Incandescent Feline

Robert Graves in the introductory note to his On English Poetry Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective concludes with the observation "that when putting cat among pigeons it is always advisable to make it as large a cat as possible."

Rabih Alameddine writing in Harper's.

We invade your countries, destroy your economies, demolish your infrastructures, murder hundreds of thousands of your citizens, and a decade or so later we write beautifully restrained novels about how killing you made us cry.

No escaping the claws of that pronoun "we".

And so for day 2421
30.07.2013

What Is Remembered: The Long View

Lorna Finlayson

There is no sense in which my great-uncle, who died at the Somme along with hundreds of thousands of others, gave his life for my freedom. He was cannon fodder in a needless imperial war which created fertile conditions for the rise of totalitarian regimes that killed millions, and which millions more would lay down their lives to defeat.

An Exercise in Forgetting
London Review of Books

And so for day 2313
13.04.2013