American veteran

The Loma Prieta earthquake of October, 1989, had already struck, and San Francisco's homeless had exploited sudden shelters in the fallen freeway overpasses in the Civic Center.

This young man is not homeless. He is an independent scholar of the works of the German classicist, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and will shortly give a lecture of his findings in a parish church in the Castro neighborhood, attended by le tout monde. We dimly know each other, but we all know him, and we know he is worth hearing.

He is a bookseller.

This is a calling, not an accident of earthly plates. The young man is the mainstay, adjutant and heart of the City's leading resource for books in interior design, gardening, and antiquity - up the street one block from its hottest gym, down a back street from the Symphony.

We are on a Sunday morning stroll, playing with high-grain film and settings of contrast. It is December and the day is beautiful, as it so often is in that month of clearest skies. Something draws us down to the water, 'though the sun is everywhere. 

We pause frequently to rest. We're conscious of the textures where we stride and where we sit, without saying so. We're touching the City, and we know we are. He is, himself, happy, but he tires, and we are quiet about that. He dies in four months. This is an accident of earthly plates, not a calling. He is recalled now for his work of knowing others, as their bookseller.

Winckelmann's radical History followed the publication of Rousseau's Le Contrat Social by less than twelve months. The pier where the bookseller sits was the site of one of the most reviled triumphs of the labor movement in the history of the United States. 

It would be hard, and in the end undignified to say whose imagination was more generous, whose work more naïve, more repudiated in our time. He understood that, and gently, brightly sustained their faith. 






Now this lady has freight in her arms to look out for, and one less bookstore in her town.

Photography Laurent, Leica M-6

Dex met with Macaulay in his library

Heads-up for hedonists ~ 


Heywood Hill’s Autumn List has landed, ‘and there is no health in us.’ 

Or none that can't be restored by enlisting in the drama of literary selection, rooted in dialogue with discernment, play, cultivation and quirk. Browse the List, and let no more than three-fifths (a sentimental fraction for a sound constitution) of your choices reinforce your happy habits, and let the four-fold tithe that’s left engulf you in diversified new personalities, pleasures. It’s what a bookseller’s for, and these booksellers - in the English language, for the most part - are good, even better than the gossip that so richly hovers about their name.

You know the bookseller. He or she’s someone who’s known our family since before we were born, has known what books we’ve seen about the house all our life, who supplied our birthday books and college Christmas books and possibly even our tentative first venture toward our own untested taste, eyebrow only flickeringly in flight. 

One of the great and necessary callings in existence, we turn to it repeatedly, in all kinds of weather, and evermore most gratefully, now that its extinction’s in our face, an entire generation driven madly to accelerate its extirpation from this world, flogged by mergers, acquisitions, and the rest of the vulgar, flotsam fallout of fiscal fantasies we’ve fattened by, leaving the next to fend for itself with ignorant search engines.

A cordial word, then, to bloggers passing by. Never, please, commit an Amazonian referral of a text, when a simple publisher’s citation will very well suffice. Renounce i-Tunes’ hideously Luddite “Genius” app, Wikipedia’s revolting indolence, and cutting the throat of friendship at its finest, the person who knows our books. Especially to aesthetes, I pose this hypothetical: Do we love what Bruce Chatwin, Elizabeth David, and Syrie Maugham knew and saved and found and made and showed and did, enough, to secure their passage to another generation?

They live by relationships we know to be tenuous, by commendation we believe to be important, and by thought of others in their works from top to bottom. Google will find them, but who will know them?

If it’s good, let the calling for it live. If we have to be hod carriers, it will likely do us good. For me, there’s a new Le Carré, for which I’m happy to pay a fair price. But suppose it’s Josceline Dimbleby? Whose chump search engine’s going to give me her? And where does one go to say, “Hey, wonderful.”

Is it true, or is there a price on it?

Can somebody clear up for us, please

... whereas the mind of Man, when he gives the Spur and Bridle to his Thoughts, doth never stop, but naturally sallies out into both extreams of High and Low, of Good and Evil; His first flight of Fancy, commonly transports Him to Idea's of what is most Perfect, finished and exalted; till having soared out of his own Reach and Sight, not well perceiving how near the Frontiers of Height and Depth, border upon each other; With the same Course and Wing, he falls down plum into the lowest Bottom of Things... Whether a Tincture of Malice in our Natures, makes us fond of finishing every bright Idea with its Reverse ... it hath been the usual Method of Mankind, to single out some Being, either in Act, or in Vision, which was in most Antipathy to the God they had framed.

Is The Horror
something
John McCain
wants us to
remember,




or forget?

Jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub, 1702
JS Bach
Prelude in C major, 1722

Friday evening diaspora

When I see stories like this, this evening in The Times and at The Southern Poverty Law Center in the Context column every month, I think of the terms of praise this blog has adventitiously elicited - pretty, hot - and of the blogs I admire, myself, where discipline plainly reigns as if Nancy Cunard were about to flick a finger upward, to restore society's yo-yo to the crêpe of her many-clustered hand. We show each other pretty things, and observe a gracious code of silence, competing to incur our own contempt.


So it seems we need a splurge in green and blue, to bathe the mind of cognition of our failed self-government, of our endlessly flouted doctrine of consent. If we are governed by consent, after all, we are responsible. Sifting through a pile of slides I took years ago from a window at the Drake, overlooking the commute home up Lake Shore Drive after dark, I think, Put on a pretty picture, cher, as we mix ourselves a cocktail of Onwentsia's own invention. Show us a boytummy glistening, as the meniscus of our drink, vermouth in swirls like fuzz of suave infusions, rises to the lips of our consensual forgetfulness.


I don't think so, tonight. I have another Friday evening diaspora. Behind, bellygrossened sheriffs fart, insensate in the cycle of a State-supported crime, evidenced before their eyes in a railway depot in Jacksonville, Florida in 1921. To this day, voluminously, the young flee this region in one's and two's, to get somewhere a State will take them without malice toward their kind. And for every one of them, and for families fractured by discovery of their unintended colour, we glide past their exemplar to the club car in our silence.

An artist on his birthday recalls where he comes from

O, learn to read what silent love hath writ.

To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

William Shakespeare
Sonnet 23

Studying green, kinetic lighting, and suiting a room

The guy at You Have Been Here Sometime has been studying green, kinetic lighting, and designing something to suit a room. So have we all, as the publicist did for all 3 considerations, in this single portrait of Jamie Conday, or this one of Joschka Netz. But he's done us the favour of breaking these elements down into discrete subjects. 

This approach moves one to contemplate a world as if these considerations did not exist, restores the appetite for their contribution, illuminates their nourishment of our understanding, anatomises the experience of hunger.

I find his to be one of the more tonically invigorating spaces one can visit, where each installation benefits not only from shrewd selection but a fine plinth for exhibition, inherent in the blog's design. None of the illustrations in this posting is present in that space. They are all drawn, as in this last one, from the genuinely delectable experience of going there. If you were a mousse au chocolat au thé vert, you would welcome the service. Well, dear reader: you are.

Gloria

For all readers of this experiment

Not to recall Anthony Patch's glimpse of his wife at the Armistice Ball, observed not long ago, not to foretell an orgiastic rapture anticipated by the anguished as a vengeance on this life, Vivaldi's expletive of joy responds aptly to confidances from Château Haut-Brion just now, that the reds of 2010 have begun to come in. It has been an extremely strenuous season in Pessac-Léognan this year. It is wonderful that the occasion has arrived. Twenty, forty years from now, it will be cherished still. 


It's a moment for those who know their ground as their mother and as their father, and who bend themselves wholeheartedly to its purpose, to say nothing else, nothing more.

Coherency and superstition

An assumption which has congealed as a principle - that the human figure is the ultimate frame of reference for a distributive system we name, proportion - has also furnished most people in the West in the last 500 years with their first experience of depicted nudity. An anthropomorphic tool, an idol of the cave if ever there were one, is so embedded that its corollaries and incidental extrapolations in music, poetic metre, and even the cartography of empire (Iraq, Colorado) are quite hard to trace to the underlying superstition that they represent.

Philip Johnson, New Canaan

At the back of our mind, we never stop being aware that the human form is a most sentimental deus ex machina for the intangible ideal we summon it to depict. Yet it is unsettling to be reminded that da Vinci's quadranted figure, for all its inspiration of the sonata style in Classicism, is a folly in the pond of a dreamt estate.

But the mortal reference point is verifiable, even if the presumption of an ideal in proportion is plainly not. It is an aspiration in search of a compliment, projected as an analogy: desire reduced to dogmatic excuse, codification, lyric approbation. We know what we mean when we say of Mr Jefferson's Monticello, that the building "dances" as our perspective upon it revolves, proceeds, recedes, its wings extending or dissolving by adherence to Palladian scruple, which is to say to Vitruvius, which is to say, to the heroic. We say that it is humane for our built world to mime us; this deference pleases us as its reference. The plantation is ourself.

The impulse gives rise to numeric allusion, reaching its baldest and most knowingly ironic state in Colin Rowe's title of recent reference, the mathematics of the ideal villa. In fashion, architecture, music, poetry - everything graphic, everything mechanical - we see da Vinci's figure quartered and strapped to this odd scruple of symmetry as not merely definitive, but prescriptive.

The idea supervenes its antecedent. Innovation, in the music of Cage or Boulez, or the Modulor of Le Corbusier, enacts the same tautological habit: the search for a recognisable paradigm rooted in the concept of the human. We see this habit as an exercise of genius, and it is an act of permission.


It will get us an architecture, and it will get us through the night. Lector, si monumentum requiris circumspice.

Weber

Epitaph for Sir Christopher Wren