Is taste a human right?

This posting was originally issued
May 25th and was taken down for
revision. A friend was asking for it
lately, and allowed that it was OK
as it was. It should still be developed,
and in time I hope to do so.




Another excellent exchange
on taste was lately joined
at Blue Remembered Hills.

     A thousand postings in the same vessel at the same time,
and still we haven't identified the right to what is so often decried of this page, taste. It's a matter of important work, 
and then we can play.

     On almost every page of this blog, a right is asserted on behalf of the young, of which they were endowed by their creator but only haphazardly by society, if at all. The right to have Horace at one's back, Haydn in one's hospital, Heraclitus in one's curriculum is nothing more than the right to be formed in the legacy of one's birthright - and nothing less. Thousands of seagulls will crash into the Seagram Building before any ten pedestrians in a walking radius will know to preserve it. Yet, it was built for every man on the street for coherency's sake, for proportion's sake, for longevity's sake, and then for eloquence and elegance and inspiration's sake. And why is this, if not because no civilisation can stand without them?

     Is it possible to torture in good taste? Is it possible to tease others with oppression in good taste? Is it possible to exalt grandiosity in good taste? Is it possible to refuse the gifts of science in good taste? Is it possible to plan for New Orleans to drown in good taste? Is it possible for a fiduciary insider-trader to "bet" against his client in good taste?

     Could Mr Madison have fashioned the separation of powers without taste? Could Mozart have reconciled his finales without taste? Could a child's quadratic equation in algebra stand without taste? If we were conscious of the rôle of taste, in short, what would be obscure? 

     We are unalterably adamant, even in this nation, on the universal right of learning. We are at times tiresomely persistent at this page, on the universal obligation to commit the same act, at least on behalf of the young. Is it not probable, given grounding in Vitruvius and Palladio, Titian and Watteau, Haydn and Schubert, Virgil and Virginia Woolf, that some software program can be written, to infuse our domestic design with sympathy -- even if, as we read from time to time, nobody knows anything anymore?

     Coherency. Proportion. Longevity. Add whatever aioli we may want, this is our sandwich of taste. Of course it can be learned; it has only been learned, as regards comprehension if not execution. Let taste shape my herbaceous borders all it wants, it will incrementally shape my civilisation. Why, may an outsider ask, do we ever entertain the slightest doubt, that Syrie Maugham lives up to the Persian Letters of Montesquieu, and that David Adler should be taught in middle schools, along with Mr Emerson?

     The teaching of taste, the sharing of taste, the conserving of taste for the bequeathing of taste have been the subjects of this blog, just as the novelty of its projection of those purposes has struck some as paradoxical. The answer is, that the constituency for those purposes claims precedence here over examples of its achieve-ment, to lend resolution to a task which should feel like play. Something mad over something good, in a word, from the BRH exchange. We want there to be healing voices, we wish there to be a literature of power without force, but not merely because they are in good taste. The wanting of them gives the good sensation of their being, if one has the taste to dream of them. And this obliges us, once in a thousand blog entries, to declare their necessity. We want such things because there are people we love, to be looked after, and taste is their right, their ultimate protection.

I dedicate this posting

with thanks, to the

sharers of taste who

have been with Laurent.

Where had cinema left us, after 'Brokeback Mountain'?

Inhaling bloodied shirts from closets in a trailer, desolation crushing through the credits: the survivor's destiny, so it said. Again I turn to my friend Tassos Paschalis for his creative vision, thinking of Colin Firth's awakening on the ink-stained bed in the opening scene of A Single Man, a film by Tom Ford from last year, based on an Isherwood novel of three generations ago.

Annie Proulx is no mean writer, and she had a point to make in Brokeback Mountain which was necessary. Isherwood, however, had persuasively shown that her conclusion represented a choice, appropriate to its predicates but not inevitable - for all her observant candour about the virtual incarceration of the rural underclass in America, to say nothing of the intransigence of the closet. Ang Lee, a very fluent director, had brought that story to the consciousness both of the street and of its own constituency, as an almost unanswerably depressing projection of the residual lives of single men who survive their partners.

This page has readers who adopt that fate peremptorily and uncritically, and Annie Proulx certainly understands why. Some of our friends sneak in for our deliciousness and upbraid us for indecency. Good grief, Charley Brown. One can understand the terror of having to blog to drum up business, one can understand the male matron's need to boast of outgrowing us. But one can't understand the misconception that conjugal felicity has the power to suppress the erotic gaze, much less the right to rebuke it. If domestic partnership or worldly position were the remedies for human nature that these readers pretend they are, we'd never have met them. At least, not here.

Far from it, says A Single Man. Isherwood's hero, George, stops for a chat with a colleague outside a tennis court, and Tom Ford captures his natural study of competing torsos on the court. George shares a cigarette with a hustler in the smog, and Ford shows his concentration on his face. George arrives for work and some cute kid, in androgynous white, offers him a wave, and it's the one greeting of many he acknowledges all morning. He's still plunged in a relationship that's real to him, but he's alive.

Everyone who reads this page has seen this movie, many have read the novel. I cite the advice of one of them, which was accompanied by a portrait of a model in Armani underpants:

I love pretty young men and mature boys and the ones you show are truly beautiful. A couple of your recent posts have been more suitable for a general audience but it’s fundamentally esoteric. I would feel the same way about a comparable blog that spotlights sexy and pretty young women; this is not a form of homophobia on my part. I do not presume that my blog readers would have a taste for [yours].

Have you ever thought of creating a second blog, one that will bring you more mainstream attention? I think it would be pointless for you to try to change RMBL at this stage in the game.

Thank heaven for clear thinking! I haven't seen a blog, yet, which goes out of its way to chat up habeas corpus, the International Style, Le Corbusier, racism, sectarian bigotry, blue roan English dogs, and really nifty Sauternes on the backs of sexy and pretty young women, but it's high time that they got started. The question is not whose back is pretty, it's whether any life is coherent, any vision sustainable, without reference to the irrepressible. The question is not the taste of somebody else, it's the tragic assumption that to declare a taste represents the slightest disclosure, the slightest deformity, the slightest insult.

I give you the surgeon, about to correct your vision. He's quite famously domiciled with his boyfriend, but in obtaining your waiver of liability he stipulates that he'll deny you any of his love for life, any of his treasurings. Is that knife one for your eye?

Deny the red mug, the blue linen's empty. There is no second blog, for acceptance's sake. We are exhibiting the tenacity of wonder in this world in every honest pleasure and principle of value to the mind. It is absolutely never absent, it is absolutely never defunct, it is absolutely never untrustworthy. Upon the proportion, for example, depicted in the previous picture, every feature of longevity, every feature of stability, every feature of elegance and balance in Vitruvian architecture depends. The figure is the living avatar of Western civilisation, and it is sad if a connoisseur can't admit it. 

This page, too, took a long time to get here, making all of the excuses and more, that its conscientious objectors put forth; but it cannot buckle to them, it cannot be just the place where they can feel safe to admire a tummy. The objection to this page is not to its taste. It's to its pertinence. Henry James declined that lunch at All Souls, to stroll among the hobbledehoys. We'll walk with him, and gratefully.

Is taste a human right ii

To become lost amid underperforming texts
the stranger won't answer. By which time
it was nosebleed territory anyway. The geese
had put away their young, then fled; all that remained
to be determined was local angst, over which who cares what
by sitters in a landscape, I say: how is this remote?
Yellow wine will rinse it all away, and how many of us
are there? Is it my imagination or must one foregather
to bring stuff in?

                  Long before that, the tocsin

had sounded in the autumn dell, Toxins were released.

One's by-now crystallized antipathy to daring new

solutions swamped local perennial borders.

Because at least getting too serious had reputable

antecedents. Being in the way didn't matter,

nor should it, yet who knows what embarrassments can leak

this way, foreground moony entertainments? Just a clench

suffices when their guard is up. The horse pilots,

sleeping rough in their thousands,

announced commodious outcomes contradicting too-prompt

displays of local affection. The broad petals of language

are stiff and may get very bad.

They make it very bad

in our language tutoring.

   Possibly you have noticed, too,

   that so few people seem to have

   heard the good news about them-

   selves. They want refreshment but

   ask, 'Give me the biggest red ya

   got', and this aspiration for

   punishment is but a consequence

   of deprivation, a means of sub-

   stantiating to themselves that

   they can take it and respect it.

   You see it everywhere, if not in

   every thing. 

   In growth there is a center that

   opens as balanced wine, unfold-

   ing congruently, responsively,

   gracefully, authentically, and

   lastingly. Which came first, the

   principle or the fact? Taste is

   an expression of the human trait

   of memory. We can watch expertise

   reviving as a birthright, across

   their features as they recompose.

  

John Ashbery

Quick Question

  New Poems

  Far Harbor

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©

Tweet us not into temptation

  David Carr at The New York Times has
  raised the subject of social media's
  influence in the dissemination of in-
  formation, and I naturally passed his
  column along to a member of the demo-
  graphic class likeliest to receive da-
  ta in that form, which is to say ine-
  luctably, of that kind. Carr's piece
  put one in mind of remarks David Rem-
  nick attributes to Harold Ross, the 
  most circumspect editor of the pre-
  vious century, on dispatching Flanner
  to Paris in the '40s. Paraphrasing, he
  said to her, I don't want to read what
  you think. I want what to be told what
  the French think.

  Mr Carr sounds almost as aware as Ross
  was, that the wholesale violation of
  this standard of reporting, which tweet-
  ing represents, is not an influence so
  much in the dissemination of news as an
  influence upon its content, at the most
  wanton risk, at best, of its misconstruc-
  tion. I wrote to my young friend, I am 
  Jeffersonian in my appreciation of every-
  one's right to the possession and use of
  information, but Madisonian in sifting it.
  I take to heart Sontag's warning, of the
  risk of diminishing the horrible, but I'm
  greatly more troubled by the certainty of
  suppressing the relevant. Tweeting around 
  editing is not in the interest of cogni-
  tion; it is not even interested in it.

  Tweeting embodies that grotesque defor-
  mity wrought in the Clinton Presidency,
  by victims' statements in the leveling of
  criminal justice. When humanity agreed to
  exchange the volatility of vengeance for
  predictable standards as the foundation of
  justice, it ceded the claims of private
  agony to the legislature to anticipate, 
  the jury to apportion, and the judge to
  administer. It is why we grade papers, why
  we have Mozart to relieve dulness, why we
  breed horses to run. There is little about
  democracy that learning can't ameliorate.
  But the taste for it is vulnerable, and
  always the victim of impulsive ploys.

  We discuss occasionally the horrors of un-
  representative, undisciplined government
  from the top. But demagoguery depends on a
  demos to endure it. I have argued before,
  that taste is a human right. But it is a
  human achievement, not an animal reflex.
  I want to know what the French think; and
  I know, I need them to do it.

 

Heartlands

I had been in Berkeley, visiting a couple

of shops dealing in used and rare books, 

when I heard on the radio while crossing

the Bay Bridge, returning to Stanford, of

the conclusion of a rudimentary peace be-

tween Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. In

no more than a few moments, I exited the

freeway at Washington Street to turn up

Montgomery, for dinner at Ernie's. You

know Ernie's, even though it is nominal-

ly not there anymore, because it is where

James Stewart and Kim Novak dined in Ver-

tigo. A gentleman might not dine in res-

taurants, but when the occasion demands

access to a superior wine list, improvi-

sation is understandable, and forgiven.

Ernie's is still there in that principle,

while paranoia and deception are still as

vigorous in the land as they were in Ver-

tigo. And no one is allowing himself a

Château Ausone until the present terror

has been purged from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Still, a civil thirst sustains the dream.

If Ernie's were still ensconced in its Bar-
bary Coast brick digs in the 700 block of
Montgomery, its cellar would certainly now
boast a Californian corollary of Ch Ausone.
Their common debt to the wine grape Rabel-
ais grew in the Loire, and called his lit-
tle raspberries - Cabernet Franc - upholds
a stunning structural elegance amidst a
sea of grapes of famed intensity and bulk.
  
Investing in the 80's in several acres of
the choicest slope in Napa Valley, and cul-
tivating daringly at right angles to the
grade of custom, a bold single-mother im-
migrant named Delia Viader planted a vine-
yard of Cabernet Franc with Cabernet Sauv-
ignon, whose principal wine exhibits that
shining confluence of terroir and oenology
which made Ausone the wine of Cole Porter,
and which defies any mention as commonplace.

They are not always saints, despite a
famous lyric, who finally go marching
in. We think they surely must be saints,
who'd deliver us from the New American
government some day; but Saigon fell to
other sorts, and no one underestimates 
the relentlessness of a riposte deferred.
Mr Porter wrote a song I like better, for
setting things aright, Why Don't We Try
Staying Home? It would have spared this
generation a great civil war of foreign
policy, still playing out in the braying
vainglory of this most degenerate of our
Presidencies. It would have steeled us
against the lurid distractions of this
hustler demagogue, snarling at the world.
It would have cultivated the human right
of taste.

  










Jason Lowe for Berry Brothers & Rudd
Château Ausone
Bordeaux

Anonymous photographer
Viader Vineyards
Howell Mountain, Napa

Annals of the palate: the winefloggers are coming

     Charlottesville, Virginia - of all places - is about to furnish accommodation to a national conference of bloggers on wine, complete with a wine tasting on the lawn at Mr Jefferson's house, on a day assured of reaching 100º. One's half a mind to journey to this convention of the industrially occult as a fly on the wall, but these are very nice walls, and at that temperature adhesion can set in, and I don't intend to stay. So one must be reconciled to mingling as the alien any human is, at such swarmings of expertise.

  One hundred degrees, on the Fahrenheit scale, are some dozen above the absolute shutdown of photosynthesis in a vine, itself, and about 40 above the most advanced temperature at which any wine below the alcohol content of Port should be tasted, much less appraised.


  But this is a convening of industrialists, in whom the posture of connoisseurship is as legible in their loafers as in their lowered madras prose of delectation. This junket is not likely to be so distracted by the excuse for itself, as to notice.

  In some 700 postings we have seldom accosted each other here, with digressions on any potable, but wine does appear to our right under Matter, not that fog does not [yes, yes; one knows this doesn't count fog's unheralded appearance]. And who would not rather, among this page's readership, speculate together on the properties of the mist's dear condensation, more fondly than on anything that's bottled? 

  Still, if there should be anything of interest in this meeting, to distinguish it from ordinary chatter at Davos on financial conspiracy, or at country crossroads porches down here on who had spilled his Floris on his hankie overnight, then we might send a synopsis to the editorial committee for a ruling on its posting here. We might, but we might also heed these madras warnings and stay away.

  But is a digression of this conjectural nature any cause to abandon our consideration of the next tummy? One should very greatly hope not; and so much so, in fact, that without hesitation the editors have posted, atop this note, some of the most impeccable abs to hammer themselves into the vanishingly taut skin of a vessel of delight since Hephaestus faked a boybelt for Achilles. We know better than to suppose there's a vogue for silver, anymore, with blogging raising the ante past the conceits of the Sun King; but this is a blog about tummy, dearest darlings, and it will see those stale doubloons and raise them parallel gadroons of swirling light.

  Who knows? Ours is a natural world, after all. It might rain at this thing, ushering the whole mob into the servants' quarters - much the loveliest, in their bunkered ranges and fixtures of unquestioned authenticity. And the wines, having all been madeirised in their sojourn in the sun, might make a merry spread for our supper's toast.

  Batik and teak wine service is incongruous around here, but nothing slips the taste of the traveled palate, and no tincture has been spurned in heat prostration. Just when have madras warnings ever been known to be a match for clash, incarnate, that natural lightness of head to be endured as one sleeve extends handshake to another? The scene unfolds as we speak: a lawnful of champagne flutes with pretty straws to slurp tartaric precipitates from the stem; in brief, a native style of travesty at that.

i  Tastevin, Tiffany & Co.