Summer Liebling iv: And you thought catamarans were degenerate

         

  One had only to be

  in Florida to wit-

  ness the decline of

  stealing second, af-

  ter Ty Cobb had set

  the standard by fly-

  ing in with sharpen-

  ed spikes. This is

  what passes for ath-

  letic intimidation

  in Tampa these days.

  And as for the blue

  muleta, is there a

  self-respecting bull

  who'd bother with it?
  
  O Barbary, o mores ..
  

A.J. Liebling
The Sweet Science
1956
op. cit.

A young man, traveling in Italy, writes to me of his passion

They are still making my mistakes,

I find, yet I've seamlessly declared,

without false valour, that they were

marvelous beyond price. A youth tells

me, his Italian journey has acquainted

him with a girl who's gone to New Zea-

land, and that he must dash home to

northern Virginia to amass funds to

commit himself to a permanent reloca-

tion. And, by the way, would I recom-

mend him to colleagues there in agri-

culture, for the usual reasons?

I wouldn't mention it, but his note

happens to reach me on the anniversary

of a wedding in which I was a princi-

pal, which I was expecting to observe

this evening with customary discretion.

Just now my English Cocker is gnawing

a post-prandial rawhide, with more than

enough concentration to revive the high-

lights of that occasion, its indifferent

aspects suspended by the little fellow's

startling pleasure.

I'll not reproach this lad for conduct

he exults in confessing now, for I was

not even cognisant of it, then. I refer

to that abrogation of all ties in the

pursuit of the betrothed. People who've

written about it outnumber the rest of

us in that particular, only. Nor is this

merely a male trait, either by destiny

or cultural tradition. My shatteringly

Jamesian wife committed it, too, very

much on time. And of course youth has al-

most nothing to do with it, for all the

commotion attending its helpless ardour.

I've cited too much Lamb, lately, so I

won't bog you down this evening with A

Bachelor's Complaint. Mine is not the

bachelor's. It's the spouse's dawning

comprehension of subscribing to adieux

almost on the scale of renunciation:

forsaking all others, almost disowning

them. (I thought, Damon and Affleck got

this very well, in their undergraduate

masterpiece). Of course there is always 

hope for a rare exception or two, to 

those dismissals. They are the trustees

of our truest, constant love.

I had mine, possibly he will, too.

Poverty's a little different from just not finding work

Poverty no longer rising 

but grips 46,000,000.

The New York Times 

yesterday's date

Even feudalism is doctrinally

predicated on the employment

of the employable. Not "right

to work" America. We have mas-

tered inefficiency in the name

of efficiency - as Bob Dylan

wrote for a track in Modern

Times, to "compete abroad."

Every exquisite element of this

injustice has been enshrined in

fiscal policy since Reagan. All

of it has been sold as a pipe-

dream of revenge on the under-

class, or the patronising in-
sult of healing it by example,
in a pentecostal fandango of 
greed. Where capital has en-

countered the threat of distri-

bution, we have enjoyed warfare.
Yes, what else is new?

46 million persons should not be

impoverished in the solar system.

For them to be suspended in that 

agony here, is a phenomenon which 

summons Lamb's A Dissertation upon

Roast Pig and his Complaint of the

Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis

to the same luncheon entertainment

at the Economic Club in Washington,

where just now the Secretary of the

Treasury opined, We are not where

we want to be. Jay Gould, himself,

could not have put it better. 

This was polite of him, given the

mystery that he is not behind bars.

I did not come to the internet to

sequester myself in a Speaker's

Corner in a leafy page. But I did

want to speak up for seeing, an

act which is directly affronted,

intimidated, and suppressed, by 

any brutality. I cannot accuse the

Steps Scene in Battleship Potemkin,

or its view of maggots on the sail-

ors' butchered meat, of agitprop,

and suffer a Treasury Secretary to
confide, he isn't happy. It ranks 
right up there, with infant mortal-
ity and malnutrition. Happiness: 
didn't Mr Jefferson aver, we might
all pursue it?

              Close the restaurants? Well, it'd

              be a start; but those people really

              can't find other work. Tithe the

              Koch brothers? God forbid. Why not

              just eliminate the innocents who

              see - which is, I assure myself,

              not actually, truly, really, and

              certainly the Right wing's program -

              and spare ourselves the remorse of

              their effrontery? I think of asking
              this of Stephen Crane, I think of 
              asking Melville, James and Faulkner.
              I think of any surfer, trusting in
              another wave. The literature of our
              people is of power without force.

              Who would betray a second chance?

Sergei Eisenstein
  director
Eduard Tisse
  cinematography
Battleship Potemkin
1925

Charles Lamb
Elia
1822
op. cit.

Timothy Egan
("Context" Sidebar)
New comment of note
September 19, 2013

If this had been a real emergency

    This is just a test

    of our hierarchical

    hygienic system.

    If this had been a

    real emergency, you

    and other siblings

    would have been di-

    rected to a shower

    in one of the avail-

    able guest rooms.

    On a friend's advice

    I found myself lately

    in an expansive rol-

    ling meadow in Virgin-

    ia, where local vine-

    yards were exhibiting

    themselves. All about

    me, there were silent

    clusters of friends, 

    tippling from glasses

    oxidised in the sun,

    staring into screens

    they were petting with

    mesmerised absorption.

    The nimbler of these

    scholars even managed 

    to clasp both vessels 

    in the palm of a single

    hand, their extracts

    fusing pleasantly in

    the mind.

Saturday commute lxxxix: sledding the asphalt jungle

   I got a note from a waif

   in San Francisco. They

   always ask me what there

   is to do.

Is taste a human right ii

To become lost amid underperforming texts
the stranger won't answer. By which time
it was nosebleed territory anyway. The geese
had put away their young, then fled; all that remained
to be determined was local angst, over which who cares what
by sitters in a landscape, I say: how is this remote?
Yellow wine will rinse it all away, and how many of us
are there? Is it my imagination or must one foregather
to bring stuff in?

                  Long before that, the tocsin

had sounded in the autumn dell, Toxins were released.

One's by-now crystallized antipathy to daring new

solutions swamped local perennial borders.

Because at least getting too serious had reputable

antecedents. Being in the way didn't matter,

nor should it, yet who knows what embarrassments can leak

this way, foreground moony entertainments? Just a clench

suffices when their guard is up. The horse pilots,

sleeping rough in their thousands,

announced commodious outcomes contradicting too-prompt

displays of local affection. The broad petals of language

are stiff and may get very bad.

They make it very bad

in our language tutoring.

   Possibly you have noticed, too,

   that so few people seem to have

   heard the good news about them-

   selves. They want refreshment but

   ask, 'Give me the biggest red ya

   got', and this aspiration for

   punishment is but a consequence

   of deprivation, a means of sub-

   stantiating to themselves that

   they can take it and respect it.

   You see it everywhere, if not in

   every thing. 

   In growth there is a center that

   opens as balanced wine, unfold-

   ing congruently, responsively,

   gracefully, authentically, and

   lastingly. Which came first, the

   principle or the fact? Taste is

   an expression of the human trait

   of memory. We can watch expertise

   reviving as a birthright, across

   their features as they recompose.

  

John Ashbery

Quick Question

  New Poems

  Far Harbor

op. cit.

Not more than a moment ago

   I had the
   very same
   reaction.

   Coincidence
   strikes one
   as being so
   extravagant.



















  

As grotesque a vision as has ever seemed plausible

And, for the next few years, 

advances in smartphones and 

tablets will continue to be 

subtle and iterative, driven 

by the twin processes of sim-

plification and connection. 

The advanced Touch ID finger-

print sensor built into the 

5S’s home button, while a 

seemingly basic technology 

(it replaces your password 

with your thumbprint in a 

handful of very specific ap-

plications) is a perfectly 

representative feature. Today, 

it’s merely a convenience, 

since putting your thumb where 

it goes a hundred times a day 

anyway is less annoying than 

typing in a password. But it’s 

also a step closer to the day 

when we no longer have to remem-

ber or store dozens of passwords—

a fundamental reinvention of the 

way we approach identity and com-

puter security on a daily, even 

hourly, basis. It breaks down one 

of the barriers between humans and 

our machines.

As if hailing the invention of eyeglasses, cleverly bobbing on the bridge of the nose so effortlessly, their correction of vision is almost spontaneous, the geek for The New Yorker gives us a thumb-rest of innocuous integration with a quite different world as it is: the one constructed of choices repeated, all day long. And what is this breaking down of "barriers," may we guess, but facilitating fingertips favouring that pattern? Could I commission an optician to convey to me a confessional screen in Prince of Wales tweed, I'd send it out for cleaning once a year and still save on battery life.