Don't know much haberdashery

    But one does

    run into Ti-

    tian now and

    then.

Linus Wördemann x Tom Ford

Funny kinds of cravings

I find I awoke just now with the keenest particular interest in British foreign policy through, say, the Attlee government. You know, before Eden's apotheosis of foolhardy aggression in the English-speaking world until our rise. Has this ever happened to you? I should think so: one gets out of bed for a cool drink of water, and finds oneself before almost any bookshelf, bristling with historians and architects, painters and poets in a persis-tent undertone of amateur schol-arship, every so often enriched by the exotica of continents connoting the most errant, not to say wayward wanderings of here a fleet, there a regiment, without apparent continuity but for custom. Not our mode, of cyclical revivals.

Monday NB's

Yesterday's acrostic from Frank O'Hara to Vincent Warren gave the chance to revisit a switchback stair on an Aus-trian river and passages in Fitzgerald, supported by an illustration cropped more in favor of the two texts than the equally stylish tower. I furnish the original here, in deference to the builder's art.





  


Principal interest lay in forti-fying O'Hara's reference to our cus-tom, possibly instinctive, to give dating to memory, and more than as a mnemonic precaution. The Roman sys-tem in this illustration is expedi-ent, gifted as it is for suggesting recurrence or continuity, and specificity at the same time. As in the tower over the Mur, the elements repeat themselves in clarifying con-summation. Blondness and Rimbaudness may have contributed their claims, but dating is ironically supreme. Even as we indulge a birth date, yet do we live. None of our reinforcements of the text can reasonably be seen as fortifying the sufficiency of poetry. 

Listening at the Monteleone v

 Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the
   torn-down Third Avenue El
 it sways slightly but firmly like a hand or
   a golden-downed thigh
 normally I don't think of sounds as colored
   unless I'm feeling corrupt
 concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which
   is simple and very definite
 even lasting, yes it may be that dark and purifying
   wave, the death of boredom
 nearing the heights themselves may destroy you in the
   pure air
 to be further complicated, confused, empty but
   refilling, exposed to light

 With the past falling away as an acceleration of
   nerves thundering and shaking
 aims its aggregating force like the Métro towards
   a realm of encircling travel
 rending the sound of adventure and becoming ultimately
   local and intimate
 repeating the phrases of an old romance which is constantly
   renewed by the
 endless originality of human loss the air the stumbling
   quiet of breathing
 newly the heavens' stars all out we are all for the captured
   time of our being

Frank O'Hara
Collected Poems
  You are Gorgeous and
  I'm Coming
1959
Donald Allen, editor
op. cit.

Familiar dispersals of the day

    ..

    Now as the great paunch of this earth
    Allows its punctuation by seeds, some to be
    Trees, some men walking as trees, so the mind
    Offers its cakes of spore to time in them:
    The sumptuary pleasure-givers living on
    In qualities as sure as taste of hair and mouth,
    White partings of the hair like highways,
    Permutations of a rose, buried beneath us now,
    Under the skin of thinking like a gland
    Discharging its obligations in something trivial:
    Say a kiss, a handclasp: say a stone tear.

  

Lawrence Durrell
The Anecdotes
  xv: In Rhodes, iii
Selected Poems
Peter Porter, editor
op. cit.

Grappling with our season's luxury

 Content to the mind, says the great
 Halifax, is as moss to a tree; it
 binds up so as to stop its growth.
 And Hobbes complained of Chatsworth
 that though there was a good library
 there, which the Earl of Devonshire
 stocked by his instructions, never-
 theless the want of learned conver-
 sation was a very great inconven-    ience.

 Upon which Aubrey comments sadly,
 'Methinks in the country, in long
 time, for want of good conversation,
 one's understanding (wit, invention)
 grows mouldy'.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Lord Dacre of Glanton

The Wartime Journals

July, 1945

op. cit.

i le smoking

  Dries van Noten

Arraigned on Thursday

   Back again, are we?

   And what is it this

   time?

Eyes on Mississippi

  Like you, I find that

  the ratio of Missis-

  sippians among my cor-

  respondents is extra-

  aordinarily high. They

  are an epistolary lot,

  and their distractions

  are few. My sampling,

  moreover, reinforces a

  belief in constancy as

  an aspect of their na-

  ture, unlike their cav-

  alier cousins of the 

  seaboard, so whimsical-

  ly vulnerable to the

  trivial and the silly,

  in gaudy and impetuous

  manifestations of doubt.

  You remember, it was his

  fanaticism that made Kar-

  la vulnerable in Tinker,

  Tailor. His secret doubt.

  Life in Mississippi, one

  could almost conclude,

  seems to flow continuous-

  ly, as a full time thing.

  Is it possible, they'd do

  a Cantor on Thad Cochran?

John le Carré

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Knopf, 1974©