Saturday commute cviii: hydrant heroics

Who knew, a quiet, harmless people?

Some years ago, an American
reader of broadcast news
popularised the expression,
the greatest generation, to
identify the youth of select-
ed nations who allied in re-
sistance to Axis aggression
after the fall of Poland. Al-
though always obviously no
more than a marketing ploy
to seduce an audience, the
damage of the expression has
endured, principally in calls
to emulate idealised behaviour
the book extolled, at the ex-
pense of an accurate history.

Taking it easy this afternoon
with my English dog, and hav-
ing channeled the conditioned
inclination to mark Memorial
Day through a lighter, paradox-
ically irresistible narrative
on warfare, I found myself re-
turning to the writings of An-
tony Beevor and Max Hastings,
on that large conflict of the
later 1930s and early 1940s.
Encountering again the reality
of cannibalism in Japanese mil-
itary doctrine in the Pacific 
War in Beevor, I turned to Has-
tings' grim compendium on the
final year of Japan's suppres-
sion, largely at the hands of
the United States.

He remarks, introducing Retri-
bution, on how "inapt" this
"greatest generation" sobri-
quet is: .. human behaviour,
aspirations and fears do not
alter much. It is more approp-
riate to call them, without
jealousy, 'the generation to
which the greatest things hap-
pened.'

At last we need not flinch at
Uncle Toby's claim, in his 
famous speech to his brother
Shandy in defense of warfare,
which even the Bush regimes
thought to invoke in the abyss
of their cynical belligerencies:


                  For what is war? What is it, but
                  the getting together of quiet and
                  harmless people, with their swords
                  in their hands, to keep the ambiti-
                  ous and the turbulent within bounds?


There is not, we know, such
a thing as a quiet, harmless
people, but we know the works
of those who are not. If then
they are our own, Pogo, who
will write our history?

Antony Beevor
The Second World War
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012©

Max Hastings
Retribution
The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007©

Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of
  Tristram Shandy
ibid.


    

Another shopping spree for love

I realize, given another Sunday
morning steeped in American car-
nage, to share tales of where 
we were when another brigand 
bit the dust, is no mere swap-
ping of alibis, but a habit of
sealing the tale in memory for
recital to the heirs of the
Bush family's Supreme Court.
I, for my guilty part, was
scooping up a copy of a slen-
der satire from Wodehouse, The
Military Invasion of America,
and also coming across this
delicious aperçu on Ovid in 
McClatchy:

   When men would be gods, they pass new laws
   and strengthen the Family. Like gods,
   Then, they breed contempt and their own betrayal.

Well, what can we expect of
a Classicist: one of the few
things one cannot be, without
having done the reading?

Possibly I have a more self-
indulgent alibi than one should
confess, given the precious turn
in our custom of slaughter. Like
you, I've begun to consider wheth-
er it's even possible to wonder,
if we aren't allowing our way 
with murderous rampage to descend
into an exhibition of upper-middle
class shopping sprees gone wrong,
a classic case of Trinkets Envy,
posing the question, who has the
glossiest J-curve of frustration?

Who, among the farm lads in your
little neighborhood, could stock-
pile half the magazines of ballis-
tic ornament that one pale college
boy of means amassed without appar-
ent strain? It truly is enough to
make one savour the negligent hom-
icides of homophobic Reaganism, a
crime wave perpetrated entirely by
thrift and arch oblivion. Now do we 
take too much to heart, our warrior
ninny's urgings to go shopping? Yet, 
who expects our Red State saints,
hoist by their own petard, to coun-
sel us to save? Remind them of their
mantra, for we've read it well: 

   Viruses don't kill. People do.















J.D. McClatchy
Ovid's Farewell
  Stars Principal
  1986
Plundered Hearts
  New and Selected Poems
Alfred A. Knopf, 2014©

As every soldier is unknown

  A generation will pass

  before the sky will be

  perfectly clear of

  clouds for his shining.

  However, what's a gen-

  eration to a sun?

            Oh, let mee not serve so, as those men serve

            Whom honours smoakes at once fatten and sterve;

            Poorly enrich't with great mens words or lookes;

            Nor so write my name in thy loving bookes

            As those Idolatrous flatterers, which still

            Their Princes stiles, with many Realmes fulfill

            Whence they no tribute have, and where no sway.

            Such services I offer as shall pay

            Themselves, I hate dead names: O then let mee

            Favourite in ordinary, or no favourite bee.

T.E. Lawrence

  to the widow of

  Thomas Hardy

  15 January 1928

The Selected Letters

Malcolm Brown, editor

W.W. Norton & Company, 1989©

John Donne

ca 1598

Elegy VI

  1-10

The Complete Poetry

  and Selected Prose ..

Charles M. Coffin

  editor

Random House, 1952©

Now that we are all assimilating Larry Kramer

The cultural whale is full, these
days, of notable bits of Larry Kra-
mer, Ahab of homophile New York be-
fore there was a whiff of HIV, and
ever since its default Father Map-
ple. This alimentary reconciliation
almost makes one sentimental for
Danton, Desmoulins, and St Juste, 
scions of the Panthéon and vision-
aries of Les Invalides. A first-
class crank, afloat in any status-
driven society, is selected from
his class to sit next to Alice
Longworth, so long as he sustains
his malice. Mr Kramer does no less.

If one hasn't anything nice to say
about anybody, it's shrewd to con-
fide this where saying anything of
the kind would sound monstrously
insensitive. And so it was, that
Mr Kramer was given an epidemic,
to leverage his contempt for ho-
mophile culture in Faggots into 
a much more gloriously universal
alarm in The Normal Heart. Like
Danton, Desmoulins and St Juste,
he was the beneficiary of a sys-
tem, compounded by unexpected
circumstances, which gave almost
infinite scope to febrile griev-
ance. This was to be expected.

      So, grabbing Nephew and a load of implements,

      he allowed the former to guide him and his lat-

      ter, recollecting from somewhere "and a little

      child shall lead them," hoping he'd soon be

      leading himself toward that more propitious spot

      in The Meat Rack where he was going to dig his 

      grave.

Years before the news broke of the
Terror on that silent summer morning
in The New York Times, his own dark
vision undressed itself in satire.
We'll never know, if Kramer was
the necessary prophet that he is
now being hailed for being. Men
and boys deserve some of the cred-
it, surely, for their honest, cruel 
deaths, of which no measure will
ever be possible. He hardly mat-
ters; his tremors are behind us, 
and we are left with sharing his 
survival. It's more than we can 
claim to do with Danton, Desmou-
lins, and St Juste. But would they 
stand for it, Ishmael?

Larry Kramer
Faggots
Random House, 1978©

Annals of cognitive revulsion: Wes Anderson for American Express

The mind makes it hazardous to
take a holiday, especially if
one yields to the temptation,
as I've been doing, to resume
contact with the great world
of artistic achievement. This
mensual jaunt I've declared,
began well enough, in a shop-
ping spree from The Golden
Bowl. There, I was able to
relish the luxuriant folds
of possibility in the prose
of our language's perfected
gift for observation, with
Wittgenstein having laid the
groundwork for altering one's
perspective, as I later found
being cited in The Wherewithal
of Philip Schultz. 

Between Bond Street and Treb-
linka, however, I hadn't reck-
oned on the possibility of en-
countering Wes Anderson, al-
though any long-deferred oc-
casion is bound to catch one
by surprise. Preparing to con-
sider his new movie on Zweig,
I plucked The Darjeeling Lim-
ited from the Criterion cat-
alogue, and settled down with
a Bombay and Fever Tree to
give it a go. Yet it is a de-
fect widely remarked of Cri-
terion's issuings, to steep
them in multiple recitals of
a director's work, so that I
found myself greeted by a
commercial he had "crafted"
for American Express, the
travel parasite. Odysseus had
craft, Ben Hogan had craft.
One stole a city, the other
bestowed the purest stroke. 

I assume that Mr Anderson
must have a mother, and that
she may be a reader of rmbl,
so I don't wish to lay too
much stress on the distinc-
tion he compels one to note,
between lark and snark. One
can see that he achieves a
lot of traction in his work
with send-ups and spoofs of
cinematic precedents, in the
mode of the film school wit.
Even François Truffaut was
not above declaring a famil-
iarity with the Greats.

                   Others will have to have the
                   last word, on the difference
                   between a hustle and a sport.
                   But I think, completely to
                   mime the work of someone else,
                   as an exhibition of fluency,
                   is to exhibit no more than
                   truancy from fair play. Prob-
                   ably I won't bother with Mr
                   Anderson's movies, after all.

                   He has lighted upon what is
                   likely the highest-ascending
                   lark in cinema after Chaplin
                   and Renoir, piggybacking snark
                   to a generation that missed 
                   the original release of an
                   unalloyed, unquestionable,
                   inimitable and triumphal ar-
                   tifact of love as we know it.
                   
                   It's a question of purposes. 
                   Any defense of homage in this
                   is no different from a lien on
                   what is ours, from a parasite.
                   It is one thing, to endure it;
                   to instruct us to be thrilled,
                   is hustling.




















François Truffaut
La nuit americaine
Day for Night
Georges Delerue
  music
1973

David Levine
François Truffaut
October 11, 1990
Laurent library scan
The New York Review©

Saturday commute cvii: Baccalaureate advice of our chum

The other day, the estimable

Tim Egan, one of the few col-

umnists condemned to recom-
mendation in our Context,

offered an attitude toward

Commencement speaking - or,

rather - listening, which I

was cheerfully disagreeing

with, to a much more recent

sufferer of the rite than I.

There's no doubt, that Egan

has the better case, that a

capstone occasion to a quad-

rennial opening of minds is

little disserved by indul-

ging a climactic Fool, even

in the guise of an antagon-

ist. Yet, if that's so, I'd

still argue for quality in

this mental bloodsport, and

we know where to find that:

      For two jars stand on Zeus'

      threshold whence he gives of

      his evil gifts, and another

      of the good; and to whom Zeus

      delights in thunder gives a

      mixed portion, to him befalls

      now evil, now good; but to

      whom he gives of the baneful,

      him he scorns, and evil misery

      chases him over the noble earth,

      a wanderer honored neither by

      gods nor by mortals.

Just sayin', Achilles was, as

the Iliad wound to its close;

yet for a fellow much then oc-

cupied by pressing matters, a

not-unsympathetic synopsis of

what's what. Yes, a whiff of

religiosity appears to taint

the offering, but it blows a-

way beneath a gentler breeze,

indifference. Pretty classy.

Homer

Iliad

  xxiv, 527 - 533

Sir Moses Finley

  translation and criticism

The World of Odysseus

op. cit.

NB: Professor Finley (1912 - 1986)

was a more than ordinarily distin-

guished teacher and Classicist, of

of luminous standing in American

academia, until subpoenaed in 1952

by the Republican-controlled Senate

Sub-Committee on Internal Security,

and commanded to state whether he

had ever been a member of a Com-

munist Party. He declined to answer

and the Trustees of his University

summarily expelled him. Immediate-

ly, at Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper,

future Regius Professor, agitated for

his appointment at Christ Church; 

but Cambridge was faster to act,

and Finley's career at that Univer-

sity found him flourishing among

peers then and to this very day in

opened, grateful minds. He was

knighted by the Queen in 1979;

and only last month, a teacher of

my own baccalaureate years, was

recommending him to me anew.

This posting is for such keepers.

Suppose it were Friday xcv: the last morels

     If it were up to me, one would not

     harvest the last morels. They hide

     to allow for this discretion, even

     as we pluck all we want in the ten

     days of their season; and when one

     does go back, connoisseurship as a

     mask for greed and aggrandizement,

     I like the experience of an admon-

     ition that reminds an unmasked de-

     sire, that it all has been plumbed

     enough for one season, soil rising

     to gather the share of its origin,

     our truest, deserving connoisseur.