October 2009

October 1, 2009    Theroux's Ghost

Starting into Paul Theroux's new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.  He is retracing the Great Railway Bazaar trip he took in 1973 and it all makes me remember well how thrilled I was when I first read that book---it must have been around 1975.   I've read many of his books over the years, probably more of his travel books than his novels, so it feels indeed like settling into a comfy train seat and relaxing into a long, long journey.   He just published a good story in the New Yorker about a man who goes back to visit his peace corps post in Malawi---where Theroux had been stationed and where he started to become a writer.  Is he one of our greatest living writers?  As if that sort of phrase mattered, and yet one wonders if anyone would call him that and why or why not.  How is he regarded?  If you look up a movie director on IMDB it tells you just how high or low her star now sits on some invisible chart of regard and opinion but I don't know if there is a similar site for writers, other than amazon's sales figures, which are as suspect as all other such lisitings.  What really matters is how consistently, brightly and astutely Theroux delivers what you want, page after page, paragraph after paragraph.  He is superb.  Much better to my taste than Bill Bryson, for one.  Maybe even in his own category at this point.

October 4, 2009      Remembering the 80s

Human Potential Movement Mantra

Now I lay me down to sleep

In touch with my body for to keep;

If I should die, by good St Michael,

Let me be at the peak of my Biorhythms Cycle.

--Bob Garlitz, circa 1983

October 4, 2009     Golf

"He plays golf.  Your grandfather.  Your grandpappy.  Golf.  A golf man.  Is my tone communicating contempt?  Billiards on a big table, Jim.  A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod.  A quote unquote sport.  Anal rage and checkered berets."

Character (a tennis man) in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: 163.

 On October 20, 2009 I posted a photo of The Last Painting.  But I think maybe I actually did a few more after that. 

October 26, 2009    The Nuns from when I had my tonsils out

" The sisters perform astonishing feats. . . . Everywhere, the great white tulips of their bonnets, which manage to flower where everything is dark with despair, where everything else is bleak and bare and inimical."   Thomas Bernhard, Frost 175

Cohen has a song about them too---The Sisters of Charity.  He must have seen them in his childhood in Montreal.  Unforgettable white bonnets, like sailboats, huge on their heads.  Are they from Normandy?  In Cumberland they ran the Sacred Heart hospital and there I stayed overnight and got put under with anesthesia to have myh tonsils taken out when I was ? six? 

October 28, 2009     Definitions in an expanding universe

I complained earlier today in an email that I try these days not to use the word "autistic" because my sense (as a layman) is that the meaning of the term has gotten expanded way past any real usefulness.

My correspondent in the UK replied---"autistic seems to have epxnaded to include males in general over here."

Brilliant---pretty much sums up where it feels like we are these days all over the place, then.

Austistic = Male

Back to Basics.  Another slice through the Gordian Knot.