Apples and Pears - Opening

Joop Zoetemelk Gagne
le Maillot Jaune

12 MESSIDOR
The mountain ash, or rowan, Virgil's onus but not Ovid's fraximus, is by family a rose and by ancient rumor a bitch.

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It all goes back, this complex friendship, to the year Picasso died, while I was finishing De Boventonen van Stilleven and beginning the commentary on Fourier, and to Paris the July Joop Zoetmelk won the Tour de France. Its plangencies cross philosophy at angles one might, with luck, trace. Fourier thought that our dream of a golden age that never was is a vision of his Periode Amphiharmonique. In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost future.

"The Bowmen of Shu" has been published before in Blast 3 and in a finely printed limited edition by The Grenfell Press; "Fifty-Seven Views of Fujyama" was first published in Granta, in England, and later in the United States by The Hudson Review; parts of "Apples and Pears" have appeared before, in early drafts: "Joop Zoetemelk Gagne le Maillot JAUNE" in Antaeus , and a section provisionally titled "Apples and Pears" in Conjunctions.

Copyright 1984 by Guy Davenport
Printed in the United States of America

The drawings on pp. 8 and 10 are by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; all other drawings by Guy Davenport.

NORTH POINT PRESS . SAN FRANCISCO . 1984