Onward, Christian Fascists https://www.truthdig.com/articles/onward-christian-fascists/#.XgoWAgkTnzI.twitter

Chris Hedges, once again, spot on.

James Ellroy’s new book, ‘This Storm,’ is out.

‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’: James Ellroy interviewed https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/i-was-a-tortured-obviously-brilliant-child-james-ellroy-interviewed/

… Dyfi Valley style 2010

• 

A Happy Christmas and a Good New Year to you all

OR MAYBE NOT!

… is an American English phrase from the 1950s. The truth is, that when many are tested, they discover that they are not ‘tough’ at all. But hollow men … and women! They profess true love or solid friendship, they boast solidarity to a cause, but when it’s time to stand up for their cause, they ‘cool’ off. They were never really passionate about something, or someone … it was all show, as we say today.

I like the way Shakespeare puts it in ‘The Tragedy of Julius Caesar’ (1599)

BRUTUS Thou hast described
A hot friend cooling. Ever note, Lucilius,
When love begins to sicken and decay
It useth an enforcèd ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith; 
But HOLLOW MEN, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle,
Low march within.
But when they should endure the bloody spur,
They fall their crests and, like deceitful jades,
Sink in the trial. Comes his army on? 

And of course, T S Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ from 1925

We are the hollow men
 We are the stuffed men
 Leaning together
 Headpiece filled with straw.

But my soul, From sight and sense of the polluting woe Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer Hell’s freedom to the servitude of heaven. Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began My lonely and unending pilgrimage …

Yes! A lonely and unending pilgrimage!

SPIRIT. Is there a God?

AHASUERUS. Is there a God?—aye, an almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice
Was heard on earth: earth shuddered at the sound;
The fiery-visaged firmament expressed
Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawned
To swallow all the dauntless and the good
That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,
Girt as it was with power …

Unending? Not really – you just walk away from him.

“I need a theatre” wrote W B Yeats in 1916.

In 2020 I need a film!

I want to share these words again by WBY: “Being sensitive, or not knowing how to escape the chance of sitting behind the wrong people, I have begun to shrink from sending my muses where they are but half-welcomed … Yet I need a theatre … I desire to show events and not merely tell of them … and I seem to myself most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty emotion. My blunder has been that I did not discover in my youth that my theatre must be the ancient theatre that can be made by unrolling a carpet or marking out a place with a stick, or setting a screen against the wall. (W B Yeats – Note on ‘At the Hawk’s Well’).

I cannot send my muses where they are not welcome at all!