Word from the land of always something

 

Word came to Americans some time in

the evening of the 18th that a hold-

out against replacement on the high

court had passed from the scene, al-

lowing speculation of whether, how,

when, by whom something definitive

would be done about this. This was

not the first intrusion on a wedding

anniversary of mine, when a highly

presentable plate of rognons de veau

was first served to me on the night

of my farewell to the East Coast. I

found myself back here eventually,

unmarried, and although cured of com-

memorating occasions with food, still

easily consoled by a determined defer-

ence to offal.

This latest bulletin in the struggle

for power in the United States found

me just as glad to be able to rely on

my friends already to be in earnest,

plotting various interventions. No 

one had telephoned me, anguished to

be reminded, how to breathe, and I

found myself managing equally well,

once I'd recalled the virtues of 

fresh coffee. Not for this house-

hold, then, will hands be wrung in

wonder of what will become of life

for another 40 terms of this court;

no swooning on the indignity of the

present power structure's swan song

of bottomless villainy. Possibly,

some frantic defections from that

cabal can be negotiated; possibly

a bolt of gastronomic clarity will

descend upon the illumination of

well-grazed kidneys, but in any

case, calving season will return, 

in all its telling raucousness.

For more than 50 years, a tenuous

claim to a position in the general

population and an ill-bred fixation

on the mythology of judicial review

have left me with the conviction 

set out above, that one's time can

much more securely be invested in

a study of the classics in cuisine

than in the tergiversations of a

casuist tradition under demagog-

ic appointment. Enough, please, 

of heroes of magical powers. Win

games, breed good beasts, honor

reality. 

Now. That's revenge.

The field, unwinnowed

  The withdrawal of Pete Buttigieg 

  does not leave the field of can-

  didates for the Democratic nomin-

  ation properly winnowed, so much

  as it sustains his renown for a

  shrewd appraisal of his position.

  He's left before he'd be crushed.

  Lest we forget, a winnowing is

  supposed to dispose of the chaff,

  not the grain, but the reverse

  befalls us all, in the resulting

  concentration of expectation up-

  on alternatives perfectly matched

  in dispiriting unacceptability:

  a noisy, confused fundamentalist

  for justice, and a maudlin wreck

  of a vapid egotist. Yes, our own

  support for Mrs Warren survives,

  intact, but its intactness looks

  like a symptom of being ignored.

  Our responses are already be-

  ing assiduously shaped to pre-

  serve Buttigieg as the polite

  and valiant spokesman, for a

  future he was allowed more to

  embody than to rally, having

  argued (assiduously) for con-

  geniality over conviction, if

  the latter requires more than

  goodwill toward an inoffensive

  outcome. Betting all one's

  chips on one's private life, 

  to evince a capacity for com-

  mitment, turns out not to be

  so winning as he'd thought. 

Has our political history ever presented us with such a striking case, of a candidate who so squandered the virtues of youth as to campaign against them all at every turn: naïveté, fire, fecundity, iconoclasm,

all suppressed as if by Tom Dewey's little man on the wedding cake?

He campaigned as the knight of the managerial class he was hired by McKinsey to be, not as the knight of the risk-welcoming class of the politician he most disdained, Elizabeth Warren. To think: in a single generation, everything we learned from John F. Kennedy, Robert Ken-nedy, and Ronald Reagan, submerged in a porridge of bland calculation, was offered as the tocsin of a "new generation of leaderhip." Yes, he did it ingratiatingly, and yet why, therefore, did our connoisseur class fail to tell him what the winner would be serving? 

The field is the loser, for this gainless occlusion of the qualities of youth, but for the persistence of Elizabeth Warren. One fine day she, too, may be counseled to do the noble thing, but I think it is likelier that she would be defeated by others' flight from nobility. 

Bruce Davidson

Whitby

ca 1960

Harris Dickinson

Saturday commute clxxvii: Going once

                                           

I don't know what I may seem to
the world. But as to myself I
seem to have been only like a 
boy playing on the seashore and
diverting myself in now and then 
finding a smoother pebble or pret-
tier shell than ordinary, whilst 
the great ocean of truth lay all 
undiscovered before me.

                         Newton
















David Brewster
Memoirs of the Life,
  Writings and Discoveries
  of Sir Isaac Newton
Cambridge University, 1855©

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

Sunday nibbled sleeve xii: Connecticut young

 Newtown High beat Darien yesterday,
 in the final seconds of a game that
 was tied, 7-7. Seven years ago, the
 same players survived a conflict we
 couldn't save them from, without an
 abuse of some Constitutional right.
 Whose rites were written in heaven?

Origins of Wednesday ciii: What do Democrats mean for Virginia?

Humane redistricting, anyone?

Just in case there's no back-

to-back national championship

or the people tire of winning.

Game on

  I always know a game
  is interesting, if I 
  do not care who wins
  or know their names.

Danish borders we have known

Who knew that the present era,

such as it is, might come to be

defined by that Kierkegaardrail

against expansive idiocy, that

Danish aperçu-to-go with coffee,

the absurd. A pity, that from a

Queens so awash in Danish pastry,

a politician should have emerged

to stalk the earth with ignorance

as phosphorescent as his hair, on-

ly to gain his comeuppance from a

female prime minister who thought

better of her territorial integ-

rity than to cede it, McConnell-

ishly, to his silly bluster. It

wasn't so much that his nation

had furnished no rejoinder, that

set the morning papers abuzz to

do the job of nailing it down, but

that when it finally did arrive,

it should have tripped so obvious-

ly and irrefutably from a culture

not known for power plays at all.

Ladies' Javelin aside, of course.

Christina Scherwin

Šli and the family stone

The upper Adriatic is not the most

fertile setting for dreaming up a

tease for the American president,

but that's where the esteemed col-

umnist for The New York Times, by

way of the internet, found one at

an hour I will not mention. Still,

to read Gail Collins by the dawn's

early light would be such a tonic

for those who stay up in the dark

to cavort in her latest fantasy, I

feel others may follow one's lead.

Her latest foray into presidential

interaction is so promising in its

particulars, and flawless in expres-

sion, that I commend it without a

single excerpt to spoil a delicious

sequencing of inspired irritants. If

you are not too elderly to withstand

the occasional ribald allusion, the

whole tenor of the thing encourages

being read to the tides, high or low.

Gail Collins
How to torture Trump
  Who's less popular than
  Elton John?
The New York Times
August 14, 2019

Suppose it were Friday clxxvi: Pretenders, everywhere

What do you say, we give contenders

for the nomination a pass for their

antic changes of the subject of the

election, in the precedents for ex-

ploitive distraction set by the guy

who's got the job, despite himself?

He, and what he has done to the def-

inition of leadership are the issue.

This is not rocket science. Leader-

ship is not revealed by attrition.

It resists attrition, and it wins.

Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House
The New York Times©
June 26, 2019

The menswear candidate

A friend of mine remarked the other

day, not a little incontestably, it 

was a dark day for menswear when the 

Presidency lost this man. Those who

lived through that scintillating ep-

och have forgotten the lateral lisp,

an aplomb in the figure at all times,

even the stern rebuke of Big Steel's

impertinent price increase, through

a veil of awesomely apposite deport-

ment, calling into question how much

his clothes really do make the man,

now that we see what little Brioni

have done to humanize the incumbent.

But I stray. Laying not very far o-

ver the horizon of the next Presid-

ency, we spy a candidate who offers,

not to say threatens, to refute the

proposition that one can be made to

seem to wear what others may place

upon one's back. Tar and feathers,

for instance; or merely, a drumbeat-

en wash of hoary phobic effigies.

Have we so soon forgotten Mr Biden's

praise of an African American run-

ning, for being surprisingly clean? 

The mayor of South Bend, a place

not so far west in The Philadelphia

Story as Duluth, offers cheerily to

be elected to this office by charm-

ing the pants off the capitalist in-

telligentsia, and lightening them

of merry wads of patronage. Every-

one is tacitly avoiding the thought 

of how he shall be dressed by the

other side, if he should gain the

nomination to run for that office.

An air of make-believe, not hugely

different from the spell which ab-

sorbed the literati in Camelot, is

suspended by satisfaction with how

he dresses himself. In Center Right

and in Center Left, the sound of

ice cubes clinking in a giddy flux

is wonderfully reminiscent of the

blitheness of the last candidacy,

oblivious to the coral in the way.

Ah, but how splendid now to don

the noble togs of chivalry, what-

ever the rules of the game.

Saturday commute clxxii: Exits we've been offered

  I suppose it's just me, but if I were

  a track star, I'd think twice, before

  entertaining advice to quit the field

  on a seduction of elevating myself in

  the opinion of some demagogue du jour.

 

ii  William Gedney
     Shilling in New York
     1967

Origins of Wednesday xciv: The inside lane

                  ...    How can I the miraculous scenery

       of my life dissuade? It's the opposite of Sisyphus, and

       will replace my nape, that buttered seat of venery,

       with the prairied shoulders of a friendly hand.

Frank O'Hara

Donald Allen, editor

Poems Retrieved

  Light Cavalry

  [fragment]

1953

City Lights Publishing

San Francisco

2013©

Jamie Squire

  Maximum Security

  and trainer,

  Churchill Downs

May 4th, 2019

Getty Images©