Preserved lemons

     As a child I could not get enough

     lime pickle from India. So when in

     Morocco I tasted preserved lemons

     for the first time, I fell in love.

Jeremiah Tower

Donald Sultan, paintings

Jeremiah Tower Cooks:

  250 Recipes from an

  American Master

Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2002©

Supernova

  When it came night,
  the white waves
  paced to and fro in
  the moonlight, and
  the wind brought
  the sound of the great
  sea's voice to the men
  on shore, and they 
  felt that they could
  then be interpreters.

Readers who remember the first sentences of

The Red Badge of Courage will need no prompt-

ing to recall the last of The Open Boat, as

the uncanny Stephen Crane resorted again to

the terrestrial telegraph. Called a supernova

by the editor of my walking-around collection

of his prose and poetry, no one seems to re-

sist the appellation in his case, as Heming-

way explained what happened to him: "He died

.. He was dying from the start."

All agree - Hemingway, the most - that this

extraordinarily projected life simply has not

met that end, and that, phosphorescently, the

touch of Stephen Crane imparts its flame be-

yond all imitation. Yet although his stamp 

upon American literature is staggering, and 

upon so many stylists, seductive, this is

his only real resemblance to Rimbaud.  

Now again we have an important study of Crane,

to add to John Berryman's and Christopher Ben-

fey's, and the constant lode in the learned

periodicals. I'm looking forward to reading

Paul Sorrentino's biography, which was warmly

received in [the] TLS. But that fine scholar-

ship must be content to compete with Crane's

astoundingly compelling writing, which draws

the mind beyond corroboration, again except

terrestrially -

    I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

    Round and round they sped.

    ..

    

Stephen Crane

1871 - 1900

The Open Boat

1899

Black Riders

  and Other Lines

1895

Gary Scharnhorst, editor

The Red Badge of Courage

  and Other Stories

op. cit.

Saturday commute xcvii: Innocuous migrations of the male

           Hôtel Magnifique
           Cannes, France, A.M.


  My Precious Dream-Rabbit,

  I'm writing this on the ter-
  race outside the hotel .. One
  or two yachts are mucking a-
  bout. There are a couple of
  islands over to the left, and
  over to the right some moun-
  tains. There aren't many peo-
  ple about at this time of day,
  as most of the lads play ten-
  nis in the morning or go off
  to Antibes to bathe.

Monty Bodkin

  to Gertrude Butterwick

P.G. Wodehouse
The Luck of the Bodkins
1935
Overlook Press, 2003©

Procession revisited: Scarpa and Paul Strand

When I first saw Paul Strand's photograph of his boyhood back yard in the upper West Side of Manhattan, I failed to appreciate the "abstraction" it is celebrated for, in the Metropolitan Museum. Beyond the incidental drama of the clotheslines I saw numerous processional pathways, bridges, elevated porches and decorative channels in the built environments of one of the architects I most love, Carlo Scarpa, whose constructed works must tend to fail the meticulousness of his drawings, some of the most evocative speci-fications a craftsman can ever study. Indeed, one of my favorite possessions is a pencil drawing of stairs at his Brion cemetery, shown here, by a friend who studied them there for hours. And when I turned to another of Strand's photographs from 1917, of a fender with lamp and wire wheel, I admired its parallel arcs as paired, pared reiterations of eloquent movement, processional strokes neither perceived nor projected as abstraction, but as scruples.

i  Scarpa, Olivetti, Venice, 1957

Short lens, long bike

              

   

  Elections are like
  that. You can make
  them say anything.

























Cy Twombly
Academy
1955
Collection MoMA

Bring your voter I.D.

     They will.

Cy Twombly
Tiznit
1953
Collection MoMA

Asylum from the city on the hill

       O wert thou in the storm
        How I would shield thee:
       To keep thee dry and warm
        A camp I would build thee.

       Though the clouds pour'd again
        Not a drop should harm thee,
       The music of wind and rain
        Rather should charm thee.

       O wert thou in the storm
        A shed I would build thee;
       To keep thee dry and warm,
        How I would shield thee.

       The rain should not wet thee,
        Nor thunder-clap harm thee.
       By thy side I would sit me,
        To comfort and warm thee.

       ..






















John Clare
Song
  [fragment]
Northampton General
  Lunatic Asylum 
  East Midlands, England
July 25, 1844
Selected Poetry
Geoffrey Summerfield
  editor
Penguin, 1990©

George Orwell
Politics and the
  English Language
op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday c: and one might say anything

                    And it came over me 'I might 
                    have married you,' she said, 
                    thinking of Peter sitting 
                    there in his little bowtie; 
                    with that knife, opening it, 
                    shutting it. 'Just as he al-
                    ways was, you know.'

















Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway
1925
Everyman's Library
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993©