Thursday, September 26, 2013

Ted's weird enough in the Senate





      I shouldn't 
      like to run 
      into him in 
      his atelier.

















Wednesday, September 25, 2013

not forgetting






..                   
                      release in me
the secret purpose I tasted deeply outside time,
           so that I may love, may love

beyond human images and all created things, beyond the single
        pulse that throbs inside me,
one now for the living and the dead; grant me,
         grant me deliverance,

to feel again the uncreated Eros
           filling my breast,
and to be to all, to things near and far away
          as the wind's sound and breath.



























Angelos Sikelianos
Selected Poems
  Prayer [fragment]
Edmund Keeley and
  Philip Sherrard, translation
op. cit.

ii Valéry Lorenzo
Racines






Tuesday, September 24, 2013

new book in print


Patrick Leigh-Fermor's literary
executors have consummated his
agreement with John Murray, pub-
lishers, to bring to life a final
travel memoir, and Heywood Hill
have begun to ship it. Everyone
probably already knows. Good.

















































Sunday, September 22, 2013

There's a country in the world that keeps wanting us to go to war






         On a better-late-than-never
         reading of history, a nation
         we all favour commends war
         to us routinely, and has en-
         trapped three generations of
         our people in a neurotic re-
         flex. Well, with so many such
         dependencies - Wall Street,
         the South, the sugar lobby -
         it seems discriminatory to
         isolate an amiable national
         chum, for corrupting our pol-
         itics and tethering us as its
         own judas goat. 

         War is different from subsid-
         ies and tax breaks, deregula-
         tion and rigged elections. We
         indulge such habits because
         our oligarchs insist. But war
         takes youth who are gone from
         us, when they are gone. That
         vile choice is for the humble
         to deliberate. It would be
         more in the interest of this
         nation to see such people in
         office again, than to do an-
         other dependent the favour of
         a war.


       


         But we have our own nemeses
         to thank for being friends
         like these, who think nothing
         of donating our youth to be
         chopped up in these charitable
         cauldrons, and yet blanch at
         ceding a crumb from our table
         in economic assistance. Even
         they, however, would have no
         platform for debauching our de-
         bates without that galaxy of
         warmongering columnists clus-
         tered at The Washington Post,
         outriders of a decadently im-
         perious editorial board, who 
         speculate openly and weekly 
         on whose society to punish, 
         whose to destabilise, thwart, 
         toy with, as Caligula teased 
         his beasts. As Connie Corleone
         warned Kay, O, read the papers,
         read the papers!

         Who can doubt, how absolute-
         ly normal this can seem, by
         now, to be suspended in an
         isometric pump of hegemony
         because of the power to de-
         fine the terms. We have met
         that country, and it is us.

         Just sayin'.