The view 15 minutes ago.  Since then the sky has already gone from pink to ivory.  I feel like Monet I've taken this picture so many times, in every kind of light and time of day and season.*  My view of water lilies.  My haystack.

Yesterday's mail brought important clippings from the TLS, (Merci!), a used copy of the complete plays of Joe Orton and, from a friend and admirer, several DVDs including one about the conspiracy of international banking families to create the Federal Reserve in a secret meeting on Jekyll Island.  

Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, was described in the February 1904 issue of Munsey's Magazine as being home to "the richest, the most exclusive, the most inaccessible club in the world" with members like J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, Vincent Astor, William K. Vanderbilt, and others. [Source]  The documentary goes on to explain the secretive cabal known as the Bilderberg Group as well as the one called the Trilateral Commission. 

I have a tea towel from Jekyll Island.  I also have a teacup saucer from the china service of the Corsair, J.P. Morgan's yacht, with crest, of which I am especially fond.  The documentary about the banking families taking over the world is very interesting and I will send it to you if you ask.  The company that made it also has one on the government plot to poison the citizenry with chemtrails and another on the inventions of Nikola Tesla stolen from him by J.P. Morgan.

Skip used to work at Chase Manhattan downtown, a floor or two below where the Trilateral Commission had their meetings.  Skip always knew about all sorts of things before the rest of us did.  Important people would fly in from around the world and stop at the bank before they went on to Washington to debrief the President and Congress.  In October 1981 he called and said he would have to work late and I would know why in about an hour.  Of course I insisted he tell me the reason immediately as otherwise I would only fret and imagine something tremendous and fabulous and be let down.  He resisted, but I did not give up.  I pressed and pressed.  Finally, he caved.  Anwar Sadat had been assassinated.   You can appreciate my disappointment that someone more interesting had not been involved, but he was right.  An hour later and it was on the news.   I don't suppose they could get away with that sort of delay today.  Or perhaps they could.  Banks have more power than you might think, even these days with so many of the little ones going under or being bought up by the big ones with the taxpayer money Congress gave them.

In any event, if you are truly keen on understanding the current economic situation, I urge you to pick up "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" by David Harvey (Oxford, 2005).  It is pointless for a rank amateur like me to explain how Paul Volcker, chair of the Federal Reserve before and momentously during the Reagan years, helped restore ecomomic power to the upper class, so that today the percentage of wealth controlled by the economic elite, if you will, has returned to the levels enjoyed in the 1920s.  Harvey does the whole explanation much better than I ever could.  The point is, conspiracy theories arise because people are sensible enough to know there's something fishy, but they're constrained in some fashion -- by propaganda, for instance, or by poor judgment shaped by some burning resentment or unhappiness or inadequate education, or by simple ignorance.  They want to get at the truth, but they aren't quite able to.  Like the view outside my window.  I am anxious to get at the truth of what's out there, but the light keeps shifting and changing, if you see my point.

Or you might simply prefer to turn to the plays of Joe Orton.  "All classes are ciminal today," an Orton character says in Funeral Games.  "We live in an age of equality."

"You have the air of lost wealth," Kath says to Sloane in Entertaining Mr Sloane.

I read that last night and thought, well don't we all these days.  Don't we all.

*16 images.  See The View.