Where there is progress

This is very deeply saddening 

news about Susie. As you know 

so well, and better than I, 

she was one of the breed's 

great innocent partisans, ex-

tremely generous and caring 

toward those who adopted her 

dogs and modest about their 

success in showing. I dis-

tinctly remember when Geor-

die's mother died, it was a 

great blow to her, and I sent 

her a Coronation mug for Ed-

ward VIII, of interest because 

he was, like Geordie, never 

crowned. I still regard Geor-

die as the most positive in-

fluence on my life since col-

lege, a completely unexpected 

miracle. I will not forget her.

Yes, Horace has my back

           Yet, now,

           who shall

           take his?

Scott's midnight cowboy

   Everybody's talkin' at me

   I don't hear a word

   they're sayin' ..

   A few years ago, it just happened to surface

   in the press, in passing, that some three 

   hundred thousand copies of The Great Gatsby

   were then being sold in the English language,

   every year. The text has enjoyed a scrupulous

   editing and continues to sustain the name of

   its Princetonian publishing family, Scribner,

   quite single-handedly, relieving any pressure

   on Hemingway. There really are plenty of en-

   during literary gestures in the American can-

   on but possibly none which can be said to be

   so plain and so impregnable. This is not an

   impenetrable book; but it is a book in the

   most autonomous sense, a communication des-

   tined for absorption in one distinctive way,

   steeped in a metabolic flux which gives the

   fairest warning against transposition into

   other constructions. 

   Here they go again, one could say, but it is

   not their fault. The Great Gatsby beats on,

   quietly unassailable and free. This is not

   allure; this is the current it comes in. It
   is always the Gatz boy, who was young when
   he left home, 

   .. going where the sun keeps shinin', 
   through the pourin' rain,
   going where the weather suits [his] clothes

   .. skipping over the ocean like a stone.


   

   

Fred Neil

Everybody's talkin' at me

1966©

Saturday commute lxxx: getting to first base

     

     Practice, prac-

     tice, prac-

     tice.

Boston ii

    

     As if bodies were the soul's ornaments,
     A mullah turned the Koran's carpet page.
     Old Babur made a couplet instead - of Age
     and Youth, his 'throneless days,' their violence.

     The opium pearl, to ease him out of life,
     Made a garden of pain. The rugs, the tent
     Dissolved. A flower still appeared. He went
     On rearranging the couplet and devised,

     To keep death at bay, five hundred and four
     Versions. His first poem had been to a boy
     From the bazaar whom for a day he had adored,

     Whose glances he could still see in the dark
     That lined the geometric border's void,
     Reproduced in glistening egg-and-dart.

..

     Each grain of sand
     Takes an eternity to articulate
     History's figure of speech for randomness.





















J.D. McClatchy
The Rest of the Way
  Kilim [fragments]
op. cit.

We did enjoy that bit again, on shutting down Guantánamo

The President was at his temptress'

best at his appearance before repor-

ters yesterday, offering glimpses of

how he won his Office. He wasn't so

great on the force-feeding of prison-

ers, contrary to international pro-

tocols subscribed by the American Med-

ical Association, but he was close to

Wordsworth's perfect heaven on the no-

tion of discontinuing his crimes of

incarceration, at least at their most

infamous outpost. Much tidier (there

were those killjoys who muttered), a

fastidious splat of drones.

Already from the wings, on the other hand, the snare-drum roll of excuses caught his signature riff of Executive incapacity, as he moued of going, fan in hand, to his sadistic Congress, begging a humane release from his predecessor's use of war powers. As the curtain closed upon his presentation, it was as if the tease of déjà vu had run its natural course, and our right wing carny matrons, from Gerson to Krauthammer, hardly needed then to spank us back to shame.
The President conceded long ago, accepting the authoritarian illusion of being kept safe as a human right, which it is not. It is a policy - and not inherently a cruel one, but for its vain and tragic dread of life.

Annals of colloquial adoption i

       I forget how we

       started calling

       each other, Mon

       vieux. It was a

       good day; mirth

       in a shared pre-

       dicament gained

       a sardonic atti-

       tude, with plen-

       ty of years for

       practice to per-

       fect it.

       

On a 29th of April in the hills of Santa Barbara

I only wish I had been there,

for the whelping of this puppy,

whom I photographed taking the

breezes off the bay at Ft Mason,

San Francisco, at 20 weeks. By

coincidence a successor of his,

also from that marine paradise,

took his final inoculations in

Virginia today. And now there

may be chasings after taunting

tennis balls, and probably a

menacing of geese, who exploit

the shaded pond with raucous 

incivility. 

Photograph Laurent

M-6, 50mm Summicron