Beneficent exterminator

 

The blue dragonfly with its bulbous eye

is my true ally against mosquitoes

who seek to siphon off my rosy blood.

He will dart and dine in shafts of sunlight,

but will depart when blear darkness descends.

Some people think a dog is their true friend,

but I prefer the bluetail’s roving eye.

This friend makes no demands at all of me—

as a result I’m left entirely free

to garden or lark about my small yard

with a sense of ease in golden sunshine

as I admire the light, hovering flight

of my bright, colorful necromancer

who glides as the air’s brilliant passenger.

The Wine Snob

 

   The wine snob possesses a superhuman nose for aromas and a godlike talent for tasting good wine. Such a person knows how to describe the start, middle, and finish of a wine with remarkable elegance. The palette of such a snob is like a super-fast computer able to crunch enormous quantities of particle physics information in nanoseconds. The nearby hill that grows currents or blackberries can be tasted in the wine or the amateur attempt to produce that illusion through additive syrup can be unmasked. As long as the wine at table is good, there is no better companion. When polite conversation rides the current of good wine, it can inspire and irrigate many fruitful fields of intellectual discourse and result in amusing digression, and so produce that ideal event—the symposium, a legendary event that sometimes happens. When it does, it appears to make life miraculous. The world smiles as intimacy and laughter envelopes the whole table. A glowing aura descends upon the host. The host or hostess has now become a mythic figure in the mind of those who attended the event.

   Yet if the wine’s finish possesses a tang too dry, sweet, or acidic, then a tempest of disgust may erupt and spoil the evening for everyone. The new bottle at a restaurant gets sent back not once but two or three times. If such a person happens to be lounging in a chair at your house, you may not have an acceptable bottle in your cellar. The dinner becomes a surreal, tragic quandary—Sophocles meets Salvatore Dali directed by Jean-Luc Goddard. The party should end as soon as possible. You have run out of wine.

   The best way to handle a wine snob when he (usually a he because men have much larger livers than women and also possess a special hormone that aids in the digestion of alcohol, a trick women don’t have) falls off track is to bombard him with random questions. Although the average wine snob has something like 50,000 bottles rattling around in his head, he cannot locate them all at one go. His central nervous system doesn’t have enough mental waiters to attend his commands. Inevitably, he will be not be able to recall the year of the best grand cru from Chateau de Seguin he ever tasted. He will admit that that it is not his favorite Bordeaux, but will meditate silently on this deep subject.

   Confusion and calm will descend upon the party as the wine snob settles into a narcissistic, senile reverie while his neurons search for the missing file folder. Others will take over leadership of the party. Table talk will be diverted into less obscure topics like the recollection of past lives, etymological ambiguities, the proper way to fall off a horse, how to best arrange clematis on a wall or shed, or the whimsical gaffs of famous philosophers. The wine snob, a narrow specialist, cannot understand such subjects, much less pontificate upon them. Holding his glass at an angle, he will need a refill. Now the only problem for the host is make sure that he does not sit at the driver’s wheel when he departs the house.

 

—Gonzo Lorenzo

 

Gonzo Lorenzo’s columns are inspired by William Thackeray’s humor columns on the gentle art of snobbery that appeared in mid-nineteenth century Punch.   

 

Writ in Snow

 

Writing names in the snow with my grandson,

we celebrate our temporality

before wind, wandering eyes, history,

which appears fleeting as mountain snow-melt

or roadside plough-sludge down in the valley.

Yet a child breathes in breaking rays of dawn

topping a hill, stunned by golden sunlight

bejeweling oak, elm, black birch, cherry trees.

When trees, laden with their blooming leaves, wave

their pennants with such excess of beauty,

they seem to whisper of red revelry

like susurration of grass by a stream.

The severity of winter gleans snow

with poignant, icicle-blue memories.

The Andes like an Elbow

     for Victor and Marylynne

Up in the Andes

gorges drop a thousand feet

and creeks drill holes in boulders.

 

Up in the Andes

mushrooms pop up to say hello

only when there´s a drenching rain.

 

Up in the Andes

the clouds fill your lungs

and the earth massages your feet.

 

Up in the Andes

you may casuallly lose your mind,

but you can do that quicker in Quito.

 

Up in the Andes

You can sleep that legendary sleep

and not be bothered by Carnaval in Cuenca.

 

Up in the Andes

if you ever get bored with work,

you can play with pale swift scorpions in your bath tub.

 

Up in the Andes

the sun  is a beneficent uncle,

but the clouds are my friends.

—Kevin T. McEneaney

Papa Humanity

 

When God made man, he said:

“Let there be papas,”

which is why man was made

in the image of a potato.

That's when God got really inspired,

when he conceived the idea of eyes

as he contemplated the potato he had made.

And he then pictured the human brain

with all its mushy white nerves

that we use to proclaim

our Promethean excellence.

 

Recently, in research for better wi-fi,

scientists have copied a page from God's blueprint

by arranging potatoes in the shape of men and women,

bagging, bundling, and belting them

into jumbo jet seats on “sold out” flights

to study the effects of radiation.

Potatoes absorb radiation at the exact rate

as scientists and other humans.

 

Whether humankind evolved from the potato

or God made human beings in the image of the potato

is, of course, a silly question.

If we are not living potatoes,

then why do we behave like potatoes?

 

Christians say that they eat God's only son

who was made in man's image,

yet this is clearly an anthropomorphic ritual

that imitates our eating of papas,

in whose image we are made.

Even in Rome, they call their religious leader Papa.

 

Just as papas come from the earth,

we will return to the earth

and partake of the immortality of papas.

 

No matter what you think about any of this,

we should all eat our papas with love.

 

Kevin T. McEneaney

At home with Francine Gray

Interview by Kevin T. McEneaney

Instead of dancing white snowflakes to announce the Christmas season, a nearly invisible pinprick drizzle of rain coated my windshield Monday afternoon as I pulled into the driveway of America’s grande dame of letters, Francine du Plessix Gray, who lives in nearby Warren, CT. Historian, essayist, novelist, raconteur, and memoirist, Gray cordially received me in her country home for a conversation about her latest novel, The Queen’s Lover (2012), which recounts the story of Marie Antoinette’s secret Swedish lover, Count Axel von Fersen. Based upon Fersen’s letters to his sister, the docu-drama novel portrays Fersen fighting with French troops for American independence and later orchestrating a failed attempt to extract Marie, who was often unfairly maligned, from Paris. The failure of her escape sealed her doom, leading her to the scaffold during the Terror. Ms. Gray assured me it was not difficult to write from a man’s point of view, that, for her, it was completely natural; and that in her youth she was often labeled a tomboy.

   Her memoir Them (2005), which won the National Book Critics Circle award in 2006, is considered to be a classic of that genre. The memoir contains all the drama of an ambitious family-chronicle novel as well as the brutal but compassionate honesty of noted masterpieces, such as the Autobiography of John Cowper Powys or the Memoirs of Elias Canetti. When I asked about the importance of honesty in writing, Gray cautioned me by saying that “Compassion makes criticism tolerable.” Them, which concludes with moving lyrical elegy, contains the eccentricity exhibited by Dostoevsky’s characters, the family drama of Turgenev, and the endearing pathos of Ivan Bunin’s short stories about émigré Russians in an alien world.

   Gray’s very readable biography of Madame de Staël (2008) creates a dramatic contest of wills between Madame de Staël and Napoleon Bonaparte, contrasting Napoleon’s whim and arrogance with de Staël’s balanced and tolerant humanism. I asked Ms. Gray if she thought that women might have more adaptive political gifts than men. She replied with a hesitant “perhaps,” yet then cited the marvelous work Golda Meier accomplished in founding Israel, the crucial role of Margaret Thatcher in stabilizing the finances of a teetering England, and the current success of Angela Merkel in providing the most significant governmental role in Europe. Among American politicians, she admires the retiring Olympia Snowe as a centrist Republican who listens to her constituency. Gray hopes that Hillary Clinton will decide to run for the presidency.

   Ms. Gray confessed that, at the moment, she was writing an article on Marie-Antoine Carême, Talleyrand’s great chef, who cooked for the King of England as well as the Tsar of Russia. Talleyrand, the subject of Roberto Calasso’s recent novel The Ruin of Kasch, was a gifted conversationalist, gourmet, and wine savant who believed that diplomacy began at the dinner table.

   Ms. Gray’s biography of Louise Colet, a poet and once-mistress of Flaubert, is another favorite book of mine. Ms. Gray was not aware that that biography as well as her early travel book on Hawaii had influenced the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, on whom I’ve done some recent research.

   Gray’s favorite writers? Saul Bellow, William Gass, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Alice Munro, Camille Paglia, William Styron, and Philip Roth, a former friend whom she no longer sees because of her close friendship with Claire Bloom. She admires the versatile and accessible writing of David Eggers, yet wonders if his writing measures up to that of her favorite icons. Gray has just read Katie Roiphe’s current collection of essays In Praise of Messy Lives and highly recommends this provocative book. The World as I Found It (1987), a novel about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein by Bruce Duffy, remains one her favorite novels in recent decades. At the moment she is about to read Pramoedya Toer’s great Indonesian novel (a favorite of mine) This Earth of Mankind (1980).  

   When I asked Ms Gray about her comment in an old interview that “art is form of revenge against mortality,” she said that she would now change that quip to: “art is form of revenge against reality”—that life is transient, and she now accepts completely the fact of mortality. She mused that all of life, even death, is transformation.

   Ms. Gray loves living in the country and has long lived in Warren, but many of her lifelong friends and neighbors, like the Millers and Styrons, have passed away. Gray finds solace in her sons and grandchildren. Thaddeus lives nearby, and Luke lives in Brooklyn. Luke, a serious painter, has upcoming show next year at the Gary Snyder Gallery in Manhattan.

   Ms. Gray remains a devoted fan of opera, and we concluded our discussion of art by mutually admitting our admiration for the superb Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, yet as I drove home through the rolling  hills of our climate-warmed mist, I glanced at the soft, brown earth and could only imagine the snowflakes from Dmitri’s various recorded lieder. I then recollected the wisdom of Francine’s philosophical observation: art is revenge against reality.