Saturday commute lxxxix: sledding the asphalt jungle

   I got a note from a waif

   in San Francisco. They

   always ask me what there

   is to do.

Is taste a human right ii

To become lost amid underperforming texts
the stranger won't answer. By which time
it was nosebleed territory anyway. The geese
had put away their young, then fled; all that remained
to be determined was local angst, over which who cares what
by sitters in a landscape, I say: how is this remote?
Yellow wine will rinse it all away, and how many of us
are there? Is it my imagination or must one foregather
to bring stuff in?

                  Long before that, the tocsin

had sounded in the autumn dell, Toxins were released.

One's by-now crystallized antipathy to daring new

solutions swamped local perennial borders.

Because at least getting too serious had reputable

antecedents. Being in the way didn't matter,

nor should it, yet who knows what embarrassments can leak

this way, foreground moony entertainments? Just a clench

suffices when their guard is up. The horse pilots,

sleeping rough in their thousands,

announced commodious outcomes contradicting too-prompt

displays of local affection. The broad petals of language

are stiff and may get very bad.

They make it very bad

in our language tutoring.

   Possibly you have noticed, too,

   that so few people seem to have

   heard the good news about them-

   selves. They want refreshment but

   ask, 'Give me the biggest red ya

   got', and this aspiration for

   punishment is but a consequence

   of deprivation, a means of sub-

   stantiating to themselves that

   they can take it and respect it.

   You see it everywhere, if not in

   every thing. 

   In growth there is a center that

   opens as balanced wine, unfold-

   ing congruently, responsively,

   gracefully, authentically, and

   lastingly. Which came first, the

   principle or the fact? Taste is

   an expression of the human trait

   of memory. We can watch expertise

   reviving as a birthright, across

   their features as they recompose.

  

John Ashbery

Quick Question

  New Poems

  Far Harbor

op. cit.

Not more than a moment ago

   I had the
   very same
   reaction.

   Coincidence
   strikes one
   as being so
   extravagant.



















  

As grotesque a vision as has ever seemed plausible

And, for the next few years, 

advances in smartphones and 

tablets will continue to be 

subtle and iterative, driven 

by the twin processes of sim-

plification and connection. 

The advanced Touch ID finger-

print sensor built into the 

5S’s home button, while a 

seemingly basic technology 

(it replaces your password 

with your thumbprint in a 

handful of very specific ap-

plications) is a perfectly 

representative feature. Today, 

it’s merely a convenience, 

since putting your thumb where 

it goes a hundred times a day 

anyway is less annoying than 

typing in a password. But it’s 

also a step closer to the day 

when we no longer have to remem-

ber or store dozens of passwords—

a fundamental reinvention of the 

way we approach identity and com-

puter security on a daily, even 

hourly, basis. It breaks down one 

of the barriers between humans and 

our machines.

As if hailing the invention of eyeglasses, cleverly bobbing on the bridge of the nose so effortlessly, their correction of vision is almost spontaneous, the geek for The New Yorker gives us a thumb-rest of innocuous integration with a quite different world as it is: the one constructed of choices repeated, all day long. And what is this breaking down of "barriers," may we guess, but facilitating fingertips favouring that pattern? Could I commission an optician to convey to me a confessional screen in Prince of Wales tweed, I'd send it out for cleaning once a year and still save on battery life.

The naïf

The struggle to portray the

President as a Chicago pol -

tough, cynical, exploitive,

implicitly shady - has foun-

dered opportunistically on

the Koch payroll's chorus, 

that this alien has sadly

not matured into that compet-

ence, after all. The struggle

is incurable, yet helplessly

constructive; a little jaun-

dice in studying the holder

of this gruesomely dangerous

office is not ill-judged, and

has led, in his accession, to

a most salubrious correction,

on the whole.

Let us accept that the diplom-

acy which is being pursued, to

the concerted consternation of 

his political enemies, may not

meet his sense of what is re-

quired for protecting Americans;

it is too soon to know. It is

not too soon to gauge its val-

ue in the war zone.

It is a pity that his enemies

find the suspense unendurable,

and do all they can to assure

that we renounce hope. But we

ask no escape from who we are.

T off

A thin wash of morning
rain on the decks was
perfect. Between Exit B
and Exit C was a twenty
yard stretch unhindered
by deck chairs. We raced
towards it in our bare
feet and let ourselves
go, sliding along the
slippery wood till we
crashed into the railing
or a door being suddenly
opened by a passenger ..

Cassius felled the ancient

Professor Raasagoola Chaud-

haribhoy during one record-

setting projection of his

body.

Michael Ondaatje

The Cat's Table

  A Novel

op. cit.

Have you never read Ted Cruz?

I ran into Andy Westerman in

the parking deck of the U.S.

Senate's classified reading

room, and together we went

off for coffee to check out

the column Ted Cruz contrib-

uted to The Post today, on

how better it is for Assad

to spray sarin gas around,

than scary zealots in rebel-

lion. Modest of him, don't

you think?

Parbleu! A Monday without "consequences"

Even Gérard, summoning his best never complain, never explain mode, would scarcely allow himself to hear of it, when the White House Chief of Staff portrayed the horror of a Monday without consequences - short, he brightened to suggest, of annihilating some of the suf-ferers. Oh, the decline of wit, some muttered, perilously close to the sin of disgust, plunging the silver into the mustard to assuage the wilting pâté. Not that this depredation of chemistry seemed the outrage, anymore, that it used to be. And so they gathered, to draw up a list of cornichons of correction, petty torpedoes of tartness to assure a Monday of demonstrable consequences. But the disturbance was as short-lived as the delicate little thwacking promised by the Chief of Staff, as a consensus coalesced around an airlift of floppy purple fingers, tiramisù left over from the buffet of the Emerald City, to point the way to saving face all 'round.