the-snug

Happy 256th to WAM

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:03:18 +0100

Happy 256th birthday to that great billiards player, imbiber, letter-writer, ladies' man and (oh yes) pretty good composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, known as WAM to his friends and admirers. I've been tending to ignore this blog, and to let commemorative occasions pass uncommemorated, but Mozart has given me so much pleasure, and will continue to do so to the end of my days--and will do so to generations yet unborn--that I had to say "Herzlichen Gluckwuensch, Maestro."

Drink and Time in Old England

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:59:07 +0100

Of all the drinking cultures I'm familiar with, and they are legion, England's is the booziest, not in the sense of actual amounts consumed but as a cultural phenomenon, one that celebrates intoxication, one--as an article in a recent issue of The Economist points out--refined and exalted by the upper, not working, classes. "Do you drink?" Jennie Jerome's American father asked her upper-class English suitor, Lord Randolph Churchill. "Of course I drink, man," snapped Lord Randolph. "I'm a gentleman." From The Economist: "Outside London, ritualized heavy drinking arrived not just in pamphlet form but also in the shape of returning sons as men of influence. One story . . . involves a cleric and two lawyers in Yorkshire. Sitting in an alehouse, the trio 'began to be merry' in a manner that started with a faux-Latin competition and ended with the cleric's penis hanging out of his trousers while one of the lawyers burned it with his pipe." Ouch. What drunken semblance-of-rational-though provoked that, I wonder? An urge for mortification of the flesh? Sudden self-disgust? Conflict between church and state? Any of the foregoing will do, washed down with several pints of Yorkshire's best.

MacNeice's Dublin (and mine)

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:07:20 +0100

Dublin

 Grey brick upon brick,
 Declamatory bronze
 On sombre pedestals -
 O'Connell, Grattan, Moore -
 And the brewery tugs and the swans
 On the balustraded stream
 And the bare bones of a fanlight
 Over a hungry door
 And the air soft on the cheek
 And porter running from the taps
 With a head of yellow cream
 And Nelson on his pillar
 Watching his world collapse.

 This never was my town,
 I was not born or bred
 Nor schooled here and she will not
 Have me alive or dead
 But yet she holds my mind
 With her seedy elegance,
 With her gentle veils of rain
 And all her ghosts that walk
 And all that hide behind
 Her Georgian facades -
 The catcalls and the pain,
 The glamour of her squalor,
 The bravado of her talk.

 The lights jig in the river
 With a concertina movement
 And the sun comes up in the morning
 Like barley-sugar on the water
 And the mist on the Wicklow hills
 Is close, as close
 As the peasantry were to the landlord,
 As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
 As the killer is close one moment
 To the man he kills,
 Or as the moment itself
 Is close to the next moment.

 She is not an Irish town
 And she is not English,
 Historic with guns and vermin
 And the cold renown
 Of a fragment of Church latin,
 Of an oratorical phrase.
 But oh the days are soft,
 Soft enough to forget
 The lesson better learnt,
 The bullet on the wet
 Streets, the crooked deal,
 The steel behind the laugh,
 The Four Courts burnt.

 Fort of the Dane,
 Garrison of the Saxon,
 Augustan capital
 Of a Gaelic nation,
 Appropriating all
 The alien brought,
 You give me time for thought
 And by a juggler's trick
 You poise the toppling hour -
 O greyness run to flower,
 Grey stone, grey water,
 And brick upon grey brick.

-- Louis MacNeice

Fröhliche Weihnachten

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:16:50 +0100

Glædelig Jul
Joyeux Noel
Buon Natale
Feliz Navidad
Boze Narodzenie
Srozhdestvom Kristovym
All of which is to say:
MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:51:31 +0100

Few public figures felt as necessary to me as Hitchens. The acidity and eloquence of his writing was a constant stimulus to thought, frequently agreement, sometimes opposition, but never indifference. He gloriously embodied the Burkean ideal of a man of principle capable of following his own judgment, regardless of the opprobrium he called down on himself from those he offended. He had a sharp, very English sense of irony, as well as a bawdy (and equally English) sense of humor, both of which enlivened his already lively writings. He was as accomplished with a well-wrought insult, or a memorable quip, as his countrymen Wilkes and Churchill. He was a patriot of two countries--for, despite acquiring U.S. citizenship, he never ceased to love England--and a believer in real freedom and democracy, not the ideological versions thereof. He was a civilized man, and I for one will miss him.

Thoughts For The Day

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:17:17 +0100

I happened to be driving behind a Mercedes bearing the license plate "WW2 Veteran" the other day; it occurred to me that it might be the last such license plate I ever see. At the wheel was the veteran in question.He had to be at least 84, if he was 18 in 1945 (he was driving perfectly well, incidentally). When I was born, he would have been 24 or so, one veteran among tens of millions, many of whom were back in uniform, in Korea. Now, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates there are fewer than 2 million WW2 vets still alive, and 850 die every day. Soon they'll all be gone. And yet, how time plays trick on us. It was all only yesterday, really. I'm reminded that my mother remembered seeing Civil War veterans in an Armistice Day parade, back in the '30s, when my octogenarian Mercedes driver would have been a toddler. And those veterans of Shiloh and Gettysburg, in turn, could well have caught a glimpse, back in the day, of aging Revolutionary War veterans, whose fathers fought in the French and Indian wars. Keep on going back and soon veterans of the Third Punic War will come tottering out of the mist....All of history is yesterday. But today is December 7th. Remember.

11/22/63

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:25:43 +0100

And so November's doleful anniversaries continue, this one 48 years to the day since that terrible day in Dallas.

C'est la Vie

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:33:36 +0100

I've been reading a lot of Julian Barnes, this year's Man Booker winner, as research for an essay on his work. I enjoy most of Barnes's ironic asides and dry witticisms, but this one stuck out:

"Have I told you my Theory of Life, by the way? Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient dispatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map."

Julian Barnes, Talking It Over

11/11/11

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:22:29 +0100

It's Armistice Day, or Veterans Day if you prefer, and time for a bit of schmaltz.

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place;wait and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead, short days ago,

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands, we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields!|

By the way, it's also 11/11/11, an event that occurs once a century. Last time it happened, November 11th had no significance at all, with WWI still three years in the future. I wonder what's three years in our future. WWIII? Well, with any luck we'll find out in three years' time. As you were, Corporal.

November 9

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:29:52 +0100

A date that lives in infamy, at least in German history. In 1918, it was on November 9th that the (Weimar) Republic was proclaimed, fueling subsequent barmy ravings by the Nazis about being "stabbed in the back," etc. Such ravings were heard on November 9, 1923, when Hitler staged his failed Beer-Hall Putsch. Then, 15 years on, ostensibly in response to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, savagery broke out all over Germany on November 9, 1938, resulting in the dreadful Kristallnacht (above), after which no one could have any doubts about the intentions of the Third Reich leadership toward the Jewish population. Fifty-one years later, in 1989, came another significant, and much happier, November 9, when the Berlin Wall came down. Because of the resonance of the date, however, this event is commemorated on German Unity Day, October 3.

Another November 9 to remember is better known in the French Revolutionary calendar as the 18 Brumaire, when Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Directoire and set up the Consulate with himself as First Consul. This would have repercussions in Germany, as well, what with the invasions of the Imperial French Army and the establishment of the Confederation of the Rhine, wherein the principles of the Napoleonic Code were enshrined, very likely the first civilized legal code ever seen on the banks of the Rhine. But the old Bonapartist in me is showing.