Monthly Archives: August 2023

The Thin Resentment

There was his strength that now is gone.
There is his memory of strength that cruelly consumes
and there is our failure to find any solace.

There is my feeble suspicion that somehow
he allowed this to happen
and my thin resentment that this will be my inheritance.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

Voltaire and the Art of Gardening

Written in 1759 Voltaire’s Candide remains relevant. That’s quite a feat, so let me revise that lackluster opening sentence with this: the story is a timeless treasure; a garden of raucous flowers all with sharp edges. There, that’s better. Am I the only one sexually aroused now? Surely not.

Candide is a “young boy whom nature had endowed with the gentlest of dispositions.” He is “sound in his judgment” and has the “most straightforward of minds.” His tutor is the great German philosopher, Pangloss, who taught him “everything is for the best.” So when Candide is literally kicked out of a baron’s castle for kissing his daughter, Cunegonde, and ends up forsaken, cold, and hungry in a nearby town where he is “recruited” into the army on the eve of battle, he is not concerned. “Everything is connected in a chain of necessity, and has all been arranged for the best.” That’s comforting to know.

But then the prevailing army kills the baron, destroys his castle, gang rapes Cunegonde, drives Candide out of the territory where he encounters the Spanish Inquisition, plagues, earthquakes, and every other kind of human and natural disaster. Still, he remains indifferent. After all, Pangloss always said “Individual misfortunes contribute to the general good with the result that the more individual misfortunes there are, the more all is well.” I’m still sexually aroused.

Candide is a stunning satire that has you laughing at the most degenerate of humanity’s creations: war, religion, philosophy, civilization, government. The list goes on. Candide travels the world and everywhere his foundational belief in optimism is challenged and fails. Eventually he lands in Turkey where he abandons optimism as a “mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”

But what philosophy can replace optimism? Don’t we need a philosophy to understand why humanity exists? When Candide questions a learned dervish why there is so much evil in the world, the dervish asks “What does it matter whether there’s evil or good? . . . When his Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?” My guess is no.

Leaving the dervish, Candide encounters a humble, but content, farmer who advises him to cultivate his garden because “Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

So cultivate your garden, my friend, and may you prosper from your endeavors. Still sexually aroused.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

For the Record

Scientists on Earth
believe oxygen on Mars
is behaving strangely.

But how would they know?
They have never visited
that remote red rock.

And who made them judges
of what is normal and what is strange?
When they know nothing of normal
and they, themselves, are so strange.

Have they considered instead
that maybe oxygen behaves
normally on Mars and 
strangely on Earth?

Or maybe oxygen
can behave no other way
because Mars is nasty
and treats oxygen like
a noxious gas.

The HR department believes
I’m behaving strangely.

But how would they know?
They have never endured
the daily indignities
I am subjected to.

Have they considered instead
that maybe I’m behaving normally -
given the circumstances?
Maybe they wouldn’t judge
if you had been nasty to them;
treated them like a noxious gas;
left them to live life
like cockroaches in the dark
wondering what will happen
when the light turns on.

So for the record,
if there ever is one,
this is not my fault.

If you had only returned
my calls, texts, emails,  
or come to the door
when I pounded on it,
your basement window
wouldn’t be broken.

I wouldn’t be bleeding
in your airless closet.  

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief

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Tiger by the Tail

In Real Tigers, the third installment in his entertaining Slough House series, Mick Herron asks one important question. Can you tell the difference between a real tiger and a paper tiger? The answer better be yes, or you may end up dead, dead, dead. At least that’s what happens in this diverting page turner.

Slough House is where Britain’s MI5 dumps its slow horses, spies who are either cursed, incompetent, unlikeable, or addicted to something. Then it gives them nothing to do. The delightfully malevolent Jackson Lamb is the foul-smelling misanthrope in charge of Slough House. He is roused from his alcohol-aided slumbers when one of his team goes missing.

Catherine Standish leaves Slough House one intolerably hot evening and runs into an old MI5 colleague. She gets nervous because there’s no “friend falser than another spook.” Minutes later she is lifted from the street and thrown into a black van. Was that meeting on the street just a coincidence? Sure, why not?

Here’s another coincidence. Peter Judd, Britain’s home secretary, has hired a tiger team to infiltrate MI5 and test its internal defenses. Judd is a messy mop-haired scamp – a “public buffoon and private velociraptor.” If you’re thinking Boris Johnson, congratulations. You’ve connected the very obvious dots. He’s in a power struggle with MI5’s first desk and its second desk. They’re all rivals, and they hate each other. But he has a secret plan that will cage his rivals, and the tiger team is going to help.

Poor Judd. A few ex-soldiers on the tiger team have their own plans, and they don’t play ball with their corporate overlords. Slough House is brought in to help clean the mess or, in the alternative, be blamed for it. And they still need to find Catherine.

It’s best not to think too hard about the plot. It’s unnecessarily convoluted and doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. However, you don’t read Slough House novels for intense psychological drama and seamlessly constructed plots. You read them because they’re fun. The characters are deliciously petty and only begrudgingly helpful. As the story reaches its bloody conclusion, we learn who’s real and who’s paper.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor