Fox-Flipping

Not the TV Channel, the Animal

You can't fall in love with anyone currently running for President? I hear you. But I don't know what to tell you.

            Especially now that everything is going so bad. By that I mean, so worse. Everything everywhere.

            Maybe someone will jump out at us. You never know!

            Last night I found on my bedside table a copy of the Spring, 2012 Paris Review. Inside, an article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, a writer I admire and enjoy very much, which is no doubt why I had acquired this copy of the magazine.

            Sullivan is a writer who pursues historical matters that seem exotic, but there is nothing gee-whiz about his style. So what he writes has a lot of straight-faced bounce. Here is the first character that jumps out of Sullivan's piece:

            "Paul Jacob Marperger, member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, is one of those figures you could know nothing about and not really be missing anything, but when you do know him, worlds open."

            Any chance of finding a candidate like that today? One of those governors of one of those states?

            We can't call on Marperger, because he died in 1730. Anyway he was not the executive type. "Marperger knew the foremost law of everything. He thought of it as his job," writes Sullivan. "Around the year 1723 or '24, Marperger stepped through the membrane of theory and became an actual . . . advisor to the court of Augustus the Strong, the elector of Saxony and king of Poland and Lithuania."

            Stepped through the membrane of theory. That is good.