Illusory Participation

Porsche 917 Brochure, 1969

Lovely photographs of what is evidently an early version or prototype  At the end of this post, see the 917 that won Le Mans in 1970. Click the photographs to view the images in detail and read the text.

What is your geopolitical situation?

Psalm 144

A Psalm of David.

¹ Praise be to the Lord my Rock,
    who trains my hands for war,
    my fingers for battle.
² He is my loving God and my fortress,
    my stronghold and my deliverer,
my shield, in whom I take refuge,
    who subdues peoples^[a] under me.

³ Lord, what are human beings that you care for them,
    mere mortals that you think of them?
⁴ They are like a breath;
    their days are like a fleeting shadow.

⁵ Part your heavens, Lord, and come down;
    touch the mountains, so that they smoke.
⁶ Send forth lightning and scatter the enemy;
    shoot your arrows and rout them.
⁷ Reach down your hand from on high;
    deliver me and rescue me
from the mighty waters,
    from the hands of foreigners
⁸ whose mouths are full of lies,
    whose right hands are deceitful.

⁹ I will sing a new song to you, my God;
    on the ten-stringed lyre I will make music to you,
¹⁰ to the One who gives victory to kings,
    who delivers his servant David.

From the deadly sword ¹¹ deliver me;
    rescue me from the hands of foreigners
whose mouths are full of lies,
    whose right hands are deceitful.

¹² Then our sons in their youth
    will be like well-nurtured plants,
and our daughters will be like pillars
    carved to adorn a palace.
¹³ Our barns will be filled
    with every kind of provision.
Our sheep will increase by thousands,
    by tens of thousands in our fields;
¹⁴     our oxen will draw heavy loads.^[b]
There will be no breaching of walls,
    no going into captivity,
    no cry of distress in our streets.
¹⁵ Blessed is the people of whom this is true;
    blessed is the people whose God is the Lord.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 144:2 Many manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, Dead Sea Scrolls, Aquila, Jerome and Syriac; most manuscripts of the Masoretic Text subdues my people
2. Psalm 144:14 Or our chieftains will be firmly established

Highbrow Cinema: The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again

 

Geopolitical Conundrum

Professor Hassler reviews Michael Butterworth Complete Poems: 1963-2020

My International Authors colleague Mack Hassler has posted an intriguing review of Michael Butterworth's new collection.  This passage (among many others) fired my imagination:

Nature seems more designed for police surveillance, for predation, for being eaten up than not—like my old friend Erasmus Darwin, who stays far from London in the Midlands in the Pennines and away from the famous Sam Johnson.  I think it is that distancing by Butterworth that this carefully constructed book maps for us,  I had known the map was there from his smaller pieces in Carter Kaplan’s Emanations and from the literary history of Moorcock and the New Wave.  Butterworth, also, has advised us [International Authors] often on independent publishing for Kaplan’s projects because Butterworth seems most interested in making something new in the world  This is what publishing is and what the risks are.  So the book has a huge autobiographical interest and structure as well as some nicely effective individual poems on what is at risk.  The whole is an open embrace of the flowing risk of time.

Please click HERE to read the full review.  Clicking the cover image will bring the reader to the book's Amazon sales page.

 

A History of New York by Washington Irving

Currently, I am reading A History of New York by Washington Irving. I have the Library of America edition; the volume also contains Letters of Johnathan Oldstyle, Gentleman; Salmagundi; and The Sketchbook. 

Very funny, wistful, romantic, touching, wonderful, arch, waggish.  Compare a majestic painting of the Hudson Valley School populated by Hogarthian odd fellows, blades, clowns, and sadly (but softly) tragic examples of our race. People lost in a landscape.

The History of New York is written in the voice of Diedrich Knickerbocker (who is a narrative voice Irving uses on other occasions; for example, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). Irving comes across as writing for laughs, and he is wonderfully genial. At the same time, he is quick to skewer a fraud.

In Salmagundi, Washington Irving was the first to call New York "The City of Gotham”—an allusion to an English village where people were supposed to be especially stupid.  

 

Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, even Nabokov are reflections of Irving's invention of a characteristically American style of humor: urbane, poised, wistfully philanthropic, facetious, contemptuous of fraud, and as “cynical” (if that’s the right word) as a tomb (and that is the right word).

 

 

“Diedrich Knickerbocker” by Felix O. C. Darley, from the frontispiece of A History of New-York