"We just can’t tell what they will do when they stop grinning"

Quoted out of context, for good use of short sentences -- Michael Wood in his essay on Yeats and violence (he is writing about this):

The soldiers are cold and tired and complaining. They have lost hope and they have blood-stained hands: they are soldiers. They die, and they tell us about dying. Then all at once they are grinning and saved. Well, they have arrived in paradise. No, in our paradise, the paradise of right or left, the saved bourgeois world or the new order after the revolution, neither of which would be glad to see the dirty soldiers of the earlier conflict again. That’s why the soldiers are grinning. They know how upset we are to see them. And they seem at the end to know who they are. They are not the drunken soldiery of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, but they are violent dead men who won’t die, who have been through several secular hells, and their grins promise all kinds of havoc in the place we thought was perfect. They are not ‘the worst rogues and rascals’; they are not even ‘weasels fighting in a hole’. They have been fighting in a hole, but they are not weasels. But they are anarchic enough, convincing enough, lively enough, to end any dream of order. We just can’t tell what they will do when they stop grinning.

Elsewhere in the piece, there is much to like, most valuably (for me) this Yeats poem, which I'd forgotten:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Imaginary zoos with real badgers

(x-post from STOATUSblog)

From John Berryman's strange 1945 story "The Imaginary Jew" (Kenyon Review via seventydys):

Now and then I went to the zoo in lower Central Park and watched with interest the extraordinary behavior of a female badger. For a certain time she quickly paced the round of her cage. Then she would approach the sidewall from an angle in a determined, hardly perceptible, unhurried trot; suddenly, when an inch away, point her nose up it, follow her nose up over her back, turning a deft and easy somersault, from which she emerged on her feet moving swiftly and unconcernedly away, as if the action had been no affair of hers, indeed she had scarcely been present. There was another badger in the cage who never did this, and nothing else about her was remarkable; but this competent disinterested somersault she enacted once every five or ten minutes as long as I watched her,—quitting the wall, by the way, always at an angle in fixed relation to the angle at which she arrived at it. It is no longer possible to experience the pleasure I knew each time she lifted her nose and I understood again that she would not fail me, or feel the mystery of her absolute disclaimer,—she has been taken away or died.

(NB 1. "Imaginary gardens with real toads" -- Marianne Moore. 2. The rest of the story is interesting; it doesn't come off, in the way most early Berryman doesn't come off, but has a whiff of the atmosphere of the Dream Songs. 3. The outage appears to have eaten a couple of posts and comments; I shall try to reconstruct the posts from my rss feed but the comments appear to have been irrevocably aetherized. 4. Perhaps because I've been rereading Moby Dick I'm abnormally sensitive to embedded iambic pentameter; "turning a deft and easy somersault" stuck out as I was reading this passage.)

"The fanged fish-gobbler"

Ciaran Byrne on twitter has been pushing a story from Northern Ireland about a wayward otter:

(Image from the BBC.)

The BBC has the clearest report of the events:

Farmer Joe Burke and shop owner Mike Hogan first noticed the animal as it passed by on the footpath outside Mr Hogan's window.
Concerned for its safety, they decided to come to its aid. However, the otter clearly had other ideas.
As a large crowd gathered, the otter became "very aggressive" and started trying to bite people.
...

He took a thick bag used for holding animal feed, and after a minor struggle, managed to capture the animal.
The two men loaded their charge into the back of Mr Burke's jeep, and made their way to a local lake with the intention of releasing the otter back into its natural habitat.
But again the otter was refusing to go quietly.
"He chewed his way out of the bag," said Mr Hogan. "The back window was missing on the jeep so he jumped out when we stopped."
The resourceful animal then made a dash for freedom half a mile back towards Tulla, before Mr Burke was able to catch it under a traffic cone.Mr Burke and Mr Hogan evenually caught the otter under a traffic cone. The men slid a piece of plywood under the cone and carried it back to the lake, where they let the otter back into the water.

Do, however, read the versions in the Sun ("fanged fish-gobbler"), the Irish Independent ("village terrorized by termin-otter"),  JOE ("Psycho Tayto bag otter runs amok in Irish town"), and best of all, the original Irish Sun headline ("Devil otter ate my mini-van").

This story is hopefully on its way to becoming a meme; here, for instance, is a story in the Irish Broadsheet titled "Devil Otter ate our Soccer Panel". Although it is not directly otter-related, I cannot resist posting this highly representative page of the Sun: