Saturday, June 22, 2019

Enemy bedpans of Alexandra Petri





   Although showing a lot of white, 
   this image does not pretend to be
   a reliable depiction of Alexandra
   Petri, who doesn't slouch and who
   - although hip - probably hasn't
   the time to impersonate a figure
   cited in one of her columns. But,
   plausible depiction of her or not,
   it isn't every day one has an ex-
   cuse to present a cineplex cutout
   of Kristen Stewart, whose ingenu-
   ity it is, to be relevant in all
   contexts. And today's context is,
   the confluence of a Petri dish on
   the American President worthy of
   Stewart, herself, and the publica-
   tion of further evidence of his
   career as the fitting-room rapist
   of Bergdorf Goodman - once Trump, 
   Inc had eliminated Bonwit Teller.
   Oh, and Russia, if you're listen-
   ing, hide those eliminations.

   It is a very good thing, that
   Alexandra Petri's trysts with hu-
   mor are episodically inconsistent,
   because at their worst they are
   horrifyingly, terrifyingly funny,
   and few are the bed frames capable
   of withstanding the convulsions of
   laughter they sometimes provoke.
   Into the near-perfection of her
   most recent essay, the interlinea-
   tion of the reference to Kristen
   Stewart's suffering at the thumbs
   of the American President would 
   be too much for any mattress, if
   that epoch in our past had not
   won verification by infinite ex-
   amples of his idiocy, since then.




   Yet the tacit backdrop of Petri's
   present épergne is the immortal
   finding of his late Secretary of
   State, Rex Tillerson, which has
   never been denied: What a moron,
   is all we can quote, and keep a
   rating for reading aloud. Laugh
   as we may, who can doubt that by
   nightfall, the President's incon-
   tinent inconsistencies will gain
   him another Nobel Peace Prize for
   canceling a war crime he'd willed
   moments before. We, for our part,
   tremble for how soon the other
   shoe will thud, when he sues Joe
   Biden for plagiarizing his schtick
   for coddling Confederates. He never
   reigns, but he stains.
















Linus Wordemann

Alexandra Petri
The Washington Post
21 June 2019©









Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Surely not another society scandal?





The matter consists of a teenager
from Florida's most famous second-
ary school, a notoriously powerful
university outside Boston, and the
factor noted by its admissions of-
fice in a notice of demand address-
ed to the teen -- "the media."

The media.

We need to bear in mind that moral
dynamo, in the decision of the u-
niversity, through its undergrad-
uate college, to exemplify its ad-
missions standards by renouncing
a candidate already welcomed to en-
ter, in a thunderously gaudy sniff.

Admittedly, to coin a phrase, the
university is under intense pres-
sure of litigation to justify its
incongruous weighting of Asian ap-
plicants, and chronic embarrassments
in accommodating more than one gen-
der. Now has not seemed the time,
to expose itself to reaffirming ad-
mission to a teenager guilty of an
ancient outbreak (in Puberty Stan-
dard Time) of scabrous bigotry.

What could reek more of prejudicial
exclusion, than this stark confes-
sion of uselessness in education?
But I stray. My university admitted
little Sammy Alito, despite a per-
colating zealotry to affiliate him-
self with a conspiracy of alumni
against gender and other natural
attributes inconsistent with male-
ness in all its shimmering white-
ness. Princeton did him no favors.

Now, is that a gun in his pocket,
or is he just glad to be a Judge? 










Saturday, June 15, 2019

Saturday commute clxxii: Exits we've been offered




  I suppose it's just me, but if I were
  a track star, I'd think twice, before
  entertaining advice to quit the field
  on a seduction of elevating myself in








































ii  William Gedney
     Shilling in New York
     1967





Thursday, June 13, 2019

Frisée






        Of all the barbarities made famous
  by the American President, the re-
  mark, I, alone, can fix it affords
  the most pristine image of proven-
  ance one could want. It feels odd,
  therefore, to find pretenders busy
  scrambling to articulate some cure
  of our unease, by application of a
  vanity only more decorous than his.
  The project of leading is a craft,
  disciplined with humble confession.
  All his kind confess only a genius. 




















i  Simone Nobili









Sunday, June 9, 2019

I don't care for wine at the sea






     One has to be able to enjoy a dis-
     crimination notwithstanding a wave
     of popular feeling these days, for
     the proposition that anything good
     is good anywhere. The sea and wine
     share a context in common, called,
     the air, in which an inhalation of
     the one is irreconcilable with the
     same gesture toward the other. The
     complication imposed on breathing,
     then, is not the least of the con-
     siderations to be invoked in favor
     of keeping them apart. They antag-
     onize each other in numerous other
     ways, with the deck heavily stack-
     ed in favor of the sea, but I need
     cite only one more to satisfy this
     observation. The quality of solit-
     ude with the one is so immeasurab-
     ly finer than with the other, that
     it would never occur to us to say,
     I don't care for the sea with wine . .










Saturday, June 8, 2019

Saturday commute clxxi: Remembered sentences ii


I seldom mean anything, by
the poetic interlineations
here, but to celebrate the
virility with which phenom-
enally basic passages from
a scholastic past find il-
lumination, eventually ex-
perienced. And I'm content
especially, as forgiveness
arises by this provenance.






     The bewildering, intricate maze - 
     Never got through until Daedalus, out of pity
     For infatuated Ariadne, 
     Guided a prince's blind footsteps
     With a payout of thread, past every wrong turn
     And every dead end he himself had devised
     And constructed.

                      In which grand design
     You too would figure significantly,
     Icarus, had sorrow allowed it. Twice
     Daedalus tried to model your fall in gold, twice
     His hands, the hands of a father, failed him.












Virgil
Aeneid
  Book VI
  40 - 52
Seamus Heaney
  translation
Faber & Faber, 2016©





Friday, May 31, 2019

Suppose it were Friday clxxiii: And recycling went on





     Sometimes I think one can
     complain too much of the
     calm of an orderly way of
     life. 
           
           What became of that
     in the intricate calcula-
     tions of campaigners for
     our electoral affections?









Thursday, May 30, 2019

What's with all this talk of impeachment?





  Really, I just don't think I'm up
  for it at all. Such a whole lot of
  drama for the gratification of ap-
  petites to disapprove. What is the
  source of this failure to be satis-
  fied, and what is it about impeach-
  ment which promises a fulfillment?

  I've heard of the fog of war, but
  this strikes me as the war of fog:
  people groping heedlessly for mech-
  anisms they cannot control, because
  of frustration with a language they
  haven't mastered. What would Tacitus

















Robbie Davidson
  x Maxwell Poth