Blog is up again

Apologies to my readers. It was not a good summer and I was ill and uncommunicative.

Also it seemed the Blog needed re-thinking.

It is now more a journal of what goes through my mind that I think might be of interest to others.

IRELAND & THE TROUBLES

I re-read as I read, a lot. Last week five novels by William Trevor, who is by a long shot the best living writer in English. Fools of Fortune which alas I will finish today, made me reflect the Great War, the Spanish Civil War in the mid-‘Thirties, and the more recent dismemberment of Yugoslavia are cut of the same cloth. They can’t be extirpated from Irish, Spanish or Serb memories; injustices, follies, were committed during these events and there will forever be family connections to those acts and crimes. They will all have lost something valuable.

The big totalitarianisms of the past century, in contrast, were vast, impenetrable and anonymous. It was talk one heard, or other peoples’ memories. The fouler for that, but not so personal.

OF BURMA

My memory was jogged by hearing of the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. An old friends from my Sunday Times days, Mihir Bose, had made me read a little twentieth century Burmese history, in which his father – mysteriously killed in a plane flying to Japan – played a part. If I remember rightly, this fetching lady’s father was the head of Burma’s communist party, which thought it better to collaborate with the Japanese invader than submit to British rule.

The lady cannot, then, be said to spring full-blown from. Jove’s brow. There, too, there is a family history.

It is curious that in moments of euphoria, democracy and whatnot, all sense of history is lost. Does anyone remember anything?

FROM SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS

Now there is to be a Library (or something) Prize for homosexual literature for the young. Will it be literature, which is just that, with no adjective preceding it?

WHY FOOLS RUSH AND THE SMART WAVER

It took some time to get the actual words our President used in the press conference after the recent election. Here is the gist of what interested me:


“There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

“When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. Those letters that I read every night, some of them just break my heart. But nobody is filming me reading those letters. And so it’s hard, I think, for people to get a sense of, well, how is he taking in all this information?”

A President who can both think and feel can’t be all bad. I’ve known presidents and nabobs and big shots, and there’s a part of most people that wants power. But ultimately my observation is in accord with Lord Acton’s. Exercising power over others will kill you. You live by it, you die by it. It is the biggest bubble there is: when no one’s left who dares say, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Power deletes thought in those around you.

I thought it was a pretty remarkable thing to say to the nation.