Saturday, July 29, 2017

In the frame, clashing


This page, which turns 7
today, is the same age I
was in this portrait, in
the frame in stripes be-
hind the celebrant, aged
11 that day. I was being
admitted to his party as
cake was being served to
classmates of his from a
boys' school in Califor-
nia, and I very well re-
member their exuberance.

At 7 years of this, I do
enjoy admission to soci-
ty and its revels, while
savoring my portion from
incongruous positioning.

Clashing sometimes, with
the foreground, with the
background, and tasting.



















my brother






Friday, July 28, 2017

Code of the maverick


Une vengeance trop prompte
n'est plus une vengeance;
c'est une riposte.





Dream a while. Scheme a while.

                          I can't give you
                          anything but love.
















Henri de Montherlant

Jimmy McHugh and
Dorothy Fields
I can't give you anything
  but love
1928





Suppose it were Friday cxxvi: Is it good to be alive?






If there's anything about
the size of the risk pool
that can subdue the costs
of protection, it has two
ways of going: by shrink-
age, discriminating in fa-
vor of fortune; or enlar-
ging it, in favor of fair-
ness. Now what is it about
49 Republicans in the Sen-
ate could not understand;
what is patriotic or hero-
ic, about twisting fate?

Wake up to Friday. Amer-






















Thursday, July 27, 2017

And for Gauleiter of Greater Zirconia?





The White House has allowed it to
be known that the self-defrocked
the Governor of Kansas, has been
rewarded as Minister Plenipotenti-
ary of Superstition Worldwide. Not
a position contemplated by the Con-
stitution, domestically, it is ex-
pected to pass the muster of the
newly corrupted Judicial Branch -
as an exemplary gesture of inter-
national comity, not impinging up-
on the vitality of the Establish-
ment Clause's prohibition of State
Nonsense. Nor has it been ignored,
like the White House's permission
for the proscription of transgen-
der overhead on the Federal books
to be celebrated in the same day,
that these divertissements both
arrive as the Party plans to defy
mathematics if it kills them at
last, making insurance whimsical -




a triumph of treachery - favored
on the grounds, can you stand it,
that the gaudier the skitthe 





















Jean Arp
1886-1966






Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Delirium at dawn


If only Olivier were on
hand to see this. It is
commonly understood, the
government does not have
a President, it has an en-
tertainer, a protean nit-
wit of too many guises to
keep up. Only the other
day, he announced he had
his own Justice Depart-
ment. Today, we hear he
has his own Generals. As
Katharine Hepburn was
heard to remark to Cary
Grant in Bringing Up Ba-
by, "Your golf ball? Your
car? Is there anything in
the world that doesn't be-
long to you?"






His mind, plainly enough.
vision even for that, in
the same shooting script -

"I've got my head, I've
lost my leopard!"

the Constitution; give it
the number, XXV. Bring up
baby, and cage the beast.





















Howard Hawks
  director/producer
Dudley Nichols and
Hagar Wilde
  screenplay
Bringing Up Baby
RKO, 1938©


ii  Micheál MacLiammóir
    Iago's extraction
    Orson Welles
       director
    Othello
    1952









Origins of Wednesday lv: Between day and evening





The senior Senator from Arizona
spoke to the Senate yesterday, 
defying the norm of orations in
that space, without an audience.

Dutiful members of the chamber
turned up on demand, for some-
thing they expected to be con-
genial, a polite concession to
a tide of condescension, under
what're delicately called, 'the
circumstances.' They got some-
thing better, and there'll be
a quiz about it, in that Fall
to be expected only next year.




                    There'll be a quiz at Annapol-
                    is, and Andover, too; and when
                    men, polishing their obelisk, 
                    proclaim their own greatness, 
                    wherever they are on land, or
                    on sea, there will be a quiz;

                    There will be a quiz for smug-
                    ness, and equally of spite; in
                    the salesman's voice, busy dy-
                    ing on the road we keep alive;

                    And it will come down to this:
                    why did he admit to no doubt, 
                    on the principle of conducting
                    republican government, openly?





























ii  Nathan Benn
    Middlebury, Vermont
    1973








Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Perorations we've not lingered for




       Numberless bents
       Distinguish men.






  If the poet is right,
  an Act of distinction
  is not what we're of-
  fered, in this return
  to the Senate for yet
  another misfire of an
  oft-anticipated clim-
  ax. Sicily is burning
  and apprehension, her
  abandoned sound, muf-
  fles dull similitude. 





















5th Century BC
Robert Fagles
  translation
Complete Poems
  34
Yale University Press, 1961©

iii  Alex Berlov







Monday, July 24, 2017

Between buildings and furniture






    

The things that never become
part of the furniture belong
to the way of life in being.

Take the carrelet, the frag-
ile, ubiquitous fishing pier
in the estuary at the center
of the world of wine, obliv-
iously immobile and obtusely
scattered for the harvesting
of even more elusive things.









































Edward Steichen
1903

Alex Berlov


Carrelet in the Gironde