08 January 2026
The murder in Minneapolis is ICE doing what Hitler’s Brownshirts did. Terrorise the general population into compliance with the dictator’s agenda. Miller, btw, is Hitler - Trump is just a useful fool.
Picture of the Week
The Turner watercolours are back at the National Gallery of Ireland after last year’s hiatus. Start the year off positively by checking them out while you can, and while there visit (or revisit) the wonderful Picasso exhibition - it ends 22 February.
The Moronic Inferno
A bleak analysis of the current state of the Disunited States on Facebook by Chris Hedges, the former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner. Here’s an extract (the entire piece can be accessed via the link below):
“The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.
Our democratic institutions are moribund. They are unable or unwilling to restrain our ruling gangster class. The lobby-infested Congress is a useless appendage. It surrendered its Constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass legislation, long ago. It sent a paltry 38 bills to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law last year. Most were “disapproval” resolutions rolling back regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump governs by imperial decree through Executive Orders. The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is an echo chamber for the crimes of state, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, and the pillage by the billionaire class. Our money-saturated elections are a burlesque.”
https://www.facebook.com/photo.phpfbid=1280328737463639&set=a.469499815213206&type=3
Musical Interlude
Oil Rigs at Night by the Delines resonates for me in many ways. It brings me back to my post-university sojourn on the rigs. Working as a roughneck at locations all over the world for more than three years. I remember one memorable spell in Spain off the Costa Blanca where we could see the lights of Alicante and Benidorm as we endured our 12-hour shifts. We were kept going by the prospects of the revels we would enjoy when we got ashore for our week off. The Delines visit Dublin regularly and I’m a sucker for their haunting country blues and the blue-collar authenticity of the their song-writing. Willy Vlautin, their guitarist and song-writer, is also an accomplished novelist. And Amy Boone supplies the haunting vocals.
A Book at Bedtime
I finally got to the end of Helen Warner’s How to End a Story - Collected Diaries. It remained compelling throughout its 800 pages. We follow her creative struggles, her love travails, her occasional spiritual episodes, her musical passions, and the humdrum of her daily life (she was a keen swimmer). One quibble would be the very many dreams she recounts in detail. With the honourable exception of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I find other people’s dreams uninteresting - and no reasonable person should bore you with them. A recurring subject throughout the entire book was the ebb and flow of her relationship with V (who we know to be the Australian writer Murray Bail). It starts with her being the other woman to the married writer. Then she eventually marries him and a period of fitful domestic harmony follows. Then she discovers the bould V is seeing another woman (an acquaintance of hers), and as the book ends she has ditched him. Absorbing stuff as the betrayal dawns on her through various clues.
A Morsel of Memoir
When we arrived in the Campfield in the late Fifties, the house next door was occupied by the P. family– two sporty sons and a daughter. This family triggered what were to become my two teenage obsessions: girls and tennis. One of the boys gave me a present of one of his old racquets which got me playing. I quickly developed a talent for the game and spent hours every day practising alone or with anyone I could find. There were 8 tennis courts (6 grass and 2 clay) just across the road from our house in the Campfield. I was beating adult players and playing in senior tournaments while still in my early teens. S. the girl next door, was about 19, way beyond my reach, but I was smitten. She was slim and leggy with dark brown curly hair. An enigmatic smile added to her allure - as if she knew things we didn’t. She was very pretty with a resemblance to the actress Jean Simmons who has fashionable at the time. I ’m not sure we exchanged more that a few words ever – but every time she played tennis I would dutifully turn up at the back of the court to watch. Thanks to her I made the useful discovery that watching tennis matches was an ostensibly innocent way of ogling girls - an activity most adolescent boys had to carry out covertly. And my tennis education also benefited. Our tennis club (Collins LTC) had a very strong ladies team. The apotheosis of this phase as a young voyeur came when I was appointed ball boy in my mid-teens for an international tennis match between Ireland and England at Sunday’s Well Tennis Club. There I was licensed to perch on one knee and admire the golden girls of that era from close up. Eleanor O’Neill was one I remember particularly fondly.
Poetry Corner
We can never get enough of Shakespeare and I’d be tempted to place one of his sonnets in this slot every week. However, how about Prospero’s perfect, elegiac speech from The Tempest for a start.
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (IV.i.148–158)”
Not a bad funeral piece either. And we hope of course that in that sleep of death no dreams might come.