Stephen King & Ron Burgundy

To humour someone long ago, I picked up a Stephen King book and read a bit of it. I don’t recall the title but the one thing I do remember is that the word “incredibly” appeared at least once on every page. On that score, King has, in recent days, with the supreme confidence of his culture, endorsed a war criminal.

It’s only now that the fictional Ron Burgundy can retire. King has corroborated in documentary fashion that egomania and any scrap of common sense are never seen in the same room, and that, like Ron, he will say anything in response to a cue and a prompt.

King took a call from someone pretending to be the Ukrainian president in what undoubtedly had to be a normal wartime diversion for Zelensky, i.e. shooting the breeze with an American celeb in a friendly hat.

When the caller turned the screw, he omitted any mention of the many Polish victims of the “national hero” for dramatic effect. He had introduced a historical character whose record, he conceded, contained some, eh, “not so big” crimes against Jews (“accidentally”), and it still never dawned on King that it might be wiser to confess to his unfortunate ignorance of the name Bandera.

But no, like a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, he incredibly praised him as a great man.

Stay classy, Maine.

Woke in Constantinople

In these decadent days of plentiful pronouns and “pregnant persons” it’s important to grasp that, fad-wise, this is nothing new. In A Short History of Byzantium (1997) John Julius Norwich writes numerous passages that feel oddly familiar in the twenty-first century but, to illustrate the point, I’ve chosen just four.

These are comments (a) on the religious riots of 512 AD (twenty years before the more famous Nika riots, under Justinian); (b) on the advent of iconoclasm in the year 725; (c) on the first Constantinople mission of Bishop Liudprand of Cremona in 949; and (d) on the First Crusade passing through in 1096.

The Good Soldier Musil

Dr. John Flynn

Robert Musil (1880-1942) is best known for Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (‘The Man Without Qualities’), an unending, unfinished novel, of which the first volume appeared in 1930. I tried to read it once but found it too essayistic (Musil’s diaries agree) and boring and thus gave up. The first funny thing reminiscent of Jaroslav Hašek that I came across in the diaries was the farcical account of the seduction of a seventeen-year-old pal of his. Let us call the story The Cougar of Brno, as narrated by the pal and recorded by the teenage Musil.

I had an intuition that something was closing in around me… I was vaguely aware that something was going on and in my youthful anxiety I asked my friend to accompany me. I stationed him in some bushes… we found a quiet bench and read the letter. My friend… explained to me I had to…

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