Origins of Wednesday lxxxv: Réflexions sur la question Bush

I opened a much-too-young vintage from
Graves - a favorite appellation - the
other night, and I told my excellent
wine merchant that I'd spend a little
time revisiting the writings of one
of its earliest vignerons. My impetu-
osity in tampering with a 2012 was
only doubly edified, in samplings of
sound and balanced discernment.
Where possible, I take that style of
commentary on our time as a favorite.

Several days ago, in a country house where 
I was staying, I came upon two scholars who 
enjoy a wide reputation here. Their charac-
ter struck me as admirable. The conversa-
tion of the first, when properly weighed, 
came down to this: "What I said is true be-
cause I said it."  The conversation of the 
second dealt with other matters: "What I 
did not say is not true because I didn't 
say it."

I rather liked the first man: that a man 
should be opinionated doesn't bother me 
at all; but that he should be impertinent, 
that does bother me, and a lot. The first 
man defends his own ideas; they are his own 
wealth. The second attacks the opinion of 
others, and that constitutes the wealth of 
everyone.

Oh, my dear Uzbek, how badly vanity serves 
men who have a stronger dose of it than 
they need for the preservation of nature. 
Those fellows seek to be admired by dint 
of displeasing. They strive to be super-
ior; they are not even equal.

Charles de Secondat
  Baron de la Brède et
  de Montesquieu
The Persian Letters
  144: Rica to Uzbek
1720
J. Robert Loy
  editor & translator
World, 1961©

1    Château de la Brède

iii  5th Avenue
      from the St Regis
      1905

Out, seeing: Ivan Terestchenko in Marrakech

This picture goes back about 8 years,

of a man carrying water on the street

in Marrakech. An incidental testament

to what still photography can show, a

rhythm in architecture, for one thing.

Ivan Terestchenko
Visual Diary
  Silhouette ...
2010©

A practiced mourning glow

We are coping as best we can this weekend with the backlit glare from a political legend crafted over more than six decades, under a reluctance, both instinctive and inculcated, to speak anything but pleasantly of the dead. Coincidental occurrences, irrepressibly happening while he had been rightfully empowered to alleviate or prevent them — the enshrinement of the evildoer Willie Horton as the baseline of Republican dog whistling, the elevation of the mendaciously malignant Clarence Thomas to the highest Federal court, the nasty indulgence of AIDS in America and thence in the world, the denial of reality as the touchstone of governing — we blow aside, for Peggy Noonan’s Sancho Panza of “decency.” 

Much more to the point, would be to take at face value the cardinal myth of the late President, breeding, and indulge not in his current successor's gaudy 30 days of lowered flags, and parades of lachrymose crocodiles, sacrificial virgins, and legions of redhats; but rather, take up a patio with circumspect grief and calm reflection. The incumbent President manifestly has pervasive ignorance on his side, of the Presidency under remembrance now, which in any case cannot be filled in or topped up by information alone. It calls for a recital from Tony Kushner, of what human life was reduced to by decisions in that place in this country, and how indolence and insolence cleared the way for a regime we claim not to have expected.

Edward Hopper

1909

                            

Saturday commute clx: Thunderbird days

Wistfulness for the decline in toys,

from one generation to the next, fol-

lows so well the trajectory of Thun-

derbirds that eventually the manufac-

turer felt compelled to issue a reviv-

al of the original's profile, albeit

heavily laden with extraneous amenity

and oppressive adjustments for safety.

The arrival of December can always be

counted on to stir nightmares of itchy

trousers and interminable devotional

silences, in our house at least; so if

an instant bares itself for celebration,

it is likely to be out of bounds, away

from traffic of every kind, with a

grateful dash into consoling distance.

I realize, one is expected to defer to

the taste for shorter sentences, shaped

by the extraneous and compulsory enter-

tainments of our current toys; but some

of us have never lost our distaste for

itchy pants, and devotional longueurs.

We love a time of not being followed,

our discovery of admiration at stake.

Miles Davis 
Columbia Studios
1956

English language vacation day

Kindly do not bother me,

because I am one happy

fella. Mississippi just

elected an utterly inane

poster child of Confed-

erate dog whistlers to

the Senate, against an

African American veteran

of progressive governing.

And it wasn't even close.

On top of that - can you

stand it - the President

gave an occasionally on-

the-record interview to

The Washington Post, to

certify conclusively his

imbecility. And it wasn't

even close.

November is a confusion

of holidays, some noted

for their original date,

with some known for our

penchant for long week-

ends, as in the day the

Germans quit the First

World War, and others

known for possibly not

actually happening at

all, as in Thanksgiving.

Here, on the other hand,

was a day that happened:

the most immaculate vaca-

tion ever bestowed by a

suspicious nation upon an

innocent international

language. Let the final

Tuesday in every November

hereafter, be remembered 

for no reliance at all 

upon English as the world

has ever used it before.

Placeholding

  The essential features of this
  subject require no more than a
  glance at the hands - an audi-
  ence documents its whereabouts
  at the nadir of an election cy-
  cle, entertained by its heroes
  of ballot suppression, defama-
  tion's handmaiden when the mic-
  rophone is "on." The leader of
  the free world hustles his un-
  derstudy off-stage, to bask in
  the backdrop of his power limo.
  Well, it's Mississippi, friend.

 Just when you were thinking, a
 Senate might have been formed,
 there came the simpler answer.

Cy Twombly
Alessandro Twombly
  in Rome
1965

Michelle Goldberg
Maybe they're just
  bad people
The New York Times
November 26, 2018©

Wine routes of Iberia, 2nd ed.

The half-life of meticulous scholarship,

when devoted now to the regions hereto-

fore praised for sustaining a distinctive

form of life -- as opposed, say, to the

American South's fetish for a way of life

-- has shrunk perceptibly under the novel

strain of climate adjustments, almost as

unforeseen as the transformation of Chic-

ago under the pressures of Jim Crow, asy-

lum seekers fleeing sharecropping's desert

for shelter in blue collars. There are e-

even those who say, Honduras is going out

of business under terror's pre-emption of

drought and rising sea levels. But have

these Cassandras reckoned with our Little

Father's genius for slamming the door, and

discounting the price of military hardware

to suppress the locals in situ? I fear not.

Now the chaos written on the vine of Iber-

ian viticulture has its reverberations a-

cross the vinous continent, as growers

scurry to plant varietals in spontaneous-

ly misplaced habitats, and investigate

the higher predictability in bottling Co-

ca-Cola. So much for the antiquated "chât-

eau" system, and on to the conglomerate's

dispassionate virtuosity with synthetics.

Is it the fault, strictly speaking, of a

Gamay to take on the attributes of Cab-

ernet Sauvignon under rising heat levels

and higher winds? One might as well insist

that it's the fault of an orphan, to be

suckled by wolves. Can Rome turn on a dime?

Joan Miró
Blue II
  [from a triptych]
1961

Introit to the very worst hard time

Timothy Egan is a psalmist with
the eye of Ansel Adams - or, to
be fair to one of his own works
- Edward Curtis, whose gift for
framing our place in the envir-
onment as a communicant at the
rail of its mercy has resulted
today in The New York Times in
an essay welcoming us to think
as Californians, which one has
to recommend without more note.

Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time

Houghton Mifflin, 2006©

Short Nights of the

  Shadow Catcher

  The epic life and im-

  mortal photographs

  of Edward Curtis

Ansel Adams

Jeffrey Pine

  Yosemite

  [deceased]

1940

The writer's father

The writer's brother

  Yosemite

1952