Saturday commute clxxxii: Nice start

After an interval of unexpected length, it is a pleasure for me to look now upon a fresh, unmarked page in this journal. I would be the first to join whatever chorus there may be, for leaving it that way, if the project were completed. 

However, we have just noticed that the United States has discharged the obligation of disposing of its sitting President, and good behavior is always to be encouraged within sight of the young. Compliments, then, to the people of the United States disdained by that figure, over the last four years of exercising his preference for the fragment he seduced and betrayed. By every count, from epidemiology to pluralist reconciliation to international comity to planetary stewardship to fiscal sanity, he had rendered the nation the first justifiably outcast pariah of the New World. How delightful, then, that on the very date when first permitted by their constraining founding document to right his institutionally unchecked hostilities, the country showed him the door.

I know, there are those morose who wail, that this remedy is not enough. They are wonderfully paid, glitteringly honored, and as obvious as yesterday's excesses. I see too many minor movies, not to have heard Rossano Brazzi declare to Katharine Hepburn for David Lean, "Eat the ravioli." Please, do not instruct us in the array of anomalies still disfiguring the feast. Rather, organize for the State of Georgia's double Senatorial runoff in early January, of which more, soon enough. For this weekend, come outside. 

Refresh acquaintance.

Photo courtesy, ubayuri©

Origins of Wednesday cviii: Static

  I wonder, if I could reclaim
  from moments of incurable i-
  dleness, my years of sorting
  out the front from the back,
  of a freshly laundered T, to
  say nothing of locating some
  seam to tell me whether it's
  inside, out: what would I do
  with all that time, to match
  the useful recurrence of be-
  ing lost for a few unhurried
  breaths, before slamming out
  the door on some inferior a-
  genda? Would I apply myself,
  once more, to the pursuit of
  some higher understanding or
  would I content myself to be
  free?

J.M.W. Turner
Venice with The Salute
ca 1840

The name one has

             So that I could mark it, the continuance of

             quality could in some way be that, the time
             of accord. For us, as beneath the falling water
                      we draw breath,
                      look at the sky.
             Talking to the man hitching a lift back
             from the hospital, I was incautious in sympathy:
             will she be back soon I was wishing to
             encourage his will to suppose. I can hardly
             expect her back he said and the water
             fell again, there was this sheet, as the time
                      lag yawned, and quality
                      became the name you have,
             like some anthem to the absent forces of nature.
             Ethnic loyalty, breathe as you like we in fact
             draw it out differently, our breath is gas
             in the mind. That awful image of choking.

The present American government has
challenged the latent ecumenicism in
every honest and inquiring heart, to
recoil into denial of both qualities.
At this, it is said to have succeed-
ed; but how hollowly, how transitor-
ily does that intimidating edict a-
chieve our hearing, given the dial-
ect of the voices which give this
verdict. It is not of the languages
of our continent -- French, Swahili,
Sioux, Spanish, Dutch, German, Gael-
ic, Italian -- but of our illiterate
merchants of obliteration as revenge.

We do not risk choking on the breath
of our descent, but on its aliena-
tion from others who would comprise 
ourselves.

J.H. Prynne
The White Stones
  Concerning Quality, Again
  first verse
New York Review Books, 2016©

Carlo Scarpa
  Olivetti
  Venice

Ivan Terestchenko
  Beach fire

West of Sunset

The capacity of a photograph to stir

instant recognition of time and place

isn't specific to photography and, to

hear many tell it, isn't even worthy.

Possibly the photograph allows time

and place to escape into permission

elsewhere to be valued. This lenity

is also not specific to photography.

So, it's the low coastal range in a

classic melting haze, the ample ten-

nis whites, and the molded chair by

Charles Eames that lift the seal of

memory for refreshment to be taken.

                  All it lacked, really, were the

                  reminding bells from countless

                  steeples at dawn and at sunset,

                  and at moments throughout the 

                  day. On the other hand, at the

                  age which he had managed to reach

                  in comparative comfort, he was

                  perfectly happy not to be remind-

                  ed, that time, his time, was pass-

                  ing. Uncomfortably quickly.

                   

Criterion has refurbished Visconti's

film of Death in Venice, in time for

permissions to extend to its escape.

Charles Eames

Chair in bent wood

Los Angeles, ca 1950

Dirk Bogarde

West of Sunset

Penguin Books, 1984©

Saturday commute clxi: Holidays against type

    The phrase throttles the throat

    which utters it, as humiliating

    tautology. Yet, we can imagine

    characters in Forster, wandering

    from pensione to pensione, in a

    cocoon, wrapped up in a gondola,

    on a single, cluttered canal, ex-

    periencing that extraction which

    the holiday must be, as a restor-

    ation of timidity. Slip Maggie

    Smith into the craft, and you'd

    almost row for free. Someone has

    to substitute for Helena Bonham

    Carter, who leapt out, oars ago.

    Watch the film again. I've been.

    It doesn't go so far as Venice,

    but it does suggest, one might. 

James Ivory

  director

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  screenwriter

E.M. Forster

  author

Ismail Merchant

  producer

A Room with a View

Goldcrest et al, 1986©

Fair warning

     America has a new Attorney

     General, the most infinite-

     ly inconceivable of all re-

     gressions. Now an occasion

     restores to us the gift we

     can not lose.

Carlo Scarpa

Querini Stampalia

Venice

A Christmas Cracker

Readers who are not disarmed
already by this year's Christ-
mas Cracker from the Mayfair
bookshop, Heywood Hill, are
welcomed to revisit previous
seasons of its writer's wis-
dom, here. The post is bound
to reach us all eventually,
with mirth of 5th Form rib-
aldry, from the perspective
of a very well-traveled ton-
gue in cheek. His Sicily, A
Short History was our runner-
up as book of the year, and
would have won, if the men-
aces commingled in its sub-
title held a candle to the
winner's merry tribe. Alas, 
mere gangsterism is not e-
nough in times of high re-
ligious dudgeon, to Cruz 
our barren dungeon as a lad-
der day saint, which is not 
the same thing (in any way)
as Gérard's rehearsal for a 
redeeming ladder day upon 
the earth. Somebody's always 
campaigning above his rank.

Each day I hesitate to

turn the key in my post

office box, in hope of

my Cracker's arrival, is

a day precariously rele-

gated to my own imagina-

tion. Mine can only wan-

der in this season, to

Norwich's adopted Venice,

and we know why: for the

perfection of the perman-

ence of its permeability,

often construed as peril.

Expecting my Cracker, I'd

cite another traveler on

this necessary principle,

with an eye for simile we

value so much in Norwich,

in whom a spree of mis-

chief always bares a sim-

ple offer of delight, un-

campaigned as an embrace.

Merry wishes, in all the

ways we truly wish them.

        The music subsides; its twin, however, has risen,

        you discover upon stepping outside - not signif-

        icantly, but enough for you to feel reimbursed for 

        the faded chorale. For water, too, is choral, in

        more ways than one. It is the same water that car-

        ried the Crusaders, the merchants, St Mark's rel-

        ics, Turks, every kind of cargo, military or plea-

        sure vessel; above all, it reflected everybody who

        ever lived, not to mention stayed, in this city,

        everybody who ever strolled or waded its streets

        in the way you do now.

        Small wonder that it looks muddy green in the day-

        time and pitch black at night, rivaling the firma-

        ment .. It really does look like musical sheets,

        frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to

        you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innum-

        erable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows, or

        curved crownings of Coducci cathedrals, not to men-

        tion the violin necks of gondolas.

Joseph Brodsky

Watermark

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992©

John Julius Norwich

  (né Cooper)

Sicily

  A Short History from the

  Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra

John Murray, 2015©

Oh, now, Martin. Don't be inconceivable.

  

   I've warned you,

   they do not nap

   at half-time!

And there they were, our extra men, struggling with their acceptance of 
a gridiron buffet, with no apparent explanation for those satchels of gosling down they clutched as weather beaters. Before them spread such countless metres of gurgling chafing dishes, with sludgy dips and humid chips, for hours on absolute end, 
and no recourse but social remorse for memory lapse to send: apologies.

I'm not one who thinks, the excuses of our lives are furnished us to be upbraided for their use. On the con-trary. On the annual recurrence of an innocent's groggiest endurance of his lowest obsession, we improvise.

Who'd not sooner down a glowing little cupcake from the cuisine of Marie Curie, than these stagnant slurries of bicarbonate worry, all whippingly Pasteured, that National Public Radio in America ran a solicitation for this past week: comestible slops to go with hops, from our own fantasies?

Recognizing, that in the host hemi-sphere there are entire continents where fleeing out of doors in Feb-ruary comes second to a protracted and even consoling nap in that cat-egory of escapism, we don't leave home without spontaneous cushions. If, that is, we go at all.

The thing about gridirony as we have come to know it, is that the very men-tality which it consumes has consumed, in turn, an instrumentality to keep it at arm's length, more truly composing than ex-posing its denial of so-cial potentialities in all their absysmal ab-sence. That is, could anyone conceive of mounting a decent buffet on such slender social pickings, as a roomful of self-contented ironists? 

  Cross one's heart, and 

  dream of lunch, there's 

  paradox to crunch along 

  the way, compulsory fes-

  tivity, and no one free 

  to play.