War, Religion.

A mosque in Gaza.

Americans

are insanely anti-intellectual
except when intellect produces
dumb domination ever more effectual.

And so it goes.

 

On Kafka.

I see no mystery in The Trial.
Joseph K's crime was to be human.

Men who know too much.

Pelicot said of Dogan’s appeal: 

"I think it is indecent."

The trial continues.

Gisèle Pelicot, a brave woman known too much,
should replace Joan of Arc
in the French psyche.

But no way is it likely.

Yours, Martin.

Sending postcards is so passé,
old hat, vieux-jeu...

So I was thrilled to get a card today
out of the blue, so to say,

with pictures of Scottish Lochs on one side,
and on the other this plaintive message
accompanying an unfranked stamp:

I’ve mainly spent the past few weeks
looking joylessly at my knees
as I hiked [presumably on a bike,
so not a tramp]]
through the Highlands
which [rugged surfeit]
was interrupted by the occasional
Trail Friend and Stunning View.
It could almost have been worth it!

Sickening.

This is not why
I read The Guardian
every day.

Outrageous.

You might surf for hours under the heading
'Dejeuner sur l'herbe with naked men'

but, amongst the hackneyed
reproductions of the paintings
by Manet and Monet,
and the film of that name by Jean Renoir,
a Renault advertisement by Doisneau
and variations, rude and (by Picasso) crude
jokes upon the theme (Dalí didn't dare)

you may find only these with even one male nude. 

Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream ?

On the planet of the blind
Artificial Intelligence
is King.

After rare rain

in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

 photo by Lucas Aguayo

 

That tedious cliché 'The West'

 
does not necessarily include the USA,
but now must include Ukraine, the Baltics and the Balkans.

Martyrdom Denied.

If only I could have found a Cause
worth blowing myself up for
I would have joined it years ago. 

More for contumely than applause.

"The right side of History."

Excuse me,
but there is neither right side
nor bright side of history.
It is all wrong.

And there is no "redemption", either.

A Question,

 

Eat your hearts out, Burke and Hare.*

It's no surprise that the world's chief
supplier and consumer of pornography
is the world's chief supplier and consumer
of cadavers (corpses) and body-parts.

I've willed my desiccated body
to Toulouse University.
For its quick transport I actually paid.
I wouldn't care what anyone would do
to or with my body**, from anatomy-instruction
all the ways to necrophilia, but I am outraged
quite simply (as always) by the trade.

* https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize

** After all, like a good primate,
I've eaten my deep-fried psoriatic skin-flakes,
nose- and ear-pickings, drunk my urine,
once even tried a tiny piecelet of my shit...

In Arcadia

 Egos are quite small.

Chronic Fatigue and Post-covid Syndrome.

 I used to have some symptoms of the one
(especially continual fatigue and depression)
with bouts of energetic ataraxia;

now I have symptoms of the other.
Preparing for bed is quite a bother. 

Gastric revolt, sometimes brain fog so bad
I have had to work out how to turn on the kettle
and turn off the laptop; I'm almost always cold;
the type of tiredness that makes me hope
I can die quickly, quietly from fatigue.
Currently I need to rest half-way
as I pull myself up the stairs,
and have difficulty getting out of the car
and up the 50-metre slope to it.
Yet I can drive. 

Listening to the radio,
updating websites and composing blogs
make me feel a little more alive.

Last week I even managed to saw two logs,
but I simply don't have the energy
to trot out my symptoms my doctor
or to become a victim of the Wellness Industry.

My latest bargain second-hand buy
folds and fits in the front well of the car.
I don't think I'll use the plastic tray.

Our heroes

reflect our views on life.
My first hero was Theseus
because (for some deep, impenetrable reason)
I was fascinated by his encounter with Procrustes. 
Then (impenetrably) I loved the Minotaur.

For years I had no hero (hated patriarchs)
until I discovered van Gogh (and painting),
and, subsequently, Rosa Parks.

Now this senescent,
quietist seeker, finder of ataraxy,
considers Volodomyr Zelenskyy*
a hero, though that could be because
the former joker is so admirably sexy.

*who, in the words of Winston Churchill, had greatness thrust upon him.

Re-incarnation

might be in the past.

If Kali forbid! I were to be
reborn I would like to return
as a sterile spermatozoon
of a happy, hairy man.

The Work Ethic

is based on the assertion
that idle dreaming
leads to subversion.

Unintentional haiku

by Frankie Boyle (Meantime 2022, page 130)

Moon, the cloudy white
eye of a disinterested
universe.

The sheer shallowness

of Western culture revealed itself i
n the vapid, culturally-restricted
and almost totalitarian
"counter-culture" which it accommodated

and I observed as an anti-counter-cultural 
drop-out.

“Every sort of contradiction can be found in me,”

 - Michel de Montaigne.

Why is the Catholic Church

so 'exercised' about sex,
when its Saviour was
probably asexual ?

 

Dear Mr Trump,

 "Most of the world's problems
come from the fact that
stupid people talk louder."

- Frankie Boyle, Meantime (2022)

Throttling the world.

'Bayer (Germany) and Corteva (US)
control 80 per cent of patents
for genetically modified seeds.'

What do they care
about people's actual needs ?

https://aeon.co/essays/

My new friend

is having a bad hair day.

Polka-dot Batfish by Matthew Sullivan

 

Funeral music, British humour.

The most popular music
for British funerals
is Eric Idle's 
Always look on the bright side of life.

When all's said and done, say no more.

By definition

prophets are unsubtle
except when being gnomic.
Their followers interpret them
subtly, or selectively,
which leads to schism
and rank hypocrisy.
Subtle prophets
are philosophers.

 

Diogenes might have said

that he'd rather share a bed
with a dog than a human.
I would probably have agreed,
without making a choice
between man or woman,
between lice and fleas.

Lifestyle.

We consumers
should not be blamed
for what we consume,
but only for consuming.

Being sociable

is not the same as
being addicted to social grooming.

Darkly-amusing juxtaposition.

You know there is something wrong

with a diplomatic event
when it begins with a photo
of the guest of honour
standing next to a child sex trafficker
being projected on to Windsor Castle.

Fact and Fiction

In fiction you know
what people are thinking.
In fact, you do not.

Diogenes said

(and Schopenhauer agreed)
that any immortality would be hell.

Diogenes in Dijon.

 

A waking thought.

There have been

in Russo-Greek Christian 'Orthodoxy'

self-styled, often uncouth

Fools for Christ.

But none like Diogenes

who has been described as

Fools for Truth.

Virtual Connections.

I see
another one
has "ghosted" me
which happens
quite regularly
when I encounter
members of the
actual bourgeoisie.

Dressing up

in England.

"Jack-in-the-Green"

The Putin of the World Wide Web

Worth more than a Himalaya of sugar.

Mark Zuckerberg

The missing comma.

 A country that presents itself falsely is not to be trusted.
(Well, no country, except perhaps San Marino can be trusted)

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
is a masquerade, a false representation
because the Kingdom of Ireland
(of which the present Northern Ireland
is a fragment) ceased to exist in 1800.

In 1922 most of Ireland bloodily seceded from the United Kingdom, leaving an entity, curiously named Northern Ireland
and not North Ireland (like, say, North Korea, North Macedonia,
or South Sudan) officially, practically, legislatively
closer to the UK than the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands
(which are a lordship and dependencies respectively)
but a separate entity which will eventually secede.  

So the UK's proper title should contain a comma,
or, better, a dash:
the United Kingdom of Great Britain - and Northern Ireland
trailing in its abominable, royal footsteps.

The Oddity of [my] Memory

I have been re-reading Peter Carey's
splendid satire Oscar and Lucinda
which I first read in 1989 or 1990. 
I remembered the cover, the title
and my enjoyment, but forgot
every ferocious iota of the plot.

If, however, the book had been called
The Glass Church
I'm pretty sure my memory would not
have left me in the lurch.

Kargah e hasti.

The poet-philosopher
Jalaludin Rumi
suggested that
I should think of Being
as Workshop.

But, having been
a fatherless technophobe,
workshops frightened me

and I am not a fan of work
or indeed employment
that is not enjoyment.

For most people
life is (at least) a tussle, 
but for me it's more
of an astrophysical puzzle.

On my 84th birthday.

Time out of mind
Time out of mud
Mind out of blood
Yet mud is so kind

Mount Olympos.

 

Up there in the pure white snow
the gods played sordid, vicious games;

and now below,
corruption rules, as
any hard-won democracy
is bought by any
festering autocracy.

The name of my edgy homeland.

Why NorthERN Ireland,
when Northern denotes the vage north of a country
as in Northern France or The North of England,
Northern Australia,

and North denotes a separate country
such as North Korea, North Macedonia,
likewise South Sudan and, indeed South Africa 
and North and South America ?

Seoul is in northern South Korea...

'Being Yourself'

is not easy
in the totalitarian
moralistic state
of liberal democracy, 

and almost impossible
in an autocracy.

Justice for Everyone.

Banksy 2025

 

Today's weather :

 coming straight at me.

Monthly check-up.

Hello, doctor.
I'm fine, thank you : some slight
dizziness when standing upright
after sitting down,
sometimes while walking in the town,
sometimes resulting in a faint.

Problems with hearing and with sight.
"Post-it" psoriasis on my thigh:
I could write a note on it and peel it off .

Permanent bloat .
(Another ventral hernia before I die ?
or just gastritis or intolerance of food,
like any ageing saint ?)

Otherwise, I have no complaint,

for, on the other hand, I seem to have
a highly-advanced Übermensch prostate
which has enabled me simultaneously
to piss and ejaculate.

If I'm still alive next month
I'll post another cheerful Old Age Update. 

Jawsome!

 

Migration.

Eighty years ago
Stalin removed to Central Asia
the entire population of Chechenya
in one of his sadistic population games. 

A third of them perished. 
The rest were deprived of their Chechen names.

Up to (and maybe beyond)
two hundred thousand Chechens died
in the two Russo-Chechen wars of the 1990s.

Since then, over a third
of the remaining Chechen population have fled.

Let us now talk of "illegal immigrants".

The Jews want to move the Philistines,
now called Palestinians,
but really they would prefer them dead.

Garlic and snails.

The food of the enemy
can also become the enemy.

The last time I cried

was in 2002 when my dog died.

Cancer diagnosis.

 

Social costs.

The Nation State doesn't care
a tinker's fart for your welfare
even if you live in a shanty-town.

Costs and statistics are what.
The poor are expenses to be kept down.

Frankly,

many of the Bordeaux
and Côtes du Rhône wines
sold in French supermarkets
under €12 aren't worth
much more than this.

The corruption of queerness.

When I was young 'homosexuals' were
special people. Either they were
literary intellectuals like Wilde and Joe Ackerley
(who, like me, was in love with a dog)

or they were 'working class', like Joe's
ill-treated lover, stocky and strong
and smelling of sweat or carbolic or both.

'Homosexuality' was forbidden, therefore exciting,
hence its attraction.  Now anyone
with neither brain nor brawn
nor criminality can be 'gay'. 
Homo-mediocrity is here to stay.

Today's photo

is by an Amazon courier.

I got it!

 

'The People', Fellow Republicans

or self-hating populace
bond desperately with populists
who so despise them.

POPVLVS MVLTVM OTIVM HABET
ATQVE MVLTI SVNT AVARI.

Rome became a republic, Athens a very limited democracy.

Eternal plastics.

Molecules
from my horrible, scorched
Terylene trousers from the 1950s
may be in your bloodstream.

 

Armageddon.

A wasp's nest
pillaged by a badger.

photo by Mark Cocker

A brilliant term

to describe many 'liberals' :
COMMISSARS OF LANGUAGE.

But behind the language-commissars
are the Thought-controllers
of the Deep State of unmitigated morality.

 

TRUMP SET TO ABOLISH WWW

Not (yet) true.
But this is certain:

Concerning which, it is no surprise
that the world's chief supplier
and consumer of pornography
is the world's chief supplier and consumer
of cadavers (corpses) and body-parts...

[more on this on October 3rd]

British society is currently

getting its knickers in a twist again
about petty (not organised) shoplifting.
Retailers claim that it puts prices up
for those who pay.  But surely 
shoplifting by the poor consists of
minute and miserable attempts to remedy
grotesque inequalities in society ?

A painter I'd never heard of until today,

underclass,
queer pride
from Ayrshire :
Bobby MacBryde.

In theory, you cannot

in a Liberal Democracy
be coerced to be free.
Except in the USA.

Multiple

is a loathsome recent introduction
which means More than three.

It has replaced 'several' (more than 5),
'many' and 'a lot' (more than 10)
and 'a large number'.

Which is the original Vermeer

and which the copy
- which some think might also be by Vermeer ?

In Philadelphia

In London

The problem with language

is that so many experiences
from boredom to tragedy
are beyond words.
Language often trivialises,
or there's something missing.

And, anyway, the problem with talking
is that people do not listen.

Gaza, 2025.

She will become plunder for the nations,
and her settlements will be ravaged by the sword.

Trump plan for holiday resort for non-Palestinians.

read details

see more of today's photos

Most Heroes

are 'Poster Heroes'
and all are heavily unbalanced,
even more flawed than ordinary folk.

« Religious ecstasy

made people callous
(so did causes)... » 

- Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway.

'Loneliest Continent' ?

Not Antarctica.

Epidemic of social isolation hits Africa.

Anti-sticker Sticker.

Geopolitics.

Trading and Financial sanctions rarely work.

They make regimes more resilient.

South Africa did not collapse because of sanctions
but, as with the USSR, the system became
politically, morally and socially unsustainable.

The only thing that will stop Putin's war
of destruction, war-crimes and terror
in Ukraine will be a geo-political or hubristic error.

Unbelievably revered,

(mainly in Catholic France)
the spongy spiritualism of Simone Weil
includes:

"The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter."

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

"There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction."

"Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity."

and reams of similar tosh, possibly as bad as my own,
which almost makes me Groucho-glad that I'm not revered.

HOWEVER, she did write some excellent epigrams, such as:

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God
the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

 – Christians do it religiously.

* * *

A less sententious philosopher >

She was one of the most odious types of poster-hero :
a preacher, a career-martyr and a
dishonest suicide who was not even a cat-lover
- let alone a resister (even by stealth)
against the Catholic patriarchy of Pius XII.

I get the impression that she would rather have died in Auschwitz, had she known of its existence.

Just as Facebook is not the web,

and as the web is not the internet,
so intimacy is not love.

 

Penultimately,

the only justification of power
is power.

Grasshopper

hitch-hopping.

'Artificial Intelligence'

White men's
Dreaming.

Interesting account...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle

 “Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms,” he said.
“If it’s a marriage, it’s not gay.”

also:

Note: I have been 'sexually inactive' since I was 80 !
Quite a relief ! - as musician and bon-vivant George Melly
remarked when he reached the same blessed state.

Arbor vitæ

My latest painting
with its title in Farsi.

Tree of Life

My 'studio'

Keeping our heads down.

I used to assume
that the reason why old people walked
with heads bent down was their arthritic
necks or shoulders.  Now I know that
at least some, like me, keep their heads down
to help them not to faint on the sidewalk or the street.

 

Susophily.

I love pigs.
So, when I read a Guardian recommendation
for an Aussie series on youTube
called Cooking for Seamus
(a very happy and highly-socialised bull),
and found this amazing hippy, happy video
of his almost-friend, an arthritic boar
called Danny Boy, I became a happy hippy
for eleven minutes - without grass or E
or psilocybe tea.

NB
There is a Pig-lovers group on Facebook.

What is he going to do with (or to) them ?

 

Meanwhile, in America,

I feel (even) older already.

 

'The Establishment'

is whoever calls the shots –
political or internet despots.

Brut

can be the best champagne
or almost-unacceptable art –

at any rate, remains apart.

Keeping Kool in Korea, and a Doorway in Sudan.

 (from 'The Guardian')

Couldn't get the people to move.

My nineteen-sixties.

I never turned on,
never tuned in,
because I was already
a drop-out who
listened to Sibelius. 

Death

(sui-cyanide)
The Deputy-Burgomeister's daughter (and parents) Leipzig 1945.

photo by the great Lee Miller

JAWS

 

Democracy

photo by Dean Lewins

"The stifling intrusiveness of Liberal Democracy
should not surprise us." – Ryszard Legutko,

The Demon in Democracy : Totalitarian Temptations

in Free Societies, New York & London 2006

"I have found from many observations
that liberals are incapable of allowing people
to have their own convictions, and immediately
answer their opponents with abuse or something worse."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot.