A mug while we're away

          Joyeuses fêtes ~

2 boys with brother

mid-20th C.

San Marino

Walking with Whit before a lunar eclipse

Walking with Whit this evening, which is chilly and bright, I looked up to the east to examine the moon, a natural habit in crystalline country air. The dog knew no such concern; the moon was where it was supposed to be, and behaving itself as one would expect. I was bemused by my first thought - It doesn't even know what is going to happen to it. 

I'm glad I did not con-fide this consideration to Whit. He needs to be able to believe that he can enjoy his evening constitutional without distraction, much less having to nanny his companion through some impertinent twinge. But then, unfailingly, his taciturnity brought me up short, and was clarify-ing.


Our holiday now follows this protocol. For a time, you won't see us; but it will not be so for us.






Thomas Gainesborough
Wooded Landscape with Herdsman ..
  Rustic Lovers, and Ruined Castle
Pencil on paper, ca 1780
The Huntington Library
San Marino

Easier seen than done

When last we visited the friable, if fertile structures of Frank Lloyd Wright, at the urging of Philip Johnson, we ran into the Lally column in the living room, against the drooping cantilever. Satan in construction's curious canon, gravity. Impromptu perpendiculars play hell with circula-tion, though glossy they are bossy in their upright concentration.

But now the maintenance of life's materials lands squarely on our desk, to test our own commitment to their conservation. Our beloved Guggenheim is patched and spiffy once again, and various other charities flock to spackle what's left of the Master's crumbling legacy. Yet who can say he hasn't had to make choices in his own priorities of repair, as the taste for things of elegant projection lays claim upon the highest maintenance? The builder's work seems never to be done - and just when one thought one might cash out one's chips, somewhat ahead for the night, there's dawn to light a crumbling cornice, a buckling buttress needing bolstering . .

Yet still the thirst for the heroic is not strained, computer-assisted design going only so far to nourish its requirements. The imagination can tell you only what you want, it can't deliver it on a plate. This tiresome lesson leads many into compromise, and others into trade, but at the end of the day, a thing meets specifica-tions or it does not. 
For a few, the great, unbending arc of time inspires the diligentest use of it; the romance of the thrilling edifice is engineer enough. And we find them, coiled as if a chord to spring a tangent from its center. But even they depend on a solid footing, and that does look like a bother.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Edgar J. Kaufmann House, 1935-39

Bear Run, Pennsylvania

Monday's gruel

The last succour of the weekend's warmth wraps some comfort this morning as the ditz blonde right-wing nut-case singsongs Murdoch's "news" to you, laced with lively Falwelled taunts against your soul, Liberty Universitied and zealot think-tanked hireling that she is, to chirp another warning to guard all infants and beasts against your naughty glance. It's Monday, and it's time to know your workplace, little fella. Smile, when you finish your oatmeal. Smile when you've stripped your last strokes in the shaving mirror. Practice the face of Monday, don't let them get you down. You're American.

Besides, remember: there will be lunch. Let them kick themselves to find out how you do it.

Sense and uncertainty

Two writers one reads, whose sites are referenced in Context, are confiding of impairments in their senses, writing with candour and eloquence on attendant uncertainty. It's a tricky season for candour, there being suddenly so much of it, particularly about loss; but I'm not suggesting this custom is suspect, for occupying a window of permission. On the contrary, Andrew Jefford and Mark Doty resort to language for framing uncertainty, despite acute pressure in the first person. Every incongruity, unless willed to the contrary, seeks reconciliation in form, and for these writers the instinct must be expected, even if the result is stunning.

People who don't know Andrew Jefford's writing will now see in an absolute sense, what his readers saw initially by comparison and then ultimately by complete trust. Jefford is read by producers and consumers alike, as a passionately scrupulous and incomparably sophisticated investigator of winegrowing and wines. He knows the physics and he knows the metaphysics of this flux, and he knows the content and the dignity of thirst. Like Valéry Lorenzo, he also likes the keyboard performances of Glenn Gould. Now he is experiencing sudden and permanent loss of hearing, in one ear.

The unexpected, the life-changing and frightening are central to the vision of Mark Doty, who writes now of severe danger and invasive remedies in one of his eyes. A necessary poet if ever there were one, Doty carries the visceral gratitude of all single men over 30, as a mediator and advocate in time of horror and pain, and is important to all readers of English over the age of 12 who may be discovering poetry. His report on this predicament continues at his own blog.



These are two men who have compelled one to think about that state of holding someone in esteem. This holding, not this stature, is the state, it is a condition; although it may be arbitrary, for the sake of plucking some word for it from the roster of likely candidates - respect, &c - esteem pops into mind because it is appropriately less commonplace, nowadays, as a verb or a noun. You can be great and not earn it; you can be simple and never lose it. 

It's not a ranking of skills; it's closer to gratitude for guiding one to an achievement of mental pleasure, the pleasure of arriving at understanding. I know: many people don't believe in the existence of understanding, but I reject that posture. Belief hasn't anything to do with it, except in a shared respect for the task. I know many deny any understanding that isn't belief. We suffer for their fanaticism. But it is human to desire understanding, proper to seek it, and humane to share it. I may not know these guys, but to paraphrase Leon Trotsky on war, they are interested in knowing me. 

I wish them well.

They're right, of course

for Bruce


It's going to change their army.
They were just never entitled to 
their army.


Now it's the other shoe
that needs to drop. And
I don't mean the DoMA.
I mean their waging wars
with a cult and not a draft.
So easy.

But sometimes they get, you know, confused,

and change their vows or the ground rules

that sustain all of us. It's cheery, then, to reflect on the past

and what it brought us. To take stone books down

from the shelf. It is good, in fact,

to let the present pass without commentary

for what it says about the future.

There was nothing carnal in the way omens became portents.

John Ashbery

Are you ticklish?

  A Worldly Country

Harper Collins, 2007©

  

ROFL & Probable Cause: a crash course for prosecutors

a curiously alimentary anomaly

a cherry bomb goes off

in the household septic system

Egbert is in charge

of chambers again

Aunt Hortense orders

tea from Eric Blore

The Ale & Quail

convenes in the Club Car

Clovis Sangrail is

coming for lunch

Laurent Chevalier's brothers

teach him spinach tennis

Your best friend believes your

"kumquat juice" is not Tabasco

Mme Arcati is in the

kitchen at Firefly

Your exam in Rabelais

is a take-home

Dorothy Parker speaks

at a Yale Commencement


Your English Cocker
avenges his tummy rub

A Yule Log is served

in the Senate cafeteria

Intellect, Craft, Property

Les photographies publiées sur ce blog ne peuvent pas être reproduites ailleurs, même sur Internet, sans mon autorisation explicite.

footnote in true scale, at a 

dreadfully pretty blog

drawing by the late
Professor of Architecture
William Feay Shellman, Jr


unattributed by its
own beneficiary








"If music be the food of love," then shut up, Orsino, and clothe your pucky boybreast in a shirt upon my copyright.




This, I thought, had gone too far. There one lay, furnishing receptive surfaces for some incisive stenograph, only to be barred from its display without exquisite ceremony of creative consent. Who knew, which had come first, the chicken or the egg? 

So much for Cuius regio, eius religio - "my tits, my terms" - where loquation may be licensed by the hour, and one's flesh alienated beyond Portia's wildest justice. Oh, bother, this homespun web of endlessly spinning derivatives, dripping shadlike chads of provenance.

What is shelf-life, in a sphere of no shelves? But I stray. I post this notice to admonish all readers, in sympathy, to allow nothing discovered here the slightest assimilation in your thoughts or expression by your infinite means of expulsion, without prior application to every being or other entity ever named (or not) in this non-existent space, and those known to them, past or future in unknowable time. I exempt myself from this seigneurage; I haven't the slightest thought of being bound to what matter passes through here.

valery-lorenzo.blogspot.com/


Princeton University
  a privately held fiction


Leandro Okabe
  the image,
  ownership unknown


Anonymous other deities