“We must resist the temptation to opt out of politics and to assume that nothing can be done in face of all the current ugliness, deception and corruption. Arendt’s lifelong project was to honestly confront and comprehend the darkness of our times, without losing sight of the possibility of transcendence, and illumination. It should be our project, too.”
(Richard J. Bernstein, “The Illuminations of Hannah Arendt,” NYTimes)
Doubtless your streets teem with miscreants and errant strollers. The windows of your cottages must be festooned with mock lace. Your doors surely sag on their hinges. Your tiny gardens must be rank with common gillyflowers and copied statues. Your kitchens reek of vile edibles — turnips, potatoes, lovage… One shudders.
Here is your project:
Fabricate a budget designed to rid our Sceptered Isle of the likes of yourselves.
Postulate the razing of your hovels to be followed by the erection of mansions.
Postulate exclusive shops patronized by graceful gentlefolk. Greco-Roman nymphettes in white marble peopling fountains with modest gushing. Nary a lady in public view not attired in exquisite headwear.
Valet parking universal, public transport banished.
Refined eateries serving delicacies able to be savored properly only by genteel palates.
Gothic altars restrainedly hymned by cosseted congregants — the few, the winsome, the titled.
Boulevards named for peers and Thatcherites.
Take the aforementioned amenities into account, and more if possible, in the provisioning of funds to your hypothetical exchequer for civilizing improvements on behalf of the beleaguered privileged class.
Assume the hoi polloi displaced by the upgrade are ferried to America, there to be absorbed into the excellent prison system. (Exclude that cost from your budget, it will be borne by charities.)
(Social Math — UK. Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Laughter is breath, it alters your being, and it allows you to move on, and keep living.” (Anna Mackmin, quoted by Patrick Barkham in The Guardian)
There’s so much to like in the blog world. As one finding his feet there, I count it an earnest obligation to sample ever more assiduously other persons’ work. To court attention one must pay attention.
I’m often grateful for the richness of a given post, while at the same time chafing ecstatically under its persevering momentum. “There’s more?” I murmur. And yes!
I’m fond of the Zen aphorism — how does it go? “A little bit is a lot, and more is an even greater amount.” With signature Zenny crypticism it hides a verity in its pouch.
Provisionally, I count on no more than a moment of a precious reader’s time for my own stuff. I have a phobia that, if I run on, he or she will run off.
Wait, wait! I’m almost done!
Working resolve: Try to write like a bar snack — briny, spare, stuffed with a tidy surprise, maybe anchovy.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Its studied fuzziness, agony glimpsed through clamor, gives this poem its knife edge.” (Unremembered)
Bush Doctrine // Hung Foo
Testes Titan // E-wrecked
Titty Tyrant // Testosterone Tank
Cmen-130 // Sperm Gun
Callous Phallus // Erectile Projectile
Headache Balls // Roadside IUD
Womb Bomb // Shuck-and-Aww
Males Ready to Eat // Fox-and-Friendly Fire
Cool Literal Damage // Peeping Tomahawk
Penta-gonad // Black Oops
Boots on the Groin // Phlegm Thrower
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
What’s right?
I was braised Raptist.
Dawder, fetch me some wadder.
Of core snot
Flying butt tresses
I’ve herded all now.
Ready! Fire! Claim!
Diddle Dawdle & Dodge, LLC
Salience is golden.
Naughty pine
Bête blanche
Procrastinator
Anticrastinator
Horse d’oovers & Canopies
Ad hominy
In her ears
Inner ears
In arrears
Who do I think I am?
Oodles of oops
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Type the following without cursing:
(1)
Ride with the tide and go with the flow.
Rade wath tha tade and ga wath tha flaw.
Rede weth the tede end ge weth the flew.
Ride with thi tide ind gi with thi fliw.
Rode woth tho tode ond go woth tho flow.
Rude wuth thu tude und gu wuth thu fluw.
(2)
Loose lips sink ships.
Laase laps sank shaps.
Leese leps senk sheps.
Liise lips sink ships.
Loose lops sonk shops.
Luuse lups sunk shups.
(3)
Wamp wamp.
Wemp wemp.
Wimp wimp.
Womp womp.
Wump wump.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“It [rotolo] taught me a lot about Italian food. It also taught me to see food through the eyes of a woman. Rose [Rose Gray, the River Cafe’s co-owner] was incredible. She wasn’t a chef, but a self-taught cook at a time in Britain when there weren’t many women in the kitchen, and certainly no female owners who weren’t trained chefs. Mostly, Rose didn’t give a damn about protocol. She and her business partner, Ruth Rogers, had spent many years living in the mountains of Tuscany, and instead of the almost robotically methodical way most chefs operated at the time, they would buy fresh ingredients and write two new menus – one for lunch and one for dinner – every single day. They taught me about seasonality, and using the whole animal, and they gave context to ingredients. They weren’t academic about food – they taught me to be more responsive and more nurturing.”
(“Jamie Oliver: The recipe that changed my life,” as told to Dale Berning Sawa, The Guardian)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
“Sher-Gil died on Dec. 5, 1941. The cause was believed to be complications from a second, failed abortion performed by Egan, Dalmia wrote in her biography of Sher-Gil. She was 28 and was just gaining widespread popularity and taking on commissions.
“Sher-Gil’s legacy has grown in recent years. Unesco, the cultural organization of the United Nations, declared 2013, the 100th anniversary of her birth, the international year of Amrita Sher-Gil.
“I painted a few very good paintings,” she wrote in a letter to her mother in October 1931, when she was 18. “Everybody says that I have improved immensely; even that person whose criticism in my view is most important to me — myself.”
Homecoming went well this year. The Stags played the Mott Mohicans here and won 49-7.
Stoop Harcourt pulled the “Sensation of the Stag Nation” float in the Saturday parade with that old Allis Chalmers tractor of his. His daughter Lirick was Stag Queen. Thistle Hunnicut was her Lady in Waiting. The Antlerettes were the Queen’s Court.
Mason Harcourt bought their dresses at the Dapper Dan in Waverly. We helped her sew organdy and taffeta pettyflurze on them to accent the plunge line. We stitched wire into the bodices so they wouldn’t sag and let bosom pop out like last year with Kendall Tarbuckle.
Faith said Scooter would turn over in his grave if he knew his granddaughter had ridden from Eighth Street to the stop light with nipple showing. Kendall was mortified, though it hasn’t hurt her social life, has it?
Thank God the wire worked.
The only thing that bothered me this year was, Mason made ’em paint sensation with an “i,” so it read “sinsation.” She got that from a dessert at Chez Clancy’s called Chocolate Sinsation. “It’s sinfully good,” the menu says.
Mason thought it was clever and would punch up the float. But I was thinking during the parade, Did I miss a sermon or something? Since when should we suggest to our young folks that sin is delicious? They’re mixed up enough already!
But that’s just a quibble. The float was as pretty as I’ve seen it in a long time. And the girls were gussied up like little floozies — cute as a bug!
(This Is Stag Country, Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
The Northernness
“If you’re full of beauty and positive things it’s harder for stuff to get to you. Joy is not a luxury that you can tack on when you’ve sorted everything out, joy is how you will sort out your problems… I’m reading ‘A History of God’ by Karen Armstrong. I’m working on a couple of projects where I look at the origins of God. Why did we invent this guy? And what’s his relevance now?” (Caitlin Moran, quoted by Imogen Carter in The Guardian)
These remarks by Caitlin Moran triggered a memory of a book that had an impact on me in high school: C. S. Lewis’s “Surprised by Joy.” It’s a biographical account of his conversion to Catholicism. Growing up in sun-baked coastal Texas, I was struck by his fascination with what he termed the “northernness,” which I recall as his way of describing a shapeless spiritual yearning which later was fulfilled, for him, by Christian faith.
I had a similar obsession then with things northern, a longing for relief from endless summer, that came out in a sonnet I wrote for senior English class. The sonnet’s lost, but its title was “L’Aquilon,” French for the North Wind. It evoked, in strict meter, how the first “norther” of the season, usually in October, refreshed my spirit and gave me strength to carry on with my adolescence!
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)