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[ by Charles Cameron — a perfect two-snake pattern from the WaPo headline writers ]
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As patterns go, this one is hard to beat:

Source:

Washington Post, John Roberts counterpunches the counterpunching president

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As you may have gathered, the human propensity for patterning is an enduring interest of mine, and my collecting of such things as ouroboroi, parallelisms, paradoxes, moebius formats and mirrorings is effectively a small pattern language study after the example of Christopher Alexander‘s Pattern Language. Mine, drawing its materials from verbal and visual exemplars rather than architectural ones, perhaps reveals more about the workings of the human mind, aka consciousness.

The “outer world” has yet to catch up with the significance of these studies..

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At a time when my worldly goods in book form consisted of fifty or so over-thumbed, used science fiction paperbacks and one hardback — I no longer recall what it was — I won a minor poetry prize of $50 and decided it was better to splurge it on one thing I’d really treasure than to dribble it away, a coffee here, a sandwich there.. much though I like my coffees.

Henbce, for about $45, I aacquired my copy of Alexander’s book — hardback #2!

An I Ching for the West! Nobel-worthy! A Master’s Masterpiece!

[ by Charles Cameron — not exactly a knife (or sayf) to a gunfight, but .. ]
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Here:

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The obvious MBS DoubleQuote is with Jared Kushner, as in the Medium article, Two Princes: Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman. Prince Hamlet offers a third and more ambiguous choice..

When the wind is southerly, Hamlet [Act 2 Scene 2] says, I know a hawk from a handsaw — but tell me, who knows whence [John 3.8] the wind blows?

[ by Charles Cameron — on the supposed world-shape — real, imagin’d, or foggy with scattered insights ]
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Here:

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Two to my mind great poets of the language on the world-shape.

The first, John Donne, brilliantly stands astride the ancient metaphysical and modern scientific understandings of world-shape with his stunning, succinct corners of the round earth — he’s familiar to the point of ownership with both traditions, at a time when the ancient was ceding way to the modern..

The second, Bob Dylan, shuffles anonymously among us at a no less fraught time of anguish as to realities, sings unsure of what’s what or which — a coin toss, a twist of fate..

bard’s wyrd.

[ by Charles Cameron — continuing the search, plus mckibben & a touch of dylan as a sunday surprise ]
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First a chyron, based on Trump’s words:

Fascinating article: The Dawn of the Intra-Family Political Attack Ad

In August, Glosser published an essay in Politico magazine chiding his nephew by sharing the family’s own immigration story as Jews who fled the shtetls of Eastern Europe. “I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew,” Glosser wrote, “an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”

Is House of Cards a poem, then?

Doug Stamper is the dog.

In the opening moments of Netflix’s House of Cards premiere episode from 2013, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) hunched over a dog that’d been injured by a car. “There are two kinds of pain,” he said into the camera. “The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain, the sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things. Moments like this require someone who will act, who will do the unpleasant thing, the necessary thing.”

He then broke the dog’s neck. “There,” he said. “No more pain.”

In the final moments of the final episode of House of Cards—which occurs in a truncated season made after Spacey left the show due to allegations of sexual misconduct—the president, Claire Hale Underwood (Robin Wright), cradles her dead husband’s henchman, Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), in her lap. She has just stabbed him in the belly with a letter opener after he nearly slit her throat with it. Underwood puts her hand over his mouth and nose and tells him that everything’s going to be okay. His eyes close. “There, no more pain,” she says. Her eyes flick toward the camera. The credits roll.

Some sort of rhyming is going on here, clearly, but does the poem mean anything?

That “rhyme” is a DoubleQuote, really — a thought-rhyme if you like, and on a technical film-making sense a clever twist to end on. Not so much a synchronicity or coincidence, more a twist of authorial fate.

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Twists of fate, eh? And tangled up in blue? Here are two recent Dylan pieces to note:

New Yorker, Bob Dylan’s First Day with “Tangled Up in Blue”

New Yorker, Bob Dylan’s Masterpiece Is Still Hard to Find

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Bill McKibben, with a s game / play metaphor that derives its strength from the topic, not from the metaphoric play:

In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out.

That’s from How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet — see also THE END OF NATURE.

Early and late, McKibben has been one of the voices crying that the wildness is shronking — from within the shrinking wilderness..

Wilderness / wildness yes, that’s deliberate..

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& by way of a Sunday surprise, here’s some extraordinary music for whenever you need extraordinary, need music — twists of tangled blue fate included:

[ by Charles Cameron — my father fought and died for an end to this, well over fifty years ago, and now this.. ]
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For the record —

— that little yellow star resurfacing on social media in 2018 USA, for shame.

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Sources:

BuzzFeed, A Reporter Got An Anti-Semitic Death Threat From A Trump Supporter

Twitter, Binyamin Appelbaum

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For shame?

It’s all too easy to moralize. Happily for me, I was born on the “better angels” side of WWII.