Au revoir, les treize

    They made a

    whole knife

    for butter?

Martin Conte

Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean Cocteau
François Truffaut

Past red

for a critic

at the exhib-

ition, and
for visitors

  

  And don't presume you knew the man       you wronged

  so very well. He surely had virtues       you were unaware of;

  nor perhaps are those deep wounds the     ones

  that you imagine (out of ignorance of     his life)

  to be the dreadful blows that came       from you

  Don't count on your feeble memory.

  Temper your remorse, which is always

  so one-sidedly against you, it's           casuistry.

              An obstacle was there and it distorted

              my actions and the way I lived my life.

              An obstacle was there and it stopped me

              on many occasions when I was going to speak.

  But perhaps it's not worth
    squandering
  so much care and trouble on
    puzzling me out.
  Afterwards - in some more
    perfect society -
  someone else who's fashioned
    like me
  will surely appear and be free
    to do as he pleases.

C.P. Cavafy
  i Remorse

  1925, unfinished
  ii - iii Hidden
  1908, unpublished
Daniel Mendelsohn
  editor and translator
C.P. Cavafy
  The Unfinished Poems
    The First English Translation
op. cit.

Authentication failure and I

Have I kept secret my relation-

ship with social media? I don't

mean D&B or Dilatory Domiciles,

much less alumni publications.

I mean, as you'd suppose, the

darling upstart industries with

GPS impertinence, which captured

friends I knew once, whom I nev-

er hear from anymore, because I

refuse authentication. Every day,

it's the same distraught message

from the leading app du jour, ex-

claiming that my authentication

has failed, in the belief (I'm 

only guessing) that I should be

sufficiently alarmed to leap in-

to corrective engulfment, to be

ratified as real, as if one's

surgeons, themselves, could not

be trusted to find a heartbeat

without this evidentiary trail.

Not to be pompous about it, it

suits me to dissatisfy entreat-

ies for absorption in this new

standard of trust. I remember

methods that work well enough

for that; and for recognition,

too. I do wish my telephones

would accept this reassurance,

but they persist in urging me,

disturbing me, distracting me

and worse, to immerse myself 

in a daisy chain illusion of

sustaining my relationships.

Not extremely likely, anyway,

that I'd be a fit for any-

one's corsage of intimates.

Who would forget Forster -

It would require a botanist

to do justice to these flow-

ers, but fortunately there

is no occasion to do justice

to flowers.

Oh, yes, indeed. I'm aware of

how much leverage I'm refus-

ing, how much linkage I am

squandering, for the projec-

tion of one's face into the

grand tier - or was it, upon

the stage, my cap's supposed

to be set? O, mirror, mirror,

marry me, at least my merry

effigy, today, lest all of

my society despair of improp-

riety in play. One does feel

somewhat Waldenish at times,

while others seem genuinely 

to thrill to this mindlessly

acquisitive, exhibitionist 

structuring of friendships. 

It lacks the requisite dignity

even for abstention to imply a 

characteristic of life, or any 

remark one could intend. 

                  Then the camel will shuffle 

                  up and down, dragging after 

                  him a wooden plough, and the 

                  Bedouin, guiding it, will sing 

                  tunes to the camel that he can 

                  only sing to the camel, because 

                  in his mind the tune and the 

                  camel are the same thing.

E.M. Forster

Pharos and Pharillon

1923©

Creative Arts Book

  Company, Berkeley, 1980©

Absolutist surveillance, anyone?

  

   ... unless a statesman
   feels some sense of re-
   vulsion when he has to
   choose to commit a nec-
   essary evil, he is far
   more likely to commit
   an evil when it is not
   necessary.

Noel Annan could capture the Wodehousian enchantedness of Comrade Stalin perhaps better than the master, himself, given the latter's absorption in record-keeping. In the surreal ditziness of the doddering ornithologist, Saxby senior, there were flashes of unanswerable penetration, resembling Stalin's on hearing that his spy, Kim Philby, was being a huge success in Spain, even as Franco was advancing. That isn't logical, Stalin objected. It's rather the way one feels to be given excuses of endearing innocence for a President, on the strength of his liking for Topolobampo, who's amassing a dossier on the entire world. Nice taco, Comrade?

 It's enough to engender the ennui
 on which repression always relies,
 to be greeted with the identical
 intimidations one voted against, 
 all one's life, as the culture's
 descent into the paranoia of the
 Cold War climaxed in the incred-
 iblest confection of invisible e-
 mergencies, in every corner of a
 soccer child's locker room. Al-
 ways there was the complaisantly
 clever "reformer," who'd promise
 relief from domestic injustice in
 broad daylight, who'd dare us to
 risk our lives and our hopes with
 worse. Now we admit, this isn't
 logical, and with the clear-eyed,
 crazy ornithologist, we observe, 
 there's no such bogey in the sky.

 It's where we go to breathe.
    

   

Noel Annan
Dean of the Cold War
The New York Review of Books©
ibid.

P.G. Wodehouse
Cocktail Time
op. cit.

Constructive apronstrings

Rare as they
may be, they
can throttle
the silly to
a standstill.

    At Groton he bucked
    the spartan regime
    of its headmaster.
    Endicott Peabody
    told his mother to
    take him away since
    he would never make
    a Groton boy out of
    him. His mother re-
    plied she had not
    sent Dean there to
    be made into a Grot-
    on boy but to be ed-
    ucated, and she sug-
    gested Peabody should
    start doing so.

Noel Annan
Provost of King's College
Vice-Chancellor of University College

Dean of the Cold War
  A review of
  James Chace, Acheson:
  The Secretary of State
  who Created the American
  World
The New York Review of Books
November 19, 1998©

Come to year's end

momentarily.

 The duties of living

 wear a face visibly,

 and yet when it goes

 the other way, a vis-

 age is companionship

 I find, sight unseen. 

Derek

beggars would ride

Saturday commute xcviii: foraging abroad

   I was in great health and 

   and spirits, and fully ab-

   le to enter into the ideas

   of the brave, rude men whom 

   I found in all quarters.

                          

      It was just being

      for a little while

      one of the prisca

      gens mortalium,

      who ran about in

      the woods eating

      acorns and drink-

      ing water.                         

James Boswell

The Yale Editions of

  the Private Papers

  of James Boswell

Frank Brady and

  Frederick A. Pottle, editors

Boswell on the Grand Tour

  Italy, Corsica, and France

  1765 - 1766

McGraw-Hill, 1955©

Horace

Epodes

 ii, 2

ibid.

Hamish Quigley

Max Motta

Suppose it were Friday lxxxix: Daybreak

 

  The displaced persons  

  are willing to go any-

  where on earth except 

  home.

It is a portrait not of Marian Evans the woman but of George Eliot the artist, and one is not surprised to learn that Lewes rejected it. The face is sad, the eyes are cold and weary, the expression superior, the mouth is sensual and cruel: not the cruelty of a torturer, but the cruelty of a judge. Why should it not be? No charge of hypocrisy laid at her door could compare with the double-dealing of the society which condemned her .. Human beings, particularly when they are artists, are too valuable, too disparate, too contradictory to be left in the hands of the critics or the psychoanalysts. Their poignancy rests in the peculiar force with which each spurns the ideal.

Janet Flanner

Genêt

The New Yorker©

October 30, 1948

Modris Eksteins

Walking Since Daybreak

  A Story of Eastern Europe,

  World War II, and the Heart

  of our Century

Houghton Mifflin, 1999©

Noel Annan

Heroine

  A review of

  George Eliot

  Gordon Haight, 1968

The New York Review©

January 2, 1969