Out, Go Home. Please.

I made dinner but it didn’t go very well.  I thought the cabbage and mustard with the pork done a bit Chinese vinegar was OK.  But others weren’t so sure. My older one is a vegan.  I made her three separate dishes, but no, she doesn’t like pepper or mustard neither Brussels sprouts are something, she reminds me, she doesn’t enjoy either. 

Boris Johnson is off to intensive care.  I genuinely hope he is OK.  And though it is probably inappropriate, I am very glad to know, in comparison that our president is virus free.  We do not need a MAGA-martyr.  We do not need to have an airport and a new tunnel crossing named after this charlatan.  Serve out your term and when you’re voted out, go home.  Please. 

I’ve started a new book.  But only after finishing the unvarnished brutality of “The Shameful State” by Sony Labou Tansi.  It is not unlike his other work that I’d read “A Life and a Half.”  The language is like a detailed look at the righthand triptych of “the Garden of Earthly Delights. “  by Hieronymus Bosch where repulsive debauchery has asserted its normalcy.  The paintings of George Grosz and others from Weinmar Germany also come to mind or a jaunt with Virgil through the Inferno.   A loud, tortured call for sanity when everything has long since fallen apart.  Wretched. Sobering. 

And now “African Psycho, by Alain Mabanckou.  The writing is much sparser and more deliberately structured.  But the topic is no less raw and unpleasant.  Within the first few pages the young protagonist has announced his intention to kill one woman.  Shortly thereafter he rams out the eye of a boy who tried to rape him. 

Monday 4/06/20