Spike's first pear

It's like that advert against drugs ... Just Say No!

So today's Guardian has another of its doom-laden speculations about how everyone (except The Guardian) is underestimating the threat posed by Donald Trump.  Unless we waken up, it cautions readers, we shall enter January 2017 surprised to find President Trump staring down at us.

I disagree. I think his standing has - in part - been inflated by the very media circus that warns us of the fate worse than death to democracy Mr. Trump represents.  Mostly, of course, I think his effervescent rise tells us exactly what a rich megalomaniac can buy in the way of public opinion before real people start to cast real votes.  I'm betting, not just hoping, the Trump bubble bursts by the end of March.

I should know better than join in but the article annoyed me - the fact of it as much as its 'straw man' contents.  I wanted to stamp my feet and shout ... just stop it please!  Instead, despite my better judgement, I allowed Mr. Angry from Gilmore to leave comments 'below the line',  I wrote:

I know it's not in any way fashionable to make the following claim but I believe the underlying evidence of everything I've read indicates that Donald Trump's preposterous and distasteful tilt for the Presidency will be effectively over by March 2016 at the latest. His legacy - if that's not too polite a term to use - will have been to drag all the other Republican candidates to the right because they lacked the moral and political courage to stand up to the charlatan nincompoop posing as a politician. It's a depressing state of affairs but the good news is that not even the Republican Party will follow that megalomaniac over the cliff, never mind the rest of the American people.

Someone who goes by the login name of honey1969 responded;

Trump/Cruz 2016 

You can't stop the Trump Train!

And I wrote back:

The Trump train will be lucky if it makes it out of the station once real people start voting rather than answering pollsters' questions. Good luck to you if you support him but be prepared to watch the Trump Train Wreck.

Someone by the name JohnMappin added:

I know it is hard for the died in the wool left wing intellectuals who have been feeding from the mamaries of their own self created media delusion bubble for best part of a decade to grasp - but Trump is appealing across the spectrum to republicans and democrats alike Americans want to win and they see the standard politicians as losers. Trump is their one shot and like Eminem they are going to take it..

And I wrote back:

I believe that American voters - Republican and Democrat - see through that charlatan and when it comes to making real choices in Caucuses and Primaries they will vote for other candidates to flush Donald Trump down the toilet of political history. If he's the Eminem of 21st Century politics my name is Beyonce.

"Died in the wool"?  I resisted the temptation to be a pedant.

Now Douglas, have you got all that off your chest?  Good.  Then please Douglas, just stop it!

All our yesterdays ... or maybe some of them

What would we do without Facebook, now?  How did we survive without it before?  With our mobile phone cameras and a narcissistic attention to the trivial pursuits of an ordinary life, almost anything may now be preserved for posterity.  In this case, three years ago today, it rained in Canberra.

This morning a computer-generated message popped up on my Facebook feed.  "Douglas", the message read, "we care about you and the memories you share here.  We thought you'd like to look back on this post from 3 years ago." I wonder about the 'we' in that message. Who cares about me? My best friend, the Facebook algorythym. 

Suspended below the message was a photograph Spike took from the balcony of the odd little room we rented for nearly three months while we waited to find, then move into, permanent accommodation; the house we bought in Gilmore and now call home.  We were staying at the Capital Executive Apartment Hotel on Northbourne Avenue, North Canberra.  I was at the start of my twenty months with the National Disability Insurance Agency and we had moved out of the apartment in Ashfield but not yet found our 1980's brick bungalow on the city's southern fringe.  We were always amused by the sign outside the building offering the dubious attraction of the hotel's "Cuddle 'n' Bubble PACKAGE"  Did we miss one of life's opportunities by not paying the extra?  I think not.

It had been a painfully hot start to the year.  At times it was easier to stay put in that cramped space than venture outdoors.  But that afternoon the Heavens opened to give us brief respite.  The photograph does not do justice to the way the rain bounced off the road and pavement.  Next day, as I recall, the heat returned and my ordinary life continued ... but sadly unremarked by my friends at Facebook.

The drive home is nearly over

Say hello to my little friend ...

Not Scarface but Bento.

We are on a short trip to Sydney to meet up with friends over from Scotland, Barbara McKissack and Brian Smith.  After a delightful dinner at a Turkish restaurant, Efendy in Balmain, we returned to our apartment in Ashfield where Sharon lives with Angela.  It was our thirteen year old co-host who introduced us to Bento, one of two hermit crabs living in Angela's bedroom.  Until that moment I had never - not even my wildest dreams - imagined a crab might become a pet.  

And I want to be known as a writer?  With such a poor imagination?  I may be, I fear, tragically delusional.

Prometheus was not wrong

I'm going to start an online course next week, studying Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.  Before I do I thought I better acquaint myself with the great Romantic poet's inspirational source.  So, today, I read a version of Prometheus Bound taken from The Harvard Classics series with a translation by someone called Edward Haynes Plumptre (1821 - 1891).

Heracles freeing Prometheus from his torment by the eagle

We know the Titan was not wrong in what he foresaw.  Io accepted his vision of her future because he could recount her past correctly.  He knew where she had come from and could tell where she was going.  Prometheus could foresee the line of births that would lead from Io to Heracles and back, the circle completed, to the release of Prometheus from his chains.

So we know Prometheus was not wrong to reject the deal offered by Hermes. Recant and Zeus would set him free ... more accurately, release him from the shackles.  Continue to resist and Zeus would heap a "triple wave of ills" upon his head: buried alive in a ravine for an immeasurable age; exposed thereafter to the light so that the eagle of Zeus could feed each day on Prometheus's liver; finally cast into the dungeon Tartarus, lower even than the depth of Hades.

And Prometheus replied:

To me who knew it all
He hath this message borne;
And that a foe from foes
Should suffer is not strange.
Therefore on me be hurled
The sharp-edged wreath of fire;
And let heaven’s vault be stirred
With thunder and the blasts
Of fiercest winds; and earth
From its foundations strong,
E’en to its deepest roots,
Let storm-wind make to rock;
And let the ocean wave,
With wild and foaming surge,
Be heaped up to the paths
Where move the stars of heaven;
And to dark Tartaros
Let Him my carcase hurl,
With mighty blasts of force:
Yet me He shall not slay.

More short stories - back in the 18th Century

I read a couple of tales from Philip Hensher's anthology, both from the middle of the 18th Century.  Neither will make it into my list of all-time greats.  I'm not entirely persuaded they merit a place in a review of the British short story across 300 years of literary history.  Mr. Hensher concedes some of my reservations when he writes that,

"The first pieces in this anthology are not, in the modern sense, short stories  But they bear in a vital, animating way on the short story's historical development.  They are trying to distinguish themselves from the long form, and are drawing on a number of literary counter examples."

And I think ... maybe.  But Philip Hensher read many, many more short stories in preparing his anthology than I shall ever read (I suspect) so I'll take him at his word; accept his judgement.  That still doesn't make me any more enamoured of the second and third stories in his first volume, by Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding.

Jonathan Swift, by Charles Jervas

I'm not a fan of Jonathan Swift.  For reasons that surprise me I struggle a bit with satirical writing generally and with Swift in particular.  I'm not entirely sure why that is; something to do, perhaps, with the way it ages so very quickly. That and what I think of as a fine line between satire on the one hand and cynicism, condescension and even misanthropy on the other.  Jonathan Swift, I've long felt, tends towards all three of the latter.  

Gulliver's Travels has always struck me as a distasteful book and it's not a surprise that most attention has been given to the first two adventures (often in a form rendered safe for children).  By the time you encounter the Yahoos I think we're in thoroughly unsavoury territory, even for its time.

Reading Directions to the Footman didn't do anything to rehabilitate Swift in my mind.  Its condescending, nasty tone was never going to appeal to me.  He may be mocking some of the absurdities of the British class system in 18th Century England but he does so by laughing at the servant classes first and foremost.  Make up your own mind: you can read it here. 

Henry Fielding, etching by Jonathan Wild

Henry Fielding's story The Female Husband seems to me to have all kinds of story-telling problems; too many, I feel, to be contained within the twenty or so pages the tale takes.  Maybe Fielding could get away with it in his longer fiction.  I don't know because I've never read any of it.  Is that a shocking admission for a man with my pretensions to make?  Probably.  Now I suppose I shall have to read Tom Jones.  As unlikely a tale as The Female Husband may be, it turns out its origins lay in historical fact, which wiki sets out here.  Shows me how wrong I can be.