Rochester Reigns Supreme (and Jordison the blogger is an idiot)

Sam Jordison, Blogger

This is the bugger-ee, and yes, I said it, he's a bloody, bleeding man who I can easily picture liking it up the arse. Well, to be fair, I doubt he's bloody or bleeding. I'm quite certain he's well stretched and likely has a trail of loose stool and other fluids following him around wherever he goes unless he's wearing a nappy.

*sigh*

That was stupid, given I have nothing at all against gay men, and find most I've seen quite attractive (which automatically rules him out). I'm about "this" far from being a fag hag in fact, so that was far too nice a thing to say about the piece of offal you see above. He's a hack, plain and simple. No, what I mean to say is he's plain, he's simple and he's a hack. 

*sigh again*

I just had to happen upon his utterly ignorant hatchet job on John Wilmot within mere days of resolving to set aside negativity, too. That makes Brilliant Bitch a very cranky bitch this evening! I suppose I must show you the link, so you can see the thing for yourselves (don't miss the comment section, where Sammy boy's true ego shines vainglorious through) ...but don't say I didn't warn you. It sucks, and not in a good way!

Jordison's Puritanical Hatchet Job on John Wilmot

Never fear though, at the end of this ...let's call it a defense of John Wilmot, given my desire to leave negativity behind as much as possible, there is a link to an actual researched and resourced, ie journalistically sound piece on said Second Earl of Rochester, complete with links to many of his well known and lesser known works, poems, lyrics as well as letters from and to John's wife Elizabeth, about whom the dolt above professes to know so much ...after looking at a tavern sign and speaking to the alleged descendants of some pissed off peasants who haven't forgiven someone for getting one over on their ancestors. Oh, the humanity! When he went about disguised as a commoner and they called him, their lord, a smarmy git or whatever they called people back then, he dunked their heads in a pail of beer. Not until anyone drowned. Not until anyone was even harmed. The worst crime as far as I can tell was alcohol abuse ...by waste. Does our resident self-proclaimed expert and Puritan realize what truly awful kinds of things happened to peasants back in those days...like rape and torture and murder? Obviously that's a rhetorical question.

John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester

17th Century artists painted male characters with long/large noses because it implied they were gifted with long/large lower parts as well. Also, it was the norm to "gift" nobility with characteristics similar to the King, especially if it were something about which the King were particularly sensitive.
King Charles II had a large, red, bulbous nose, so no doubt John Wilmot's nose was far more refined than what we see here, but we shall never know for sure. Pencil drawings done before the painting seem to indicate a far more handsome man, but that would NOT have been acceptable to His Highness, the King.

I am going to break here just to show you a few pictures of the contemporaries and friends of the court of King Charles II. Let's see if you can pick out that singular feature they all seem to have in common with the monarch, whose picture I shall place first of course, well second, beneath that of the Earl of Rochester...just because I can!   So there! Why do I get so much pleasure out of such a simple thing? Ah well...

King Nostrils ...er King Charles II, the mold by which all other noses would be painted, only slightly smaller, of course.
The rest are his friends, in order, Christopher Wren, John Dryden, and Samuel Pepys. There were several more, all with
very minor variations on the same basic nose, and while we would expect that with the inbred royal family itself, it
extended far beyond that, as you can see, to include scholars, writers and architects. 

I happen to adore the works of John Wilmot, the real John Wilmot, in all his glorious, delicious imperfection, though I will admit it was the very perfectly made Johnny Depp who brought his writing and life to my attention. Thanks to the expert efforts of entities like "The Poetry Foundation" and modern day editors whose names I confess I do not know it is only now, in the twenty first century, that John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester and Baron of Adderbury (that is a pun for a all time given John's life story) is finally receiving his due as one of the Great Poets, Playwright and Lyricists of Restoration England. Sadly, his gods-whore of a mother burned the greater bulk of his private collection of his own works upon his death, leaving unromanticized history and the world far poorer for it. Imagine the world without most of Shakespeare. THAT is what this woman did. Imagine if only his lampoons and lesser works and private letters were left us, and some bitch had destroyed Othello and the rest. It doesn't bear thinking, and it happened. It makes me dearly hope parallel universes do exist and that in the rest of them she's the one who died of the pox at age 33 and he lived and wrote well into his sixties, at least. He hadn't even really matured yet, and was writing like the greats of all time. Talk about tragedy! How I loathe that art destroying shrew.

Such irony exists in the fact that those who claim to be so "veddy-veddy devout" (insert false High English accent, please) and cloak themselves in conspicuously false self-righteousness focus so attentively on the alleged filth and shame of sex and anything with even the most remote allusion to it. It is like a reverse sexual addiction...or perhaps not. Maybe that's just how they get their jollies. Maybe Rochester's "old sour cunt" (to steal a line from George R. R. Martin) of a mother squirted buckets as she watched his "pornographic" drawings and poems burn. I sincerely hope not. She didn't deserve the pleasure of it. She was probably fucking the minister who supposedly badgered her son into a deathbed renunciation of all he had done and been, so she's a liar too, or he was so deep into the dementia of syphilis that he knew not what he said. One thing I have learned in my decades on this earth; the more pious they are, the more likely they are to be complete and utter hypocrites!

Ann, John Wilmot's mother and the destroyer of most of his works...the rancid bitch.
She looks relatively young in this picture and she already looks like a bitter biddy, as if she's thinking  to the artist
"I know you're undressing me with your eyes, young man." AS IF! She could have probably used a good...
fill in the blank.

I can think of no other reason, when religious mythology has been so completely debunked and sane people understand that the Bible (capitalized here out of courtesy) is, if anything, a too often translated to suit the whims of the leaders of the times, possibly thought by some poor souls to be a divinely inspired collection of books written by mortal men. We know the New Testament was absolutely written after the life and death of Yeshua bin Joseph, the man Christians call Jesus, the Christ, Son of God, then altered in major ways, with entire books removed, by the Council of Nicaea in the 4th Century. If divinely inspired, who were these mere men to remove God's inspired works? Clearly, the Bible IS is seriously flawed, so anyone who takes it literally as the pure Word of God is not only a bit naive, but a bit nuts OR an all out sinner, because they are not doing all things the Bible commands us to do, because the "good book" is full of complete contradictions! 

Seriously, take this whole "sex except within marriage and for procreation is dirty, shameful and bad" thing. It really should have permanently run its course like a bad flu centuries ago, but like a bad flu it keeps cycling back around and around and around, bringing death and destruction (and major buzz kills) with it every time! But for a vocal minority of people, like that guy whose picture is up top, that thinking ridiculous (meaning literally to be ridiculed, which I am in the process of doing) thinking has not changed much in the past several hundred years.  

Take this old gem of an aphorism, just as a simple and obvious example. Religious zealots almost universally teach that their god created us. And the god of their own religion/myth is always the only one true god, yet they have no explanation for the fact that:

1. sex feels good, married and procreational or not

2. anal sex can be delightful for anyone (am I right, you BYU flippers?) though it is clearly not for procreation--in fact it is used in many cases to avoid procreation and pretend to maintain virginity ...and there's Hypocrisy rearing his beastly head again!

3. pleasure in sex continues, even increases for many, long past childbearing age

4. I could go on, and on, and on...but I'm sure I've already offended enough people

If this god of everyone's is so all-powerful, would he have made so many obvious errors in our design, or is the error in the idiotic thinking of repressed individuals who use religion as a means to control others--usually women? Gee,  let me think... Ahh, we're back to 4th century Nicaea, where a bunch of rich and powerful men, the only people legally allowed to read, write or hold religious office at the time, removed Mary Magdalene as the most favored Disciple of Christ, very likely his wife, given  it was "not right" for a Jewish man to be single well into his thirties, no matter who he claimed to be. Not only that, but they wrote her into whoredom. To top it all off, much of what Christians think of as Biblical or Gospel did not come from the Bible at all. It didn't even come from the <expletive deleted> Council of Nicaea! It came from Paradise Lost, a book of fiction, by someone named John Milton, who thumped the Bible so effing hard, he actually changed the perception of it for the majority of people alive today!  So no, no god made the mistakes. The mistakes are ours, all ours. That is clear, at least to me, and clearly to my beloved Merry Poet as well. Is it any wonder he graduated from Oxford with an MA (not BA, MA) at age 13...thirteen. That was not a typo. I call myself Brilliant Bitch completely tongue in cheek, but that man truly was brilliant, and to me his star shines as brightly now as ever. I just wish I could have seen his whole body .....of work.

Some say Rochester was a woman hater toward the end of his life. I cannot imagine why. Oh wait, he got syphilis at age sixteen it is believed, for which he received torturously traumatic and barbaric treatments throughout his young life...he never got beyond his youth, dying at age 33. Those treatments included mercury baths and scorching hot wires inserted into his penis, since bread mould (antibiotics) had not yet been discovered, though some "witches" had been using mouldy bread poultices on wounds with great success for centuries. Imagine that...women knowing how to dress and heal wounds hundreds of years before the great men "medicine" the barbers, the bleeders and leechers who took over the proper healing, greatly increasing the body count while the god all effing mighty church burned these good women and their healing secrets with them! All must obey and bow down (and tithe generously, very generously) to the man who shat upon the golden throne in Rome. Again, no typo. 

The Pope still shits on toilet of pure gold (no, it's not a rumor or urban legend, just a very carefully guarded secret that's been carefully scrubbed from the internet, but not from books in print...you remember those, right? ...they have paper pages you turn by hand). His Holiness (again capitalized out of courtesy) lives in his own city-state with his own government and has his own bank and standing, armed military and investigative service, discrete and separate from Rome and Italian law. I wonder how many poor and needy could be housed, clothed, fed, medicated and temporarily sterilized until they are self-sufficient with all that useless splendor and ridiculously redundant security. Why do they maintain such a huge archive that only they and peole they deem fit can visit, under tight supervision. Art, science and history belongs to the world, not the effing Catholic church! What are they HIDING? ...but I digress. 

Where was I? Oh yes. It's no wonder Wilmot had "issues" with women. Between getting the pox from a whore and with it the knowledge of impending mental decline, which for a genius and artist of words had to be worse than the death sentence itself at age 16) the pain of a chronically inflamed liver and having that thing for a mother...it's no wonder bitterness towards women sometimes comes through in what writings we have. Of course then as now, it's the sensational stuff that's remembered. That is a sad fact of human nature. I suffer much of what he did physically and mentally, though for different reasons (toxins I was exposed to in the Army) and at a considerably older age than 16...like 3 times that,  but I can sense, along with the angst and devil may care attitude, a forlorn urgency to make every moment count as much as possible, and an irritation toward people who have so much ...health, wealth, everything they want at their fingertips, yet still find shit to piss and moan about. Add Wilmot's harpy mother to the mix and even I could break bad.

I'm a very feminine feminist, but that woman makes me want to reach beyond the grave so I can re-kill her for what she stole from him, from us. And no, feminine feminist is not an oxymoron. The world is neither that black and white nor even simply grey; it us full of more colors than even we can see with our eyes, and that kind of complexity most certainly applies to the human psyche as well. Rochester not only saw and felt, but expressed it all with passionate vulnerability and fury that perhaps only one deep soul can express and another comprehend. It is beyond my understanding that anyone could read his words and be so blind as to see nothing but dirty sex. It's ...offensive.

Rochester writes viscerally and without the false, florid idealism that smells to me of wagon loads of flowers sent to mask the odors of a polluted and decaying aristocracy. As much as he was one of them, he was never truly one of them. He was a favorite of Charles II due to his easy wit and charming good looks in a time when bisexuality was the norm and the King filled his court with lovely young men. Charles also felt true gratitude for Henry Wilmot's sacrifice in his service, which cost him exile with his king and cost John all contact with his father growing up, and of course there was that that small matter of Henry saving the King's life, which earned him his title. Charles was proud of his young ward's valor as a officer in the Royal Navy and his scholarly accomplishments as well, as he was well known to be well read and conversant in any and all topics of interest, which was another reason he was such a favorite at court. He had many friends and few true enemies, aside from jealous husbands of lusty wives. Charles must have felt some level of responsibility for to Henry after his death because he forgave John over and over again when others would have been banished forever to the Tower for far lesser "crimes" than his--too many to begin to mention here, bu tthey are quite numerous and outrageously hilarious! 

Still, John was little more in reality than the King's pet ...made to look pretty and charm and above all behave, to beg and sing for his supper like some exotic pet bird, and if he crossed some unknown line when Charles was in the wrong mood he would be banished to his dull home in the country, where I'm sure the sound of his clock ticking down, ever more slowly with each passing season, nearly drove him mad. Yet as his mental state continued to decline, his behavior became ever more outlandish. It was the most vicious of cycles, and eternal loop of unwitting (or too witting) cause and effect.

Elizabeth Barry, Wilmot's student and  longtime mistress.

It was a painful trichotomy of existence John seemed to live, and he saw the worst of all the worlds he straddled. The world of the poor working girls in the theater where he met and trained to stardom his cruel and inconstant love, Elizabeth Barry, with whom he had a bastard child he was never allowed to see. The country life with his wife who loved to play the disdainful shepherdess to his ardent shepherd, and who, like the King, forced him to beg prettily for her favor, despite the fact that by mere marriage he had given her something more precious than all the money her wealthy family could buy, a high title in the Aristocracy and a sure place for her children for generations to come. Jordison compares her abduction and their elopement to rape, but I strongly disagree. If anyone was raped in that situation it was John, for he was the one shunned and disdained, until he finally turned away, at which point his reluctant shepherdess decided she wanted him after all. However one looks at it, their encounter was anything but rape, and was oft relived to the delight of both parties involved according to their explicit love letters.   Wilmot's widow died just a year and a month after his passing, even younger than he, at age 30, and since no record of any kind seems to exist as to cause of death, and I cannot find if she was buried in a church or family plot, I suspect cause of death may have been suicide. Sadly, her ten year old son died soon after. It is hard to say if it was an illness, "consumption" perhaps, or if she had contracted his diseases and even passed them on to their offspring through birth. One just cannot know, thanks to the ever censoring zealots of one form or another. 

That a man who lived so fully and bravely in so few years has been so completely forgotten, left untaught in our schools, due to something as foolish as religion is criminal! It is HEART BREAKING! First it was his mother and her puritanical spite. Then later, after some of his works had been lovingly reassembled by his younger friends and later by other artists, those collections and entire plays were deemed pornographic because not only did the eventual downfall into infamy or Bedlam of every rake and rogue become the butt of every joke and the lesson or moral to be learned behind every child's tale, but then to compound things along came a succession of monarchs (or they didn't come, which was probably their problem) ending up with frightfully frigid Queen Victoria, who was taught that "a well bred and Godly  married lady must turn her head away and bravely endure the intimate touch of her husband in the marriage bed, but only as a duty to her him for the purpose of procreation, and she must never take enjoyment in it." ...and so we return to, exactly WHO made the mistake here in making it all feel so freaking good, God or man? I don't care what anyone says, that icy Victorian attitude is more sick, perverted and wrong that anything, and I mean ANYTHING two fully consenting adults could possibly do together and it's certainly worse than anything anyone can say, write or draw that doesn't involve children..

And thus, John Wilmot was forced out of the art and history with full malice and intent of the royal family and the newly gelded art world. Elizabeth, his wife, did nothing but sit in a country manor home, but is remembered and referred to as "a great beauty and the fortune of the north who married the Earl of Sandwich who was a libertine and fathered four children and also had many affairs." I had to stand up and walk away from my computer for a little while before making use of the site's handy address for sending in corrections. What I really wanted to do is scream, tear my hair out, find the dim witted, presumptuous little (or large) ....person who wrote it, who cited that great purveyor of excellence in accuracy, Wikipedia, then tear his or her hair out, along with each and every fingernail, and just to insure some study on the matter before more is published, even here, where any fool can "publish" anything, cement her or his teeth together with dental bond, so as to prevent clear speech into any kind of speech recognition device. Sandwich indeed.

I know the buzz of "journalistic gnats" was of absolutely no concern to the Second Earl of Rochester, who was Noble by birth and far nobler of spirit and art than the twit Jordison and all the twits who came before and will come after him. Not one of them will ever be the slightest whisper in history, while some of the greatest literary minds of Wilmot's time and many since recognize his genius. I am just happy to live in an age in which reading his works, those that remain and have been painstakingly reassembled by publications like Poetry Foundation are available for anyone with the inclination to search for them. They are well worthy of reading for anyone with the slightest love of true literature.

Believe it or not, I could go on, but I want this read, not skipped over. I have actually removed several paragraphs I took hours to produce. Such is the life of someone with swiss cheese for a brain. I know it's overlong already, and my beloved Rochester deserves better than I could ever hope to write. I wish I could afford to pay blogger the money it takes to pay promote my blog, because "Johnny" does have fans out there...real ones, not the ones who mistake him for the sublime Mr. Depp. Plenty of love to go around. I think it's a travesty that one has to pay to do promote the written word on the internet, especially since Google already makes a fortune on other promotions.  At least in print media crap writers can't pay their way into having something published by a high quality publishing house. I think that's why books, real books, asI said, the ones with real pages, are forever. People are going to get tired of wading through the dreck people like Jordison here pay to promote when better fare is available.

Why is it people who are born rich are always treated better, and just assume they are better, when all they did was be born to parents with money? I served in the military, like Rochester. I'm going to die before my natural time due to poisoning, like Rochester, and I chose to use my, at one time genius level IQ for the betterment of the world, also like him. I chose healing, he chose the arts, both serve societ, and neither pay what they should until (except actors and very popular novelists). Still, either beats simply being a rich,  witless, useless and meaningless, and more times than not, full of self loathing.

In closing, does it surprise me that someone hack, some would-be journalist, saw a film in 2009, read a few of the easiest to find Wilmot pieces that sounded most likely to be offensive from the Internet, where, let's face it, men find what they're looking for (and I'll leave it at that for now because that is another entire post--and it's a doozie so far!). Then he thought he'd make the whole thing seem legit by listening to some village lore passed down and embellished upon since the 17th century and report it as if researched? I'd have to say no, sadly. We may have our next FoxNews anchor in the making, folks. Come on across the pond if you're not already here working for Mr. Murdoch, the troll.  

I did have a true, hearty belly laugh when reading the following, which appeared directly under Jordison's photo:

Sam Jordison is

 the author of

 Sod That: 103

 Things Not to Do 

Before You Die

 and co-editor of 

Crap Towns. 

He still hasn't written a novel.

Shocking.

Sounds like a truly positive kind of guy. Wish he'd do something on John Milton. I might begin to think he has more than a single brain cell bouncing around repeatedly off the inside of his otherwise fluid-filled brain pan..