Wednesday, July 5, 2017

C'mon, Pruitt, there's something we haven't destroyed





Our metric reference for today's
celebration of the new government
is the immortal exhortation from
Rock Hudson to Elizabeth Taylor,
in George Stevens' 1950s romance
on Texas, Giant. Embracing inter-
racial enlightenment during the
Eisenhower Administration, hotly
rejected in the rise of our New
Greatness (hilariously interpret-
ed only this week by David Brooks
as the rebirth of a frontier spir-
it), Stevens' screenplay finds a
newlywed couple disembarking from
their private rail car at their
imperial ranch in Texas, as the
élitist coastal bride graciously
accepts a welcoming bouquet from
a sub-captive Hispanic retainer
of her man-of-the-people husband.

A touch annoyed by this forbidden
interaction, his final demand to
get into the car for the drive to
the house, rings loud and clear -



C'mon, Leslie, it's 50 miles to coffee!



Amidst all the buffoonery of the new government, yet coiled in plain sight in its horror of illegiti-macy, it is easy to over-look its childlike agony. A workmanlike apparatchik was certain to emerge in the maelstrom of hate mongering headliners staffing the regime. He is the former attorney general for fossilized Oklahoma, and he is destroying everything he possibly can, before the nation's day in Court, much less at the polls. 






In all the President's frenzy in
the stealing of myths, is said to
be some cover for his henchmen's
theft of resources. But his clock
is right, twice a day. They are
inextricable. Nice car, not his.























i    Xavier Serrano
ii   Luc Défont Saviard
iii  Kenneth Blom
      Les palmiers
      2013
v    George Stevens
        director
      Giant
      Elizabeth Taylor
      James Dean
      1956




Monday, July 3, 2017

Canada at a hundred and fifty






     Not that anyone's counting
     or anything, but how could
     Canada have whupt our ass,
     in the War of 1812, and be
     younger than you'd expect?



































Sunday, July 2, 2017

Quiet jetty





  A breakwater, possibly the allusion drawing
  Roosevelt to plant trees to hold the land in
  the first worst hard time, in lieu of pursu-
  ing advice to adopt soils management by sci-
  entific scruples, comes to mind in the pres-
  ent worst hard time, a dust bowl degradation
  of the framework of community, the language.

  The clean white shirt, possibly an allusion
  to a breakwater, is resorted to repeatedly,
  rather, for its porosity, permeability, clar-
  ity, coherency, and transparent antecedents.
  This gives a taste for it, generic as it is.



  I think of soils management these days, as a
  friend was writing to me only the other day,
  to do: you can defend, simply by reading a
  poem. This I hadn't discovered I'd known to
  do, until I glanced again at prose just now,
  so steeped in Scott Fitzgerald, that it had
  held in ground and flowered, another season -




          Snatching her hand, he pulled her along with him,
          and they ran until they reached a side street muf-
          fled and sweet with trees. As they leaned together,
          panting, he put into her hand a bunch of violets,
          and she knew, quite as though she'd seen it done,
          that they were stolen. Summer that is shade and moss
          traced itself in the veins of the violet leaves, and
          she crushed their coolness against her cheek.
















Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time
  The untold story of those
  who survived the great
  American dust bowl
Houghton Mifflin, 2006©


Truman Capote
Summer Crossing
ca 1959
op. posth.
The Truman Capote
  Literary Trust
Random House, 2006©