In the wake of Bush's gobsmacking victory, the insight de jour is that voters (or rather slightly more than 50% of them) ignored the quagmire in Iraq, the unsustainable economic situation, and the general incompetence of the administration, preferring to focus on the issue of the candidates' "morality" and "character"--secular euphemisms for being religious. Yet just as it is transparently obvious that there was no link between Saddam and 911, I cannot for the life of me connect any notion of real spiritual values with the sort of crony capitalism facilitated by the Bush White House. I mean, where exactly in the Bible does it say blessed are those who grant massive tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent of society?

I await with interest Paul Krugman's howl of outrage in his next NYT op-ed piece. Meanwhile, the title for James Wolcott's latest post to his blog must echo the rueful cries being heard across the Northeast and Pacific coast of the United States: Anyone Know How to Make a Noose?

The concession speech by John Kerry and the victory address by President Bush brought home what was lost to America, and indeed the rest of the globe, yesterday. I'm biased (who isn't), but I thought that Senator Kerry was eloquent in defeat and showed an emotional core that many accused him of lacking. (But I keep thinking of the exchange from Berthhold Brecht's The Life of Galileo when the importance of charisma in politicians comes up. One character says "Pity the country that has no heroes." To which Galileo responds, "Pity the country that needs them." We still live in nations where it is more important whether we would like to share a beer with a politician than hear their policies. Hence the stubborn popularity of own incumbent, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern)

In contrast, Bush's "healing" speech was actually as divisive as ever, riddled with creepy coded phrases to his "base". If I remember correctly, he talked about reforming the outdated tax laws (i.e. moving the burden of taxation from investment to income) and pledging to protect the family (ensuring that gay marriage will never happen).

However, this story from ABC (via AndrewSullivan.com) suggests that imminent fiscal headaches could well put a crimp in the President's swagger. We might find that the next four years could be spent trying to cure the hangover caused by the last four.

Pundits keep popping up and pondering where exactly the Kerry campaign went wrong. I don't think it went wrong anywhere--because there are only so many left-of-centre values you can sacrifice before you cease to offer real opposition.

It seems concerns about "moral values" are even seeping into "old Europe." A report that appeared in Le Monde a few days ago detailed a bit of moral outrage over the resting place of Victor Noir in the graveyard of Père-Lachaise in Paris. Noir was a journalist who was fatally wounded on 10 January 1870 in a duel with Pierre Bonaparte, an impulsive cousin of the then Emperor Napoleon III. Noir was just 22 when he died and he was elevated to martyr status by the anti-monarchists in France. (They actually didn't have to wait too long: the Emperor was forced to abdicate following his ill-judged war against Prussia later that year.)

When Noir's body was transferred to Père-Lachaise in 1891, his grave was graced by a striking sculpture by Amédée-Jules Dalou, which captures the young man just moments after receiving his lethal wound. If you look at a photo of the statue (see here, for example), you might notice a feature that Le Monde delicately describes as "Sa braguette est gonflée par un membre turgescent" (his fly is swollen by a tumescent member). As anyone who has read Melville's Billy Budd might remember, sudden death can leave you rigid in unexpected ways.

The reason why poor Noir's crotch seems so burnished is that for over the last one hundred years, women who want to conceive a child or just improve their sex life have been rubbing Noir's "membre turgescent" for good luck. (It helps that the romantic legend says that Noir married the night before the duel.) Other cemetery vistors have become scandalised by these furtive caresses, and the authorities have now erected (pun intended) an iron fence around the statue, along with a warning that "frottements indécents" (indecent rubbing) will be prosecuted.

If you can't engage in a bit of indecent frottements in a Paris graveyeard, what is the world coming to?

One of the (few?) advantages of maintaining a blog is that it prevents you from indulging in that most futile of bourgeois literary exercises: writing letters to the editor. Two pieces in this weekend's papers got my letter-writing dander up.

The first was by Mark Lawson, in the Guardian. His op-ed columns are often rather lazy, pun-laden affairs, but this piece, mocking US liberals who are "threatening" to leave the country following a Bush victory, blundered into the bizarre. He writes:

Robert Redford, for example, has long lived in Montana, a state that has become progressively more Republican and, if he wishes to go into political exile, could simply move to California or New York, although it's true that both currently have Republican governors. He has spoken of fleeing to Ireland, but while he can be fairly sure that country wouldn't invade another, he would still find himself in a theocracy with views and laws potentially shocking to a Hollywood liberal.

Now I know we have the Angelus broadcast over the airwaves twice a day, but I'd be somewhat reluctant to say Ireland shows the same willingness to impose the one true faith on its population as, say, Saudi Arabia. Of course, the famously erratic sub-editors at the "Grauniad" must share some of the blame. Why didn't the sub in charge of the column phone Lawson and say, "Mark, you're in danger of sounding like a pillock of the Robert Kilroy-Silk variety."?

Actually the second piece that irked me suggested that, far from living in a theocracy, we in Ireland have all become Godless, alcoholic 4X4 drivers. These were the opinions expressed by Emily O'Reilly at a conference on "changing values in society" held last week and dutifully regurgitated in the Weekend Review section of this weekend's Irish Times.

It seems this type of article, castigating the hollow materialism of the nouveau riche, appears in the paper at least every three weeks. In effect, they're rather like those periodical warning from the Central Bank over people getting into debt and banks lending too much. We bow our heads like naughty boys and girls for a moment before returning to our bad habits.

But O'Reilly is candidly bewildered at her compatriots: "Readers of last week's Sunday Times would have got a flavour of this phenomenon of excess in a front page report in which a Dublin retailer exulted in the fact that her outlet had a waiting list of 500 women in pursuit of a handbag that retails at 5,000 euro plus...Imagine that on your obituary. 'Here lies Mrs X, fifth in line for a Birkin bag, and raging she wasn't first.'"

Of course, O'Reilly's address (which includes some cloying paragraphs about how her daughter's modest Halloween outfit was overshadowed by the creations of her contemporaries' more grasping mothers) is given piquancy from her own socio-economic status. A former journalist, she was appointed "Ombudsman and Information Commissioner" (sounds like something out of "The Mikado") following a recommendation by the then Minister of Finance Charlie McCreevy (the bête noire of liberal Ireland).

According to a piece in The Sunday Business Post that appeared when O'Reilly was appointed to her post, "O'Reilly is, when pension contributions are included, perhaps the best paid public servant in the country...Financial sources have put the value of the pension at about an extra €200,000 per annum on top of the salary. This brings O'Reilly's salary close to €400,000, making her one of the best paid public servants in the country."

With the wisdom of the Buddha, O'Reilly tells us that "Money can't buy you happiness." But 400K a year must at least secure a deposit?

My post-colonial hackles are bristling again. This time the offender is the toxic AA Gill. In yesterday's Sunday Times he reviewed some new gardening show co-hosted by Diarmuid Gavin:

Diarmuid is the bad boy of gardening, a bit of a little rude rebel, a red-hot poker among the lilies. Gavin defends his wicked rep with a surly naughtiness; he abuses plants, swears at hedges, sneers at shrubs and beams with a buttercup joy when he says something shocking, like: “Roses smell.” As with a lot of presenters with regional accents, his is growing ever more rustic. It is now positively thatched. The Irish, bog-thick brogue would fit perfectly into a 1950s Ealing comedy.

Regional accents, regional bloody accents? Of course, reading anything by AA Gill is a bit like eating a Big Mac. You undertake both activities with a vague sense of shame. And after finishing, as the regrets over your weakness start, you shouldn't expect a sympathetic ear if you want to voice your dissatisfaction.

But I'm surprised at the Sunday Times--it's an Irish paper, isn't it?

Today's New York Times reports that New York neighbourhoods in the Bronx, Yonkers, and Queens that have traditionally been home to Irish immigrants are seeing both naturalised citizens and illegals who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s returning to Ireland in unprecedented numbers. Such is the scale of the exodus that, according to the paper, "Liffey Van Lines [...] had to keep its container loading dock in upper Manhattan open 24 hours a day to meet the demand from families shipping their household goods back to Ireland before school began."

Similar large-scale departures are also being reported from Boston and Philadelphia.

The article cites the crackdown on illegal residents stemming from heightened security concerns as well as the lure of a newly prosperous Ireland. One wonders, however, whether an immigrant community leaving in such numbers, albeit returning to another First-World nation, can give an idea of just how troubled the American economy actually is beneath the upbeat headlines. For until now the lure of the American Dream appeared to have been sufficient consolation for the pangs of homesickness. Yet as harried families struggle with bloated healthcare costs and steep fees for their children's education, the traditional middle-class American existence may be becoming a pursuit only the rich can afford. And it seems that many Irish, after looking hard at the balance sheet, have decided to vote with their feet. (Education and particularly the health service in Ireland are very far from perfect--yet the cost to consumer is probably not the primary problem in either area.)

Needless to say those returning to Ireland having cashed in their chips Stateside must be aware that a Brooklyn brownstone does not translate into a mansion in leafy Ballsbridge, or even necessarily a semi-D in Terenure. And with the euro just popping the $1.30 mark, the image of the flush Irish-American returning to lord it over his benighted compatriots is quickly becoming an anachronism.

Of course, if the euro goes much higher (and some commentators eying the US trade deficit warn of a potential collapse to $1.70 to a euro) the question will be whether Ireland might see its own mirror-image migration--as American multinationals flee an exorbitantly expensive nation for more accommodating climates in Eastern Europe and beyond.

By the way, for those who don't want to register with the NYT, the same story is available on the International Herald Tribune site.

Travelling into work the other day, during a break in "Morning Ireland", I heard a sequence of clips of famous Americans giving famous quotes. There was Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you", Martin Luther King's "I have a dream", and Roosevelt's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." To what purpose was this stirring rhetoric put? A fundraising drive for some altruistic cause? An appeal to volunteers to work in the Third World? In fact it was for an international consultancy firm. In grave tones, a voiceover told us about the importance of leadership and how this outfit could somehow help you find it. Or twaddle along those lines

Now it's one thing to ask living actors and statesmen to pimp themselves for a company. But isn't it pushing things a little far to induct dead people who cannot object into your own campaign? (There was a similar issue when Apple began using images of people such as Einstein to promote their products. But at least they didn't try to borrow their words as though their historical statements were in fact pitches for a firm of accountants).

What's laughable is the disconnect between the loftiness of the stolen quotations and the mundanity of the offering. And imagine if FDR had brought in a team of consultants following Pearl Harbor. They probably would have suggested a 18-month review of the strategic position vis-à-vis global challenges and opportunities before recommending a paradigmatic shift to a more flexible military posture. By that stage, the Japanese army would have reached Denver.

Meanwhile, Amazon has set up "Amazon Theater"--offering "a series of five original short films available exclusively at Amazon.com as a free gift to our customers." (That grammatical sore thumb term "free gift" seems destined to survive. And keep in mind that this "gift" is a commercial!). The film itself is pretty ropey but the product placement is done fairly subtly.

RTE is promoting the snappily titled "Fair City Civil Action Special" on its website. Always slow to jump on the bandwagon, our indigenous soap opera has finally decided to exploit the issue of child abuse undertaken by Catholic priests. No doubt there will be the usual fig leaf of public service education when a concerned female voice will announce after the program, "If you or anybody you know has been affected by the issues shown in this program...".

From the synopses of upcoming episodes (inexplicably, RTE has posted the plotlines for this week's and next week's storylines on its site--so much for suspense), it seems Fair City writers will draw deeply from their well of talent so that the subject will be handled sensitively. Here's the breathless exposition for one episode:

Myra (Orla Charlton) digs for information on Brennan (Stanley Townsend). Mitchell's death means his evidence in Aidens[sic] case is hearsay. Quirke visits Rowe in prison. Lawler pressurises the Bishop to settle quickly before Rowe is released. Lana questions the morality of Irish Law.

That last scene, in which Lana questions the morality of Irish Law, sounds powerful.

A report (registration required) in the LA Times from November 15 provides details on the destruction wrought in Falluja (the LA Times spells it 'FALLOUJA'--if the insurgency lasts much longer the Chicago Manual of Style might have to start listing the standardized spelling of major Iraqi cities) during the bizarrely named 'Operation Phantom Fury.'

(Presumably the campaign to take Ramadi or Mosul, where many of the insurgency leaders are supposedly now holed up, will be dubbed "Operation Real Fury".)

The sewage system is destroyed, the electric grid virtually dismantled, and most of the mosques are at least partially demolished. Moreover, the stench of death pervades the streets as the bodies of the Iraqi dead remain uncollected. Given the intensity of the fighting and the prevalence of snipers, it is understandable why few on either side are willing to take the risk to drag the dead in.

It the light of such grisly facts, the stated plans for reconstruction seem blackly comic. From the LA Times report:

In the works is some kind of "Welcome Back to Fallouja" campaign, directing residents to military civil affairs offices where people can find reconstruction help.

"It won't be a fruit basket or anything like that," said Hanson, the Marine major. He had $500,000 in cash for various expenses: compensating civilians who had suffered property losses or injuries or lost relatives deemed not to be insurgents.

So it's welcome back to the Necropolis and here's 500 bucks for your dead brother.

This month's issue of threemonkeysonline should make some professional journos tug their collars with unease. After all, with an interview with one of the filmmakers behind the documentary The Corporation, a discussion with Greg Palast on American politics, and a talk with Sarah Hall, a rising author recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the online zine gives the traditional arts supplement inserted into your high-minded broadsheet a run for its money. What's interesting about threemonkeysonline and other sites like it is that it has no real staff--each issue the editor, Andrew Lawless, assembles an ad hoc group of writers who contribute only if they think they have something interesting to say. The age of sleepwalking hacks will finally come to an end when reasonably clever people realise they can do better if they're knowledgeable about a subject (and can craft a half-literate sentence--although the existence of Dublin's Evening Herald is evidence that even this skill is not indispensable in newspapers).

If you'd like to join this free-floating group of contributors, check out the site's submission details.

On a related topic--how electronic media is threatening the traditional few-to-many paradigm of information distribution--Dan Gillmor's book We the Media (O'Reilly) is available online under a Creative Commons licence here. I've just browsed it so far but according to a review in the Guardian, "anyone plotting the future for a media organisation - or any organisation that deals with the media - would be foolish to do so without first reading Gillmor's book."

In the next day or so, I'll try to post details on some other "open content" books available on the Web.

After poring over the kilos of newsprint lugged into the house over the weekend, I think I could draw a graph that proves the equation that the number of newspapers you buy is inversely proportional to the articles you actually want to read.

At first glance, most of the supplements' pages seem like unashamed celebrations of the fruits of capitalism, with the "features" on new gadgets and outlets difficult to distinguish from paid advertisements for the same items. But I'm starting to wonder whether the consumerist porn that is, say, The Sunday Times' Style supplement is not actually unintentionally subversive. For what better way of recruiting a new wave of blood-thirsty Jacobins than to ask them to read about 21st-century party etiquette among the new aristos?

This cosy mood — let’s call it the Big Love-in — reigned at the recent Amfar ball in Venice, when Sienna Miller, Joseph Fiennes and Jeremy Irons, dressed to the nines, spent the evening sprawled on beanbags. It is also the prevailing spirit at dinner parties thrown this month by Damon Dash for friends including Jade Jagger, Kate Moss, Kevin Bacon and Mick Jones of the Clash. Held at his London home, they drank Dom Perignon, played pool and chewed the fat. They were low-key, but they were fun.

Load all of them onto the tumbrils, our new Robespierres will hiss.

Yet sometimes you need to be wary, to withhold credulity because you suspect that something so outlandishly stupid has to be a hoax. And maybe my sensitivities have been temporarily heightened by recently reading David Mitchell's hugely entertaining novel "Cloud Atlas." One of Mitchell's interlocking narratives is about a clone who escapes his fate as a fast-food drone and travels across a landscape destroyed by hyper-consumerism. So after being locked into Mitchell's nightmarish vision of über-mall culture, I flip through a magazine and see an ad for this--seemingly straight out of fiction. Perhaps I'm over-reacting to this ingenious innovation, but doesn't planting a TV screen in a fridge door seem like a tipping point in the culture? Doesn't it acknowledge a fear that we might have an autonomous thought between seeing a commercial for a snack food and opening the fridge door to retrieve the suddenly desired product?

And while you can go purple in the face from denouncing the kitchen's answer to the SUV, you can't help thinking (like one of Mitchell's brainwashed "purebloods") that its Stainless Steel Finish with Aluminium Door Trim is really quite slick.

I came across this site via the splinters blog: espressostories. According to the text on the somewhat rebarbatively designed site, it provides stories that follow the "basic rule...that they're just a sentence or two, totalling 25 words or less."

The project is inspired by Augusto Monterroso's "famous" story, 'The Dinosaur'":

When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

With all the enthusiasm (you suspect) of a child swallowing boiled broccoli, Sunday's New York Times Book Review presented a high-minded Poetry Symposium* in which various poets handled the unenviable task of picking a "book of poetry, published in the last 25 years, [that] has meant the most to you personally--the book you have found yourself returning to again and again."

Most of the discussions failed to get me itching to add the nominees' work to an Amazon shopping basket, but one of two pieces that did pique my interest was the dissection of John Ashberry's book "As We Know" by Harold Bloom (the same Harold Bloom who has scarred Naomi Woolf for life by allegedly groping her knee during a boozy after-hours dinner ("his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh", according to Woolf)). Bloom may lack a normal endoskeleton but he remains an engaging writer, dropping names and quotations with Olympian verve. For instance, the quality he identifies in a number of Ashberry's poems is that they are "inexhaustible to meditation."

Thanks to the wonders of Google, I tracked this ringing phrase to the writer and philosopher I.A. Richards. I suppose the quote struck me because it chimed with an unfocused hunch I have about why poetry has faded so significantly from Western Culture relatively recently. (Of course, it was always a marginal pursuit but not so long ago--two generations in the past at most--an "educated" person might be expected to be able to rattle off half-a-dozen poems learned off by heart in school. Going further back, recall that Byron is considered the first media celebrity and that Tennyson immortalized a botched cavalry charge in Crimea**).

Perhaps today we actually like to "exhaust" our works of art, because we then feel we have somehow "mastered" them or at least gotten our money's worth. I think this impulse lies behind two habits common to those who read a lot of novels: 1) When starting a novel you check the number of pages it has. This, in a way, represents the "finish line" to aim for. 2) After finishing reading a novel, you add it to your list of books read that year. This, I acknowledge, is an embarrassingly bit of anal retentive behaviour, but most people who are serious readers appear to succumb to it.

Yet a book of poetry seems to elude these two ticks of completion. This is particularly true of non-narrative poems. You can put a line through, say, Byron's Don Juan or lie to yourself and add Paradise Lost to the year's tally because you've reached the end of the story (or narrative as university graduates always prefer to call it). Knowing the end of a story is one way of mastering a piece of art.

But it seems there can never be that same level of assured accomplishment with a collection of poems. On a most basic level, it seems to block the traditional start-to-finish trajectory of novel reading. After reading one poem after another you start to think that this is somehow inappropriate, being pointlessly sequential. The finishing line already starts to evaporate. Then there's ambiguity--Richards' protégé, William Empson, in his famous book "Seven Types of Ambiguity", apparently prefigured the Deconstructionists by claiming that a line's meaning is always shifting according to the angle from which it's viewed. Basically, with the great poems you're never quite sure if you've got "it" or even if there's a a final "it" to get***. Hence we return to Richards' phrase, and a poem's refusal to be wrapped up in a single reading.

I suspect none of this is new; doubtless some mid-20th-century Mitteleuropean philosopher has expressed, and teased out, similar thoughts aphoristically in an essay I have yet to hear of.

But toying with the idea that poetry might somehow exist outside modern consumption patterns brings me back to the old issue of whether poetry is 'superior' to prose. As someone who thinks the best prose has a power equal to the best poetry (think, for example, of the descriptions of New York from Saul Bellow's Herzog (James Wood quotes a luminous paragraph here)), I'm reluctant to admit to a hierarchy. However, as anyone who was tried her or his hand at fiction (and how many English graduates haven't?) can testify, there is something envy-inducing about poets' freedom from the creaking mechanics of plot.

This is because for novels to work, the prose has to be, in places, prosaic--there are few things more wearing than to read, for example, colourful descriptions that bracket conversations. ("Please, give me a chance" she wheedled, her hot anxiety tingeing her words, etc.). And that perhaps is where a gap appears between the two practices. A poet can be unique in the way she or he describes a cloud scudding across a sky, but there are only so many ways a fiction writer can get his character out of the damned house. And that means that sometimes the very best of prose writers have to use the same words, in the same order, as the very worst.

*Symposium is a word that conjures up bitter coffee and hot photocopiers. However, the original Greek meaning signified a drinking party punctuated with songs and raucous games. For example, this site shows a detail of guests playing kottabos, in which "the dregs or drops of wine were flicked from the drinking cup at a target set in the middle of the room." Winners were often rewarded with kisses from serving boys or courtesans. It's doubtful whether any wine was hurled during the NYT Symposium.

**Incidentally, a new book claims that the Charge of the Light Brigade (see review) was in fact, by the sanguinary standards of the age, "an astounding success."

***Elsewhere in the Symposium discussion, John Ashberry mentions the ending of Wallace Stevens' The Man on The Dump: "
Where was it one first heard of the truth? /The the." That's correct: "The the". Faced with this sheer rockface, how many readers could confidently put a tick beside Stevens' name to indicate he's been "done"?

In the wake of the smoking ban in Ireland, many pubs in Dublin now feature outdoor ashtrays, shaped like boxes and clamped to a wall. Advertisers, aware of the eyes of a captive market, have started putting small posters on the front of these ashtrays. (This painful exposition is for readers outside Ireland--that vast horde).

All this brings me to such an ad for Today FM. Along with a logo for the radio station, there's some text, which uses a sombre font similar to that used for cigarette health warnings. From memory, I think the sentence reads "Smokers die younger but then again so do rock stars." My sister and some friends think I'm being po-faced in finding this offensively dumb--to me it's like something a sulky 14-year-old would come up with.

But apart from that, it appears to flagrantly contravene regulations that prohibit cigarette advertising. Today FM might claim the whole thing is lighthearted (dying from lung cancer being such a hoot), but I wouldn't be surprised if, after a few words from the standards authority, this gag disappears pretty sharpish.

With the dollar touching new lows against the euro almost every day, the United States' trade deficit, running at about $600 billion a year, is much in the news. This article from the New York Times (requires free registration), which tracks the 22-day journey of the enormous Korean-registered container ship Hyundai Glory from China to New York, makes you realise how this debt is being racked up day by day:

"...the mounting Asian trade has been largely a one-way affair. After unloading 1,120 containers from the Glory, the longshoremen reloaded the ship for the return trip. Of 667 containers to be sent back, 419 were empty, being returned to Asia to carry more goods back to the United States. Of the rest, most were stuffed with two of New York's biggest exports: wastepaper and scrap metal."

Meanwhile, with more good news, the arch bear of Wall Street, Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley is apparently predicting a 90% chance of the U.S. stumbling into "economic Armageddon" (Boston Herald via Blogdex (a very handy site, by the way.))

In the usual annual lists of best books, several reviewers have mentioned the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This 60-volume set is a snip at just £6,500.00. One critic in "The Spectator" claims it's so good that it's worth flogging your daughter's pony to afford it. Such is The Spectator's readership.

At least it's eligible for free delivery for Amazon customers--but only if you live in the UK. The extra tariff for postage to Ireland is starting to put me off using Amazon. For example, for an order of say, £73, the charge for postage is close to £13--pretty much the price of a hardback book. However, I will probably bite my lip and continue to use the service occasionally because the range in Dublin bookshops continues to narrow by the year. This hit home a while ago when I was trying to find a copy of Aldous Huxley's Island--in retrospect, not particularly worth the hardship of trying to locate*. A few stocked Brave New World but that was about it. Yet, next to the emaciated Huxley selection, almost the complete works of John Irving always seemed to be there, taunting me. And doubtless you'll never have any trouble picking up in Dublin the full fictional output of Tom Wolfe.

*Actually, Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza is far better. Island is really a series of lectures on how to meld mystical Oriental thinking with Western science presented by thinly fictionalised mouthpieces. EIG is more novelistic (at least by Huxley's standards) and uses an interesting achronological time scheme in which characters are shown at different stages in their development. It also includes one of the weirdest scenes in all fiction: while the protagonist and his girlfriend are sunbathing on the roof of a French villa, an aircraft passes overhead. An object falls out of the plane and hurtles towards the roof. As it nears, they see that it's a small dog which then splats onto the roof, covering the two onlookers in blood and guts. What's intriguing is that Huxley (if I recall rightly) never explains the "backstory" behind this grisly incident. Apparently random, the dog's death represents, I think, the horror each of the characters is trying to keep at bay in the uneasy atmosphere between the world wars.

Anthony Burgess said that Huxley equipped the novel with a brain--this novel proves his contention.