Monday 30 November 2020

Book Reports

 To find something to read is made a little bit more difficult now that archive dot org and its affiliates have been neutered.  For a goodly period you had a superb library at one’s command from the comfort of home.  It’s a rearguard action before the strategic withdrawal.  Making money from books may for a while devolve into intellectual merch.  I don’t discount t-shirts.  Justin E.H.U. Smith a man in a die-cast suit, an angster whose antennae are attuned to the moons of the internet has gone substack with the promise of exoteric free, esoteric you pay me for the entry into a fanum which casts us on our faces.

Still there are areas which are free where copywright is not snaffled by self-styled new editions of old works which the public do not appreciate as though they were the spoil heaps of ancient mines which can have the last speck of gold extracted.  Fadedpage dot com a Canadian outfit has a lot of good titles meticulously produced.   Evelyn Waugh is there in full and Charles Williams.  I’m reading ‘The Place of the Lion’ now.  Realism which is also magical and doubts itself is my red tea.

I was reading ‘Daniel Martin’ by John Fowles and I’ve stopped where I balked before.  It became unreadable where it became un-writeable.  Emergency story lines were brought in and were cast buoy attached but the narrator sunk for the third time.  I may go back to see what happened.  If our Dan’s lungs were not filled with water he may have been murdered before being dumped in the sea.

Which brings me to Colin Dexter’s Morse books.  Entertaining puzzles with twists that are not factitious if that is not a contradiction.  ‘Turn back Lewis’.  The literary epigraphs as chapter headings are apposite and the mental elaborations of Chief Inspector Morse are usually noughted by his intuitions, the something not quite right.  The TeeVee adaption is a superior product also but naturally less inward.  I’ve watched them several times.

I have a Kate O’Brien book in hand as well - ‘The Flower of the May’.  Is she read much or known outside of Ireland?  Probably not and even here moving to the bins.  Virago published several of her novels.  ‘Flower’ starts with that great device for introducing a milieu, the wedding.  1909 Dublin, Southside - Mespil Road reception at home, ceremony in Haddington Road.  Merchant families.  I will write about this later.  Will it end with a funeral, a death in childbirth: that sort of bookend?  What is expected is also satisfying.

Philosophy: Lots of back and forth - Brahma Sutra Bhasya, Upanisads, Maritain ‘Approaches to God’.  Very French that title and old fashioned in its brisk clarity.  Nisargadatta and he would agree on the intuition of existence.

Bergson of course by two good explainers - Keith Ansell Pearson & John Mullarkey - Key Writings. Elie During on Bergson and Time, the twins paradox etc.  Both available from Academia.edu  What Bergson meant by ‘images’, ‘the world as an aggregate of images’   swims after the fashion of an eidolon  before my corporeal vision.

Thursday 26 November 2020

Ouija boards and Time Travel in America

 Eight Thousand plus voters who have passed over  moved the planchette on the ouija boards to spell out the name of their candidate in a touching display of post mortem fidelity to the party of their choice.  Assiduous apparatchiks transcribed their votes to a mail in ballot.  There was a significant number of time travellers who posted in ballots for people before they had been sent out.

On a Belfast poster - Vote Early -  a wag added in brackets (Vote Often). In Philadelphia the Gold Banana award goes to the man who urged President Trump to put on ‘big boy pants’.  He was an Irishman by the look and name of him and he perfectly resembled the stroke artist that we know so well whose joy it is to tell you that he has pulled one on you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Was there American interference in this election?  Such a thing to say.  I’m shocked, shocked.

Tuesday 17 November 2020

E voting in elections

 Ireland has a curious and therefore very Irish experience with electronic voting machines.  Wikipedia summarises the entire debacle:

<blockquote>Electronic voting machines for elections in the Republic of Ireland were used on a trial basis in 2002, but plans to extend it to all polling stations were put on hold in 2004 after public opposition and political controversy. Electoral law was amended in 2001 and 2004 and sufficient voting machines for the entire state were purchased, but the plan was officially dropped in 2009 and the machines were subsequently scrapped. Elections continue to use paper ballots completed in pencil.</blockquote>

The whole entry is worth reading.

e voting in ireland

Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp demonstrated how easy it was to falsify results in elections when these machines were used.

The final result was a move away from e voting to “stupid old pencils” (Bertie Ahern ex Prime Minister).

That was a while ago you might say.  Yes, but as we know, if someone is smart enough to devise a system someone else will be smart enough to hack it.

Saturday 14 November 2020

Dawn at St. Patrick's by Derek Mahon

 Derek Mahon, always alone, always watchful, trying to catch up to himself and the latest news from his soul.  He mentions McLean’s psych unit Bowditch Hall where Robert Lowell spent time.

"After a hearty New England breakfast,

each of us holds a locked razor.” (from ‘Waking in the Blue’)



Mahon is in St.Pats being dried out.    It is  a bleak poem and also very funny.

“in a Dublin asylum

with a paper whistle and a mince pie,

my bits and pieces making a home from home.”

Through the poem we hear his neurons fizzing like fallen lines you are advised not to approach.  The self-pity is bleached out and there is a sad sprig of hope.

---------------

Soon a new year

will be here demanding, as before,

modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf,

new leaves. This is the story of my life,

the story of all lives everywhere,

mad fools whatever we are,

in here or out there.

________________________

Dawn at St. Patrick's

BY DEREK MAHON


There is an old

statue in the courtyard

that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone.

The griefs of the ages she has made her own.

Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard,

her body is covered in mould,

the garden overgrown.


One by one

the first lights come on,

those that haven’t been on all night.

Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone.

No snow, but the rain pours down

in the first hour before dawn,

before daylight.


Swift’s home

for ‘fools and mad’ has become

the administrative block. Much there

has remained unchanged for many a long year —

stairs, chairs, Georgian widows shafting light and dust,

of the satirist.


but the real

hospital is a cheerful

modern extension at the back

hung with restful reproductions of Dufy, Klee and Braque.

Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff,

a snifter of Lucozade, a paragraph

of Newsweek or the Daily Mail


are my daily routine

during the festive season.

They don’t lock the razors here

as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright —

though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene,

with grown men in their festive gear,

was a sobering sight.


I watch the last

planes of the year go past,

silently climbing a cloud-lit sky.

Earth-bound, soon I’ll be taking a train to Cork

and trying to get back to work

at my sea-lit, fort-view desk

in the turf-smoky dusk.


Meanwhile,

next door, a visiting priest

intones to a faithful dormitory.

I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist,

and stare the clouds of unknowing. We style,

as best we may, our private destiny;

or so it seems to me.


as I chew my thumb

and try to figure out

what brought me to my present state­ —

an ‘educated man’, a man of consequence, no bum

but one who has hardly grasped what life is about,

if anything. My children, far away,

don’t know where I am today,


in a Dublin asylum

with a paper whistle and a mince pie,

my bits and pieces making a home from home.

I pray to the rain-clouds that they never come

where their lost father lies; that their mother thrives;

     and that I

 may measure up to them

before I die.


Soon a new year

will be here demanding, as before,

modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf,

new leaves. This is the story of my life,

the story of all lives everywhere,

mad fools whatever we are,

in here or out there.


Light and sane

I shall walk down to the train,

into that world whose sanity we know,

like Swift to be a fiction and a show.

The clouds part, the rain ceases, the sun

casts now upon everyone

its ancient shadow.

Wednesday 11 November 2020

Victorian Gardener Shirley Hibberd

Everybody grows cabbage, and everybody eats it; but my lady never hears the word, for all cabbages are “greens” in polite society. But plain people call things by their proper names, and I, for one, rejoice in cabbage, even if I dine with a retired tailor. Now a cabbage is a thing that most people think they can grow well, and generally speaking, good cabbages are very abundant; but cottagers, not looking upon it as a precarious or particularly choice crop, too often get careless, and where they take one ton of cabbages, a little extra pains would enable them to take two.

 

(from ‘Profitable Gardening’ by Shirley Hibbert pub. 1878 - my copy calls him Hibbert, Interesting Wikipedia article on Shirley Hibberd also Internet Archive has a lot of his very influential books on gardening. proto-ecology etc)

 

)

Profitable Gardening That might have been written by V.S. Pritchett. It’s that same sort of vigorous prose with two short sentences balanced by one long. The bed is layed out and then double dug. 

 

 For this crop, a newly-trenched deep loam is just the thing, and, if never trenched before in the memory of man, it will produce wonderful cabbages, as I know from experience, on an old worn-out soil, where cabbages had become a failure, but which, at the second spit, had never been touched with spade or fork, when trenched two and a-half, or three feet deep, and the lower hazelly stuff brought to the top, the cabbages took to it, and grew like wildfire. 

 

‘Trenching’ is also known as double digging or sometimes ‘bastard trenching’. A spit is the length of a spade face. 

 There’s a short story peering out of the brambles in the first two sentences. Let me dibble a little: 

 

Rennick the tailor was never called anything else. Even his wife used say ‘Rennick is up the town buying thread’. Rennick loved his bacon and cabbage which he ate in the middle of the day and when sitting crosslegged on a table set near the window would keep a roll of worn calico near him occcasionally ripping lengths of it. ‘For the mechanics’. I was in the room getting measured for my school blazer. It had saffron edging on blue, no crest. There was an optional cap in the Edwardian style which demanded launching into a tree.

 Now read on.

Monday 2 November 2020

Tractatus by Derek Mahon

Tractaus by Derek Mahon


‘The world is everything that is the case’

From the fly giving up in the coal-shed

To the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God

Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face

Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud

 

The world, though, is also much more -

Everything that is the case imaginatively

Tacitus believed that mariners could hear

The sun sinking into the western sea;

And who would question that titanic roar,

The steam rising wherever the edge may be? 

Sunday 1 November 2020

The Irony of Coleman Hughes

 Coleman Hughes in his youtube video of ‘Why I’m Voting for Biden’  shows a fine grasp of the principles of rhetorical irony - litotes, asteism, and antiphrasis with a
soupçon of paralepsis.  However the internet is a blunt instrument and he may have misjudged his likely audience and proven the theory that irony ought to have its own font.  Or on the other hand energised his conservative followers.     
It’s here:
IRONY