… hiking in Harpers Ferry.

Come out, come out, wherever you are: The only Islamic high school in Amsterdam needs your support! Municipal subsidies have been withdrawn because… well… We had to threaten the inspector in order to make him leave… And then despite our scaring the shit out of the inspector, the authorities still managed to find out about our … visitors… and our … practices… and our foreign contacts… and our guest lecturers. And all. Send money!

Windswept wastes do bewail, they say; but SOS hears hymns of joy in the windy waste material wafting out of architect-whores when they defend lucrative massive destructive projects. Oscar Wilde called fox hunting “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible;” mega-mansioning is the unspeakable in pursuit of hilariously haughty vacuity.

Architect Thomas Hickey of GRADE New York, who has designed the vast home, admitted it is one not commonly found in the region. He described the style as “transitional” in a neo-Tudor style with modern details…

“We are not building history, instead a translation of history,” he said.

The psychotic billionaire from whom we got mucho bucks to build this thinks he is a Tudor king – a big fat bastard who rules the world, like Henry VIII – and his castle will certainly not “commonly” be “found in the region” (sniff) because it is a castle, see.

Cues were taken from the surrounding vernacular styles and paired down to create a modern design. 

Wouldn’t want to spend any of that money on spelling.

Our period’s Decadent, Late.

Provenance: The Sackler Estate.

“But to pay for our Braques

With this family’s smahck

Is one step too far for the Tate.”

So next year’s IKEA catalogue for this community will not eliminate women in their entirety from its pages, as last year’s did.

Next year’s will feature vaginal canals.

He has said his efforts have been driven by the losses of the Holocaust…

A remarkable new form of victimhood.

*******************

And… yeeeeecccchhhh. UD was entirely unaware of this eugenics movement. Gross me out. Handmaid’s Tale city.

Ostentatiously corrupt FIFA and outrageously violent Greece got together this time last year and issued mucho this is really serious language after months of match riots culminated in a team owner rushing the field aiming his gun at officials and threatening to kill them.

Today’s Greece and today’s FIFA are a match made in heaven.

So obviously nothing came of this ominous concern about violence because life is about collecting money for yourself while watching your sport (high-profile soccer is becoming a violent-fascists-only spectacle all over the world) and also your country crumble into the dust.

La lutte continue. So what.

Well, “Traviata” makes perfect sense for the new Saudi-money-whore opera house La Scala, veils or no veils! And don’t forget Salome, which features SEVEN veils… Though La Scala’s new Saudi masters might not approve the dance sequence in that scene…

But ah shit ah fuck ah shaddup okay we’ll give back the money and we won’t let the Saudi guy buy himself a place on the board. Okay? Happy?

In response to student demand that a Sarah Lawrence professor be detenured by a committee made up of students with complaints against him plus faculty of color (the professor wrote a couple of op/eds about the liberal-leaning academy in The New York Times), the school’s president wove an exceptionally long strand of dithery platitudes. Or, as SOS calls them, dithertudes.

The aims of today’s students are not dissimilar to those who made their voices heard 30 and 50 years ago: they seek to ensure a truly inclusive environment of respect and support at Sarah Lawrence, especially for students of color and low-income students… [The complainants bring to the] fore many pressing issues that students at Sarah Lawrence face, especially students of color, low-income students, first-generation students, LGBTQ+ students and others, and I am grateful for the willingness of our students to share their concerns with me and the campus community… [Collaboration from] all parties is the best means to move these efforts forward, and this will require us to develop the most effective process for working with students as well as faculty and staff…

A little throat-clearing followed, in which the president suggested that forming a tribunal to drive out a conservative professor isn’t “appropriate.” But this woman’s creative energy overwhelmingly directs itself to thanking the students for showing everyone what a show trial looks like; for being “not dissimilar” to ‘sixties free speech advocates even though they are their absolute and exact opposite; and for being open to the sort of “collaboration” to which they are utterly opposed.

Of course Les UDs will be out there tonight, gazing up at this year’s “third, final, and best” supermoon.

Now that you’ve addicted the poor and defenseless of America, you’re making aggressive plans to addict the poor and defenseless of China and India. The reward for that is cultural oblivion, which is exactly what you’re going to get.

George, in UD‘s favorite play, is famous for having said this to Martha; but I think it does as well for the gathering storm that is Philip Esformes – a man who seems never to have seen a code law or rule he didn’t try to break.

Enjoy the photographs.

… beachy municipalities with wall to wall bars and little law enforcement attract really big vicious crowds. As one traditional spring break town after another says enough to the carnage, larger and larger groups of drunk fucks concentrate in smaller and smaller spaces, to the point where South Beach, and the handful of other still-certified SB locations, are absolutely choked with traffic jams police stops drugs guns fights biker gangs and open-air rapes for as long as two months. Residents seem to think this isn’t the best way to welcome in the spring, and even the merchants who in the past haven’t minded the grossness because it brings in so much cash have begun to respond to the city council’s pleas that they close up early or stop feeding infinite liquor to everyone who shows up or whatever.

UD wonders, though. Bestiality will have its way, and our enterprising country should be able to produce one or two cities/towns willing to make a name for themselves as crapulous destinations of last resort. I’m putting my money on Myrtle Beach.

… by the suicide of Princeton economist Alan Krueger at 58. It will perhaps be seen as an iconic death, carrying most powerfully within it horrible truths about the ultimate incorrigibility of some forms of clinical depression. His was as far as one could tell one of the golden lives: Brilliant, athletic, handsome, wealthy, esteemed by presidents, rich in friends and family. A “gentle, generous guy.” And still the mind has mountains.

 O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall 
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap 
May who ne’er hung there.

********************

After decades of reading, writing, and thinking about suicide, I’ve gathered a few statements about it that feel right to me.

Boris Pasternak wrote:

We have no conception of the inner torture which precedes suicide.

… The continuity of his inner life is broken, his personality is at an end. And perhaps what finally makes him kill himself is not the firmness of his resolve but the unbearable quality of this anguish which belongs to no one, of this suffering in the absence of the sufferer, of this waiting which is empty because life has stopped and can no longer fill it.

… What is certain is that they all suffered beyond description, to the point where suffering has become a mental sickness. And as we bow in homage to their gifts and to their bright memory, we should bow compassionately before their suffering.

Philip Roth wrote:

What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would have once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. How odd. And how odd it made him seem to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.

***********************

August Kleinzahler’s comment on his wild and brilliant brother, who killed himself at 27: “He wasn’t made for the long haul. Not everyone is.”

************************

This poem by Donald Justice is very much in line with Pasternak and Roth:

For The Suicides of 1962

in memory: J & G

If we recall your voices
As softer now, it’s only
That they must have drifted back

A long way to have reached us
Here, and upon such a wind
As crosses the high passes.

Nor does the blue of your eyes
(Remembered) cast much light on
The page ripped from the tablet.

*

Once there in the labyrinth,
You were safe from your reasons.
We stand, now, at the threshold,

Peering in, but the passage,
For us, remains obscure; the
Corridors are still bloody.

*

What you meant to prove you have
Proved: we did not care for you
nearly enough. Meanwhile the

Bay was preparing herself
To receive you, the for once
Wholly adequate female

To your dark inclinations;
Under your care, the pistol
Was slowly learning to flower

In the desired explosion
Disturbing the careful part
And the briefly recovered

Fixed smile of a forgotten
Triumph; deep within the black
Forest of childhood that tree

Was already rising which,
With the length of your body,
Would cast the double shadow.

*

The masks by which we knew you
Have been torn from you. Even
Those mirrors, to which always

You must have turned to confide,
Cannot have recognized you,
Stripped, as you were, finally.

At the end of your shadow
There sat another, waiting,
Whose back was always to us.

*

When the last door had been closed,
You watched, inwardly raging,
For the first glimpse of your selves
Approaching, jangling their keys.