Critic Cal

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Sunk in these thoughts, my hapless self despising, I turn for balm to Sonnet Twenty Nine But two-thirds down, I feel my rancour rising... The Bard recants his woe, and says he's fine! Well, thanks a million, Will: my misery Was reckoning on yours for company.  ( Shakes et Cal. And I do apologise... ) So, feeling low, and low on fellow human low feeling, and betrayed thus by the Bard,  Pessoa  beckons -- as companion to my own disquiet I find him quite disquietingly meet: "I question myself but do not know myself. I've done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. The part of my lif

A well-proportioned naked woman kneels at the edge of a raised open-air platform. Sombrely, she contemplates a scattering of onlookers reclined on picnic blankets, whilst two young girls arrayed as cherubs shroud her head with a transpicuous white veil. The girls depart; the woman rises slowly -- to display some rather unexpected (ahem) 'lady topiary' picturing, in vivid red, the communist insignia. Standing tall -- sinews stiffened, blood summoned, terrible aspect duly lent unto her eye -- she forms her full-lipped lipsticked mouth beneath the veil and fills her lungs and issues forth a fervid bellow: "io non ti amo!" She turns, and strikes the posture of an athlete at the blocks. A pause, to let her audience appreciate the moment of the moment. Then, she sprints: with unconstrained determination down the full length of the platform -- which, it happens, has been given the appearance of a road and ends abruptly with a wall -- and it is at this wall the woman ends her