​Fr. Martin strikes again.

Louisville Courier-Journal has it.

He’s a winner, to be sure. “Troubled” is euphemism, of course. “Menace,” anyone?

If not nutcase, dangerous even if unarmed, nobody you want to ride an airplane with. He seems a candidate for any man’s no-fly list.

And who covers such things like the Daily Mail, hunting up answers to questions about him that arise for many readers. Go, Daily Mail.

For foundation to support anti-violence programs.

I can only imagine what’s in those programs.

Or: What this city needs is another program.

Or: Program people smell the meat a-cookin’. (Their ears perked up at this pastoral message.)

El Rushbo on the Susan Rice business:

It is fascinating to watch an entire industry disintegrate before our very eyes. So much of what we call the news business is literally eating itself alive and I guess they’re willing to do it. I have never in my life seen such a shocking abandonment of stated principles and objectives on the part of any group that I can recall.

Abandonment of stated principles, yes, CNN leading the pack. But notice this, all ye Chicagoans, from Pat Hickey of the South Side:

Here’s some fun, Kids! Try and find any reference to Susan Rice in any Chicago News Paper! Warts will disappear before you do.

He supplies links:

http://chicago.suntimes.com/section/politics/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics

That’s gonna change, when it comes time to defend her when she appears before House and Senate committees.

​Perez: I’m going crazy and I can’t take it any more.

​Boo-hoo, everybody.

From his 1927 book Time and Western Man, I will cherry-pick, if I may, and present various bon mots and more substantial observations from the man whom T.S. Eliot called “the most fascinating personality of our time” and “the only one among my contemporaries to create a new, an original, prose style.” (Jeffrey Meyers, ed., Wyndham Lewis, A Revaluation, 1980, “Introduction,” 1)

Thus Joyce’s Ulysses presents a “torrent of matter . . . the einsteinian flux. Or (equally well) . . . the duration-flux of Bergson—that is its philosophic character, at all events..”

Lewis was looking for Joyce’s philosophy, apparently in the understanding that everyone has one, knowingly or otherwise, especially a serious writer. But more particularly, in line with his major theme, he cites the “all is flux” thinking of the philosopher Henri Bergson, in this case with passing reference to physical relativity.

In Ulysses it works out in Joyce’s espousal of “mechanicism” in his narrative, a sort of grab-bag assortment of things that just happen. This cobs Lewis no end. He says Joyce is led by “that old magician” Sigmund Freud to “the Aladdin’s cave where he manufactured his Ulysses.”

Joyce’s novel is all about himself, a “highly romantic self-portrait of the mature Joyce (disguised as a Jew) and of his adolescent self—of [Leopold] Bloom and [Stephan {sic}] Dedalus.” Its “homeric framework is “only an entertaining structural device or conceit.”

Well! Lewis cuts through what seems at times a plethora of Joyce-adulation. Beautiful.

In the matter of style, he references “Miss [Gertrude] Stein’s technique of picturesque dementia,” Joyce’s employing of Mr. Jingle, from Pickwick Papers, “the half-demented crack figure of traditional english humour,” and his use of “the manner of [the Elizabethan poet and prose-writer] Nash,” whose “high-spirited ingenuity” said “nothing.”

The mind demands some special substance from a writer, for words open into the
region of ideas; and the requirements of that region, where it is words you
are using, must somehow be met. Chapman, Donne or Shakespeare, with as
splendid a mastery of language, supply this demand, whereas Nash does not.

Even so, as a prose-writer, he was “one of the greatest as far as sheer
execution is concerned.” In reflecting Nash the technician, we have Joyce preeminently the craftsman, also with nothing to say.

All of which here presented gives merely a flavor of Lewis, whom I for one am finding remarkably fascinating.

​Congressman Adam Schiff (D.-Cal.): Before discussing immunity for Flynn, ​

​
“We should first acknowledge what a grave and momentous step it is for a former national security adviser to the president of the United States to ask for immunity from prosecution,” Mr. Schiff .

​Which as stand-alone statement is indisputable. But context is everything here.

While they are at it, they should think also about the former Secretary of State being declared by the FBI director as "extremely careless​" with national security information kept on computers in her basement. Congress had to swallow that, but this time it’s different?

Put another way, has such carelessness been the norm and we only recently heard about it? Or has the political climate done a very bad turn-around in the last, say, ten years?

​

​

Bracing counter-mainstream stuff from a premier critic of the last century, in his Time and Western Man:

Ulysses is “the sardonic catafalque of the Victorian world . . . like a record diarrhea,” without “romanticizing,” unlike Proust in his Recherche.

In it Joyce was a trickster: “The mere name suggests a romantic predilection for guile.” (92)

It features a “merging of analects,” selections from various sources (or here styles?). In his early years as a writer, Joyce had been “rather unenterprising and stationary” in this respect. Dubliners, his story collection, was written in one style, Ulysses “in a hundred or so.”

In fact, Joyce’s “ability to be influenced by all sorts of people and things” remained undiminished as he kept growing “more susceptible to new influences, of a technical order.” Thus the merging of analects as above.

The style made the man, says Lewis. He was “a craftsman pure and simple,” nothing more, “has practiced sabotage where his intellect was concerned.” Indeed, Joyce’s mind was of “extreme conventionality,” his characters “walking cliches . . . ready-made and well-worn dummies,” to which his “intelligence was so alive.”

He’s the equivalent “in music [of] the supreme instrumentalist.” (This is the summit of Lewis’ praise for Joyce.) His characters are “the material of broad comedy, not that of a subtle or average reality at all.” (Which makes for hard reading. I know I found it so.)

Throughout Ulysses he betrays a “radical conventionality of outlook,” in all of which he is “a craftsman not a creator.” A virtuoso at the typewriter, he is no great thinker, hanging “a mass of dead stuff” on “lay-figures” (mannequins, nonentities) “without a life of their own.”

More to come of this all-in-all thrashing of a literary favorite . . .