No Millennium

If history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, the third time it's -- Art History.

Yesterday, while leafing through a book of photographs of the early days of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I found this arresting image:



Does Infantrywoman Felicia Harris, posing in Uday Hussein's palace in 2001, know that she is imitating Manet's Olympia? Compare:

I had spent the evening reading Leonora Carrington. In the morning, I went outside to find, flattened to the sidewalk, an empty and discarded cardboard crate which once had contained -- Carrington Apples.

I need to remember to carry my camera with me. For instance I really ought to have photographed for posterity (or at least this journal): 


The sign reading "S & M Funeral Home" on Wayne Avenue in Dayton, Ohio. Sadly someone must have informed them, since they've removed it.

An establishment in Tipp City, Ohio, called "Dee and Kelly's Hair and Gifts", where presumably the hairstyles are dictated in an angelic language. (Those familiar with Renaissance magic know it ought to be 'Kelley', but spellings weren't standardized in those days anyway. Look at Shakespeare's signature.)

The inimitably apt graffito painted below a viaduct in Grant Park, Chicago, which read,
Drag Queen
Creature
Skeleton Girl. 


One never knows when the marvelous will strike.

Recently I came across a copy of Melville's Moby Dick -- a book which, it is embarrassing to admit, I had not revisited in a long time and which in fact I had never read all the way through.  It opened, unbidden, to this passage:


And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago.  It came in a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances.  I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."


. . . which would date Ishmael's voyage to some time around the year 2001.