Blasé in extremes

The model, Clément Chabernaud, has

stood in for so many principles at

this page, that he acquired (early

on) a vitrine. We can't be sure if

he has been found here, loitering

with intent, but he certainly does

with inclination, so he might very

well have something up his sleeve,

notwithstanding an air of Indiffér-

ence worthy of a figure in Watteau.

Whose nature's drawn to infuse the

vacuum, what purpose to extremity?

Origins of Wednesday lxv: Acting

I have always liked music,
but I grew to like opera
in my 30s because it told
me a story, and I could
hear dialogue as conver-
sation explained on par-
allel tracks. Except in
Mozart, naturally, where
da Ponte's libretti were
no more than narratives
one no longer needs.

I watched Ang Lee's mov-
ie on the Annie Proulx
story, Brokeback Mountain,
for the first time since
the daytime screening I
saw of it more than ten
years ago. Now, I think
Heath Ledger's portrayal
of Ennis del Mar, widely
praised back then, holds
up honorably well. Ledger
is gone, our Jacks and
our Ennises are gone; but
he put something on the
screen for the generations
to see themselves by. In
the meantime, we all have
Jack's shirt on its hook.
Long after it held there
for anguish, it persists
in place, to warm his kind.











Willy Vanderperre
Clément Chabernaud
undated

Face off

In Preston Sturges' sometimes un-

dated and exceptionally funny com-

edy from 1941, Sullivan's Travels,

a high-minded star director thinks

it's his duty to cast aside escap-

ist frolics, and sets about an im-

mersion in the life of the common

man, culminating in a spectacular-

ly sadistic Southern prison, where

the inmates are sometimes pacified

by a glimpse of cinema at the loc-

al African-American church. And it

works; movies can do things.

Layers of difference would have to be con-ceded, in how we see another high-minded star director's examination of the life of the common man in post-Cold War Europe, in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue (1993), White (1993), Red (1994), but again the cinema works its ambivalent escape.

That most cinema is watched in solitude today, must call upon assumptions in a director which are as wholly unexpected as a lifting of political censorship. A coincidence of history raises a defining question, of whether the DVD has only exchanged one alienation for another. In Blue, which is as far as I've allowed myself to step thus far - for about 20 minutes - I couldn't say I've ever seen imagery of greater eloquence in movies. And this impression generates another: does the great film, the superlative symphonic performance, require the participating witness by the many, not just to be endurable in full or to be achieved in full, but even to be received in time?

Clément Chabernaud

Sean O'Pry

Donath Szatmári

A set, restored to print

In the back pages of rmbl there is

to be found an outcry on the adop-

tion of imagery of this conduct to

portray anything but self-destruc-

tion. It happens to suit a discus-

sion of David Leavitt's latest ef-

fort, The Two Hotel Francforts, an
impressively popular rumination on
survival.

The book comes to us with blurbs

immunising it almost against com-

prehension, much less any further

admiration. This is too bad. It's

worth reading, even if one cannot

qualify as such an innocent as to

share Edmund White's sense of be-

ing manipulated by a "master." It

is a totally serviceable portrait

of a set whose play with sex and

money is intimidated, and thereby

wasted, by indulgent privilege. I 
study the paradox, not quite as a
first impression.

Such is the patrimony of our con-

ception of homosexuality, that a

Hispano-Suiza is, like the Kelly

bag, or an indenture at Groton, 

simply neutered whenever it may

make its entrance. It does no

good to mourn the faux libera-

tionism in a tale of morbid mat- 

uring millionaires*, mouthing mi-

metic medial parts, when, after

all, there is much to mesmerise

in the allusions they can mus-

ter, to literature, painting or

sculpture which remain tragical-

ly alien to the common mind. And

such an enviable part, on these

occasions, too.

The common mind suspends its
natural truancy from works on
pompous parlour games, if sex
might be conjugated en route.
Intellectual tasting of life
will not supersede muscular
activity, Mr Emerson warned,
anatomising our experience. 
Drawing from Chaucer, Leavitt
goes so far as to ask its help. 
This is not the least of what

one can extract from this os-

tensibly superficial text, be-

cause it is not to be put past

this writer to be discomfiting
the settled, even as he might

hoist a living from the pruri-
ent, fashionbound, and dazed.

He has an attack to mount on

treachery to privilege, and, 

aw, shucks. Hear him out. It
isn't every day, our enter-
tainments dare go near the
water. He serves, who also 
shills.

  You know, you're wrong to       think I'm smart, [Edward         Freleng] said. The truth is,     I'm just a junk heap. All       these allusions and             references, these little         associations I draw - they're   junk. And all I do all day is   sift through them, line them     up, move them around. 

David Leavitt

The Two Hotel Francforts

  A Novel

Bloomsbury, 2013©

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essays: Second Series
  Experience
1844
David Mikics, editor
The Annotated Emerson
op. cit.

* the dollar in 1940

Durrell unreticent

..

And poetry, you once said, can be a deliverance

And true in many sorts of different sense,

Explicit or else like that awkward stare,

The perfect form of public reticence.

I would guess, after a while,

many of us know our short list

of writers, to whom we return

for a kind of revitalising vis-

it, only to turn up more than

we originally discovered. Dur-

rell is securely on that list

for me; and he is not a stored

pleasure, for this reason. He

is almost a surrogate conversa-

tionalist, but I do appreciate

his distinctiveness. He is not,

to put it mildly, a pet.

I would not like to be in any

position of seeming to offer a

boast for Lawrence Durrell. I'm

unhappy with such things, espe-

cially for practitioners in his

art of writing. A lover of mine

from Paris sometime back once

replied, to one of my exuberant

praises, But I had nothing to do

with it. Durrell had everything

to do with how he wrote, but not

with what he gave it.

Lawrence Durrell

Selected Poems

  Portfolio

  fragment

Peter Porter, editor

op. cit.

Clément Chabernaud

Saturday commute xciv: one's own chariot

  On the path to the water, I found an ugly weed

  growing between rocks. The wind was stroking it,

  saying, 'My weed, my weed.' Its solid,

  hairy body rose up, with big silver leaves

  that rubbed off on me, like sex. At first,

  I thought it was a lamb's ear, but it wasn't.

  I'm not a member of the ugly school,

  but I circled around it and looked a lot,

  which is to say, I was just being, and it seemed to me -

  in a higher sense - to represent the sanity of living.

  It was twilight. Planets were gathering.

  'Mr Weed,' I said, 'I'm competitive,

  I'm afraid, I'm isolated, I'm bright.

  Can you tell me how to survive?'

            

Henri Cole

Pierce the Skin

  Selected Poems 1982 - 2007

  My Weed

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010©

Before the Terror, and of course Ted Cruz

Sir, I'm sure you believe

that everything is for the

best, both in the moral and

the physical world, and that

nothing could possibly be

different?

I, sir, the scholar answered,

think nothing of the sort. I

think everything goes wrong,

in this world of ours; that no

one understands either his place

or his duties, and except for 

dinner - which is cheerful and

appears to bring people together - 

we spend our time in ridiculous

quarrels. We have Puritans fight-

ing with Jesuits, parliamentarians

fighting with bishops, writers

fighting with other writers, and

courtesans with other courtesans;

we have bankers fighting with peop-

le, women fighting against their

husbands, relatives against other

relatives. What we have, in short,

is endless warfare.

Candide replied, I've seen worse

things. But a very wise man, who

suffered the misfortune of being

hanged, taught me that all these

things are truly fine: they're

shadows of a lovely painting.

Your hanged man, said Martin, was

poking fun at the world. Your shad-

ows are really ghastly stains.

It's men who make the stains, 

said Candide, and they have

no choice.

François-Marie Arouet

1694 - 1778

Voltaire

Candide, or Optimism

Burton Raffel, translation

Yale University Press, 2005©

Thorny, who is not especially Scandinavian

  My English Cocker Spaniel

  cannot be presented to il-

  lustrate this announcement

  of his attaining the age of

  6 months, today, because he

  is out of groom at the mom-

  ent. We were just about to

  tidy him up when it became

  known that he had totalled

  a second pair of topsiders,

  as I was digging out a cita-

  tion for our Court's latest

  parody of jurisprudence. Let

  this be a lesson to us all:

  do not blog unshod, at least

  about our liberties; and do

  comb out your dog from time

  to time. You might unearth

  a shoelace in his masquerade.

  Thorny, for his part, is not

  entirely unscandinavian, be-

  ing descended from some Nor-

  wegians on his father's side.

  English dogs do get around.

History so large

                            

This evening, there will be an op-

portunity to listen to the first

President of the United States, ev-

er to seek election on the basis

of securing actual rights which did

not exist until he fought for them

and won them. There had never been

a right to health care in this na-

tion until he secured it as a mat-

ter of law. There had never been a

right to serve in the armed services

until he secured it as Commander in

Chief and with permanent legislation, 

irrespective of gender preference.

There is still not now a universal 

right to marry in the United States,

and he is the first President ever to

call for it and to campaign for it.

At the same time, it is striking, that

he is implacably opposed by one Party

which vows to destroy each of these

rights, and that their policies still

draw mesmerised attention. Who is anim-

ated in this land, every day on get-

ting out of bed, by the prospect of

destroying someone's life as a matter

of political satisfaction? 

There is, indeed, a candidate for the

Presidency who is willing to wear our

shame and to promulgate it, zealously.

I am thankful there is Barack Obama to

defeat him, and I cannot conceive of

a more worthy human act.

iii    Francisco Lachowski

iv     Andrew Cooper

v      André Boleyn

viii  Hedi Slimane, photography

x      Stonewall Inn, 1969

xiii  Clément Chabernaud

xv    Anderson Weisheimer