Presents

         The girl reaches out to
         take the boy's hand. Hello, 
         young man! she says. He is 
         your grandson?

         Not my grandson, not my son,
         but I am responsible for him.

I think there's an ethical ques-

tion inscribed there which looks

backward.. Is history about, as

Aristotle said, what Alcibiades

did and suffered? Or do sources

from the past merely provide raw

material which we turn to polit-

ical or intellectual ends?

J.M. Coetzee

The Childhood of Jesus

Viking, 2013©

Tony Judt

Timothy Snyder

Thinking the Twentieth Century

op. cit.

ii  Recession of the last funeral

     of a soldier of the Great War

    Wells Cathedral

I suppose what one reads, relates to one's dreams

On holiday weekends, at the

least, I don't doubt, it is 

so. It's funny, though. One

may be willing to entertain

a Jackson Pollock - please,

don't be more hip, just now

-- and yet venture very lit-

tle from Austen, in the com-

mitment of literary senses.

Of all the channels of dif-
fusion of the self, poetry
is the most interminably re-
constituted. It doesn't dry,
as poets do, but waits.

   How marvelous to have done it and then left
   It in the lost property office of the loving mind,
   The secret whisper those who listen find.
   You show us all the way the great ones went,
   In silences becalmed, so well they knew
   That even to die is somehow to invent.

  

I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace.
Because we've loaded even our song with so much more music that it's slowly sinking
and we've decorated our art so much that it's been eaten away by gold
and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail.

Lawrence Durrell
Selected Poems
  Seferis
Peter Porter, editor
op. cit.

George Seferis
An Old Man on the River Bank
Edmund Keeley and
  Philip Sherrard, translation
The Greek Poets
  Homer to the Present
op. cit.

Saturday commute xcv: To the Ostsächsische Sparkasse, Diver

  Intrigued by this subtle

  modification of the Stan-

  ford University logotype

  I followed it, as far as

  Dresden, where I suppose

  Leni Riefenstahl had vis-

  ited before me. I marvel

  how a thrift institution

  could distract me such a

  distance from my chores;

  but then, it isn't every

  day I see any bank of so

  much spirit of adventure.

  I hasten to offer the u-

  sual disclaimers. I have

  not the slightest inter-

  ests in this unspeakably

  chic sparkasse, and must

  note for the record, you

  can't be sorrier than I.

  

Güntzplatz 5

01307 Dresden

Suppose it were Friday lxxviii: possibly one had to be there

     

   and as for distant

   and forbidding, on

   the contrary. But,

   you also were a

   little the worse,

   or the better, for

   wine, and there are

   rules about that.

James Stewart, P'32

The Philadelphia Story

Donald Ogden Stewart

  screenplay

George Cukor

  director

Warner Brothers, 1940©

Less clomp, more romp

  

  Thorny and I awoke today

  to the frivolous bright-

  ness of a cheeky gluteal

  moon, splashing past the

  unguarded clerestory, of

  our exactly axial dwell-

  ing. There was no sense,

  in repressing his retort

  on this occasion; an Eng-

  lish Cocker's synapse is

  irreversible, on the wis-

  dom of going out to run.

          

I have never believed that it makes much sense, objecting to a pretty moon of youthful consti-tution, and if I were a superstitious man I would have to credit the stars with arranging, for our quiet countryside, a mer-rily urbane tuck in their resolute trajectory. But now of course, you were about to say, the sky is on its way to California.

Go home and give thanks

     You still

     have that

     first Le-

     vi jacket.

We had our A7 chip

When all one can do is, read,

the rapport with texts resem-

bles a kind of cold war of mu-

tually assured destruction in

unstable equilibrium, the rap-

port never having been intend-

ed for polarity so nakedly un-

enriched. 

          I remember favoring

Sea Island cotton, but with a

tennis collar. It was then, I

happened to discover slavery,

from its genealogy in luxury.
(Who knew it were bilateral)?

Horace looming. Oak ostensib-

ly opaque, taking one by one.

Inside, within that grasp was

Ishmael, Melville's wondering

seaman, his balsam harvester.

These were guys who knew how
to end a book. So much easi-
er than slavery. I got email
from Apple, about their one-
day sale on luxury. Suppose,
as they say, it were Friday.
One could read Benito Cereno
in a glossy pleasure-screen.

Timing is everything. I met
this text by curricular co-
incidence, in the year that
Styron's Confessions of Nat
Turner came out. A ferment,
in the planet, percolating,
in the pulse, made personal
the feeling for a language,
rising. Timing, come again.

Herman Melville
Billy Budd and
  The Piazza Tales
Doubleday & Company
Dolphin Books, 1961©

A fork at our feast

Before the "dark side" revision of modes in warmaking by the United States, Topic A in our commando training, now only too infamously unsecret, might have been lifted out of the Iliad.

What did we inculcate in ourselves, as policy, even before gastronomy?

Possibly, who writes the war, writes the training, is not so far from who wills the end, wills the means.

Who knows, the war to mean well might be no better than the usual kind, and possibly our soccer moms are right: better to destroy before any risk of danger. 

Such are the new American Studies, the droning undertones that reinscribe Ernest Hemingway's constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war as chaste precipitations of fastidious machines. 

Once, even survival psychology 
knew its place, not one generation distant from thanksgiving's table, 
in deference to its honour.

     

Thibault Oberlin

Records of a U.S. Naval Officer, 1968

Santorini caldera

Tines

Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929©

Hemingway Library Edition

Scribner, 2012©