Read to us the funnies, Mayor La Guardia

South Carolina in 1786 made any

defendant found guilty of pre-

meditated mayhem subject to the

death penalty. Mayhem was defined

as 'violently depriving' another

person of a member of his body,

excepting the ears and nose. The

ears and nose were excluded be-

cause their loss only disfigured

the victim. Despite the severity

of the law, gouging flourished.

Judge Aedanus Burke, who worked

the Edgefield circuit, was ap-

palled by the number of one-eyed

men in his courtroom. 'Before 

God, gentlemen of the jury, I 

never saw such a thing before

in the world!' he once exclaimed.

'There is a plaintiff with an

eye out! A juror with an eye

out! And two witnesses with an

eye out! What a state of society

you must have in this part of 

the country!'

I never did suppose I'd bring Fox Butterfield's masterpiece on the morals of South Carolina to this page; but then I never did reckon with a candidate for President, rising from its malarial maw on the valour of marital betrayal. And such a candy date he is, to tinge our cappuccino with the nutmeg of this news, that indignation grates its pungent pod of righteousness in every froth of fancy down there still. A Party primary is what it is, a chance for the angriest to flourish; but this is where they flourish hottest, in chronic resistance to the Country. Read to us of Sumter, sir, and of Shaw.

                    

      

Fox Butterfield

All God's Children

  The Bosket Family 

  and the American Tradition 

  of Violence

Knopf, 1995© 

iii  Johannes Niermann

We are not here to discuss the chromaticism of Scarlatti

  

.. but of course, we might. Who has ever heard a sounder argument for the random walk theory of investing, than by applying it to the selection of one's houseguests? It is uncannily likely to present us with companionship unpredictably steeped in the curtain wall of Beauvais, say, or the keyboard techniques of Horowitz. And why should it not? If we are so improbably inclined in our interests, who would be so daft as to resort to probabilities? I realise, there is a whiff of Clovis Sangrail in this line of thought, but that's not what it is. It's a line of experience. I do not believe we get lucky. I believe we just are. Or maybe it's a property of Saturday?

Studies in kissland i: the crime of the upturned face

For Tassos Paschalis

Here, I lapse into a neo-academic voice that I'd like to think seldom surfaces at the page. What inspires it is a text I acquired almost 25 years ago, in the easy browsings I so much enjoyed at City Lights in San Francisco. Few young readers will ever know that amenity, for whose loss not even a fine Review can adjust. Our culture had good company in the stimulating discern-ment of honest tradesmen. I do not pretend to imitate them; but on our days, of all days, we are entitled to seek the company our productivity has taken from us, not by our choice and not by our consent, archaic frames of reference as we speak.

Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier .. The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.

This excerpt from The Red Badge of Courage is not the first to be cited here. Crane tells many stories at once, but also unlocks many vantage points on the Question. He is a writer of great leverage into desire, morbidity, dread - the underside of Burke's influential essay on the sublime and the beautiful - and into the "morals" of any culture's view of their correlation. In The Blue Hotel, Crane finally deposits this correlation in the lap of the criminal code. 

I present a portrait of the kiss, to pursue the question of where its criminality lies. This is not an exercise in the anatomisation of actual criminality, but of the posture which excites the reflex to condemn. Assuredly, something is the focal point of that reflex toward this portrait; and even though we know already what it is, I think it is not excessively evident why we think so. Crane can help.

We know this document does not arise from the inherently radioactive hour of dawn. The plinth on which the figures are situated betrays no nocturnal disturbance. With this circumstance an inference of premeditation cannot be discarded; but people premeditate the buttering of their toast, so we wisely don't linger in horror of that element. Moreover, given the times, we manfully assimilate their sharing of a gender, even a nakedness, with a minimum of that ick factor which nevertheless pertains to this portrait.

We observe abundant clues of their proximity, but we write these off only moderately grudgingly, as elements incidental to the act they are committing, a kiss. We resign ourselves readily enough to precedent for this coincidence; and we have heard, that at a certain age and with a certain experimentalism, this sort of casting of the parts is almost rather ordinary. Not that we could confirm it, our Chorus insists. The intent concentration in the face of the kneeling figure could well be that of an infantryman passing a corpse - a wholesome enough occurrence, in any lad's life.

We will notice a pressing by a hand, but not only is this gesture attributable to the exigencies of one remaining upright, and the other in parallel; at worst it is an innocuous reinforcement of sentiment - or, if this is worse, of motivation. There is a fanny for its placement, but when is there not, we reasonably recall.

Now. Something catastrophically implicates the left face in a condition from which the other - enthralled as it is - is exempt. It is that of the corpse. The upturned masculine face is the marker, at bottom, of death. It is morbidly compelling in signalling something much more stark than the canards of submissiveness, dependency, decadence; yet the face peering into it is captivated definingly by its posture. Call it a vortex, call it an abyss, the reading of the upturned masculine face gives rise to the complaint, but that is supposed to be dead. I happen to think the crime of death, itself, which in Crane is the Question of the infinite, is embedded in the blameworthiness of this image; and I am not surprised, that this umbrage surfaces in scriptural trappings. Our reigning eschatology is proudly steeped in carnal pre-occupations; but Crane reminds us that a phobia is a fear, not a scruple, and that it cannot be under-stood without going to its shuddering reflex.

What a stroke of unsung courage would it be, to breach reflex, shuddering, scruple, fear, pride, umbrage, and rule, to come so far, to kneel there in the backlight of day to meet that face as what it is, even with one's own? We all have seen such people, even met some; and it is apparent that what they have discovered, is that these forces weave not a defense but a tissue of shock having no origin in nature. Not for them, but for anyone, I note that today, in South Carolina, in the United States, every single voter drawing the curtain across his backside has been 'roused by men demanding to be the next President of this nation, to draw a curtain upon that face.




But I stray, and stumble into the abstract against my nature. This is Saturday, and the checklist calls for a kiss. You have Rodin, you have Doisneau, you've Mr Porter to say it's so. You have the world (excuse the limitation) as your oyster. Look into its face. Take all the time you need.

                        

Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of
  Courage
op. cit., cited in


Michael Fried

Realism, Writing,

  Disfiguration:

  On Thomas Eakins and

  Stephen Crane

University of Chicago Press, 1987©

x-xi  Jeremy Young

Suppose it were Friday lii: we treasure a break from I Tatti

Tassos had a birthday;

alas, it was last week

There is an endearingly hilarious episode in Alan Moorehead's fond memoir of Berenson, in which the rough Aussie protégé has had quite enough of the stultifyingly impacted treasures of the house, and one evening turns out the lights, simply to be free of them. Of course he can then not escape, without crawling carefully on all fours, through a minefield of precariously positioned excrescences of the past, to the doorway's merciful egress.

My friend had a birthday last week, and laid before me the means of observing it in his own vision, refreshing along the way (and none too soon) memory of why we are here.

To make a break we went up to stay for a few days with --- and his fourth wife, ---, who happened to be an old friend of ours; they had taken a chalet at Cortina in the Italian Dolomites. We arrived in heavy snow, and [he] was out shooting duck, a gruelling business in that weather since it involved standing by the hour in a barrel in a frozen marsh waiting for the dawn to break. When he came in at last he was the walking myth of himself. Cartridge belts and strings of teal and mallard hung in festoons from his shoulders, powdered snow clung to his beard and woolly cap, and when his gun was laid aside in the corner he had to be helped off with his clothes - 

layer after layer of sweaters, leather jerkins and a coloured shirt. At the end of it all he fished a cable out of his pocket and held it out to me. It read: 'Nothing could be better than a piece on Venice by you but it so happens we have got someone called Alan Moorehead who may be doing it one day so I am sorry ..' It was signed Harold Ross.

Nothing could be more certain than that my friend Tassos will be taking to the slopes soon (he confessed it here); and with any luck we shall see thrilling pictures, and news of other conquests. I hope it is widely understood, that rmbl originated because of missing him on one of his sporting vacations. 

I think it's wonderfully fitting that we find Hemingway welcoming Moorehead in Cortina, with a jest on crossing paths, besieging cheapskate editors. I'm grateful to be the hapless upstart who doesn't really get in the way, because I get to play in my own little duck blind and still keep up with the antic goodguy when he's in Attiki. Laurent is a guy who didn't exist until he found Tassos' Comment section; and like Hercule + Auguste, Naughty Witt, and Dickie H here, he has chums over there, Yr obdt svt, But I love your place, And don't forget the roditis. Tassos runs the page where puppies go to munch the furniture; he is homo ludens, the fire Cocteau would save, our goddy of the duty of play.

I owe to my father, my introduction to Alan Moorehead, and Hemingway, of course; but possibly I'd have heard of him eventually. I owe to a stray comment from Tassos at another blog, my discovery of him. I know, I may never be the blogger here, I've been as Tassos' guest, just as I suppose I'll never interest anyone so much as my father. But I'm not ungrateful to fate. I'm happy that my friend illustrates the creativity of friendship, as much as its profile, because I like very much what it looks like, and feels like even in cyberspace. It is play. I hope I never forget how to leave I Tatti; I know I'll never forget where to turn.

Alan Moorehead

A Late Education

  Episodes in a Life

Hamish Hamilton, 1970©


ii-v  Joshua McVeity, photography

i-vi  Tassos

I'm terribly sorry, but in North America, it's still Thursday

Yes, but whose fault

is that?

My favourite clothespin v: a stepping out in pieces

Possibly one of our most widely rec-
ognised gestures, the freeing of one's
foot from confinement, is not available

for our discussion here, except in

pieces. Fragments do suffice, how-

ever, for the character of the page. 

If you'll give me a moment, I'll 

gather them from their folder.

They come to us as readily assembled blocks. There is no cause for alarm because they are, after all, so familiar. 
You will naturally have to compose 
them as you like, but if you follow 
the traditional pattern, all will 
take care of itself. Don't be con-
cerned about the absence of clothes;
this will have a happy ending.

The awkwardness which we associate with the already completed portrait, is its possession of elements beyond what is sufficient for this page, as its betters see it. Thus, our allotment of fragments, to amuse us with that distinction. Perhaps we may turn to that, if the residual coherency of the image has begun to emerge?

We have a running subject, as you know, called my favourite clothespin, where a human quality or act has been inferred from a figure's posture. People have enjoyed these speculations, whether about gazing out of a window, in the first instance, or conferring with one's mother in the next; and the general interest in the freeing of one's foot has long called for assigning it a clothespin, here.

Objection has already been anticipated, to the image's failure to show a foot. It is upon this complaint that the whole principle of the clothes-pin could be ridiculed as one of fantasy. I shudder to count incompleteness of affect as a bar to comprehension, however, when the weight of cir-cumstances bears so heavily upon a single probability. We could not vote to convict him of unsnagging a foot, but we could allow this portrait to show it, beyond doubt.

What's telling about this portrait, is that avoidance of completeness only gives rise to several misconceptions at once. The first block shows a gesture which may be directed toward the right foot, but it is not. The portrait of the ankles is all but meaningless, but crucial. The portrait of the left side leads only to the emptiest conjectures. And the torso offers the same hazards. At last, we come to that feature of which everything else is a projection of a false incoherency. We are seeing an expression of calm bemusement, at stability, detained.

At St Anselm's College and often since, we have heard the now presumptive Republican nominee extolling the virtue of smashing people to bits, not for the untidy motives of the unfeeling, but as an immaculately unquestionable mandate of God. Yet beneath his delectation of the resulting image, there was such a contentment with the rightness of its incompleteness that it does not go too far to define it as a pleasure of withholding, and one he could believe he was extending to his listeners. He would propose to daub the resulting icon with a bit of vitriol here, a veil of ignominy  there; and as he warmed to his subject it was plain that he was admiring his creation. It could not hold, but that was its charm.

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

jar and kate

I feel very confident now
of saying, it isn't always
possible to know when one
is ready to see a great
painting. 


Having to be in Washington
yesterday for other reasons,
I set aside a couple of 
hours of the afternoon to go
and look at Watteau; but the
NGA's French paintings are in
storage, pending repair of
their gallery's skylight, due
to be completed this month.


I'm not someone who can bear
to ignore a fine painting, 
and passing by the Ginevra
de' Benci is not my idea of
coming to grips with any part
of it. Moreover, I don't en-
joy assimilating more than
two masterpieces in a single
afternoon; and now that I do
not have to turn in an assign-
ment, it pleases me to look
at art as the work that it is.


I haven't any idea why the
painting I saw yesterday is not
taught along with the Eroica
symphony, apart from manifest-
ing that reign of specialisa-
tion that I so detest. This
work by Jackson Pollock is al-
so not going to be presented
here, because it cannot and it
does not make sense in this
medium - whereas, it is true,
one can read Beethoven.

A great painting will shock
for being the least radical
thing there could be; and,
as I say, it isn't always
possible to know when this
will be obvious. It will
sometimes be dozens of the
very things it is said not
to be; and in the case of
the Jackson Pollock painting
cited above, it is necessary
to tick some of them off at
once - it has structure, it
has narrative, it has coher-
ency, it has meaning, it has
eloquence, it has complete-
ness. It is, moreover, no
more than a coincidental ex-
position of its techniques.
So what was all the noise
about, we allow ourselves
to ask.


Mrs Nelson has given us a
gate to a residence, and I
suggest we look at it, past
the telltale elements of its
setting. After it has been
assimilated as a witness to
many passages, many seasons,
many handlings, many dis-
missals, what is it doing,
apart from staring us in
the face? I know very well,
what it is doing, but I
might not have done until
yesterday. It is staying.







  

Honour of the house

Leonhardt