The Dying Animal

Among the primary themes of serious modern literature is, of course, the suffering of educated middle-aged males who don't get laid as much or as well as their intellectual eminence deserves. For obvious reasons this philosophical genre resonates a good deal with professional literary critics, many of whom also happen to be educated middle-aged males and perhaps in a similar sexual position.

"Brief and brilliant" according to the then-ageing Frank Kermode, the then-ageing Philip Roth's The Dying Animal certainly seems about as brief as a 160-page monologue of geronto-priapic self-pity possibly could be. While hardly engaging, it is competently told, and documents the outrage of the ageing Professor David Kepesh who, having dedicated his life to self-liberation through erotic adventure, suffers a certain deflation when he becomes unavoidably conscious of his prisoning meat and the maggots that await it.

Kepesh's memento mori is a humiliating affair with his erstwhile student Consuela Castillo, scion of a proud breed of Cuban émigrés who swallowed the American delusion to the extent of sending the federal government cheques refunding their welfare payments. A literary pundit for whom culture is a tool of seduction and music a makeshift substitute for copulation, Kepesh is casually contemptuous of Castillo's intellect: "not the most brilliant girl in the world." Nevertheless, Castillo's main reason for hating Castro seems to be that he can't throw a New Year party the way Batista used to; which at least serves to demonstrate the cleanliness and purity of her animal instincts.

Sex for Kepesh is "the revenge on death," much as endothermic metabolism is the revenge on global weather systems, I suppose. Among the handful of secondary characters (a priggishly resentful son, an irritated one-scene fuckbuddy) is a poet friend who suffers a stroke and then gropes his wife on his death-bed, though alas "he never reached her pendulous breasts." The wife's subsequent epitaph, "I wonder who it is he thought I was," may be the book's best joke.

Kepesh himself has something of a mammary fixation (he previously appeared in Roth's oeuvre as the eponymous gland in The Breast), which may give the game away when Castillo develops breast cancer. Some years after their break-up, she gets back in touch with Kepesh and asks him to photograph her, thereby simultaneously validating his purely carnal appreciation of her and sharing in his dying animality. Perhaps Roth's shrewdness in keeping Castillo's character shallow enough for some to find this plausible constitutes the brilliance detected by Frank Kermode.

A slightly, if only slightly, more interesting reading is that Kepesh has not in fact heard from Castillo since they parted, and that he is deploying literature, or anyway narrative, as his revenge on all those young and healthy bits of meat who have left him to dust and decay. There is little evidence to support such an interpretation, but with a novelist brilliant enough to title one of his works The Great American Novel it would be imprudent to discount the possibility. In any case, even poor old Colin Wilson, who thought rumpy-pumpy some sort of gateway to godhood, was rarely as ridiculous as this.

Dyed-in-the-Fuel Nastiness

Even as the benefits of liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke obtrude themselves more clearly with every passing opportunity, the beastly Euro-wogs cannot forbear from revenging themselves upon our robust British prosperity. The European Court of Justice has fined the UK slightly less than the cost of a September mini-budget for infringing some petty rules on fuel in yachts. A ban on red diesel in pleasure craft was introduced in 2018, but the UK had lots of more important things to do during the subsequent two years than bother with mere laws, and argued that the rule is only valid in Northern Ireland, where EU rules still apply to the colony's copious endowment of private yachts. With typical legalistic vindictiveness, rather than accepting British sovereignty over international law the ECJ has decided to treat the United Kingdom as if it were a united kingdom. How far the gratuitous assault on vulnerable yacht-owners will affect the Orangemen's Regatta and other highlights of the maritime calendar remains as yet unclear.

Fantastic Incredibility of Democratic Multiculturality

Fishy Rishi has refrained from echoing his successor's Conservative Party leadership campaign speech which, following the Brexiteer tradition of fighting internal wars mainly by shouting at foreigners, she delivered to a far-right thick-tank in the United States. Distancing himself from the rule-breaking loose cannon whom he appointed through no fault of his own, Fishy Rishi praised the fantastic multicultural democracy which enables a squillionare-by-marriage to take on the job of prime minister with no mandate from the country and then rip up the manifesto on which his party attained its parliamentary majority. Fishy Rishi countered his successor's criticism of those too cowardly to be thought racist with the boast that he and his fellow genuine citizens have done an incredible job integrating people into the monolithic value system of entrepreneurial gumption that is the true glory of Britishness. Doubtless Fishy Rishi's patriotic sentiments are shared, with all due moderation of sensibility, by the two lying, poor-bashing, migrant-kicking white males knighted by the Conservative Party who constitute our fantastic multicultural democracy's main electoral choices beyond the lying, poor-bashing, migrant-kicking Conservative Party.

Natational Johnson

Not content with having defied the laws of country, veracity and decency, the former National Johnson has now taken it upon himself to violate Bertie Wooster's dictum that sex and newts should be mutually exclusive passions. The Johnson, who lives in Oxfordshire with a comparatively recent wife and three of his acknowledged offspring, is trying to keep up with the Sunaks by installing a swimming pool, but has been hindered by the local authority's bureaucratic concern for a neighbouring population of great crested newts. Having previously fulminated against species less protected than himself, the Johnson has now pledged, in no less an organ of truth than the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, to do whatever it takes to protect the animals. Thanks to the Johnson's half-century of truth-telling and promise-keeping, that seems to be good enough for South Oxfordshire district council; so it is to be hoped that the newts will not be excessively traumatised by the prospect.

Union Dues

One of those bits of our great united kingdom that isn't quite as equal as London is hooting and skirling with nationalist rage at some official rah-rah which implies that the Beano comics characters Dennis the Menace and Gnasher were created in London. In fact Dennis was created by an Edinburgh artist and published in Dundee, leading to accusations of the most blatant act of cultural plundering since India's wealth was last ceremonially plonked onto a royal British cranium. A spokesbeing defended the advertisement by explaining that it referred only to the animated series featuring the characters, which is made in London and thereby certifies the Beano as a great British success and enables it to bask in the capital's reflected glory. Besides, no true expression of modern British patriotism would be so crass and vulgar as to refer to something people might read.

Bad Etymology

Horizon, n. the boundary where sky and surface appear to meet; from Anglo-Norman oreison prayer, hence an illusory contact between heaven and earth.

Subject, n. from Latin sub under and iactare to throw: a citizen who can legitimately be cast down.

Simple Business

However favourably it may resonate with the hotly-contested far-right dimwit vote which both major parties are pursuing with such laser-focused assiduity, Fishy Rishi's dumping of environmental safeguards has lost him the backing of the septuagenarian founder of a defunct mobile phone company. The squillionaire donated some lunch money to the National Johnson's campaign four years ago, presumably because his entrepreneurial pragmatism led him to believe that the National Johnson was a chap to be relied upon; today he is denouncing Fishy Rishi in the Sunday Murdoch and threatening to buy shares in Team Starmer instead. "Would I switch to Labour?" he said. "The answer to that is very simple: I will support any party that I believe will do the right thing for Britain going forward," which certainly sounds like the sort of policy statement to which Team Starmer could potentially consider itself as more or less assenting without too much excess of unprofitable qualification.

Help Freeze Britain's Floating Canal Cancer

His Majesty's Government and Loyal Opposition have no particular problem with green crap, provided only that it emerges from the bowels of our Mother of Parliaments in an appropriately British fashion. Moisture provision profiteers are allowed to turn rivers into sewers while the little people receive finger-wagging lectures about spending too long in the shower; fossil fuel corporations are handed an indefinite licence to pollute while the great British voter frets about the fictitious costs of low-emission traffic zones: such is the stuff of leadership. Even more world-beating in its potential is the Environment Act of 2021, which provides for on-the-spot fines of up to £300 for emitting visible wood smoke. Since most councils lack the resources to carry out continual and effective chimney surveillance, local authorities will have to rely on denunciations from public-spirited curtain-twitchers, thereby declaring open season on anyone who lives on a boat. Hard-working families with log burners, whose contribution to atmospheric poisoning has doubled in the past ten years, will be scrambling to cleanse their community waterways of filthy floating gypsies. Among the many great glories of British pragmatism, co-opting the woke tree-hugging agenda for the traditional purpose of traveller-bashing must surely have an honourable place.

Too Hot a Take

Displaying its customary treachery, the Office for National Statistics has attempted to undermine the bipartisan consensus on rowing back the green crap with a tactlessly timed release of mere facts about the impact of the climate emergency. Heat-related deaths are on the increase, with over 4500 expendables succumbing in England last year, which was the UK's most baskable since records began; and over seventeen thousand in the last seven years. Of course this lying down on the job is deeply inconsiderate and un-British at a time when both Team Starmer and its policymakers in Downing Street are doing their mutual utmost to lighten the burden of hard-working fossil fuel corporations. On the bright side, more people are still dying from cold than from the heatwaves, doubtless thanks in part to the Government's pragmatism over fuel poverty; but the ONS clearly has much to learn about flagging up data in an appropriately patriotic manner.

Dynamic Realignment Through Managerial Inertia

A suitful of tepid corned beef has announced a non-change in Team Starmer's European non-policy from the other side of the globe, prompting some in his own party to marvel at his forensic temerity. The parliamentary wing of the Farage Falange was in no doubt: routine protestations that Team Starmer regards with loathing and horror the idea of rejoining the customs union or single market drew squeals of patriotic indignation from the Minister for Wogs and Misnomer and from Jeremy C Hunt, both of whom raised the apocalyptic possibility that a Labour government would undermine Global Britain's glorious epoch of rule-taking and red tape. Nevertheless, it remains eminently apparent that Team Starmer in office would not want to diverge from EU rules and would almost certainly do so only in the event of a more or less pragmatic political expediency such as winning over yet more of the kind of voter who thinks Nadine Dorries a better bet than Sadiq Khan.

Comic-Book Villains

Notwithstanding its intimate linkage with long-standing Christian tradition, the Holocaust did have its disadvantages, some of which persist unto this day. The God-fearing state of Texas has done its part against the moral rot by sacking a teacher who showed thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds a comic-book adaptation of Anne Frank's diary, which includes details of her sexual curiosity that her father excised from the original 1947 publication. The adaptation has previously fallen foul of moral guardians in the God-fearing state of Florida, where a charmingly misnamed gaggle of harridans called Moms for Liberty preached that the accurate representation of what Anne Frank originally wrote constitutes a distortion of history. It is one thing to teach that some Jews were killed (the gays and the gipsies, let alone the commies, are generally considered unworthy of mention even outside the God-fearing state of Texas), but to imply that the Holocaust failed to prevent sexual self-exploration in teenagers is clearly a little too harsh.

Bad Etymology

Conspiracy, n, from Latin con together and spirare to breathe, hence a theory for the uniting of windbags.

Slate, n. from Middle French esclater to break: something brittle, flat and grey, hence a list of candidates for political office.

Minor Impurities

Not unlike one or two holy wars before it, the Ukrainian crusade to keep Russian tanks from rolling into Westminster appears subject to a moral glitch here and there. A former deacon of the Orthodox Church in Odessa is accused of helping draft-dodgers escape the country by certifying them as missionaries to the infidel Euro-wogs, and of taking bribes for the favour. In addition, the head of the military medical commission and a couple of secretaries are being investigated for the dereliction of issuing certificates of unfitness for conscription at a slightly more substantial cost than the ex-deacon's alleged fees. Such antics will doubtless be deplored by all right-thinking persons, constituting as they do a malign and subversive caricature of the noble vocation of war profiteering.

Bad Theology: The Collection

Long-term lurkers in this humble corner of the blogosphere may recall that some time ago I ran a Sunday series called Bad Theology, in which I did my humble best to justify the ways of God and the Saviour to humanity with the aid of a moderate, sensible and non-tendentious reading of Holy Scripture. Four years ago the first few dozen of these pieces were collected in an ebook, and the remainder are now available in a second volume. All the texts have been revised and footnoted for this re-publication, and I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the profound and insightful introductions which the Reverend Humphrey Comfort contributed to both instalments.

Cleanup Act

A major contributor to current and future floods and wildfires is to review personal relationships among its staff in case they lead to bad behaviour. The chief executive of BP resigned last week, having been less than fully transparent in reassuring the Board about his chums and conduct, and the company is now seeking to ensure that its own interests are not unnecessarily affected. As an instance of self-imposed regulatory reform and improvement, the process may yet prove nearly as significant as the Chicago Outfit consenting to file income tax returns.

Conversion Conserved

Surprisingly enough, His Majesty's Government appears on course to break its promise to legislate against sexual reorientation, as there is no more time to publish the draft bill. Even more surprisingly, the pledge was originally made by Tumbledown Tessie five years ago, and reiterated the following year by no less stalwart a statesman than the National Johnson. As late as this year the Coronation sword-bearer and Leader of the House of Expenses Claimants gave an assurance that the draft bill would be published before the end of the parliamentary session; but other little matters, such as killing dogs and leaving schools to crumble, have manifestly taken priority. Besides, leading enemies of the people have pronounced conversion "therapy" degrading, harmful and unworthy of a civilised society, and therefore self-evidently worthy of the United Kingdom. Even the Church of England has proclaimed that it has no place in the modern world, and has largely given up the practice in favour of marital apartheid and other broad-minded measures. His Majesty's Loyal Opposition has not yet expressed an opinion on the matter, at least in the sensible and moderate pages of the Murdoch scumbag press or the Rothermere Daily Stürmer; but it can scarcely be doubted that Team Starmer would be happy to see a few benign mental modifications applied to striking workers, climate protesters and other contemptible un-British elements.

A Very Naughty Baron

One of the several obscure henchbeings elevated to the House of Lords in the National Johnson's ejection honours list has very selfishly and unsportingly decided to operate within the rules. Baron Rosenfield of Muswell Hill will sit as a cross-bench rather than a Conservative peer, because his day job as a fossil fuel and utilities profiteer requires a veneer of political neutrality. Rosenfield's lack of buccaneering spirit will deprive the Conservatives of slightly more than a third of one per cent of their presence in the upper chamber, and has caused purple-faced umbrage to break out in the Other Place with predictably orgiastic fulmination. One anonymoid retroactively and unilaterally expelled Rosenfield from the Party, while another proclaimed that he had committed the total outrage of making the National Johnson look like a chump. It remains as yet unclear how the National Johnson intends to rebut the calumny that his looking like a chump requires anything more than his own personal pluck and gumption.

Bad Etymology

Conservatism, n. from Latin con with, servus slave, and vates a prophet or oracle: the urge to follow a charlatan along the road to serfdom for others.

Patriot, n. from pat facile and riot a commotion: something noisy and simple-minded.

Good News, Bad News

Our mother of government mumbles
And vague oppositional grumbles,
Though mortared with bile
In bipartisan style,
Is filled with the concrete that crumbles!

But, laden with structural stumbles
And trembly with sexual fumbles,
The putrid old pile
May yet stand a while
And still need assist ere it tumbles!

Bodger Leavitt

Cake for Baker

Most of us are aware by now of the clear blue water that tends to separate Brexit promises from Brexit realities, and the hotels tycoon Sir Rocco Forte has been good enough to furnish a particularly charming example, apparently because Brexit has done insufficient damage to the hospitality industry. Sir Rocco, whose name even the late Martin Amis might have found lacking in subtlety, vowed never again to support the Conservatives on the grounds that Fishy Rishi is a social democrat, only to find himself throwing money at a Conservative earlier this year. Steve Baker proclaimed last October that even foreigns can have legitimate interests, but Sir Rocco has slipped him ten thousand anyway; doubtless Baker's climate denialism, casually abusive relationship with the truth, and various other symptoms of born-again Christianity were redeeming factors. In fairness, Baker's bung is two thousand less than Basil Fawlty's wet dream spent on a victory spaff-and-spew when the National Johnson belched his way to the Party leadership. Surprisingly enough, Sir Rocco's knighthood is not of Johnsonian vintage, but was bestowed almost thirty years ago under the non-administration of the equally ridiculous but more cheaply educated John Major.

Sucking Up to the In-Laws

The leader of a corrupt and Muslim-baiting far-right government has been getting all cosy with Narendra Modi, apparently in the hope of bodging together an election-saving trade deal should the gerrymandering prove inadequate. Despite the meeting being put off for a day while Modi attended to something important, Fishy Rishi also managed to refrain from emulating his former master, the National Johnson, by quoting Kipling at the natives; although in fairness this was most likely because Fishy Rishi has never heard of Kipling except when cake futures show up exceedingly well on the spreadsheets. Fishy Rishi did not even scold the Indians over their continuing imports of Russian oil and armaments, since legitimate business interests are a very different matter to the insidious schemes of the Heathen Chinee, which could have risked a premature termination of the Ukraine war and its concomitant profits for the right sort of people.

Yet More Moral Leadership

The Cop28 international summit on climate change is to be held in Dubai: a piece of venue-oriented symbolism comparable with holding a summit on preventing child abuse at the Vatican or an anti-corruption summit in Westminster, and undoubtedly destined to produce the usual glorious results. The sultan of the United Arab Emirates (and, by a coincidence of which the Conservatives doubtless approve, also head of the national oil company) favours "phasing down" over "phasing out" fossil fuels, which presumably translates to doing slightly less than the present less-than-nothing. Fortunately Alok Sharma, the presiding nonentity at Cop26, lectured the little people and lesser breeds that "it would be a significant achievement, and a win for people and the planet, if at Cop28 the world agreed to consign fossil fuels to history," a whole month after his boss Fishy Rishi pledged to maximise their use: an example of British forthrightness which will doubtless help matters no end.

Above Politics

Someone has produced a portrait of Theresa May for the Parliamentary Art Collection, which has received gushing acclaim from all quarters and served to rehabilitate the ghastly hag in the eyes of discerning journalists. Tumbledown Tessie is aptly depicted with the expression of a twitchily unpleasant headmistress, standing against a Wizard of Oz curtain draped in a military coat (apparently out of self-pity - "a politician does go into battle every single day" without, of course, having the slightest choice in the matter) and clutching a very thin, decidedly closed book to indicate her cultural breadth. "In its careful composition and clearcut shapes, its penchant for the symbolic object and the expressive gesture, it leans heavily into the Renaissance, each element a kind of mise en abyme into art history," which evidently is what caused a discerning journalist to pronounce it really rather wonderful.

The piece was commissioned by the Speaker's advisory committee on works of art, which "serves to memorialise public servants who have made a significant contribution to UK political life." The Great Migrant Cat Lie, the hostile environment and the appointment of the National Johnson to one of the former great offices of state were certainly significant contributions to the present world-beating condition of UK political life; how far they were acts of public service will doubtless be determined by analysts more nuanced than your correspondent. It is argued that such little indiscretions were all just part of the politics she was thrust into: the poor old trout never campaigned either for her seat in the House of Expenses Claimants or for the leadership of the Conservative and Unionist rabble, but was forced into both as a painful and reluctantly undertaken duty. One supporter of this view is the artist, who found her as decent and honest and dignified and stylish and statuesque as one would expect for £28,000 a daub, and who presumably makes no claim to be a realist.

Bad Etymology

Meritocracy, n. from French mer sea, Latin ritus ceremony and Greek krátos power: a ruling class's ritual pretence of fishing for talent.

Welfare, n. from Anglo-Saxon weal rampart and fær road: a socio-economic expedient for driving the unworthy to the wall.

Art of the Possible

The robust relationship between His Majesty's Government and the Babbage computificating engines appears to have reached new heights of modernity, with a minor flunkey giving its assurance that companies will not as yet be required to remove end-to-end encryption from messaging services. The online spying bill provides for services to be ordered to use "accredited technology" in finding and removing material to which the Government objects; but the minister for arts and heritage (sic) stated that the provision would only apply if the scan was "technically feasible" and met minimum privacy standards. While one hardly cares to speculate as to the minimum standard of privacy our lords and masters imagine we deserve, it is at least reassuring that His Majesty's Government will not be making what is technically unfeasible into a legal requirement. Even so, the wording of the bill remains unchanged, and presumably one reason why Global Britain has again condescended to share its boffins with the beastly Euro-wogs is to ensure the accreditation of ever greater levels of official and corporate snoopery.

Making Greater Britain

One of the many sectors of the economy to benefit from British independence has been the famously expanding tailback industry at Dover, which is expected to expand even further when the beastly Euro-wogs implement their sinister scheme to undermine the great British passport with high technology. Fortunately, pluck and gumption may yet prevail as the Port of Dover is resolved to expand Britain and make room for the extra queues. It is hoped that plans will be complete by the end of the year and that the Government will make a financial contribution, even though success will necessarily make the English Channel narrower, thereby shortening the route for invaders in small boats.

A Chopper Too Far

A lawyer who likes to compare himself to Field Marshal Montgomery has been battling for unrestricted use of the helipad in his back garden, with results reminiscent less of Alamein than of Arnhem. Although the helipad is not for his own use but for that of some underprivileged squillionare clients who cannot afford a chauffeur, the local council has decreed that unlimited flights within a rural area would frighten livestock and inconvenience residents. Unless he wishes to expend further ferocious litigative meticulosity upon an appeal against the decision, the victim will just have to wait until the net-zero consensus at Westminster brings a major airport into convenient proximity.

Beaver, Away

Connoisseurs of the Department for Effluent, Fracking and Reactionary Antagonism will rejoice that the Government appears to be reverting to traditional British values on the beaver question. Hunted to extinction in the sacred name of commerce while Britain was becoming great for the first time, the animals have recently been reintroduced into the wild, where their dam-building and wetlands-condoning behaviour tends inescapably to create an environment which favours insects, birds and bats over sewage dumping. It is even rumoured that the dams themselves incorporate concrete crumble, let alone asbestos, in quantities that are disproportionately meagre. Accordingly, the Government has been dragging its feet over implementing any policy that might encourage further invasion, and may also be considering withdrawal of the beaver's protected status. This would, of course, be entirely in keeping with the Conservative Party's current grand strategy of creating swathes of political scorched earth which Team Starmer can then pledge not to reconstruct.

Concrete Plans and Crumbly Pledges

Since the present Government's fear and loathing of non-privatised schools, hospitals and legal systems is emphatically shared and endorsed by Team Starmer, it would no doubt be antisemitic to expect too much of Labour's righteous indignation over a few public buildings falling down. The chair of the public accounts committee wondered why not enough money has been invested despite no real systemic change being necessary; but of course such fripperies as buildings and equipment must always be down-prioritised when seeking the Grail of Growth, especially when that eternal quest must needs be undertaken without taxing the rich, without Government borrowing, and without any substantial reintegration of the mainland's relationship with Europe. On the bright side, given the next Labour administration's likely degree of non-ideological pragmatism there will surely be opportunities for the private sector to step in, and rescue the British taxpayer at no more than a moderate and sensible rate of exorbitance.

Bad Etymology

Cerebrum, n. from Middle English sere barren, sterile, useless; and French brume fog: the organ of human thought.

Non-event, n. from Latin non none, e- electronic and French vent wind: the zero point for a blast-wave of online flatulence.