With whom is ours a Common Era?

Nightingales, Swallows, your admirers, who

Discovered each their signal songs in you,

Voiced rival dirges from opposing glades,

And one flock chafed the other: Milksop maids,

You call that grieving? Well, we're grieving, too.

Sicilian Muses, croon your sad old song.

Master thrice missed, what arrogant upstart

Would lip your pipes in mockery of your art?

Your mouth still sounds them, they still breathe your air,

And your own echoes still are straying there.

Bequeath your song to Pan? No, even Pan

Would back off, yielding mastery to a man.

Sicilian Muses ..

And Kypris lavishes more kisses than 

She lately planted on the dying Adonis.

                  Then in the incarnadine darkness

                  a great slow pulse began to beat.

  Early one summer morning when he was a boy he had watched from the kitchen a snail crawling up the window outside. The moment came back to him now, wonderfully clear, the washed sunlight in the garden, the dew, the rosebuds on the tumbledown privy, that snail. What had possessed it to climb so high, what impossible blue vision of flight reflected in the glass? The boy had trod on snails, savouring the crack and then the soft crunch, had collected them, had raced them and traded them, but never before now had he really looked at one. Pressed in a lavish embrace upon the pane, the creature gave up its frilled grey-green underparts to his gaze, while the head strained away from the glass, moving blindly from side to side, the horns weaving as if feeling out enormous forms in air. But what had held [him] was its method of crawling. He would have expected some sort of awful convulsions, but instead there was a series of uniform small smooth waves flowing endlessly upward along its length, like a visible heartbeat. The economy, the heedless beauty .. baffled him.

Moschus of Syracuse

Untitled

ca 150 BC

Aaron Poochigian

  translation

  [fragment]

The Greek Poets

  Homer to the Present

Peter Constantine

  Rachel Hadas

  Edmund Keeley

  Karen Van Dyck

    editors

W.W. Norton & Co.

op. cit.


John Banville
Kepler
  A Novel
  III  Dioptrice
Secker & Warburg, 1981©

iii  John Coltrane
iv   Karlis Adlers
v    Glenn Gould
vi   Native passage
      Edward S. Curtis
      1907
      cf., Timothy Egan
             Short Nights of the
                Shadow Catcher
             Houghton Mifflin, 2012©

Lèche-vitrine

An idiomatic phrase, denot-

ing desire-window, connot-

ing to us, window-shopping, 

became lately a category of 

posting at a web page I know, 

which is concerned with tex-

tiles and other tissues of 

taste among people of deco-

rating interests in France.

My observation is that all

are born with decorating in-

terests, but that France pre-

serves a wider demilitarised

zone for us than most Western

cultures. It is a wonder, if

one thinks about it, that we

never hear of a depletion in

taste in the culture most of-

ten cited as disseminating it, 

and with such little regard

for who exercises it. Can it

be, that the human right is

not rebellious when embraced?

Not that this cultural and

psychological reality lacks

for historical derivation,

in feudalism, Catholicism,

and openly ironic absolut-

ism. The Protestant, plu-

tocratic, and capitalistic 

societies haven't synthe-

sized it, and would not

if they could. No one is

to blame for this acciden-

tal cultural injury, but

its legacy proliferates -

to make taste, dangerous.

Is this ever sustainable?

Who will mind if it isn't?

Recondita armonia

To an artist who 
suggested being
linked in.

     All media are social,

     Scarpia. What are you

     going to do about it?

A backstage sign can't stop it.
The challenge in social media,
for lack of a better defining
phrase, is less in the quality
of their painting than in their
audience's seeing. I realize
that these things overlap, but
poor work has always existed -
with the best, often ill-served.
What's new is its distribution,
and rapidity of assimilation.
Is this temperature, reductive?

So much imbalance and unrefine-
ment are in self-reinforcing ex-
change, so that the likelihood
of their acceptance only rises,
while the excellent is suspect.
Nations panic, societies unrav-
el, friendships fray in such a
climate. Gresham's Law shows it-
self a scourge to every quality, 
irreconcilables flourish madly.
Any day, there may be Cézanne.

Because, we see, standards fail
by testing, not by neglect. If
an unharmonious way is tried,
it will nevertheless be tested.
Does art, as Cavaradossi sang,
blend contrasting beauties, to-
gether?  

Is this a risk we're ever spared?
Something is always not supposed
to be shown.

Giacomo Puccini
Giuseppe Giacosa
  libretto
Tosca
1900

Paul Cézanne
Houses in Provence
ca 1880
Collection Paul Mellon
National Gallery of Art

Richard Shiff
Cézanne and the
  End of Impressionism
op. cit.

Frederik Ruegger
i, ii
2014

Ah, our horrid half-times

                  just the

                  time for

                  jesting.

 

There can be no question
but that a lot of people
believed that painting
was in trouble ..
















Jed Perl
New Art City
  From Ready-Mades
  to Cut-Outs
op. cit.

See also, especially,
Jed Perl
Magicians & Charlatans
  Essays on Art and Culture
  The Opportunist
op. cit.

Alexander Vandepuite
Niki de St Phalle
Jasper Johns

Has the rage for washing gone too far?

We all awoke to happy news of our 
dear Yale, a university near water, 
in Connecticut. Sterling Library has 
been scrubbed spanky clean, which cuts 
down considerably on the lighting bill, 
as you can see; but there were those 
who wondered if the glare were very 
wholesome, or especially conducive to 
reading. That said, The Times illus-
trated the triumph of the bucket bri-
gade with a portrait of undergraduates, 
browsing in laptops in the eaves. Even 
happilier, this was free money anyway.

Somberer, however, is the
heart that greets Martin
Filler's latest alarm -
so fresh, from our losing
battle for Park Avenue -
of the scrubbings gone
amok at Chartres. And, yes, I do mean that Chartres, not in Connec-ticut at all, whose dis-covery we attribute to a Harvard man. Now a cabal of that college is dis-covered, veritably bleaching the place, rectitude again drowning faith in its own cradle. 

Now we don't think unclean, a rev-
erence that's enhanced by manifes-
tations of permanence. An artist,
a generation, is entitled to an
idea, but not to its immunity. To
repair is one thing. To eliminate
centuries of dialogue and its con-
text from our experience of such
things, is a cremation of their
extant life. This seems arrogant.

Just sayin'. 

My jacket for winter

     and how I like to
     hang my shirt out 
     in the wind 
     


















Tom Wells

Thinking outside the Arsenal

When was it, last year, the

year before? I was standing

in front of the Arsenal in

Venice, looking at your sta-

tue. You nearly always stand

slightly turned away in your

statues, looking to one side,

as though you wish to avoid 

a conversation.. That after-

noon I had read something a-

bout the divine in a book a-

bout Plato, about how the

Greeks, in moments of terrify-

ing catastrophe or delirious

joy, those moments when every-

thing about our lives becomes

dazzlingly visible in a light

of almost unbearable intensity,

would have an experience of the

divine.. Some gods are still

feared and worshipped, others

languish in books and museums..

they can still rely on their

beauty, but no longer on their

power. Where did the problem be-

gin for you Olympians? With Soc-

rates, who, by constantly think-

ing aloud, began the process of

removing magic from the world,

even though he believed in the

immortality of the soul? 

Or was it earlier, with Xeno-

phanes, who accused Hesiod and

Homer of having given the gods

all manner of negative human 

habits - adultery, jealousy, 

deceit ..? Did you ever devote

any attention to such thoughts?

Of course, that means my writing

to you is a paradox, because the

letter assumes you still exist,

but please allow me my questions..

 Cees Nooteboom
 Laura Watkinson
   translation
 Letters to Poseidon
   Letter xx [fragment]
 Maclehose Press, 2014©

Marmoreal

  Elevation,
  of swells.


  Astound me
  with some-
  thing obvi-
  ous.

Lartigue
Deauville
1917