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Augustio Except for the Ponte Vecchio, the Germans blew all the bridges over the Arno as they pulled out of Florence on August 4, 1944 The Ponte Vespucci, the Ponte alla Carria, the Ponte alle Grazie, etc., along with many of the ancient buildings on the embankments Leaving Norway they did the same all the way south In 1945, twenty RAF Mosquitoes raided the Copenhagen Shellhus Gestapo headquarters killing a hundred Germans and Danes who worked for them. Eighteen of twenty-six Danish resistance prisoners on the top two floors survived 1946, the twisting camera distorting Cary Grant standing over Ingrid Bergman's mussed-hair befuddled hangover in Hitchcock's Notorious would never be left in the final cut these days 1947, André Gide won the Nobel, The Quakers won the Peace Prize, Robert Lowell won the Pulitzer for Lord Weary's Castle, and Robert Penn Warren won it for All the King's Men 1948, Stan Musial hit .376 and Ted Williams .369 1949, Faulkner won the Nobel 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea A number of times during the remaining fifty years of the twentieth century, Margaret Thatcher pontificated that, "there's no such thing as society." Richard Reid was subdued on a Paris-Miami American Airlines flight while trying to set off explosives in his shoes, December 22, 2001 And on August 10, 2003, the pubic hair barrier finally crossed by The New York Times Magazine with a full-page full-face fashion feature shot And nothing halfway about it, vivid, a good inch of it above the pudendal veil, shot in straight tough-fashion black and white A woman, the general assumption was that it was going to be a breakthrough for metrosex and men in general They've done men like that for decades with full baskets and big erections under wraps There's so much barbecuing in Houston that meat particles form a major component of their smog "All that space contains is billions and billions of hunks of matter, hot or cold, floating around in darkness according to a great design of aimlessness" Mostly missing now is Ibsen's "claim of the ideal," the motivation to try serious, independent things "The utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling" After the banquet and dancing, out-of-town guests and the wedding party slept right there, onsite west of Montpellier, in a hostel on a hill among vineyards In the morning hunters were out shooting wood pigeons and rock doves, braces of them lay piled in two parked vans "Just as there is no such thing as Nature, only individual trees, rocks, streams, etc., so there is not such thing as Human Nature, only individual men and women" The remarkable truths of Sibelius's Second, from the same contra-Russian period at the turn of the nineteenth century as his Finlandia A fox barking from the fields beyond, an extremely rare sound an hour after an August sunrise, a sound of deep December frosts A strange morning, the fetal shape of a baby flying squirrel, eyes probably not yet open at death, on the side of the road Their perfectly globular skulls A lot is seen and a lot comes clear while riding bicycle No dark windows to keep rolled up Behind dark windows, actively close off the rest of the world and privatize "It is a function of the news that if you listen to it enough, you have heard everything before" Dulcet guitars, fado tremolos, off Africa, facing the whole South Atlantic from the Cape Verdes Ana Firmino's Chico Malandro, bad boy, Firmino was born on Sal in 1953 And Nana Matias, born on São Vicente, her Pays Sol Cesaria Evora, kidnapped by Paris from to be a chanteuse, her traditional cavaquinho accompaniment music-halled up for French consumption Lay in the roads of Mindelo on São Vicente for bunkering, with no idea of the ancient slippery quay stone charm, could barely make out the profile of the mountains behind the port that night Weighed anchor before dawn, then it was Fogo farther south in the moning, nearly three thousand meters of green straight above the ship Fogo in the mind Fogos are landmarks of the memory, there on landscapes' horizons "Todo mi amor esta aqui y se has quedado: Pegado a las rosas, al mar, a las montañas" Like a first memory, wrapped to a tree by a leaping, affectionate family setter tied to it so as not to roam and be shot during hunting season Gunning season, as my Edwardian father called it, he who a few times a year would replenish the blotter in his desk mat, consulting with my mother on the color before getting her to drive him to the stationery store in town to get one Maroon, two greens both of them unattractive, maybe a brown, always dark blotters and not memorable The ink was blue, for some reason black ink was incorrect, maybe it was saved for sympathy notes Have forgotten what his fountain pen looked like Back there before, from the carriage and the crib They looked in at me and it was frightening, then they backed away aslant "The trees overhead make a noise of urgent conversation, too quick to catch; the leaves part, the sky moves the sun peers down at me" Born the year of Shostakovich's Fourth, 1936 The Fourth's demanding, dramatic first movement The half hour of tympani and solemnity of its Largo-Allegreto final movement Soviet times, fascist ascendance During the times of my solid tricycle Spinning that tricycle around madly as the post-1939 world went up in smoke Some of Prokofiev's strongest work came after he was trapped politically in 1938, the last four piano sonatas, the Flute Sonata, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Alexander Nevsky, the Cello Symphony-Concerto Show up in your office in the morning, hang your jacket on your chair behind your desk, go and do what you want all day, come back late in the afternoon to pick up your jacket Entering a Boots on Tottenham Court Road is the same experience as walking into a Rite-Aid on K Street Smith's Lawn in Windsor Great Park off the A10 out by Virginia Water The Guards Polo Club "They [the English] are the only people who can experience Schadenfreude at their own misfortunes" The bombardon, the single-action harp, the tenoroon, the serpent, the Turkish crescent, the three-string double bass, the Russian bassoon At the time of the Council of Trent, mid-sixteenth century, the cult of the saints generated new subjects for feast days And that meant plenty of work for painters like Juan Sánchez Cotán from a Church that was to the arts what creative writing and English departments are to writers now Sánchez Cotán's paintings improved dramatically when he became a Carthusian and stopped talking Happily anticipating orange doves in the forest openings And silktails with their iridescent black and vivid white plumage in the understory Climbing through rainforest on the two thousand meter peaks on Taveuni Two species only there and on Natewa Peninsula on Vanua Levu Vanua Levu slightly larger than Delaware Viti Levu exactly the size of Los Angeles County And the hundreds of smaller islands and partially submerged coral reefs All of Fiji will be another world Copra plantations, reefs, steep green landscape and disarming friendliness +++++++++++++++ Sampling credit to Willem de Kooning, D. H. Lawrence, Donald Richie, Hugo Williams, Raul Zurita, Detendidos Desaparecidos, carved below the names of over a thousand Ejecutados Politivods on el Memorial in Santiago-de-Chile, Hilary Mantel, Tony Judt.

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