Martin Meenagh blog

Walt Whitman could sure right pretty. He wrote what Bartleby.com refers to as poem 245 for the 1853 New York exposition, which was in itself a reaction to that of the United Kingdom, and that in turn a reaction to the French one of 1844. I came across it because I've been listening to a great history of the Habsburg Empire whilst taking the first really long walks of the year (today, from a do at the House of Lords down to Parson's Green). Vienna's expo in 1857 was a sad affair,  not because of anything they did, but because of a stock market crash and an outbreak of cholera, which, alone or in combination, were and probably would never be that good for business. Not for the first time, Vienna has me thinking about the connection between culture and politics. Seen from the brilliance of the Kennedy administration, for instance, and its grace and elan, Lyndon Johnson is an outline in the light, and a murky one at that. Seen as a kind of living embodiment of some brash, eff...

D onald Trump's inauguration--which too many people are seeing as 'really Quincy Adams' when it's all Jackson, Harding, Johnson, and Wilkie--came on St Agnes' Eve. She being a virginal martyr, and it being cold here in Britain, I thought that a spot of Keats was in order.  (By the time anyone has finished reading it, everything might be all over anyway). It is, given the womens' protests, also worth noting that St Agnes' Eve was traditionally the time when women who dreamed of a life with people who were worth it would do things that were unusual to them to make it happen. Seems a better way of interpreting a nationwide 'Pussy March' packed with people who aren't the usual suspects than trying to make it into a series of marches on Versailles.... St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!         The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;         The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,...