Friday, February 15, 2019

What news of Bottom, and his anxious lower border?





  Who can dream of making light of
  Fox News' pixie dust, after trans-
  forming our endearing Bottom into
  an Ass for all to see, reduced to
  striking menacing postures to the
  delight of their viewership, even
  to the disquiet of their nemesis,
  the undistracted gaze of history;
  how shall his Queen Titania still
  find reason to tickle his ears?






















Queensland Ballet
2016





Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Origins of Wednesday lxxxviii: Consent or custom?






The intriguing defense of Virginia's
Lt Gov (the office doesn't really use 
the orthographic space it occupies),
to a couple of pressing complaints of
sexual assault, is that the encounters
were "consensual." To have any experi-
ence with life is to possess enough ex-
perience with assault to blow that re-
tort out of the water with one simple
question: how the heck would you know?





I give you the circumstance, of submit-
ting to the custom of the towel snap
on the fanny in the locker room, the
mussing of one's hair before class,
even (hypothetically) the tummy grab
from behind, as yielding to horseplay
as good-naturedly as the setting seems
to demand. But setting and submitting
aren't consenting, and the Lt Gov is
not any likelier to forge that equation
in his pending testimony, than a jury
is to lack experience of assault. Dis-
tinguishing volition from consequence
is akin to counting a ballot without
gerrymandering its frame. He'll learn.
















Stella Tennant x Cathleen Naundor
2013

John Koch
1909 - 1978
After the Sitting






Sunday, February 10, 2019

Sunday nibbled sleeve iv: Governor Northam's therapy campaign





Briefly to recapitulate, for readers
blessed to have been comatose last
week, the Governor of Virginia, hav-
ing been publicly convulsed in con-
trition for posing in a group port-
rait favoring Ku Klux Klan violence
and minstrel show standards of equal
protection, recanted on the following
news cycle, and denied that he had
any idea where the picture came from.
With that, he announced he would ig-
nore the interests of Virginians, his
Party, and his own ostensible prin-
ciples, and cling to his Office with
the tenacity of the tick he may be.

The subsequent exposure, within hours,
of his successor as a serial sexual
assailant, and of his successor as an-
other racially confused vessel of e-
has somewhat reinforced the Governor's
barricading of himself in Office, much
to the 24/7 employment of poll-takers,
to quantify the damage before it hits.





to attain a new level of ridiculousness,
and sink to an unimagined low of divis-
iveness, by vowing as unctuously as any
caricature of Uriah Heap to commit him-
self to what he wouldn't know if it hit
him in the solar plexus, racial equity,
for the rest of his livelong daze as Gov-
ernor. Seldom has the chaos of a politi-
cian's contrition so spontaneously ren-
ovated the urgent priorities of policy
in his domain, to suit a program of ef-
facing a sordid, sodden sense of guilt,
which his resignation could do for free.
And yet, who can forget the example of
Brutus' funeral oration for Caesar, re-
vealing a glittering upside to grief?

But even Brutus didn't blame the State.
According to Ralph Northam, it is more
urgent for Virginians to be conscript-
ed in his crusade for himself, than it
is for them to redress with their legis-
lators' sobriety and balance, the many
pressing opportunities and problems of
public policy in the Commonwealth. What
a dauntless idiot. As if repulsive in-
anity in his underlying conduct had not
made Virginians feel deceived enough, 
he offers the cure of heedless vanity.