Saturday commute xlix: space to let

This is the first photograph

I have seen in several years

which spontaneously inspired

me to possess it. I'm happy

to be able to recall, having

met it fatal moments ago, a

primary and pure effect. It 

was published with a frame 

of reference that I resisted 

investigating, and possibly

always will. 

By common practice, this is 

how a creative publication

is often read. Here, the 

publisher is in the place 

where this page has been

described, its writing be-

ing the privileged image,

collateral data resisted. It 

just happens to be the fate 

of that publication, for 

the writing to be the pho-

tograph. We all prosper in 

our own way. 

The picture at the center

of this discussion is the 

work of one of my favour-

ite writers of the day. 

I pretty entirely love it. 

Now with that frame of ref-

erence, I have invaded it,

and certainly your impres-

sion of it. This indelicacy

was not intended. I have

never doubted, it is sound

to read for the pictures.

I wish everyone a superb

day.

ii  Valéry Lorenzo

About abandoning an exemplary model

He tackled no group of appearances,

no presented face of the social or-

ganism (conspicuity thus attending

to it), but to make something of it.

To name it simply and not in some

degree tackle it would have semed 

to him an act reflecting on his gen-

eral course the deepest dishonour.

Therefore it was that, as the moral

of these many remarks, I "named" un-

der his contagion, when I was really

most conscious of not being held to

it; and therefore it was, above all,

that for all the effect of represen-

tation I was to achieve, I might 

have let the occasion pass. A 'fan-

cy' indication would have served my

turn - except that I should so have

failed perhaps of a pretext for my

present insistence.

I have cited Henry James' prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels as one's book of the year in its present publication. (The picture I selected to accompany that announcement is one of the more apposite to its case that I've ever found). These are not prefaces collected for re-publication; they are prefaces written late in life for the purpose of reconstructing what was in his mind as he wrote those works, from Roderick Hudson in 1875, forward. Here, he is recalling having alluded to a literal place in that early novel - Northampton, Massachusetts - and he is confiding how, at the time, he was so impressed by Balzac, that he was troubled by the exercise of such a gesture of naming, without remaining creatively in "the shadow" of an exemplary model. "The critical question swarms," he says, in these retrospective hours.

Taken together, through the many works which they address, there is very little of this swarm which does not emerge in these prefaces, which is why the book must be thought to be one of the greatest confessions of an artist, ever assembled. That said, if anyone can recall to me a subsequent occasion, when an artist has openly reflected on whether it impeaches his honour, to depart from a model he admires, I would be surprised to see it. And yet I think this impression must invade many a creative consciousness, as it certainly does in blogging - a form in which Balzac's tenacity for descriptive detail in writing of Saumur or Limoges (as James recalls) would be impracticable. Not that description, itself, is not reconstituted in the blogging form.

Because blogging is or becomes to the blogger, a creative form, a maturing consciousness of its limits is constantly at war with the underlying impulses of expression. This is simply a touchstone of what form, is. It isn't that James is good for bloggers to read; he's good for anyone to read, who is conscious of negotiating with form in everyday life. But if the question of honour may be called something else - as James persistently shows that it needs to be - it is whether the expression adopted fails the pretext of a present insistence. 

This is the north star of what honour is, in the created thing. It's the astrophysical body James could not ignore because it is more than his screen, it is his light. These prefaces are profoundly intimate. He is a passionate companion, of nothing other than the passion anyone may feel, to align his form to his pretexts. As gorgeously as I've seen it done, he threatens contagion for belief that it matters.

What precious school is this?

Henry James

The Art of the Novel

op. cit.

And what has it meant for the bath library, may we ask

      

 It was bad enough,

 when every Tom, Dick

 and Harry could wan-

 der up to the front,

 with a portable cam-

 era. At least that

 came in handy for
 tracking Mr Waldheim

 through the Balkans.
 But now, cameras are

 entering the bath -

 and not just as cam-

 eras, anymore, but

 as personal devices

 of the broadest ap-

 plication. Something

 serious is at stake,

 or it isn't Friday.

Now, library designers tell me, cameras are also our book repositories. This would be fine, but for the camera's innate zeal to commemorate its user's every moment. It used to take a natural photographer 40 or 50 years to get through War and Peace. Now, is it even thinkable? Moreover, what would it matter, that Mr Baldwin had designed the snuggest library for your bath, if you're focusing on connectivity?

None too soon, designers are reviving the notion of borders, having first done so much to dissolve them. By using fixtures which are ever less com-modious, even less condu-cive to ease, to say nothing of that shrinkage in their compartments which has banished entire genres of bathing, the self excites less com-petition with the book.

In which we interrupt our neglect of materials

You can always tell, you are

not in Palm Springs, when your

perch is a deck made of wood.

This noble building material

is not a feature of desert ar-

chitecture, although surely if

a ship can be sent to Arizona,

twenty idiots may have spec-

ified Jamaican mahogany for a

pool deck, in that happy out-

post of Los Angeles.

I have a friend who is, at 

the moment, wandering the

globe to visit the sources

of various architectural 

materials, no doubt to ver-

ify that they have a place. 

It seems a sound undertak-

ing (besides, he is young,

and has the time) in this 

age of gaudy prosthetics

and synthetic derivatives. 

Too bad he isn't in banking.

Of course this is nothing

more than the miner's sup-

erstition, that gold would

come from particular hills,

and not from some idler in

the bowels of Wall & Broad.

That said, 20 idiots revis-

ing the ecology of Palm

Springs represent nothing

more than a coincidence of

vanity; while it seems, if 

you could put 20 bankers in

touch with each other on a

pipe-bomb of that kind, you

could wreak some lovely sight.

One always used to associate

anarchism with unfortunate

tailoring. You well remember

how Emma Goldman helped to

raise funds, to clothe Mr 

Frick's unlucky assassin. 

But there you are, the mot-

ility of language seems to

have balked at this latest

migration in antecedents,

from illusion to capital.

Possibly if we could dress

the mind with that prescience

with which fashion is cred-

ited, we'd command at least

a better price.

If one could contribute

through mirth and lark,

in some small way to the

measure mankind will one

day take of that scourg-

ing, calculated, knowing

rip-off of human life,

centered in American bank-

ing in the Age of Bush, one

could almost feel recom-

pensed for having lived so

long as to see an icon of

Stalinist art traded in the

millions for some pantry in

Palm Springs.

ii   Offices of J.P. Morgan

     23 Wall Street

     September 16, 1920

v   Konstantin Somov

     The Boxer

     1933

     Christies sale: $1,195,830

Pre-heat to 325º

  

 Dad, I need to take a couple of  days.

 She won't like that ..

 Dad ..

 I know.

 I'll be back. For the Ballet. I'll  take her to the club.

 I have to be in Chicago then.

 I know.

 Be careful?

 You, too.

i  the birds guy

May I recommend roasting a few extra quail, for contingency's sake?

Alumni of our entry on frogs legs might be the first to attest, to how the circumstances of everyday life occas-ionally present the venturesome palate with impromptu opportunity. Particular-ly in these holiday weeks, guests of a keen appetite and brow may pile aboard without texting, and it would be folly to hold them to that formality. No one is ever more satisfied - don't we find - than with his own, personal animal; and a brace of quail affords a lishy jumble of legs for munching. I happen to like a Nuits-St-Georges if the birds are seasonal game, a Volnay if not; but the Champagne one's begun with will always do. A cuvée rosé will nicely split the difference.

But I concede to you, these are very orthodox approaches; yet I grew up in a household, when birds were served, where a brace of sterling cocks would grace the table, from another century. You may say what you like against silver, or rather what you like in favour of little plants in shiny cachepots. But nothing flashes like it, the warmth and colour of the viands before one's face; and they are our subject.

With wine, the venial sin of our time is to offer a feast as a plinth for exhibiting the vintage. Apart from being in exceptionally poor taste, at great sacrifice of the senses being celebrated, this is simply a vanity invented by vintners. You'd probably be right to think, the company might prefer a luscious white with the quail; the answer is rather a quick sauté in extra virgin olive oil and de-glazing in Spätlese, say, for its delicate residual sugar and forward fruit, and then

relying on continuing with a non-vintage brut from a good house; and the silver will likely turn vermeil before your gaze, picking up the gold in the glass and on the plate. Technique, with ingredients, is as fundamental in their delectation as their natural selection, in the first place. But as to that, has a personal animal not always posed a natural claim, spontaneous, unor-thodox, or not? Moreover, all of nature abhors an appointment. In spon-taneity we learn how the waste of our unctuous wines is not in expending them, but in exposing them to comparison.

One has occasion to reflect on this, in these swirling days and nights of repat-riated families, hobbledehoys back home to supplement allowances and endure forgotten aunts. Lamentably, the diaspora seldom diffuses that illumination with which it bursts, in the scene of its conception. We must wonder why that is. But that project of diffusion does take place, and all we suggest is, a tolerant readiness toward the personal animal, and a wine of measured deference to the glow.
















vi  the birds guy

Oh, Mr James, don't you just know everything

  imagine a literature 
  of power without force

               The very claim of the fable is naturally 

               that he is special, that his great gift 

               makes and keeps him highly exceptional; 

               but that is not for a moment supposed to 

               preclude his appearing typical (of the 

               general type) as well; for the fictive 

               hero successfully appeals to us only as 

               an eminent instance, as eminent as we like, 

               of our own conscious kind.

Henry James

Preface to the

  New York Edition

Roderick Hudson

1874-1875 in serial,

  The Atlantic Monthly

Tbe Art of the Novel

op. cit.

'Tis the season to be spiffy ii: débutante invasions of December

Aw, Ma, do I got to?

Looking back, I'd say that

the Christmas holiday at

home which found me hos-

pitalised for dental sur-

gery, bent over convul-

sively in recovery from 

its anaesthetic, had a-

bout it a comparative 

modesty of invasion one 

could undergo again for

its unconsciousness, had 

the impactions not been

extracted. Yet such com-

ings-out are possible but 

once, it seems, and the 

work had been so thorough, 

and its fallout so famous-

ly picturesque, one could 

never again avail oneself 

of refuge in that parting.

Mind you, my aversions to 

the season could not then

have been articulated on

the scruples now known to

me, silently subcutaneous

in rebellion at the time. To

furnish the offices of the

escort has, indeed, not ev-

er been less than agreable,

given a mutual liberty to 

structure the occasion.

It's as the costumed prop in

an entertainment for other

parties, even more than for

a sodden inhalation of par-

fum, that the obduracy of

that servitude manifests it-

self, even today, in memory

of those holiday evenings.

My sedation now exhausted

as the excuse that it was, 

I welcome a marginalising

autonomy as I enter these

terminating days of the cal-

endar, chuckling with de-

light over cards announcing

at-homes for which an Eng-

lish dog affords the fair-

est of regrets. Whit must

always claim his share of

one's time; and we negoti-

ate these escortships rec-

iprocally, he in charge of

evening, I of day.

And every time these lic-

ences converge, when the 

light lowers just right on 

his coat on a stroll be-

fore dinner, as again now,

one can hear a kindly mov-

ie mother say,

Let's just enjoy the dusk.

John Ford, director

Frank Nugent, screenplay

Winston C. Hoch, cinematography

The Searchers

Warner Brothers, 1956©