March, 2025

March 31, 2025: I take pleasure in reading Proust. I take pleasure in looking over baseball box scores, it being that time of year, a new season underway. What does that make me, if anything? A closet snob? A boor? Good God, an enthusiast. (Lunar will tell the checkout girl at his local mart, as he bags his beans and Vegemite, that “enthusiasm drives the universe”, especially when the Jerusalem Cross is central to an enthusiast's plumage of tattoos as might get one a cabinet posting, violence a cool thing now.) I was reading along in Proust’s The Past Recaptured. All of a sudden, the young Marcel (at the centre of the writing, some three thousand pages worth of writing), his hapless love affairs behind him, is an old Marcel. He is perhaps unloved. He is possibly underappreciated.

Or else Proust, like an old edifice, has settled more deeply into “Proust”, man who expatiates on capital “A” Art and capital “T” Time. He has not had a day job for a long while, if ever. Which is to say he was most likely resigned to making a fool of himself as a “writer-thinker”, come what may, but then I am only guessing, or I am throwing shade. And just when I thought he was going to sidle back into the plot after many, many pages of writing off the cuff, his gun belt strapped on, the OK Corral in his sights, he embarks on another tangent, one that expresses the shock (without the awe) he feels at seeing people he has not seen in ages. My, how they have aged, and in some cases, not well. (And this can only mean that he himself is a fresh, peachy-keen face no longer, and people will regard him with a decent amount of shock animating their receding eyes, and with something like pity or disdain.)

So, he has rejoined society after a long absence (for reasons of health). But he has lived long enough to see that human things recur no less than the seasons do, in particular the virtues and addictions peculiar to the Guermantes family, aristocrats with a bloodline hearkening back to the “Frankish kings”. They showed up in a big way in the person of Robert de Saint-Loup, Marcel’s old friend who has been dead a long while at this point in the opus. In our day, de Saint-Loup would have gone to West Point, written a novel, fought in Afghanistan and, randy, sampled anything that moved. The echoes are loud in Proust’s ears: the courage, the waywardness, the libidinous, the unflappable social graces, matters of the intellect not entirely out of the picture... Proust will have to resort to la tristesse, to the word “sadness”, to say as simply as he can that what mostly comes of the passage of time is just that – sadness, disappointment in addition to which there is no getting around one’s mortality, try as one might, and one bargains with the devil always.

But then Proust has occasion to speak of the “timeless man” within himself, and that, in a flash – how else say it? – I know exactly what he means by the “timeless man within”, and I also know that, were I asked to explain what such a creature is, I would fail the attempt. Perhaps this “timelessness” is another way of speaking to what was once considered to be the divine spark in us (man, woman, child and the dog), a “spark” we may have mislaid, so many bright, shiny objects telling us we are each “special” instead of small “s” ever so slightly sacred. Bright, shiny objects then part us from our wages and sanity, pony up. Or perhaps not, the divine spark nothing more than an overactive gland, the timeless man that fellow in the old Marlboro ad, or that billionaire there, sucking at the desiccated dugs of Ayn Rand.

And still, and this is very odd, I happened by chance to be watching some docu-drama about the FBI and serial killers when, in the course of an interview two FBI men were conducting with such a killer, and the killer, in great detail, was grinding on about his motives and methods, I heard – in another one of those flashes that are over before the fact of the flash even registers on the brain – I heard Proust and the killer as cousinly voices, and it fatally disturbed any cozy notions I might have with respect to art. The same preoccupation with self-self and what the self-self does, given circumstances… Then I said to myself: ‘If you can possibly help it, don’t go on about writers and the madness they flirted with so as to find sanity, that is to say true ground, that true ground which is the aim of art, because you’ll no doubt trip all over yourself and come off like a Hallmark greeting card. You’ll say “love”, and expect a thousand pimps and dealers and human traffickers to lose their wings in an instant, a Fortune 500 contingent heading off at the pass not the Persians so much as an invading horde as would subjugate whole towns in the eyes of a Deputy Chief of Staff prone to hysterics? Years and years of apparently normal cognitive function, and it all boils down to a single word? Love? Doesn’t processed cheese figure in it somewhere? Put a sock on it, man.’

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘Tomorrow’s itinerary: London Library, and then another freebie at the Romanian Cultural Institute, a play this time, Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. [You know, before Trump gets his sleaze on it.] Just back from seeing Italian Girl #1 which, as always, was lovely. She is heading off to Naples for her new film project. … …. We discussed "the situation", which is whatever situation you like, although she and I agree there will be no jackboots or death camps … …. she calls it a formless Thing with [ ] flex in it and that it might be the Thing we see at the end of La Dolce Vita. … …. Did I mention the universe is about to collapse? Answer this a million years from now, [if you’re still kicking the can down the road]. It is expanding much faster than anyone realised, but does that mean everybody gets stupider by the minute? The thing is: if America takes Greenland (Canada not really being in its sights at all) Putin will feel absolutely justified in taking Ukraine. There lies the dirtiest of all unspoken deals.’ … …. And then, as per mutual friends in Israel: … …. ‘This is all bad news in a way because it would appear the best people are leaving, which I suppose suits Netanyahu just fine.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, angle yourself in a northeasterly direction and carry on for a while, if you are looking for sanctuary in the Scottish Highlands: … …. ‘M is almost certainly right that, under what you correctly perceive as Trump's Naziism, "there won't be jackboots and death camps". There's no need for them. Those who held the promise of vigorously opposing Trumpism are by and large lying down before his intimidation. … …. And the Rs' (Republican’s…???) "woke stuff" was never a real force in American society except for the Rs' invention of it as a powerful one. They convinced a lot of people of that false reality and so its great evil did, in a sense, prevail. Now they'll bray about having quashed a monster that never existed. After all, they're the easiest [those monsters] to defeat. … …. [And yes], exactly. Such is the worry [Germany 1933 getting on for the really dark stuff]. That points on two parallel lines have been traveling along the same trajectory doesn't dictate that they'll continue in parallel fashion, but there's pretty strong empirical evidence that they will. For Trump, whose point is on his head, to suddenly break off would nullify the "reasoning" behind all he's done to date. Of course that assumes that he's employed some level of reasoning all along, which is questionable in itself. But there is an established pattern and it's blinking red. It doesn't take a Cassandra to see that. … …. I did wonder as I read [your poem] if you've ever held, or realized you held, any sort of ideologically identifiable views in the broadest sense of the phrase, what Marx called society's "superstructure," which I've always found helpful in terms of understanding fixed opinions, which, let's face it, are just other words for "ideological" — a sweeping frame in which one sees the world. I fight ideological tendencies because they're confining and I'm intellectually claustrophobic as well, though if needed I'll cop to socialism. But ideologies mustn't always be political. Southern Baptists and hardcore Catholics live by an ideology, as do money-grubbing timeshare salesmen and failed, penniless writers. [Ring any bells, that last demographic?] … …. M may be a bit overconfident about Trump's unHitlerian ways. He's willing to unconstitutionally deport human beings, many of whom might be as innocent as 1930s Jews, to what's known as one of the Western hemisphere's most inhumane prisons, where they're sure to wither and die. That's one short step away from concentration camps for the unwanted masses. Why would he not take that step? He is, after all, a sociopath, and sociopaths never get better.’ … …. Well then: Jeepers, creepers, where’d ya get those eyes?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Hey there, Sibum, Percival and me, we’ve prepared a few quotes for you, all from Graham Greene the novelist, to ingest 3 times a day preferably with food, otherwise strap yourself in. Here goes: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” I bring this up because we both have our doubts, don’t we, eh, about art as therapy. It may be therapy, but art? Or do we lack for a generous disposition on each our parts and are terrible skinflints when it comes to process over result, as when the ends cave to the means every time? And seeing as you’re on about Proust and love: “It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.” Now that’s a Hallmark greeting card, wouldn’t you say? Because: “Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.” I’ve known a few of those. And sometimes, in a demented moment, I’ve heard my own voice in lieu of one of those, and it sounds like it’s hailing a cab, it’s that desperately emphatic. Which is why it’s sometimes good to keep a goat around. Goats bleat contrapuntally. For: “You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” And here’s the kicker “People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations”. Now for the weather report here on the island: sun and cloud with a high of 11.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Is it emotional resonance you’ll be wanting now? You’re getting greedy, sir. How’s this from a lad, and I lay on the Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid: “There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.” Or there are words of his that speak to the fact of Scottish writers, how they’ve, in large part, managed to escape a “regular education”. As for me, give me Hesiod any day. He’s Hobbes without the cute. Life is nasty, brutish, short, in no particular order, to be sure, but sometimes you win a poetry competition. Slovakian news? Standard safety precautions are in order here, if you’re drifting over this way, even with a confirmed case of foot and mouth disease in the boonies, and that the Russians would see us addicted to a kind of Trojan horse, or Russian gas.’ … ….

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘But I always have pancakes with blueberries on Sundays. With real maple syrup, not that ersatz sweetness as rots the soul. Such as inclines me to the notion that America sold out to a thousand false premises, even in the small stuff, like authentic condiments. Velveeta? Are you sure? I look out the window at the freezing rain. Feeling confined. My French horn looks out the window, depressed. It wants, pretty please, some sunshine rum drink with coconut milk. Yes, I am opinionated in a charming sort of way. I started out a MaryJane Girl. That is to say, I liked the guys, still do, enormously, but that I learned the hard way that I prefer to live alone. What’s this Lunar fellow on about? The collapse of human discourse? Oh horror! Shiver me timbers! Two Years Before the Mast Sort of Thing! Which is to say I’m no adventure story, I’m a guide as to how best sail the seas and keep my spirits up and my health. Even so, me and Hephaestus, we used to walk in the park and smoke cigs, and ward off the stares we got with hisses and the sign of the cross, he dragging his lame leg along.’ ... ....

March 24, 2025: A friend writes to me of a mutual friend, how his writings are getting darker and more, how shall it be said, uncivil, and is this helpful at this juncture, so much “darkness” swirling about us like clouds of midges. And they cannot be persuaded just now to disperse – those clouds, and if one would reason with them, one is a message in a bottle talking at oneself. Self-perpetuating echo chamber.

Moreover, yesterday, as I sat in my local with authorial intentions, across the narrow aisle, next table, a large man in a tall red tuque was being interviewed by someone plying him with questions in a strictly monotonic tone. (So as to sound professional? I had images in my head of a suburban newspaper all supermarket flyer.) Turns out the interviewee is a hockey player who, perhaps, played pro, but was concerned with the fact that his nine year old son does not love hockey as he had loved hockey when a kid, and that, in addition to the world going to hell and gone, there was this to contend with: electronic devices, social media in lieu of playing at anything outdoors and yet, hockey is being watered down: too many leagues, too many teams. The best players are not able to play with the best players…. So, which is it? Not enough hockey or too much or both? And can one score hat tricks in the afterworld?

Alright then, a world going bonkers, as per any intellectual of any epoch… How such intellectuals have always loved to sing “it’s all over, baby blue” and then play poker like Doc Holliday, gunslinger and toper – with complete disregard for one’s doom. And sometimes, yes, it is over. Finito. But the Comptroller of the Universe wags a finger: ‘Don’t be saying things like the world used to be a better place. Since when? It’s what it is. It was what it was WayBackWhen when leprechauns ruled one’s backyard and only a love potion #9 was going to get your pimply self any sex and your soul still owed umpteen paternosters, see you around, buddy, in the Afterworld, Neo-Lib Sector.’ She does have a grip on things at times, this Comptroller of the Universe, Milky Way Division. And when I am jocular, am I serious? So one weeps to keep from snarling. Leeloo was fragile perfect being in The Fifth Dimension, not the greatest of flicks. You do see how seriously I take my art?

Proust said that the men and women who cheat on us are our teachers, as true art comes only of suffering. How does one suffer but to have been someone’s dupe, to discover one’s lack of centrality in someone’s affections, to learn that one does not have a backhand worth a damn. One must get one’s PH.D in “Albertine” or in some RatBastard. … …. And even more than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and, so far as literature can, to reality, needs to have seen many churches in order to paint one church and for the portrayal of a single sentiment requires many individuals … …. (From The Past Recaptured, final volume of Proust’s seven volume opus À la recherche du temps perdu.) To be sure, the assertion is arguable. There is the “you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” mode of operations as might pertain to government policy, as might pertain to a prejudice, as might pertain to a general weariness with life, as might pertain to one quick to judgement and so, the podcast is going to conclude, after all, within its allotted time. Sometimes I see Proust as the serving maid with whom, in the course of one’s reading him, one gossips as to what went on at the previous evening’s dinner party…. Really? Shex all around?

Or: … …. A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than a man of genius who interests us. … …. You betchum, Red Ryder… What I did not know as a child when I collected Red Ryder cowboy comics (which included a caricature as was the portrait of Little Beaver) was that Thunder the horse was intended to have some linkage with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that the comic strip was a triumph of marketing, never mind a bunch of top hat literature as swanked its way through all the capitals and waggled fingers, you, too, F Scott and Gertrude Stein. … …. All those men and women who had revealed some truth to me and who were now no more, appeared again before me, and it seemed as though they had lived a life which had profited only myself, as though they had died for me. … …. Gives one pause, does it not, about whether to write or play the horses?

The other morning, a power outage in progress, I was reading Gibbon (Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire man), and it struck me to ask why I was bothering. There he was going on about the make-up of a Roman legion, and I had only to insert Gladiator in the machine and there it would be in the movie’s inaugural scenes complete with the dog. But right, power out, so then the book which requires no plug. That is to say, it wants for no electrical outlet, as one turns its pages manually, and one applies one’s mind by way of squaring up, by gathering one’s feet, eyes on the hoop, wrists cocked, release (good God, yet another sports metaphor!). And for a while, however brief the application of mind, “Dark Enlightenment” is in abeyance, Singaporean feudalism and the thrill of knowing one’s place, accountants counting every head of sheep lest computer programmers make off with the cheese in a fit of corporate raiding. Will we all wear chain mail, my liege? Musk as Polyphemus to a bunch of thieves? As the Holy Ghost to Trump’s deification? As John the Baptist clearing a path for payback? Just asking, throwing it out there…

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar would say and he does say it: … …. ‘Of course the Poles are perverse: they know only two modes of being, saintliness and wickedness. Put them in a middle ground of normality and they are lost.’ … …. He would say: … …. ‘I've said it before: something has gone badly awry in the sphere of human relationships.’ … …. And not one to leave a stone unturned, he would say … …. ‘What is happening in the world? It is more than Trump, more than Putin, more than Netanyahu.’ … …. In a moment of reflection, he might surmise: … …. ‘Any bets the UK is next in line for "punishment" as Starmer is going against Trump's wishes [?]’ … …. And this, an event review thrown in for good measure: … …. ‘Swept away yesterday afternoon, a wholly unexpected delight, a sizable exhibition of the pen and ink drawings of Victor Hugo. They are wonderfully strange without being deliberately so. Hugo thought of them as using up the rest of the ink in his pen after writing. I don't want to suggest they are psychoanalytical either. Maybe the best word to describe them is immediate. I was reminded a little of the immediacy of Goya's work in the same medium. What really took me by surprise (and I presume Hugo was not a trained artist) is how accomplished they are. Also I had no idea that he campaigned vigorously against the death penalty and was particularly taken up with [the] cause of John Brown in the USA. I certainly knew that Hugo is a titanic figure. So you don't believe in fairies. You'd amazed by how many, otherwise sensible, Scots do.’ … …. I stand corrected and am amazed. And the pay-off? … …. ‘I won't upbraid you but the difference between Trump and Hitler is that the former is not pushing the people he doesn't like into gas ovens. If I am wrong about this, then I will solemnly beg forgiveness. But yes, I hear you and what is happening is horrible and, above all, it is humiliating. Those who are humiliated are dangerous, hence Arab terrorism. They've been humiliated for three-quarters of a century and look at the monsters some of them have become. This may well be America's future, the chickens that come home to roost. [By the way] your comments on sacred space are exactly right because it is the axis mundi where meet sacred and profane, Heaven and Earth, and so yes, it is all about orientation and has been since Neolithic times. You get a gold sticker in your notebook.’ … …. I expect I can find one of those (gold sticker) at the nearest Dollar Store.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you encounter a single act of civility, and with respect to his recent travels, an account of which, one day, might rival that of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: … …. ‘My high point was winning $1 from a slot machine in Deadwood; the great moment [coming about] just a few feet away from where Wild Bill done got shot in the back by that dastardly lowlife Jack McCall. I took my huge winnings and split. Speaking of professors, you mentioned again yesterday that few have ever interested you much. I've also known some as real losers. But by and large they're a good bunch. The easiest way to identify the good ones is the process of elimination; avoid those who use "Dr." or add "PhD" after their name. [Piling on], he is flying too close to the sun. He will crash. Burnt tailfeathers and what then for us, Trump on the down low? You say you have no resentment with respect to Academia? It’s just that you were disappointed to discover that, in some instances, you were more learnéd than your betters, but that you’ve always happily been a Socratic know-nothing? May I remind you, man, shit happens.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. “You think I’ve been pulling your leg about Percival. You know, my goat. Well, Percival lives, and he’s a literate goat. He eats everything though wild cherries are a no-no, sunflower seeds acceptable. What does he give me? I read something aloud that I’m working on, and he bleats. Every writer should have a goat that bleats. I envy you your local though. I miss that about Big City life. Sacred space? Hereabouts? I don’t want to jinx things by answering in the positive, or otherwise, tourists will come in their throngs or tree huggers. Seeing as, lately, the pickings have been slim at the Recycling Depot, just one grimy copy of The Comedians which I’ve read a number of times, so there’s no reason for anybody to come. I completed my forays into the book before the cabbages I was growing turned post-modern. Then, because I was feeling out of joint, I went sailing in the South Pacific only to know perpetual seasickness. I was, and am no sailor. Percival says hello. He eats manuscripts. For the extra roughage.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … .… ‘Longinus says greatness is in the writer, not the art. The UV index in these parts (Slovakia) is miniscule just now, though there’s some Stalinesque flatulence in the breezes left over from … Alright, a joke is a joke is a joke until it gets noticed by the Guardian.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Wish I could say that when you come to the end of Proust’s opus, and a great day that’ll be, I’ll be there to tell you ‘been there done that’, but I can’t. Read only a few snatches in a dorm, was bored, give me Greene or Orwell or Rebecca West in a pinch anytime. Besides, seeing as you’d speak of Proust and suffering, I’d love to make some Last of the Born Losers suffer mightily, you bet, ensnaring loverboy with my charms, but I’m too easy going, even soft-hearted, and why should he (or her) cop the Booker because I’d pay him or her any attention? Cupcake, anyone? French horn?’

March 15, 2025: I put Proust to the side for a while, his The Past Recaptured, last volume of the seven volume À recherche du temps perdu. In some neighbourhoods, in its totality, the opus is the greatest work of fiction ever wrought, though strictly speaking, it could be read, and perhaps ought to be read, as a thinly veiled memoir and a tract on various matters of art, philosophy and politics, amateur sexology, plenty of science worked in even so. I have been reading it for the better part of a year. I have been hot and cold on its “prime” passages, sometimes neutral on its vision of love as a thrill until boredom collects on its wager, but I have not regretted the experience. I am sure I cannot add much to what has already been said and written about things Proustian, but at the very least, at this point in time, things Proustian have helped me come to grips with various matters of art, philosophy and politics, amateur sexology, plenty of science worked in even so. Et al. And moving on…

When I left off, Proust – through his proxy the “young” Marcel – was having a crisis of sorts, inasmuch as he would write, it seemingly what he was born to do. And yet, it was to be asked: what was literature but a vanity project? But then, if it is in one to take art seriously, one might broach a prickly-pear question or two: what is there to say for art and the making of it?

Proust suggests (in a rather discursive fashion) that besides being so much SFA, art is the endeavour to recapture lost time, though I suppose diversions from the main “row to hoe” are allowed now and then. (As when we might watch a rom-com or a fantasia for its entertainment or distraction value, art nowhere near the opening or closing credits, let alone the mash scenes…) In any case, the “poet” is basically nothing more than an amanuensis taking notes on the proceedings that amount to the recapture of time. The poet is a kind of “chief of staff” at best, a thousand voices contending for his or her ear. Those who chat up art as “self-expression” – here comes the next parade of uniqueness, genuflect – ought to be arraigned on charges for having turned art into an excuse for thumping one’s chest and spiking footballs and buying Teslas out of pity for slumping sales. And sometimes it does seem like “interiority”, or that mythical realm of self where Proust said one had to hang around for a while in order to hit upon the true relationships between things, linkages as are often obscured by ego, has been reduced to a parking lot by artists trolling for money quotes. … …. An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelope us simultaneously with them…. The art industry… What in effing hell has it ever done for art but make certain artists the flavour of the month for a week or so, all the while they get in the way of their own understanding with respect to what is in a flower pot?

And one might be forgiven for thinking that the chief virtue of the American experience is power. No use going on about all the other virtues as once were associated with “old hickory” Americans, as are now the sticky mess compromising the Golden Rule or the Bill of Rights or the Gettysburg Address, touch at your own peril. If contextualization is what you require for proof of an authenticated thought, here are your piles of banks ads and pharmaceutical ads and Jeep ads (Tesla has got its brand some stigma), a host of other ads all claiming to have had deportment lessons, and they will save the planet in the bargain. But in which it is said ad infinitum: power is our summum bonum. The power to be this, to be that; the power to do this, to do that. Empowerment is the sweetness in a whole lot of sweet and sour. You will not hear: ‘By all means, dream, aspire’ as words spoken by some emcee on a night of prize hand-outs or other distinctions. You will not hear: ‘But empowerment has nothing to do with the creative act. It has nothing to do with accomplishment, though it may help keep a few illusions free of scrutiny or a House of Cards intact.’ You will not hear: ‘The most empowering thing one can have going for oneself is time, time enough in which to fail or, as it happens on occasion, to get something right’. You may hear: ‘But the latest rocket launch into the wine dark sea of space shows up this discussion as irrelevant, and we’re headed for Mars, anyway, not Troy.’ You will not hear me mouthing off like this, as I try my utmost to refrain from bluster. You want a wee bit of swagger? … …. If reality were indeed a sort of waste product of experience, more or less identical for each one of us, since when we speak of bad weather, a war, a taxi rank, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden full of flowers, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were no more than this, no doubt a sort of film of these things would be sufficient, and the “style”, the “literature” that departed from the simple data that they provide would be superfluous and artificial. … …. (The passage immediately above seemed worth the trouble of typing out in full, so I thought to pass this Proustian world-in-a-nutshell along. Though there is something to be said for grocery lists, as when we speak of zucchinis and peppers and two per cent milk, one’s aged brain a sieve.)

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar’s money quote of the millennium, to be followed by suppositions, disquisitions, by avowals born of strawberries and cream, by remarks of a general and benign nature, 1: ‘You and [I]have spent our lives floating on the assumption that we can afford to be poor. It is that which we are being robbed of. … …. 2: Yes, well, Rasputin was a guy's guy. But don’t you know? Men are so yesterday. … …. 3: Z told me something about that recent slaughter of Alawites in Syria, which is not to excuse it, but that prior to the clash between the old Assad guard and the new lot the old guard had ambushed cars on the highway between Damascus and Aleppo and had indiscriminately killed 350 people. And so what happened next was pure revenge. Women and children though, it was horrendous. It is the first indication things are not quite as in control as one might like to think. … …. 4: The other Z told me the Lebanese adore Trump because they look upon him, rather than Israel, as having beaten Hezbollah. The Lebanese want free of those bastards. … …. 5: I am re-reading Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond and it may well stand as the wittiest novel of the century with a lovely sense of faux naivety, resulting in some of the funniest passages on religion in particular and with something to offend everyone of woke sensibilities. She dares to make much of Islam but she also makes fun of the Church of England. … …. 6: It would be almost worth watching America take an economic dive even if it takes the world with it. … …. 7: When let off the leash, America is a cruel society and one that enjoys humiliating the unfortunates of this world.’ … …. I have nothing to add to the above items. And I do not know if the Lunarian pique passes sociological muster. Still, why disturb a master in his stream of consciousness? And why rile up Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho who apparently have been asleep for two thousand years and would like to single out someone for their attentions, just to scrape off the rust and settle into a groove? Springtime for the Sisterhood, a cabinet secretary in their crosshairs? Do executive orders take us out of ourselves and we begin to live a little, though we might well wash up on some distant shore half dead if not all the way dead, reality TV cameras all around us, liberal ratings in denial?

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you have got your sulk on and you want someone to pay, has had nothing to say for himself of late. Other than to say that he is the owner of 265 piles of clothes which he does not get around to wearing, and that he has ordered for himself a reading copy of The Leopard upon my recommendation (see previous post). That Mark Carney (soon-to-be Canadian Prime Minister) may well be a decent guy, but he might have to get in touch with his inner Perseus, wielder of the Medusan Head, for his American counterpart is some kind of kraken thrashing about in the imperial jacuzzi.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Hey, these are my last observations to make on A Reed Shaken by the Wind, Gavin Maxwell the book’s author, which it is an account of his travels amongst the marsh Arabs of the 1950s. Melancholy Alert: they were already on their way out as a culture, as a viable human society. But if their kids’ behaviour de-feathering live birds and feeding them to cute otter cubs is any indication, and despite the fact that American Indians, for example, honoured the buffalo or the bear that they hunted, there doesn’t seem to have been much sentimentality overall amongst “primitive” peoples for animals. The agonies an animal might be subjected to meant nothing to the marsh Arabs whose hospitality Maxwell experienced. The other side of the coin? Well, ask and you shall receive, or that the people who rated the palm for the greatest effusions of good will with regards to animals, especially pets, were the Germans circa the 1930s. I read this somewhere in an age prior to the age of “infotainment”. I needn’t spell out the irony, I trust, of Haustierliebe – loosely translated as love of schnausers. Usually, at this time of year, daffodils on the horizon if not already in the garden, I feel wanderlust. Need to stuff a backpack with socks and toothpaste and a change of undies, and a dog-eared copy of something George Orwell or Graham Greene. This year not so much. I just want to burrow in somewhere until the air assault on my senses has passed over, and I can pop open a can of beer without wondering if I’d be better off boycotting it. Percival (my goat) looks a little worried that he mightn’t be invited to my one-man bunker party. But thank Christ, eh, that I don’t keep chickens or maintain a harem, space at a premium. How are you keeping? Seen any trashy movies lately?’ … …. Oh, all the time. It is my on-going curiosity as to just how low we can sink. Lower than Grown-ups 2. Cowboys and Aliens. Just to name a few and just for starters, and there is far far worse, and fewer and fewer chances for a rewrite of Battlefield Earth.

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Rutilius got drunk last night… …. […] … …. He fell in with three English-speaking Slovaks in the Agat pub who knew the other Anglophones in this part of the Marcomanni territory and we discussed Trump and Putin. My chief interlocutor was a wine merchant dealing in Tokay wines from north-west Hungary. Being Slovak the world situation was judged to be on the verge of ultimate catastrophe. The general consensus was that in four years time there would guerilla warfare all over the Ukraine. Poland would have liberated Belarus were it not the use of tactical nukes by Putin. However, Finland would have retaliated and occupied Saint Petersburg. The US would be useless as Trump would be fighting a series of impeachments after the economic disaster beginning in October 2025 and the Democrat landslide in the midterms. A Russian defector was rumoured to have films of Trump enjoying a watersports spectacle during his visit to Russia. But was run over in a London street and his safe house destroyed in a bomb blast. Elsewhere China would be busy stamping out the last resistance in Taiwan. North Korea's attempt at a nuclear strike on South Korea ended in catastrophe when the missile failed to take off and exploded destroying an immense area. Melania Trump and JD Vance were pictured on a Caribbean holiday together.’ … …. [und so weiter…] Rutilius on a roll. Best keep clear.

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘You know how sentimental the Germans were about their pets. You’ve heard? Well, I’ll refresh your memory. Animals had more rights than the occupants of any concentration camp cum halfway house, and more than most proper bipedal citizens enjoyed. Are we clear on this? Now let me say that the last Russian tsar and tsarina enjoyed the sex they had. (I daren’t say how it’s been for Putin, seeing as I had a Polish grandfather, and Putin might take it the wrong way.) There are hominin bones in Europe over a million years old. Is the Citroen prefigured in a million year old handaxe? I’m firing up the oven for this week’s ration of cupcakes. My old French horn lies abject on the kitchen table next to the peaches. I haven’t indulged it for a week. But as it’s an animate object, it’s quite capable of melancholy. I’d have you over for coffee but then the Fates mightn’t countenance the klatch. You say you’ve been listening to Latin guitar and Corelli? I’ve had Mahler on my bandwidth, and Tommy Dorsey. “Song of Indjah”. Causes cupcakes to rise with elan. Dear old dad always wanted me to read Gibbon. Decline and Fall and all that. I told him to stuff it. It pained him. It now pains me to say it pained him. Maybe I’ll get around to it. The loopy looking broad in the park with a thick book and thick glasses and a snack wrapped in a napkin… The squirrels come around to check “it” out… Gibbon words, make of them what you will: … …. War was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade … …. A kind of elliptical sense in the sense of those words… Just shush me anytime…’ … …. There is no gainsaying the woman. Ever. High maintenance she might be, but she is our high maintenance.

March 9, 2025: Modernity has given us our epoch, our very own Age of the Jackals. And with this assertion, I clumsily paraphrase a TV series.

It is a Sicilian production, this series, a recent one. It is entitled The Leopard. It is based on the book of the same title written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published posthumously in 1958. Lampedusa died, thinking he had produced an unpublishable mess, a dog of a book; that he was an abysmal failure as a writer, just that his novel was one of the greatest of the 20th century, and in my estimation, second only to Proust’s opus À la recherche du temps perdu. As for modernity and jackals, modernity and jackals are nothing new. Ancient Greek times, and Theognis was writing poems with human jackals in mind. If modernity has more than one childhood, I had only one of those, but in the course of it, the most popular opprobrious epithet was “ratfink”. Now seems like a good time for the word’s return.

Modernity. In addition to the steam engine and the telegraph, to “industrialized” war, to the eventual abolition of slavery, it was Garibaldi. It was the unification of Italy. It was progress on various scientific fronts. It was the beginning of the end of the “leopards”, those men and their women with vast landholdings who lived on the backs of peasant labour. It was the rise of the Calogeros in the ensuing vacuum, or those men and their women whose only code of conduct was profit at any price. One particular leopard, the “prince” in the novel, divined what was coming, understood the reasons why. His answer to all the upheaval was a desire to “sleep”, that is, not make things any worse than they had been. Perhaps he was only marginally a better person than Don Calogero and his mercenary daughter Angelica who was to marry the prince’s nephew on whom the prince doted at the expense of his own son. The prince, at least, stopped to smell the roses on occasion, took a telescope to the night skies, and did not stand for gratuitous cruelty. Perhaps he foresaw the Trump to come whose spiritual prototype is the original Calogero, mayor of Donnafugata, senator in the making, skilled at telling lies and subverting the nobility, all the twits. Trump’s whole life seems to have been a vendetta against the equivalent of titled wealth, just that all the gold plumbing in the world has not accorded him any class, not even in the ballroom, let alone the Oval Office….

Move forward some 70 years… …. And here continued to be moments – strange, ludicrous moments – that suggested that Germany was merely the stage set for some grotesque comedy, not a serious country in a serious time. (From In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, Crown Publishing Group, 2011). These words are eminently applicable to a certain nation-state in the year 2025, and through some fluke of time, from our vantage point, one might catch a glimpse of the year 1933, Berlin, people on the cusp of something horrific though the weather was good, lots of shopping to be had on the Kurfürstendamm. The daughter of the American ambassador – Martha Dodd, friend to Thornton Wilder who, besides writing popular fiction, wrote a crackerjack novelistic treatment of Julius Caesar – had not yet been suggested as an offering to Hitler. It was intended that she serve as a sort of blind date whereby, sex working its magic, the man might be rendered a tad less aggressive and hysterical, this lover of Wagner and King Kong. Dinner parties, and Nazi VIPs might “julienne” one another with witticisms though the American ambassador could probably out-droll all comers. And surely, o sancta virginitas simplicitasque is somehow a feature of Oval Office pressers. “Such pious maidenly innocence”. Tweetie Bird feathers all over the place… It might be said that Hitler was not exactly indifferent to Martha Dodd’s charms, but that she might feel she had not much to work with by way of a dance partner.

And they do seem interchangeable – the Hitler-Trump lackeys just prior to some history-bending event as was “The Night of the Long Knives” or “Operation Hummingbird”. Hitler, feeling a threat to his own power, egged on by Göring and Himmler, decided to rub out the Sturmabteilung, a paramilitary force (the infamous “brown shirts”) that Ernst Röhm had been building up over the years and was likely to use as leverage. From that point on, as bad as things were, they were soon to get infinitely worse. Such men – the brown shirts – showed up in a dream had by a citizen. The SA brown shirts entered the house, went straight for the kitchen, opened the oven door, and out spilled every negative thing anyone in the household had ever said about the government. Bring on the Gestapo, the state (secret) police, and it was the Gestapo’s business early on to hire sadists to perform certain unpalatable tasks. The thing is, sadists “attracted sadists”, and it got out of hand – the brutalities to come. Sissboombah.

And some writers elected to stay in the country, maintaining as low a profile as was possible. They might publish the odd tome or two, keeping to inoffensive subject matter, whereas other writers like Thoman Mann did the lickety-split. That is to say, they went to California and went on lecture tours with their “gospel of the Muse”. Mann considered the works of those writers who stayed behind as worthy only of being pulped.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar, with a prospect in his eyes of current reality: … …. ‘Again, I really do believe comparisons with the past don't really capture what is happening now because what is happening now is new in so many different ways. Shall we call it “The Revolution of the Billionaires?”’ … …. Sure, why not call it that? Or rather “The Revolution of the Tech Bros as Bankrolled by Kazillionaires in All Their Coats of Many Colours as Are Making the World in Their Own Image”. That sort of thing. Who are smarter than anyone else, Dance-for-Me Marjorie Taylor Greene included. … …. ‘[But] how much power can he have?’ … …. As much, it seems, as he wants, he being Trump, so I take it, eating away at each our mental spaces, eating our dreams, or so I read on a news site. … …. Moreover, as per Lunar: … …. ‘I find myself in an increasingly difficult situation with respect to friends and the sense there is something bigger going on in the atmosphere. H is the latest. He sent me a poem that thoroughly irked me. He wanted my thoughts on it and those I gave with everything that is in me to give. You will know I have always been truthful, if occasionally unsparing, with your work and what I told H was true. I am not saying I was right but I was true. … …. I lament these matters … …. I think it no coincidence that both human and political discourse should die at the same moment in our history. I've avoided the word but I really do fear that with Trump's "help" we will blunder our way into WAR and Europe will have to handle it on its own ... except it will be some years before we get up to par with respect to the military. Russia is probably deadly serious about foreign peace-keeping troops in Ukraine. And who does Putin hate most in Europe. Yes, you guessed it. And now "there will be hell to pay" in Gaza. Will be? The other thing is that for once the fat cat Arabs have devised a plan for restoring Gaza and it has been rejected by the USA and Israel. We all know what that means. [Movie review alert], last night we watched Anatomy of a Murder with James Stewart, the rather delectable Lee Remick and George C. Scott, soundtrack by Duke Ellington. It ought to have [been] terrific but it fell way short of expectations. I think this may be due to the psychiatric elements that crept in when the battle between good and evil is all that matters in crime movies. It became a damp fizzle, also insufficient wit in the dialogue. … …. I can't stand Justin T., but I was certainly riled on his behalf. I mean the "governor" business was just going too far. What an utter pig. … …. I spoke to J last night who, you will remember, worked for the State Department and had been several times at presidential meetings in the Oval Office which he says are mostly photo opportunities and not where decisions are made. He thinks it was not a set-up which surprises me. The tipping point is when Zelinsky said you will "feel it" and Trump goes mad. As J points out it was a problem of Z. speaking a language not his own and what he really meant is that sooner or later America would feel the consequences of a bad deal over Ukraine. I disagree with J about it not being a set-up and yet he knows more than me about protocol. Are you happy up there, in the 41st state?’ … …. Whoa, wrong number. No, the denizens of a putative 51st state are, in Lunar’s word of choice, “riled” as in “riled up” and ready to hitch a certain entity to a chuckwagon and have him hauled around at the next rodeo. Requiem for a Ratfink, John Huston in the director's chair? But Lunar is not yet finished: … …. ‘Strange to think that under McCarthyism Trump might have been sent to the [gallows]. J sent me something Kissinger allegedly said, that being America's enemy is dangerous but being America's friend is deadly.’ … …. I guess this has amounted to piling on …

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see heads on pikes, has been barnstorming various states sometimes referred to as the ‘northern tier”. He has with him a travelling companion. Perhaps Morocco is next on their agenda, each intending to write a novel of “lost years” or years found, for that matter, years found to have been calamitous, Mr Drake sporting a Borsalino and she something Gatsby style, daiquiries the wasting liquor of choice.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Again, no Proust? Have you given him the heave-ho? Ah, you can’t read as much and as fast as once you could. Well, I’m near the end of A Reed Shaken by the Wind, and I owe you one for calling my attention to it. The 1950s. Iraq’s marshlands. One of the last sightings of an ancient way of life, all the superstitions intact. Is our psychobabble any improvement? My goat and I communicate on some level or other, but don’t expect me to apply New Age notions as to the how and why. We’d both prefer to remain stupid. It’s wet here, nothing strange in the weather. I tried to watch The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann), but I bailed after twenty minutes on the Best Makeup and Hair. I do get that your buddy Lunar does the movie reviews with respect to things cinematic. I won’t obtrude. Though I do recall standing in line for Room at the Top at the Bleecker Street Cinema, Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey starring. I seem to remember it was blustery and cold. Litter afoot. Cigarette butts, candy wrappers, condoms. Heavenly back then for a lad from the Canadian boonies.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘As you norteamericanos say, I’ve got nothing. What’s on my mind? There were Celts in these parts three hundred years before Christ, and such an ancestor may’ve preceded me here. What’s on my mind? The Venus of Moravany. Statuette of an old nude woman. 25,000 years of age and counting. Mammoth tusk ivory. And will my bones carry my imprimatur 25, 000 years hence? Will the shape of my bones be adjudged as human should I show up in a subway 25,000 years into the future? This will bring your post full circle: Himmler, head of the SS, somebody or other’s evil genius. In particular, “Himmler’s Spade”. That he had somewhat to do with Slovakian archaeology as Honorary President of The Ancestral Heritage, or that German origins were to be seen virtually everywhere in Europe. Capiche?’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Nor do I have anything clever to say. I suppose there are a lot of slags in my oven for a certain Head of State. But at the moment, my kitchen is fragranted with the smell of cupcakes. My French horn glints in the light of a winter sun getting on for spring. (Don’t expect Tchaikovsky’s Fifth from me.) As the wind is icy cold out there, I’ve brought myself to heel: not going out for any reason. Could do my taxes. Could weigh my ample self, and if there were any justice, I’d tip the scales in favour of justice, if you cotton to my drift.’

March 3, 2025: I woke up one morning, and the feel of the day to come was all Fat City. Or it was what I remember of the flick. Which John Huston directed. Which featured Jeff Bridges and Stacy Keach. Two knock-about boxers, one up and coming, the other going down... I seem to recall the pair sitting around a lunch counter to exchange their poor boy aspirations. Silence took over their chat. You are born a certain way into a certain set of circumstances. So alright then, the fix in, what is there to say? Now and then you can point out, in the face of a verbal barrage: ‘I don’t play cards, I’m only trying to survive in a sea of existential threats.’ Yes, that is how it is: you are stuck with some “losers on a couple of barstools”, and there is no direction home.

For the next thing I know, the TV on, and here is the Oval Office, one of the more famous or infamous indoor arenas of power in the world, at least for publicity purposes. The Messrs Trump and Vance are upbraiding a bearded Zelensky (looks like some zoned-out Beat poet from ancient days) for his temerity. This particular president is a pilgrim with a vapour trail. He seeks alms and a security guarantee and yet, he refuses to bend a knee, his overlords incensed. Ungracious little beggar, that one. Still, the interloper’s intransigence is understandable, given “the situation”, which is to be caught between a rock and a hard place without a paddle, a prayer, a can of mace. And he might have the urge to look up a history of trophy scalps. Neolithic origins? Have there been refinements to the procedure?

A word occurs to me (only because I came across it recently, to wit: Selbstgleichschaltung. This Teutonic, morpheme-studded vocable connotes that it would behoove one to “self-coordinate” or “get with the program”. (The Nazis had use for such imperatives with respect to the Nazification of the populace.) “Self-censorship” also comes to mind. Writers afraid of offending a fascist regime (or one given to some other “sensibility”) might then see fit to censor themselves in a round of publish or perish or place your head on a chopping block and suck it up, or sign away those mineral rights for nothing. Zelensky the comedian should have bit his tongue, so says the word on the MAGA street, rather than assault the president with an instrument as blunt as a true fact, there being facts, and then there are facts. Zelensky the president should have ritually submitted, so says the Secretary of State because this Secretary of State damn well presented himself for the ordeal a number of times, the word on the street planted there by rattled news outlets and Republicans who would not be caught dead on any “street” unless it were a yellow brick road, unless it led away from a source code of presidential whining and rage.

In the Garden of the Beast is an account of an American ambassador, 1933-1937 the years in question, and Berlin is where most of the action takes place. The social behaviour of Nazis comes under some scrutiny in the book. Let the whisky flow. Let the good times roll. We are in the saddle. My, how we prance about. Sometimes there is more history to be gleaned from this sort of writing than there is from a straight-up “what was said and done” history of great powers in their entanglements. (I have in mind Suetonius, gossip columnist of Roman times, and read him in conjunction with Tacitus, and you will have got yourself a whiff of possible screen treatments that never dreamed that biopics were possible.) What kind of people were spinning their little webs? And when did they know it?

Trump, flirting away with the Belle of the Ball or neo-fascism, is radiant in a florid sort of way. Written all over his tan – power, and the satisfaction that his name is mentioned in the same breath as “rebirth”, as “revolution”, his smugness the same animal as the Nazi smugness once they had turned the tables on the world, and the world was nobody’s oyster but their own… The ambassador’s daughter Martha Dodd (who had it in her head to become a great writer and have a lot of sex), admired them there Nazis, was smitten by their spell. (Still, she did not like Nazi courtiers kissing her hand. Hygiene? Smarm?) She did wind up disillusioned with all the “handsomeness” and the “dash”, so much so she went and did a number as a Soviet spy, and this went on for years. She published three novels, but it could be said she, too, lived a Fat City life. So much for the sex and the thrills and making a difference and having something to say, because, at bottom, the fix is never “not in”, and there is always a Cosmic Joke with which to end any enterprise cinematic or "in actual fact", all the agonies in all the good guys for naught.

And a black comedy (it is not Saharan Mirage by way of colour) about cannibalism strikes me just now as a metaphor for a country gnawing on what is left of itself, though the humour in the show is so gross that one suspects the gnawing to be done has already been done. Santa Clarita Diet. I do not know if Jonathan Swift had anything to do with its conception. I do ask what I fear is a pointed question: ‘Is Drew Barrymore in it for any reason other than to look cute at 50 and flash that jaw, and be a cracker of one-liners, demimonde among deracinated suburbanites?’

Meanwhile, I have seen Elon Musk likened to Cleander, hatchet man for Commodus the Roman emperor, but then Cleander developed a Fat City size fat head, and we are not talking video games. He, how shall we say, overextended himself. Commodus his boss had him killed (as he had had Perennis killed who preceded Cleander in the imperial affections), this Commodus who was more interested in the art of hand-to-hand combat (gladiators, or Trump and golf) than he was in governing a city over-populated with ingrates (Trump and civil servants) and so, shopped the onus of governance out to various marks and suckers moonlighting as sharks.

Nazi code of conduct… it was predicated on the sense that a new world was in effect, the old sins washed away. It was said that Commodus did not begin life as a cruel monster, that he had been a rather nice guy, but things will change. An attempt on his life might have had something to do with the change. Trump, according to various biographies I have seen quoted, was born a snake-in-the-grass, and the attempts on his life have, so far, failed to bring him any humility with respect to the transience of life and its sweetness and horrors. He will say to Death, as he inspects his nails: ‘What’s in it for me?’

Well, the Nazis in 1933 thought they were out of the shadows and back in the sunlight, Germany reborn. Trump dominates in his own version of The Shining, and his Humongous Hatred is not for Zelensky so much as it is for Obama-Biden, a hydra-headed grotesque in Trumpian eyes. He will whip that hatred out for any camera moving or stationary. He may even choke on it. … …. The memory of Commodus was branded with eternal infamy. The names of tyrant, of gladiator, of public enemy, resounded in every corner of the house. They decreed in tumultuous votes, that his honours should be reversed, his titles erased from the public monuments, his statues thrown down, his body dragged with a hook into the striping-room of the gladiators, to satiate the public fury… …. Trump or Biden? Fantasy or historical record? The Mueller Report? Consult your local The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, volume I, and you may find your answer.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar somewhat peeved: … …. ‘I am back to where I was a few years ago, getting up in the morning and wondering what Trump has done except this time round it is triply worse. It is not an obsession I want to have. Otherwise, Arcangelo Corelli, but of course. There is no mystery as to why you like him, the music being both warm and stately, dazzling brilliance.’ … …. That is one way of putting it, to be sure: warm and stately, like grizzly bears lolling about in a meadow. But now for a Lunarian movie review: … …. ‘Yes, Conclave, the ending struck me as "pat" and, uh, aimed at current sensibilities. I thought the acting was brilliant and the tension was, uh, tense. Are we looking to another conclave soon? I think there will be quite a clash between liberal and conservative elements in the Vatican which is why, I suppose, the film is timely but I just wish it hadn't copped out at the end.’ … …. And so, we have controversy arising in sleepy Hammersmith. Moreover: … …. ‘Zelensky asked the most natural question possible of one who was not invited to the table (once again, shades of Yalta) "What kind of deal?" and this has been manufactured as an insult to the Oval Office[?] I hope he does not meet Navalny's fate, but it is beginning to look unavoidable. … …. Does Putin have a video of Russian prostitutes pissing on the bed in which the Obamas slept? I'm still convinced it's true…. …. Vance: my teens were poisoned by the likes of him, high school principals and teachers with dead eyes.’ … …. And to demonstrate that Lunar can lay down a techno-pop beat, rhythm section, hit it: … …. ‘Trump has just given Putin leave to kill Z. and seize Ukraine.’ … …. ‘King Charles da Second is going to offer Trump the Hebrides.’ … ‘Starmer loves Trump. Trump loves Macron. Macron loves Starmer. Putin loves Trump. And King Charles the Second wants Trump at his smorgasbord. What a lovefest.’ … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you spot a security guarantee, but avoid upper-story windows: … …. ‘You're damn right it was an ambush — never seen anything so fucking tacky come out of …’ … …. Mr Drake seems at a loss for words.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘What, no Proust, today. Prousted out? Had enough Time and Memory and Of A Sudden My Life Means Something? As for Argentinian noir chiaroscuro, none of it has anything to do with cable news and their experts. But then, CNN, and you’ll have all the swirling shades of punditry, all the earnest attempts to say something even as nothing is going to be said, for clearly crimes have been committed or are about to be committed, and the smoking gun is as plain to see as the nose on my face, read my lips and then forget you heard it here… I told you my goat grunts at mention of your name, and though he’s never seen you, it’s as if you’re iconic in a pair of goaty eyes. Having thoughts about deracination. Heart of darkness sort of deracination. Here’s a quote from that book you’ve gotten me to read (A Reed Shaken by the Wind by Gavin Maxwell): … …. In a few years’ time, the young tribesman whose urgent silhouette I shall carry in my mind’s eye as a symbol of the marshlands will be driving a lorry if he is lucky, pimping in the back streets of Basra for white employees of a western Petroleum Company if he is not…. …. And, on account of Maxwell’s 1950s prose, I’ll always see that tribesman-boy poised on his hunting canoe the size of a water ski, and he’s holding his fishing spear and is ready to throw it, perfectly balanced, no question of his losing his balance…. Publishers, I could go on and on, as, no doubt, could you. A strange little caste of power mad control freaks.’ … ….

Postscript V: Rutilius, he remarks on his once upon a time visit to “Auerbachs Keller”, Leipzig, Goethe’s “local”. which he used as a setting for Faust’s encounter with Mephistopheles. (The wine, however, did not turn to fire.) The thing is, it is the same restaurant that the Dodds (American ambassadorial family) visited (1933) and paid three marks for the meal. Anything, however, to do with Mephistopheles, and Rutilius’ ears get pointy. … …. ‘Now then, young man! [My] last periplus was to Prague [.]The journey there was in darkness [.] The journey back [was] th[r]ough territory once occupied by the Alemanni and Marcomanni in a compartment shared with an Armenian engineer working in a Czech metal company. He looked like an Armenian, olive features, high cheekbones, black hair and beard and one of the most musical voices [I’ve] ever had the pleasure to converse with. One wonders what Armenian singers are like as a whole. … …. I intended to write reviews of recent poetry that I liked and poems, but managed only a few lines. I also wanted to see the Dylan movie which is still showing in Prague cinemas, but only managed a visit to the Kampa museum where I discovered the work of Frantisek Kupka, an extraordinary painter who moved into an abstraction entirely of his own devising. Back at home now feeling my working life needs ravelling up into some sort of discipline and order.’ … …. And there you have it for things Rutilian, not a word on the current world order.

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Let me say “Dürer”. Let me say there’s an engraving he made. It’s called Knight, Death and the Devil. It can be said to mean that, despite all of life’s nasties, one soldiers on. It could mean other things too. Like there’s this idiot sitting on a horse…. The Gestapo consisted of quite ordinary people. People who bake cupcakes like I do according to quite ordinary recipes. Who blow on a French horn like I do and startle the neighbours. Like I do. But they worked in secret. That’s where the terror came from. It’s not to say that Musk’s hit squad is on the same level as the Gestapo but… But such terror has a political aim whereas my French horn is strictly between me and myself, if with collateral damage. … …. There began to appear before my romantic eyes … a vast and complicated network of espionage terror, sadism, and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape. … …. Lo, there it is – Martha Dodd from that book In the Garden of the Beast you lent me temporarily. To shut me up, no doubt. That blasted horn of mine. Now if I were to do cupcakes without frosting, they’d be called – healthier?’ … ….

Sanctum: Home page, click on “Sanctum” for pieces by Michael Glover, Grant Buday, and Sibum. Exordia and exegesis.