November 2025

November 30-December 2, 2025: Doubtless, there are government quotas for dead Gazans, promotion for some impressive body count, merit badge, citation at the very least, free drinks at the local rave club. Friends who live in the land have told me for years that there is a lot of rave that goes on there and has been going on. Breakfast at Tiffany’s sacramental high fives? Or what was served a la carte in Titus Andronicus, generally speaking, the point of it all become lost?

In the meetings between pop culture and, say, Greek myth, pop culture wins every time. (Check Percy Jackson and The Olympians if you desire a for instance, and you can stomach the puerile badinage.) This says less than a fingernail’s worth of approbation for us humankind. That we are triumphalist window dressing in our being here, each goal or point scored (whatever the game, whatever the adversary rubbed out) an occasion to crow righteously, not because the great moment rates a celebration, but that athletes, as if self-celebratory King Kongs, are perpetually self-affirming. To a man and a woman. Perhaps it has always been this way. Then again, miracle catch, and grins and amazed cries are properly in order. Most likely, three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae emphatically beat their chests before the Persians finally flooded the zone on them. And yet, with us, winning quietly is not winning at all; it makes one a freak who got lucky. When Dionysus the god was an object of fun in the Aristophanes play The Frogs, was this early pop, much less testosterone in overdrive? Let us break for a paragraph and then hazard a guess:

Popular culture is, for the most part, a desirable thing, is it not, and so much high art is stuffy in committee, and Shakespeare took care to throw the cheap seats a bone or two, but that “pop” which reduces humans to Jell-O cubes with arms and legs (a construct as might, in motion, make for hey, man, so cool – awesome configuration) – I am not sure there is much to say for it, but take care not to get splashed as the quivering creature jiggles about. In any case, pop or not, The Frogs is gut-busting funny even in translation, even as it deals with a serious subject: the re-energizing of Greek theatre and Athens by way of a ratings contest of sorts between the tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides (who are in Hades vying with one another), the former old-school, the latter hot new stuff. It is on the cowardly Dionysus garbed as the hero Hercules to judge who, between them, wins the palm and then bring the victor back to life to restore both Athens and the theatre to a state of health. How Athenians were dealing with their Athenian-ness made of Aristophanes a kind of HL Mencken figure: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." It has to be said: it is one thing to re-establish lost equilibrium and another to continue flying off the handle with even more velocity. As we are always on thin ice when we would set the dial to extreme measures, and clowns are calling the balls and strikes.

I was reading along in Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, the chapter dealing with an 18th century version of a savings and loan (or some such) scandal amongst the rich, and as I read, I thought, well, Epstein and his tentacles, all of them greased. And then I thought that every scandal like this has its particulars, but the generalities are always roughly the same, and stem from both greed and need. Some “house” over-extends itself and must make a quick pile to maintain appearances. Otherwise, a pox on their mega-eyesores. As for poets, the poet is basically a secretary who takes from a jumble, or from the debris field that is the life swirling around him or her, and makes some sense of it. For example, Theognis, 6th century B.C. man of verse, aristocrat, probably a pederast… He would have loathed Trump and his minions for their transactional hacking through life without a single principle between them as might bend the arc of justice truthward with a scintilla of grace. Theognis, as if the right man at the right moment, may be quoted thusly: "Surfeit begets insolence, when prosperity comes to a bad man". A remark which might be amended to say: “Surfeit begets insolence in a bad man who can’t get any worse, and then he does.”

Postscript I: On this day in history (1955), don’t know much about biology, but among other things, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white bus rider, and was arrested. Carpenter might agree that the above remark speaks to a whole lot of water as has passed by, as has passed under, the proverbial bridge now picturesque and worthy of a movie shoot. And yet it all seems to be the stuff of another universe, given the nature of the daily orders in force at the present moment.

Postscript II: Lunar compressed: … …. ‘So “they” are surprised to hear Putin say he is not going to play ball? Witkin, the most witless game in town?’ … …. No, il miglior fabbro, not Witkin but Witkoff, that is, if you mean the “negotiator” packing, what, packing a gold fountain pen, pacts in the air, get in queue? Rare earth minerals, whereupon oligarchic tizzy? Men falling out of windows. Women eligible for the same. But yes, he is, no doubt, anticipating his lottery gleanings.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see MAGA cracks become canyons in the cosmic space-time continuum (though what will that get us but a lot of dead canaries?): … …. ‘This sad, unpleasant country needs all the uplift it can get. I do question AI's destruction of the internet. Social media took care of that little job years ago, politics-wise, anyway.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Solzhenitsyn is still on the back burner. It’s to say I still don’t have a back burner to speak of. Still looking for a domicile on this island wherein Percival and I might hang our hats and shelve a few books after our eviction. “Maa,” says the goat, putting a brave face on it. Again, we’ll get back to you when we regain our footing; when the sun shines on our prospects as once it did. I had a novel on the go, as you know, but right now the attempt to put words to a page just strikes me as silly. Novels being pressed like so many license plates, including those personalized. See? Check out the WATTEVR. Why add my skepticism to the heap?’ … …. Look, we are pulling for you, good sir. I know of a shack I could offer you, but then you two would have to come east and put up with ice storms (not the ICE of the catch-and-release kind, that is, so long as release involves summary executions elsewhere, or death by abnegation). As for your novel, you are on your own.

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘[Fellow poet and I are] planning to escape from our wives in [the] spring and take a bucket list journey by train from Presov to Athens. In any case, you want Theognis? You go get him. Check “exile”, “faceless”, “embittered”, “Thebes” as possible locations. This, too, has been a public service announcement. Best.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Cupcakes in the oven, French horn shuddering at the prospect of the chariot race bit (“Parade of the Charioteers” in Ben Hur), that it might have to perform, put out, emote. Could be strenuous. I endeavour to assure it that I’m only in jest. My Polish cousins, some of them at any rate, are up in arms over the proposed Ukraine-Russia peace deal as promulgated by the money changers with all their chip stacks, lucky 7 still a good toss to throw, and, in the way that one thought bails and another thought lies-to, I watched Shakespeare in Love the other night, that frippery, inadvertently squeezed a tear, even as I considered it a betrayal of my just-the-facts-ma’am attitude to life, though I can live with “a thing of beauty is a joy forever” because Keats wasn’t arty-arty codswallop, was he now, if you’re getting my drift?’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘I had something in mind, but it’s slipped my mind. What outrage now? What infamy? What podcast as would fit decadence to cruelty and thereby make angel wings, truth to power, but power’s not buying it? As if the nation-state to the south is going to fly away, straight up into heaven in any case, seeing as neither hell nor purgatory will have anything to do with the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief, sorry, evangelicals, for the inconvenience to your peace and quiet. Sitting in my local, mood parlous. Grilled cheese sandwich. Christmas ornaments putting in an appearance. Folded sheet of paper in my jacket pocket, draft of a poem scratched on it… Haven’t the nerve to peek because it’s probably a dog’s breakfast. This diner, by way of its shape, I liken to a penteconter, crew randomly selected, mission code name: Golden Fleece. Or some other quest object – winning Bingo card. Nobel Peace Prize. Venezuelan Crestliner. I wonder if, in their tank in this place, the goldfish sleep. A poet I know, tongue-in-cheek, has it that dreaming is the whole point of their existence. Perhaps I’ll meditate on a fish eye.’

November 23-24, 2025: Certain principles to which I have adhered over the years have been called into question. You-Know-Who and the cruelties his “watch” has rendered ubiquitous are triggering agents (among others) for a review of pleasure as I have understood it.

So then, the pleasure principle. As has happened before in history, it is yet again a parody of itself, kazillionaires on their yachts boosting their dopamine levels with concoctions strange to me, celebrities slinking about, brains self-cannibalizing… True decadence, as it turns out, is not just silence in the face of fascism, it does, in fact, involve grotesque sexual behaviour. A friend remarked to me that networks maintaining pedophilia and satanism amongst the rich are much more extensive than we might think. Consequently, he now loathes everyone, not just wide eye shut liberals, the new breed of oligarchs included. Oh, and Spengler was spot on. The ship is not only floundering, its prow is under water.

And then, a week ago, I came across a post a poet offered up on a political website. He stated that the death of republics spawns the birth of all sorts of freak show uglies in addition to and in conjunction with the spectacle of idiots wielding enormous power. Whether or not the assertion has historical validity, it does look and feel that way. Rome of the Caesars comes to mind. Germany of the 1930s. The USA of Netflix homiletics. It has been getting so that I have not been able to make a distinction between, say, Lord Byron and Beau Brummell (the fashionistas of their day) and Trump and Epstein and their fratty hijinks. Both buddy-buddy pairings would merrily flout the conventions and take pride in doing so. Mores intended for Average Joe and Average Jane are superfluous to bad, bad boys all smiles, admitting nothing except when there is shock value and smirks to be had. In the instance of T and E, and irrespective of the fact that E is no longer with us (death by murky circumstance), the only laws that have mattered are the laws that govern the physics of the transactional, as in, for example, do unto others before they do unto thee. Another poet told me to snap out of it. I ought to reacquaint myself with Byron’s letters. Whatever I would find in them, and whether Byron buggered boys or was the acme of propriety in all encounterss sexual, I would not be cringing on account of wholesale creeps.

And what put all the above in some kind of relief is a podcast I viewed earlier in the week. In which a woman, being interviewed, commented on what, in high school, we used to call “current events”. It was not what she was saying so much as the ever-lengthening pauses between her sentences that struck me as, how shall I say, compelling. She did not wish to overstate a case, to flail about irresponsibly, to throw gas on a fire. In fact, she did not wish to be talking any of this sh-t, period, end of story, and never has the s-word been uttered as scrupulously as she uttered it, been so scrubbed of its defiling properties. Her eyes asked: “What’s happening that we have to be discussing these horrors over and over endlessly, getting nowhere in a futile attempt to convince ourselves that we’re still sentient and not the walking dead, politically speaking?” I do not know what kind of person this woman is, be she saint or flat out bitch or just a woman trying to do her best with what she has, but her troubled expressions did speak of a kind and patient individual who would not hurt a fly if she could help it – yes, whatever that is worth any longer. I thought of her, oddly enough, as a kind of Sacagawea figure, what she had to say addressed to a crew (the podcast viewers) paddling the Ship of State up some cosmic river deeper into the hinterland, geographical and spiritual unknowns ahead. Best I stop myself here.

So let me just say I have returned to Proust. It is looking like I will actually come to a point rather soon when I can say I have read the whole enchilada that is Á la recherche du temps perdu, all seven volumes in spades, the reading of which has, in itself, been a Lewis and Clark foray into the grim realities of existence concerning the upper crust and its retainers and hangers-on, this on the backs of sentences concluding cinderblock paragraphs, as roll up the human universe into a ball of string, and then what? You give it to the cat. The cat, playing with it, swats it about.

Postscript I: Well, on this day in history, don’t know much about biology, Milton the poet published his treatise on censorship (Areopagatica 1644), and Pascal had his “night of fire” vision (1654), whereupon he gave up science for religion, and Carpenter might have scratched his head, as it would seem the human sphere had done it yet again: one constant in an equation cancels another, “zero sum” achieved, a comedy show synch track, heavy on the bass, kicking in.

Postscript II: Whereas, Lunar on “surprises” is his own constant: … …. ‘No surprise there, Trump throwing Ukraine to the dogs, not an iota of change since the Alaska meeting, and this in a week when he speaks of the murder of Khashoggi as “things happen”. And now ICE is sending Christian converts back to Iran where sentence for apostasy is death. There is no end to the rot.’ … …. Here an interjection, one rude perhaps but meaning well: … …. Rot? Is that all? Rot? In all quarters on all accounts? Lunar unfazed: … …. ‘I suppose, too, it is only a matter of time before Zelensky is felled by a bullet probably from his own side. Again, remember, Zelensky’s question at that hideous meeting in the Oval Office: “What kind of deal?” Exactly. We watched an Australian movie that could so easily have been slush but which in the end was very moving. It goes by the unlikely title of Babyteeth and is bound to show up on one of your movie platforms over there. The most spectacular scene is one in which nothing is said or done.’ … …. Ah, and the camera was panning, I guess, or spooning, or forking over the Ineffable. Lunar giving me the look: … …. ‘[A friend of mine has a Mexican boyfriend who wears] a sombrero (that bit is a lie [???]) and had a thin moustache (true) and is studying Spenser at Oxford (quite impressive). I asked him if he ever goes swimming in the Gulf of America.’… …. There it is: Lunar’s wit once again Johnny-on-the-spot. And lastly: … …. ‘It’s official: it is quite alright to chop a journalist into pieces and send the body parts to his wife or so it would seem after Trump’s lovefest with the Saudi crown prince. What exactly did the latter mean when he said it was a “huge mistake”? That should put “quiet, piggy” on alert. She will be made into sausages. What next? Ah yes, the files. Clinton will have some explaining to do, but … who else? The president of Harvard apparently.’ … …. The inevitable exhaustion sets in after one’s exposure to the inevitable headlines. You take your co-efficient out to lunch. You celebrate his or her birthday with a crepe. From out of nowhere, Walden Pond’s Thoreau pops into your head. This startles you because you have always regarded the man as a wee bit sanctimonious.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see a health care plan looking for an emergency ward, its intestines trailing along behind it. Toot away if you see MAGA breaking up into bits and pieces as might enter the atmosphere, meteors posing a hazard to the populace below; as might burn crop circles in Iowa: … …. ’I rechecked the original. It's in a Callender 1800 campaign pamphlet, "the prattle of a president, the prattle of that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness; without regard to that hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."’ … …. This is Drake responding to my paraphrasing Anthony Scaramucci who either said that Thomas Jefferson had called John Adams a hermaphrodite or it was Adams slinging the dirt, but anyway, and Drake got back to me: … ….’I hope he (Scaramucci) knows Greek playwrights and Shakespeare better than US history. Tom didn't call Johnnie a hermaphrodite. (Tom's hatchet press agent, James Callender, threw that little gem at Johnnie.) I'm guessing Mr Scary brought up the often trotted-out myth to show that American politics was also terrible terrible terrible 200 years ago? It was raunchy but never fascistic, barring [Andrew?] Jackson's dabbling in that genre. [As for that other matter], I recall reading of Byron's childhood; the sexual abuse was horrifying, so at least he had a pretty good excuse for his bizarre personality. I'm unfamiliar with Epstein's, but Trump? He had every advantage and he was pampered, not mistreated. He grew into his sociopathic pathology, it was a choice. [Hencewise] he has no excuse. When he kicks the bucket — soon, I hope — the world's sum total of human decency will double.’ At a juncture like this, one says, “Amen, brother”, and digs into the chili con carne.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Solzhenitsyn is on the back burner. It’s to say I’ve no back burner to speak of: we’ve been evicted, Percival and I, and I’ll get back to you when we’re back on our feet. It happened just like that. Landlord drives up in his truck. Landlord says, “Sorry.” Landlord drives off. Could take my goat to the mainland, Percival up for a little street action, but there’s no way I can afford the mainland, and where would I work? I came here years ago so I wouldn’t come to find myself pratting about the metropolis like an auteur who thinks he has something to say in an interview, as when a thought-bubble explodes in the air, and no one knows whether to pop open an umbrella or duck. Indeed, we’re much put out. I’d taken evasive action. I thought I had character. Now character is biting me on the arse.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘No history lesson, today. No quote of convenience. No Tacitus in a fortune cookie. (Yes, we have Chinese eateries in Presov.) But regarding Trump and his apparent invincibility as well as the condition of his lame duck savoir faire, I can provide this from my own copy of Proust: Thus it is that the pattern of the things of this world changes, that centres of empire, assessments of wealth, letters patent of social prestige, all that seemed to be forever fixed is constantly being refashioned, so that the eyes of a man who has lived can contemplate the most total transformation exactly where change would have seemed to him the most impossible. A little chunky, this quote, as opposed to creamy peanut butter… But I can tell you that my American friend [here] lent me Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems. Some of them are magical. [Moreover], I'm working on variations on a poem by Li Shang-Yin, whom you might know from the Penguin selection Poems of the Late Tang. [Got] drafts of forty-two so far and I'm aiming at fifty, an ambition occasioned by the first line of A.C. Graham's translation "Mere chance that the patterned lute has fifty strings." My poetry ambitions are becoming more dependent on other artists. I still have a desire to write some ekphrastic poems on paintings by Poussin. … …. 17 November was a day of demonstrations against the Fico (s)trump(et) government. I was writing in a cafe and popped out from time to time to see a sizeable crowd gather and babble about the cost of living and democracy. The government probably won't make it to summer. Orban in Hungary is also under threat. I've just finished a journalistic book on how Christianity snuffed out paganism in the Roman empire. The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey. Her prose is not elegant - a "gee whiz this is awful!" style - and therefore undermines her broad-brush depiction of a horde of Calvinist or Tea Party or Islamic fundamentalist precursors smashing idols, burning ninety per cent of classical literature and lynching philosophers such as Hypatia of Alexandria. It seems the hermits of the desert were little better than deranged fanatics who could neither read nor write. They certainly never washed. Saints John Chrysostom and Saint Augustine do not come out of this account well. For balance, I'm re-reading Robin Lane Fox's magisterial Pagans and Christians and from there I'll proceed to Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. A rail service over the north-eastern border from Plavec to Cracow has resumed and so it's now possible to travel by train all the way to Gdansk on the Baltic coast from my little station four hundred yards away. In the other direction it's possible to travel by train to Athens or Istanbul. This has been a public service announcement.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Cupcakes in the oven, French horn on the by and by, meaning he’s taking a siesta. Funny you should mention chili con carne in your response to Drake. It brought about a flashback, me in some Santa Fe restaurant. Texas Red green chilis. And for a few minutes, I reckoned it all the soul of welcoming and friendliness and then, I saw under or behind or in the assorted eyes around me rage and confusion and cold malice. Everybody up against it as is no run of the mill “up against it” and… And I was sick of politics, hadn’t taken a political breath in days, hadn’t talked with any of my Polish cousins for a while, but indeed, what I was seeing were eyes, man, eyes that work as geology works. Because, as you probably know, there are in rocks and soil traces of every cataclysm as has beset this earth. And, as you may have deduced from the previous post, I’ve been on a Spanish kick. What’s meant for the piano or the guitar but not the French horn… Well, I digress, I’m sure.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘In my local. The proprietor just stuck a candle in a heap of pancakes and brought it to a couple’s table, singing Happy Birthday to You-u-u-u-u. Everybody applauded, if applause can come off tongue in cheek. It’s snowing lightly out there. On the flat screen up on the wall, an episode of Meet the Press, Mamdani and Trump the topic, and you know, I don’t care. The meeting between the two has been a source of revelation by all the relevators as can now say that winners appreciate winners, however antithetical the one is to the other, as winners make winners look fabuloso. Could be. I’m not going to argue it. But when was the last time we had a president with the intellect of a Thomas Jefferson, whatever his faults? I ask in light of the fact you brought on the Lewis and Clark expedition like it was worthy of Virgil. I’ve been thinking that early American prose (up to Melville) is its best. I walked away from the William Carlos Williamsy side of poesy, but the British side of things didn’t really pan out for me compositional-wise, either. However, I can see Eliot having a go at L&C with all that “we arrive only to begin again” – whatever it was he wrote as he spiritualized. A painter suggested to me that there is no longer a world which we inhabit, it’s AI as The Truman Show stealing all the thunder to the point of our redundancy, only we won’t be laughing all the way to the bank, if there are banks after it all comes crashing down. Still, some people-like people are very happy with the way things are. They agonize over their choice of wine. They rehash the video game they played the night before. They mull what’s genuine and what’s faux-genuine only to conclude that it’s unseemly to exercise judgement with respect to such matters, the best jogging sneakers being – you supply the logo. Dinner at eight, with games to follow, bring your ceremonial mask.’

November 11-13, 2025: Ceasefire, they call it. What ceasefire, 245 dead to append to the official count of some 69,000, unofficial tabulation thousands more? Doubtless, ordnance has a mind of its own and would seek – well, how does one write it up on a dating site? – would seek tryst-time with a bottom-feeder, ergo Gaza.

Otherwise, Aeschylus wrote 90 plays. Seven of them have survived intact over the course of some two thousand years. Thing is, I would like to know the titles of the other 83 for a head’s up as to their subject matter. What did an Athenian audience lacking trailers, consider diverting? Farces, to be sure, satyr plays heavy on phalluses and risqué language, what we designate as raunch. As for the Jerry Seinfeld Show, its concluding episode (meant to be funny, I suppose), did not come off with much hilarity. Seemed to reverse the tragedy-to-farce formula (as relieves high seriousness with chortles), the finale looping into a trial as Kafka might have spun it – Clotho-like, karma paying back a crew of jokesters for their cruel fun-mongering. You mean the show was Republican?

And there is a suspiciously Republican passage in Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon in which Redmond Barry characterizes philosophers as “poor-spirited cowards” as they take no risks in life. The insinuation is: they spend too much time performing what is called virtue-signalling, Byron and Brummell snickering away. I am having one on you. But perhaps the passage has something to do with something in the current climate, or that, as per Giuliani, you can play but you may not always walk away unscathed. Ah, but there is pardon power, You-Know-Who at the wheel of the magic bus.

Now: aposiopesis. Which it is a pause in conversation, one sometimes born of inanity or of strong emotion. As when, a century ago, one of Proust’s duchesses (a Guermantes) in her dying years is caught out near the end of Proust’s grand fiction. Someone, wishing to score a point at her expense, speaks the word “culture” to the woman, and a doomed bloodline, responding, stutters on purpose: “KKKKulture?” This was to be indicative of the decline of her vaunted wit… Well, all I am saying is that, in this instance, we have a prefiguring of modernity’s modernity, the culture wars, too, wars weary of themselves, and then there is the depreciation of the Kennedy Center. It is as if, after a long hiatus, I have parachuted myself back into Proust, blindfolded to boot, alighted upon the tail end of a supper party, and the truth of it all smacks me where it hurts: beautiful people get all old and some not at all beautifully, and oh, the vanity et cetera. (Not to mention the recent Great Gatsby theme party at Mar-a-Lago that had slipped my mind until just now, perhaps because, you know, it was going to happen (how could it not?) – that party, that giant cocktail glass with the girl plopped inside it – like an olive. See next paragraph.)

Look, we have nothing against the pleasures and high spirits here, so long as they harm no one unduly. Still, it has to be said: when you have tacky eyes all you will ever see is tackiness. All you will ever make of anything is tacky stuff. Tacky palace. Tacky sex. Tacky, tacky, tacky. Tackiness is not only your middle name, it is why everything you touch turns to schijt, Belgian word for you-know-what.

Postscript I: Besides it being Poppy Day (day of the armistice), on this day in 725, Willibald arrived in Jerusalem, English pilgrim, “one of the first known Europeans to visit the Holy Land”. So, it was not Carpenter.

Postscript II: And Lunar says: … …. ‘Well, what a gift the BBC has given Trump and by extension Israel and every other sniping critic of the organisation. What it did was stupid, of course, and it was faked in order to get at a bigger truth, but this could have grave consequences as the right-wing in this country have been after the BBC for a long time. In the history of “own goals” this is pretty spectacular. Farage has been thrown a bone as well. Bad, bad, bad. Never mind that the American people are fed a daily pack of lies every time they turn on the TV, this is inexcusable. Weirder still is the Syrian president at the White House when under his watch things are becoming more and more disastrous by the day, the killings of Alawi and Druzes.’ … …. A moment for some aposiopesis here, and, a pause come to its logical conclusion: … …. ‘It is not all that often I am wholly defeated by modern music, but half of last night’s concert at the Romanian [embassy?] I found impenetrable, or, rather, the pieces just wouldn’t cohere, one I found tolerable, which is to say bordering on forgettable, and a fourth work was good enough to prompt further investigation. It did as the best music from that part of the world does and dug into the soil, drawing out folk influences, with that irresistible streak of Doina, the melancholy that runs so deep it pleases. Galens was right in saying music banishes physical pain and makes one forget politics.’ … …. Must be nice. And with respect to the Ars Nova band out of Italy, the concert in London which Lunar attended with bells on: … …. ‘They were just wonderful, had the audience in their hands from the first few chords and then one of the musicians got this beautiful woman in the audience to dance the tammuriata with him, which, as if you didn’t already know, is an exercise in how to make love without touching and then it culminates in a locking of the legs. You watch something like that, and you think the PC world and its petty concerns can go to hell in a hand basket because this is what it is truly about, the dance between the sexes. All my women friends, I, R, L and, uh, B, went weak at the knees watching Gianluca who I’m absolutely convinced has no idea of the effect he has on women. I have never seen him with one. I think he lives for music. Anyway, it was a joy to see them and oh did I ache for Naples. Repaired to a pub afterwards and sat with a very pleasant older couple from Kentucky. I deliberately refrained from politics and then, suddenly, lo and behold, they were condemning Trump, the criminal activities of ICE… ICE has been rounding up Latinos in his neighbourhood, farm workers, and then, bingo, the farmers, the orchard keepers in particular, are in a panic because they can’t do without them. About Mamdani, is he going to be as “woke” as people say?’ … …. I, for one, have no idea. He seems able to speak directly to point and not weasel. In similar spirit, Lunar has an additional remark: … ‘Bye, bye, Cheney. Remember when he was the most evil witch in the cupboard, who now would be considered only moderately bad?’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see eight Dems disintegrating before your eyes like pillars of salt. The honey trap of a funding bill might rate a blast. One whole aircraft carrier as was ordered to rendezvous in the Caribbean, warrior-ing in the cards? Only if Drake is permitted to write the review: … …. ‘Trump? Dictators' playbook calls for doubling down whenever their power is threatened. [….] Such things come naturally to the s.o.b.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Don’t know if I’ll ever claw my way back to Solzhenitsyn. The book (August, 1914) sits to the side of my desk like a megalith. One wonders how such tonnage was shunted about in an age when there were no flatbeds or railcars or barges or monster cranes or stiff-legged derricks. One says, “Ah, ingenious humanity. Or else, alien intervention.” I’m joshing, of course, and I’ve got nothing against Solzhenitsyn who was a serious man. I’m thinking my own writing has swallowed me whole and I’ve become a know-nothing as a result. I’m asking myself to what extent know-nothingness abets writerly creativity? Or is writerly creatively just another rationale for the verbiage no one will ever read? Alright then, rum mood. I blame you. There I was, a paid-up member in full of a years-long island idyll, blissfully ignoring the cartoons that comprise the Trumpgeist, and you’d have me make sage commentary about it all? You’re a freakin’ sadist. Percival says “Maa.”’

Postscript V: Rutilius:… …. ‘I see that you’re back on the books. You’re reading again after your, what was it, sabbatical? Here’s some T Hodgkin to catch you up: … …. It was notorious that, in his eager quest for money, to gratify the needs of his dependents and to prolong his own tenure of office, Probus had frequently driven rich citizens into crime… … …. (From Italy and Her Invaders Volume I: the Visigothic Invasion, Thomas Hodgkin who lived and died, i.e. 1831-1913.) But the analogy to America as Plan B veers off into the rich becoming the victims of imperial extortion, the prose however, remaining a pleasure to read, if one likes that sort of thing. One, called to have an audience with the emperor, is asked if one has come of one’s own accord. “No, indeed,” says the truthful philosopher, “most reluctantly do I come from my groaning countrymen.” I don’t know how many times I’ve read the equivalent of this dialogue in other histories, other scenarios. America? What’s the Scots equivalent of dunno? Dinnae ken. A Canadian says that political violence in the U.S. may attain the viciousness of Iraq or Syria. Others say no, not sectarian enough. Not enough marmite on the pumpernickel. Well, dinnae ken. Rock on, my man.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘I was trying to piece out by ear a slow passage on my French horn. The passage in question is from a guitar composition (“Asturias” by Albéniz) I’d heard on the radio. Then I remembered: 1, put cupcakes in oven. 2, oil up my winter boots. It was snowing outside. To see how much had fallen, I looked out the window. Saw a neighbour refilling a feeder with seed. The sparrows were already gathering. Someone dragged a shovel along the sidewalk. Had he a grave to dig? Mournful sound. On the day previous, I’d TV-watched a terribly sentimental flick about a “secret garden”, the preserve of a girl and a couple of lads doing whatever children get up to whose energies aren’t hoovered up by electronic devices, and though it wasn’t a badly-made flick, and though it was seriously romanticist, as I watched, I never felt so far away from, wait for it, Trump. (Here I did hesitate to pronounce the T-word as it might’ve grabbed me like Scylla and eaten me whole, and not even the most intrepid of my Polish cousins could’ve saved me from the beast. Get it? That was what I’d never felt so far away from – the ubiquitous T-awfulness.) Alas, the interlude was short-lived. So where did the Hungarians in 1849 make their “last gallant stand” against the Hapsburgs and the Czar? At Komorn. Where else? Rock fortress.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix:… …. ‘Want some kitsch on a scale to dwarf Trump, then you can do no better than watch some of the celebration for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing. Sitting in a café next to blue holiday lights and a jar with a candy-striped straw in it. It signifies? Future archaeologists will make of this? Will make something akin to the fact that our kind didn’t kill off the Neanderthals, but that something did? Kitschy amulets? A Mexican movie I viewed the other day (lots of mud, cacti, old Buicks) showed that what corrupts corrupts forever, and there’s no reversing it. In this way, even a stupid person can become a head of state; you just have to outlive your opponents. Epstein didn’t, even if it now appears that he knew an idiot and a monster when he saw one. It’s snowing. A jogger jogs in this snow, hands held away from his body. Has the look of a basketball player prancing downcourt, having just scored a critical three-pointer. There’ll be no rebellion coming out of him. (Not unless he’s traded to the Wizards in Oz-Land.) I ask the proprietess: “What’s with Tehran being on the verge of uninhabitability?” I don’t know what she thinks I’m asking. But as if I was on about the Smoot-Hawley Act (tariffs) or “Section 33 of the Charter” (parliamentary sovereignty, Canada), she answers wearily: “I don’t know. So much is changing.”’