Red Mug, Blue Linen : 2018-07-15

Saturday, July 21, 2018

It will give them something to do, dear

Of all the considerations our

betters tend to extend to us,

in our years of their parent-

ing, the providing of a lake

house is possibly the shrewd-

est solution for that riddle.

Friday, July 20, 2018

Analytics tell of bots

red mug, blue linen, a blog

you are reading, is enjoying

another siege of aggressive

bots, splattering this week,

as sometimes happens in this

mode of communication, wheth-

er or not the news be merry.

I don't particularly object

to this, apart from a tran-

sitory suppression of real-

time distribution to loyal

readership markets, because

the blog is both a vehicle

of recurring greeting, and

a semi-permanent database.

These surfs tend to subside;

as I suggested, this is not

the first. Then the patterns

of stable readership return;

thus, this is a posting less

of umbrage than of gratitude.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

If this were a real world, the White
House would have taken on the profile
of the ramparts of Troy by now, and
our immersion in all day permanent red
would be understood as linking mortals
in a 24 hour aggression emerging from
its Fox News-scripted forays against
Humanist disbelief. What began life as
a campaign for a Revlon lipstick, and
migrated to the Iliad on the inspired
arm of Christopher Logue's translation,
has fetched its fangs into the neck of
NATO yet again, this time in the win-
some hypothesis of the stooge Tucker
Carlson, of having to come to the aid
of Montenegro. All day permanent red's
fronts were many yesterday, in its un-
deviating tactic of spilling too much
effluent to congeal in a single spot,
with a hectoring Press Secretary's de-
nials that "No" means what it sounds
like, and her Boss's assurance that
support from a hostile state for the
tactics he adopted to come to power
was, lest we'd forgotten, documented,
yet magically unbelievable, and even
comparatively innocuous, to boot.

The poet Anne Carson, often cited here
for an exemplary rapport with thinking,
has admitted, Sometimes I dream a sen-
tence and write it down. It's usually
nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key
to another world. It helps one to sur-
mount the shock of all day permanent red
nonsense from the White House, to recog-
nize its impeachable, if human quality.

We see a cloistered, indignant people,
spellbound in another world, and a host
determined to cast the broadest pool of
of martyrdom, with rapture's nonsense.
Troy had its Priam. It didn't go well.

i Doug Inglish, photo
ii Farce, Fox News
iii Witness, The New York Times

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Origins of Wednesday lxxiii: Alibi of Broadway

Surely, we remember, the knock
on the door from the Execution-
er, to console the widow for a
natural mistake. Instead of or-
dering, "Fire," he says he did
say, "Fire is not what I ask."

Innocently, explicably, circum-
stances intervened to suppress
any sound of such distinctions.
Truly, he is a man of his word.