December 31, 2024: Whenever I feel the need to listen to the speech of angels as they boogie on the head of a pin, I have only to read the latest review of the latest break-through book in philosophic thought. I will be told that it is all a matter of language.

One starts with a premise. Any premise will do. And by way of a perpetual motion machine called Language for Language’s Sake, at an ever accelerating speed, one is directed to the nearest rabbit hole. You are invited to leap. One will disappear without ever once having encountered the world. Sterility or a state of having been inbred in the Womb of Language will bring one to squeeze one’s lips together and cause them to vibrate as per Daffy Duck. One once read Camus and felt the warmth of the sun on the beach. The sensuality that there was in just being alive, forget sex… There was at least that in his philosophizing.

And one learned more about the human condition from reading almost any old smelly book of history. Even so, philosophy, so one is informed, has not been about the ‘human condition’. Or rather, the not-being-about-the-human-condition is, apparently, the human condition, drum roll, please, roll over Beethoven. One imagines pre-history man re-thinking his knapping technique in his attempt to fashion a better spear point or arrowhead or more efficacious surgical forceps. Perhaps he scratches his pate as he accords the matter the full focus of his mind. Perhaps there is something in this of the philosophe, a foreshadowing of the same. Plato has always mattered to me even if he was dead wrong about this or that. Ah then, it has been the idea of Plato all along. Or this: Philosophy has deep, deep roots, as in, I have pain. Make it stop. As in I feel pleasure. This is nice. Or is it?

Ramaswamy and Musk, those two business titans so much in the news of late, are partly right when they say that Americans are too attached to mediocrity to be of any use to the planet. But then there is the matter of their own immense fortunes and the skill sets required to grow them along hothouse lines. In other words, these titans are in the market for something other than a moronic work force; they require mercenaries of a kind.

Excellence, back in the hippy days, was seen as a buzzword giving permission to fascistic enterprises, hence the ‘chilling out’, have a toke, have a beer, and life will take care of life, otherwise &c. Failing that, opioids. Well, yes and no. Perhaps one had in mind the efficiency with which the Nazis made the trains run on time and kept the gas chambers humming. The pursuit of excellence had a meaning for them, to be sure. For myself, speaking in a very general sense, it is for love of the thing – be the “thing” a sport or an art form or a hundred other endeavours – that artists and athletes and even hobbyists and gardeners aspire to excellence and do not crow about their achievements overly much. (Would Achilles have spiked the football, done a touchdown dance? Probably.)

But yes, as if in a self-fulfilling prophesy by which stereotypes come to ring true, I have been in living rooms, the TV switched on. A miracle catch in the end zone occasions a pumping of fists and yet, joy and adulation are purely ironic displays of satisfaction, the stars properly aligned. The spectator is never going to rise more than an inch off the ground, no matter how hard he would jump and uplift his paunch. The inference is: deep down the celebrant resents excellence. For all that, when the two business titans cited above call for excellence, one is justified in asking exactly what it is they are calling for, seeing as, the way I understand it, it is mediocrity on a collective basis that keeps a fascist machine in good running order, no questions asked. A young friend of mine, mired for the moment in Academe, tells me he is editing essays and training “artificial intelligence” to be more “human” in its analysis of [human affairs]. All of it, marking papers, kibitzing with AI – it is making him feel robotic. We really are trading what’s human about us for something else at this particular moment in history. Two simple statements of fact, or that the man is feeling “robotic” and his mention of a trade-off – it is his only way of undercutting the irony that would increase his sense of helplessness which he has under quarantine for now, walled off with signs as would warn of hazardous materials in the vicinity. Which might bring us to, well, see next paragraph:

The too ugly spectacle of the present day and all that… …. For optimism is the philosophy of the past. (From The Sweet Cheat Gone as penned by Proust and translated with some gusto-kept-on-a-leash by Montcrieff.) I confess I was puzzled by the “philosophy of the past” remark. But then, it was followed by this: The events that have occurred being, among all those that were possible, the only ones which we have known, the harm that they have caused seems to us inevitable, and, for the slight amount of good that they could not help bringing with them, it is to them that we give the credit, imagining that without them it would not have occurred. (Would he have had in mind Trump’s rape trial?) A little squirrely but passable, if one is looking to escape the clutches of language for its own sake, if one does not want the taste of irony in one’s mouth as one is shot down for one’s scurvy debating point, though there are worse things in life than scurrilous parlour games, philosophy one of those games. If one will live in the world and love the world even as one hates it at times and would rather be elsewhere, no other conclusions to be drawn at the moment… There it is. I quote myself, as when a brawler like Mailer quoted himself a few times and got away with it. Would that author, some difficult passage in his writing nailed, spike the football? Would he have bought me a beer, the effer?

And this is as good a place as any to say that I have moved on from The Sweet Cheat Gone at long last to The Past Recaptured, the seventh and final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. A thought popped into my head this very morning that sometimes one encounters the best of a novelist in his or her opening salvos, and in the closing out pages. A tone is often set as to how the reader may or may not interpret what is to follow and what has happened… …. All day long, and in that slightly too countrified house… quite a modest beginning to The Past Recaptured. But a major chord struck with hints of a minor mode mixed in… Which is to say, a bit of melancholy, but without the tarting up of it by one “life is cruel” observation or another, for “life is to be lived”, and there it is in a nutshell. That a simple description of the wallpaper of a house as happens to mirror the surrounding countryside, make of that what you will, happens to capture the complex workings of an innocent looking day… Human interiority and nature’s “exteriority”… No, I have not just coined a word. Exteriority is a pre-existing condition associated with architects, as when they would talk about porches and things, things outside the house or office tower...

And then the reappearance of Robert de Saint-Loup, the young Marcel’s “best buddy”, and then the fact that I am having a feeling, as I read the first few pages, that the previous volumes and the worlds within them are now going to come, albeit in its own good time, to some sort of pass, to some sort of “making sense”, though I have not been that often at a loss in the Proustian morass of words. The most basic basics concerning Saint-Loup? He is an army officer. Upper crust family. (The Guermantes, and they do breathe a different sort of oxygen than does your average bear.) He had a mistress. He moved on and married Gilberte. Gilberte is Swann’s daughter with whom the young Marcel had been in love and perhaps still is. Saint-Loup loves Gilberte as well. He cheats on Gilberte with other women. He cheats on Gilberte with men. He is, nonetheless, considered an attractive man, engaging, kind, intelligent, not a monster. Gilberte has her own shady side, with a fortune to back it. Well, I am not going to recapitulate the entire narrative here. Just to say that, had I not taken a look at the title page of The Past Recaptured, I might not have noticed that I would be letting myself in for a different translator’s rendering of the book. I have become used (to the point of complacency) to Montcrieff, to the “Proust-Montcrieff” amalgam. That I might well have not noticed…. So much, this past year, for the attentive reading on my part.

And since Proust is so often including dubious people as members in good standing of his dramatis personae – the self-satisfied aristocrat, the sexual “deviant”, the pretenders to artistic distinction, the mediocrities, the outright twits, the society hostesses with all their designs, I might remark that the twisted among us are most likely to be found with those whose most serious kink is the eternal ka-chinging of the till, all the while devoted to ‘mindfuless’. To mindfulness being, so it would seem, an approach to life whereby one cannot only be better at being “good”, one can be better at being “bad”, and with finesse, with such a greater focus. And so many people want to be bad (and willfully cretinous, and excellently so), people as hail from Small Town, Indiana to people who take such delight in mangling Gaza, soon to be a casino’s parking lot.


Postscript I:
Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar’s excuse this time around? He has been in Wales. Still, it is not blackberry season there. Best then not to ask. Nonetheless: … …. ‘You've heard it here. A pub on the English/Welsh border, a charming place, specialises in local ciders one of which is called Badger's Arse. [ ] It is rather vinegary and not at all sweet, so I ended up drinking Bobbie's as well. Well, Jimmy [Carter]: I think he was probably the most decent president of the postwar years, albeit terribly unlucky ... the economy, the Iran hostage crisis etc. Maybe he did more good out of office than in. Well, Scotland will be in misery with the cancellation of the Hogamanny celebrations. [???] I expressed my doubts about this a couple of weeks back, the series on Netflix (One Hundred Years of Solitude), but it is much better than I expected. There are some astonishing scenes and I have to say the depiction of Aureliano as the good man who becomes evil is a most convincing portrait and to which one may apply any number of revolutionary figures, from Lenin to Che Guevara. Happy New Year and a Badger's Arse.’ … …. (Hogmanay, proper spelling thereof: “A celebration of the New Year in the Scottish manner”) … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champagne-Urbana, whistle as you schlep on by, has gone deep into the belly of the beast. Missouri, then. He survived it. Managed to extricate himself. He has reported that “a cesspool would have been refreshing compared to the crap I listened to driving down.” … …. He thought he had heard everything. So much for the incandescent radio dial. As for philosophy, it has been useless since the early 20th century. [That, quoting Drake]: ‘in the ensuing decades philosophers were able to declare Wittgenstein's Tractatus brilliantly revolutionary and then his posthumous and antithetical Philosophical Investigations [were] equally brilliant and revolutionary. Then Russell and others' linguistics — positively somniferous. Right or wrong, earlier philosophies were at least enthralling to read. Majoring in the discipline today I'd find a rather frightful prospect.’ … …. Indeed, Mr Drake has been busy, though not at being frightful. In some places, there is an old bardic tradition of praise and curse poems as related to warlords and their courts and retainers. Mr Drake has come up with the ‘insult-limerick’ – as relates to incoming presidents. One of which limericks features the word “clucks” which requires a pair of words to rhyme with it in a power-sharing agreement, in the appropriate places then. Three guesses as to what those two words might be. Otherwise he swears by Montaigne, Plato-Socrates, I. Berlin in any order, though he may not go so far as to sport a string tie at the hoedown.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Farewell, Jimmy Carter or good riddance? Which is it? That he did fine deeds or that he was a monster who caved so as to do Wall Street’s bidding, as one of those All-Knowing progressive online sites wrote of him this morning? Well, have been watching Mary, Queen of Scots. (Vanessa as Mary up against Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth I, and Glenda, I think, gets the better lines as befits her ferret-like temper and wit…) The film moves perfunctorily, inexorably, if you will, from scene to scene as, you know, the one queen is going to lose her head to the other queen’s basket. Even so, Mary right at the end figures she has the spiritual edge over her cousin of whom it might be said she is interested in keeping the peace between Protestant and Catholic. That’s her excuse. In any case, the movie has cast no light on my Jimmy Carter dilemma: saint or otherwise? Handy with a power saw or another Wizard of Oz? Neighbours of mine are going to holiday in Thailand. Why? For the quality of the beach sand? I mean, are they remotely interested in the Thai people? You speak of language for language’s sake. You ought to get out more. There is poetry that fits such an all-points bulletin. Sometimes when I myself read Proust there’s a voice in my head that sounds like one of those unseen narrators in a BBC period piece. I try not to let it upset me and throw me off my game. We are, my friend, so far up the ass of the beast that we’ll never again have a vantage point from which to see what’s what with any clarity. My God, I did listen to Christmas music. I did eat some Christmas fudge. Was Trudeau rolled at Mar-a-lago? I am bewildered.’ … ….

Postscript V: Rutilius: I hear he is not to be disturbed. I take it more poems are forthcoming on myriad topics. Otherwise, he is given over to watching tournaments. Golf and tennis. Lacrosse? It might appeal to the contrarian in him, but would it suit the Argyle socks? I hear he is yet another man who detests the word “blog” and Streep in her feel-good, feel-gooder, feel-goodest roles. We ought to apply for a government grant. Or at the very least, start up a social club (Glenda Jackson our pin-up girl). How to sum up Rutilius’ poems in twenty-five words or less? The beauty of a ladybug on a weathered shed. The landscape of a failed (Soviet-imperial) economy, as in scarred. Et cetera.

Felicitations Department: A Badger’s Arse to all youse.

December 24, 2024: What do you say to someone whose daughter, a violinist, is in the Leipzig Philharmonic? ‘Well, you must’ve done something right. Does she tap dance too?’ It is to say my mood is compromised, and through no fault of my own. Have never felt less like venturing either a fact or a lonesome opinion. Am perhaps due for another long break from “blogging”, which it is a word for which I still have no affection. No tacky infinitive in the language leads more quickly to a false sense of entitlement and achievement than “to blog”. My excuse? After a ten year hiatus, I resumed the “posts” on this site because, so I decided (in a heyday year, the year 2023), that I was not so inimical to the sound of my own voice as all that. Indeed, I preferred it to the all-encompassing Trumpianized inanity aways pitched at a dull roar – like one of those forever chemicals that occlude all channels through which sentience seeks to pass. It is a species of hazing. As if to break through the latest new spate of white noise, a friend wrote me, asking, ‘Are you still wrassling with Proust?’

And I suppose I am still doing double knee arm-breakers and brain busters and back body drops with the prose of Proust. Seeing as I do not regard him as the greatest writer ever, and he is certainly far, very far from the worst, I have no ax to grind with respect to the man, and I can just read and let the devil take the hindmost.

And in this spirit, I was reading along in Proust's The Sweet Cheat Gone, and I closed my eyes for a moment to rest them (the font size of the edition miniscule), and without warning, from out of nowhere, as if piggybacking on a rogue cloud, appeared the name Ramon Llull (Raymond Lully when anglicized. More about him in a postscript below.) But it was as if one near monolithic batch of prose deserved another, and of a sudden I was looking at a roiling sea of medieval history and literary derring-do on which my hold has always been shaky, my shoddy scholarship come to spook me. But read about Ramon Llull and you will come upon a mention of something he wrote, or Ars Magna, “The Great Art”, about everything and anything under the sun and then some, as understood back then. And you may even ask, ‘Is there anything noble to be had in it, if ever there has been anything noble anytime, anywhere? Will the life of the mind always be some schlepping R Crumb cartoon farce?’ Upon my word then: ars inveniendi veritatis. The art of finding truth… These locutions, be they rendered in Latin or English or any other tongue, are about to encounter strong head winds just around the corner…. You say you are in the market for a sentence, subject, verb, object included? How about this? Before the Noble Peasant could become a literary trope, he had to be on the verge of extinction. (From Barcelona, by Robert Hughes, 1992.) Words intended for a history of the Catalans (Ozarkans too?), as in some instance of one economic system succeeding another, but words applicable to various peoples around the globe just now, though I have Gaza particularly in mind, and tomorrow we might well be talking about Greenlanders.

And so much for Venice and the young Marcel roaming about the place (as per the last section of The Sweet Cheat Gone). A visit to Venice was to be a highlight of his life. He may or may not say that this or that angle of the sun flattered the stone and the marble and the watery canals of the city and himself, too, in his being there. (If New York City is a temple to capital, so was Venice in its way. It was piratical. It was legitimate, above board Mediterranean trade.) Perhaps Marcel’s Venetian sojourn was spoiled by the realization that he most definitely no longer loved Albertine, even as he had a momentary fancy that she was still alive, therefore still available for sex. Followed by another, perhaps even shabbier realization that he could not stay in Venice alone, and he must go and join his mother bent on departing the city, the train about to roll; hence he, the young Marcel, if a little older and wiser, was something of a spiritual failure. I once spent a lonely, solitary time in Venice and was grateful for it. Sun, sea, stone and Vivaldi (concert in the Chiese della Pietá, the church where Vivaldi lived and for which he composed his music), and whatever misery was besetting me, was flattered by a sense of having been put in a somewhat noble perspective. Thank God for small mercies, I had yet to hear of carnivorous squirrels. (Where else but in California?) And I had yet to learn that chivalry (from the French cheval or horse) had nothing to do with chivalry; it simply meant that a man who could afford steed, stable, and armour was a man who could rule, the peasant no longer the backbone of the army…. Which brings us to: “emphyteusis”. Yes, you said it. That which allows a contract holder the right to enjoy land or a property so long as said land or property is properly cared for… Feudalism, by the way, is a word that might yet again come for us if it hasn't already. ‘Yo, peasant (pissant), generate me some formatting.’ What am I getting at? It is resoundingly true: I am only an economist when my fixed income has to deal with the rising rent every year like clockwork on the calendar….


Postscript I:
Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: ‘Best of the season, you Teutoniste. But I wonder if you have been following the Netflix adaption of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have to say there are some striking things in it. I'm no fan of "magic realism" however and whenever that intrudes it seems to weaken the plot. It has been many years since I read the novel which at the time bowled me over but would it do so now, I wonder. [And] speaking of a waste of good actors - Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren (the sexiest woman this country has ever produced) - I watched a bit of the uncut Caligula. It is an absolute riot though, O'Toole completely over the top. I couldn't stop laughing. I may have to watch it straight through treating it as a thinking man's bonkarama. [Now there’s a word. Does it have curly hair and a rubber nose?] Yes, a bums and tits extravaganza. How did Tinto Brass get some of the best actors to do this? Another evil facing Syria, which could result in the formation of an Arabic mafia, is the drug Captagon which has destroyed countless lives in the Middle East and the manufacture and distribution of which was under the control of the Assad family. And then, because of the starvation wages, the army got involved in its distribution. How is that country ever going to stabilize itself? What with its friendly neighbour to the south. Meanwhile, O Canada. The news we get here is that Trudeau is screwed, much of it down to his own stupidity and arrogance. It's just what Trump wants. It might end up with Trudeau's head on a plate being his inauguration present. Meanwhile Musk, whose knowledge of the UK is just about nil, is obsessed with this country. Farage, a total worm. Punk politics, that's what it boils down to’ [….] … …. And a ho ho ho and a ha ha ha, emphysteusising our merry, merry way somewhere or another via some protectorate or other…

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see a constituency for civil war, and he is on his way to Missouri: … …. ‘This once beautiful country is brimming with tens of thousands of cars on billions of pounds of pavement poured to reduce its beauty so that commerce may thrive. And Trump says he's serious about buying Greenland. I wish his imbecile project well. The voters of the object of his affection elected a parliament of majority members to the left — the LEFT mind you — of a long-standing socialist government.’ … …. And for something else on the radio dial: … …. ‘Dusty (Dostoyevsky) has been dragged out to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A fellow, name of Mikhail Zygar, has said as much. He's a Russian journalist, author and self-exiled Princeton professor; Putin has ordered his arrest in absentia… …. what the Putinists are doing to literature and one of its greatest…’ More dial on the radio: … …. ‘I was curious why violas de gamba players hold the bow differently from cellists. Came up with these explanations, from the Violas de Gamba Society of America.’ … …. We will give it a miss. However, yet more dial as one barrels down the high road on, presumably, U.S 63: … …. ‘U.S. history. It has always been so. Highs and lows, ideals and apostasies. No question we're now at our lowest, excepting that little bump in the road called the Civil War. We'll never again go that low; there's very, very little constituency for it. But along with one damn thing after another there are the highs: J. Adams, the Virginia Dynasty, Lincoln, T.R. (w/ caveats), and the highest of all — Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We'll get there again, and sooner than most people think — I'm thinking within the first year of Trump's utterly catastrophic second term. The worm will turn (on him).’ … …. And one hopes it is a ravenous worm.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: I have a collection of his (Jordi Savall’s) European music from 1550 - 1650 and once in a while I actually play it – with both overhand and underhand techniques as I operate the CD player! As for current events, well, one's insides wither. Even I, with my taste for the comic grotesque, can scarcely bear to look. I try to take some solace in the fact that here in BeeCee we re-elected an NDP government, if only by a hair, but that is small solace indeed. Mostly I cultivate my own garden even if that often feels as though I'm working with thin soil. Age, health, money, publishers. Egad. Wade Davis was here on the island giving a talk last week. I did not go, unwilling to spend $45. But those who did go came away awed, struck dumb, reverent at the immensity of the man's mind. Well, I've been reading his Everest book, Into the Silence, and am impressed by the volume of research and the biographical sketches, though it is flatly tedious when chronicling the various villages and elevations: they reached Dzong Di, 22,000 feet, then they reached Di Dzong, 22,001 feet. One person who went to his talk said there were two main points: more people should drink coca leaf tea, and women should run the world. To which I think, sure, why not, can't be any worse.’ … …. Thatcher? Dance-for-me Marjorie Taylor Greene? And we could go on…

Postscript V: Rutilius: ‘A friend watched Gladiator II so I didn’t have to. I am, of course, indebted.’ … …. Just so you know, that friend was not I. Moreover, a 79 year-old man wrote to say he was done with Happy Happy Holidays, it was back to merry, merry, merry from here on in, old school stuff, you know, so as to indicate the barely suppressed hysteria that has got so many people double-clutching as they attempt to downshift their way out of a skid. Slovakia though, with its traces of Roman outposts, and there, one double-clutches with juniper brandy.

Great Man Never Heard of Department, Echoes of His Thought Which Are Just Discernible in Borges and Joyce Department: It was Ramon Llull who, at some point in the 13th century, hit upon the notion that if you wished to deal with the Arab in some shape or fashion, it might behoove you to learn their language. &c. He recognized that were it not for Arabic scholarship, and though some will say, ‘good riddance’, Plato and Aristotle would have been lost to European frontal lobes. Besides, he desired a meeting of the minds, a bake off, as it were, as to various scientific, literary, theological points of view, let it all hang out. He was a mind-opener, not a shut-the-damn-thing-down kind of guy and then burn it.

James Sutherland-Smith, and you can catch him at: https://www.jamessutherland-smith.co.uk

this being a poem: TAKING THE WATERS

Astoria, Ozón, Mier,
the hotels sing to one another
that things are arranged just so
because things are just so.
They’re staid and neat as maiden aunts
in their best, never ruffled
since the republic gained and lost
its good name. Folk song, lullabies
of friendship, and there are dances
every night from seven
to ten-thirty at which time
the villas of good health
Marianna, Alžbeta, Carola
douse their lights so the prudent sick
who’ve never harmed nor helped a soul
can convalesce from others’ politics.
We drink the waters, we drink the waters;
Hercules, César, Napoleon,
perhaps from Jordan or from Babylon,
perhaps from pure distress though no-one
would come within a mile.
A racket of birdsong at sunrise,
an owl’s uncertain cry at night
hither and thither over
the various unassorted
in their regimes of sleep,
over the ills of the century
for which there is no cure:
yet after a meagre breakfast
someone very sweet will say
that “during socialism”
ten miles north on the border
you could swap a pack of cigarettes
with the Polish border guards
for a punnet of blackcurrants
“Fresh! Fresh! Picked by the guards themselves!”

1991

December 17, 2024: Perhaps the Catalans still worship shit, make monuments out of excrement, as they have done for centuries, as was a way of saying, ‘We give back to the earth what we took from it.’ As was a way of giving the modernist intellectuals of Madrid, overly taken up with their “inner selves”, the finger. God only knows what they made of Proust.

And Proust, in The Sweet Cheat Gone, the finale of it underway, has come out of his watery prose (see the post previous) into the sunlight with his stay in Venice, has given air to his pleasure with it all, the prose taking pains with some minor detail of a mullioned window.

It was in Venice when I said to myself, ‘Stop trying to understand everything at once, just be. Have some cheese. Knock back a glass of prosecco. If the waiter thinks you unworthy, yet another clueless stranieri, foreigner to you, impart to him a heart-felt “up yours.” If he wants to stare down a grizzly in British Columbia, a yet-to-do to strike off his bucket list, you know a guide there you can hook him up with.’ &c. What I did come to understand, due to my sojourns in Italy, and it took a while for the realization to get traction, is that there is no such thing as beauty for beauty’s sake. There is always in human-made beauty some element of pushback, however infinitesimal, against forces that would deny life for life’s sake (if that does not come off too clever an echo).

Recently, in some venue or other, I came across an ex-president, Obama in fact, riffing on James Madison and pluralism. For a span of time as is the blink of an eye, I thought: ‘How quaint’. Then, more rapid eye movement, and I took it back. I have no quarrel with the man. Just that he thought to propose and then defend the proposition that America, from the get-go, has been, had been an America of possibilities. Hard argument to maintain when even the worst of best intentions are being shut down, when the culture is depressively anal, endlessly a sci-fi-horror-fantasia, as is Trump being Caspar to all his ghosts bending their knees, or learning how to samba in the gravitational field of his butt-end flab and so, genuflecting.

I find myself, strictly on a private basis, reviewing flicks for friends. It is a way of avoiding hitting upon words (and the notions they suggest) as might depict what is going on out there, not to mention the asking of wrong questions and the supplying of wrong answers as squat like a head cold in the mind of a bobblehead, You-Know-Who boogying on everyone’s dashboard. The flicks I would review (including made-for-TV lollapaloozas) are all reducible to a single suspicion, or that something robotic or at best humanoid upchucks the story line, and the cash registers go ka-ching like some Pavlovian response. That the strict formalism of a sonnet affords more leeway for the imaginative to do its stuff, and with no thought of profit, as there is not any to glean for a fourteen-liner as rhymes AB AB CD CD EF EF GG, and X marks the spot... Again: sci-fi-horror-fantasia. Then I am catching some cable news, and here it comes: a trailer for a Bob Dylan biopic. It has a pretty boy lead, from the looks of it, and it has the look of a protracted false note from the opening credits to the The End, that’s all folks, and, poor man, even Dylan the bard has been reduced to the thinnest of veneers: an advertisement for ulcerated bowels. To be fair, I have not seen the movie, but why would I want to, given the aforementioned trailer and yet another triumph of the human spirit?

It is a weird sense of time I get from having a go at pre-code films. One minute, I am trying to imagine 250,000 years of hunter-gatherer humankind, 250,000 years of sunrises and sunsets and climate patterns and following after the herds, and the next minute, and it is hard enough getting my head around the fact that a movie made in 1932 is damn near a century old and yet, it feels like it was released only yesterday. In which case, here are Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou. They are having some love play between themselves in a movie with the title Forbidden. They are making with the witty patter, with the wearing of grotesque carnival masks, the melodrama of their love affair a true measure of pathos for those stolen moments. Pre-code then. One will give the Stanwycks and the Menjous the sometimes dated stabs at streetwise dialogue, the snappy back and forth as the sun sinks under the yardarm. There is no great urge to dismiss a hyphenated buzz word on the strength of an exaggerated sense of aesthetic scruple. A guilty pleasure then, pre-code being a code in itself for elapsing time, time that keeps bleeding out, as might require notions of parallel universes, not for the fantastic in it, but so as to get to the core of the very Proustian sense of time pickpocketed and mislaid. Where did it go?

And another thing… ‘Popular culture’ once fed opera stories and tunes. It was cyclical: “high” and “low” feeding each other. ‘Pop culture’ has had its boots on the throats of Dick and Jane for far too long. It is a hog, everything on the menu, and there is no getting away from it, not even on the planet Vega what has Carl Sagan’s thumbprints on a white, sandy beach. And then a podcast sent to me for my listening pleasure, and it would be serious business, purporting to tell a history of the Middle East from the 8th century to present day Gaza and the horrors, the lecture two hours long, but riddled with an ad every minute and a half, YouTube’s contribution to civilization. I have a conspiracy for you: someone wished this podcast to be, in a word, ‘unlistenable’, or ‘unconsumable’, unfit for a semi-educated ear. At this price, to venture a thought however spot on or wrong-headed – it is not worth the nickel and diming of one’s intellect until there is nothing left but the desiccated husk of one’s brain stem. Kind of the way the Trump Show continues to move along its blitzkrieg.


Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar’s question of the hour, the day, the week, the month, the year, of a low and dishonest decade: … …. ‘We watched an excellent documentary by the Taviani Brothers, Caesar Must Die, about hardened criminals in the high security wing of a prison in Rome putting on a performance of Julius Caesar. A couple of the people in it were lifers, others drug dealers etc. but what was so extraordinary was the dedication they put into the performance. One of the "extras" on the DVD had interviews with the prisoners and what really struck me was how articulate they all were, which begs the question: did Shakespeare and the depth of his characterisation make them articulate or were they already so? … …. Well, how about Charleton Heston as Mark Antony, speaking of hardened criminals doing The Bard of Avon? And as for Brit cinema: … … ‘God when I think of the fabulous cinemas we had here in the 70s and 80s, it's enough to make one weep.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you love poetry, sent me a poem, asked for my opinion, and only later revealed that it was his own, his maiden attempt. So then, full disclosure, and a rondeau-like affair that riffs on a line of Auden (or else it was that Drake rubbed a lamp, instructed the emergent AI genie to compose on the spot something Auden-esque):

Auden met in his days
a low and dishonest decade,
and we saw in the clock face
a spin of three score and sixteen
a grim likeness apace.

Yet we in history rhymed
sleepwalked no euphoric dream
as Auden met in his days.

No we in ours fast took on
jinns of negation and despair,
which the elegist fought and now
we must meet the self-same dare
Auden met in his days.

Dryden, in his grave, is thinking about it. Pope in his is saying, ‘Well, think on it already. Haven’t got all day.’ Somewhere Bukowski is putting down his chaser and idly giving out with a gesture.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Poetry Unchained? Yes, you can quote me on that. And then I’ll raise you an Ezra Pound and I’ll impound all the chips. I’m in a snippy mood. The more I’m speechless on account of the news, the whatever’s next sort of news, the more I fill up my journal with observations like “I’m speechless”. Is it worth it anymore (when I get restless) to go into the city (Vancouver) so as to revisit my old Chinese haunts as smelled of bacon and pancake batter and ginger and greens and ancient cigarette smoke? To sit around in them only to hear how So-and-So, who once would’ve talked about how awful Trump is, now follows some ghastly woman online, so that, today, she’s pro-Assad, the White Helmets being the ones who used poison gas i.e. not the regime, etc etc. ?? Here’s our brave new internet making us all Brave New World entities with night-vision goggles. Here’s the disinformation. Here are Syrians running about now lynching everyone in sight. I’m rounding up my goats and locking the door. After taking on board provisions and such. Well, anyone who has managed to write their first ever 13-liner that-is-not-strictly-speaking-a-rondeau must be deemed brave, as with the fool who publishes it. I like that bit about the Catalans. Wasn’t sculpted shit part of their Christmas tableaus ting-a-ling ting-a-ling-jingle-bell-rock?’

And, to close us out:

Postscript V: Rutilius. This man will insist. He says: ‘I'm in Bongusto's sister Cafe Trieste reading Proust. Where our complete dweeb of a hero is getting excited over old ladies and waiters in Balbec. Proust is very funny although he often labours a joke for two or three pages.’… …. Indeed, it is true. He is so funny one finds oneself pink-eyed. But imagine it: Australian flamenco, forget Elton’s signing off tour. Now this is a world that Proust could never have seen coming….


December 12, 2024: I was awakened the other morning by a Randy Newman chorus. This chorus was in my head, in addition to a snippet from Proust. Burn on, big river, burn on… …. The Cuyahoga River goes smokin’ through my dreams… …. The Proust snippet consisted of a single word. “Infusoria” was that word. It was new to me when I came across it in Proust’s The Sweet Cheat Gone, so I consulted the dictionary.

And I found that it is a mantling noun for freshwater micro-organisms, what you may have frolicking in your aquarium, though in the Proust passage it seemed to have acquired a less benign application, as in unisexual fertilization … …. something something something leading to the extinction of the vegetable kingdom. These words followed upon a discussion of “detestable defects” arising from an accumulation of “egoisms”. I know. I had to read the paragraph over a number of times before I felt I had got its drift. No wonder “infusoria” insinuated itself into a quasi-dream of mine. Even now, I am not sure that I have sufficient command of all that Proust would have the word signify… …. So then… …. Burn on, big river, burn on… Why the song was in my head before I had even gotten out of bed, I am unable to say. Just that the tune, over the years, has always put me in mind of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and The Three Penny Opera (1928), a “musical” play that Hitler banned for its being, well, socialist, and how the greed of the one per centers renders the penurious, well, greedy.

And if bodies of water have layers, and I am sure they do (for instance, the epipelagic zone is an ocean’s skin beneath which are other “zone” determined by temperature), I see Proust’s prose as inhabiting the layer just beneath the first, but still close enough to the surface to admit sunlight and bald statements of fact. As when Proust describes the relations between the young Marcel and his “friend” Andrée as having gotten “semi-carnal”. Where I am in The Sweet Cheat Gone (volume six of À la recherche du temps perdu), young Marcel has reached a point in his “sufferings” when his jealousy of Albertine’s extracurricular shenanigans has ratcheted down to a dull roar. It can now be said that he had not loved Albertine as much as all that, though in his grief over Albertine’s death, he could have sworn that it was indeed love of the young woman that had had him by the short hairs for an eternity. One might consider that he did not mourn her long, as would befit the depth of that love. Up periscope, and in the cold light of day, and here is Marcel and Andrée exchanging caresses such as may have been turbo-charged in one party’s nerve-endings by the fact that Andrée had been one of Albertine’s many sex partners.

So then, Proust goes on a tear about the egoism of sex. You say you love someone? Do not flatter yourself; your only true love is your latest version of yourself. Perhaps then the fatigue and distress which I was feeling were due not so much to my having loved in vain what I was already beginning to forget, as my coming to take pleasure in the company of fresh living people, purely social figures, mere friends of the Guermantes, offering no interest in themselves. Shades of the nights of the living dead? There is Proust’s pessimism as to the roots of most human behaviour – the me, me, me of it all, but as for love being purely a mirage designed to make one feel better about one’s ego despite its corrosive effects on everything ego touches, I say, ‘Hang on. It’s not all life in the fast lane and paths of least inconvenience.’ Impertinence on my part or not, I say that love is sometimes that, to be sure, illusory, and all those clichés about what makes the world go round are just that – clichés, but when you have been up close and personal with love that gets past the me, me, me … …. here, best I put a sock on it lest I jinx that love for all concerned.

And who is to say that Albertine did not feel something other than lust for the little girls she plundered? And then, moving on, the waters are further muddied or clarified when Proust announces that, because we desire, we lie. We lie so as to protect our pleasures. And if our pleasures should compromise our honour, we lie so as to protect that honour. And yet, young Marcel does come to realize that Albertine may have lied about this and or that simply because she was unmarried and did not look to be married any time soon, her lot in life thereby pretty precarious, she a young woman of scant resources, her reputation on the line. The sunlit waters &c. Society weighted for the accommodation of the male &c… ‘Aw, sod it,’ I have sometimes said to myself over the course of this rereading of Proust, my pessimism not altogether untethered from a capacity for ebullience, ‘Maybe I’ll take up Tristram Shandy, the life and opinions thereof.’


Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar, and because Syria is in the news, overshadowing Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, and in the interest of conversation: … …. ‘It is quite clear that the last thing Israel wants is a democratically-elected "Islamicist" state, even one that is mildly so. Are they actually inviting Islamic State to take over? They have lied about going for chemical sites whereas what they are really doing is neutralising the country and leaving it without protection. And still world leaders are gutless when it came to saying anything that might be construed as being against Israel. Israel knew where it was with Assad which is why they were quite happy to see him remain in place. I'm speechless.’ … …. Or: ‘… …. is Israel bent on destroying a possible democracy in its infancy? Where are the public outcries? I don't believe for a moment that all those bombing sorties are aimed at chemical warfare sites. They are aimed at military jeeps, planes, anything that might be needed for self-defence. Could there be some kind of secret alliance between the Israelis and the Kurds in the east of Syria who are agitating for power and who are themselves supported by America? This could be the beginning of a truly filthy game all in Israel's favour. I heard on a radio an stunning interview with a young Syrian woman, aged 24, who is waiting to see if there are any family members alive in Seydnaya prison: "Now freedom rings like a bell too loud for ears accustomed to silence." And she said this in broken English! Anyway my head is reeling at the news. There is just one rogue state left in the Near Middle East.’ … …. Or: ‘Z____has just left. He is aware of the dangers, of course, the vying for power by certain Islamicist groups, the threat posed by the Kurds but at the same time he is more hopeful than I've ever seen him. Three weeks ago, the people "in the know" had no idea what would happen. What in the hell are the Israelis doing, though, 100 bomb strikes overnight? Are they in their hubris totally insane? Whatever happens the Syrian army must be kept going and not as in Iraq dissolved, which is why that country went to pieces.’ … …. Or: ‘I have just phoned U____ in Damascus, the first time I've dared do so since the beginning of the Syrian war. "We are ecstatic!" he shouted. But he said the Israelis have started bombing warehouses. Can this be true? Otherwise the signs are looking good thus far bar Trump's unbelievably stupid remarks. This is the moment America could make a positive move in the Middle East and the idiot is denying the opportunity. I also spoke to Z____. The members of the regime emptied the bank overnight, millions and millions of dollars and the Kurds are making unwelcome overtures in the east of the country after America, again stupidly, allowed them control over oilfields etc.  Absolutely essential that everybody unites to rebuild the country, also that Assad be tried at the Hague. The prison at Sednaiya where tens of thousands of people have been tortured to death has its own crematorium apparently. All this borders on the unbelievable. Only two weeks ago, it seemed impossible that the regime could fall.’ … …. Well, the words speak for themselves and require no addendums for crowd control and enhanced word count. Here in my local as I read over these words, a man and a woman speak in conspiratorial tones of their regard for one another, young but seasoned professionals whose voices claim that they have command of their destinies. And people wonder why class warfare has made a comeback and why there is a partridge in that there pear tree.

Postscript III: Whereas Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, the distance between it and Damascus roughly 6300 miles as the crow wings it: … …. ‘I'm still guessing Trump will stiff-arm Syria's "govt" to the point it becomes a regional foe, terrorist oriented or linked, and so the US will have another Middle East enemy on its hands.’ Or: … …. ‘Trump will mishandle Syria because of Putin and we'll have a new set of terrorists to deal with. The moron isn't even in the WH yet and he's already screwing the US.’ … …. Or: … …. ‘No sci-fi on [….] tonight but as good, Basil Rathbone (Basil Rathbone!), Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Vincent Price in "A Comedy of Terrors." A rare oldie? (1963) I hadn't seen.’ … …. Uh oh. How did this sneak in here, this appropriation of a deepfake culture held fist-like to an ardent heart? In any case: … …. ‘Speaking of high-minded Americans, did you see what some Missourians are up to? Possibly the legal bounty hunting of "illegals"? And what was that about Lunar and American high-mindedness? Maybe he was speaking of the last century, you know, when we dabbled in helping defeat fascism rather than foster it? Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain despair.) — with no apologies to Walt [Whitman], who undoubtedly would be just as fucking beside himself with despair as I am.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘I was sitting in a Chinese noodle place (Vancouver) a few days ago, and something made me think of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Could be it was the fish tank at which I had been absent-mindedly staring. You know the novel. But in case it’s been a long while, in it, an old fisherman goes out to sea to catch a marlin, the biggest sucker he can hook. But in a not-so-parallel universe there in my bean, an old man (say, Joe Biden) would catch (save) a republic. The sea beast, the huge marlin is caught. Enter the sharks and the long struggle to bring the fish home. All that is brought home is a carcass, the sharks having feasted. The tourists (society) on the beach mock-cheer. Ditto for the republic. Ditto for the mock cheers. The old fisherman at least has his dignity. Biden, however, leaves a legacy of questions, some fair to ask, some not. Among them: “What were you thinking? Did you decide that America should get the government it deserves, having played fast and loose with what you brought to the table? Gaza? Hasn’t that been a hoot? Did you suddenly read up on your Elder Seneca and came away with instructions on how to stoically maintain a stiff upper lip and a stiff middle finger and your integrity, just that Seneca was a major hypocrite, and he was into little boys? Alright. Cheap shot. No aspersions meant.” And, on the ferry home, Sibum, I was leafing through something I bought in MacLeod’s Books, a book on Barcelona. I chanced on a passage which I’ll quote you verbatim, without explanation, as the kicker will bring it all into focus: Corberó swears that he owes his conception of the dignity of his métier as an artist to three gypsy friends back in the early 1960s, old-clothes sellers who went under the nicknames of Puça (Flea), Flanél (Flannel, and Plàstic. They were brilliant salesmen. They sold the worst, the rattiest clothes as though they were the newest English tweeds from Bel on Passeig de Gràcia. They were so good that the artist, amazed, suggested that they go upscale. Why not put some of the take back into buying better merchandise, things that – compared with the coarse rubbish they now sold with such virtuoso effort – would walk out of the cart? Flea, Flannel, and Plastic listened to this suggestion gravely and with scorn. “You may be right about the pesetas,” concluded Flannel dismissively, “But what about art?” And that’s it in a nutshell, tutti, the whole shebang, all the Ezra Pound anyone ever needs to know. I rest my case. I salute those abut to die. It was a rough ferry ride. I’ve been depressed these past weeks with really no understanding that I was. One of those newfangled viruses? Tell your Mr Drake not to bother apologizing to Mr Whitman. The body electric is up on sex charges, and all the deep savvy of a William Blake can’t save us from the next administration. My money is on the Austrian Karl Kraus and how he’d give readings of Shakespeare by candlelight in Vienna as things got more and more vile. Not because Shakespeare was a charm against Hitlerism, but because reciting Shakespeare was like having something like decent bread in the bread box. There. I’ve done my nut. I may go into hibernation. I may get really chatty. You are warned.’

Postscript V: Rutilius, and no, I have not a clue: … …. ‘I was a little unfaithful to Bongusto today having to pick up from the Viola theatre and cafe a Christmas present made by a local ceramicist called Monika Curillova. I was the only customer in a space presided over by a heavily pregnant young woman slightly below street level in Tkacska, an alley, leading off the main street, down to Jarkova where you turn left if it's the evening and you want your shy, but unabashedly heterosexual nephew, to disburden himself of his virginity at "The Gentleman's Secret Club."  Later in the Novum Centrum, Presov's mini-mall I ran into retired Professors Marian and Magda Bily, fellow regulars at Bongusto. Magda I hired just after the revolution when I was dragooned onto selection panels for new lecturers in English. Magda came top of my list and had film star looks. Imagine Catherine Deneuve. Marian was a professor of geography, a handsome convivial fellow.’ … …. Or: … …. ‘I guess cautious celebrations are in order over the fall of Syria's tyrannical dweeb. My brother Piers has any number of Syrian friends from his thirty years in Kuwait who are beside themselves. The western media are sounding warnings about Al Jolani, but if the IRA leadership could change its tactics and attitude to peaceful settlement, I don't see why any other organisation can't change unless an incipient racism is to rear its unpleasant head…. …. which prompted me to write poems at the spa as opposed to reading Proust (I took a copy of the second volume of the Penguin translation with me), sitting in the sauna and then consuming beer, or falling on the chambermaids with a loud cry.’

Book Cited Department, see Postscript IV: Barcelona, Robert Hughes, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York, 1992

December 5, 2024: Most of the time, in the conduct of our lives, we are mistaken. Insufficient data, misread facts and events are the usual reasons why we find ourselves out on a limb whistling sad ballads, full-blown dirges, even self-deprecating jingles. Prejudice, hatred, fear, in short, hardened minds – all that brings up the rear as we kick the can down the road because we must. So Proust in the latest pages I have read in The Sweet Cheat Gone seems to have it. There is no help for our abysmal ignorance. Forget ‘artificial intelligence’ as the latest in spear point technology. It might be nature as brings itself to bear on human nature for good or ill, but it is nature at its most abstract. And yet people prevail. Societies prevail – until they do anything but prevail. The vast human comedy.

So that, the other night, a friend rang up late. He had a need to talk. In the ensuing talk we found we could not complete our sentences. We both of us were wary of overstating cases, catastrophe looming on every front of the president-elect’s revivalist show to come. Moreover, neither of us, apart from anything we might write, relish making spectacles of our worries. Thereupon, we laughed. Never mind tariffs, collapsing health care systems, detention centres. What a bunch of old nonny-nonny-nonny-Os we were.

Meanwhile, I have been wanting to say something positive about the TV series Outlander, but I am coming up short. I would watch it, seven season’s worth, and I would turn in for the night, flummoxed. I figured that a missing piece of the puzzle were the books on which the series is based. So, at a civilized hour, not exactly at the break of dawn, I trudged over to my local bookshop. I located the items on a shelf. Well, I was not going to buy a book that had the look of a drug store book now, was I? That glossy, over-marketed look. Such a snob, eh?

Even so, I scouted a few pages of one of the tomes on offer. I was prepared to be generous, and if not, I would set up base camp in some open season region of my mind. I decided on this: if one could merge Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe’s debut novel (1929), with Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) and drag it all through a creative-writing workshop process, one might arrive at an epic sweep of Cecil B DeMillean proportions, and a nation will have explained itself to itself at last. Tack on an insane amount of drama, life or death cliffhangers for every week in the lives of a whole lot of characters, do the hokeypokey, shake it all around, and presto! Some dharma achieved, some usable karma, and there is no soul but good Scotch whisky cannot enhance the soulfulness of.

Lovers of the series will cry ‘foul’ at my remarks. Perhaps they well should. As stated above, I wanted the series to succeed, not necessarily as a crowd-pleaser, but as a work of speculative fiction I could take seriously. Who does not like a good yarn? Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are yarns. And who does not like a good love story, especially when the lovers are busting the odds at every turn of the twists and turns of their lives? And then, the attempt to ‘imagine’ colonial America, to treat with Cherokee or Mohawk as something other than cartoon stick figures, to show slavery for what it was – repellent; the lot of women as precarious and yet, the sense of boundless possibility (as would require a lot of people to die for it); the claustrophobic alehouses filled to the gunnels with psychos and the embittered and besotted lamebrains – one wants the imagining to succeed for the sake of ‘truth’; one will overlook the supernatural element directing the plot line, just that, in the end, fantasy gets in the way of a true engagement with the past. The uneven acting, some of which was very good… But if every word in Homer, even the dullest words, are sacred, it is not so with Outlander. I winced when the concept of Ley lines was introduced into the picture with all the New Age insouciance of a sugar high, even as one could point to lines of dialogue proffering a pretty firm grasp of reality, of wisdom with which no one could argue. A confused mélange of high-mindedness, sadism, softcore porn… The American psyche? Another manufactured extravaganza with ratings? There were episodes I liked, characters I cared for, sentiments I could live with, and that is all that can be said in the saying of: ‘Be vewy, vewy quiet; I’m hunting wabbits”.

Perhaps the series spawned a recent dream I had in which, long-haired agitator wearing a ruffled shirt, I was in an alehouse writing out a draft of something like The Rights of Man by candlelight. I was chewing on a quill. You mean we have to go through all that again, as in “back to Square One”? And was it part and parcel of the dream or was it the series talking – words verging on the nature of time as being the nature of God, time what knows all the secrets? And then fast forward (or indeed fast backwards): Prosperity tries the souls of even the wise: how then should men of depraved character make a moderate use of victory? A reference to Trump and his kazillionaire sponsors? The words belong not to colonial or even contemporary America but to late Republican Rome, to Sallust, Roman politician and historian, a pleb, who had in mind Sulla, the man who perpetuated a blood bath in Rome, a general proscription of anyone who was anybody and who had property to confiscate, and so, political difficulties were resolved, business done. The closing of a chapter. And the first Caesars would bring on the next chapters, make them official.

And at times, bringing back Outlander the series here, as I went from episode to episode, I thought I was witnessing the development of a new language such as could deliver ‘truth’ and still turn a hefty profit, hauling water for some NY Times Top Ten list. The Comptroller of the Universe, as she sat with me (out of pity for my addled wits) said: “There’s only one thing to keep in mind with this thing: all that’s happening here is money-making. Why are you even bothering to imbue it with the distinction of ‘Art’? With ‘Serious History’? Are you missing some meds? And if I never hear another Scots fiddle, it can’t be too soon.”

So then, was she unfair to a noble failure, if noble it was, if failed it was; if just another bit of weather in a changing climate enveloping the entire globe? Are my questions in themselves an overstating of cases? Here we are full of Trump and Gaza and its horrors, and a good deal else ad nauseam, and the only antidote seems increasingly to lie in fantasy worlds, not Shakespeare, and it may be a welcome distraction, but it is anything but a cure, if there is any palliative for our condition, as we have all got implants in our brains, so say a few million conspiracy theorists immediately at large. Theatre patrons of the ancient Greek world left the performances of Aeschylus & Co. no doubt entertained, but they also left with a sense of what was at stake, with something by which they could measure their souls against and not drown in vats of Jell-O. Letr us bow our heads and pray.


Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar has a bone to pick: ‘I would correct one thing in what you say about America: it is confused between "highmindedness, sadism and hardcore porn". Sadism is in the whole judicial system in particular the governor of Texas who seems to actually like sending people to their execution no matter how flimsy the evidence. I am besieged with messages from this website called the Innocence Project, who clearly are doing good things although the harder their efforts it seems the less likely they are of success. Also reading about Israeli soldiers who refuse to go back to Gaza after seeing cats eating human flesh. It's dark out there…. …. [Now] I'm glad Carpenter is equipped with the gift of bringing about mechanical contagion, something which I myself like to think I have, as computers have been known to expire in my presence. We are, he and I, of a godly caste. Last night en famille we went to the light show at Kew Gardens some of which was quite magical, one of the displays being two rows of trees changing colours which struck me as unintentionally Dantesque. Were I a child it would trouble me.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, no senate confirmations required: ‘Your professor friend is an ideal friend. I'd love to ask him what he thought was off base about Nazi analogies, other than a 90-year difference, a different continent, different histories, different cultures, und so weiter. Still, some generalities apply. Hitler surrounded himself with mobsterlike characters, most of them not too sharp (excepting Goebbels). He was megalomaniacal. He was sociopathic. He was lousy at management. He was, ahem, a trifle intolerant of dissent? The twosome's personality disorders are strikingly similar, although one could say that of virtually all dictators and the wannabe kind. The U.S. isn't Weimar, sure, on the other hand both are symptomatic of feeble democracies. Even on foreign policy, D Frum argues that Trump isn't isolationist, he's predatory; he wants international involvement, but it must be on his zero-sum terms. Something of a soft Lebensraum, nein? Historical analogies are fraught, yet one can rightly say that Iraq was Vietnam II, in that we again waltzed into foreign territory absent knowledge of its conflicts, people, traditions, culture, hell you name it. Anyway your friend sounds interesting, to put it mildly. Afraid of overstatement? My beloved Hofstadter once noted that some things are so worth stating they're worth overstating… …. I went off on one of my tangents tonight, reading about the physicist Wolgang Pauli… …. thought you might be interested in this: "At the end of 1930, shortly after his postulation of the neutrino and immediately after his divorce and his mother's suicide, Pauli experienced a personal crisis. In January 1932 he consulted psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung, who also lived near Zürich. Jung immediately began interpreting Pauli's deeply archetypal dreams and Pauli became a collaborator of Jung's. He soon began to critique the epistemology of Jung's theory scientifically, and this contributed to a certain clarification of Jung's ideas, especially about synchronicity. A great many of these discussions are documented in the Pauli/Jung letters, today published as Atom and Archetype." The passage, "He soon began to critique the epistemology of Jung's theory scientifically," sounds interesting. I wonder if he got around to Jung's collective consciousness? Am I ringing any of your bells? Synchronicity is not just another word for “meet-cute”, I’ll have you know. For my viewing pleasure ce soir: "The Trollenberg Terror" (U.S. title: "The Crawling Eye"; also "Creatures from Another World"), a 1958 British science fiction horror film. It's just like following the news.’ … …. CNN’s Dana Bash doing the voice-overs?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Hey man, sorry to hear you don’t like the looks of drugstore books. I live for them. Although I also like the colourless cover look of French book publications. A handsome look. But you don’t see many of them at the Recyling Depot here. I happen to be watching a sci-fi horror series. So far, it’s pretty engaging, good on the physics of dread, but I can tell it’s going to come to a fizzle. There’ll come a crunch time for a moral reckoning, and all it’ll be able to offer is romance at the sock hop, and then upchucking in the parking lot. Well, I suppose it’s better than getting all super pious with an attorney-general’s enemies list. Have you had your dump of snow yet? Light rain showers here. The lot of the population on this island are seniors and four times as many deer. How are you at Speedy Gonzales chess? I suck.’

Postscript V: Rutilius has written: It’s the most baroque of times,/It’s the least classical of weathers. I do not believe the man wrote this couplet on the back of a beer coaster in the bar car of the Bratislava-Vienna line. But he may have been tempted to do so. It is hard to get this man’s measure, though this man brings Pope to the Dali-esque…. …. Rutilius in response: ‘But I do write on the back of beer coasters and on the palms of my hands, lest I’m drugged, and I forget what I was on about. I think I’m more of a hardhead than you. I think you are altogether too merciful. Sing “If I Could Turn Back Time” a la Cher at the corner of Mel’nikova and Dorohyozhytska in Kiev, and see where that gets you.’ … …. Alright then.