Thursday, September 25, 2014

Wanted: A new Hamlet






    Eric Holder, the Attorney-
    General of the US, is va-
    cating the legal parapets
    he prowled, as Gertrude of
    banking and Claudius of civ-
    il liberties so stifled him.
    Who knew, the courtiers had 
    wished it so?

    Any loiterer with a decent
    stomach for intrigue will 
    do.

























































Withering the grass for God





The setting could not have been more
scrupulously structured for the hues
of irony. Beneath a banner citing a
verse in Isaiah, The grass withers,
the flowers fade .., the Southern 
Baptist Convention kicked out a con-
gregation who have come to peaceable
terms with same-sex relationships, 
rado. Such a strife-torn jurisdic-
tion, our higher State's become of
late, I hope the Little Nell goes on.

Not to be outdone - as, when have
they ever been - our Brokeback
Mountain Roman Catholics have put
shall we say, "down," or "in it"
again - by shunning a sexagenarian
couple of long membership in the
Church, for marrying in Seattle.
No one has alleged jealousy in the
congregation, for the ceremony's
taking place near the water, but
sages in the Style section have
cautioned against ruling it out.
But the newlyweds had paid the
standard extortionary price for
indulgence, long enough: closet-
ing themselves in silence, for
decades of devotion in that com-
pany. 

Somewhere near us all, is a State
to shelter us from such corruption,
where the word Isaiah cited is re-
stored, even as the legions of its
withering, surely hear it coming.





















Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The seduction of boys viii: Texas down their throat





The same perfervid lemmings,
who so effortlessly captured
financed by the Koch family
(lads so challenged to speak
their own name correctly, as
to loose the dogs of many a
misbred litter)have begun 
to dictate to the parents of
the suburbs of Denver, that 
the preaching of the Tea Party
creed must extend to a child's 
grasp of history; which is to
say, to his loss of who he is. 

It's straightforward molestation. 

Now an entire school system gags
in public at last; this will be
seen as another Ferguson moment,
because it goes beyond resisting
myth, to saving the unarmed from
being destroyed before our eyes. 

























Tuesday, September 23, 2014

In the country, staying



 In whatever company you find
 yourself in England, you may
 always be sure that some one
 present is "staying," and you
 come in due time to feel the
 abysses within the word.






The large windows of the drawing room
I speak of looked away over the river
to the blurred and blotted hills, 
where the rain was drizzling and drift-
ing. It was very quiet, as I say; there
was an air of large leisure .. [They]
talked about "town": that is what peop-
le talk about in the country. If I were
disposed I might represent them as talk-
ing with positive pathos of yearning.




  We had a beautiful solstice day
  in our Piedmont: breezy, warm, and
  balmy as a resilient loft of pillow
  to deliver us to Fall. In our count-
  ry modesty, we can't tell you any-
  thing you don't already know. We re-
  ly on visits to constitute a world.

  It is a treasure, our language gives
  us, to resort to an ear so fluent in
  our yearnings, it can build for them
  a manor where they huddle, atavist-
  ically. What else is a yearning, but
  a delectation of unfulfillment? 

  Something more, I love to believe,
  something I respect James for not
  allowing to be easy, but showing.























Henry James
English Hours









Monday, September 22, 2014

Is David Cameron's joy the final nail?






Her Majesty's Prime Minister, who
conceived the late referendum on
the dismemberment of the United
Kingdom as a mode of entrapping
symptoms he could detect, of 
forces he could never understand,
immediately last Friday deliver-
ed himself of revelation again,
that self-determination in her
islands had been quashed for an-
other generation. Joy in clubland.



It was lost on no one, that this shallow and demeaning partisan boast exhausted the last of the underlying intimidation in Toryism's most frantic arguments for sustained oppression: that the repair, self-determination, would be irreparable. With what sublime and stark genius are the subjects spared their breath, in tautologies on their own desire?
We can't know, if such deeply immature arrogance will be cited, some day soon, as the final nail in his system's coffin. But we can begin to see in it, sentiment's share in mistaking ancient expe-diency for efficient distributions of justice.




Toryism, left to the Tories, has
always exposed itself to Acton's
warning of degeneration in power.
Mrs Thatcher's seizure of Disraeli's
party mirrored (yes, prefigured)
Reaganism's of Theodore Roosevelt's.
An ignoble party of nobility is all
the present generations in the Eng-
lish speaking world have ever seen.
How long will they wear its forms,
the more its pretenses are exposed?

With catastrophic miscalculation,
Tories have pursued their debasing
austerity policies with a smugness
implicating the Kingdom they rule,
as the Left, drenched in pessimism,
has surrendered the initiative to
disunion.

What is the meaning of unrecipro-
cated, nostalgic deferences? Finally,
who cares? Mr Cameron's nightmare's
above ground, and very much alive.
The chimes are audible, David, of 
when Harry cut the cord with Fal-
staff.




















E.P. Thompson
Customs in Common
  Studies in Traditional
  Popular Culture
The New Press, 1993©

Jeremi Suri
Power and Protest
  Global Revolution and
  the Rise of Détente
Harvard University Press, 2003©

Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Invention of Scotland
  Myth and History
op. post.
Jeremy J. Cater, editor
Yale University Press, 2008©

Alasdair Roberts
The End of Protest
  How Free-Market Capitalism
  Learned to Control Dissent
Cornell University Press, 2014©

Katrin Bennhold
On Road to Scotland's Decision,
  Gambles and Fateful Steps
September 18, 2014
The New York Times©

Irvine Welsh
This Glorious Failure
September 19, 2014
The Guardian©