The View-Master
The more ubiquitous our image-making machinery gets, the rarer independent perception and personality become.
‘One of the most sublime — if highly introverted — experiences you can have is examining a View Master transparency exposed on a sunny day, on a cloudy one.’
I struggle to convince myself that it’s all just entertainment.
“Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.” So asserted Oscar Wilde; and, as one of the wittiest people ever to have razzed a US customs official, he knew what he was quipping about. When I was reworking his Modernist myth, The Picture of Dorian Gray, for a film adaptation, I went through the text and wrote down every single epigram.
There were scores — for, in truth, Wilde’s novel is little else but a thin chain of narrative links, from which depend, jewel-like, scores of epigrams, apothegms, bon mots, and pinpoint-sharp remarks. Which is not to denigrate it: For all its clunkiness as a work of literature, it is as an aesthetic fairytale that Dorian Gray has come to lodge permanently in the contemporary imagination. The reason for this is the timeliness of the book, which appeared in the first year of the decade during which virtuality, having massed its shadowy forces in the very wings …
The Sons of Liberty
Two days after Josiah Chase’s eighth birthday had been marked by a raisin cake and a game of roundelay with his seven siblings, his father’s elder half-brother Ezekiel had appeared from out of the west, occasioning a great stir. Ezekiel had traveled the Pennsylvania frontier as a chain-bearer with the surveyors, and then had fought in the Indian Wars, and seemed easily the tallest man anyone had ever seen. He wore long breeches and a hunting shirt the color of dried leaves and told tales of summer ambushes so vivid that Josiah could smell the pines and feel the hush hanging in the hot air. One account involved an English supply train in the wilderness for which Ezekiel had been employed as an escort, a column so encumbered with necessities that it extended six miles, and included folding chase chairs, cases of powdered mustard, and dozens of bottles of Madeira wine. After the rout the abandoned spoils …
Up, Up, and Away
Pigeons on a Plane!
They don’t belong there, sure – but do you, Mr. Sky Miles Member?
What about your cowering dog?
Dogs are profoundly earthbound creatures. They dig in the dirt, hiding bones and chunks of carrion. They sleep on the ground and love to roll in mud, and they follow their noses, attracted by musky scents. They pursue rodents and rabbits into holes. And dogs’ wild cousins, of course, give birth in dens.
Yet people, to serve their own narcissistic needs, insist that dogs leave the realm to which they’re suited — the surface of the planet — and join them on planes and go hurtling through the air, an experience no dog has ever sought but one which great numbers of dogs have been subjected to by selfish human beings. Even worse, the reason some people make dogs fly and face an ordeal they haven’t evolved to handle is that the people themselves find airborne travel unnerving and require emotional “support” to do it. But where are nervous dogs to find support? And how are they to ask for it when airline …
