Not the easiest thing

 

I find myself reading Jack Schaefer's
Shane (1949) this weekend, occasioned

by nothing more than a browse in Wil-

liam Allard's beautiful Leica photog-

raphy. I don't think there'd be much

chance of my reading a Western these

days, which only goes to show how ill

one can understand one's time. That's

not the easiest thing.

It was a shrewd choice on Schaefer's

part, to present this intensely sen-

timental story through the sustained

first-person voice of a young boy. It

allowed him to support a tone of leg-

itimate awe for the upper Plains of

the American West, to carry the some-

times fevered responses of his narra-

tion. (Noting this, director George

Stevens adopted the same perspective

in a film which so immortalized his

child star, as to illuminate every-

thing this actor did in adulthood,

opposite Paul Newman in Hud). Today,

readers who've been present for the

same years as Brandon de Wilde will

cut this story a wry slack. For all

its naïveté - not to say, cynicism - 

it touches faithfully upon what is

not the easiest thing.

                    He was there. He was there in

                    our place and in us. Whenever

                    I needed him, he was there. I

                    could close my eyes and he would

                    be with me and I would see him

                    plain and hear again that gentle

                    voice.

William Albert Allard

Vanishing Breed

Photographs of the Cowboy

  and the West

Little, Brown & Co, 1982©

Jack Schaefer

Shane

1949

The Library of America

Ron Hansen, editor

The Western

  Four Classic Novels ...

LOA, 2020©

Saturday commute clxxxii: Nice start

After an interval of unexpected length, it is a pleasure for me to look now upon a fresh, unmarked page in this journal. I would be the first to join whatever chorus there may be, for leaving it that way, if the project were completed. 

However, we have just noticed that the United States has discharged the obligation of disposing of its sitting President, and good behavior is always to be encouraged within sight of the young. Compliments, then, to the people of the United States disdained by that figure, over the last four years of exercising his preference for the fragment he seduced and betrayed. By every count, from epidemiology to pluralist reconciliation to international comity to planetary stewardship to fiscal sanity, he had rendered the nation the first justifiably outcast pariah of the New World. How delightful, then, that on the very date when first permitted by their constraining founding document to right his institutionally unchecked hostilities, the country showed him the door.

I know, there are those morose who wail, that this remedy is not enough. They are wonderfully paid, glitteringly honored, and as obvious as yesterday's excesses. I see too many minor movies, not to have heard Rossano Brazzi declare to Katharine Hepburn for David Lean, "Eat the ravioli." Please, do not instruct us in the array of anomalies still disfiguring the feast. Rather, organize for the State of Georgia's double Senatorial runoff in early January, of which more, soon enough. For this weekend, come outside. 

Refresh acquaintance.

Photo courtesy, ubayuri©

Timely blades and second chances

No one, of course, has any appetite for
seeing a certain name again, except as

a line to avoid selecting, at the top of 

his ballot, At last the gathering of a di-

verse and remarkably distributed storm

of revulsion is poised to restore self-

determination to the United States. The

ingenious photography of Damon Winter of

The New York Times portrays a rescue op-

eration deeply reminiscent of med-evac

Hueys lifting from the battlefields of

Southeast Asia, saving the passengers if

possible, but more certainly ceding na-

tive ground from which they are removed.

Nor was this an expulsion by cruel chance,

but by the incapacity and illegitimacy of

the occupation, revealed in its helpless

incompetence and reliance on its own lies.

This chance is one not to blow, but also

not to crow. It's generous, even to desig-

nate this deliverance as a restoration, 

given how few have ever influenced their

own governance in this country. But every

such valuation is relative, and is being

re-examined under pressures both urgent -

pandemic, racial discord, economic dis-

location - and implacable - climatic

crises, other environmental despoiling,

and international security hazards both

recklessly propagated or negligently

denied by the government soon to depart.

The circumstances are auspicious for a

popular insistence on self-determination.

They are equally vulnerable to repressive

pre-emption, which is the unfailing custom

of our history. But now at least we know

why: racism has been the contortionist

corrupter of every populist opportunity in

this nation's experience. This contortion-

ist is avid to overwhelm the pending elec-

tion by intimidation, deception, malicious

prosecution, and every rejection available.

At last, the great anti-progressive energy

of the American experience has fallen into

the hands of a spent force. We now behold

the readying of an electoral swift sword -

a climax of nothing, a beginning to be de- 

termined by the People. We have our vote. 

Word from the land of always something

 

Word came to Americans some time in

the evening of the 18th that a hold-

out against replacement on the high

court had passed from the scene, al-

lowing speculation of whether, how,

when, by whom something definitive

would be done about this. This was

not the first intrusion on a wedding

anniversary of mine, when a highly

presentable plate of rognons de veau

was first served to me on the night

of my farewell to the East Coast. I

found myself back here eventually,

unmarried, and although cured of com-

memorating occasions with food, still

easily consoled by a determined defer-

ence to offal.

This latest bulletin in the struggle

for power in the United States found

me just as glad to be able to rely on

my friends already to be in earnest,

plotting various interventions. No 

one had telephoned me, anguished to

be reminded, how to breathe, and I

found myself managing equally well,

once I'd recalled the virtues of 

fresh coffee. Not for this house-

hold, then, will hands be wrung in

wonder of what will become of life

for another 40 terms of this court;

no swooning on the indignity of the

present power structure's swan song

of bottomless villainy. Possibly,

some frantic defections from that

cabal can be negotiated; possibly

a bolt of gastronomic clarity will

descend upon the illumination of

well-grazed kidneys, but in any

case, calving season will return, 

in all its telling raucousness.

For more than 50 years, a tenuous

claim to a position in the general

population and an ill-bred fixation

on the mythology of judicial review

have left me with the conviction 

set out above, that one's time can

much more securely be invested in

a study of the classics in cuisine

than in the tergiversations of a

casuist tradition under demagog-

ic appointment. Enough, please, 

of heroes of magical powers. Win

games, breed good beasts, honor

reality. 

Now. That's revenge.

Of frogs we should have expected

’Twas a warm Summer night, just the 

weather for merchants of sentiment 

to stuff our throat with frogs. Not 

merely to agitate the lachrymose, but 

equally the otiose, our hapless Clas-

sics majors bewitched by the comedy 

of Aristophanes to which the amphibi-

ans lent their name, a battle of tra-

gedians. 

Already in everyone’s mind had been 

shades of Franklin Roosevelt and his

leadership of national recovery, re-

form, and resistance to fascism. Who

would muck with this? 

Enter boldly the nominee, citing FDR’s 

crippling by polio - a virus, he alert-

ly recalled - and then, not referencing 

Roosevelt’s self-exemplifying charity 

to others at Warm Springs, segued into 

presenting himself as mentor to a school-

boy who stutters. None dare call it pla-

giarism, but his opponents are what they 

are, and I hold four hopes in escalating 

order of intensity - 

That the campaign is ready for the fire-

storm of exploitation of his fuel; that 

the soul of FDR is slapping his knee with 

glee at this overreach for his image; 

that nobody faults Aristophanes for our

witless memory; and that the boy in ques-

tion will be held as blameless as he is.

This leaves the nominee. I respect the
necessity to project an unanswerable im-
pediment to Trump and Trumpism's penchant
for mocking his speech as a symptom of 
frailty. At the same time one would like
to be able to expect the candidate to ex-
ercise his own strength, without sending
for a child in his place. One would like
him to stop striving for poignancy and be-
gin to enact raw, exposed superiority:

Listen, swine. I have a neurological prob-
lem with my speech. I'll stutter all day,
before I'll emulate your lies.

Polykleitos
5th C BC
Metropolitan Museum

Saturday commute clxxxi: This very day, no less

In James Brooks’ hit film comedy, “As 

good as it gets” (1997), Helen Hunt, 

playing a single mother of an asthmat-

ic boy being neglected by the American 

medical establishment, receives an en-

dowment covering all of the medical ex-

penses necessary to transform her son 

into a soccer star within a week. But, 

suspecting that this gift comes with 

carnal expectations attached, she turns 

to Shirley Knight, her mother, to fret 

that maybe she should reject it. “No,” 

she flatly declares. “This isn’t a pair 

of stockings, this isn’t a string of 

pearls. This you do not give back.”

I find myself unable to imagine that 

Joseph Biden could have foreseen that a 

prospective running mate, often seen but 

"somehow" blocked in her quest for the 

Presidential nomination that he won by 

attrition, would be revealed as a soccer 

star within hours of being presented with 

his favor. How oblivious the presumptions 

so often are, at the foundation of our ex-

pertise, we need hardly note in this moment 

of Donald Trump. Yet suddenly the campaign 

that might already be seen as straight, but 

which no one pretended might see very far, 

finds itself carried aloft on a wave of ju-

bilation not seen since the conquest of 

Vicksburg.

Look here. People are affected. That very 

night one could feel the country, stand up. 

Stephen Colbert found Jon Batiste, composing 

a song, "for Kamala." Those who were able to 

squeeze into the donation sites of the Democ-

ratic National Committee, managed to deposit

$48 million there in those hours. Personal

ties, political commitments, alumni networks, 

lately moribund in the moment of Donald Trump, 

sprang to giddiest life — and all without the 

least forewarning. There was pandemonium at

the corner of Castro and Market, without a

word from Dionysus. This selection is not 

a pair of stockings; it’s not even a pair of 

Bernie’s fishnets. Alas, it isn’t pearls of 

Elizabeth Warren. It's the ore of our ground,

not of our statues. This is our birth.

No tentative “connection with the future,” the 

cliché of the day — or light at the end of a

tunnel, Kamala Harris declares the truth of

this very day, that only an unyielding maze 

of sordid, illegitimate structures could con-

ceal. Nor could it be lost in the confetti,

this revelation was ultimately forced upon

powerfully reluctant beneficiaries. But it's
done, and what one feels is the pace at which
such power can shift.

ii  Joshua Lott

    Getty Images©

Suppose it were Friday clxxvi: So run

             I live with the sound my body is.

             . .

             I can't forget the pure sound I heard once

             when a violin string snapped nearby

             in three o'clock's perfect silence.

             But I tell myself I'm safe. I remind myself

             of the boy who discovered order in the piano

             and ran upstairs to tell his little sister

             that they didn't have to be afraid anymore.

Jack Gilbert

The Dance Most of All

  Poems

Infectious

  [fragment]

Alfred A. Knopf, 2009©

Conor Fay

Origins of Wednesday cxi: A country maybe to be living in

  No, I didn't believe it either, when

  I heard that New Yorkers were buying

  cars to get around, much less that a

  chance had been laid upon the table,

  of a government not to make us sick.

  It's enough to promise to stop World

  War II, as the 1918 pandemic did, or

  maybe just refocus it on fascists of

  our own. But I stray, which the Bid-

  en campaign, so far, does not. Nice. 

A feast on hold

In allowing the 29th of July to pass 

without comment, I found myself in a

position of deferring recognition of

the anniversary of rmbl in a context

of widespread suspension in society,

as well as of suspense in individual

life. I don't think I describe an ob-

literation in our communities of in-

terest, so much as an enlargement in

their enrollments in overlapping com-

mon cause. Public health, social jus-

tice, national reclamation from its

direst imaginable imperilments, seem

to depend upon one date's promise of

commitment to their advancement, be-

ginning this November. And yet, even

though the fork for the fish course

of a feast bears suggestive resem-

blance to the fork for a later, the 

salad, they are different enough to

argue for their individual mastery,

lest we falter in their requirements.

Emergency is always at its most per-

ilous when it challenges discernment,

and a combination of emergencies is

especially fraught. The first order

of business in the emergence of the

unimaginable is to recognize, with-

out being comforted, how familiar

it is. Yes, it is now as late as the

salad course, but the mix is still

a salad of discernible ingredients.

We did not imagine this compilation,

but we know its addresses must be

compendious, and it is time to re-

ly on an instrument well designed

for selection as well as embrace. 

We recognize, such is the tick-

et of Joe Biden for President of 

the United States, and Kamala Har-

ris for Vice President. Look at

how congruent are the tines, look

at how excellently they are dis-

tributed, look at how purposefully

they alternate, and how they accom-

modate and balance what they hold,

with our acceptance. Set the table.

Christofle
Cluny
1862

Juneteenth now

Who might ever have guessed that the genealogy of America's deliverance from Donald Trump and his Republican Party would be traced directly through the emphatic embrace in Spring, 2020, of racial equality before the law?

And why was this, except that both the necessity and the reward for struggle came to be seen as one. People turned to each other in disbelieving unison to ask, Where the hell have we been, to forget that playing fair is first of all to play? They rid themselves of Trump by reclaiming the sheer pleasure of the soul-sustaining resolve to be fair.