Measure for Measure

Isabella, the ice-queen, a meet match for Angelo, who micturates in snowmelt.   He is perched upon the mount of his incorruptibility;  she, on that of her virginity.  Her approach to him, for clemency for her brother, is stiff and formal, till she heeds the counsel of her crouching Cyrano, who advises her to turn on the waterworks, and maybe show a bit of bodice.   Yet it is her very purity-armor that attracts Angelo to a fall, where strumpets had no such power.   (I am familiar with such paradoxical infatuations.)

As for the duke, he is more of a trickster-figure, a trifler with men’s fates, than an image of the Good King Haroun-al-Rashid  toddling about the night-streets of his capital  incognito.  In a formal sense, he could be called the hero of the play, and Isabella the heroine.  God preserve us from such heroes.

Right-wing support for left-wing candidates

Reports that Putin’s Russia has been attempting to load the electoral dice in favor of Bernie Sanders,  likely startled adherents of monolinear manicheanism, but that sort of thing is a time-tested gambit.  There is a notable parallel from the Presidential campaign of 1972.  A historian writes:

What all the 1972 dirty tricks that had become known as “Watergate” were intended to accomplish:  sabotaging all the other Democratic candidates  in order to leave Geroge McGovern, the field’s weakest link, as the last man standing.

-- Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge (2014), p. 170.

Additionally, Nixonian operatives went about “drumming up fake enthusiasm for the black female candidate Shirley Chisholm" (id., p. 171)

The strategy worked.   McGovern received the nomination, then a shellacking in the general election, losing in 49 states.

~

Hunter Thompson, describing the Democratic convention in his entertaining Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,  via interviews with the pols and pros of the delegate floor, describes considerably more byzantine maneuvers -- feints, pawn sacrifices, “shaving”, sitting-out a round, taking a dive, lowballing your vote-totals till the propitious time -- telos and kairos being the watchwords.

Eyeless in Serbia

Her eyes, while fiery,

also appeared strangely unfocused,

as though blotted out by superstition,

like the saints’ eyes  in the church.

-- Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (1993), p. 34

Damascus, in the Grand Mosque

The court was half full   of afternoon shadow,

  and half  of sun …

-- Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (1907, repr. 2001), p. 150

Soiled Light

From the west sky, a wrathful shine -- all that wild March could afford in way of sunset --- had burst forth after the cloudy day,  flooding the tired and sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the women, which clung to them like dull flames.

-- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1892),  ch. XLVIII

Downtown Lost Angeles:

dawn comes upon this city

like a shitmist.

Will it burn off  before noon?

Will the sun  eventually  poke through ??

-- Hunter Thompson,  Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, p. 222

That Orange Glow

He virtually glowed with vanity, and its evil twin, the infinite capacity for vengeance when insulted.

-- Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw (2008), p. 105

Dispatches from the Buffyverse

(1) Precedent for the Hellmouth:

On an island in the west of Ireland,  an entrance to Purgatory was revealed to St Patrick, that he might overcome the obstinacy of those whom he was trying to convert.

-- The Oxford Companion to English Literature

More re antecedents for the Hellmouth:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-proto-buffy.html


(2) The vision of “Once More with Feeling” (“They Got the Mustard Out”):

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing, and bankers while banking?

-- G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

Epistolary epiphanies

The anglophone literary world is aflutter  over the newly-unsealed cache of intimate Dickensian correspondence:

Unseen Charles Dickens letters open window into the life of a genius

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51403625

All of Dickens previously published works  have been amply studied, from every standpoint;  that ground has been tilled  this way and that, for over a century.    These new revelations  will therefore  principally interest scholars, for any light they may shed on the only recently discovered, and still mysterious fragment, tentatively titled “The Dinner at the Veneerings”,  whose byways and undertunnels  we examined here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html