My first foray into R. Davies

The Cunning Man:

He certainly boiled them the February Sunday night
he read his paper titled A Knotty-Point of Shakespeare
Criticism Untied: Where Did Hamlet Hide the Body of
Polonius? This sounded so meaty, so solemnly literary,
that Mr. Thomas Norfolk, the senior English master,
decided to grace us with his presence, in addition to one
of the junior English staff, rely-poly; witty Mr. Sharpe,
w~o took an unschoolmasterish delight in Brocky's mis-
chief. There we sat, puffing away at our strictly legal cigarettes (Mr. Sharpe smoked a pipe with a bowl of
extraordinary size) as Brocky unfolded his manuscript
and began.

The problem of what Hamlet did with Polonius, said
Brocky, had been neglected because so many other mat-
ters of greater immediate interest were raised by the
famous scene (Act Three, scene four) where Hamlet has
his great confrontation with his mother? and treats her
to a most unfilial roughness of tongue. The scene moves
swiftly, as the finest of Shakespeare always does, and
indeed not twenty-five lines have passed until Hamlet
detects the presence of Polonius behind the arras, and
stabs him, without knowing who he is. What then
passes between Hamlet and Gertrude is so laden with
significance-Brocky said that he would not even
attempt to deal with the suggestions of an incestuous
passion in the Prince, and Mr. Norfolk nodded sagely in
approval of this scholarly reticence-that we are apt to
neglect Hamlet's declaration-

I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room

-until after the next scene when Hamlet appears,
declaring-

Safely stowed.

Clearly he has hidden the body of the good old coun-
sellor, but where? When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
question .him, he says that he has "compounded it with
dust whereto it is kin," which would have tipped off
the two court toadies if they were not so stupid. We
know better; we remember that "dust" means not only
the flesh that remains when the spirit has flown, but
any cast-off rubbish or human waste matter, and in the

circumstances, what might that be? It is made plain
enough when Hamlet is questioned by the King, and at
last says that they may find Polonius by his stench-if
they take their time looking in the right place. "If you
find him not within this month, you shall nose him as
you go up the stairs into the lobby."

Now, what does this tell us? Is it not as plain as day?

Hamlet has hidden Polonius in a room reserved for the
King which the King rarely frequents, a room to be
found off the stairs. In such a castle as Elsinore, and
indeed in any castle of the sort that would be well
known to Shakespeare, who had visited several such cas-
tles with his troupe of travelling players, that room off
the stairs would be the privy, built on the outward walls
to overhang the moat. Hamlet who has a nasty and
decidedly dirty tongue--consider the way he talks to
Ophelia before the play-within-the-play begins, with
everyone listening!-is hinting that the King does not
often go to the privy, and is indeed constipated.

Was this a deadly insult? Consider the reference the
Prince makes to his uncle-father: he calls him "the bloat
king" and describes his kisses as "reachy" which we
know means rancid. Did the King then suffer from hali-
tosis? Was not Hamlet being inexcusably personal in
thus taunting a man who had the power of life and
death over him?

Can we utterly deny ourselves some speculation as to
what significance such a taunt may have had for
Shakespeare himself? It is often said that it is dangerous
folly to attempt to plumb the depths of an author's mind
by fmding apparently significant hints of personal preoC-
cupation in his work But-we are only human; may we
not seek to find out anything about the Prince of poetS
tha~ he has inadvertently let slip? It is surely worthy of
notice that you may seek a Shakespeare Concordance

from end to end without finding a single reference to
constipation, although a plethora of other human ills are
exploited to comic or tragic effect. Why this silence on a
complaint so common, so vexatious, so sinister in its
effect on the human spirit? Was Shakespeare attributing.
to King Claudius, through these taunts of Hamlet, an
ailment that was his own secret, nagging, unremitting
worry?

Brocky modestly left conclusions to others. He had
not had time, he said, to sift the complete works for ref-
erences which might throw light on this matter. But he
threw it open for discussion by the Curfew Club. Was
Shakespeare constipated? What do you think?

Our Man in Havana

Brilliant, brilliant Graham Greene.

Did you torture him?’
Captain Segura laughed. ‘No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.’
‘I didn’t know there were class-distinctions in torture.’
‘Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.’
‘There’s torture and torture. When they broke up Dr Hasselbacher’s laboratory they were torturing … ?’
‘One can never tell what amateurs may do. The police had no concern in that. Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class.’
‘Who does?’
‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal. You see, I was right to make that king, and now I shall huff you for the last time.’
‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or in the prisons of Lisbon and Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’
‘We’re not shocked by that any longer.’
‘It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.’

Kenneth Tynan

Marx, Perelman and Tynan

From the Diaries:

(In 1967) The premiere of Peter Brooks' "US" ended with the house lights up and the entire cast standing on stage staring accusingly at the audience, the intention being to arouse our guilt feelings over the Vietnam war. My reaction, since I felt no guilt, was one of mounting irritation. The audience docilely stayed in its seats, shifting a little uneasily (out of sheer uncertainty whether the show was over). I finally decided to break the deadlock from my seat in the third row. "Excuse me, I said, but are we keeping you waiting or are you keeping us waiting?'

Yellowing bits

Marcel Duchamp, center. Stephen Spender, right and Madame Blavatsky in soapbox derby.








From the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/20/arts/taking-jokes-by-duchamp-to-another-level-of-art.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/books/review/27SWIFTL.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22The%20poet%20of%20autobiography%22&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/31/books/books-of-the-times-the-self-and-those-who-tend-it.html?scp=1&sq=constructing+the+self+constructing+america&st=nyt

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/14/bookend/bookend.html?scp=1&sq=defrocking%20the%20artist%20michael%20lind&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/26/books/the-medium-with-a-message.html?src=pm

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE7D9163FF935A15751C0A963958260&scp=1&sq=madame%20blavatsky%27s%20baboon&st=cse

My end

I have reached the age where I no longer fall over, but sustain a fall, which I did, a few days before the new year. I braced my fall with a slice of bread, which made Buddy's undivided attention to it pay off in the end.
The night of December 30th, I received a nasty cold which tours my body like a cadre of sightseers. They are overlooking the canyons of my lungs now. I had someone's belt buckle in my mouth that night. There is a picture. That can't have helped. The fever has amplified the pain of the bruise on my leg as it does everything with the great echoing hollowness of prewar municipal buildings with a leak somewhere in them. I can''t apologize for the way it causes me to write.
I am convalescing with E.M. Forster. Howards End, which I did not remember until I reached the slip of paper willing the place away, then still unsure whether I encountered the paper honestly, having read the book, or heard of it.
I retained a distant but warm affection for Forster, though I read him all in a rush very early and have not gone back. I love this book.

How lovable his voice:
"That evening Margaret took decisive action. The house was very quiet, and the fog- we are in November now- pressed against the glass like an excluded ghost."
and:
"The interlude closes. It has taken place in Charles's garden at Hilton. He and Dolly are sitting in deckchairs, and their motor is regarding them placidly from its garage across the lawn. A short-frocked edition of Charles also regards them placidly; a perambulator edition is squeaking; a third edition is expected shortly. Nature is turning out Wilcoxes in this peaceful abode, so that they may inherit the earth."

How indulgent he is:

"Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.

It was hard-going in the roads of Mr. Wilcox's soul. From boyhood he had neglected them. "I am not a fellow who bothers about my own inside." Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband, or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad, a belief that is desirable only when held passionately. Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. Amabat, amare timebat. And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.

It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good "talking." By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty.

But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things, and there was no more to be said. He never noticed that Helen and Frieda were hostile, or that Tibby was not interested in currant plantations; he never noticed the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation, the finger-posts, the milestones, the collisions, the illimitable views. Once--on another occasion--she scolded him about it. He was puzzled, but replied with a laugh: "My motto is Concentrate. I've no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing." "It isn't frittering away the strength," she protested. "It's enlarging the space in which you may be strong." He answered: "You're a clever little woman, but my motto's Concentrate." And this morning he concentrated with a vengeance.

They met in the rhododendrons of yesterday."

and:
The sense of flux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time. She forgot the luggage and the motor-cars, and the hurrying men who know so much and connect so little. She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize England. She failed--visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying. But an unexpected love of the island awoke in her, connecting on this side with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable. Helen and her father had known this love, poor Leonard Bast was groping after it, but it had been hidden from Margaret till this afternoon. It had certainly come through the house and old Miss Avery. Through them: the notion of "through" persisted; her mind trembled towards a conclusion which only the unwise have put into words. Then, veering back into warmth, it dwelt on ruddy bricks, flowering plum-trees, and all the tangible joys of, spring.

On... ahem... trousers

As early as 1793, however, Gibbon in a letter to a gentleman of title referred to his "inexpressibles." In all instances contemporary with its popular usage the term expressed the exaggerated sensitivity of the time in referring to men's outer nether garments—breeches or trousers. Curious it is that this could acceptably be done only by a humorous euphemism. Writing in 1880, one Helen Bedingfeld in Jerningham Letters spoke of, "A pair of old inexpressibles . . . containing seven thousand Guineas ! . . . deposited in so vulgar a garment." In 1809 an English magazine observed that "a fine lady can talk about her lover's inexpressibles, when she would faint to hear of his breeches."

Lord Lytton in Paul Clifford speaks of a gentleman in boots and spurs, with one hand in the pocket of his "inexpressibles." A conversation in a little-remembered book of the period has the line, " `Hush: you should say inexpressibles—that's the way genteel people talk!' " One of the Ingoldsby Legends alludes to "Bond Street inexpressibles." In Sketches by Boz appears, "He usually wore a brown coat without a wrinkle, light inexpressibles without a spot." In the story Shabby-Genteel People, "The knees of the unmentionables soon began to get alarmingly white." Pickwick Papers has "symmetrical inexpressibles, and scented pocket-handkerchiefs." And so on. Gentlemen's legs might be named without circumlocution, but not their habiliments. In 1875 a Melbourne newspaper stated that "the episcopal inexpressibles for obvious reasons will be unsuited to lay legs."

Sometimes, presumably in the eighties or nineties, however, the humor of the term became extended—among people more bold than genteel. This occurred, at least, in the United States. Thenceforth it was a very reliable witticism, which endured with undiminished vitality well into the present century, in intimate gatherings to refer orally to the mysterious underthings of femininity as unmentionables.

Unmentionable by their given names certainly they were.

The matter of the explosive events occasioned by the early presentations of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, first in Dublin in 1911 and, four years later, in various American cities, has been variously explained. In New York potatoes were thrown at the players. These famous incidents probably had their origin in the tender sensibilities of Irishmen who felt the dignity of their country, then seeking to become a State, affronted by so veracious a picture of an unflattering aspect of life in Ireland. At any rate, upon the introduction of the play in Dublin, Lady Gregory wired to Yeats, "Audience broke up in disorder at the word 'shift.' The riots would no doubt have broken out without the mention of a shift, but that word was a good blasphemy to begin with.

-excerpt fr. Robert Cartes Holliday's "Unmentionables"

Mostly from the New York Review

On...

Collected Stories and Other Writings
by Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue
Library of America, 1,093 pp., $40.00

by Ch. Baxter in the NYRB June 11, 2009

Katherine Anne Porter is a case of a writer whose last fiction seemed oddly ill-matched with the work that preceded it. Readers of a certain age may remember the literary hoopla surrounding the publication of her only novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962. A work of twenty years’ labor, the book was reviewed everywhere, called “a great work of art” by Mark Schorer, went onto the best-seller list, and was sold to the movies for $400,000. The author’s shrewd, imperious visage appeared in the pages of the Saturday Review and other publications. But readers who actually bothered to start this 497-page novel did not often finish it. Finally a critic told the truth about the book: Theodore Solotaroff, in a long essay-review in Commentary, did an inventory of its faults that still seems, from a distance of over four decades, definitive and irrefutable.

But at the time of its publication, Ship of Fools appeared to have almost everything: a large cast of pan-European blowhards, a historical moment of considerable importance (1931), and great themes having to do with prejudice and international relations. Indeed, Ship of Fools had almost everything except the one element it needed, the breath of life. After a few years, the novel fell off the shelf into oblivion.

None of this would have mattered very much if Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories hadn’t been among the best ever written by an American. But they were so remarkably good, so touched with genius, that the spectacle that followed their publication is more than a bit disheartening. A writer whose work could justly be compared to Tolstoy’s spent over twenty years of her life working on a bloated and sententious novel. With the publication of the Library of America’s edition of the Collected Stories and Other Writings, some questions naturally arise, although most of them are unanswerable. Where did the stories come from? And then what happened?

Katherine Anne Porter made a habit of misrepresenting the year of her birth, 1890, claiming that she had been born in 1894 (two years after her mother died). She also maintained that she had grown up as a descendant of four generations of Southern aristocracy—though in fact she was born in a two-room log house in Indian Creek, Texas. Other misrepresentations followed. Like many other American writers of her generation, she regarded her autobiography as unnecessarily factual and in need of revision.

“I was fed from birth on myth and legend,” she noted, “and a conviction of natural superiority bestowed by birth and tradition.” For her, snobbery and fantasy tended to stimulate each other. But the conditions of her early life were so difficult that one is surprised that she survived it with her faculties intact. After her mother’s death, her father moved her and her siblings to Kyle, Texas, where she was educated by her grandmother until she was ten. Following the death of her grandmother, her father took the children to various relatives, or dropped them in one boarding school or another, and generally left them to fend for themselves. By the age of sixteen, her formal schooling having ended, she was married to her first husband, John Henry Koontz, who habitually beat her. She lived with his alcoholism and physical abuse for eight years. She survived a bout of influenza in 1918. The illness turned her hair permanently white.

There has been a tendency among quite a few of Porter’s critics to criticize her life instead of her work and to give it low marks. According to these commentators, she should have lived some other kind of life than the one she actually had. What kind is not specified—perhaps one with fewer deceptions would have been better. Joan Givner’s biography does not present a particularly attractive picture of Porter, who was much married and given to more than a few of the usual human vanities.¹ She seems to have engaged, rather frequently, in betrayal of people close to her. Still, compared to the alcoholic stupidities of other American writers of her time, her misdeeds seem rather amateurish.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jun/11/flowering-porter/

From the September 24, 2009
John Searle on a book by Paul Boghossian:

A problem faced by social constructivism concerns facts about the past. Are we now constructing facts about the past when we make claims about history? One extreme social constructivist cited by Boghossian, Bruno Latour, accepts this conclusion with somewhat comical results. Recent research shows that the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II probably died of tuberculosis. But according to Latour, this is impossible because the tuberculosis bacillus was only discovered by Robert Koch in 1882.¹ “Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.” To say that Ramses II died of tuberculosis is as absurd as saying that he died of machine-gun fire.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/men-and-boys/
Interesting article of Greek homosexuality and pederasty. Learned all about intercrural ways.

On Byron via Edna O'Brien through Harold Bloom
In the two centuries since Byron died in Greece (April 19, 1824, aged thirty-six), leading a messy rebellion against the Turks, only Shakespeare has been translated and read more, first on the Continent and then worldwide. High Romantic in his life but not in his art, which carried on from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Laurence Sterne, the endlessly digressive Byron incarnated countless contradictions of thought and feeling. He bewildered and fascinated his contemporaries with a vitality overtly erotic, compounded of narcissism, snobbery, sadomasochism, incest, heterosexual sodomy, homosexuality, what you will. Of the two authentic English vices, humbuggery and bumbuggery, Byron scourged the first and expanded the horizons of the second. The first matter to bear in mind concerning Byron is his royal lineage, descended on his mother’s side, the Gordons, from Annabella Stuart, daughter of James I of Britain (James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots). His father was “Mad Jack” Byron, gambler and heroic womanizer, who had been guilty of incest with his sister Frances. The daughter of his first marriage to Lady Amelia D’Arcy, Lady Augusta Leigh, the poet’s half-sister, became his true beloved, thus repeating the pattern. Mad Jack died in France, poor and abandoned, when his poetical son was three. Born with a lame left foot, George Gordon, Lord Byron, became a superb swimmer and marksman, and at ten secured the family title.
The rest:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/sep/24/pilgrim-to-eros/

More Yellowing Articles

More things to burn:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/21/science/how-the-brain-might-work-a-new-theory-of-consciousness.html?scp=1&sq=how%20the%20brain%20might%20work&st=cse
The sensations of one instant of a spring morning have thus become represented by millions of activated cells in many different regions of the cortex. That much is known. A still baffling question for scientists is, how does the brain bind these fragmented pieces of information into a single coherent image? The nature of the reassembly process, known as the binding problem, is intimately related to the age-old question of consciousness, since an answer to the binding problem would go far to defining the physical basis of the conscious mind.
The first step to understanding, brain scientists say, is to realize that there is no Cinemascope screen in the brain where all the pieces come together. But if there is no screen, on what physical principle is consciousness organized? A growing number of scientists say the answer must lie in some form of timing. An image may be reconstructed from all cells that are firing in a particular rhythm at a particular instant.



Purdy by Vidal:
I first heard of James Purdy a half-century or so ago on a bright spring day in London. Edith Sitwell had asked me to lunch. We drank martinis while she put the finishing touches on a letter to The Times of London; D. H. Lawrence's novel ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was under attack for obscenity. Although Edith disliked Lawrence for having, she thought, caricatured her brother Sir Osbert in the novel, as the gin took its effect on each of us, I boldly assured her that the offending book was not actually the work of Lawrence but of Truman Capote. The red-rimmed eyes atop the long Gothic face narrowed: ''Surely the dates are not right.''
''Capote,'' I said, ''will never see 90 again.''
She sighed contentedly. ''That would explain the dreadful style.''

On the genetic basis for homosexuality:
Natalie Angier:

As it happens, the evidence for a genetic basis for homosexuality remains slender and incomplete. What Mr. Hamer reported in 1993 was that in families having two gay brothers, 33 of the 40 pairs of brothers shared a piece of the X chromosome, significantly more than the 20 pairs of brothers who would have been expected to inherit the same chromosomal terrain by chance alone. Mr. Hamer also found that a gay man was much likelier to have gay male relatives on the maternal side of the family than on his father's side, further evidence of something of interest on the X chromosome, which in men is always passed along from the mother. The molecular and genealogical evidence together suggested that a gene or genes embedded in the wilderness of the X chromosome somehow contribute to male sexual orientation.
However, the specific "gay gene" -- as Mr. Hamer calls it in a reluctant bow to popularization -- has yet to be found. He has no idea how the gene could possibly work to influence a man's erotic nature. Nor does he know how many people out there may carry the trait; whether the trait invariably or only occasionally leads to homosexuality; whether it operates solo or in conjunction with many other genes, and so on. In short, the genetics of sexual orientation is in an utterly embryonic stage, as is our grasp of the biological underpinnings for any interesting human characteristic.


More on The Bell Curve:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEEDC123DF935A25753C1A962958260&scp=1&sq=what%20is%20intelligence%20and%20who%20has%20it?%20bbrowne&st=cse

The Guermantes are delayed

The last page of "The Guermantes Way":

‘I should like to know, all the same,’ Mme de Guermantes asked him, ‘how, ten months before the time, you can tell that a thing will be impossible.’
‘My dear Duchess, I will tell you if you insist upon it, but, first of all, you can see that I am very ill.’
‘Yes, my little Charles, I don’t think you look at all well. I’m not pleased with your colour, but I’m not asking you to come with me next week, I ask you to come in ten months. In ten months one has time to get oneself cured, you know.’ At this point a footman came in to say that the carriage was at the door.
‘Come, Oriane, to horse,’ said the Duke, already pawing at the ground with impatience as though he were himself one of the horses that stood waiting outside.
‘Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy,’ the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-bye to us.
‘But, my dear friend, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I consulted last winter, the thing I’ve got – which may, for that matter, carry me off at any moment – won’t in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,’ replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out.
‘What’s that you say?’ cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage, and raising her fine eyes, their melancholy blue clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and, not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. ‘You’re joking,’ she said to Swann.
‘It would be a joke in charming taste,’ replied he ironically. ‘I don’t know why I am telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment… But whatever I do I mustn’t make you late; you’re dining out, remember,’ he added, because he knew that for other people their own social obligations took preference of the death of a friend, and could put himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death. And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her shoulders droop, saying: ‘Don’t worry about our dinner. It’s not of any importance!’ But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed: ‘Come, Oriane, don’t stop there chattering like that and exchanging your jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme de Saint-Euverte insists on sitting down to table at eight o’clock sharp. We must know what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles,’ he went on, turning to Swann, ‘but it’s ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte’s.’ Mme de Guermantes advanced resolutely towards the carriage and uttered a last farewell to Swann. ‘You know, we can talk about that another time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like,’ (with Mme de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons) ‘you will let me know your day and time,’ and lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: ‘Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather,’ he said to the footman, ‘tell the lady’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.’ ‘But, my dear,’ replied the Duchess gently, annoyed to see that Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stood back to allow the carriage to pass out in front of us, could hear, ‘since we are late.’ ‘No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight they’d have to wait for us, but you can’t possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes.

More to feed the fireplace fire

One of the articles I collected on the attempted establishment of an objective system when valuing art: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/01/arts/ruling-prevents-removal-of-warehouse-sculpture.html?scp=1&sq=judge%20prevents%20removal%20of%20warehouse%20sculpture&st=cse
Also January 27: Jane Alexander testifying for a "legitimate Federal role in the Arts".
From May 21, 1996
GAY RIGHTS LAWS CAN'T BE BANNED, HIGH COURT RULES
In a significant victory for gay rights, the Supreme Court today struck down a provision of the Colorado Constitution that not only nullified existing civil rights protections for homosexuals in the state but also barred the passage of new anti-discrimination laws.

"A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in a forceful opinion for a 6-to-3 majority. He said the Colorado provision, known as Amendment 2, had placed the state's homosexuals "in a solitary class," singling them out in violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee for a legal disability so sweeping as to be inexplicable on any basis other than "animus."

It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort," Justice Kennedy said in an opinion joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. [Excerpts, page A20.]

Justice Antonin Scalia filed an equally forceful dissent, accusing the majority of taking sides in "the culture wars" through "an act not of judicial judgment but of political will." The process by which Colorado's voters adopted Amendment 2, by 53 percent to 47 percent in 1992, was the "most democratic of procedures," Justice Scalia said.

September 4, 2005

Reviews of bios on Edmund Wilson, Henry Ford, Matisse

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04TOIBIN.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=american%20critic%20colm%20toibin&st=cse

and:

"Spurling reached the end of Volume 1 with a transcendent insight: his ''paintings of light and color . . . seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries. . . . He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a 20th-century art that would draw its vitality essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04HOWARDL.html?scp=1&sq=matisse%20the%20master%20richard%20howard&st=cse

Reducing the fire hazard further

Mostly from the NYT:
On Bingo:

BINGO goes back to 1530, descended from an Italian game called Lo Givoco del Lotto D’Italia. A pitchman encountered a version in Germany and sensed its possibilities, bringing it to America in the 1920s as a carnival game. It was called Beano, since players marked their cards with beans. Winners shouted, “Beano!”

A struggling toy salesman from New York named Edwin S. Lowe saw the game at a carnival near Atlanta in 1929. Back home, he tested it on friends, and one winner mistakenly called out, “Bingo!” rather than “Beano!” He liked what he heard.

It was a priest in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who recognized the game’s power to help his ailing church. Trouble was, there were just 24 unique cards at the time, so too many people were winning. The priest pressed upon Mr. Lowe the need for vaster possibilities of losing. Mr. Lowe enlisted a Columbia math professor named Carl Leffler, who configured more than 6,000 different bingo cards.

All those combinations took a mighty toll. He is said to have gone mad.

On Martin Amis:

A.S. Byatt accused Amis of "folie de grandeur" for demanding $794,000 for "The Information", firing his agent and switching publishers. "I always earn out my advances and I don't see why I should subsidize his greed simply because he has a divorce to pay for and just had all his teeth redone"

On judicial reasonable doubt:

"Jon O. Newman, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a November article wrote that a curious feature of a judge's instructions about reasonable doubt is that trial courts are reluctant to explain it to juries.
"I find it unsettling that we are using a formulation that we believe will become less clear the more we explain it."

On the favorite film villain, the Government:
"There have been so many movies with such a consistent theme that I'm afraid they're also shaping the views of society," Mr. Thompson said. "That's not to say that government shouldn't be fair game along with everything else. But can you think of a movie in the last 10 years that has shown the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in a positive light?"

RONALD BROWNSTEIN, AUTHOR of the 1991 book "The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection," is critical of that scene, on the grounds that it unduly simplifies the problems of governing. "It symbolizes what's wrong with all of these movies and so much of our politics as well," he said. "They perpetuate the idea that the problem in the country is self-centered or careerist leadership rather than the structural disparity between what we want and what we are willing to sacrifice for what we want."

Such plots, which pit a well-meaning outsider against a vastly corrupt political system, have another effect. They let audiences cheer for the hero while realizing the fleetingness of the victory: if people are told that the root of government is rotten, then even a good branch can't survive for long.

On Tony Alamo:

Born Bernie Lazar Hoffman in Joplin mo.; married Susan Lipowitz in 1966 (his 3rd of 6 wives). The cult designed and manufactured jeweled jackets. Susan died in 1982. Alamo stated she would be resurrected and for six months he had her body on display "while their followers prayed". After 16 years, her body was given to her family.

On July 28, 2009, shortly after his conviction, Tony Alamo again made headlines by calling himself "just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the gospel." On October 22, 2008, Alamo's former followers testified in court during a preliminary hearing that Alamo had practiced polygamy and had taken an eight-year-old girl as a wife. He was sentenced to 175 years in prison on November 13, 2009.

On Leo Strauss:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/weekinreview/the-nation-a-very-unlikely-villain-or-hero.html

From the November 13, 1994 Book Review, letters on the Bell Curve controversy and a terrific article on Voltaire by Professor Larry Wolff:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/13/books/if-were-younger-would-make-myself-russian-voltaire-s-encounter-with-czars.html

Pope JP2's 1995 letter against ethical relativism which hints at moral ambiguities inherent in Democracy

James Atlas' article on the conservative movement:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-counter-counterculture.html?scp=3&sq=the%20counter%20counterculture&st=cse

February 19, 1995's reviews of a book on teaching and race:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/are-white-schools-bad-for-black-children.html?scp=1&sq=kwanzaa%20and%20me&st=cse

and a review of Gert Himmelfarb's book on Morals:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/19/books/why-can-t-we-behave.html?scp=1&sq=the%20de-moralization%20of%20society%20himmelfarb&st=cse

And a review of the Joseph Frank Dostoevsky bio, The Miraculous Years.

and Clinton's 1995 State of the Union Address

Lambert Orme nee Firbank

From Harold Nicolson:

His sitting room was exquisitely decorated.

When I think of that room, I am again convinced there

was something cabotin about Lambert Orme:

people at the age of twenty should not have rooms like that.

He had painted it shiny black....

I did not see him again for some five years. He

went round the world, and sent me a postcard from

Yokohama. He was immensely impressed by the

beauty of American cities, and it was from them that

he first learnt to see life as a system of

correlated planes. It was several years, however, be-

fore his very real and original talent for association

was finally able to cast the slough of symbolism.

When I next met him he was still intensively con-

cerned with the relation between things and himself:

it was only in his final period that he became

predominantly interested in the relation of things

towards each other. His talent, which though singu-

larly receptive was not very muscular, had failed to

attract any interesting synthesis from the confront-

ation of the universe with his own twitching heart:

He had tried, and failed, to interpret con-

scions cognition by a single simple emotion. But,

in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying

original analysis, implicit rather than expressed of the

diversity and interrelation of external phe-

nomena: he was able to suggest a mood of subcon

cious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities.

The conception of life as a repetition of self-con-

lined and finite entities can be integrated only

by the pressure of a compelling imagination: Lambert's

imagination though mobile was not compelling- I

suspect indeed that less power is required to disinte-

grate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms for-

tuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a

tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of

our convention. His later poetry succeeded because

of its influence to this unapparent reality, I am now

assured that some of his later poems were very re-

spectable.

Kenneth Clark on William Blake

Personal revelation also has an insidious effect on illustration. Clark on the appalling visions of William Blake.

"Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a

visionary. It is a vague term. Artists, even the most realistic, start

from some kind of vision – that is what leads them to select what they

need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

But with Blake the word vision has a more precise meaning. He did not draw from

nature because, as he said repeatedly, his visions were clearer and

more vivid than his optical perception of the world around him. He

saw these visions as a child; saw God put his head in at the window,

saw the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree at Peckham Rye. There is

nothing extraordinary in this; many imaginative children have

similar experiences. What is exceptional is that Blake kept these

intense powers of visualisation after the age of puberty. Exceptional,

but not incredible, because this can be paralleled in other forms of

mental activity. Some people have the gift of total recall and others

can renumber accurately whole pages of figures; physiologically

these endowments seem to me quite as hard to explain as the accurate

visualisation of images.

“What was the nature of Blake's visions? His accounts of them sug-

gest that, although obviously closely related, they were of several

different kinds. The first was simply his poetic faculty that led him

to see a natural event as something supernatural. 'It will be ques-

taoned', he says in his Descriptive Catalogue, 'when the sun rises do

you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea – Oh no, no,

1 see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying “Holy?

holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty”. The seventeenth-century

poets, Traherne or Vaughan, might have said the same. The second

was when an analogy became so strong in his mind that an ordinary

experience was transformed: 'With my inward eye 'tis an old man

grey. To my outward a thistle across the way.' These lines show

that Blake was capable of switching from one kind of vision to another

out of course Blake's pictures in the fire' are far more precise than

ours.

This leads us to visions of rather a different order which seem to

have involved an element of hallucination. They are described in

detail by Varley and Linell, in whose presence Blake drew a number

of what are known as 'visionary heads' One must remember

that Varley was an early spiritualist and he encouraged Blake to

draw these heads in the middle of the night and in an atmosphere

rather like that of a mediumistic séance. He was requested to draw

the likeness of William Wallace, says Linell, 'the eyes of Blake

sparkled, for he admired heroes. “William Wallace,” he exclaimed,

“I see him now, there, there, how noble he looks – reach me my

things.”Having drawn for some time with the same ease of hand

and steadiness of eye as if a living sitter had been before him, Blake

said: 'I cannot finish him, Edward the First has stepped in between

him and me.'

There was an element of clairvoyance in his work, but the

visions that make his best work unforgettable were somewhere

between the poetic analogy of the rising sun and the literal reality of

the heads.