Friday, June 29, 2012

Friday firebreak i





One likes to be down there
at dawn. It can cauterise
the week and steel the day
with something impregnably
perfect.







    






















republished July 1st


Thursday, June 28, 2012

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Is there a passing scene?





Is there a passing scene,
and which came first (the
scene of passage) and if
so what could that have
been?

Right now Renzo Piano will 
have a new museum and Cal-
vin Klein a new waistband,
and are they getting in my
way of seeing this stride?

Then please do not expect
that I will show them, too.




Monday, June 25, 2012

"Go sit down and wait to be examined."






I have lately become very interested
in tidepool effects which the drap-
ing of a T shirt can recall in some
lightings, as the previous entry and
this one will suggest. 



  














ii  Jeremy Young



Sunday, June 24, 2012

Portrait from a marriage: matching the profession to the estate


Mirth - not an experience so
often associated with Graham
Greene as it is with mascul-
ine disappointment in our Age
of Bob Dole - is what floats
to the surface as Peter takes
Poopy to Antibes, to dispatch his honeymoon chores. Oops. Yet, with aid of a pair of 
humane interior designers 
(and I know, this is not merely plural but redundant), his conjugal distraction is
relieved in the usual way, and he returns to his bride with such elation in the acquisition of two new chums as to impart it with no trace of his previous reserve. And what a blessèd convenience, that the new couple's manse must be so extensively redone.


You can well imagine my bemusement, on discovering this classic of Greene's virtually on the day of my marriage's dissolution in Santa Clara County; and such a svelte little Penguin it is, as almost the cornerstone of my decor to this day. Yet as Tolstoy says, not all alliances dissolve for the same reason; in mine, one of us didn't care for California. I beg you to believe. How enormously I'd have preferred a clever pergola for our tidepool than to have paid a pack of lawyers to leave us alone. I cannot drive down to Monterey Bay, and see the sea otters crack the abalone open on their chests, without the sense that gastronomy, too, saves a California marriage.













Graham Greene
May We Borrow Your Husband?
1967
Penguin and Bodley Head, 1969©