qatsi | Reading

The current President of the USA got a lot of mileage while on the stump out of his promise to "drain the swamp". Surprisingly it's a promise that's being kept. Only in these latter days he's been doing all he can to halt the process because it turns out that one of the biggest swamp monsters (did we ever doubt it?) is himself.

I forget where he used to stand on NATO, but the MAGA rhetoric sort of implied that the USA didn't need allies. Anyway, whether intended or not, he's currently in the process of taking the alliance apart- with the once unthinkable spectacle of European forces being mustered to deter the US invasion of a European country....

He has surrounded himself with incompetents, he appears to decide policy on a whim, he is only feared as a mad dog is feared. He gets no respect.

The USA has been an Imperial power since at least the end of WWII. We have seen it behave rapaciously and amorally and foolishly, but never with so much clown-footed, whitewash-slinging, buttonhole-flower-squirting slapstick as under it's current president. The nation will probably survive him but I doubt that its Empire will....

poliphilo

Picture Diary 115

1. Mademoiselle

2. Gotcha

3. Not a care in the world

4. Pretty steamy for the 1950s

5. Here comes Trouble

6. Take it!

poliphilo

I got through the night without having to get up periodically to douse the coughing with cups of tea or wear it out by watching vids.

The night before last I caught a couple of hours sleep by shifting onto a different plane and taking deep breaths, each one visualised as a little square green window, lit up from within. When I'm ill this shifting of consciousness seems easy, when I'm well it don't.

Steve Judd, my favourite astrologer points to a big conjunction of heavenly bodies (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Pluto) starting today and carrying on over the next few days with an even groovier and rarer arrangement on the 20th. This, he says, marks the beginning of a great movement of resistance against the lies of the powerful- which I'm guessing, though he doesn't specify, means Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.....

poliphilo

Every astrologer, psychic, channeler, cartomancer I pay attention tohas said there will be great upheavals this year- startling revelations- and the world will emerge on the far side a kinder, saner place. Old power structures will collapse, old certainties be disproved, new truths established.

Can't wait....

But they have also said that these first few weeks- where we are now- will be hard going- which is just what they're proving to be....

poliphilo

Judy is reading a time travel story which has modern day people going back to 1914- and it's annoying her that the dialogue the author gives his Georgians to speak feels really "off".

Yeah, well, but how did people speak in 1914? What's our evidence?

It's almost entirely literary. And literary dialogue has been cleaned up, tidied up, rendered, well, literary. And, anyway, we can't know whether any particular writer had a good ear for dialogue or not.

Did anyone ever speak like Oscar Wilde's people- except, perhaps, Oscar himself? Was the speech of Irish peasants half as as colourful as the stuff Synge puts in their mouths? Going back a bit further, did Dickens's Cockneys really transpose their "v"s and "w"s and if so when did they stop?

And how did people cuss during the Great War? Someone a while back was protesting that is was wildly anachronistic to have soldiers saying "fuck" in the movie 1917- and it piqued my interest, so I dug. Turns out they certainly did- all the fucking time- only you wouldn't know it from most of the contemporary novels, memoirs and plays.

Accuracy bows before good manners. It does in our time too. Stick a microphone in front of someone's face and they'll start minding their "p"s and "q"s. There's a lot more casual casual racism (the taboo of our times) in the speech of the streets than shows up in the record that will be available to our grand kids....

poliphilo

I'm not sleeping well because, "Cough-cough-cough, cough-cough-cough." I keep thinking I've got this cold on the run and then it rallies. On the whole, though, I haven't been feeling ill, just tired.....

poliphilo

William Allen, the Quaker polymath, scientist, financier and all-round do-gooder was an ancestor of mine. His younger brother Samuel was my several times great grandfather. Does that make William my many times great uncle? I'm not sure. Anyway we are related.

I don't think the brothers were close. Leastways Samuel doesn't get a mention in the biography of William I'm currently reading. William was a high-flier, active on the world-stage, whereas Samuel was never anything more than a respected Quaker preacher.

Here's William, wearing a Quaker hat. (I want one)

William_Allen_abolitionist_by_Amélie_Munier-Romilly_(sq_cropped).jpeg

William_Allen_abolitionist_by_Amélie_Munier-Romilly_(sq_cropped).jpeg

And here's Samuel, holding forth (gloomily?) at a Quaker Meeting.

Samuel_Lucas_(1805-1870)_-_Samuel_Allen_at_a_Quaker_Meeting_-_HITHM.5518_-_North_Hertfordshire_Museum.jpeg

Samuel_Lucas_(1805-1870)_-_Samuel_Allen_at_a_Quaker_Meeting_-_HITHM.5518_-_North_Hertfordshire_Museum.jpeg

The difference in status between the two brothers can be gauged by the quality of their portraits. William gets a delicate pencil sketch by Mlle Romilly- the distinguished Swiss painter- while Samuel makes do with a daub by his brother-in-law Samuel Lucas, the brewer.

Oh, these old time Quakers, they're so serious! William is esteemed by the Duke of Wellington and more than esteemed by the saintly Russian tsar Alexander I but wouldn't it be jolly if he'd occasionally meet a poet (there were enough of them around in his era) or attend the theatre or say something funny. He had a wonderful mind for facts but he wasn't creative or playful. He partnered the great Robert Owen in setting up schools for the poor but fell out with him over what should be taught. Owen wanted to teach music and dancing and what we would now call ecology while William wanted nothing but Bible study. Oh, Uncle William, do lighten up!'

You may gather I'm having a hard time actually liking him. A man, however mild and obliging, who wants his nieces to read Pliny to him over breakfast is never going to be my soul-brother.

But he did like the ladies! His third marriage- to a woman pushing 70 and a good decade older than himself- allowed the profane to go, "See, we always said the Quakers are randy old goats under those silly hats." Cartoons were published. Sincere and loving Friends wrote to tell him, "Don't do it!" For the first time in his life he was a cause for merriment....

Ah, unseemliness! Now that's more like it!

poliphilo

I look around at the Friends assembled for the Area Meeting and think, "But we're all so old!" No-one appeared to be under 40- and the bulk of us were in our 70s- and 80s. I know there are young Quakers because I've met them, but none of them were in Eastbourne yesterday.

There were 56 of us. That's the most who have attended such a Meeting in recent years. Our Meeting Room was only just big enough.

Much of what we did was tedious and pointless. We're too small an organisation to conduct ourselves with so much formality. We should be ducking and diving like partisans, not plodding along like an Imperial army.

The value of these get-togethers is mainly in the gaps and not in the programme. I met two new people I was glad to get to know- a chap who has visited Heaven while still in the body and a gentle, spiritual, 70 year old cross-dresser. We're an odd lot. Oddity is our glory. I didn't want to show up yesterday and I hated a lot of the procedure but I came away feeling I'd been among my people.....

poliphilo

Maria Goretti was an Italian peasant girl who was murdered (aged 11) while resisting a would be rapist. She died in hospital, forgiving her killer and hoping to meet him in Paradise. This happened in 1902. She was canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church in 1950.

Her killer Alessandro Serenelli repented in in prison, became a leading proponent of his victim's cult and died, aged 88, in the Franciscan convent where he lived and worked as a lay brother.

This is the only photograph that exists of Maria

Photograph_of_Saint_Maria_Goretti,_1902.jpeg

Photograph_of_Saint_Maria_Goretti,_1902.jpeg

And this is Alessandro in late middle age

I got on their track because we are currently being pummelled by a storm the French weather people have elected to call Goretti- and wanted to know what was behind the name.

Well, now I know. Initially inclined to be flippant, the more I read the more engaged I became. It's a sad, uplifting story- and if I said I ended my research with tears in my eyes I wouldn't be lying. Maria and (ultimately) Alessandro were simple, good people and I'm happy to have been introduced to them.

Meanwhile, asked to account for their choice of such an inappropriate name for their storm, the meteorologists gave a Gallic shrug and said, "Well, it works, doesn't it?" Gotta love the French. They know their culture is the highest on the planet and they don't have to explain themselves if they don't want to.

poliphilo

I woke in the night and my cold seemed to have gone away and I thought (no, don't roll your eyes; this is real, I really did think it) that the E.T.s had passed by and cured eveyone of whatever was wrong with them and we'd get up in the morning and find a new world had come into being from which disease had been banished forever. I rotated my thumbs and they didn't hurt. "That proves it," I told myself. "My arthritis is cured...."

On a mundane tnote, I'm no longer coughing uncontrollably- so a corner has actually been turned, but perhaps not for all humankind.

poliphilo

I haven't gone into the Meeting House today. I'm tired but not particularly ill and reckon I could have hacked it. Thing is I'm almost certainly still contagious and it wouldn't have been friendly (Big F as well as small f) to share this virus.

Anyway, I'm not indispensable

poliphilo

I dreamed an old lady on a bus offered me LSD. I took it of course. My vision of the sunny coastal landscape we were passing through was enhanced.

I chanced this morning on a video about paranormal goings-on at Beachy Head- the landward side of which I can see from our windows. The phenomena include shadow people, white ladies. the sense of being watched and lights manoevering in the sky and rising and descending into the sea. I hadn't known this was happening but I'm not surprised- and that Beachy Head- the highest cliff on this coastline- and a magnet for suicides- should be a place where "the veil is thin".

Someone on Quora offered the opinion that the present occupant of the White House was the handsomest president ever. The opinion is so self-evidently absurd that I assume it was made in bad faith or by a bot. One person who chose to engage said "No, the handsomest president was JFK" and- as I coughed myself to sleep last night- I found myself engaging too. I considered the claims of this man- who was after all, a film star

But decided that handsomeness is not the same thing as good looks or beauty, and that dignity, gravity and presence are also involved, so that my choice finally lit on this fellow- arguably the most gifted individual ever to hold the office.....

Official_Presidential_portrait_of_Thomas_Jefferson_(by_Rembrandt_Peale,_1800).jpeg

Official_Presidential_portrait_of_Thomas_Jefferson_(by_Rembrandt_Peale,_1800).jpeg

poliphilo

Lying on the bed, looking out the window, watching the light change.

We are on ground that is ever so slightly higher that the rest of town- and have an unobstructed view over the trees and houses to the Downs.

The sun comes up- no clouds to speak of- and everything in its path turns orange. I could say gold but that would be fancier and less accurate. A window about a mile away reflects the sun's light right at me. it is beyond orange, beyond colour. Directly above the shining window hangs the moon, now a few days past the full.

The shining window fades, the sunshine goes from orange to white. My eye is caught by a red spot on a street close to where the shining window was. I think it must be a traffic light but it doesn't change- so just a small, unidentified red thing......

All the while the birds- chiefly gulls and pigeons- criss cross the space between here and the hills

poliphilo

The window cleaner was admiring my hat- this one as it happens-

He's from Kosovo- where they wear something similar. He's been in this country since 2001, escaping the troubles which, he says, still go on even if the world is no longer looking

From there it was easy leap to world politics and from there to the evils of US imperialism.

And in connection with that I was researching Venezuela this morning (by which I mean skimming the wikipedia entry)- and its history is lamentable- a chronicle ofcolonisation, wars, coups, revolutions, corruption. The name of the country means Little Venice- and the story goes that Amerigo Vespucci came up with it after visiting a lake village built on stilts....

strange_complex

I know I don't post much here any more, but here at least is a list of all the books I read in 2025:

1. David Bramwell (2023), The Sing-Along-a-Wicker-Man Scrapbook
2. Peter Haining, ed. (1974) Christopher Lee's New Chamber of Horrors, hard-back edition
3. P. N. Elrod, ed. (2001) Dracula in London
4. Stephenie Meyer (2005), Twilight
5. Anne Rice (1976), Interview with the Vampire
6. Jane Austen (1817), Northanger Abbey
7. Essie Fox (2025), Dangerous
8. Oscar de Muriel (2017), A Mask of Shadows
9. Robert Simpson (2021), The Willing Fool: the spectacle of The Wicker Man
10. Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer (1978), The Wicker Man (novelisation of the film)
11. Alden McWilliams, Otto Binder and Craig Tennis (1975), The Illustrated Dracula
12. Francis K. Young (2023) Shades of Rome: Ghostly Tales of Roman Britain
13. Anthony Williams and Bram Stoker (2023), Dracula (pop-up book)
14. Ann Radcliffe (1794), The Mysteries of Udolpho

( Pictures of and fuller comments on each can be found under this cut )

Passacaglia and Fugue

previously The Titfield Thunderbolt

Clown-footed

Picture Diary 115

Strange Days

Prophecy

How They Spoke

Coughing

Ancestor Worship

My People

Goretti

Feeling A Little Better

Staying Home

Everything Is Connected But The Links Between These Three Items Aren't Obvious

Watching Light Change

One Thing Leading To Another

Books read 2025

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January 2026

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