Fly to a distant city

  Find one good jacket.
  

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, 

at a rump court proceeding in Colo-

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

their foot in the usual place -

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.

The seduction of boys viii: Texas down their throat

The same perfervid lemmings,

who so effortlessly captured

the history texts of Texas -

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. 

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

op. cit.

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©