August 2014

AUGUST 2014

Friday August 1

Tracking down translations on the French-American Foundation site for the annual prize for translation.  Sticker on the dust jacket of the Simon novel and finally I noticed it and said “Ah Ha.”  Source for info about interesting and recent French fiction worthy of a look. 

Interesting emails from Phil too.  He has a new Albanian landlord. 
But first big chunk of the Paris Review interview with Claude Simon.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that “our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete . . . our memory is selective. Writing transforms . . .” Is this transformation therapeutic in any way? Do you see writing as a form of therapy?
SIMON
No. I write only for pleasure, for the sake of producing something, and naturally, in the hope of being read. Apparently this hope is not completely vain, since I now have, in many countries, thousands of readers.
INTERVIEWER
Did the writings of Sartre and Camus have a great influence on your own work?
SIMON
I consider the writings of Camus and Sartre to be absolutely worthless. Sartre’s work is, above all else, dishonest and malevolent. If I have admitted to any influences, they have been those of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner. All my writing comes from personal experience.
INTERVIEWER
The hero of your first novel, Le Tricheur, has been described as being very close to Meursault in The Stranger.
SIMON
Le Tricheur was nearly finished in the spring of 1941, well before Camus’s The Stranger. I met my first editor, Edmond Bomsel, during the war. He was Jewish. His publishing house, The Sagittarius, had been confiscated by the Germans. He was a refugee in the southern zone and asked me to wait until the end of the war to publish Le Tricheur. I agreed. There is, therefore, absolutely no link with or influence on the part of Camus.
INTERVIEWER
You mention the influence of Faulkner, Joyce, and Proust on your writing. Does it bother you that some critics view your work as imitative?
SIMON
Those who write more or less stupid or malevolent criticism leave me largely indifferent. If I had given them my attention, I would not have done the work that won me the Nobel Prize.
INTERVIEWER
Some have said that it was after you wrote Le Sacre du printemps in the fifties that you became a “new novelist.”
SIMON
Since the majority of professional critics do not read the books of which they speak, mountains of nonsense have been spoken and written about the nouveau roman. The name refers to a group of several French writers who find the conventional and academic forms of the novel insupportable, just as Proust and Joyce did long before them. Apart from this common refusal, each of us has worked through his own voice; the voices are very different, but this does not prevent us from having mutual esteem and a feeling of solidarity with one another.
INTERVIEWER
What distinguishes your voice from those of the other new novelists?
SIMON
Beginning with The Grass, my novels are more and more based on my life and require very little fiction—in the end, really none at all.
INTERVIEWER
If you had to attach a label to your type of writing, what would it be, if not nouveau roman?
SIMON
Labels are always dangerous. You oblige me to repeat myself: if there is anything new in the novel, after the abandonment of the fable, it began in this century with Joyce and Proust.
INTERVIEWER
You once said you were bored by nineteenth-century realism. Did you choose your style of writing in reaction to this, to write a novel you felt was truly representative of reality?
SIMON
There is no such thing as a “real” representation of “reality.” Except, perhaps, in algebraic formulae. All the literary schools pretend that they are more realistic than their predecessors. Who knows what reality is? The impressionists stopped pretending to represent the visible world and presented the public with the “impressions” they received from it. If it’s true that we only perceive the exterior world in fragments, the canvases of the cubists’ “synthetic” period are realistic. More realistic still are the “assemblages” of Schwitters, Rauschenberg, or Nevelson.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you choose the style of writing that you did?
SIMON
I did not choose it. I write as I can.
I’ve had the luck to have a genius of a publisher—Jerome Lindon. He owns one of the smaller publishing houses in Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, with only nine employees. I came to them through Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom I met on vacation. He asked to read the manuscript of The Wind, which I was then finishing. He liked it and encouraged me to publish with Les Editions de Minuit, which I agreed to do because they had published writers for whom I have a great deal of esteem, such as Beckett, Butor, Pinget, and Robbe-Grillet himself. In recent years Les Editions de Minuit has had two Nobel prize-winners—Samuel Beckett and myself.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write quickly?
SIMON
No. Very slowly.
INTERVIEWER
Do you take notes, keep a journal?
SIMON
I take very few notes. I have never kept a journal. My memory is visual above all else.
INTERVIEWER
What do you want your readers to learn from your books?
SIMON
They’ll learn nothing. I have no messages to deliver. I hope only that they will find pleasure. The nature of this pleasure is difficult to define. One part is what Roland Barthes has called recognition—the recognition of sentiments or feelings one has experienced oneself. The other is the discovery of what one had not known about oneself. Johann Sebastian Bach defined this sort of pleasure as “the expected unexpected.”
INTERVIEWER
How do you work?
SIMON
I write with a ballpoint pen (Stabilo-Stylist 188), after which I use a typewriter. I write with a great deal of difficulty. My phrases construct themselves little by little, after many erasures, which prohibits the use of a typewriter.
INTERVIEWER
Do you follow a regular writing schedule, setting aside a certain amount of time to work every day?
SIMON
Each afternoon I start at around three-thirty and work until about seven-thirty or eight.
INTERVIEWER
You once said, “It’s the moment when I begin to battle with words that something comes to me.”
SIMON
Exactly. Each time I have a vague project in mind that gradually modifies itself for the better as I work.
INTERVIEWER
Is it true that you color-code your manuscripts with colored pencils in order to keep track of each narrative strand?
SIMON
The composition of my books gives me great problems. While working on The Flanders Road, I gave a color to each of the themes and characters. Doing this, I could visualize the whole, modify it, improve the placement of the fade-ins, the alterations of scenes, the rehearsals, the curtain calls. One day the composer Pierre Boulez told me that my biggest problem must be that of periodicity, which in music is the frequency of repetitions of one theme or refrain in a composition, often subject to variations or changes of tone. Boulez was exactly right. He did not find too many repetitions in my books, but understood that one of my problems was arranging them well.
INTERVIEWER
If you have trouble remembering the order of these strands, how can you expect the reader to do so?
SIMON
If he’s not capable of following the course of the book and it bores him, why shouldn’t he throw it out? It’s that simple. That’s what I always did when a book did not give me pleasure. We live in a democracy. We can choose to read what pleases us.
INTERVIEWER
In your early novels, such as The Grass and The Flanders Road, you wrote in long and complex sentences. More recently, your sentences have become simpler, and you have abandoned the paragraph altogether. What caused you to change your style?
SIMON
My project is different every time. To repeat the same things is of no interest.
INTERVIEWER
Do you decide the point of view in your novels in advance, or does this emerge as you write?
SIMON
When I start a novel I see it as a very vague project that gets modified for the better in the course of my work, not because my characters dictate their conduct, as certain imbecile novelists pretend, but because the language unceasingly presents new perspectives. Many years ago I said in an interview, “The novel makes itself, I make it, and it makes me.”
INTERVIEWER
Critics have said you have two types of heros—one who fights against order and one who accepts it—and that the conflict between these two types is at the center of your books.
SIMON
One must pose this type of question to philosophers. I am a novelist. One last time: what interests me is not the why of things but the how.
INTERVIEWER
So you don’t consider yourself a philosopher?
SIMON
Certainly not. I did not even take philosophy in high school. I studied mathematics. In general, I distrust philosophy. Plato recommended chasing poets from the city; the “great” Heidegger was a Nazi; Lukács was a communist, and J. P. Sartre wrote: “Any anticommunist is a dog.”
INTERVIEWER
Do you think it is possible or idiotic for human beings to find happiness in their lives?
SIMON
No, it’s not idiotic. It’s human. But was it Flaubert who said, “The idea of happiness has caused many tears to flow”?
INTERVIEWER
When are you happiest in your own life?
SIMON
In numerous ways . . . in loving or sexual relationships, reading a good book—Proust always throws me into a state of rapture—contemplating a picture, enjoying architecture, listening to music . . . it would take too long to list them all . . .. Maybe my happiest days were during that autumn when I was escaping from the prison camp . . . living outside the law.
INTERVIEWER
For the characters in your novels sex is always emotionally empty or destructive. Yet your portrayal of the sex act is often very erotic.
SIMON
The great weakness of the majority of erotic novels is that they feature conventional characters, spineless puppets who have no depth—the inevitable marquesses or marquises, English lords, multimillionaires, valets, and gamekeepers—to whom these sexual acts just happen, and for this reason, seem disembodied . . . To describe erotic scenes inserted among other, nonerotic scenes (as it happens in life) interests me; I have attempted it several times. Sadly, so many taboos are attached to sex that it is very difficult to talk about it. It is necessary to find a tone, a distance. Things such as affectation, derision, or lyricism, that may flaw writing about other subjects, become completely intolerable in erotic writing. That which is private is rendered into something frankly ridiculous, as in the famous Story of O . . . And recall the passage in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils where, after Stavrogin recounts the highly erotic and metaphysical episode of the rape and the hoped-for suicide of the little girl, Tikhon asks him, simply, if he does not believe in the ridiculous.
INTERVIEWER
Your novels repeatedly deal with the inevitability of death, with the dissolution of all things, with the futility of life. If life is really so empty and meaningless, why write about it?
SIMON
André Malraux, for whom I do not otherwise have much appreciation, has said: “Man is the only animal who knows that he is destined to die.” Life is not “futile” for all of that. Really, on the contrary, it is to be valued because of that. Why write? To write. To make something. The best response to this question was given by Samuel Beckett: “That’s all I’m good for.” If life is sometimes difficult, full of misfortune, suffering—I know something of this: I fought in war, was a prisoner, constrained to forced labor, scarcely nourished, much later gravely ill—I also know life carries many joys, satisfactions.
INTERVIEWER
Well then, what is the role of the writer in society?
SIMON
To change the world. Each time a writer or an artist “tells” the world in an ever so slightly new fashion, it is changed. “Nature imitates art,” Oscar Wilde said. And this is not a witticism. Apart from touching it, man only knows the world through representations given of it . . . through painting, literature, algebraic formulae, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
Do you concern yourself with national or international politics?
SIMON
I take an interest in politics, but without passion. Today politics seem more than ever to be controlled by economic constraints; political leaders are reduced to the role of administrators. It is not for ideological reasons that Gorbachev was looking to make a political structure different from his predecessors’, but because he faced an economic disaster in the Soviet Union. When events cross the threshold of what is tolerable (as, for example, the repression and the war led by France in Algiers during the fifties) I show my opposition.
INTERVIEWER
You were twice a runner-up for the Nobel Prize for Literature. There was a public outcry when you failed to receive it in 1983. How did you feel when you got it in 1985?
SIMON
Extremely pleased. To be honest, others have had reactions of displeasure they cannot hide. In France, in literary circles, it was as though someone had made them swallow a hedgehog, whole, with all its needles. For example, a colleague, a “friend,” told The New York Times that he made me hold back every other chapter from one of my novels, thanks to which it had become more readable. But still, the Nobel. A great stroke of luck, let me tell you! It’s lucky to have something like this happen when you are seventy-two years old, and when your head is solidly screwed on. Honors and money are suddenly heaped on you! An avalanche of invitations from all over the world! That can be stressful, can turn heads. After receiving a Parisian literary prize for much less, some writers have remained impotent for the rest of their lives. Lars Gillensten, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, told me at Stockholm: “Now—write, write! . . . Afterward, most laureates write nothing else.” And so, “afterward” I wrote a big novel, The Acacia, published last fall, which the critics, from the communists to the extreme right, including the Catholics, have called the best of my books.
INTERVIEWER
You have often referred to yourself as an amateur writer. After producing fourteen novels, do you still call yourself an amateur?
SIMON
Writing novels is not a profession. One is not paid by the month or year by a boss. A professional is someone who has acquired a certain number of skills by which he can be assured of a calculable return. The butcher has learned how to cut meat, the doctor to diagnose illnesses, the mason to build a wall—all according to various rules. In art, there are no rules. To the contrary, often it’s a question of breaking them. With no guarantees. I am, therefore, always an amateur on whom, miraculously, money is bestowed from time to time.
INTERVIEWER
What is your definition of a professional writer, then?
SIMON
A journalist, a critic, charged with regular assignments in a publication for a predetermined salary. Also, the authors of best-sellers who write in order to please the public at large and to receive constant remuneration.
INTERVIEWER
. . .
SIMON
Apart from a certain level of elementary instruction, I think that in effect anyone can, by working hard, do what I do. Certainly there are tastes, predispositions . . . some for mathematics, for business, medicine or painting . . . or even laziness . . .
INTERVIEWER
Do young people ask your advice about how to become a writer?
SIMON
Not often, happily.
INTERVIEWER
If they do ask, what do you tell them?
SIMON
To go out in the street, walk two hundred meters, go home again, and then attempt to write (and describe) all that they have seen (or thought, dreamed, remembered, imagined) during this walk.
                        . . . .
I am not a symbolist. I saw the light drawing a T that moved slowly across the floor and the furniture of a room. The T suggested to me the word temps and the march of time. It seemed like a good image.
INTERVIEWER
Trains appear often in your novels—what do they symbolize?
SIMON
Nothing but trains.
INTERVIEWER
Boxes with illustrated lids—the cigar-box label in La Corde raide, for example, and the cookie tin in The Grass. What is their significance?
SIMON
Nothing. I like to describe things. As others like to paint. Nothing else. Shakespeare wrote: life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That’s also my way of thinking. Except that for me life is not only full of sound and fury. It also has butterflies, flowers, art . . .
INTERVIEWER
Do you read your novels once they are published?
SIMON
No.
INTERVIEWER
What are your plans for the future?
SIMON
None. I only make short-term plans. I am seventy-seven years old. I can die tomorrow. I wish only to be able to write.
---------
Paul Theroux’s story in the New Yorker this week.  
Paul Theroux’s story in the New Yorker this week. 
Garamond and Didot below.  Now that I am in my Francophile phase I must decide whether to use Didot or Garamond. 

Theroux’s story about working in his father’s shoe store after high school. 
      All through high school I worked for him at the shoe store hating every minute of it.  He claimed that he needed me, but business was slow--“slack” was how he’d put it--and I knew that he wanted me there only to keep me out of trouble.  His letterhead said “Louis Lecomte & Son,” which looked important, but the reality was my father dozing in one of the customer’s chairs and me in the basement stacking shoeboxes.  (59) 
Man, sure could have been my paragraph about working in the store.  “Action” is the title.  New collection out this fall.  So Theroux is kicking along.  What if indeed he is the greatest writer of our generation, American writers. 
Phil had an earlier longer email about Israel and an essay in Tikkun.
You made me laugh today and feel good for the first time by pointing out the undoubted hubcap-Albanian connection.

Have just purchased a used hubcap in good condition:  $39.   New ones cost $95.

Tomorrow I turn 70.  Ugh.

One thing I like about Theroux is his refusal to be politically correct without turning himself into a fascist idiot.


P


Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2014 15:44:19 -0400
Subject: by now
From: robert.garlitz@gmail.com
To: jpjones33@hotmail.com

surely you are suspecting as I already have that your hubcaps are being stolen by your new Albanian landlord's goons as the kickoff of his campaign to harass you out of the building?

-----
 We had Paris thrust upon us.  When I read Franz Hessel’s essay “In Berlin: Day and Night in 1929” I knew I had been a flâneur long before I had ever heard the word. 

etc

The illusion, delusion, of the day, every day, a neurotic fantasy that keeps me going through each day these days, that I will wake up today, tomorrow, and stop all other of my usual round of distractions throughout the day and devote myself “once and for all” to writing, to writing this book called Hotel Courier.  There is a street in Paris named after Paul-Louis Courier, right off St Germain.  And a lycee after this hero. 

Theroux’s story is pretty good.  But I would never write it like that.  I am no Paul Theroux, nor was I meant to be. 

We went swimming this morning and my skin is dry and itchy.  Had an encounter with a clown today.  Paste in the email I sent to the clown just after it happened. 
Dear Simplicity

I was walking back home from the college
library.  You asked directions to Fox Pond,
you were late for your gig.

I was taking two books home to my wife,
books from Argentina on interlibrary loan.
She is a (famous) scholar of Spanish literature.
You startled me a bit and I was glad you
helped me remember our acquaintance,
Moe the Clown and his wife Suzanne Schwartzman.

Virginia pointed out when I told her about
our encounter and how great you looked as
a clown, that one of the books I was carrying
is about her current research topic, a famous
English clown in Buenos Aires in 1900 named
Frank Brown.  Here is his photo

frank brown buenos aires

He was known as King of the Clowns, died in
1943.

Clown creepiness, or what!

Hope you had a great gig with the kids at Fox
Pond.

Best wishes,

She knew about him, he is clown famous. 

Hi!

Thank you for your help getting me to my gig!
There were more than 100 kids at the park and I only had two hours to create a balloon for each one.... but I did it!  HA!
I arrived at 12:15, everyone got a balloon and I left the park at 2:30
Phew!

I learned about Frank Brown at clown school, glad you jogged my memory!  His clown makeup was not very kid friendly, but he was an excellent clown none the less... so we were told  :o)

Have a great day and thanks for sharing!



Your friend, Mary Anne "Simplicity" Ross

-------------
How could I have forgotten that Courier is also one of the key Fonts.  Duh.

See, I waste my time on all these idiocies rather than focusing my energies on the one thing. 

by 170 in Jules et Jim the threesome is back together.  “Jules, in love with solitude . . . .”    He moved all his books to one room.  “In there he was a monk, very much at peace provided Kate didn’t call him.” 

Sunday afternoon, now 1:30 almost.  Just finished Valeria Luiselli’s book “Faces In the Crowd” or Los Ingrávidos---the Weightless Ones as in Unworthy or non-existent--another word perhaps for Ghosts.  A poetic arrangement of paragraphs on a cluster of characters and themes.  Nicely done but I wouldn’t get all wild about it.  She’s no Clarice Lispector.  Yet.  Not that she wants to be.  She and her husband are terrifically ambitious.  They live in NYC and are working the scene with great success.  His wiki article shows that.  I might look at her slim volume of essays because someone managed to get Cees Nooteboom to write a forward to it.  Kirsten recommended her a few weeks ago as one of the hot new voices that her friend Patrick is especially keen on. 

Rare to have an email from Burgo.  July 30
Bob,
Just google Paris September Events and you will find an excellent site listing a number of special events.  Don't forget the third week-end of September is "Jours de la patrimoine" when all kinds of places are open to the public.  The list is often not available even on line until into September.  Of course lines for the most famous places are very long, but lesser places you just walk in.  I waited for two and a half hours for the Elysee Palace, but it was worth it.  Saw Sarkozy and his wife.  Went right into the Foreign Office on the Quai dOrsy, the British Embassy, the Sorbonne, etc. on different occasions.

  When in Paris there is a state sponsored place in the rue St. Honore that has all kinds of printed matter.
Of course, upon arrival in Paris get a copy of Pariscope, which comes out every Wednesday.  It has just about all events.
Just received my copy of European Rail Timetable (formerly Cook's) and now must decide if I want to get a Eurailpass and for how long.  Two months is of course the most convenient, but now frightfully expensive. I shall have to reflect.

Donald


Nooteboom’s Introduction is fantastic.  For a writer and for a writer as young as Luiselli, almost like winning the Nobel, I would think. 

She has a great quotation at the outset too: 

There is nothing more productive or more entertaining than allowing oneself to be distracted from one thing by another.    --Unknown genius, possibly a reader of Blaise Pascal

It opens the essay on looking for Joseph Brodsky’s grave in Venice.

It could be the best thing in the book.  Also, you wonder, if her mix of topics is not just too perfect, post Savage Detectives and Bolaño and the search for the next new great Latin American writer.  Still, her book, the “novel” feels light and I want to say “fey” but that word is no longer available.  Light and deft perhaps. 

Nooteboom’s essay is wonderful, all the more so since he knows he’s older now and this young generation just jumps in to what he and his generation prepared before them.  If I Google “post-flâneur age” will I not find some brilliant essays on the topic?
I did google the date of Stonewall riots and wow, sure enough, 1969.  So exactly one hundred years from 1869--the age of heterosexuality lasted precisely a century. 

Doug Fife died over the weekend.  Still on the faculty it looks like.  Did I last see him in Walmart a few months ago, just as I had Walter Tatara?  Wonder if Doug knew he was ill and did not resign on purpose?  He must have been maybe 75?  Joined the college two years before we arrived. 
Our small fund lost 2k over the weekend.  Alas.  And my chart line has dipped a wee as we take out too much and now take out our minimum tax distributions.  What to do with excess cash except spend it becomes the issue here.  I think.  Need some more good advice on investments again. 

What is flânerie in a global age? A lecture by Kathryn Kramer for the Flâneur Community
Last March, we had the pleasure to meet Kathryn Kramer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and new Chair of the Art and Art History Department at SUNY Cortland in New York, while she was in Shanghai conducting research on the last Shanghai Biennale. We took this opportunity to ask Kathryn to present her recent article, entitled Flânerie and the Globalising City (written with John Rennie Short), and she was so kind as to give a lecture which gathered some of our flâneurs and experts.
Flânerie started as both an artistic and sociological practice to get inspired from and learn about the phenomenon of growing cities at the turn of the 20th century. Charles Baudelaire, Franz Hessel and Walter Benjamin are considered to be the “founders” of flânerie. While these early wanderers looked at the city as a subject, those reviving flânerie today also use the city as an object, a tool or a laboratory to expand artistic or other practices. They are thus contributing to the revival of what is perhaps becoming a method, which allows for the subjective and the analytical to co-exist and extends from a solitary activity into a collective and collaborative one, rather than a mere leisure activity. Kathryn also demonstrated how flânerie expanded from its European roots to other cities worldwide and how some flâneurs navigate between cities through events such as art fairs and biennales or the Universal Exhibitions.
The resurgence of Shanghai and the many government-promoted events have certainly brought the attention back to the city and created new urban landscapes, adding layers to the older ones and reminiscing of modernising Berlin and Paris. “Besides being colonial, post-colonial, industrial, post-industrial, republican, communist, capitalist, Shanghai’s multilayered urban imaginary incorporates flânerie’s history as well as its own.”
As much as this may have been music to our ears, Kathryn’s compelling lecture opened our eyes to the ever more varied practices and applications of walking as well as the increasing numbers of actors involved. In short, flânerie is alive and thriving!
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market basically down, so, don’t look so often as per earlier in the year! 

great batch of photos from the kids.  At Faunia.  I sewed 4 bibs for them this morning on the old machine!  Memories. 

Tuesday evening almost night  Thunder showers right after we got in a walk around 4:30 at docks.  Now it feels as though fall is already beginning, the days growing shorter, even though it is only the overcast from the rain showers.  Still it is 8:15 pm and a month ago it would have not gotten this dark until 9:15.  Or so. 

Finished Franz Hessel’s Berlin 1929

Liked this phrase when he’s talking about the dance clubs and the same gender dances:  "and your own normality becomes a peculiar stroke of luck.”

That essay on wandering Berlin and taking in the people conjures even now most successfully.  The Wiki entry on his life shows how sad the ending was---he survived internment on the coast at a spa type place, camp, at Millets-sur-mer, or it was near Sarnay-sur-mer.  Died shortly after the end of the war.  He had been a French citizen for years, that must have saved him form worse treatment.  His younget son, Stephane Hessel, became a very important diplomat and at the age of 93 published a book attacking world banking and power interests that became an force for the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Wow.  Not bad.

Piece from the web on the flâneur finally gives me the clue I was looking for about Bolaño’s title “Savage Detectives.”  Baudelaire calls the true flâneur a detective. 

A strange and difficult labor it was to read through to the end Roché’s novel Jules and Jim.  He deserves the credit, of course. for givin Truffaut the story, the material, from which Truffaut made such a famous movie.  The most unforgettable image is the suicide by driving herself and her lover off the edge of a bridge into the river.  Suicide together in an automobile that “leaps” off into the air and water below.  Thelma and Louise re-use the trope years later.  And Roché gave the ‘60s its image of free love and the loving three-way, if not in sexual terms, then in emotional terms.  Two dear and loving male friends inextricably bound together in love with one woman who is ancient and archetypal and mystical and impossible.  In the meanwhile they each, the men and the woman, have innumberable lovers along the way, on the side.  I guess it is Roché’s inadequate talents as a writer that make the book so difficult and every so often he throws in strange items in some attempt to be psychological or rapturous or ineffable or grand and artistic.  In the final passage about the suicide itself he includes this strange attempt at resonance of some sort---Jim is tumbling into death with Kate in the car, she is “like a red idol at his side, attracting him like a magnet.  He let himself be drawn passively into her splendour.”  Perfect.  End it right there.  Please do not add the next lines:  “In the darkness he could see, on each side of her, curled up with its legs retracted, a big white spider . . . .  No, it was moving . . . .  It was Harold’s hands.”   Man what a way to ruin an otherwise compelling enough moment of death.  Roché has used the spider image for sure before and that is no surprise, but Harold was one of Kate’s minor lovers in passing and he does not need to appear in this key moment. 

There are so many lovers and combinations through the book that we get tired of keeping track of them.  Lucie and Gilberte and Jim’s mother and Jules’ children and others.  And late in the story Roché seems to just throw in while passing a note about Odile and Jules.  She had been with Jim a while back and things ended and then one night Jules was in Paris and the two of them spent the night together.  “It was she who had raped him, Jules, and after a while he had let her do as she liked.  He had been wide-eyed and astonished, like a child in front of a Christmas tree, and they had never laughed so much.”   Maybe “ravished” would be what the translator today would use rather than “rape.”  Even so, why put in this little sidebar so late into the tale? 

Truffaut had the genius to see that a rambling, perhaps even at times a bit pointless a novel could be made into a good short story and even better film.  The essential images, the three-in-a bed, the three gamboling in the countryside, Kate’s leap into the Seine one night in Paris, various moments of shared bliss and trouble, and then the suicide in the car off the bridge.  Bam.  Great movie for its day. 

Roché brings in another couple, younger, Jack and Micheline.  Nudists and advanced thinkers.  Seeing Jack helps Jim see what he has not yet quite seen: 
      Venice, like sleeping-cars, brought Jack and Micheline together too much; Jack had bouts of miserable depression as a result, and these hit Micheline on the rebound.  Jim could see this happening; he also understood that, mutatis mutandis, he was in the same case as Jack and perhaps as all other men:  they were all straws in the blazing fire of their women’s beauty.  (189)

“Jim was amused, and wondered why these two gave him their friendship.  Did he, as they did, belong to the pirate breed?  Or was he just an idler, but so goodnatured a one that they gave him their favour?  190

Who first designated “the pirate breed?”  Was that Baudelaire as well?  Sounds like it could have been.  Or Benjamin?

Wednesday late afternoon  6th ! 

What I like about reading Giralt Torrente’s novel, Paris, is how far into the narrator’s thoughts it seems to place us without giving us any or almost none, of the usual stuff novels used to assume was essential to great story telling.  I’m on page 73.  And I’m now closely watching out of one corner of my eye to see just how true that sense of the narrative continues to be.  So far (glancing back over the pages) it seems there is no dialogue---or at least none spaced out differently from the text.  There are only chapter breaks with roman numerals.  And as much as I would have thought I had prefered Luisa Veraselli’s practice of small paragraphs separated by only an asterisk, I really think I prefer Giralt Torrente’s.  Marías has no chapters or very long chapters.  It is the intensity of voice we want.  Roché’s novel was so cluttered with events and names but had little real intensity even though it wanted to portray the tightly bound quality of the three-way intimacies.  He should have had Jules tell the whole story, Jules the Benedictine-ish monk who survives. 

Also Paris makes me interested in using the theme of secrecy and dishonesty as the organizing principle or presence in my tale about the retired (early) therapist who travels to escape the voices he cannot forget of his former patients.  And to mourn the loss of his beloved.  Or perhaps only one of these, or are they bound together into the same inexact story?  To serve as a messenger for other people’s secrets seems to him to be the ultimate nature of a life of meaning.  People need and cherish their secrets more than any thing else in their lives, including their loved ones, who are, finally, the greatest secrets they have encountered, the strangest aliens in their lives, the bearers of the abyss we call human personality and human nature.  We are lovable to each other, we give and receive love, in our greatest moments of life, but none of us is knowable and that gives love over to time itself before we can fully savor what it has meant. 

Friday night       Thursday’s performance of Verdi’s Requiem blew me away.  Tomorrow night Verdi’s La Traviata in Lebanon. 

been obsessed almost at digging into the DeMoulas saga.  Nasty stuff.  Maybe it is DNA after all?  Greek tragedy as purely realized as possible, though I don’t know if there’s been any violence or death.  But there was a fist-fight between these two cousins way back.  And Mike did steal almost half of the fortune from his brother George.  Or was it the other way around?  Arthur S’s father was George.  Arthur T threw the punch at him in the back of the courtroom.  Arthur T is Mike’s son.  S’s sister-in-law, Rafaela, switched her voting allegiance from T to S this summer, from London, creating the whole new stage of the saga. 

Tuesday  12 August
Writing a big check, 7k, for Toomey has put me in a panic.  Unnecessary, I know but I still called Dockrill and ordered more and his response while as professional as ever also put me in a panic.  Mild but still.  Must be the super full moon of the past few days.  Which, come to think of it, we could blame for the suicide of Robin Williams, our great contemporary comedian, couldn’t we?  Why not? 

I feel like a real mono azul, photocopying way too many photos from a huge book on Argentina’s centenary for Willow’s new paper in progress.  Yes they do re-live in a few snaps, big, what we did on that epic journey through South America.  I urge Chris Buckley to write his book about his early life and journey with the brother but perhaps the real urge is for me to write my books about our journeys.  Fictionalized and re-shaped into imitations of Aira and Sebald and Luiselli all in one.  Or just my own poor mumblings. 

Wednesday
to Phil
I suspect we "bring in" various foreign cultural dignitaries to lionize
whatever they do just to show how open and multi- we are, our sophistication

once installed, like Murakami, designated Asian genius, no one dare say
much contrary to ruling wisdom.

Aristotle got it wrong---I always knew it and finally I've got the correction
I was looking for all these years.  It is not that man is a social animal but
that man is a hero-worshipping animal, a follower of blindly chosen leaders,
a team-joiner.   Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Hitler, Napoleon,
the Pope, the Queen, etc.  I'm Alsatian and you're not.

Not to disagree at all with your main point---people read and like their
writers for the widest possible spectrum of reasons ----

Are you about to see this new Indian feel-good movie--Journey of 1000 steps?
Friend is inviting us to go this weekend so I suppose we will.

Torrential rains today, always pretty amazing ---the weather, when it wants
to show us what its got once more.

-----
Concord won me over yet again and even in the torrential rain a short but super-sweet trip.  Bean burrito with great guacamole at Dos Amigos on main street, a sloshy walk up to Crust and Crumbs and there a super chocolate torte with vanilla cream icing, thick and double-layered with candied violet petals on top.  Again, remarkably good.
Heavy rain soaked me but the new rain hat worked nicely.  Got home in time not to conk out but get onto the bed for a fine proper nap.  Solo bit me and I got up to put alcohol on it. 

In the morning Bert and his daughter, Jenna?, stopped to say they would hold off starting on their job until tomorrow.  And before that Tom stopped to say the same thing and add that the tv room needs a new window.  Yep, another 1500$ or more on that one.  Have to ask Tom how much the kitchen window ran to see if I did double-pay him.  Hope so. 

Talked myself down out of the panic mode about the money.  Soon as you go that route you ruin everything for all of us and past experience shows it is such a waste of energy and time.  Soon as I calm down the money always works out fine and dandy.  My approach to finance and its contents.  Besides, we enjoy our panics when the possibilities are not too dire.  The edgery of panic enlivens the day and the week and the sleepless night.  So I thought, finally, my math has never been good and I’m probably overlooking something key as I intuitively try to scan the coming expenses vs the money coming in vs the fluctuation of spending.  End of summer has always been for us a point of high expenditure right before we close down and inward for the long wet fall and bleak cold barren winter when dormancy has us spending less than eight cents a week just to keep ourselves breathing and the amount of money in the accounts skyrockets into unreasonable heights, preparing us for spring and hope and new consumption of ephemeral goods. 

Also, before these trips, panic seems the natural and best way to ratchet up excitement.  We can fear airline disaster, or course, but barring that, worry about money on a daily basis gives the anticipated trip the frisson of delectation we look for so that we may look forward with the greatest of pleasure.

Today, my worry about whether to take the jaunt to Concord or not, gave me a perfect microcosmic thing.  The anticipation is so important it becomes almost decree, one that one may not disobey without penalty.  The anticipation creates obsessive compulsion and even guilt.  I can not not do what I imagine perhaps doing because if I did, the guilt at breaking the weight of the anticipated activities would be too great. 

Post-Flâneur Salonist. 

FOUND the Calasso book, La Folie de Baudelaire, as I knew it would show up right under my nose.  Was on the shelf with the address books.  So the decayed windowsill helped reveal this lost book.  Calasso will teach me everything and everything through an Italian’s take on a key period of French culture. 

Friday morning

If I write the book, complete it or abandon it, the anxiety about not writing it will go begging and become anxiety about what to write next. 

20th C identity politics will be looked back upon as temporary alignments which gave people a ride for a while over turbulent seas.  New conveyances will be created.  So all the divides created by late 19thC science will wither and be replaced by fluidly reconfigured something or other. 

Friday night   Biggest imagined wonder in that regard, above, is whether in the long run, the hundred years of this “scientifically” devised divide will be looked back upon as a way men found to play it safer in a wildly changing world.  Learning how to survive and thrive with men alone, as the ancient patriarchy itself came crashing down like the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, was really what the gay revolution was about.  Once that had ended by marriage being the structure of choice for everyone no matter how successful it proved in practice, “gay” as structural necessity or desirable category gradually disappeared, like the legalization of pot.  Slow, rhizomial social change, erosive, recoagulant social evolutionary redefinition and categorization.  Where gender and sex used to be such important tags for these things, portable state identity, global employment passports and local wrinkles of niche livelihood became much more important for the subsequent three hundred years. 

Anyway.  Friday night.  Outlet shopping at Merrimack.  News from Louise and Chuck making us wonder if they will come after all.  Louise’s brother deathly ill of cancer right now.  We await further word on that. 

Fabulous concert last night---“Latin Soul”  ----a Copeland clarinet concerto I’d never heard, early, touches of Brazil and not at all Copelandesque, which was a relief.  Bizet Symphony by S---- have to look up his name.  Brilliant use of brass to flesh out the symphonic nature of the re-setting.  A Danzon by Marquez, contemporary, and one other piece I’ve forgotten, oh, part of De Falla’s Three Cornered Hat. 

He had created this illusion that if only he wrote a book, a novel preferably, this would give him a final satisfaction from which he could savor the remaining years of his life. 

“Starving the pig” that is the saying we used to use to try to reign in expenditures.  Happened a few times before, can happen again. 

Sunday night August  17  Busy day.  Polly’s for pancake mix for the starving French people in Paris.  Bethlehem for lunch.  Walking at Tanger and returning things. Busy all day.  Cool weather, giving that touch of end-of-summer and start of school.  Feel like I spent the day posting and scanning stuff on Facebook.  That thief of creativity, time, self-respect and interiority.  At the same time, someone is laptopping a book on how Facebook has saved civilization as we speak. 

Tuesday late afternoon
Another shooting in St Louis.  Market Basket slides further. 
Toomey and his brother have been working all day.

Astonishingly beautiful day, beyond Perfect.
Lunch with Lindsay Anderson and her husband Cameron at the Bistro.  Stroll to the Commons where Cameron played a few tunes on his kitchen bagpipe, a scaled-down version designed to avoid detection from British soldiers and these days to be a portable instrument.  Called Dane Anderson over to join us.  He and Cameron could talk music a bit and then sailing---they both knew the tall ship in Connecticut called the Quinnieapac. 

Reading just one book all the way to the end might help stop web-browse mania. 

Should I tweet that?  Posted a reallly good piece on Berlin’s efforts to memorialize its violent history. 

Thursday night

Day off.  so-so.  Went to Patrick’s Pub in Gilford near the Yacht Club Mountain View.  Predictable in every way.  Meal ok.  Mud Pie even.  Yuck.  Trees being cut own in front of Hans’s old house in Meredith.  Not much else to report.  When you have steak tips on the salad even though not many they fill you up.  Long Island Iced Tea too.  Dumb choices.  Dumb day.  Day off. 

Saturday almost 3 pm

tried to sum up the Demoulas tale for Phil

Three generations involved.  Grandfather started the grocery store in Lowell, MA.
Sons inherited it (daughters and cousins too by then.)  Biz grew.  Wealth.
One son suspected his brother was hiding part of the wealth.  Found to be true.
String of nasty court battles and one fist-fight in court.
Their sons inherited the biz and the battle.  ArthurT and Arthur S (his dad
tried to defraud AT's dad)--cousins.

Years and years of court battles.  Key battle involved divorce from AT by
his wife Rafaela Evans.  Most expensive divorced battle in Mass court
history.  After that Mass Supreme court about fifteen years
ago decided Arthur T and his side of the family group should get controlling
interest on the board 50.5 percent.  So Rafaela (the divorcee) threw her vote to AS's side and for years he proceeded to control the company and actually run the grocery stores.

They expanded and grew, no corporate debt.  AT became beloved people-

Saturday night August 23 

Tom Tommey stopped in the morning with great news.  Whereas I had thought I owed him another 8k, he gave me his sheet showing I owe 4k with a little more later in October for the two new windows.  Woo Hoo  Nice relief.  So looks like all is a go-go.

This and that all day.  Walking in Wal and BJ and various errands and then fresh corn for dinner.  Photos of the kids on Facebook on the Normandy coast.

Short chat with the Nielsens.  Christopher now working in Boston as an architect for Bruner/Cott.  well, designer is his title.  He did architecture at Oregon, taught for some years at Middlebury.  Did he teach skiing there?  or design, or both?  His favorite contemporary architect is new to me---Peter Zumthor, Pritzker prize in 2009, Swiss.  Six or seven key projects.  Very spare, very austere, Swiss, cold, cereberal.  Chris is a mathmatician like his dad.  Janice says she has two to four more years and then maybe, Jeff hinted, they go to live in France.  Janice comes from money, I’ve decided.  The style of gold jewelry.  Or maybe not, maybe always wanted to be seen that way.  Her father is in his eighties and not doing well. 

Dick Gardner died this past week.  Marie Therese had left a phone message on Tuesday? 



person, for both customers and employees.  Also profit-sharing model--4%
per year.  In 2008 with the Downturn, AT said the corporation would
cover-absorb--the 48 million the employee pension fund had lost.

This Spring, Rafaela, who lives in London, changed her vote.  AS's side now had
the controls.  He, AS, had made himself through normal financial strategies
(I think) among top ten wealthiest people in Boston.  He and his board
fired AT in May or June and put in a whole new top level management
team.  Employees quit, customers boycotted and of late suppliers bailed
and cut all ties in spite of huge and unusual extra payments.  Stores empty
for at leat two months.

Seems AT has found backing to buy out the other side of the family.  Decision
coming this week.  Governors and senators from both MA and NH actively
involved in negotiations (on AT's side--save jobs, the company).

I think the primary motive for AS was revenge against AT.  That is one reason
I sent the WaPo article to you because I snickered at the ways the Young
business school hot shot at Drexel U tried to frame the tale on higher levels
of biz theory and behavior.  Why Rafaela changed her vote is the key question
and we will probably never know.

Maybe science will some day isolate the specific DNA strand they will label
Greek tragic revenge motif!

We shop in the nearest store occasionally---half hour away.  Always good prices,
always full of people and I had never seen so many people working all the time
at a big grocery store.  Had not realized the factor of the profit-sharing and
the near cult status of AT and his ways of building customer loyalty.

 The story, the whole back story, was pretty new to me and I spent way too much time piecing it together for myself.  :-)

Oops, forgot one other key item.  15-20 yrs ago when it delivered its decision about the final split of the board--49.5 vs 50.5--the Mass supreme court told the
family that it would Never Ever again hear a case involving any members
of their family.  !

Weds afternoon   Such a lovely day even if a wee warm and hot.  Our new ac is chilling us down so comfortably as we watch General Hospital.  Now we feel that Dave wants us to come because on the first day we can dive into helping him a bit with the kids.  Solves our arrival details too because now Camille doesn’t need to bring us a chair..

Nicholas posted about his tantric reader and now I want one too. 


The Tantric numerologist

For my xx significant birthday a friend gave me a 'session' with a tantric numerologist (who lives inevitably perhaps in California). She was whacky, extrovert...and penetrating.

The session was conducted on Skype and all she had to go on was my presence, my birthdate and my name, and a very brief account of 'me' that I gave her.

Yesterday I was listening to the recording of that session, thinking how uncannily accurate it had been, as it unfolded.

Indeed she used almost the exact same words as another friend had years before. This friend was a distinguished astrologer. Both had used the image of repeated previous lifetimes spent in monasteries but that this time one's karmic imperative was to be in the world, and of service (however much retreat is sometimes necessary). There would be no authoritative, enclosing community for me this time.

It gives me (however you understand it) a poignantly lonely spirit, accomplished after its own manner with some wisdom, but so restless, unable to settle.

How accurate she was too about the trajectory of engaged enthusiasm, paradoxically coupled, with an oft burning desire to 'get the hell out of here' (wherever 'here' is at the time)!

It is difficult to know what to do with 'seers' in contemporary culture, they elude our 'neating' material categories. Allow oneself, I suppose, to be seen and take from it whatever is valuable, parking the rest.

Today the tension between 'being here' and wanting to escape was especially sharp. I know that I will stay in the world of helping, that is so honourable and good, and yet never quite mine in the configurations in which it presents itself (whatever mine is)!


Weds afternoon   Such a lovely day even if a wee warm and hot.  Our new ac is chilling us down so comfortably as we watch General Hospital.  Now we feel that Dave wants us to come because on the first day we can dive into helping him a bit with the kids.  Solves our arrival details too because now Camille doesn’t need to bring us a chair..

Nicholas posted about his tantric reader and now I want one too. 

Tuesday evening now August 26  Va got her hair trimmed, Ben replaced the faucet in the kitchen.  The vinyl craftsmen move slowly around the house.  It really looks as tedious and fine as real cabinet work.

Back to Weds the 27  cut and paste messed up the sequences up above.

While Va, Karen and Carole lunched at the Bistro, I went to the Squam general store for a sandwich, scrumptuous macaroon and ice cream.  They have a key lime pie in their freezer---information filed for later use.   Eavesdropped on the vacationers and entitled Squam boat and estate owners.  The store looks and feels better than it has in thirty years.  Upscaled most sensibly.  Harold Hyde’s daughter published a memoir about growing up in Plymouth from 1951 to 1969.  See if Ken and Carole might be interested but probably not. 

Got all the plates back up.  Suitcases in the living room this time which is perfect.  Colin here for piano today and we’re all set for Sunday.  Catherine and Emrys might stop in Paris to mooch for a few days or even a week.  That would be fine.  Like them both and glad to be back in touch.  Catherine says Scotland will go. 

Thursday afternoon  waiting to see Arthur T’s press conference at 5.  Walked in
Tilton and earlier at the Docks.  Facebook intense activity regarding the Market Basket news.  Then I declared that we were in the Zone, ready to fly on Sunday, now packing with the checklist. 

Shoes came.  45 not 45.5.  UPS picked up yesterday’s.  Talked around the blocks in the new ones to get them started.  All leather, “Hand Cut” in Portugal, woo hoo, sure to be awesome. 

night.  Ran around wrangling clothes.  Packed a bit more.  I’ve got my shirts in and my trousers.  Odds and ends. 

Looked up more apartments for a few weeks after we are there on rue Cambronne.  Sure enough “our place” is available.   It will be spectacular.  That balcony off the 11th floor.  Finishing up Luiselli’s essays.  She’s read all the recent musts---Sebald et al. 

Friday mid-afternoon.  Lunch with Ted and Pat at Gypsy Cafe.  Sunny gorgeous dry.  More packed.  Adrenaline pumping full-time. 

Anticipation tied up with the photos online.  The imagination as it fleshes in those photos. The fantasies of expanding life into books and art and landscape.  Dropping all interests here, the little death of saying good-bye to here, this house, these things, these lives. 

Ted did not seem as frail or out of it as Pat suggested the other day.  But we don’t know  from this distance.  Pat also visits her mother in a nursing home in Westmorland which is near Walpole, NH. 

Coffee and muffins this morning, Saturday, at the Pasture.   Magnificent breezy sun and cool but not too.  Ken and Carole in top form.  They have a midwest driving tour planned from mid-Sept to October.  Old friends and haunts.  College roommate not seen for forty-five years, Ken’s.  Down to the last few items on the packing list.  Probably go walk at the docks now.  Almost 3pm.