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Taking a moment to send this one out to Cletus Socrates

by Vanderleun on May 13, 2021

Here’s to a man who has made my day, week, month…

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ghostsniper May 13, 2021, 5:24 PM

He was briefly stationed at the post I was stationed at in Germany, Wildflecken, though about 15 years earlier. Don’t know if he’s sporting hollywood rank or what but I was in twice as long as him but yet he is showing 1 more stripe than I had. spec 5 vs spec 4

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Casey Klahn May 13, 2021, 7:56 PM

My compliments to Mr C Socrates.

Ghostie, I wore that Spec 5 rank, right before I went to OCS, became an E-6 for pay as a cadet, then onto the exalted O ranks. I could swear I’ve seen Elvis pics with buck sergeant stripes – probably switched jobs. Don’t you know the infantry, armor and artillery were rolling in rank like pigs in grease?

I was chatting with a friend’s dad, and he indicated that he was in an armor unit, in Germany, about 59 or 60. I asked the obvious question, using my own version of tact: “did you meet Elvis”? Turns out he did!

I’ll do that even one better. My housemate’s dad stole Elvis’ 8th grade girlfriend!

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Nori May 13, 2021, 9:05 PM

Ulysses 2017 comment “She just blew like a frog sucking on a cherry bomb.”
Sweet Home Southern.
The Archives of Mr V are indeed replete with treasure.

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Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020

Lament for the Rohirrim

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

— Tolkein

from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND

The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.

from Preludes

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

— Eliot

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Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”