American Fez

Interregnum

Tomorrow I am departing for a brief mountaineering expedition the fabled peaks of the United Kingdom, and since I don't believe God has supplied Wi-Fi access atop the jagged and frosty summit of Ben Nevis, there will probably be nothing new posted here until October 3rd when I return from the aforementioned excursion.
However, midweek I will be taking a short detour from lofty locations to visit my grandmother in the Berkshire village of Cookham where the artist Stanley Spencer once pushed his pramful of paints, unfolded his easel, and then proceeded to render images of himself and his wife in the nude looking like a pair of lamb chops.
For those of you that are wondering, since the philistine swine printed a disgracefully negative review of "Our Stan" and his work some years ago, Granny and I will be giving the bird to anything connected with the New Criterion's British Initiative.

God's Socks

It has been drawn to my attention that certain people who ought to know better have been abusing their positions as "guest bloggers" on this site and using the space I have charitably provided as a forum for airing their dirty laundry: I refer, of course, to His Cleanliness the Pope, and Little Miss Bleach herself, the Manageress of the Vatican City Coin-Op.
The heated, apparently unresolvable conflict between these two eminent personages began last year when the Pope, or Cardinal Ratzinger as he then was, dropped off a mixed load at the Coin-Op since he possessed an unused "two-fer" coupon for the overnight wash and fold service the establishment provides. When the former Cardinal returned to pick up his clothes the following morning he discovered that two socks were missing. As these socks were hand-embroidered with an attractive Saint Sebastian novelty motif, the Cardinal was understanderbly quite upset. Later that day, however, witnesses from a visiting seminary observed the still damp socks soddenly stuck to the insides of a double-load washer in the back of the Coin-Op. This miraculous recovery the two socks was described by the parties concerned as an example - literally - of what they call a "Deus ex machina."
But unfortunately it appears that not everybody has accepted that ineffable explanation of the sock mystery. However, I promise that as of today this argument and its associated vendettas will no longer be pursued on this weblog. Thank you for your patience.

Guest Blogger: the Manageress of the Vatican City Coin-Op

We had a bloody great big conclave of cardinals in here the other week. A whole effing college of them trying to wash their sacramental vestments on the cheap with only a tiny chalice of detergent to share between them. Listen, I told them, ff you're going to stick your silks in the machines then for God's sake use the damn delicate cycle. How many sodding times do I have to say it? And do they listen? No of course they don't and it's "unbalanced load" signals all over the place as you might expect.
So I told them, I said, listen, I said, I said I know that your scarlet vestments symbolise the fact that you're willing to die for your faith, so if you overload these washers again with them I'll wring your stinking scrawny Jesuit necks for you. Understand? And while you're at it, don't go trying to push your worthless Polish money in to the change machine again.
I tell you, I'm wasting my breath. No matter how often I scream and yell they just huddle in a group around the fabric softener dispenser and mutter amongst themselves in Latin. Meanwhile there's a single skull cap flopping about in an otherwise empty dryer. Idiots.

Posted in response to the Pope's guest blogger spot last week.

A Brief Second In the Life of Captain Tension

Captain Tension's face has turned an angry mauve. His cracking knuckles are as white as Siberian blizzards. His mighty jaw trembles like a volcano as boiling blood streams through his veins like fiery lava: teeth grind, eyes blaze, nostrils flare, pulse quickens. Then, with spine-chilling interrogative violence, he speaks and spits acid into the fearful ear lobes of those who cringe around him: "Où est ma fookin pomme croissant?" he demands.

Mini-Maxim

With quick wit and nimble finger, I have recently posted the following comment upon Mortimer Shy's blog: "It is better to have ideas than opinions. Ideas are exchanged but opinions start wars." How true that is, I thought, as I typed the words out; so I'm posting them here too.

I Dwell Too Long Upon A Woe..

In the manner of one of those mutton-chopped and trembling Victorian scientist who rises like Nosferatu from his laboratory desk dashing his ironmongered microscope with all its unsatisfying, worthless slides to the floor in the process after having just discovered that the cold and inanimate, gray-fleshed beast upon whom he wishes to bestow the gift of life requires rather more battery power than the lightning rod attached to the scientist's slate roof can provide, and whose bethrothed, Maria, spends all day in her four poster bed being comforted by an an ancient maid while weeping for the fiancee whom she believes to have been driven mad by his dangerous electro-magnetic equipment, I, too, am feeling a little discontented with the petrie dish of unpleasant circumstances I am currently laboring to scoop into a formaldehyde-filled test tube so that I can categorise them and deal with each individually according to its molecular composition and chemical properties.
All in all, then, a bit of a pain in the ass week, if you catch my drift.

Wat'ry Glades

The tide was low this morning along the river, exposing round brown boulders where once the water lapped. Several stratas of milky mist stepped down from the clouds to meet the depleted surface and the sluggard current corrugated and shimmered in shiny gray like a sheet of aluminium. Obviously under these conditions the fish in the estuary have less room to live in, and it must have seemed to them as if they had suddenly been evicted from a four bedroom penthouse and now dwelt in a single studio with bunk beds. Above their heads a lonely oarsman sculled eastwards pondering the fate of nations.
Meanwhile, I went to see an unconventional Icelandic rock group called Sigur Ros or something last night. Reasonably entertaining, although this musical excursion was mainly an excuse to examine the beautifully restored Boston Opera House which the band unfortunately obliterated with their extensive light show and humdrum video projections. Oh well.

Guest Blogger: The Pope

How I envy (oops!) those dignified and beatific Patriarchs of the Greek Orthodox Church. How regal they appear in their solemn beards, wooden clogs, and imposing headgear. Laundry must be a pinch for them too since it's just those simple black robes: cold wash, quick rinse, and then hung out to dry on a line strung between two olive trees in the Balkan sun. Meanwhile, there's me bent over my basket sorting out my whites and reds in that clammy Vatican basement laundromat.
Fortunately, however, I've recently made a "Road to Damascus" switch to Tru Croz liquid detergent with triple action bleaching power for a really bright clean finish and super swaddling softness, and Tru Croz is colorfast so I don't have to worry about my white vestments turning pink if I select the hot wash cycle. Tru Croz is much, much superior to the Powder from the Pelvic Bone of Saint Theresa of Avila I was using before, that could never get the tough brown stains out of my skull cap.
Obviously, I still bless all my loads first, just in case.
Of course, the annoying rumble of the old Maytag is always a pain during vespers, just like that pesky high-pitched whirring sound from the spin dryer which nearly always interrupts matins. But what are you going to do? I mean, you don't want to be sitting there the whole time knowing you've got a filthy, incense smoke stained hem when the faithful are kissing it. Now that truly would be a sin.

Guest Blogger: Abraham Lincoln

One of the oft asked questions that echoes through the marbled halls of the athenaeum of American politics is the debatable subject of whether or not my wife Mary might have actually taken some small crumb of enjoyment from observing the play that she and I attended on the evening of my assassination. I can state here and now quite baldly that she did not enjoy these entertainments. Indeed, I consider it the height of grossest impertinance that anyone should even suggest that my wife could take pleasure from such third rate, melodramatic waffling as the unfortunate audience was forced to witness from their uncomfortably upholstered seats at the Ford Theater that infamous night: Our American Cousin? More like Our American Theatrical Shame. How ignominious for me that I, the most important of American Presidents, should have been shot and killed during the pitiful performance of this tawdry piece of poorly constructed and inadequately rehearsed nonsense.
Events would have been much different, of course, had I been assassinated while engrossed in the first act of a play by the young Harold Pinter, even a staged reading of something by Athol Fugard would have been acceptable to my family's dignity. But no. The fate's are cruel.

Wood Womb

There is a photo-op that grows aslant a brook.
Welcome to the dark depths of the Wood Womb where the Black Widow weaves her web and the cobra coils in hooded hollows. Here the wild honey fungus enfolds itself like a little toadstool clitoris and Mapplethorpe syrup is collected. This is the sort of thing to make Brother Cadfael excitable. Vagina dentata? My advice is floss twice a day.
Actually, after the salacious allusions have been safely squirrelled away, I can tell you that this tree was felled from its once proud spot alongside the River Charles - willow weep for yourself - and undoubtedly its suggestive stump will become a brown basin for the accumulation of litter left by humans. A natural trash can formation in which rusting coke can and slimy plastic wrap will gather like grubby Druids in their temple copse. No room left for Ratty, Mole or Toad.

Guest Blogger: A Dead Fish

Hello there. I'm just a dead fish but that doesn't mean I'm not also a keen and busy blogger. My own personal favorite bloggers are Drudge Report and anything to do with pollution. Here's a cool picture of me rotting away in Boston's famous River Charles, drifting helplessly in the grimy water, buffeted by the current, just slapping my decaying flesh against the embankment until the scales drop from my flanks with nowhere else to go. Yes sir, it's no fun hanging out beside the sewer pipe. But one of the interesting facets of floating around upside down in industrial effluence and human garbage is the fresh and exciting perspectives such activity produces. Whole new vistas are opened up for me. Well, they would be if some greedy and ravenous water rat hadn't eaten half of my head.

Photograph taken by me with my brand spanking new six megapixel digital camera (although I can't see much difference between this picture quality and the type created by my old four mega pixel digital camera to be honest with you)

Guest Blogger: Samuel Beckett

Endblog by Samuel Beckett
(translated from the original French by Stephenesque)

The stage is bare except for a thin brick wall into which a computer screen featuring a blogging interface has been cemented. As if troubled by a dial-up connection, words appear slowly on the screen.

Blogger: Log on .... Blog? .... Blog? Not I .... Blog? Do I remember my own arsehole? It was cured like salted ham and sat there not knowing. Or was it lean and feathered with coarse white hair like a senile eagle who streaks the sky with spittle yellow as fool's piss ....Blog? A long stretch of piss here. Link via mumble dot com dot com dot com. Ha! An echo of an internet inside a scrap heap. Not I .... Blog? ... Quick scroll down: type: post: link: quote: italics: delete: delete: delete: escape: no return: shift alt ....option? ... Blog? .... Trackback always tracking back. This dying screen imprisons as many pixels as Mother O' Houlihan's steaming vagina giving birth into a unwanted URL .... Blog? .... Blog?
No comment.

Guest Blogger: Cesare Borgia

My dad is Pope, which is nice for me.
I am very partial to two particular flavors of poison: Almondine de Bittere au Regulare, and Yankee-style Carbonated Bitter Almond (the green poison and the red poison as they are more commonly known). My sister, Lucretzia keeps both flavors in small glass vials that she secretes betwixt her ample breasts. When I am not looking, she pours one of the poisons into my afternoon glass of grappa and I have to guess which one it is."
"Almondine de bittere au regular?" I say.
"Wrong!" she shrieks, kicking me playfully in the codpiece.
Then we make love. Afterwards I go outside and invade the Campagna with my soldiers.
When he is not scribbling in one of his black notebooks, my good friend Niccolo says to me: "Many years from now, your descendants will move to a place called New York, and they will learn to balance their lunch boxes on huge swaying iron girders high in the air as they drill rivets into the superstructure of something they will call the Brooklyn Bridge."
"And will these descendents be warriors like me?"
"They will certainly have huge fights about which of them makes the best spaghetti bolognese sauce."
"And who will win?" I ask.
"He who uses The Prince brand spaghetti sauce, of course." Niccolo replies.

Memo To Outer Life

"For ten years I followed the peregrine. I was possessed by it. It was a grail to me. Now it has gone. The long pursuit is over. Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still."

From The Peregrine by J.A Baker (available from NYRB Classics)

The Poet Consoles His Goldfish

What ails thee mine mournful, melancholy fellow, ye sorrowful golden teardrop floundering through thy globular and glassy eyrie placed upon mine mantelpiece? Doth not flavorful fish food flutter down upon thy tap wat'ry table like the epicurean dreams of Apicius? Speak now, oh cousin o' the carp, or forever still the bubbles that fizz from thy frowning lips.

After the Holiday

The poet stumbles from his weekend bed like a vanquished knight staggering blindly in the drifting dust of a jousting field. Tongue heavy as chain-mail. Bones of creaking, battered and rusting metal. The scolding screams of florid peasantry fly across littered lanes and through ragged, windswept pavilions: "Hey poet," they shriek, "Get a bloody move on!"
It was ever thus. Will we never be set free. And where is that damn lazy Lady of Shallot with my effing breakfast.

Pardon My Hubris

A highly amusing typo appears at the rear end of Hanson Victor Davis' latest screed: "AUTHORR'S NOTE: Correction: In last week’s essay ..." I have always considered myself blessed that I can take great pleasure in such tiny things, rather like the DVD version of Twelfth Night, directed by Trevor Nunn, that I watched last night. Shot on location at the Cornish coastline and in extremely traditionally "Shakespearian-looking" stately home gardens, it was actually pretty decent in a chocolate box and tinsel kind of way, designed as if all the participants were really weekend guests who have discovered Victoriana costumes in some forgotten sea chest in a musty attic. Despite some typically stagey British casting, Mel Smith (always good) and Richard E Grant were especially entertaining as Sirs Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek; likewise, Ben Kingsley as Feste and Nigel Hawthorne as Malvolio.

A Word to the Wise Blogger

Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, if you host Google or Amazon advertising on your blog, then you deserve all the horrible comment spam you receive and more. Face facts, you have entered your blog into the commercial arena, and the last time I checked it was a free market. So, come friendly spam, fall on these blogs. This curse counts double if your blog trades in political punditry.
Furthermore, if you are one of those wretched bloggers who labor under the impression that readers should donate money to your personal bank account because they have accidently skimmed through some of the boring tripe you've posted, then you should also be condemned to suffer endless acres of comment spam. There is simply only one blog I know of that's worth paying for and it's obviously Lileks. Still going strong after all these years. Hail to thee blithe spirit!
If you don't host ads or demand your reader's cash and yet still get comment spam then I am truly sorry for you. If you would like me to punch the spammer's face in for you, I will.

UPDATE: Speaking of commerce, I should add that I've recently begun composing a business weblog for my company, replacing the corporate jargon of a standard press release with Stephenesque epithets and longuers, which, at the risk of appearing to be a complete tit, I have emailed to all my clients. So far the feedback has been productive, not to say illuminating. Perhaps you will discover it one day as you trawl through the oceans of other weblogs. Perhaps not. Let me know if you think you have.