11/14/2016

This week, two offerings, a brand new character: Gomer-Begat-Ashkenaz Williams (friends call him Willy).

And Kel’s Reading Room, wherein here and there, now and again, to this one and that one I offer up the overlooked, overwrought, hallucinogenic and old school.

Special art edition

This offering - the third after Chesterton’s Lepanto, page 78, and Dorothy Parker’s Men, A Hate Song, page 94 – concerns the subject of artist Ilya Repin’s splendid 1891 Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire:



Completed over eleven years, set in 1676, the painting celebrates the Ukrainian Cossacks’ written reply to Mehmed IV’s demand of fealty; a fitting answer then and now to any and all usurping oligarchs intent on taking power after not having received even the barest majority of a people’s popular vote...

Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!
O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil's kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are you, that can't slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. You will not, you son of a bitch, make subjects of Christian sons; we've no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck your mother.
You Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig's snout, mare's arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw your own mother!
So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won't even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we'll conclude, for we don't know the date and don't own a calendar; the moon's in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day's the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!
Signed
koshovyi otaman Ivan Sirko, with the whole Zaporozhian host