Friday, September 1, 2017

Suppose it were Friday cxxxviii: For 3 free days






Seven months of their present
government have given Americans
a compensatory appetite for hol-
idays, and Labor need not apol-
ogize for an aggravated anguish
today, to be comprehended, and
respected. At bottom, all labor
is that of the craftsman; and
if the suppression of craft is
a quality we abjure in our con- 
sumptions - just imagine, what 
that must mean to that soul -
then to capitulate to falsity, 
must only fortify its seducer.






















Frederik Kaltoft




Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Tall water iii: Sodden and besotted in playland






    researching the superlatives
    redundantly invoked by the
    of his every public appear-
    once can flood more than one
    senior thesis with an entire
    Baedeker of misattribution,
    as Swift's "A Tale of a Tub"
    rising into its own on the
    swollen tide of narcissistic
    illiteracy; but what can ex-
    plain our time's account of
    his rhetoric as post-modern,





















      



Jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub
1704
Kathleen Williams
  editor
J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1975©

Leo Damrosch
Jonathan Swift
  His Life and his World
Yale University Press, 2013©







Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Tall water ii





 A palace fraught by illusion and
 contradiction, the Tuileries has
 extracted itself from any partic-
 ular epoch in its past, to be en-
 joyed for gardens and plazas for
 the Seine to reduce to spectacle.

 This can happen almost any place
 where water nourishes forgetting.






























































Paris
1939





Monday, August 28, 2017

Tall water



  There is a strand of thinking,
  not unknown along the Gulf of
  Mexico, that natural disaster
  is an expression of a divine
  displeasure. There is a strand
  of thinking, not unknown along
  the Gulf of Mexico, that Feder-
  al union is a condition of cap-
  tivity. But tall water is simp-
  ly tall water, and one can on-
  ly hope that local thinking is
  not arrayed against human res-
  cue, as if a nation building.
























update : On September 4th,
The New York Times was
full of a Republican torrent
of Texan antipathy toward
Federal assistance they
were demanding.





Sunday, August 27, 2017

The life of form


The other day, I was musing on
the theme of the alienated lib-
rary, confessing to occasional
searches in the second-hand or
remaindered stashes for a book
allowed to slip away, to which
I should gratefully add a more
contemporary resort, the house
of republication. FS&G, for ex-
ample, will reprint for one in
need of an out-of-print trans-
nation of Virgil or Horace, by
the masterful David Ferry, not
that this will offer insurance
against all miscalculations. I
give you an entire government,
for example, it would be prop-
er to exempt from preservation.





Over the weekend, exploiting a
peach of a natural disaster, a
distinguished pair of offenses
against the nation and our law
were issued by the White House
as an almost endearing sort of
dare to utter condemnations at
a time of televised suffering,
and damages to Texan property.

Behind rude, howling winds and
cruelly penetrating tides, the
President pronounced the first
unilateral edict of discrimin-
ation against a distinct class
of citizens in the lifetime of
this nation, where even incar-
cerations of Japanese-American
innocents claimed an emergency
of a limited duration. And, as
if this stunning triumph might
not be enough, he also brushed
aside every tissue of due pro-
cess in the peremptory pardon,
of a political ally for crimes
steeped in discrimination, in-
jury, death, and social harms.





The times summon the mind to a
discipline of form on all lev-
els, such is the gravity which
distinguishes our nation's or-
deal under this government. In
aid of portraying to oneself a
restoring vindication of these
disciplines, I was reminded of
Humanism's vital connection of
rhetoric and philosophy in the
Italian renaissance, presented
to me in college in a text I'm
revisiting, cited below. There
can be no doubt, that the gen-
ius of the current government-
al assault on our nation is in
its violation of every discip-
line of form. It boasts of it.





We assert an interest, not on-
ly countervailing but defining,
in the humanity of a coherency
long demeaned as elegance, but
truly the triumph of study and
application. The marauding neg-
ligence we suffer at this gov-
ernment's hands is, at bottom,
sloth incarnate, all its venge-
ances a feast of malnutrition. 





Time to do the reading once a-
gain. Everyone knows the text
that warned him, he'd be back.