The riparian temptress and I

Having just passed through a weekend in the mid-Atlantic, when fully half of its daylight hours were conducive to the regional faiblesse, the skinny dip, it is clear that we have reached the time on the annual calendar when the great decision is upon us. I refer, naturally, to the question of whether to tanline, or not to tanline. Of course it is never too soon to be careful, but any day now, on a pleasing walk into our countryside, readers will come face to face with enough solar resolu-tion, to compel their choice on the spot. One spontaneous leap upon the flanks of a riparian temptress - and they are everywhere - is enough to dilute the pristine tanline for a whole season.

Readers may well wonder, that we should selflessly digress again upon a question of maintenance of this kind, on a Monday morning, when the last time we did, a historic exercise in marmsmanship was visited upon us, by one of blogdom's hoarier martinets. Ignoring its inspiration of a sweet adoption tale, to say nothing of the compliment of contempt, it's because the underlying logic of that posting remains incontrovertible: Monday is Everyman's day for self-critical assessments, if only to beat mankind at its punch. That it is also an occasion for naughty Wittgenstein to lay his latest experiment in guyplay athwart the assump-tion of drudgery, is a coincidence upon which we couldn't speculate. We rinse, we repeat.

Moreover, having committed ourself to the defense of sport against the degenerate exploitations of the age, it would be exotically incongruous to launch our practice of inquiry upon any quadrant of the monthly interval without that scorekeeping scruple which many associate with ordinary tidiness. How many holes of golf, for example, does the leader board allow to be shot, without performing its ritual tally? We note, what a blurring follows from tasking ourself to recall how things were, so relatively few strides in the sun ago. And we take care, not to raise ourself above the lot of Everyman.

We take no position on the tanline, for others at least; but it is only fair to warn, the calendar is adamant and the time is now. We hear it averred, in the case of a default in judgment, there is always next year. But we cannot suppose that Mr Dylan would have sung, Every-body's making love, or else expecting rain, if there really were two sides to this question. If we are to give such expression of the sun as the lyric sug-gests, who can be sure he is prepared to allow indifference to be his rhetorician? And need one add, there is little more tragic, than to have made the irreversible choice, euphoric as the sense of liberty may be. We can always dissolve the tanline; but what then, should proclaim the sun?

That said, far be it from us, on this Monday's occasion of self-maintenance, to shrink from multi-tasking along the lines of the first. In evaluating the stability of the colour bar, much can be done with a reliable towel - provided, it is always the same - to assay its circumference. From this, urgently practical and most seasonal consideration, too, a flourishing tradition of self-portraiture by telephone has sprung up, enriching countless social networks before the opening bell has even rung. For those hard-to-appraise reaches of the tan-line, we suppose a likely convenience in texting the data to the Four Hundred for their response. What pos-sible agenda could they pursue, who dismiss the tanline?

Bob Dylan

Desolation Row

1965©

iv, Ronan Bertoli

A beginning, a middle, and an end

A fine wine is a spectacle in narrative coherency and highly articulate originality. The cliché suggested here is that of the first chomp into a vintage Billecart-Salmon Blanc de Blancs, a shock of Granny Smith radiating into ripple upon ripple of umbra and penumbra of the vicissitudes of the cuvée, in Champagne.

And how does it wear? It will shock some to entertain the suggestion, that what a wine's flavours are, is quite secondary to its appreciation, and they are in any case, substantially connoted by its structure, and how that structure behaves. Proportion is anterior to coherency, in any fine wine, as we are likely to reflect upon again. Discover that, and its flavours and aromas fall into place like clock-work, in palate space and in time. Ar-omatics and colour, clarity and tex-ture induce the investigation, and in a fine wine will not default on appli-cation to the palate. Its character is revealed in how these qualities are distributed and sustained.

If we are to ascribe a fault to a wine, it has to be attributable to the wine, not to our preference. This is invariably the most difficult appreciation for the connoisseur to master. A parti pris

drives criticism as sadly in this field as in any other. One can and does fault vanity in the winegrower, for vulgar ambition in the wine. One can fault the year for its manners, although vintage comparisons are often arch and ostentatious; but one cannot fault a wine for a callous where its terroir has laid it. One could and might, complain if it were missing. Who wishes not to know the touch of a strenuous harvest, or the scrape of alluvial experience, is not yet ready for living things.

Tiara at 24

I think heaven is perfect stasis
poised over the realms of desire,


where dreaming and waking men lie
on the grass while wet horses
roam among them, huge fragments


of the music we die into
in the body's paradise.
Sometimes we wake not knowing


how we came to lie here, 
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones. And given






the world's perfectly turned shoulders,
the deep hollows blued by longing,
given the irreplaceable silk


of horses rippling in orchards,
fruit thundering and chiming down,
given the ordinary marvels of form


and gravity, what could he do,
what could any of us ever do
but ask for it?









Mark Doty
Tiara
  [final fragment]
  Turtle, Swan
1987
Fire to Fire
  New and selected poems
Harper Collins, 2008©


William D. Walsh photography

New and very noteworthy

Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.


by James Richardson at Mark Doty

by Beth Nelson at by land by air by sea

The Big Lie will be heard again- 

and if it is heard long enough- like all lies-

it gathers believers.

by Patricia Gaye Tapp at Little Augury

by Ivan Terestchenko at Ivan Terestchenko

by Anonymous at Tassos

I had lately been fascinated by the deconstructed, dehydrated Eggs Benedict at the newest temple of molecular gastronomy. And had even been thinking that I wanted to learn how to copy the sous-vide seventeen-hour egg at the trendiest restaurant downtown where you will never get a reservation. But this story of the seventy-five-year-old man, cracking an egg slowly and accurately with two hands and using his thumbs to get the thirteenth egg as his mother had done during wartime food shortages, put me right back on track.

by the best gastronomic memoiriste

since the discovery of Amanda Hesser;

to be presented soon at this page

random trouvaille

Saturday commute xxii: the bathers

.. I dipped to test the stream
some yards away
from a hot spring ..

And you would want to know (but you know already)


How usual that waft and pressure felt
When the inner palm of water found my palm.












Seamus Heaney
A postcard from Iceland
  The Haw Lantern
The Noonday Press
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987©

A dulcimer for daylight

Because the mast's peak hit the sand no more than six
Feet from Patroclus' car, the horses shied,
Spoiling his cast. Nothing was lost.


As Akafact fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight, and thus

Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull.
His dead jaw gaped. His soul
Crawled off his tongue and vanished into sunlight.

I agree. The habit of the United States is in questionable taste. Sadly, the cultivated life in a republic is different from one in a kingdom. In a kingdom, things happen. In a republic, people cause things. I did this before I woke up this morning, and I will keep doing it as I select my evening houseguest, take him shopping, share his amusing scent, and relax with him, or someone else, over supper tomorrow by the fire. Whatever I wear, wherever I dine, however I speak, my habit is the lancing of throats. I haven't skipped a day. 

An adult in a republic who doesn't know he's doing this is uneducated; one who says he isn't, is even more pitiable. I don't know if I'll staple this man today, but it won't be for lack of trying. Maybe you got him? I should be envious, but surely, there are more.


One is conscious of the breach of form in the exercise of the second person in public writing. We will be accountable for our imagery, we will be accountable for our text. We bear responsibility for what crawls off the tongue of republican form, and vanishes into sunlight. There is no aristocracy to get us off the javelin, and mentor the tongue of men.

Who would pretend to aristocracy, must first contend with this. This saucer's not collectible. Its substance is too perishable. Yet there's no shield known to bar the scruple of this thing. The cultivated life is inalienable, or it is extinguished. 

     






Johann Christian Bach
Clavier concerto in B flat major
Ingrid Haebler, fortepiano
Eduard Melkus
Vienna Capella Academica
Philips, 1966©




Christopher Logue
Patrocleia
  War Music
  An Account of Books 1-4 and
  16-19 of Homer's 'Iliad'
The Noonday Press
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997©

Restoration time Down East

Hoping not to be misunderstood as of the especially cowering sort, one would confide experiencing a reliable sense of shelter in Mr Sherman's scholarship, in which conundrum and controversy are cured by a meticulous concentration. Ah, but is such succour ever certain in cross-currents of these days, censoriousness ascendant 'gainst the way a fact's displayed? No sooner had one turned to a current entry, than terror seized one in its grip - the very last sensation and manner to expect of such a trip. Our Mr Poe comes from down this way; we don't expect to panic in the drawing rooms of the shingle style, at a spectacle of usage.

But there we were, accosted by a grisly glimpse our nature forbids us to recite, of a vulgar term of art for chimney-piece, and in the very sanctuary of our first resort. Scrolling hurriedly to the Comment Box, to advise against exposure of this kind, we dashed off a warning before fleeing the page in fright against the fray which must, anon, befall it. M'lords and Ladies, the offense was too great, but even worse must be the plea of innocence, which is the exact quality to be condemned in the first place: the mark of a barbarian, indeed. For being bred to incurable deformity to begin with, the heart goes out to any scholar.

Oh, our renovations are contested so these days, it seems like a novation to attest how it dismays, to be arrested, much less bested by some wit in how he plays. How little did we know, the hothouse heaviness of claustrophobia which cloisters itself to cure the web of openness, in these cluttered ranks of arbiters. And who could have thought, righteous braggartry could gain traction of consent, in the medium invented for its clutches to relent? 


El niño come naranjas.
Desde mi balcón lo veo.
The little boy is eating oranges.
From my balcony I can see him.








Brad Sherman
The Down East Dilettante
  A rolling .. gathers no moss
April 7, 2011


Federico García Lorca
Despedida
  Canciones, 1921-1924
W.S. Merwin, translator
Francisco García Lorca and
Donald M. Allen, editors
The Selected Poems of ..
New Directions, 1955©

Oh my gosh, I really have to go

Any advice?

Have a very good time,
and bring him home for Easter.
















i, ii  Ryan Taylor