"Carmine said, one boy"

The line occupies the air,

intact, I'm confident, and

needs no hyperlink. In one

of the endearingestly fun-

niestly fashioned films in

any organized escape route

from real life, the speech

introduces a character aud-

ibly indebted, if physical-

ly evolved from this most

unforgettable face of exam-

ination in the history of

the pleasure dome, Greene's

exact characterisation of 

the movies.

Carmine said [there would

be] one boy, and this is 

he, as I met him in my boy-

hood, with my father at the

movies. Again, no hyperlink

is needed.

Maximilian Schell died yes-

terday. In the happiness of

pure laughter I happened, by

complete coincidence yester-

day, to see him present that

line again, in the 31st min-

ute of a romp in which he 

and Brando and Matthew Brod-

erick prove, enchantedly, 

one boy would be a waste.

The reason, obviously, that

this line of dialogue works

so exactly to arouse dread

of the interrogator, in gay-

est comic displacement, is

that Schell's is the voice 

for a seductively simple for-

mula already cited more than 

once here, for precipitating

our greatest crimes. For my

life, I have owed an actor.

Dominik Sadoch

Matt Lambert 

  photography

Save the clock

  As if this campaign had not
  gone long enough, it picked
  up an extra hour somewhere.
  Oh, my loyal clockface. How
  should I ever explain this? 

i  Dominik Sadoch

"No nestling place is left in bluebell bloom ..

    

   . and the wide arms of
   trees have lost their
   scope."



   Cambridge University
   lately placed online
   the diaries of Sieg-
   fried Sassoon. There
   is shelter to be val-
   ued where a conscious-
   ness can live, if not
   be spared.

Wilfred Owen
Happiness
  February, 1917
  [fragment]
The Collected Poems
C. Day Lewis, editor
op. cit.


i    Photo Bruce Weber
iii  Dominik Sadoch

My favourite clothespin ix

     So few days of Fall

     afford the meteoro-

     logical coincidence

     for wearing no more

     and no less than an

     escapade by bicycle

     wants in afternoon.

     It's the acute ang-

     le season, the ear-

     then pleats welcome

     some unbrittleness,

     darts array in play

     upon the aubergine.

     A fleeting pastoral

     ensign, unmistaken. 

     

Dominik Sadoch

Lukas Pukowiec

  photography

Elle Man Poland

October, 2016

Le Grand William 

  bicycle 

Hugo Boss

  vest and shirt

Ermenegildo Zegna

  trousers

Cowgill Forge

Blacksmith's Eye

October, 2016

Lines for breakfast

Victoria is back, Paul 
is not, which has been 
an obdurate suspension. 
Here I interlineate, in
the company of almost
too many extraordinary
counselors and confi-
dants in printed form.

A poet I've cited sever-
al times and an essayist
of similar frequency con-
verged for me without war-
ning, other than by traits
they observe in common.

   Penser c'est l'homme. They aren't
   heedless flowers that blow and
   perish; they have thought their
   lives into shape, a shape worthy
   of survival. Dust and heat, blood
   and tears, thought and vigil cre-
   ated the art of Keats, as his let-
   ters show; and Achilles was an in-
   tellectual, the only intellectual
   among the heroes of Homer.. And 
   the rest of life, the interstices
   of this grand design - well, it is
   enough, by the pleasures of society,
   and the taste of divine solitude, to
   keep melancholy at bay.

  

   You can't tell anything much about who you are
   By exercising on the Romantic bars.
   What are the wild waves saying? I don't know.

   And Shelley didn't know, and knew he didn't.
   In his great poem, "Ode to the West Wind," he
   Said that the leaves of his pages were blowing away.


In May of 1944 the British Army major's 
journal entry confides a resolution to 
write a great work of history, some day; 
and I think, to all of those who knew him 
(I've been close with several who did), 
his framing of stirring ambition in terms 
of Homer's unexemplary hero must suggest 
certain regrets of his subsequent life, 
which to me is radiantly companionable.

The excerpt from David Ferry comes from
a work collected in his superlative Be-
wilderment, "Ancestral Lines." Studying
Schumann, Shelley, a friend and a dog, 
the expansion of ancestry enriches exact-
ly as it did for Trevor-Roper, the ques-
tion he's addressing - And who it is I am
because of them.

Here nothing so grand is at stake. I also
go less far in attribution to others, than
Ferry's figurative "I" speculates here, on
going. What immortal warmth there is to be
distributed in this language, comes dialec-
tically, I suppose, but somehow in a timely
way, in the candour of good company. Doubt
will see one through, and an English dog.






















Hugh Trevor-Roper
Lord Dacre of Glanton
The Wartime Journals
op. cit.

David Ferry
Bewilderment
op. cit.

Dominik Sadoch
  Louis Cattelat photography

Suppose it were Friday cxxv: Calder at the moment

    Like a face crossing a mirror
    at the back of the room, Eros
    moves.. He never looks at you
    from the place from which you 
    see him. Something moves in
    the space between. This is the
    most erotic thing about Eros.

Anne Carson

Eros

  The Bittersweet

  What is this dialogue about?

Princeton University Press, 1986©

Dominik Sadoch

Alexander Calder

Untitled

1947

Whitney Museum

Calder: Hypermobility

An exhibition, June 9 - Oct 23

New York

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.