How many might there be?

The other day, having been invited by Ermenegildo Zegna or some such industrialist, to reflect upon the battles of the Isonzo River, all that came to mind was the tendency of granite cliffs to shatter disagreeably, under the influence of repeated artillery shelling - itself, a large enough nuisance. But hardship by misdirection is of such renown to the Common Law, that I found myself lapsing into nostalgia for Torts class, and those many dreamy nights of sharing hypotheticals between Socratic drubbings before one's peers. One likes to know where to lay a blame, and yet in the case of battle, Sovereign Immunity wittily bars the door. It's splendid to be able to turn to a Creator for damages, in the defective production of His rocks. It was bad enough, I think we can agree, to allow a river to carve away half of Arizona.

We may never know how many readers there must be, who had experience of that Century, on which the Sisyphean genius of the Isonzo River battles - staged 8 or 9 times, over a couple of years, to prodigal movement of rock, if none of either front line - raised such a mesmerising curtain, one could have skipped the entire opera. Whole bunches of human limbs actually made it out of that interval, to our fair surprise.

Tony Judt
Timothy Snyder
Thinking the Twentieth Century
Penguin Books, 2012©

Friday tidyings

 

 Oh, heavens, yes, I'm with 
 you. One signs up for the
 seminar on canopy manage-
 ment, only to hear the lec-
 turer claim that it's all 
 about leaf pulling and the
 ventilation of clusters. 
 And what ever became of tan-
 nic grip, one should like to
 know; extraction, and length 
 of finish? Tidiness may be a 
 mode of godliness, but are 
 they the same thing?

The language of oenological criticism approaches the unreadable, much less 
the unpresentable, the more that it escalates into the mystical. An ac-
quired neurosis is its constantly 
pressing touchstone (if you see what 
I mean), and consensual myth becomes 
its dreary blight. Friends have an-
ticipated that I'd touch upon this, 
since the launch of the page; people, 
simply, with whom I've dined in the
exploration of wines. 

But the subject is switched,
in focus upon the hoary myths
of wine. That subject is the
human being by whom and for
whom the transfiguration of
fruit has been undertaken and,
yes, refined. And that is a
most consuming discussion, 
yet after Virgil, almost un-
avoidably egotistical to re-
open. We have lived with the
fundamental text for more
than 2000 years. We are in no
position to say, science has
failed us. The problem of in-
articulate wine is not in its
stars or in its ground; it's
in the scientist, among whom
no lover of wine is exempted,
as it is up to him to complete
the gesture that it is. How he
will is how he does.





























La Fleur '66
  scan by Laurent

Cabernet Franc in 2013
  grown by Eric Chevalier 
  photo Kermit Lynch

Thursday stop and frisk

I had a plan.

                          I said we should

                          go to the police.

  Well, what's the rush,

  Thelma? If we wait long

  enough, they'll come to

  us.

Callie Khouri

screenplay

Thelma and

  Louise

1991©

Wednesday shelter

How does one remember the Isonzo campaign?

Well, as a haberdasher,

one multiplies 300,000

youngsters by two legs

and quantifies a sudden

surplus of gabardine in

this season, on a scale

to compel peace talks,

subito. But possibly,

this is the logic of a

nation of shopkeepers,

not of their clients in

fashion's cauldron.

Where is the edifice of

permanence, for man to

confide his aspiration?

The fascist monstrosity

shown above, as much as

Lutjens' revolting dur-

bar hinge at Thiepval,

has no response to give.

Where does that come

from, do we suppose,

if not in embodying 

disdain of vanities, 

and guarded hope?

John Keegan

The First World War

Knopf, 1999©

Before the Terror, and of course Ted Cruz

Sir, I'm sure you believe

that everything is for the

best, both in the moral and

the physical world, and that

nothing could possibly be

different?

I, sir, the scholar answered,

think nothing of the sort. I

think everything goes wrong,

in this world of ours; that no

one understands either his place

or his duties, and except for 

dinner - which is cheerful and

appears to bring people together - 

we spend our time in ridiculous

quarrels. We have Puritans fight-

ing with Jesuits, parliamentarians

fighting with bishops, writers

fighting with other writers, and

courtesans with other courtesans;

we have bankers fighting with peop-

le, women fighting against their

husbands, relatives against other

relatives. What we have, in short,

is endless warfare.

Candide replied, I've seen worse

things. But a very wise man, who

suffered the misfortune of being

hanged, taught me that all these

things are truly fine: they're

shadows of a lovely painting.

Your hanged man, said Martin, was

poking fun at the world. Your shad-

ows are really ghastly stains.

It's men who make the stains, 

said Candide, and they have

no choice.

François-Marie Arouet

1694 - 1778

Voltaire

Candide, or Optimism

Burton Raffel, translation

Yale University Press, 2005©

Last House in backlight

Yet another benign defeat of

ambition redeems Luke Barr's

new book on his great-aunt,

M.F.K. Fisher and her franco-

phile peers in gastropublish-

ing, Provence, 1970. Mr Barr

is involved in the hedonism

business with Travel & Lei-

sure, and Clarkson Potter set

the bar accordingly low, to

his effort to identify a his-

toric turning point in Amer-

ican culinary culture, as if

there could be any to sift in

the wake of so many first-per-

son accounts from the victors.

It helps, that Barr wasn't ac-

tually there, and that a night

of long knives, ultimately lib-

erating American cuisine from

francophilia, was never so con-

centrated in one place or time

as it is his project to declare.

M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, 

James Beard, and The Reinvention

of American Taste - he means to

include Olney, but it would have

thrown the meter - his subtitle,

gives a robust but partial cast,

as enlistment by Sybille Bedford

and Elizabeth David clarifies,

tending toward a reinvention

which remains anarchic to this 

day.

They dined together, warily, and

with a sectarian bitchiness wor-

thy of Jeremiah Tower, boiling

water. Their quibbling egos make

for tiresomely familiar reading,

to which Barr nevertheless brings

an arresting impartiality as the

foundation for a sharp anatomisa-

tion of snobbery. Ignore the pre-

tense, that the book is a neces-

sary history. It's a provocative

and sensitive scrutiny of rules. 

I've read most of the books by all 

his protagonists, Child excepted;

and like other San Franciscans of

such interests, I was fortunate

to visit one of them in Sonoma.

Now, Barr's survivorship of their

influence is all one has wished

for oneself. He has a gift for
sharing hunger without claiming
it, and taste without regulating
it. A fundamental understanding

the generosity of the casual, 
within the spheres of equable

competence and sympathy, places

him estimably close to two polar

opposites in his text, to expose

ego as the only quality dividing

them into putative factions. His 

gift for characterising their vir-

tues, for restoring their company,

is distinguished, and greatly to

be prized. His understanding ex-

ceeds his own awareness, and this

is a fine failure of ambition in

a field where it flocks intermin-

ably. If he could laugh, he might

be Liebling. 

Luke Barr

Provence, 1970

  [etc]

Clarkson Potter, 2013©

ii  Engraving from Pauillac

I may take in a new lens sometime

  To judge the appearances

  that we receive of ob-

  jects, we would need a

  judicatory instrument;

  to verify this instru-

  ment, we need a demon-

  stration; to verify the

  demonstration, an ins-

  trument: there we are

  in a circle.

.. Something cleaves to form

until the last minute, past it,

and though the vet's needle was an act

of mercy, the life needed to continue,

the life was larger than cruelty,

the life denied the obliterating gesture

where only kindness had been expected.

..

the life takes it in and says more,

..

and the flooding darkness. The life doesn't care.

The life only wants, the fugitive life.

Sometimes our judicatory instrument

is that supreme essayist of succul-

ence, Montaigne, a son of Bordeaux

and of the early family of Château

d'Yquem. Of him Emerson wrote, Cut

these words, and they would bleed;

they are vascular and alive. Flau-

bert admired his style as a fruit

that fills the mouth and throat,

so succulent that the juice goes

right to your heart.

When it comes time to identify the

judicatory instrument Montaigne en-

visioned, Sainte-Beuve points us

right: Thought and image, with him,

it is all one. Montaigne senses; yet

it is his mode of judgment, which is

celebrated. Between the camera and

the refractometer, both unknown to

his century but not to his imaging, 

he would have chosen the latter, to 

study the impact of the object on 

the light, not the other way 'round.

It is the winegrower's choice, of any

who thirst to match their taste. It

is the choice of Alexandrians, from

Cavafy to Durrell to Doty.

The refractometer, which can measure

suspended sugar in a drop of grape

juice by its refraction of light, re-

lies upon technology impervious to

solids suspended in the air, such as

fog and its less seemly corollaries.

The painter, the photographer incor-

porate them. When it comes to it, we

will breathe what is there; the soul

will come before disdain.

Michel de Montaigne

Apology for Raymond Sebond

Donald Frame, editor and

  translator

The Complete Essays of

  Montaigne

Stanford University Press, 1958©

Mark Doty

My Alexandria

  With Animals

op. cit.

i  photo Laurent