Suppose it were Friday xcvi: The cheat sheet and the triceps

 
    How many of us, one can only won-
    der, affect a confident air in the
    kitchen because of a handy cheat-
    sheet or mobile app, in the nuanced
    voice of Mr Olney or, I confess, of
    Craig Claiborne? Legions, have we
    noted, on the Greenwich steps of 
    Telegraph Hill, the spiraling croi-
    sette of Corbett Street, indeed e-
    even the stately stairs of Taylor, 
    rising between Bohemia and the Hun-
    tington, all assured in their acu-
    men by a guide who climbed before.

    But what happens, as an unfolding
    of ordinary life repositions the
    secret, early stenciled upon the
    evolving fore, as a magnified yet
    inaccessible code on the obverse 
    muscle group? Ah. A consternation?

    A seizure by anxiety, at the dis-
    appearance of any legacy of learn-
    ing, upon the thoroughly intended
    renovation of the subject, is pos-
    sibly the most endurable remorse -
    of our marginal sample of mankind.

    I recall, distinctly, the parsley.

  ii   Joe Collier

Where could he have come from?

              Nasce l'uomo a fatica,

           Ed è rischio di morte il nascimento.

           Prova pena e tormento

           Per prima cosa; e in sul principio stesso

           La madre e il genitore

           Il prende a consolar dell'esser nato.

           Poi che crescendo viene,

           L'uno e l'altro il sostiene, e via pur sempre

           Con atti e con parole

           Studiasi fargli core,

           E consolarlo dell'umano stato.

               

               Man is born by labor,

           and birth itself means risking death.

           The first thing that he feels

           is pain and torment, and from the start

           mother and father

           seek to comfort him for being born.

           As he grows, 

           they nurture him,

           and constantly by word and deed

           seek to instill courage,

           consoling him for being human.

Giacomo Leopardi

Canti

  Canto Notturno di un Pastore

  Errante dell' Asia

  [fragment]

1831

Jonathan Galassi

  editing and translation

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010©

On whether one wishes to bother with self-government

 

 

   A tragic illusion,
   you say, and never
   yet have you been
   proved wrong. Yet,
   without it, there
   can be no others.

   From which side,
   then, do you dream:
   on the outside, be-
   ing shrewd, or the
   inside, otherwise?

   We return to bil-
   dungsroman to per-
   petuate our losses,
   you may say, or to
   praise the beloved.

Adam Liptak 

  on the ordeal of James Risen

The New York Times

June 2, 2014

  

Saturday commute cviii: hydrant heroics

Who knew, a quiet, harmless people?

Some years ago, an American
reader of broadcast news
popularised the expression,
the greatest generation, to
identify the youth of select-
ed nations who allied in re-
sistance to Axis aggression
after the fall of Poland. Al-
though always obviously no
more than a marketing ploy
to seduce an audience, the
damage of the expression has
endured, principally in calls
to emulate idealised behaviour
the book extolled, at the ex-
pense of an accurate history.

Taking it easy this afternoon
with my English dog, and hav-
ing channeled the conditioned
inclination to mark Memorial
Day through a lighter, paradox-
ically irresistible narrative
on warfare, I found myself re-
turning to the writings of An-
tony Beevor and Max Hastings,
on that large conflict of the
later 1930s and early 1940s.
Encountering again the reality
of cannibalism in Japanese mil-
itary doctrine in the Pacific 
War in Beevor, I turned to Has-
tings' grim compendium on the
final year of Japan's suppres-
sion, largely at the hands of
the United States.

He remarks, introducing Retri-
bution, on how "inapt" this
"greatest generation" sobri-
quet is: .. human behaviour,
aspirations and fears do not
alter much. It is more approp-
riate to call them, without
jealousy, 'the generation to
which the greatest things hap-
pened.'

At last we need not flinch at
Uncle Toby's claim, in his 
famous speech to his brother
Shandy in defense of warfare,
which even the Bush regimes
thought to invoke in the abyss
of their cynical belligerencies:


                  For what is war? What is it, but
                  the getting together of quiet and
                  harmless people, with their swords
                  in their hands, to keep the ambiti-
                  ous and the turbulent within bounds?


There is not, we know, such
a thing as a quiet, harmless
people, but we know the works
of those who are not. If then
they are our own, Pogo, who
will write our history?

Antony Beevor
The Second World War
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012©

Max Hastings
Retribution
The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007©

Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of
  Tristram Shandy
ibid.


    

Another shopping spree for love

I realize, given another Sunday
morning steeped in American car-
nage, to share tales of where 
we were when another brigand 
bit the dust, is no mere swap-
ping of alibis, but a habit of
sealing the tale in memory for
recital to the heirs of the
Bush family's Supreme Court.
I, for my guilty part, was
scooping up a copy of a slen-
der satire from Wodehouse, The
Military Invasion of America,
and also coming across this
delicious aperçu on Ovid in 
McClatchy:

   When men would be gods, they pass new laws
   and strengthen the Family. Like gods,
   Then, they breed contempt and their own betrayal.

Well, what can we expect of
a Classicist: one of the few
things one cannot be, without
having done the reading?

Possibly I have a more self-
indulgent alibi than one should
confess, given the precious turn
in our custom of slaughter. Like
you, I've begun to consider wheth-
er it's even possible to wonder,
if we aren't allowing our way 
with murderous rampage to descend
into an exhibition of upper-middle
class shopping sprees gone wrong,
a classic case of Trinkets Envy,
posing the question, who has the
glossiest J-curve of frustration?

Who, among the farm lads in your
little neighborhood, could stock-
pile half the magazines of ballis-
tic ornament that one pale college
boy of means amassed without appar-
ent strain? It truly is enough to
make one savour the negligent hom-
icides of homophobic Reaganism, a
crime wave perpetrated entirely by
thrift and arch oblivion. Now do we 
take too much to heart, our warrior
ninny's urgings to go shopping? Yet, 
who expects our Red State saints,
hoist by their own petard, to coun-
sel us to save? Remind them of their
mantra, for we've read it well: 

   Viruses don't kill. People do.















J.D. McClatchy
Ovid's Farewell
  Stars Principal
  1986
Plundered Hearts
  New and Selected Poems
Alfred A. Knopf, 2014©

As every soldier is unknown

  A generation will pass

  before the sky will be

  perfectly clear of

  clouds for his shining.

  However, what's a gen-

  eration to a sun?

            Oh, let mee not serve so, as those men serve

            Whom honours smoakes at once fatten and sterve;

            Poorly enrich't with great mens words or lookes;

            Nor so write my name in thy loving bookes

            As those Idolatrous flatterers, which still

            Their Princes stiles, with many Realmes fulfill

            Whence they no tribute have, and where no sway.

            Such services I offer as shall pay

            Themselves, I hate dead names: O then let mee

            Favourite in ordinary, or no favourite bee.

T.E. Lawrence

  to the widow of

  Thomas Hardy

  15 January 1928

The Selected Letters

Malcolm Brown, editor

W.W. Norton & Company, 1989©

John Donne

ca 1598

Elegy VI

  1-10

The Complete Poetry

  and Selected Prose ..

Charles M. Coffin

  editor

Random House, 1952©

Now that we are all assimilating Larry Kramer

The cultural whale is full, these
days, of notable bits of Larry Kra-
mer, Ahab of homophile New York be-
fore there was a whiff of HIV, and
ever since its default Father Map-
ple. This alimentary reconciliation
almost makes one sentimental for
Danton, Desmoulins, and St Juste, 
scions of the Panthéon and vision-
aries of Les Invalides. A first-
class crank, afloat in any status-
driven society, is selected from
his class to sit next to Alice
Longworth, so long as he sustains
his malice. Mr Kramer does no less.

If one hasn't anything nice to say
about anybody, it's shrewd to con-
fide this where saying anything of
the kind would sound monstrously
insensitive. And so it was, that
Mr Kramer was given an epidemic,
to leverage his contempt for ho-
mophile culture in Faggots into 
a much more gloriously universal
alarm in The Normal Heart. Like
Danton, Desmoulins and St Juste,
he was the beneficiary of a sys-
tem, compounded by unexpected
circumstances, which gave almost
infinite scope to febrile griev-
ance. This was to be expected.

      So, grabbing Nephew and a load of implements,

      he allowed the former to guide him and his lat-

      ter, recollecting from somewhere "and a little

      child shall lead them," hoping he'd soon be

      leading himself toward that more propitious spot

      in The Meat Rack where he was going to dig his 

      grave.

Years before the news broke of the
Terror on that silent summer morning
in The New York Times, his own dark
vision undressed itself in satire.
We'll never know, if Kramer was
the necessary prophet that he is
now being hailed for being. Men
and boys deserve some of the cred-
it, surely, for their honest, cruel 
deaths, of which no measure will
ever be possible. He hardly mat-
ters; his tremors are behind us, 
and we are left with sharing his 
survival. It's more than we can 
claim to do with Danton, Desmou-
lins, and St Juste. But would they 
stand for it, Ishmael?

Larry Kramer
Faggots
Random House, 1978©