, could be “repealed”. At least, that was the idea. And sure, if SCOTUS and so-called Republicans had something more than forked tongues with which to ring in “originalist” interpretations of legalese and the dulcet tones of bipartisanship. Lincoln was not finished. He went on to say, more or less, how “success” and “ambition” and “the quest for distinction” can either “build up” a country or “destroy it from within”. Go on, spin your Wheel of Fortune to see where it spins to a stop in a game of “What’s Up? Right. We’ll Huff and Puff and Blow the House Down”. Ah, looking like a war zone…

As stated in previous posts, Proust’s The Past Recaptured, the concluding volume to his seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu, has occupied me now for roughly a year. I have been reading it like I read anything else, with a view toward history, and to what the life of the mind and the life of the spirit might claim as their own, as in what endures and what falls away. It is WWI and bombs are falling on Paris. There is the beauty of the night sky and the airplanes and the search beams, a kind of tapestry made of light. M. de Charlus the baron is looking for sex. Paris is compared to Pompeii, how Pompeiian lives were “caught in the act” by the eruption of Vesuvius and flash-frozen by ash, in a manner of speaking, or sort of immortalized; how Parisian sinners would have to make do with photography and selfies. (Just kidding.) My idle thought was that Paris must have been the first city to have suffered air raids and bombs. Wrong. Took to a little research, nothing strenuous, came upon mention of the Song Dynasty (in China) of the Middle Ages. Came upon “flying kites laden with black powder” … And that some 17th century Thai king also employed kites… The Austrians besieged Venice with “incendiary balloons” in the course of the war for Italian independence… The Italo-Turkish War… The Balkan War (Adrianople bombed by enterprising Bulgarians) … Somebody dropped something on Mazatlán in Mexico, and it was not an asteroid name of Sundance… WWI and Antwerp, Cologne, Dusseldorf… Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, King’s Lynn, no mention of Paris, not a whisper…

And Proust has recourse to a more or less straightforward narrative when he presents us with M. de Charlus in a room of Jupien’s temple-bordello, a nail-studded whip, activated, being applied to the baron’s body, and the baron is loving it. And Proust’s narrator cum messenger boy – the young Marcel – is on the premises for innocent enough reasons, or so one is to suppose (to serve a summons?), young lads about who are not idiots but are simple-hearted, who are natural-born patriots, the war just one of those things like toenail fungus or Clemenceau’s mordant eloquence; who regard the baron with some affection. The baron sees in them something near sacred. At any rate, whither pain, whither pleasure at this stage in the proceedings? That the baron is strapped to a chair is the last thing I expected to come across in my pondering, through Proust, as to what boots it when hell has broken loose…. And then, as the digressionary cannot be forestalled forever, commentary breaks out on the nature of sexual love, that the pursuit of pleasure is the main business of life, and only a blockhead fails to comprehend this basic fact. And yet, those young'uns who would kill a Boche (German) without a thought are kind at heart, not terribly complicated, and they die at the front as heroes, as the baron would like to have it. And the longer the rap sheet of which a young man can boast as he lays on the baron’s punishment, the greater the baron’s pleasure. There is so much going on in these immediate pages that it is useless to summarize briefly. Words reducible perhaps to something as banal as, “bombs falling all around, but life goes on”. Virtue and vice in fifty shades of pick a colour. Profit-taking.

And then, I am thinking, given the horrors of Gaza, that someone ought to write a novel of the past fifteen months on a par with Erich Maria Remarque’s Black Obelisk (he also wrote All Quiet on the Western Front); on a par with these immediate pages of Proust, throw in a little Tolstoy, and how about a dash of William Shirer and his journals and diaries (dealing with the 30s), as something seems to have come full circle even as it has put out new, unprecedented shoots of what has been an evil shrub. There is no use appealing to morality or ethics or Christian virtues so as to stop its spread; no use critiquing the downside of some realpolitik so as to avert another massacre, the charge of genocide in one side of the mouth, permission in the other, that is, if that mouth belongs to Lady Justice. Since when has any of this ever won an argument outside of Diogenes' tub? (And we do not overlook the fact that Hamas bit the hand that fed it and has likewise been monstrous….) Humankind is a weed that kills, algorithms calculating acceptable kill-collateral damage ratios notwithstanding….

So yes, the carnage is blind even when weighed and measured, if only because humankind, as avowed above, is a weed and is opportunistic; is not a gardener or a shepherd though it may dress up as such now and then. Besides, at this juncture in time, humankind wants to be bad; it wants the satisfaction of destroying and the pleasure of killing on an operatic scale. I sit in my local listening to the soundtrack of a solo guitar recycling old hits in a speaker above me. I watch comfort food disappear down gullets. Images flick across a TV screen, the sound muted, the chryons flying like pterodactyls. There are ugly Valentine’s decorations about that have the feel of the 1950s. BE MINE and such. I am put in mind of Roman sex poems which, in turn, bring on the writer of history Tacitus, and here he is, by way of the written word, glowering at Tiberius, Caligula and Nero in the wings and hot to trot. The old man smell of politics. The cruelties of the young. ‘This is all it’s been,’ I say to myself with too much conviction, way more conviction than I can use, though we have somehow managed to persuade ourselves that there are better angels in our “weed-like lot”. Because the stab at being civilized brings about painless dentistry, never mind the daisy-cutters.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘The only positive thing one can say about Trump is that there is rarely a dull moment but yesterday's news really sent a chill through me, his actually recommending ethnic cleansing, which will be welcome news to certain Israelis. And then I got almost physically sick when I read about Starmer praising Trump for the hostage deal. I mean wasn't that Biden's initiative? Crazy times.’ … …. No shit, Durango. Discombobulated times. Berserk times. The pendulum does not just swing one way, then reverse itself; it flies off the handle on occasion… …. ‘I learned from Z— that she had been invited by a wealthy Lebanese woman who had all these people to dinner, serving, on the basis of her reading into the character of each guest, a completely different meal for each, several courses, and M— had something with fish that did her in. That's not the point of the story, however. Imagine a completely different menu for each guest. I said to M—, "But that is decadence!" And she replied, "Welcome to Lebanon." There is one hell of a lot of wealth there and I've always felt a bit uneasy with wealthy Lebanese as if something had gone soft inside them. Anyway, end of story.’ … …. Alright then, if you must: end of story. But how about an encore? … …. ‘Watched Corpo Celeste, Alice Rohrwacher's first film, she who made La Chimera. It was very good and although it might be considered anti-church, I think it may in fact be quite the opposite. I'm beginning to think she is the one Italian director who is consistently good whereas Paolo Sorrentino of The Great Beauty is entirely hit and miss… …. He has made a new film Parthenope about Naples, which I've yet to see and which has had very mixed reviews. I have just watched the trailer and it looks a stinker. But, holy mackerel, it is filmed in the house on the bay where I went to a party. Bloody strange you refer to "The Garden of Earthly Delights" on the very day I inserted it into my Scottish prose. What, you'll say, Bosch in Uist? Aye, that too. B— wrote to ask me if I had any thoughts on the charges of misogyny that have been laid at Dylan's door and I said that on the basis of ten love songs he wrote - I didn't list them - he could never be that but I also suggested that youth is cruel and that he may have been crueller than most but that has to do with the dangerous dynamic between young men and women. Etc.’ … …. There it is again: the cruelties of youth. Is this one of them there emoticons?

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, keep an eye out for an intimidating creature all spiky and scaly-skinned, lots of teeth, powerful and in a foul mood, lurking about: … …. ‘I wound up blowing most of the day. Now a bit of after-sundown breakfast and some leisurely 1956 time with Raymond Burr and "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!" (Can't handle Godzilla [photoplays], unless my man Raymond is in one.)’ … …. I do not even know where to begin….

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘I see you’re in for a major wind event in your neck of the woods, while we here on the coast, we have gentle winter time temps on our hands, sun, and we can pretend we’re noble souls all Hobbited down, as in hunkered, doing the conceptual in our sleep, and calling it unconscious, I mean art, though I do expect at some point to see ICE officials wandering about looking a touch bewildered in the company of even more bewildered island folk, and who has seen the breezes (is that what I mean to say)? I told you the name of my goat already. Christ, now I can’t even remember it. Ah, Percival. He has his eye on the metaphysical while the inspector-generals go down in flames. Roman sex poetry, eh? You mean Roman insult poetry, don’t you? As per Catullus or Martial? A nicer version of the former Roman appears in Lord Byron, though even Byron could work a verbal shiv to some effect. But you know that. Just hanging out here, having had my lunch. If I were smoking (again), I would light a cig and squat on a piece of driftwood and watch the sky try out different versions of itself. I would continue my reading about the marsh Arabs. The price of modernity and all that. Now you’ve got your comforts, where in hell is your freedom? Hail and farewell, soldier.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: The man is resting on his laurels though, knowing him, this will not last for long, he being a restless sort. If there is a poem to write on a ladybug (which is actually a beetle), there is a better one to write on avifauna, including the golden eagle. As for Roman sex-insult poetry, Rutilius is of two minds. Mind the first: you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Mind the second: don’t let your toolbox get rusty, because you never know….

January 21, 2025: I wondered what Marcel Proust, imagining him to be a senior correspondent for a mythical World Tabloid, would have made of the doings inside the Capitol Rotunda on “Swearing in Day”? August, as in a temple to the sovereign will of the people? What to make of the neo-classical architecture recalling Rome’s Pantheon? Of the paintings appearing to add yet more gravitas to the place?

The one, for instance, showing George Washington resigning his commission… By this gesture, the first American president-to-be vouchsafed civilians the civilian control of the military. What to make of the baptism of Pocahantas as rendered by John Gadsby Chapman, as if this ceremony signified accord between the white man and the Powhatan? The white robe suggesting that, for the young woman, heathen sin was, as it were, attended to? What would Proust have made of the embarkation of the pilgrims headed for the New World? Not hope so much as ‘we’ve got nothing to lose’?

And what would he have made of the British surrenders at Yorktown and Saratoga as painted by Trumbull, himself a military officer? Lots of decorum here, one of which paintings was a backdrop to Trump speechifying not necessarily in a decorous manner. And words, seemingly without connection to what was in progress, popped up in the mind, words like “bananas (with or without the hitching post word of “republic”), and then “purely weird”.

And what would Proust have made of the painting of the discovery of the Mississippi River by De Soto (1541) as done up by one William Powell, wary native Americans in the picture, peace pipe available for the smoking? Any takers? And what of the odd painting of the Declaration of Independence, a row of men (starting from the left side of the painting extending clear around to the right) whose heads occupy a kind of horizon line, that all heads are at the exact same level? A rare alignment of all the planets? All men are, in theory, created equal, or with equal shares? Perspective gone off the rails? What would Proust have made of how the women of the hour were dressed, the figures they cut as they filed into the rotunda? There were indications of some bravura flourishes, brave or brazen décolletage, loge seats at discount, opera glasses optional. And what of all that hair gel as slicked the heads of men who had the look of guys headed for a yacht, cocaine, and escort girls? What of Dance-for-Me Marjorie Taylor Greene playing the heavy in the handshake queue? No way would respect for congressional seniority cheat her of face time with He-Whom-God-Saved. Such a dear. What a keener. Could be she sees in the man something we have difficulty detecting: darling pretty boy violinist and a whole lot of flies sans wings.

I was having a go on my guitar, CNN muted. I was picking through John Fahey’s “When the Springtime Comes Again” in dropped “D” tuning on my classical, a composition meant for a dreadnought, the piece heavy with the D minor chord, the C chord and the E minor chords keeping it company lest the elegiac tenor of the music overwhelm one’s threadbare sanity entirely, Trump and his charismatics on the books now, the Golden Age primed, the “beguine” in the hands of lunatics. For one unhinged moment I berated myself for having been over the top with respect to Trump these past ten years, but then what was I looking at if not a desecration and perhaps an attempt to preempt a discussion of crowd size, seeing as the event had been shifted indoors from the bitter cold outside?

Now for the inevitable digression, though it is entirely in keeping with a great many previous posts hereabouts…

And I want to say that I had forgotten how much Proust discussed politics and war in his The Past Recaptured, seventh and final volume of his À la recherche du temps perdu. The “political” was often enough delivered through the pronouncements of M. de Charlus, aristocrat on the skids and somewhat anti-war inasmuch as it was to be regretted, the lost lives of beautiful young men. … …. Because Beauty is still Beauty when it exists in a living material…. …. And besides, when France mouthed off and Germany mouthed off (World War I), the rhetorical overkill was difficult to distinguish one from the other, and perhaps one needed to hear from the Americans exactly what it was that one was fighting for? Bombs were falling on Paris. Airplanes and zeppelins: a terrible new order of beauty in the world. M. de Charlus was cruising the streets for sex, but he had not completely lost his marbles, and there was the young Marcel now more mature (he had “suffered”), taken seriously by his social superiors, squiring the old gentleman around. Ah, respect for one’s elders. The old gentleman was saying something to the effect that when the “people” read newspapers, they imagined the opinions they encountered were their own. Look out! Social media opening its enormous maw ... over there at two o’clock! Proust might intimate that the only opinions that mattered anywhere were those vented in the salons of women bent on playing cards. He might proceed to the notion that there is no such thing as scientific truth; there are only vested interests, the boiling point of water debatable, never mind the boiling point of the planet’s atmosphere. So then, it follows that one ought to have a principle or two whereby the collapse of logic is somewhat mitigated by reason however enfeebled. The president, meanwhile, as hinted at earlier in this writing, speechified. His countenance set on “grim”, his glare out-sovereigned the sovereignty of the people, all the while the applause was treacle in an echo chamber. Watching it, the Comptroller of the Universe said something in my ear that did not reflect well on the A-Team. And was Hillary Clinton’s laugh a cackle heard around the world, another senate hearing in the offing? Was the new First Lady wearing the boater trying a bit too hard?

I did not see the whole business through, but I saw enough. What I saw was akin to a black mass, the “Christian” mass mocked, its raison d’etre turned inside out, snake oil the sacrament, the lifeblood of American capitalism, Musk perhaps stoned. I put the guitar down. The use I had made of it was in itself sacrilegious.

And the painting missing from the art on display in the rotunda was Lorenzetti’s The Allegory of Bad Government (part of a series of paintings he did on a theme of good and bad governance, what “good” and “bad” look like). It depicts a ”devious figure”, a horned tyrant, his feet resting on a goat, “bad actor” figures all around in their functions as the “leading enemies of human life”. One could go on and on. One could ask, with respect to a tableau as would have had some majesty beneath the capitol dome, were it not for the ubiquitous red tie and its cheap seats aura: ‘Indeed, where are the bored putti, the cherubims whose task is to praise a praise-worthy divinity?’ Seems they fucked off, gone in search of a Lincoln Lawyer hirable with crypto currency.

Postscript I: Carpenter The man and his site have a new look.

Postscript II: Lunar, as if he is the only one among us living in the real world, on the Bob Dylan biopic: … …. ‘I also wasn't prepared to like it on the basis of the trailer, but B— wanted to go for some reason and I was mightily surprised. Again, bar a couple of small issues, it's good. … …. I've been at the grindstone but no matter how much I work there seems to be just as much left to do. It is hard to write about the supernatural without continually hitting the "strange note" ad tedium and yet, and yet, when inside that situation, as I was in that festa outside Naples, the supernatural begins to feel commonplace. I had an interesting discussion with S— the other night who spends a lot of time in Egypt and there too there is a powerful belief in the supernatural which has its origins in pre-Islamic times and which she says one just takes as natural. Actually it is the wrong word: preternatural is what we are looking at. I don't know if you watched any of the inauguration. I saw just a bit: some lunatic black preacher but Musk ... Musk looked stoned to me. I've heard he does a lot of something or other but then all [these] tech billionaires do drugs. Oh, and some C&W female singer sang "America the Beautiful" flat but then it is a bloody awful song anyway.’ … …. And here Lunar ends on a note more sympathetic, be the note sharp or flat: … …. ‘The most sympathetic and probably most accurate portrayal (in the Dylan biopic) was Pete Seeger in that he was presented as everything I thought he was, generous to a fault, and, given that Dylan was/is unstoppable, willing to be left behind. … …. Isn't there some inauguration somewhere?’ … ….. Indeed, there it is. Come west, turn south at JFK, present yourself as a fly on the wall overlooking the action… …. But Lunar will have the last word: … …. ‘A— is working on a new book that argue[s] that it is Egypt, not Greece, that has had the greater influence on the spread of civilisation. Well, Isis [the goddess] was big but I'm not sure I can accept the premise. On the other hand why not both, equally.’ … …. Now there you go: a dogleg’s south of the Cotswolds, and you may bump into even truer expressions of both sides-ism there in the hinterland of Hammersmith.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, glower if you see an inauguration lying around: … …. ‘Why watch a [“freakin”] Polish police procedural that's "very dark, grisly," when we have all that right here, [with or without cable]?’ … …. I don’t know, man. As if I can’t get enough of the stuff, grisly a transcendent value when tech kazillionaires howl like werewolves at the midnight hour…

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘So then, what’s the verdict? Have we gone over the top with the insults? Are they still merited? What are the ethics of the situation? Are we born as moral beings? Is Trump a hologram, the product of 70, 000,000 minds glued to the same wavelength, so much so, time warped and space got all crinkly like crumpled tin foil? Is “hold the mayonnaise” to be the new election strategy of whatever Democratic Party pols are still above water, flailing about? Can you play Fahey’s “Stomping Tonight on the Pennsylvania-Alabama Border”, my favourite ever song title?’ … …. Why yes I can, after a fashion, on both my classical and my dreadnought which makes it, in effect, two distinct pieces of fable-music, and I love bending the “D” at the third fret….

Postscript V: Rutilius: The man is on sabbatical, availing himself of the baths somewhere as a reincarnated aspect of Petronius Arbiter.

Postscript VI: Crow: The man is terrified, as per his last message in a bottle to me.

Postscript VII: Petronius Arbiter in a preternatural state: … …. ‘Let the insults fly. I made poetry out of mine when Nero gave me the option of slitting my wrists. While I bled out, I rhymed on his ass.’

January 18, 2025: A few idle remarks to follow. But first an obituary notice of sorts. Big Feral Cat aka Humbert was struck by a vehicle a few days ago and killed. To mark his time on this earth and his place among us, a shrine (candle, flowers, a portrait photo) has been put up in the alley just around the corner where it meets the main drag, Humbert’s turf. When he walked the street, you knew he owned it, with a resolve that was something out of High Noon. Every silent paw on the pavement was a loud ‘I do not tolerate fools’. The depanneur on the corner fed him and let him sleep just inside the front door, Humbert’s task presumably to greet customers looking to buy their lotto tickets, their smokes, their beers. The coffee shop adjacent put out water in a pan for Humbert in the summer dog days, and quite a few passersby scratched its ears for luck. Eric Ormsby, poet of things wild, on a visit to the neighbourhood, noticed the brindle-coated hulk of a cat straightaway and said it deserved a poem, if not a good-sized portion of Texas in which to roam. How could a cat govern any worse than Current Governor? Which brings me to, see next paragraph:

Idle Remark No 1: In the offing soon the official installation of the President-elect and his Charismatics. No, they are not a swing band; they are not a softball team. They are not a collection of astronauts, but say "warlord and petty chieftains" and a bell might affirm your answer as being in the ballpark. Idle Remark No 2: Reading a history of Barcelona and the Catalan people, and I see some similarity to Canada and French Quebeckers, though I do not know if the Catalans in Spain dreamed up a language police operating under cover and making lists in this here province. How very you-fill-in-the-blank of them. Idle Remark No 3: to do with a Japanese miniseries entitled Asura, and how good it is. Superb. Four drama queen sisters with a father who strayed, but was still a father to them. Like I said: idle remarks, no follow-ups, elaborations; no do-overs.

The other day, I happened to catch a few minutes of a senate hearing on CNN, one to do with the confirmation (or not) of the president-elect’s pick for defense secretary. I felt a rash coming on. To quell its approach, I muted the TV and satisfied myself with scanning the faces of the interviewers and the interviewee for signs of sentience. I watched the actions of the jaws. But if I nipped the rash in the bud, there was nothing I could do for the nausea. That night (and I believe there is a connection between the hearing and what I wound up dreaming), I dreamed I was listening to a composition by John Fahey, so-called American “primitive guitarist”, composer-arranger, and it was based on a love ballad, waltz time. It had a curious feature, or that its final section, on every re-hearing, would change itself by a single note, either through addition or subtraction. Odd stuff. Perhaps the dream was hinting that this is how republics come crashing down – note by note until something finally gives in the superstructure. Which would make John Fahey the only “musical” prophet I am aware of, as I have always regarded him as a reluctant “seer” in “open tunings” with a dreadnought Gibson and with a possibly morbid sense of humour.

In the post previous I mentioned M. de Charlus, major figure in Proust’s seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu. As Proust gets the ball rolling in the concluding book, WWI has broken out. Bombs are falling on Paris. M de Charlus is wandering the streets looking for sex. He has been ostracized from the social set he once dominated with his views and aesthetic sense. He is seen as pro-German as he has an affinity for Nietzsche and Goethe. But he would most likely answer that there is nothing to choose from when dealing with German or French imbeciles who are very likely running the war. And, while I am reading all this in The Past Recaptured, I note that I can easily enough stay on beat when switching over, say, to a news report concerning the present day, and whether China has America by the throat, and whether the young royals always in the news are nice people, the answer to which could divide a nation not of their origin. Proust’s young Marcel seems to have grown up, knock wood.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar with a confession to make: … …. ‘Well, I kinda liked David Lynch, a true as opposed to manufactured weirdo. I have a terrible admission to [put to you]. After the famous incident when I threw the television outside the back window because I couldn't stop the girls watching it, we went without a TV for well over a year, a probably blissful time, and then I went and bought one just so I could watch Twin Peaks. So there. … …. Otherwise, what? B— has had a shock - the government has announced that craftsmen working from home will have to pay business rates. This is close to unbelievable as craftsmen make little enough money as it is. It is also mean and stupid and unimaginative. This Labour government is putting the squeeze on people wherever it can and it does so out of ignorance of how people actually live. Mark Carney is probably a smart choice [for you Canadians]. He ran the Bank of England for many years and so understands money; he also knows how Trump operates.’ … …. (An unflattering comment ensues that bears on Current Canadian Prime Minister. How very The Hunt for Red October of Lunar, mid-January, the world on a precipice or just a high curb. To continue:) … …. ‘Another, rather different, evening at the Romanian Cultural Institute, an evening of popular song from between the wars, piano, guitar (brilliant musician) and a baritone and some of the melodies were just lovely and, I suspect, owe a great deal to the Neapolitan canzone tradition with just a touch of soupy Russian melody in there. I think Hamas is just as capable of torpedoing the ceasefire as Netanyahu, given the hatred between them. Peace, really? Amid the rubble…’ … …. Yes, there is that: rubble rubble, toil and trouble and damn near 47,000 Gazans dead, and some might say not a patch on Hiroshima but getting there….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, keep going if you have not got a sense of humour morbid or otherwise: … …. ‘[I suggest] try [seeing] the tragicomedy, emphasis on the comedic, that we bright Americans have inflicted upon ourselves. [And] about a year ago I became a bit obsessed over the unanswered question (in my mind), which would prevail in a war, the US or China? I consulted several articles penned by assorted scholars in all things war, and each concluded on the same note: China's gaining but since the US leads considerably in modern-war technology, it wins. That, anyway, is for now. But you hit the key — and unraveling — note. Trump is too [uncomplimentary adjective here in the Drake manner] and incompetent to be commander in chief. The idiot could lose against Greenland. Otherwise, with near certainty I reject that he'd ever commit forces against China's Taiwan invasion — coming soon to a theatre of Pacific blood, for there's no time like a US idiot's time in charge.’ … …. Yes, well, not to put to fine a point on it, I suppose. But when it comes to what we best do on this earth, cue up “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (H Bosch), if you want something along the lines of a mockumentary, something real and fantastical, lustful and corrupt, with a side panel or two of hell.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Catalans, you say? I went to sleep listening to de Falla the other night. Well, he said he owed the Catalans for his art. “Nights in the Gardens of Spain”. “El Amor Brujo”. “The Three-Cornered Hat” and all that. He told Franco where to get off, seeing as Franco wanted de Falla back from his Argentinian exile. I’ve a goat named Percival, by the way. Just saying, no segue in sight. But my, how we do anthropomorphize. My mood is peculiar. Could be the side effects of de Falla's music. The man would classicize flamenco which I happen to like though it seems quaintly querulous on a west coast island heavy with mist. (Isn’t it said that your Fahey classicized the blues?) Back to my peculiar mood, could be due to, what did you call them, the imminent arrival of the Charismatics. One of whom, the Miller guy, reminds me of a scene in The Fifth Element, wherein the alien in human guise keeps wanting to bust out of said human guise at the ticket booth, flights to Fhloston Paradise in the Angel constellation on offer where a Bosch painting would fit right in, Hawaiian music, luaus and all.’ … …. It has slipped my mind what I intended to say to an old friend in response. That de Falla hung out with Ravel and Debussy and others in Paris roundabout the time Proust was writing and publishing his grand opus, but that this sounds a little earnest. Not only that, I have been accused of harbouring the grumps on my person as if I require a fumigatory procedure… Talk about climate change, on the 20th (of this month) we will have it in spades.

Postscript V: Rutilius: ‘Just had my brain scanned with magneto-resonance. Twenty minutes of one of Edgard Varese's lesser known works all around me in a metal chamber after which I emerged expecting to have acquired a frock coat, white shirt with ruffles and Jon Pertwee's bouffant or else babbling, "OK! OK! I did eat the last chocolate" or else to a brightly lit chamber filled with rugose cone shapes wielding instruments of an eldritch nature until they fall back in evident fear. "The eyes! The eyes! Nygghaarrr ui gnai-gnai Elon Musk!”’ … …. Lord Byron with a high-tech upgrade? More Hieronymus Bosch who was a 16th century painter? Do his works still have legs, heralding Feudalism 2.0? A Rutilius feeling frisky? A Rutilius who thinks it is all over, anyway, baby blue? A thousand questions and not one decent W C Fields interjection in lieu of “my little chickadee”…

Postscript VI: But as for Crow, here is his pitch: ’Forget the Romans, Nazis, et al. America is going to look like Putin’s Russia, wall-to-wall oligarchs.’ Direct quote: ‘Politically, I think we never were in such a bad situation. In the US, in Canada, in France, Germany, Italy, almost in every European country, in Russia, in the Middle East, in China, in Korea and so on.’ English is not Crow’s first language, nor is Corvusian, or what crows might parley in at a meeting of the Prime Minister and the premiers. However, epithets in French might well close us out here: ‘As for Quebec, the current government is a shame: they are totally incompetent and use identity politics (language, secularization, nationalism) as a fig leaf to cover their incompetence. When they took power they inherited from the previous government a surplus of more than seven hundred billions and six years later they managed to accumulate a deficit of more than eleven billions while having nothing to show except failures upon failures. Well, I'll stop here. Simply put, I'm desperate. X%#***WTF!’ … …. I am not sure “desperate” is the word Crow would wish for here, but I will cut the man some slack. I believe he had health care in mind, not whether Foucault, after all is said and done, really had anything to say.

The Feckless “I Am That I Am” Department: Seated in my local, pen resting on chin. Indicates thought-mode. I am spinning my wheels. The smart TV monitor has a cobalt blue background. Against it news headlines manifest. Fish tank blocking my view, I am unable to make out in full a news item by way of the words “United Airlines, Trump inaugural, world-wide protests”. ???? All the pretty and enchanted fishes. People have the air of entitlement to the air they, the people, breathe in here, though it is air imbued with a cheesy guitar soundtrack, and they are not obliged to pay attention. Cook and proprietor yammer at each other. Indeed, who really runs the place? A couple works its way halfway through the crepes on their plates and bail. Sex might have been on the table for them an hour ago. Is she disappointed? Has he got his back up? They rise. They pay the bill. They depart, and perhaps real life is to be encountered ten paces from the door. Busboy clears the mess, he who is a part of the world’s immediate future. Not necessarily looking good. A banjo joins the cheesy guitar. An instant improvement of the musical fare. What if the song played was entitled “The Top Ten Legal Stories of the Past Year”, would you have my litigation? Banjo cuts away; it was not serious. A customer wants chocolate cake. ‘So let him eat cake,’ the cook says in a thick exotic accent.

January 13, 2025: The Comptroller of the Universe, years ago, stashed away a page of the Montreal Star. The May 5, 1970 edition. She does not recall why. She came across it by chance the other day, and thought to show me the thing gritty to the fingertips, unpleasant to the touch. She either wished to broaden my horizons or to pile on. That is to say, I am already rendered speechless by various turns of events of late, and now, she would have me contend with ancient reportage of ancient chaos, of events that still have a faint stench of sulfur affixed to them but are dimly remembered.

On one side of the page the headline reads: “Cambodia policy brings Death on campus”. You will note the capital “D”. It was meant, perhaps, to invoke images of the Grim Reaper, and make of a political crime a bad line of verse. Underneath it: one tell-all photo. In which a young woman screams as she kneels beside a dead body, that of a student, Kent State provenance. If you go down in the woods today…. Yes, to be shot by some member of the National Guard. And then, beneath all that, something to do with SALT talks, and we are to know that reason will prevail. Then it is reported that Spiro Agnew speechified, “elitists” in his crosshairs, and campus bums were not to feel left out. The rhetoric is pretty much transferable to the present day. On the opposite side classified ads for apartment rentals… And perusing them one gets the sense that Montreal really was a well-kept secret once upon a time, but then landlords got grubby and grabby. I would ask the Comptroller of the Universe if she thought the ‘wheel’ had turned again, full revolution in our lifetimes, so much so, we are back in the 60s fortune-wise, bad trip just around the corner, Nixon smirking. I would ask, but she would only flash an enigmatic smile. She would suggest I draw my own conclusions. Mayhem it is.

The above pretty much swept the floor with my thoughts. I had intended to go on about people who presume to their in-the-moment-thereness. That they bring their laptops into my local; that they turn up the music channel (sans headphones) whilst they wing their way through whatever it is on their screens. And then, when their cell phones get all squirrelly with fetishy ring tones, they talk into them with voices that carry out the door all the way to the inner chambers of the tattoo parlour across the street where these voices do not up and die; they develop feedback loops. Ordinary conversational levels of chat do not bother an old scrivener intent on editing a page of work or reading a book or just sitting around in the not so futile attempt to hear old scrivener thoughts. But the other shenanigans – these self-advertisements for connectedness, it was squalid enough when virtue-signallers were up to their necks in it, but now far-righters get to muck about in the sandbox and throw audibles and dirt and God knows what else in our faces, the public reamed out by the private.

So then, what had I in mind before I was diverted from my noble course? Proust, naturellement. Specifically The Past Recaptured, volume seven of the seven volume opus À la recherche du temps perdu… For all that, I have nothing profound to say for the writing, nothing well-considered just now. Have not got my Bloom or Frye or Walter Benjamin trilbies on, let alone any Avengers cap. Just that this particular volume contains what stayed with me from my earlier reading of Proust, when I was in my 20s and impressionable, gullible, as when it was thought that there still was such a thing as "acting in good faith" for which Charlie Chaplin’s tramp was one proof among others.

And it is the absurd figure of M. de Charlus that I have remembered most from the cinderblock prose. And the bombs are falling on Paris, and he is gadding about looking for sex. He has been cast out, so to speak. The crowning jewel of salon society, of what was considered civilized and intellectually accomplished, has been let go. Seeing as he is out of date, and not because of his pedigree. The fashionistas turfed him, the fashionistas who set the tone for the life of the mind. In fact, it would seem it is always all about the fashionistas and how it is that what they say goes, no matter if they and their assertions are ridiculous. One might have gone to some lengths to avoid the company of this Charlus fellow, and one still might, even as one has sympathy for a creature gotten increasingly pathetic, who has no idea what has come down on his head. And it is not that M. de Charlus is a rebel and so, would act out against his inferiors who consider themselves front rank, but that he cannot help being what he is. Well, he is a homosexual whose attentions may extend to boys, but who, try as he might to disguise it, has also a generous nature, whereas fashionistas are anything but, what with their 24/7 petty scheming and their own predations. And there it is, the history of the world. From the book in question: … …. In short, people in society had become disillusioned about M. de Charlus, not from having penetrated too far, but without having penetrated at all, his rare intellectual merit. … …. Moreover… …. The reason why he [M. de Charlus] was found to be “pre-war”, old-fashioned, was that the people who are least capable of judging the worth of individuals are also the most inclined to adopt fashion as a principle by which to classify them; they have not exhausted, or even grazed the surface of, the talented men of one generation, when suddenly they are obliged to condemn them all en bloc, for here is a new generation with a new label which will be no better understood than its predecessor. … …. Indeed, what to do when we will run out of zeds to qualify as Generation Zers, having stuffed the Xers in the wrong time capsule? Queue up some Qs and dot the I’s? And if the music of the sirens going off in WWI Paris was Wagnerian (“The Ride of the Valkyries” sort of Wagnerian), one wonders if the screen treatment of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and its attack helicopter scene (meant to scare the beJezus out of Vietnam villagers) and orchestrated to the same music, was derived from a reading of Proust? Air-to-ground missiles as the ultimate fashionista pronouncement, segue to the music of The Doors?

And so, jefe and his goon squad down there has us in a tizzy up here, they on about not only Canada, but Greenland and the Panama Canal and else. Whereby speechlessness dredges up a fresh and yet, weather-worn metaphor, one that would have you on a beach, huge tsunami wave on the approach, but that to say anything now is rather pointless. I’ll see you in hell, motherf--ker. Jefe wants society’s approbation, always has. He will settle for hatred as it means he has got mail. M. de Charlus, the “baron” was, for the most part, above that sort of thing. He was the “baron” no matter what. He could be no other sort of actor. We may not like him and what he got up to. We might not like that there was no apology in him for his privileged life gone to ruin, but he was not devoid of what he regarded as ‘principles’. Jefe's mind is single-tracked too, but only when he can manage to hold a single thought in his attention span. For integrity the man has predictability and zero principles, nada, not one iota of the same, save for “never cede an inch to Goody-Two-Shoes”. He is all Negatory City. Jefe, he say: 'I'll squash like a bug any player rash enough to sue me or darken my path with a questioning frown. The only way to keep score, man. Rack up the humiliations. Rack 'em up and the devil take... My enemies love getting it up the you-know-where.' But we know that already. Why waste breath on it, no words more tired than these with which to flick a grotesque off one’s back?

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: ‘I'm struggling with the writing which is currently on the supernatural. It strikes me how tedious accounts of the supernatural can be when set down on the page, one after another, the repetition of the strange note. The supernatural is best rendered in the human voice, with all the pauses in the right places. … …. This morning's news is that Starmer is going to introduce AI in just about every government department which, wait for it, will make life more difficult than ever. Already it is responsible for disaster in various cultural enterprises. Old Macdonald had a farm, AI, AI, O. [Oh and] it might be said [that] Greenlanders are selfish fuckers having all that space to themselves.’ … …. Rest assured it is being said. And Jefe Jr wants to bag some lions there. And I have got a bridge to sell you. And all the world loves a dum-diddy man whistling while he rapes.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you believe in the supernatural: ‘[I’ve been] barred from talking about a couple [of] things ... Trump, Musk, the Republicans, the right-wing media, the godawfulest years of America, its proud new image of violating any nation's sovereignty at any time and at any whim of the Chief D—khead and thereby joining [???] the Russian Republic and the People's Republic of China, God's vicar, the We-Know-F—k Democrats, and and and and. So, sorry, can't comment on your remarks.’ … …. No problem, kind sir. Your drift is received, acknowledged, and scrutinized. No traces of forever chemicals to be had in it, though the fumes might power your escape pod.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Well, I had occasion. Yes, I had occasion to watch The Pope’s Exorcist. Definitely mixed reviews material. I like Russell Crowe, like him in Master and Commander, Gladiator, L.A. Confidential, and a few other flicks, though I’ve lamented his appearances in some godawful bottom tier cinema. But I enjoyed this one, enjoyed his Italian, enjoyed the Vespa, the savoir faire with the whisky flask, and that his worst nightmare would be that France might win the World Cup. And then he goes 15 rounds with Asmodeus the nose-out-of-joint fallen angel. He, Crowe, claims to have been intrigued by the real life man on whom his character is based, one Gabriele Amorth who was, in fact, an exorcist; who wrote books on the subject and the like. And to be told that a person might be possessed by multiple demons – it doesn’t offend my reason, even if the claim can't be strictly true as per the limits of natural laws. God knows I’ve come across deeply troubled, deeply repellent people in my time for which "demons" and "possession" are as good for "dynamics", "pathologies", "syndromes", as any other euphemisms, you fill in the blank. Beyond that… But as you can see, I haven’t much to go on, today. Just riffing here, and it's breezy, partly cloudy – that being the weather on the island, not the state of my mind, not to go all Autumn of the Patriarch on you.’ … …. I know, I know: the mind starts shifting in ways that alarm. One is aging. The news provokes. Literature is a crapshoot. Ah, but you are not yet finished: … …. ‘I can’t believe that, not so long ago, I did my pilgrimage to Key West in a vintage Buick, and now it seems yet again an entirely different country from the one I drove through, yet it’s still the same haunted land, all the old, familiar ghosts swirling about…. Do you buy that? Not to get all Look Homeward, Angel on you.’ … …. No worries. You can even get Proustian, if you like, I shan’t call you to task or brand you as a ninny, your house on fire.

Postscript V: Rutilius: ... .... ’And not to go all Horatian on you, but try a little Who now enjoys you, thinks you gold,/Dreams you will love him, —still, still hold/No hand but his, nor knows/Winds change. Alas! for those/Who trust your sheen. All this by way of Horace’s 5th ode, first book. Now I won’t say Trump, but I see him fixing his hair for something “sleek” and “essenced”, and crikey, that something could be Putin. An age, like any age, of obscene wealth and immense cruelty born of boredom, sadism the national sport of any number of host nations, compared to which American football is a tea social… But perhaps it's worse, worse than any epoch we've known so far. Still, I don’t do ‘harangue, you rang?’ So as to score cheap debating points, you know. Here in eastern Europe, we'll slice your balls off with a rusty tin should you think to come it the prophet with The Economist at your back as you lay on seven loaves of bread and a few fish for a few thousand concert goers...' ... .... ??? Rutlilus, he be cryptic at times, but there is never any mistaking his tone.

January 6, 2025: Where else but here can you find a discussion of Proust and John Fahey’s “Orinda-Moraga” in open D, which it is a pretty piece of “primitive” guitar music? Now, I ask you. And of Biden’s eight billion dollar bequest to the state of Israel, and what is it for? – research and development, magic tricks, how best obliterate 141 square miles of Gazan territory?, well, I am afraid that, in this instance, you will find us at a loss for words. Speechless, if pressed. Nauseous. Another silly ad for better living through chemistry and with side effects too numerous to mention, and I will get back to you on my light-headedness. Is there anything predictive in Proust’s The Past Recaptured (seventh and final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu) for our era, now that Proust has brought his “narrative’ into the opening stages of the first world war? Bombs are apparently falling on Paris. Robert de Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, a pair of homosexuals, are extolling patriotism and despising effeminacy. The young Marcel, and perhaps he is not as young as all that any longer, though he figures he no longer loves Albertine, is still beset by memories of her, and those memories nag. For Pete’s sake, why did she have to fall off a horse and die?

It is not the most interesting people who make great art; it is those people who know how to look and listen. Just thought I would toss that out there. In Proust’s case, he had a knack for gossip which requires a fair bit of listening and perhaps even more looking. His epic is gossip writ large, no matter that epics are at their acme ‘when words cease to matter’. I read that somewhere, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

And I heard from some source or other that history is but an exchange of executive teams at the pyramid’s top. A vampire’s words delivered at an AHA meeting, history, not cardiovascular health, the matter at hand? … …. From The Past Recaptured: … …. But as these epochs will not last forever, it is a mistake for a man to sacrifice his health and his fortune to the elucidation of mysteries which one day will no longer interest him. But just how short is Trump’s attention span? How sharp his maxillaries? 100 Years of Solitude, the TV series, is better than your average bear. Said the Comptroller of the Universe: ‘This “movie” understands death.’ And I went and watched something else, something about the Mexican equivalent of the one per centers frolicking in their gated communities, and I learned that shallow people may generate intense emotions, just as shallow waters can throw up some pretty vicious waves and swamp a person.

And I learned something else as well: I understand not the lives of 89 per cent of the world’s population (as would include the top one per cent and the bottom ten per cent of the absolutely destitute, the rest walking on increasingly thinning ice). I understand not, being quaintly and roughly bohemian, having been that since I left university after a semester or two for the simple reason that I could not stomach the tedious and uninspiring business, and because “symbolic logic” was lost on my brain; I had thought it an aspect of the poetry of Mallarmé or some damn thing. I suspect Lunar was more right than wrong when he said back in the glory days that what separates a writer from non-writers is that the writer is much more conscious of his or her mortality. Could be that it focuses the mind. I do not know if Lunar thinks that boredom has a role to play in the forming of an author, but there are Saharan stretches of history-writing that can wither the head of a chipmunk at 100 paces. I know because I have often enough been so withered.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar on his own recognizance: ‘You have to laugh: a couple of months ago we watched a piece of junk called The Substance starring Demi Moore as this older woman literally confronting her younger self, which might have been a decent enough essay on beauty's transience except it became a tedious (as in an extremely obvious) exercise in schlock horror. Anyway what I am trying to say is that Demi Moore's acting was so atrocious I told Bobbie at the time she would get best actress. Actually the film might have had a good premise but lacked the courage to "go there" which is why it opted for the horror genre. Why am I telling you this? Ah yes, it points to something wholly gone from our popular culture, The Wheel of Fortune. So easy to dismiss as fable, it is psychologically true. Consider Nigel Farage on that Wheel of Fortune, Musk promising him millions and now telling [him] he lacks "the right stuff". Why is everyone complaining about Russian and Chinese political interference when we've got this going on? It ought to be made illegal to interfere in the internal affairs of other [democratic] countries. This was always a given, never actually worded because there was no need to do so. This is the sinister picture ahead of us although Trump and Musk are bound to come to blows.’ … …. And furthermore: ‘We watched, again, La Strada and I am wondering if it might not be my favourite Fellini film. La Dolce Vita is, of course, the "greater" film but in terms of what goes straight to my heart it may have to be the former. And, as with all Fellini's films, there is always something new to discover in them. Most films, I'm sure you will agree, tend to lose something with each viewing. Did you know Anthony Quinn was making two films at the same time? In the mornings it would be La Strada and then in the afternoons he would rush off to the set of Attila the Hun with Sophia Loren. Imagine. The news is too depressing. Anyone ever heard of Gaza? Ukraine?’ … …. Well, now that you mention it. And he who shouts the loudest the longest rates a bye when the next International Court convenes to lay down the law and justice is let loose like some greyhound at a dog track, for all the good it will do for litigants wearing slabs of broken concrete as protective headgear.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, wink if you are nodding at any of this, seeing as Drake has got his scholar’s hat on: … …. ‘[A] casual situating remark is a hallmark of epistolary poems. Horace uses such effects throughout the Epistles to achieve a meandering, digressive, and conversational style. These poems are chatty, ask questions, and make inside or private jokes. Here is the beginning of his letter to Vinius Asina, and I’m definitely quoting: Just as I’ve told you over and over, Vinny,/Deliver these books of mine to Augustus only/If you know for sure that he’s in good health and only/If you know for sure that he’s in a good mood and only/If it comes about that he asks in person to see it.... .... [So] poor Horace [the poet] sounds a bit nervous about it all. I think I would have foregone sending the books to Augustus [the emperor]. What if [Caesar Augustus] rereads one when he's in poor health and a sour mood? Gulp. [Jeepers.] It was Ovid [another poet] who got booted by Augie, right? … …. And stuff like this scares the hell out of me: "Greek and Latin metre", Greek prosody, Latin prosody, Dactylic hexameter, Elegiac couplet, Alcmanian verse, Archilochian, Latin rhythmic hexameter, Iambic trimeter Saturnian (poetry), Metres of Roman comedy, Trochaic septenarius, Hendecasyllable Choliamb, Aeolic verse, Choriamb, Glyconic – (has nothing to do with diabetes), Asclepiad (poetry), Sapphic stanza, Alcaic stanza, Ionic metre, Anacreontics, Galliambic verse, Sotadean metre, Dochmiac, Anaclasis (poetry), Metrical foot. Metron (poetry). Brevis in longo, Anceps Biceps (prosody), Resolution (meter), Brevis brevians, Porson's Law, Arsis and thesis, Catalexis… just saying. A pinch of this and a pinch of that, and either it’s the foundation or it’s the cherry on top of the (layered) cake of western civilization, what think you? I’m all for Mahler’s First and Mendelssohn’s violin concertos, the Duke and Bix Beiderbecke. It pains me that you can’t see any virtues in Led Zeppelin but will defend “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’s” right to exist as a guitar study.’ … ….

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘And I’m just saying that I just read somewhere that “Carter is possibly (as in just barely) the last president to have human qualities worth mourning”, the author of those words a self-declared cynic. Sounds about right to me. Trudeau is reportedly going to resign any minute now, and will he be mourned, seeing as Trump’s spittle may’ve ruined his complexion on his flying Mar-a-Lago visit, and if not his complexion, then his suit, and if not his suit, his dessert? Then again, I’m not political, questions of politics not up my alley. I’m of the ‘they’re all arseholes’ school of thought, don’t encourage them. I was going to catch 100 Years of Solitude myself, seeing as I worshiped the book in my younger years. How does a good man go bad? I leave it as an open question. I once had a session with a shrink. He went into a great spiel about family history and the patterns thereof, and while this was certainly of interest, it did nothing for my anxiety. I dealt with it on my own. I got out of Academe and felt like a human being. I hear Magnolia broke a bunch of bones falling down a hill like a wayward Jack, Jill on his tail in its retirement. Pass on my regards.’ … …. Will do. What I hear is that, bugger retirement, he plans to broker some poems as a modern day Dryden. Well, what the market will not allow, it will reissue as food stamps.

Postscript V: Rutilius: The man is out, but not down, today. Catalexis would be his middle name, and he will see your choliamb and raise you a spondee.

Postscript VI: orinda-moraga