Friday, July 26, 2013

Suppose it were Friday lxxii: In the plentiful season





                      A little zipper whine
                      that runs along the
                      convolutes of his ear
                      licking in under every
                      bone like a bad emotion.
                      It could be morning noon
                      midnight the sound never
                      stops. He stands watching
                      a thousand whitecaps go
                      diagonal on the bay.
                      Components of today
                      include a shape asleep on
                      the floor an erased white
                      world the tumblers
                      vibrating in the closet and
                      he brought the wrong
                      book. Alive in a room as
                      usual.















Anne Carson
Red Doc>
  [page 34]
Knopf, 2013©









Thursday, July 25, 2013

Cranky aubergines


Mme Reid-Gaillard writes
the indispensable kitchen
garden blog referenced in
Context, and captures the
volatility of the season 
as few have done, in her 

    You always blame the 
weather for the fact that 
your aubergines are a few 
centimeters shorter than 
the neighbors, your hot 
peppers have only started 
flowering or your tomatoes 
persist on remaining green. 
It's a gardeners preroga-
tive to moan!


I don't think one could put dismay with one's aubergines any more poignantly than she has done, especially in her adoption of the comparative frame of reference; and with the season now so advanced upon its evanescent trajectory, who can afford to wait for hot peppers to reach veraison? This is horticultural cruelty at its nakedest imperviousness to aspiration, to say nothing of good works and good will. Nor is this ultimately a matter so much of knowing that somewhere a neighbor is proffering a plusher aubergine, as it is a crisis of underripening, per se, in which the very shade of the fruit proclaims it, never mind its scale. Moan? Rage, rather, against the persistence of tart hues.


One feels an almost natural 
dread of tribal culling in 
any botanical failure, and
while she manages to keep
it together with resilient
culinary wit, I know there
are many of us whose first
recourse might be to our
usual suspects, the gods.
I, for my part, have too
much respect for the pow-
er of prayer, and can ill
afford an overcorrection,
of clumsy side effects.























Tuesday, July 23, 2013

So if New York does go ahead, to elect a flasher, mayor






Do you think he'll
allow any day when
they won't have to
see, you know, it?
That's sort of the
thing, it seems to
me, not a fellow's
compulsiveness but
his making it com-
pulsory to notice.

It's like the Com-
monwealth of Vir-
ginia spouting Fox
News in every In-
terstate pit stop.
Shame doesn't live
there anymore.



















Sunday, July 21, 2013

Blue 78 in Los Angeles






      People who don't know Los
      Angeles, who wish to dis-
      tinguish it by fragments
      they believe have some ca-
      chet, miss that is a whole
      space, not The Blue Boy by
      himself in San Marino. The
      permeating golden light is
      why we recognise him there,
      but that gilt frame is cast
      about him everywhere. Born
      in the neighborhood of The
      Blue Boy, I was taken often
      to see him, and to roll my-
      self down the slope of his
      gardens from his perch on
      Oxford hill. But even then,