Everybody's Hoppin'

A new dance called The Dengue Fever?

La Peste?

Excuse me, sir. Could you direct us all to the meningococcal meningitis emergency clinic?

Further 'Fessin' Up

Nothing of Schiller but secondary sources.

Of Dante, Hell only.

Loss Of Appetites

Three days the heat kept me from sleep, the Vulgate, and pan fried oysters.

Mad About The Deficits -- Literary, That Is

Thomas Mann as though facing a headwind, arduous in that way.

Two or three Kafkas, but never with a moment's pleasure.

Not a jot of Victor Hugo. Dostoevski, just a jot.

Be My Valentine?

Love, huh?

The ability for it should grow, be made to grow, be cultivated.

The objects of it change, often disappear or become demon versions of what they were.

'Romantic' love shapes itself within an amniotic sac, handling itself only in the most exegetical, self-definitional way. No wonder it's short-lived. Nine months? It should gestate that long! The membranes, the frontiers of self-contained environments, they stiffen, they fissure, they crack, and -- boo! -- a monster is born.

Hence the relative virtue of caritas, the love spun from the heart of religions -- and surely secularizable.

Without a sense of broader connection, of fellow-feeling, one gets the cynic -- not that justifiable version of cynic who questions establishment values, but the cynic soured on anything. Stunted.

Sisyphean By Trade

T Fool has a graduate degree in literature, yet has seen performed only 14 of Shakespeare's plays, has only just recently 'read' Joyce's Ulysses (by listening to Jim Norton's performance of it on Naxos), has intended to take on Proust's Recherche, etc, but hasn't, has no intention of tackling Don Quixote despite its being brought up time and again.

Indeed, if key works (let alone major subsidiary works, still less the intensively-researched 'small' ones) of the Western world (not even getting to the Eastern) were scribbled onto sheets of long paper, T Fool's check marks would be far and few between.

This is not to denigrate either his education or his ambition toward one.

This is to note how difficult it is to get beyond 'small specialty' even when one's aim is humanistic, even when one tries to encompass much, even when one preaches 'breadth' and 'range' and 'depth' to classrooms of college faces which betoken intelligent minds beyond the mp3 earbuds, slouchy clothing, and other contemporary camouflage.

The Unfindable Formula For Tutti Frutti

Learning. 'How to'? If so, how to . . . outgrow 'received ideas', letting [idea/principle/awareness/reality] emerge from experience.

Science is foremost a methodology. Products of it are always by-products.

Wisdom? An ever-humility, an acceptance of shortfall, a comfort with unending mystery.

Call Me Zhivago

Masha, with her long legs and buoyant hello. She kicks up her legs in greeting, if once, often, in T Fool's fantasies of her. The room imagined with books: Pushkin and gazeteers, Marguerite Duras, some volumes with analytically cold titles connecting to mathematics. T Fool has no understanding of the latter, but in hearing her discourse on them -- sometimes in chalk, in a poetry (!) of quantitative relationships -- he feels her fire. The serious looks, her face picking up shadows, pin him, and he lies back as she initiates lovetaking. Authoritative. He has wanted to feed her cherries, but meets her pace. That is all.

Asking about her five years after circumstance keeps their daily routines utterly separate, he's apprised she has cancer.

Just A Trim

More hair in the nose now. Falling off the legs.

House Beautiful

The 'decent man' lives in a showroom of compulsive order, a combination of basic-training barracks, HGTV, Howard Hughes, and presentation vanity.

The 'average man' lives in a den of squalor, part garage, part last night's pizza party.

The living room?

Not fit for the average swineherd.

Impolitics

The American system is one of negation.

In their heads and hearts, some still hold allegiance to Dixie.

Some to the Frontier.

Some to the Colonies.

Enough of some combination of these prevents adjustment or innovation.

Our glory will be our epitaph.

Long lasting are traditions.

The Mirror Breaks To Look In It

Said of Robert Byron's books (and character), by Paul Fussell in his book Abroad.

" . . . all nine . . . dramatize the action of the disciplined moral intelligence beleaguered by stupidity, convention, received error, greed, provincialism, nationalism, and aggression."

Byron seems to have come from what we Americans might see as an 'aristocratic' point of view, a man parodied by movies as 'English gentry': part eccentric, part wit, part fop, part university man, part remittance man, part fair-play umpire, part assumptive snoot, part decent sort. A type not without charm and interest, but a type hard for us to create now with a straight face.

Not being able to attest either to Byron's books or to Byron himself, one might like to assign such virtues to those of us living now, hoping that we might apply them in our own context.

That human ugliness against which Fussell claims Byron's opposition, though, might be pinned down in the matter of less than an hour, concretized from a look or two at websites or web headlines.

We're arboreal no more, but we're a bad crew. Always have been.

Vanity Fair

A magazine a man

can thumb in a public restaurant,

lean forward in his chair and squeeze

his thighs

one against the one

still feeling respectable

The Count Is On

How many become posthumous dedicatees?

How many know what this is?

How many avoid as 'metaphysical' this whole notion of interest and just find focus in the probability question?

How many see this as a diversionary query barely masking an anxiety toward death?

How many see this as involving only one pampered class who feel they may ignore concrete problems?

How many would trample all this under horsehoof, tanktread, jackboot to clear the knot in their throat?