I can't escape camp too soon

    

  I've been squinting so long
  through a lanyarded bong my 
  brows have woven a ligature

  while under this sway I can
  hear myself say, the plight
  shares another's signature:



  When betwixt Nell Gwyn
  And Anne Boleyn
  I was forced to make my choice,
  I became so confused
  I was even amused
  And abused by Peggy Joyce ..

  

Cole Porter
Out of this World
1950
They Couldn't
  Compare to You

Selected Lyrics
Robert Kimball
  editor
American Poets Project
The Library of America
op. cit.

Is taste a human right iii

  Am I alone in resorting to prose
  from the kitchen, when I wish to
  experience clarity? I wasn't dis-
  paraging Philosophy, the other
  day, in cautioning against claim-
  ing too much for it; pleasure and
  clarity may be acquainted but en-
  joy their independence. So, too,
  the other muses, seldom unself-
  interested enough to afford that
  suspension of argument, which I
  take to be a principal property
  of clarity as I recognize it. I
  listen to my dog, lapping fresh
  water from his porcelain after an
  outing; and to internalise this     harmony, I read of well-tem-
  pered endive in Elizabeth David.

She has a genius very different, I think, from the mis-exalted acts of arousing hunger, of propounding rules, consoling vanities, and inspiring ambitions. Hers is for extruding the impacted impulses of gratitude, in a natural solicitude for the inherent blessings of in-gredients. Hers is the wonder of 
an innocent for clarity.

I think, to celebrate her famously unintimidated opinions, much less to embrace them as some acolyte, is to misrepresent the fundamental composure which lies at their root, as a compost of questions laid not merely to rest, but to illuminate. Is this even about food?

              Thus when Galileo speaks of the alphabet,
              he means a combinatory system capable of
              representing everything in the universe.
              Here too we see him introducing the com-
              parison with painting:  the combination
              of the letters .. is the equivalent of
              mixing colours on the palette. It is
              clear that this is a combinatory system
              of a different order [from others] .. a
              combination of objects which are already 
              endowed with meaning .. cannot represent
              all of of reality; in order to achieve 
              this one needs to turn to a combinatory 
              system of minimal elements such as pri-
              mary colours or the letters ..

   

   And when we get home,
   there will be bright,
   fair music to imbibe.

























Italo Calvino
Why Read the Classics?
  The Book of Nature
  in Galileo
Martin McLaughlin
  translation
Jonathan Cape, 1999©

Saturday commute xciv: An awkward shortage for stairs

    What will fashion think of
    next, in those cyclic sac-
    rifices we're compelled to
    make to its shifting sands
    of taste? And how like Ti-
    berius, too, to command an
    appearance of us just now;
    yet what an amusing way of
    celebrating our inequality.

   

John Todd

J.S.S. 
Capri 
1878

Course correction

  Frank O'Hara at
  a rail station.

  Fifty years ago
  for the summer.

  We left Federal
  Court yesterday
  not somber, but
  seeing simpler.

          Just when I was getting completely through
          dried out, balled up, anxious and empty
          like a gulch in a John Huston movie
          I went to see Strange Interlude and began
          to go away for a weekend on the beach
          into that theatre again and again
          now I have a pot of basil a friend gave
          me and am reading Keats again and realize
          that everything is impossible in a different way
          well so what, but there's a difference
          between a window and a wall again.


 

         

Frank O'Hara
Again, John Keats, Or
  The Pot of Basil
MS 8 June 1963
Ephemeris 2
May 1969
Donald Allen
  Editor
The Collected Poems of
  Frank O'Hara
op. cit.

Sometimes a perfect radiance percolates from the dankest muck

We don't know whether to credit

the Napoleonic fatuousness of

Louisiana's legal lineage for

any of the ingeniously still-

born stuff in Marty Feldman's

worry for intact children in

woolly families, or whatever

he was thinking, against the

plain and glaring defense of

children in Justice Kennedy's

opinion for the Supreme Court

of the United States in the

cases striking down populist

homophobia in recent preced-

ents; we just know to relish

the sight of such desperate

dislocation twixt subject and

judgment, while we can, in

these waning hours of bigot-

ry's hoariest stand. 

Sometimes a perfect radiance percolates from the dankest muck. It is the gift of any anguished exposure of ignobility, to furnish in the extremity of its indefensibility the very predicate and path for a resolved exodus to loftier ground. 




In his stunningly personal
declamations, extending dir-
ectly into passive aggressive
self-pity for epistemological
isolation, this judge went way
beyond the call of this duty,
in resounding tones of Confed-
erate martyrdom at its lowest.

Could anyone be ungrateful to

notice, that Marty was enter-

ing a rant against a settled

matter, the right of unmar-

ried couples to adopt child-

ren, as an illegitimate human

interest for Louisiana to

resist, against children's

spilling out into congenital-

ly innocent hands? Such was

his deliriously inventive

way of asserting that mat-

rimony is not a fundamental

right - a position bound to

strike a chord in every home -

but that propagation more or

less is obligatory, maritally

ornamented or not. 

Stella!

Is Philosophy to Morals as Acetylcholine is to Grace?

      Just play.

Who knew? A professional philosopher

has opined that Hannah Arendt's end-

lessly contested characterization of

Eichmann's furtherance of the judeo-

code may be certified as erroneous,

because conclusions she reaches by

the exercise of philosophy show his

evil was not the banality of a bur-

eaucrat. I have less hope that this

proud self-promotion can enhance the

stature of that discipline, than I

have for biochemistry's criticism of

the dance. Readers who believe, none

of us has a dog in this hunt, expose

themselves to a potentially rude sur-

prise, as the floor they've stood on

to achieve that footing, quits early.

I have reasoned confidence in proces-

ses of literature in this matter, as

previously reported; and I have just

as much confidence that this is not

a taxonomic tournament, in the first

place. Arendt's perspective cast val-

ued light on the horrors of bureau-

cratic vitality - inertia, in floor-

speak - and left no daylight for any

inference of thoughtless "evil." But

the zest for a quarrel over terms is

undying, especially with philosophy.

Tuesday collars

   Quiet

   city.

When it seems a lot of work

    When it seems a lot

    of work, to let the

    air do all the work

    I think it is prob-

    ably because of all

    the water.