Between buildings and furniture

    

The things that never become
part of the furniture belong
to the way of life in being.

Take the carrelet, the frag-
ile, ubiquitous fishing pier
in the estuary at the center
of the world of wine, obliv-
iously immobile and obtusely
scattered for the harvesting
of even more elusive things.

Edward Steichen
1903

Alex Berlov

Carrelet in the Gironde

People who make jam

One could derive the foundation
of this page by a simple act of
triangulating certain influence
from other pages, listed in the
sidebar under Context. They are
the people who make jam, and it
is up to you to investigate who
they are, although in one case,
it is obvious. Another, is less
so, having been deleted to keep
stray attention from being paid
to a member of that family. But
the third I interrupted one day
with a transatlantic call, hint
hint, and rang off promptly, so
as not to put at risk the fruit.

Michael George
Sean, traveler in Aubrac
2013

Origins of Wednesday liv: Letter from a watchman on the coast

Stubbed toe

Mulling it over, I have hope that this fracturing of the Republican Party over its cardinal objective will make it harder for Bannon and Trump to achieve the intimidating character they were looking for, by means of any salient legislative triumph in the two Houses they unambiguously possess, not merely control. Their erasures of Obama's regulations and their extraordinarily prompt destruction of the Executive departments, possibly excluding the Pentagon but plainly not the State Department, are of truly daunting semi-permanence, which will probably mature into irreversibility if they control both Houses for another two years. But they left the President unsatisfactorily feared. He needed (not that he knew it, but Bannon does) to exhibit himself as truly contemptuous of his base, in order to solidify his position. This was Himmler’s insight, and he is evidently Bannon’s model, his exemplar in the genuine seizure of power over the ostensibly organized, neo-representative State. He doesn’t want to martyr them, any more than he particularly wanted to expose the tremulous docility of Congressional figureheads. But he does need them go to mad in the knowledge of his control.

Bannon knows, Trump can never achieve all that he must as merely ‘primus inter pares’ in a party already obsessed by visions of financial concentration in the fewest unregulated hands. He must mature that consequence. He must destroy the position of the United States and avenge any pretext for its liberties.

The alienation of dozens of millions, of whole organic sectors of the population from sustainable life - the unifying vision of “health care” legislation emerging from both Houses of Congress - would represent the most articulate image of this agenda, imaginable, short of full bore terrorism hysteria in the streets, with all its racist and religious ornamentation, all the darling bells and whistles of anarchic carnage. Garden variety thievery, such as we see in the rape of Dodd-Frank and foretell in tax “reform,” are mere orthodoxy of Republicanism, not the clarifying eradication embodied in the health care crusade.

I passed along Al Hunt’s appreciation of the rôle of Old Media in this. I don’t wish to exaggerate it, but the Times - one has to admit - has been vigilant in this beyond precedent, and we did read the damn paper every day through the Administration of Richard Nixon. The Post, by slight contrast, has taken the lion’s share of open warfare with the President’s personality in all its ramifications, certainly not avoiding the health care fight but casting its net just as diligently into foreign policy, trade policy, war and peace (its arrogated purview, for many years), and of course the partisan tradecraft of Party politics. Bannon welcomes this; not that he has a choice, but because it affirms his lifelong message to the base — “they” are snotty pricks. What the Republicans could not have measured, or at least failed to do, was the energy of CNN in its own open warfare against the President, to say nothing of SNL’s remarkable cheerleading for us all. This made the essayists, from lettered venues such as The New Yorker, The New York Review, The Atlantic, New York, and The Nation, Huffington, etc, etc, not exactly superfluous, but almost. One didn’t need to know Plato, to know that the President is incompetent, crazy, and adored for both virtues.

So, I do think there is a momentary condition of trench warfare now, with both sides “dug in,” and you will tell me, it is such an unstable interval, and untenable for Trump, that I should expect something extraordinarily depraved on his part, any day now. Well, I do. He does retain the initiative, merely because any reprimand is in partisan lockdown in the Republican Congress. But this only argues for not letting up in the exposure, while it still bleeds, of the rotten carcass of Republican health care, so that whatever Trump next pursues, will draw its revolting stench. He does control the Party well enough, still, for imminent lying before investigative committees to be seconded, praised, upheld and embraced. So, for me, if Summer has shown us anything, he is immune in his corruption, his betrayals, his treasons and his striking incapacity. But he is not feared enough to satisfy himself. And this bothers him, because he really is the only power who can bring himself down.

History tells us to expect a trade war exacerbated by a naval incident or two. I don’t think George HW Bush’s foray into Panama affords the scale this time. Sounds like China, from where I’m sitting. He has to be seen to be willing to make his base suffer; and he has to be seen as so reckless of security, that he can claim not to need it, and of common sense, that his genius can be seen at last. But endocrinology tells us something else, which is the intolerability of the gradualism of a strangulation by commerce. He needs a paroxysm - garish, noisy, inversely scaled to his magnitude. If he were sane, we'd say he had endangered himself. Not intentionally. As he has taught us, he'll eat whatever will bear his name.

I ran into Mitch McConnell en route to the bath

     Under the circumstances

     I didn't think it right

     to try cheering him up.

     I promised him his plan

     will stay a secret they

     could not drag from me.

Vive la République

Stefan Pichler Goncalvez

Tricouleur, Ivan Terestchenko

C'mon, Pruitt, there's something we haven't destroyed

Our metric reference for today's

celebration of the new government

is the immortal exhortation from

Rock Hudson to Elizabeth Taylor,

in George Stevens' 1950s romance

on Texas, Giant. Embracing inter-

racial enlightenment during the

Eisenhower Administration, hotly

rejected in the rise of our New

Greatness (hilariously interpret-

ed only this week by David Brooks

as the rebirth of a frontier spir-

it), Stevens' screenplay finds a

newlywed couple disembarking from

their private rail car at their

imperial ranch in Texas, as the

élitist coastal bride graciously

accepts a welcoming bouquet from

a sub-captive Hispanic retainer

of her man-of-the-people husband.

A touch annoyed by this forbidden

interaction, his final demand to

get into the car for the drive to

the house, rings loud and clear -

C'mon, Leslie, it's 50 miles to coffee!

Amidst all the buffoonery of the new government, yet coiled in plain sight in its horror of illegiti-macy, it is easy to over-look its childlike agony. A workmanlike apparatchik was certain to emerge in the maelstrom of hate mongering headliners staffing the regime. He is the former attorney general for fossilized Oklahoma, and he is destroying everything he possibly can, before the nation's day in Court, much less at the polls. 

In all the President's frenzy in

the stealing of myths, is said to

be some cover for his henchmen's

theft of resources. But his clock

is right, twice a day. They are

inextricable. Nice car, not his.

i    Xavier Serrano

ii   Luc Défont Saviard

iii  Kenneth Blom

      Les palmiers

      2013

v    George Stevens

        director

      Giant

      Elizabeth Taylor

      James Dean

      1956

Canada at a hundred and fifty

     Not that anyone's counting
     or anything, but how could
     Canada have whupt our ass,
     in the War of 1812, and be
     younger than you'd expect?

Quiet jetty

  A breakwater, possibly the allusion drawing

  Roosevelt to plant trees to hold the land in

  the first worst hard time, in lieu of pursu-

  ing advice to adopt soils management by sci-

  entific scruples, comes to mind in the pres-

  ent worst hard time, a dust bowl degradation

  of the framework of community, the language.

  The clean white shirt, possibly an allusion

  to a breakwater, is resorted to repeatedly,

  rather, for its porosity, permeability, clar-

  ity, coherency, and transparent antecedents.

  This gives a taste for it, generic as it is.

  I think of soils management these days, as a

  friend was writing to me only the other day,

  to do: you can defend, simply by reading a

  poem. This I hadn't discovered I'd known to

  do, until I glanced again at prose just now,

  so steeped in Scott Fitzgerald, that it had

  held in ground and flowered, another season -

          Snatching her hand, he pulled her along with him,

          and they ran until they reached a side street muf-

          fled and sweet with trees. As they leaned together,

          panting, he put into her hand a bunch of violets,

          and she knew, quite as though she'd seen it done,

          that they were stolen. Summer that is shade and moss

          traced itself in the veins of the violet leaves, and

          she crushed their coolness against her cheek.

Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time
  The untold story of those
  who survived the great
  American dust bowl
Houghton Mifflin, 2006©


Truman Capote
Summer Crossing
ca 1959
op. posth.
The Truman Capote
  Literary Trust
Random House, 2006©