America burning ?

No, just a scary sunset,
some derricks,
and a statue of hypocrisy

photo by Charly Triballeau

The Genital Olympics.

 

 Read all about it...

'The best books

make you rethink
how you relate to the world.'

– Tracy Chevalier

My literary life - so far -
has roamed for eighty years
from Little Grey Rabbit
to Raising Hare.

Perhaps –

apart from the 'enslavement
in Babylon', the expulsion by the Romans,
the ghettoes, pogroms, Shoah,
mass-muggings, unending insults
and forced usury –

it will transpire
that the worst thing to befall the Jews
will have been
the recent seizure of Palestine.

False spring.

The crocuses and violets are blooming.
When I insert my hearing-aids
I hear the kettle
(but no birds)
sing.

'The tears of the world

are a constant quantity.'

- Estragon, in Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

(But it's the quality that matters, says the priest.)

I don't much care for mirrors,

for when I've looked in them
I have never seen more than
an image, a curious simulacrum
no more real than a photograph,
a life-like puppet, a trick of light. 

For women they are less often
a source of self-admiration than of anxiety.
The last time I looked in mine
I saw that I had my pullover
the wrong way round and inside-out.

But they are useful
for beard-trimming,
for watching pilferers in shops...
and they were once slightly helpful
in treating my teenage spots..

I don't believe I ever looked as cute as this!

Fame is not a virtue.

Famous people
are not necessarily
worth knowing

any more than are
'hard workers'.

Sun-bear and butterfly.

 from Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

photo by Mogens Trolle

The Romantic Fallacy.

Kissing is a very small part of life.
So why does it feature
in almost every movie ever made ?

The original romances – derived
by troubadours through Courts of Love
(really courts of mutual respect)
in the 11th and 12th centuries
from Sufi Islam, e.g. Rumi – involved
no carnality, not even kissing.
Romance that spellbinds
was marriage of minds
long since degraded
to sexual compatibility.

More Senility.

My lycracrylic long-johns
are so warm and cosy
that it was only when
I was about the leave the house
that I noticed I had no trousers on.
But if you think that's silly,

yesterday I put my long-johns on
the wrong way round
and deprived myself
of access to my willy

though I mostly sit down to pee.

A Wall in Wales.

The Ultimate Reality

is not death
but solitude.
Available even now.
First month free.
Cancel any time.

 

Indoor pollution.

I should have died long ago from
some pulmonary condition
because I have always lived with
an open coal (now closed wood) fire
and spent most of my adolescent winters in a room
heated by an Aladdin paraffin stove
(of the old wick-burning type)
I could cook on. Now I have the more advanced
(equally-smelly) injection
kind for winter mornings. (Needs electricity.)
For twenty-five years I smoked a pipe.
Since 1970 I have cooked with gas,
and only during Covid and in a crowd
put on a mask - insofar as spectacles
and hearing-aids and claustrophobia allowed.

But I have hardly ever had a chest-cold,
let alone asthma, emphysema or bronchitis.
Most old people die of pneumonia.
I'll probably die of pudibonditis
turning me into unpleasant
human detritus.

'Normacorc'

In no way are plastic bottle-stoppers 'green'.
What proportion of them is actually recycled ?
They are an insult to, a weapon against

the ancient cork forests
of Eastern Portugal 
soon to be facing ecological collapse
due to climate-change and plastics
which cause climate-change
- and easy screw-top caps.

One of the nastiest words in English.

BANTER.
The bane of my school years
and one of the reasons
I avoided pubs, sport and other
unpleasant masculine situations.
'They're only teasing.'
I 'went mad'. Nearly was expelled.
To a tree-loving Aspy
they were very dis-easing.

*

The most celebrated banterer in Europe.

Over-confidence

is a serious symptom
of optimism.

Some days

I devote several hours
to getting my head
together, gathering
my wits in one place.
Then it's time for bed.

Since today is

let us consider the greater holocaust
perpetrated by Europeans
in the Americas,

and smaller ones all over Africa
and in Australia.

Let us not forget the other genocides
all over the world, including Armenia,
Cambodia – and holocausts of hunger
as in India and Soviet Ukraine.

And now the offspring of offspring
of holocaust survivors
are venting ire and fire on Palestine.

Dating Questionnaire.

Question 3.

In ten words or fewer, describe yourself.

Thanks be to the Welfare State, I'm
an octogenarian, vegetarian
Marxist Oblomov.*

Oh, sorry ! that's 12 words plus two commas.
Does I'm count as one word ?

*A book I haven't got round to reading.

Homeless in Oklahoma.

photo from The Guardian

 

On the upward escalator.

photo by Mark Wilkins

 

In most modern societies

the stress of hypocrisy
is a 'major cause' of illness.

Suburbia, Atlanta, USA.

 

The sad thing about cinema

is that it got so quickly taken over
and almost submerged by
ruthless and ugly
Jewish-American heterosexuality.

Vincent's Ear.

A report on Vincent van Gogh's damaged ear
by the handsome Dr Félix Rey (left)
sent to Irving Stone in 1930.

Following weeks of living in poverty
with the ego etc. of the insufferable Gauguin,
Vincent committed the symbolic act
and rushed to the local house of transient
pleasure, where he handed his bloody ear-lobe
to a maid called Gabrielle Berlatier -
whom, unfortunately, he did not celebrate in paint,
nor the bordello.
But he painted this one in Arles, in 1888.

To put it mildly (and succinctly) :

I have for decades understood
that evil often begets evil,
but good rarely begets good.

Is an illustration really necessary ?

 "I'll show you my Pacemaker
if you show me yours..."

The 'Greenland Shark'

 

But...

Joseph Maclise,

an anatomist born in Cork
liked drawing male genitals
and, assuredly, regarding them.

He drew them well.

 

Ruthless optimism

enables ruthless capitalism.

Palestinians

  "will be allowed to exit Gaza,” 

 said the Israeli prime minister last year.  

– in the same way that Jews who could pay
were allowed to exit Germany
in the mid-1930s.
Though the scale of its evil and hypocrisy
is tiny in comparison with Hitler's Germany,
who would have imagined
60 years ago
that Israel could become a
vicious little power
(with useful concentration-camps)
in alliance with
illiberal autocracies
to assure its Lebensraum ?

So much for democracy !

from 'All the Tattered Stars'.

... just before the gate to heaven

is yet another hole to hell. 

– Richard W. Halperin

God bless ye

who, like my mother
and me,
smile without baring
their teeth !

There's none so authoritarian

as a modern 'libertarian'.

The selfless
tend not to be noticed.

Only by freeing capital
do you 'free the world'
- for ruthless take-over.

Best not to be noticed.

"Celebrating the rottenness,
that's freedom." 

(John le Carré : 'The Night Manager')

Best not to be noticed.

Today's Book Choice

from The Guardian. (scroll down when you get there)

The Ice Pool

 Watercolour by Andrew Wyeth.

Old and current news.

When I lived briefly in Denmark in the 1960s
 – ten years before the birth of the present prime minister –
it was hardly on the geopolitical map, a small NATO country
composed of islands, a peninsula and alleged hygge –
remote and almost exotic to a sheltered Northern-Irishman.  

It used to be quite a power – owning Norway,
Southern Sweden, Iceland, Schleswig-Holstein,
Northern Estonia, Coromandel* the Gold Coast
and some Caribbean islands for the slave trade.
Now only Greenland remains.

While I was enjoying myself on dreamy Bornholm
learning heterosex in candlelit hygge
and eating smørrebrød and kryddersild,
labskovs (known in Liverpool as scouse),
boiled cod fresh-landed and stikkelbærsgrød,
Danes were doing to Innu Greenlanders
what Russians are today doing to Ukrainians : snatching
native children to turn into Proper Danes
eating with knife and fork and being
hyggelige.  The fork was invented
only a century after the Inuit arrived on the world's
largest island from the western continent.

Now Greenland is a Prize Territory and,
apart from the Faroe Islands, the only overseas part
of the ancient Kingdom of the dithering Prince.

I was brusquely dumped by my Danish girlfriend.
I have never had one since.

Nor been to Denmark.

We are all now familiar with
Greenland's national flag.

from Wikipedia:
                             Since 2025, the United States has engaged in hybrid warfare against Greenland;^[30][31] as a result, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service included the United States as a potential hybrid threat to national security alongside Russia and China in its threat assessment that year.^[32][33]

* So it may have been, as Osbert Sitwell wrote:
On the coast of Coromandel
dance they to the tunes of Handel.

Such a pity!

 

Lucky Iranians ?

If France did the same,
perhaps I would have
a less stressed existence.

I refused to fill in the Census form online,
and insisted on the paper version.

(Roll on Le Pen and/or sidekick ???)

*

ON A DIFFERENT, MORE CHEERFUL NOTE :

Even though ...

1. Fatberg the size of four buses likely birthed shit- balls that closed Sydney beaches – and it can’t be cleared.

Promethean.

 Just as Homo sapiens stole the means to make fire
from Neanderthals, before wiping them out
one way another, so he will steal something even more
cataclysmic from the first superior extra-terrestrial beings
he encounters when on a galactic look-about.

from Polly, aged six.

Wrinkled uncle Magga Trump
You look like a Heffalump
Up above the world so high
Like a monster in the sky...

Yawning Capybara by Bob Karp

 

Senile Frustration.

There's little point in lapsing into
silent rage.
A little sense of humour is essential
for old age.

I never cared much

for American Cinema.
It wallows too anxiously
in heterosexophilia.

 

Just ignore the buggers and their profitable crap.

The wellness industrial complex !   Six rules to ditch –
and what to do instead.

Very little. Buy nothing.

'SEX'

It is a tragedy that this language
has shackled and sleazed the word,
offering no linguistic alternatives
(as Irish offers several words
for kinds and kindnesses of rain).

In a more ignorant time
(the nineteen-sixties)
we thought that the more
it was hidden, forbidden
the more toxic and driven
Sex could become for men.

We were sadly mistaken.
Anal-genital abuse is at least as rife,
sensuality just as rare in life,
since 'Sexual Liberation'.

Happy New Year by the road-side.

 

I have met only one Wise Man

in the long, narrow valley
of my life. He was
my professor of philosophy,
the gentle, self-effacing
Bryce Gallie.

Aspy in his eighties.

Even now sometimes

I shockingly & unashamedly reveal,

as I did in childhood, that I feel 

the only power I have

is to throw a tantrum.

Rest In Peace,

my brilliant namesake.

Meanwhile,