Heartlands

I had been in Berkeley, visiting a couple

of shops dealing in used and rare books, 

when I heard on the radio while crossing

the Bay Bridge, returning to Stanford, of

the conclusion of a rudimentary peace be-

tween Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. In

no more than a few moments, I exited the

freeway at Washington Street to turn up

Montgomery, for dinner at Ernie's. You

know Ernie's, even though it is nominal-

ly not there anymore, because it is where

James Stewart and Kim Novak dined in Ver-

tigo. A gentleman might not dine in res-

taurants, but when the occasion demands

access to a superior wine list, improvi-

sation is understandable, and forgiven.

Ernie's is still there in that principle,

while paranoia and deception are still as

vigorous in the land as they were in Ver-

tigo. And no one is allowing himself a

Château Ausone until the present terror

has been purged from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Still, a civil thirst sustains the dream.

If Ernie's were still ensconced in its Bar-
bary Coast brick digs in the 700 block of
Montgomery, its cellar would certainly now
boast a Californian corollary of Ch Ausone.
Their common debt to the wine grape Rabel-
ais grew in the Loire, and called his lit-
tle raspberries - Cabernet Franc - upholds
a stunning structural elegance amidst a
sea of grapes of famed intensity and bulk.
  
Investing in the 80's in several acres of
the choicest slope in Napa Valley, and cul-
tivating daringly at right angles to the
grade of custom, a bold single-mother im-
migrant named Delia Viader planted a vine-
yard of Cabernet Franc with Cabernet Sauv-
ignon, whose principal wine exhibits that
shining confluence of terroir and oenology
which made Ausone the wine of Cole Porter,
and which defies any mention as commonplace.

They are not always saints, despite a
famous lyric, who finally go marching
in. We think they surely must be saints,
who'd deliver us from the New American
government some day; but Saigon fell to
other sorts, and no one underestimates 
the relentlessness of a riposte deferred.
Mr Porter wrote a song I like better, for
setting things aright, Why Don't We Try
Staying Home? It would have spared this
generation a great civil war of foreign
policy, still playing out in the braying
vainglory of this most degenerate of our
Presidencies. It would have steeled us
against the lurid distractions of this
hustler demagogue, snarling at the world.
It would have cultivated the human right
of taste.

  










Jason Lowe for Berry Brothers & Rudd
Château Ausone
Bordeaux

Anonymous photographer
Viader Vineyards
Howell Mountain, Napa

End of the clown

Looking back, it seemed to those who

play the long game in Asia - not un-

numbering the two players, Russia and

Japan, who won an American President

a Nobel Peace Prize for hosting them

at Portsmouth - that the new American

President had already made every con-

cession to North Korea and China that

they could ever have begged, in with-

drawing the United States from the one

dynamic trade pact in that sphere, of

any counter-balance to their interest.

That bold blow, to isolate America and

wither its reach into the future of in-

ternational economic growth, was cer-

tainly worth a temporary retrenchment

in an exorbitant weapons program of

no productivity, especially if such a

feint might fortify their mark's posi-

ition at the head of his nation for a

second term of sabotage, and result

in the deportation of its forces.

How little like rocket science it was,

to play the pulp hero of hollow poses.

Yet through it all, he beguiled his 

people to upbraid him as a racist, a

dilatory misogynist, and incompetent

albeit savage head of state, when all

the time, he was the simplest traitor.

Herbert List
Ostsee
1933

Origins of Wednesday lxx: I never read a thing by Philip Roth

Overnight my telephone screen
flashed the New York Times'
report of Philip Roth's death
at 85. He was one of the most
heralded observers of post-War
American society, and I was a
post-War child.

The failure was not, in short, Philip Roth's. He wrote of a society and from a culture of highly fertile influence in American life, which were nevertheless circumscribed by covenants and restrictions and holocausts and other persisting maldistributions in the American dialogue in which my generation was raised: a brilliance in a shell game of bushels in scarcely glancing interaction. I knew a massive war had ended just before I was born, but I was 10 years old before I was aware there are Jews.

I think such oblivion defines the intractability of the wasteland cherished so anxiously by the new American government, that one needn't ask how It happened. It, an insidious presumption of innocence in resistance to information, withstood masterpiece after masterpiece from Philip Roth - not alone among post-War writers to do his best to give meaning to the permeating leanings of a common language, but just stellar enough to illuminate the density of the shell with each one.  

Today we hear counsels for mourning. As if this were understood.

Traction

     Lymie came up from the locker rooms,

     in his street clothes,

     with his logic book under his arm,

     and his leather notebook, his an-

     thology of nineteenth century poetry.

William Maxwell

The Folded Leaf

  III: A Cold Country

1945

Christopher Carduff

  editor

Early Novels and Stories

The Library of America, 2008©

Plan now

It is becoming clear that the 're-education'

of Germany by the allies will not be a pious

aspiration, but an unavoidable duty.. 

First, although the German people certainly

did know about the horrors of the concentra-

sion camps, their real crime was not that 

they failed to stop them when all power was

in the hands of the Nazis, for this would

have been practically impossible, but that

they ever allowed the Nazis, whom they knew

to be villains, to rise to power at all..

Secondly, it is no use hoping to build any-

thing except on some foundation of national

tradition. Germany will not be a tabula rasa.

Every means should be taken to persuade the

Germans that they themselves have such a tra-

edition, however completely forgotten now, 

on which a decent society can be based.. It

was in part the influence of American schol-

are who had caught the flame in Germany that

made Harvard, as early as the 1830s, a stead-

fast defender of the scholar's freedom from

political and religious pressure..

Thirdly, the Germans must learn to respect

the Slavs. In Western Europe it is not gen-

really recognized that one of the main tra-

editions in German history, and the most 

sinister, is that of the conquest and col-

onization of Slav lands. As a result the

ordinary German has come to regard the Slav

as an inferior being..

Yours faithfully,

                  R. Birley

May 8, 1945

Sir Robert Birley

Headmaster of Charterhouse

  later, Headmaster of Eton

  Advisor to the Military Governor,

    Control Commission of Germany

    1945 - 1947

Letter to The Times [London]

Kenneth Gregory, editor

Your Obedient Servant

 op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday cliv: A fixer's payroll

Casual Friday brings out the paddle

player-hero in all of us, to the ex-

tent that all we have to wear on our

sleeve to distinguish ourselves are

the testimonials of prior conquests.

Yolanda, Liz, the redoubtable Erica.

And, one keeps looking for the name,

Hope Hicks, whitest of lissome liars

in that realm, but how soon we for-

get the roster of our vanquished as

they settle off the table with Cohen.

Sascha Schneider
1913

What do "they" care?

Untrammeled play in the fields
of the lord does not very ac-
curately describe the range of
possible gestures, even in the
most liberated state, available
to the practitioner of speech.
In surfing, we have long known
that the gods conduct a monitor-
ing of behavior, which we have
lately learned our corporations
and other manipulators maintain,
to anticipate and shape the arc
of our play. Every time we ven-
ture into a discernibly oblique
convergence with currents in the
New American Government, the lis-
tening posts of Russia leap into
the acutest concentration, al-
though whether for that nation's
policies or for this one's, one
couldn't possibly claim to know.

This is the consumption pattern
of the first 36 hours of the pre-
vious posting, on the NAG's em-
brace of a torture administratrix
to supervise a widely known unit
of our secret intelligence service.
Yet, all with no mention of Russia.
Given the NAG's affection for the
government of Russia, one could 
hardly attribute this interest to
any apprehension of mistreatment
of its citizens. Of whom, then;
for whom are "Russians" reading?

Upon coincidences of much less
persistence, the paranoia sustain-
ing the NAG continues to be fed.
Why not the curiosity of occasion-
al critics, condemned to be read?

iii  Willy Ronis

      1938

  

The Gina Haspel obscenity

Stalwart fellow, always willing 
to support his underlings, and 
lead them in the service of the 
Nation as defined by his superi-
ors. Extraordinarily experienced 
and demonstrably devoted servant 
of the American people. Show the
threat, and turn your gaze away.

This impeccably impregnable

claptrap for any abuse of the

Constitution of the United 

States is on offer once again,

this week, in the frantic ef-

forts of the New American Gov-

ernment to expose the humanity

of its dissidents. One has to

count oneself among them, simp-

ly to breathe a better air. As

our entertainment, the NAG now

offers, at phenomenal hazard of

discovery, a lady to navigate

the gates of its Trojan horses.

If told to, this servant of a

finer civilization will claw at

captive throats, submerge them

indefinitely in water, and make

sure no bruises are discovered.

Of course, Gina Haspel captures

the imagination of the infant

upstairs, as much as Clarence

Thomas struck George Bush the

Elder as the finest legal mind

of his time. They are loyal.

Such prohibitive affronts to the

dignity of self-government, itself,

illuminate the constant agenda of

ostensible Conservatism today: to

break the will of the People to up-

hold restraints upon self-dealing.

The NAG, in its zeal to debauch 

every value won in the nation’s
evolving aspirations, has select-

ed a frantic grifter to ruin the 

Environment, an ignoramus to shep-

herd Education, a constellation of
bigots to tear down the Lincoln 

Memorial, and Orwellian stooges to 

mop up the entrails of their fes-

tive savagery. Now, openly to pro-

tect viciousness, itself, from any 

risk of resistance, it has anointed 

a female to stand as torture’s own 

shield, against every humane notice.

Seldom has moral capitulation gath-

ered such surpassing negotiability.

Raffaelo Sanzio, eat your heart out.