From: proustsingsmud@hotmail.com   
      
   The most telling moment of the D Day commemorations on television came   
   around quarter to twelve; a service had been given, hymns sung and speeches   
   made. The bugler played The Last Post and then there was silence. During   
   this silence, all I could hear from the new houses built behind my old man's   
   house was a cacophany of adult shouting, children shouting and pop music   
   playing loudly. It was an iconic moment for me, to hear bad, tinny,   
   pop-reggae (if it had been good reggae it wouldn't excused it one little   
   bit), adult curses and screaming kids coming in the kitchen window and back   
   door as the camera roved around the cemetary at Bayeaux.   
    A chortling liberal would have enjoyed this moment on many levels; the   
   cleverer ones reaching for histories of Rome to announce 'was it ever   
   different?' and the stupider ones for vague reasons usually having to do   
   with listening to Elvis Costello and the Clash and being intensively   
   potty-trained in childhood.   
    History is mostly ignored and that has happened since day one but this   
   morning's juxtaposition was an unpleasant one and said a great deal to me.   
   It would be a knock-out moment in a film or drama.   
      
   It is quite stunning to see the amount of union jacks, monarchy and soldiers   
   on the BBC actually. The presenters are all saying 'this is the *last* big   
   commemoration' as if to reassure themselves that normal service will be   
   resumed quickly. Funnily enough I clearly remember twenty years ago when   
   they said exactly the same thing.   
      
      
   Ronnie Raygun's dead. The Right Wing press are gushing this morning. I   
   always recall him as a silly old prick but who knows?   
      
   In the course of my correspondence with a woman who works in arts and   
   museums we spoke about literature. Talking about Ronald Firbank, Conan Doyle   
   and various others. I asked if she enjoyed Waugh and she said she'd never   
   read him and the implication was that his politics made reading him infra   
   honestas.   
    This seems regrettable. Unlike those 'young fogeys'--the sort of cunt who   
   writes smarmy columns about gastropubs in the evening standard and how   
   wonderful hand-made brogues are at six hundred quid a pop and how he wears   
   his grandfather's tweed suit to the Chelsea Arts Club--who have co-opted   
   Waugh into their reactionary posing, I've simply always found him to be a   
   very entertaining novelist and a master of English prose writing. My   
   admiration for him began when my politics were at their furthest left.   
    Using his own test of novelistic intention, he comes out an aesthete and   
   mournful, comic one. Funny as it seems when written down, the fact that he   
   was a roaring, misanthropic snob, ultramontane Catholic and crypto-fascist   
   shouldn't get in the way of the work. And yeah, it is quite pleasing in   
   these evil days of cultural cabbage water to have Waugh as a literary hero.   
   He would have detested me, but then  he detested most people. He   
   would--did--destest most of those old men on the beaches and in the   
   cemetaries of Normandy today; they were his detested Hoopers and Trimmers.   
   At this remove--and indeed then--all these prejudices and snobberies are   
   quite indefensible.   
    What *is* defensible is the work. Last night I read The Loved One, about a   
   pet cemetary in Hollywood; it wasn't long before I was laughing   
   uncontrollably:   
      
   'Not all his customers were as open-handed and tractable as the Heinkels.   
   Some boggled at a ten-dollar burial, others had their pets embalmed and then   
   went East and forgot them; one after filling half the ice box for over a   
   week with a dead she-bear changed her mind and called in the taxidermist.   
   These were the dark days, to be set against the ritualistic, almost   
   orgiastic cremation of a non-sectarian chimpanzee and the burial of a canary   
   over whose tiny grave a squad of Marine buglers had sounded Taps. It is   
   forbidden by Californian law to scatter human remains from an aeroplane, but   
   the sky is free to the animal world and on one occasion it fell to Dennis to   
   commit the ashes of a tabby cat to the slip-stream over Sunset Boulevard.'   
      
   http://robbie.journalspace.com/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)