May 2009

May 11, 2009  A Million Blogs Bite the Dust

Facebook and Twitter----have they not killed millions of old blog sites.  To post on a blog now feels as Dinosaur-like as teaching books used to feel.  Next semester at least one of my courses will be all youtube all the time.  Maybe.  

Twitter post from a few minutes ago---that I posted---just to give you a taste of how incredibly valuable that site has become to zillions of us ---- "visitor from Ibiza today"  

Virginia's former colleague R T stopped by.  He is in town for a few days to get some medical attention out of harvard pilgrim while he still has some coverage.  He and his husband ? live on the Spanish island of Ibiza.  He is a Lorca scholar and is excited by news that reached him a few weeks ago from a man in Mexico who has a treasure trunk of Lorca letters and other memorabilia---all apparently genuine and potentially worth thousands---both on the markets and in the worlds of scholarship.   He has also been in touch here in NH over in Chocorua with a 97 year-old man who was a reporter with the Chicago Sun in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.  Lots of tales to tell about his work and travels in Europe in the mid-20th C.  Roger is thinking of shaping them a bit into a novel.  

I am nearly finished Saramago's remarkable novel "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis"---which is also set in Portugal at the time of the rise of Salazar, Franco and Hitler.  Virginia just finished a Salvadoran novel in translation and loved it---Castellanos Moyas' Senselessness.

May 11, 2009  Should I Write This?

I've been thinking of making this my next writing project.  This or something like it.  Cast your vote & you will be entered into the Travel Along contest which could win you a guest appearance in my Travel Lit class next fall.  

Lobbyist, a novel.

The main character, Stefan Lucas, realizes he is in the grip of an unknown disease, a syndrome which compels him to fly to strange cities and rest in a room and the lobby of various hotels for a few weeks. He is not without funds for doing this, his ATM receipts make this clear. Otherwise he is not sure why he is doing this even though it is not that unpleasant. His therapist, in London he does take the trouble to talk with one, suggests he is suffering from a kind of agoraphobia, but Lucas decides this diagnosis keeps him from finding what it is he is looking for in the lobbies he spends so much of his time in now. He has lived in the hotels of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Sydney, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpor, and Tokyo. He reads, he watches people, he tries to remember what has happened to him that he should be on this route of associative lobbies, this network of hotels and airports. His skill in eavesdropping improves greatly. He thinks if he overhears the right conversation, the right suggestions of dialogue, he will be able to bring an end to his wanderings. He also begins to imagine the lives of the types he recognizes in each hotel's lobby. As a self-professed, self-discovered lobbyist, Lucas begins to feel at home in his life. He knows some trauma has brought him to this cultivated, narrow way of life. Finally he decides not to concern himself any longer to any further variations on this lobbying way of life. His money never seems to run out, his worries about money have no result, no effect on the complete adequacy of the funds in his liquid account. He can continue this way for the foreseeable future. He begins to gain interest in staying in each new country and begins to learn some of the language. He perfects the arts of minimal packing, minimal needs. His wariness of human involvement does not lessen but does grow more refined. If he sees a woman who fits his ever more specific qualifications, he approaches her, they find companionship, at times even relations for a few days, and then they part very warmly, very amicably. The friendship of various men happens according to a similar plan. Only within a few clear parameters will he reply to inquiry or contrive to make a chance beginning to chat. It is successful ninety percent of the time and leads to a few drinks, an evening or two of sharing tales over dinner, maybe a card game, a stroll in the evening through the boulevards and plazas of the central district. Then these friendly encounters also end pleasantly. Then he packs, decides which city to go to next and repeats the cycle.

May 12, 2009   See

Dennis Brock commented on your status:

"There's a chapter in a Graham Greene novel, Travels with my Aunt, I think where a man is fond of traveling but is diagnosed with a terminal illness. He's forbidden to travel. So he buys a villa in Italy that has 52 room. He sets himself up in one room with the nurse always a room behind him and he changes rooms each week. This way he gets to travel still, to enjoy the new environment for a few days before he anticipates his next destination. He travels through 51 rooms and as he's packing for the last room he feels death hovering and he tries frantically to reach the last room and he dies just over the threshold."  For goodness sake write your story.  I wanted more of the villa traveler but he was just an aside."

May 13, 2009  Passage from Saramago

Ricardo Reis descends as far as the bend, where he pauses to look at the river, the mouth of the sea, a most appropriate word, because it is here that the sea comes to quench its unassuageable thirst, sucking lips pressed to the land.  Such an image, such a metaphor would be out of place in the austere structure of an ode, but it occurs to us in the early morning when the mind submits to feeling.

" 

José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (230)

May 14, 2009     on a rainy afternoon in May

"All writing is a sin against speechlessness.  Trying to find a form for that silence.  Only a few, Yeats, Goethe, those who lived for a long time, could go on to do it, but they had recourse to known forms and fictions.  So one finds oneself going back to vielle compétences ['Know-how' , as opposed to the creative act.] -- how to escape that.  One can never get over the fact, never rid oneself of the old dream of giving a form to speechlessness.' 'Vielles compétences' (the old adroitness').  . . . 'A sin against speechlessness.  When one tries to say it, one uses the old forms, one tells all kinds of stories.' 

            ----Beckett, quoted in Anne Atik, How It Was: 95-96

May 18   Sexiness and Class Structure

Quote from Laura Warholic page 345 

Composer Ned Rorem wrote : 

"Sexiness comes from the financially underprivileged.  The rich don't need to be sexy.  Any Greek waiter or ragazzo di vita exudes more carnality than the handsomest duke in town.  A beautiful woman, no matter how wealthy, is still underprivileged and by that token sexual."

May 19, 2009   When Was 1985?

Notes from a Travel Diary from 1985 that never got used much and will be thrown out to make more shelf room

8/22/85  Lincoln (Delph Guest House) Yesterday -- woke up in Norwich.  Out to great Yarmouth & Goreston.  Seaside towns, factories.  At St Andrews Church got directions to E. Gill's church--St Peters.  Beautiful--all ivory, red tile floors, open frame work ceiling, timbers,  Play of pointed arches & complete icon of altar with Gill's painted crucifixion.  Back to Norwich.  Lady Julian's cell.  Four nuns.  Green gold light.  Silence.  Cathedral clean & sparkling.  Circular motif in stonework.  Tall spire.  Drove to Sandringham, but closing.  Lunch at Briton Arms, old inn in Norwich.  Visit to Castle.  Stop in Kings Lynn for dinner at Wimpys.  Arrived here around 9 pm.

8.28.85  Earlmont guest house  in Oxford.  Modern, clean, stark.  No coziness here.  Prize for guest houses goes to Glen Eagles in York.  Stuffed animal in every room.  Bright eyed Eni Walker (?) who sews & loves running her B&B.  Dormer window in our second room had glass on three sides.  Dinner last night at the Eastgate Hotel.  Academic anxieties returned with return to this "familiar" world.  Monday of Bank Holiday weekend.  We will look for a laundry and go see Blenheim & maybe Compton Wynyates, which cannot be visited any longer.

            Night before in St George Hotel in Nottingham.  Our grand room---circular corner window, blue "Venetian" motif.  Dinner at the Gloucester Steak House across the road---waited an hour or more for a table.

            Vladimir Ashkenazy & an Agatha Christie play were on at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham.  New building---"bold" & "imaginative" -- rather nice. 

This has been two weeks away from the word.  No reading or writing for two weeks.

York 2nd day  Visited the Minster.  Choir boys practicing.  Large east window uses more white than any window I remember.  Whole not as impressive as Lincoln, which had a nobility to it & grandeur.  York town is wonderful, though.  Walked along the wall.  Then watched a battle by members of a plate armour society--Steve Quigley types who make their armour & then stage fastivals & battles. 

9/5/85

            I liked seeing Eric Gill's church.  It looked fresh & clear.  Well kept up & beautiful in concept.  The time it took gave me an excuse for feeling guilty--but I was glad Va liked it.  I hope the photos turn out--especially the ones of the altar crucifix.  You can see his theology worked out there carefully--Christ the King & sacrifice over the altar & crowned in glory.  Images, impressions fade fast.  I drove out to the store last night & realized half way up Emerson St here in Plymouth that I was driving on the left hand side of the road.

May 19, 2009   The Dead Weight of History?

Finished The Assassin's Song by M G Vassanji.  Canadian writer, born in Kenya, Indian parents.  Complex novel, meditative, intricate, trying to situate Islam in India, exploring the fluidity of identity, destiny, belief and skepticism, political explosiveness, grief, loss, homecoming.  Lots of interesting material, details, historical information, stories, but it did not congeal, did not cohere.  The whole lacks a living flame.  It feels cobbled together.

May 20, 2009      Cousineau on Bernhard

The book of the moment----I like the basic argument & I like Bernhard more and more.  

This is from University of Delaware Press web page about Thomas Cousineau's new book Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard.

The epigraph to Correction, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's masterpiece, reads: "A body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position." Three-Part Inventions finds in this simple geometrical axiom a surprisingly complex key to an understanding of Bernhard's major novels. It argues that each of them, although firmly anchored in Austrian history, emerges from an archetypal story involving a trio of figures: a protagonist who, having been deprived of a desired object by a more powerful adversary, displaces his frustration upon a scapegoat who suffers in his place. It further shows that Bernhard transforms this destructive protagonist-adversary-scapegoat pattern into a creative trio formed by the author himself, the artistic precursors who serve as his models, and the readers who receive the finished work. This study is intended to enrich for English-language readers the unforgettable experience of reading the author whom Italo Calvino once called "the greatest writer in the world." Thomas J. Cousineau is Professor of English at Washington College.

May 24, 2009    My Memorial Day Meltdown Theory

Somehow our current meltdown is about our own sense of dismay that our Public Relations approach to everything really does give us hollow "victories" at every turn.

May 25, 2009   Castellanos-Moya

Monday May 25 the holiday

Virginia took a Zyrtek last night and it hit her hard.  She slept until 1 pm today.  And it was the most beautiful day of the year---brilliant, breezy, sunny, and maybe too cool, but not for me.  We got to the docks at 3, walked and then split a lobster salad.  $15.95 which is not too bad.  Not that much lobster but enough.  Half price of Perkins Cove a month ago at Barnacle Billy's.  But they were gouging the early April crowd that day when nothing else was open in the Cove. 

Most of the day I spent reading and finishing the astonishing novel Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya.  I had first heard of it a year ago on the website The Quarterly Conversation. (See below.)  I'm glad in that year I've read more of Thomas Bernhard and more about Bernhard because in reading Castellanos Moya I can see more clearly how wide and deep Bernhard's influence has been.  Bernhard perfected a narraive style that is hypnotic and compulsive, rhythmic and obsessive, using repetition and certain other ticks and bits of style that contribute greatly to the power of the stories his works involve us in.  I think the work of Spanish writer Javier Marîas is deeply indebted to Bernhard and now in this short central American novel I am sure we see how a young writer has taken Bernhard's work at put it to new uses in creating a novel that witnesses to the horrors of violence and power in Central America is very unique and even funny ways.  Moya's book is grotesque but in a very readable and enjoyable and comfortable way.  It is really funny in places.  And it slowly and incredibly surely builds into an amazingly intense portrait of the narrator and of what he is involved with by being hired to edit a huge manuscript that is an official report on years of political abuse, terror and genocide against indigenous peoples in Guatemala.  Well, in a country like Guatemala, like Salvador, like Honduras, like Nicaragua.  Never specified, perhaps, but the truth clearly told.  By--as Dickinson suggests--the telling being very slant.  Seems grotesque to even say it---but the book is extremely enjoyable as well as totally chilling and horrifying.  You put it down rather speechless with the terrors remembered and with admiration for the power of this writer.  

May 28, 2009   Opposite of Envy

RAINY THURSDAY 

Reading Kira Salak's new novels The White Mary I came upon a term new to me---Mudita.

The character named Sebastian explains to Marika:

            "Buddhists consider mudita a 'God-like' state." . . . It's supposed to be the single hardest thing for a person to feel for another.  Even harder than feeling compassion for an enemy."  . . .  "When I'm feeling sincerely glad for others, I'm also feeling it for myself.  It comes right back."

It took a long while for this term to get into my vocab over all these years of reading in the spiritual tracts and beat poetry and Buddhist lit.  But here it is.