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

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

first, doing no harm, that

49 Republicans in the Sen-

ate could not understand;

what is patriotic or hero-

ic, about twisting fate?

Wake up to Friday. Amer-

icans still have a chance.

And for Gauleiter of Greater Zirconia?

The White House has allowed it to

be known that the self-defrocked

disciple of supply side stupidity,

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 skit, the 

jollier the crime.

Jean Arp

1886-1966

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.

But Howard Hawks made pro-

vision even for that, in

the same shooting script -

"I've got my head, I've

lost my leopard!"

Give us an Amendment to

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?

i   Alex Berlov

ii  Nathan Benn

    Middlebury, Vermont

    1973

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. 

Bacchylides

5th Century BC

Robert Fagles

  translation

Complete Poems

  34

Yale University Press, 1961©

op. cit.

iii  Alex Berlov

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