Saturday commute clxxiv: Travel for breakfast

The party had spread out to visit

the further corners of the site

but Deeds, who knew from old not

to waste time, headed me across

the meadows towards a pleasant

little bar where we celebrated ..

"It was a very singular sound he

made," said Deeds. "Like a bumble

bee in a bottle. I heard it from

a great distance. It sounded like

the bees in Agamemnon's tomb."

Miss Lobb walked about with a

pleasant air of having done her

duty. The two old apple-people

sat down in a clump of bushes

and began to eat fruit which the

old man peeled with a small pock-

et knife. They were radiant, ab-

solutely without fear of the un-

derworld. The Bishop had recovered

his composure and was once more

pacing about the temples and be-

having as if he were suspicious

about being overcharged for them.

Roberto, still shaken, drank Coca-

Cola. Mario blew his sudden horn

at last and we awoke to action

once more.

Lawrence Durrell
Sicilian Carousel
  Agrigento
Viking, 1977©

Suppose it were Friday clxxv: "What shall we do, play cards?"

One of the charmingest lines in

the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock,

in the sound era at any rate, 

finds the would-be assassin of

his well-to-do wife peevishly

mocking her refusal to go along

with his well-oiled conspiracy.

Her task is to stay at home, so

to bore herself to sleep that

she may be awakened in a daze 

and overpowered by a strangler.

But she wants to go to a movie.

Thus, he must shame her for re-

quiring him to stay as well, by

ridiculing what they might do.

As any decent murderer from a

hit play - the original book

for this film - would only too

freely confess, the show must

go on, the crisis must precip-

itate, the unities be observed.

Now the assassin plays the pro-

gressive part, and the victim

the transgressive in the long-

running thriller, grinding

away on Pennsylvania Avenue.

But these terms of art only

miss the point of Dial M for

Murder. Crime is not ideology,

it's meteorology; it's what

the times will permit. Imagin-

ing rolling back the tide, to

those halcyon days of Biden's

highest ever-held office, in-

vites one to neglect the plot.

Alfred Hitchcock

  director

Frederick Knott

  and Alfred Hitchcock

  screenplay

Dial M for Murder

Warner Brothers, 1954©

Origins of Wednesday xcvii: Books to let go of

Winston Churchill, invoked already in

the casual preposition in this title,

argued equally wisely once for a cas-

ual relationship with one's books, ad-

vising to pick them up occasionally,

turn to a page or two, and place it a-

gain where it may be found. This reli-

ance, apart from taking place more and

more these days through the wits of a

search engine, among pages not even in

physical reach, touchingly neglects de-

accessioning books now and then, as is

not unheard of between academic years.

Physical contexts are evidently beneath

discussion, except in American politics,

where there is little else that counts.

  

  

Can we agree to think of a book to let

go of? Then we must agree to think of a

book, unless they are all alike. In fair-

ness to readers in languages other than

English, let us agree on a book in wide

translation, which originated in English.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will

serve, I think, with its exorbitant ad-

vantage, further, of discussing American

politics without omitting the physical.

Can one imagine a preparedness to dis-

pense with the book as if it never did

exist? We live with the Parthenon, and

yet have allowed its vestiges not to be

brought to London; could we not live

without its having existed? But that's

the difference. We accept the Parthenon

as a matter of form, without assimilat-

ing its purposes and implementation, as

we are browbeaten to respect the book.

But the book can be with us physically.

And the Parthenon? Stepping by my copy

of Vincent Scully's notes on the build-

ing, on my way to collect a mug of cof-

fee just now, I plucked it to hand and

saw, A critic wrote at the time that 

Guernica [Picasso, 1937] looked like

a Greek pediment that had been hit by

a locomotive, and that is, of course,

exactly how the west pediment of the

Temple of Zeus looks in its recon-

structed fragments. What search engine

will give me spontaneous revelation,

and lift coffee from humdrum habit?

This is Churchill all over again. Hold-

ing the physical decanter of the thing,

is a stage of readiness and indebted-

ness we can't approach, even in Athens.

Think, the book, and know where it is:

a precarious impression at best, but a

deeply embedded one. Possibly this is

why Churchill's great contemporary,

Harry Truman, counseled getting a dog.

We know Huckleberry Finn so casually.

Vincent Scully

Architecture: The

  Natural and the

  Manmade

St. Martin's Press©

1991

Some summer night

    As far back as I can remember,

    I always wanted to be a gang-

    ster. To me, being a gangster

    was better than being Presid-

    ent of the United States.

Nicholas Pileggi
Martin Scorsese
  screenplay
Goodfellas
Warner Brothers©
1990

White hot and humid

The season is giving us wonderful

things to talk about just now, in

weather in the Northern Hemisphere

which is simply punishing to men-

tion, and adventures in progressiv-

ism which seem inspired to emulate

this brooding miasma in all but its

transitory aspects, with articula-

tion of a new and alluring image of

racism. Does anyone recall what it

was like in 1848, when dialectical

materialism steeped us in its kettle?

The present striving, to portray a

frequency of effect as monolithic-

ally determinate, is understandable

in view of its unspeakability, but

if we have learned that reform is

not wasted on the weather, how do

we propose racism without racists?

I'm going to go out on a limb, and

suggest a little skepticism toward

theories of a culture's more repul-

sive characteristics which endow

them with the impersonal innocence

of weather. It's really only for

these analytical risks that I haz-

ard resistance to neo-Natural Law

illusions to dismiss free will, but

now that you mention it, fatalism

has acquired such support of late

in the fluctuations in the ozone

layer, as to endanger blame itself.

These consequences of inertia are

usually deemed ironic, when belat-

edly perceived. But like our dif-

ficult weather just now, let's not

flatter them by denying meteorology.

We can be dazzled by how it could 

end, but we can know how it begins.

Drew Gilpin Faust

Race, History, and

  Memories of a Vir-

  ginia Girlhood

The Atlantic©

August, 2019