Friday, December 15, 2017

Suppose it were Friday cxliv: Venturing a point of view






Partners to a quarrel have a way of proposing themselves for that purpose to each others' eyes, whom natural selection identifies, pretty well. One's acceptance is only slightly less predictable. Had the photographer seen the gaping mouth formed by the elbow, holding the umbrella, as a cry of pain from the hatcheting fender and license plate behind, or was the precision of the parallel borders of black above not arranged to frame the extended neck so perfectly? The purpose of the quarrel is to displace acute considerations of quite another kind, to a field agreed upon for the familiarity, the security of its footing. Chaos, however, looks on with all the opportunism of any player, alert to the other's vision.


















Ralph Gleason
photograph
1954

Pablo Picasso
Guernica
1937

Jegor Venned
2017




Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Origins of Wednesday lx: Hurry, now, to drain the silo


  Forasmuch as God hath showed
  thee all this, there is none
  so discreet and wise as thou
  art ..


  In a hot and rapine haste
  to grab, now, tax reform
  for their pleasure - to
  empty every silo of the
  Treasury for their own
  revolting fattening - a
  Party in precarious pow-
  er in the United States
  have suppressed an erst-
  while proclivity to hec-
  tor us from sacred texts.
  To what remission of de-
  lusional pride are we to
  ascribe this omission?

  Alabama? 

  Who could have expected
  such modesty among the
  great, as to resemble a
  carelessness to compare
  with Pharaoh's butler?







The Leader of this flimsy
hegemony in the Senate has
opined that Alabama's new
Senator could not possibly
be seated - what with all
days - until some distant
date which must convenient-
ly follow the pending rape
of future generations. And
how baffling this is, may
be measured in the Presid-
ent's certitude, that the
new Senator would aid it.














ii  Comme des Garçons





Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Alabama goes voting



All that was missing from the Fauve master, Louis Valtat's depiction of the President's great rally for Alabama of last week-end, was the pointillist sea of little red hats. 

How well the swooning basses mimed the maestro's anguished spine, the brasses and the drums arrayed to let the true faith shine. 








To each his own mode, I suppose, 
of delineating the pendancy of a
great moment. Valtat painted the
alternative interpretation, him-
self, to the aroused, fused, and
thundering mass in his orchestra
canvas: the other state, so to
speak, of mind enacted in the
same great moment, of voting. We
have a President who relies upon
the one, and a culture cognizant
of the other. Each of his canvas-
es gives us the glimpse into the
aspirations of the act, indeed
their wellspring, which marks it
as subject to the greatest vari-
ation. Now we test the power of
privity, to counsel this conduct.
I do not believe any Alabamans
are impervious to the finer sec-
rets of this moment, their own.



















Louis Valtat
1869 - 1952

The orchestra
ca 1922

Boy drawing
1914

Matthew Holt
  Sara Reverberi, photography



    


Monday, December 11, 2017

Shaving fair


A problem with being willing
to confess to permitting one-
self a degree of enjoyment in
poetic imagery, not fully ad-
apted to that pleasure, is a
reputation to which this can
give rise, of unfairness to
the work of art. I find I am
habitually unfair to the work
of Anne Carson in this way,
and it's not much exoneration
to confess, she is not alone.

And one does like exoneration.
It's just not why I read her.
I find a music in her phrases
I could not exchange for any
glossary, any rosetta stone.

Some may call one to surren-
der naïve belief, given the
catastrophe pending from it
every day, by cruel design.
What evangelic genius is at
work, to serve such scorn?






          It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
          Polarity
                  means
                        plus or
                                minus
                        total
          night.
          Penguins topple like astonished dice
          But
              New York
                      barbers are good
                 on
          ice.
          Morning swings in a moonsplashed hole
          Time 
               zones
                     jam together
                                  at
                               the
          pole.
          His scissors blaze on open black water
          She
              likes
                    the
                        quiet she
                                  may
                          be
                     his
          daughter.

          "Whatsoever of it has flown away is past.
          Whatsoever remains is future."

             (Augustine, Confessions, XI)






















Anne Carson
Men in the Off Hours
  The Barber Shop
Random House, 2000©

Louren Groenewald
Johannes Westerwald
Bettina duToit, photography