November 2024

November 29, 2024: At some point in the course of the late Roman Republic, the politics of grievance took over everything at the expense of the people and the state. Am I trying to ram through some parallel between those days and ours? I would not dream of it. Then again, why else would Appian have written: Freedom, democracy, laws, reputation, official position, were no longer of any use to anybody, since even the office of tribune, which had been devised for the restraint of wrong-doing… was guilty of such outrages and suffered such indignities… …. ? And why else would I then chat up the quote (plucked from The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Mike Duncan, Public Affairs 2017) but that to make mention of ‘special counsel’ in the same breath as ‘tribune’; to make mention of mass dismissals from government; to make mention of mass forcible removals of skivvies and menials; to make mention, for the millionth time, of ‘lock her up’; to make mention of ‘I’ll nail your balls to the senate door (no one has said as much but a great many are thinking it); to make mention of the Cord (now there was a car, and yes, it has nothing to do with our line of inquiry here, but then we are not a sub-committee investigating chariot-producing monopolies); to just say ‘president-elect’ and you will have got yourself a collective hissy fit on all parts of a slide rule, I mean political spectrum. And make mention of Thanksgiving Day demented balloons haunting boulevards and avenues all over America; make mention yet again of ‘Spider Man’, and the day-to-day status of your intelligence is your own affair.

Or say 'Topper' as has Cornelius W Drake. He of Champaign-Urbana, turn left at the next insurgency, or right, depending on your point of view, will say, 'But why Topper?' Well, Topper is a 1937 American supernatural comedy film starring Constance Bennett and Cary Grant, and Roland Young too, and an automobile, one specially built for the film, one resembling the Cord, but with fake supercharger pipes. (Manufactured in the days when capitalism was only predatory, not a colossal rat-fuck.) Why Topper? Because Topper, explaining everything as if an oracle, was all Shall We Dance Fred Astaire even while Hitler was having his next Nuremberg rally and saying ‘not if, but when’, that is to say, war, just that the Chinese and Japanese beat him to the punch, convened the hostilities with their dust-up. Or forget about saying 'Topper' as in who cares anyway, and say, 'Who the hell is Appian, the guy you made mention of above?' Answer, 'Greek historian who had Roman citizenship, who may or may not have been reliable, discussed the affairs of the late Republic and on, into early Caesarian times.' Caesarian times. Say ‘expanded, overweening executive’ and win a trip to Dubai. Say 'You’ll always find history a mess when you stumble upon it', and you will not get even as far as Palookaville, but you will have quoted this post’s author.

I had planned to remark on ambition, how perhaps in the absence of it nothing good or bad can happen, but that in a world where nothing else matters but ambition and success, anything good is pre-emptively circumscribed. As when, from Euripides and put on your safety glasses just in case: Why, my son, do you so long for Ambition, that worst of all deities? And the question is capped with the observation that, wherever Ambition has been, ruin is the consequence. We are not necessarily talking deforestation and pileated woodpeckers here, but, if it talks like a duck &c. There had been a price on the head of Gaius Gracchus, a radical reformer of those late Republican times. He, run out of town due to a vote count that did not break his way, was obliged to commit suicide at the hand of his slave. Which brings us to the next plot point as goes to the heart of the nature of sheer opportunism, the larking heart of democracy, again quoting from the Mike Duncan book cited in the opening paragraph: After his body was found, Gaius’ head was duly cut off and secured bv a savvy former supporter. The erstwhile Gracchan carried the head home and “bored a hole in the neck, and drawing out the brain, poured in molten lead in its place.” Then he carefully “stuck the head of Gaius on a spear and brought it to Opimius, and when it was placed in a balance it weighed seventeen pounds and two thirds”. Opimius paid him in full. It is to say there literally was a price on this head. But still, going with the flow, say what? Morning Joe (a Trump basher) goes to Mar-a-Lago to besmirch the ring with a kiss? And what about Lucius Opimius? Most likely, he was not Bruce Wayne with a costume fetish. No, he was a Roman politician, so saith Wikipedia, who held the consulship in 121 BC, in which capacity and year he ordered the execution of 3,000 supporters of popular leader Gaius Gracchus…. Rome, according to one of its friend-enemies Jugurtha (consider Netanyahu in a similar light?), was a city for sale and doomed to speedy destruction if it finds a purchaser…. At this stage of Roman history, violence, extortion, bribes – it was more and more how one did business in and away from the Forum and its money bags.

Now, from Maggie Haberman’s book on Trump: The writer Adam Davidson would later trace Trump’s ambition for raw dominance to the economics of Manhattan real estate, in which wealth comes from grabbing one’s share of scarce land and extracting income from others as its value grows. The “rentier economy”, Davidson explained, enshrined a zero-sum mentality in which the person (or country) with power gets to set the terms of exchange. That, for Trump, is the whole world, in addition to the Milky Way and outliers beyond. It is how the Fig Newton crumbles. How the tea leaves are scattered across magnetic fields. Haberman’s book is entitled: Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. (Mr Drake tells me he will eschew buying it as he follows the news. Assiduously.) In any case, I go and look up “rentier economy”. Lo and behold, it can, in fact, involve renting one’s country out, and there are fees.

And I was going to remark on the pleasure principle and the digressionary, how I believe in the one (although there are limits), and that I am all for the other, except I was reading along in Proust (The Sweet Cheat Gone) and the young Marcel is now speaking of Albertine as if she had been the love of his life even after she was the focus, the fulcrum of his jealousy and his near ruination, but that now he is "human", a half way decent one, at that; and he may congratulate himself on being human, which is to say it is as if he has gone through a great rite of passage, has loved and lost (Albertine left him and then she fell off a horse and died), and on and on in this vein. And then, of a sudden, he picks up a newspaper, reads familiar words, words so familiar he figures someone has plagiarized something he himself has written, and, sacre bleu, mon dieu, that’s it, it’s his own work, why, he's a published author, and, by gum, still he’s human! And there ensues an involved rumination on how the way he reads his own words must willy-nilly be of an entirely different order than how some casual reader views the words as the aforementioned casual reader consumes his or her croissant and bowl of coffee, and so forth and so on, and here the digressionary deserves its bad rap. I also meant to remark that this dig on my part is not meant to detract from Proust’s greatness as a writer though he nowhere says in his seven-volume work À la recherche du temps perdu that coffee first arrived in France when Louis XIV was on the throne, and we do not mean on the euphemism. Unless I am mistaken… So what makes Outlander, the TV series, so popular? The shex? A depiction of colonial America more accurate than that depicted, for a for-instance as would glorify the American past, in the movie Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer, 1956, filmed in Mexico? The old-school honour? The high-mindedness? The cruelties graphically relayed to softened-up retinas? The slick accounting of all the injustices as were the theft of the land and slavery and the usual corruptions, as in tax-gouging (all of which half the country wants swept under the rug, the pretext being "anti-wokeness")? Alright then. The shex. I have no idea of the literary worth of the books on which the series is based, but I have got my fingers crossed.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: ‘I've little to report other than my general disgust for the human race, otherwise I'm laughing, dancing and singing. {I will say] I absolutely [detest] the "new" kind of funeral, with the bloody slide show of a person's life on a TV screen, the awful pop songs, the icky language of whoever is in charge, usually a celebrant. What ought to be intensity and, yes, poetry nowadays amounts to little more than a visit to the local shopping centre. I mean, did we have to listen to two pop songs by Coldplay and [a] ludicrous rendition of "Over the Rainbow" sung to a ukulele for the "committal"? I am going to get religion so I can have a whole Requiem Mass. I am trying to get at something bigger than yesterday's business: it is that as life diminishes in value so too does death. As death diminishes in value so too life. And gone is the solemnity with which one marks a person's departure. It will sound crazy saying this but I used to "like" English funerals, there being something a bit askew about them but reverent at the same time. Now it feels so so so American and plastic. Maybe one reason I'm rambling on like this is that I've been writing about ancient funerary practice.’ … …. Amen, sir. And some demon-slaying sign of the cross….

Postscript III: Conelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana red-circled on an illegal’s radar screen, possible landing site: ‘MASH is an example of [series] fatigue. "BJ" arrived and stayed too long. So many episodes were about his longing for middle-class life in San Fransisco and Alda began inserting ahistorical feminist episodes. I agree with what you see in Trump. Not an outright dictatorship. Political scientists call what is likely to develop "electoral authoritarianism" (the illusion of democracy; rigged elections) and I'd add "state capture" (special interests convert public policy to private wants). But, yeah, incompetence. That what sets Trump apart from electoral authoritarian regimes that last. If he does only half of what he's promised we'll be in such a mess he'll have his diehards but none others. American voters are foolish and ignorant, we just witnessed that. But they're not willing to be slaves to any form of the preceding. What they've brought down on us will be an agonizing lesson, but still a lesson learned. Anyway, that's my take. I bit more optimistic than yours? Or do you see it as game over” … …. As a matter of fact… as in ‘I rest my case’… as in it, the fatal, ubiquitous "it" has been degrading for some time now, though pundits cleverer than I will talk of adaptation, as in "you take what the defense gives you", as in, but this is getting wearisome, vexing, inane.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Topper? Whence Topper? Topping up my Topper, mind the step… I always liked the fat guy who played the hotel detective in one of those Topper flicks, the first one, I think. Comic actor. Conspiracy theorist of his time. Out and out racist. There it is. The best laid plans of mice and men. Endearingly comic. A real life shit.’ … …. And I used to like root beer floats. I did. I doubt I could hack them now. And now for another demon-slaying sign of the cross. And a shout out to Denisovan DNA, the residues of which are in us.

Postscript V: Rutilius insists he is on a train in eastern Europe. Well, I have to believe the man. But if there is such a resource as time travel, he might well be one of them, one given to writing the sort of thing that follows: A mountain lion scales a stack of chairs/to reach a singing bear./It’s not politics, just circus tricks/as the big cat snarls and swipes/at the honey-lover’s archetype,/calculated jiggery-pokery/against history/in favour of mystery. Sybilline, against a Soviet backdrop of rusted smokestacks? Spanish power politics in Tenochtitlan? Ah, Halifax (Nova Scotia): half financial, commercial, industrial, half mystical, excellent shopping – roundabout 1776

November 23, 2024: The word xenoglossy has been around forever, but I first encountered it only yesterday. Xenoglossy: the ability to speak, read and write in a language one could not have acquired by ‘natural means’. This interested me because I have often enough had dreams in which I am doing just that: speaking, writing and reading in some foreign tongue that, by day, would only mystify my brain. What? I am reading Yeats in Aramaic? And I thought I was on to something only to learn that these ‘language’ dreams are quite common. Which led me by a circuitous path to the notion of transmigration of souls and to the origins of the idea. That it seems to have come out of ancient India, and somewhere along the line, the Greeks got wind of it – Pythagoras, Plato… Just how far back can one go and find a notion of soul kicking around? Cave people? The very ones who left imprints of their hands on cave walls? Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana situated where ‘C’ meets ‘D’, ‘A’ and ‘B’ in the middle of some parallelogram geometrically analogous to the End of the Republic, says that history groans, as if always having to deal in tongues strange to it with respect to failures no generation ever seems to learn from, even with the internet switched on. But moving on… Waiting in the wings: ‘lucid exaltation’ (which has nothing to do with a Kardashian having car sex with a Tesla).

Lucid exaltation. I came across it in Proust or Proust-Montcrieff, author-translator of À la recherche du temps perdu, all seven volumes worth, and it – the ‘lucid’ and the ‘exaltation’ showed up in volume five, The Sweet Cheat Gone. I have felt such a thing, usually at the start of a season, the first snow, say, or first warm spring day, the first crisp September morning after a lot of mugginess…. Proust-Montcrieff has it that … …. with that fresh and piercing novelty of a recurring season, of a change in the routine of our hours, which, in the realm of pleasures also, if we get into a carriage on the first fine day of spring, or leave the house at sunrise, makes us observe our own insignificant actions with a lucid exaltation which makes that intense minute worth more than the sum-total of the preceding days. Would that it could. Because the American regime soon to come is not going to cut it. Will bring neither lucidity nor exaltation, though the prospect of it has already brought to the fore all sorts of people making all sorts of peculiar noises with polysyllabic words meant to denote ‘freedom’ or ‘drain the swamp’ or ‘not on my watch’ or ‘buy two, get one free’ or ‘mi casa sure as hell ain’t su casa’ and ‘Bob’s your uncle because most decidedly he isn’t your niece’. A jolly-poly season then. With recess appointments. And polyamorous to you, too, as when, forget ‘The Great Gatsby’ effect on the American psyche, it is the roll-out of ‘The Great Gaetz’ and such as are besetting us.

So then, Bizarro World. And so far as I can thus far determine, I have not had any dreams that are explicitly Bizarro World in their content or all Trump cabinet. But I have come across a post by one Carter Ratcliff, art critic-poet, who would make some declarations concerning exemplary Americans, artists most of them, and some discussion of painting ‘stripes’ all Edgy-Artistic. And, I am all for exemplary independence of thought as is what allegedly separates Americans from the rest of the world, but if we are going to sit around discussing how best paint stripes a la Jasper Johns or whomever, I think I will head for the nearest bodega or il bar, and in my cups, consider la prospettiva….

The Sweet Cheat Gone, and the young Marcel is still rank head to toe with jealousy, and we begin to suspect that he is ‘into’ jealousy for its own sweet smell, or that, if it had not been Albertine who betrayed him it would have easily enough been someone else. And then he goes and makes love to girls Albertine would have been attracted to. And he is saying something like ‘as bodies move in space, souls move in time’, and ‘as there is a geometry in space, there is a psychology in time’, and ‘that one day I should no longer be in love with Albertine’ and ‘that my love was not so much a love for her as a love in myself’ and: It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind. I do not know that anything was perishable in Proust’s mind; he seems to have hung on to every last scrap of memory. Moreover, the words in italics immediately above put me in mind of Lear and Priam and other old codgers. Joe Biden, perhaps? And then I watched a show, episodes of which depict man on man sexual sadism and the breaking of body and spirit, and this brought me back to Proust and the young Marcel and Albertine (as Proust may have slept with women but his preference was otherwise), but then, as the show was an adventure yarn, I hoped we would get back to outwitting the enemy. And then Lunar, bless him, came back with ‘wild particle’ or that which puts ‘efflorescence’ in writing, and I in turn got to say, ‘you mean gas’, though I knew perfectly well what he meant: divine madness, as Plato used to have it, but then science, religion, philosophy and anything that involves a true aesthetic sense have not held hands for ages, much less cousin-kissed. Wild particle. That with which the more self-respecting poets play ping pong.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘A good actor might get the Scottish accent right but Gaelic, Gaelic is bloody impossible. I can say och. But yes, and in fact I tried it on the page, duplicating accent, and my friend Puck in Orkney has advised me not to. It was a polite way of saying my attempt was a total disaster. I cannae do it, laddie. Cavemen must have had some notion of soul otherwise why the deposits of flowers inside their graves? That, I believe, is a fairly recent discovery. Those flowers were for something, were they not? I continue to paint myself into the corner.’ ... .... And some of us, those who love the man, may hand him a brush.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, spin the bottle and let the devil take the hindmost in Chambana: ‘I know the feeling. It's history groaning, too. It's overloaded with such instances that always ended in ruin but every new generation learns nothing from the past, it seems. And so off we go. It's all so mentally oppressive, having to watch it. Sometimes I'm tempted to shut it all off and regain my life. But that seems as reckless and irresponsible as the oppressors.’ ... .... These words came about because I had watched a film to do with Munich and Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, and I said as much to Drake. Only the film fudged the history a little and made it out that Chamberlain was not such a doofus as has been suggested, had gained some time for the Brits to prepare for a war…. That Chamberlain was wise to Hitler’s game all along. &c. I found the film painful to watch based on two periods of history, one, the actual lead-up to WWII, and that there were people who tried to head the calamity off at the pass, Germans included, and two, but were I to say ‘president-elect, need I stipulate any further? In any case, I passed all this onto Mr Drake and he got back to me with an anthropomorphism. Of which you can hear it in the groaning.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Guid efternuin, you effing Teuton. Power was out for about 7 hours [here on the island] which interfered with my evening episode of Downton Abbey. So [I] read 1984 by my battery-powered clip-on book light. Terrifying how prescient Orwell is re mass media. Was listening to a podcast about George Wallace’s political career and how hugely popular he was not just in the South but the working-class northern states as well as parts of California. Norman Mailer said that the conservatives were waiting for a “Super Wallace”. Guess who? And, what’s more, when I said (see your last post) that the Recyling Depot hadn’t turned up anything of late, the very next day I found a book on Trump, the prose not exactly timeless, but as a depiction of a man adept in the arts of ratfucker capitalism – yes, it has its moments….’ ... .... Yes but, to get back to mass media, you get on a bus in the city, and all forty passengers are staring into their hand-held devices or talking to them, and you are hearing things you do not care to hear, but that there is no way you can drown out the voices without ramming your head against a stanchion, and you may well think that Orwell had it right in principle but sort of backwards, as when the private intrudes upon the public, so much so it is like a mass upchuck. Ye ken?

Postscript V: Rutilius. He is insistent that he is on a train somewhere on the European continent and he really cannot be bothered with trifles.

November 18, 2024: At what point does a self-imposed state of not-knowing get in the way of knowing something? You may be unable to muster much faith in the existence of a capital 'G' God, but you know that, should you stand in the path of a moving bus, a moving bus will kill you. And yet, history is replete with instances of people doing just that, of acting on an urge to stiff-arm said bus as it comes at one, one promulgating fist bumps all the while, a miracle, the upending of physics, to be brought off. These words do have something to do with the election and its result, and perhaps I will be able to state something definitive in my Whistle Stop Tour of the Human Mind, or perhaps, funking it, I will roll up my magic carpet and go home. The Italian poet Leopardi believed that science, in a word, would destroy the imagination, and yet, poetry could not afford to get sentimental. Science then for us muddlers. A poet, for a change, was at least half right.

Now the following remark is so general as to be near useless, but I am game, as sometimes gets said. What truly bound all Romans together, though, were unspoken rules of social and political conduct. … …. Even as political rivals competed for wealth and power, their shared respect for the strength of the client-patron relationship, the sovereignty of the Assemblies, and wisdom of the Senate kept them from going too far. When the Republic began to break down in the late second century it was not the letter of Roman law that eroded, but respect for the mutually accepted bonds of mos maiorum (which means the ‘way of the elders’). Well, perhaps it is possible to apply this quote to current happenings now as pertain to a certain nation-state over which oligarchs are haggling and contending, jockeying for leverage whilst the president-elect applies a torch to everything (institutional) in sight. It is fun, doing such graffiti, no, with something that throws flame? Or else the man loves the grotesque for its own sake, he who does grotesquerie with a rococo flair. Moreover, everyone is free to get in on the act. In any case, The Storm Before the Storm – The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Mike Duncan, Public Affairs, New York, 2017, is the book quoted from.

And another quote with a bunch of particulars: “The charming landscape which I saw this morning,” Emerson writes, “is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this lot, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But nobody owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon that no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.” … …. The billionaire’s sublime is different. This version of the sublime appears when we adjust Burkean and Kantian theories to make an aesthetic object of fortunes facilitated by the tax cuts and financial deregulation that began in the Reagan years. To turn mind-bogglingly immense accumulations of money into objects of aesthetic contemplation would be to seek pleasure in a phenomenon that has generated an extreme degree of inequality—has, in other words, caused enough social stress to render the United States in many ways dysfunctional. With this observation comes the thought that the aesthetic is ultimately indistinguishable from the ethical. Just saying. And the Italian poet and thought-meister Leopardi, as Lunar would remind me, has something to say on this. The imagination? It is a lollipop slathered in the sand of a sandbox. Exit Homer for lack of a reason to hang around.

The quote just above came to me in a somewhat circuitous fashion by way of an art critic, one Carter Ratcliff, as laid on me by the Comptroller of the Universe who is beginning to see in the man a possible explanation as to why she feels herself at odds with the ‘arts scene’. And I assume the Emerson cited in the quote is Ralph Waldo, and is there a Rothko on your horizon line? The Comptroller of the Universe has said to me, ‘The kazillionaires don’t just want to own art, they want to own it, that is, dictate to it as to how it gets made.’ Or, shooting from the hip after asking any number of questions, High Tech is God and Muse and Father Confessor. I am at odds with literary committees that would engineer literary genius by way of sucking up all the oxygen in the room and then flogging the vacuum. That it has been like drawing silk curtains across vistas all rubble and festering corpses, this treating with one’s soul like it was a somewhat worn out butler....

Casuistry. The word has been on my mind of late. It has been a long time since I have seen it written out anywhere or put to work in a conversation, especially with respect to such high level discourse as one encounters on CNN. In which, generally speaking, the casuists are apologists for Trump as they endeavour to blunt the moral pique of a more liberal interlocutor with their own claims on something either ‘moral’ or with a better claim to ‘reason’, as when ‘reason’ would stipulate that the aforementioned pique is irrelevant or at best self-indulgent. It is always delivered with the tone of ‘that train has left the station’. ‘That dog don’t hunt anymore.’ ‘Get your raffle ticket here’. There are any number of synonyms for casuistry but ‘specious’, as an adjective, gets at the sense well enough for me. Clever people tend to enjoy their cleverness. It is a wild west display of cleverness on those panel talk shows, the back and forth presided over by anchor-persons obliged to be fair, but wherever speciousness prevails, there is no ‘fair’ to be done, and reason is better off vacating the field to joust another day. Well, you know this, the spectacles alluded to being, by way of thought, of the species of ‘right-in-front-of-your-nose’. I am no specialist, doyen, savant, think tanker, policy unit cog, utterer, sybil, but anyone can see that the energies before us now in play have a ways to go before they burn out, and the question is: how much carnage will they exact before they choke on their own exhaust? And will there be a free press when the sun also rises and shines on Caligula’s swearing-in, on his hand-on-the-Bible-moment?

A detour here, and I have another question. Question: did the young Marcel ever love Albertine, truly love her? There would have been some initial attraction based on a quality or two Albertine may have had – a great laugh, attractive figure, impish eyes. But then, perhaps, young Marcel goes and builds what is essentially a fantasy around those qualities, and presto-presto, he has his pie in the sky love. The question occurred to me while I was reading those passages in The Sweet Cheat Gone wherein the jealousies raging in young Marcel are beginning to level off a little, even abate somewhat, more time having elapsed since Albertine’s demise and since it had been demonstrated to him that Albertine of the plump cheeks had liked to frolic with girls. There she is dead, and he cannot just leave her be. He picks at her like one might pick at a scab. Because she has made him suffer. (And there is always someone who will pedantically have it that, no, he allowed her to make him suffer….) Was she faithful to him? Did she cheat on him? The questions flank and outflank every conceivable position on a battlefield as is circumscribed by Eros. In the meantime, I was also asking myself why, if I am having trouble with the ‘literary scene ’for its being so literary, why I do not feel the same toward Proust and his works? The man was nothing if not exclusively ‘literary’. Beats me. An evening spent with Buñuel’s Belle du Jour, random choice of movie, did not advance my understanding. Sometimes what is idiosyncratic in a work dooms it. Sometimes what is idiosyncratic in a work is its genius. Beats me. Sometimes a digressionary tangent taken is the most politically subversive thing one can do. Or sometimes it is just sheer cussedness and very much beside the point.

But one more thought from the Storm Before the Storm &c quoted above: With all the taboos of mos maiorum breaking down left and right, “this was the beginning in Rome of civil bloodshed, and of the license of the sword”. The definitive triumph of naked force was a lesson no one could unlearn. As the ancient Greek historian Velleius Paterculus later observed: “Precedents do not stop where they begin, but, however narrow the path upon which they enter, they create for themselves a highway whereon they may wander with the utmost latitude… no one thinks a course is base for himself which has proven profitable to others.” Perhaps these words are apposite to the current ‘situation’ in some sleight of hand fashion, and how is it that bloodshed is civil? But even if one asked and got answers all around, one still got the Caesars.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar says, ‘I am not prepared to write "normally"’. Say what? Right, some publisher has asked Lunar for an autobiography. Lunar reports that said publisher ‘"would like to see what one normally sees in such books." (The italics are the publisher's.) There, too, I find myself uninterested in doing anything normally.’ And that is it for Lunar having spoken, that is, until he pipes up at the onset of the next outrage. But all indications suggest that it is not going to happen: no “forgotten-but-will-be-remembered Lunar book-as-read-aloud-by-Johnny-Depp”. No hijinks as per Carrie Fisher or Craig Ferguson. Besides, I do not think Lunar can do ‘Scottish’. Still, Lunar has been around and seen a few things. There are possibilities....

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaigne-Urbana, and once within the city limits, beware of any off-ramp signage marked Redemption: ‘About Dems staying home: You expressed no opinion other than the collective act sort of throwing a new light on the election results… my opinion is that those folks [the stay-at-homers] essentially pulled the lever for Trump, just as 75 million others did. No excuse for having sat this one out.’ Perhaps Mr Drake nicked himself shaving and there was blood and he is testy. And that one can kill fruit flies with a spoonful of vinegar and a few drops of dish soap - it is not a fantasy, just that it will not work on the reanimated dead....

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Tried to watch a couple of Paul Schrader films. One was an "erotically charged thriller". The characters were so vile that after a few minutes, I pulled the plug on it. The next film was better, but two-thirds of the way in, I hit a wall, and couldn't watch anymore, the violence, rage, hatred, self-loathing in the men so relentless that, well, alright already, I get the point. (The Greek tragedians gave a pretty unvarnished view of humanity, but you didn't reach for the remote 10 minutes in.) So yes, here I am being cranky. If, as you say, the people down there wanted to be bad and got their permission slip for it, I guess I’m entitled to a little crankiness of my own. To wit, Christ, it’s going to rain all week. And, good God, the next thing you know, some half-assed limerick writer is going to be the next American poet laureate, the prez-elect’s tiny hands and rumpy fanny to be immortalized – in a fun way. Now would you paint his portrait if asked? Might make you clickbait for the alligators. As to what I found at the Recycling Depot this week, I found not a damn thing. It’s as if no one reads anymore, but that can’t be true. Maybe people are hoarding the printed word. Is there to be a bidding war on all the Graham Greene’s? Proust, you say, as if you’re going to bang on about him forever? We live in age of ‘shit happens’. That is to say, not everything comes with the gift wrapping of an explanation. But, let me say, gimpy intellect that I am, just saying shit happens may well preclude an explanation or two that just might prove useful. And this has to do with Proust because the man was incessant and obsessive – every possible shade of an emotion and opinion was an archaeological dig, everything put through a mesh. I’d better stop. This constitutes sass. Like I said, it’s going to rain all week.’

Postscript V: Rutilius self-referencing Rutilius: ‘OK [.] Rutilius is on a periplus to lecture on translating poetry next week. He's being accommodated in a pizzeria with guest rooms called Toscana. No, we’ll be nowhere near a Red Sea coast as written up by an anonymous ancient Greek unless some wormhole is in play.’

The Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) Department:

Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.

November 14, 2024: ‘Literary’ dream: It seems I was handed a mock review of an Iranian novel which, itself, spoofed the novel form, and what did I make of it? That such a review could not be possible, given the nature of the current regime which does not do ‘spoof’, let alone allow spoofs. And that was the end of it. The dream did not refer to, say, Sandler the American, who in a movie he wrote (screen treatment), spoofs the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Mrs Lincoln depicted as having the face of a bewigged burro. But then, on another night, another dream:

A ‘lovely companion’ and I steal a long, long, pale blue convertible, probably a Lincoln, and we go joyriding. Lovely companion giggles that we are awfully conspicuous in this vehicle; we will be pulled over at any moment. However, we arrive at some town unapprehended, and I pull the car into a garage. The mechanic looks a lot like the actor Steve Buscemi. The expression on his face, as he critically eyeballs the machine that conveyed me and my companion to his shop, suggests he is about to launch into a disquisition on Aristotelian poetics rather than philosophize about horsepower capacity and spark plugs. I prepare for the long haul whilst lovely companion takes a manuscript from the car’s glove box. She proceeds with it to a building across the street where she finds a slot in which to insert the offering. Yet another script of Americana farce? The outside surface of the building being plastic, the plastic is lit from within like some house porch decoration of Santa Claus. The spectacle is otherwise all carnival row or amusement park, featuring, as it does, cartoon characters in sculptured relief. Some dreams do have a comic, if a somewhat The Day of the Locust flair (as per Nathanael West).

What is not a dream are the election results. Though, to judge by the knowledge that there have been, in the past few days, millions of e-mails flitting across the globe in every which-way direction, bewailing those results, these days do savour of a whiff of unreality. And so it is that the atmosphere in my head is all Ship of Fools, a 1965 film based on a 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter. A ship in the year 1933 is bound for Germany from Mexico, and onboard are all sorts of passengers reflecting all sorts of attitudes with respect to life in general and to fascist politics in particular (MGGA or Make Germany Great Again); and certain people who are most in danger are least likely to regard themselves at risk. The film won a few awards (though in some quarters it was thought overlong). When it shows up on cable TV, I will watch a bit until I have had enough, the film feeling a touch more dated with every viewing. But then, here it is, come roaring back….

Somewhere, and I have forgotten where, in my reading of a few news sites, I came across the words ‘nihilistic consumerism’, and to myself I said: “Aha, someone somewhere gets it.” And yet, whatever the ‘it’ is, I cannot tell you. Some addiction to violent video games? The compulsive purchase of items one does not need? The consumption of polling data? Yesterday, in my local, I heard at another table, two elderly ladies discussing the election. The voice of the one lady was unmistakably schoolmarmish which (before you jump all over me for unwoke dereliction of etiquette) just means that she spoke with authority and with high articulation. The other lady, apart from a few questions she asked, had less to say, as she, her turn, was playing the foil. In any case, after a while as I went to pay for my fare, I paused at their table and said, “The people down there – they want to be bad, and Trump is their permission.” “Brilliant,” said the schoolmarmish lady, according me a rather unladylike thumbs up, and I saw in her face somewhat of a toper and a player of cards, not a sober judge and mentor to young striplings and their burgeoning intellects. (I have since read, by the way, that millions of Dems did not bother to vote. There is a story about lemmings that may or may not figure here.) It was one of those moments, in any case, and before anything could ruin it, I paid and went out the door. Some days, and one frets that one is not welcome anywhere. Other days, and one wonders why one would even wish to darken a ‘welcome home, bud’ with one’s grotty presence. On still other days, and one ought never take anything for granted.

In the meantime, I have been in continuance with Proust’s The Sweet Cheat Gone, volume six of the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu. Indeed, I was chugging along at a modest rate through the Proustian seas when I came across a passage which seemed to indicate that Albertine had been on the pudgy side. This brought on a full stop. Pudgy, is it? A few passages before, and Albertine’s tongue had been licking the young Marcel’s belly, and perhaps because scenes of explicit sex are not that frequent throughout the course of six volumes thus far, it came off pretty graphic, a full complement of texture and sensation. It did not feel like a ‘pudgy’ Albertine as could have both seized the initiative and been self-ironic. For all that, and so as to tie this paragraph to the initial paragraph of this post, one of the things that led to the young Marcel’s hooking up with Albertine in the first place, was the promise of seeing a Norman Byzantine style church in the seaside resort of Balbec, and that it would prove to have been inspired by Persian architecture. Get it? Persian? Iranian? Never mind. The young Marcel was disappointed, even so, by the sight of the church.

And it goes without saying that he is forever whinge-ing on about his frustrated desires and his overweening jealousies even as Albertine is stone dead, having fallen from a horse. On the young Marcel’s part, it is a vast universe of desire and analysis and anguish and the pain of jealousy – a perpetual tinnitus in his ears and sometimes mine. And yet, this so-called universe – it is only a tiny window opening on some human’s tiny life, a reality that may just be beginning to dawn on the young Marcel, though we shall have to wait and see. Still, one can see easily enough that some man or woman, much less lettered than this Marcel, much less knowledgeable as to physics and natural laws and classical poets and pre-Socratics, might say, one to the other, speaking about Marcel: “So, what’s with him? So his girlfriend, eh – she’s into the chicks. Big deal.” &c. The thing is, the young Marcel dispatched a man to Balbec with instructions to interview certain people as to how Albertine conducted herself there in the young Marcel’s absence. Whereupon the young Marcel received what I will call the ‘bathhouse letter’, and it has news, or that Albertine, in the baths, used to conduct her own interviews. A reality storm hits. And it is not an Albertine who has been in full command of herself and her wants, it is an Albertine as flawed and confused as himself. An Albertine who might well have asked: “What, in fact, is my part in all, this?” Somehow, this only increases young Marcel’s own sense of having been betrayed. The upshot, as it stands now: they had had a shot at a happy life together regardless of their ‘tastes’; they had both blown it. You think you have made a choice; you have been herded by something like a fate all along.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar, waking up taciturn, but choosing his words well: ‘I guess Gladiator II has been deemed laughable.’ Even so, he would have me understand that: ‘… …. architecture and storytelling, the relationship… Any ideas? Prime example: the souks of Damascus and Aleppo provided most of the stories which would be virtually impossible in [a]modern shopping centre. Example: Greek theatre, circular, derived from threshing circles. Example: both Bronze Age roundhouses and obloid crofters' thatched cottages had fires at their centres, an unbroken line lasting four thousand years. TV killed it all stone dead.’ Indeed. But I am not about to the throw the TV out with the bath water. One does not easily forget The Honeymooners. And I still remember the Saturday matinees at the movie house when I was a kid, Flash Gordon and all the rest of it; and so, alright, it is not Aeschylus; and even though Lunar has a point, the point is that, one way or the other, people will still congregate to hear a tale or two unless waylaid or obstructed.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, check your travel advisories, has been hosting a family member. He has been contemplating his Social Security check. He is flabbergasted.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado and post-election anxiety, or that, 1871, and Secretary of State Seward […] endorsing sending the Union army north and liberating Canada… it happens to the best of us at times, such fears and palpitations, given an alarming outcome. And it is because you know that, buried deep in some governmental department, there is an idiot having such a thought, and now the odds are increased due to the ushering in of a bevy of idiots into offices with safes and caller ID.

Postscript V: Rutilius unabashed, or that the man rather dislikes ‘the current “scene” which just encourages entitlement among individual poets and all sorts of minorities: ethnic, gender (oddly, women regard themselves as a minority rather than a put upon majority), disabled etc. The old days were unsatisfactory. A poet would hang out in venues and bars and if you were any good you “got the nod” … You could also sleep with somebody or some bodies. It was elitist and male dominated.’ Unclear here as to who would be sleeping with whom, but I think we get the idea. But is the man confirmable for a cabinet posting?

Received: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Mike Duncan, Public Affairs, New York, 2017

Missed Out Department: Jean Gabin. For years, I have heard Gabin’s name mentioned in this or that discussion of film, and here for the first time I have seen the man in action. He does exude considerable charm in an otherwise so-so flick: Moontide. Now Lunar pipes up, having had his coffee and a shave: ‘Well, you have a load of catching up to do. I'd watch any movie with Gabin in it. Actually he is the forerunner of just anyone you care to choose, Bogart, etc. Pepe le Moko is an old favourite of mine. Gabin can do funny, he can do tragic, he can do class, he can do low-life, he can do song and dance, he can do first-rate gangsters. He may even be the greatest movie actor ever.’ No doubt Drake will beg to differ for whom Bogart is a god, for whom 1950s sci-fi is the apogee of western civilization. And yet, some day, a woman of wit is going to come along and express her desire, here paraphrased: “I want to read some love poetry by an Englishman. But no Keats or Shelley. I want someone who’s not going to slobber while they’re doing it.” Ah, right. She has already come and is long gone. (Anne Bancroft in 84 Charing Cross Road. A dullish, but sweet, rather touching flick. About the book trade.)

Poem by James Sutherland-Smith, from a manuscript entitled ‘Varieties of Superstitious Experience’:

THE SPARROW’S MESSAGE

Ornithomancy: divination from the actions of birds.

The chuckling clamour of ring doves
feeding in the copper cherries,
blackbird pop songs from a gable end,
screech owls keening doom, magpies silent
before thunder, before lightning
shivers down and fizzes on a lake,
don’t make a science or an art.

Yet this sparrow compulsively
hopping on the windowsill outside
and pecking at the half-pane of glass
that gives light where stairs pause and turn
up to the attic in which I scribble,
could bring messages not of this world,
but the next: taptap, slow tap, then a quick tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap. More reflective now,
he flits (I say “he;” from the black bib
on his chest, which indicates a capo
in sparrow underworlds) between his nest
in the cypress by our gate, the power line
and sill where he sees what in the glass?
Once more that slow, considered tap, tap, tap.

Lesbia and Jane Scrope doted
on their sparrows who daintily
took titbits from where their poets
might have liked to. Alas, the first died
“causarum ignotarum,” Gib the cat
wapped the second, poets’ elegies
providing not a crumb of comfort.

“Where have all the sparrows gone?” composed
a poet with whom I’ve fallen out.
But this bird is back, turning his head
this way and that until he starts to send
his passerine morse code one last time
before nightfall when he flies home to roost:
a quick tap, a slow tap, then taptap.

Another Point Well-Taken Department:

art review

November 9, 2024: The election has come and gone. It will not be business as usual with respect to various endeavours between now and the next ‘election cycle’, if there even is one. The word ‘politics’ may take on a whole new meaning, a side dish to the prison slop. Someone famous slated for a visit to his or her hometown may just send a note instead: ‘Unavoidably detained. The Fat Lady sang.’ Right then. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, indeed. Which it is a movie. And in it, a girl named Dinky might well have grown up to vote for You-Know-Who even as she set up her town’s first animal shelter with space enough for a turtle. So I return to Proust where I have been for most of the year.

And in returning to Proust, it is as if I return to a place rather than to a name appended to a book. It is a place which might have in it an ancient olive grove. But then we are not sure if Proust will ever get to southern France, let alone Italy as has been his hankering. ‘Post-mortem’ and ‘reckoning’ are two operative words mightily in play just now with most pundit-chat TV panels. Expertise just keeps showing up for more punishment. Why in the world would I not return to Proust, to read the man’s volumes in the glare of Friday night stadium lights and to the sounds of marching bands having at “I’m Still Standing”?

But to do so, to resume my reading and know my whereabouts in the current volume The Sweet Cheat Gone, I have got to regain the thread. What was going on when I laid the book aside in exchange for a book of lectures on Dostoyevsky and to cover my eyes on election night like a child knowing there is a monster in the room? A book which, as I stated in a previous post, made me feel stupid. An election which did not. A book in which an afterword by David Foster Wallace described Dostoyevsky as ‘fun’ and so, I had all the benefit of regarding the great Russian novelist as an ‘amusement park’, not that he should forever be locked up as an ‘icon’, remote and inaccessible. An election which, in some minds, was a hoot. But the thread? Well, Albertine, thrown from a horse, is dead. A multitude of Young Master Marcels is now having to do with a multitude of dead Albertines who, for a multitude of reasons, still enhance his jealousies. What is it with the multitudes? Proust as Whitmanesque? The mourning process, perhaps, but without Martha Stewart around to exhort the living to take it to the limit but be sensible? We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and so many of our memories, our humours, our ideas set out to voyage far away from us, until they are lost to sight! Look, there are not a lot of exclamation points in Proust, so I assume the quote does have significance. Does the meaning in the words italicized extend to one’s 401 (k) plan?

As for the Drama Queen-elect (now that we are stuck with him again), the fires of ambition and vengeance have burned off the impurities in him, all the ‘multitudes’ that the umbrella of his un-soul may or may not have contained as a Whitmanesque ensemble, and well, that would make him just pure poison. It was an upside-down-turned-inside-out campaign and election. It was a parody of moral regeneration. It was pageantry and a black mass decades in the making. But will things snowball now, as things tend to do when a certain point has been attained? Last evening, I watched Pedro Páramo, a 2024 movie based on a famous book from the 1950s of the same name I had no idea existed. Moreover, I have difficulty with magic realism as, what, a literary strategy, but the movie (Rodrigo Prieto the director), is powerful. The voices of the living keep talking even when dead, there being a ‘multitude of sins’ with which to treat, and ‘sin’, it seems, has its own physics and may safely ignore natural laws. The movie, damn it all, struck a chord. A town becoming a ghost town on account of frustrated love, all channels of life drying up. Do I have to point you in the direction of an obvious metaphor, and it is hardly a stretch? Ghost town as dead republic? Used to talk itself up, or that it once could boast of 65 saloons? Lunar is convinced that Tommy Lee Jones read Pedro Páramo before making his The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, one of those sleeper-movies that are all quality, no cheap shots, although I take one here, as in, metaphor-alert: how to give democracy, before it truly rots off the bone, a decent funeral, a timely Happy Trails.

Postscript I: Carpenter (Fine post – the November 7 entry with the words Monty Python in the heading.)

Postscript II: Lunar: ‘I remain baffled. I am not baffled. I am, I'm not. How did the polls get it so wrong though? I think the reason Kamala lost is connected to my earlier forebodings. What I dread most of all, just now, will be the utterly savage scenes at the USA/Mexico border. I heard the glee in one border official’s voice when he said that under Biden he had become "a babysitter" whereas now he was going to be able to get tough with the immigrants. Tough as in bullets tough? It is going to be spectacularly cruel and one may reference the "Who cares?" slogan on Melania's coat.’ … …. Here, Lunar takes a breather. And I might mention that, well, as if things could not get any worse, Lunar has got himself a brand-new spanking hat – blue cloth band on dark chocolate brown, and already people are stepping aside for him. On a melancholier note, a friend informed Lunar that the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square was going to float away, everything inside it ruined. What? Even the Pieros? (The della Francescas, I assume…) Yes, those too. Apocalypticism at 97 per cent proof. Lunar has no stomach for it, nor for this: “It was one thing Starmer offering congratulations to him but hearty congratulations? Will Starmer's head be stuck up Trump's arse?’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, 19 hours driving distance northeast from Lajitas, Texas (a filming location for the Páramo flick: ‘Policy, the stuff of real politics, wasn't a factor; Kamala tried to make it one (a mistake, but I said so before the election and won't get into finger-pointing now). No, this election was all about Americans exchanging 250 years of what they've always praised as "American values" for some delusional idea of financial gain secured for them by a strongman — the oldest con of dictatorships. Informed and especially historically knowledgeable electorates know better. But in the educational rankings, the U.S. has become the Mississippi of the world.’ Yes but, what about the fried catfish and comeback sauce?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: The man is quite possibly more cut up than he realizes (with respect to a recent event), though he will complain about the state of his back as a way of distracting himself from a pounding ache. He is a cautious dude. He will sometimes say that the sky is red just in case it might actually be as such and there is something amiss with our eyes. He is the only Canadian who, himself, might have written Pedro Páramo, if he had not intended to write The Leopard first. The last time I laid eyes on him he had set aside his mackinaw in favour of a casual cotton blend and something Oxford tan. We drank sangria at a park-side cantina run by a Portuguese fellow and some Costa Ricans. He reminisced about Peru. The Portuguese fellow knew a post-post-modernist when he saw one, but he let the likes of us hang around.

Postscript V: Magnolia asks, ‘Is it ok to talk about family?’ I suppose it is. He is just back from the UK. Saw Trumpism there. Leicester. Undesirable suburb. In his own words: ‘In order to accommodate ages ranging from 7 to 85 various outbuildings (garden sheds) and immobilized caravans are clustered around a central house, spilling into a garden which serves as a communal compost heap, soccer pitch, vegetable patch, chicken farm, bath (there is a jerry-rigged jacuzzi) and WC (for two 'orribly affectionate dogs). Thanks to the husbandry of one of the women in the family, the garden is the source of most of their fruit and veg. over the course of the year - which saves on groceries! The men are all employed by the local supermarkets where they work paycheque to paycheque as delivery drivers for minimum wage. The two male children [around 5 and 8 years] are very well-behaved and proudly shared their Halloween haul - (meagre compared to Canadian standards) Presiding over all (two and a half nuclear families) is an 86-year-old grandmother, Pam, who had risen from her sickbed and glamoured up to greet us. Sadly, the modest household and the welcoming generosity of its inhabitants put me in mind of the Cratchits in Dickens' A Christmas Carol. After 200 years of living in the same area of Leicester; 200 years of politics, of history, of poverty, of striving and of hardship, the family was clearly hanging on (albeit joyously) by its fragmentary fingernails. This financial insecurity was only balanced by the closeness of the family and the extreme tolerance with which they treated each other, neighbours and visitors.’ And so forth and so on. The 'it was ever thus' parade. The mass arrival of immigrants. The mention of which is to be regarded as a fact, not as a stick with which to whip up hatreds. But Magnolia again: ‘Trump and other demagogues take advantage of this. He has convinced them that he both sees and hears them - how strange is that when you consider that his background couldn't be more different. It is all a little pathetic since the likelihood is that his followers will be the first to suffer the gradual erosion of the safety net that provides them some modicum of support. I hope for a different outcome. Maybe he'll appreciate the extreme trust that is being placed in him to change things for the better. But I doubt it.’ And then, to cap it all off, there was a visit to Wordsworth’s Lake District.

As if John Donne the Poet Had Trump in Mind Department:

To what a cumbersome uwieldinesse/And burdensome corpulence my love had growne,/But that I did, to make it lesse,/And keepe it in proportion,/Give it a diet, made it feed upon/That which Love worst endures,/discretion.

The Comptroller of the Universe City-Slicker Division: ‘There’s nothing more to write, Sibum. They don’t want to hear from you – the people. So eat, drink, be merry. &c.’

The Brain Surgeon on Weekends Department: ‘I always knew it’d come to this: you can teach an old dog new tricks. Brain surgery it is then.’

November 6, 2024: I have been reading a series of lectures on a man I have come to call, out of affection, Dusty. The author of the lectures calls the man Dostoyevsky. (That author would be one Joseph Frank. He wrote the book Lectures on Dostoyevsky, Princeton University Press, 2020.)

And Frank had it that Dusty, for various reasons, but especially for reasons to do with his prison experience and his near-death episode before a firing squad (the execution order was cancelled at the last minute), came to divide love into two main categories. There was ‘eros love’ and there was ‘agape love’. Eros love at its best was formulated by Plato in the Socratic dialogue The Symposium, for example, and elaborated on in other dialogues. Love starts with the body (the sensual, the beautiful), and ascends to a ‘higher level’ in the contemplation of the ‘Good’. To Dusty’s way of thinking, this love nonetheless can never entirely separate itself from the egoism of the one loving who must needs ‘possess’ his or her love. I have a friend who often speaks to me about the politics of pragmatism, that it gets better results than the politics of some utopian idealism or other. One Donald Trump seems to have satisfied the spiritual needs of a certain segment of the body-politic by turning the spiritual on its head. A devil’s bargain, and it will prove to have come at a very high price.

As for agape love, it reverses the conditions that is eros love at its highest expression. That is to say, it starts with the low, with the ‘love’ of the poor, the wretched, the repulsive. Christ brought this sort of love into the world. Humankind can only go so far along this path. But Dusty was also interested in a phenomena he called the ‘egoism of suffering’. Well, it seems that, yesterday, such an egoism was given quite the boost by the election victory of the Trump referred to above. Early on next January, he will take office as the Victim-in-Chief. The people have wanted to be bad. They have also wanted their ‘suffering’ and their aggrieved sense of justice to be taken seriously. They will have their cake, and they will eat it too, along with whatever else they ingest to get through the night. And for now, they have got the world they have been wanting, have got it by the short hairs. It is going to be one hell of a bacchanal.

Talk about egoism, now and then in my life, I have felt the temptation to say that something like a moral regeneration at the heart of western civilization would not be amiss. What history says, to the extent that history says anything, is that such regeneration, if it comes at all, comes at cost, and it is not a pretty sight – an excuse for all sorts of zealotries. (Still, one might think that the kazillionaires could pay some taxes.) Dusty, at the moment when he was expecting to feel the impact of a bullet against one of his vitals, and the bullet was not forthcoming, and some adrenalin rush perhaps reversed itself, was overwhelmed by the sheer joy of being alive. It, as it were, trumped any cause. It is the most profound meaning that life affords us; that and the need for freedom. The peasants with whom he had been imprisoned, he their superior in terms of class standing, had taught him a rather profound lesson. What has reason to do with anything? They might earn a few kopeks working at some labour or other in the course of their incarceration, but that, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, they would spend their wages on rotgut booze and drink themselves silly. It gave them the illusion that they had some control over their lives, that they could ‘make a choice’, never mind that they might have saved their money for a rainy day upon their release from prison and it was back, back back to Maggie’s farm again. In any case, who is it again that may well have put Trump back in the driver’s seat? The immigrant class, a socially conservative bunch who may not welcome the sight of all those wretches at the border looking for the good life too? Who do not want to hear about gender-busting or anything else in a similar vein? Who, as immigrants, are what Trump has demonized? I mean, does irony apply here? Or had there been a plan all along in some gland that passes for a brain and is reaching for the rodenticide?

The deeper I have read into the lectures cited above, the more stupid I have been feeling. Thought at the level of a high school debate contest, thought as a storm-tossed ship crashing against rocks characterized as moral regeneration or free will or agape or Nihilism 101 or political pragmatism or justice deferred – well, I have been feeling shipwrecked. I thought I knew or at least vaguely understood this stuff. When Frank quotes Dostoyevsky as saying: The highest use which one can make of his individuality, of the full development of the ego, is to seemingly annihilate that ego, to give it wholly to each and everyone wholeheartedly and selflessly, I read the words and say, “Sure, I know what it means, but it does sound quaint.” Moreover, no, this sort of beatific piety – it is not going to happen, hence the Gospel of Matthew: “They neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven…” That is to say: not going to happen on this earth. Perhaps too many people once full of p&v and the old college-try no longer ‘get’ what the ‘good’ is or how to do good or how to be good, or have simply assumed they were all that, willy-nilly, having lost the capacity for self-criticism which I suspect is too much at the heart of what is considered progressive thought. This may not be the prime cause (but it has been a contribution) that has led not only to the reality of Trump but to the parody that Trump is, or the clown who would masquerade as a human being and get down with a microphone in hand. Well, the joke is not so much on him just now, is it?

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar and I have come to blows. He thinks I think he believes Harris, in her capacity as a presidential candidate, to have been a greater threat to human well-being than the victor. ‘Jesus, Norm, what's with you?’ He then goes on to say that, last time he checked, he was not yet a vegetable, and that he lay ‘frozen’ in bed as he took in the news, London time. He let me know: ‘My criticism of her was as important as my condemnation of Trump. Do you not think her weaselling on the matter of the death penalty is hugely important? I mean what does that say about her? And her woke rubbish with respect to offering sex change operations to prisoners when America's prisons are hellholes desperately in need of reform. Do you not think she lost tens of thousands of votes with that one? And what about her stance on Israel, is it really any worse in substance than Trump's. No accident, by the way, that Netanyahoo would seize the opportunity to sack his defence minister and replace him with someone even more extreme. I'm not living in a jungle here where news seeps in as if by chance. Trump is going to produce some terrible contortions in this country too.’ &c. For all that, I am confused: was he, Lunar, criticizing Harris for being a politician or for being insufficiently political? As for arts and culture, well: ‘Would Aristotle and Plato think there actually is an artistic scene [worth a discussion, say, in Aeschylus?’] … …. ‘Meanwhile something real and utterly chilling is happening. AI is developing avatars for dying people, the idea being you leave behind this AI version of yourself with whom loved ones can communicate after you've gone. And, worse still, you can, in your avatar existence, speak back to them and console them. I am beginning to think a dying planet may be the least of our worries. So what would Aristotle and Plato say to avatars of themselves? Who needs a soul?’ True enough, it does appear that a lot of people out there are, what, soul-lite? Check your celebrity news. ‘The death of the oral tradition is being superseded by the death of something else. What to call it though? There is a correlation between the hand, the pen and the paper, is there not?’ … …. And, speaking of the Canadian poet John Newlove: ‘We spoke of Newlove and his problems. The drink destroyed him, on top of which he had a stroke, but at least he was real.’ Now any reader of this post familiar with Newlove’s oeuvre may infer from those words what they wish. I have always said this of Newlove: that he took in much of the ‘new American writing (1960s poetry) into his own poetic practice, and yet, he kept his head. Lunar seems to have kept his. I am wondering where mine has got to…. Oh, as per Lunar’s wrath, I am forgiven. Barely.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champagne-Urbana, turn in any direction the wind is blowing, and you will have arrived at a sea change in the The Devil and Daniel Webster as may figure in Illinois: ‘I'm not sure I'd say ego is politically pragmatic, other than — and maybe this is what you mean — a person with little ego would be unlikely to enter politics.’ Or this, seeing as I was picking Mr Drake’s brain, and he scratched: ‘And if everyone were that way, we'd be in rather bad shape. I'm hesitant to defend many, perhaps most of the members of Congress, but many or most really are there to do some good. Mostly on one side, naturally. I know voters think they have it pretty easy, but the hours they spend working are truly grueling, and today so much of their time is spent on the phone raising money for re-election. I can't imagine a worse way to spend five or six hours a day.’ Or this: ‘From the way you or perhaps Frank framed Dostoevsky's view — "that the only way the spiritual could work in this world of ours was through the sacrificial, the willing surrender of one's ego" — it reads as though he was pretty heavily influenced by much of the communist and socialist literature floating around Europe in his day.’ No, Cornelius, old buddy, I do not think any such literature gave a rat’s ass about what was ‘spiritual’ or halfway decent Christian behaviour. Or this: ‘In your earlier email you mentioned a "rabbinical, Reconstituted Marxist bookseller" [whom you knew], who touted spiritual renewal, which is exactly what I'd expect from a rabbinical, Reconstituted Marxist bookseller. I know we disagree on this but I cannot conceive a vaguer, hollower advocacy. It's impossible to imagine what it might accomplish when one can't even define it. What, move to Northern California and join Don Draper at a group handholding session? What he got out of it [was] a Coca Cola ad campaign. And I believe the series' conclusion — its whole point — was spot on. In brief, that any such spirituality will always come back down to earth and our commonplace earthly concerns.’ Yes, Cornelius, you are bang on the nose: it does seem to be what history says time after time, even when written by the winners.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado who has thought to avoid the commuter rush by living on an island: ‘As for Dusty, I know I mentioned my failure to get through The Idiot last year. Just don't have the stamina like you. Give me Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald, lean and absurdist, whose novels hover in the 150 page range. There, I'm owning my predilections. Perhaps if I end up getting sent down for a five-year stint in Oakalla I'll get through Proust. I recall [a mutual friend] extolling the mind changing qualities of reading Proust. [Alas], now I'm making myself feel guilty.’ Speaking of which, has my intention to re-read all of Proust altered my consciousness? It does not appear to have. It has caused me, however, to question my sanity. But I do intend to get back to the man soon. First, have things to sort such as a few requests I have received of late for mattress space in my living room.