Now that we have Argentina

Now that Argentina has restored

herself to our google map, it's

possible to hope that we might 

move on from American politics,

and get about the serious bus-

iness of play at this page, in

lamentably short supply since

the medical distractions of late

winter. How splendid it is, of

Argentina to return on the heels

of Quixote and of Ishmael, yet

so Brucefully Patagonian at the

same time.

Now, can you stand it, there

are people who will say, there

is not the slightest excuse for

anything in this posting: not

one shred of contribution to

the vitality of the mind, much

less of any nobler organ of op-

inion. But there you are: we

who argue, for a fact-based im-

pression of the world, are well

advised to project one without

remorse, and let the Edict of

Aunts try to find us. So, allow

me to level with you, and drive

you completely nuts in the bar-

gain.

There is a satirist named Edward

St Aubyn, who is the likelier son

of the writer of Lucky Jim and

Girl, 20 than the massively bril-

liant Brooklynite who surely is.

Mr St Aubyn is dangerously funny,

in almost the only way funny ever

can be, whose latest venture caps

a quintet of novels chronicling a

gloriously extended Tory boyhood,

At Last to the death of his parent

of great financial hope.

If, in short, we are to lay aside 

the cudgels of political fratricide

in favour of delight, St Aubyn's

substitution of failed infanticide,

suicide, and gladder sides of beef

can not have come into print for a

higher purpose, or reached America

at a timelier moment. I realise, 

too, there are Argentines who've

not laughed since the last Waugh,  

and I celebrate their elating re-

turn with a probitive turn of our

laughter's priceless estate. 

Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels

  Never Mind, Bad News,

  Some Hope, Mother's Milk

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

  Picador Press, 2012©

At Last

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011©

Loomings ii

I offer this posting with regard

for a direct inquiry I received.

Most of us who blog, I'd wager, 

have our private correspondents,

who trade ideas and feelings out-

side of the repartée of the pub-

lic page. And I interpret the

character of the private corres-

pondent also to include the lit-

erary resource and the diaries

which interact with us in per-

mission and resiliency, uninter-

rupted by postal vicissitudes -

dynamic waveforms of memory, by

content less infused than style,

crystalline, sensuous, resurfac-

ing resources of our passage. 

Have you ever been asked, what

need there is for a masterpiece? 

Of course, one is always delighted

to find another person who under-

stands, say, that the right against

self-incrimination is the absolute

core of human rights; but one can

get along pretty well, simply to

allow it to shape one's judgment 

of pretty new suggestions, such as

enhanced interrogation.

Those who know their Peter Grimes

will know what I mean, when they

call to mind Britten's sea inter-

ludes, which I warmly believe un-

derstand Melville as well as Crabbe,

the naïve as well as the mad, and

speak to us undyingly of their

quest for reconciliation. The sea

interludes are suspiciously akin

to acoustic production design, 

but work as internal soliloquy.

Politics in America cast us back 

on that sea, to which we are not 

called by any inner voice or na-

tural, Parliamentary timing, but 

by a Constitutional calendar com-

manding us to stamp government's 

ticket of legitimacy. The artifi-

ciality of the occasion undoubt-

edly lends that quality to its

enactment - inducing, it seems

very likely to me - a chronic

and distracting resort to reli-

gion, where the ingredients for 

a spirited secular dispute were

not mature enough in their clar-

ity to generate the savagery of

partisan vituperation. This is 

the natural space of the naïve 

as well as the mad. 

Now we are at it, again - as

the chorus has it in Britten,

Grimes is at his business -

and tomorrow night, the two

principal parties will put

forth their arguments to hold

the Executive sinecure in our

government - the submerged, 

regulation-writing, fate-dic-

tating borough of that showy

surface of name-calling tirade

which passes for an election in

this country. As in most such

diversions in the past, we are

to be fed a religious quarrel -

who detests Marxism more, who

apologises for slavery less -

to drive us toward a monument-

al financial consequence, of

often mortal dimensions.

Who knew, Ishmael? This year, the

great whale looms frenetically, as

the question of white, male rule,

by a thousand harpoons maddened in

its grazings out of sight, the on-

ly explanation for the morbidity,

hysteria, and birther refusal to

navigate the current with us all.

At the same time, the threadbare

Manichaean Heresy of revanchist

reasoning in our politics has

gained personification in a cham-

pion of absolute greed, a vocal

idolator of the Great Bear and 

Pleiades of money - only money,

mated by a minstrel of Palin-

esque depth and conscience. It's

almost an afterthought, to dismiss

everyone else as ugly, but with 

sublime, unwitting modesty. He is

right, of course. 

We're not his job to worry about.

    Well, then, however the old sea-

    captains may order me about - 

    however they may thump and punch

    me about, I have the satisfaction

    of knowing that it is all right;

    that everybody else is one way or

    other served in much the same way

    - either in a physical or metaphy-

    sical point of view, that is; and

    so the universal thump is passed

    round, and all hands should rub

    each other's shoulder-blades, and

    be content..

    And, doubtless, my going on this

    whaling voyage, formed part of the

    grand programme of Providence that

    was drawn up a long time ago. It

    came in as a sort of brief interlude

    and solo between more extensive per-

    formances. I take it that this part

    of the bill must have run something

    like this:

Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.

    The pale usher - he loved to dust his

    old grammars, it somehow mildly remind-

    ed him of his mortality.

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick

  or The Whale

  i  Chapter I: Loomings

  ii Etymology

op. cit.

A question of who had done the reading

Ours was a stern weekend, 

first with Virginia giving

away a done deal football

game against some denizens

of the Delta, and then giv-

ing it away to them again

with a last-minute penalty

inscribed in the ninth cir-

cle of a dimmer sphere.

By the time the Ryder Cup

had sailed for Europe yet

again, it seemed as if we

did deserve our politics.

It put one in mind of an ap-

praisal of Tobias Smollett's

translation of Don Quixote, 

suggested by Carlos Fuentes,

on its re-appearance in print

some time ago: believing the

world is what we read, and

discovering that the world

reads us. Our politics does

believe that it reads the

world, notwithstanding that

so few of us can believe it.

It's enough to make one care-
ful of how we're being read.

Miguel de Cervantes

The Adventures of

  Don Quixote de la Mancha

Tobias Smollett, translation

1755
Carlos Fuentes, introduction

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986©

Oh, I think it would be understandable, anyway

     As long as I continue

     to come across questions

     in more remote regions

     which I can't answer, it

     is understandable that I

     should still not be able

     to find my way around re-

     gions that are less remote.

     For how do I know that

     what stands in the way

     of an answer here is not

     precisely what is preventing

     me from clearing away the 

     fog over there?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Diaries, 1948

Culture and Value

G.H. von Wright, editor

Peter Winch, translation

op. cit.

Saturday commute lxviii: hanging out on a question

  The delight I take

  in my thoughts is

  delight in my own

  strange life. Is 

  this joy of living?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Diaries, 1932

Culture and Value

G.H. von Wright, editor

Peter Winch, translation

op. cit.

A magpie without name and I were talking

I had three guesses of his name,

and I blew them all. I thought,

of course, of Kipling; and so I

figured Mowgli would be fine. I

thought of Edward Elgar and his

dream of Gerontius; I even fig-

ured Lutyens on the durbar for

George V. I knew I was dealing

with a Potemkin sort of magpie,

an empty etch-a-sketch of shil-

ling for the exceptionalism of

the mercantile empire, but I in-

nocently got the dynasty wrong.

Mary of Teck would not have had

two Cadillacs.

The other day, our magpie was dis-

encumbering himself of a faith that

spoke wonders for the scope of his

bladder, on how the furthest reaches

of the Earth might be enhanced by a

constant sharing of our betterness,

as a people, burnished by the engine

of profits. Subsidiary, but equally
dazzling premises were advanced by
our chirpist, but I came to the ten-
tative conclusion that one can't ac-
tually know what he thinks, if he
does think a thing of his own any-
more, until and unless the President
of the United States is no longer of
African descent. But Friday is not a
day for unhappy reflections. He might
not, actually, revive torture in
our military jurisprudence, once the
spectacle of the black man's humane
Executive Orders were vacated; and
he might fret less about apologies
for our genius, if we had his to fall
back upon.

Yet every day does push forth his

demand to be our leader - our, if

you will, example, as he is bold

(always, we may count on it, bold)

to say. And this Friday I reflect

that it will be nice to have our

Fridays back, once this more can-

didly racist campaign than 2008

has washed away the magpie's tale.

ii  dark sea, Derek 

Horace at your back v: across the plains of the turbid sea

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum

Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus

  silvae laborantes, geluque

  flumina constiterint acuto?

See how Soracte, glistening,

stands out high in

its cape of snow, how laboring

woods let go of

their load, and all the streams

are frozen

over completely with sharpest

cold now?

The story is one of the more famous ever

drawn from the cruelest war ever fought,

of how an enterprising Special Operations

officer spirited the Wehrmacht general

of the occupying forces on Crete away to

British custody in Cairo, whom he'd kid-

napped by posing as his chauffeur. Escap-

ing Crete by hiking across Mt Ida, the

birthplace of Zeus, the General was heard

to recite the first line of this Ode, the

9th from Horace's first book, and his cap-

tor then resumed the recital to its end,

writing later, they had seemed to have

drunk from the same fountains, before.

It does not seem to most as likely that

the necessary task, ongoing now, to subdue

the forces of exploitation and cruelty in

American politics might later reveal them,

in their subjugation, as having been nur-

tured much by learning they are so merry

to revile. But heaven knows, they must do

Horace at Cranbrook sometimes, and it is

just possible that the poet may be shown

again to have been right:

Entrust, then, all the rest to the Gods

as soon as

they've calmed the winds that battle

across the plains of

  the turbid sea, the cypresses and

  ash trees of old will no longer tremble.

At the same time, we are entering the

season of book-signings, and soon the

most auspicious biography of that Brit-

ish officer will be in broad circula-

tion. The grand-daughter of Duff and

Lady Diana Cooper, and daughter of our

premier historian of Venice has had ac-

cess to everything and everyone who

could illuminate that life, beyond his

own undying memoirs in print. This is

an occasion of great news for people

who accept the escort of learning.

Horace

The Odes, I, 9

  To Thaliarchus

John Hollander, translation

J.D. McClatchy, editor

op. cit.