Come to year's end

momentarily.

 The duties of living

 wear a face visibly,

 and yet when it goes

 the other way, a vis-

 age is companionship

 I find, sight unseen. 

Derek

beggars would ride

Saturday commute xcviii: foraging abroad

   I was in great health and 

   and spirits, and fully ab-

   le to enter into the ideas

   of the brave, rude men whom 

   I found in all quarters.

                          

      It was just being

      for a little while

      one of the prisca

      gens mortalium,

      who ran about in

      the woods eating

      acorns and drink-

      ing water.                         

James Boswell

The Yale Editions of

  the Private Papers

  of James Boswell

Frank Brady and

  Frederick A. Pottle, editors

Boswell on the Grand Tour

  Italy, Corsica, and France

  1765 - 1766

McGraw-Hill, 1955©

Horace

Epodes

 ii, 2

ibid.

Hamish Quigley

Max Motta

Suppose it were Friday lxxxix: Daybreak

 

  The displaced persons  

  are willing to go any-

  where on earth except 

  home.

It is a portrait not of Marian Evans the woman but of George Eliot the artist, and one is not surprised to learn that Lewes rejected it. The face is sad, the eyes are cold and weary, the expression superior, the mouth is sensual and cruel: not the cruelty of a torturer, but the cruelty of a judge. Why should it not be? No charge of hypocrisy laid at her door could compare with the double-dealing of the society which condemned her .. Human beings, particularly when they are artists, are too valuable, too disparate, too contradictory to be left in the hands of the critics or the psychoanalysts. Their poignancy rests in the peculiar force with which each spurns the ideal.

Janet Flanner

Genêt

The New Yorker©

October 30, 1948

Modris Eksteins

Walking Since Daybreak

  A Story of Eastern Europe,

  World War II, and the Heart

  of our Century

Houghton Mifflin, 1999©

Noel Annan

Heroine

  A review of

  George Eliot

  Gordon Haight, 1968

The New York Review©

January 2, 1969

Hat frisbee memories

    Clean shirt wishes on

    the day they invented

    delight.

Not leaving without her

   Why is Tatiana, then, more guilty?
   Is it because in dear simplicity
   she does not know deceit
   and in her chosen dream believes?
   Is it because she loves without art,
   obedient to the bent of feeling?
   Because she is so trustful,
   because by heaven is endowed
   with a restless imagination,
   intelligence, and live will,
   and headstrongness,
   and a flaming and tender heart?
   Can it be that you won't forgive her
   the thoughtlessness of passions?

























Aleksandr Pushkin
Eugene Onegin
  A Novel in Verse
  Chapter three, xxiv
Vladimir Nabokov
   translation
Bollingen Series LXXII
Princeton University Press, 1975©

"Then there are these accidents to consider .."

To learn hunger, if

well fed, would give

us Flaubert, I think.

Not a bad idea. But

it also gives us what

claims to be called,

taste. How to hunger,

as if unfed, gives us

Horace.

Horace

was one generation re-

moved from slavery, by

his father's manumis-

sion; and spent a wary 

life in the munificent 

patronage of Maecenas.

It gives a different

view of taste; not to

say, another taste to 

everything. We see a

clean white shirt and

accept it as a custom.

Horace saw white and

knew his hunger. At

Nasiedienus' feast,

the tapestries all

fell with black vol-

canic dust. Off we ran, 

taking our revenge on 

him by tasting nothing

whatever.

  

Horace

Satires and Epistles

  Satires II, viii

John Davie, translation

op. cit.

The clean shirt cycle

How would one know?

Our correspondent landed in

Grenada as I was born; this

he tells us merrily, in his

first published travels. It

would be some 21 years be-

fore I got there, not know-

ing at the time that our

footsteps were so much as

intersecting, walking Grand

Anse toward St George's, as

the children played in the

silent sea. Some of my fav-

ourite, sweetest pictures,

I took with my earliest M,

of their splashing in the

tide as if to wake it up;

and it's my guess that he

did, too, with probably a

iii-f model. But he was in

Grenada as a landfall in a

Leeward Islands checklist

in his post-war travels in

the Caribbean; and I was

there because a rowing mate

in freshman crew had plant-

ed dreams of the island in

my mind, as we would haul

back up to Commons for our

dinner after dark. Travels

follow from affections al-

most as bananas succeeding

themselves upon the branch,

re-enacting flowerings. 

Did I know what to expect?

Yes, but what's it like?

Well, it's light, like con-

fetti. It falls out of the

sky and blows about in the

wind. It's terribly cold,

and when it settles it re-

sembles cassava or mashed

potatoes. Your feet leave

marks on it as though you

were treading on sand, and

you can make balls of it,

or even snowmen. It is so

heavy it sometimes breaks

the branches of trees. It's

deep and crisp and even ...

I'm sorry. I don't get it,

maan. I don't get it at all.

Not what it's really like.

Sir Patrick Leigh-Fermor, DSO, OBE

The Traveller's Tree

  A Journey through the Caribbean Islands

New York Review Books, 2011©

i - iii  Tom Barker

Oh, hurt me no more, PG

In the interest of gossip,

I know, I really shouldn't

confide that the addressee

of this plea is not that

gracious benefactress of

the page's endless fledge-

lingness. It would be so

much more amusing, very

possibly, if this weren't

so; but in fact I suffer

mortally from humour's aw-

ful torments, much as my

poor parents did, who

might read aloud during

cocktails, from mid-cen-

tury English malefactors

of the pen. So, you know,

whom I mean: the fellow

with whom Duff Cooper and

his boy were trapped in a

lift at the Bristol, soon

after a sad unpleasantness

he'd stirred. But, just

yesterday, foraging for a

lighter text, to charm my

English Cocker on a first

birthday, I ran into an

exchange which must live

in the extremest echelons

of humour's infamy in print.

Dear reader, avert thy gaze;

discard thy shirt, risk not

the hurt of bursting collar

stays.

    You mean Barmy's cousin Egbert from Harrow?

    That's right. The one who shoots Brazil nuts.

    Lord Ickenham was intrigued ..

    Shoots Brazil nuts, does he? You stir me strangely.

    In my time I have shot many things - grouse, pheasants,

    partridges, tigers, gnus and once, when a boy, an aunt

    by marriage in the seat of her sensible tweed dress

    with an airgun - but I have never shot a Brazil nut...

    Not sitting Brazil nuts, I trust?

    It was apparent to the Egg that the old gentleman

    had missed the gist.

    He shoots things with Brazil nuts, he explained.

My very nice little dog, not heretofore known for undue biting of the ankle or hurt-ling into a hearth to chill out against eruptively ex-purgative convulsions from the diaphragm on up, col-lapses from synapses to the toey-tip that tapses, took umbrage also at this waste of scavengeable snackery, for yet another sordid re-port of idle clubmen firing with slingshots at top hats from their windows on the Mall. A truce ceded to him the right to rule on the admissibility of any wit in our relations, in exchange for my not having to share from my libations. I fear condemning laughter to a spontaneous estate, ever an imponderable bliss.

  

P.G. Wodehouse

Cocktail Time

Simon & Schuster, 1958©

Listening at the Monteleone iv: McClatchy en passant

  The poet, J.D. McClatchy,

  gives pictures which, one

  could say, are blasphemed

  by illustration. At best,

  corrupted. But we know as

  many students of pictures

  who believe they can hear

  them. McClatchy writes to

  be audited by every sense.

  He was here for our first

  notes from the Monteleone.

         






       .. Angels in his veins
  Weep for their empty sabbath
  and loot his sorrows.
  Stalls in the Market of  
  Silence open next door ..

J.D. McClatchy

Hazmat: Poems

  Aden

    Rimbaud dying

    [fragment]

Knopf, 2004©