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September 28-30, 2025: I was listening to Paganini violin-guitar pieces in the wee hours the other night. For a moment I was, body and soul, in 18th century Italy, Parma, say, right down to the wig, the waistcoat and breeches and a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. There might well be a point to all the nonsense. But no, none of this has any bearing on American politics whose only point is power and the keeping of it, collateral damage, if you please and so, the hardening of what might have been considered soft fascism. I would prefer to the current Fop-in-Chief with his tacky sense of décor, his heart boiling over with payback – to all that I would prefer any Italian fool of a prince, of which there were a few, the Enlightenment notwithstanding. There were also some of a viciously Machiavellian bent, despite the inbreeding as might compromise clear-headed schemes. Otherwise, The Last Picture Show – surely it has to be one of the saddest movies ever put on the silver screen. One might say, ‘Well, that was the 50s in windy, dust-blown Anarene, Texas’, but I wonder if things have changed all that much, that the moneyed classes are still more likely to produce brats than not, even if Sam the Lion who owned the town, was a prince among men in the best sense and perhaps the only moral force in the county. For a few women he was their only friend, and it was the women who mourned him most when he died. Some will say, ‘Cheeseburgers will do that to you, kill you’, but what a cheap shot for an age like ours that is all about cheap shots taken to the level of executive orders. And is it that we are morally superior because we know that cheeseburgers, cigs, and booze are bad for you, but who gives a rat’s ass about your soul, pork away, junior or missie, in all senses of a million urges. While you are at it, beat the crap out of anyone you do not like the looks of. Throw women down to the ground. Terrorize on the upbeat. Such spectacles would have given Savanarola a few wet moments. Would Stephen Miller know “noble” if it bit him on the proverbial? As noble as the good cyborg in Terminator 2? We have come out to the country, the Comptroller and I. with suspicious colds. She picked hers up, she figures, on the return flight from Athens where she had been in consultations with Zeus who was sporting a long, white beard and who only shook his head at mention of American politics. There were plenty of Irish running around, other Europeans as well, all of whom did not have necessarily unkind words to say for Americans, but were, to a man and a woman, bewildered and flummoxed and utterly bothered, unto the point of disbelief, as to how Americans could have … and what follows here are various options as might complete a sentence, your choice, and at prices you can spiritually afford.

Postscript I: On this day in 1542 a European “discovered” California, San Diego, to be all didactic about it. And Carpenter would, but he has more pressing things on his mind.

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘...She said it is a forgone conclusion Putin will invade Poland and Estonia, that he has so much as already [shown] them his intentions. Chilling. And then, oh lord, I find H sitting right in front of me. He wanted to get me a drink afterwards. I made my excuses, saying I was in too much pain to stay on, which was true. Then he insisted we meet. I have no desire to reignite an old nightmare. And then I had a terrible time getting home. This effing government is introducing digital ID cards. No, I will definitely not carry one.’ … …. And there he is – Lunar in grizzly wrestler, remote frontier mode. … …. ‘The girls are back, and JB is gone. JB is not still here. No complaints for he is a true original, mad as a box of snakes, but what character, and which Ancient Greek nutter said, "Character is destiny"?  I tried to watch some of the Arizona love fest but it was all just too repulsive. Barking idiocy. All I kept thinking was "Horst Wessel, 1930". The parallels are striking, though, and I wonder why nobody has raised the comparison. Ah, just got yours. Netanyahu has become a trannie? Here's another conspiracy theory, all mine. The call for a Palestine state has come too late and it is not just because all these countries forgot to set their watches. It is the power of impotence, an impotent move come far too late so that what it actually signifies is an open invitation to Israel to take over the West Bank completely. Surely Starmer, Carney and everyone else realise they are calling for what will never happen, but which might have happened twenty years ago. … …. I read several heart-breaking accounts about ICE, and I conclude we are witnessing something far worse than McCarthyism. Why are the American people so silent about this? Where are the civil rights protests? This is pure thuggery not to mention that women are being raped by them and there is one "facility" where a doctor sterilized 40 women.’ … …. The first I have heard of it. Mengele in lululemon wear?

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see a country going to hell: … …. ‘Before he has consolidated his power? What are the outlying centers of power he has yet to usurp? Seems to me he has things pretty well wrapped up. About RFK's MLK speech, I recall reading Evan Thomas' bio of him. I hadn't known RFK was so ill-read, but someone turned him on to Aeschylus — Jackie K? — and he became obsessed with him. Sure came in handy. Just take it easy until you're back to par. The horrors aren't going anywhere.’ … …. Will do, kemo sabe.  

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Guitar-violin? I once tried to take up both in a grotty teen year. Guitar-fiddle, you might say, On the one, I couldn’t get past “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” On the other, “Rockin’ Robin” was my threshold. I’m about as musical as a clam. I’ve nothing to say. Still lollygagging when it comes to Solzhenitsyn. Will you forgive me? The other day I was terrified that I had put a foot ostensibly mine in dementia territory and couldn’t retrieve it, and couldn’t, for the life of me, remember Odysseus’ island, his home base, Then Percival maa-ed out coordinates, and it came back: Ithaca. Ithaka. Whatever. I was overjoyed. Ever seen a man hug a goat?’ But at least I was sane for another day, week, month, year.’ … …. Gratified to hear it.

Postscript V: Rutilius:… …. ‘Alright, alright, but I have to say I dislike bandwagons, being in the passenger’s seat of any one of them. But yes, I feel it too. Caught a few snippets of his address to the General Assembly, and I thought “Good God, he’s just insulted the entire world, and now America is right there, along with Iran, Israel, North Korea, as a pariah among fair-weather nation-states. Apropos of none of this, Karl Kraus said something like this: “Diplomats lie to journaiists and then believe their lies when they see them in print.” I’ve lost the zing of it, but presto zesto and you’ve got yourself a shooting match. Otherwise, still alive. Charlee the cat was probably run over two weeks ago on the night of the Blood moon. A witness saw a small black cat "with beautiful fur" lying dead on the side of the main road parallel to us. I guess she was hit at high speed on her way from hunting on the bank of the river. We were devastated. Slovakia has nobody as direct as Karl Kraus despite the cultural and political landscape needing one. Plenty of characters ready to take politicians and poets to task over their punctuation, but nobody coming out with vitriolic criticism and humour. I'm beginning to despair of the little print magazine as the atmosphere around poetry is that of the coterie. If you're not in town then forget it. I'm too old to star in a blue movie scripted by myself so that I wake to find myself famous, mad, bad, and dangerous to know due to a fear of STDs. Off to the Dr Latex Gloves tomorrow as I've pissing rather too often.’ … …. Sorry to hear about Charlee. Sounds like she was a most fetching and distinguished cat.

Postscriopt VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘I didn’t see that one coming. I allude to a cop show in which the female lead goes full out out there, excuse my girlish patois, in her pursuance – as a lady sleuth – of a, what else, psychotic male, then realized no, she was in the hunt for a bonkers female, her own sanity on the line and in need of an overhaul, check the mileage. Indeed, why should the men rate all those gory headlines? We give ourselves permission to do strange stuff in the name of pushing the envelope and doing a little housecleaning, you know, immigrants. We’ll always need someone tp beat up. That’s what I conclude after witnessing twenty years or so of progressive politics, and how many years of it have you blundered through, terrified you’d miss the curtain call? Did I say Gaza? Cupcakes in the oven, the French horn sitting in the window soaking up sun. Should all my Polish cousins decide to band together they might could get a seat at the United Nations. 20 Questions? Guess who’ll invade and raid all their pantries? And with lobotomized mercenaries getting in the way of all the Polish bullets…. You’re right. I’m no adjutant anything with a correspondence course in military tactics, IQ levels negotiable. Just a French horn playing, cupcake eating single gal who lives in a shoe with other singletons plus a handful of couples, all of whose heads are on the down low. They don’t know what gives. But they know that they know that something does. It might be the Creatures from the Black Lagoon. It won’t be Christmas come early. Even so, T has put the pizzazz back in redemption and is neighing like a filly in heat as a consequence... Do fillies go into hear? I suppose they must, or we couldn’t have biological studies.’ … …. Yes, there is such a thing as mares in season…

Postscript VII: Trail Mix:… …. ‘Unsettling dreams, none remembered but one: freeway interchanges lined with crucifixes, bodies affixed…. A dream is a dream is a dream. Who was noted for this sort of thing? Romans. Do tell. Speak to the crosses and the oneiromancy. I am being checked out by yellowjackets at my local (and I take it they aren’t drones), leaves falling thick and fast as it’s been quite dry, full on autumn a touch early. There is a great wad of something in my mind that I could unpack, but it might make for tedious reading, my customary chucklesome wit ragged of late. You can tell yourself that you’ve lived the life you feel you ought to have lived, and then, some grinning jerk in your mind’s peanut gallery raises a frog-like finger. “Permission to speak, sir,” and, permission granted, the permissee presents arms: “For real? Moral crusade? Gas prices are up again, as are the profit margins of companies who want to scare the bejesus out of Dick and Jane. You’ve been a poor instance of literary quality, but then, true, it’s no halcyon age with the likes of a crackling Swift or Wharton to carry the load, or a C.H. Gretsinger whom nobody has ever heard of and most likely never will. His only book (A Whole Lot of Fat Minds) was last spotted in a remainder bin – in Des Moines. And it didn’t look well-used. Heard enough?” Indeed, I have. But the Blue Jays pulled it off, an outcome I predicted, the concurrences of fascism and miracle baseball and clear autumn days lining up like something finely calibrated in a tumbler and ready to do the town. Zeus had this cooking in his day-planner 3,000 years ago.’

September 20-21, 2025: As of the moment, Lunar who has worn a number of hats, including those of straw, is on about pain. He has the chronic kind whereby, as he moves through space (barely), it seems to him that the upper and lower halves of his body are joined by a single hinge, and it might snap at “any moment”. Since he must have this pain, he will have it then on his own terms. In words of current parlance, he will “own” the thing. This may seem illogical to those of you who are blessed with logic, but then logic is not a circus bear one brings to a party, or else it is, and with all the trimmings. For all that, in Lunar’s mind the thought is: abolish pain and you abolish humanity. I can hear comebackers, what ifs and buts, in their myriads, the pros and cons as are like fledgling sparrows demanding to be fed. I will simply let the statement stand and “resonate”. So resonate already. Resonate. Which it is another word overly abused to the point of triviality, flashing like some neon in a bad part of town.

Accordion. Tango. 12th straight day of sunshine here in my local, Muhammed at his door staring into space. A groschen for his thoughts. He is thinking he has never been to Lithuania, but he serves hamburgers to a lot of Baltic types as have settled amidst the Quebecoise. Or are we just saying that? But the weather has been good, too good for what gives in the realm to the south of here, in killing fields everywhere. He, Muhammed, does not sweat the small stuff, because he has done so in his younger years and it profited him none. I have sworn to have a memorial cigarette with him some day when it seems appropriate, perhaps when the Constitution gets its groove back and puts away its far-right porn. We might have to wait a while.

Postscript I: On this day in history Julius Caesar had his fly-over, we mean his triumph, and something about the first test ever of a gas-powered car. And, right, the end of the French monarchy, whether or not Carpenter had anything to do with it…

Postscript II: Lunar: … …. ‘Another outing. I must do what I can do when I can manage it and I saw Italian Girl No #1. There is a crazy heatwave and [we] sat outside this wonder[ful] Italian cafe in Russell Square, a favourite place of mine, superb coffee quite unlike any blend I've tasted elsewhere. C was very sharp today, i.e. spot on, with the demands placed by people that one has to be "realistic". It stops all adventure although that final bit might be my tag but yes, to be realistic is to go the Starmer way and kiss arse or to think only in terms of what pays for itself. I drifted into a couple of bookshops and, yes, damn it all, did the last thing one is supposed to do in bookshops and bought some books. All this achieved in [me] not a little physical discomfort. J is still here. [He may stay so long B and I might have to bury him in the yard.] [Now, as for writing] a book on pain? Only to the degree that I'm bloody entitled to my pain and will not surrender it to eugenics, which is to say a world that wishes to abolish pain because no sooner will that happen than we lose our humanity which to a huge degree is predicated on pain.’ … …. Resonating … Resonating… And a metaphor piles on: … …. ‘Did you receive this morning's [message] from me. Both my computer and record player have stopped working for me. Mechanical contagion everywhere.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you spot a government shut-down lurking in the bushes, as well as a penny-farthing going by, the cyclist, stogie in mouth, threatening to topple a land speed record. (Could be Drake, the wind at his back.) In any case, I had asked the man for a brief statement as to where things stand, no chortlings, guffaws allowed, and he responded, getting back to me just as I was viewing a documentary on space-time-gravity-the-race-to-some-ultimate-cosmological-constant in the dining salon of our observable universe, or that expanding space will win the running of the derby, out-sprinting light, and I called his timing an example of synchronicity. Whereupon he said: … …. ‘Synchronicity. I was there once, too many people. I prefer the country.’ … …. I was rubber-necked, still missing a press release. But it did come, and it was pure cheek: … …. ‘Rather than 29 words, I'm going with [the] option of "more or less" in summarizing, as requested, where I think we are, where we stand, just where is the light "in our benighted kingdom?" — and they're not even my more or less 29 words. They're [yours]: "At the moment, I am admiring, in my local, some begonias in a flowerbox. They are of a shade of orange that does not cause one to think of candy or aerodynamic coifs. [Trump’s.] How does something this delicate make do in a world indifferent to quiet, un-showy splendour?"… …. Well, I never… I then proceeded to have Virgil on my mind and Daffy Duck, a concurrence as is indicative of rivets popping and bulkheads giving way, but by then I had lost Drake to his own noodlings and various obsessions not the least of which is when “too late” is “too late” and the sun has a greenish tinge around its edges, overripe fruit about to jump out of its skin, and another republic dies, choking on its Book of Revelations purple prosody.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘How do we know the universe is 13.7 billion years old? And if it’s infinite, not our knowledge but what’s out there, what then? We work through the crackerjack box, root about for the prize, anyway? Regards from Percival. Well, a goat needs fibre more than he needs, as an image in his brain, what may lie outside the boundaries of said universe, coloir it, what, indigo or flaming red? When are you going to finish up with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon novel? Whither Proust? Alright, when will I re-engage with Solzhenitsyn? But we seem to be in a serious moment, and that’s no tongue being oblique in my cheek. Those philosophizing at the recycling depot are kind of sombre around the mouth, and not because someone much prettier than they just died. Their yachts tied up here and there in the various marinas around the island, and the Americans are sheepish. At least the ones I’ve come across are, and why shouldn’t they be? Their president is running the table with a kind of Minnesota Fats dynamism (“damn well going to do this”), or maybe not, being top-heavy and not all that spry on his feet. I’ve read novels (the titles of which escape me) wherein bad, if not downright ominous news comes during a spate of fine weather and Cinderella outcomes in the league play-offs. Or you marry the love of your life, and love would stay lovable, only there’s a knock on the door. Pain? A standard-bearer for humanity? Dunno. But I’m suspicious.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘A pair of quotes ascribable to Karl Kraus who died in Vienna, 1936. (Yes, I can tell you this much, happy to be of service.) The quotes then. Number one: “The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.” And two, and this is, how shall we say, trending now: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.” Good one, eh? Are we done with cathedrals as per the last post? Yes, I’d make mention of Kraus and Leopardi in the same breath, with caveats, the one idiomatic and so, obscure to the public; the other idiomatic and so, obscure to the public…. It’s been years since I read Kraus, the book in question either written by him or about him, I don’t recall. What stays in my mind is that, when the Nazis came into Vienna, he began to hold candlelight get-togethers, recitations of Shakespeare. Some attempt, I suppose, on his part to preserve his sanity and that of a few other Viennese.’

Postscript VIL Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Evil was seeping through the walls. Cop show. In it every man was a serial killer. And when every man wasn’t occupied with serial killing, he was a sleazebag who always rated the worst lines of dialogue. He was, for sure, disappointing, even if capable of sparkling repartee and the milk of human kindness. And for all the bad things that happened to the men, deserved or not, creepy, horrible things just kept happening to the women. Over time, some of the woman got pretty creepy themselves, but never mind. The problem is, it all seemed all too true. Which brings on the next reality show: “Young Men in Crisis” Should I throw some love their way or just toss a bunch of shade? The males among my many Polish cousins aren’t terribly “woke”. They’ll compliment an attractive woman and expect not to have to walk a gauntlet of hashtags for it. For all that, they have other things on their minds right now: the Russian menace. The more loutish among them might drunkenly crow: “Bring it on.” Silly guys. I think I’d be more circumspect when contemplating the infinite, especially when in the deli. Otherwise, cup cakes in the oven, French horn on retainer. Which means, on occasion, I play music, alarming my neighbours in the building, many of whom keep dogs. I have cousins scattered across the U.S. of A. They’d prefer, to Bozo Beelzebub, to wake up in a small ‘d’ democracy, come morning. It’s not looking good. If I become sufficiently bored with myself, I’ll offer to write zingers for Jimmy Kimmel in my next manifestation of me myself: comic genius. Apparently, Kimmel doesn’t do outrage; he does “absurdity”. This gets a few bells in my brain to tinkle-tinkle little star.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘I went scouting and came away with nothing. The Sally Ann. A depressing assortment of books there, mostly of the self-help variety. It’s standard procedure apart from the rare true find which I might flip to a book dealer. Such a find is real estate, don’t kid yourself. My favourite blazer fraying at the edges, I had gone looking for a replacement theory. So that, if necessary, I can conduct myself on the Via dei Condotti (Rome) and only look like a dead-end author, not a homeless panhandler or Guatemalan lowlife. Politics? The spaghetti has stuck to the wall, now the flying excrement. I’d do “Bell, Book and Candle” Karl Kraus style, as a heat shield, if I thought I could get away with it, sashay past the culture vultures. Kraus? He authored books. One of which was The Last Days of Mankind, an odd duck grotesquery of a play such as perhaps only a journalist could write. “Bell, Book and Candle” because even a mediocrity of a film (though with Kim Novak keen on poetry and art at the helm) might eat up an inning or two in a game (one that seems already hopelessly lost) against Team Fascism. From dissecting the horrors oif WWI, and excoriating the cultured elies, Kraus (in Vienna) went on to treat with the Nazis, and he wasn’t exactly inviting. So far as I know, he didn’t wear a cape, leap over tall buildings, recite from the Rubaiyat. He translated Shakespeare instead, whom he revered.’

September 15-16, 2025:The words “trail of tears” (as when the Choctaw and the Cherokee, among other tribes, were displaced from their lands in the southeast and marched into Oklahoma, 1830s) come to mind when I see Gazans on the newsfeed, 2025. There they are in a forced hike, trudging along with what possessions they can carry, bombs and sniper fire at their backs. It is no analog to the Babylonian captivity of the biblical Judeans, but it is tempting to think so. Still, it is looking like the Gazans will not get off as well as those Judeans had in the end. Cyrus, so to speak, reversed the march, cancelling the exile, and back in Jerusalem the temple was reconstituted. I suppose the bottom of the Mediterranean can easily enough accommodate a million dislodged souls with baggage, but there will be no en masse CPR as might lead to statehood, offices in the basement. What other conclusion can one draw from the images? That these people are being relocated so as to be re-booted and upgraded? That all traces of them are to be eliminated? That it will be, in any case, to their benefit, to a better history, as it were, and various heads-of-state will stay clear of jail

Postscript I: Feast day for St Cornelius (early Catholic pope.). Who was St Cornelius? Carpenter might tell you, and he might not. He is no zealot; he is a Montaignian. Religious trinkets mean nothing to the man, though the annals do, and he analyzes. And scintillatingly he remarks and concludes.

Postscript II: Lunar insists that no one can get lost in Stornoway because, well, it sits on an island. As for the Canadian residence in Ottawa of the same name…. Lunar reports he is getting “St Charlie” stuff in his inbox, this Charlie who has the same last name as the famous Star Trek captain of the USS Enterprise … where no man has gone before, at least not since The Fugitive Slave Act, or failing that as a watershed moment, the ambling out of Africa, Pliocene era … …. ‘I think with the trannie side of things now firmly in view we are going to witness some excesses of the kind you might describe as police state excesses together with vigilante action. Ain't pretty. Trump arrives tonight under the cover of darkness. Starmer will [pucker up], and poor Prince Charles will have to put on a welcoming face. If one presses one's ear to the wall one can hear mutterings all the way from Buckingham Palace.’ … …. That is one way of getting to the heart of a matter. Continuing: … …. ‘… Brace yourself for some horrific scenes in the next months. There will be revenge killing sprees. There are perverse goings-on I've never even heard of...’ … …. Believe me, that is quite an admission for Lunar who gets around, despite the sciatica. So, continuing: … …. ‘I had no response from the Catholic website I [critiqued] but there is growing hatred from their quarter and elsewhere for Pope Leo for failing to say more on the assassination. Wouldn't you say he, too, had better be ready to dodge a bullet. So not civil war as you say, but something else. What, though? Social media terror tactics? J is still here and will be for the next decade, I think. He is so amusing, though, and just now I need to be amused.’ … …. And why is that? By way of an answer perhaps: … …. ‘…the day was disturbing, the first major right-wing demo I've seen in this country, 150,000 people led by this thug Tommy Robinson, a televised speech from Elon Musk "fight back or die". What is happening? J and [I] walked along the river and met countless people because he goes up to complete strangers and in one instance even knocked at someone's door. The thing is, if I did it the police would be called but J can charm the birds out of the trees. People's smiles are real. There's an extreme feminist website called Jezebel that paid witches to put a curse on CK a couple of days before the shooting. They've had to remove the article, needless to say, but it goes to show... […] I'm sick to death already by this "martyr" business, which no doubt was set off by an […] idiot. It comes awfully close to all those reports we used to have about America losing its innocence. How many times does one have to lose it before it's gone? This guy died of the very thing he helped make. End of story. G is coming to see me on Saturday. I must be in a bad way.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see dangling ropes tied off in empty nooses: … …. ‘I love European cathedrals. I was in awe of the 12th-century architecture and engineering of those E and I visited in France, and the magnificent, massively gothic Frauenkirche (the Dom zu Unserer Lieben Frau, "Cathedral of our Dear Lady") on Munich's central square; i stood gaping for a half-hour, then we had lunch on the square and I stared at it for another hour. We also sauntered through the sprawling Palais des Papes in Avignon, not a cathedral, just the humble digs of 1300s popes, and I loved every step of it. But myths and rituals and liturgies? Thank you, no. I agree with L; it could be, just could be, that America lost its innocence in the Boston Massacre, or when it burned the HMS Gaspee a couple years later, or when it fired on British soldiers at Lexington and Concord. All because parliament thought it might be really nice of America to maybe pony up a few colonial pounds to help pay for the Brits' defense of it in the French and Indian War — aka the Seven Years War, the globe's first world war, which George Washington's blundering ignited. [Now] I trust your local has alcohol. Postmodernism-as-in-current-Trumpism would seem to be correct that power is indeed the whole enchilada, never mind the seven articles and, what is it, 27 amendments of the Constitution. Just take it out in the back and put it out of its misery.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Wasn’t homo erectus a handsome devil, the longest surviving hominid? His and her innings lasted some two million years. Thoughts like this one seize up my brain with increasing frequency, and I fear for my wellness levels. But funny your guy should mention Sheen. I don’t know where Sheen is in the evolutionary Big Picture, but I just watched an extended interview with the man (son of Apocalypse Now) and found him not terribly appealing. Can’t recall how Blake phrased it, but his notion that the path of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, to a kiosk at least – seems to have been lost on this crack-smoking Sheen though, from what I understand, he’s beem celibate and soberly bipedal for the past decade. Why do I care? I don’t, but it was your mention, a while back, of Two and a Half Men the sit-com, and the mini-feuilletons that the show’s creator (Chuck Lorre) appended to the end of each episode as what placed Sheen in my mind, as if there was something culturally significant in all this, something worth, what, a look-see from a Pulitzer committee? In any case, there ‘s The Ginger Man (JP Donleavy. 1953). Apparently sold 50 million copies. True son of J Joyce. Horribly funny, even if the main character is a complete and utter shit. Should have been a hundred pages shorter – the novel, but then that’s my view on many [what do they call them, narratives]. Also read Orwell’s Coming up for Air as came to me by way of the recycling depot. Very different voice. Impressive, insightful, prescient [just stop me anytime], though [it] collapses at the end. One always feels as if one’s nose has been shoved in the toilet bowl after reading him. On a more personal note, I seem to be in the throes of an attack of bursitis in my right knee. I’ll spare you the details because the only thing more tedious than hearing someone go on about their pain is enduring it yourself. Was on the phone to my 96-year-old mother this afternoon and she laughed at me. Percival says hello. Damn goat. He’s been fretful lately. Do you think he understands what he sees on TV?’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘The Slovakian Cathedral of Ste Elizabeth is the largest and most eastward of the gothic churches in Europe. In truth, I know f-all about it. I too have been in avoidance of politics before ten in the morning, but clearly something is in the wind, and as remote, in a sense, as we are here in these parts, we do get whiffs. There’s the Russian menace, if nothing else. Givers of great dinners have few enemies. (Martial.) You mean Putin cooks? ‘

Postscript VIL Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘My battalion of Polish cousins might have their mind’s eyes on Russian movements, but the paying-it-all-some-mind doesn’t extend to Venezuela. Sister of a friend of a friend asked her sister if she had a gun. On account of the whackos looking for their due diligence. Otherwise, cupcakes in the oven, and no, I don’t intend to change my tune on such carbs, nor does my French horn. I liked Redford. I hazard to say that he was wasted on Streisand: all that The Way We Were ain’t-life-grand stuff. For the longest time I had trouble with “Air on a G-String”. I kept seeing air on a G-string, and it wasn’t Bach. My cure for post-modernismitis has always been cupcakes of the Cindy Cupcake variety, the kind that used to ring up the taxi dispatcher in the wee hours and regale him with her boyfriend troubles and her view of the physical properties of wormholes in the space-time continuum not RFK Jr’s brain. Sometimes she wanted a cab and so, you had to take her seriously.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘I’ll say this right off the top of my head such as it is: it feels like a whole new ball game. I agree. It was no assassination, it was a nutter…… Celebrity is no answer to one’s problems, but the money must be nice. Fanbase eggs on some star’s penchant for self-destruction but dying takes the fun out of dying until a weep is wanted. In which case, die away, friend. Well, seeing as we’re discussing Sheen and his dynamics, and whether the problem with the USA is not politics but pathologies… Are there sufficient brain cells left in the body-politic for the rigours of wisdom and good civics? I haven’t seen the Sheen interview being referenced by your other postscripting elves, but a documentary on Anna Nicole Smith touched a nerve. That the sons and daughters of every depressing bungalow town in the U.S. of A. is summed up in this reportage on stardom. Such soul-crushing backwaters are what made me a city slicker. Her long absent father was perhaps a monster, had those glassy high-cheeked Elvis looks along with the same pompadour. Didn’t find his daughter’s beauty especially beautiful, though perhaps she truly was kind-hearted, only her mouth was set hard with her every utterance. Synchronicité, she and this business with Sheen, he who seems to have had a good childhood despite being son of Apocalypse Now… I was just in my poor man’s super mart where I ran into the proprietress of the café I’m in at the moment, and she accused me of buying out the store. She’s weirdly jocular. What I can tell you is that the contents of the shopping cart reamed out my pocket. That much for a tin of maple syrup? Are we talking a rare spice here? What makes a dark age dark is its loss of memory to do with a great many things, not just cultural concerns. The Mycenaeans are centre-stage in the greatest poetry ever written and yet they themselves were anything but literary, obsessed with inventories of their material goods and trade networks, not whether the gods could hear their prayers. Very anal, so it seems, unless some humdinger of a poem comes to light one of these days to show us otherwise, and it’s not a super mart flyer.’

September 10-11, 2025: A brief glimpse of Anthony Quinn’s battered face as I caught a preview of Requiem for a Heavyweight on cable, and I thought: “No way Trump rates a like consideration.” Human nobility, my ass. On another front, and I had wanted a single word equivalent for ‘tech bro science’. A friend got back to me with, not early German romanticism, but with various titivations. Said he: “ETnoir.” Then: “Cyberfabulation. How about hubbahubbageekology? Merlinonmethdom?”. And a partridge in a pear tree. Well, a whole lot of ‘Komposita’ going on here, composite words on the part of someone bone-weary with respect to American political depravity. To return the favour, I supplied said friend with a new metaphor for the SOTU as supplied by moviedom. The Attack of the Giant Leeches. Friend was not impressed. Pegged me for a rank amateur in the art of trolling this and that and the great white sharks of a far-right Sea World. Can friendship transcend political differences? In a normal universe, all things being equal, and the question is answerable with a demure yes.

But is going all Hamlet on the senate floor a proper response to “The Department of War”, which it was The Department of Defense in happier days? Who among the regime’s shills has anything like a vocabulary and concomitant sensibility as might parlay into a touch of far-sightedness, of ‘do this and here’s your likely outcome’? We here at Ephemeris are not intellectual snobs; we are not eggheads, if a little hot under the collar, but, man, one misses an Adlai Stevenson or a Eugene McCarthy having an intelligent populace to address, the whistlestop some International House of Pancakes. (Or Canadian Tire, if you will, where you can find patio furniture in a deconstructed fashion design, and a parliament reflect on ethical décor.)

Postscript I: National Wienerschnitzel Day. It sure has that feel to it. Carpenter might be feeling jovial.

Postscript II: Lunar, and jolly well stating the obvious: … …. ‘Putin knows what he is doing and can afford to do so because the loss of lives means nothing to him. This has always been Russia's strength, the willingness to sacrifice or the willingness to sacrifice others for one's own sake. Doubtless you are hearing about our political turmoil, all of which benefits the square-mouthed Farage’. … …. That allusion to a clench-jawed rabblerouser sounds like an invite for mudslinging at dawn. In the meantime, more stating of the obvious: … …. ‘I've read something which has chilled me to the bone, that the USA is sending back to Russia refugees from there, who will almost certainly face ten years imprisonment. Army deserters [are on the hook too], which will mean death by other means i.e. not executions as such but [you know, they’ll be] put in conditions as will result in [end of life scenarios]. Was this the deal struck in Alaska? If so, it is the most [perfidious] of its kind since immediately after the war when the rebel Cossacks were returned by the allies to Stalin and certain [extinction]. What chills me even more is that it is not getting top billing in the news. Does [anyone] remember anything anymore? Does no one remember Navalny's fate? This plus America not allowing any Palestinians admittance into the country so as to attend the UN, which includes Palestinians from the West Bank. The week before last, the Israeli military chopped down 10,000 olive trees all in the cause of "security"’. … …. Could be someone was hiding behind a fig leaf….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see birthday greeting graffiti on a public wall, especially if it includes a hairy signature. Oh, and a double toot on the horn should you spy a stray Abraham Accord, the spirit of which may have just been shattered, remains to be seen (and, as for the hostages still breathing?): … …. ‘Welcome to the club. I've been in a weird kind of numb stasis since early Nov. Nothing has surprised, all this crap was easily foreseen; now it's just a matter of playing it out. It's like a chess game in which the ending is known from the first move. I'll say it again — Trump's end will be [but] the beginning [of] America's real, long-term problem: the world will have no good reason to trust us for at least a generation; our trade structure will lie in ruins; our economic and technological advantage over China will be dust; our higher education system will be distrusted by the globe's brightest; our former allies will remain wary; we'll be alone. But there's always "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," the hands-down best of the lot, if you've not seen it.’ … …. Oh, I have seen it. Likely got me through a hangover after an evening of bad poetry (recital, ears steaming). Did not one of the cast members do commercials for “good to the last drop”? Five syllable line as might put us over the edge into haiku…

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. “Me and Percival or Percival and I in our You-Me-Thou-ness – we were doing something we don’t often do: watch a fair bit of news in the morning. I decided upon the inadequacy of language to truly capture what was on view. It was full-metal-jacket on Percival’s part when he ‘maa-ed maa-ed his objections. You think I’m being cute? It’s partly cloudy here, and I still believe in weather. Climate is one thing, but weather is the cherry. Islander that I am, I don’t own a boat, much less a radar, but my bones creak at times at the approach of weather. My old Buick is up on blocks, sequestered there after my American travels, and its old bones cry out in the course of gales. Gives my spread the look of outlander authenticity, in addition to the bean patch. And since you’re on a kind of work-to-rule regimen with respect to Proust, so I am as well with respect to Solzhenitsyn, and I’ll continue to follow your lead. We’ve gotten so used to life without meaning that those of us who still insist on ‘meaningful’ look silly, dressed up in our metaphysical tuques and tutus. Alright, I’ll give it a rest. Until next time then. I’ll see your Gass and raise you three Hellers. But if you’re holding a Foster-Wallace, I’d fold if I were you.’… …. Indeed, where is sturm und drang when you need one?

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘You were saying about Trump? Might I add: “There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.’ From Martial. Ancient Rome’s answer to Robert Frost. But I jest. And for once, you’ve got me dead to rights. Anyway, these days, I see one’s mortality as an alluvial plain. One was going downriver nicely, saying, “One Mississippi, two Mississippi” and then, but I’m beginning to wonder what’s in this coffee I just bought. I said I’d never do it – bring a laptop to the café. (Better a nickelodeon.) Well, I brought it. Because my life is on-going, just that my eyesight has been going and so, the screen is, for the nonce, easier to read than the printed page. Early German romanticism? Was there some Hansel and Gretel syncretism in it? Salt mines? Between emotion and reason what’s to choose? “Excuse me …. madame…. what’s in this coffee?” You see, I am rather a Brit in Slovensko.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: ,,, ,,,, ‘Cupcakes in the oven, French horn in disgrace… Foisted on me a baroque piece of music that had all the charm of a manic episode in which one attempts to squeeze as much variation out of a dry-as-dust theme as humanly possible and then proceeds to shove the result into a crawl space as might get you from the kitchen to the latrine… Don’t get me wrong, I have plumbing, and generally, I like the baroque. Now, women in combat fatigues? Women with weapons training? I can’t say. Doesn’t interest me. What makes real life policing different from cop show dramas, terrorists on the loose, is bad acting and bad writing. (Has to be.) Female officer getting all Charles Bronson, pedal to the metal in her swagger, courts parody and overstated eyebrows. What’s up with all that? Run at a senate seat? Cosmetics franchise? Amongst my vast numbers of Polish cousins, there must be one who’s been shooting or at least shouting down Russian drones of late. A poet friend of mine says that Putin drinks history through a straw. Not bad, that. He’s a pretty good poet, actually….’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Hamlet? I’m feeling a little Hamlety just now as I sit in a café and consider that I can’t quite shake the cafe habit though there is in this place nothing healthy to eat, maybe a banana that appears to have frostbite. And what was it your Comptoller of the Universe said? TV screen with news in the frame, and one’s brain is sucked out of its frame into a black hole, as is the spoon in one’s hand and the oatmeal in one’s bowl. So staggeringly asinine are all the wooden dummies who, from across the border, purport to marshal our sorry asses into a condition of being managed (sic) governed, and then, what of our own lumbering ventriloquists this side of the 49th Parallel? If they take a breath every other breath, perhaps no one will notice the skewered chessboard on which they genuflect, knight to queen’s jaws of death. Otherwise, I have retrospectively in my noggin the swamps of Okefenokee, denizens of which we all still are, be you from Buffalo, Crete or the Philippines, and Pogo perhaps, in comparison to the prez’s fan base, has all the wisdom of Solon. But then, what ETnoir does for civics (rendering it irrelevant), tech bro science does for Montaigne and Santayana and your basic AAA automobile manual, just to name a few thought-meisters? Do I sound deflated? Does that mean I was recently a bright hot air balloon? A noodling jazz piano in the speakers. Sounds like something riding a very thin thermal. On occasion one wants a declarative measure of music, not strident, just something with its feet on the ground. Think I’ll risk a day-old croissant. Uh oh. Been texted. What do I make of Brad Pitt’s facial revamp, not that I care? In the ‘There’s Sex Past Sixty-Five Department, vanity leads sex by a nose. Hell, under certain conditions, vanity and sex are one and the same, or else neck and neck.’