D'you believe in children?

          Funny thing:

          you'd be par-

          tisan in our

          furnace, had

          you said yes.

        

You heard, probably, they opened the titanium wing

  Yes, I know. 
  Saturday's 
  supposed to 
  be quieter.

   But this is
   still Texas.
   And they do
   adore metal.

             With any luck,
             we might even
             see a hanging.

           

Bastian van Gaalen
Kevin Flamme
Hamish Quigley

A friend in Context asks, how to frame a masterpiece

for Valéry Lorenzo,

giver of problems

The Huntington, the hometown library

and bicycling destination of my ear-

ly years, presents a Christmas study

of camellias from the borders of the

place, and shows off a nifty margin-

al autograph in a copy of Julius Cae-

sar from a circulating library. But

nobody goes to the Huntington with-

out visiting the Gainsboroughs, and

always the same one draws the gasp

of anyone old enough to stand. I re-

member this because I was mastering

both tricks when I first laid eyes

upon it. At the time, I thought he

was awfully big, but not unpleasant,

very high, but in no way haughty -

I was too young to know suspicion -

and mesmerisingly wrapped. Unchar-

acteristically, I discover that time

has not diminished it, even as gasp-

ing and standing have lost a little

of their original edge. Maybe frames

are replaced every so often, to the

refreshment of how a canvas appears;

but I'm content that this one bears
unchanging delight to children, for-
ever. (My marginalia, anyway).

  

For the camellias, I have only
treasurings of sweet memory. They

were propagated in our own garden,

nearby, by my father, who delight-

ed in original graftings of his

selections. How interesting, it

strikes me, for no reason what so

ever, that those camellias have

long been mulched for the enrich-

ment of others I've never seen.

It is a fact that reacquaints me

with my sense of his fatherhood,
and this contents me, too, as a
frame for my undoubted degradation.

But we are willing to accommodate
ourselves to the framing of any
masterpiece. After all, it's also
a protective act, and offers con-
soling conservation. Yet, I don't
mind to concede, that one can't be
framed and still be seen, whole. 
It is a problem we have with the
photographs of Valéry Lorenzo -
they don't mesmerise, they remind.


    Steady, like a log
    riding a sawmill's spillway,
    the steady coydog.

Paul Muldoon
Moy Sand and Gravel
  News Headlines from
  the Homer Noble Farm
  [fragment]
op. cit.

iv  photography Valéry Lorenzo©

Tea Party to-do's, why wait?

  The other day a columnist
  for The Washington Post -
  or would that be, a blog-
  ger; one never knows, in
  the Amazon kingdom, where
  the stuff is coming from -
  was hailing a subsidence
  of the Tea Party's ram-
  page against the 5th Com-
  mandment, and I found my-
  self tallying the list of 
  deficiencies in that pro-
  ject, of chastising the
  Republican Party for ad-
  mitting modernity through
  the blinders. Is it too
  late a stage in this dawn-
  ing transition into back-
  sliding, to speak up for
  traction in the tea cup?

  Something has happened, as
  I know you don't need to be
  told, to the composition of
  our materials. Some kind of
  hamburger helper concoction
  has invaded our porcelain,
  a weirdly shiny agent of
  slipperiness, which I sup-
  pose could be some cousin
  of that non-glass stuff
  that's going into glass
  these days, in bar tumb-
  lers of exotic endurance.
  And this, mind, is taking
  place at the very time
  that Lucretius' knowing
  complaint on behalf of a
  supporting finger, is be-
  ing addressed by reducing
  the diameter of the ring
  to a mockery of digital
  passage (not that it was
  ever to be condoned). That 
  is to say, it's getting so 
  one can't get a grip anymore.

  Far be it from anyone's in-
  tentions, "after" what we're
  going through with the Repub-
  licans - always assuming, our
  scribe is on to a trend, be-
  yond coincidence - to open up
  a purge of the purgers, some
  indelicate raising of stakes
  in a game that was naughty in
  the first place. But a decline
  in our mettle is just certain 
  to settle, if a shtetl's new
  kettle is not swept, pristine. 
  As they say.

  We repulse the slippery slope
  of tractionless teacups today,
  or we defend against this slip
  and fall of civilisation, it-
  self, in backlit boots of mil-
  itancy. (Whee! These bipolar 
  binomials are fun, I've always
  wanted to try one). Nor is the 
  slide confined to tumblers and 
  go-go first responders, anymore.
  Even as we speak, we're find-
  ing an addition to one of the
  page's preferred edifices, con-
  fected of concrete diluted by
  2 percent glistening titanium. 
  And these are bearing walls, 
  mind you, no dangling scrims
  for Renoir and Rubens and such
  stuff. How on earth, may we at
  least demand, could this have
  come to pass in Texas?













Martin Filler
No Harm to the Kimbell
The New York Review of Books
December 9, 2013

Renzo Piano Building Workshop

It is this world's business, what they do against their own in India

May we let it go some day,
at this: that no state is
part of Yosemite, that has
the effrontery to dictate
to Nature.

photograph, collection Laurent

Hussar's pelisse plundered, Cracker to blame

"Topicality," as our Smiley

remarked in conference with

Control, "is always suspect."

And so is it, to extract sea-

sonal merriment from that fa-

mously draped chivalric cape

we encountered in our book of

the year; but we were not the

first. Leigh-Fermor's biograph-

er's father, himself a writer

of travels extraordinaire, and

offspring of that kind, has 

filched the headings of the

decedent's privy files, in the

present volume of his annual

Christmas Cracker for the book-

shop at 10 Curzon Street. That

cataloguing system is a model

of bloggerly continuity, viz:

  Detached Oddments

  Not Very Important Oddments

  Own Oddments

  Unsorted but Interesting

  Oldish - Needs Sorting

  Badly Needs Sorting

  Current: Unsorted

  Current: Various

  Vol III: Odds and Ends

  Crete: Mixed Bag

  Tiring Duplicates

  Disjecta Membra

  Scattered Intractables

  Official Bumph

  Flotsam

A more alert moralist than I -
don't everyone rush forward -

will elatedly decry the un-

apologetic breach this posting

might resemble, but for exigent

partying conditions, celebrated

by that scrupler's own client in

our book of the year - exhibi-

tion among them. I think, what

needs to take place, is a col-

lapse from that lapse, toward 

hilarity, which convention it-
self demands of the season. Let 
so much of it fall against us
as may slough the timid scales
from honest interplay. Then, if 
anyone will confide, what became

of our Hussar's bright cuirass, 

I should be ever so grateful.

John Le Carré
Tinker, Tailor,
  Soldier, Spy
Knopf, 1974©

John Julius Norwich
A Christmas Cracker
John Julius Norwich, 2013©

i photography Hedi Slimane

People say, you know, Henry James can't move

  

  

  

   

  Possibly it's be-

  cause he has come

  rather a long way.

     To walk in quest of any

     object that one has more

     or less tenderly dreamed

     of, to find your way, to

     steal upon it softly, to

     see at last, if it be

     church or castle, the 

     tower-tops peeping above

     elms or beeches - to push

     forward with a rush, and

     emerge and pause and draw

     that first long breath

     which is the compromise be-

     tween so many sensations:

Henry James

English Hours

  Lichfield and Warwick

1872

op. cit.