Saturday commute xcvii: Innocuous migrations of the male

           Hôtel Magnifique
           Cannes, France, A.M.


  My Precious Dream-Rabbit,

  I'm writing this on the ter-
  race outside the hotel .. One
  or two yachts are mucking a-
  bout. There are a couple of
  islands over to the left, and
  over to the right some moun-
  tains. There aren't many peo-
  ple about at this time of day,
  as most of the lads play ten-
  nis in the morning or go off
  to Antibes to bathe.

Monty Bodkin

  to Gertrude Butterwick

P.G. Wodehouse
The Luck of the Bodkins
1935
Overlook Press, 2003©

Procession revisited: Scarpa and Paul Strand

When I first saw Paul Strand's photograph of his boyhood back yard in the upper West Side of Manhattan, I failed to appreciate the "abstraction" it is celebrated for, in the Metropolitan Museum. Beyond the incidental drama of the clotheslines I saw numerous processional pathways, bridges, elevated porches and decorative channels in the built environments of one of the architects I most love, Carlo Scarpa, whose constructed works must tend to fail the meticulousness of his drawings, some of the most evocative speci-fications a craftsman can ever study. Indeed, one of my favorite possessions is a pencil drawing of stairs at his Brion cemetery, shown here, by a friend who studied them there for hours. And when I turned to another of Strand's photographs from 1917, of a fender with lamp and wire wheel, I admired its parallel arcs as paired, pared reiterations of eloquent movement, processional strokes neither perceived nor projected as abstraction, but as scruples.

i  Scarpa, Olivetti, Venice, 1957

Short lens, long bike

              

   

  Elections are like
  that. You can make
  them say anything.

























Cy Twombly
Academy
1955
Collection MoMA

Bring your voter I.D.

     They will.

Cy Twombly
Tiznit
1953
Collection MoMA

Asylum from the city on the hill

       O wert thou in the storm
        How I would shield thee:
       To keep thee dry and warm
        A camp I would build thee.

       Though the clouds pour'd again
        Not a drop should harm thee,
       The music of wind and rain
        Rather should charm thee.

       O wert thou in the storm
        A shed I would build thee;
       To keep thee dry and warm,
        How I would shield thee.

       The rain should not wet thee,
        Nor thunder-clap harm thee.
       By thy side I would sit me,
        To comfort and warm thee.

       ..






















John Clare
Song
  [fragment]
Northampton General
  Lunatic Asylum 
  East Midlands, England
July 25, 1844
Selected Poetry
Geoffrey Summerfield
  editor
Penguin, 1990©

George Orwell
Politics and the
  English Language
op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday c: and one might say anything

                    And it came over me 'I might 
                    have married you,' she said, 
                    thinking of Peter sitting 
                    there in his little bowtie; 
                    with that knife, opening it, 
                    shutting it. 'Just as he al-
                    ways was, you know.'

















Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway
1925
Everyman's Library
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993©

"The part I knew, I saw as a neighbor"

I met Willem de Kooning on

the fire escape, because a

black kitten lost in the

rain cried at my door, and

after the rain it turned

out to be his kitten.

     Later, I saw in some Greek temples

     contradictory forces operating pub-

     licly at full speed. Reading the Il-

     iad, the poem at the height of reason

     presented the irrational and subjec-

     tive, self-contradictory sweep of ac-

     tion under inspiration. I had missed

     the point in [talks with de Kooning].

     The question Bill was keeping open

     with an enduring impatience had been

     that of professional responsibility

     toward the force of inspiration. That

     force or scale is there every day here

     where everybody is. Whose responsibil-

     ity is it, if not your own? What he

     said was, "All an artist has left to

     work with is his self-consciousness."

  Next week, the Library

  of America will publish

  an indispensable reclam-

  ation of contemporary

  writings from the heart

  of mid-20th Century art.

  Here, Edwin Denby is re-

  constituting the evolu-

  tion of his friend's art

  from the germinaton of

  its conceptual rudiments.

  I do not know a more ex-

  citing project in art

  history than the volume

  which has lately fallen

  into my hands. We are

  closer than neighbors,

  to such wonderful things.

Rudy Burckhardt

The Flat Iron

1973

Jed Perl

  editor

Art in America

  1945 - 1970

  Writings from the

  Age of Abstract Ex-

  pressionism, Pop Art,

  and Minimalism

Library Classics of the

  United States, 2014©

Some Service

  

   Coming to terms with the reality

   that an agency charged with the

   protection of the President would

   shove him into an elevator, any-

   where, with persons unknown, much

   less persons unscanned for contra-

   band, even if known? This doesn't

   happen. Is there a coming to terms

   with a little slack for negligent

   homicide, against the holder of an

   already unstable and excessive pow-

   er over the lives of several hundred

   million ostensibly free people? It

   makes more sense for the Secret Ser-

   vice simply to toss him down the 

   shaft, relying upon wings of angels.

   At a minimum, I don't see why we can

   not be conditioned by episodic stunts

   of higher visibility, imperiling our

   plans and disrupting our commitments,

   to wean us all of illusions of trust,

   to say nothing of the fallacy that a

   limit exists, to how power stupefies.