Critic Cal

No one enters suit justly;       no one goes to law honestly; they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies,       they conceive mischief and give birth to iniquity. They hatch adders' eggs;       they weave the spider's web; he who eats their eggs dies,       and from one that is crushed a viper is hatched. Their webs will not serve as clothing;       men will not cover themselves with what they make. Their works are works of iniquity,       and deeds of violence are in their hands. Their feet run to evil,       and they are swift to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity;       desolation and destruction are in their highways. The way of peace they do not know,       and there is no...

I am endlessly intrigued by allusion to Jesus in literature. Intentional or inci-/accidental, affirmatory or critical – it all expands on the conversation; all highlights and reinforces the permeation of his shaping presence in reality. There's lots of examples to choose from. Writers, it seems, are themselves endlessly intrigued by him – at least, within the largely Western, recent centuries' traditions that encompass most of my reading choices. It's the subtle instances that most delight me, like the following scene in the pleasingly quirky  White Noise  by Don DeLillo [1]... The family of college professor Jack Gladney – along the rest of their town and the inhabitants of the surrounding region – are displaced by an 'airborne toxic event'. They are temporarily housed in an abandoned scout camp. The place is rife with uncertainty; rumours of varying degrees of extremity proliferate; concrete information is scarce. Anyone boa...

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.  (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, c.1609)  Was ever arrogance so eloquent! He's basically saying, "Look, love, you're a bit of alright. And I can write, right? In fact, I'm a big-shot playwright. Will's words won't wilt, I'll warrant you. Some centuries' time this rhyme'll be a rite of educational passage for school kids up and down our Scepter'd Isle and where'er else our native tongue be known." Only, he's Shakespeare, so he's saying it in words so Shakespe hear ianly splendid as to render them self-fulfilling. (Well, four hundred years and counting, at least ... so far, so good). Many of Shakespeare's sonnets are pre-occupied with the idea of immortalisation through the written word. The fact that most are addressed to a man (scholars are unable to unambiguously conclude that the relationship was a romantic one but much o...

“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity — most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has bec...

There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one---something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in ...

"Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning." ( Joseph Heller ,  Catch-22 ,  from Chapter 8 'Lieutenant Scheisskopf ') Justice, injustice, and the aching arbitrariness of it all is a central theme of Catch-22 [1] -- summed up powerfully in Chapter 39, which finds the protagonist Yossarian (a WWII bombadier) wandering through the streets of Rome, hopeless and helpless in the face of human tragedy and suffering: The night was raw. A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash h...

Wimbledon is here. Wait, now... didn't Beckett's Lucky have something to say about tennis? Ordered to 'think', and supplied with his requisite hat, he spouts... “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast heaven to hell so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry […] waste and ...

"Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble… and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something." ( Samuel Beckett , from 'Molloy', 1951) [1] Days when 'only Thom Yorke understands' are likely to be punctuated by the odd trip to the ladies' room to shed a few self-pitying tears; days when 'only T.S. Eliot understands' are probably best spent working from home where I am less likely to make a nuisance of myself; days when 'only Beckett understands' I would perhaps ...