So you want a film festival and yet you must go by land

Even then,
Venice is
approachable.

                    

          

           worst case,

           "we'll always

           have video."

somehow, one can't

hear Bogart say-

ing that.

So you want a film festival ii

  

   

   pace of the fast

So you want a film festival

Here comes another festival in Venice. You can sort of tell. The pool at the Cipriani is roped off, for insurance reasons. You can't get a drink at the Gritti, and nobody will empty your ashtray. They're looking for faces. And who isn't. They can look all they want. 


There are Lions of Venice, minted every year. And there are lions. Yes, there are. 

Are you in Church now, dear man? Is your Quaker wedding concluded, and are you still in your white shirt, cufflinked? Does your watch chain sweep clear of your cartridge belt, and do you know the time? Have you come to this arena, of all places, combed as you are, with hope? 

Then give people that. Change the world, if that's not asking too much; and be the face of it.




















Mr Cooper in Venice
1955


Fred Zinneman, director
Carl Foreman, screenplay
  blacklisted
Floyd Crosby, cinematography
  blacklisted
Gary Cooper as Will Kane
High Noon
United Artists, 1952©


Solidarity election poster
  Republic of Poland
  At High Noon, 4 June 1989

On the Virginia Governor's graduate thesis, at age 34

For Poesy! no, she has not a joy,

At least for me, so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steep'd in honied indolence;

O, for an age so shelter'd from annoy,

That I may never know how change the moons,

Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

Brooks Brothers was established in 1818 and in the following year, John Keats came out with his disgusting Ode on Indolence. I see this cause and effect, right away, now that my mind has been bathed clean in the investigative methodology of Pat Robertson's academy; and soon we entered the depraved Age of Jackson, whence, need I say, all golly heck broke loose and our gummint in Washington has been a fornicators' tyranny ever since, which began with his unconstitutional assertion of national control over our currency, itself an obscene publication, 

from the sacred entrepreneurship of Nick Biddle, who was not really that snooty, all because this fancy kind of boy was drowsying in bed and, as you can always tell with that kind, far from alone, it hurts my soul to report, or what was all that honey about, I would like to know, because the Lord calls upon his pure and shining servants to be brave in these matters and unashamed to jive about our beliefs and intentions, so we can hold office in this sinful world, and let good people do what has to be done about these honeyboys.

I take it, mon cher Auguste, that on the discovery of this manifesto, his defense was to call it, spurious?

Mais non, Hercule. He confided that these had been his beliefs, in the infancy of his recent 30s, but in the alternative, like the late Chancellor assuring Hindenberg of his gentleness in the use of emergency powers, promised to be benign, admitting that he does so need to exercise power over others, that he trusted he could be excused an endeavour to be popular.

John Keats

Ode on Indolence

  fragment

1819

i, iii, iv, v  Thibault Oberlin

The bells of St Denis were melted down for cannon

In my studies of the Gothic cathedral under François Bucher at college, when the gift of understanding was implanting itself as the ultimate experience of love, I heard that the medieval bells of the Gothic jewel were forged for cannon in the siege of 1870. It comes back now in a novelist's allusion - this was 1872, Rimbaud's eighteenth year, two years into his siege of the Muse. We've discussed Manet in passing, without mentioning his paintings of the catastrophe. But now in Rimbaud, who ignores the humiliation of France, the starvation of Paris and the butchery of the Commune in the moment he began to write?

What happens when the literal substance of the sound of peace is translated into that of war, we know as our transubstantiation of masculinity, itself. We appreciate how France's slaughter of its egalitarians would register as another radical contradiction in a youth, at least as intransigent as anything he met in Paris literary circles. 

The flag goes to the filthy landscape, and our dialect stifles the drum.

On to city centers where we'll nourish the most cynical prostitution. We'll massacre logical rebellions.

On to peppery and waterlogged countries! at the service of the most monstrous industrial or military exploitation.

Farewell here, anywhere. Well-meaning draftees, we'll adopt a ferocious philosophy; ignorant of science, sly for comfort; let the shambling world drop dead. This is the real march. Heads up, forward!

We read, we vote, we shape our own society, and our politics ordains what youth may learn. But they will know what the bells of St Denis are for, and who it is who calls for cannon. 

We are raising their Rimbaud, and they will need him. For now, the one we have is good enough, for anyone who wishes he would speak.

Bruce Duffy

Disaster was my God

  A novel of the outlaw

  life of Arthur Rimbaud

Doubleday, 2011©

Alistair Horne

The Fall of Paris: 

  The Siege and the Commune

Macmillan, 1965© 

Jean-François-Arthur Rimbaud

Les Illuminations

  Démocratie

John Ashbery, translation

op. cit.

Daniel Mendelsohn

Rebel Rebel:

  Arthur Rimbaud's Brief Career

The New Yorker

August 29, 2011©


iii  Mathias Lauridsen

For the bath they draw of peace

   always

   the other

   side of 

   the storm 

i   Figure of Greece

       in the Sudtirol

ii  Ivan Terestchenko

      La Soule

Does trapezius' hollow drain along the clavicle trench

We can admit, we don't remember how the bath's abdominal displacement framed the water with parentheses, but pooled somewhat more randomly at the sternum of which we've heard. Residual dapples at the throat or at the breast, innocuously scattered distributions, were on their own to find a likely channel or evaporate without remark. Siblings and spouses, parents and friends, classmates and cousins don't remember - and they'd like to, it would seem fitting - as all now mark the long-lost instant when they could have seized that one impartial fact they might contribute from their store of secret trifles. Does trapezius' hollow drain along the clavicle trench, or flush the breathy pillow as it sinks.

       

          Solid things dissolve,

          and vapours ape

          substantiality.

          You sensed him near you

          just now, but that's

          more like a nettle to

          the touch; and on your

          left Joe Donkin walked,

          where only weeds stir 

          to the night-gusts if

          you feel with your hand. 

         

David Michael Jones

1895 - 1974

In Parenthesis

  seinnyessit e gledyf ym

  penn mameu

1937

Edited and published

  by T.S. Eliot at Faber

New York Review Books, 2003©

If a storm can bring a frog

              

    just askin'