POETRY
CORNER
When
I Came Back To Fleet Street
When
I came back to Fleet Street,
Through a sunset-nook at night,
And saw the old Green Dragon
With the windows all alight,
And hailed the old Green Dragon
And the Cock I used to know,
Where all the good fellows were my friends
A little while ago.
I
had been long in meadows,
And the trees took hold of me,
And the still towns in the beech-woods,
Where men were meant to be;
But old things held; the laughter,
The long unnatural night,
And all the truth the talk in hell,
And all the lies they write.
For
I came back to Fleet Street,
And not in peace I came;
A cloven pride was in my heart,
And half my love was shame.
I came to fight in fairy tale,
Whose end shall no man know—
To fight the old Green Dragon
Until the Cock shall crow!
Under
the broad bright windows
Of men I serve no more,
The groaning of the old great wheels
Thickened to a throttled roar;
All buried things broke upwards;
And peered from its retreat,
Ugly and silent, like an elf,
The secret of the street.
They
did not break the padlocks,
Or clear the wall away.
The men in debt that drank of old
Still drink in debt today;
Chained to the rich by ruin,
Cheerful in chains, as then
When old unbroken Pickwick walked
Among the broken men.
Still
he that dreams and rambles
Through his own elfin air,
Knows that the street's a prison,
Knows that the gates are there:
Still he that scorns or struggles,
Sees frightful and afar
All that they leave of rebels
Rot high on Temple Bar.
All
that I loved and hated,
All that I shunned and knew,
Clears in broad battle lightening;
Where they, and I, and you,
Run high the barricade that breaks
The barriers of the Street,
And shout to them that shrink within,
The Prisoners of the Fleet!
—GK
Chesterton
Kevin
Michael Grace,
10.55
pm, 15 January 2008►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
Frankly,
I'm kind of tired of the continuing one-upmanship in
violence and perversity among the recent generation of
directors. I think it's become the other side of the coin
of sentimentality. The classic definition of
sentimentality is "unearned emotion"—a
privileged, unreal, self-indulgence in the sugary sadness
of things. There are a lot of recent movies and books I'd
call excremental for their unearned disgust—their
privileged, self-satisfied wallowing in the gruesome
shittiness of it all. David
Fincher is a prime example of an
excremental director.
—Richard
Hell
Spacey in Se7en (sic): Dr Evil sez, 'Ooh scary,
kids!'
Kevin
Michael Grace,
10.45
pm, 15 January 2008►
MINING
NEWS
Nevada
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.32
pm, 8 January 2008►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
Most
species within nature aim not at unlimited growth but
rather at optimum growth; that is, a condition of
stability, fulfilling but not destroying the species’
appropriate niche within the larger life-system. Likewise,
the individual organism, if it is healthy, seeks not
endless growth—which is monstrous and suicidal—but
rather maturation and reproduction, which also coincides
with the “ideal” of the species. Both tend to serve
and sustain the ends—whatever those may be—of
evolutionary change as a whole.
Cancer
is distinctive and pathological precisely because it does
not conform to this pattern, or recognize any limitations;
the disease with—as well as of—hubris. Delighting in
nothing but multiplication, cancer ends by destroying both
its host and itself. The analogy to our modern planetary
growth-devoted techno-industrial society (whether
capitalist or socialist makes no difference) is complete
and exact. Like cancer, expansionist industrialism
believes in nothing but more expansionism. Growth equals
power: power equals growth. Again like cancer, the process
will self-destruct. Not, however, without human suffering,
which will be great until a different kind of society
based on a more stable adaptation to the earth’s thin
skin is somewhat achieved.
—Edward
Abbey, Letter
to the Editor of the New York Review Of
Books, 30 March 1973
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.32
pm, 1 January 2008►
