May 2026

May 28-30, 2026: A sentence in an Andrea Camilleri detective fiction seemed to have extra spit on it as I read the words: His last thought was that there is no better soporific than pornography. Something directional lit my brain. Presently, the arrow indicated an insomniac Trump caught up in his Truth Social 3-in-the-morning chicken scratchings, cluck cluck cluck, and the porn that is the regime. He was attempting to polish a tweet all the while he thrashed about in messes of his own devising. Just that I do not think the man will ever bait the switch and find blessed detachment from his and all our follies by way of a restorative forty winks and the world catch a break from social media. Moreover, it is one thing to despise English Departments and their suspect goods and the moral ascendancies gotten pedantic and witless, but it is another to come it dumb enough to think that Trumpism is the countervailing balance, the cure, the way out, the avenue to anything noble and good &c, his syntax apparently more potent than that of any Robert Lowell or Phillip Roth, so say his cabinet members. One bad turn begets another, as keeps winning the day in some casino-land, especially one stuffed to the gunnels with opportunistic scruple but devoid of anything more moral than opportunistic sanctimony. Mediocre minds hyped as genius, no matter to what they are applied, always make for mediocre doings and worse. What? Am I endeavouring to carry a point? Am I just packing my lunch?

Americans are settling nicely into their fascism. They are like dogs and cats that, having circled their sleeping areas, having tamped down all that is bumpy, less than smooth, feel confident enough to lie down, noses pointed at what calamities the wind may bring next. “Schlock and awe”, eh? Meanwhile, Gaza is still being strip-mined and clear cut, its body-politic harvested for body parts, and the land is going to be expropriated and prepared for, who knows, Trump towers? Retail outlets at the very least? Retirement homes? Lebanon – why, it continues to be Howdy-Doody time by way of ordnance, give us your poor, your tired, your shop owners, and we will carbonize all of it. The bombardiers have rage on their side, the requisite racism, and I guess they figure that, with such high-octane mojo going for them, God has perked up, taking lessons from their swagger.

An on-going question of late: is a too-sizable portion of the American populace ignorant (as in merely uninformed) or full-out stupid and beyond caring? How about spiritually depraved? A poet (bivouacked at the Smirking Chimp outpost) recently remarked from under the auspices of that redoubt: On a personal basis, given the choice, I would rather choose to be buffeted by the unimaginable than to be surrounded by people so small of mind that I suffocate from the tedium of having to humor them to be allowed to have a (cramped, airless) place in the world. &c. To which plaint one might, via Marcus Aurelius, countermand: Remember, you were born to help people. Their ignorance is no excuse for you to cop an attitude. (And with this sort of wind in one’s sails, it is going to be a slog – clawing back territory lost to the indefatigably corrupt, getting back to ordinary levels of winner-take-all.) Could the imperial self-remonstrance have been an example of Roman irony, Aurelius the philosopher-Caesar having a drolly sleepless night of his own in some Hungarian outback as he wrestles with the state of his soul, the health of the Roman “experiment”, the tent drafty, battle with the barbarians soon to be joined? And if you are an unprocessed traveller just landed in America, on a World Cup pilgrimage, well, as per the smoky-boozy voice of Edward R Murrow: “Good night and good luck.”

Now, from a I-do-not-know-what-to-call-it-Irish flick, a tough-guy-doing-good-for-the-local-people flick, this oligarchic observation as spoken tongue-in-cheek by a second-tier soulless profiteer, your politics (right or left) a matter of indifference to him: “When little people are on the take, they need to feel respected.” It is assumed that if you are one those little people, you will understand you have just been “disrespected”, Trumpification unaccountably flashing a modicum of wit. But have there been MAGA-ites in Ireland in the biblical sense? In any other sense? To which there was a response on the part of the movie’s reluctant hero along these lines: “The mind is more powerful than the fist. At least it used to be.” Which speaks to what? Our “blow-everything-up-if-they-don’t-behave tantrums”? The lobotomies as have rendered us co-conspirators?

Alright then, what is lecanomancy? Divination, forsooth. Pour oil on a dishful of water. Watch what forms. Drop a stone in a dishful of water. Watch what shakes up in that. Interpret to your heart’s content, hauling out the I-pad. Write your erotic thriller all the while you pillory the novel-as-project. What about the mid-terms? You could stare into that dishful of water, and an answer just might rise to the surface, if not entire visions. Magoi? I thought the word, at first blush, the Greek equivalent of magi – the wise men. It can also mean, amongst the Japanese, an energy field, “the stamina of the universe” (as if the cosmos gets winded????) and thence to how magic comes by magic…. Whatever, man. MAGA, even so, has zilch to do with it though magical thinking is as rife in that quarter as in any other.

Postscript I: On this day in the year 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. The forced uprooting of various tribes ensued. The year 1431, and Joan of Arc was accused of wearing male clothing and so, an excuse for her execution was on the books. So far as I know, Carpenter does not cross-dress. But he will happily depose any monstrosity and fight for the true-hearted. No mystic, he may well assert that the air we breathe is made of souls who in life were willfully crazed and depraved, the souls of the good outnumbered. I believe, unless I heard him wrong, that he has a (distant) blood relation to one of the renovicted tribes alluded to above.

Postscript II: My candidate for an immortal Lunar utterance: … …. ‘At least it is the beginning of soft fruit season.’ … …. The man says: … …. ‘Aye, I've been deep into Orphism. It all has to do with those tiny gold lamellae that I saw at the archaeological museum in Naples, which were stamped with Greek Orphic verses, and which were sometimes placed on the tongues of the dead so that [they] might serve as soul-passports commending the bearer to the care of Persephone. It's still unseasonably hot. Yes, like you, [I see that] there is a momentum of some kind, not necessarily political, that may see Trump out on his arse. What triggered it for me is the enormous images of him on the street of Washington, DC, which brings to mind all manner of tyranny and personality cults. The bigger the pictures, the harder the fall will be. I reckon Vance knows this and is biding his time.’ … …. Well, God knows there is a lot of biding going on, no sideways allusion to Biden intended here… …. ‘The heat wave continues. Demoralisation continues. [But] we watched a lovely old comedy, Hobson's Choice, 1952, with Charles Laughton, from the days when the British could really do comedy. Could he be the greatest actor ever, I wonder. [ … ]. I find myself thinking that for all the shabbiness, the lousy cooking, the country was a much better place to be. I remember when we first came here, you could go into a shop, nobody around, and there'd be an honesty basket, and this was in London. You made your purchases and took the right change. And men laughed at women, women at men, and smut was smut and the water from rivers drinkable. What am I trying to say here? We have good cuisine, greater comforts, better everything except the laughter is gone. I'm not imagining this. Nor do I suffer from nostalgia. Ah yes and public discourse. The biggest thing of all is that as a species we have forgotten how to take care of ourselves. I squandered a day simply trying to find out who at the hospital treated me so I might have some kind of follow-up. No, couldn't do it. The answer phone may be the end of civilisation. Sorry I'm wrapped in gloom this morning.’ … …. Some days, I too feel like an enchilada or a gyro, if you will, hold the lettuce. But as you were saying: … …. ‘So there you have it, an Americanized Cuba plonk in the middle of the "Gulf of America", what a pretty picture. It will become America's whorehouse just as it was in the 1950s. I mean Putin is not going to rush to Cuba's aid nor sure as hell is anyone else. The next logical step in an illogical world: Panama. And Alberta wants to be a slice of the rotten cake? Anything to take the world's eyes off Trump and the IRS.’ … …. And apropos of nothing, a thousand pardons, and it could be said that demons once operated in the service of delayed justice. Then they said, what ho, let us participate in the making of Woody Allen dramas, “Another Woman” a case in point, and while the middle-classes are squeezed dry so that tech bros may conquer, let us fuse wholesome living to what respectability remains to those who once had airs. Were Albertans and Texans, say, happier back in the 80s than east coasters with all their shrinks and elitist views? Nowadays demons, improvising, taking what the defense gives them, inhabit your average Janes and Joes in all the ‘burbs and homeless encampments, trash talk the sexually ambiguous and yet, they would turn every “normality” on its head. They do keep busy. But let the man have the last word/s: … …. ‘… up all night, twisting and turning, shouting, eating a nectarine at four in the morning just so I might feel pleasure. What in the hell is happening with me? It's not just the heat, not just the pain, not just that D and H appear to be shunning me. It is massive anxiety on another, perhaps metaphysical, level. I'm wrecked. What can I say more? Yes, Israel has gone berserk and I sense they love what they're doing because it takes them back to the merry old days of the Old Testament and its genocides. Netanyahu is depraved. Israel is the rogue state. My elderly lady fan in America says there is going to be, any minute now, a mighty political tsunami that will sweep away the rotters. That feels biblical too.’ … …. And so it goes, along with a truly insidious parody of a Quixote figure on his weekends astride his golf cart….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you espy a phalanx of placard bearers, the word REPENT in play, emphasis on the notion of buyer’s chagrin, seeing as, as rumour has it, the ghost of Norman Mailer is flitting about, would update his tome “The Armies of the Night” with respect to certain undercurrents in American society, Pentagon or not, and Orphism, no doubt, has not much to do with it. Then again, if one has just been primaried, perhaps one is hoisting high a placard or two of one’s own as is chockful of petard, but here Drake gestures, hypnotically so: … …. ‘The essential element of what most consider "classic" fascism — Germany's — was racism, which, as you note, the Romans weren't all that keen on. So yeah, Caesarism seems a bit off. But what the hell, all these epithets have somewhat [melded] together, Putinism, Xiism, Trumpism. All that remains as essential is the Führer Principle, or so it seems to me. Which, for the US, is a good thing. When Trump is no more, Trumpism will fracture into impotence. But the Russians and Chinese — they'll always love, or at least tolerate, their masters.’ … …. ‘I hope the goons in Tehran get that $25b unfrozen only because I'm so eager to learn how the goons in D.C. will spin it. Bound to be the ultimate in surrealism. And yes, failure/defeat and the difference applies to our political system. We survived its monstrous failure in the 1850s; by the 1870s we were back to good, solid, old-fashioned graft, the way it was always supposed to be. I'm holding out for nothing worse than a repeat.’ … …. I am unsure here as to what differentiates failure from defeat in Drake’s thinking. Yet a 4-alarm fire going on for 5 necessitates all sorts of fire trucks and emergency vehicles, not to mention extra crews working the hoses and calling for compassion and understanding and the calvary, no guarantees. Just being a wiseacre at this juncture, certainly not a civil engineer. “Ignorance gets supercharged when fueled by stupidity.” Did I say that? No, Drake did, and it was a civilized hour.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘I suppose Socrates was sacrificed to a MAGA-like pique? Because his sense of God differed from the gods of the workaday Athenian? So you’ve had a look at the Derveni papyrus text fragments. I sure as hell won’t go on about it. A very early instance of physicists and spiritualists exchanging hats and jerseys and speaking one another’s language circa the 5th century B.C. Although what was it you said the other day, something along the lines that physicists, all persnickety in these anti-science times, condescend like crazy, spiritualists no better than La-La-Land flakes? Odysseus is one thing, Orphism another and yet, sure, that Orpheus had a story to tell and something to atone for needs no allegorical gloss as would render him yet another bauble of academe. Percival says “hi”. He’s an all-the-way animal, as I like to remind you, not a half goat half vegetable contraption. The temps are quite normal for this time of year on the island, nothing alarming. I think I may’ve gotten my novel happening again, knock timber.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘I’ll tell you where the 60s went to die. (Even here in Slovakia.) Went to wherever the demented are housed or locked up all the while they’re singing Bruce Springtsteen tunes, karaoke session. You see, and I don’t even have Polish cousins, I was roped into watching something from whence I got this item of actionable intelligence, a horror flick involving creature-grotesques set in an old folks’ home, the most unsettling scene though the above-mentioned sing-song scene. The series, entitled “The Boroughs” (which has its moments to be sure and some unimpeachable pathos) did slide into kitsch, oldster irascibles (such as I am) perhaps gotten too endearing, finding sex and happiness and the triumph of the spirit on a better-late-than-never basis. Since when am I making commentary on pop culture? This has to stop or my membership will be ripe for cancellation come the next Socratic drinking session.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. Lavender cupcakes (with honey and vanilla bean) are in the oven. French horn does take the whole western civilization thing seriously. Yet even he’d agree that the cakes aren’t sacramental, do not represent souls (as one of my Polish cousins would have it) as are on their way to seeing God. Which could be Zeus. Or Hera. Or Aphrodite. Or all three of them hump-lumped together. As for the hoi polloi, there’s this of the wishing-to-be-initiated-into-a-religion crowd, seeing as it seems we’ve been talking “stupidity” versus “ignorance” versus “depraved” or what best characterizes the MAGA Lilliputians: Since they are overcome by error and pleasure as well, they do not learn or believe. Disbelief and ignorance are the same thing. For if they do not learn or comprehend, it cannot be that they will believe even if they see dreams … and so forth and so on. Dreams of what? Can’t say. Potable tea? I believe the quote has to do with an argument regarding the authenticity of ancient Greek rites, how one has to get them right if one expects to progress in one’s apprehension of God. Kind of like blowing into the French horn in such a way as to nail that long tone. Can’t do so at 3 in the morning though, or you’ll wake the neighbours sleeping off their baptisms.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘What’s with all the esoterica?’

RECEIVED, and it has been a while since we last received anything: one David Hackbridge Johnson CD: Orchestral Music, Volume Four: Piano Concerto No. 3, OP. 455 “After Bruno Schulz”; Symphony No. 18 in F Sharp Minor, OP. 438, No. 3. Will let you know.

May 19-20, 2026: A blowhard wrote the words that follow: It is true that men who have laboured with some show of excellence, have already given knowledge of themselves to the world; and this alone ought to suffice them; I mean the fact that they have proved their manhood and achieved renown. Yet one must needs live like others…. And yes, there is that – living like others. But for once, you will not find these words packed in a Truth Social screed. You will not see them registering on other self-serving media platforms. The quote is an emanation of one Benvenuto Cellini, showboat, murderer, master crafter of gold and silver objects, and not least a musician, nothing wired anywhere near him, no Moog or Abyss handiwork. Literally a Renaissance man. And now we learn that the presidential daughter believes she is a Stoic. Might one suggest that Marcus Aurelius is not something one reads on a bottle of beauty product? Am I in error? In which case, ought I to be flabbergasted?

I intended to give the Battle of Cumae a say-so, if for no other reason than that I feel affinity for the word “Cumae”, perhaps on account of its “sibyl”, cave-bound prophetess who, every time I come across her in the annals, always seems on the verge of a burn-out, of being over-tasked. She had her set-to with Tarquin the Proud (he Superbus all over, Rome’s “final” king), and he finally got the point. And thereafter, the Romans made much use of her. One can read that “Cumae was the first ancient Greek colony of Magna Graecia on the mainland of Italy; that it was founded by settlers from Euboea in the 8th century BCE. That, in the 5th century BCE, the Greeks and Carthaginians, as interlopers on Italian terrain, posed a significant threat to Etruscan trade dominance in the Mediterranean. [So that] the Etruscans suffered major naval losses in battles, such as the Battle of Cumae in 474 BCE against a Greek fleet, which disrupted their trade routes and weakened their economic power. (Which eventually led to the Romans getting the best of everybody, especially those Etruscans.)” That I like the sound of the word, the associations the sound can muster up: some Mediterranean breeze, the taste of a blood orange, a glimpse of Tiberius on Capri, some sense that the ancients could as easily divine events or misdirect themselves through oracles as moderns do through their electronic devices. Mention of another such word – Sinope, port trading town on the Black Sea, puts me in mind of mill towns I knew on the BC coast, a decoction comprised of the reek of pulp and green beer, the sea tang, the mist, relentless gulls, poets face down on terrycloth, passed out…

Postscript I: On this day, 1962, Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr President, and Carpenter may have rolled his eyes. On this day in 1935, El ‘Awrence (Lawrence of Arabia) bit the dust, motorcycle accident, and the world lost, if not so much a gentleman, then a scholar-mystic, speaking of alleged showboats and self-aggrandizers. Also, Jackie Kennedy died on this day (in 1994), wife of what had been the aforementioned birthday president, she all style and elegance, and intelligence. Hard to imagine that the likes of her will ever come around again, what with the devastations…

Postscript II: Lunar in serial quotes: … …. ‘We watched a most peculiar film the other night "Sirat", apocalyptic, all about a father, together with his young son, in the Moroccan desert looking for his missing daughter. The world is falling apart and all these people, old enough to know better, going to raves in the desert, techno music. It may drive you up the wall, but talk about dancing one's way to oblivion. I'm not sure what, ultimately, the film was aiming at but bleak, bleak, bleak.’ … …. ‘I've never known things to be so bad here. Politically everything is in turmoil, Starmer on his last legs, Farage gloating of course. This country has always rejected extremism and now, now I'm no longer sure.’ … …. ‘I am rubbing my eyes in disbelief: has Trump not just given China the go ahead to take Taiwan?’ … …. ‘I listened to a bit of the forthcoming Rolling Stones release. They may be our last hope.’ … …. ‘Yes, I'm a ruin and I'm going to charge people admission just to look at me, guided tours extra.’ … …. I will be first in line…

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you think the latest formation of a slush fund (courtesy of Carpetbagger #1) is most unseemly: … …. ‘[Alright then, you categorically reject that poetry is something that makes one feel all gooey inside. Gee I got all gooey when reading Milton's little history (“Paradise Lost”) on the founding of Hell. Didn't you? Poor, abused Lucifer. You can stop worrying about where the US is headed. Even Xi acknowledged to Trump that we're the "hottest country" anywhere, after 4 years of decline under Biden. So that physicist you had in mind who said that all of us, when contemplating the nature of the universe, its somethingness and nothingness (if there is such a thing) are operating at junior league levels, are probably delusional, that the surmisals oughtn’t have anything to do with religion or, at some level, science as we think it is, so 1, leave the driving to the physicists, and 2, why bother with the big questions? Concern yourself with another order of petty inquiry. What’s with the presidential hands? How much will the crypto prediction market pay? Should I have kissed her on that first date? Most intriguing and, to me, most likely, is that because astrophysicists don't yet fully understand quantum mechanics (in relation to general relativity), they also don't yet know all the physical laws of the universe. So it might be that those laws — the constants — would always produce precisely the kind of universe we have. The somethingness. The nothingness. The kiss that quantumly strayed off-target. Fascinating stuff. Physics is yet another discipline I sometimes regret not pursuing. Life just isn't long enough to squeeze in so many fascinating academic pursuits. Absolutely should’ve kissed her or at least aligned the buss properly – one’s intention with a receptive mood. Otherwise, good chance she dies of boredom.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘So we’re not done with all things Odysseus. Seems the latest movie rendition of “The Odyssey” has gotten itself all sorts of controversy, for the flat American accents, for “diversity” issues, for a certain lack of integrity with respect to Homer’s poem, and on and on and on. I’ll watch the flick when it comes around and judge the various critiques for myself, being an amateur critic in full plumage, but also a deep-sea reader in the Homeric canon. I expect the movie will have gotten it wrong, and I may well wind up preferring the 1997 Odyssey miniseries that featured Assante, Williams, Scacchi, Rosellini, Peters et al. Percival says hi. He’s never been all that keen on goat sacrifice. Gets nervous when I haul out my Greeks…’ … …. I know the feeling. Americans get pious and haul out Havana…

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘I thought the Hegsethian. I thought Betty Boop. Who had more courage (virtus in periculis firmior) in her little pinkie than he has in all his tattoos? Otherwise, if you’re going to bring up Sinope, you ought to mention Diogenes the Cynic, local boy. He let an emperor know that said emperor was blocking his view of the light. Apollonius of Rhodes immortalized the Black Sea with his Argonautica which I confess to have started but never finished. Eumelus of Corinth was way ahead of Apollonius and preceded Greek colonization… I am in the mood for a bowl of cherries. Slovakians regard their cherries as others might their heirlooms.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Polish cousin of mine wrote me to say he quit on ”Carnal Knowledge” (1971) after an hour’s worth of viewing – not because it was bad, but because of the two male leads: they were such ditzes when it came to women that he couldn’t abide it. Of course, the flick, quite the little satire, was meant to be critical of “male sexuality”, but even so… Me, I’ve got cupcakes in the oven, French horn gearing up for the warmer weather after a coolish spring thus far, and I could care less about what men were or were not in the “back then 70s”, in the beforetime of my sentience, and I find that men are something that I take as I take them, and sometimes I’m surprised. As it is I’ve never seen the movie, and I can barely stomach Jack Nicholson at the best of times for his continual oozing of diabolical sleaze, and that other fellow, the other lead – Garfunkel, I can never get out of my head the precious “The Sound of Silence” voice once it starts puling on… In fact, I’m getting more and more testy about present generation music as has been considered great… But that’s it for me. One thing I’ve noticed in my career thus far: those who assail the “classical” canon of any art form, who will dish it out, can never take it when they come under bombardment. How’s your end of it?’ … …. Dandy. Or I’ll say hunky without the dory, given that You-Know-Who looks like forever, and that contrary to popular opinion, he just might have read Epictetus. Circumstances don't make the man, they only reveal him to himself. Still, try saying that to Donald, and lizard eyes will stare back at you and tiny fingers flail as they gesture hypnotically.

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Old age is much on my mind. I forget sometimes that I’m not 17 – in my brain at least, as when I’m an enthusiast, curious, hungry to know stuff, in love with the guitaring of John Fahey, the poems of Lorca, taking up Eliot and his “Quartets” – I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And all that stuff about time… Time is neither this nor that, nor this, that, and the other thing, but it is… well, whatever… There has been progress on the part of the bricklayers working on the building that houses my favourite café. I wonder if they, the proprietors, will raise the price of coffee. Rent has gone up 70 per cent in these parts in the last decade. It seems that more often these days I’ll recall the taste of a cigarette when I was, perhaps, out on my balcony overlooking the neighbourhood, when I was least involved with hummin’ beings and most involved with the “world” in some weird abstract sense, one made of squirrels and tulip trees and feral cats. Strange sorts of moments, a kind of fluidity happening between one’s body and that of all the consciousness that ever was aware of itself throughout all of time. What was consciousness in the age of the dinosaurs? Silphium went extinct in antiquity, overly plucked by Greeks and Romans because of its seasoning and medicinal properties. That it was a wild, yellow flower… That, had I known about this as I was having that back balcony smoke, I would’ve mourned the once unassuming bloom….’

May 10-12, 2026: Mischief, thou art afoot. Try visualizing those words squirting out of a hole in Steve Bannon’s mug. How about Mark Antony (not the pop star) in a reflective moment? Shakespeare having one of those – a moment? Supposition: America has received its full petition (of something or other), never mind what is good health for the commonweal, an upscale word. In a discussion of how we got here, one might hear: “Don’t blame the liar. Blame the gullible.” Trump Regime Effects and Aftershocks, Installation #2, more in the offing. What would Shakespeare have made of the Designated Hitter Rule? Would he have rooted for the Knicks? What happens when the liar and the gullible are joined at the hip in a single entity, a person, say, and that person helms the free world, his orange aura miasmic? So far, nothing good. Nothing Good. The new national motto by fiat.

Otherwise, in the wake of recent developments – in Virginia, with respect to menacing electoral realities, I raise my hand (tentatively) and ask: will there be a blue wave or not, come the imminent midterms to the south of here? I expect to be shouted down by experts. I expect my hand to be bitten off. Does one have any right to feel mounting disquiet, to take one’s eye off the ball, so to speak, and ignore the polls and other sources of data, and all the good-times-are-coming oracles, and somehow feel the overall madness as deepening, that it has an unbreakable grip on a nation state’s wits and bones? Can there ever be a morning in America (after a horrendous night of successive storm fronts) that is freshly crisp air to one’s skin again, air not endlessly soiled by Reagan era blueprints for supply and demand, by a presser’s gastric winds, by all the bells and whistles with which Ayn Rand acolytes and Newt Gingrich-ian interns (cloned from the master copy) perform ditties, humbly busking for a polity of white idiots in comparison to which Neandertals come off spiffing? Try articulating the question into a golden phone while on bended knee, while stuck to some posture of ritual submission, a golden statue’s shadow having sucked dry one’s vibe? Well then: A quick break south is the beginning of wisdom, Genoa and Naples are not negligible, and the sea is the sea.

What the above italics mean and with respect to what – some civilizational crisis? – I throw up in the air as beyond sense. The sentence is, within its syntactical confines, a tone poem as opposed to a statement of fact. It is the sort of sentence one might klutz over in a memoir-travel book by an overwrought author overcome by the beauty of a place, with a history of humankind that has not been suborned by bots. (The Hill of Kronos, Peter Levi, 1981, a case in point.) And it is just that in just such a book. Perhaps the author meant to say: “Get out of England (or North America) if you want to understand a thing. Get out of your freakin’ head.” Or perhaps not. The cost of travel, these days…

Still, the following clause (from The Hellenistic World, F W Walbank, also 1981) is telling: in a manner befitting an educated man. Here we have reference to an ancient “presenter” of poetry. He puts a plectrum to his cithara. He brings forth the songs of Timotheus and Polyidus and other “poets”. It is perhaps all rather precious. But how long has it been since the words might apply to a post-post-post-modernist chewing on post-post-post-structural jellybeans in Terra Haute or Regina as opposed to Cnossus, the mic needing tweaking, the laptop out of juice? Beats me. How long has it been since poetry (in the person of, say, a SpongeBob Eumolpus or a freeloading Rilke) took a chair at some breakfast table and buttered toast and sugared coffee and flirted with the lady of the house? Be it a morning-after table… Be it the dawn of an age table… Be it just a getting-on-with-it item of kitchen furniture… There once was a world that was, at least, redeemable, if not equitable to all concerned. Beyond the White House lawn is a world that increasingly has all the texture of coprolites, with or without a Garden of Heroes… (Because everything You-Know-Who touches turns to… and all that… Since you have heard the gossip, twig to the rumours. That the gravitational constancy is one thing; nuclear winter is quite another, if you would seek a metaphor for the rise and fall of the latest neo-Reich to pearl-clutch at the Brass Ring nailed to our necks.)

I cannot say when my interest in antiquity first came about. There was the image of Apollo cradling his lyre on the title page of a book of Plato’s writings. It frightened me. It was saying: “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to reckon with what I get up to”. I was roundabout twelve at the time, the world an abyss. The book was one of those cheap editions by which my father, in all modesty and with mild intent, said: “I have no intellect to speak of, but I know that intellect exists.” (My mother had no objections. Hell, when a schoolgirl, she read Rilke like Americans once read “Hiawatha” at their desks.) I read the Plato and understood nothing. But that I did read it, yes. And it might well have introduced to me the notion that language was something one could explore. Even so, I was also very much smitten with baseball and basketball and comic books. I hoped to play “pro” in one of the aforementioned sports, extending my love of sport into adulthood. Serious reading in the “classics” came later – in my early twenties, and I was grappling with the “New American” poems, Shakespeare easier to grasp. I had long since quit Batman and Red Ryder and Archie. I discovered Juvenal in a bookstore, Vancouver Island, and that was that. One whacked the f-word (fascism) about like it was a shuttlecock back in the 70s, and it would die in the air and drop and yet, one was fairly sure that it, the f-word, was still a matter of not if, but when.

There was a time in the history of humankind (long, long, long before Das Kapital) when “profit-taking” was frowned upon. Or perhaps not quite so, but it was an idea making the rounds. Gain at the expense of another belonged to a different realm, to warfare and raiding, where it was achieved by acts (or threats) of prowess, not by manipulation and bargaining. The Straits of Hormuz? But then the quote just cited, from The World of Odysseus, applies to “the world of the Homeric poems” and perhaps, to the Bronze Age itself and wherever barter was the mode of “exchange”. I keep saying (somewhat flippantly) that I have no quarrel with mom-and-pop capitalism. This kind of economy, if it still exists in any meaningful way, at least had, and still has a face. What does one do with robocalls and bots and all sorts of other “late stage” capitalistical goodies and fetish items of which I have no understanding nor desire to warm to, that it is all alien to anything once recognizably human and approachable….

When everyone attains honour, then there is no honour for anyone. (Not a sentiment from a Project 2025 directive but a declarative sentence like any other, one elicited from The World of Odysseus, 1954.) And what about Trump, his greatness spoon-fed him in gobs? The honour, by way of his wolf hour screeds, is all his. Verily, here is a truism that he thinks is true to his incandescence: In the final analysis, how can prepotence be determined except by repeated demonstrations of success? You have heard of irony, I trust.

I sling quotes around like they are frisbees or boomerangs or so much hash fries. Prepotence? It is a word signifying strength and authority. There is thought as has circulated for decades now in which a ”competitive spirit” is a negatory and nothing but. Then there is the regime headed by You-Know-Who that wishes to ban all challenges to its hegemony electorally and otherwise, mostly otherwise. It was argued, even in remote times, that the hero, because of his obsession with honour (his prowess), cared more for that than for the “community” at large, so, as an idea, he had to be killed off. Did Odysseus give a straw for the people of his Ithaca? Was it only the insult to his person that he was bound to avenge, the false suitors raiding his stores and stalking his wife, his oikos (see post previous), as it were, sapped as per a siege? The answer, if there is one, may be a great deal more complex yet than anyone would like to acknowledge – in a book review, perhaps, AI crib sheets attached. One thing is certain: if honour is a worthy aim in life, Trump can never know honour because he is a cheat who does nothing but cheat. Obviously, House members and senators think him the alpha and omega of whatever the sun pisses on. It follows that Congress is certainly incapable of a noble act, having removed itself from the equation because heroes are too much damn trouble, and besides, the notion of heroism, by way of mere mention, has long been debased by drugstore blowhard-cowboys, by cowards and hucksters and cultists and collectivists and supremacists of all stripes. Whereas Odysseus (who was a trickster, who played any number of fellow travellers and Trojans for suckers) never assumed the “world” began and ended with himself, everyone else in it collateral damage.

Postscript I: On this day, 1962, Marvel Comics released the first issue of The Incredible Hulk, towering muscle-bound anti-hero. Carpenter was around to sample the pages, metaphysical implications of the strip there for the asking.

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘Every time I check the election results Reform has won more and more seats. I can't even begin to tell you how much this shocks. [ ]. Sorrentino’s La Grazia stays with me. (You'll have to see it before we can discuss it further though.) And of course, the election has shaken me because it seemed not so long ago that this country had bucked the trend that so many countries have in moving towards the political right. I keep saying, "What happened?" and the answer does not materialise.’ … …. Hey, we feel you, bro. … ….’This morning I watched a trailer for a new movie of The Odyssey starring Matt Damon as, yes, Mr O, the lousy mariner, and my first impression is that it looks like a candidate for the worst movie ever made or at least the worst since Brad Pitt starred as Achilles. Why do Americans take on classical roles when we all know the ancient Greeks and Romans spoke with Oxbridge accents? Trouble, double toil and trouble, it looks like Iran may be Trump's nemesis. You tell me which side wins, the side on which even a single loss of life is too much to bear or the side that can sacrifice without blinking ten thousand lives? Trump doesn't get it. Yeh, I've been wondering about the universe. One gets to the age when things ancient no longer seem so ancient at all and for all we know the birth and death of the universe may be no more than a blip in someone else's eye.’ … …. Goodness. Well, the last time I heard someone say as much, and he was Polish, too, I was ten or so and trying to throw a perfect spiral. (Football.) I took the words under consideration.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk away because it is all going to hell in a FedEx packet: … …. ‘No, I'm thinking that Trumpism is in its early stage of death throes. It'll have a long half-life, of course, like radiation. But its demise has begun. That's not insightful. It's fucking obvious.’ … …. Alright then. I’ll set my calendar. … …. ‘[Robards in that Caesar flick? Here’s an opinion or two on how a good actor is unmanned by Shakespeare’s blank verse]: “Generally as flat and juiceless as a dead haddock" —Howard Thompson, NYT; "There's hardly any way to describe how Jason Robards brings Julius Caesar to its knees, but let me try" —Roger Ebert. … …. [But] about not yet hitting bottom, [situationally speaking, politics the enabler], that's the beauty of this paradox: The worse things become, the better they become.’ … …. But for whose profile? “The Last Yuppie to Shop at Walmart”, sequel pending?… …. ‘The Democrats just can’t catch a break [.] [Virginia?] I think the Dems will still win the house, but [for] sure [the] margin will be slimmer.’ … …. Ah yes, when beggars die there are no comets seen. … …. Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war…. But hey, Drake, you have the last word: … …. ‘Yes, we can't know if the ancient Greeks were "better" [than us]. But I would caution that what we know of their thoughts on life and living comes from a highly select group of first-rate minds and temperament. If in 2,500 years all humanity knows of Americans is what writings were left by some of the Founders and Abraham Lincoln, they'd think we were the most virtuous people on earth. (As some scholar once said, "The only thing worse than writing history without documents is writing history with documents.") [And] yes, the universe does have an edge, it's like a bubble, and assuming no multi-universes, it's all nothingness from there. Infinite nothingness, no edge, no end; it just goes on and on.’ … …. Your source? Pilgrims getting pedicures in the Toe-tally Polished Salon? Sorry, I was once, many lives ago, the Class Wiseacre. … …. ’Imagining blackness extending endlessly is an impossibility for the human brain, it being wired for only the finite. As the Buddhist priest said when asked if there's an afterlife, "Why do you ask such a question? It'll make your brain hurt." Your mention of themis was interesting. Last night I was reading Pericles' funeral oration: "We are lovers of nobility with restraint"; nobility translated from kalon, "nobility of character." I thought maybe the two words were synonymous. I did some digging. They're not, says the research. But the distinction in modern parlance is an awfully fine one. Themis (from the goddess, Themis) means "divine law," or law from the gods ("tradition," as you say), and kalon means "moral excellence." A person of kalon, then, is "virtuous." Today's theists would say morality (whatever that means) is what conforms to God's law (whatever that is, or might be). I like the Greek distinction: themis is divine, whereas kalon is generated by humanity.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘I guess we’re done with all things Odysseus, meaning we’re on to other talking points. Harriet Beecher Stowe? Is a kalonoscopy in order? Percival says “maa”’.

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Still recovering from my cure at the spa. I leave you with the following – from a book I’m sure you’ll recognize and for what it’s worth, and apropos of everything and nothing. But before we begin, there had been a discussion of a lament that a woman was singing on a bus making its way through backcountry to a town in Arkadia (Greece). The point being: a local lamenting the dead Christ, as opposed to a dead anyone else, was considered poor form when there were foreigners among the passengers. The quote: And Mikis Theodorakis, most famous and beloved of Greek musicians, learnt the elements of his art from an old church singer at Tripolitsa, now called Tripolis, which is also in Arkadia. That old man knew by heart every part of the ancient repertory of the church, and the whole corpus of secular, traditional music. He sang all day in churches and all night in taverns. [ ]. Mikis was going to be a great musician, and George was going to be a great poet. They were going to write an opera together. It would be a pastoral opera, and it was going to have real sheep. They were 8 years old then. … …. And then a discussion of Arkadia’s history and what Arkadia was good for, if anything. Mother-goddesses with strange eyes? A few good poets who wrote short, perfect poems like the dying notes of sheep bells? … …. From Peter Levi’s The Hill of Kronos. Need I say more? Was there once a world that had textures not always friendly to the touch, but something one could touch just the same, as might pave avenues into all the senses? I’ve rendered myself a conspiracist.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘What’s up, doc? You got me. I was munching on a carrot. As you must know, the movie crew has decamped, taken all their gear, fist bumps all the way to their vans. The building is ours again. What were they up to? Anna Karenina remake? Cupcakes in the oven, French horn awaits his turn. Not to be put in the oven but to proffer a tune. I love classical music, opera, those sorts of things. (I love all sorts of music, generally.) But the other day I happened to hear Jean Ritchie sing “Shady Grove”. Shady Grove, my little love, I'm bound to go away. Cheeks as red a blooming rose, and eyes are the prettiest brown. It put shivers down my neck.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. In the flick “A Month by the Lake” 1995 rom-com (and the lake is Lake Como), Vanessa Redgrave shamelessly pursues the affection of a man. In our day and age, it’s called stalking. Still, a charming movie in its way. I didn’t wince once. Not a hint of creep in it, save that it’s the year 1937, war in the air, fascists in the streets… Whereas yesterday, the literal yesterday, not a metaphor, was all about baseball and “Julius Caesar” (the 1970 film). I switched back and forth between them. I see one of your buddies was onto it too, this movie version, I mean, of “lend me your ears”. Does it have anything to say to this moment in time? My kingdom for a gerrymander? (Right. That was some other Shakespeare. One of the Richards.) Look, it’s been a pouty spring. It wants to be warm. It can’t quite get its act together. You talk about raising your hand, you timorous, so as to posit a question, all the while you expect to be rounded upon by the perspicacious? You have my sympathies. My favourite café is still held hostage by obstreperous bricklayers two months after it was slated to re-open to a smattering of applause. Will Cassius rate a presidential pardon? Is the current Geist an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” subtext? They’ve been streaky, those Blue Jays. They either score runs in bunches or they claw for air.’

May 4-5, 2026: Old news by now, though it was centre-cut a few days back when the question arose: am I dreaming? Dreaming an episode vis-à-vis Congress… Wherein a king, Brit monarch at that, lectures (mildly, even good-naturedly) the members of that body on the matter of a few nuts and bolts. Yes, as pertains to a cog or two in a political mechanism. Or what is minimally required for a democracy to function as it goes through a rough patch, a nightmare, in fact… And for his troubles, he rates a standing ovation. It is bipartisan two-hand clapping, and in unison, fancy that. Perhaps the ruckus startled him. As if all those men and women were desperately in need of a venting moment, and they let off a bit of pent-up consternation, of, how shall we say, repressed rage? No doubt, stranger things have happened, much stranger, not the least of which was the re-election of the, how shall we say, lizard brain for HOS or Head-of-State, guest-friendship relations up for a reboot. Lizard brain with disposable lizard tail and somewhat convex lizard eyes (cannot nail the sucker, impeachment proof) … And so forth and so on… Even so, that royalty should ever so slyly admonish what would be the leader of the free world not-so-free-as-we-speak-and-it-is-getting-more-parlous-by-the-minute, is that not a hoot?

I have in mind the word themis, one I came across in a little book. The book is entitled The World of Odysseus, M I Finley, 1954. The sense of that word lies with “the right thing to do” or with “what is not done – ever”. With what is customary. With “tradition”, and there is a word as had a bad rep in the 60s, with some justification… But the violation of unwritten law as opposed to what is on the books – it is at times the more unforgiveable crime… How many “unwritten laws” of the last ten years have been routinely and gleefully trashed? I am not going to do it here, but ask yourself, for a grand for instance: how many court orders has the regime ignored since 2016? And that is just for starters. And how many jellybeans are in that jar?

Whatever “themis” was, it was discussed in the local assemblies of Homer’s Greeks. From Finley’s opus: The world of Odysseus had a highly developed sense of what is fitting and proper. In the world of the U.S. of A., whatever might constitute a bunch of “themis” has been quashed, abandoned, bulldozed over, hardly missed. Though the stony island of Ithaca was nowhere near being democratic in practice, everything tilting in the direction of lords lording it over peasants and slaves, things were discussed by one and all; most everyone figured in the discussions and so, this or that lord who had executive decisions to make at least knew what was thumbtacked to the community’s bulletin board, what was on everyone’s mind from the top rungs to the bottom tiers of the collective oikos, or economic unit beyond that of the immediate family and its household “issues”. Let me catch my breath.

Perhaps the millennia that separate us from those Greeks are not such a barrier as all that when it comes to a glimpse of their moment at one of history’s mustering points (the Bronze Age). In light of which, what the “people” wanted from their bards was not so dissimilar from what TV audiences desire of their HBO binge-watches, i.e. action, one might say action-narratives, what happens to whom and who does what about this or that, even if no one lives happily ever after, never mind exegeses of what it means to be human. (Proust, for all his nattering about jealousy and what the passing of time does to body, mind, and soul, wrote up characters to whom things did their worst, to whom sh-t, or life as a general principle, happened.) In any case, it is not to say that your average action-thriller has more to offer than the poetry in which Achilles drags Hector’s corpse around Troy’s walls (after he has hitched it to his chariot) and how that spectacle came to pass. And as for what it means to be human, the tragedians that succeeded Homer – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (not to mention a great many lost authors and their lost works), from whom do you think the likes of a Proust lifted a nugget or two of insight? Nobody-Is-Interested-in-Sweetness-and-Light Hedda Hopper? In summation: Conversely, there was no weakness, no unheroic trait, but one, and that was cowardice and the consequent failure to pursue heroic goals. What were we saying about Congress?

And, inane question, one worthy of a juvenile, but an adult of mature age? And yet here goes nothing. Does the universe have edges beyond which is some kind of nothingness? As if that nothingness were an amniotic fluid of sorts nestling a perverse appetite for cosmic paradox. And why should any of it – a universe of energy and matter and nothingness exist at all? The mind wants a reason or reasons as it is so constituted that reason is its raison d’etre and yet, so often reason is an impediment to knowing a thing. Why should there be any reason for anything, for should x=y, top that z, then q has to be taken seriously? (Seems that, tail-end of my seventh decade, and I find myself sifting through the same questions I had on hand when I was a pre-teener.) Homer had all that in mind too, in his way, although his responses, if any, were posited in the melee called human affairs having to do with a warrior class. Was Odysseus a thug or a man of principles as he went about slaughtering the false suitors stalking Penelope, those sackers of his stores? (The storeroom, not the hearth, was the centre of every household.) And if you do “A”, “B” is likely to follow. So, do you want “B” to follow? Well, you do not piss off the gods, for starters. That was morality for a Homer man, guest-friendship relations that world’s underpinning, its cutting edge of enlightened behaviour. A thousand years later, with Plutarch, and we arrive at what is needed to “improve” one’s character: mastery over one’s appetites and emotions. Even so, a somewhat stuffy Plutarch does not seem to have been that much of a finger-wagger, of “you’re going to rot in hell for your un-Christian attitudes” kind of censure, as when the Bird of Paradise flies up your nose, but there are consequences just the same, have a care. And here, another two thousand years later, and we seem to be shadow-boxing one another and ourselves in a world where it seems like anything flies, even shit-filled balloons, let alone the heaviest and least aerodynamic egoisms.

Postscript I: On this day in 738 of the “common era”, Maya ruler 18 Rabbit of Copán is captured and beheaded by his former vassal Cauac Sky, ruler of the nearby city of Quiriguá. How could I resist that mouthful, not to mention that Carpenter, in a past life, might have witnessed it, sporting feathers as he did? He is certainly witnessing stuff now, and he is not clutching pearls. Read this time-traveller should you have need of a rather lustful union between insightfulness and acerbity.

Postscript II: More Lunar Anomalies or: … …. ‘[King] Charles was put in an awful position of course and ought not to have gone. It was really forced on him by Starmer who is so bloody obsequious that it is embarrassing to observe.’ … …. And then, after a decent interval of time, this: … …. ‘I have only just realised King Charlie did rather better than anticipated with his speech to congress, the fact that Vance refused to applaud him. That is a kind of victory. I suppose that means Vance understood what was being said. And the little creep comes over here to lecture Europe!’ … …. I know. I know. And I thought I had a bad case of Herr Professor. As for Pompeii: Under the Clouds, what say you? … …. ‘Hmmmm, it was the film I was most looking forward to and ... and ... I was disappointed. Yes, the trailer was most promising, but it was a great opportunity missed, nothing, for example, about the philosophical implications of living with the thing that might one day kill you. So many people have profound things to say about Vesuvius but there were [these] silly phone calls to the police department abouts tremors etc. I'm not saying it was bad, but it was not half the film it could have been. … …. A certain I-country doing unto Lebanon what it’s still doing to Gaza and the West Bank where shoot-to-kill civilians now has official sanction – there’s that too. So, a number of British Jews have escaped into the “relative peace” of Israel at which I don't know whether to laugh or cry. [ ] And of course the [ ] Starmer wants to ban pro-Palestine marches as supposedly being vehicles of hate. [Hate?] I hate what this world has become, the genies that have been released from the bottle.’ … …. Roger that. I can hear bubbles sparkle and hiccups fly and the can you kick around rattling something fierce.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see food assistance being dumped in the street amidst the cannon fodder staring down NICE hoods and phalanxes of anti-vaxxers: … …. ‘Trump has absolutely cratered; the last Pew poll has his net disapproval at +30. Even Rasmussen and RMG — a couple of GOP whores — have him at +13 and +15. And his numbers get worse (i.e., better) every week. I've not read Finley but bless his heart he comes cheap, 6 bucks, unlike so many other works on ancient lit. (And I still say the Iliad is superior to Odysseus.’) … …. ??? You mean The Odyssey. … …. ‘[And] Maga knows it (by way of the bad polls, not ancient literature), but won’t admit it. Everyone else knows it and is telling pollsters precisely that. [You see], we're already scathed. It'll get worse and, I suspect, [and the worseness will] hang [around] for a long time. But the sooner we correct course, the shorter the duration of pain. All I really know is that what the Trumpists want most is for us to declare defeat; to say, well that's it, we're doomed, it's all over. Thank you, no. Ain't doin' that.’ … …. Yes, I think we get where you are coming from. When I wrote you to say: Texas town, churchy, exceedingly kinky, corruptions new and old, hypocrisies as stale as OT accounts of evil kings, as fresh as yesterday in the life of the regime, and if this depiction (by TV series writing) is even halfways accurate, America as paradise is thoroughly noxious, the sunset a swamp, night a bottomless bog, you said: ‘You could have stopped at "Texas town”. I would’ve gotten from whence you’re coming from.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘We’ve been fascinated by all things Odysseus for a long, long time, how he stacks up in this world of threadbare Christian virtue and transactional thuggery, Polyphemuses comprising every legislative body, Percival and I being islanders a la Ithaca, the Recycling Depot the centre of our “oikos”. Then again, I prefer to downplay the fascination, literary fetishes anathema to me. We’ve received an e-mail from one of your buddies in which he suggests that things are so bad, there can be no saying how bad they are. We’ll have to accord that some thought. Maa. Yesterday, the sight of a movie crew assembling at the ferry dock gave me a chest full of melancholy and other misgivings. Yes, we’re listed as local luminaries – as in a “man and his goat”, but we don’t flash. Maa. The side of me that’s Odysseus, sacker of cities and all-around trickster – it’s on high alert as I consider the likelihood of yet another one-word awful title as will flag the latest pile of movie trash to be released into the world. Maa. Not to get me wrong: I love movies. Will watch almost anything, even mindless farce. But feel-good pottage all mean girl and bad boy dialogue – it unnerves one. It points to a great sucking sound at the centre of the universe swallowing every iota of sentience…. Thank you, even so, for presenting me as having been sane. (Previous post.) Dubious claim, however.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Taking a pass this go-round. Recovering from my cure at the spa. It was an out-of-body moment, me seeing myself in towel and flip-flops, the weight of western civ on my shoulders, some part of my brain a shrine to Schopenhauer, even if I’ve long since forgotten what he stood for, unless it be that humankind is mostly a fool’s errand, but suffer the little children anyway. You know there was a variant of a certain story-line as floated about in the ancient Greek world. It went like this: one of Odysseus’s sailors (under the influence of Circe’s spell) would rather not have been turned back into a man. He liked being a pig. Ah, pigglety wigglety igglety what’s up, doc? I think I’ll grow carrots in my garden. I sense a downturn in the air….’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. Yet another movie shoot in this building. Weary of it. (Landlord, ass and wannabe arts patron, gets shekels for the vacant suite.) But I aren’t weary of cupcakes and my French horn. Of course, you realize the horn is schtick on my part. Can’t play it worth beans though I’ll have it bleat away at times, in warm weather, say, in the park down the street. Gets me high-fives and looks of concern. Wonder what this latest cinematic venture is to be called. Something as grotesque as “The Man with the Smallest Penis in Existence and the Electron Microscope Technician Who Loved Him.” Actual title. Polish cousin brought it to my attention.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Seems to me we ought to be getting serious. Too much badinage in our badinage.’