The game blade and I

As I considered how to announce this 

posting, in the way of a heading, I 

thought I might just let the whole 

thing ride on a cheerful double en-

tendre, and say no more. But this is 

no way to get off one’s chest such an 

abiding, leeching peeve that I’d be re-

luctant to call it a pet. On the other 

hand, Saturday, with all its consoling 

liberty, is no time for a Miltonian 

trumpet blast on the proximity of “the 

end,” which in many things can be most 

welcome. If one could suggest an end, 

therefore, I’d certainly choose the ir-

rational, fashionable adoption of the 

device described as “the steak knife.” 

Readers are invited to peer over the 

shoulder, as we all tend to do anyway 

at this page, to observe how very near 

indeed “the end” may be, if one could 

wean the tenant opposite, of promoting 

the steak knife.

The steak knife is to gastronomy, and

to its table service, as the Modern Jazz

Quartet of the 1950s and 60s was to jazz:

a shiny, slightly glittering object of no

inherent derivation in its medium. Probab-

ly research will show they emerged at the

same time, along with turquoise roadsters.

Sadly, it seized the known world by its

consummate extraneousness, as any artifact

of ostentation always does, such as the

several superfluous chronometers in a sing-

le Breguet wristwatch: not having to have

them, means having to have them. Even ad-

mitting the restaurant's genius for botch-

ing things, fails to justify the easier

slicing of the undesirable, only to ac-

celerate the distress of the jaws.

Now, who would take on, on Saturday, the

remediation of commercial gastronomy, es-

pecially in a setting such as this one,

which has renounced that oxymoron, in no

uncertain terms? Only the present writer?

I greatly doubt it, for the impertinences

of public dining have penetrated our pre-

serves, in the assumptions of our guests.

In the feeding, then, of visitors, even

the discreet open themselves to emulating

that tragic discovery of restaurants: he

who dines alone, is likely to stay alone.

And Saturday affords no support for this.

Admitting that the cuisine of China,

Mexico, India, and Oceana, broadly

speaking, exempt us from the likeli-

hood of having to lend a guest this

idiot prop of Western dining, an en-

tire universe of red wines cries out

for the occasional presentation of a

slab of flesh unreduced to bite size.

We don't query why this should be so;

it is a fixture of adapting to guests.

And there we are: necessity is the

mother of preposterous invention,

not its excuse. Who among us, would

ever venture within a Marathon of

distance, to serve a cut of meat so

unyielding to the blandishments of a

simple dinner knife, at worst, as to

support a cultural obsession with sam-

urai standards of sharpness, only to

transit the nibble to the frailty of

human teeth? The pristine silliness

of the device cries out to be beaten

back into butter spreaders, for the

plush extractions of the braise, the

discerning selection of the tender-

loin, the opulently grained fibres

of the competently managed roast. 

Are there really tables in our very

homes, where the translation of a

carcass from vitality is in doubt?

Yet still the plea arises, once

the steak knife has been exposed

as the fetish that it is, of the

incompetent and the commercially

seduced, for some residual oppor-

tunity to enjoy the allure of the

boning device, without guilt. If

not from necessity, then certain-

ly from convenience, a whiff of

legitimacy arises from the con-

sumption of wild game, especially

of fowl, the noblest and in many

cases, the most ideal foils for

the glories of red wines. Here an

edge is welcome, in eliciting the

meat from the elegant bone, from

tenacious ligatures of flight as

we admire enough to present to

each other, generously. A roast

of squab is an engagement to be

savored meticulously to the ful-

lest; and, so far from destroy-

ing such a prospect by its bon-

ing in advance, the steak knife

gains preferment it never knew.

Claire MacDonald

The Game Cookbook

Birlinn Publishing, 2015©

Duchess of Rutland

Shooting

  A Season of Discovery

Quiller Publishing, 2012©

For Burke, for Sheridan, and innocent pedestrians

Frederic Reynolds, twelve years old, thought he was going to die. He was walking down the narrow passage between Vinegar Yard and Bridges Street at nine o'clock on a May evening in 1777 when he heard a terrible noise above his head. The sudden, tremendous rumble made him sure that Drury Lane Theatre, which formed one side of the passage, was collapsing .. He covered his head with his hands and ran for his life, but 'found the next morning that the noise did not arise from the falling of the house, but from the falling of the screen in the fourth act; so violent and so tumultuous were the applause and laughter.' He had passed by the opening night of Sheridan's new play, The School for Scandal.

St Patrick's is more than certainly as good a day as any, for a coming to grips with the possible, when an entertainer turns to politics, and invokes the English language to do it. Never mind the factor of imperialism in its adoption, Ireland is all the rage in the Executive branch of the American government today, not for her genius with English, but for the myth of her people's welcome as immigrants to this land. It was not the shrewdest move of this mountebank regime, to patronise a people who has seen it all and then some, from such frauds. Sheridan's biographer has noticed, and by anyone in that dervish cabinet who can read, this might have been expected. 

Readers of this page will remember Sheridan as the brilliant Irish dramatist-statesman of the 18th Century, whose use of this language electrified audiences in Parliament and theatre alike, not merely with its acuity, but with its undeniability. In Sheridan, as in his rival Edmund Burke, the line between the power and the purpose in rhetoric was controlled by the most luminous exercise of conscience. Indeed, Sheridan once said to Burke, I don't mean to flatter, but when posterity reads one of your speeches in Parliament, it will be difficult to believe that you took so much pains, knowing with certainty that it could produce no effect, that not one vote would be gained by it.

With no falsity whatever, therefore,

by virtue of the genius of the great

unwashed - a phrase misattributed to

Edmund Burke - for the unvarnished 

and unfalsified, clean energy of a

language which only its scoundrels

demand to make compulsory in a free

nation, it's not only possible, not

only necessary, to revel on St Pat-

rick's day as a refreshment to Amer-

ican principles. It is a way of re-

vealing them.

Fintan O'Toole

A Traitor's Kiss

  The Life of 

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  pp. 122 & 258

op. cit. 

Green Beer and

  Rank Hypocrisy

The New York Times©

March 16, 2017

A sea wall firebreak in the Lowlands?

In the Dutch national elections yesterday,

their Donny Thump-Thump didn't win such a

large minority as ours did, in the multi-

layered coup d'état that threw America out

of the family of nations. Was it our exem-

plary proof of nativist idiocy that turned

the tide, or an ingeniously fractured par-

ty system, in the judgment of one observer

at The New York Times? Withal, Holland's

salvation is not an occasion for the minc-

ing of words. They are safe, and they have

shown it can be done.

Instead of awakening this morning to an ab-

surdly unstable concentration of revanchist

power in one party, they've awakened to an

endearingly familiar mess of partisan frac-

turing, which our Constitution was design-

ed to preserve, institutionally. (It works

just fine, with weak parties). Instead of

awakening this morning to a declared war

in their national budget, upon the global

environment and domestic justice, they are

handed time for further reflection.

If the United States did contribute to an

outcome needed by this world, it's not a

precedent that we'd discourage, only its

novelty.

  

Origins of Wednesday xlv: Worry for the Netherlands

  The polls are open in the Netherlands

  at the moment, and throughout much of

  the world, for the first time in any-

  one's memory, there's some worry that

  they might imitate the United States.

  Now so much a spectacle of humanity's

  worst fears, it's only proper for the

  US to defend decency abroad by domes-

  tic capitulations to its abandonment.

  This is no less than official policy:

  exhort, exploit, exclude, extinguish.

Piet Mondriaan

Winter Landscape

1907

Composition Nr 10

1939 - 1942

Mid-Atlantic seasonal mix

   I'm not sure I understand

   the concern of California

   friends, for highway vis-

   ibility in our transition

   into Spring. Once I shook

   off Daylight Savings, the

   rest was a piece of cake.

The lady vanishes

People do not say, I'm the life

of the party, 'cause I tell a

joke or two. On the contrary -

one's own best friends haul one

aside sometimes by the snark,

and whisper, I never know when

to take you seriously. That said,

film buffs, as they conveniently

are called, will not hesitate to

identify this charade by the Al-

fred Hitchcock masterpiece, The

Lady Vanishes, in which two (count

them) almost hilariously rutting,

premonitory lovers, cavort in a

baggage car with the obligatorily

Italian stage illusionist's coffin.

What can one say. I just saw the

movie again at this very desk, via

dvd, and apart from the fact that

a pleasure dome, in Graham Greene's

immortal phrase, does not reduce it-

self amiably to a computer monitor,

the lack of audience responses puts

one's feet to the fire to appraise

the thing from every angle, the hy-

pothetically hilarious to the con-

frontationally evangelical. Within

even this cockpit, The Lady Vanishes

gets up and frontally confides its

risible ludicrousness on the spot,

preserving (thereby) one's delight

in, and ration of reality, even in 

absentia under the new government --

which advances a "health care plan,"

assured to annihilate 24 million of

us, and a border-crossing salad of

hallucinatory security measures,

certain to incite their most urgent

and, need I say, sorry penetration.

And still one can't bring oneself,

these days, to put a thing seriously.

How soon we expose ourselves, unexpec-

tedly, as connoisseurs of coffin humor.

Alfred Hitchcock

  director

Sidney Gilliat and

  Frank Launder

  screenplay

Alma Reville [Hitchcock]

  continuity

Jack Cox

  cinematography

Margaret Lockwood

  Michael Redgrave

  Paul Lukas

  Dame May Whitty

  Naunton Wayne

  Basil Radford

  

The Lady Vanishes

Gaumont, 1938©

John Surtees

I glimpsed a note in The Times
this evening, after dinner, on
the demise of Mr John Surtees.

I wish the natural reluctance,
to convey any such news, could
survive an indiscipline of af-
fection in boys, for exemplars
of adroit tempering of risk by
inordinate physical capacities
and skill. If, for all time, a
sweet note of memorable brevi-
ty hovers in the rapturous re-
flex they reserve for fulfill-
ment of their truest rival and
inspiration, then I do not ex-
aggerate to observe among that
generation of ours, resolution
to be the next of its apostles.

We'll be delighted to go fast-
er, but never so vain as to go
better.

Sean Spicer Süß, Keeper of the Scabies

Have we been enjoying the mouthpiece's

channeling of regime hysteria? In 1940

the paradigm for its impromptu hyster-

ia about Deep State vermin and burrow-

ing disloyalists was published as that

publicity coup of Joseph Goebbels, Jud

Süss, as ingenious an allegory for the

naughtiness of outcasts as Mr Spicer's

script of the present. Sad it is, with

his principal's ostentatious non-anti-

semitic protestations, he cannot foot-

note it. His denials will do for that.