Category Archives: Aesthetics

On The Sadness Of Diminishing Things

Aesthetics, America, English, The West, The Zeitgeist

The soul can seek and find solace in an achingly beautiful (and sad) thing. (We’ve gone there before, with “The Magic Of MacNeice.”)

The sadness? For our fading country.

The Judge Who Always Knows What’s Right has sent this along:

The Oven Bird By Robert Frost

THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

A Cow Is Born

Aesthetics, America, Intelligence, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

You had 14 underdeveloped babies, willfully test-tubed via in vitro fertilization, and you spew forth mouthfuls of clichés, oblivious to the destruction you’ve wrought. Speaking of your Mouth: you’ve inflated it to resemble the mating-abalone lips on the famous face of another fertile female. Your nose too has been so obviously sculpted to look like hers. Clearly, IVF is not your only pastime—or expense.

And those are your better features.

You’re not working with much; that’s stating the obvious. What a shame about those tiny tots, who’ll have to battle the odds of being yours.

On the bright side: Judging from your compromised intelligence, self-absorption and recklessness, you have the making of a star in contemporary America. Already you’re described by your intellectual equals in the moron media as “Calm, poised and articulate.”

America: meet Nadya Suleman The Great. “A Star is Born.”

Seriously, when I see someone on TV who’s particularly grotesque or gormless (it happens all the time), I say to Sean: “Just you see, she/he has a great career ahead.”

Related: “Octuplets One Can Get Behind: Apu & Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon’s”