Tiresome mensuality.

It's the moon
I have to thank
or curse. Once
a month I am
'sexually active'
and have a wank.

Two questions

asked of Andrew O'Hagan,
brilliant author of Caledonian Road.

plus:

My thought on the internet:
I remember the www being
an exciting tool of exploration
(Google Earth !)
Now it is a tyrannical instrument
of control and exploitation.

Perhaps Marcus Aurelius

didn't get it quite right,
and the quality of your life depends on
the fizziness of your thoughts ?

Ballad of the Skeletons.

This much-praised and very dated poem is at least as bad as some of mine

and much more tedious. 
Like most bad popular poetry it is written for performance,
not for the inner eye or intellect.

Said the Presidential Skeleton

I won't sign the bill

Said the Speaker skeleton

Yes you will

Said the Representative Skeleton

I object

Said the Supreme Court skeleton

Whaddya expect

Said the Miltary skeleton

Buy Star Bombs

Said the Upperclass Skeleton

Starve unmarried moms

Said the Yahoo Skeleton

Stop dirty art

Said the Right Wing skeleton

Forget about yr heart

Said the Gnostic Skeleton

The Human Form's divine

Said the Moral Majority skeleton

No it's not it's mine

       And on it goes...

Said the Buddha Skeleton

Compassion is wealth

Said the Corporate skeleton

It's bad for your health

Said the Old Christ skeleton

Care for the Poor

Said the Son of God skeleton

AIDS needs cure

Said the Homophobe skeleton

Gay folk suck

Said the Heritage Policy skeleton

Blacks're outa luck

Said the Macho skeleton

Women in their place

Said the Fundamentalist skeleton

Increase human race

Said the Right-to-Life skeleton

Foetus has a soul

Said Pro Choice skeleton

Shove it up your hole

Said the Downsized skeleton

Robots got my job

Said the Tough-on-Crime skeleton

Tear gas the mob

       Is it ever going to finish ?

Said the Governor skeleton

Cut school lunch

Said the Mayor skeleton

Eat the budget crunch

Said the Neo Conservative skeleton

Homeless off the street!

Said the Free Market skeleton

Use 'em up for meat

Said the Think Tank skeleton

Free Market's the way

Said the Saving & Loan skeleton

Make the State pay

Said the Chrysler skeleton

Pay for you & me

Said the Nuke Power skeleton

& me & me & me

Said the Ecologic skeleton

Keep Skies blue

Said the Multinational skeleton

What's it worth to you?

Said the NAFTA skeleton

Get rich, Free Trade,

Said the Maquiladora skeleton

Sweat shops, low paid

Said the rich GATT skeleton

One world, high tech

Said the Underclass skeleton

Get it in the neck

Said the World Bank skeleton

Cut down your trees

Said the I.M.F. skeleton

Buy American cheese

Said the Underdeveloped skeleton

We want rice

Said Developed Nations' skeleton

Sell your bones for dice

       Yes, there's more.

Said the Ayatollah skeleton

Die writer die

Said Joe Stalin's skeleton

That's no lie

Said the Middle Kingdom skeleton

We swallowed Tibet

Said the Dalai Lama skeleton

Indigestion's whatcha get

Said the World Chorus skeleton

That's their fate

Said the U.S.A. skeleton

Gotta save Kuwait

Said the Petrochemical skeleton

Roar Bombers roar!

Said the Psychedelic skeleton

Smoke a dinosaur

Said Nancy's skeleton

Just say No

Said the Rasta skeleton

Blow Nancy Blow

Said Demagogue skeleton

Don't smoke Pot

Said Alcoholic skeleton

Let your liver rot

Said the Junkie skeleton

Can't we get a fix?

Said the Big Brother skeleton

Jail the dirty pricks

Said the Mirror skeleton

Hey good looking

Said the Electric Chair skeleton

Hey what's cooking?

Said the Talk-show skeleton

Fuck you in the face

Said the Family Values skeleton

My family values mace

Said the NY Times skeleton

That's not fit to print

Said the CIA skeleton

Can'tcha take a hint?

Said the Network skeleton

Believe my lies

Said the Advertising skeleton

Don't get wise!

Said the Media skeleton

Believe you me

Said the Couch-potato skeleton

What me worry?

Said the TV skeleton

Eat sound bites

Said the Newscast skeleton

That's all Goodnight

       If you got this far, award yourself a medal.

Mr Skeleton, with Pacemaker and hearing-aids.

In George Orwell's time

it would have been ridiculous fantasy
to imagine that one could have bed-time
music (beside one's bed)
coming live (not by the world-wide-web
but by digital audio broadcasting) free, unpaid
for, on ABC Classics' early-morning
programme (with dawn chorus)
from Adelaide.

I have always hated 'strimmers'

(débroussailleuses in French).
They kill and destroy so much.
I'm not surprised that they might
even have started wildfires near Bordeaux.

View from the sea of wildfires near Bordeaux.

The successive heatwaves in France 
have caused considerable harm to wildlife.

Modern slavery.

Spare a thought also
for nubile, trafficked boys and girls
amongst whose duties
is the cutting of the toenails
of paedophile and aged billionaires.

Just as early Christian converts

might have been outraged
by shrines and sacrifices to Cybele and Pan,
Priapus and Artemis and Zeus,
at almost every street-corner,
so, too, am I, a mildly-vegetarian man,
sickened by the stink of the neighbours'
Satanic barbecues.

All friends

are Fair-weather Friends.
A lot depends
on whether
and how they endure
your weather.

I am looking forward

to shock headlines
that read: WOMEN'S
DRUG RAPE GANG
TRAUMATISES
MULTIPLE MEN
DAMAGING THEIR WILLIES.

instead of

 

One of Ray Exworth's Sheds.

© Jem Southam

"Discovery

not God himself
Could now annihilate."

Indeed not, Deep Emily :
it will annihilate itself,
past, present and future
- and us all.

Heat-hub.

In this enhanced satellite image you can see
how France this past month
has been a rainless heat-hub - I would say
mainly because of the warm-air-sucking
influence of the Bay of Biscay.

Cumulus and strato-cumulus avoid France.

Maybe you can watch on your Tor browser.

CIVISE (France's Economic, Social and Environmental Council)
reports that every three minutes in France a child is sexually abused.

*

At this very moment, somewhere in the air,
female cabin-crew are being groped, propositioned, pawed,
insulted or shouted at...while bladder-weak
male passengers piss in their seats, or against the outside
of the occupied toilet door
on their way to a vacation in the sun.

What is it about human males (of which I am one) ?

Voltaic Agriculture

in Colorado.

The title

of this recent painting
comes from Patricia Highsmith's
idea of a dilapidated art gallery
that nobody visits, and probably
has no pictures.

The subject reads:
L'art privé : private, as opposed
to public, art.

Galerie Zéro, 2026.

Not so very long ago
there was a little game
played for fun
between and within villages,
 neighbourhoods
and towns in England,
originally with a pig's bladder
that was kicked by opposing teams
attempting to get it through goalposts
at either end of a fairly-level field.
Sometimes these were marked by 
a pile of clothes or old fence-posts.

This is what it has become.

As with everything it gets involved with,

the USA not so much accepted
the unAmerican football World Cup
(and a minor sport in North America)

as imposed itself upon it.

And indeed, Mr Belloc,

about the actual personality
or - say- night time behaviour
of the failed but famed Saviour
we know only his frugality. 

*Hilaire Belloc wrote a famous quatrain:

              How odd
              of God
              to choose
              the Jews.

Pelican doctors.

Pillicock sat on pillicock hill,

weeping in Shakespeare's time,

dribbling still.

from today's Guardian.

We live in an age of spectacle.

It surpasses substance. 

It vaults reason.
No outrage goes unapplauded. 

No bigotry  goes unblessed. 

Are we not entertained?

She might have been wrong.

“No collapse,
just a gradual shrinking/ of the present.” 

OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK

On The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Drinking
wine (for the tonguesome taste)
in solitude
can induce
philosophical thinking.

The danger
of knowing yourself
to be (apparently) very different
from other human beings
is to think yourself thereby superior.

A Dionysian-Khayyámian Thought:

On the Easyjet
of Existence
language
is excess baggage.

A robber fly in Cost Rica

and a hat in Vienna in 1910.

photo by Ronen Tivoney

The Fraudyssey.

I wouldn't dream of watching
a crude Christopher Nolan film.
Two lines of a review sum it up.

Homer’s Calypso is a great part. 
Nolan’s is some woman who runs a beach bar 
and is thinking of pivoting to psychotherapy. 

I guess it's the most recent equivalent of
The Robe or Quo Vadis, both of which
I saw in ill-spent youth.

Interesting distinctiion

Dirty Linen (with overtones of shit)

washed at home in France and not at the public wash-place
or pond = keeping problems and quarrels  and perhaps scandals within the family :
« laver son linge sale en famille »

washed in public in Britain and not in the private laundry-room or wash-house = letting everyone know your family quarrels and problems and perhaps shameful things : « to wash one;'s dirty linen in public »

The meaning of dreams.

What to make of the dream in which
the dreamer discovers
a little bird living in his anus ?

The meanings of dreams (as of life)
this book suggests, may lie in 
the very absence of meaning.

Harmless pornography

has entered a new dimension
with micro-cameras
that women can insert
deep into their vaginas
(or men into their recta ?)
to photograph the mechanics
of fucking. Quite fascinating
and educational. 

However:
one man or woman's exciting bit of letch
is another one's excellent reason to retch.

"No man knows a rapist,"

wrote a female victim in The Guardian yesterday...

apart from penis-buddies in the same
drug-rape ring or squad

and the young guys forcibly buggered
by their uncle or their dad... 

FALSE CURRENCY ?

And what will it be worth
in 50 years ?

Gold-plated, of course.

The triviality of 'news media' (snob's view)

In the midst of almost world-wide war :

Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine, Mali, Iran,

Burkina Faso, Burma...

the BBC's chief headline and 5 minute report

this morning was England's deserved defeat

by Argentina in the infantile football world cup.

The Guardian, one of the world's top newspapers

is filled with fashion, lifestyle, silly menus, sport,

gossip, pop music and video-games reviews 

and has very little news.

J-P Sartre :

'When you accept despair,
you can stop expecting the world
to be co-operative,
and get on with life.'

Beware the fridge-aware bear !

 

Monsieur Degas finishes

a painting

buttoning his fly.

 

Splendid self-expression.

 

Faint praise.

Just as I admire Switzerland
for having a robust democracy
and rotating presidency (a bit like the EU)

and Ireland for its constitutional embargo
on joining any military pact
(such as NATO which still includes a dictatorship)
- though not for its National Day, hijacked
and of course vulgarised by the USA -

and Scotland for its independence
like Catalonia's within a federation
and its very quiet National Day,

so I admire England for not having
a public-holiday National Day, 

though Shakespeare's Birthday
has been attractively suggested.  

Do National Days promote social cohesion
or simply provide excuses
for political expressions of nationalism -
and in the case of France's 14th of July
celebrate a very bad model of failed revolution
soon turned into dictatorship ?

On the Blue Bus with Siegfried Sassoon in Rilkean Mood.

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend
The end
The door
to the not-beyond
nor behind
nor above nor below
but the Friend everlasting
evermore
ever-fasting
Minotaur.

Mind the Door.

[EPITOME

A representative or perfect example of a class or type.

A brief summary, as of a book or article; an abstract.

A work in which the contents of a former work are reduced within a smaller space by curtailment and condensation; a brief summary; an abridgement.]

A nice neologism:

to be MURDOCHED

means to be “editorially attacked when one’s ideas or deeds do not accord with the media proprietor’s programs or publications”.

Not many people know that the Malign Media Mogul Murdoch
was once a Marxist.

Good old Socialist Realism

with Dog.

The Smugglers, 1930.

The Man in the Iron Mask

was once second only to The Count of Monte Cristo
is my list of favourite books.  So I am a fan of
Lord Binface, who could actually win - and deserve -
a seat in the British Parliament.

Today I also learned (from the BBC)
that many communities in India
choose their leaders by lot, 
including the entire population in the raffle.
If chosen, one can always refuse,
as happened in ancient Athens.
Apparently, it works very well,
not least because it avoids the anti-democratic
excrescence of political parties, and is
very inexpensive.  

It has been wandering around Paris for years,

Statue of Alfred Dreyfus
by 
Louis Mitelberg, political cartoonist and Jewish Pole.

read more >

Sigur Rós.

FluguFrelsarinn.

I am the fly-saviour.
I am the disappointment
that liberates hope.

Surprise, surprise !

 

Tombeau du docteur Marx.

Dear Karl,
let us curse
the bourgeoisie
(of which we are a raging part)
who with greed and ire
have set half of the world on fire.

After nearly a thousand years

the 'Bayeux Tapestry',
embroidered in southern England
(on linen, not cotton, hemp or jute)
has crossed the twinkling Channel
(in a heat-wave) 
to be displayed ironically
in the British Museum
of Global Loot.

When I was in Bayeux, I went photographing
'marginal' sculptures on nearby churches
while my mother tired herself enjoyably
with the embroidery.

I am much more interested in The Turin Horse
than in the Turin Shroud.

I have a large-format book showing, in detail,
the complete anglo-saxon-norman art-object,
which I could and can study
at my leisure, without the awfulness
(suppressed madness) of a crowd.

TODAY'S OTHER NEWS: The Collapse of Decency.

Under the current 'Heat Dome' I descend
to breakfast in my pyjamas, which I have
never (in good health) done before.
Worse, half-way through my croissant,
I disrobe completely, casting my flimsy 
garments to the floor.
Armageddon must be nigh.

There are, basically, two

kinds of on-the-hoof photography:

catching the moment (action);

and seeing a composition.

The first is reportage,

the second can be great art.

Butisme* - More on the USA.

Do people - does anyone - actually
pursue happiness ? Or do they pursue goals
which they think will make them happy ?
Or is happiness just a half-expected side-product ?

*Butisme is my French coinage from but
meaning goal, hence goalism (not Gaullism).

Today: temperatures rising here to 40°C,
and expected to last another 10 days.

Wildfire in southern France.

A corner of my balcony,
taken this morning.

English humour

enhances its grim politics.

Meanwhile in France
the future looks really grim.

 

The same awfulness everywhere

except (so far) Albania. 

Ibiza used to be a beautiful
tranquil island, relatively unoppressed
by Franco. Now it is a mispronounced
hell-hole oppressed by tourism,
the world wide web, airB'n'b, and
drunken teenagers..

see Gerald Durrell's early account of Corfu
before the lagoon of flamingoes
was turned by greed into an airport;

and Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis.

The Albanian coast from Corfu in 1992

see my own connection with Albania >

A tasty birthday card.

Cyanea capillata

by Aleksandr Semenov

Yours slurpily, Wofl.

Celebrated painters

(especially females praised for the wrong reasons)
are often pretty bad.
This is one of the better ones by Vigée le Brun,
who commanded huge prices :
Portrait of her daughter

(All her subjects have big soft-porn Tretchikoff eyes.)

Here is one by current pin-up,
Frida Kahlo.

And here is a self-portrait by a truly great painter,
Gwen John :

Then there is the brilliant, exuberant Alice Neel :