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There’s no need for a traditional POETS Day this week. “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” doesn’t really resonate when so many have a long Thanksgiving weekend anyway. Maybe “Pig Out, Enjoy Tryptophan Slumber?” I’m phoning this one in myself. I’ve got potatoes dauphinoise (Not potatoes Lyonnaise!) to make and since no one else eats or […]

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Happy POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work as early as you can and steal a few hours of a weekend that’s never long enough to begin with. Next week’s taken care of because of Pilgrims. Happy Thanksgiving long weekend to come, by the way. This Friday can be a half […]

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War in the Western Mediterranean, 1794

 

Philippe Kermorvant is an officer of the Marine Nationale, the navy of Revolutionary France. He is an aristocrat but a French patriot first. Captured by the British, he refuses parole, making a daring escape from a prison hulk to return to France.

“Tyranny’s Bloody Standard,” a historical novel by J. D. Davies, follows what happens next. Waiting follows Kermorvant’s return to France, as he haunts the Ministry of Marine for a new assignment.

Despite support for the Revolution and his escape and return to France, the Reign of Terror is underway. All aristocrats are under suspicion. He is finally given command of a frigate, but in the Mediterranean fleet in Toulon rather than his desired posting in Brest. France is rebuilding its Mediterranean fleet after the British occupation of Toulon, and it needs experienced officers there.

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I went a little long on the poem this week, so I’m shirking the POETS Day intro. I suppose I could claim that I’m taking a POETS Day myself even though I’m writing on a Thursday so it would technically be a POETF Day. I’m not going to dwell on it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s […]

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All of us above a certain age – perhaps a very high certain age – know the connection between the word “discotheque” and discs of some sort. On the other hand, there is no English word “ephemerotheque” and if there were, even a smart and old guy like me would be challenged to guess what […]

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Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in the weekend, Henry Ford’s greatest creation, a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that […]

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I started watching True Detective on Max a few weeks ago. I remember reading about the show when it came out in 2014. It was supposed to have all manner of Easter eggs from supernatural horror works. One article made a big deal about references to The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers so I bought that book as […]

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Baseball is over for the year. They’re still playing games, but don’t let that fool you. In a particularly cruel twist of plot the Orioles went down in three straight after coaxing long suffering fans into a state of disarmed expectation. Was it better than the old days where we would enjoy a few games […]

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I am already planning another lusophonic trip, but probably not halfway around the planet. Probably not much farther than Belém do Pará, which is itself only a six-hour flight from Fort Lauderdale. Plus I love saying “Belém do Pará.” More than do Brazilians themselves, who customarily leave off the name of the state of which […]

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Disco Monster Hunting

 

Chloe Mendoza hunts monsters for a living. She is one, too, a nagualli – a creature of pre-Columbian Central American myth. When she lets her inner monster loose, on direct orders from her superior, the results force her to leave Israel and the monster-hunting team she was a member of.

“Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever,” by Larry Correia and Jason Cordova opens a new branch of Correia’s Monster Hunter series. It is a retrospective novel, set in the 1970s using characters mostly gone from MHI by the time Owen Pitt appears in the mainstream MHI novels.  Chloe Mendoza is the story’s narrator and central character.

She appears to be in her early 20s, but is a World War II veteran of the OSS. Nagualli age slowly. Having liberated Nazi death camps, when it ended, she moved to Israel afterwards. An incident in the Egyptian desert leads to exile. Her World War II heroics gained her a PUFF exemption, which keeps her from being hunted down as a monster.

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When you’re with me, the theorizing just never lets up! Here’s my latest: if a movie is ever made of a Louis Auchincloss story, Mr. T won’t be in it. Or: there will be no part in it playable by Mr. T. I think Mr. A himself would appreciate the lawyerly distinction. I’m not sure […]

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It’s POETS Day. That may be hard to remember with all the pretender days clamoring for your attention. It’s Garlic Lover’s Day today. That gets my attention. American Libraries Day too. Ecological Debt Day certainly gets my attention. The people I’m picturing “celebrating” that one don’t look like the people who would share public space […]

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Not everybody’s taking a POETS Day this week. Senator Bob Menendez ([REDACTED]-NJ) was charged last Friday with “corruption-related charges for the second time in ten years.” This time’s better. There are gold bars. Cash was stuffed in closeted pockets of “Senator Menendez” embroidered jackets. Nothing this gloriously cinematic/made-for-tv has been reported since Tammy Faye Bakker […]

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Quote of the Day: ‘As Imperceptibly as Grief, The Summer Lapsed Away’

 

The quote is from an Emily Dickinson poem, and I have been meditating on it for a while now.  Let me share my thoughts.  Like most of Dickinson’s poems, this poem is untitled.  The poems were posthumously numbered when published in the scholarly collection by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955.  Dickinson knew nothing of the numbering.

My Johnson edition reaches 1,775 poems, an incredible opus, all but ten unpublished in Dickenson’s lifetime.  If you are not familiar with Dickinson’s biography, you can read the Wikipedia entry.  In summary, she was a reclusive woman, unmarried, living in Amherst, MA, writing poetry all of her life and saving them in boxes with few people even aware of them.  Like all her untitled poems, which I believe were almost all, the opening line usually serves as the poem’s title.  “As Imperceptibly as Grief” is number 1540, written in 1865 when Emily was about 35 years old.  The numbering does not reflect a chronological ordering.  Here is the poem.

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It’s tempting to try and grab a game on one of these last few Fridays left in the baseball season, but my advice is to hold on to that escape excuse. Put it in your back pocket and save it for the playoffs, especially if you’re a Baltimore fan. We don’t get to say “Orioles” […]

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Book Review: The Iron Heel

 

As book reviews go, this one may seem strange and incomplete. That result might be appropriate, since that was how I responded to the book myself. @philo suggested the book The Iron Heel by Jack London after I had somewhat recovered from reading 1984 and Animal Farm. (I don’t recommend reading dystopian novels too close together in time; you’ll be depressed for days.) But I was intrigued by this book’s premise and couldn’t resist reading it. How much worse could it be than 1984?

For a little background, Jack London was a devout socialist in the early 1900s, and here is what one reviewer said about his book:

The Iron Heel describes the build-up to revolution in the USA and the ruling class’s vicious response to crush it in blood. Its central fictional device is a memoir, the Everhard Manuscript, by Avis, a professor’s daughter who marries The Iron Heel’s key character, the socialist leader Ernest Everhard. In the world of the book, her manuscript (which covers the years 1912 to 1932) was hidden and found centuries later. By way of footnotes, inserted after her manuscript is discovered, London makes clear that socialism eventually triumphed – some three hundred years later.

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I have COVID again. This is the third year this has happened. By now I should be like James Matthew Wilson’s ill in “On Being Ill”, “marking down its savor / With such alacrity for shades of difference / That no one else can see or listen to.” This is the first time I’ve had symptoms though, […]

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Quote of the Day: Should We Trust Anyone Under 30?

 

I’m a bad poster.  I’m not going back to look up the Twitter post that inspired this.  I saw an interviewer on a college campus asking, “What are the biggest problems we face as a people?” And the two most popular answers were “sexism” and “racism.”  And when asked how we could solve these problems, the student respondents had no idea.  I didn’t want to risk watching the video again, let alone link to it.

So many of the worries of the young these days are just absurd. There were some who also said “Climate Change,” but fortunately none of them said “Equity.” To say that “sexism” and “racism” are the greatest problems shows such a breathtaking lack of knowledge about history, economics, and the current condition of the nation and the world… It’s all very, very sad.

As the principal says to Adam Sandler in Billy Madison, “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.” But that’s not my quote of the day.

You’ll Stick with ‘The Landing’

 

Dr. Raj Mondal works for the Landing’s Genetic Hygiene Board. He sentences people to death. He does not see it that way. He sees his job as making the genetic classification system fairer. He counsels those carrying an excess error load (EEL) of genetic flaws to register.

“Charis Colony: The Landing,” a science fiction novel by John David Martin, opens in The Landing, a city on Charis Colony, a planet settled by Earth. The colony ship has been destroyed, they have lost contact with Earth, but the colony still exists over two hundred years after arrival.

Raj Mondal descended from the colony’s leaders, and benefits from the system at the Landing. A socialistic society, it receives from each according to their abilities and provides for each according to their genetic status. An atheistic society, the only god is the state. Things start going sideways for Mondal after he counsels Vindaran Singh that, as an EEL, Singh has to register for harvesting.