At the back of the first American edition of his Great War memoir Undertones of War (1929), Edmund Blunden appends a selection of thirty-one poems he titles, with perhaps mock-formality, “A Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations.” Often the poems describe not combat but intervals between engagements and knowledge that the respite will be brief. As always, Blunden observes the pastures, livestock and orchards of the French countryside, and the ravages they have sustained in the fighting. Here is “At Senlis Once”:  “O how comely it was and how reviving, When with clay and with death no longer striving Down firm roads we came to houses With women chattering and green grass thriving.   “Now though rains in a cataract descended, We could glow, with our tribulation ended-- Count not days, the present only Was thought of, how could it ever be expended?   “Clad so cleanly, this remnant of poor wretches Picked up life like the hens in orchard ditches, Gazed on the mill-sails, heard the church-bell, Found an honest glass all manner of riches.   “How they crowded the barn with lusty laughter, Hailed the pierrots and shook each shadowy rafter, Even could ridicule their own sufferings, Sang as though nothing but joy came after!”   Senlis is a village about thirty miles northeast of Paris. It had been captured by the Germans in September 1914, and marked the limit of their advance on the French capital. In the prose portion of Undertones of War, Blunden writes of his unit’s approach to the village in 1916:   “[M]y own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled, one spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember. We were merry when at length the relief was sent in and we went along the road in pale daylight to Senlis, a village six or seven miles behind the line.”   Blunden follows this with a brief reprieve from war: church bells, beer and chocolate, and soldiers admiring “with determination” the French girls who sold it to them. The “prime gift of eccentric heaven” was an invitation to a divisional concert party. Without transition, Blunden continues:   “Soon enough, from the huts in the orchard, from the mud-walled barns by the church, from the blankets in the straw or the mahogany beds with the mountainous straw mattresses, we were marching eastward again, and with little to recommend our future to us.”   A frequent complaint from the men: where are we going? Blunden and the others follow orders with little knowledge of their destination or purpose. Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., the 108th anniversary of the Armistice. An estimated 9.7 million military personnel died in four years of fighting. Starting in the early 1980s and for the next thirty years or so, R.L. Barth would write at least one epigram each Veterans Day. They now number more than one hundred. In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. Here is one of his epigrams, untitled:   “'Why not adjust? Forget this? Let it be? Because it’s truth. Because it’s history.”   And this is “Epitaph”:   “Tell them quite simply that we died Thirsty, betrayed, and terrified."   Bob wrote to me this week: “My favorite WWI poet is and always has been Sassoon. However, the WWI poet I feel closest to is Blunden. Why? Take whichever of these reasons you prefer: he is the one poet who could never let go of the war, or he is the one poet the war would never let go.” Bob honors a kinship with soldier-poets who wrote of wars fought before he was born. Take “A Letter to the Dead”:   “The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight. Cold with the mountain winds and two week’s rain, I watch the concertina. The starlight- Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.   “You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon. Through sentry duty, everything you meant Thickens to fear of nights without a moon. War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”   According to the U.S. Marine Corps History Division: “The Vietnam War was costly to the U.S. Marine Corps. From 1965 to 1975, nearly 500,000 Marines served in Southeast Asia. Of these, more than 13,000 were killed and 88,000 wounded, nearly a third of all American causalities sustained during the war.”

A wave builds into a tsunami. I went for a run just over two years ago. Then, it was to shake out the results of the 2024 election. A deep disappointment, but also acceptance knowing what this country is capable of. Come Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026. Jen and I are in the living room, watching news come in on YouTube, and we’re both refreshing social media and news sites to glean the latest. We’re alert. We had voted two weeks prior, dropping our ballots off downtown. Ever since becoming a citizen in 2012, I have taken my ability to vote with respect — a responsibility and duty I don’t take for granted. You betcha I voted. As results started coming in, a feeling we hadn’t felt in a long while crept in. Was that...hope? Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, South and North Carolina, and Maine went blue. Indigenous representation happened. Queer and trans representation happened. Young people turned the fuck out — Asians and Latinos too. Black voters always turn up. White men turned up. In two years of depravity, deportation, and death, people have come to realize that they don’t want a world in which negativity, polarization, and survival are the only modes we exist in. This is a reprieve, a moment to take a breath, before we continue the marathon. The work continues. → This looks better on the web → Reply via email Thanks for reading and using RSS!

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.  – Elias Canetti 1 I am not one for reading projects. I have never planned to read a play of Shakespeare every day until I have read them all or set out to read every novel by a particular author in order of their publication. There are people who every year read all six novels on the Booker Prize shortlist to make a judgement to compare to the jury's or ask "Where to start?" with an author when they (the author) has recently died or been awarded the Nobel Prize (which amounts to the same thing).2  I wonder what they hope to achieve. Despite this, I did plan to read Harvard UP's four-volume Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin in order. And not just in book order but each essay in each book in order. I believed this would enable to me to get a handle on Walter Benjamin's thought better than knowing well the odd essay like The Image of Proust or The Storyteller, both found in a battered copy of Illuminations I've had since the late 1980s, and as a result become a more informed and learned person, able to reach for an idea or example with the nonchalance of one who knows. It started with great promise with consecutive essays on Trauerspiel moving me with unexpected force 3, only then to reach the 69-page essay On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. Not only was it like walking across the Atacama Desert, it was like eating it as well. Of course, I could skip the essay and carry on but, no, it had to be every essay and in order. This is also why I resent books with long introductions by a third party. While they may be full of useful information, with their spin and spoilers they diminish the enthusiasm one had to read the main text, yet skipping them feels like one cannot claim to have read the book.4 Unread books promise, cajole, weep and sneer. Beside the four volumes on the bookshelf is the translation of Benjamin's Arcades Project. Twenty-five years on it remains untouched. (Note the peekaboo on the dust jacket, a design inspired by Albert Angelo by BS Johnson perhaps.) And then on a coffee table there are the toppling piles of partly read books promising a glorious future of enlightenment: Joseph Leo Koerner's Reformation of the Image, Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale and Georges Poulet's Metamorphosis of the Circle are just three.5  Instead I have been picking up books I have read and reading them for the second, third or even fourth time. Is this comfort reading? How do we understand this phrase? Akin to comfort blanket, it suggests a retreat into warmth and familiarity. The number of adults reading or, rather, rereading the Harry Potter novels suggests as much, and more: reading as passivity; reading as sleep. If fantasy novels arouse wonder in a child, they numb an adult. I recognise this need even if I could never read that kind of book. There is a longing only to submerge oneself in a river of prose, to find a rhythm as one sentence follows another on the way perhaps to that fabled infinity, even if that is now diminished into the complete absorption of a complete work. I have long been aware of the dangers of dilettantism, the tendency to be satisfied with a passing understanding of what one is dealing with, manifest in the haphazard nature of blogging. Recently, I saw an advert for IndieScholars and, keen to find a way to read and write more productively, I downloaded its free practical guide. When I saw the advice to get rid of my TV, I found the answer...and got rid of the guide instead. It is for the unexpected and perhaps for the revelatory that I read and risk dilettantism as their possibility. I take comfort in desultory reading. The process of reading has something infinite about it. Notes  1. From The Secret Heart of the Clock.  2. This urge is worth noting: it suggests respect for authority and the impulse to question that authority without questioning the conditions generating the need for authority. If they did, their reviews may become more interesting.  3. As a result I began to read Origin of the German Trauerspiel but stalled at the seductively entitled Epistemo-Critical Foreword.  4. That said, Hannah Arendt's 58-page introduction to Illuminations contains a quotation I have always valued: 'Truth, so Benjamin said shortly before he became fully aware of the irreparable break in tradition and the loss of authority, is not "an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice."'  If one wants to know where the quotation comes from, the publishers in their infinite wisdom have provided a reference to a page number in the German Gesammelte Schriften. Were they not aware that Illuminations is a translation for people who cannot read German! Anyway, by coincidence it's from the Epistemo-Critical Foreword.  5. Blanchot says Poulet's book prompted him to ask himself why "along with this book, the very history of criticism and culture closed".

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