The best of the rest is poetry, which understands that the world worlds (Larkin: ‘Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest/ Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,/ And dark towns heap up on the horizon./None of this cares for us.’) (Stevens: ‘Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/ Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness…’) — it all goes on without us; and though we crave worlding’s unconscious endless essence, we generate some of our greatest poems out of our failure to satisfy that craving. We are human selves, not berries ripening in isolation – in total wilderness! – to fulfillment. We want of course to ripen, to live in transcendent fulfillment with our nature, but we are bound, human all too human, to the world, to a running commentary with the world. A running battle with it, really:

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Our inescapable battle, observes Henry James, is with what humans have made of the world; there’s absolutely no chance we can abandon the battle in favor of some humongously seductive state of calm autonomous being. Only the world can world.

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

Or, I mean, we can do stupid shit like mainline heroin and all the other opiates the Sackler family so famously monetized. UD ain’t gonna stand here and deny the depth of that business … Not so much MAKE THE WORLD GO AWAY… STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF as make me a sweet berry ripening in the oxysphere…

AFTER GREECE

James Merrill 1969

Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge, pale stones
Shine from within. The moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from between the columns,
Shielding his eyes. All through
The countryside were old ideas
Found lying open to the elements.
Of the gods’ houses, only
A minor presence here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital. The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen

Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.
But where is home – these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep, toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk, I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.
I some days flee in dream
Back to the exposed porch of the maidens
Only to find my great-great-grandmothers
Erect there, peering
Into a globe of red Bohemian glass.

As it swells and sinks I call up
Graces, Furies, Fates, removed
To my country’s warm, lit halls, with rivets forced
Through drapery, and nothing left to bear.
They seem anxious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
I start explaining how in that vast fire
Were other irons – well, Art, Public Spirit,
Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,
Hatred of Self, a hundred more,
Each burning to be felt, each dedicated
To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them
As I should have done those ladies; how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream–
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,

Row upon row, Essentials,
Dressed like your sister caryatids,
Or tombstone angels jealous of their dead,
With undulant coiffures, lips weathered, cracked by grime,
And faultless eyes gone blank beneath the immense
Zinc-and-gunmetal northern sky.
Stay then. Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits. This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

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

Of course the system, such as it is, calls for spirits. You can imagine – you can forgive – Merrill hitting the bottle.

UD‘s in cold unloveable Boston, as usual, for the holiday. Wandering about cursing the city and reflecting, under end-of-year pressure, on la condition humaine, she comes to conclusions no wiser than she ever did: Everyone struggles.

Therefore — compassion.

Harvard president Larry Summers will be known to posterity as an executor of a will left by the captain of the Lolita Express.

We can only hope the French courts keep her there for the duration, and don’t decide after six months that I mean golly she’s a girl and all with kids and all … let’s let her out.

A longtime, hardened, ISIS propagandist, she explained to the court that “ISIS ideology had prevented her from fully grasping the severity of the crimes being committed around her.” Which is like… I don’t get that. Hitler’s ideology – killing Jews en masse, for instance – prevented me from fully grasping the crematoria smoking away at Auschwitz… ?

ISIS was never coy about its ideology and its intended actions, and puleeze don’t pull the I’m just a silly female bit puleeze? We hear that a lot from the Al-Hol honeys who wanna come home. At the very least, we know that these are dangerous people who may regret what they did but have established a susceptibility to the very worst ideas and actions human beings can generate. Their extremism and moral degeneracy means they will never be safe to have around. It will never be safe to have them walking the streets of French cities.

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

Update on one of her collaborators. Another case of a girlie sentence.

But this one was overturned in 2023!

I mean of course her husband got a life sentence for tying up their five year old slave girl in hellish heat and letting her burn and starve to death in it. But I mean his wife is a girl! and we can’t be expected to believe that a girl is just as philosophically committed an enslaver and torturer as a boy…

Clearly the German courts are just as disgusted as UD by this bullshit. They are reviewing her initial sentence with an eye toward lengthening it.

… shows us yet again why basketball coaches are so highly compensated (G’town’s prez only makes one mill): They are GREAT ambassadors for the school, especially to the youngest among us.

Watch for him to be rewarded with a million dollar raise next year.

The French have it down to a science.

Like the fairy godmother passing her wand over Cinderella, Asha Hassan visited each Somali house and poof made all the children autistics.

David Brooks need only have mentioned, in his NYT piece dismissing people interested in the Jeffrey Epstein story as stupid conspiracy theorists, that he himself attended a smallish dinner at which Epstein was present.

This, however, would have unburnished his highly burnished self-presentation as a moral exemplar.

And this U Arkansas poli sci prof has a lot of them – or so it’s claimed. It’s claimed she simply made up a whole interview with an Iranian political activist (the person making the claim is, uh, the political activist); it’s claimed she engaged in research fraud in her dissertation (Cambridge, which published it, is investigating). As head of a mideast studies unit on campus, she called for the destruction of terrorist state Israel, which the university seems to have felt fell a bit short of the sort of official statement they had in mind when they appointed her.

He also killed multiple people and then, aware the FBI was close, killed himself in a secret location. It seems likely he killed (and Valente killed) because both were

1. insane; and
2. murderously jealous of successful people.

How the fuck did this become a legal case in the first place? What needs investigating is the mental health of the fanatics currently running the University of Washington. HUGE embarrassment for the institution.

For few, read tens of millions of course… The indispensable Kathleen Stock scathes through the now-notorious defense of FGM in a once-respectable British journal…

[A]nti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Auctioned off at a pathetic thirteen million from an original asking price of $50 million — if this doesn’t fit the definition of Aristotelian tragedy, I don’t know what does.

Bad boy Lawrence Krauss was forced, back in 2018, to retire from Arizona State; you’d think ASU would know by now that you take down bad girl Elisa New’s university page before announcing she’s been dumped too. But there she is, bright and shiny, eager to gentle you with poetry…

[M]easles can cause complications like blindness, brain swelling and even death. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97% effective.

The Texas Mennonites merrily kill their kids and spread measles to the rest of the country. Plus they’re “now staring down the barrel of a different vaccine-preventable outbreak: whooping cough,” which will torment their children and kill some of them.