J U L Y
2 0 1 3
ALREADY JULY 1 MONDAY and I am just now at 3:47 noting the fact.
email from Phil and response---his quote from Montaigne
Great quote for sure.
That eloquent chunk in
my last email was stolen, alas, from Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquiet."
I read the passage about a minute after I got your email query about
retirement and I just couldn't resist embedding it into my response to see if
your suspicious hackles would rise and drive you to google a phrase so as
to track down the
source. Probably something I would do because of years of reading student
prose and being hyper-alert to those shifts in style that are
just too good to be
believable.
That's too bad to hear
about Peg's neighborhood. I have read about this reverse process around
major cities---the burbs getting more dangerous while the
core gets gentified
and safer. Weird but another chapter in the subtle and not-so-subtle
class warfare that shapes our overblown amalgam of nation-states.
Your word by the way,
"numbness" is a better version for these days for what Pessoa calls,
by his translators, "tedium," which I assume works with the
early 20th C sense of
aestheticism he would have been immersed in, in the Lisbon of 1920s.
The book is one of those trunks full of slips of paper that scholars
re-assembled after his
death, like E Dickinson, so much is made of the claim he made that he had
written a novel that wasn't a novel and a "factless autobiography,"
in other words a Modernist masterpiece that rivals Joyce's Ulysses. Not sure
if Pessoa knew about Joyce.
Virginia's having a
colonoscopy on Wednesday, so prep and follow-up will take my most of the week.
Last time she had a seizure and we're hoping
that won't happen this
time because we think we worked out with the doctor how to avoid having the
prep-cleanse wash out all the anti-seizure
medication she takes
on a regular basis. Fingers crossed. Friends told us the other day
that colonoscopies are way over-prescribed, so there's that
doubt too. But
she's worried because her sister had some recent cancer and someone else in the
family had colon cancer, a generation back I think.
On Jul 1, 2013, at
11:16 AM, "J. P. Jones" <jpjones33@hotmail.com> wrote:
Nice quote from M: " To divert myself
from troublesome fancy, it is but to run to my books; they presently fix me to
them and drive the other out of my thoughts, and do not mutiny to see that I
have recourse to them for want of other more, real, natural, and lively
conveniences; they always receive me with the same kindness. "
Tuesday July 2
so yesterday I finished Cousineau's book on
Pessoa. wow such a terrific
disappointment. He has no feel for
Pessoa's voice. He treats the
voice as simply both Soares and Pessoa, the author. Makes no note of any instability between the voices, no
awareness of the play of the voices,
the texts, the words, the feelings.
It is as though he cannot even hear, that is feel, the quality of the
book that makes it what it is.
He runs it through his very fixed
formalist/Girardist? sieve to worry about how it is unified and coherent even
though it does not want to be coherent in the traditional ways usual for the
novel when he wrote.
The final chapter of the book is the most
strange. Twenty pages devoted to
setting forth "the daedalus complex" a la Eliot's ideas about poetry,
the Greek myths and Prufrock and Hamlet and then a final ten pages as a sort of
footnote on Pessoa. Feels like he
had this potted lecture or essay on Daedalus and he wanted to use it somewhere so he pasted it in to the book and applied it to
Pessoa.
I'm not being careful enough in my evaluation, of
course. Cousineau does good work
throughout, lines up lots of apt citations and quotations. It is the underlying way he seems to
set up his whole project---anxiety about whether the work is a whole, whether
it coheres. He overuses the idea
of reciprocity between elements. I
suppose this is the primary effect of explication and close reading---you've
got to emphasize and find patterns of resonance and poetic linkage. Linkages of every sort possible. Which is fine. That allows you to trace both the clear
and the hidden, the underlined and the uncanny. At various points I kept hearing Burke wanting to break in
and burst out and say, Oh, for goodness sake, you do see that, but don't you
see how the other way(s) are implicit as well??? Cousineau talks about hierarchy too and yet he really needs
a short course in Burke's ways of working both the upward way and the downward
way as moebietic mirrors of one another.
Or Mobieustic? Both could
be good terms! Neither show up in
Search.
Anyway, I suppose I could write my own book about
Disquiet and get better results that way.
I'm still reading it once through and I've not studied it in detail and
depth as Cousineau has done. I got
to page 400 today. I suppose I
wouldn't want to study it, really.
Don't want to dissect it into a corpse, that old undergrad
complaint. But I do want to read
some other commentary on it and not the recent book on Gender in Pessoa. yawn.
Who could write the INFP review of Pessoa? without seeming an idiot about pop
psychology. Do literary critics
take Myers-Briggs at all seriously?
Should they?
Even without that one could have written the book
with much more appreciation of how for Pessoa since feeling drives the other
interior functions---dreaming, thought, memory and desire---the very nature of
disquiet as a function of feeling is that it be as turbulent, shifting,
modulated and constantly in process, nuanced, as weather itself. There it is---Pessoa's great attention
to the weather, ---to the sky, clouds, light, sun, rain, darkness, stars,
shadow,--signals the driving nature of feeling as the primary interior
state. Doe Cousineau talk enough
about the weather? He talks too
much about the static theater vs the Aristotelian dynamic theater and ignores
what Pessoa himself talks about--the skies, the moods of weather and the moods
Soares feels all the time.
Weds July 3rd
Oh dear.
Started reading new copy of Cousineau's "After the Final No"
about Beckett, liking it in contrast with the Pessoa book and I just looked it
up on Goodreads only to find I gave it three stars June 18, 2009. ooops
In some sort of obsessive summer loop about
reading a book by Cousineau??
Garage door got installed. Virginia got her colonoscopy done. All clear. We got up about 5 am to finish the whole "prep"
clearing out. I took three or four
naps, I've lost count.
Weather has cleared somewhat too. Humidity very high most of the day but
now at 5:30 it feels better.
Sunshine all day. At
last.
On page 63 of An
Unwritten Novel, Cousineau talks about Feeling in Pessoa. In passing. As part of the trio of events---sensing, dreaming, feeling
and thinking. Guess that is
four. Tomorrow is the 4th. Then we go see Barb and Ed on Friday
and Saturday.
Just have to put the Cousineau
"disappointment" behind me.
Gave into obsession today to buy some catalogues
of Genevieve Asse's work.
Hmmm. Might regret that
too. But that will be ok.
More Pessoa books arrived today. Guess I will be reading him for a while
longer. Disquiet feels too long again. Time to take a break.
Where Soares describes dreaming I can fill in reading. In fact doesn't he say as much
somewhere, even while elsewhere he says he reads very little. "Between" is the key term I
would have used for a whole chapter in my book. "Between" and "Confused"---he likes both
of those words. And it seems part
of the "vision" of disquietude that he explore every sort of
contradiction and paradox he can think of.
Keep reading ten or twelve different books at a
time. That is my major way of
dreaming all the time and of dreaming in full confusion as to who I am and what
we are all about.
By the way, great column today on Gawker about the
fluidity of sexuality and identity.
About time the pop sites catch up with Marjorie Garber's book of twenty?
thirty? years ago. Or rather about
time the blog chat recycles all of it yet again. No one mentions Garber of course, but the topic lends itself
to constant recycling. Underneath
the official dogmas and propagandas.
How civilization works and unworks itself.
Sunday 7 July evening
lovely day all around even after getting a little memory
jolt on Facebook. That damned Jack
Foley re-appeared after all these years.
here is
"news" today on facebook that proves it is pure evil and yet again
the world has gotten too small---
don't know
if you recall, but the first year we had Bro Richard, Gerry M, as a teacher he
had just come from St Johns prep (which you kindly drove me by) and all he
talked about was what a wonderful student he had had there, John Foley, who was
this amazingly gifted writer. I wanted desperately to be like John Foley,
to be as good a writer as John Foley, to just be as good as John Foley.
And basically that "tape loop" has been in my head my whole
life. Neurosis and its pleasures and all that.
So this
fucking morning on Facebook here is this exchange. My spiritual advice Question
to you is: should I post the above paragraph in response to their
shamelessly public display of back-slapping or should I hold my envious little
tongue?
===pasted
Hey Brotha Richard/Gerry:
Great to
hear from you! I yes'ed your request to be Facebook friends. If you are curious
what I have been up to, check out my personal website http://jrfoley.com/. (Which I think can be reached directly from my Facebook
page.)
Jack Foley
Gerry Molyneaux Hye,John, great to se that you are using using your
creatuive writing and with clout. Is your play going to have more productiosn?
Are you also still atv the Archives? I was down there in March doing research
about the Peace Corps. The last time I saw you, we were celebrating my 25th
year as a bnother. Last Saturday marked my60th. Keep in touch.
Yesterday at 9:56am · Like
John Foley Bro.
Gerry, Your 25th was quite a memorable weekend. You just celebrated your 60th
anniversary, which suggests, arithmetically, that you taught freshman English
at St. John's 55 years ago! Ah well! I work at the Library of Congress (not the
Archives) still, with no plans for retirement. (As I tell people who ask, I
like income and I like paid vacations. I also want, not to retire, but to
transition to another line of income-production involving writing which will
allow me to stay in bed till 7:30 each morning.) "Jesus le Momo" has
not had further productions to date, although I have submitted it to a couple
of places. (My jrfoley.com website, if you have not seen it yet, features a video of the
very best of 6 very good performances.) I am more interested, though, in
getting productions for my full-length plays. (Plays are what I have focused on
over the last dozen years, working in the DC-area Playwrights Forum; and I am
now a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.) Currently my writing is the
busiest ever: fine-tuning two plays "about" the last days of St.
Augustine (though they are not really realistic plays); two novellas; and those
are just my own projects. (I'm also assisting a cousin with a novel
"about" late 16th century Ireland.) If you care to back-channel, my
best email address is timwake73@hotmail.com. ("Timwake" is
from "Tim Finnegans Wake.") -- Jack Foley
=========
came to same spiritual advice position Phil gave on my
own--keep my tongue silent here
=====
Holdeth thy
tongue, Sir Robert as nothing of worth is to be gained. You and I remember the
near canonization of Foley, but no one else likely remembers or cares.
A
congressman from Florida by the name of Foley intrigued me several years
ago. He was thrown out of Congress for molesting male pages. I
thought he might be the same Foley, but when I googled that Foley he was
obviously someone different. He didn't grow up in DC, the son of a
congressman as Bro R's Foley.
Artaud was
famous for his "theater of cruelty." Odd that none of the
reviewers mention this (although I didn't read every word of every
review.) As for this play, I can't decide if it has some merit or is just
pretentious nonsense. Certainly, the actors speaking in
French argues for pretentiousness. I may attend a
performance to find out and will let you know my reaction. At this point
I suspect my review may cure you forever of any envious thoughts, but we shall
see.
Other stuff: I don't dance anymore, at least not
"fast dancing" as practiced today because other people look silly and
I have to assume I look the same. So I went to a wedding last night and
was the only person who didn't dance. Ergo, I stood out in the crowd and
didn't enjoy it at all. How about you? Do you still get out on the
floor and wiggle your butt? I certainly did for many, many
years. But not once in the past 25 or so years.
=======
well
said, especially since it is the same advice I ended up giving myself.
Wasn't sure if his father was the congressman but that would explain the
political themes (paranoia?) in some of the material he seems to have written.
And leaping onward I will suspect that the play has a good deal of
pretentiousness. Artaud now? He was a '60s thing here so why bring
him back now? Foley seems to be still exorcising his own catholic
themes---notre dame and st johns.
Dancing.
Va always loved it a bit more than I did but we did cut a pretty good
jitterbug in our day. Last 15 years I was much less interested. I
think we did go to a wedding two years ago here and I remember distinctly
giving a passing though to dancing and decided not to. Especially then
since it became clear that the event was featuring barn/square dancing in an
organized fashion.
Looser
normal wedding I might, depending on who I knew, how inconspicuous I could be,
how big the crowd etc etc. Not something I would really look forward to.
Ever attend a Playback Theater
production? We saw friends for an overnight visit over in Portland and
they took us to one of these events. Never heard of it. Improv
troupe. Participatory. Member of the audience goes up front and
tells a story or an anecdote. The leader then suggests a "form"
for the troupe to use. Seven actors. Form such as "story
circle" or some phrases I had never heard of. Interesting enough and fun
most of the time. I wondered right away if it were not something that
had grown out of therapy of various sorts, even as basic as AA and such.
Actors were good and the whole sense of actors workshop really did
demonstrate the powers of the stage and acting. People generally very
poor at telling stories, it seemed. So you had this sense of raw material
being transformed into viable shape right before your eyes.
Monday evening 4 pm
Wish I could throw
out what Freud and Jung said about the uncanny in six or seven easy words or
so.
The pop-up news about
Foley caught me because it was the second unexpected "small worlds, full
circles"
event of the past ten
days.
Last week we went to
dinner with our neighbor friends to celebrate all of our birthdays. A
once-a-year ritual.
Small gift exchanges.
Doug grew up in Hyde Park, his father a minister near UC campus at the
big theological
seminary there, maybe
high Baptist. His parents are now 98 and still summer at their cabin
further north
up in the White
Mountains. He had to go through boxes of old clothes so he came across a
t-shirt he thought
would be a suitable
birthday gift for me. It is a cartoon gargoyle with the legend
"HO-HO The University
of Chicago Is Funnier
Than You Think."
What he didn't know
was that the shirt was designed and produced by a fellow we were very good
friends with
back then in the 70s
on campus. Richard and Carol Kimmel lived two doors down in our married
student
apartment building
and we hung out with them all the time. In fact Carol had just come for a
visit with us
last summer, first
time in thirty years. Richard died some years ago and they had divorced
years before that.
And we still have our
own t-shirt from then, so now we have two.
So hearing about
Saint JRF seems to belong to this uncanny "news" bin of things I
really didn't want to have
re-appear. But
here they are.
I "know"
some of the names on Foley's Flashpoint online magazine and would say that like
millions of us, the arrival
of the web brought us into publication of a sort
after we had spent years toying around with writing ideas.
=======
tuesday evening Surprised myself and
embarrassed that I got so pissed at the rental car people this morning. Nothing they can do about it, a small
operation. Feeney is going to go
with me to Concord tomorrow to get a Hertz car. See if they have a decent one. Maybe Hertz does shift its large fleet around between
offices.
Miserable wet weather continues. Spot of sunshine this afternoon for
about ten minutes and no real rain all day. Small blessings.
So miserable of me to be so cranky and ungrateful.
Oh, Virginia took a fall this morning
in the tv room. Luckily heavy
carpeting helped cushion it. Super
wet sticky air, shoes drag on the carpet.
Took some Tylenol a few times.
Knocked the wind out of her and upset us both.
Fresh volume of My Struggle arrived
though so I can get back into that as my salvation. Not, however, the Archipelago edition but a brand new trade
paperback from FSG so you can see how the big house bought up the book as soon
as it got lots of acclaim. Wonder
if Salvatore Scibona is reading it or taken note? I think he's buds with J Galassi at FSG.
WEDNESDAY late morning
maybe I embarassed myself yesterday
morning and maybe not. This
morning we got a better car at Enterprise after a pretty good swim. Hope we didn't offend Eric Bouchard
when we said we would chase out the stranger in the pool. Another guy showed up too and so Eric
graciously moved on after only a lap or two. Maybe he goes often during the week, especially in this
rainy rainy weather when his crews are having a hard time keeping their work
going. He said the painters
somehow manage---must be indoor painters and they must be using blowers to try
to fan the paint dry.
So, a better car and no need to have
Bob Feeney drive me to Concord. I
tried the wet vac on the basement floor and now it does work and feels like
attempting to mop up the red sea even after it got divided in half.
Knausgaard giving me the big summer
read. Don't know if Esposito
even has one going on his blog.
Have to check. Had not found
them very stimulating or fascinating I have to say. People just don't have much interesting to say on a pop-up
basis. Twitter proves that as did
most of my students. Maybe in the coming
shrinkage of the colleges, lecturing of a short will return. Some sort of new knowledge-based
conveyance of knowledge.
The little book on Pessoa is most
helpful in ways that Cousineau was not.
Pessoa really seems to have experienced multiple personality events and
managed to turn them into poets and writing. He invented his term for them, heteronymns.
Now back to writing my Hotel
Labyrinth book and publishing the blog book. Hmmm.
Monday July 18 oops now july 15
deeper and deeper into Knausgaard and
by 329 in fsg edition really starting to hit paydirt. Guess I'll type up my
personal collection and put them on my blog in a day or two after I finish the
bloody volume. Ordered number 2 already
in uk paper edition. The
Archipelago editions are handsome as possible but not as bendably soft and nice
to hold and handle. This fsg is
like a big Penguin and as comfy as possible. I tweeted
Is Knausgaard literature or reality tv reading for the literati? Paydirt was his use of
"dilettante" my key word.
"Compared to their heavy gloom
[the poets} I felt like a lightweight, a dilettante with no understanding of
anything, just drifting across the surface, watching soccer, who recognized the
names of a few philosophers and liked pop music of the simplest
variety." 335 FSG edition
Weds July 17
yesterday we went to the American
Girl doll store in Natick. Huge
new wing of the mall. Saw a Tesla,
only showroom for it in New England.
The doll shop pretty impressive too. Only one in New England. Some developer group expanded this mall in 2008 just as the
downturn was starting but it looks like it has survived ok.
Finished Knausgaard at 2:20
today. Earlier I found the
original copy of volume one---under the pillows on the leather sofa in the
living room where I must have taken a nap two weeks or so ago, July 3rd? day
Virginia went for her colonoscopy or thereafter before we went to see Barb and
Ed in Maine. So now I have three
copies? of volume one. Don't tell
anyone. If it is the greatest work
of literature at the moment perhaps Emma can sell them for huge profits when
she is fifty. She is now two.
It is compelling and incredibly
moving. Incredibly? well, yes, at the moment I do think
so. It weaves its web of power
over you. The death of the father
and the birth of the son's vocation as a writer. Simple as that and told with all the power inherent in the
archetype---without however resorting to any of that kind of fancy lingo or
large-type appeal.
Let's assume it is a great work and
let's imagine Joyce and Beckett and Bernhard, maybe Proust, Pessoa and Sebald,
and others in the company, being here to enjoy the party. Knausgaard creates the illusion of saying
to them all----forget the schticks and tricks, forget your special style and
angle, you should have just told the essence of the tale. But isn't that what all the writers say
in hindsight to their predecessors?
Students are already for sure writing dissertations on Knausgaard and
analyzing the craft and skill and art with which he has invented his magical
illusion of having just let the details unfold effortlessly from his
keyboard.
It caused furor in Norway for having
written so honestly about the drinking and squalor of his father and his
grandmother. The worst sort of
alcoholics living in their total filth.
His father died at fifty-four if my calculations are accurate, when Karl
Ove was thirty.
PAGE 329 in the FSG edition I began
to mark passages using my own filiters of course. That's when K begins to talk more directly about his desire
to write, to be a writer. Or if he
did earlier in the book I took less notice. He must have, slightly at least, because he has written one
novel by now, the one he wrote when he was in the creative writing program at
the Academy and which got turned down by a publisher.
He is now twenty-four.
Lars Iyer likes to quote this Handke line--he tweeted it
again recently and it works really well for Knausgaard: "Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature
consists of the gradual removal of all fictions. (Handke)"
Quote
When
I was twenty-four I had a flash of insight: that this was in fact my life, this
is exactly what it looked like and presumably always would. That one's studies, this fabled and
much-talked about period in a life, on which one always looked back with
pleasure, were for me no more than a series of dismal, lonely, and imperfect
days. That I had not seen this
before was due to the constant hope I carried around inside me, all the
ridiculous dreams with which a twenty-four-year-old can be burdened, about
women and love, about friends and happiness, about hidden talents and sudden
breakthroughs. But when I was
twenty-four I saw life as it was.
And it was okay, I had my small pleasures too, it wasn't that, and I
could endure any amount of loneliness and humiliation, I was a bottomless pit,
just bring it on, there were days when I could think, I receive I am a well, I
am the well of the failed, the wretched, the pitiful, the pathetic, the
embarrassing, the cheerless, and the ignominious. Come on! Piss on me!
Shit on me too if you want!
I receive! I endure! I am endurance itself! I have never been in any doubt that
this is what girls I have tried my luck with have seen in my eyes. Too much desire, too little hope.
Unquote (329)
"I
leafed through Adorno, read some pages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for
a few days, had a look at Derrida . . . and learned nothing, understood
nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase,
led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an
enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer
for intuitions and feelings."
(330-331)
"
. . . I, the king of approximation, . . .was after enrichment . . . . the shadow of these sentences that
could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood
on something real, on something living.
Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a
cement mixer. For it was not the
case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose
from them." (331)
".
. . for thoughts, whatever good one can say about them, have a great weakness,
namely, that they are dependent on a certain distance for effect. Everything inside that distance is
subject to emotions. It was
because of my emotions that I was starting to hold things back." (332)
".
. . the crux was that he musn't notice, he musn't find out that I harbored such
emotions, and the evasive looks in such circumstances, emerged to conceal
feelings rather than show them, . . . ." (332)
"Now
Espen was as dark and brooding as Hauge.
They were poets, I thought, that is how they are. Compared to their heavy gloom I felt
like a lightweight, a dilettante with no understanding of anything, just
drifting across the surface, watching soccer, who recognized the names of a few
philosophers and liked pop music of the simplest variety." (335)
"
. . . the difference between us, which I did not want to be visible, / would
become obvious. He would be the
realistic, practical person; I would be the idealistic, emotion-driven one. . .
. along with my tendency to cry all the time . . . ." (345-346)
"
. . . because I wasn't invited to that kind of gathering. Why not, I had no idea. I didn't care anymore anyway. But there had been days when I had
cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the
outside." (377)
"One
of the things Tonje liked best about me, I suspected, was that I was so
fascinated by precisely that, by all the contexts and potential of various
relationships, she wasn't used to that, she never speculated along those lines,
so when I opened her eyes to what I saw she was always interested. I had this from my mother, right from
the time I went to school I used to carry on long conversations with her about
people we had met or known, what they had said, why they might have said it,
where they came from, who their parents were, what kind of house they lived in,
all woven into questions to do with politics, ethics, morality, psychology, and
philosophy, and this conversation, which continued to this day, had given my
gaze a direction, I always saw what happened between people and tried to
explain it, and for a long / time I also believed I was good at reading others,
but I was not, wherever I turned I only saw myself, but perhaps that was not
what our conversations were about primarily, there was something else, they
were about Mom and me, that was how we became close to each other, in language
and reflection, that was where we were connected, and that was also where I
sought a connection with Tonje.
And it was good because she needed it in the same way that I needed her
robust sensuousness."
(385-386)
"I
knew it wasn't true, but that was how it felt, and it was feeling that was
leading me, . . . ." (394)
"Furthermore,
my wild state always became worse for that reason, as my drunkenness was not
brought to a halt by sleep or problems of coordination, but simply continued
into the beyond, the primitive, and the void. I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite feeling,
but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or days after, it was as
closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with
a passion. But when I was in that
state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment and that was why
I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was
radiant." (399)
"But
that light, bantering tone of theirs, which Erling and Gunnar also shared had
never been part of my nature, to put it mildly, . . . . I was / unable to dissemble, unable to
play a role, and the scholarly earnestness I brought into the house was
impossible to keep at arm's length in the long run . . . ." (419-420)
"I
saw the rooftops in the residential area stretching down the road and
remembered how I used to walk among them as a sixteen-year-old, bursting with
emotions. When everything I saw,
even a rusty, crooked rotary dryer in a back garden, even rotten apples on the
ground beneath a tree, even a boat wrapped in a tarpaulin, with the wet bow
protruding and the yellow, flattened grass beneath, was ablaze with
beauty." (422)
"Death
and gold. I turned them over in my
hand, one by one, and they filled me with disquiet. I stood there and was frightened of death in the same way
that I had been when I was a child.
Not of dying myself but of the dead." (423)
"The
day always came with more than mere light. However frayed your emotions, it was impossible to be wholly
unaffected by the day's new beginnings." (437)
Knausgaard
closes the book with a terrific passage that circles back to the opening
meditation on death and gives us this great last line: "And death, which I have always
regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than
a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that
slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor." (441)
Monday July 22
Dear Lars---
Badminton Ethics:
Love that too. Because while I had had my monk years followed by
study at Chicago with the likes
of Wayne Booth, Saul
Bellow and Norman McLean, those years followed on with teaching for 35+ years
at a Badminton Ethics uni---a small college in central New Hampshire where we
had mostly Education majors and Phys Ed majors---skiiers and skateboarders and entrepreneural
types.
(see "History
Boys")
so -- Newcastle
liberated you enormously from the monk years and from Blanchot et al
the badminton science
students and faculty of newcastle gave you the voices of your two clowns,
W. and Lars
Can they not look
back, though, now, and re-see the monk years in their new lights? Monks
are
merely trying to
perfect clown wanderings with desperate measures --
did reading The
Golden String figure? Bede Griffiths? Enormously beautiful book
when one is
about 16.
And Thomas Merton??
The Cloud of Unknowing? I don't know Orthodox classics except
for
The Mystical Theology
of -- forget the full title Lossky
I mentioned Nicholas
Colloff because he is the only person I know who has been to Mt Athos and I think
he actually went twice !
He tried to join the
Dominicans (in Wisconsin) a few years ago at the age of about 38. I told
him not to--even after writing a letter in his favor---and then within the year
he decided not to and they turned him down.
The
"seduction" of the monastery---could it be the most perfect form
invented?? (see also Deleuze's essay on Venus in Furs -- Coldness and
Cruelty---most important work of the 20th C top ten list
cheers,
Bob G
---
Tweet do you discuss Deleuze Venus in Furs
essay anywhere? sent long email
-----
Monday
1.
Iyer doesn't like these questions very much or, rather, he might prefer
them worded a different way. He has trouble answering them,
although he does eventually.
2. He's
very European in his attention to philosophy and theory of
literature. Unusual for a Brit, I think.
But,
yes, there is a fair amount of overlap, although part of the overlap
is with Wayne Booth and Bellow concerning (the authorial voice). I really
agree with these ideas, which I first heard from you earlier this year,
and I doubt I would have ever reached these conclusions on my
own except unconsciously as I worked on my stories. When
I read your comments, they instantly struck me as something I had
believed without truly being conscious of it.
You are also
right that Iyer and I see the lit game today fairly similarly.
He bothers to get a small publisher to put his work out there, and it gets a
few nice reviews and a few readers. I don't bother with the small
publisher and let readers who buy the works on Amazon review
them. However, he is far more self-conscious and, I suspect,
autobiographical than I am as a writer. I write about place I've live and
people that I met in these place, albeit fictionalized. Iyer strikes me
as someone whose fiction is an attempt to work out "who am I?"
The heat
wave has broken here temporarily, but when I go out to peg's for the
weekend, I turn off the airconditioner in my apartment. Consequently, I
return to an apartment with a temp in the 90s. I turn the ac and big
fan back on immediately. Right now (9:50 pm), I'm trying to get
the temp down into the 80s so, if I turn the fan so it blows on me in bed
I can get some sleep. By tomorrow the apartment will cool down to around
72-75, but when I return from Peg's on Sunday nights it's tough in the
summer.
I heard the
England is having a heat wave and because almost no one in England has ac, over
800 people have died. It's like France a year or two ago.
P
I think
you're right on both counts. Iyer is having a splash of success with a
small group of illuminati on the blogosphere and small literati magazines and
bookstores. He's probably about 40 and hit a lucky streak about five
years ago by turning his philosophical training into comic routine that
continues the clown/tramp work begun in Godot. His two characters, the
same in all three "novels" of his trilogy, endlessly rehash the main
talking points of lat 20th C lit chat and lit theory and phenomenological philosophy
and for his generation of grad students it makes for nice entertainment.
They all had to try to plow through that stuff in their studies and so
enjoy hearing phrases and terms thrown around with a kind of abandon that makes
for great stand-up since they really couldn't have passed real exams on the
obscure French theorists anyway. Have you ever seen Blue Man Group?
We saw it years ago when it started in Cambridge and I've been amazed it
has lasted so long and is now a fixture of night life in many cities.
Again---for audiences who had to sit through a semester or two of
required art history, art humanities, etc, the comedy troupe mentions all the
key people and key paintings and such from Van Gogh to Frank Lloyd to Pollock
and everyone can nod head and enjoy the jokes and slapstick pratfalls.
Iyer no
doubt is trying to figure out himself and I love it to be able to see now that
when people do pontificate in places like book review supplements and
especially now Interviews, they speak blithely about "the way things are
now" when what they mean is
this is how
I see it for the time being, or me and my buds (who will talk to me).
Voice.
I wonder if this is why writers turn to writing drama or near-drama.
Even Cormac McCarthy's late novels are as lean and spare as almost
scripts and screenplays. Beckett turned to writing plays, Bernhard did
too. Have you ever thought of trying to write something in play form?
You see a lot of plays. You should give it a try. Plus you've
even been an actor.
Surely it
all comes down to one or two or three voices and they can spin along in story
form. The dominance of the narrator's voice is what I guess still makes
novels more appealing to me. I don't enjoy trying to read many plays.
I still like the voice of the narrative flowing along.
We usually
watch the british pbs detective shows. Last night another Inspector
Morse. Like the actors a lot and what they can do. But the basic
script and genre form is really starting to irritate and bore. Maybe I've
seen too many.
Death of the
novel was a big topic when I was in college. Now the websites talk about
the death of literature. Saw a good piece somewhere calling for an end to
English departments. He pointed out that the university study of
literature only began in the
mid to late
19th C (like everything else we now take for granted). Especially the
study of modern literatures. When I was in grad school there was still a
faint hold-over aroma in the air that studying English lit was fine but that
American lit was too young to have a real "body" and was of a lower
grade in all respects and not really worth serious study.
Could be
that what we sensed as the Romance of writing, being a writer, was itself a
mid-20th C thing generated by college study of literature and then of writing
(creative). And journalism, communication. Academic study of these
topics wears them out as it throws everything out of special keeping into
common coin.
Publishing
on a small scale for friends and whoever turns out to be pretty satisfying and
much more like the way things always were for most writers in the history of
the world. Replace "handing around copies of your poems for friends
at court" with posting on the internet and messaging various interest
groups and it makes "new york publishing" from say 1870-1970 as the
true historical anomaly.
Like the
bankruptcy of Detroit. So much of the current "new world" way
of doing things reveals how overblown and inflated so much of what we had
earlier taken for the real world actually was in truth. Same for the
deflation of the previous british empire.
Saw a Tesla
car last weekend at a new mall outside of Boston. High-end electric car
from silicon valley. 70k Not sure it will make it, now with oil
tracking postponing the "end of oil" for another few generations. ?
New kind of
ride service in boston now. Uses some sort of app. Much cheaper
than getting a taxi. You use your phone to give your location, car shows
up to take you where you want to go. Not sure the name.
Hope this
easing of the heat wave holds for the rest of the summer. Bet you do too.
Tuesday night
amazing to have news that the Tess Reed murder has been
solved twenty-one years after the event---
saw it on Facebook---
we were all surprised
to hear about this today. this poor girl was murdered a block from our
house. we all knew her,
real shock to the
whole campus and for years we all had suspicions and rumors about various
people---quite amazing
to have a
"tv" sort of thing spring back to life on the news like this ----
A Massachusetts inmate has been charged with the
stabbing death of a New Hampshire woman 21 years ago, and a defense lawyer
believes his client — already serving time for two murders — implicated
himself. New Hampshire authorities said Craig Conkey, 46, is charged with
first-degree murder and an alternate charge of reckless second-degree murder in
the 1991 death of Theresa Reed, a 30-year-old associate registrar at Plymouth
State University. Attorney Bernard Grossberg said he has a client by that name
who is serving two life sentences for killing women in Lexington, Mass., in
1992 and 1994, and that his client contacted New Hampshire authorities last
year about his involvement in a New Hampshire homicide.
© Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All
rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed.
Facebook---
hope it is so.
my tweet If true a true relief too
fascinating email from
Kirsten G about her new boyfriend -- hope they do go to south america and it
does last for her --
No tweets out of Lar
Iyer. Maybe I overdid it. Maybe he's on vacation, traveling, over
worked, working on his book, pissed at all my thoughts and questions and impositional
readings of my life onto his life and ideas. Does my envy and jealousy come through in such stuff? My own cries for attention? No doubt.
gorgeous full moon right
off to the right tonight
Weds July 24
great swim this
morning. Eric Bouchard and Char
and we all agreed about what a relief it was to have that murder indictment
announced. Shows how long you hold
that stuff in your body. I emailed
Dick Mertens and Mark Christensen.
two tweets (just to show
Lars no hard feelings. He did
tweet today---one hour ago if twitter is to be believed--- Sal: 'Why don't you write your own philosophy?' W.: 'Look at
us!. And, turning to me: Look at him!'
no reply from Kirsten tho
to my long tickle to her last night
cooked quinoa for lunch
-- avocado salad
long messages from my
correspondents---
this from Mark Christensen
Bob,
That was a sudden
message from the past. That happened the year after I
left, but I was still
following the news.
We have lost touch
with each other. What's up with you? Are you painting?
I'm now long divorced,
single again, with my mother living with me. She's
88 and very hearing
impaired, but intellectually sharp. Reads a lot;
plays bridge; does the
shopping and cooking.
I'm teaching.
This past May I completed a B.A. in Music, with a vocal
emphasis. The
last two years as both full time teacher and full time
student have been
arduous. Self discipline and time management were very
much in play.
Still, I gave a senior recital that set a couple of dubious
records: oldest
vocal recitalist in BSU history (by 25 years) and only
professor in another
discipline ever to do that. I actually attended my
graduation ceremony
for the first time out of six degrees.
The poems keep coming.
I have a new collection of prose poems due out
this fall. Title
is Broken Welds.
The teaching continues
to be varied and satisfying. This coming fall I'm
teaching a graduate
seminar in composition theory, a liberal education
course in
understanding poetry, an English Education course in methods of
teaching English in
secondary schools, and a capstone course for our BFA
degree in creative
writing. Quite a variety; I am looking forward to it
with great pleasure.
I do hope you and
yours are well. I've enjoyed thinking about you again.
I often talk about you
in my writing/rhetoric courses. I hope your ears
burn inexplicably
occasionally.
Mark
-----------
from Kirsten
tee hee. a colleague
of mine googled him, too. you guys are doing all my work for me.
will check out iyer,
though feeling like i've indulged in too much insanity the past week or so and
now need to find some kind of equilibrium
sobering up, literally
and (i hope) figuratively
i feel fondness for
bolano but yeah, no devotion
evergreen, i don't
think so--maybe linkedin misled? yes, marathon, ultramarathon, mountaineering
freak--and maybe not for the right reasons (are there any right reasons to be
into that stuff? or into anything of course)
not a quaker, just a
quaker college, i think. raised catholic in philly. from totally normal stock
who nonetheless managed to screw him up
into drug experiences
(though hasn't done for a while) wants to do, uh, all kinds of things. . . or
at least needs to feel that it's possible he might. which i can, of course,
relate to.
okay, fun is over (for
now)
project equilibrium
restoration begins. reading, writing, studying spanish, deciding whether south
america somewhere really a good idea (still quite possibly yes--feeling so dead
here)
wonder how you're
occupying yourself. still painting? writing or thoughts of writing? hope you
feel able to go after whatever you most need/crave--you totally should--wonder
if some kind of artistic residency/retreat appeals (whether painting or
writing)
----------
from Phil
"Compare Homer's
prolepsis to Shakespeare's ghosts and to Dante's premonitions, then contrast
these with Ibsen's reversals, Chekov's irresolution, and Kafka's absurdity in
the light of omniscient narrators in Jane Austen, narrative delay in Henry
James, and free indirect speech in Joyce. Time: one hour."
The above quote may or
may not actually have been an hour test in some lit class, but it is
used by Lee Siegel, a guy with a PhD in Literature from Columbia (who
studied with Lionel Trilling) to argue in an article entitled "Who
Ruined the Humanities?" that the study of literature should be dropped
from colleges and universities. Great books should be introduced to
students in high school, he argues, but after that just let people read because
post-WWII literature study in colleges and universities has produced
little more than idiocies such as the test question above.
He also argues that
the study of literature really got started in the US only after WWII as a way
to sop up all the vets who wanted to go to college, learn a little bit
about the world, but not work too hard. Then it became a career
opportunity and newly "doctored" profs started to ruin the
reading experience with a bunch of "theories" that just keep getting
more ridiculous every year. He adds that studying the
humanities as THE way to learn to think analytically and write
well is a claim that amounts to pure horse manure.
I think he has a
point, but even this guy admits that some profs can enhance the reading
experience to a point that the student would never have reached on his/her
own. Some profs, as he admits, are spectacular, although most are
not ( which, of course, is true of nearly every group on
earth).
Is literature dead or
dying? In my opinion, no. Will it lose most of its mass
influence? Absolutely. The world is splintering in soooo many
ways. It ain't just literature that is facing a great splintering, but
politics, philosophy/religion, all the arts, life styles - you name it,
it's coming apart.
****
Like you and Va, Peg
and I watch the PBS Brit detective shows, and, because Peg has cable, we
also watch (on the MHz channel) detective shows from Italy, Germany, Sweden,
Norway, and France. At first I really liked them all, but
like you I'm growing weary of them. Time and time again these days, I say
to myself: "I don't believe this plot at all. It's just what writers
come up with to produce a weekly or monthly show. It's farfetched
nonsense and, more and more, these shows get like American cop shows:
gotta have a car chase or a foot race or some sort of 'action.' Ho
hum! " At first one is interested because it's a different
culture and unfamiliar personality types. But once the viewer
is familiar with the background and character-types, one starts to pay
attention to the story, and that's when the whole thing starts to fall
apart.
(I think whatever
happened to the woman who lived down the block from you will prove to be much
less "interesting" than the plots of TV shows. Instead, it will
be all too familiar to the police and all too real: death by dumb-fuck for no
good reason.)
Incidentally, Laurence
Fox, who plays Hathaway on the Inspector Lewis series, may be the son of some
semi-famous Brit actor also named Fox. These days I always
wonder how some actor got a plum role and frequently it's because of his
family.
Yes, indeed, I
have considered writing plays. Indeed, I think I often write my
stories from the viewpoint of an actor. My cousin in Connecticut
once asked me why I had so much dialogue in my novels. I think it's my
acting background coming out. I see scenes in terms of characters
interacting and not so much from the point of view of the background
author. It's another reason I write often in the first person.
I can get inside a character's head and stay there. To me, that's
more credible than an author explaining what the characters don't reveal.
Phil
--------
note from Mark most surprising. Wonder how I should reply after all
these years? Strange to have him
say he quotes me ! in his classes---that is hard to believe.
Kirsten urges me to write--always nice--always
what writers say to one another wistfully--- do seriously consider
writing your short boring and banal novel thing
Splintering that is
the key term---and the way the world will seem to us until we're well out of it
I had seen Siegel's
piece and liked it and was going to send it to you. Turns out he's now
about 55, perfect age for realizing that what he used to take for granted is
now all over. Of course he's right in his way and in fact he is proposing
a sort of new form of the old idealism. But what else can any of us do.
Literature of course is not over and everything is getting re-configured.
And just as with the death of the novel and all other cultural deaths, we
will all be surprised at how much sheer inertia will keep lots of things going
far longer than we had thought possible. Or "sustainable" to
use the new term that I really still can't stand! I'm sure Sitter would
give Siegel a very calm, measured response showing him how and why he misreads
the whole situation. At least I think he would.
Humanities will
definitely shrink in various ways and plug themselves into other
"collaborative" programs. Never underestimate the sticking
power of a higher ed payrolled cog! As a former cog I know how we can
re-adjust ourselves to serve on the next committee. In fact just as I was
leaving that world I noticed
that there's a new
move for humanists to team up with the techies---the computer support
people---of course, follow the money. You'll get a degree
in the decadent
movement in Euro-American culture and the future of perma-culture in the
development of wind power economics. Stuff like that.
Entrepreneuralism
with a vengeance in the academy because any word can be combined with any other
word to make a task force, a cross-discipline discipline,
a "new"
grant application funding source.
Really like your last
line--- It's another reason I write often in the first person. I
can get inside a character's head and stay there. To me, that's more
credible than an author explaining what the characters don't reveal.
I've gravitated to
first-person fiction over the years I think for that sort of reason. I
trust that voice much more than the "omniscient" puppeteer in
third-person fiction. I'm reading Leonard Cohen's second novel,
Beautiful Losers, published 1966 and now a real time capsule experience.
Also started a big new work by a Norwegian---Karl
Ove Knausgaard---gotten lots of hype. He is pretty good and writing about
his own life---or a subtly manipulated version of it which he somehow manages
to make really compelling. Maybe we're all just tired of the formulas for
a while.
Thurs afternoon July 25
Santiago feast day reminder the sad train wreck in Spain
nice repy from Lars---see he was not mad at me at
all
Hi Bob,
Ah, so you've worked
at a badminton ethics university - very funny!
Well, I mentioned my
monk years in this interview:
Coldness and Cruelty -
very fine, read it when it came out first in translation. Must reread.
Lossky - yes, I know
his Mystical Theology (actually, I'd forgotten that title). The Philokalia ...
Unlikely that I'll do
a further W and Lars book, but it would have them going over the monk years
again, if they did.
best,
Lars
also got a nice hello from Karolyn Kinane while
we lunched at the Co-Op in Concord.
She's at the end of her first sabbatical and doesn't want to go back. Needed to confess that to someone and I
was the perfect image.
ok so later the disappointment sets in in the
sense that Iyer has turned his grad school student wit into a splash of
authorial success among a coterie of grad students in philosophy and lit and
his kind reply to my needling has shown me again that yes I threw too much at
him and what I had imagined was nothing of what he had to offer back. He was not in the orthodox and
benedictine schools as a devout youngster but he went to Patmos after or during
his grad school wanders because in typical English fashion he wanted someplace
warm and cheap to live out of UK for a while and he lived with the monks on
Patmos because they would let him hang out in exchange for a few chores and he
could live cheaply in the English fashion. What did I expect or want by investing so much in wanting a
reply from him? I guess I wanted
to be the clever, witty grad student all over again. Or I wanted the adulation of another student, I was missing
again the classroom, my classroom, where I could be the leading wit and have
the youngsters laugh at my jokes and hang around after and want to have a
drink. Falstaff's folly all over
again. that sort of thing Ah well
FRIDAY right after noon
composing tweets while we swam earlier this
morning.
after The Party dried up, everyone wallowed in
Fellow Traveler swag
Phil on July 24
Funny you should
mention Sitter, then talk about how humanities profs are latching onto
other disciplines. That's exactly what John told me at the reunion
that he was about to do at ND. He was joining some
cross-discipline team devoted to ecology and saving the planet. I think
he even mentioned it in his bio for the reunion booklet. However, I still
can't see what 18th century English poetry can contribute to this effort.
Miller told me
recently that Sitter confessed to him back in the mid 60s that he was
having a hard time at Harvard. I'm sure he did since I had trouble
at Exeter. I suspect that John got his phd at the U of
Minnesota because his overall record at Harvard was fairly mediocre. I
recall Vicki, his wife at the time, saying that John didn't do well on
tests but did better on papers. I think he got better as time went
on and eventually published a couple of books that aren't bad.
However, I'm still baffled about why Cambridge U Press chose him to edit the
poetry anthology. I have to believe England is filled with people who
could do it, probably better than John. I asked him about this at the
reunion and his answer was pretty vague. I got the feeling that he was
willing and available to do the job for a certain price and others weren't, but
that's just a guess.
Of course, I didn't do
very well at Brown, but that was mainly because I was "majoring in
motorcyles." After Exeter, I got nothing but A's in my first
report card at Brown. At that point I said fuck it and began drinking
my way through college. In the end I didn't get an A in any of my
courses in my 4 years, but I did manage to get Cs in some courses without
reading a single page of any of the assigned books.
By the way, the fact
that your ex-students keep in touch with you says good things about the
value of your classes at PSU.
Phil
------------
Friday July 26
beautiful evening out
Zero debt balances on the credit cards as of today. Curious to see if we can make it
through the rest of the year with no further withdrawals from TIAA. Not so sure at this point but I think
our big expenses are over for the year.
Saturday evening
Actually walked through campus a bit earlier, front of Blair dorm. Deserted. First time I've done that in two years or more? Gorgeous day. We drove to Lebanon and walked the common, delightful lunch
on the terrace and three tomatoes.
I will at nothing tonight just to see if I really can do it, Brad Pilon
style, though at the thought all afternoon I've said well, maybe lettuce only,
maybe a wee bit of chicken stir-fry which Va wants with leftover couscous. Tired though and waiting for the kids
to arrive probably Sunday afternoon, evening, or Monday. Dave's concert in Cheshire might be
this evening and not last night. I
was so keen to answer Mark C's email the other day but now I'm not. Twenty-two years since he was here,
twenty-one I guess. He was here
year after Tess Reed's murder.
Whatever I had thought I had to say to him is probably best left in the
empty mental bin of lost messages, forgotten impulses.
What I do want to note is how sweet Pessoa's Book of
Disquiet is when you finally finish it.
Cousineau definitely missed that about it. Somehow he too intently graphed it with his formalist grid,
intent on making it like Eliot and successfuly (american?) coherent modernism.
How quiet and gentle Pessoa is compared to Joyce for
instance. All his early century
bluster and blarney hidden behind the
hocus-pocus of every language, every symbol, every fancy gold braid he
could think of, even using the ordinary Jewish guy to craft an anti-hero for
Dublin. Maybe I should read a few
pages of Ulysses just to recall that my edge against Joyce is unjustified and
late-invented. Why I don't
know? Memory of adolescence and
loving Portrait of the Artist and seeing myself as the Catholic wannabe writer
like Stephen Dedalus and knowing later that I understood at the time nothing of
the ironies Joyce was working out and was instead a ready idiot for taking it
all at face value. Something like
that? Not important really. What about Pessoa and Beckett. Again, the gentle, weary anxious
sweetness versus the harsher and more bitter emptiness of Beckett. But he came so long after Pessoa and so
much more had happened to everyone after the opening third of the century.
For my money, though, has anyone written about my two pet
topics better than Pessoa?
Feelings and envy? Disquiet
is his and I can match it somewhat with a lifelong anxiety about
everything. But I have to re-read
what he says about envy and about feeling in the sections as the end because
they are so superb. Cousineau
neglected them, did not understand them, did not understand Pessoa at all.
Sunday night
-- feels really like rain
coming---heavy gray wet air
nice day though.
walk at docks, model in pink bathing trunks and his girl rented standing
paddle boards. He looked so
perfect and had a spray on tan of some sort. She as pale and thin as a rail.
Vanity Fair uses the Proust Questionnaire. I'm inventing the Pessoa Test: the email I sent to Mark earlier. A test about dreaming and reality which
the taker/recipient can choose to answer any way he wants to and reveal thereby
what for him is dream and what real and for the sender what is real and what is
dream. All in Fernando's spirit of
inquiry into disquiet, tedium, dream, weather and writing.
Short chat with Dave earlier. They will drive up tomorrow evening.
Monday almost 3pm.
About to shower and thunder rumbling in anticipation. Can't recall if I tweeted my tweet from
the other day. "You are
always robbing exhilaration to pay for anticipation."
Any idea what I could possible be trying to mean with
this??
Heavy shower, sure to re-wet the basement and feed the
black mold once again.
Hope the kids are not on the road right now. Glad we are not. Handed in the Enterprise car this
morning and walked ALL THE WAY BACK HOME.
Slowly. Checked on the Map
App and indeed it says it was exactly One Mile. Wow.
Thunderous downpour.
No word from Mark.
Hope I didn't offend him, irritate, aggravate or worse. Do I have some compulsion to do this
sometimes? Craving attention of
any sort? Or am I misreading
because I'm full of imagined dread and disquiet? Is disquiet really strong enough a word in English? What was the Portuguese? What was the Norwegian (in Knausgaard?) What if he never replies? Ok, never know. That would be ok too. Might show me more than a reply
itself. Part of the whole PTSD
tangle that the murder itself created for all of us at the time even though we
never fully realized it? Shock
unnerves us. We know that. He may not have known about Virginia's
stroke? Forget completely who I
told and who I did not.
Feeney talks about going to Dartmouth. Last night I looked at the faculty of
the MALS programs. Don Pease's CV
is astounding. Incredibly long and
impressive. He's the King of
American Studies it seems. Didn't
realize he had published so much.
Just called Dave at 4:02. They are in Tilton having pizza at Uno's and plannning to
shop for Cécile and Emma. So now I have no idea what we will
figure for dinner since I bought ravioli at Walmart earlier. Look up Squam Lakes to see if they are
open. I guess we can always go to
Docks. But it will be late. Hot dogs or hummus on toast?
almost 6 pm Browsing in the new bio of Cohen for
background on Beautiful Losers. Irving Layton was Cohen's best older
friend when Cohen was twenty and Layton was forty. Page 67 Cohen gives the best answer I've seen on the question
of such a friendship and on how the novel portrays the relationships. It is such a great portrait of the
whole age and time---written while on drugs of various sorts and living on
Hydra, nine months time, long stretches of desperate writing, bent on proving
the second novel could be as brilliant and prize-winning as the first had been
but much different. So a wild and
experimental joy ride or trippy exploration of a book. Really conjures so much, since we came
ten years after the whole thing. 1966
we were in college but Cohen was already launched as a personality, writer,
poet, song writer, traveler.
Exactly ten years older than we are. I'm going to have to read the first novel too. Companion pieces they will be to
Knausgaard. Conflicting zeitgeists
playing off each other.
Tuesday July 30
Dave and I went to
the bank to deposit his Houghton check.
Gorgeous clear dry day.
Bringing in thai smile for lunch, Emma now asleep. 2:30. They arrived yesterday evening.
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