C'mon, Pruitt, there's something we haven't destroyed

Our metric reference for today's

celebration of the new government

is the immortal exhortation from

Rock Hudson to Elizabeth Taylor,

in George Stevens' 1950s romance

on Texas, Giant. Embracing inter-

racial enlightenment during the

Eisenhower Administration, hotly

rejected in the rise of our New

Greatness (hilariously interpret-

ed only this week by David Brooks

as the rebirth of a frontier spir-

it), Stevens' screenplay finds a

newlywed couple disembarking from

their private rail car at their

imperial ranch in Texas, as the

élitist coastal bride graciously

accepts a welcoming bouquet from

a sub-captive Hispanic retainer

of her man-of-the-people husband.

A touch annoyed by this forbidden

interaction, his final demand to

get into the car for the drive to

the house, rings loud and clear -

C'mon, Leslie, it's 50 miles to coffee!

Amidst all the buffoonery of the new government, yet coiled in plain sight in its horror of illegiti-macy, it is easy to over-look its childlike agony. A workmanlike apparatchik was certain to emerge in the maelstrom of hate mongering headliners staffing the regime. He is the former attorney general for fossilized Oklahoma, and he is destroying everything he possibly can, before the nation's day in Court, much less at the polls. 

In all the President's frenzy in

the stealing of myths, is said to

be some cover for his henchmen's

theft of resources. But his clock

is right, twice a day. They are

inextricable. Nice car, not his.

i    Xavier Serrano

ii   Luc Défont Saviard

iii  Kenneth Blom

      Les palmiers

      2013

v    George Stevens

        director

      Giant

      Elizabeth Taylor

      James Dean

      1956

Canada at a hundred and fifty

     Not that anyone's counting
     or anything, but how could
     Canada have whupt our ass,
     in the War of 1812, and be
     younger than you'd expect?

Quiet jetty

  A breakwater, possibly the allusion drawing

  Roosevelt to plant trees to hold the land in

  the first worst hard time, in lieu of pursu-

  ing advice to adopt soils management by sci-

  entific scruples, comes to mind in the pres-

  ent worst hard time, a dust bowl degradation

  of the framework of community, the language.

  The clean white shirt, possibly an allusion

  to a breakwater, is resorted to repeatedly,

  rather, for its porosity, permeability, clar-

  ity, coherency, and transparent antecedents.

  This gives a taste for it, generic as it is.

  I think of soils management these days, as a

  friend was writing to me only the other day,

  to do: you can defend, simply by reading a

  poem. This I hadn't discovered I'd known to

  do, until I glanced again at prose just now,

  so steeped in Scott Fitzgerald, that it had

  held in ground and flowered, another season -

          Snatching her hand, he pulled her along with him,

          and they ran until they reached a side street muf-

          fled and sweet with trees. As they leaned together,

          panting, he put into her hand a bunch of violets,

          and she knew, quite as though she'd seen it done,

          that they were stolen. Summer that is shade and moss

          traced itself in the veins of the violet leaves, and

          she crushed their coolness against her cheek.

Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time
  The untold story of those
  who survived the great
  American dust bowl
Houghton Mifflin, 2006©


Truman Capote
Summer Crossing
ca 1959
op. posth.
The Truman Capote
  Literary Trust
Random House, 2006©

Helplessly all thumbs

She has certainly the finest Hand
of any Woman in the World. I can
assure you, Sir, were you to be-
hold her, you would be in the 
same Condition; for as her 
speech is Musick, her form is Angelick. But I find I grow ir-
regular while I am talking of
her; but indeed it would be Stu-
pidity to be unconcerned at such
Perfection. Oh the excellent Cre-
ature, she is as inimitable to
all Women, as she is inaccessible
to all Men!

I found my friend begin to rave,
and insensibly led him towards
the House, that we might be join-
ed by some other Company ..

Sir Richard Steele
1672 - 1729
The Spectator
  Nr. 113
July 10, 1711

Robert J. Allen
  editor
Addison and Steele
  Selections from The Tatler
  and The Spectator
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970©


ii  Eddie Redmayne
     2015

Origins of Wednesday liii: Pendant days

ii   Ezra Stoller

        New York Athletic Club

        from the lobby of the

        Seagram Building, 1958

iii  Ourense Cathedral

        Galicia, 12th C 

        fresco detail

iv  Marlon Brando

        book and matchbook

        undated, uncredited

Stealing a march

     The plan, we remember, was that

     Lupa and Remus were to be "out-

     door dogs"; that, at least, was

     what Ed firmly intended. But I

     had it in mind that they should

     be outdoor dogs only until Ed

     relented and let them move into

     the house ..

      

George Pitcher
The Dogs who 
  came to Stay
Dutton, 1995©

Bright ideas of health care

    With the wind gusting so wildly,

    So unpredictably,

    I'm willing to bet one or two ants

    May have tumbled on their backs

    As we sit here on the porch.

    Their feet are pedaling

    Imaginary bicycles.

    It's a battle of wits against

    Various physical laws,

    Plus Fate, plus -

    So-what-else-is-new?

    Wondering if anyone's coming to their aid

    Bringing cake crumbs,

    Miniature editions of the Bible,

    A lost thread or two

    Cleverly tied end to end.

Charles Simic
New and Selected Poems
  1962 - 2012
  On the Meadow
  2000
Houghton Mifflin 
  Harcourt, 2013©

One on the rocks

If I listened long enough to you,
I'd find a way to believe that it's
all true.

                Your paintings aren't weapons, some-

                one wrote for him to say, you would

                never do that to them, never reduce

                them like that. Maybe you started

                the commission thinking that way but

                then art happened. You couldn't help

                it, that's what you do ..

Of all the arguments to present,

to a man who knows what he's do-

ing, I think the effort to dis-

miss a moral crisis he confronts

is the symptom of a script which

has to end, one way or another.

Expression always has something

to do for others, if it is art.

                If you can't find your courage in a

                war, you have to keep looking for it

                anyway, and not in another war ei-

                ther; in where it's old and jammed 

                until the rocks start moving around,

                a little light and air, long time no

                see .. The war ended, and then it 

                really ended .. I watched the chop-

                pers I'd loved dropping into the sea

                as their pilots jumped clear, and one

                last chopper revved it up, lifted off

                and flew out of my chest. 

Tim Hardin
Reason to Believe
1965

John Logan
  playwright
Red
  Scene iv
Oberon Books, 2009©

Michael Herr
Dispatches
  Breathing Out
Alfred A. Knopf, 1977©

Eddie Redmayne
i   Out
ii  Esquire UK
2015