In case you haven’t seen it, this is Trump in excelsis thank you very much.
Archives for September 2025
The Vanity and Narcissism of an ‘Irreplaceable’ Leader
The comparison to the 47th American president is overworked but necessary. Here’s an excerpt from “Hitler’s People” by the British historian Richard J. Evans.
Charles Plymell
Sunday Service of Sun and Clouds
There was a time when Charles Plymell claimed that Bob Dylan stole his Nobel Prize. Charley was full of blustering anger in those days, calling his old friend Allen Ginsberg a phony, his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti a two-bit miser, and Jack Kerouac a Mama’s boy whose ‘On the Road’ he never read. In more recent years, though he still claims not to have read Kerouac, Charley has apologized for his deprecation of Ginsberg and dedicated his latest book, ‘Over the Stage of Kansas,’ to Ferlinghetti. Because it would make poetic sense, I would like to date his change of heart, not only metaphorically but literally, to the time he had a heart attack and wrote this majestic, never-published poem.
Upon the Death of Charlie Kirk
The Most Truthful Statement I’ve Read About Him
“The media wants you to believe he was some saint of free speech, cut down in his prime. They’re already sanding down the edges, turning a man who spent his career spewing bile into a martyr. But here’s the truth: Kirk wasn’t about dialogue, he was about domination. He wasn’t about protecting liberty, he was laying the rhetorical groundwork for fascism.” — Samuel Thompson
One-Strike Poems
Malcolm Ritchie’s Mountain on Top of a Mountain
Here is a magnificent book of short poems so rich in images, so clear and yet mysterious, so generous in feeling that, to steal a thought from a Donald Hall essay about Dylan Thomas, “form and shape and honey-in-the-mouth make small monuments of English literature.”