Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The closest soap we have to Champagne?


In an age of which it is possible to understand only less and less, with every passing day, while blogs for gentlemen continue to prescribe nostrums for this predicament of ever more excruciating specificity, readers may forgive a celebratory digression to the contrary, occasioned by a bit of travel one had to endure over the past few days. Our apothecaries at Kiehl's, now taken under the wing of L'Oréal, have come up with an application which is to fetishes of the bath what Champagne is to the flatulent wine list: balsam for any contingency. Just add water, they say, not even Champagne.




Ta-da! The Kiehl's [Since 1851] Cross-Terrain All-in-One Refueling Wash, Paraben-Free & 99.9% Biodegradable, promises An Energizing Shower Cleanser for Hair and Body, A tri-mendous formulation for the cross-terrain adventurer! It may also be used (oh, thank heaven) as a speed shaving aid, whatever that daredevil pursuit may be. They do not say if it can be ordered with a masquing stencil.





You may well think, I know, that too much can be made of general remedies, when discrimination allows such illusion of discern-ment, and flattery of trespasses. But in the present case, even our heroic pharmacist - who stands to lose countless sales of single-nuance products - has seen the advantage of traveling light, to say nothing of the advantage of social mobility, per se. It all comes fully certified, adventure tested. What a windfall to the human rite of washing! Who knew there might be a one-app-suits-all remedy to dispense, as if we were all adventurers? 













Thursday, May 16, 2013

Undergraduating, contextually


Poor Valentino, caught up
in the unfairness of fash-
ion, suffers his trousers
now to be worn too short
to celebrate the cut, to
say nothing of the stride.

This would be unthinkable
to Alistair, who wore one
length of trouser for sit-
ting on the club veranda,
and another for venturing
off to a seminar on Yeats.

But the thing about doing
without socks would be a
consolation, always assum-
ing the foil of the her-
ringbone, paving his way.











Ben Eidem



Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Chilling, as he was, in his Farrow & Ball whites


our idler thought of Venice, 
as he contemplated dressing.





            Then it was all true. I saw the skins 
            of tigers flaming in his palace on the 
            Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest 
            of rubies to ease, with their crimson-
            lighted depths, the gnawings of his 
            broken heart.


I've been reading (haven't we all been reading), and with acute in-terest, the happy volunteerings of many voices, on what they think The Great Gatsby is, and what it would be like to make it relevant. New York donated space to a lady who used it to denounce Fitzgerald's morals; The New Republic opened up for one who sees it as our Moby Dick of class consciousness; then, naturally, there are spirited findings on the latest movie, The New York Times taking care to insist, the text is nothing sacred.

Possibly not. You can jockey for position on it, and money; and yet the world will go right on,              getting it.


















F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
op. cit.



Sunday, May 12, 2013

Pomp and circumstance





.. I must essay a path by which I too
may rise from earth a triumph fluttering on the lips of men.
I first, if only life prolong, into my country returning
will lead the Muses from the Aonian mount,
and in the green field a marble temple plant
at water's edge, where in slow turns wanders
great Mincius fringing its banks with supple reeds.
In its nave I will have Caesar, and he will have its dominion.
In his honour I, a victor dazzling in Tyrian purple,
will drive a hundred quadrigs along the river.





  ..
  Meanwhile it flies,
  time flies irretrievably,
  while captivated with love
  we ramble through minutiae.























Virgil
Kimberly Johnson, translator
Georgics: A poem of the land
  Book III, 8-18, 284-285
Penguin Classics, 2009©


Friday, May 10, 2013

Where there is progress







This is very deeply saddening 
news about Susie. As you know 
so well, and better than I, 
she was one of the breed's 
great innocent partisans, ex-
tremely generous and caring 
toward those who adopted her 
dogs and modest about their 
success in showing. I dis-
tinctly remember when Geor-
die's mother died, it was a 
great blow to her, and I sent 
her a Coronation mug for Ed-
ward VIII, of interest because 
he was, like Geordie, never 
crowned. I still regard Geor-
die as the most positive in-
fluence on my life since col-
lege, a completely unexpected 
miracle. I will not forget her.




























Sunday, May 5, 2013

Scott's midnight cowboy






   Everybody's talkin' at me
   I don't hear a word
   they're sayin' ..


   A few years ago, it just happened to surface
   in the press, in passing, that some three 
   hundred thousand copies of The Great Gatsby
   were then being sold in the English language,
   every year. The text has enjoyed a scrupulous
   editing and continues to sustain the name of
   its Princetonian publishing family, Scribner,
   quite single-handedly, relieving any pressure
   on Hemingway. There really are plenty of en-
   during literary gestures in the American can-
   on but possibly none which can be said to be
   so plain and so impregnable. This is not an
   impenetrable book; but it is a book in the
   most autonomous sense, a communication des-
   tined for absorption in one distinctive way,
   steeped in a metabolic flux which gives the
   fairest warning against transposition into
   other constructions. 

   Here they go again, one could say, but it is
   not their fault. The Great Gatsby beats on,
   quietly unassailable and free. This is not
   allure; this is the current it comes in. It
   is always the Gatz boy, who was young when
   he left home, 

   .. going where the sun keeps shinin', 
   through the pourin' rain,
   going where the weather suits [his] clothes

   .. skipping over the ocean like a stone.


   

   




















Fred Neil
1966©