Summer negatives

                   A man, of no particular interest,
                   in seeing civilization inherited, 

                   can ill be trusted to see that it

                   survives.

ii  Ernst Haas

    Paris

    undated

iv  Josef Sudek

     Prague

     undated

He's come alive

     Who can forget Michael Corleone's
     pride, promising his father that
     he'd be able to handle the blood-
     bath they had planned when he took
     power, that 3-year-old Anthony is
     already reading the funny papers?
     But even he does not rest his case
     on the oxymoron, military solutions.

     We'll get there, Pop.
     We'll get there.

















Francis Ford Coppola
director
Mario Puzo and
  Francis Ford Coppola
screenplay
The Godfather
Paramount, 1972©

Exhausted stars

The columnist David Brooks confided to his nearest and dearest hundred thousand in The Times (NY) today, that he has joined that cadre of seers whose spirit is drained of respect at last, for the task of resisting the new government. Much better, he avers, to turn one's specula-tions on the likely extent of the wreckage as its eventual legacy; and, far from expecting any restorations, to build the new expression of a national value system, from what one may find.

I hope one joins the field of gravity in the Letters, excusing him from further illuminations.

Cy Twombly

Note 1

1967

Otto Lotz

Expected somewhere?

Let us strive together to part
with time more reluctantly, to
watch the pinions of the fleet-
ing moment until they are dim
in the distance & the new com-
ing moment claims our attention.

Emily Dickinson

Correspondence

8 September 1846

Peter Shear

Stitches

2016

Josh Olins

Tim Schuhmacher

2017

A story of force without power

Almost every day, under their new government,
Americans have awakened to a farrago of bar-
stool braggadocio of the next momentous res-
toration of their birthright to domination,
in the personification he offers, of their
triumphal embodiment. White racialist joy.

There is no good literature of power, which 
ever so depended on a resort to force. Now
they see an infant with his rattle, offering
force persistently, without access to power.
All he holds is an office. How pathetic for
him, it's but one of several in a republic.

And of the rats, these days, hippety-hopping
about that barque: so many, with such hopes.
So many, striving to preserve the illusions
that produced him, in presentable behavior.
Yet we have seen a literature of power with-
out force, and wonder, who'll defend that?

Herbert List
Temple of Poseidon
Cape Sounion
1937