Bartlett for America
Watch: Suddenly got my West Wing mojo back last week. Damn I miss that show. Even if they did end it as perfectly as possible, the thought of no more new West Wing is still a distressing one. Though I suppose now I can go back and watch the episodes I never wanted to see first time around (the horrible ones where the Scooby Gang at the White House fall out amongst themselves and the grim lighting makes everything worse) now I know there's a happy ending.

Read: On a poetry kick at the moment. More specifically a Louis MacNeice kick. Some of his poetry is just too trying-to-be-intelligent, some of it is too rooted in the slightly detached left-wing university poetry of the grey mid-century. Some of it has that 'reach inside your mind and put it into words' quality, and some of it is just plain great poetry. As for instance.



Entirely
By Louis MacNeice

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Read and appreciate with every fibre of your being.