Essays in Idleness

Reading Czeslaw Milosz through the afternoon; and now I realize I cannot set the “L with stroke” that would be necessary to spell his name correctly, or that of any other poet in Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Wymysorys, or some other language wherein a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative might be required. Worse, I cannot set verse properly, in any language, owing to my own high-tech ineptitude.

One can, however, reading through the Collected Milosz Poems, come to appreciate how many were written in Berkeley, California, where he settled into a perfessership after exiling himself from Stalinism. (Read: The Captive Mind.) A magnificent translator, too, back and forth through Polish and English, he has that poetic quality of translating himself, into his original, as he wanders.

Now, the reader must pretend this is typeset properly:

“You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime, / And kept a pack of fools around you” … continues as a sonnet until … “you’d have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.”

This from three-quarters of a century ago, about when he first landed in the United States, as the cultural attaché of a “People’s Republic.” He was also a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, whose life was saved from the Nazis by a nun, and various other crises of modernity, often parallel to Saint John Paul II. Their works yield many fine mottoes.

It is amusing to think that Milosz, and the father of Kamala Harris, were teaching at Berkeley about the same time — the one among the most learned and eloquent opponents of Communism; the other a moronic socialist activist. Indeed, Ms Harris was brought up in an academic household in Berkeley (and in Montreal), but has substituted working-class Oakland in the family tradition of lying. Her nature is revealed in her “joyous” cackle, … “bursting into laughter at the crime.”

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IN OTHER POLITICAL NEWS. — One of my most reliable correspondents informs me that Larry the Cat, about whom I wrote extensively (on July 13th, 2016), refused to be photographed with “Sir Keir” Starmer, the unlikeable current prime minister of England. He (Larry) would not participate in the latest cute publicity shot, for which he was called “a little shit” by the Scottish Secretary. (That was rich.) Too, Larry was slandered as “the most miserable animal you’ll ever meet,” and blamed for ten years of Labour defeats. But Larry despised Rishi Sunak, as well as Mr Starmer, and outpolls both with the British public.