MAY 2015
MAY 1 Lilies of the valley day in Paris.
Swam. Va got mani and pedi at Tanger. In Starbucks in walked Dave Cummings and his two boys, Noah, 14 in a new bright turquoise pair of Nikes, and Mason, 12, quiet. Wish I had said more to him. Rosie is four years younger, or six? She and mom elsewhere. Later, walking the arcade, we saw Monique Minichiello and her two red-haired teenage daughters, sophomores now. Randy Hoyt’s girls. Eric Johnson messaged he’s living near-by on Avery and wants some interesting magazines.
Rick is having another heart flutter problem. Tomorrow we dine with the RiverRats at Harpoon. Lunch.
Sunday almost noon May 3
Plans now to overnight after Brigham’s in order to see Arnold Arboretum. Lilac sunday is Sunday. Gorgeous day today.
email to Donald in reply to his
yesterday
Enjoyed all of your comments. I've guessed it---you would ask Mr Bloom to please remove Hart Crane from the list. Important, yes, but now more and more only historically so, not eternal, as are the others.
Am I right?
Poor Mr Leader. A guy tries to do a conscientious job and gets blasted from every angle. I was not going to bring this up just yet, but he did contact me about thirteen months ago. He wanted permission to use my letters and to get certain things correct. Yes, I affirmed in writing back, Mr Burgo did live at International House but no, he never did take a course with Mr Bellow. Yes I was a member of the now legendary seminar on Joyce in the Spring of '68 in which David Greene played such a memorable role. Yes, Mr Bellow did nod to me one afternoon when we both were strolling on 59th Street in front of the Lab School. And Yes I did interview Mr Bellow in order to see if he would permit me to enroll in said seminar on Joyce. Mr Leader asked me to draft a private set of recollections with Mr Bellow (and his private secretary at the time who also lived in I House) and I sent him my 43 page manuscript with strict instructions to see how he used it before he sent his pages to his editor. He agreed. He did ask if he could use the privately famous photo of me taken at the gate of Taliesin which looks incredibly like Mr Bellow. He thought it captured the aura of the zeitgeist more successfully than any other image he had encountered.
Will everyone evetually agree he is the greatest American writer of the 20thC???
Greater than Eliot? It is always pretty hard, isn't it, for a novelist to unseat a poet, when the final tallies are counted.
I'll paste in some comments from my friend in UK who does oversee phd candidates at the university of falmouth. Rupert Loydell:
" so you doing a bit of supervision for some pennies and to keep your brain alert?
i have 5 degree dissertations this year but they are all
by muppet students. a really strange year this year.
imagine doing degree level work on lord of the rings! why? "
Muppet students! Perhaps we are grateful we never dealt with graduate students?
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from Donald
Dear Bob,
Thank you for all the M.H. Abrams e-mails (although one was sent two or three times). The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism remain high favorites with me. I did not know he was your inspiration to major in En glish. Should we hold it against him?
May edition of Vanity Fair had favorable comments by Martin Amis on the new biography of Saul Bellow, but the review in the New York Times and today in the Book Review pan it, and for the same reasons. Of course, since it only goes to 1964, our important influences on Bellow are not yet mentioned. I say this because reviewers say the author includes everything, and I do mean everything, Bellow is supposed to have experienced. And surely....
The same issue of of VF mentions Harold Bloom's next book from Mt. Sinai which names definitively the American Sublime (there are twelve that make it; see if you can name them before looking them up). I would dispute one. I used to find Bloom impossible to read, but now as I grow old, I find I agree with him more and more, especially his comments on much of contemporary literary criticism.
The April 3, 2015 TLS has a superb review of a book on Pope Francis, with him on the cover. of the issue. I've ordered the book. Until then, the review is the best thing I have read on Francis.
Thank God it's now May.
Donald
today
Dear lBob,
You hit it correctly.
You are good, indeed very, very good. Far more time and imagination than I have. I am delighted that you were contacted. I expect vol. 2 to be about two thousand pages. By way of comment: I am tiring of extra long biographies. Look what Erdman did in one for Joyce or Peter Brown for Augustine. A Winston Churchill might take two or more volumes, but Claire Booth Luce??? I am enjoying Andew Roberts's one volume on Napoleon (and he, too, would deserve more}
I think Bellow will probably be considered the greatest American writer of the second half of the twentieth century, but look how Sam Tanenhaus in the NYT Book Review ends his otherwise well written review of Leader's tome. " Slipping away ...!" I know, the pendulim swings. I must also take exception to his remark about Bellow's" movie-star good looks." As he aged, I found his face distinguised, distinctive, even a bit sexy (he certainly had a swagger about him). So, fascinating, yes, but movie-star handsome? De gustibus....
Martin Amis's review of the nonfiction is excellent."Deep readers of the World, Beware" remains a masterpiece, as does the essay in which Bellow wrote:
"Show me the Proust of the Papuans or the Tolstoy of the Zulus, and I will read them."
Donald.
Dear D --
Forgive me, I was lying.
Through my teeth as they say.
I've always fancied myself a great novelist who never wrote, so I try these little micro-fictions on unsuspecting souls as a dumb exercise in passive-agressive idiocy or some-such. Learned it from my father I think who would tell a customer the beef roast was superb this week, Mildred fixed it last night, when we had warmed up ham and soggy green beans. This while I was off stage stocking the shelves to the right of the meat counter. He at least was selling his wares to support the family. I have no legitimate excuse except vanity of some species.
Agree with you about the movie star issue. As he aged he kept something striking in his glance and demeanour but otherwise, no.
I think today's bios have to be written for the next generations --- it is no longer a pleasure to read one's age being portrayed in such detail and leaden prose. I have glanced at the tome on Cheever, another on Leonard Cohen, one or two others and I really can't get into reading them for pleasure. You see up close and personal how fragile and unattainable a true portrayal really is of the person, of the time and period, of the age. History becomes yet another miracle to wonder at. Or flawed opera (as Don Sheehan used to refer to liturgy).
Also--why can I not interest myself in re-reading any of Bellow's novels? Or James's. Just don't have that kind of energy any longer? And I use it most shallowly for "what's new" rather than what was really worth it a while ago?
Have you watched the tv show "Revenge?"
Bob
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and from Phil
These days virtually all stories, whether on TV in a film or a book, strike me as meaningless as Harlequin romances that Peg used to read by the bucketful. She would read two or three a day and just toss the books into a growing heap. I called the FLBs - fucking little books - for women. And that's what most stories today seem like to me - FLBs, stupid little stories for stupid little people. Even so-called "good fiction" seems like that to me. After the story finishes I ask: "what was the point of that, other than to take up time?" Yet the paradox is that I fault people who haven't read widely and seen a fair number of films.
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I like Phil’s opinion. No softy English major stuff for him. Bellow ain’t worth nuttin’. That’s it.
Donald on the other hand replied suitably---
Bob,
Did you think for one moment I thought you were telling the truth?? Terriblly
disappointed that we are now unable to carry on the charade. Or can we? I presumed you understood that my remarks in the initial e-mail were totally in jest and meant to spark your imagination. Which they did.. I shall choose to interpret "Forgive me, I was lying" as a lie. Clever of you to introduce the untrustworthy narrator into the discourse.
Donald
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Touché, M. Burgo, touché. I will reply. On another point---the American townscape, landscape, looks and feels so vast and empty. Is that why we like going to Europe, to see a scene more dense, more anxious and fraught with enclosure and weight?
You've saved me a phone call ! Youl are still alive and you are still "in process!"
Nevertheless I know what you mean. We watch dumb tv shows and I think all of
this. I make myself pick up the book(s) I am trying to take an interest in and I
do---for a while, perhaps, but not for as long and not with the real or fake enthusiasm
I was able to muster a while back. 20 years ago? We had lunch with friends
Saturday over in Vermont and one fellow was new to us all, a neighbor of an old
friend, and I kept marvelling to myself on the way home how much energy he seemed
to have even though he works as a public defender lawyer for the state of VT and
as I learned later, he had to put his younger wife into a mental home in CT for
schizophenia about six months ago. But he's playing racketball every morning and
riding his bicycle like crazy, I also learned later, to numb himself with denial and
exhaustion. Still---he still seemed like a college kid--so young even though 50!
Can 20 years make that much a difference? And/or is it spring fever, like everything
else, all over again?
Saul Bellow as the greatest writer of the American 20th C? Or of the second half of the
century? Friend in St Louis raises this topic, looking at reviews of the huge new bio of
Bellow. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I have no personal interest any more in looking again at any one of his novels.
WTF as the kids would text? Great Lit might be over for a few centuries.
Lukacs I found published a short book recently called A Short History of the Twentieth Century. I bought it and will read it, I think. Or today I think this.
Stay tuned. Sent you a "humorous" text "about" you and Peg, these days. My homemade attempt at a Roz Chast style verbal cartoon about your new lives together.
Hang in there,
B
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Donald is generous with his praise --- even before his martini
Bob,
Please start writing that godamn novel that I think you may well have in you, if for no other reason than to make me especially envious.. Do not make it too serious. Parody and satire seem more your style. A bit autobiographical (but of course, not too revealing,) and lie through your teeth: (Art is the lie that tells the truth) . All right, we'll settle for a good New Yorker short story.
I shall comment on the contrast between European and American landscapes at a later date. One can certainly begin there, superficial ( I mean that literally, not pejoratively) as it might be, but one may always begin at the beginning with what meets the eye and dig deeper. We are never more European than when we are in America, nor more American than when we are in Europe. You may or may not include yourself and Virginia in my apercu. I employ the royal or editorial we.
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Phil forwarded something about Vietnam vet statistics---most depressing.
I am touched and heartened by Donald’s urging and faint belief that I could indeed pull off something. Maybe it is even a stronger belief than I acknowledge. And the thought of provoking someone other than myself to be envious should be cause enough. Why is it not? Why not indeed? Why shouldn’t it be. Notice that in spite of all my promptings and veiled beggings for such encouragement from Phil he has never gone ahead and said anything similar. Or if he has in his own mind it has never quite registered with me, or registered as clearly as this note from Donald has. We look for the approval and blessing of the right one who will unleash our creative urgings. But who exactly is that? And if not Donald who might it be?
I don’t like it feeling so hot so fast as today. I missed my early morning walk and now I think I have to take it as if it were a matter of life or death. Or something. We swam but that is not the same, for me, no matter what. Now, 9pm, it is so hot and muggy. I don’t feel comfortable. Too big a dinner I guess, of cold tortolini and cheese and salsa. I keep imagining the paradisical days of macrobiotics, nothing but rice and vegetables. As if.
Tuesday night May 5
Donald quip may have given me what I was looking for after all: “if for no other reason than to make me especially envious.”
This has morphed into something like this: I don’t really want to write this novel but the task has been imposed upon me by two friends---D who is racing me to the finish and W who set us both to the task with the offer of a magnificent prize. Whoever of us finishes the novel and gets it into print for all and anyone to see, wins . . . . a penthouse in the Nordstrom tower in NYC, a huge stipend for life and the private equivalent of a MacArthur Genius Grant. I have come to Copenhagen to make it happen and to avoid any possible subversion by D and his crowd. I am somewhat on the lam, in secret. At the same time I am asking any and every one to lend a hand in some way without spilling the secret. It is a secret challenge, no one may know.
Friday night May 8
Overnight in Coolidge Corner last night. Marriott Courtyard.
Long wait at Brigham’s for Dr Johnson. He worked under Dr Arthur Day who has moved to Houston. Saw nothing to suggest that the shunt is not still working just as it should. Or not. No way really to know but the three key symptoms are not present as they were twelve years ago and nothing has really gotten worse. He was very nice and basically we got the feel that our visit was not necessary or at least there was nothing to worry about.
We met up with Mike Farkas and had a very late lunch at Anna’s Taqueria. Ok, not great. Gave Mike the books and drove him over to his place in Brighton. Gorgeous day. Flowering trees everywhere. They we drove him to Kenmore Square where he was meeting a friend. We strolled Beacon street a little before turning in.
Today I got up earlier and took a morning walk. About 7:30 am. Breeze and cool but glorious sunshine again. After breakfast we drove out to Arnold A. Got a wheelchair but then took it back after getting about 1200 steps down the roadway. My hand wouldn’t take trying to hold onto it until we needed it. Climbed half-way up the hill and saw some of the early lilacs. Got lost getting out of the city, lost in Southie as per usual. Even with Siri on the GPS!
Tuesday May 12 Been a while it seems. Zipped the paperwork back to TIAA for the home loan, very disgusted by the badly organized cache. Heard a piece on npr about these lines of credit coming back again after the recovery from the near-collapse. No wonder if this paperpack is any indication. No wonder it toppled. Worst sort of bankish forms and no explanations. Shoulda gone with the local bank and walked in when necessary to deal with a person. Gale Dorval for instance. Dumb of me not to. refresh salon in the morning. Walked around south Laconia near the big catholic cemetery.
Re: Bankishness gone wild ---headline in today’s Salon “The magnitude of falsity is enormous”: Federal judge rips into banks implicated in 2008 collapse
And on Higher Ed --- “Academia is the Titanic”: Mark Bauerlein on teaching in the morally-bankrupt grind of the new American university.
After French group at Foster’s. Brendan Hart showed up and an old fellow who studied under Madie Barrett, Kate H, the Quebec teacher and Va. Brendan talked with me a bit before and after. He’s interning at Snowboarder magazine in CA. Was Tom ___ his ski teacher? Tom the redheaded skier who studied writing here. For a few moments the old teacher-gestalt juices flowed and the pinball bumper lights flashed and I wanted to be back in the teachery mode. Kate confirmed that all tenured teach 4-4 . . . she then whispered “unless you’re FOJ---a friend of Julie’s. Ah, ha. Same old place and its tales.
note from Dennis
Bob, Thank you for the payment. And the extra. That's very helpful just now. How many quilts have I made for this family? Thankfully the weather is breaking and the heat is fading away. No air conditioning at work today and they refused to open the doors. I hate air conditioning but I hated that dead air worse. Just dreadful. So that wonderful breeze when I walked home proved to be such a tonic.
Watch Grace and Frankie. Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are delightful together.
Take care.
Love Dennis
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We did see the first episode of Grace and Frankie.
WEds morning May 13 Peo meeting and day off.
Drove down across the Mass line, back up west of Manchester through Weare. Beautiful day.
Thursday May 14
Chilly but gorgeous and breezy day. Note to Donald been in my head a few days so I’ll try drafting it.
“ The De Burgo library receives The New Yorker, New York, TLS, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books, among Bob,
Please start writing that godamn novel that I think you may well have in you, if for no other reason than to make me especially envious.. Do not make it too serious. Parody and satire seem more your style. A bit autobiographical (but of course, not too revealing,) and lie through your teeth: (Art is the lie that tells the truth) . All right, we'll settle for a good New Yorker short story.
I shall comment on the contrast between European and American landscapes at a later date. One can certainly begin there, superficial ( I mean that literally, not pejoratively) as it might be, but one may always b egin at the beginning with what meets the eye and dig deeper. We are never more European than when we are in America, nor more American than when we are in Europe. You may or may not include yourself and Virginia in my apercu. I employ the royal or editorial we.
I must go now. My martini is calling me.others.
Answered for Dr. Burgo by his private archivist”
Dear Donald
Your astute comments about our novels have been resonating around my inner bell chamber and prompt me to propose a solution to kickstart us both. The prospect of inciting the other to be especially envious almost gets us to our writing desks, but not quite yet. Or so it seems in this household. So, I have come up with an incentive that will make us both position our derrieres and take up our computerized pens once and for all and get with it. You, too, mon semable, have a novel wishing to come forth as well.
After speaking with my brother in law M. Uddo in New Orleans, he has contacted his confreres in French law across the pond, and they in turn have privately contacted Jean-Jacques and he has, incredibly enough, agreed to these terms. Forthwith a Competition and a Prize. One of us Will Complete his Novel.
Who on earth was it who ever said each person has at least one novel within them? Found this but not the anwer to the question.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/28/opinion/think-you-have-a-book-in-you-think-again.html
The Competition: Who finishes his novel first, wins the prize. Start date will be September 8, Feast of Our Lady’s. Completion date open. Definition of “novel”, a loosely or tightly linked set of characters and tales at least 20,000 words long. Quality is of no concern.
The Prize: Jean-Jacques will give the winner one of his residences and a bank account in France sufficient to maintain the property until the death of the new owner.
If this doesn’t get your skinny butt seated for a minimum of two hours a day spinning your tales and yarns into a simulacrum of a novel, then what will? Do not make it too serious. Parody and satire seem more your style. A bit autobiographical (but of course, not too revealing,) and lie through your teeth: (Art is the lie that tells the truth).
My novel, by contrast, might be a bit more moody, serious and fake serious, waffling and uncertain, satiric and reliable, not phony but not kitschy either, wandering around all over the newly avaliable literary apps and robotic programs for writing such castles in the air. Or skinny new york skyscrapers.
There. We must chat on the eve of Sept 8th. Jean-Jacques and Basile Uddo and the team of lawyers on both sides have made the appointments for a conference call on that date. May the best bullshitter win! The loser, of course, has the right of house-guest first on the list, three months of the year.
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tues night May 19
wow, been a long time. No reply from Donald, must be visiting. Great birthday yesterday for Willow. Lunch at Consuelo’s and walking in the mall and gouté at Crosby’s in Nashua (old style bakery). Three videos from the kids.
No pool and missing it. Kathie tomorrow and day off. Where to ?
Alan Mann and his cabinet guy Warren showed up a minute or two before 5pm. Measured and went over details. Also the Azure glass tile showed up few days before from Chicago. Ball is rolling. We both feel much better with Alan than with the Lowe’s committee. Glad Va came around on that. Mortgage guy even answered the phone today and we got some things done on that.
Weds
day off
even The Kloons just posted a video about their day off adventures--he/she got his hair cut & she/he decided it looked good after being at first a bit pissed
Indian meal in Salem. Not much to Salem except what seems to be the original strip drive from Mass up into tax-free NH. Chocolate at the Dancing Lion.
post on Facebook today May 22
Stereoscopic Summer Reading project: 20th C History by two different writers.
John Lukacs: A Short History of the Twentieth Century, 2013.
Geoffrey Blainey: A Short History of the 20th Century, 2005.
Lukacs born 1924, Hungary, American since 1950?+/-. I took his history classes my first and second years at LaSalle University. He has published over thirty books. I was born in 1944.
Blainey born 1930. Australia. Know nothing about his work. Published over thirty-five books. Distinguished says Wiki.
Lukacs' book is 212 pages, no notes. Blainey's 329 + 27 pages of notes.
I've read about ten of Lukacs' books, maybe more, but not all.
Saturday night May 23
No Outlander tonight. Memorial day holiday weekend. We emptied the cabinets above the pantries and the refrigerator. I took a nap. Chatted with Jeff N about the bike trails he loves to ride in the woods and how well they’ve been developed over the past twenty years. Big fat-tire bike. Also about the kitchen remodel. Later, after dinner, I was looking up apartment rentals in Paris. Nothing popped up on Cambronne. Looked for Miollis and some did. Just found “our” place on ParisAttitude---listed as “Ecole Militaire” 65sqm Ref 10554 2397 euros a month! Did we pay that?
Monday night May 25 Phone chat with Donald while we walked in the Tilton Wally’s late this afternoon. He says he has no novel within, is too left brain, I have much more right brain at work (and by implication could write a novel). Rue Forche ? is the private street in the 9th where J-Jacques has the apartment (in addition to the other two there). He also owns one or two or three other houses given to him or left to him by Patrick. He hasn’t spoken with him since December. That surprises me but then don’t we all get to the place of talking with each friend about once a year? Bruce is taking him to NY in July, he’ll visit Suzanne on Long Island and stay with the guy who arrives today for a visit there in SL. Phone chat with Anne yesterday. Kevin is bringing his black girl friend to Hickory for the next family get together. Chris will report all to Anne. Jennifer bringing her boyfriend, lawyer from Pennsacola, trial lawyer. Max Taylor Milner graduated from Bard. Rick is feeling his exhaustion again---so much for the surgery helping him with this problem. Roy was down again to visit and hang out.
Tuesday
The hospital staff in Athens is calling Bob “Sponge” after Sponge Bob Square Pants.
We will discharge your wife in two days and fly you both back home. A doctor will be on the plane with you. You can choose which hospital you want to send her to in your region. Perhaps Dartmouth Hitchcock or UMass General or another hospital in Boston. She will be there for two or three more weeks and then after that she will go to a residence program in physical therapy for three or four months. The young doctor spoke to me from behind his desk, which was on a raised dias in his large office in the Hôpital Lariboisier, Paris. Virginia had experienced her first seizure a week ago. Who on earth was going to pay for all of this? Boggle! What alien worlds we lived in. Well, I said, marveling to myself at how good his English was and wondering how I would frame my dismay. We want to complete our visit to Paris for another week and then after that we go to Spain for two weeks where Virginia is due to give a graduate seminar at the University of Santiago Compostela. The doctor looked at his desk for a while and then he said quietly. As to the payments, I don’t know. I’m sure your arrangements will be able to cover them. And, pause, while Spain has made great progress in many areas over the past few years, I would not, pause, go there for any medical treatment. It was my turn to sit silently for a while, my mind spinning in pretty much total disbelief. I needed to call my son and his wife and have them come back with me the next day and speak French and explain things as we saw them and as we saw what he proposed as entirely impossible. Not to say off the mark about Virginia’s actual state of health at the moment, which was fully recovered I thought from the seizure. She was bored and anxious to get back to our beautiful rented apartment at the foot of Montmartre, with views up to Sacre Coeur and from the other side out over the whole of the city.
Tuesday afternoon May 26 Super hot and humid now. Slept late, until 7:30 but still just took a nap. Took Zyrtec last night. Did it help my hand, the squito sting? Hard to say. Paula came today. Unusual for a Tuesday. She broke her arm about two weeks ago. In a small splint now. What to do with a day off tomorrow? Super hot, up to 91.
Prompted to write the above by Nancy’s posts about their adventures in the hospital in Athens.
day off Wednesday Udupi restaurant in Nashua next to Costo. Felt family-run, pleasant feel, little grocery next door. Back-lot little mall of shops directly across from Barmarkian’s and the big mall. Then the car wash, the “new” starbucks, reading Knausgaard, barnes&noble and home.
May 29 So far it is Sleep-In Friday 8:45 and Willow snoozing. I just finished shower. Gorgeous out and cooler after the thunderstorms.
Grass peeking up through the straw too all over the lawn. Maybe I don’t have to water any more? This feels like it should be Memorial Day weekend. Years past it was.
Sunday May 31
In Bookforum an excellent review by Prudence Peiffer of a biography of Agnes Martin. Discussing Martin’s love life she notes two relationships with women, perhaps others. “Martin denied being a lesbian, though. She was an isolationist, refusing to be attached to anyone or any cause; sometimes she even refused a signifying pronoun altogether, referring to individual women with the distant “they.”
Reading in Calasso about tedium and boredom in Baudelaire, Chopin and Delacroix. That was Madame Azur. Next chapter has the marvelous title “The Dream of the Brothel-Museum.” Wow, the 19th Century was awesome.
Last night we were turned-off and maybe even embarassed by the sadistic sexual violence of the finale of Outlander on Starz. Male rape scene played as strongly as ever seen on tv before. Just read a piece in Variety about it and even the showrunner said he had to stop when they were doing the editing and cutting. The author was there and involved, she insisted the confession scene be kept. Variety for May 30. I guess I’ll fall back on my Deleuze essay once more: sadists speak to sadists, need each other, and masochists masochists and never the twain shall meet. This Outlander show has all the either-or’s and sadistic slants that, ultimately, always drive me crazy. So does “Grace and Frankie” which was completed afterwards. Not so funny and somewhat irritating, especially Waterhouse’s character’s responses to the fact that Frankie and Sol sleep together one more time. That doesn’t seem nearly that terrible as so many other tales about newly divorced people testify. The question about Outlander is why Galbaldon made the rape such a strong item in the story---but perhaps it is essential and even brilliant within the parameters of the woman’s romance genre. Just looked up Ron Moore and he seems to have long list of credentials on Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica etc etc--macho-geeky sci-fi guy. Was he right for this production?
Jennifer Bertrand on her blog complained about how the whole book trivializes rape. Commenter Kiko Lohr
December 21, 2014 at 11:02 pm
Yep. This sums up my take on the story as well. I haven’t even finished it, but the continual presence of rape as a plot device and as titillation is making me extremely uncomfortable, and I came online to read some reviews and see if it gets better. I’m glad I came to this page, because I would have been very upset if I’d read further. Thank you.
Like
Reply
Jennifer Bertrand
December 21, 2014 at 11:24 pm
I completely understand and I’m glad the article helped. I did the same as you, except after finishing the novel, and was surprised by how many reviews gloss over this content.
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Galbaldon herself is a scientist, biologist, by training. So I guess doing romance fiction for sci-geeks is what gives her the license to use rape as cheap plot device and titillating emotional power machinery.
really rainy day today. Steady, cool. Seasonal at last. Feels sort of good. Willow burrowed in to working on a paper on V-I and pilgrimage.
Galbaldon is Catholic, Va says. So there’s all the sadistic crucifixion imagery. Plus I think she’s got some Mexican/Hispanic thread in there too.
Monday first day of June. I was going to have a project of loading all the journal months onto the other Chromenos blogger site for posterity. Haven’t done that yet. Might get to it my birthday month, eh. ?
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
April 2015
APRIL 2015
1 APRIL WEDS
Phat Boys for lunch with Greg today in Cornish. Great visit. Afterwards I took a short walk and fell into a delightful encounter with a guy in front of a big blue house where I had stopped to take some photos of the faded siding. Bo a musician, guitarist, and former teacher, I think. He and his wife Valerie are new to Cornish, opening an antique shop later this year. House of her aunt which she visited for thirty years. Will see if I can get over this summer and chat with him again.
Beautiful day. I thought maybe in a week with the off Saturday I could go all the way to Portland and demand a free cup of tea from Ray Marcotte.
News that Jerry Zinfon died yesterday. Prostate cancer Nancy says. Never knew he had been a Marine in Korea!
Thursday night April 2
Lamictal arrived, day early, on budget promised. Hooray. Good swim and then ReFresh for new do. Nice reply from John Sitter at Notre Dame:
Dear Bob,
Good to hear from you, Doktor Herr Professor Emeritus!
To your question: Here we have two doctoral exams. The first, based on reading lists, is not ceremonial; i.e., people do occasionally fail it, or sometimes part of it, and have to repeat. The 2nd, the dissertation defense, is ceremonial in the sense that the dissertation has already been deemed finished, perhaps pending minor corrections. There is conversation about strengths & shortcomings, the latter usually in the form of suggestions for what to do do before submitting parts for publication, etc.
So it depends mainly on which this is. But in any case, nodding mysteriously is a good bet.
All's well here. More of my energy is going into courses on literature & the environment and into a team-taught interdisciplinary course on sustainability. Or perhaps pre-disciplinary. I plan to do it a couple more years or until the planet has clearly been saved. Whichever comes first. We are trying to decide whether this will be where we retire. We like it, but each winter gets us browsing Atlanta real estate listings.
I hope this finds you well & thriving. I'm sure it will be gratifying to be in on your former student's doctoring. And there's a pretty good chance that in June the snows of Boston will finally be the snows of yesteryear.
All best,
John
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Friday
Short walk to break-in the Pearl Izumi EM Road N 2 v2
Step into to the meat-and-potatoes of the E:Motion collection. As a high-mileage, neutral trainer, the EM Road N 2 contains moderate cushioning. Unlike most traditional running shoes that feature a static heel-to-toe drop, the E:Motion collection has an always-changing drop that shifts as you move through your stride. It adapts to your body and propels you forward in an intuitive flow for a smoother, more efficient run. The result? A blend of excellent ground contact with a high-performance, responsive ride. The seam-free upper gives it an even more natural, skin-like feel.
this text from Runningshoes.com Took out the insole so might put them back later for a fuller test of the dynamic motion promised.
Is strange to go back from barefoot to padding. But maybe a good move, given recent scare about feet and legs and back. Good to stretch out the back on regular basis. Sitting at the computer no doubt a big factor.
Found the site that convinced me: running.competitor.com
best clear comparison discussions -- graphics and text --
on the Pearl
Incorporating less-is-more design principles while still offering enough cushioning, protection and energetic pop for a wide range of training runs and races, the updated N2 is the epitome of modern shoe design. The new seamless, one-piece stretchy mesh upper, enhanced by supportive but minimalistic heat-welded overlays, provides a supremely connective fit for all foot shapes. The updated, softer two-layer foam midsole improves great heel impact cushioning and bolsters the heel-toe flow of the shoe. Our wear-testers loved this shoe for its amazing agility, inherent stability and proprioceptive feeling for both slower and faster running. Although it has a good amount of cushioning, it doesn’t give off a mushy or even springy sensation—more of a moderate softness that serves up a responsive ride and allows for great feel for the ground. We tested both the neutral-oriented N2 and the light stability M2 model and preferred the N2 for the uninhibited smoothness it provides.
Best for: A variety of training runs and races from short to long and slower to faster.
weights: 9.6 oz. (men’s), 8.4 oz. (women’s)
heel-toe offset: 4mm; 23mm (heel), 19mm (forefoot)
Read more at http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/2015-running-gear-guide/2015-running-gear-guide-road-shoes_123444/8#Tz0seL4FPXuwC9Wr.99
so this shoe ADDS a 4mm rise-drop to my Barefoot feel and gait. Oh dear.
Easter Sunday night April 5
Overnight at the Fairmont on Copley. High winds. Otherwise sunny and bright and almost warmish. Dinner with Mike Farkas at Lolitas on Dartmouth and today dinner at the Atlantic Fish Co on Boylston.
Breakfast at the Oak Room in the hotel. Vaguely familiar. Did I stay there once on my own 12 years ago? Not impossible. We both think we had never stayed there. Looks wonderful. Refurbished a few years ago for the centenary. Turns out it is owned, ultimately, by Saudi Arabia kingdom! Canadian management.
Music at Trinity as per traditions.
Monday night April 6
Va felt bad again last night so we called Larson and drove there, arrived at 10 but phoned and they couldn’t see us until 4. Lunched, shopped, goute-ed, Larson is ordering an e e g and a cat scan just to see if the shunt has moved and if it needs to be re-set.
Dr Albert Day or Alfred Day ? at Brigham and Women’s, retired back to Texas now. Sent a great letter to us when he did. Va remembered that. I had forgotten until she mentioned it.
Shoes galore. Wore the Mizumis today. oops Izumi. Feet did thank me even though they feel tight and pinchey and a wee high. Four others arrived today.
Maybe shoe obsession goes back to wanting to be on the basketball team like my older brother, wanting to be a jock while knowing that would never, could never, happen.
Four pair of new shoes at once! Yikes. manic-d? All are blue and gold, florescent green-gold. Might get away with not being noticed quite. Will see. Might have to invoke the Chase rewards angle. Free books, free shoes??
Finished Iyer’s book on Blanchot. Early effort. Lots of good stuff but lacking, finally, in real explanatory power. Not far enough back from Blanchot. Goes in circles, repeats, pastes in clumps, ambitious and bright but not yet fully formed. Will take a look at the second book but might not give it much attention for now. Back to more direct work on Bataille.
Discovered a new American writer in bookforum. Goyen, William Goyen. Friend of Katherine Anne Porter et al. How did I never hear of him??
New Balance Zante
heel-toe offset: 6mm; 16mm (heel), 10mm (forefoot) 6mm
HAVE NOT worn these yet.
Read more at http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/2015-running-gear-guide/2015-running-gear-guide-road-shoes_123444#k8gP4TtAbb5JeIrg.99
Today I did wear the ON Cloudsters. 7mm ! yikes. I could feel it. This was the day in Newburyport and Exeter. Gray, overcast after a short sunny start.
The Altras heel-toe offset: 0mm; 26mm (heel), 26mm zero mm
these are the Altra superior trail I think
Read more at http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/2015-running-gear-guide/2015-running-gear-guide-road-shoes_123444/27#t43SLoB0KwUpPvGl.99
Pearl
Altra
ON
NB Zante
Altra 0 zero mm
Pearl 4 mm
Zante 6 mm
On 7 mm
seems like there is a fifth--have to go check the closet
could include the Lems leather shoes I guess
now I’m disappointed not to have bought a 5th new shoe! talk about obsession!
running site reminds us to look at basketball shoes---always zero-drop, always rational in padding and structure.
on Exeter to Phil----
Day started off pretty sunny but by the time I pulled into Exeter, 1pm, it had clouded over and gotten colder, so the place looked pretty gray. As soon as I walked around I felt like I was in the pages of A Separate Peace. Talked briefly with two kids, matchstick skinny, probably first or second year. One of them did know the name of the famous architect who designed the library I was there to see. Louis Kahn. I gave them a factoid to ponder--when he died everyone found out he had had two families in secret, hidden from each other. They laughed and paused to take that in. Corrupting the young!
Campus looks so impressive, as you say. It would have overwhelmed me and I could never have survived the translation you underwent. The place looks like Harvard should look. Coherent and artfully massed and huddled. Matched styles, red brick, white pillars. The lawns look beautiful in the summer and fall and the rest of the time so large as to be intimidating.
You think the campus took shape in the late
20s to the 40s? Dartmouth's library which copies
Independence Hall was finished in 1929. Exeter
had the good luck to have those buildings all built
within I'd say ten years of each other. ? Maybe
1930-40 for the kids whose parents knew the war was on its way?
On a bright sunny day in late spring it would be totally idyllic and beautiful and one could read Keats and Shelley and dream the good life. Lots of sports being played on the fields. There is a huge phys ed buiding as you know across the road as you drive in from the south (Seabrook). Added onto various times. One huge bunker like concrete thing.
The Kahn building became famous for sure because it photographs so damn well. And it was right at the end of the 50s I think and he got all the combinations of brick and concrete just right, exquisite scale, proportions, mystery, materials etc just right. He may have thought he was quoting the mills, sure, because then that huge block was a violent "insertion" into the rich lawns of privilege, sort of like the Centre Pompidou's tubular plumbing plopped into the heart of the old Marais. But at the same time Kahn gets all that brutal concrete to feel light and near-delicate with those huge circles and curves. Just looked it up. not completed until 1971 so by then Boston's brutalist city hall was surely under construction?
Anyway, as with all buildings one has seen so often only in photos, it looks and feel smaller at first encounter than you had expected and pleasantly human in scale. Almost, now, artisanal to use that terrible trendy term. And it captures the essence of what private libraries have felt like for centuries. The oak woodwork, the nooks and angles and play of light and texture plus the books themselves and the rigorous Order of the whole geometry keeping everything secure.
By the way it felt refreshingly like the world we grew up in in the sense that I parked on the street behind it, walked in, even photographed and chatted with the two students, walked into and all around the library and not one whiff of security. Library staff smiled pleasantly. Very nice. Not that way even at our campus.
Perhaps there are security cameras hidden in every square inch, but it still feels good to have that feeling. Money can buy that at least for a while longer, we can hope.
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photo with dictionary in window
That's looking directly at Webster Hall, which was the cool guys' dorm when I was there. I can't remember the name of the dorm to the left. I think this photo is taken from a window in the Kahn Library. Y? N?
yes. wrote the paragraph just sent earier today and now have
lost all my other precious obsv for a while. Didn't take time to
look up your specific sites. Warmer day for that. Frosty wind
had picked up.
You get a medal for having survived that transfer. How on earth
did you get there? Train to Boston and then the school picked you
up or did your parents drive you each time? Must have felt like
Siberia at least at times. Especially then, long before the town and
area had been gentrified in any way. Sorta like Plymouth in 1972 ! !
For years at the only grocery store around fresh produce was a
limp head of iceberg and a bunch of parseley if you were lucky to
get there each week in time.
Phil
Ah yes, the Main Academy Building. Abbott Hall, my dorm in my senior year, is slightly hidden by the pine tree. Again, I think this photo is take from near the Kahn Library. What did you think of it? Kahn said he took his inspiration from the old industrial-era buildings down along the Squamscott River in the town. I wonder why in hell he would do that and not take his inspiration from all the buildings on the campus. When I visited I also questioned the big hole in the lobby wall in the interior. I thought it might allow noise from the lobby to reach the stacks where students would be studying - or trying to study. I was assured by the head librarian that it didn't. Then again, she was the head librarian and not a student.
So what did you think of the place - New England picturesque or bleak or both?
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so I did do the day as imagined, more or less. Mr India was not open but Jewel in the Crown served just as well. Now Saturday looms. Va goes off with PEO again as early as a quarter to eight! super early. Certainly gives me the time to go over to Portland if I want.
John Giono never replied back. So that’s that. Ray’s Dobra Tea room will be interesting enough. See what’s at the museum too?
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Phil
I was also able to walk thru the library with no one questioning me. Not true of dorms. In '62, no dorms were locked. Now they all are. Maybe because of co-ed now - at least in part. Don't want anyone raping any young girls I went into art building but was quickly questioned by teacher.
You're right that the place seems idyllic in the spring and fall (and, I assume, summer), but much bleaker in the winter. In fact, most of my memories are of bleakness. I also hated steam heat which I never mastered so I was always too hot or too cold (with a window cracked).
It was a terribly challenging change from LaSalle. I almost flunked a course that combined physics and chemistry, but managed to get c in math, low B in English and high B in French because I memorized everything.
Mom and Dad drove me up to Exeter the spring I was accepted to take placement exams. I got failure in Latin and 'bad failure' in math. So I dropped Latin & took French. And, because Exeter required only three years of math, I took sophomore math in my first year and junior math in my senior year. I took two years of French in my first year, and took 3rd year French in my senior year, thus graduating with minimum courses.
During my two years, I took train to Boston. Got a cab from South to North station and took Boston & Main train to Exeter. Walked to the campus with my bags. My parents then shipped a trunk of my clothes to me.
people magazine (via facebook from zen glow susan harubin) on
magician Penn Jillette’s weightloss
decided to do just that, spending December through March on an “extreme low-calorie program” in which he consumed about 1,000 calories daily and was able to lose an average of 0.9 lbs. a day.
Since reaching his goal weight on his birthday, March 5, Jillette has stopped restricting the amounts he eats, and instead follows Dr. Fuhrman’s Nutritarian diet – this means he consumes no animal products, no processed grains, and no added sugar or salt.
“I eat unbelievable amounts of food but just very, very, very healthy food,” says the magician.
His typical daily diet consists of an “enormous salad” with vinegar as dressing for lunch (he doesn’t usually eat breakfast) and a dinner consisting of 3 lbs. of greens and three servings of black or brown rice with a vegetable stew, along with lots of fruits for dessert (his favorite is “an enormous amount of blueberries with plain cocoa powder”) and vegetables with vinegar or Tabasco sauce as a snack.
“I could probably have a steak or a doughnut every couple of weeks, but I just haven’t felt like it,” says Jillette. “When you’re feeling as bad as I felt, and you go to feeling as good as I feel, the temptation to go back to doing what you were doing when you felt bad is not very great.”
--------now to check out Dr Fuhrman
3 lbs of greens! could I eat that in a day???
wiki Peter Lipson, a physician and writer on alternative medicine, has been heavily critical of Fuhrman's health equation, writing that since its terms cannot be quantified, it is "nothing more than a parlor trick".[4] Fuhrman created what he calls the "Aggregate Nutrient Density Index", a ranking of foods based on micronutrient concentration.
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McDougall: “I want to to win the war rather than every battle”. Traditionally, peasants ate brown rice. Yet many healthy starch-based populations have traditionally used white rice. If you must, go ahead and eat your white rice. Give up the grease, meat, and dairy, and eat the white rice. Clearly brown rice is the better choice between white and brown, but “I’d rather you ate white rice than meat and dairy.” White rice does NOT cause diabetes. Dr. Kempner’s rice diet which reversed diabetes was white rice and sugar.
Mackey: What is your opinion on beans vs. grains for starch?
McDougall: As beans are around 30% protein and too much protein can present a stress to the kidneys. Limit them to 1 cup a day to be on the safe side.
Fuhrman: Eat freely of beans, limit the grains.
At this point there was a short debate over the % of calories coming from protein in beans. McDougall had them at around 30%, Fuhrman placed them much lower.
Mackey: Are potatoes good or bad for us?
Fuhrman: It depends on the person. I you are overweight or diabatic, limit them. If not very active, limit. 35 studies show high glycemic load on sedentary overweight individuals promotes diabetes in some poeple.
McDougall: Glycemic index leads you in a false direction. Potatoes have a glycemic index of 100+. Snickers bars, are 68 on the glycemic index. Potato-based populations do not have diabetes or obesity.
Mackey: Nuts and seeds: How much is healthy? How much is too much?
Fuhrman: Overweight women should have no more than 1 oz. a day, overweight men no more than 2 oz. a day. Eat them with green vegetables at dinner to facilitate absorption. If you are slim, you can have more.
McDougall: In July, 2003 I wrote an article titled “What do I do if I lose too much weight?” Nuts can help you gain. Nuts are delicacies.
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he usually doesn’t eat breakfast, lunch are the greens and dinner the starch --- blueberries dusted with chocolate sound great.
Kempner is the one who reversed diabetes with white rice and sugar!
Want to remember that. Probably we eat too many nuts. Va’s weight might be there?
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Thursday night April 9
Snow this morning. Terrible flare-up of anal florescence--hemorrhoids. Blood a few days ago and not that now but just some itching and pain. Feel tonight like I have a fever or something deep inside. Quiet day because of the snow. Walking at Lowes in Tilton. Take-out from Thai Smile.
Reading Connor on Bataille. Quite good. Better than I had thought at first. Bataille worried that he was a “babbler.”
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Friday afternoon ---- dreary day, sick as a dog, in the gut, right after lunch. something I ate in Exeter, Indian, and day after, here, warm-ups of Indian and PEO leftovers and too many desserts, and last night, Thai Smile. All and whatever. Took stuff and napped after we swam this morning.
meanwhile, from Phil, who also sounds like he was in a crappy mood---didn’t a heavy front move over there too? Delusion Central
“
Well, we may differ here, Bob. I agree that a mistake in judgement on a news story that only embarrasses the newspaper and that particular editor (and reporter) may qualify for Christian charity. But I would not excuse dereliction of duty during a time of war (the war wasn't over), where the president might be the target of some southern sympathizer. Going across the street to get snockered while allowing a president - or anyone - to be murdered should have merited severe jail time, in my opinion. In Tunisia there is even some question of collusion of the two guards with the Islamists because Islamists had predicted what was going to happen on some internet based radio announcement. However, the Tunis police aren't exactly on the ball enough to monitor such things. That takes too much fucking effort. I think it more likely that no one at the museum or the Tunis police knew about the broadcast. The Tunisian guards just did what so many arabs do - took off because they felt like it. And the universal Arabic excuse for such neglect of one's responsibilities is always "mayselch" - meaning "it doesn’t matter." What one finds out, sooner or later, in Arab lands is that anything arduous or tedious, requiring focus and effort, and attention to be paid is nearly always blown off with a "mayselch." Wonder why Germany gets things done, and Arab countries don't? Germans pay attention and feel a sense of duty. Other people mock them for it and then wonder why Germans are successful and other people just slowly go down the drain. Americans used to be a lot like Germans. Not anymore. We're not nearly as bad as Arabs, but we are letting stuff slide all over the place with an attitude much like “mayselch."
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meanwhile tomorrow’s plan has shaped up---Portland early after getting Willow into the PEO ride super early in the morning
then visiting Ray Marcotte’s Dobrá tea shop and tea-ifying my life. Sprituality. In the pool this morning I wondered about doing yoga again and think I might call Will Haring next week to ask him about which yoga group in the region I might try. Darlene’s is a natural choice but it might involve too much chatting with George. Other class would involve meeting Karolyn Kinane.
In other words, don’t need to look up any of these classes.
night strange afternoon Aleve and sleep and now feel much better.
feels like I had a stomach flu for about five hours. Butt feels better too and feels like there was a connection.
Saturday night April 11
Day in Portland. Long drives but enjoyable. The constant play of light on the landscape.
Met Ray Marcotte at his tea shop. Fascinating visit catching up on his life story and the tale of the tea shop. He and Ellen met via Match.com about fourteen years ago. She is the eldest of two daughters of German immigrants. Her father, now 79, very active, was a cabinetmaker in NY state, Hudson valley or thereabouts? She went to UMaine at Orono. Forget what major if she mentioned. They both worked at Dartmouth’s library for a while. Gave me some comments about the attitudes there. Students are told to see their mission to “change the world.” I.E. world leadership on grand elite scale. Faculty very insular, closed society.
Dobrá started by three young men who segued it from having been a secret tea society into a post-soviet business. One quickly dropped out after designing the logo they use. Other two set up the tea sourcing and supply lines. So Ray gets all of his tea through the central operation in Prague. Franchise but they are looking for a better word. They pay a token fee per year to keep the name, stay connected to the supplies. Fifth year this year. Hope to make some money, so far are about breaking even. Both of them work other jobs. Ray as an online librarian until a few weeks ago, with Kaplan University network. Ellen as a web designer architect. “information architect” phrase Casey Bisson first used about seven years ago.
Kannerkreative.com
Ray spent thirty-one days in China on his first trip with/for the company. They went to lots of tea growing operations. Trip to Japan with Ellen was shorter. Korea too. Ray enjoyed China more, did not like how uptight Japan feels.
He still meditates and does yoga. Says TM is as popular as ever, even more so. Oprah and other stars now praising it. New batch of stars I guess. We went for lunch to a Chinese place they like---Empire Chinese Kitchen. Great.
Ray’s mother died two months ago. His father some years before. Ray is last of eight ? children. Oldest brother fourteen years older.
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Sunday April 12
Bright and sunny and crocusi open in the back.
Note from Ray with instructions
It was great to see you today. I would like to outline the best methods for brewing the two teas you bought.
Dian Lu Eshan - use 1 tablespoon per 6 ounces of water. Use water that is 80 degrees Celsius. First steep for 1 minute, second steep for 1.5 minutes, and third steep for 2 minutes. Be sure to resteep the same leaves to get all of the flavor out of the leaves.
Zhu Cha (gunpowder) - use 1 teaspoon (not tablespoon) per 6 ounces of water. Use boiling water and steep only once for 2 minutes. Gunpowder is a very high fired green tea so it requires much hotter water and a longer steeping time. And because it's high fired, it doesn't lend itself well to resteeping.
Let me know how you like the tea. Take care.
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Walked through campus earlier, taking photos right and left for the two women in Greece. Sofia and Natatakou? have to check her spelling. They were here 94-96.
Monday super warm and bright walked already. April 13
Love the book on Bataille. So well written and such important discussion of mystical experience vs language and its discontents.
I will allow myself to connect reading up on Bataille, the memories associated with it and going to see Ray Marcotte and connecting backward a little bit with what all happened twenty years ago, more of less. Somehow goes with the request from the girls in Greece, Natalie, for photos of campus. Natasha not Natalie. How could I make that mistake??
Natasa Koukoutegou and Sofia Sarafidou
Now that Connor is really helping me “get” Bataille, I don’t know that I an ever go back to Blanchot. I wonder if Lars Iyer really got the two of them or the crucial differences between them?
Night Scare in the garage after we walked in Tilton. Va headed in and I turned to the mailbox to pick up two books left on the trash can top by UPS. Va was holding onto the vertical grab bar on the door. As I looked toward her I could tell she was losing her balance and was going to fall. Terror. I could not get to her in time. I saw her bottom hit the ground and then her back and her head. She seemed ok and I propped her head on the books and told her to wait there while I called for help. I yelled over to Jeff Nielsen and his biking buddy but they couldn’t hear me. I walked half way down the drive to call again and Doug Grant backed out of his driveway. I caught his eye and asked him to come help. He stopped his car and got out and signaled to Jeff that he was going. He came in and helped me get Va standing. We went inside and sat for a few moments in the tv room and agreed we should go to the ER to get everything checked. We drove over and got a CAT scan. Jean the name of the woman doctor who we had seen there some time before. Results negative on all points. Va feels sore in her right shoulder, senses her left eye not seeing properly and will no doubt feel sore in the morning.
So. Bataille. Back to the inner experience.
Tuesday April 14 5:30 Laconia Eye satellite office here saw Va this afternoon. No damage or indications of anything awry to explain why she feels her vision is off, sees double or sees half-images. Hard to describe accurately. She is resting now, Aleve and on the sofa, listening to the last few minutes of General Hospital. Whistling for the cats.
Sunny sunny day. I got a good walk early on. Picked up some meds and stuff, self-diagnosing, for my legs. There are even homeopathic remedies for it--leg cramps at night that keep you from sleeping. Hmm, could be too much caffeine but we’ll try the magnesium and calcium and I forgot to look for some potassium but one mix may have some of that in it Also Krill oil. What about COQ 10 ?? Slippery Slope.
Tuesday night almost 7 thirty. Cool and sunny. Lazy morning, walk. Sending back the Izumi Pearls. Found the SocDoc website again and enjoyed his zeal for barefoot and went for a walk in the Lems and enjoyed them again. Gangemi also had a discussion about leg cramps that made so much sense and reminded me of having read all of this stuff years ago when running actively. He argues it is imbalance in the fats in the diet. Have to track his argument more carefully. But I fixed green chili stew with the hamburger in the freezer. He’s big on coconut oil too, so I munched a few slices of bread with coconut on it to see if all of that will help the leg cramps. We lunched at Panera and walked Lowes and came home for gouté. Va seems fine if still cautious about doing too much. She canceled Kathie’s pool workout today and Colin on the piano.
Saw Janice on the morning walk and got info on their kitchen remodel. Big event of the day was going to DMV to get my new drivers license. Easy as pie and no lines. Tax day and memorial for the Boston marathon bombing two years ago.
Sunday late afternoon
super gorgeous day. Pool not open, again, so we walked. Only about 2500 steps even though across the bridge and main street and back to the field house. Saw Robin and Joan Bowers.
Obsessing over the kitchen project and appliances etc past few days. Finally decided on Samsung group I think. Maybe some Bosch inserts? After further deliberation with all parties.
Phone chat with Phil on Friday or Thursday by chance, while Va was with Larson. He doesn’t sound so good. This move in with Peg taking far more of a stress toll than he had imagined. “As we age . . .”
April 19 Sunday night
Beautiful air all day and now.
Bataille: “For all the talk of summit and decline, ascent and descent, what Bataille describes is a labyrinth, the elusive labyrinth of being from which “no one escapes” and which is itself, remarks Denis Hollier, “impossible to circumvent, for reasons stemming from the economy of language” (Against Architecture, 71).
Remember how I wanted to title my dissertation the Labyrinth of Language? But Booth wouldn’t let me do that. Didn’t like it.
Bataille’s constant injunction: “We have to go further”---an injunction that continually exasperates all who would settle for the consolations of conclusion and closure. 127
Reminds me too of what Dad said a year from his death, about going on rather than just sitting down on the corner to wait. His legs and knees killing him. He could have sued the maker of those damn arch supports he wore all of his life for having ruined his feet and legs. And the doctors who had him wear them.
“effervescence” of mystical effusion vs Hegel’s order of rationality and law
Hegel never allowed himself the ultimate question, “the emptiness of intelligent questions.” “life life lived to the point of terror and a practice of joy that affirmed that terror and the “nocturnal spasms” it spreads. 136
Weds night April 22 eve of the Bard’s birthday
Nice day off. Sunny at the start. New toll plaza going south just opened today so I posted a facebook snap of the huge mill wheel in the entrance.
Walked on the ridge of Derryfield Park east of Manchester. Not at all what I had expected. Site it seems of the water works for the city. Old ski lift, dried cross country trails. One other guy wandering. One guy left as I arrived. Another arrived as I drove off. Wondered. Nice view across the valley to the far hills and mountains. Seemed very far. Wide river valley. Big river through Manchester. The mills. Couldn’t really see much. Woods thin, not that interesting. Rocky ledge everywhere, the top of the hill/ridge.
Lunched at Chipotle on South Willow. Cookie purchase at the Coop and later at Crumb and Cake. North main torn up for two years! Caffeineo bit the dust. Va and Gigi at the book group, John Allen talking about a famous lady spy from WWII.
Comment from the web this evening---could be a gloss on Bataille, especially the part I am now on near the very end about the search for life in the instant, free of all thought, all discourse.
“Didn't know I was looking for your site, but the interest I am taking in it tells me I was. Never knew this interest was so deep in me. I only got to page two so far. I’m 66, and this never happens to me! I thought I was no longer looking for anything. Thanks.” could be about any infinite number of topics----thanks internet for bringing us the world and confirming notions we never knew could be found.”
Thursday night
Surprise email joke from Ryan Hale. Good one too----
“I just got some junk mail from MyLife.com, telling me I have critical threats to my image and reputation via people hacking my information. It requires payment for me to root out the full identities, but they do provide first name as bait...Bob. “
And now turns out he’s on break and does want to lunch next week.
“I am on break next week and can meet you in Concord or Manchester for lunch wed. I realize Exeter is a haul.”
Nice surprise.
We met with Alan Mann this afternoon. Great talk about the remodel and he liked lots all of the new ideas. $35k > 40, just about what I expected.
Earlier with Melinda.
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Friday morning early --- cold and windy out
Night --- lunch at Consuelo’s Taqueria in Manchvegas and walking in Pheasant Lane and Hooksett Target. Cold and windy all day.
Saturday evening
“Culo veo, culo quiero.” Spanish proverb Va gave me to describe the way I respond to anyone’s news. Ran into Mark and Marla Okrant at Lowe’s. Did Facebook research later. Both are from CT. They just sold their house and bought a condo house at the Villages in Loudon. I was all set to do the same. They also vacation three months a year at Rincon on the western side of Puerto Rico.
Finished Connor’s book on Bataille. Superb but got tired of it too. As interesting as Bataille may be, he’s had his moment now and somehow we’ve all moved beyond where he was. He would be shocked and pleased as how much the world did catch up with him and then move way, way beyond him, from 9/11 to the internet. He had his prophetic function and the next generation, Derrida, took what he gave them and cashed in and cashed out with it. Now Derrida too has moved into history and who do we look to now?
Monday night April 27
Obsessed with the Okrants and their decision to move away, move to Loudon, the Villages. Should we be doing the same? Why are they abandoning us? Who are they? Who were they? What was their old house like? What did it sell for? 232k? or below? What are his novels like? He golfs. Probably I won’t like his novels. Even one. Even if it fills me in on tons of info about the big hotels. Drove past their old street, walked down the one parallel with it to see what sort of noise they would suffer from when the college kids get wild.
Is it envy of what others do? Anxiety that I am not choosing well, not capable of choosing well? Or is it anxiety that I might be forced to choose what they have just chosen? We drove to their place in Loudon. No way, Jose. What has possessed them? Much better to stay where we are for ever and ever rather than move to something like that. Like the Villages. From the first glance of the big sign just as you drive it---“Park Your Toys Here” ---onward, every details turned me off even while I was trying hard to acknowledge one could make a case. But this geography professor and writer has never seen the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Nashua! Yikes.
Today we swam. Nice to be back to our private pool.
Tuesday April 28 Waiting for Jason from Lowes to arrive at 9. Sure hope we can decide to go with Alan with no hitch. The sample of granite arrived yesterday and we’ve been looking at it. Florestal Verde by Sensa, Cosentino. Really does look like “living” stone! Well, now cut out from the living earth, a fetish sample, polished into high objectifiedhoodedness. (Bataille et al)
4:26 GH time and gouté. Long visit with Jason and Lorrie (from Duby construction). Lunch and then drive to gilford for Lowe’s walking. We were on edge a bit but after we decided to throw out the idea of the sliding glass door in the dining room, we settled on going with Alan. Jason and Lowe’s just too huge a constant committee meeting, it would seem.
night
Sent the break-off message to Jason. Va said, just say “thanks for the great work, unfortunately we’ve decided not to proceed with the project.” I didn’t even add “at this time.” To me it feels so cold and heartless and yet to Va it seems just what needs to be said and that’s that. 46 years of marriage and I’m just catching on. My mini-almost panic attack this morning during their presentation was a bit like the big one I experienced years ago when I feared for my life that Va was going to buy a condo up on Conway or some such place. Such an interesting life-long pattern we have here. Feel relieved we will work with Alan Mann and hope it goes well. Wise indeed to drop off the dining room project of putting in a sliding door and deck.
Ryan Hale not joining up tomorrow for lunch but we’re not surprised by that are we? He has to take his 11 yr old boy to have his teeth pulled as preparation for getting braces. Where shall I go then tomorrow? What shall I do? We’re going over to Windsor on Saturday to lunch with Jess and Helen and Ted.
Have I had enough about Bataille for a while? I think so. I can inch through Scott’s ms and have done with it.
Here is a great passage from Scott Merrill’s dissertation on p. 181
Individual’s are always walking between the sacred and the profane, between reason and the irrational, pain and pleasure, knowledge and “unknowledge.” This is why Bataille denies the equivalence inner experience and the ecstasy of the mystic: because the mystic’s goal is an impossible unity with the divine through ecstasy; it is impossible because a truly ‘inner’ or ‘negative’ experience cannot be fully realized. Philosophy or ‘discursive thought,’ is no help here because it is part of the world of profane work, “whereas inner experience ultimately derives from the sacred, a realm in which depense rather than production is the ruling principle.”
dissertation on p. 181
He is really doing it. A superb work it seems to me, now that I’ve been cramming and reading around in other books about Bataille.
Went to Nashua today for the day jaunt. Lincoln Park, along a river there (or canal?) right under the highway and behind the high school. Not pristine wilderness by any stretch, big power lines and highway noise etc. But still a well-used parkland with lots of trails. Will sure get buggy with those wetlands and the river. Later lunched on a steak salad at the Bugaboo Steak House. Four guys at the table over were live broadcasting a sports radio show for NH ESPN.
email from Jason said he found our decision to stop the project sudden and he hoped he hadn’t offended us. (Not surprising that he thought that?) Told him no, not at all, that it was a matter of changing our minds about what to do---visit grandchildren overseas or remodel etc etc.
As we drove up the street I saw Alan’s truck parked at Janice’s driveway and wondered why. I think she wants him to do a few tidying up things and so I suppose that since we’re a go he called her and said well I’m going to be around this summer across the street so let’s get that stuff you want done now.
This passage sounds like it could come straight out of Scott’s study of Bataille---or similar: “Masculinity is a perpetually unstable state, requiring constant re-affirmation. This affirmation is a performance specifically for an audience of men, to whom we prove and reprove our identity as proof of membership to the tribe.
Eroticism is the perpetual cycle of transgression, from contradiction to affirmation and back again, of our identities as they are encoded by the stereotypes of masculinity and desire.”
In fact if we take it out of “masculinity” and make it for both genders, it could be out of Bataille’s Erotism without change.
Be interesting to see if Lars Iyer in his second book on Blanchot, says anything about how and why Blanchot turned away from Bataille’s obsessions and developed his own, much more cerebral and yet literary ones. That collection of B’s obsessions might have something.
Wonder if M H Abrams ever looked at these guys? I doubt it, really.
Great quote from Phil
This is from Max Beerbohm:
"It distresses me, my failure to keep up with the leaders of thought as they pass into oblivion.”
Both Lars and Larry enjoyed this quote.
Jan sent news that Meyer Abrams died at 102 a few weeks ago. The greatest English major of the 20th Century?
Good swim this morning. Va got her corrections sent in to Temple.
Last day of the month.
Looking at Zillow I realize that their estimate of Okrant’s house was 188k and yet the asking price is 232k. So Zillow now says our house is at $205k and on that model we could ask maybe ? 240??
Paula told me about Jack Armstrong and Dana going through bankruptcy a while back (2007? or before). Now they live at the top of Tenney Mtn surrounded by trees. Dana has already put 100k down with Taylor Homes for her retirement there when she needs it, says Paula.
Gloria had successful cataract surgery on her only eye. Lost the other in childhood, her brother. Eleanor and Larry enjoyed the opera and theh book of mormon in nyc last week. Saw her at the store last night. Her walking looks a bit worse. Spirits fine.
Dave emailed us their Dates today. Arrive Philly July 16, Depart Boston August 21/22. Arrive up here around July 30.
Rupert’s “Salvage” has a very beautiful ending. I assume he’s thinking of his father but might be someone else?
There once was a time
when everything made sense
and there was a reason to be;
there once was a time
when it was just a scratch
and we would never bruise.
I would like to run right back
into the stories I heard you tell
and risk the things I don’t recall,
am prepared to do anything
that would bring you back.
All these years gone and I
still don’t know the words for love
or how to grieve and let you go.
It is never ending, this cycle
of love and loss, drink and despair.
I am back at your door, belong
to you. Don’t argue, rescue me.
Boyhood Island snaps into focus around 210 when Karl drops the rock on the car and is in love with Anne Lisbet. Beautiful passages there and he conveys that terror in between his dropping the rock and his parents finding out from the driver’s phone call a week later.
1 APRIL WEDS
Phat Boys for lunch with Greg today in Cornish. Great visit. Afterwards I took a short walk and fell into a delightful encounter with a guy in front of a big blue house where I had stopped to take some photos of the faded siding. Bo a musician, guitarist, and former teacher, I think. He and his wife Valerie are new to Cornish, opening an antique shop later this year. House of her aunt which she visited for thirty years. Will see if I can get over this summer and chat with him again.
Beautiful day. I thought maybe in a week with the off Saturday I could go all the way to Portland and demand a free cup of tea from Ray Marcotte.
News that Jerry Zinfon died yesterday. Prostate cancer Nancy says. Never knew he had been a Marine in Korea!
Thursday night April 2
Lamictal arrived, day early, on budget promised. Hooray. Good swim and then ReFresh for new do. Nice reply from John Sitter at Notre Dame:
Dear Bob,
Good to hear from you, Doktor Herr Professor Emeritus!
To your question: Here we have two doctoral exams. The first, based on reading lists, is not ceremonial; i.e., people do occasionally fail it, or sometimes part of it, and have to repeat. The 2nd, the dissertation defense, is ceremonial in the sense that the dissertation has already been deemed finished, perhaps pending minor corrections. There is conversation about strengths & shortcomings, the latter usually in the form of suggestions for what to do do before submitting parts for publication, etc.
So it depends mainly on which this is. But in any case, nodding mysteriously is a good bet.
All's well here. More of my energy is going into courses on literature & the environment and into a team-taught interdisciplinary course on sustainability. Or perhaps pre-disciplinary. I plan to do it a couple more years or until the planet has clearly been saved. Whichever comes first. We are trying to decide whether this will be where we retire. We like it, but each winter gets us browsing Atlanta real estate listings.
I hope this finds you well & thriving. I'm sure it will be gratifying to be in on your former student's doctoring. And there's a pretty good chance that in June the snows of Boston will finally be the snows of yesteryear.
All best,
John
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Friday
Short walk to break-in the Pearl Izumi EM Road N 2 v2
Step into to the meat-and-potatoes of the E:Motion collection. As a high-mileage, neutral trainer, the EM Road N 2 contains moderate cushioning. Unlike most traditional running shoes that feature a static heel-to-toe drop, the E:Motion collection has an always-changing drop that shifts as you move through your stride. It adapts to your body and propels you forward in an intuitive flow for a smoother, more efficient run. The result? A blend of excellent ground contact with a high-performance, responsive ride. The seam-free upper gives it an even more natural, skin-like feel.
this text from Runningshoes.com Took out the insole so might put them back later for a fuller test of the dynamic motion promised.
Is strange to go back from barefoot to padding. But maybe a good move, given recent scare about feet and legs and back. Good to stretch out the back on regular basis. Sitting at the computer no doubt a big factor.
Found the site that convinced me: running.competitor.com
best clear comparison discussions -- graphics and text --
on the Pearl
Incorporating less-is-more design principles while still offering enough cushioning, protection and energetic pop for a wide range of training runs and races, the updated N2 is the epitome of modern shoe design. The new seamless, one-piece stretchy mesh upper, enhanced by supportive but minimalistic heat-welded overlays, provides a supremely connective fit for all foot shapes. The updated, softer two-layer foam midsole improves great heel impact cushioning and bolsters the heel-toe flow of the shoe. Our wear-testers loved this shoe for its amazing agility, inherent stability and proprioceptive feeling for both slower and faster running. Although it has a good amount of cushioning, it doesn’t give off a mushy or even springy sensation—more of a moderate softness that serves up a responsive ride and allows for great feel for the ground. We tested both the neutral-oriented N2 and the light stability M2 model and preferred the N2 for the uninhibited smoothness it provides.
Best for: A variety of training runs and races from short to long and slower to faster.
weights: 9.6 oz. (men’s), 8.4 oz. (women’s)
heel-toe offset: 4mm; 23mm (heel), 19mm (forefoot)
Read more at http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/2015-running-gear-guide/2015-running-gear-guide-road-shoes_123444/8#Tz0seL4FPXuwC9Wr.99
so this shoe ADDS a 4mm rise-drop to my Barefoot feel and gait. Oh dear.
Easter Sunday night April 5
Overnight at the Fairmont on Copley. High winds. Otherwise sunny and bright and almost warmish. Dinner with Mike Farkas at Lolitas on Dartmouth and today dinner at the Atlantic Fish Co on Boylston.
Breakfast at the Oak Room in the hotel. Vaguely familiar. Did I stay there once on my own 12 years ago? Not impossible. We both think we had never stayed there. Looks wonderful. Refurbished a few years ago for the centenary. Turns out it is owned, ultimately, by Saudi Arabia kingdom! Canadian management.
Music at Trinity as per traditions.
Monday night April 6
Va felt bad again last night so we called Larson and drove there, arrived at 10 but phoned and they couldn’t see us until 4. Lunched, shopped, goute-ed, Larson is ordering an e e g and a cat scan just to see if the shunt has moved and if it needs to be re-set.
Dr Albert Day or Alfred Day ? at Brigham and Women’s, retired back to Texas now. Sent a great letter to us when he did. Va remembered that. I had forgotten until she mentioned it.
Shoes galore. Wore the Mizumis today. oops Izumi. Feet did thank me even though they feel tight and pinchey and a wee high. Four others arrived today.
Maybe shoe obsession goes back to wanting to be on the basketball team like my older brother, wanting to be a jock while knowing that would never, could never, happen.
Four pair of new shoes at once! Yikes. manic-d? All are blue and gold, florescent green-gold. Might get away with not being noticed quite. Will see. Might have to invoke the Chase rewards angle. Free books, free shoes??
Finished Iyer’s book on Blanchot. Early effort. Lots of good stuff but lacking, finally, in real explanatory power. Not far enough back from Blanchot. Goes in circles, repeats, pastes in clumps, ambitious and bright but not yet fully formed. Will take a look at the second book but might not give it much attention for now. Back to more direct work on Bataille.
Discovered a new American writer in bookforum. Goyen, William Goyen. Friend of Katherine Anne Porter et al. How did I never hear of him??
New Balance Zante
heel-toe offset: 6mm; 16mm (heel), 10mm (forefoot) 6mm
HAVE NOT worn these yet.
Read more at http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/2015-running-gear-guide/2015-running-gear-guide-road-shoes_123444#k8gP4TtAbb5JeIrg.99
Today I did wear the ON Cloudsters. 7mm ! yikes. I could feel it. This was the day in Newburyport and Exeter. Gray, overcast after a short sunny start.
The Altras heel-toe offset: 0mm; 26mm (heel), 26mm zero mm
these are the Altra superior trail I think
Read more at http://running.competitor.com/2015/03/2015-running-gear-guide/2015-running-gear-guide-road-shoes_123444/27#t43SLoB0KwUpPvGl.99
Pearl
Altra
ON
NB Zante
Altra 0 zero mm
Pearl 4 mm
Zante 6 mm
On 7 mm
seems like there is a fifth--have to go check the closet
could include the Lems leather shoes I guess
now I’m disappointed not to have bought a 5th new shoe! talk about obsession!
running site reminds us to look at basketball shoes---always zero-drop, always rational in padding and structure.
on Exeter to Phil----
Day started off pretty sunny but by the time I pulled into Exeter, 1pm, it had clouded over and gotten colder, so the place looked pretty gray. As soon as I walked around I felt like I was in the pages of A Separate Peace. Talked briefly with two kids, matchstick skinny, probably first or second year. One of them did know the name of the famous architect who designed the library I was there to see. Louis Kahn. I gave them a factoid to ponder--when he died everyone found out he had had two families in secret, hidden from each other. They laughed and paused to take that in. Corrupting the young!
Campus looks so impressive, as you say. It would have overwhelmed me and I could never have survived the translation you underwent. The place looks like Harvard should look. Coherent and artfully massed and huddled. Matched styles, red brick, white pillars. The lawns look beautiful in the summer and fall and the rest of the time so large as to be intimidating.
You think the campus took shape in the late
20s to the 40s? Dartmouth's library which copies
Independence Hall was finished in 1929. Exeter
had the good luck to have those buildings all built
within I'd say ten years of each other. ? Maybe
1930-40 for the kids whose parents knew the war was on its way?
On a bright sunny day in late spring it would be totally idyllic and beautiful and one could read Keats and Shelley and dream the good life. Lots of sports being played on the fields. There is a huge phys ed buiding as you know across the road as you drive in from the south (Seabrook). Added onto various times. One huge bunker like concrete thing.
The Kahn building became famous for sure because it photographs so damn well. And it was right at the end of the 50s I think and he got all the combinations of brick and concrete just right, exquisite scale, proportions, mystery, materials etc just right. He may have thought he was quoting the mills, sure, because then that huge block was a violent "insertion" into the rich lawns of privilege, sort of like the Centre Pompidou's tubular plumbing plopped into the heart of the old Marais. But at the same time Kahn gets all that brutal concrete to feel light and near-delicate with those huge circles and curves. Just looked it up. not completed until 1971 so by then Boston's brutalist city hall was surely under construction?
Anyway, as with all buildings one has seen so often only in photos, it looks and feel smaller at first encounter than you had expected and pleasantly human in scale. Almost, now, artisanal to use that terrible trendy term. And it captures the essence of what private libraries have felt like for centuries. The oak woodwork, the nooks and angles and play of light and texture plus the books themselves and the rigorous Order of the whole geometry keeping everything secure.
By the way it felt refreshingly like the world we grew up in in the sense that I parked on the street behind it, walked in, even photographed and chatted with the two students, walked into and all around the library and not one whiff of security. Library staff smiled pleasantly. Very nice. Not that way even at our campus.
Perhaps there are security cameras hidden in every square inch, but it still feels good to have that feeling. Money can buy that at least for a while longer, we can hope.
--------
photo with dictionary in window
That's looking directly at Webster Hall, which was the cool guys' dorm when I was there. I can't remember the name of the dorm to the left. I think this photo is taken from a window in the Kahn Library. Y? N?
yes. wrote the paragraph just sent earier today and now have
lost all my other precious obsv for a while. Didn't take time to
look up your specific sites. Warmer day for that. Frosty wind
had picked up.
You get a medal for having survived that transfer. How on earth
did you get there? Train to Boston and then the school picked you
up or did your parents drive you each time? Must have felt like
Siberia at least at times. Especially then, long before the town and
area had been gentrified in any way. Sorta like Plymouth in 1972 ! !
For years at the only grocery store around fresh produce was a
limp head of iceberg and a bunch of parseley if you were lucky to
get there each week in time.
Phil
Ah yes, the Main Academy Building. Abbott Hall, my dorm in my senior year, is slightly hidden by the pine tree. Again, I think this photo is take from near the Kahn Library. What did you think of it? Kahn said he took his inspiration from the old industrial-era buildings down along the Squamscott River in the town. I wonder why in hell he would do that and not take his inspiration from all the buildings on the campus. When I visited I also questioned the big hole in the lobby wall in the interior. I thought it might allow noise from the lobby to reach the stacks where students would be studying - or trying to study. I was assured by the head librarian that it didn't. Then again, she was the head librarian and not a student.
So what did you think of the place - New England picturesque or bleak or both?
--------------
so I did do the day as imagined, more or less. Mr India was not open but Jewel in the Crown served just as well. Now Saturday looms. Va goes off with PEO again as early as a quarter to eight! super early. Certainly gives me the time to go over to Portland if I want.
John Giono never replied back. So that’s that. Ray’s Dobra Tea room will be interesting enough. See what’s at the museum too?
-------
Phil
I was also able to walk thru the library with no one questioning me. Not true of dorms. In '62, no dorms were locked. Now they all are. Maybe because of co-ed now - at least in part. Don't want anyone raping any young girls I went into art building but was quickly questioned by teacher.
You're right that the place seems idyllic in the spring and fall (and, I assume, summer), but much bleaker in the winter. In fact, most of my memories are of bleakness. I also hated steam heat which I never mastered so I was always too hot or too cold (with a window cracked).
It was a terribly challenging change from LaSalle. I almost flunked a course that combined physics and chemistry, but managed to get c in math, low B in English and high B in French because I memorized everything.
Mom and Dad drove me up to Exeter the spring I was accepted to take placement exams. I got failure in Latin and 'bad failure' in math. So I dropped Latin & took French. And, because Exeter required only three years of math, I took sophomore math in my first year and junior math in my senior year. I took two years of French in my first year, and took 3rd year French in my senior year, thus graduating with minimum courses.
During my two years, I took train to Boston. Got a cab from South to North station and took Boston & Main train to Exeter. Walked to the campus with my bags. My parents then shipped a trunk of my clothes to me.
people magazine (via facebook from zen glow susan harubin) on
magician Penn Jillette’s weightloss
decided to do just that, spending December through March on an “extreme low-calorie program” in which he consumed about 1,000 calories daily and was able to lose an average of 0.9 lbs. a day.
Since reaching his goal weight on his birthday, March 5, Jillette has stopped restricting the amounts he eats, and instead follows Dr. Fuhrman’s Nutritarian diet – this means he consumes no animal products, no processed grains, and no added sugar or salt.
“I eat unbelievable amounts of food but just very, very, very healthy food,” says the magician.
His typical daily diet consists of an “enormous salad” with vinegar as dressing for lunch (he doesn’t usually eat breakfast) and a dinner consisting of 3 lbs. of greens and three servings of black or brown rice with a vegetable stew, along with lots of fruits for dessert (his favorite is “an enormous amount of blueberries with plain cocoa powder”) and vegetables with vinegar or Tabasco sauce as a snack.
“I could probably have a steak or a doughnut every couple of weeks, but I just haven’t felt like it,” says Jillette. “When you’re feeling as bad as I felt, and you go to feeling as good as I feel, the temptation to go back to doing what you were doing when you felt bad is not very great.”
--------now to check out Dr Fuhrman
3 lbs of greens! could I eat that in a day???
wiki Peter Lipson, a physician and writer on alternative medicine, has been heavily critical of Fuhrman's health equation, writing that since its terms cannot be quantified, it is "nothing more than a parlor trick".[4] Fuhrman created what he calls the "Aggregate Nutrient Density Index", a ranking of foods based on micronutrient concentration.
--------
McDougall: “I want to to win the war rather than every battle”. Traditionally, peasants ate brown rice. Yet many healthy starch-based populations have traditionally used white rice. If you must, go ahead and eat your white rice. Give up the grease, meat, and dairy, and eat the white rice. Clearly brown rice is the better choice between white and brown, but “I’d rather you ate white rice than meat and dairy.” White rice does NOT cause diabetes. Dr. Kempner’s rice diet which reversed diabetes was white rice and sugar.
Mackey: What is your opinion on beans vs. grains for starch?
McDougall: As beans are around 30% protein and too much protein can present a stress to the kidneys. Limit them to 1 cup a day to be on the safe side.
Fuhrman: Eat freely of beans, limit the grains.
At this point there was a short debate over the % of calories coming from protein in beans. McDougall had them at around 30%, Fuhrman placed them much lower.
Mackey: Are potatoes good or bad for us?
Fuhrman: It depends on the person. I you are overweight or diabatic, limit them. If not very active, limit. 35 studies show high glycemic load on sedentary overweight individuals promotes diabetes in some poeple.
McDougall: Glycemic index leads you in a false direction. Potatoes have a glycemic index of 100+. Snickers bars, are 68 on the glycemic index. Potato-based populations do not have diabetes or obesity.
Mackey: Nuts and seeds: How much is healthy? How much is too much?
Fuhrman: Overweight women should have no more than 1 oz. a day, overweight men no more than 2 oz. a day. Eat them with green vegetables at dinner to facilitate absorption. If you are slim, you can have more.
McDougall: In July, 2003 I wrote an article titled “What do I do if I lose too much weight?” Nuts can help you gain. Nuts are delicacies.
-----------
he usually doesn’t eat breakfast, lunch are the greens and dinner the starch --- blueberries dusted with chocolate sound great.
Kempner is the one who reversed diabetes with white rice and sugar!
Want to remember that. Probably we eat too many nuts. Va’s weight might be there?
------
Thursday night April 9
Snow this morning. Terrible flare-up of anal florescence--hemorrhoids. Blood a few days ago and not that now but just some itching and pain. Feel tonight like I have a fever or something deep inside. Quiet day because of the snow. Walking at Lowes in Tilton. Take-out from Thai Smile.
Reading Connor on Bataille. Quite good. Better than I had thought at first. Bataille worried that he was a “babbler.”
--------
Friday afternoon ---- dreary day, sick as a dog, in the gut, right after lunch. something I ate in Exeter, Indian, and day after, here, warm-ups of Indian and PEO leftovers and too many desserts, and last night, Thai Smile. All and whatever. Took stuff and napped after we swam this morning.
meanwhile, from Phil, who also sounds like he was in a crappy mood---didn’t a heavy front move over there too? Delusion Central
“
Well, we may differ here, Bob. I agree that a mistake in judgement on a news story that only embarrasses the newspaper and that particular editor (and reporter) may qualify for Christian charity. But I would not excuse dereliction of duty during a time of war (the war wasn't over), where the president might be the target of some southern sympathizer. Going across the street to get snockered while allowing a president - or anyone - to be murdered should have merited severe jail time, in my opinion. In Tunisia there is even some question of collusion of the two guards with the Islamists because Islamists had predicted what was going to happen on some internet based radio announcement. However, the Tunis police aren't exactly on the ball enough to monitor such things. That takes too much fucking effort. I think it more likely that no one at the museum or the Tunis police knew about the broadcast. The Tunisian guards just did what so many arabs do - took off because they felt like it. And the universal Arabic excuse for such neglect of one's responsibilities is always "mayselch" - meaning "it doesn’t matter." What one finds out, sooner or later, in Arab lands is that anything arduous or tedious, requiring focus and effort, and attention to be paid is nearly always blown off with a "mayselch." Wonder why Germany gets things done, and Arab countries don't? Germans pay attention and feel a sense of duty. Other people mock them for it and then wonder why Germans are successful and other people just slowly go down the drain. Americans used to be a lot like Germans. Not anymore. We're not nearly as bad as Arabs, but we are letting stuff slide all over the place with an attitude much like “mayselch."
-------
meanwhile tomorrow’s plan has shaped up---Portland early after getting Willow into the PEO ride super early in the morning
then visiting Ray Marcotte’s Dobrá tea shop and tea-ifying my life. Sprituality. In the pool this morning I wondered about doing yoga again and think I might call Will Haring next week to ask him about which yoga group in the region I might try. Darlene’s is a natural choice but it might involve too much chatting with George. Other class would involve meeting Karolyn Kinane.
In other words, don’t need to look up any of these classes.
night strange afternoon Aleve and sleep and now feel much better.
feels like I had a stomach flu for about five hours. Butt feels better too and feels like there was a connection.
Saturday night April 11
Day in Portland. Long drives but enjoyable. The constant play of light on the landscape.
Met Ray Marcotte at his tea shop. Fascinating visit catching up on his life story and the tale of the tea shop. He and Ellen met via Match.com about fourteen years ago. She is the eldest of two daughters of German immigrants. Her father, now 79, very active, was a cabinetmaker in NY state, Hudson valley or thereabouts? She went to UMaine at Orono. Forget what major if she mentioned. They both worked at Dartmouth’s library for a while. Gave me some comments about the attitudes there. Students are told to see their mission to “change the world.” I.E. world leadership on grand elite scale. Faculty very insular, closed society.
Dobrá started by three young men who segued it from having been a secret tea society into a post-soviet business. One quickly dropped out after designing the logo they use. Other two set up the tea sourcing and supply lines. So Ray gets all of his tea through the central operation in Prague. Franchise but they are looking for a better word. They pay a token fee per year to keep the name, stay connected to the supplies. Fifth year this year. Hope to make some money, so far are about breaking even. Both of them work other jobs. Ray as an online librarian until a few weeks ago, with Kaplan University network. Ellen as a web designer architect. “information architect” phrase Casey Bisson first used about seven years ago.
Kannerkreative.com
Ray spent thirty-one days in China on his first trip with/for the company. They went to lots of tea growing operations. Trip to Japan with Ellen was shorter. Korea too. Ray enjoyed China more, did not like how uptight Japan feels.
He still meditates and does yoga. Says TM is as popular as ever, even more so. Oprah and other stars now praising it. New batch of stars I guess. We went for lunch to a Chinese place they like---Empire Chinese Kitchen. Great.
Ray’s mother died two months ago. His father some years before. Ray is last of eight ? children. Oldest brother fourteen years older.
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Sunday April 12
Bright and sunny and crocusi open in the back.
Note from Ray with instructions
It was great to see you today. I would like to outline the best methods for brewing the two teas you bought.
Dian Lu Eshan - use 1 tablespoon per 6 ounces of water. Use water that is 80 degrees Celsius. First steep for 1 minute, second steep for 1.5 minutes, and third steep for 2 minutes. Be sure to resteep the same leaves to get all of the flavor out of the leaves.
Zhu Cha (gunpowder) - use 1 teaspoon (not tablespoon) per 6 ounces of water. Use boiling water and steep only once for 2 minutes. Gunpowder is a very high fired green tea so it requires much hotter water and a longer steeping time. And because it's high fired, it doesn't lend itself well to resteeping.
Let me know how you like the tea. Take care.
---------
Walked through campus earlier, taking photos right and left for the two women in Greece. Sofia and Natatakou? have to check her spelling. They were here 94-96.
Monday super warm and bright walked already. April 13
Love the book on Bataille. So well written and such important discussion of mystical experience vs language and its discontents.
I will allow myself to connect reading up on Bataille, the memories associated with it and going to see Ray Marcotte and connecting backward a little bit with what all happened twenty years ago, more of less. Somehow goes with the request from the girls in Greece, Natalie, for photos of campus. Natasha not Natalie. How could I make that mistake??
Natasa Koukoutegou and Sofia Sarafidou
Now that Connor is really helping me “get” Bataille, I don’t know that I an ever go back to Blanchot. I wonder if Lars Iyer really got the two of them or the crucial differences between them?
Night Scare in the garage after we walked in Tilton. Va headed in and I turned to the mailbox to pick up two books left on the trash can top by UPS. Va was holding onto the vertical grab bar on the door. As I looked toward her I could tell she was losing her balance and was going to fall. Terror. I could not get to her in time. I saw her bottom hit the ground and then her back and her head. She seemed ok and I propped her head on the books and told her to wait there while I called for help. I yelled over to Jeff Nielsen and his biking buddy but they couldn’t hear me. I walked half way down the drive to call again and Doug Grant backed out of his driveway. I caught his eye and asked him to come help. He stopped his car and got out and signaled to Jeff that he was going. He came in and helped me get Va standing. We went inside and sat for a few moments in the tv room and agreed we should go to the ER to get everything checked. We drove over and got a CAT scan. Jean the name of the woman doctor who we had seen there some time before. Results negative on all points. Va feels sore in her right shoulder, senses her left eye not seeing properly and will no doubt feel sore in the morning.
So. Bataille. Back to the inner experience.
Tuesday April 14 5:30 Laconia Eye satellite office here saw Va this afternoon. No damage or indications of anything awry to explain why she feels her vision is off, sees double or sees half-images. Hard to describe accurately. She is resting now, Aleve and on the sofa, listening to the last few minutes of General Hospital. Whistling for the cats.
Sunny sunny day. I got a good walk early on. Picked up some meds and stuff, self-diagnosing, for my legs. There are even homeopathic remedies for it--leg cramps at night that keep you from sleeping. Hmm, could be too much caffeine but we’ll try the magnesium and calcium and I forgot to look for some potassium but one mix may have some of that in it Also Krill oil. What about COQ 10 ?? Slippery Slope.
Tuesday night almost 7 thirty. Cool and sunny. Lazy morning, walk. Sending back the Izumi Pearls. Found the SocDoc website again and enjoyed his zeal for barefoot and went for a walk in the Lems and enjoyed them again. Gangemi also had a discussion about leg cramps that made so much sense and reminded me of having read all of this stuff years ago when running actively. He argues it is imbalance in the fats in the diet. Have to track his argument more carefully. But I fixed green chili stew with the hamburger in the freezer. He’s big on coconut oil too, so I munched a few slices of bread with coconut on it to see if all of that will help the leg cramps. We lunched at Panera and walked Lowes and came home for gouté. Va seems fine if still cautious about doing too much. She canceled Kathie’s pool workout today and Colin on the piano.
Saw Janice on the morning walk and got info on their kitchen remodel. Big event of the day was going to DMV to get my new drivers license. Easy as pie and no lines. Tax day and memorial for the Boston marathon bombing two years ago.
Sunday late afternoon
super gorgeous day. Pool not open, again, so we walked. Only about 2500 steps even though across the bridge and main street and back to the field house. Saw Robin and Joan Bowers.
Obsessing over the kitchen project and appliances etc past few days. Finally decided on Samsung group I think. Maybe some Bosch inserts? After further deliberation with all parties.
Phone chat with Phil on Friday or Thursday by chance, while Va was with Larson. He doesn’t sound so good. This move in with Peg taking far more of a stress toll than he had imagined. “As we age . . .”
April 19 Sunday night
Beautiful air all day and now.
Bataille: “For all the talk of summit and decline, ascent and descent, what Bataille describes is a labyrinth, the elusive labyrinth of being from which “no one escapes” and which is itself, remarks Denis Hollier, “impossible to circumvent, for reasons stemming from the economy of language” (Against Architecture, 71).
Remember how I wanted to title my dissertation the Labyrinth of Language? But Booth wouldn’t let me do that. Didn’t like it.
Bataille’s constant injunction: “We have to go further”---an injunction that continually exasperates all who would settle for the consolations of conclusion and closure. 127
Reminds me too of what Dad said a year from his death, about going on rather than just sitting down on the corner to wait. His legs and knees killing him. He could have sued the maker of those damn arch supports he wore all of his life for having ruined his feet and legs. And the doctors who had him wear them.
“effervescence” of mystical effusion vs Hegel’s order of rationality and law
Hegel never allowed himself the ultimate question, “the emptiness of intelligent questions.” “life life lived to the point of terror and a practice of joy that affirmed that terror and the “nocturnal spasms” it spreads. 136
Weds night April 22 eve of the Bard’s birthday
Nice day off. Sunny at the start. New toll plaza going south just opened today so I posted a facebook snap of the huge mill wheel in the entrance.
Walked on the ridge of Derryfield Park east of Manchester. Not at all what I had expected. Site it seems of the water works for the city. Old ski lift, dried cross country trails. One other guy wandering. One guy left as I arrived. Another arrived as I drove off. Wondered. Nice view across the valley to the far hills and mountains. Seemed very far. Wide river valley. Big river through Manchester. The mills. Couldn’t really see much. Woods thin, not that interesting. Rocky ledge everywhere, the top of the hill/ridge.
Lunched at Chipotle on South Willow. Cookie purchase at the Coop and later at Crumb and Cake. North main torn up for two years! Caffeineo bit the dust. Va and Gigi at the book group, John Allen talking about a famous lady spy from WWII.
Comment from the web this evening---could be a gloss on Bataille, especially the part I am now on near the very end about the search for life in the instant, free of all thought, all discourse.
“Didn't know I was looking for your site, but the interest I am taking in it tells me I was. Never knew this interest was so deep in me. I only got to page two so far. I’m 66, and this never happens to me! I thought I was no longer looking for anything. Thanks.” could be about any infinite number of topics----thanks internet for bringing us the world and confirming notions we never knew could be found.”
Thursday night
Surprise email joke from Ryan Hale. Good one too----
“I just got some junk mail from MyLife.com, telling me I have critical threats to my image and reputation via people hacking my information. It requires payment for me to root out the full identities, but they do provide first name as bait...Bob. “
And now turns out he’s on break and does want to lunch next week.
“I am on break next week and can meet you in Concord or Manchester for lunch wed. I realize Exeter is a haul.”
Nice surprise.
We met with Alan Mann this afternoon. Great talk about the remodel and he liked lots all of the new ideas. $35k > 40, just about what I expected.
Earlier with Melinda.
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Friday morning early --- cold and windy out
Night --- lunch at Consuelo’s Taqueria in Manchvegas and walking in Pheasant Lane and Hooksett Target. Cold and windy all day.
Saturday evening
“Culo veo, culo quiero.” Spanish proverb Va gave me to describe the way I respond to anyone’s news. Ran into Mark and Marla Okrant at Lowe’s. Did Facebook research later. Both are from CT. They just sold their house and bought a condo house at the Villages in Loudon. I was all set to do the same. They also vacation three months a year at Rincon on the western side of Puerto Rico.
Finished Connor’s book on Bataille. Superb but got tired of it too. As interesting as Bataille may be, he’s had his moment now and somehow we’ve all moved beyond where he was. He would be shocked and pleased as how much the world did catch up with him and then move way, way beyond him, from 9/11 to the internet. He had his prophetic function and the next generation, Derrida, took what he gave them and cashed in and cashed out with it. Now Derrida too has moved into history and who do we look to now?
Monday night April 27
Obsessed with the Okrants and their decision to move away, move to Loudon, the Villages. Should we be doing the same? Why are they abandoning us? Who are they? Who were they? What was their old house like? What did it sell for? 232k? or below? What are his novels like? He golfs. Probably I won’t like his novels. Even one. Even if it fills me in on tons of info about the big hotels. Drove past their old street, walked down the one parallel with it to see what sort of noise they would suffer from when the college kids get wild.
Is it envy of what others do? Anxiety that I am not choosing well, not capable of choosing well? Or is it anxiety that I might be forced to choose what they have just chosen? We drove to their place in Loudon. No way, Jose. What has possessed them? Much better to stay where we are for ever and ever rather than move to something like that. Like the Villages. From the first glance of the big sign just as you drive it---“Park Your Toys Here” ---onward, every details turned me off even while I was trying hard to acknowledge one could make a case. But this geography professor and writer has never seen the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Nashua! Yikes.
Today we swam. Nice to be back to our private pool.
Tuesday April 28 Waiting for Jason from Lowes to arrive at 9. Sure hope we can decide to go with Alan with no hitch. The sample of granite arrived yesterday and we’ve been looking at it. Florestal Verde by Sensa, Cosentino. Really does look like “living” stone! Well, now cut out from the living earth, a fetish sample, polished into high objectifiedhoodedness. (Bataille et al)
4:26 GH time and gouté. Long visit with Jason and Lorrie (from Duby construction). Lunch and then drive to gilford for Lowe’s walking. We were on edge a bit but after we decided to throw out the idea of the sliding glass door in the dining room, we settled on going with Alan. Jason and Lowe’s just too huge a constant committee meeting, it would seem.
night
Sent the break-off message to Jason. Va said, just say “thanks for the great work, unfortunately we’ve decided not to proceed with the project.” I didn’t even add “at this time.” To me it feels so cold and heartless and yet to Va it seems just what needs to be said and that’s that. 46 years of marriage and I’m just catching on. My mini-almost panic attack this morning during their presentation was a bit like the big one I experienced years ago when I feared for my life that Va was going to buy a condo up on Conway or some such place. Such an interesting life-long pattern we have here. Feel relieved we will work with Alan Mann and hope it goes well. Wise indeed to drop off the dining room project of putting in a sliding door and deck.
Ryan Hale not joining up tomorrow for lunch but we’re not surprised by that are we? He has to take his 11 yr old boy to have his teeth pulled as preparation for getting braces. Where shall I go then tomorrow? What shall I do? We’re going over to Windsor on Saturday to lunch with Jess and Helen and Ted.
Have I had enough about Bataille for a while? I think so. I can inch through Scott’s ms and have done with it.
Here is a great passage from Scott Merrill’s dissertation on p. 181
Individual’s are always walking between the sacred and the profane, between reason and the irrational, pain and pleasure, knowledge and “unknowledge.” This is why Bataille denies the equivalence inner experience and the ecstasy of the mystic: because the mystic’s goal is an impossible unity with the divine through ecstasy; it is impossible because a truly ‘inner’ or ‘negative’ experience cannot be fully realized. Philosophy or ‘discursive thought,’ is no help here because it is part of the world of profane work, “whereas inner experience ultimately derives from the sacred, a realm in which depense rather than production is the ruling principle.”
dissertation on p. 181
He is really doing it. A superb work it seems to me, now that I’ve been cramming and reading around in other books about Bataille.
Went to Nashua today for the day jaunt. Lincoln Park, along a river there (or canal?) right under the highway and behind the high school. Not pristine wilderness by any stretch, big power lines and highway noise etc. But still a well-used parkland with lots of trails. Will sure get buggy with those wetlands and the river. Later lunched on a steak salad at the Bugaboo Steak House. Four guys at the table over were live broadcasting a sports radio show for NH ESPN.
email from Jason said he found our decision to stop the project sudden and he hoped he hadn’t offended us. (Not surprising that he thought that?) Told him no, not at all, that it was a matter of changing our minds about what to do---visit grandchildren overseas or remodel etc etc.
As we drove up the street I saw Alan’s truck parked at Janice’s driveway and wondered why. I think she wants him to do a few tidying up things and so I suppose that since we’re a go he called her and said well I’m going to be around this summer across the street so let’s get that stuff you want done now.
This passage sounds like it could come straight out of Scott’s study of Bataille---or similar: “Masculinity is a perpetually unstable state, requiring constant re-affirmation. This affirmation is a performance specifically for an audience of men, to whom we prove and reprove our identity as proof of membership to the tribe.
Eroticism is the perpetual cycle of transgression, from contradiction to affirmation and back again, of our identities as they are encoded by the stereotypes of masculinity and desire.”
In fact if we take it out of “masculinity” and make it for both genders, it could be out of Bataille’s Erotism without change.
Be interesting to see if Lars Iyer in his second book on Blanchot, says anything about how and why Blanchot turned away from Bataille’s obsessions and developed his own, much more cerebral and yet literary ones. That collection of B’s obsessions might have something.
Wonder if M H Abrams ever looked at these guys? I doubt it, really.
Great quote from Phil
This is from Max Beerbohm:
"It distresses me, my failure to keep up with the leaders of thought as they pass into oblivion.”
Both Lars and Larry enjoyed this quote.
Jan sent news that Meyer Abrams died at 102 a few weeks ago. The greatest English major of the 20th Century?
Good swim this morning. Va got her corrections sent in to Temple.
Last day of the month.
Looking at Zillow I realize that their estimate of Okrant’s house was 188k and yet the asking price is 232k. So Zillow now says our house is at $205k and on that model we could ask maybe ? 240??
Paula told me about Jack Armstrong and Dana going through bankruptcy a while back (2007? or before). Now they live at the top of Tenney Mtn surrounded by trees. Dana has already put 100k down with Taylor Homes for her retirement there when she needs it, says Paula.
Gloria had successful cataract surgery on her only eye. Lost the other in childhood, her brother. Eleanor and Larry enjoyed the opera and theh book of mormon in nyc last week. Saw her at the store last night. Her walking looks a bit worse. Spirits fine.
Dave emailed us their Dates today. Arrive Philly July 16, Depart Boston August 21/22. Arrive up here around July 30.
Rupert’s “Salvage” has a very beautiful ending. I assume he’s thinking of his father but might be someone else?
There once was a time
when everything made sense
and there was a reason to be;
there once was a time
when it was just a scratch
and we would never bruise.
I would like to run right back
into the stories I heard you tell
and risk the things I don’t recall,
am prepared to do anything
that would bring you back.
All these years gone and I
still don’t know the words for love
or how to grieve and let you go.
It is never ending, this cycle
of love and loss, drink and despair.
I am back at your door, belong
to you. Don’t argue, rescue me.
Boyhood Island snaps into focus around 210 when Karl drops the rock on the car and is in love with Anne Lisbet. Beautiful passages there and he conveys that terror in between his dropping the rock and his parents finding out from the driver’s phone call a week later.
March 2015
Sunday March 1
WHEN we get back I have to spend a day saving and blogging all the months I can find as a backing up move.
So even BBC let us down last night. The close of The Fall just not as good as the opening. There might be a season Three so of course they fudged it all and put in delays rather than good drama. As I’ve always said, these actors and script writers enjoy a great scene most of all. The arc of the tale they learn to hold in abeyance and that, finally, ruins everything. The great scene was going to have been between the killer, Peter, and the hunter, Stella, and it fell as flat as possible. Peter spouted boilerplate neo-nietschean superman stuff, Stella seemed helpless to unravel him or pin him down or cut the flesh off his bones. After that it was just dragging along and having the abusive husband plot give us the temporary shooting with which to suspend and negotiate for a new season.
All the usual sociological dreck dragged in to motivate everything and everyone. Same old police procedural stuff of main stream tv after all.
oh well
reading Yalom, Lying on the Couch
strangely pleasant to be off for a very short trip. Not sure why. Walked in Concord at Tarjay and then back home while snow starting to flurry lightly. Snow tonight but over by morning. That’s the way we like it. Finale of Downton coming up. 50,000 marched in Moscow over death of the dissident, Boris Y. Nemtsov, who was fatally shot on Friday.
Sat night March 7
Punta Cana Four or more days with no screens, do I really want to start again? Why not make it the Whole vacation trip? turns out we have WiFi here in the room and I didn’t realize it. Just as well.
Damned Irvin Yalom novel. Read it before, probably in Cozumel or even Cancun, somewhere similar, beach vacation. Moment of certainty is when Marshall goes to find Macondo (yes, garcia marquez, so clever, Irvin) at the Pacific Union Club and the maitre’d clues him in to the fraud. Michael Caine Scoundrel wannabe plotline.
Now reading Chevillard and Blanchot.
Scott Merrill wrote asking me to be second reader on his diss for Boston U. ! holy cow. Patrick Armstrong is applying for a lecturship at coastal college of georgia. second holy cow. no direct message from him on that.
Davey sounds anxious and down in his email today. Fight with Annie and Cecile about baby sitting and other stuff. ?
March 8
Sunday mid-afternoon Gorgeous and breezy and breeze is lighter in humidity than yesterday and this morning. Nice swim and lunch at Agora, walked half-way and got a ride. Showers. Va finished her Olmstead book already and now reading Irvin Yalom. Be interesting to hear her take on it.
In honor of Chevillard’s novel, I had cauliflower for lunch. Not gratiné in perfection but close enough to join the spirit and essence of the narrative.
March 9 Monday 5:34 pm
Strange day but nice too. Spa morning. Then we finally connected with Davey for Facetime about 1:30. Late lunch. The Shopping Mall---all brand stores, nice building but souless unless you went to the Hard Rock pub. Va reading Yalom.
Blanchot published his book on waiting a good nine years after Beckett. Can’t see how it is not a sort of reply to Godot. Well, not reply I’m sure but a response-variant. Beckett born 1906 Blanchot born 1907 but did not die until 2003 ! at age 96
wiki Right to death
Two kinds of death (the first death is the actual event, situated within history; the second death is the pure form of the event, which never happens)
Douglas Johnson Guardian Obituary Saturday 1 March 2003
The French writer Maurice Blanchot, who has died aged 95, was not so much a private person, it was almost as if he was perpetually absent.
In May 1968, Blanchot again left his solitude to join the street demonstrations of the student protest movement, on one of which he met the philosopher Jacques Derrida. They had both researched the work of Mallarmé, who had fulfilled Blanchot's belief that the hold on language was the supreme test of a writer, and, last week, Derrida was to give the speech at Blanchot's funeral.
After 1968, Blanchot retired from the scene, although he continued to publish. Sometimes, he offered to return to public activity - as with his suggestion that he could mediate between Salman Rushdie and his Islamic enemies - but usually he acted as if he were already dead, and said that his books were posthumous. ---Johnson
Tuesday pm March 10
mostly packed, fly tomorrow
day in the capital today
Sunday night March 15
Chevillard has a great passage about being the solitary child. “The shy child is not as helpless as people believe. He learns to know himself before he becomes mixed up with others.” “This little creature, evasive, apathetic, laconic, whose discomfort unsettles, who quickly discourages every attempt to approach and to tame him, is in fact full of a disdain and a haughtiness he’s wise enough never to put to the test of reality. His solitude is a kingdom. He rules over it without rival, and with good reason. He has only to blush a little to keep others at a distance---his blood is boiling oil, molten lead, pitch, his entire head a red-hot cannonball. Then he will one day have to leave this scarlet paradise of childish self-love. A whole other story. Not easy. Habits have been formed, the habit of writing very possibly among them.” Footnote 29 pages 114-115 The Author and Me. trans Justin Stump
“What’s happening to literature is what happened to painting: no one gives a damn.” Great long passage on the end of literature and reading as Blanchot and Mallarmé read. On page 116.
Monday
exchange about various with Phil including this--
your friend's writing group !
"A bunch of women! "
today at the 5 pm matinee it was about 98
percent women and I made a mental note
to self: if you end up in a home some day,
you will look for one with a men only wing
or even a home for gays rather than get along
with a crowd like this for the remaining five
years or so of your life!
Grandma G in her retirement home never
left her room, refused to dine with the group,
had her highball every evening. lived to 103-4 sharp til the end and relaxed and funny too
doubt I can be that chill but the notion is there
when you find that nursing home, let me know...P
earlier he said----
No, I blow off all lists that appear on the internet or in magazines. They're just fillers to take up space and give the illusion of information. Moreover there is no way I'm going to re-settle in some country just because it costs less than the US. There are a whole lot of things here in the US that make this place pleasant. And Medicare is one of those things. The only reason I considered retiring to the US Virgin Islands was because I figgered it was still part of the US, so Medicare and lots of other things might be available. Then I got there and looked around. No way. As for all the other countries: "Nice place to visit but..."
BTW: I just finished Cetenich's novel. At the end, he thanked his writing group for all their help. A bunch of women! And that confirmed for me the value of writing groups. Zero. And less than zero if you are a male writer. His novel is very poorly written with long boring passages that get the story nowhere and amazingly dumb expressions such as "that room was filled to the gills." Of course, I emailed him that it was an interesting story. It could have been. But it wasn't. I'm just praying that he doesn't ask me to write a review on Amazon.
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the kids had a wonderful birthday day for Emma---we got a bucket of photos and videos from the day --- Eliot ready to jump into the fray ---
Chevillard has me saying all through his book, see, just sit down and write the shit as it comes no matter what. He’s doing it and look how you are glued to his pages. Well, even if not glued, happy to be along for the ride.
That’s it, that’s enough.
---------
comment by Stendhal in Calasso “It is as if Ingres were telling us that his secret was a secret to himself first of all. In a letter, he remarked on the “incomprehensible sensations” that set him against all that surrounded him. In the unexpected manner of their utterance, these words recall the moments in Stendhal’s Italian travel journal when, writing about an ordinary day, he pauses to says brusquely, “These secrets are part of the interior doctrine that must never be communicated.” Calasso 81
explicated on goodreads by Intro to R&B in UK (from Madge)
‘From my Introduction to R&B: (Raffels trans)
'[Stendhal, whose real name was Beyle,] developed a doctrine he called he called "egotism" or "Beylism." and later wrote of this doctrine in detail in a series of works not published until long after his death. The doctrine, the name of which is deceptive to speakers of English, urges a deliberate following of self-interest and views the external world solely as a theatre for personal energies. The "will to glory" is no more than the doctrine's external manifestation. Its essence is inward, an intense study of the self in order to give to the fleeting moments of life all the density of which they are capable. Although this is an admittedly elitist doctrine, Stendhal excused and justified it by his total sincerity. It ultimately proposes self-knowledge, not self-interest, to enhance the cult of the will, and it proposes the energy to develop an ever present sense of what one owes to oneself. To Stendhal, Italy and Napoleon were the supreme models of his doctrine. He proposed them to the "Happy Few" as guides, for he believed that the elite alone possess sufficient independence of judgment and strength of will to dare to be themselves. They alone may seek the supreme goal— happiness and the complete conscious realization of self— through self-analysis leading to self-knowledge and an awareness of how all others also seek their own ends; through a conscious hypocrisy to conceal their own goals; and through an unabating honesty with self.’
---------
funny thing I get sort of excited about going to Sarasota but then as soon as I look up places Ken suggests on google maps and street view--especially street view---my excitement wanes pretty quickly. Do I really want to go there??
Maybe Savannah first? Wait and see, Time will tell, unless money speaks first. Davey!
Weds late afternoon High winds still. Great long lunch with Scott. He may be a true wandering monk. Trip to Nepal a few years ago. Works at landscaping and brickwork in the summers. Teaching philosophy as a long-term part-timer. For years he hung around harvard divinity and b u taking courses of every ilk. We agree he would put more pressure on his newly retired diss adviser to get the degree finished. He was going to wait until mid-July but I think I persuaded him to tell the guy he is coming down in early June soon as he’s back from Florida.
Great reality check on my notions and flawed memories of the time he was a student. 97 must have been the year Phil and I taught the sex and death class for the last time and Scott was close to being a senior and grad.
Finished Chevillard’s book. His uncle was assassinated.
“This past weekend, the Algerian city of Tizi-Ouzou commemorated on Saturday, December 27 to observe the 20th anniversary of the tragic death of Father Alain Dieulangard Charles Dikers, Christian Chessel, and Jean Chevillard. These missionaries were victims of an attack perpetrated on December 27, 1994, by a terrorist group within their chapel located at the center of Tizi-Ouzou.” this from a Catholic online magazine, 2014
Chevillard is indeed also the name for a special kind of butcher. “wholesale butcher” is one translation but another is a butcher who processes the fat on meat in a certain way. “Boucher” is ordinary butcher.
Night Do I want to read another Chevillard right away??
Talking with Scott was a good reality check. He was defensive about Phil when I mentioned how Phil liked to tease and provoke people and said he has learned how to defend himself and not let it get to him. They took two road trips to Mexico, one in ’97 and another a few years later. Phil had a bumpy exit from campus and from elsewhere---he had been named director of Camp Mowglis when his father died---and that was around ’97 which I never quite realized. Scott really didn’t have an answer about why Bev left him. Tom StM helped him move over to Newport but he never expected to get stuck there. Andy StM is/was an alcholic---in recovery now I guess. Long phone calls to Phil at times.
Thursday evening---Email from Scott’s adviser puts me in the official loop for this diss and defense, sometime in June or July. Already “nervous” about it, can’t find my copy of J Biles book on Bataille, which I will take with me as my Crib!
of course now, late Sat night March 20 I’ve ordered three more books on Bataille in my anxious rush to be taken seriously by the gangsters at BU as “the Bataille expert.”
And in the pool today, my otter pool, I thought that of course the novel, after Chevillard, et al, will be a novel of Beginnings. The author will be in Copenhagen to forget his previous life and work, to start up a new courier service and to write a rambling novel of beginnings and only beginnings. Endings no longer interest us at all, as Marías posited and as the web has proven to us each day.
SUNDAY MARCH 22
after the opera and dinner in Hanover yesterday
hmm fast google detective work sure enough small percentage of men over 60 experience weight gain when using cialis and viagra and aspirin
but of course totally unreliable results as visible when yahoo vs google used for queries -- emed site seems especially sketchy because the studies are anecdotal it looks like --- chat reports from people eHealthMe.com ---
seems a money site rather than scientific
and “weight gain” one of those topics you could google search with any other topic and get positive results ---
still noticeable flush and wee dizziness this morning after great spa morning---cialis and viagra together though
Virginia told me the last Outlander volume includes this bawdy gaelic poem, Ode to My Excellent Penis
The poem Àdhamh read was “Tha ball-ratha sìnte riut” by Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. Many thanks to Dr. Michael Newton for permission to use his copyrighted English translation of the poem, which appears in his book The Naughty Little Book of Gaelic. (Do check out Dr. Newton’s own blog, The Virtual Gael.)
There is a lucky limb stretched against you
That has made a thousand conquests:
An excellent penis that is leathery, well-equipped,
Sharp-pointed, piercing, firm,
Lubricated, sinewy, chanter-like,
Strong, durable, long-enduring,
Vigorous, powerful, joyous,
That would not jilt either soft or hard (body).
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Can’t help but note that in terms of ambivalence in gender history that last line could suggest multiple meanings. And the history of practices ancient and medieval across all cultural boundaries. According to
MONDAY March 23
Found Biles book on Bataille. Now ready to become the premier Bataille expert in New England. Listed on Scott’s application as Reader Number Two, of Four. woo hoo
Great facey visit with Dave Emma and Eliot. Eliot looks real happy and Emma entertains-teases him royally.
digging into the bataille books that arrived today. 3 of them!
Weds March 25 English pub in Manchester. Day off lunch with laptop. Reading Scott’s thesis and email. Walking around gingerly. Will my legs ever feel normal again?? Started last weekend at the outing to the opera broadcast in Hanover. Too much sitting? Harsh chair legs, cialis overload, infection, inflammation? something more? worried and not worried. Hoping all will stretch out with more walking in the spring sunshine.
Thurs night rainy outside
we walked and shopped at Lowes in mid-day. I felt sick, food poisoning or just junky food from the day before at the bloody british beer house. And/or Va does have a UTI and has started the cipro for a 5-day run.
Grim sounding news from Nancy--
Hi,
I think most of you know that Bob has been having trouble walking, keeping balanced. Working with the neurologist, we don't know the exact cause but he has a serious narrowing of the spine (spinal stenosis) in his lower back and she said that can cause foot/lower leg problems. He has had neuropathy from his toes to his knees for the last two years but only since January did the serious walking issues start. He says at times if feels like he has forgotten how to walk and has to focus on lifting each foot. His neuropathy does not cause pain in his feet or legs.
He was dealing with this and we had just scheduled physical therapy when he took a VERY BAD fall on Tuesday night this week. He caught his foot and crashed his side on the kitchen granite counter top. It was a really hard fall.
We spent Wednesday first at the local Minor injury clinic where they took an XRay to check for broken ribs. But, in the exam, the doctor's probing found major pain in his spleen area so we had to go to the main hospital for Ultra Sound (to check for internal bleeding) and a CAT scan to check for spleen damage. From 2:00PM to 9:00PM we were in medical facilities--Ugh. The Results were no internal blood showing on the Ultra Sound (always a concern since he is on blood thinners); The CAT scan showed: spleen ok, but a HUGE, deep bruise (which I understood is on a facia wall that sheaths some internal organs -- I am not able to clearly describe what I think I understand.) AND, to be investigated later, what the ER doc explained was a "bubble" on the outside of his pancreas (syst) which was not showing in past scans--so soon he will have a more detailed scan of this later.
The current pain status: when at complete rest, next to no or negligible pain. But, with Any movement, excruciating pain that makes him cry out. Getting up, down, lying down--all horribly painful. He is on a 4-hour med schedule. He can barely walk and just drags his feet/shuffles so as not to cause the sharp pains. This is all compounded by the fact that for the last couple years he can't get up without using his hands/arms--so now not being able to get up plus the pain is so much more difficult.
We know it takes rest and time and can just with the pain to be more manageable.
That's it--send him good thoughts,
Nancy
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Friday night Concord for walking today. Legs and feet slowly feeling better. ready to try some different shoes though too. Gasp. Heresy. But some of them will still be zero-drop but more padded.
Sat 2 pm Jason from Lowe’s came at 11. Va likes him better than AlanMann.
Woke from a nap. Doctoring myself I would say if Va has a UTI (yes) then I have one too that goes from my belly down through my legs---that the leg-aches are linked with the groin-belly inflammation-infection. All low-level and kept at bay bay aspirin and advil every so often. What if I were to take an Advil cold and sinus this afternoon or evening? What if it is almost a cold-allergy combo of some sort? Va takes Zyrtec. Could I take one of those and get some relief in my legs?
Sunday March 29 Carried away with the remodeling ideas now that we consider covering over the backdoor with counter and cabinets and having a bigger window over the sink.
Sunny and bright if cool. Took a walk early but now my legs are really bugging me. Hmmm? arthritis, neuropathy?
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