An unsustainable presumption, I suppose, of the blog form is that a reader can happen upon it out of context, and make spontaneous sense of the whole, from an incidental presentation. The photography blogs don't require this, the better prose blogs avoid it scrupulously, reasonable as it may be to rest some assumption on their renown. Here the habit is (possibly unnervingly) to treat the reader as a classmate returned from a long vac, not expected to know what we've done, but probably to have heard what his culture has done. You know C&C the way you know G+T, and I know you do because you've read this far. Even then, C&C and G&T are never the whole point.
I have introduced few pictures with the provincial delight that this one gives me. If the blog did have a regular, timely and voluble following, I would expect to see 7 or 8 learned and nuanced remarks on it in the moderation box by the cocktail hour, and I would probably mix a Negroni out of season just to light their review. To satisfy this urge I should simply send it off to Victoria or Barry or PGT, and allow Nature to take its course. I might even improvise an appreciation of my own.
A picture can't bring a more fundamental illumination to this space than this one. But it belongs to the reader now, and so I remark on only one of its inescapable points: how the rules of a game, however subtle their variation from one to another, will distinguish the posture of the human form exploiting them. How gaily and concertedly the responsive mechanism shapes itself to its conduct, is a grat-ification, also, to the calculations of the cynic. We're taught, quite rightly, to distrust the loiterers at our playgrounds. I give you the ones on horseback, most of all.
The little black box, numbered 58 on the right margin in the field below, is that of the Institute for Defense Analysis, an ostensibly independent think tank. And where is it? Not a 5-minute walk from every playing field at Princeton, right next door to where the innocent are fed.
Cricket on the beach with a Negroni! That is how I want to spend summer! It just isnt cricket if you have not illicited several highly intelligent or at least humotous remarks at least by your second Negroni.
ReplyDeleteYegads, David, I fear you've sorted out the destiny of all mankind with this vision. And with so little sodium, except on the breeze!
ReplyDeleteNo worries. Galvanising post.
ReplyDeleteI thank you for the lending of this great picture. Longtime readers of this page should know that your tumblrpage, http://queerwolf.tumblr.com/ is a superb resource of fine imagery in sport, especially in the one of our choice, rowing. Thank you for your visit, and best wishes.
ReplyDeleteI'm borrowing this picture for my own blog. I hope you won't mind my using it at a later stage. I will not forget to quote my source :)
ReplyDeleteDear Franck, it would be obscene to contemplate a credit where so much debt proliferates. Take the picture, it's more yours than mine.
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