Origins of Wednesday lxxxviii: Consent or custom?

The intriguing defense of Virginia's

Lt Gov (the office doesn't really use 

the orthographic space it occupies),

to a couple of pressing complaints of

sexual assault, is that the encounters

were "consensual." To have any experi-

ence with life is to possess enough ex-

perience with assault to blow that re-

tort out of the water with one simple

question: how the heck would you know?

I give you the circumstance, of submit-

ting to the custom of the towel snap

on the fanny in the locker room, the

mussing of one's hair before class,

even (hypothetically) the tummy grab

from behind, as yielding to horseplay

as good-naturedly as the setting seems

to demand. But setting and submitting

aren't consenting, and the Lt Gov is

not any likelier to forge that equation

in his pending testimony, than a jury

is to lack experience of assault. Dis-

tinguishing volition from consequence

is akin to counting a ballot without

gerrymandering its frame. He'll learn.

Stella Tennant x Cathleen Naundor

2013

John Koch

1909 - 1978

After the Sitting

Sunday nibbled sleeve iv: Governor Northam's therapy campaign

Briefly to recapitulate, for readers

blessed to have been comatose last

week, the Governor of Virginia, hav-

ing been publicly convulsed in con-

trition for posing in a group port-

rait favoring Ku Klux Klan violence

and minstrel show standards of equal

protection, recanted on the following

news cycle, and denied that he had

any idea where the picture came from.

With that, he announced he would ig-

nore the interests of Virginians, his

Party, and his own ostensible prin-

ciples, and cling to his Office with

the tenacity of the tick he may be.

The subsequent exposure, within hours,

of his successor as a serial sexual

assailant, and of his successor as an-

other racially confused vessel of e-

quality (if not in marital rights),

has somewhat reinforced the Governor's

barricading of himself in Office, much

to the 24/7 employment of poll-takers,

to quantify the damage before it hits.

The interval has emboldened Mr Northam

to attain a new level of ridiculousness,

and sink to an unimagined low of divis-

iveness, by vowing as unctuously as any

caricature of Uriah Heap to commit him-

self to what he wouldn't know if it hit

him in the solar plexus, racial equity,

for the rest of his livelong daze as Gov-

ernor. Seldom has the chaos of a politi-

cian's contrition so spontaneously ren-

ovated the urgent priorities of policy

in his domain, to suit a program of ef-

facing a sordid, sodden sense of guilt,

which his resignation could do for free.

And yet, who can forget the example of

Brutus' funeral oration for Caesar, re-

vealing a glittering upside to grief?

But even Brutus didn't blame the State.

According to Ralph Northam, it is more

urgent for Virginians to be conscript-

ed in his crusade for himself, than it

is for them to redress with their legis-

lators' sobriety and balance, the many

pressing opportunities and problems of

public policy in the Commonwealth. What

a dauntless idiot. As if repulsive in-

anity in his underlying conduct had not

made Virginians feel deceived enough, 

he offers the cure of heedless vanity.

A Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet

The handiest answer to the
diminished popularity of a
caffè con panna, is the 
tautological one, fashion.

                     Yet this escape hatch, it-

                     self fashionable, begs the
                     question, is this Prada fa-
                     shion, vegan fashion, car-
                     diac fashion, diversity fa-
                     shion..? Yet, we say, abor-
                     tion is not so much in fa-
                     shion, because we can't a-
                     gree whether it's murder, 
                     or couples clamoring for a
                     constriction of choice. Nei-
                     ther one is much in fashion. 

  

  Murder is down, possibly as
  a bizarre function of the
  rising trend toward suicide;
  and people who had been up
  in arms for a choice between
  Republican or well-behaved
  Congressional oversight have
  begun to constrict their
  choice to ill-behaved inter-
  rogations run by Democrats.
  But we hear this was not a
  choice, merely the nudge of
  being human. A more fright-
  eningly accurate definition
  of fashion might not exist.
  Fashion keeps chugging on:
  who's paying for it today?
  Maybe some of them, humans.

Suppose it were Friday clxix: A very good light for Volnay

  Here you will find a poor but beau-

  tifully exposed, very stony, reddish

  soil of Bathonian origin on a rocky

  base, on quite a definite slope fac-

  ing to the southeast. It is the light-

  ness of the soil throughout the Volnay

  vineyards that largely contributes to 

  the delicacy and finesse of this com-

  mune's wines.

Although I have argued here, before, that taste is a human right, it isn't from care that I haven't rejected the reality that it can be educated, with all the risks of coercion that process can inflict. It's in weather such as this, in backlighting of earlier days like this, that I look with gratitude upon the qualities of a wine which is less probable to discover today, without a push such as I was given as a student, and the house red wine was from an appellation not then expensive, also not hotly flogged by hired authorities. We don't experience those conditions in these times, but I do not regard them as indispensable to loving an extraordinary treasure for itself. I apologize as much for speaking its name, as for withholding it. 

Clive Coates

The Wines of France

  Revised Edition

Wine Appreciation Guild

1999©

i  Alexander McQueen

   Bazaar UK

Will the beautiful room be empty?

I don't recall the infantile crisis

of bed-wetting as especially conta-

gious, but then I wasn't collecting

statistics at the time, to alibi my

campaign for staying in the family.

As Virginia has come down with an

outbreak of blackface impetigo at

the highest levels of her govern-

ment, and a lawsuit gathers steam

against a bench-warmer, for imper-

sonating consensual sex, people be-

gin to remember how the sure-thing

grown-up candidate-in-all-but-name

for higher office was a klutz of a

plagiarist, a leading antagonist of 

the degenerate President is a combat 

veteran imposter, and another candid-

ate carries James Stewart's vertigin-

ous pursuit of a falsified identity

to the extreme of playing hers out

as her own Judy. 

This has given rise to The Ralph

Northam Rule: Before we allow one

of the children to be excused to

go potty, we need to be sure not

to discriminate against others of

equal claim to mercy. Someone must

stay, so to speak, to hold the fort.

The Democratic Party had better be-

gin to find out if the people care

anymore if a politician is trust-

worthy, or if they should evacuate 

a beautiful room they don't deserve.

The resistance is not a festschrift

for contrition, but for liberation.

If a Democrat isn't available, one

had better not try to be invented.

We are used to Republican Presidents

If you've been led from the

White House by a man who remem-

bers history from film scripts,

or declares the subject expired

just because an office building

is destroyed, it isn't such a

stretch to translate the dreams

of an undernourished idiot up-

stairs, lashed to electrodes of

flattery and disinformation.

This must be the hard part, for

the rest of the world to under-

stand. Yes, it makes our nation-

al conduct unusually spasmodic,

but we have the reassurance to

offer, that this doesn't flow

from policy, really, to offend.

We wouldn't go so far, we don't

think, as to say we are changed.

The illusion of freedom: My brother at 75

The continuity girls - and there
were more than a few in his case
- performing the function of our
search engines, today, remind me
that at this page, this date has
often yielded to my reminiscence
of the moment of my one sibling.

I did not know him, for the full
25 years, coming into his life a
while after him, in the guise of
an intriguing but not altogether
necessary presence; and I wasn't
there, as it ended. In the fifty
more recent years, however, this
person has sustained that categ-
orically exceptional position of
being the single mysterious gift
to my existence, to the extent I
believe must be familiar to many
siblings in a family of four. As
such I do 'return,' if that com-
monoplace term can be used, into
his existence in mine so custom-
arily, that the challenge of his
birthday is not to summarize it,
but to identify the terms of its
effect. This is always advisory,
not a prescription, but a tenta-
tive deduction from his example.

              Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

              It doesn't so much matter what you do in

              particular so long as you have your life.

              If you haven't had that what have you had?

              I'm too old - too old at any rate for what

              I see. What one loses one loses; make no

              mistake about that. Still, we have the il-

              lusion of freedom; therefore don't, like

              me today, be without the memory of that il-

              lusion. I was either, at the right time,

              too stupid or too intelligent to have it,

              and now I'm a case of reaction against the

              mistake. Do what you like so long as you

              don't make it. For it was a mistake. Live.




From his example, not from these
terms or punctuation, one should
derive the profile of a benefic-
iary of this frame of reference,
in my brother. I never knew well
a more stark examplar of the il-
lusion of freedom, and up to the
point of his turning toward that
loss he incurred, knew him well.

Nothing can exceed the closeness
with which the whole fits again
into its germ, James observed, as
he identified the foregoing exhor-
tation as the subject of his fav-
orite among his novels. It is a
story, as experience of this au-
thor steels one to suppose, which
will not leave its hull until it
is anatomized, exhausted of dichotomies and paradoxes, and simply laid there, for memory. 

The illusion of freedom in The Am-bassadors is merrily imperiled 
(and not) by a chronic symptom in James, an impressionability in Americans, or in the argot of our time, the seduction of boys. The germ encapsulates, reproduces, both elements, rivals. He knew.

Henry James
The Art of the Novel
  Preface to The Am-
  bassadors
1909
Charles Scribner & Sons
1934
University of Chicago©
2011

If reflection's as good as shadow

  Spring has 

  no choice.

  

Elvis Harper

  x Carter Smith

Mathias Lauridsen

  x Henrik Bülow

James Merrill