November 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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