Aug, 2025

Aug 2-5 2025: If the hemophilia of Tsar Nicholas’s young son was indicative of the health of tsarist Russia (the end of the Romanov dynasty would come with a bang – literally), what medical condition might speak for the health of the American experiment? Ah then, IBS. And if the jewel-encrusted corsets of the Tsar’s daughters (such as deflected the executioners’ bullets on the night of July 17, 1918, Bolshevik firing squad) are now iconic memory, so will be Trump’s in-office extortion schemes. One might check his waist-cincher for bitcoins. The Russian revolution was spiritually corrupt from the start, all ends justified by any means. The American revolution, whether a temper tantrum with respect to the Brits, or a profound shift in how one did business politically, ethically and fiscally, is now as corrupt as any spotted banana junta, and it is all quasi-legal, the effects of which are likely irreversible. We can begin to read the pages of Tacitus without having to allow for a two thousand year time differential between his Day of the Jackals and ours. Soon enough, it will be Diocletian to the rescue, the tetrarchy jive step, and then a new capital, Phoenix, say, or Vancouver, as in B.C. after the annexation. We are venting here – playfully, it is to be hoped. You may engage your dessert spoon, move on to the pudding before the next fracas between the states breaks out, and some Dem goes all Gettysburg Address on us, and no one much cares.

Switching horses now in mid-stream, and if there is any universality in Proust it lies with how his “people” behave – the young Marcels, the Albertines, the M de Charlus’, the Jupiens &c. They almost always act out of not just self-interest, but strictly craven self-interest, as if they cannot help themselves, and could not help themselves even if they tried. So that it is very nearly a moral-spiritual self-intervention when the young Marcel gotten old severs his relations with society so as to pursue the dreaded writing at which he fears he will fail. Peel back the layers, dig deep enough, and it is there: the psyche’s cesspools even as the masks are beautiful, as if one has, at last, escaped oneself.

And it is not to say there are not noble creatures in the Proustian pantheon – the odd artist, materfamilias, faithful servant, the odd sensualist who is nonetheless an honest soul. Still, they do not occur as frequently as one might think they would, and even then, as they usually shrink from any spotlight, they are not often visible on any radar. A friend wrote to tell me that, as he watched a portion of Dangerous Liaisons (Malkovich, Pfeiffer and Close) he was immediately put in mind of the firm of Maxwell & Epstein. Whereupon he knew that he was thinking in terms of apples and oranges, or that if depravity is depravity, the one is not necessarily a carbon copy of the other. Epstein’s suicide (if suicide it was) was not Valmont’s death, and my friend did not know enough about Maxwell to offer her up as a continuation of the Marquise Isabelle. Even so, to judge by the photographs in which they appear together as an item, there was some kind of bond between Epstein and Maxwell. It could have been affection, something not reducible to the valences of co-dependency.

As for The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon as written by William Makepeace Thackeray, quite the authorial monicker, it is a masculine world that he presents and yet, despite the Brit, French, Prussian hostilities (the Seven Years’ War); despite the duelling, the gambling tables, the whoring around, it is a world that has nothing to do with testosterone on steroids as graces the UFC fight universe. The voice remonstrating with everything, with life, and, what ho, its vicissitudes – here today, gone tomorrow – is indistinguishable from that of a courtesan remarking on a society of courtesans at court. It is catty elocution rendered prescient through unfiltered experience, and it tends to pessimism. What fools people be. What dullards, what fribbbles, what addle-headed coxcombs… Getting the goods on people and getting their goods – it is how the world goes round. Just ask You-Know-Who.

And as we were saying at the top with respect to revolutions and their rationales, even when they run parallel with colonial rapine, collateral damage for a “better vision” is acceptable if you are Putinesque and in a hurry. Gaza is a work-in-progress, have patience, casinos the plan, the twinkling lights of which will sparkle on the Mediterranean and perhaps illumine a few dead souls in search of their old vegetable stalls. But yes, I would say that Lenin may not have been as monstrous as Stalin, but those were sugar plums dancing in his head, power on the street just waiting to be plucked from the chaos and wielded. Ideology and greed of a spiritually materialistic kind in a kissing-cousin clinch, one not above hauling off Romanov treasure to deposit in the Kremlin’s night deposit box, and then, where? That we have been living in a bubble for the past 80 years and the true human condition involves a humongous caseload of brutality and a whole host of stick-it-to-em escapades?

Postscript I: National Mustard Day, and we will genuflect, otherwise Carpenter…

Postscript II: Lunar observes: … …. ‘My God, two idiots trolling the internet could between them start a nuclear war. Does Trump not realise Medvedev is such a non-entity he doesn't even make the crossword puzzles? Meanwhile, with the sacking of that woman (commissioner of labour statistics), Trump is running his very own Potemkin Village.’ … …. Lunar, from behind his duck blind, further observes: … …. ‘Some new system being brought onto Google this week that will allow AI more power than ever before. If I understand it correctly, [when] trying to get information on anything at all we will have to wade through AI responses before getting anywhere close to a human response. How did we ever get here that quickly? Remember our apprehension when we both first got our computers. I even remember something to the effect that we would continue to write to each other and use email only when absolutely required. Did we imagine even a smidgeon of what was to come? Not just AI, the new god [and first god] known by initials alone, by online theft of identities, scams, porn, surveillance, etc etc. I still think it is perhaps the single biggest revolution in history and every time we turn the machine on, we commit ourselves to it. Otherwise I'm awfully confined here and am getting increasingly jumpy about morphine addiction. According to the nurse, with whom I'll take a turn on the trampoline, she will provide the syringe and the jokes. She has got that thing that has gone out of North American and much of British existence, grace that is unafraid of underlying sexuality.’ … …. Moreover (sound of a duck call here): … …. ’You can bet your little booties, Miss Maxwell will be pardoned, the price she'll pay being her silence and she knows that if she blabs after her release, she might have an "accident". It seems impossible that Trump was not involved in a big way with Epstein's girls. And there again that story which disappeared as soon as it appeared, T. slapping a terrified teenager. Well, Starmer seems to have come around a little, not wholly as ought to be the case, and of course Netanyahu pulls the old card. I really wonder what the old Jews, the ones who really suffered, would have to say to N. using them as an historical excuse. … …. I went out for a few minutes and in front [of me on the pavement] was a black woman about the same age as me, supporting herself, as I was, on two crutches and obviously feeling pain with every step. I thought: is she in it for the long haul and then I thought: am I in it for the long haul? I mean, given my spinal history, which goes back to the 1980s, there is a certain inevitability about this. Did you know that many Scottish people consider themselves descendants of the ancient Egyptians? Can this not be verified through DNA? Whether it is true or not hardly matters because it is based on desire.’ … …. ?????? Duck call calls to duck call. Desire to be what exactly? We durst not speculate.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see a hope in hell: … …. ‘[Bought] a book, not long, titled Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by [a] Polish officer who spent time in one. Name of Czapski. Do you know it? He says Proust’s sensibilities were a reflection of France’s late 19th century artistic and literary movements, naturalism and realism.’ … …. Yes but, only among other things, right? … …. ‘It's self-evident that defining morality is futile, but as I ventured, evil is just as self-evident. And of course it matters. And of course it must be called out and should be confronted. But the flipside, "the good" as a universality, Socrates couldn't put his finger on it, and he almost gleefully admitted such. Probing begets probing and before long one's entire house of certainty begins to disintegrate.’ … …. And yes, I should imagine that this could lead to depressive states of mind, to over-eating, to laugh tracks in questionable taste…

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Not a lot going on here other than the fact that the island is overrun with tourists yee-hawing into the night. Oh for the November silence... Percival wants them gone too. He’s been out of sorts, as has been previously stated. Goats are plenty tough, but the goat psyche – it’s a delicate mechanism. I've been rereading Beryl Bainbridge. Her sense of the comic grotesque appeals to me. She also has a talent for the telling detail, the odd bit of business in the corner of a room, or on a shelf, which lends a tangible realism to a scene taking place centuries ago. And her sentences are well wrought. You could lay one over a ditch and walk across it. Actually, one thing going on here is that I got hold of a 1933 Underwood 6 typewriter as a prop for a local AmDram production. All black steel and as heavy as a locomotive. I love it. I've been [bashing] away--clack clack zing clack clack--and delighting in the tactile experience. I'd completely forgotten what it was like… …. Seems that just as there are antique car enthusiasts there are antique typewriter nerds. Yes indeed, stick some treads and a cannon to the thing… The other day I saw that the type was fading because the ribbon had come to its end and required reversing. How to do it? I went online and found original manuals. The language! Like reading Chaucer if he wrote a blacksmithing manual. The detail, the terminology, the concentration and comprehension required to comprehend it. I gave up and took my glasses off and peered at the ribbon in its housing and finally managed to remove the spools, reverse them, refit the ribbon in and around the tangs and spindles and resume typing, my fingers ink-smeared to the wrists. Percival gazed reverently at it all….’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Now that you mention it, let me introduce you to the “Tigellinus Factor” (Tigellinus: manipulator of Nero, pushed all his buttons just as Sejanus would turn Tiberius’ head in this or that direction, ping-ponging him a la Curly, Moe and Whomever the other Stooge, and perhaps abetting the pedophilia (or was Tiberius slandered with respect to his swimming with little boys and girls pervily in the imperial pool), Sejanus thereby acquiring power and perks for himself? Who do I have in mind? Various minions of the current Antiques Roadshow? The Chuckies et al, and then all the Bagdad Bobs bending reality as if it were taffy, and then Love It-Or-Leave-It Leavitt whose labium superius oris and labium inferius oris apparently excite the Boss at the wheel of the Presidential Bumper Car... Is this podcast-y, podcaustical enough for you?’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘So Mr Netanyahu is going for total conquest, is he? He’s declared war on dust clouds, I suppose. Otherwise, just me and my cupcakes and French horn here. And I’ll pass on this go-round’s commentary. Because you seem to speak for all of us when you speak the equivalent of: “Kind heart never ….” but it’s slipped my mind, the rest of the quote as may or may not have slipped yours, as may or may not apply to the tariff wars. Chalk it up to a rough night, last night, when I got into the rum with an old school chum, and then he professed a love of my body and I got all Jane Austen, never mind that no forebears of mine were engaged in the slave trade. Look, I forgave the dude, was a teensy bit flattered, but where were my flowers, and what about the etiquette as was germane to the situation? He did pay for my cab home.’ … ….

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘I was sitting in a coffeeshop at the Gare Centrale waiting for a bus. The guy behind the counter was bantering with all sorts of people going by, drivers, I suppose, security personnel, janitors, even travellers. It was banter designed not to impede anyone’s progress and yet, there was scope allowed for replies, elsewise it wouldn’t have been banter but a monologue. French barbs. English broadsides. Ironies in Arabic. And while destinations were announced on the PA system, “Embarquement immédiat… now boarding [at gate number whatever]”, morbid thoughts of annexation hijacked my noggin. And then a sliver of melody and lyric from an old Everly Brothers tune (the source a ghetto blaster in transit), and in my head, I saw old 45s as archaeologists might view pre-Clovis spearpoints, and was the tarantella danced as far back as the Younger Dryad? Got on the bus, had a seat to myself. A real grind to get out of the city, traffic gridlocked… A thousand points of light as were the electronic devices all around me, and I might’ve been interstellar… Eventually, the countryside. Corn fields. More corn fields. Then higher elevations. The pick-up sticks look of criss-crossed birches…. Then our mutual friend Miss Jewett (though in no way Dickensian). Lots of talk of politics. The super nova of a carrot-cocoanut cake with cream frosting….’ So have we been living in a bubble all these years, and now the butcher’s bill has come due? That is the question. A new friend of Miss Jewett in on the conversation said (somewhat apologetically) that Infinite Jest is unreadable. The air was thick with wildfire smoke. The kittycat retched on the patio. We were agéd but ornery barbarians as have a passing acquaintance with what’s tucked away in the British Museum, my favourite displays being the Assyrian stone reliefs all beard and malice aforethought.’

Some AmDram Dialogue:

Person 1: ‘Hey.’

Person 2: ‘Hey’.

Person 3: ‘Hey.’

Person 4: ‘Hey.’

Cue soundtrack guitar: Things aren’t so great now, but feel-good is right around the corner. Fingerstyle. Wisdom-satiated puling voices male and female. Key of C.