 So, a sprint into foolishness... Having just finished George Saunders' wonderful new book (A Swim In a Pond In The Rain) on reading and writing, in which he repeatedly extols the importance of spending time with, and on, the re-write; and, being a long time admirer of Donald Hall's poignant late essays (Essays After Eighty & Carnival Of Losses) where he reveals that he sometimes changes a word between sixty and three hundred times, I am ignoring their advice: Letting something sail into the world because of the wind behind it, rather than a scrupulous and methodical check on whether it is a sea worthy vessel. Late last night, as an unexpected snowfall entered its final melting, I sat reading Luke Mogelson's troubling and telling essay The Storm (Among the Insurrectionists) in this week's New Yorker. This followed: In Him We Trust God must be sleeping or have died a while back, 'otherwise, ' she said 'he would have smite those motherfuckers' whose twisted mouths conspire to set fire to truth with their firsting dragon breath, their tattooed hands hurling history onto the pyre of stories that cause indigestion or inconvenience a roadblock on the pursuit to happiness "Stop the steal, beat the seal, to death we don’t like the colour of his pelt and how the hell did he sign the ballot paper anyway Af- af- af- af- af- af- after this we are the flippers. Stop the clocks, the count this is the end of the world as we know it" Lady Justice has her blindfold ripped from her face, her lips painted blue so that she can sing a proud boy’s anthem extinguished dreams have fallen from the mountain and there he is, god, sliding gleefully down its side having abandoned his angels to march with them Groyper, they call, slapping his stooped back and his big old white feet goose along with them to whose house? "Our House!" The fountain has poured its black liquid for so long that words are forming in its raging foam, parasite, parasitism gurgles and spills over its stoney lip, staining their green and pleasant land "Look what it’s done to our lawn, ma" Somewhere on the floor of a deserted building a shape with coyote fur, buffalo horns and the body of a man his wounded animal wrath seethes through megaphone “I will be he’rd. We will be he’rd.” He turns his woolly head in thanks to their heavenly father, slumped against a lectern slack jawed, breath wheezing from gaping mouth and a yellow plastic shard embedded in his cheek “We need more firepower” he barks © Simon Parker
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