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January 1, 2012    How to Talk About Being Quiet

First day.  What a bang.  Almost 50 outside.   No snow visible.  Long walk on bum left foot.  Baked pumpkin pie.  Waiting for the turkey.  Printed out vegan recipes from the Times.  Watched tv.  Unpacked rowing machine box.

most emailed pieces in the Times today---finding Quiet by Pico Iyer and science of weight loss (not very encouraging).

Iyer quotes all the usual suspects, especially Merton and Steindl-Rast--haven’t seen his name in a good while --

of course Iyer had a year full of big trips too.  But then so did we.  So here is the paragraph that catches me most---

“None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

this is the best moment in the column---

the other key passages---can’t help but think that Iyer has these on a convenient file like an old Rolodex for churning out an article such as this one, on command as it were, for either Times---or both---or just an easy google search---

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

“None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

“Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

“most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less

that doesn’t depend on what happens.

oh dear, that is indeed my hardest addiction to imagine giving up or trying to give up, get free of---and yet--- the selfish joy of utter absorption in one-ness is really it, isn’t it.

“ Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music.

I would not have guessed that Iyer is already 55.  Still---this piece seems so typical of him.  He advertises his semi-celebrity life-style, his moving to northern Japan to escape the noise and demands of manhattan and the marvelous big trips he takes in one year

“I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai.

and he makes frequent trips to New Carmoldi, the Big Sur Benedictine monastery where of course he is recognized by some producer from mtv --   hippest benedictine place in the States.  I visited Santo Domingo de Silos, though, in late July of this year.  Also Benedictine, also packed with tourists, also hip.  We were only there for a few rushed moments though.  See all my snaps posted on Flickr of the famous beautiful sculptures and carvings from the 14th? C.  Our private guide took us as well to the 12th C hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga---the one that had its magnificent frescoes stolen and sold eventually to the Cloisters, back in the 1920s.

in other words, as a celebrity piece, it is a flawless piece of self-congratulation---

great interview quote about French designer Philippe Starck---a name I first took cognizance of last June when we were trying to figure out how to use the restuarant bathrooms in the newly renovated Musée des Arts Decoratives, at one end of the Louvre.  The restrooms, including the big square ultra looking water closets. were, it was noted, the design of Philippe Starck.  Since then I’ve been on the lookout for his name, and it is everywhere.

“designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

he notes "hyperbolically" to show he's no fool ---

there’s the fault-line in Iyer’s whole approach to all this joyful silence.  He urges himself and us to it not for its own sake so much as the ultimate one-up-manship way to “remain so consistently ahead of the curve.”  As he demonstrates in this very piece in the Times on the first day of the new year.  (well, it was first published on the 29th of the previous)

Iyer seems in Merton’s mold indeed.  Cistercian monastery, sure, and then reams of publications about the virtues of the silent life for the next twenty years as the superstar writer of spiritual silence ministering to the terrible, noisy modern world “out there.”

In contrast?  Robert Lax, Merton’s old friend from Columbia.  He went to live in Greece, few have ever heard of him, he did not become a superstar writer.  Nor did he travel famously to important and importantly forgotten places in order to keep writing books about each move.  See my new book about him on Amazon. Well, it is an old chapbook which I just re-published.

Now I am at the crossroads.  Should I post all of this on my blog?  or should I keep it quiet here in the silence of my laptop?  Or has the internet not given us the third way---I’ll post it and then a tiny handful of web surfers might scan it for ten seconds and move on.

“most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less

If I don’t toot my own horn, who else will?  Pico Iyer sure won’t, but here I’ve gone and added to his darned fame for the moment.  Oh well, anything to protect my own tranquil privacy.

January 3  Mid-mid zen

The trusty Kindle tells me I’m at

Location 15501 of 21994 * page 655 0f 925

in Murakami’s long new book 1Q84.  At this point I could drop it and not go back.  I could also keep going.  Murakami might well be, having brought me this far with nearly perfect equilibrium of response, the great zen writer of our time, even of the first x section of the new millenium.  Could also be the pure zen effect of a cold, sunny day in winter.  January zen.

January 3, 2012   Paper Letters Again

Stephen Elliott on The Rumpus is bringing back paper letters---in subscription form. 

January 20  

Finished 1Q84.  Should I now go and dig into 2666?  First I could finish Melancholy of Resistance.  In the Book Discussion section tacked on at the end the publisher lists one Vonnegut book for suggested further reading---Slaughterhouse Five.  Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon I’ve never heard of.  The others suggested I have read--Auster’s New York Trilogy, Cortazar’s Hopscotch, Eco’s The Prague Cemetery (not read), and Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

I was going to say think of Vonnegut heavily infused with Beckett, salted with Stendhal and finished with ?  can’t come up with one more--tale of Genji perhaps---something Japanese--oh, the hari kari guy, Mishima---of course.

Simply because I know so little of Japanese literature.  I mean there has to be some essential element of Japanese culture to the book---Phil would say it is the restraint, the resistance toward any serious revelation of feeling or even clarity of event.  All is hidden behind screens of superficiality.  Does seem so.  The idea is then that the tension is all the greater, the emotional impact and implication all the moreso.  It’s a pretty good, classical aesthetic and centuries old in most of the high cultures.

And yet I’m going to go ahead and say I liked it.  But I wouldn’t urge it on many other readers I know---if you’re going to like Murakami you have to know what you’re getting into, taking on. Priscilla’s reading group wouldn’t like it, nor would I suggest it to them.   Eco, Auster, Cortázar---these do give you a good idea.  Stephenson’s title is great but makes clear to me that I don’t want to read it.  Just looked it up.  Too recent, too sci-fi.  For me Murakami is not at all sci-fi.  He’s Asian & Japanese tale crafting.  Like Genji and like folk tales where dimensionality is easily played with.  Also Carl Jung.  Murakami plants a rather too heavily obvious reference to Jung smack in the last third of the book.  The book is not moving so much as intriguing in ways that you just haven’t met in many other literary works.  It is a giant waste of time.  Pretty much like The Red and the Black is a waste of time, or Tolstoy.  Except that in that grand waste there are explorations into our imaginative lives that we need.  Orwell said the best works tell us what we already know.  Murakami comes closer to doing that than Franzen in Freedom and even than Eugenides in The Marriage Plot, which I thought was much better than Freedom.

I exaggerate and ironize in talking about “wasting my time.”  I did not and I knew I was not after I paused around page 100 or 200 and wondered if I wanted to go on.  I’m glad I did.  It seems like the main pull is “what will happen?”  You think that is at bottom what keeps you going.  But I think that is the real mcguffin of Murakami.  You know you’re being allowed think you’re catching on to his mcguffinistic techniques for keeping you lured and seduced.  But what really works is something else, something you can’t quite put your finger on.  He’s got some talent that is not evident in discussion of technique.  Like most pretty good writers.   You know what will happen next so what you’re enjoying much more than that is how will he tweak it moment by moment, what unexpected details will be used, what sort of angles will he describe, what refinements to the characters and their decisions and situations. I remember, for example, the ugly quasi-detective guy, Ushikawa, eating canned peaches at one point late in the book and the old formalist in me said at the time, why the heck describe these canned peaches at this particular moment?  Looking back via the Kindle I find I had been asleep at the wheel---he eats more peaches than I had realized, so its a marker for the character.  And what else?  Dissertations waiting in the wings to be written for sure.  And with this character Ushikawa there is the longish section with his corpse in the white room.  Yes, puzzle gamers can have a field day with Murakami’s books, but that aspect doesn’t interest me.

“Dreamlike” always comes to mind with Murakami.  This book is so long that the long slow dream is what it is like.  And after it is over even as it has worked out as you expected and intuited, it lingers well, a lingering dream of something---creativity--spiritual longing, love, loneliness, dissociation and of course writing and re-writing a book---book as air chrysalis--an alternative reality in which we readers live for a while like the characters in their experience of the alternate reality of 1Q84 where there are two moons, not one.

A fine wintertime read, a few pages a day, not too many.  Just how I made it  through The Red and the Black, and Proust.  But I think Proust was two winters and one summer.  Maybe even two summers.  Reminder here---one of the main character’s in this novel reads Proust, or tries to while she is in hiding after her second act of murder.

Jan 21,  Woody's Paris

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris has so many delights for those old enough to catch all or nearly all of Allen's quips (did you get the one about Djuna Barnes?) that choosing which one to start with is yet another delight all its own.

The way Allen skewers Hemingway is a mere thirty-seven or so lines of dialogue may be the most brilliant achievement of his career.  Hemingway and the whole msytique as it has been dogmatized by AmLit and CrTveWrtg industry professionals.  Corey Stoll is young enough to not give a hoot about the man or the myth but he plays the part with full knowledge of how great a small role it is by the great writer and director.  Sure, the next generation might say Ehh, Allen, Schmallen, too.  I enjoyed finding out via Wiki (cut and paste coming) that Allen re-wrote the role for Owen Wilson.  It was not a specific actor he had had in mind but the difference between East coast intellectuals and west coast romantics.

"Allen originally wrote the character Gil as an east coast intellectual, but he rethought it when he and casting director Juliet Taylor began considering Owen Wilson for the role. “I thought Owen would be charming and funny but my fear was that he was not so eastern at all in his persona,” says Allen. Allen realized that making Gil a Californian would actually make the character richer, so he rewrote the part and submitted it to Wilson, who readily agreed to do it. Allen describes him as, “a natural actor”.   Wikipedia

Jan 23, 2012   Two More Red Cents on  Rothko--and Still

Washington DC is hot about Mark Rothko these days thanks to the play by John Logan being performed there called “Red.”  My friend who lives there just sent me the whole Arts section from this past weekend’s Washington Post.  I was pleased to see a really good review of the play by Philip Kennicott who shows how little John Logan gets right about either Rothko or the art world.  As he says, Logan borrows his portrait of the painter “from central casting.”

Last summer in Madrid I had a Rothko experience that gave me a good, fascinating start.  I like his work and sometimes don’t like his work and wonder, as everyone does, how it will fare, how long it will last.  Of course the Post’s other articles point out that the Rothko Foundation got the National Gallery of Art to become the central repository of archival study of Rothko.  Pretty much like getting government bonds to stand behind the value of that painting, if you happen to own one.  Or at least a strong position for securing the judgments of history.

But I saw all of that reputation called sharply into question on the day we were spending at the Centro Reina Sofia, Spain’s premier showcase for modern and contemporary art.  The Reina Sofia is the permanent home of Picasso’s “Guernica” and in years past that painting drew large crowds.  Last summer there was hardly anyone there.  In fact the whole museum felt pretty down-at-the-heels or at least empty of excitement.  There was a lot of space devoted to newly released archival material about the Spanish Civil War.  It seemed like the large collection of modern painting, post-WW II painting, had been significantly downsized, lots of it put back into storage no doubt.  All the excitement last summer in Madrid was for a new retrospective at the Thyssien of Juan Antonio Lopez, the current greatest living painter in Spain, now in his early 80s and a sort of hyper realist.  His paintings show landscapes, buildings, people, open refrigerators.  There’s much more to be said than that, but its clear his vision is a long way from Rothko and that era.

As I wandered the galleries in the Centro, I noticed that the curators were trying to include more clips from movies in each gallery.  There would be short clips of significant films from the period of art being presented.  Or clips of film that linked to other pieces in interesting ways in terms of artistic questions or challenges.

I strolled up to one large room, the lighting throughout is sort of dim in the hallways and as I turned the corner into the collection of rooms that made up this gallery I could see on the far wall a large clip from a movie playing on the white wall.  Instantly I recognized Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, a famous scene from Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”  A small explanatory card on the wall.  The museum was taking film much more seriously as art.  Then right to my left a small work that felt instantly familiar but strange.  I looked at it.  It was a little too high on the wall and then I saw the names on the identifying wall card.  Mark Rothko, “Untitled,”  1952.  Sure enough, one of his smaller works.

Wow, I thought. Or Ouch.  What a fantastic curatorial Put Down and critical judgment.   The primary work is the movie.  Rothko’s period piece contribution is to echo the movie in a small painting contemporaneous, yes, and resonant with the theme of Window.  The painting looked very much like the old roller mounted blinds that you could pull down or allow to spring back up.

Were the curators being as mean as I thought?  Or did they just think the collaging of the two as pieces from the 50s was a sprightly art historical joke?

Mean is at issue because as Rothko struggled to make his way, make his paintings, gain more success and become a major abstract expressionist artist in those now storied 40s and 50s in New York, his critics dismissed his work as mere window dressing, as a kind of department store version of what the new explosion of abstract art in New York after the war was really all about.  I think Clifford Still was one who thought that way about Rothko.  Both tremendous egos.  All of them, clashing egos---Pollock, DeKooning, Reindhardt--the whole gang.

This fall in Denver we saw the opening of the Clifford Still Museum.  Still held out, refused to sell many paintings, produced steadily and kept them all rolled up in a barn near Frederick, MD.  Never had the success of Rothko.  Said in his will the paintings had to be shown in a place that would show only his work, Still, and no one else.  This was thought to be a pretty egotistical position, but he won.  Before his museum opened this fall, many younger artists, artists of the generation after Rothko and Still, managed to get their own one-artist museums to guard their work and their reputations.  Rothko died in 1970, at 67.  Still was born one year after Rothko, 1904, died in 1980.  76.  His wife and daughters kept the works until the right city would agree to build the right museum for them.

If I wrote to John Logan, I wonder if he would reply?  Did he consider writing a play about Clifford Still?  Why Rothko?  Why did he use central casting?  The vagaries of cultural history, of cultural wars, elude us all.  Even if he replied, the answer would not be in his letter or his email.  If we could ask Still and Rothko?  They would say, as all painters do, look at the work.

January 24, 2012   Delirium and the Erotics of Excess

Finished the book about those French guys and I hereby swear to go cold turkey:  no more reading about them for quite a while, no more lit theory for quite a while, maybe even no more academic philosophy for quite a while, maybe no more philosophy.  Loved the title of Eleanor Kaufman’s The Delirium of Praise.   I was easy there and threw out the money, even though I should have known better.  But it is a study of Five of the Big Guys:  Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski.    I read a lot of Bataille about ten years ago.  How much I got I’ve never been sure.  I recently read James Miller’s superb book on Foucault.  I wanted to learn more about Blanchot because he’s re-appeared in things steadily over the years and I’d read a bit of Lars Iyer’s Spurious, the book, and the website of the same name and Iyer is big on Blanchot.  Plus Kaufman seemed to have a really neat thing---to study the minor writings of these writers in which the praise one another excessively.  None of the bitter warfare of ordinary critical (“dialectical”) literary feuding and positioning.  Instead the intoxicating ether in which they conjoin intellectually in the act of praise.

The yield, by the time the book ended, seemed to decrease with each turn of the page.  It was a dissertation before it was a book and having written my own I am painfully sensitive to the weaknesses of the genre.  Plus I didn’t learn much about Blanchot.  Or not enough to make it interesting all the way through the book.  I did enjoy finding out that Klossowski and Bataille were the non-praising duo of the group, the exception to prove the rule.  And Klossowski criticized Bataille, attacked Bataille, for being too much of a capitalist.  Maybe attack is always more fun than praise after all.  Klossowski says of Bataille, after a number of rounds of disagreement over the years, “no one finally, was more anticommunist than Bataille” and “in the worst sense Bataille realized these predictions:  he remained an anarchist who fell back into capitalism while marxism all around him was characterized by powerlessness.”  Bataille was famously concerned with the sacred, evil and eroticism and he propounded a rather brilliant theory of a general economy that makes him sound like a great guy on Mitt Romney’s staff.   Money . . . “is but a form of energy.” Money is thereby the locus of fundamental contradiction.  While it defines the restricted, homogeneous system which it safeguards under the rhetoric of equal exchange, money is, in itself, “nothing but energy and excessive energy at that.”  Money is “a sign of sheer excess, one that is so excessive as to approximate the absolutely intangible, nothingness itself, heterogeneity par excellence.”  “The general economy [makes apparent that] excesses of energy are produced which by definition, cannot be utilized. The excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning.”   Hence we have the need for limitless loss or squandering.  Sounds like private equity, hedge fund heaven to me.  But I will confess to a Fox News comprehension of these things.  Anyway, back to the delirium of excess and praise.  By the last pages of the book, Kaufman gets tangled in the language of all this theory and these six thinkers and her need to prove her study has shown us something.  When I came to the following on page 128, I thought of the old New Yorker when the little passages used to fill out a column would come from benighted publications and then the editors would make a snide comment about the poor grammar and poor style and poor taste of the passage.

“Such a chronological explanation raises as many questions as it explains, but it is useful in characterizing the Klossowski-Bataille exchange as a catalyst in a larger nuclear reaction.  Perhaps this exchange might be fashioned as a pocket of imbalance, a pocket of reserve that is necessary to the maintenance of the larger general economy.  As Bataille often reminds us, the general economy does not issue from nowhere, but issues otherwise from an established restricted economy.  In this regard, Klossowski and Bataille mark a disjunction of theory and practice that enables a larger and more absolute interpenetration of the two.  By way of conclusion, it is interesting to map out such a model along the lines of work that has been done in the field of chaos theory.  . . . dissipative structure . . . pocket of increased order . . . in a system that is on an overall course tending toward disorder.  . . . . explosion of nonsubjectified chaos our of a nicely reversible order of subject and object boundaries . . . . absolute laudatory excess . . . . whose theories of pulsional expenditure . . . larger group dynamics.  Finally, like a movie with multiple endings, we have a visit from grandpa Lévi-Strauss to talk about gift exchange, a short story by Camus and a movie by Pasolini.  “ so that what is created is a community of thought that knows no bounds, a hospitality that liquidates identity, a communism of the soul.”   Last line of the book.  At last.

I’m afraid I am still curious about Blanchot.  Against my better judgment I’ll try reading one of his novels that I just bought.  Is this masochism?  Or addiction?  The degeneration of brain chemistry that comes with age?  Alzheimers?  Be careful what you joke about.

January 25  Pessoa   

Weds night

Finally got the car in for an oil change in Gilford today.  Turns out the service manager, David, whom I’ve known for ten years now, is a big reader.  He retains his courtly Tennessee accent too, a bit more mild every year.  He loves McCarthy’s The Road.  I told him to find a copy of Blood Meridien.

best passage from today’s reading  from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet

    93 [174]  29.3.1933 

How good to be all alone!  To be able to talk out loud to ourselves, to walk about with nobody’s eyes on us, to lean back and daydream with no interruptions!  Every house becomes a meadow, every room takes on the amplitude of a country villa.

All the sounds one hears seem to come from somewhere else, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe.  We are, at last, kings.  That’s what we all aspire to and, who knows, perhaps the more plebian among us aspire to it more eagerly than those with false gold in their pockets.  For a moment we are the pensioners of the universe, existing on our regular incomes with no needs or worries.

January 27   Seamless Transition

FRIDAY morning Jan 27

Ordered the gout book prematurely, then.  And the gout diet.  Called Mid-state and the uric acid results in the blood test are normal but that still does not necessarily rule out atypical gout.  Called the podiatrist back to see what a visit to him will yield.  Still might follow the gout diet ideas anyway.  One page said that guys who drink lots of coffee do not get gout!  So more coffee is a fine idea.

Really icy yucky day out.  Paula is here now though.  Her sister’s husband had a logging accident two weeks ago---cut into the tendons of his thighs.  Awwggh.  Don’t even want to hear such reports.  But she’s taking him back to Florida and leaving Paula to take care of trying to see the dad’s house.

We saw the Wild Swans production last night.  Children’s Theater.  Nice production.  Learned from Rosen by chance that Bunk was eased out at the high school last spring.  A sort of Final Straw event between her and Parsons is how Lorie Eaton described it to me at the Peppercorn.

So with gout now out I guess the podiatrist is going to discover that it is a kind of sprain or stress created by these new flat zero drop shoes.  Like a new convert, however, I refuse to buy into that.  Even against my own better judgment?  Maybe.  I could wear those saucony shoes that look like the older running shoes and just say Oh I tend to prefer a sort of minimalist type shoe.  See what he says to that.  Better to cast it like that rather than Announce the new zero drop dispensation.  In fact I guess I could experiment with wearing those shoes around the house and see what might happen to that left foot and toe with the re-addition of a slight heel.

It could happen that not too far from the railway station, but far enough, I would come upon some solitary person walking through the empty streets—under such circumstances, tailing another person was impossible, because in those neighborhoods the itineraries are too short, and especially because I had no way of dissembling or fading into a landscape as barren and quiet as that, both of us, walker and pursuer, would be the only living creatures in the desert, and thus too visible, etc.—and so it could happen that if I saw someone in the empty streets, I’d feel an initial impulse to follow him at a discreet distance, but in the end I’d give up on it; the very desolation of the neighborhood would override any argument and conviction. It was as if the desire for adventure, for fiction to a certain extent, as I explained just now, which had originated someplace as a variant of curiosity, had dissolved before assuming any true form.

The atmosphere on the outskirts of the city turned out to be both intimate and alien to me; I could recognize the language, since I shared it, but I’d lost a bit—or a great deal, I don’t know—of the pulse of its expressions and of the local idiom in general, its resonances. And so these birthday walks were approximate in more than one sense. My birthdays consisted of vague gestures of this type, an exile for a few hours toward a part of the past and toward a geographic area that no longer belonged to me, but because they’d been mine once, I had considered them united until that moment: both parts were one and the same, a mixture of time and place. When the day was nearly over, I’d return from the outskirts as if I were coming back not from another reality, but rather, from a brother planet, an outlandish dimension into which I could set foot only once a year, when the calendar, underscoring my presence, so to speak, in the world, invited me by this same operation to suspend that presence, to doubt it, or at least, to hide it.

Page(s): 186-187, My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec, Margaret B. Carson and Enrique B. Vila-Matas, Open Letter

NOOKstudy (Robert Garlitz, robert.garlitz@gmail.com). This material is protected by copyright.

January 30, 2012      Humanists Butt of Humanist's Humor

How is it possible that a man of my station has never yet read a novel by Richard Russo?  How could that have happened?  Correcting that now with his most recent work, That Old Cape Magic, about an only son of two English professors who is driving around the Cape looking for the right place to scatter his father’s ashes.

“Except they never managed to actually save.  Indeed, they exhibited the professional humanist’s utter cluelessness where money was concerned.  They bought on impulse, often things that required assembly, saying, how hard could it be, then finding out.  Bookshelves invariably had at least one shelf where the unfinished side faced up, its rough edge facing out.  When you pulled open the upper-right-hand drawer of a desk, its lower-left-hand one opened in noisy sympathy.  They gravitated to failed technologies like eight-track tapes and Beta recorders.  .  .  .  .  The cop who’d talked to him at the turnpike rest stop had noted that his father’s dented trunk was secured by a bungee cord, testimony to a recent accident, and Griffin had to explain that it would’ve been far more unusual if the trunk had not been mangled, and also that the accident in question probably hadn’t been that recent.  His father had been the sort of man who considered the bungee cord a permanent solution, at least as permanent as the car itself.  “He was an English professor,” he explained. "