3 July 2025
The Israel/USA genocide in Gaza continues as the world looks on. No effective boycotts or embargoes, just pious bleating by EU leaders. Starmer pursues musicians who dare to mention the slaughter.
Picture of the Week
Apocalypse by Karl Weschke - for the times that are in it. This year is the centenary of the German-born artist who settled in Cornwall after being released as a prisoner of war. An exhibition of his dark, unsettling work continues at Hillsboro Fine Art in Parnell Square until the 26th July.
Sporting Highlights of the Week
The gritty win in the Irish Derby by Lambourn, a contrast to his runaway success in the Epsom Derby but evidence of the right stuff. Trained inevitably by Aidan O’Brien for whom it is an astonishing 17th winner in this most prestigious of Irish flat races.
And what a flying start by the Lions in Australia. That first try featuring Fin Russell’s pin-point cross-kick, Dan Sheehan’s palmed deflection to Lowe, and Lowe’s reverse pass back to Sheehan was pure poetry. More please.
Previous Bedtime Reading
Ellman’s Joyce by Zachary Leader is a book of two halves. The first half details Ellman’s rise to academic success - hard work, zealous networking and an amiable manner proved a winning combination. His personality was described as “emollient” by Leader. The second half focuses on Ellman’s wide-ranging research interviewing people who knew Joyce and tracking down letters and other written sources. He was beyond methodical but did exercise modesty control over some of Joyce’s more outré sexual predilections in the resultant publication. The main criticism of the Joyce biography when it appeared seemed to be Ellman’s marrying of fact and the fiction of Portrait of the Artist - often attributing to Joyce the experiences of Stephen Dedalus. Also, his omission of any detailed analysis of Finnegans Wake was questioned - a work disliked (with reasonable cause) by many contemporary critics. You’d probably want to be a Joyce enthusiast to enjoy this fully - but as a study of the biographer’s art it’s also interesting.
Current Bedtime Reading
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. I’ve enjoyed everything that Barry has written back to his first novel City of Bohane, and am already loving this.
A Musical Interlude
To Live is to Fly by Townes Van Zandt
Notes from the Trenches
Another astute piece by Fintan O’Toole in the July 24 edition of the New York Review of Book. Here’s a taste:
Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.
In late May 2020, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump held a meeting of his advisers in the Oval Office. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril (2021), Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s most extreme anti-immigrant policies, advised: “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”
Citing the daily Domestic Unrest National Overview produced for him by his staff, Milley told the commander-in-chief, “They used spray paint, Mr. President. That’s not insurrection.” He pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln: “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley insisted that the BLM protests were “not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.” Along with other real soldiers, Milley was able to resist Trump’s demand that the 82nd Airborne Division be sent to Washington. But that was then. Now there is no one in the Oval Office to tell Miller to shut the fuck up or to explain to Trump what an insurrection is.
Artists’ Archive
Poetry Corner
In 1969 at my first lecture studying English at UCC the late and lamented Professor Sean Lucy swept into the hall in his flowing gown and without a word of introduction declaimed, with theatrical panache, this poem by A. E. Housman - On Wenlock Edge (extracted from the Shropshire Lad collection of 63 poems by Housman).
On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
FINIS
Dalkey, 3 July 2025