… appears, UD likes to post this great James Merrill poem:
ISLAND IN THE WORKS
From air seen fathom-deep But rising to a head – Abscess of the abyss Any old night letting rip Its fires, yearlong, As roundabout waves hiss –
Jaded by untold blue Subversions, watered-down Moray and Spaniard… Now to construe In the original Those at first arid, hard,
Soon rootfast, ramifying, Always more fruitful Dialogues with light. Various dimwit under- graduate types will wonder At my calm height
Vapors by then surmounted (Merely another phase?) And how in time I trick Out my new “shores” and “bays” With small craft, shrimpers Bars and rhetoric.
Darkly the Old Ones grumble I’ll hate all that. Hate words, Their schooling flame? The spice grove chatted up By small gray knowing birds? Myself given a name?
Waves, as your besetting Depth-wish recedes, I’m surfacing, I’m home! Open the atlas. Here: This dot, securely netted Under the starry dome.
(Unlike this page – no sooner Brought to the pool than wafted Out of reach, laid flat Face-up on cool glares, ever So lightly swayed, or swaying… Now who did that?)
Three women have been arrested for allegedly physically assaulting a hijab enforcer in an incident in the Tehran Metro.
According to Abbas Karami-Rad, the head of the Tehran Metro Police, the incident occurred on Saturday afternoon when one woman approached three others to admonish them regarding their hijabs.
He stated that the situation escalated, leading to the three women “attacking her and physically assaulting her.” Subsequently, the three women were taken into custody.
**********
Expect more of this. Passive resistance is of course all over the country; huge numbers of women won’t wear the hijab. Active resistance is a thing too.
A [divorced] teenage mother from Overbrook, Kan., Ms. Fluke-Ekren slowly embraced the Islamic State’s ideology...
[Her first ISIS husband] was killed in an airstrike as he was conducting reconnaissance for a terrorist attack …
… Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specialized in drones and worked on a plan to drop chemical bombs using them. After the man, Wamiq al-Bengali, died, Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Bangladeshi man, an Islamic State military leader who was responsible for defending Raqqa, Syria. He died while fighting for ISIS in 2018…
She was smuggled out of Syria in about May 2019 and married a fifth time, according to the statement of facts. But the couple separated…
… UD shared a Guinness with Mr UD at the dinner table (pad thai with shrimp from Noodles and Co., since you ask). Holding her little glass aloft, she said A toast to the greatest English-language writer the modern world has ever seen. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, I love you, and I will never stop reading you.
Mr UD went on a bit, during the meal (pad thai without the shrimp), about Habermas, and the rather different form of communication about which he’s obsessed. Joycean internal monologues are all well and good; the stories we endlessly tell ourselves about ourselves as we walk around all day are all well and good; but the understanding of rationality to include communicative rationality, and, on that foundation, the elaboration of a discourse ethics, is just as crucial…
All day, UD‘s been playing and singing songs that appear in Joyce’s work (she just performed Sweet Rosie O’Grady).
UD has read from Joyce at the Irish Embassy, at the Cosmos Club, and at lots of other venues around DC. But some years seem to call for something more quiet. One year she took two of her GW students to an Irish bar. Sipping Guinness, we took turns reading favorite passages from Ulysses.
James Joyce is Mr UD‘s ninth cousin, twice removed.
Well, it’s actually a county lockup, but UD finds the tongue-twister irresistible.
Yes, the dusty Sandusky story needs to be dusted off for a moment while we note the failure of Graham Spanier’s endless efforts to avoid incarceration for his role in the child abuse scandal at his university, where coaches buggering little boys in the locker rooms was all in a day’s work.
The whole sordid tale, you recall (it’s okay if you don’t have the stomach to recall) was a testimony to the institution-enhancing greatness of big-time university football.
