What I really should do, but will probably not, is to tell you about the important meeting that Trump had with Vladimir Putin. You will remember—or maybe you won’t—that Trump had promised to make a deal and settle the war in Ukraine in the first 24 hours of his presidency. He then met with the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, and berated him in the oval office with cameras rolling for not wearing a suit and not being grateful. It was agonizing to watch.
Now, Trump is doing what he can to divert attention from his dalliances with a couple of known sexual abusers—Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. So the idea of meeting Putin in Alaska (without the un“suit”able presence of Zelensky) got floated and instantly was taken up. This is not an administration fettered by overthinking.
It was horrifying, if all the details are correct. Trump got out the red carpet (quite literally, since there were marines on their knees rolling the damn thing out), and then stood waiting like a dog for his master to get off the plane. At which point he clapped, and then veered like a drunk down the red carpet.
Things got worse. There were three of them and three of “us,” though how much “us” is in Donald Trump is debatable. Trump got off to a fine start by delivering a monologue that lasted 20 minutes and was largely disconnected from any reality that should have been dealt with. Putin sat quiet and let him talk. Then the flattery, along with the history lesson that Ukraine had been part of Mother Russia for centuries. Anyone could see that, especially a man with the insight and the erudition of Donald Trump. That alone would be sufficient to justify his very firm no, to the historical impossibility of ending the current war with anything but the “return” of the Donbas region. It’s a huge amount of land, and it includes, of course, Russia’s access to the Crimea.
My knowledge of Russian history is less than Putin’s, but even I know about the Russian mania for the Crimea.
The whole affair was a bust, because there was no cease fire—which had been the goal. Actually, Trump had told everyone that it was gonna happen, because Putin really, really liked Trump and wanted to make a deal with him. Still, it didn’t happen, though the world got to hear Putin speak of being “neighbors” TO THE United States, and his wish to increase that good will which should exist between neighbors.
During the peace summit, Russia bombed Kiev severely and repeatedly.
Trump looked old and weak. Putin looked old and in control (that KGB training comes in handy). The European leaders looked aghast, when they put down their phones after talking with Trump. He was calling them, essentially echoing Putin’s talking points, one by one, when he called them for support in getting Zelensky to propose to his country that they give up the area about the size of the east coast of the United States, stretching from the northern tip of Maine to the southernmost Florida Key.
So they put down whatever they were doing that day and flew to Washington, to support Zelensky and try to quash any plans to give up the Donbas region. The strategy appears to be to flatter Trump, and then slip in whatever truth they want to impart. I get it—I do the same thing to my cat. I put the pill in a nice, dripping spoonful of tuna fish, and we’re all happy.
That was hardly the most important news, since really the whole thing was about appeasing a severely-stricken malignant narcissist who has also developed a rampaging dementia. He also has the codes for the nuclear football.
Just to exhaust the Fire Department, Trump set another fire, this time in Washington, D.C. by sending in 800 national guardsmen last week to “combat crime.” The number of guardsmen is now up to 2000, according to one report; the mainstream media is covering the spontaneous protests (which are apparently large) with reverential silence.
There is, in short, serious shit going down, but did Trump go down? Not at all, he went up—UP!—to the roof of the White House, apparently twice on two different days. Having settled (or not) the difficulties in Ukraine, Trump got out his developer hat (or hardhat) and did what any real guy would do. He surveyed the site of the new ballroom that has to be put on the site of Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden. The whole thing is part of redecorating the White House to make it look like Mar-a-Lago, and in this he has been entirely successful. We all remember the ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, though it’s always lovely to refresh the memory.
All of this is really important, and a serious person would be telling you about it, but I am not a particularly serious person. I certainly wasn’t last Tuesday, when I had wasted my day finding a poem that I intended to bind into the indictment of Donald John Trump that Jack Smith had presented to the country in the first week of the year, before he skipped town.
But I was thinking about books, since the image of Trump on the White House roof (the cartoons the next day had crowds gazing up at the President and shouting “JUMP”) was too unsettling. Books don’t get up on the roof, generally, and they stick to their libraries until it gets timed to be rebound.
They lead quiet but not inconsequential lives. Actually, the most consequential thing about them is that against all odds some of them survive.
This post has no chance, I think, if someone or something wants to get rid of it. The website hosting this blog could have AI scouring their servers; my words and whatever thoughts they convey could be scrubbed from the internet in the time it takes to shut down my computer, stick all my stuff in a backpack, and head for the door to go home. I could disappear very easily, and so could Jack Smith’s indictment.
But something altogether extraordinary might happen if I printed a bunch of these posts into a book and gave it to Johnny, my brother. Johnny might put the book into the Norwegian chest that came over on the (as usual) second boat, us having missed the first. And there the book might sit, enjoying the dark and the muffled sounds of life outside the chest. The living room and especially the dining room are really nice places to be.
And some ancestor might come along, some day, with a morning free to look at a manuscript in that old chest. The pages would be yellowed, perhaps, though if it were lignin / acid-free it would help. But long after the Internet had forgotten about Trump on the roof of the White House, well, my book would not. All I (and my book) depend on is Johnny, who is a superb older brother and generally reliable. The ancestor might learn that the “tourist visit” thousands of Trump supporters made on January 6, 2001, to the United States Capitol was a less than peaceful affair. Though it taught us a lot.
Books only have to deal with fire, floods, desiccation, ill-use to the point of abuse, termites and time. They don’t have to deal with evil or malice.
They’re the quiet dudes in the room. You have to open them up to get them to talk.
Or rebind them, since that’s what I was thinking about, as I walked to the Poet’s Passage. One of the great things about books is that for centuries they were damned expensive to make: outside of the time and labor to produce them, vellum and parchment weren’t cheap. I throw away paper when I glue an end-paper down—such a practice would have horrified a monk in a medieval scriptorium. He would have gathered up the scrap and used it to thicken a book cover. In fact, stuff crops up from time to time in book bindings, and it recently did several months ago. Here’s a hint from the BBC:
…the 700-year-old fragment of Suite Vulgate du Merlin – an Old French manuscript so rare there are less than 40 surviving copies in the world – has been discovered by an archivist in Cambridge University Library, folded and stitched into the binding of the 16th-Century register.
I’ll let the BBC continue the story.
Today, multispectral imaging (MSI), CT scanning and 3D modelling has enabled scholars to not only read the faded and hidden texts of the fragment, but to understand exactly how it was folded and sewn into the register. The Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory team at Cambridge University Library has even been able to analyse the different threads used by the Elizabethan bookbinders and the different decoration pigments used by the medieval illuminator, whose job it was to "illuminate" manuscripts with decorative illustrations and rich colours.
Well, well, I thought—it’s an interesting world. We no longer need to take the cover off and undo the binding of a book to see what’s inside. I knew about that, since we are doing essentially the same thing with the Dead Sea scrolls that are far too fragile to unroll.
What I didn’t know—and was pleased to discover—was that a bookbinder could plant history, as it were. Kids put messages for unseen eyes in the improbable future to discover in empty bottles tossed into the sea. Why not bookbinders?
So I gassed on about the Irish-monks-saving-Western-Civilization to the people at the Poet’s Passage. Then I told them about the Merlin manuscript, discovered after 700 years of gentle sleep in the inside of a book cover. Then I read them the poem of Arthur Waley about censorship. The poem that I had wasted a day trying to find. You remember, the poem that ends:
It is not difficult to censor foreign news,
What is hard today is to censor one's own thoughts --
To sit by and see the blind man
On the sightless horse, riding in to the bottomless abyss.
Then it was time to slip the poem into the folded cardstock sheet of the cover, and to put glue on the marbled paper to the cover. I sealed it up in front of everybody, since who wouldn't be curious to see, and indeed want to see…
…history being planted.
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