Graves and Valéry: the German economy in two pre-war's

Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That (pre-war economic jingoisms )and Paul Valéry in Regards sur le monde actuel on his visit with Henley, London, 1896, from 48 years later (The Review) : statistical mechanics/thermodynamics metaphor; hierarchy; Prussian ways and mores, economic warfare.

Economic warfare and Gus W. Weiss on the Farewell dossier ( l'affaire Farewell fiction) ; Fidel Castro on economic war (2007) ; the curious fate of Vetrov (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Mitterand in Ottawa)

The later London of Ford Maddox Ford

Heinrich Böll's Irish Journal and the Irish view of Germany and Germans

Ireland software bubble/real estate bubble in Cork ; Nabakov on time and the bubble (the philosophers, Pnin)

economics and real estate waves ; 1979/1980 collapsing sand heaps and catastrophe theory

Durs Grünbein poem : divorce hotel

Le Devoir philo  ·  Nabokov note Card 68

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Derek Walcott Venus

This will be small-minded.

First, an aside.

I could not help but notice a strange parallel between Robert Graves in the trenches (1915?), the bombardments, (Goodbye to All That) and Elizabeth Smart's (1938?) kangaroos in a garden (on the subject of time).

Now, the unwelcome gristle.

Walcott "North and South" (1981) has Venus rising in an opening stanza that also carries both a full moon and a sunset.

Through the weeks, you might speak of Venus rising in the west (when first seen at sunset.)  But the rising Venus of morning is the only rising Venus, whether, as he reminds us, she survives translation or not.

Poetic license ?  Not with the planets.

More a question of knowing eastern and western, whether to your north or to your south.

Geddes has a photon flashing innumerable times among crystals in the snow.  Can he escape knowing that a photon takes millions of years to translate from the solar core to the shell of the sun ?  Was this his parallel? What is the poet to know of the local inferno ? The flipping magnetic poles ?

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Beguile Betray mandalot

Robert Graves' "To Beguile And Betray" has the line

of jealous hankering for the mandalot

which must be commented upon somewhere ...

see: mandala, mandalotus weevil