Stark reminder

Given that Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men has maintained its reputation as one of the most lauded of American 20th century works of political fiction, I abstain here from too much (unqualified) comment. But I feel like I have to write something for it is a work of such merit and is, in my opinion, incredibly relevant to the contemporary political landscape.

My own Penguin UK copy

A couple of years ago I saw a 2006 movie adaptation of the novel on Netflix with Sean Penn as Willie Stark; presumably a box-office flop and only tepidly received by critics but liked immensely by this person (that is, ME). Watching it at the time, I recall only being able to think of Donald Trump; by then out of office if not out of mind (HIS or mine I am not sure!), and confined to the annals of history one could have thunk. Well, one could have…! Alas. After his reelection in November, I was reminded again of Warren’s book and so, over the holidays (and for the first time), turned to the original stuff. And I had not been deceived, he (TRUMP) ghosts his way through the entire narrative. But not only does HE, but also a particular brand of populism that once set alight, blazes, may diminish, but continues to smoulder, ever ready to flare up again.

Now I have no idea when Trump became TRUMP, but one can follow Willie Stark as he progresses from an ambitious wannabe to THE BOSS, and one can follow, too, those around him facilitating his ascendancy. For instance, I was particularly taken by this exchange between the still-fledgling candidate and his runaround Jack Burden (the novel’s narrative voice) who, in an attempt to salvage the floundering gubernatorial campaign, launches into a rare tirade in an effort to persuade Willie to change tack – to forsake his formulaic, heavy-on-detail speeches for an oratory style with more, shall we say, entertainment value:

[…Willie says:] “They didn’t seem to be paying attention much tonight. Not while I was trying to explain about my tax program.”

[Jack:] “Maybe you try to tell ’em too much. It breaks down their brain cells. […] Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the fat boys and forget the rest of the tax stuff.”

[Willie:] “What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that -“

[Jack:] “… they don’t give a damn […] Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

-“All the King’s Men” (Penguin Modern Classics) [p.108]

Now if that ain’t the winning formula for a Trumpian scorched earth rally! A major difference of course is that nobody has needed to nudge Trump; what Willie had to learn, Trump seems to know instinctively.

Embedded below is a sample reading of the first chapter of this legendary novel from the U.S. publisher’s website. For the uninitiated: Think Faulkner just not as difficult, the Deep South almost palpable – the heat, the poverty, the religious (irreligious, and anything else) fervor, the politicking, the corruption. Then exchange Louisiana for Queens, rural poverty for urban wealth – inherited both, Willie Stark or Huey Long (an inspiration for Stark, though one which Warren sought to minimize) for Donald Trump, and you can imagine your way to the here and now. Mag(a)nificent (sic) – to imagine, that is. In reality anything but.

Trump (v.2) begins

Yesterday at a bit after high noon, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as 47th President of the United States of America. George W. Bush’s oft reported statement of the proceedings the first time around, that is, Trump (v.1) in 2017: “…that was some weird shit” applied still – one could even say the whole affair was even more perplexing.

Due to freezing temperatures (complementing the state of some of those unfortunates in forced attendance), Trump’s inaugural address was held in the rotunda of the Capitol – yes that place where his out of control MAGA supporters tried to hinder the succession of power in 2021 – and was, though not quite the American carnage rhetoric from 2017, still dark enough to leave one aghast, and his reckoning with the outgoing Biden administration ruthless and complete. There he stood, ignoring precedent and ritualistic niceties, just as full of himself as ever, or more so. But, the more typical stream of consciousness diatribe followed a short time later as he spoke to loyalists elsewhere in the Capitol building, and was indicative for sure of what we are all in for during the next four years.

It all became even more madcap at a sports arena “rally” where, seated at a desk in the midst of the faithful, Trump signed a seemingly never ending series of executive orders. All this to raucous mega MAGA applause which he acknowledged with snide remarks and a flourishing pen – sorry, sharpie – to then be tossed to his adoring audience amidst more rapturous applause!

Trump signing executive orders on January 20, 2025, his first day in office, at Capital One Arena.

In the last hours more have followed, and many more intentions – some precise, some vague. Just a selection: renaming of Mount Denali (back to Mt. McKinley) and the Gulf of Mexico (to Gulf of America); immigration: securing borders, seeking out and expelling illegal aliens, (an attempt to) end birthright citizenship; gender and diversity: abandoning D.E.I. programs, two sex (m/f) only policy; international bodies: withdrawal from WHO, ditto the Paris climate agreement; tariffs: around the corner – 25% on imports from Canada and Mexico, 10% on those from China; climate and energy : Biden’s ‘green new deal’ torpedoed, Alaska opened up to drilling, EV’s no longer to receive federal subsidies, no more wind farms on federal property; government efficiency: the infamous DOGE, freeze on federal hiring, return to office order.

That all is but a sampling! Announcements are coming at a terrifying rate. This is another Trump, another Trump administration. A much more dangerous proposition.

Virginia the poet

Said oft before
and to be said again:
just as one thinks
there can be no more
come upon perchance
a pair of unknowns
scribbled one day
as a playful jest
for the dearest
the two nearest
to those
she never had.
 
- Anne Dromache

On the discovery of two unknown poems by Virginia Woolf.

Discovered by chance at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas by the University of Liverpool academic Dr. Sophie Oliver, are two little poems by Virginia Woolf, written for her niece and nephew, Angelica and Quentin Bell, presumably sometime after March 1927. Says Dr. Oliver in the opening paragraph of her just published piece in the Times Literary Supplement:

Two poems by Virginia Woolf have resurfaced. I found them tucked in the back of a folder of letters to her niece Angelica Bell in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Light verse, quickly drafted for her niece and nephew (Quentin Bell) in pencil on two sheets of the same grey-blue paper, “Angelica” and “Hiccoughs” delight in fantasy and invention. […]The manuscripts join a handful of extant poems by this novelist, who as a young woman could not get on with poetry and as a mature author declared it “defunct”. […] like most of Woolf’s other known poems, it takes up poetry to do something; in this case to play, poke and charm, and to help with what Angelica thought was one of her aunt’s greatest gifts, creating intimacies with people.

–‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’ by Sophie Oliver, TLS January 17, 2025.

Oliver goes on to mention some other known examples. That written as a child for the Hyde Park Gate News is known to me, the others not:

Woolf’s earliest known poem is a quatrain written (c.1892) for the Hyde Park Gate News, the whimsical newspaper that she and her siblings produced. A mother looking after her sick son, as Woolf’s mother did for many in need, is compared to a predatory animal: “Like the vulture hovers / O’er the dieing horse / thinking ever thinking / that her boy is slowly sinking”. Already, at ten years old, Woolf understood the comic power of a perverse image and a dippy rhyme. “Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville” (1934) is, as the immoderate title suggests, a narrative poem that exceeds the bounds of poetry. “Fantasy upon a Gentleman Who Converted His Impressions of a Private House into Cash” (1937), meanwhile, is a satire that uses occasional rhyme to skewer a journalist’s complacency (“his lack of attraction; his self-satisfaction”).

–‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’ by Sophie Oliver, TLS January 17, 2025.

Without a subscription I can get no further! But an interesting find to be sure, that says something about the ‘Aunt’ Virginia and is supportive of Vanessa’s children’s later recollections of her; as being somewhat ‘other’, shall we say, but always lots of fun and a kindred spirit of sorts – creative and playful.

The style of the two poems and the tonality one hears is also indicative of what one could imagine Woolf would have heard in the nursery as a child herself – Lear, for example – and one is reminded of the power of such words, rhymes and rhythms to stay with one a life long.

La la land is ablaze!

In the last 48 hours or so that famed City of Angels from which so many dreams have been spun has been visited upon from the other side; by darker angels with devilish wings of fire rather than of fairy gossamer.

An unseasonable and radical Santa Ana wind event colliding with a tinder dry landmass has ignited the most horrific wildfires in LA County.

In the parlance of the day, this is an on-going event, and the extent of the destruction will remain unknown for some time, but great swathes of the coastal area between Santa Monica and Malibu and the famous hills and canyons beyond have been decimated, especially the Pacific Palisades community. In fact, the Palisades Fire already bears the title of the most destructive in Los Angeles history. And the so-called Eaton Fire affecting the Altadena and Pasadena continues to cause incalculable damage.

Palisades Fire taken from hi-rise in downtown Los Angeles

As I write, a new fire has ignited in the Hollywood Hills overnight. I mean to say this catastrophe is all playing out just a bare few miles from central LA!

All the above links are from Wikipedia – lazy I know, but with a “developing story” so to speak, the better option. But I will take the time to direct to a favorite source for all-things Californian: CalMatters – non-profit and non-partisan, or so they say and (with the exception of the Trump aversion) I am inclined to believe them. Here, for instance, is a wildfire explainer that doesn’t shy from the science and policy decisions, and here a wildfire tracker and database.

I watched La La Land over the holidays. Had the Gosling and Stone characters been romancing last night up there in the hills at the Griffith Observatory, as they do in that charming film, the outlook below would have been something other – and terrifyingly so. Of course, the ‘dream factory’ has always had its nightmarish side.

January 1. 2025

Another New Year upon us, and the wish that it be a good one, a better one; for god knows it’s a struggle to find some satisfaction with the one just passed. But it’s worth considering that, from one day to the next, from one end of the world to the other, with all the despairs and tragedies that have befallen many, and in a myriad of ways, so, too, have loving relationships been formed and deepened; babies born and children grown before one’s eyes; successes of all sorts – great and small – achieved; moments of generosity – given gladly or rewarded. And, so, it is true to say, for very many the past year will be remembered with warmth in their heart.

And, this, a day like any other, is best celebrated with modest hopes and realizable expectations for the year that lies ahead.

Happy New Year 2025!

Politicum! (x 2)

I am not even going to attempt to explain my silence throughout much of this year, but as the leaves fall, and the grey sets in, and it is almost done, I return here only to make note of two extraordinary political events of the last days:

  • It was election day in the US last Tuesday, 5th November 2024. Donald J. Trump was not only the 45th President of the United States, he is now also the President-elect, that is, will be the 47th President of the United States. Unbelievable but true. As I write, each day brings new appointments to his White House or cabinet – most of them stranger than the one that came before. And then there is Elon Musk! At the same time, I sense an organisation, a plan, that was not discernible the first time round. That is not necessarily good news.
  • The next day, 6th November 2024, this news hardly digested, the Bundeskanzler der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Olaf Scholz, decides to sack his finance minister, Christian Lindner, in effect leading to the impending dissolution of the coalition. Lots of stuff in between, but as it stands now, Germany is effectively without a functioning government and new elections will be held on 23rd February 2025.

This at a time when wars still rage in the Ukraine and the Middle East, and insecurities predominate in almost all of the western liberal democracies being reflected in many of the electoral outcomes. Things bode not well into the foreseeable future.

Reminiscing on self

Publisher: McNally Editions (March 12, 2024)

In an LRB piece (Vol. 46 No. 17 · 12 September 2024) coming out of the publication earlier this year of a new edition of the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life: A Memoir (first published in 1925 towards the end of her life), Mary Beard ponders the Harrison life stories as told by her, to be retold by others until the varied accounts thereof fused to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or perhaps not. And if not, who cares, for Harrison’s life was remarkable in every way irrespective of questionable veracity, mischievous embellishment or the self-interested spin. Harrison knew that a woman of her time had to control their own narrative or no one else would – or worse, could easily find itself appropriated by a … bloke!

This is not the first time Mary Beard has considered Jane Harrison. She too is of course a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, where Harrison studied, was rejected by, and returned to – to become the archetype for generations of women academics. And, Professor Beard in fact hunted through archival material for her own book, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Harvard University Press) in 2000. (A review from the time at The Guardian can be read here.)

If written words are not enough, the LRB also included a conversation with Mary Beard about her article in their podcast (available on their website or embedded below from Spotify) where Harrison is stylized as ‘the cleverest woman in England’ (of that time).

I too have mentioned Jane Harrison before – here and again here, for instance, in respect to her being one of a particular group of intellectual women who happened to live for a time on Mecklenburgh Square in London, and as written about by Francesca Wade in her book Square Haunting (2020). Another of those was of course Virginia Woolf, and the Woolfs attendance at Harrison’s funeral (on 19th April 1928) is recorded in a 21st April 1928 diary entry that I make note of here. This, an event that does not appear to have moved VW terribly much but, just as she has afforded others who touched upon her world, her memorializing of Harrison is other – for her, a guest appearance in A Room of One’s Own. And what a memorial that is; one that assures a recognition beyond her time into the present.

With some justification

… Again, like, HE doesn’t HAVE to, THEY don’t HAVE to. For him, maybe a matter of conscience and good citizen of the world -ship. For her, perhaps too, but it is also her job; which gives authenticity to the project.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice – of celebrity put to better use I am unaware. A whole lot better than the cesspool of US politicking.