You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2009.
Last weekend Mr. P, sans Mrs. P was in St. Louis. Therefore and whatnot I got a call and, needless to say, plans were laid for serious debauchery on a global scale. Howevah, there was another call placed that day, one without the sound of champagne chilling in the background, I might add…This short, quiet and altogether soul-destroying call between the Countess and Mrs. P put paid to all our plans.
Needless to say we still went out and about the town last weekend, but it was done under the baleful gaze of our personal Sauron, the Countess. She covered us like a free safety whose contract is up for renewal. Dinner Friday night at Mike Shannon’s downtown where Mr. P’s strange airs and stranger accent caused him to be suspected of being from Chicago, or worse, a Cubs fan, and we barely got into the joint. As it was they seated us near the kitchen just in case. And despite our “sentry on a hill”, there was a somewhat bewildering, long running argument concerning the proper color of a Manhattan, in which most of the restaurant staff and a few bystanders were also involved…I’m not quite sure what the answer was in the end, we were too busy drinking Manhattans to care.
Saturday night, after Mass, which we will not go into, except to point out that I did demonstrate to Mr. P the proper way of avoiding hugging, hand shaking, Mayfair kissing and other kum-bah-yah nonsense while attending the illicit Norvus Ordo community meeting. Mr. P did body block my attempt at tripping the liturgical dancer, (I was that close) and I’ll probably never forgive him for that. Spoil-sport. Anyway, our original plan was for a Japanese bath house, which became a Japanese Ginsu knife restaurant after the Countess Hays Code was finished adjusting our itinerary along more family friendly lines. We did accomplish some deft prank phone calls from our table, with the help of the Baron, to Mrs. P (which turned out to be one of the little Ps). I’m sure she’s scared for life. Just like my shirt which the Baron so liberally sprinkled with soy sauce when he mistook my arm for a plate of chop suey. The brute. Family friendly indeed.
We did get Mr. P back to the airport on time, somewhat a little worse for wear, but with a Countess Seal of Approval for a no sex, drugs, public drunkenness or violence weekend. Damn the luck!
Anyway, I guess Mr. P had a good time. I haven’t heard from him yet, but he’s probably still sleeping…I have heard from Mrs. P, but it’s probably best not to go into that here…
“…Why does anybody, other than thugs, policemen and employees of fast-food establishments that insist upon them as part of a uniform, wear a baseball cap? Even old people in increasing numbers now sport them. Is it some kind of perverse desire to look stupid, a form of auto-humiliation? Is it an attempt to persuade other people that they are humble folk who think that they are no better than anyone else?…”
“…Puritans lack this sense of measured and temperate appetite. When sexual taboos were lifted, therefore, they found no further reason to refrain from indulgence. Since no virtue was at risk in our sexual transgressions, these ceased overnight to be transgressions. Thereafter, no proof of the damage done to children by premature experiment, no proof of the moral and medical chaos of uninhibited sexuality, could be heard. Puritanism turned an absolute no into an absolute yes. And it looked around for other pleasures that it could forbid, not because God was offended by them but because they offended the thing that had replaced God in the Puritan conscience — namely the Self. Any pleasure harmful to the self must now be subject to the same absolute condemnation as had been directed against the pleasures of sex. Hence the hysterical campaign against smoking, which has not taken the form of advising against something harmful, but the far more alarming form of condemning that thing as a sin. You can portray young people on the screen as engaging in sexual orgies, beating each other up, swearing and exhibiting every kind of nastiness. But you must never show a young person with a cigarette in his hand, since that will be condoning and encouraging sin. Portraits of famous smokers like Brunel, Churchill and Sartre have been doctored by the Ministry of Truth in order to remove the offensive item from between their fingers, and side by side with the poster on the school notice board that advises 12-year-olds on safe sex and free abortion, is the absolutist edict saying that thou shalt not smoke…”
Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility.
In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon’s subsequent conversion to Catholicism.
From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont’s definitive biography.
“…We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.
I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?…”
