A City of Coffee Mug for someone to watch

sea death flower star moon

He does his homework. There isn't an unqualified illustration in his oeuvre. He has begun to quote from Valéry Lorenzo, not the mark of a flippant gadfly. He seems to have re-appraised everything in the canon of literature and cinema addressing "Laurent," and especially gainfully in works of his own time. Without prejudgment he is risking being seen as the coming thing that he could well be, Horace's true client in his Odes and Virginia Woolf's in The Common Reader. Now he's impregnating tumblr with adventurous, sometimes hilarious, and thoughtful, brilliant text. One can watch time, tak-ing a generous turn. I don't care that he's a tumblr, not a blogger; we take our saltimbanques where they are. His page is called, ciné.

Some while ago, this page was ambivalently made the object of a cheeky honorarium, for "style." Abruptly as that patronage was withdrawn the prize stayed here, for irony's sake. As the page approaches its first birth-day, it's not premature to remark on the year's finer discoveries in internet expres-sion, by presenting to him our first City of Coffee Mug, for extending a distinctive sensibility toward humane ends, and exhibit-ing this as necessary. No strings. I wish him well.

Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberations and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.










Virginia Woolf
The Common Reader
  On Not Knowing Greek
Andrew McNeillie, translation
  introductory words from Woolf
Harcourt, 1925©


i, iii  ciné