Another Sign of Senility.

I turned on the car radio the other day
(it's pre-set to boring and talky France-Musique)
and was amazed to hear some superb Arab-Jazz fusion
which turned out to be Jan Garbarek with Anouar Brahem and others.
Finally! I thought, somebody has got the message
that there is music beyond post-11th century Europe.
But when I got home, I couldn't find it on the listings,
so went to the car to check what station I was on.
I had been playing one of my own CDs.
So it's back to mainly-baroque boredom on France-Musique.

Language, Truth and Logic

If the offspring of a cat
is a kitten,
I think it highly likely that
the offspring of a mat
is a mitten.

An excellent dinner-companion.

http://dogsdepicted.tumblr.com

Haiku

Horse-fly's shopping-trip:
from dog-turd to me, and on
to someone's dinner.

Epithalamium ?

On the 14th of June 2017
we (aged 75 and 55 respectively)
had our platonic,
same-sex and boyish,
sweetly intimate
relationship
of over 20 years rewarded
for a modest fee with an official
and embossed
Civil Partnership certificate.

A Reply to Adam Zagajewski

poetryfoundation.org/zagajewski

Of course we should praise the mutilated world -
but we should rage against its mutilation.
Let us not praise in any way
our mutilating selves,
our self- and world-mutilating creeds,
'values', 'ways of life'.
Rage against the deserts we call 'gardens',
our cynical and criminal misuse of water,
our making the poor ever-poorer, rare animals rarer,
our destruction of trees by farms and fancy furniture and paper,
our pollution of the oceans through sheer greed,
our servicing of cities by continuous slaughter
which we drown out by night-club laughter.

Before there was glass

in church windows
there was thin but untransparent
alabaster.
The hovels of the poor
had the caul-
like skin of a cow's stomach
stretched and dried
over a hole in the wall.

19th century milestone, outside Caylus.

click to enlarge

The gloriously controversial

Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture entitled:
Under capitalism 80 percent of the population are simply disposable. 
Ultimately, he's right, but the notorious "checks and balances",
not to mention committedly rebellious folk
will ensure (short of nuclear war)
that 80 percent is not actually disposed of...
except, of course, the unimportant people in Syria
and at least 80% of the world...

Passchendaele

Mud three metres deep...
     The horses, the poor horses!
and the dead England- and Empire-resenting Irish
     mortar-bait
who fought allegedly for "plucky little Belgium",
and for whom no sickly-sanctimonious war-memorials
would be erected in their half-Free State.

[The three-month Third Battle of Ypres, fought around the village of Passchendaele (now Passendale, NE of Ieper/Ypres),began on the 31st July, 1917. 
The bodies of 35,000 soldiers on the Allied side,
drowned in mud, were never found or never identified.]

A nice (if awkward) little rhyme

from Aleister Crowley.

"Blot out mankind - and give the beasts a chance!
 Nature may in their inheritance grant
 Some semblance of a race
 Less infinitely base."

When I smoke weed

I happily imagine
that I lose my identity
and become
Old Man With Dog.

The most ancient Conundrum.

How was it
that co-operative creatures
constructed the Pandora's Box
of private property ?

Humans just can't keep their hands to themselves.

https://vnewlaur.tumblr.com/

Deep down,

I suspect that most people
are the opposite of what they seem.

Why I have so few friends.

I did not know that I concurred with and followed William Blake's instruction:

(Most of my friends are women.)

Unlike Emily,

I would rather my poetry
and my paintings, my name,
became known after my death than before,
thus enjoying the frugality of isolation
and avoiding the horrors of fame.

Ironic

that we borrowed the term joie-de-vivre
from the French,
who are somewhat dour and surly
compared with the Italians.

The poetry of great prose.

"Above him the great dome made a lonely tumour above the ogre-king."

on the tomb of  Tamerlane or Timur in Samarkand, by
Colin Thubron in The Lost Heart of Asia.

Some mediæval 'Holy Women'

claimed that the foreskin of Jesus
'materialised' in their mouths -
like old rubber bands, perhaps,
or with the texture of a pre-latex condom -
but what did they do with it ?
[insert answer here]......................................
.................................................................
- and at least one Italian church
has a relic of St Joseph's Breath...

Art

which began as a kind of homage to nature
is now an insult,
being like gold taps in a bathroom
without running water and no WC -
or like the donning of a sable coat
in winter with nothing underneath.

The Savannah of Eden.

When food was no longer free for all
and equally shared - that was The Fall.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p057w3nm

Infinity

is as ridiculous an idea as Heaven
or Yahwe/God/Alla'h,
yet, like them, is what our civilisation is based on.
In an infinite hotel
which is fully (infinitely) booked
there is an infinite number of vacant rooms
- or so I'm told.
This sounds like sophistry
of the most outrageous, religious kind.

(My dog, Asterix, however,
who had seven years of irregular
under-feeding, when he spent
his days in a cage, and his nights
alone in spooky warehouse dark,
tells me
that he
understands infinity -
because it is located in his belly...)

Human Intervention.

Thinking (yet again) about Syrian refugees

arriving in Greece
land of Clytemnestra, Œdipus, Antigone, Elektra
...and Diogenes,
I wonder
what's so marvellous about survival ?

For Malcolm

I feel so privileged
and humble
eating your gorgeous
gooseberry crumble.

I am a Peculiar Person

who talks not only to himself
and to his dog
but also to his delicious
gooseberry crumble.

I hope that I will beckon Death

before She hits on me,
with adjutants and bully-boys
of pain and misery.

Afterlife

appeals to two opposed categories of human beings:
those who cannot imagine that their self-importance is temporary,
and those whose life is so wretched that their only consolation
is that a life-to-come might be a compensation.

The only route

to emotional independence
is by avoiding peer pressure.
This is especially difficult
if you're a parent, so if you want
to be emotionally independent
it is necessary to avoid peer pressure
by not being a parent.

Although I am certainly not an admirer,

I would venture to say that the main reason
for the widespread dislike of President Trump
is that he is incapable of hypocrisy.

Where are they ?

(Islamic State Do!)

Being so downright,

I don't think I have ever been upright
(as in upright citizen)
except in my teenage, year-long, religious phase,
when I was a sickening prig - polite,
and, very up-tight.

We are coming down with stuff -

but have hardly room to breathe
or laugh -
and so we seethe -

bothering only to study stuff
rather than our situations
or our mass, crass motivations.

I guess I'm too late.

In 1979 (aged 27) I was living with my German Sheepdog
as a part-time gardener on the 9,000 acre estate
of the Earl of Caledon, on the Irish Border.
I had read Jean Genet and Dostoyevsky,
but I don't think I knew anything about cocaine
apart from Cocaine Blues and a 1920s blues
that I cannot locate, but has been re-interpreted
by Jackson Browne.
I guess this is typical of a white middle-class nerd!

(listen also to the wonderful Memphis Jug Band's
Take a whiff on me.)

On the Fourth of July

European-Americans celebrate
their independence from England,
so most African-Americans don't have to work.
They can spend the day
celebrating each other
and commiserating with, maybe even praying for,
Original-Americans.

Before Independence,

New England (especially Maryland)
was a penal colony.
Three-quarters of the population
had been shipped from the British Isles in chains.
After the Independence of the USA,
Australia became 'home' to Irish Republicans,
vagrants, blasphemers and stealers of beans.

The difference between

All
and an infinite number is
Imagination.

In 1968

(the year of the Prague Spring, Pražské jaro, Pražská jar)
one in every nine Canadians was an immigrant
or refugee - mostly draft-dodgers, drop-outs
and deserters from the USA.
In 1970 Canada was the world's largest exporter
of small-arms.
There is no connection.
The "vibrant" Czech small-arms industry
is based in Brno, called Brünn
in the anti-nationalist Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Why you should never turn on an overhead air-duct on an aeroplane.

Aer Lingus* gave me the 'flu
- and this was mid-June, mind you!
Ten days in bed...
I wished I was dead
or at least was able to sue.

* [Aer Lingus is Ireland's snooty and deposed national airline,
now lowish-cost - if you book early.]

Western Values

exterminated these fine specimens, too.
(WVs always eliminate the toughest,
always want to bring down the alpha-males
whether lions, tigers or superior people.)

If it is warm enough (in summer, anyway) to live without clothes
on Tierra del Fuego,
not so far from Antarctica,
why are we forced and brainwashed to do so ?
For two reasons:
1. The nasty genital-obsessed Abrahamic religions which have taken over the world.
2. Without the huge areas of land devoted to growing cotton
     and the huge factories devoted to processing it
     and the huge factories devoted to fashioning it
     and the millions of underpaid workers involved in all this
     our nasty and criminally-wasteful capitalist system would collapse.

go to website =>

A dog's nose...

...can see in the dark.

And what is more...

children spread children.

Considering the Abrahamic religions,

I conclude than God is
misery.

Then - and Now.

click to enlarge

Adam Zagajewski, a celebrated poet, wrote:

"Only in marriage do love and time,
eternal enemies, join forces."

Well, he's not Rilke, not Miłosz,
but a middle-class
triumphalist Polish Catholic,
living in the USA,
so he would write
such populist, trite,
sub-militarist tripe.

Welcome to the Astérix Hotel *

Just one star.
*

* Himself, your * canine * trip advisor *

Buying a second-hand violin ?

Check that it doesn't look like this inside:
PVA and possibly sniffing-glue, missing linings and corner-blocks...

photo by violin-restorer Almina Kaselis

The benefit of Literature.

I have read perhaps 500 novels
and, although I understand people
(especially males)
better than I otherwise would have,
I am no better at coping with them
(and my own shortcomings)
than if I had not read a single one.

Until AI* saves the planet,

the more technology we rely on,
the stupider we will get.

* by this I mean the unlikely perfection of Artificial Intelligence,
not the god-playing practice of Artificial Insemination.