Spots, Pores, Dripping Briars
September 30, 2004
Flattery always slipped off the Prince like water off the leaves of a water lily: it is one of the advantages enjoyed by men who are at once proud and used to being so. 'This fellow here seems to be under the impression he's come to do me a great honor,' he was thinking. 'To me, who am what I am, among other things a Peer of the Kingdom of Sicily, which must be more or less the same as a Senator. It's true that one must value gifts in relation to those who offer them; when a peasant gives me his bit of cheese he's making me a bigger present that the Prince of Làscari when he invites me to dinner. That's obvious. The difficulty is that the cheese is nauseating. So all that remains is the heart's gratitude, which can't be seen, and the nose wrinkled in disgust, which can be seen only too well.'
-- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Returned from a Long Day's Journey Through Deposition -- from which I have emerged with exactly the same understanding of the strengths and weakness of the case as I had before, but a much better understanding of why they are the strengths and weaknesses of the case -- the occasion calls for a Quote From Whatever I Happen to Be Reading Just Now, and a string of unrelated but interesting links. Behold:
♣ Apropos of my endorsement of Professor Ann Althouse's weblog, how can one resist a post with the 18th-century-novelesque title: "A new TV arrives, DVDs are deployed to test its quality, and, a propos of Kerry's new tan, the subject of disease perceived as health is discussed"? One cannot, and you mustn't.
♣ Portland, Oregon's finest (weblog division), Michael J. Totten, explores the soul-blasting architectural horror that is the suburbs . . . of Paris.
♣ Cowtown Pattie knows it's hard to be a Texan when your pores are unrefined: "Just mention sleeping with day-old makeup on at the female powerlunch table and you are greeted with rows of raised, but deftly waxed eyebrows, giving the eerie feeling of having lunch with a group of hoot owls."
♣ Doctor-poet-modernist giant William Carlos Williams would have been 121 years old a couple of weeks ago, which is as good an excuse as any to link back to Jonathan Mayhew's mid-June post pointing out the virtue to be found in even the late, flawed work of a genuinely interesting poet. [Go ahead, click through, if only to read the poem, "Raindrops on a Briar."] ::: wood s lot ::: noted the birthday with an abundance of WCW links, a nice reproduction of Breughel's Kermesse to accompany the poem it inspired and, down below and worth the scroll, Kenneth Koch's hilarious Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams (which sends up this well known WCW poem, but you already knew that).