The Political and Social Outlook

in Europe and the USA
is not encouraging.

Socialism

has been suppressed in the legendary Land of the Free

more successfully than it was in Nazi Germany

and more successfully than Christianity

was suppressed in the USSR.

House and Homeless.

House designed by Roger Walker, Aotearoa 1980.

 

Homeless in Mexico, 2024.

Polling Day in France.

Just as Hitler advanced through voters' collapse
of trust in politicians and their tired old parties,
so the early 1930s have come back to haunt us. 

The first Fascist-racist
regime in Europe after WW1 (lasting until 1944)
was that of "nationalist Christian" Hungary.

Simple Shoah Statistics

are rarely presented, because they implicate the inhabitants of the Nazis' victim countries.  Here are just a few.

                                            Contrary to what I thought,

Of the third of a million Jews in France at the start of the war. three-quarters survived, compared to just over half of Jews in Belgium  – and only a fifth in the Netherlands.

That striking statistic is due in significant part to the role of convents and other havens provided by the Catholic church, particularly in Vichy (semi-independent, very-fascist part of) France.

Over 90% of Jews survived in Denmark, due to various factors including the general acceptance of (small proportion of) Jews by Danes who helped them escape, mostly to neutral Sweden, easily reachable across the strait from Copenhagen. 
Denmark, which had no army to speak of, but was considered to be highly 'Aryan', managed to negotiate a lenient Occupation, and was self-governing until 1943, when the Nazis finally lost patience with Danish reluctance to collaborate, and debilitating resistance.

In Poland (the country with the highest Jewish population), a maximum of 0.3% of Jews (10,000) is estimated to have survived the war, many of whom, of course, fled to Israel...where some of their offspring enthusiastically persecuted Palestinians.

Good people are very few.

Arms Manufacturers

making billions in Europe, Russia,
Israel, USA, China, India, etc.
cannot be accused of genocide.

Dedication to reproduction.

It took Monet four years
to capture the exact tones
of a foggy moment in London.

And on the Web, bad digital
reproduction loses them.

This photograph is far too blue.

A cathedral AND a library.

"Her father had taught her about...a dog's paws.
Whenever her father was alone with a dog in his house
he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. 
This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter,
is the greatest smell in the world!  A bouquet! Great rumours of travel. She would pretend disgust, but the dog's paw was a wonder,
the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said – so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen – a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day."

 – Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, 1992

Not so Gallant,

and not (yet) on trial for war-crimes
(though his face would have gone
unremarked at Nuremberg)

Yoav Gallant
Israeli Minister of Defence
warns tottering Lebanon
(neighbour to the north) that
he could 'blow it back into the Stone Age'.

Didn't we hear the same phrase from George W Bush
before the invasion of Iraq ?

Not Yet, Dear God, Not Yet.

 

[Nappy = Diaper, from French nappe
= tablecloth, hence napery.]

Almost everyone with the slightest

pretension to snobbery,
has a favourite hated neologism. 

Mine is already sixty years old,
and I still loathe the word: 

life-style/lifestyle

I have had (still have) a life,
not a fashion, not a presentation
nor an image, nor a style.

Tricky Moral Question from a Dole-receiver.

Is it better to send small amounts of money
to help protect animals and habitats
or to buy organic 'fair-trade' coffee ?

Coffee alleviates depression.

Fair trade must exist, but where ?

Toyless in Gaza.

 

Ourobolos.

Language is edited thought.
Thought is processed language.
Round and round we go
in the fairground talking-show.

The Fear of Solitaries.

 

No, social pressure puts it in our heads.

If we are alone or solitary
we are viewed as unusual
if not freaks.

On the other hand, the 'fragmented society'
greatly benefits deviators and those
who have the emotional strength
to heal-whole themselves
and choose solitude: those who don't need
'validation' from others.

Aristophanes' famous story in Plato's Symposium
that humans originally were whole hermaphrodites
bisected because of their arrogance
reinforces the idea that without our other half
we cannot be whole or, often, even acceptable.

This story acknowledges the usually-unmentioned
role of unavailable sex in the suffering of loneliness
and feeling of loss,
whereas solitude implies a voluntary state
and the possibility of something gained.

'The Lonely' are also 'highly vulnerable'
to conspiracy theories.

Dear Mr Netanyahu,

When People Who Count
in countries such as Britain, France, the USA
condemn your insane action in Gaza,
your criminal cleansing of the West Bank
of the ronce-holy river Jordan,

why don't you quietly remind them of the carpet-bombing
of Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Viet-Nam...
the mass-murder by the Japanese in Manchuria and Java,
the atom-bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the barbaric 'police action' in Algeria...?

And then wise up.

Bananas!

There are more than 1,000 varieties of banana,
and we eat just two of them.

Life.

There must be other
more successful forms
of development,
break-up or re-coalescence
of matter in the various
universes, especially if
Black Holes do not exist.

The Rentier Society.

One in every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord.

The UK’s homes-per-capita ratio actually exceeds that of the US  – yet

Homelessness in the UK is at its highest level Victorian times.

Where are Karl and Friedrich when you need them ? 

Coffee-abuse.

It would seem
that almost all the coffee
that we drink
is shamelessly, ignorantly
disrespected.

(The only emperor
is the emperor of coffee-ice cream.)

True Progress.

"The most backward [people]
are the most friendly."

– Paul Theroux, My Secret History.

The Male Gaze.

 

I am an Ineluctable Unrepentant Peasant-Prole

Almas caviar, white truffles,
yubari melon, or roast
ptarmigan ? No thanks. I'd rather

eat proper Scottish pinhead porridge
and home-made marmalade on toast.

Eat your heart out, Cleopatra !

Not only can we now, at the height
of civilsation shower
(assuming that we have a shower)
with Asses' Milk shampoo 'and shower gel
for body and hair,'

but we latter-day Mark Antonies (and pooves)
can buy
special Asses' Milk Beard Shampoo.

Did M.A. have a beard ?
This stuff smells distinctly chemical.
Maybe I'll just use it on my little hooves.

Interesting Cultural Appropriation.

The craque about craic
which means a good conversational time
often, in the case of men, with badinage.

The Irish commandeered
the Northern English and Scottish word crack

(which I remember being widely used
in my 1940s Belfast childhood,
prefixed by great or good)

as they did with jig (formerly gigg*) from gigue,
borrowed from French :

craque : tall tale, amusing fiction.

*gigg popped up again in the 19th century
in the term sheela-ny-gigg in which both Gs are hard.

Neologism of the Month :

Suicidality.

What can it mean ?

Suggestions, please.

The Continuing World-wide Pogrom.

Post-mercantile, pre-industrial Capitalism
was founded on slavery, which was founded
on ships and navigation.

Then came the Industrial Revolution,
which really should be called the Industrial
Global Pogrom of craftsmen/women/children,

founded on colonial exploitation,
which was founded on improved navigation.

The rich became fewer and fewer,
richer and richer, so that
at the end there were less than a hundred
who owned and bickered over the drowned
and screaming, burnt-up world
before they barricaded themselves
and perished underground.

Gay Pride ?

 

The main reason
that I never had anything to do with it
even in the 1980s was because it was

inevitable that when queer people
became respectable and Americanised
they would move on to being soldiers and bullies.

PS Love has nothing to do with soldiers or sex.

Progress ?

The most technologically-advanced

cultures are now the most infantile.

Maybe they always were...

Which of these Bulgarian Babuggeri

is my real daddy ?
I hope he's not into buggery
(unless very gently for my swollen prostate) 
whose name derives...

I rather fancy this guy as my Favorite Uncle.

Panamá City

 

A lean raccoon searches for food.
Guides from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
have reported that destruction of the raccoons’ natural habitats
is driving them to the capital city.

Dear Billy,

Being plastic and flimsy,
Snow-globes make bad paperweights,
and peonies bloom now, in summer,
not in Spring...though maybe in the Deep South
of the USA they bloom in early May.

It puts all Heaven in a rage,
wrote William Blake, to see a linnet
(or a canary. or any living thing
including humans, I might add)) in a cage.
Not to mention zoos, circuses and abattoirs.

(This is my pernickety Aspergerish comment on the poem below.)

Today

BY BILLY COLLINS

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

Political parties

make democracy 
impossible.

 

A&E

Acquisitiveness
keeps high-profit
capitalism on the go.
Envy makes it grow.

Outlandish.

Somebody asked me
which film characters I identified with 
– and I couldn't think of any,
except, possibly, ridiculously,
Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Films and books are about Other People.

I just want to look at my aquarium, look at my sea horse, read my Murakami,
watch Bergman. I’ve been on a great Bergman run. I just saw “The Virgin Spring,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Persona.” I also love Tarkovsky. I love “The Sacrifice.” I looked at “Stalker” again. I have all the time in the world in between movies to lose myself in these maestros’ films.  – Nicolas Cage in a New York Times Magazine interview, March 2024.

I almost identified with him in the wonderful film Pig (2021).
I identified even more with the sow, seen only for half a minute.
The Virgin Spring was the first 'proper' (and 'foreign') film I ever saw, almost alone in Mayfair's splendid Curzon cinema on a wet afternoon
in 1959 or 1960.  It shaped my whole attitude to cinema
after a childhood of seeing only hyped American propaganda-trash
such as From Here to Eternity, The African Queen and High Noon.

Crass & crude 'Soft Power'

On the Karakorum Highway
in Gilgit-Baltistan
surrounded by Kashmir,
Afghanistan, Tajikistan
and Uighur Xinjiang in China,
Pepsi welcomes you.
– No way. No thanks.

Balanus balanus,

Sea-barnacle.

photo by A. Semenov

Delicious similes.

"...then I saw Lillian with an expression on her face
like a stubbed-out cigarette."

"...I noticed that the journalist had got hold of Lillian
and was pouring his opinions over her
like a bucket of sand on to a chemical fire."

– Elizabeth Jane Howard: The Sea Change (1959)

Sitting on my balcony,

I briefly think that it's a good thing
I'm 'going deaf' –
for when I put in my hearing-aids
I'm almost deafened by the happy birds.
And when I take them out again
I need not endure my fellow-creatures' words.

Israevil.

 "Obviously, two more Negev Bedouin pro-Hamas Terrorists
are hiding inside that horse."

Shrugging and Shrieking

Caliban Shrieks  

Atlas Shrugged

Caliban Shrugged

Atlas Shrieks

רָדָה - Domination-1

Man, having made a god in his own image
(how banal!)
assumed domination over every living thing. 

Mark, 23 years in an Albanian restaurant
for the entertainment of diners.

Good-memory Birds.

In the Western USA,
Acorn Woodpeckers peck dozens, hundreds,
or even thousands of acorn-sized holes
into large trees, utility poles, and sometimes houses.

At acorn-time they stash
a single fresh acorn into each one.

Similarities and Differences.

There has been in sympathetic circles
much mention of empathy
and little of sympathy.
Empathy goes within.
Sympathy is with. The difference
is miasmic. I guess I feel empathy
only with dogs and cattle,
and sympathy mainly with plants
and horribly-afflicted humans.
Either I am a sociopath, or other people
are self-congratulating fantasists.
(Both might, of course, be true.)

Sycosis is an inflammation of beard follicles
which, along with my permanent
beard-dandruff and minor
but more-permanent psychoses,
I have had from time to time,
once even on Corfu.

Thank God !

No-one, not even in bleak Northern Ireland,
wants to Fuck the Pope.

致敬中国

They were forced to grovel.

On every continent
people were forced to grovel,
to give up their children and their labour
and their land, their livelihoods.

On every continent people were imprisoned,
maimed, tortured, lynched, starved, wiped out,
by maggot-Whites  –

their languages banned, their places of worship
destroyed, their sacred rites
despised, proscribed.   

And now that China
has got up from its wasted knees
the hypocrites condemn it for its
'abuse of human rights' !

The meek, the weak,

the losers inherit the Earth
while the winners are carving up Mars.

Gangs rather than individuals.

 

The commonest human condition

is not poverty
but (in the loose meaning of the word)
idolatry.

Great news!

 The Bubble-car is back.

Electric bubble-car, 2024

Two-stroke Heinkel Kabine, 1957