Race and its profiling, revisited

As our Red State candidates dazzle

us again with stalwart speculation

on the rôle of race in our precip-

itous decline under a nonwhite in-

cumbent, the Committee has reached

a conclusive determination that Mr

Cruz couldn't possibly be Canadian.

Suppose it were Friday cx: Ay, they had been impractical

Don't you remember, Seaneen,
and how it was. The road led
up past the chapel, and how 
it wound and it wound. 

And there was the field where 
Dan Tobin's bull chased you. 

It was a lovely little house,
Seaneen. And the roses! Your
father used to tease me about
them, but he was proud of them,
too.

                     Could you tell me the way

                     to Inisfree?

                     Do you see that road over

                     there? Don't take that one,

                     it'll do you no good.

                     Oh, Inisfree you want. Be

                     savin' your breath, let me

                     direct the gentleman.

                     Happen to know the way to

                     Knoghenor?

                     If he knew the way there,

                     would he be asking the way

                     to Inisfree?

                     There's many knows Knoghen-

                     or, that doesn't know Inis-

                     free.

                     If you'd take the time to

                     study your country's his-

                     tory, Mr Maloney - -

There is a cast of mind, not

confined to the United States

but infamous for permeating

the place, of quiet endurance

of being chased by Dan Tobin's

bull, and heaps of its waste,

following the path home where

even the father is proud of

the roses. This is not a cast

of mind to be deflected from

its confidence, by rules of

navigation which exalt the

practicality of failure, and

ignore the place's history.

  

John Ford

  director

Frank S. Nugent

  and John Ford

  screenplay

The Quiet Man

1952

Penguin on the wall

to Denis Bold

  To put at risk
  a good book is
  writing's hope
  regenerated. I
  would be a Pen-
  guin on a wall
  to be so used.

   

Romy Schneider

Alain Delon

Eve of the supply side

We drove back that night with a profound content, and as the moon was late and high, turned off the road to spend an hour in the owl-haunted ruins of Lambousa, an old church standing in magnificent desolation upon the echoing stony beach below Lapithos. Here, walking about in the ruins, eating the sweet brown grapes we had stolen from [our host's] table we talked of our houses, of the books we were going to write, and of the lives we should be able to live here in the sun: within reach of each other on this eloquent range of hills. The owls whistled and the sea banged and rubbed under the moon. We were full of premonitions of a life to be lived which could offer, not merely leisure in sunlight, but a proper field in which to read and reflect, deploy words and study. Marie was to leave for India next morning and felt disinclined to sleep, so we drove back along the silent coast and down to the little mosque, blazing like a diamond on the rocky peninsula opposite her wattle hut. Here we bathed in a sea still full of cold currents, smarting to the flesh, and drank the last of a bottle of red Chianti which we found in the hut. The dawn was breaking before we were ready almost, rushing out of the night sea beyond Cape Andreas, a steeply mounting flush upon the bronze faces of the mountains. A dense dew lay upon everything as we drove back through the silent fields to Kyrenia for breakfast. There were to be many such mornings, many such evenings spent in good fellowship and wine, before the vagaries of fortune and the demons of ill luck dragged Cyprus into the stock market of world affairs and destroyed not only the fortuitous happiness of these friendships but, more tragically and just as surely, the old tried relationships on which the life of the little village was founded.

I don't marvel that our power centers
have their hands full with rejection,
left and right; but I do rather marvel
at the poverty of vocabulary resorted
to, to explain it. Because it was al-
ways about the money to the Right and
to the Left, at least since England
started fencing in estates, and a City
bourgeoisie became inevitable, it has
seemed derisorily artistic to look a-
head (had you thought, back?), to edu-
cation's taming of upstart deformity.

And who are they, who are that natur-
al market; who are they, who are its
stock?

















Lawrence Durrell
Bitter Lemons
  The Swallows Gather
Faber and Faber, Ltd, 1957© 

Carl Julius von Leypold
Mondschein
1824

Peter Laslett
The World We Have Lost
  "Paul Mellon's interest and en-
  couragement have been more
  important than perhaps he can
  have realised. I only hope that
  he may recognise here some-
  thing of the England which he
  can see for himself in his pictures."
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965©

E.P. Thompson
Customs in Common
  Studies in Traditional
  Popular Culture
The New Press, 1993©
op. cit.

Spotlight the way home

The only person I have telephoned
from Virginia, whom I knew before 
arriving here, I called for the
first time yesterday after seeing
the American movie, Spotlight. An
ancient friend I luckily met, as 
a young man in San Francisco. It
was a brief and happy conversation.

I believe I've just given the film
the only review it needs. For view-
ers who have ever been American or
ever been young, this is a script
capable of reaching beneath habits
and adjustments, to awaken sensings 
gratefully, of another's heart.

Unobserved isolations, internal ex-

iles persist deeply in a landscape 

of superficial toleration, on many 

levels just as intractable, if in 

spheres less spectacular than the 

rape of children by institutions of 

trust. The seduction of boys series

in this blog appropriates its title 

sardonically from a marker of genital 

invasion, for which the phrase is uni-

versal shorthand, for that reason -- 

to portray the enterprising range and 

corrupting consequence of a culture's 

dilettante, yet not whimsical manipu-

lations. The peripatetic hottie, for 

that reason, portrays iconographical-

ly the endgame of customary casuistry, 

high and low, in examples accruing al-

most every week. Now we have a movie, 

lauded by critics sounding exonerated 

in print media, hailing a whadya know 

discovery of literal genital racketeer-

ing in an outpost of the Vatican. 

I agree with them, this is a detective 

tale of zingy suspense, so far as it 

goes. But its path draws it along lines 

of Dr Tulp's discovery of innards in a

human body for Rembrandt. The question 

was not, who knew, not even who wanted 

to know. The prize cannot be genuine if 

it is claimed by the painter, any more 

than by the anatomist. It belongs to the 

life, investigated, feeling its way home.

Thobias Malmberg
Erik in Venice
2015

Michael Fried
Realism, Writing,
  Disfiguration  ~
  On Thomas Eakins and
  Stephen Crane
University of Chicago, 1987


Stephanie Zacharek
The Village Voice
3 November 2015

Peter Travers
Rolling Stone
4 November 2015

A.O. Scott
The New York Times
5 November 2015

Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
5 November 2015

Anthony Lane
The New Yorker
9 November 2015

Ann Hornaday
The Washington Post
12 November 2015

A campaign slogan so great

   You don't even
   have to say it.

   You just have to

   be playing fair.

Madison PHS
Brooklyn, New York
1958

The Washington Post
29 January 2016




Saturday afternoon update:
Everyone's telephone registered
endorsements offered today by
The New York Times to follow-
ers of the Presidential race in
the United States. This posting
is not an endorsement; this
page might not offer one. And
the Times might well change
its mind.

Tuesday morning update,
9th February ~
The slogan lit the day.

Theban trails

Possibly I should open a parallel blog this 12-month, of footnotes and diagrams for readers who know the United States only as the foreign country that it is. At the moment, for instance, we note that the leading Right Wing columnist for the paper of record has warned Right Wing voters that it would be insane of them to nominate either of their two favorite candidates for President, while the leading Left Wing columnist for the capital paper has warned Left Wing voters that it would be insane not to nominate the least trusted operative in either Party, the wife of the only President impeached in the 20th Century. 

In the midst of all this, an urbanite gadfly and publisher in his own right has intimated that he will nominate himself, if this insanity is perfected. Here was impressive agreement, then: insanity must not be so unconstructive as we'd thought. 

Yet maybe I'm right. Wouldn't it be happier to write for Thebes? We do the next best thing, to read about the house of Atreus, where the political Chorus was just as gloomy as America's is, but you could stay home at will. In previous postings, I've likened our volatility to that of Bacchae in revolt; but now we see, we'd been watching the Oresteia all along, a chronicle of endless palace coups. There is, however, a self-defrocking effect of our mentors' good advice. It had been obvious in Murdoch's farce, but now it's come to the most exalted pages. They bring readers' disgust to greater heights with these diagnoses, than tragedy is designed to bear. We therefore approach the exile of the Chorus, which has exhibited itself to the Left and to the Right, as vested middle managers of privileged play. Suddenly and simultaneously, their earth has shifted by our exposure of the protagonists. It was nothing personal. They might still sell us other bubbles. 

Just not today.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Offret

  The sacrifice

1986

David Brooks

Stay Sane, America,

  Please!

The New York Times

26 January 2016

Dana Milbank

Democrats Would be Insane

  to Nominate Bernie Sanders

The Washington Post

26 January 2016

Embarcadero

  Like you I had found this
  to be a suspiciously posh
  little saddle, but on the
  other hand, I must admit,
  it only enhanced my sense
  of its being auspicious.

 














...                        each lord            
Touched at his sleeve for the ace he'd hidden there.
























David Ferry
Of No Country I Know
  New and Selected Poems
  and Translations
  The Embarkation
  for Cythera
  [fragment]
University of Chicago, 1999©

Antoine Watteau
L'embarquement pour Cythère
1717
Palais du Louvre