Saturday commute cli: Indictments by the vanload

  Although out of season, indeed out of terroir,

  I thought of Jason Lowe's estimable glimpse of

  the vintner's van at the crushpad in Bourgogne,

  as the Special Prosecutor's first indictments 

  of the conspirators against the American elec-

  tions of 2016 were delivered to Federal Dis-

  trict Court in Washington yesterday. My second

  thought, was what a tourist trap that edifice

  must shortly become, as visitors from all over

  the world come to touch the façade, now demon-

  strably not false, of the American legal system.

  Grapes now ripe for pressing, if not a stamping 

  out, against rank wrath transgressing to pol-

  lute them with faux doubt. We have a Potemkin

  Congress. On, in time, to a jury of our peers.

      

Jason Lowe

Berry Brothers & Rudd©

2018

Another big day for "pure evil"

It was heartening to find the British
media picking up the rhetorical litter
from the Governor of Florida, at the
scene of yet another American massacre.
What is left of the English language
in America is so frequently nothing
more than the coded droning of Repub-
licanism's busiest worker bees, cel-
ebrating another visit from the devil.

"Pure evil" is the reflex term of art
they adopt for every civil slaughter
in their propaganda for private arsen-
als, apparently without the slightest
sense of how hilarious it is to com-
pound the superlative. With this new
gore, it was timely for that politic-
al flirt to get his marker down, be-
fore his eventual rivals, the Vice-
President, Mr Pence, and our new Am-
bassador Plenipotentiary to the Re-
ligious, Mr Brownback, could mount a
wired podium, somewhere near Fox HQ.
Dismiss the facts, rally the base,
on no account should insanity go to
waste.

But Governor Scott won that race of
rendering due process (a passion,
have you heard, of his Leader), by
sanctifying the bloodshed before the
abbatoire had even been hosed out,
the lumps and stumps of steaming,
streaming life bagged off to the ice.
Governor Scott had already shown us
that he walks on water, as the only
shoreline politician in America to
have exempted his beaches from his
Leader's war on the environment. To
find him rising above constituents'
gushing blood is no surprise.

Origins of Wednesday lxiii: Our new deli

    A fantastic growth, it seemed to me,

    every time I looked at the New Delhi

    of Sir Edwin Lutyens, a style without

    ancestry, without posterity, an archi-

    tectural sport; and I compared it, ac-

    cording to my varying mood, now with

    the Pyramids of Egypt, now with the

    great statues of Easter Island, now

    with the megaliths of Avebury or Stone-

    henge. All the same, as my eye sought

    to comprehend that great pink and white

    symmetry of palaces and pagodas, foun-

    tains and obelisks, ornamented ponds

    and regal statues, I couldn't help

    thinking of those Roman magnificos of

    whom Gibbon wrote, who "were not a-

    fraid to show that they had the spir-

    it to conceive, and the wealth to ex-

    ecute the most grandiose designs."

  

If there is anything that heartens me, on this recurrence of Valentine's Day, it is the promise of the eventual triumph of

a cultivated point of view over a disturbed frame of mind -

two familiar antagonists in the films of Alfred Hitchcock,

and even in the fantasias roiling the American government - 

which we can find in the survivorship of Gibbon, to write 

about Rome at her most hideous, and in the letters and diar-

ies of a 20th Century successor of his, still perhaps too 

warmly controversial for his virtues to be obvious. They 

are more valued with every passing day of trashings of our

point of view by a disturbed frame of mind; but most uncom-

monly beautiful, is his confiding of waging this very con-

flict before one's eyes, in a virile genius for language.

What heartens me is how he lifts himself, not by denial of

what he witnesses, but by refusing it; a benchmark mind,

for fellowship. Longtime readers here will know him, but

I am also amazed, by the refreshment in his every return.

         

         It isn't a mist, - for a mist is a delicious thing

         that creeps down English valleys in the night-time,

         leaving a cool trail of dew, - it's a stinking, pes-

         tiferous miasma that hangs over the city of Basra;

         and as I sat in its chromium-plated hotel, contem-

         plating it, I recognised that whatever disgrunted

         travellers have reported of it is true. Like Bah-

         rain, .. it smells of singed wet flannel; and the

         Euphrates seeps through it, generating dusty palm

         trees and mosquitoes. Was it really here that our

         civilization began? It seemed incredible; let us

         rather give the priority to Egypt, I said to my-

         self, and went in to dinner to escape these morbid

         reflections. And at the same time they issued forth

         from the bar, the European colonists of Basra, 

         mirthless men with paperish yellow faces. The damp

         heat had ironed out their souls, and like the lotus-

         eaters, having drunk the gin-and-bitters of Basra, 

         they wished only to live on there, among the mud-

         houses, and the festering waterways, and the Shatt-

         al-Arab Hotel, with its bed-bugs and its execrable

         local gin. 

         And yet how trivial are these outward things! For

         sitting on a stool at Basra, I learned from a casual

         fellow-passenger that he had once, in the west coun-

         try, bred a pack of basset hounds; and at once the

         miasma parted, the heat and the smell vanished away,

         the gin tasted exquisite, the paper-faced colonists

         sparkled with wit and culture, and the glorious hea-

         ven shown down on Basra, cradle of our civilization.

         

         

Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Wartime Journals
Richard Davenport-Hines
  editor
Spring, 1944
Literary Estate of Lord Dacre
  of Glanton©
I. B. Tauris, 2012

ii  Margo Davis
     Antigua ruins
     ca 1970

iv  Tassos Paschalis
      Paros
      ca 2010

Suppose it were Friday cxlix: Never a dull moment

In the new American parlour game
of contradicting a promise never
to take, lying down, the latest
thing the American President has
done to trigger it, we allow no
revulsion to obscure those mer-
rier occasions for this posture,
with their validation of a self-
regard remembered from democracy.

And when better than Friday, to
haul them out of the repertoire
of spinally spirited antics, and
relish their interesting effect?
Surely others are bound to recur
to one; these are but a start ..

Any suggestion of a sequencing,
temporal or hierarchical, is pos-
sibly unintended, although one can 
never be sure about intention now-
adays. So many vows, so little con-
sequence.

Do we laugh for poor Margot, or with her?

Poor Margot Mary Wendice, how few of us
are ever tempted to think, given her un-
canny incompetence. Having failed to be
strangled the first time, by garotte pro-
cured by her husband, she slithers out of
the knot the Crown's arranged as her pun-
ishment. And yet, to watch Dial M for Mur-
der with the mirth with which it was made,
these days, seems to call for an almost
Presidential scale of denial, of doing any
such thing. Still, how many survivors of
two such accidental acts of justice do we
know, in our unanimously censorious times,
who have the sang froid to accept a con-
gratulatory highball of Scotch from the
loser in these trials, a spouse culpable  
of both of them? Yet who, apart from a
very ugly American, would ever interpret
her acceptance, I suppose I could do with
something, as proof she had asked for it?

Poor Margot's incapacity to satisfy the
pangs of affront she excites, arising
first from her adulteries before a mer-
rily neglectful husband, and next from
the inadequacy of bruising about her
quite elegantly tempered neck, in the
eyes of the law, is suspiciously allied
to certain felicities of genetics, cou-
ture, deportment, carriage and voice
without which the British craft of com-
edy would sink like a stone, if she ev-
er were to bolt the corral for a casino.
It isn't enough to deliver a line per-
suasively, which Margot seems never able
to do; one has to make the line go away,
or rather to sink its hook in disbelief.

For this sleight of hand Hitchcock

floods the set of a West End London

drawing room with eight blue eyes,

and they all belong to Margot. Two

are her husband's, two her beau's,

two for the inspector, and two il-

luminate a face that absorbs them.

Their job is to subject her to in-

fractions. Hers is to play nice.

At last (one can almost hear the

screen call out), in his first of

three pictures with this Margot,

he has finally found his icon.

Everyone allows the director his

boast of taking it easy with this

picture, of simply lifting a hit

play from the stage and celebrat-

ing its own structure with his

inspired camera angles. But when

in doubt, one goes with Truffaut,

who confessed to Hitchcock, in

their famous interview in LA, he

might allow that the film lacked

importance, but he could not re-

sist revisiting it with pleasure.

It will do nobody any good these

days, to publish a kind of approv-

al of this picture or its methods.

Ah, but for those to whom doing

themselves some good makes for a

superfluous conversation, we re-

member Margot's advice to Tony,

before her first strangulation -

Don't make the martinis too watery.

Alfred Hitchcock

  director

Frederick Knott

  and Alfred Hitchcock

  screenplay

Robert Burks

  cinematography

Dial M for Murder

Warner Brothers, 1954©

Some time back

I can not pretend to remember
my brother's birthday; I ar-
rived in the family some four
years later. It quickly became
one of the few calendar dates
I would memorize, and antici-
pate always as one of one's
happiest days. I would ignore
it for months, even though the
sound of it would always touch
a nerve, only to welcome its
proximity with particular in-
tensity, and its arrival with
suspended anxiousness. Even 
now, with abundant practice,
it always comes to me with ex-
traordinary sympathy. I notice,
the American JD McClatchy cap-
tures an ironic aspect in this,
while considering friendship --

          Friends are fables for our loneliness.

          If love would live for hope, friendship thrives

          On memory, the friends we "make" made up

          Of old desires for surprise without danger,

          For support without a parent's smarting ruler,

          For a brother's sweaty hand and a train of crumbs.

We extol the details some-

what differently. I do not

feel the hand as sweaty, 

but sometimes damp, changing

places in the bathtub, ris-

ing from the pool, passing a

condensing cocktail. It is

strong, even clenched from

time to time, but primarily

it is calm, as in closing

gratefully upon a golf club.

I prefer not to pronounce

upon that hand in any way, 

because it does not yield.

Friendship certainly does

thrive on memory, but not 

on this, and is made up of

inconsistent subtractions

from brotherhood, whose ev-

every surprise harbors an 

element of danger. This is

the edge we keep between our-

selves, and is ever present.

It changes nothing, even us;

and it changes for nothing.

J.D. McClatchy

The Rest of the Way

  Poems

    dedicated to

    James Merrill

  An Essay on Friendship

    viii  1 - 6

Alfred A. Knopf, 1992©

  

What flu shot Brooks?

A positive flash flood of flu

having crested through these

parts in recent days, I took

myself down the road for an

inoculation, for what good it

might do, taking care at the

time to request a reading of 

blood pressure - a narrative

I never have understood, but

which, like Beowulf, I've

come to respect. Besides, it

makes one feel cared for, to

be compressed in a good cause.

The shooting part did not go

well, however, and purely for

that reason. I was wearing a

recently produced shirt from

my childhood haberdasher, 

Brooks Brothers, and found it

so binding in the sleeve that

it couldn't be rolled up, and

had to be removed. It's hard

to convey a basis for bitter-

ness toward shabbiness, if it

isn't obvious; but I laughed

to myself to recall, how my

elder brother, entering those

vain years ending in the syl-

lable, "teen," complained of

an architecture in the stand-

by button-down of our lives

theretofore, resembling a

"tent." Now, compression did

not make one feel cared for,

nor did it seem to respond to

any neutral necessity in man-

ufacture. It felt, together

with more minute details of

tackiness, as if one were be-

ing taken advantage of. 

It's a pity that, whoever

owns this oft-sold brand to-

day has not been furnished a

guidebook to its lore. The

great shirt has doubled for

generations as a pajama top,

as a copious tail for the ex-

pressive drama of shirtlift-

ing, and, actually, as a sur-

passingly comfortable and vis-

ibly classic passport to a de-

cent table. It wore forever,

it held its texture and its

ratios, and it never did re-

quire the removal of a necktie,

to receive a simple flu shot. 

If their underwear now emulates

this decadence, they'll have a

boxer rebellion on their hands.

Daniel Wolmer