Young maps

 I'd been made curious by this
 phonetic spelling of Glouces-
 ter, and indeed of the entire
 Bay, amidst perplexing indeci-
 sion about harbor; but I rea-
 soned, possibly these Konohas-
 sets own theirs, and the Scit-
 ates do not.

 This would correlate reasonab-
 ly with other land grabs from
 the time. One doesn't settle
 a language, without settling
 first the land. Thereafter,
 of course, the thing is sup-
 posed to be reliable. But I
 allow a little room for mig-
 ratory help, and welcome it.

¡ No pasarán !

The former President, whose name
informally identifies the struc-
sure of our health care system,
released a written statement on
Thursday, the 23rd, as a remind-
er of its reforming effects. It
was a curious utterance, marked
by no mania or narcissismm, in
fact, no Presidentiality at all.

Presidentially, obviously, the United States

is at a moment where we don't want the chil-

dren to pass any further. The gathering con-

sensus invokes the reluctance of Everyman to

permit the present spectacle to be witnessed

by their innocence. The expression is lifted

from the rhetoric of Dolores Ibárruri in the

war our grand-parents waged against fascism,

on a plot of ground commemorated by Goya for

us all. But what did loose the dog internal-

ly, compulsively now leaping at our throats,

if not a quicksand which embraced his leash?

This repulsive orgy against our people's hu-

man right of care, claims no canine dignity.

Not a shred of it.

Francisco de Goya

ca 1820

Clean white shirt, coming back?

I am torn between attempting
a scattering of joy and sim-
ply keeping it all to myself

but every time I contemplate

that calculation, I remember

to keep the ball in play, or

forfeit possession for delay.

Now Jane Mayer, over at The New

Yorker, has discovered the fami-

ly Mercer, as she memorably has

done for our darling Koch boys,

to say nothing of Dick Cheney -

not to ask more than forgetful-

ness could ever bestow upon us.

What this will mean for the new

government seems likelier to de-

pend on how much time it's per-

mitted outside the penalty box,

more than whatever she may turn

up. But we've made that miscal-

culation before, respecting ex-

posure's style in playing fair.

Down to desperate begging

What does it mean, when a Center-Right

opinion leader and namedropping hob-

nobber in powerful circles resorts to

anguished pleading in his elevated col-

umm, to a few noted oligarchs, to save

the Presidency by nannying its usurper?

It means an unconstitutional avoidance

of impeachment, ungentlemanly temptation.

Thomas L. Friedman

Calling on a few good men

The New York Times©

March 22, 2017

Mark A. Patterson

Defining the Presidency down

Politico©

March 21, 2017

Eton College

How we live

The evening brought word of the death 

at 87 of Robert Silvers, a founding 

publisher of our most oft-cited maga-

zine, The New York Review of Books. 

Turning with reluctance, to the no-

tice in The Times, it was astonishing 

but apposite to read the most expansive 

and exuberant report of such a transi-

tion I had ever encountered, placing one 

in no mood whatever to go beyond a grate-

ful, “Yup, that’s right."

The Review and I go back, as must be true 

for most readers, to one’s college days, 

that period of such eruption of curiosity 

as to wed the social and institutional as-

pects of the one with the portable and 

printed ones of the other, without a hitch.

One seamless curriculum and recreation, too,

setting certain values and expectations to 

challenge the tide, as searchings concealed 

within undiminished delight from one decade 

to the next, in ways which no other outstand-

ing “liberal arts” periodical has done with-

out sharp vicissitudes and alienating embar-

rassments, or destruction by mismanagement.

But there is that ultimate distinction to

be raised on this occasion, and it is that

in other fine periodicals, one can be made

to feel one had missed out, by lacking the

requisite cultural bias or social identity,

to say nothing of academic advantage. This

magnificent journal opens every humanist

calling to its pursuit by any active mind.

Now, suddenly, we see it is not too soon to 

understand, unlike our cyclical academies, 

the Review never does gain an alumnus, until 

one achieves the rest now granted this guar-

dian of its ebullient play. The boat will go

out, the Review will go with it, and there

will be feasting on the beach as this is so.

Oh, to paint one's way from Winter

Art is the conscious design
of emotions that work on us
unconsciously, an achieve-
ment of naturalness through
the most unnatural of means.

The strange fact is that in-
spiration must be crafted,
that the flight of fancy must
be engineered.

Returning to Watteau again on Sunday, for an unhurried escape into co-herency as well as subtlety of gesture - particularly to research any background one could find at home, on a remembered model he created for a figure of indifference - I found it only too telling that one of Watteau's most ardent advocates on my shelves had chosen to discuss that extraordinary painting under the heading, rather, of unconscious-ness. For, truly, the very motive to examine the sources of indiffer-ence as Watteau proposes them, is to investigate calculations of dis-ciplined inspiration, and sustained craft. Merely to admire the in-congruousness of the result is not enough, I think, where so radiantly the painter is celebrating the method.

To enjoy the endowments of indif-ference is to generate them and protect them. 
Watteau's L'indifférent is not a fashionable idler, a flâneur out of Baudelaire or Edmund White. He is that spiritual accomplishment, a free man. But then how little recognition one might have given to his need to be painted, that is, to be crafted by a conscious, unconflicted vision. Yet the painting goes beyond structural resolution to present freedom, not so much in its expression, but as its expression. And this, we recognize as entirely the case in its every feature, as a mature construction within the concep-tion and conduct of its engineer. The critic left one no escape, only something better.

























Antoine Watteau
L'indifférent
1716
Palais du Louvre


Jed Perl
Antoine's Alphabet
  Watteau and His World
Alfred A. Knopf, 2008©

"Haec mea sunt," he says

I think one cannot recommend,
to relieve that sensation so
prevalent these days, of be-
ing too captivated by "cur-
rent events," any flight to
agrarian Classics we grew up
with, culturally, figurative-
ly, academically, literally.

Lycidas, we never thought that what
Has happened to us was ever going
  to happen,
And now we've lived to see it. 
  A stranger came
To take possession of our farm, and   said: 
"I own this place; you have to  leave this place."


"haec mea sunt; 
ueteres migrate coloni"






Now, when the literature of
the rural preserve, such as
we still renew so gainfully
in our time, is revisited as
an escape, we find a shadow
has always been there; and
if it is true, that finally
it is this nation's turn to
endure its weight, it is as
if we were being scavenged,
but for the life of poetry.

                  .. when eagles come

                  tell me what doves can do about it?

Virgil
The Eclogues
  Eclogue IX
  Lycidas and Moeris
  [fragments]
David Ferry
  translation
op. cit.

Verlyn Klinkenborg
The Rural Life
Little, Brown & Co, 2003©

Michael McCarthy
The Moth Snowstorm
  Nature and Joy
New York Review Books, 2015©