Blossom and Joan

Now that we mend our nets and wait at stoplights and do whatever else it is we think we may seem to be doing, without the angelic Blossom Dearie (deceased, February 2009), we are challenged to forebear the malevolent monsters without her armature: tenderness and truth. Joe Rico, jazz scholar and producer, had a radio show on WUWU Buffalo in the early 1980s. He pointed out that Blossom would not sing in venues that permitted smoking, at some peril to her professional career. May I suggest to those in my particular lifeboat, that sweet beneficence obtains from the strange and wonderful Joan Bender.
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Dawns

Loud good fortune rained on me in the year 2000 when I was able to interview Sam Posey relating to some biographical notes I was preparing about Sam and Miles Collier. Sam (BFA RISD, Tour de France commentator, and a soul of surpassing nobility) has an easy way of recounting events of the past without actually mentioning that he was there to observe them. Ten times he raced at LeMans, but the sensation he most favored in his memory was the arrival of dawn after the long June night of racing. The treeline came into focus, the streaking lights shaped themselves into competitors' cars, and even the corner workers, otherwise jaded and proud, waved a morning greeting: as if to say, you made it too.
The Colliers, entrepreneurs and Florida landowners, were recreational automobile racers. In the 1930s they would drive from their winter home in Boca Grande straight through the night to their estate in New York. If many of us have made long drives across the country and have seen dawn brighten over I80 or I90 or I95, it is possible to imagine that daybreak over rural roads in Virginia in those years would feel redolent with wonder and adventure, as the true nature of the rough continent's topography was discovered and vanquished.

Tristessa

in English literature,
in the English language,
the saddest words:

she asked me
was I going
to Araby.

our Kate

I met Kate in 1973. Since then she has written me many letters. Most of them are five to eight pages long, and include numerous annotations, notes, sketches, marginalia, and illuminations. Searching for a certain book in my attic the other day, I came across five grocery bags of her letters. Hundreds of letters, perhaps a thousand letters; accounts of her life over the decades, with particular reference to crazy romances, life in New York City, matters of health, and the tiny plural twists into which some notion of hers might explode. A treasury for which I am immensely grateful.
A mutual friend has described Kate as having more friends than anybody she knows, which suggests grocery bags speckled all over the world.
Kate has shifted chiefly to email, and I am assiduously archiving every bit she blesses to my inbox. I wish all her friends would copy me her electronic diaries.
Pepys!
The detailed private diary he kept during 1660–1669 was first published in the nineteenth century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London. (wik)

I Thought of Daisy

Edmund Wilson was puzzled that people who interested themselves in his work rarely took his fiction seriously. I am imagining, though, that there lives in Greenwich Village today (not the one carrying the geographic name, but the Village of the Fifties and Twenties) a monk, a stroller, steeped in literature, practicing a form of meditation requiring a more relevant mantra than Bo Peep, or Rin Tin; who enjoys very deeply the tears of the martini on his lips, and declaims over and over:
"The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour, of the harp and the violin - some old musical comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to suggest; and as I glanced at Daisy, now gazing out like a charming good-natured child at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with a sentimental reverie."

when beauty becomes extravagant

In these times of sadness and woe
as measured by remorse,
as on parlous seas,
imagine that you have lived on a tugboat
for many years,
on, say, Cayuga Lake, year-round,
for even when the lake freezes over,
there are many square miles of open water
in which
to sail and drift.
A woodstove within, by which
you drink coffee and read and write
and out the porthole espy
the hills that form your home Ithaca.
Port.

By which we know that once were written
novels of surpassing beauty:

"Joan’s martinis were made according to a recipe that no one else ever discovered. Even Bruce had never found out how she built them. They were better than any other drink that has ever been tasted by sea or land. They were freezing cold, they were strong, they were subtly scented, yet they did not, like so many special martinis, produce instantaneous paralysis or coma after one had imbibed the third glassful in succession. Instead, they produced euphoria, which in turn led into hilaritas, joyful contemplation and delight. They sprung each individual brain cell into something very like that “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” of which Professor Northrop has writer. Simply holding a glass which contained this fluid had an immediate effect upon the person holding it: he would smile, quite unconsciously, as if in anticipation of his coming translation."

Helpfully: one

For thirty years I have unfailingly lifted dark clouds by recalling a remark of Auden:
"English and German are the languages of heaven, and French is the language of hell, because the French people annoyed God in the first place by calling him Cher Maître."

The Book of Andree

I believe it is so that Marcel ungenerously deprives any other soul in REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST of a nerve/blood/breath recollection that might be understood to challenge his own. We may be grateful for our own pleasure that this is true,
yet hath no sloshing pool of undifferentiated warm floods of past romance
Andree?
For she is true throughout
shewing what we shalt take for courage as none other,
to leap costive bankers,
and ride her bicycle from Balbec to Brest to Balbec;
to warm her blood with tender lips and buttons,
and to keep her wits
as Marcel
goes on and on and on AND ON.

Andree is noble, and kindly waits,
and truth she speckles on the scene
and would in her forties hop another fool
if filled with doughnuts and caffeine.