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.

Of a trial down in Richmond

-- medio de fonte leporum

Surgit amari aliquid, quod

in ipsis floribus angat.

From middle spring of sweets some

bitter springs

Which in the very flower smartly

stings.

In the matter of the Federal District Court corruption trial of Virginia's most recent ex-Governor and his wife, the element of conspiracy has been frontally rebutted by assertions, now quite famous, of no love lost between the conspirators. Infamous as a gladiatorial net of indiscriminate suspicion, a conspiracy indictment deserves all the opprobrium it can get, for incrimina-tion without acts; and the affections, as we've tried to suggest, are the last business of the law. On the other hand, Jon Stewart, long suspected of lurking about the perimeter of this most Gordian of all of repression's knots, clove it paradoxically, with something of an idiot savant's epitaph, "You don't have to be in love to be corrupt." 

That said, you need to have acquiesced in each other's darling little stocking stuffers, to be deemed to have known they come to you from a common source. And this seems very much to define the source in question here, a quite splendidly gothic construction out of the wildest dreams of Huckleberry Finn. We are not, dear Readers, threatening the domain of taste in the transcripts before us. A white leather coat, a 5-lb Rolex, do not the Pleiades excite. But there is innocence born in all of us. I gave my mother once a sap-phire bracelet at La Côte Basque, and she kissed the captain for it. Not that he didn't deserve it.

The evidence, presented in these proceedings, supports the Southern fratboy gotcha to a T. Observing serial indelicacy of judgment as we may, we find that the laws of the Commonwealth extend a reverence toward the Office of Governor with which no petty crackpot can compete: he [sic] is insulated from avarice by law, if not by nature. He may suck all the Sazeracs he likes, and Louis Treize in the bargain, on the premise, very frankly, that he is likely to be richer'n death as it is. Jefferson, the first Governor, could turn only to Washington with envy,  but that man inherited several counties, and his wife brought him the whole Potomac watershed in dower, and still they couldn't hire a decent architect. 

In short, foundation law portrays a fine opinion of who may vote and whom he'll [sic] select. Mind you, no one anticipated this exact Governor's educator, Jerry Falwell, or had any inkling of Fox News, where nothing ever needs to be true. All the more reason to marvel, then, at least for a moment, in the spectacle of a definition of the Office, which anticipates hypocrisy in such elevated flight that the world might see only the soaring radiance of shattered principles.

 Yet this is the only story,  actually, to claim position  here, not the squalid, emetic  distractions the defendants'  attorneys conspired to thrust  before the People of the Com-  monwealth. And all of this as  free entertainment, too, given  their confidence that there is  no case. There is a greater  humiliation, as Jefferson  certainly knew, than subjecting  the People to the shameful  affront of begging them to be  excused for years and years of  indignity, at best, for lack of  conjugal felicity. Who hasn't  given that one a whirl, on an  off weekend; and 48 solid  months of neglectfulness, it  has been said, deserve a  consolation.

Now the People's little, ancient, natural principles are desecrated as pretenses of antiquity, expectations pitched too high for Falwellian contrition, Foxed fabrication. The People are blamed by these attorneys for believing, silly fools, in values uncongenial to alligator tears. And it's true. There isn't a crime inscribed in their statutes, for such loathing of the public trust; and there shouldn't be. It would be a tyranny over the mind of man, which Jefferson so presciently detested, and it would moot the prospect, as well as the living reality of trust. These attorneys, these officers of the Court, are openly soliciting a jury of Virginians to betray themselves.

Even if this tactic should succeed today - as it might, given our storied resistance to Federal embarrassment, our denying flair for splitting phantom hairs - there is, always, History. Who could want to say, this had happened? Clio only knows the virtues, she can not summon them. Can those who govern as if trust were dead, really take it with them, against the likelihood of a Virginian's being born, any moment?

iii  Dominik Sadoch

Michel de Montaigne
  Citing Lucretius
We Taste Nothing Purely
1578-1580
Shakespeare's Montaigne:
  The Florio Translation of
  the Essays, A Selection
John Florio, translation
1553-1625
Stephen Greenblatt and
  Peter Platt, editors
New York Review Books, 2014©

The estimable and complete
Donald Frame translation,
1957, is restored to brilliant
company in NYRB's recent,
self-recommending issue.

Straw man

      Well. Nobody ever
      said, this were a
      perfect language.