Daily Blague

This was to have been written yesterday, an announcement that I'm going to post very little on the Daily Blague this week. I want to spend some time bringing order to Portico, which is rather like a house with additions dating from different centuries - a charming effect in buildings, but not a good look for a Web site. I want to step back, too, from the traffic that I play in every day, because I have some ideas about its flow and its blockages that need to ripen. I have been blogging now in one for or another since June, and the need to take stock is overwhelming. Don't be afraid that I'm pulling out; anything but. I will keep you up to date on progress at Portico. The hiatus may take two weeks.

As I'll be posting a temperature chart every day, though, I might as well add right now that I'm feeling very low. Every now and then the bits and bolts of wrongheaded nonsense and bad luck that we manage to duck through while getting our work done coalesce in a malignant cloud that fouls the atmosphere. Mine is made up of minor but irritating medical complications, harmonised to a bourdon of mortality's intimations; a clutch of personal matters that from time to time manage to drown out cheerfulness with whining; and the fear and loathing that wingnuttery and dereliction in Washington have inspired. Ordinarily, I resist, but today, I'm giving in. And doing something that I've not done enough of lately: reading. Wouldn't it be nice to finish with Richard Wolin's astute and timely (alas) study of the misreadings and distortions of Nietzsche that have fueled reaction against the Enlightenment, The Seduction of Unreason? (I am finding the chapter on Maurice Blanchot a little long and vindictive.) And to put a dent into Ian Rankin's latest, Fleshmarket Close? I could have done worse than to begin the day with Anthony Hecht's A Love for Four Voices.

From the cool shadows of this rock,

These crowding blues and heliotropes,

As from some attic of my youth

I gaze out at the distances

That contrast renders almost white,

Like frocks of garden-party girls

I once knew or desired to know,

Speckled and flecked by shadow leaves

Like missing jigsaw puzzle parts.

And whether the girls were known or not,

Whether those yearnings were stillborn

Or were met with kindness, now they lie

Like quilts of sunlight spread to dry,

Scattered and thin and dimly gold

And permanently out of reach -

Small flags of failure, or, at best,

Triumphs will all their glory lost.

The Guarneri Quartet's performance on Saturday night was excellent; this time, the Mozart was completely on pitch, the intervening Dohnanyi golden and glowing, and the Dvorak exuberant. The pianist joining three members of the Quartet, for Dvorak's Piano Quartet, Op. 87, Anton Kuerti, was a marvel of precision nuance.