Without Lifting A Finger

They're buried in the same graveyard (took their marble portraits -- but that's down the blogal road), so I'm paying homage to both. Read Eliot on Pound; read Cathay ; and recently finished rereading Brodsky's Watermark (a quick read, not as great as I remembered, but the target was out of this world: Venice). * From Brodsky's Watermark :      What woke me from my reverie was the sound of Susan's voice, which meant that the record had come to a stop. There was something odd in her timbre and I cocked my ear. Susan was saying, "But surely, Olga, you don't think that the Americans got cross with Ezra over his broadcasts. Because if it were only his broadcasts, then Ezra would be just another Tokyo Rose." Now, that was one of the greatest returns I had ever heard. I looked at Olga. It must be said that she took it like a mensch. Or, better yet, a pro. Or else she didn't grasp what Susan had said, though I doubt it. "What was it, then?...

The Dreyfus affair ( French : l'affaire Dreyfus , pronounced: [a.fɛʁ dʁɛ.fys] ) was a political scandal that divided France from its inception in 1894 until its resolution in 1906. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus , a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent . Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent almost five years. Two years later, in 1896, evidence came to light identifying a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real culprit. After high-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after the second day of his trial. The Army accused Dreyfus of additional charges based on false documents. Word of the military court's framing of Dreyfus and of an attendant...