Morning Read
¶ Decameron: The Fourth Day. The introduction, an authorial aside defending the burgeoning of vernacular literature — Boccaccio was writing in a world more or less without it (aside from, ahem, Dante) — has on at least once occasion served as a replacement for yesterday’s very saucy tale about putting the Devil in Hell. Not that today’s is without its capsicum: “Their bills are not where you think, and require a special sort of diet.” If you ask me, this is a jolly improvement on the original, which says only, “tu non sai donde elle s’imbeccano.” McWilliam’s little crack about the “special diet” is wonderfully “off-color”…. ¶ In the Aeneid, the funeral games come to an end at last with the boys’ mock battle, and we approach a scene that I have seen on a museum wall somewhere — at the Met? The burning of the Trojan ships. Goody! Something to look forward to for tomorrow. Not…. ¶ C K Williams, “The Knot.” I’ve no idea what this means, but it’s a pretty line: “knots of purpose we could touch into as surely as we touch the rippling lattice of a song.” I have no patience for the metaphysics of this verse, for the poet’s mad persistence in distinguishing between “spirit or flesh.” There is certainly flesh, and their may be spirt, but they are not elements in a dualism. That’s over!…. ¶ Clive James, nominally on Octavio Paz but actually, and with sweet infatuation, about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, of whom he writes, fetchingly: “Though her faith was real, it undoubtedly came in handy.” Sterling. At the end, he returns to the more recent Mexican poet:
The correspondence [of Sor Juana Inés was lost through sheer carelessness: the Spanish carelessness that Paz defines in scathing terms: “It is said that the passion that corrodes the Spanish peoples is envy, but worse and more weighty is carelessness: the creator of our deserts.” When he brings in a phrase like creador de nuestros desertos, Paz shows us the transatlantic cable that runs from Unamuno and Ortega to himself and Vargas Llosa: the charge of energy that brought Spanish civilization to life again, offshore in the Americas. Spanish expository prose in the twentieth century was a miracle that these men created, but they didn’t dream it up out of the air. There was already a long heritage of rhetorical strengtrh in the poetry, where the telling phrases lie separate that would later be strung together in a coruscating style.
¶ Diana to Debo, October 1978, oh, what a treat! (But I suppose I had better mention that “Colonel” is Gaston Palewski, Nancy’s BF who, after twenty years of fooling around, up and married somebody rich. Nancy’s horrible cancer commenced presently. You decide.)
It was so rich having a chat yesterday.
I don’t think I told you a very odd thing about Colonel. We were alone & he suddenly said he’d been terribly hurt because Naunce didn’t mention him in her testament. So I said ‘But her will was just one line leaving everything to Debo,’ & he said ‘Oui, je sais, mais elle aurait pu quand même dire un mot de moi.’
Well, can you imagine, isn’t that wanting everything all at once! He maried [somebody else], & yet he expects that! I feel certain he simply wants it for his biographers, if any. He was almost in tears. When I told him about the telly thing, he cheered up & wanted to know who is to act him in it. I’m afraid vanity is strong. He must be very put out by the Pop dying because he knew him from Venice & loved saying so.
“I’m afraid vanity is strong… and loved saying so” — English doesn’t get more delicious…. ¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Frank Warren, of Post Secret. Goodness! When did I last check it out? Perhaps I ought to link to it, under a new heading, “Divertissements” or “Sunday Morning” — how long, I wonder, are Internet weekends going to continue to be dead? The Post Secret postcards are titillating to read, of course, but it’s the sharp designs that carry the site. There is, it’s true, a nasty pong to it all: it’s one thing to hear somebody’s deep dark secrets, but quite another to know that somebody is doing some pretty awful things! Kathleen would take one look at Post Secret and, after that, never again…. ¶ Stendhal: “Le grand malheur des petites villes de France et des gouvernements par élections, comme celui de New York, c’est de ne pas pouvoir oublier qu’il existe au monde des êtres comme M de Rênal.” Yes, the great misfortune of elected governments such as New York’s is the occasional inescapability of beings such as M de Giuliani.