Noam Chomsky on Donald Trump:

"He's an ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac, but he's not an ideologue."  Which  is what I've been saying all along--except where Chomsky says "ignorant," I say "ignorant and vulgar."

A Dream-Story from long ago (maybe 1973)

In my dual character of Virgo Security Guard and Mercury Guide of Souls (Psychopompous), I was aboard the Orient Express, escorting the embalmed, coffined body of a murdered Archduke back to pre-World War I Vienna. For all the power of the huge pre-war locomotive and the funereal splendor of  his Highness's entourage, his final entombment--when at last, under cover of night, the train pulled to a stop, in just one  (seemingly the first at hand) among many obscure, empty, vaulted niches of the vast, gloomy cellar-prison such as might have been depicted by Piranesi, and which seemed to serve both as train station and mausoleum--was disconcertingly perfunctory, without any kind of ceremony. As the train rolled away behind us into the night, we former pall-bearers walked back along the tracks, shivering in the cold wind that seemed to blow from everywhere, shuffling in the  peculiar grainy grey-white dust that lay in sparse drifts on the stony ground, finding oddly placed little doors in the sides of the cavernous underground space that opened onto the  prosaïc, gemütlich corridors of luxurious pre-war Vienna hotels.

So I was at breakfast with my Girl Friday--the coffee was excellent, and the Kaiserschmarrn mit Kirschen exquisite--and reading (well, glancing through) the Wiener Zeitung:  Several stories about the disappearances lately, here in Old Vienna, of Famous Beauties.  Suddenly I had an idea--and I said to my lovely and vivacious young companion, "I think you need to visit the Beauty Salon of our grand hotel,  Get your nails, maybe your hair, done. Perhaps we shall buy you some feminine Beauty Products." And after breakfast I dropped her off at Chez Proserpine, and came back a couple of hours later to pick her up.  As we left the Salon, we stopped at the front counter where I gallantly paid for the beauty treatments that had been given her, and, just at the last, bought her a big oval-shaped cannister of the house-specialty face powder, called in fancy flowing script on the sides "Jeunesse Éternelle." And, right there at the counter, I pried the lid up and took a curious pinch of it between my thumb and forefinger--and I could not help exclaiming aloud, "Aha!  It is just as I thought!" For it was the same peculiar grey-white dust--bone dust!--that blew and drifted in the desolate emptiness of the archduke's tomb.

That evening my young companion and I hovered in the shadows across the street from Chez Proserpine while a magnificent Daimler came to a stop before the entrance, and an extraordinarily beautiful, fashionably (in the mode of 1913) dressed woman with hauntingly sad eyes descended from the motorcar and hurried inside, for her personal special beauty treatment:  An upper colonic irrigation with Aqua Regia.  We watched as the short-haired female attendant (no doubt Lady Proserpina herself), dressed more like a nurse than a beautician, locked the glass-panelled front door from the inside and pulled down the sign which said Closed.

And then we went away.  Once the mystery was solved, it had no further interest for me.  The sad fate of the Famous Beauties is, after all, just one among countless stories of ironic destiny that are told, and concluded,  in the Afterworld.

But the fact is, Obama's mama, while she lasted, was more of a Whore than a Bitch.

"Pute," that is to say, or "Putain," rather than "Salope."

What is the trick or knack that persuades people that something they've seen before and are tolerably familiar with, like controlled demolition, is, in fact, not what they're seeing?

It can only be some sort of acquired, willfully self-blinding horror of disbelieving those whom they feel obliged to believe--but how is it acquired?  From whom?  And what are its first, learned manifestations?  In this, if it did not stink of fraud and chicanery, one might be tempted to look for a profound mystery.  

Booing Gold Star Families

It's time we all realized that there is no honor in serving in the U.S. military.  Quite the reverse in fact.                 Any soldier serving in a country where U.S. troops ought not to be is ipso facto a war criminal.

Am I a Misogynist?

Let's just say that the last time I went to the library, along with Vingt-mille Lieux sous les Mers, which I've read a couple of times since I was ten years old, I checked out Le Tour du Monde en 89 Jours, neither the book nor the movie made from it I have been able to force myself to read or watch even once in my whole life--and on reading the Wikipedia review and synopsis I have found out why:  My Guardian Sylphs knew that when Phineas Fogg and his valet get to India they acquire Redundant  Female Baggage in the form of a Hindoo widow, with whom our chief protagonist falls in love, proposes marriage to, and who encumbers them throughout the rest of what has already become an insufferably long and tedious tale.  Say what you will about 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, there is no Redundant Female Baggage in it.  Or none that I recall.   

But Atheism?

In the first place, not believing in things that don't exist is no skin off anybody else's nose.  Forgive my saying so, but I'm not obliged to believe anything because someone else believes it.  Beyond that, I'm much more interested in morals and ethics than in religion.

The Reason that Bob Dylan is not all that thrilled to be getting the Nobel Peace Prize, and really can't be bothered to go all the way to Oslo--excuse me, Stockholm--to pick it up, is two-fold:

(1) He can't think of anything he did to earn it.

(2) Nothing he'd be sharing with Barrack Obama would be all that special.

Stupid Swedes, you little reckoned all that you'd be pissing on when you foresook your national honor.

Met my first live MtF Tranny in the library the day before yesterday--

No big deal.  He/she was checking out books, and I had books to check out.  We stuck to business. I hope the rest of his/her/its life goes as smoothly for him/her/it as our pleasant, brief, business-like encounter went.  

Holy Christ! It looks like Trump's going to win!

But really all I had wanted was for Clinton to lose.