Bruges, Paris and the spectres of Symbolism

"What they were looking for can be seen in the famous portrait of the Belgian Symbolist painted by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer in 1895, three years after the publication of Bruges-la-Morte, which is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It depicts Rodenbach in an open-necked white shirt, with a stylized Bruges behind him. There are gabled housefronts and a beguinhof on his left, a cathedral tower on his right, and, below it, a low stone bridge. His shoulders seem to merge with the canal at his back, and he looks thin and ghostly (he died three years later, in the same year as his friend and master, Mallarmé). Rodenbach appears as the city’s emanation, a pale flower from its watery depths; at the same time, Bruges is like a crepuscular think-bubble, existing only as the writer’s projection. The persistence of that image, or its persistent vagueness, is attested to by the fact that in the Pisan Cantos, meditating on the lost world of European Symbolism, Pound remembers, or half-remembers, “somebody’s portrait of Rodenbach”. If the Symbolist unconscious could be represented as a city, that city was Bruges..."

Merry Christmas folks! Play Safe!

Nanaimo Southend and South Wellington Trees

Proposed new colour schemes at the Hospital.

a couple of wonderful Laura Nyro performances--Poverty Train & Save the Country

rather enjoyed the new BBC live action version of The Wind In The Willows--Ratty & Mole were fine (though they never make Rat serious enough) but Matt Lucas' Toad & Bob Hoskins' Badger were definitive--"Piper at the Gates of Dawn" left on the cutting room floor as usual, though...

Octopus Escapes Through One-Inch Hole

Stubble and Slough in Dakota



The happiness of a hunting party
is like that of a wedding,

so important is it
that true love shall rule.

*

A crow flies through
the tinkle of the last window on earth
carrying in its beak
the clementine eye of God,
around his neck a Diana set to bulb
the nitrate views of Minot
the deep sturgeons of Superior
Red Hills of death & indebtedness,
iron pocked surface with fake bulletholes,
elevators tight with mustard, canola, durum,
evolving past kingship with a penitential swoop.

*

The sun has set,
and no longer bathes
the landscape
in its golden light,
and yet I sit
in the water and mud
and indulge this pleasurable
taste for gore, wondering
why it is so ecstatic,
or if my companions
will not give over
shooting presently.

*

Cut it out of your thoughts
as though snipping
the furball dreads
from a feral angora,
roll it out the snowy driveway
into the path of a boxy 4X4
with homemade chains
snapping & scattering in the ice,
press it to a wafer
in a tower of turtles.

farewell Ahmet Ertegun (far right, with the Coasters & (Frank OHara's pal) Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller) founder of Atlantic Records, which brought the world Ray Charles, Aretha &c &c. George Trow's New Yorker profile (half of "In the Context of No Context") is very much worth seeking out.

today's YouTube - Skip James-Devil Got My Woman (via metafilter)

Hunting the Grizzly Bear


The poor idiotic boy
could not even then
realize the danger
through which he had passed,
and could only appease his anger
by continuing to maul
the bear over the head
with the camp kettle
for several minutes
after she was dead.

*
Thus from the rococo woods
stumble into the mannerist clearing

or is that muskeg
into which our hooves sunk

sucked runners off escaping subjects
replacing chickens with used books

so slowly no one noticed
until their cakeless birthdays rolled around--

on the icon they've got baby Jesus
standing upright in a dear little

junior pantocrator outfit--
orb & mace, little brocade robe

heavier than him, looking up at his mum
who looks through me.

*

Bears are usually,
though not always,
killed at considerable distances
from towns, or even ranches,
where it is not easy
to find a pair of scales.

*

Still hunters of the lyric
must shower with carbolic
to erase the stench of patronage,
build their hides with beaten pewter
to deflect the low winter sun's
dust-revealing torch
as it plays on yellowing pads
& capless brown markers,
they must fold their arms into little wings
and pretend to sing.

"Warping Human Nature





God Damn US!

You, me and you and all the rest.

The unthinkable has happened and soon deliberate human climate change will be spun as a potential triumph. The current (US) administration has long been promoting and actually accelerating carbon emissions via a pathetic petroleum based fuel economy, inefficient and dirty power generation and transmission, shortsighted and destructive resource extraction and management combined with hollow recycling programs, and on and on and on. All this as a concerted privileged economic policy- While concurrently denying any correlation between oil dependency and dismal environmental policy failures with the increased carbon content of our air and water that is enabled and encouraged. At the same time our govt. scientists are developing for immediate usage ‘small scale nuclear bombs’, ie huge bunker busters, much larger than the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to bomb the 3rd world completely into a new radioactive stone age compounded by massive death, burns, radiation sickness, soil and water contamination, and all the ensuing radiation problems affecting generations for possibly thousands of years.



You and I pay the aggressive military scientists and lobbyist stooges their inflated salaries to think up this insane shit and perpetrate it on our behalf. In exchange we receive the phasing out of social security, the release of genetically modified food without adequate testing, the increasing privatization and construction of toll roads, and crap education and skyrocketing healthcare costs if you are lucky enough to afford them, just to name a few.



I have long believed that the evil motherfuckers serving as our government leaders and scientist tools have approached nuclear warfare as a beneficial geopolitical tool to fuck up certain religions, and a nuclear winter as just some black trick up the magician’s sleeve to ‘bring the earth into balance’.

For several years now I’ve been producing scenes containing snowmen and mushroom clouds- highlighting the two extremes, while being afraid and certain that these soulless puppets would eventually combine these elements of the apparent dichotomy at some point in the near future. * To try and use evil to fix evil in a Dr. Strangelove-esque scenario (With the problems actually created by the supposed hero/absolvers in denial). A complete validation of Pierre Boulez’ novel, Planet of the Apes, where human greed completely and totally overruns common sense and progression of the species. President of the NRA Charlton Heston shall beat his chest in Triumph (of the Will)! And just think- All to offset the repulsive destruction of earth that they simultaneously promote and capitalize on!



It was only a matter of time before my dreadful fears became someone else’s liberating dreams- Merging day with night in the hopes of creating a perpetual grey twilight- much like sacrificing Israel to progress the Apocalypse. An improbable task, but one that will make the perpetrators (government stooges with no value of animal or human life) and the complicit accomplices (average citizens who are more comfortable watching sports than dealing with real issues that affect them personally) feel useful and self righteous still, as opposed to the blind selfish greedy fiends that we know ourselves to be…





At this rate it will not be long before the bombing of non Christian nations becomes a matter of patriotic pride and survival for the rest of us(a). That includes me and probably includes you…



Gold Bless You and Gold Rain on the USA!



Bruce Conkle



Dec 12th, 2006"

On Snow Shoes to Barren Grounds

The storm
was now squarely
in our teeth,
and the dogs
would not face it.

*

Face the skin & snap of it,
like business cards or snowpeas hurled
at the eyeteeth but hitting the lenses,
suddenly your wig is tighter
than your pants, forepaws
caked with frosting
palming meatballs past numbness--
your gold watch is
we don't eat you,
but the bear
or its surrogates needn't twig that!
But even not knowing the handshake
you could walk these Druid Hills unmolested
sneakers painted with lime,
breath neutral to minty,
predator smile projecting
a half-step ahead as
the plane tree tops of Coffey Park
poke and wave through the ice...

*

These people
had never before
seen a camera, and
many of my plates
show them scurrying away
or turning their backs.

*

Waves of wax
ebbed over the fly
until at last
he supplanted the wick
and burned on the counter
for over an hour.

Ben Katchor reads Love Teller (YouTube) and gives you some some Paper Dolls of characters from his immortal 1998 "The Jew of New York"...

Sugar Magnolia & Oregon Pine from The American Woods

"Radial, tangential, and cross-sections of 350 North American woods from the 14-volume rare book The American Woods, published between 1888 and 1910 by the author, Romeyn Beck Hough."

(more at BibliOdyssey)

The Upper Peninsula


Such strawberries as these
need to be seen

to be appreciated and must be
visited to be seen,

for they are too large and
too delicate

to bear much travel
themselves.

*

A cold ragged-trousered arrival
we had of it, into such weather

as would strip us clean
we thought, the bell bottom

bottoms likewise unhemmed
the better for to drag sticks

along like the furrowing bellies
of a fat clumping cat,

less walking than a kind
of controlled trip through

skinned coffeemate puddles
to unwaiting basements

and uncontrolled thaw.
To open the window

was to invite death, or if not
a long snooze in the Legions

of North Battleford, Cold Lake,
Pickle Lake, Humboldt--

anyway as far up as Basic Stick
had taught the locals to hip shuffle

& thus in appreciation buy beers
for the band including retinue.

Later Jerry Lee, Haggard, Kind of a
Drag & Kind of Blue.

*

It is the name
of a river, a canoe trip
down which
has all the charms
of wood life
without its discomfort.

*

Last dependant leaf
swinging like a rusty gate

or a kid's emphatic
no way headshake

getting carried away
& falling into an earthquake.

from the mighty Isola di Rifiuti--

"“Rien,” as Mallarmé so aptly put it. Snow accumulating under Wallace Stevens’s hat. Thomas Pynchon talks about the “suburban imperative”—right up the alley with Thoreau’s “quiet desperation,” what most men live lives of. One makes a little niche for oneself, keeps a blank white notebook nearby. Nudges one’s furriest utterances to the cave-mouth, out into the unblinker’d lambency of spangled light. Morton Feldman: “When you play an instrument, you’re not only playing the instrument; the instrument is playing you.” Nidges and nods of agreement. The language: a fish-bone in the sun. We a nidgery to it, and its only begetter. Language acting like Marcel Duchamp asking John Cage, that terribly poor student of chess, “Don’t you ever want to win?” Of course not, bourgeois miscreant! One desires language to cook in its own juices like a cutlet, desires it malleable and off-putting, consistency of the brain of a small child. Baudelaire: complacency in a shoe, an abattoir of complacency. “A very nodypoll nydiote myghtbe a shamed to saye yt.” First cousin to lucid prose, no?"

East River Raft

"I have climbed high in the steel of new bridges and skyscrapers, and laughed with sandhogs building caissons deep beneath the dark water. When I was a child, the port of New York was my playground, and since I had never been far from home, it offered much of what little I knew about the world beyond the river.

I often walked the piers with my father in the summertime, sometimes riding high on his shoulders, past thick webs of netting loaded with bananas and rare woods, touched by the breezes of distant oceans that mingled with the fragrance of spices and exotic teas; pausing to stare in awe at the huge smoke-clouded stacks of great ocean liners, sometimes eight at once, that loomed above the tenement rooftops..."

sad to learn here that the essayist George Trow has died. His 1980 "Within the Context of No Context" was crucial for me.

“Television is dangerous because it operates according to an attention span that is childish but is cold. It simulates the warmth of a childish response but is cold. If it were completely successful in simulating the warmth of childish enthusiasm — that is, if it were warm — would that be better? It would be better only in a society that had agreed that childish warmth and spontaneity were equivalent to public virtue; that is, a society of children. What is a cold child? A sadist.”

Kevin Davies' Comp., traduit de l'anglais par Xandaire Sélène

"Comp. dresse un portrait acide de l'Amérique au tournant du XXIe siècle. Dans le prolongement critique de la poésie L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e, Kevin Davies tire son matériau lyrique des discours qui font la sphère publique nord-américaine. Livre-poème en cinq parties, Comp. désarçonne et relance la lecture par une composition libre, qui sélectionne, assemble, remixe. Ruptures de ton, glissements de sens, syntaxe et vers combinatoires emportent cette comédie de langage, où se profile l'homo economicus moderne en pleine surproduction agitée.

S'écrivant depuis des points de vue toujours mobiles, Comp. se construit en reprenant à son compte les thèmes, les préoccupations et les rhétoriques du pouvoir, du militarisme, de l'obsession de la gestion, des combats idéologiques, de l'automatisation, du corporatisme triomphant, du consumérisme comme mode de vie, de la médiation à tout prix et en tout.

Au-delà de la vigueur critique des textes, la composition rythmique et visuelle de chaque page, de chaque poème confère au livre une beauté indéfinissable, en porte-à-faux, où résonnent, flottant, les échos d'un feuilleton collectif que tous les langages traversent d'office : Comp. les éprouve et les ausculte à l'écoute de vérités pliées.

Délicieuses erreurs de communication, les phrases et les vers se font ici en se défaisant, et leur force est de réaliser le potentiel poétique du bruissement continu des discours qui nous entourent – qui constituent le véritable landscape américain d'aujourd'hui, qu'il est encore possible d'investir et de transformer..."

South Wellington Trees

Hap'ly re-reading Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon in preparation for planned post-Xmas curl-up with the new one & suddenly here is this splendid on-line reference...

a mention on "The Wire" made me curious about the Lake Trout Sandwich, a Baltimore favorite--

"Rob Kasper, writing in this paper some time back, suggested that the name lake trout caught on because it was a more appealing moniker than whiting. But I prefer the story told by John Shields in his book Chesapeake Bay Cooking. Shields conjures the image of the last fishing boat of the day making for shore. As the crew nears the dock, a worker sings out, "Late trout! Late trout." The buyers, unfamiliar with the Chesapeake Bay accent, hear, "Lake trout! Lake trout!" Pick a story or make up your own..."

Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another a film I've been trying to see for years, on TCM at 2300 PST tonight....

Interviewing the man behind "The Wire"

"Slate: If you had to sum up what The Wire is about, what would it be?

Simon: Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.

Slate: How so?

Simon: Whether you're a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It's the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It's viable for the few. But I don't live in Westwood, L.A., or on the Upper West Side of New York. I live in Baltimore..."

The Deep Funk of Mount St. Helens's "Drumbeat"

"The current eruption of Washington State's Mount St. Helens, which began about two years ago, has been marked by a series of weak, shallow earthquakes, or "drumbeats," that occur every couple of minutes, a new study says.

The "slip/stick" motion of the rocky "plug" being pushed out of the volcano is causing those rhythmic quakes, according to scientists from the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington..."

Chickadee and Titmouse History


At the moment
of the lunge,
the black-and-white
striping
of the head
brought her into
abrupt and
conspicuous
view of the observer
peering into
the cavity--
reinforcing
the surprise effect
of the sounds produced.

*

on June 9, 1935
go down
a little squirrel hole
underneath
a dead pine stub
in a little clearing

of these the kinglets are

when the emotion of spring
is no longer controllable

when the birds are obscured
by the falling snow

*

he is omnipresent,
even in the heart of the city

{Brownsville}

on the inside
of the left mandible
of the Sulphur-bottom
Whale skeleton
under the shed

so he worked
around my ear

feel him snip snip
as he severed them

like the whistle
of a man calling his dog

he is omnipresent,
even in the heart of the city

{Brownsville}

*

the heavy, dark forests

{Kirkland}

on bending branches,
vent squeaks
and low chirps,
varied with buzzing
'dizzes'

pairs thus continue
up the forest-clothed flanks

of slopes and cliffs

only the blue jay
refuses to make way

brown above
and plain gray

{Kirkland}

the heavy, dark forests

sharp filletting of Hitchens--

"Discussing the reasons why Burke, who had supported the revolution in America, should have been so hostile to the revolution in France, even in its earliest and most innocent phase, Hitchens remarks that ‘it is a deformity in some “radicals”’ – he has Marx particularly in mind – ‘to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or “real” one.’ Quite right too; and if any radical, misled by George Galloway’s description of Hitchens as ‘a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay’, should suggest that this book was written out of vanity, he would surely be mistaken. A vain man would have taken care to write a better book than this: more original, more accurate, less damaging to his own estimation of himself, less somniferously inert. The press release accompanying the book led me to expect something much livelier; Hitchens, it exclaims, ‘marvels’ at the forethought of Rights of Man, and ‘revels’ in its contentiousness. There is a bit of marvelling and revelling here and there, but it is as routine as everything else in this book, which reads like the work of a tired man..."

Thomas Pynchon and the myth of invisibility

"Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten acre mesh, levelled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien mockers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams . . . we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos . . . when all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum?"

Unmentionable lessons of the midterm aftermath

"The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny..."

Abandoned Shopping Carts

"Everyday throughout Los Angeles thousands of shopping carts are ditched in neighborhoods and dumped in back alley’s, used and abandoned. Serving as a key element in our commerce driven society, they act as a modern day pack-mules carrying goods down the aisles of stores and across large parking lots to waiting cars. For those shoppers without transport, these carts often make the slow journey home only to be cast aside after reaching their driver’s destination.

To Combat what has been deemed a public nuisance, the city has passed numerous laws making it illegal to be in possession of a shopping cart in public and will fine businesses for allowing customers to repeatedly make-off with them. In accordance, carts have been equipped with all manners of wheel-locking devices and some markets attach tall poles so as to not let them out the door, yet many still escape. As a last resort, contractors are hired to scour the neighborhood in search of stolen pushcarts, which are then sold back to their respective establishments to wait for the next customer and possibly the start of another strange odyssey."

Chickadee History


Enlivener
of our winter woods.

*

The chika is,
as a rule, two tones
higher than the dees,
and the pitch is
B on the chika and
G on the dees, in the
next to highest octave
on the piano.

*

They made aiming
almost impossible,
for every time I raised
the rifle, one or two
birds would perch
on the barrel
completely hiding
the sights.

*

'Any old
side up
without
care'

*

Blind man's bluff
and hide and seek,
and tag

when
staged in three dimensions

a labyrinth of
interlacing branches for

hazard

and swinging
underneath, caught
each end of the caterpillar

with a foot
so held it
fast

within a few feet
of its apple-branch door

calling Hear, hear me,
with only a breathing space
between repetitions

caught by a cat
at Belvidire, N.J.,
on December 24, 1932

I wrapped the offending
rag around the branch

the tail moves, the expanding
wings shoot out sideways
and strike the
surrounding wood
inside the cavity
and as the head comes
stiffly down the bird
emits a strong
hiss or puff
strikingly like that
of the copperhead.

Welcome Belle Roxy Shier!!
born yesterday...


1607 John Harvard England, clergyman/scholar, major benefactor to Harvard University (library & half his estate)
1731 William Cowper England, preromantic poet (The Task)
1792 Sarah Moore Grimk‚ American antislavery, women's rights advocate
1832 Mary Edwards Walker US, doctor/women's rights leader
1857 Ferdinand de Saussure Switzerland, linguist (Cours de Laguistique Generale)
1876 Willis Haviland Carrier developed air-conditioning equipment
1892 Joe Guyon NFL halfback (Canton, Cleveland, Oorang, Rock I, etc)
1894 Norbert Wiener US, mathematician/discovered cybernetics
19-- Elizabeth Savage Pittsburgh PA, actress (Gwyneth-Loving)
1902 Alberto Morin PR, actor (Armando-Dallas)
1905 Emlyn Williams Wales, actor/playwright (David Copperfield)
1907 Frances Dee US actress (Of Human Bondage)
1910 Cyril Cusack South Africa, actress (Day of the Jackal)
1912 Eric Sevareid Velva ND, newscaster (CBS Weekend News)
1912 Eugene Ionesco France, dramatist (Rhinoceros)
1913 Foy Draper US, relay runner (Olympic-gold-1936)
1915 Earl Wild Pittsburgh PA, pianist (Caesar's Hour, NBC Symphony 1942)
1922 Adele Jergens Brooklyn NY, actress (Dark Past, Fuller Brush Man)
1922 Charles M Schulz cartoonist (Peanuts)
1924 George Segal NY, sculptor lifelike mixed-media figures (Bus Driver)
1925 Eugene Istomin NYC, pianist (Leventritt Award-1943)
1925 Linda Hunt Morriston NJ, actress (Bostonians, Eleni, Silverado)
1927 John Carter Center Ridge Ark, actor (Max-Falcon Crest)
1929 Betta St John Hawthorne CA, actress (Corridors of Blood)
1931 Adolfo Perez Esquivel Buenos Argentina, (1980 Nobel Peace Prize)
1931 Giuliana Chenal-Minuzzo Italy, downhill skier (Olympic-bronze-1952)
1933 Robert Goulet Lawrence MA, singer/actor (Camelot, Naked Gun 2«)
1934 Ludmila Shevtsova USSR, 800m runner (Olympic-gold-1960)
1935 Marian Mercer Akron Ohio, actress/singer (Dean Martin Show)
1937 Boris Yegorov cosmonaut (Voskhod 1)
1937 Leo Lacroix France, skier (Olympic-silver-1964)
1938 Rich Little Ottawa Canada, impressionist/actor (Love on a Rooftop)
1938 Tina Turner [Anna Mae Bullock], Brownsville TX, singer (Proud Mary)
1942 Olivia Cole Memphis TN, actress (Roots, Szysznyk)
1943 Jan Stenerud Norway, NFL place kicker (Kansas City Chiefs)
1945 John McVie rocker (Fleetwood Mac-Rumours, Tusk)
1945 Mikhail Woronin USSR, gymnast (Olympic-2 gold/4 silver/bronze-1968)
1948 Galina Prozumenschikova USSR, 200m backstroke (Olympic-gold-1964)
1952 Wendy Turnbell Australia, tennis player (1979,82 US Opens Double)
1959 Jamie Rose NYC, actress (Susan Birch-St Elsewhere, Falcon Crest)
1961 Marcy Walker actress (All My Children, Eden-Santa Barbara)
1963 Allyson Rice-Taylor actress (Connor-As the World Turns)
1981 Jamie Fiske liver transplant recipient

nice appreciation of pianist Anton Kuerti's Beethoven Box--we saw him in Nanaimo in 1999, confirmed by ticket folded & tucked behind the Diabellis--

"Anton Kuerti’s set of Beethoven’s piano sonatas on the Analekta label is far and away the most interesting and thought provoking I’ve heard. My respect for his playing, my awe and delight, continue to grow each time I listen. Kuerti has obviously thought long and hard about these sonatas. The performances are never rote, never tired, often strikingly original. In a previous review (of a Brahms sonata), I likened Mr Kuerti to an explorer or adventurer, with an eye for discovery. Although some of the sonatas are played in a “traditional” manner, many (perhaps most) are not, employing an unusually slow tempo, or an unexpected delicacy and finesse, or the slightest hint of rubato, quite unprecedented in my experience. Not that Mr Kuerti is shy of the traditional sturm und drang approach to Beethoven. (The Diabelli Variations, included with the set, is an absolute hair-raiser.) The pianism throughout is marvelous, strong and sure. I love the originality, the intelligence, and I especially love the voicing. Kuerti gives the left-hand articulateness, nuance and clarity that put it on an equal footing with the right hand. This not just unusual, it is revelatory. At times one partakes of a sort of marvelous dialogue between the hands. There is never a moment of doubt, either about the pianist’s certainty or his musicianship. This is the big league, brilliant technique combined with intelligence and original insight..."

guess it's time to bust out that old Manse favorite, John Greenleaf Whittier's Snow-Bound--

"Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north-wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed;
The house-dog on his paws outspread
Laid to the fire his drowsy head,
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall
A couchant tiger's seemed to fall;
And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood..."

(can, in emergencies, be sung to the tune of Snowbound by DONALD FAGEN)

a conservative surveys the wreckage--Good-bye to All That--

"Convinced that history at some point took a wrong turn, they pore over ancient texts in search of some Hermetic insight into the fatal error. (Not surprisingly, this approach has little popular appeal, although it still commands respect among professional conservatives.) The notion of a crisis of the West, however, grossly overestimates the importance of ideas; indeed, it requires an unphilosophical and almost paranoid ability to treat ideologies (most conspicuously, liberalism) as living, breathing omnipresences to which intentions, tactics, strategies, feelings, disappointments, and conflicts can all be attributed. Believers in the crisis of the West rest almost their entire worldview on an elusive notion—modernity—borrowed from a half-formed science—sociology. Crisis-of-the-West conservatism, at one time a fruitful response to the calamities of the 20th century, has become more a posture than a genuine school of thought.

Another group pleads for the conservative movement to return to its alleged first principles. “If only people would still read Russell Kirk,” one hears. But the movement never had any first principles to begin with. Although it boasts a carefully husbanded canon of supposedly foundational texts, the men who wrote them—Kirk, Strauss, Voegelin, Weaver, Chambers, Meyer—were notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure. Russell Kirk, for example, even as he shrewdly positioned himself as the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement, had almost no political opinions whatsoever.

Still others eulogize local attachments and ancestral loyalties. They invoke a litany of examples: family, church, kin, community, school, the “little platoons” in which Burke found the basis of political association. Celebrating such “infra-political” institutions may well have made sense in the 1950s, the high tide of American nationalism and federal government prestige. At most other times, however, ancestral attachments are dangerously subversive. The U.S. could not have survived had it not ruthlessly extirpated the ancestral loyalties of both natives and newcomers; Great Britain suffered endless civil wars before the great constitutional oak that Burke praised took root; the West itself succeeded precisely because it cut short the reach of the extended family or clan. Ancestral loyalties are the curse of uncivilized peoples, most especially in the hypermnesiac Middle East. Most ominously, praise of local attachments now comes in the guise of multiculturalism, perhaps the most insidious threat to a just order today. Not for nothing did communitarianism become a left-wing vogue.

For all their philippics, disgruntled conservatives remain decidedly of the movement, if not in it, for they share with the mainstream the fundamental conceit that conservatism exists to advance some core set of beliefs or principles. Like a soul animating a body, these principles allegedly guide, smooth or grim, all the movement’s institutions, programs, publications, alliances, tactical feints, and shifting positions. Hence, even those outside the mainstream keep the faith that the movement will not stray forever. Conservatism, in this view, can no more betray its principles than the God of Abraham can betray His covenant with Israel.

But “conservatism” has no mystical essence. Rather than a magisterium handed down from apostolic times, it is an ideology whose contours are largely arbitrary and accidental. By ideology, I mean precisely what Orwell depicted in 1984. I do not mean, of course, that conservatism is totalitarian. Taken as prophecy, 1984 has little merit. Taken as a description of the world we actually live in, however, it is indispensable. 1984 reveals not the horrors of the future but the quotidian realities of ideology in mass democracy. Conservatism exemplifies them all..."

(photo the death mask of Edmund Burke)

on occasion of the re-issue (and hopfully fast DVD release) of her father's 1987 "The Dead" an interview with Anjelica Houston