A classic

"The other night, eating a bowl of pasta and sauce, I felt a familiar gravelly crunch. Sure enough I spat out a tooth. A whole tooth, or so it seemed - quite a nice new porcelain looking one - I thought I'd lost a crown. But I ran my tongue round my mouth and couldn't feel any sharp edges, or holes or gaps. So I said it was funny but I didn't seem to be missing any. And Alexandra said that Tina had lost a tooth about a week or so ago, that is she'd given the tooth  to Alexandra for the tooth fairy pay-out, but Alexandra had lost it (Tina got the money anyway). So I asked Tina where she gave the tooth to Alexandra and she said "The kitchen". So, still not quite sure how it got there, but I found a tooth in my mouth that wasn't mine..."

And

Further down,

Never had I more 
Excited, passionate, fantasticalImagination, nor an ear and eyeThat more expected the impossible—No, not in boyhood when with rod and flyOr the humbler worm I climbed Ben Bufcen’s back 
And had the livelong summer day to spend.

Tsk Tsk.  And

The mountain throws a shadow,
Thin is the moon’s horn; 
Wha did we remember
Under the ragged thorn?
Dread has followed longing
And our hearts are torn.

This is not rocket science: it isn't even really lit crit. It's called reading.

At least he died before seeing it.

At least they didn't, as far as I can see, fuck up

“O cruel death give three things back,” 
Sang a bone upon the shore;
“A child found all a child can lack 
Whether of pleasure or of rest
Upon the abundance of my breast”;A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

“Three dear things that women know” 
Sang a bone upon the shore
“A man if I but held him so
When my body was alive
Found all the pleasure that life gave”;A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

“The third thing that I think of yet” 
Sang a bone upon the shore,
“Is that morning when I met
Face to face my rightful man
And did after stretch and yawn”;A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

Yo, Yeats

The New Republic tries to make use of its backlist; it scans in and posts online among  its other articles its old triumphs from old Nobelists, as so:

Seven Poems

BY W.B. YEATS

October 23, 1930

Girl’s Song

I went out alone
To sing a song or two,
My fancy on a man
And you know who.

Another came in sight
That on a stick relied
To hold himself upright,
I sat and cried.

And that was all my song—
When everything is told
Saw I an old man yo’ing
Or young man old?

The problem being, as here, that either they don't read them once scanned or that they don't have anyone in the building who's ever read Yeats or, indeed, anybody else. The death of the editor.

What rough beast

We can say, surely, that Trump is the most uncomplicated candidate that there has ever been, nationally - without, and without any particular interest in, intellect, knowledge, ideology, morals, religion, or anything else other than ego and resentment - and you can therefore say that anybody who votes for him does for out of, and only out of, ego and resentment. He may not win, but he's already punched an enormous hole in the fundamental concepts of democracy.
He's won over about 60% of white males. He can't gain much support from the other groups, because he'a already promised to support whites against them.  Imagine, though, if everybody - white and unwhite - was wearing virtual reality headgear through which they heard Trump's resentment directed against the people they  disliked. Blacks, hispanics, gays, women, would be offered different targets.  Is there any reason, then, to believe that they are actually more virtuous than whites - that if offered that faustian pact, they would not take it? If 60% of any group is capable of operating only through hate and fear, 60%  of any group is, and 60% of people are; and our polity has survived till now only because we have such a complicated web of different interests that it is very difficult to assemble a majority whose resentments all point in the same direction and are not undercut by competing differences.
When I say interests, of course, I mean psychic interests, or what in material terms one would call false consciousness.

Metric madness

Lenovo and Acer are both now advertising computer size in litres.  Acer's range runs from 1 litre to 30 litres.
Lenovo's one-litre PC weighs 1.3 kg, which means that it's heavier than a litre of water. It's 179 x 182.9 x 34.5 mm, which means it's 

1129498.95

cubic millimetres, or 1.12 litres. Which means that a litre of computer is 1.15 times heavier than a litre of water, which considering the amount of extra space is slightly counterintuitive.

The Acer 30-litre measures 30.68 litres, so close enough for government work; but doesn't give a weight.

Still, the litre measurement does rather suggest that it it won't fit in a particular spot you can pour it into a different-shaped container and get it in that way: which isn't, surely, the situation.  Not a terribly helpful measure, I would have thought. 

Brotherly Love

And Chesterton worshipped his brother Cecil, too, and with Cecil antisemitism was paramount:

In response to this episode, “the Beilis Affair,” Cecil Chesterton characterised Russian pogroms as something horrible, but also something to be understood as part of an ongoing “bitter historic quarrel” between Israel Zangwill’speople (i.e. “the Jews”) and the people of Russia. The “evidence of the pogroms”, he argued, points to a “savage religious and racial quarrel.” He suggested that it was sometimes “a naturally kindly people like the Russians [who] are led to perpetrate the atrocities,” and sometimes it was the “equally embittered” Jews, who, “when they got a chance of retaliating, would be equally savage.” Referring to the Beilis Affair, Cecil endorsed the blood libel, stating that: “An impartial observer, unconnected with either nation, may reasonably inquire why, if we are asked to believe Russians do abominable things to Jewish children, we should at the same time be asked to regard it as incredible … that Jews do abominable things to Russian children – at Kieff, for instance.” Israel Zangwill, a prominent Anglo-Jewish author and playwright, countered Cecil Chesterton’s accusation, noting that following his logic, we should have to accept that if hooligans throttle Quakers then Quakers must also be throttling hooligans. Zangwill also rightly pointed out that it was implausible that a Jew would murder a Christian child for ritual purposes considering no such ritual exists in Judaism. In response, Cecil Chesterton stated that “as to ‘ritual murder’, Mr. Zangwill, of course, knows that no sane man has ever suggested that it [ritual murder] was a ‘rite’ of the Jewish Church any more than pogroms are rites of the Greek Orthodox Church.” He then proceeded to clarify that what he and others had suggested, is that “there may be ferocious secret societies among the Russian Jews,” and that “as so often happens with persecuted sects, such societies may sanctify very horrible revenges with a religious ritual.” In other words, Cecil Chesterton accepted that responsible Jews did not go around committing ritual murder, but did suggest that a sect of fanatical and vengeful Jews did go around murdering Christian children following a “religious ritual”. Eleven years later, his brother, G. K. Chesterton, similarly suggested as part of his complex multifaceted construction of “the Jew,” that “ritual murder” had occasionally been committed by Jews, not by responsible practitioners of Judaism as such, but by “individual and irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews”. Cecil Chesterton, “Israel and ‘The Melting Pot,’” New Witness, 5 March 1914, 566-567; Cecil Chesterton, “A Letter from Mr. Zangwill,” New Witness, 12 March 1914, 593-594; G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1925]), 136.

Doesn't clarify the  "innocent innocent" stuff, but shows where the sub-sect stuff comes from.

Such a sweet man

Somebody like myself who has a firm grounding in Chesterton - a feel for the rhetoric, a liking for The Man Who Was Thursday, The Flying Inn, the Father Brown stories, The Napoleon of Notting Hill - does have to rock back on their heels rather when reminded that his antisemitism wasn't simply a matter of being against a plutocracy he saw as Jewish, it followed every kink in a Catholic Church he felt himself bound to defend at every point, even when it came to the pogroms of the Blood Libel.

Here's a passage I've just happened across, from The Everlasting Man (1925);

This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better not to speak. Some of them indeed might almost be named without being known; for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent. They are too inhuman even to be indecent. But without dwelling much longer in these dark comers, it may be noted as not irrelevant here that certain antihuman antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course by any representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did but give another version of a very national English legend, when he conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman watching behind her high lattice and hearing, like the babble of a brook down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.

Nineteen jews died in Hugh's case - 

The nine-year-old Hugh disappeared on 31 July, and his body was discovered in a well on 29 August. A man called John of Lexington appears to have suggested that Jews were responsible.^[1] Hugh's friends apparently claimed that Copin (or Jopin), a local Jew, had imprisoned Hugh, during which time he tortured and eventually crucified him. It was said that the body had been thrown into the well after attempts to bury it failed, when the earth had expelled it.^[2] Copin was arrested and, under torture,^[3] confessed to killing the child. He later appears to have implicated the Jewish community as a whole. He was executed, and the story would have ended there were it not for a series of events that coincided with the child Hugh's disappearance.^[1]Some six months earlier, King Henry III had sold his rights to tax the Jews to his brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. Having lost this source of income, he decided that if a Jew was convicted of a crime, any money he had would then belong to the king. As a result, some ninety Jews were arrested in connection with Hugh's disappearance and death and held in the Tower of London, charged with ritual murder. Such accusations had become increasingly common following the circulation of the Life of Saint William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, the hagiography ofWilliam of Norwich, a child-saint said to have been crucified by Jews in 1144. This story clearly influenced the myth that developed around Hugh.
Eighteen of the Jews were hanged for refusing to participate in the proceedings by throwing themselves on the mercy of a Christian jury.^[4] It was the first time ever the civil government handed out a death sentence for a conviction of ritual murder. King Henry promptly expropriated the property of those convicted. The others were pardoned and set free, most likely because Richard, who saw a potential threat to his own source of income, intervened on their behalf.^{[citation needed]}The chronicler Matthew Paris described the supposed murder, implicating all the Jews in England:

This year [1255] about the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul [27 July], the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy called Hugh, who was about eight years old. After shutting him up in a secret chamber, where they fed him on milk and other childish food, they sent to almost all The cities of England in which there were Jews, and summoned some of their sect from each city to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lincoln, in contumely and insult of Jesus Christ. For, as they said, they had a boy concealed for the purpose of being crucified; so a great number of them assembled at Lincoln, and then they appointed a Jew of Lincoln judge, to take the place of Pilate, by whose sentence, and with the concurrence of all, the boy was subjected to various tortures. They scourged him till the blood flowed, they crowned him with thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him; each of them also pierced him with a knife, and they made him drink gall, and scoffed at him with blasphemous insults, and kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus, the false prophet. And after tormenting him in divers ways they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a spear. When the boy was dead, they took the body down from the cross, and for some reason disemboweled it; it is said for the purpose of their magic arts.^[1]

- and many more afterwards; but 

The Cathedral in Lincoln benefited from the episode, however, since, saint or not, Hugh was regarded as a Christian martyr; and sites associated with his life became objects of pilgrimage.^[2]  

 - and a Catholic apologist had to believe.    I think I'm offended most by that line "not of course by any representative of the religion of Judaism" since of course the legend was exactly that it was an official Jewish custom and the body of the story makes no sense whatsoever without it. 

I also have to confess that I don't follow some of the dark hints at all. 

....that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent. They are too inhuman even to be indecent. 

Is that contraception?  It's close to a line about preventing the birth of children; but then he jumps straight to childmurder, and moreover at the time contraceptive advice was regarded as indecent and prosecuted for that. I'm stumped. Which is mildly humiliating: I thought I understood England in the twenties well enough to pick up even their dogwhistles.