Panic is the swiftest stream of praise

We celebrate the undef-ended senses for their pathway to the mind, probably most of all in their portrayal of readi-ness and approachability, estimable estates for a man to cultivate. From time to time we're taken to task, ostentatiously or surreptitiously, for presenting readiness of limb, as if extolling its exploitation, not its use. How monstrous should we be held, to be seen to praise the open mind? We would rather build it.

i  Another Country
ii The beach house, La Jolla

Hedgie adopts a bloggie

Now, are you going to be a goddy little bloggie, and do as Hedgie says? Or is Hedgie going to have to be baddy-strict with you, and take away your biscuit? Meanwhile, gimme babycuddles. Hedgie will let you have a sip from his preshylishy saucer! Now make Hedgie all gladdy by not being a bloggy little bloggie, so he can let you down.

And you are, some kind of friend of mine

Jesse Dobson

          . .

          But it was not easy to tell in what direction

          the permanence tended, whether it was

          Easy decline, like swallows after the rough

          Business of the long day, or eternal suspension

          Over emptiness, dangerous perhaps, in any case

          Not the peaceful cawing of which so much had been

          Made. I can tell you all

          About freedom that has turned into a painting;

          The other is more difficult, though prompt - in fact

          A little too prompt: therein lies the difficulty.

          .

John Ashbery

Fragment

The Double Dream of Spring, 1970

  John Ashbery: Collected Poems, 1956-1987

Mark Ford, editor

The Library of America, 2008©

Monday gut check

In wearing haste to dress for the office, it takes but a second to record the weekend's wear and tear on the waistline, and note the requisite course corrections, if any, for lunchtime. Download the document in media res, and circul-ate it at once to your trainer for independent review, with cc to your topiarist. In most cities, you can expect a return comment right away. Remember: silence is not golden in regard to such questions, in cities akin to New York or San Francisco, where networks are friable, or in Dixie, where translation is incred-ibly time-consuming. Bring the gun, leave the cannoli.  

Kerouac does read better as a scroll

For City Lights
his bookstore

In 2007 the executors of the estate of Jack Kerouac approved the publication of On the Road (1957) in its original scroll version, and to one's way of thinking the anarchic layout made the work more coherent than ever before. Its debt to Whitman, always acknowledged in its frontispiece quotation, leapt constantly off the page, along with the influences of his renowned contemporaries and friends.

At the same time, I noted a discovery of this book in the present generation which one's own had never accorded it. Undoubtedly, we had resisted his milieu as his literature, an extremely common mis-take in American youth. They were no different, but Kerouac had slipped into the unthreatening past. And the culture had sunk into that torpor and denial which originally inspired his project. So they discovered Whitman:

                      Camerado,

                      I give you my hand!

                      I give you my love

                      more precious than

                      money,

                      I give you myself

                      before preaching or law;

                      Will you give me

                      yourself?

                      Will you come travel

                      with me?

                      Shall we stick to each other

                      as long as we live?

Allen [Ginsburg] was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have. I was in the same room ..

The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the hiway [sic] unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. Neal hunched his muscular neck, T-shirted in the winter night, and blasted the car along. In no time we were at the approaches of Philadelphia. Ironically we were going over the same road to North Carolina for the third time; it was our route. I kept wondering what it was that I had forgotten to do back in New York; it unrolled behind me more and more and I forgot more and more what it was. I brought it up. Everybody tried to guess what I had forgotten. It was no use.

Walt Whitman

Song of the Open road

  final lines

Leaves of Grass

  1891-92 edition

Justin Kaplan, editor

Library of America, 1982©

Jack Kerouac

On the Road

  The Original Scroll

  excerpts, pp 113 and 235

Howard Cunnell, editor

Viking Penguin, 2007©

Saturday commute xv: les très riches heures

A year ago today, this simple and instantly comprehensible photo-graph was published in a series of quiet aperçus of a ski trip. I have waited until today to re-publish it, without permission, as one of the handful of those queries we all receive in life, along the lines of, So, what the heck are you doing?


I have waited, but I haven't planned. Now, there is another ski trip, and illumination figures still as one of its fundamental qualities. It likely always will, it's the touchstone of all the fellow's images.


I'm looking for it, and so are you. Here's his advice, as I under-stand it. Don't come here, don't go there. Go where you lead your-self, possibly quite nearby.


When I was concluding a liberal education at one of the universities we note for the wrong reasons, and it was necessary to compose an impression of oneself for admissions committees at the next rail stop, I wrote one to the place in Connecticut in candid anxiety toward entering a trade school, after something approaching paradise. These remarks took the form of a comment on The Razor's Edge, by a man more famous today for his ex-wife than for himself, dreading the pursuit of that narrative of spiritual discovery in reverse. I commend that story to people who look at these pictures; they're from a tradesman, you could say, searching where he leads himself, wherever he is sent, a Learned Hand of light.

i and ii , Ivan Terestchenko


W. Somerset Maugham
The Razor's Edge
William Heinemann, 1944©


Learned Hand
Student of Santayana and William James
as an undergraduate; of Ames and Thayer
in the law school; Chief Judge of the US
2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, New York,
1941-1951; gentleman, skeptic, genius.

Valéry Lorenzo has reported sightings of Spring in Carcassonne

Oh, gosh ..

Here we go again.

Valéry Lorenzo

Is it common knowledge that Lawrence Durrell could be funny?

Well, then, you can just hear Alice Brady reply, I won't have my child exposed to it. That bristling, bossy comedienne has served more than one generation as the Rosetta Stone of embonpoint vigilance against any species of male mischief, yea unto the middle ages of Edward Everett Horton. What a grateful ear turns later to her regurgitive inanity, of everlasting timing. At the core of the best writing for her (Kaufman and Yost in The Gay Divorcée, 1934 and Ryskind and Hatch in My Man Godfrey, 1936), a fey ribaldry hangs long after the beat, ironic in lustrous sympathy for play. In short, she's our heroine of disapproval.

A brilliant actress, made so sentimental by div-orce, who resents it in a man if he is interest-ing, rates a Day of Obligation of her own in any gentleman's calendar. By no means, our bones tell us, could she accept our assimilation of common knowledge. And who are we to quibble?

Our genius, then, for the Profoundly True Signif-icant Detail (ptsd) might owe as much to a search for something she over-looked, as it does for a lynchpin for our esteem. I grant you, to Aunt Hortense this portrait may only portray a louche way with cuffs, or an unpardonable sinecure for the hand. To us, it's a life's revelation in sel-ection of a watchband for secret swimming. It's ours to wear.

May it not seem untoward, then, to remark that if a man will be funny about one ptsd, it's incumbent upon him to be funny about them all. We can't have Durrell hurling us to the floor in stitches over Serbia - repenting for a tacky potboiler for boys - and not lifting us up on wings of hilarity over ritual circumcision. I know, I know; this page has done precious little to imply regard for the feature identified with that procedure. But it's not for lack of fellowship, may I say, but for scruple to be non-sectarian.

What a grace note of literary recovery it would therefore be, to find the diplomatic satires of Lawrence Durrell outside of common knowledge at this time, for their delectation by the innocent. To the fecklessness of diplomacy in an empire in decline, Durrell brought the succour of mirth, in the mode of Coward in Pomp and Circumstance, Farrell in The Singapore Grip, and even Saki in The Immortal Bassington. It fell to Durell, however, to exhibit the underlying juvenilia of the form. It was only fitting, then, that he'd turn his blithely errant instrument upon the ultimate Particular True and Significant Detail, give or take a warhead from Stanley Kubrick.

(Although sometimes attached to diplomatic settings, the satiric writings of Mitford, Waugh, and Greene could just as readily be set in a pharmacy. They are about human character and rules, of all things, and are therefore hope-lessly based in common knowledge. They are also intelligent, and can only embarrass diplomacy without defining it). Durrell's diplomatic satire is about the pathos of the task, itself, and the natural impression that its practitioners are suited for nothing else. Known as 'the Antrobus stories' for their primary idiot, they were published from the middle 50s into the middle 60s, until those miser-able Cantabrigians spoiled all the fun.

Having refined Ambassador Polk-Mowbray to a doddering fare-thee-well of feint and transparency at once, it must have been just crushing for Durrell to find Philby, Burgess, Maclean and later Blunt absconding with the franchise. No wonder he went off to Sicily, where such things are done more candidly. As a parting shot, then, his title story in the Sauve qui Peut collection finds Antrobus invited to the ptsd of the hour:

His Excellency Hacsmit Bey and Mme Hacsmit Bey joyfully invite you to the Joyful Circumcision of their son Hacsmit Hacsmit Abdul Hacsmit Bey. Morning dress and decorations. Refreshments will be served.

One cannot know whether to attribute this disarming of mortal horror to the sartorial specification or the promise of restoratives. But here, comedy this low is the staff of life with an English dog; and if anyone thought we might be drawn into an elevated approach to this Great Subject, we apologise for resort to this shabby excuse. We can say, without fear of contradiction by familiarity with these stories, these days, that they defy common knowledge in the endearingest way. 

And the ending? Every man for himself. 

________________

Lawrence Durrell

White Eagles over Serbia
In England, marketed to children.
In America, marketed to adults.
Faber & Faber, 1957©
Penguin, 1980© 

Esprit de Corps
Sketches from Diplomatic Life
Faber & Faber, 1957©


Stiff Upper Lip
Faber & Faber, 1958©


Sauve qui Peut
Faber & Faber, 1961 et seq©

Source: Heywood Hill
Please see Context