Suppose it were Friday clxxii: The night they invented champagne

The phrase comes from an obscure
Broadway musical from an equally
unremarked century, the previous 
one. But we take heart, the wine
is still recognized, even as the
turtleneck and the pea coat have
vanished, with much more finali-
ty than the male waistline. Hope
for a song extolling long pants,
then, if you favor your moorings
in the present era. Now the pro-
fession of basketball is the on-
ly serious threat to the reputa-
tion of champagne, but while its
pants do keep getting longer, it
asks too much to expect to see a 
break concealing an endorsement.

But LVMH, who produce more cham-
page than anyone else, also cer-
tainly hawk shoes as well, so we
must soon see our czars of cham-
pagne consumption sipping from a
shoe with the same logotype. Dom
Pérignon sneakers are inevitable.

How providently, then, we subdue
the past. Back when we had Gigi,
the aromatics of a gym shoe were
thought to signify a wine fault.
How elegantly our status symbols
ascend from the soles of virtue. 













Mathias Lauridsen
  Cerruti 1881

Origins of Wednesday cvii: Motivated to meet

A new acquaintance is seldom undertaken

entirely on one's own terms. Those that

are, can still remain interesting, when

a liberality of collaboration is a term

of one's point of view. I have been en-

joying screwball comedies from the '30s

and '40s again, which acknowledge anar-

chy less as a structuring principle and

more as a consequence of its resistance.

I could have been reading Euripides in-

stead, whose Bacchae is really not fun-

ny, but which acknowledges this paradox

pretty vividly. But now I have lost the

certainty of reach which depends upon a

life with one's books in an established

if quaintly disorderly location, having

moved house in the last quarter of 2019.

This inflicts a loss of fluency in con-

nectedness among influences on the mind

which I wouldn't wish on anyone. I deny

that it is refreshing, because connect-

edness comes first, propinquity second,

except if anarchy encounters resistance.

This glimpse of things was brought home

to me early in the life of the blog, in

a learnèd mentor's stupefaction, that I

proposed to consider water for its link

between the cinema of Jean Vigo and the

movie, If.., by Lindsay Anderson, where

there isn't any. No, there is gymnastic

exercise, though, whose incidence marks

connectedness with mesmerising fluidity.

The screwball comedy exhibits instabil-

ity as the price of a compulsory order-

liness about as well as if dull reform,

itself, had kept my translations of the

Bacchae all in one place, instead of in

the general terrain of each translator.

A more desolate outlook for the mind is

no pleasure for me to imagine. Give one

the connectedness of dark with light, a

sense of procession without fences, but

of genial collaboration, such as we ex-

perience in Henry Miller's intuition to

travel to Greece by way of the Dordogne

to Marseille - a passage ordered freely

by expectancy, astonishment, and nature.

So I packed my valise and took the train for Rocamadour where I arrived early one morning about sun up, the moon still gleaming brightly. It was a stroke of genius on my part to make the tour of the Dordogne region before plunging into the bright and hoary world of Greece. Just to glimpse the black, mysterious river at Dômme from the beautiful bluff at the edge of the town is something to be grateful for all one's life. To me this river, this country, belong to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It is not French, not Austrian, not European even: it is the country of enchantment which the poets have staked out . .

Henry Miller
The Colossus of Maroussi
New Directions, 1941©

The name one has

             So that I could mark it, the continuance of

             quality could in some way be that, the time
             of accord. For us, as beneath the falling water
                      we draw breath,
                      look at the sky.
             Talking to the man hitching a lift back
             from the hospital, I was incautious in sympathy:
             will she be back soon I was wishing to
             encourage his will to suppose. I can hardly
             expect her back he said and the water
             fell again, there was this sheet, as the time
                      lag yawned, and quality
                      became the name you have,
             like some anthem to the absent forces of nature.
             Ethnic loyalty, breathe as you like we in fact
             draw it out differently, our breath is gas
             in the mind. That awful image of choking.

The present American government has
challenged the latent ecumenicism in
every honest and inquiring heart, to
recoil into denial of both qualities.
At this, it is said to have succeed-
ed; but how hollowly, how transitor-
ily does that intimidating edict a-
chieve our hearing, given the dial-
ect of the voices which give this
verdict. It is not of the languages
of our continent -- French, Swahili,
Sioux, Spanish, Dutch, German, Gael-
ic, Italian -- but of our illiterate
merchants of obliteration as revenge.

We do not risk choking on the breath
of our descent, but on its aliena-
tion from others who would comprise 
ourselves.

J.H. Prynne
The White Stones
  Concerning Quality, Again
  first verse
New York Review Books, 2016©

Carlo Scarpa
  Olivetti
  Venice

Ivan Terestchenko
  Beach fire

New York, May 7, 1949

Homer Page

1918-1985

Howard Greenberg Gallery

New York