Quixotic or idiotic ?

Had it been possible
I would have written a letter
of appreciation of his short stories
to Kafka, and of praise for his portraits
to Vincent van Gogh.  As it was,
I wrote to blind Borges, blind Tolkien
(secretaries replied)
and to the splendid Alice Neel
not long after she died. 

In the evenings

only
I feel so good after dinner
and a modest measure
of wine, that my socialist
disposition makes me want
to share the pleasure.

The Fall.

Adam and Eve
dropping from a Tree
in Autumn.
Among withered leaves
and a sloughed-off skin,
no tomb,
Fall Guy and Fall Doll.

'If computers can surmise, can they surprise ?

Can Artificial Intelligence
be creative ?

Memoirs aren't improved by total recall.

Is Artificial Intelligence
capable of curiosity ?
(a faculty largely suppressed in humans)

It can't have fun, 
enjoy, regret, or suffer,
or incline towards impetuosity.

The times they aren't a-changing

 very much. 

Leigh Hunt (who might even now be called a seditious agitator, and be arrested for supporting the Palestinian cause)
was sentenced to two years in prison for libel against the odious Prince Regent (later George IV), after publishing a critical article and satire in his newspaper, The Examiner, in 1812. 

In gaol from 1813 to 1815, he continued to engage with
literary figures and maintain a vibrant intellectual life.

ex-Prince Andrew (the youngest of the Mountbatten-Windsors),
and almost never in line for the throne)
was arrested the day before yesterday = 213 years later...
and was soonish released.
He will not go to prison.
Although he has rubbed shoulders with literary as well as deeply-unpleasant and vile figures (some of them also literary)
he does not have a vibrant intellectual life,
and, partly because of his sad sexual adventures,
not even a current wife.

© Wofl McGonagall, MMXXVI

COTERMINOUS [adj]

 – as when Lent and Ramadan
endure for the same forty days,
or as nearly as dammit.

Though not necessarily when
Israel starts a religious war
at the al-Aqsa mosque
built on the site where
the earth was last trod
by M'hamed.

I Bought a Second-hand Dogma

(don't we all in this vale of dark deceit ?)

It belonged to a lady with good taste
and slender wrists just like mine
(in contrast with my spathulate
thumbs that are not smartphone-friendly).

I wanted it to be (since, unfortunately,
I am not) black, elegant, easy to read -
o which end I took out its third
(seconds) hand, removing all guarantees
that might ever have been attached to it
as it was attached to its dead owner,
who is now even more of a loner than me...
now dog-less for five years

'Junior Dogma Quartz Original
Vintage Cr 3231-88', from the late seventies.

Width: 19 millimetres

The Future

means nothing
until it strikes,
arrives,
or sidles in.

Surely the Chinese are not really this stupid ?

They sell music-box mechanisms on eBay
(hundreds of them)
without informing us of the tunes that they play !

George Sand:

"Always resist those
who say Work hard
to live badly."

This is the state of social involution.

Laurent Binet wrote:
"Sport ?
A fascist conspiracy."

No fence:

No fear.

*

Right-minded
is left-leaning.

Would you believe

that my Fair Trade
coffee from Rwanda
is harvested from trees
tended by happy, trained
mountain gorillas ?

How I would like to !

Malcolm (64) has had a minor stroke.

But he's better now.

Another near-extinction.

The extraordinary whistling dogs are falling silent...

Their reddish fur and wolf-like features might fool you into thinking they’re foxes.

Their long backs and slender limbs might suggest a close relationship with cats.

They can’t bark, so surely they can’t be dogs… right?

But these are in fact the utterly adorable - bordering on unbelievable - Asiatic whistling dogs: the dholes.

And almost no one has heard of them, which is a true tragedy.

Because while they may not be able to bark the way domesticated dogs do, what really sets dholes apart is the noises they can make.

Clucks, screams and whistles cut through the forest as they carefully coordinate a hunt. These specialist canines are expert communicators as well as extremely social creatures, living and working together in tight-knit teams where each member plays a crucial role.

But their intimate families are being torn apart.

Across the globe, dholes are disappearing at a horrifying rate.

One by one, vicious snares see their whistles become whimpers, and humans introduce deadly diseases into their close communities, causing their clucks to go quiet.

These beautiful dogs are fading away.

In some areas, such as Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains, snares litter the ground. These cruel devices trap the limb of any poor dhole unfortunate enough to cross their path, tightening mercilessly as the helpless dog fights desperately to escape. But, more often than not, it’s already too late.

There are now fewer than 2,500 mature dholes left in the world. They are hurtling towards extinction.

If we don’t stand up for them now, we could soon lose them forever - they are in urgent need of your support.

And so are we.

We need your help to get essential equipment into the hands of those that need it most – to buy a ranger a fresh pair of boots, a new raincoat or a sturdy rucksack to replace those worn out by thousands of hours spent patrolling through challenging landscapes like the Cardamom Mountains, painstakingly sweeping and removing snares as they go.

Dholes are one of the world’s most extraordinary canines – together, we can ensure they don’t fall silent.

SAVING WILD DOGS IN CAMBODIA

 

Please help save dholes. If everyone reading this donates just £3, you could help get the rangers all the equipment they need to help bring these remarkable creatures back from the brink. Thank you.

    I DID.

 

DONATE NOW

 

You are receiving this email because I thought you should read it.

My relatively-small

environmental footprint
is not only a hundred thousand
times the size of the footprint
of a hunted hare,
but many hundreds of times larger
than that of a persecuted wolf or bear.

Big-power Bully

Pusher of Christian Values

Deprives Valentine

Of 1,800 years

Of sainthood

No society

that has to be policed
is worth perpetuating.

As for democracy, the Athenian
experiment was hardly worth the name,
run by mono-ethnic, high-born 'citizens' –
all of whom were males with military
training and experience
who eagerly suppressed Free Speech
as taught by Socrates.

Fairly far from the madding crowd,

the pogroms, the hate and the greed.

Golden Jackal, Jordan.

 

"It's happening round the corner.

 … Right now, somewhere, not very far away, someone is either being beaten, locked in a cupboard, being raped, being abused, being coerced into something they don’t want to do.”

– Tracy Emin, artist with bed.

Life without a bladder is “pretty heavy”, she tells me. Today, for example, when she got in the shower, she had a lot of bleeding from her stoma. Then there’s the whole business of the bag, which needs emptying into a loo maybe “every 15 to 20 minutes, or it might be OK for an hour. For a lot of people with urostomies, they don’t go to theatre, they don’t go to cinema,” she says. If you can’t get to a loo in time, it can overfill and burst, which isn’t great, especially if it happens in a public place. If she wants to do something as simple as take a nap at home, she says, even that’s tricky. “It wakes you up because of the pressure” and, worst case, “The bag will just fly off, and then all the urine will go everywhere. It’s 500ml of urine in a small bag, which doesn’t sound like much.” (It sounds like plenty, to me.)

She has bowel problems on top of everything else. “You’ve got the blood, you’ve got the shit, you’ve got the pills – it really can get you down, because you can’t be free...

Family Portrait

by Conrad Felixmüller.
How I love the German Expressionists
and the Weimar Republic! It was possibly
as Advanced as Civilisation will ever get.