"The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind"

 

On opening Justine one is seized every time. It is, as Durrell says, today. His adopting of the present, in an expansive invention of retrospection, is not artlessly hammered by the announcement of a perpetual, mobile date of conscious-ness. This is a device of urgency, and the voice is of the Classics, not of age. But why is this?

    I see at last that none of us 
    is properly to be judged for 
    what happened in the past. It 
    is the city which should be 
    judged though we, its children, 
    must pay the price.















Lawrence Durrell
Justine
  a novel
1957
op. cit.

France embraces marriage as a human institution

By a majority of 3:2 the

lower house of the parlia-

ment of France has adopted

the measure known as, mar-

riage for all, over the

concerted opposition of 

all establishments of re-

ligion. Let them come to

people when they're ready.

It goes against our scruples

to celebrate a fine wine if

the occasion is good enough

by itself. But in the country

of humanity, exception proves

the rule to our continuing

delight and debt. There's an

American-owned estate that Mr

Jefferson admired, and Pepys

before him, which stands apart

from all the rest of its rank

in the distinctive composition

of its soils and their exposure.

How well this fair exception

proves the rule of nature's gift.

i     Andy Fabbi

ii   The New York Times©

iii  Collection Laurent

I sent The Times a thank-you note, for watching Lindsey Graham

The ascendancy of Princeton's latest

humiliation, in the tradition of Don-

ald Rumsfeld and the bitter, fetid

Sammy Alito, Texas' avatar, Ted Cruz,

has threatened to obscure the abiding

thuggery of South Carolina's Senator

Lindsey Graham. This would be unfair,

as the pending trials in the Boston

bombings make clear. The other day,

Graham was advancing the notion, with

his sidekick mugger of habeas corpus,

wacky John McCain, that the suspects

(however numerous or not they may be)

ought to be hauled up before Pentagon

prosecutors as specters of seditious

battle, an especially droll suggestion

from a South Carolinian, need I say,

but even more poignant when his votes

and rants against sound public policy

on guns, human rights, and military

justice are taken into account. At the

moment, Ted Cruz swoons a good game of

neurotic Right-wing character assassin-

ation, but he's yet to be tested in our

South Carolinian's lengthy legislative

gauntlet of slashing civil liberties at

every opportunity.

Taking the whole spine to write the title

I came home from the bookshop

yesterday with Miss Madison's

thrillingly learned Vegetable

Literacy and Anne Applebaum's

decidedly undelectable Gulag,

having somehow eluded the po-

etry section, entirely. There

had been no known object to

this foray but a purchase of

viticulture's finest period-

ical, whose latest issue had

not yet arrived; but the new

Madison hadn't been expected

and I blamed myself for Anne

Applebaum, whom I encounter-

ed in History, Europe, while

hoping to make it as far as

Spain, where I did ultimate-

ly find Mr Beevor's reliable

study of the civil war which

I'd not revisited since col-

lege (Borkenau, Brenan, Fra-

ser, and naturally, Orwell).

But I stray. Probably every-

one remembers John Hersey's

interesting nightmare novel

from 1974, out of Kafka and 

Malthus, My Petition for 

More Space, on appealing to

the bureaucratic gods for a

little more room, which the

publishers of Gulag seem to

have found it timely to a-

ward to Applebaum's title,

leaving no square cm of her

spine unstamped with that

grisly acronym of roughly,

State Camp Administration.

Lucky for her, Denisovich

had already been taken, or

she'd yet be at her lathe.

Now, this is said to be a

worthwhile frame of refer-

ence for the late Soviet

project in the productiv-

ity of enforcement; and no

connoisseur of the crimes

of its era can do without

it. But I can't say enough

for the printers' offense

against the good order of

one's library, by allocat-

ing 1.25" of font height,

and 0.5 of width, to each

and every letter of this

five-figure neologism set

within a spine of refrig-

erator white.

Who could reasonably ob-

ject, do you suppose, to

discerning the thoughtful

face of Alexander Pope at

twelve paces from a shelf

-- laid into Yale's spine

for his collected poetry?

You could say, a library

might do worse in a lode-

star for true north. But

this extremity of noise,

for a monstrosity upon a

monstrosity, only leaves

a library feeling like a

chamber of horrors.

Someone will tell us all,

one day, why Steve Pincus'

enormous white 1688, also

from Yale, doesn't manage

to roil the metabolism of

assimilating information,

with the gasp which must

always greet Anne Apple-

baum's embonpoint of text.

She is a graduate of Yale,

summa cum laude at that;

but, alas, her publisher

is Anchor, who must still

be striving to vindicate

their name. Possibly they

could consult J. Press on

discretion, at least with

projects from New Haven.