Saturday commute clxxii: Exits we've been offered

  I suppose it's just me, but if I were

  a track star, I'd think twice, before

  entertaining advice to quit the field

  on a seduction of elevating myself in

  the opinion of some demagogue du jour.

 

ii  William Gedney
     Shilling in New York
     1967

Frisée

        Of all the barbarities made famous
  by the American President, the re-
  mark, I, alone, can fix it affords
  the most pristine image of proven-
  ance one could want. It feels odd,
  therefore, to find pretenders busy
  scrambling to articulate some cure
  of our unease, by application of a
  vanity only more decorous than his.
  The project of leading is a craft,
  disciplined with humble confession.
  All his kind confess only a genius. 

i  Simone Nobili

I don't care for wine at the sea

     One has to be able to enjoy a dis-
     crimination notwithstanding a wave
     of popular feeling these days, for
     the proposition that anything good
     is good anywhere. The sea and wine
     share a context in common, called,
     the air, in which an inhalation of
     the one is irreconcilable with the
     same gesture toward the other. The
     complication imposed on breathing,
     then, is not the least of the con-
     siderations to be invoked in favor
     of keeping them apart. They antag-
     onize each other in numerous other
     ways, with the deck heavily stack-
     ed in favor of the sea, but I need
     cite only one more to satisfy this
     observation. The quality of solit-
     ude with the one is so immeasurab-
     ly finer than with the other, that
     it would never occur to us to say,
     I don't care for the sea with wine . .