Sustainable Scum

Defying the potential risk to revenues, the Murdoch scumbag press is to make selected gobs of its output accessible only to those who can count to two and back a bit. Absorbers of toxic waste who wish to avail themselves of the wit and wisdom of Rod Liddle and Harry Cole will have to pay £1.99 per month for the privilege, and I am sure we all wish them joy of it. The enterprise is called Sun Club, which appropriately evokes a holiday with bludgeons. The Supreme Leader and his minions have tried charging for access before, but lost too many patriots to the online Rothermere Stürmer, which has itself recently introduced a kickback scheme for access to some of its luvvie-baiting, Meghan-bashing and "investigations" sections. It seems that the Supreme Leader's former papers of record, the Murdoch Times and the Murdoch on Sunday, have managed to make a success of their own paywalls, although it remains as yet unclear whether their readers aspire to the level of sophistication that will characterise the patrons of Sun Club.

À l'orange

One of the Trumpster's offspring has been doing manly things in Italy, and has chosen a special conservation area near Venice to try his strength against the local ducks. Living up to his illustrious family's competitive spirit, the Trumpster spawn donned combat camouflage and mounted his assault from the shelter of a foxhole in case any of the ducks shot back and injured his hereditary bone spurs. One of the casualties appears to have been a ruddy shelduck, a protected species with plumage of a hue only slightly more tasteful than the complexion of the Trumpster himself. However, thanks to the smoochy diplomatic relationship between the heirs of Mussolini and the host of the head-tribble, the bird's conservation status seems unlikely to result in much trouble for the Trumpster spawn; so any Oedipal aspects to the shooting will probably remain mercifully unexplored.

On the Tragic

Thanks to writers such as Thomas Ligotti and David Benatar, both of whom contribute brief prefaces, the author of On the Tragic has received increasing attention in the English-speaking world. His magnum opus of pessimistic philosophy was completed, in "eccentrically conservative" Dano-Norwegian, just before the Nazi invasion, yet has nevertheless contrived until very recently to escape translation into English.

The stylistic whims of Peter Wessel Zapffe extended to idiosyncratic use of italics and quote marks, as well as to occasional footnotes querying the grammar; all of which the reader of Ryan Showler's translation has been mercifully spared. Latin phrases are unpatronisingly retained and conveniently glossed, while the English is clear and concise; although the usage of the pronoun one requires some acclimatisation. Whether or not this results from the translator's rendition of a Zapffean quirk will take a better and braver scholar of Riksmål than I to determine. Many of the references are from Scandinavian and German sources, and therefore possibly not widely known or readily available to English readers; but the translator has been compassionate enough to include an index, which the original did not.

Some of On the Tragic is heavy going, at least for the philosophically untrained; and there is a lengthy legalistic digression (Zapffe was also a jurist, as well as scaling mountains merely geological) which may try even a philosophical patience. But all through the book Zapffe drives home his points with sharp little parables, among which the antlers of the Irish elk, the tree destroyed by its best fruit, and the cats stranded on an isle of jumping beetles are merely three of the most memorable. No less worthy of mention is the theorist who seeks to sum up and transcend his two hundred predecessors only to find himself classified as Theorist No.201.

The analysis and classification of tragedy in its many variants and combinations culminates with an examination of tragic literature and criticism, including detailed and interesting readings of Prometheus Bound, the Book of Job, and Hamlet. I was gratified to observe that Zapffe reached a conclusion similar to my own concerning a certain resident of Pandora's box. In Job Zapffe finds "a fanatical will to intellectual honesty, and a poet who combines the ability to give his abyss-deep hatred of God a dazzling satirical form with cascading cosmic pathos ... a blasphemous masterpiece;" while in Hamlet he sees a great man whose ruinous "tragic flaw" is not a vice like Macbeth's ambition or a weakness like Othello's jealousy, but the very strength and virtue of his moral and intellectual courage.

Ryan Showler and Peter Lang deserve our gratitude. No philosopher with a name like Peter Wessel Zapffe should be allowed to languish in obscurity, any more than he should be permitted to escape becoming a humourist.

Our Intimate Companions

With more and more species becoming extinct and endangered, it's refreshing to see that at least one continues to thrive. The urban rat population is on the increase, and growth is particularly healthy in those cities where temperatures are rising fastest. Aside from Amsterdam and Toronto, most of those surveyed were in the realm of the Trumpster, where the climate catastrophe doesn't count; so the rodent surplus and any resulting plagues will doubtless be considered a Canadian import or the wrath of Baby Jesus against un-American sexual practices. London did not deign to provide data; but given the presence of both the Square Mile and the Houses of Parliament the facts rather squeak for themselves.

By Grace of Nigel

Farage Falange Incorporated will not be suspending a parliamentary flunkey who was convicted of assaulting his girlfriend. The conviction was eighteen years ago and the flunkey in question did not see fit to mention it before some nice people in Essex elevated him to the House of Expenses Claimants, despite its obvious potential for increasing his vote among those unafflicted by the woke mind virus. Fulsomely redemptive blah-blah has been forthcoming since the Murdoch Times snitched about the matter, with the Falange's First Undernigel proclaiming that we're a Christian nation (we aren't) and that Christianity is about forgiveness, which is true in approximately the same sense as the one about the Nazis being socialists. Translated from the sanctimonious, the flunkey is a well-fleshed white investment banker who has learned his lesson in British values: namely that if you want to kick someone when they're down it's cheaper and simpler in the long run to do it through the proper channels.