Saturday commute lxxviii: exploring vintages

        A little disarray

        is a modest price

        to pay for under-

        standing.

Open stacks and closed

The Bibliothèque Nation-ale is a subject of cur-rent discussion at New York's Museum of Modern Art. This is especially timely, given France's proof of the feasibility of preserving the very model of textual husband-ry being destroyed in New York by its custodians. Scholarship isn't flix-ing. It will not queue.

Exult responsibly

We are in the midst of
an early awakening of
Spring; two days of
sunshine after a late
snow, find the earth
warm and fragrant in
our twilight walk.

Whole days would go by, and later their years,

while I thought of nothing but its darkness

drifting like a bridge against the sky.

Day after day I dreamily sought its melancholy,

its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me,

and upon my lengthening neck its kiss

was murmuring like a wound. My very life

became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings

and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes,

walled in water, would glimpse the pathway

to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne.

         Then for a moment my strengthening arms

         would cry out upon the leafy crest of the air

         like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain,

         would go through me on its way back to the forest,

         and I'd sink back upon that brutal tenderness

         that bore me on, that held me like a slave

         in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day,

         though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me,

         moment of infinitely salty air! sun fluttering

         like a signal! upon the open flesh of the world.

Frank O'Hara

River

1953

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

Donald Allen, editor

op. cit.

I just think it's enormously too nice a day

  I just think it's     enormously too nice a   day, to be remembering   James Knox Polk.

But that's just how it is, so many times, as one accepts the advice of a strong review. Fine, yes; but how much of his awful war is going to comport with a tour of one's gar-den, right now, when a week's pressing business is at last, suspended? No, it wasn't fair of Mr Polk, but what do you say we refuse him another day to ruin? And you know, it will only make us think of Texas.

Amy S. Greenberg

A Wicked War:

  Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the

  1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

Knopf, 2012©

Thorny in California

  at 6 weeks

Paddy Chayefsky on Executive Action

  Whaddaya wanna do to     kill some time, Mr       President?

  I dunno, Mr Brennan.     What can you give me in   the way of a bang, that   won't get me into         trouble?

  Guess that rules out a   housebreaking contest?

Paddy Chayefsky, script

Marty
Philco Television Playhouse, 1953
United Artists, 1955
Palme d'Or
AMPAS Best Picture


Thorny in California
  with his brother

I felt a terrible renunciation coming on, of all seriousness

   This sets an insupportable example for the young,

   I realise, second only to yielding to the tempta-

   tion to confide it. But we'd been going through a

   little impromptu power outage in our neighborhood,

   a classic if tiresome Virginian response to snow-

   fall of the gentlest distribution; and there one

   was, alone under the covers with a trusty torch.

   What to do, what to do; yes, and with so little

   practice of having to improvise the onset of drow-

   siness without adding to one's irritation. The e-

   ternal hole card at bedtime - reading - would have

   to be played just right, or news of the Battle of

   Kursk (in Antony Beevor's fine telling) or Alan

   Bennett's inconclusive interview between Auden and

   a rent boy in Oxford, could, well could ratchet up

   the sense of a day's not ending just perfectly, es-

   pecially as one is being napped in freezing ambient

   infusions.

I suppose it is as obvious to everybody else, as it eventually became to me, that it's to the sardonic that we turn, in such circumstances, even at some risk of a literary experience. Who else do we know, who could make such a happy omelet of privation, as Dorothy Parker? Yes, but everybody else remembers, better than I, how she turned Benchley's seat of theatre criticism into such an unhinged riot of contrarianism, when he took leave at The New Yorker in the early '30s, to dabble in Hollywood (everybody else loved him with milk, in his bar room greeting of Joel McCrea in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent).

I very much hope that everybody else would be prepared to say, that this page has 'roused no suspicion of taking a position on whom one should read in bed, even in a power outage. John Lanchester, for example, is blessedly sardonic, and even edifying on how to murder a talentless cook in the subway. There are, that is, horses for courses: natural pairings which occur circumstantially, and under certain conditions, per-form at their very best. Ms Parker and everybody else are a match of enslavement at the best of times - everybody else and I couldn't think, of better guest room reading - but if one is ever feeling the pinch of a pitched tank battle or a dys-functional tryst, it helps to believe it might not be happen-ing, if (that is) it is.

                              

Antony Beevor

The Second World War

  Chapter 31:  The Battle of Kursk

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012©

Alan Bennett

The Habit of Art

Faber & Faber, 2009©

Dorothy Parker

Kindly Accept Substitutes et seq.

The New Yorker, 21 February 1931

The Portable Dorothy Parker

Marion Meade, editor

Penguin Classics, 1976©

John Lanchester

The Debt to Pleasure

Picador, Henry Holt, 2001©

We were never fancy

Over the weekend, preparing for the arrival

of an infant English dog, I went out to pro-

vision the house with a maker of smoothies -

the new compulsion among the green Maoists -

for his nutrition and mine, to see that I'll

keep up with him. I foraged a breakfast with

the thing this morning, inducing its opera-

tion for the first time. Immediately, I fell

into a gentle basin of despond, if not fully

a pit, as the device exerted itself in dig-

itally nuanced pulsings and whirrings and

ancillary esoteric frolics, to persuade me

that I'd made a witty acquisition.

I take, needless to say, the contrary view.

I'd been had by a culture of technology over

technique, and left with an incurably glossy,

supersafe chemical compound for a canister of

state-of-the-art extracts and chopped debris.

If only my family were here to indulge a de-

served laugh at my expense, I'd feel I were

still living in a gentler, more humane world.

Our world is one of cutting boards and sieves,

food mills run by hand, and mortars and pestles.

Our engagement with our ingredients is physical,

stylised, an exercise of craft. Apart from the

undeniable lewdness of the machine, there was

its mockery of time and feeling, caring and cre-

ativity to welcome, suddenly, as if some stan-

dard befitting the puppy.

I will not go that way with him. 

Adam Prucha

Breville 

  Hemisphere™ Control Blender

Thorny in California

Caïque

  Caïque in the wind's center,

  sails hauled in bow-taut,

  tiller swung into the final tack

  against the bare blue mountains.

   And the heaven-coursing howl that swamped

   rigging, backstays, the yard

   -- dolphins in pursuit all the way --

   strummed her over the waves: an upright lyre.

Angelos Sikelianos

Selected Poems

  Caïque

  [fragment]

Edmund Keeley and

  Philip Sherrard, translation

Princeton University Press, 1979©

Thorny
California, 3 March