Yeah .. bring 'em on!

"In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

  ... H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Raunchiness par excellence!

American writer Henry Miller (1891-1980) [pictured here in the mid 30s] celebrated Bohemian ex-pat life in Paris in the early 1900’s, as deliciously depicted in such novel-memoirs as Tropic of Cancer.

Another ex-pat in Paris at the time was the Hungarian artist Emeric Timar (1898-1950) who was inspired enough by Miller’s accounts to create expressionist lithographs with a surrealist edge capturing the raw sexuality that permeates pretty well everything Miller wrote. They were made in 1949.

Presented here juxtaposed with the sombre looking Miller is Timar's “The American Girl” in water colour. Miller apparently disliked them, perhaps because for the title page vignette Timar drew Miller with a penis for a nose.

The Union endures!

“… there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which … will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality”

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)

The sedge has wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing

"Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendations, I hope I shall never marry: though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, and the curtains of the morning clouds, the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet’s down, the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winandermere, I should not feel, or rather my happiness should not be, so fine; my solitude is sublime—for, instead of what I have described, there is a sublimity to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through the window-panes are my children; the mighty abstract Idea of Beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.... I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone, than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a King’s Body-guard: “then Tragedy with scepter’d pall comes sweeping by:” according to my state of mind, I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches, or with Theocritus in the vales of Sicily; or throw my whole being into Troilus, and, repeating those lines, “I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian bank, staying for waftage,” I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate, that I am content to be alone.”

  ...  John Keats (1795-1821) from a letter written 29Oct1818 to his brother George. Keats was 23.