December 2013

Tuesday  Dec 3

Ben installing faucet and drain we hope.  We changed the basement water filter---really full of iron.  Yikes.  Also put in the front door glass--does not go in well.  Back to normal after our two-day jaunt for the Nutcracker and mall crawl back home.  Va got 7k steps and we enjoyed seeing the high-ed restored to something of its former levels.  One empty space in the Chestnut mall---where the restaurant was that served us a piece of metal shelving with the salad five or six years ago.  We missed our chance for a big lawsuit.  Or a few hundred bucks in shopping cards.  Something.  (Ha) 

Short facetime with Emma and Dave just as we got into the car.  Emma wanted to show us how she is tall enough now to turn on the light switch in her room.  Short chat with Dennis today about a new quilt.   He’s getting his computer fixed this week. 

Va at wetcercise with Kathie.  Pretty warm and clear outside.

this was Phil Nov 30 about Infatuations

It seems to me that European writers are obsessed with the various characteristics of story-telling.  It's never far from their "story."  Hence, Bethold Brecht was constantly putting "alienating devices" in his plays to remind viewers that it was a play, not reality.   Such preoccupations strike both American and English writers and readers as silly.  "Of course I know this is a story, not reality, and it's just someone's point of view.  So just get on with it, will you, and forget all these word-games about storytelling."

In other words, I'm sure you're right that JM does think that he's weaving an infatuation among readers.  He's European.

And while I didn't "like" it,  I am really glad I read it and grateful to you for seeing some similarity between JM's ambiguity about a crime and my own ambiguity in Convictions, the Tunis book, and even the last book.

Because JM presents a case for bletting a crime go unpunished in certain circumstances, I may go back and work on "Nothing is the Same," the story of a young techie businessman in DC whose girlfriend is raped.   My story borders on the politically incorrect, and that's why I had decided to skip it.  But JM made me think about some other aspects of the story.

Peg and I had a very low key Thanksgiving, just the two of us.  I've been fighting off a cold or the flu for a week, so I'm rather glum, sleepy company these days.

Mike O is witty, smart, and knowledgeable about Spanish and French culture, literature, etc.  But his tastes definitely fly pretty far from "mainstream."  He cans spend hours and hours talking about Gargantua. I like him, but in small doses....P


to Phil

One more note about the Infatuations.  Agree completely that the Euros have worn out their mode of self-consciousness about the artificiality of the work, talking about it while we’re reading it.  I had thought that while reading Inf—that that sort of gameyness is way over.  In the Spanish-speaking world it dates from Borges but he was brilliant at it precisely because no one had done it quite like he did for such a long time.  Marías indulges himself too much in it.

And yet so successful was his hocus pocus that I was disappointed in myself when I finished for not having realized sooner that he built the thing onto the oldest plot in the books—man kills his best friend to get at the wife.  Of course the ambivalence is fun by the end—did Varela do it and concoct the tale about the terminal illness or did Louisa herself initiate the action by telling Varela to take care of her husband in some way so they could be together.  I prefer the latter version.

Haven’t had a chance to look at the article you sent but will later this evening.

-----
We caught up on Homeland, ehhh, Brody is in Iran.  And Masters.  Various errands including sending the American Girl baby to Emma.

Sam Kriss, the UK young genius who reviewed the DSM as a novel, gave me this reply on Twitter to why he used “dilettante” to describe himself.
“to an extent it's about distrust of sanctioned opinion-formers; mostly it's just true & pre-empts accusations of unseriousness”


Just love the way young minds work so fast

Thursday

Back from great swim and lovely wally walk where I tweeted.  Dave tweeted he had picked up the Master disc of his new CD. 

email from Phil
It was Peg who started calling me a novelist. I don't think I have ever used that term to describe myself even though I do tell people that I've written novels. I've always been a tad uncomfortable with the term "novelist."  I prefer "writer" because that's what I think I'm doing: writing stories.   it's almost a coincidence that those stories ended up novels.  I've written about places - Tunis, DC, and Cumberland/Bartonsburg - and that required a lot of pages. I've also written a bunch of short stories and one novelette (Ralph, the Weight-Lifting Nun), but I don't much care for the short stories.  I've kept them in my drawer or, in the digital age, on diskettes.

The effect of writing fiction has made me acutely aware of what I call "the fiction in fiction."   What I mean by that: I seem far more aware than most people of "realistic" passages that seem false.  "The writer doesn't really know what he's talking about in that passage" I will say to myself. "He's just making up stuff."    Making up stuff, however, is fine if the writer is not trying for realism.   Fantasy is fine.  But when something like this French film comes along and has two young lesbians behaving in ways that just don't seem credible to me (and a lot of women) it just  sends up a flare: fiction in fiction.   A similar thing will happen if I see a development in a story that seems incorrectly presented.  In this case, it's just a structural mistake, but I still seem as acutely aware of such things as I do "fiction in fiction."

I think Hemingway was describing "fiction in fiction" when he said that he had developed a finely tuned "bullshit spotter.”

P

* * *
I always like what I come up with while swimming with regards to my ongoing work on this novel I’m writing in my head.


quote from Lorie Moore on the new lesbian movie---French I guess it is--something Blue --  208 words--now that Rick Whittaker has reminded me that “fair use” is 300 word max I’ll be a bit more conscious of that.

from “Gazing at Love”  NYRevBooks Dec 19

Such theory, often written in a prose with the forensic caress of an appliance warranty, may not be a useful way to look at films, especially when one is dealing with the high caliber of acting—visceral, rangy, possessed—that is on display in Kechiche’s film. The sex scenes notwithstanding, almost every moment contains a dramatic presence where interiority is brought forth via concentration, utterance, silences. This deserves a separate sort of notice. The close-ups of the young, still-forming face of Exarchopoulos show that the director knew precisely what he had when he cast her. The camera work also shows Exarchopoulos knowing what she’s doing as well. Et cetera. Ad infinitum.
An esteemed British actress was once asked why in such a small country as England there were so many great actors. “It’s because we’re always acting,” she said. This past year has brought forth astonishing performances from young French-speaking actresses, not just Seydoux and Exarchopoulos, but Émilie Dequenne in the harrowing Belgian-French film Our Children. Have young Francophone women newly seized a form of cultural expression for themselves? Have they kept their chic, insouciantly coiled scarves but broken free from something more oppressive? Or are they simply—and not so simply—always acting? 

Did I already paste in this comment from Phil’s email on Infatuations? 
One thing:  the central characters both fall in love to a degree that they are willing to do virtually anything for the loved one.   Never been there, myself.  I'm the son of a woman who was an orphan who imbued a certain coolness of heart in both of her sons.  As with the Christmas Grinch, my heart  seems two sizes too small.  And I do find Christmas annoying!
A Certain Coolness of Heart could be an awfully good romance novel title! Or title for lots of other sorts of books.  Probably the phrase that explains the most about Phil---or one of them.  Also confirms what I suspect is the nature of his relationship with Peg. 
The idea of the book keeps evolving so that now I see that stealing Javier M’s basic plot/structure gives me the armature on which to construct whatever I want, sort of.  I could pop in quotations galore like Rick Whitaker does in way too mechanical and complete a way (a way I tried fifty years ago and found wanting ! ) and I could pop in lots of other junk too.  Playing with just who the narrator is or is not would be where I would change JM’s novel drastically.  I could put into “her” the whole persona of the former therapist who escapes to Copenhagen as a way of getting away from other people’s stories.  I cheated and read the Complete Review’s review of De La Pava’s Personae and now I am enjoying it a bit more and seeing that it too is a deconstructed murder tale, a police procedural of some sort, greatly pulled apart into separate pieces rather than a random collection of journal entries or such.  I was too inattentive to get that on my own.  Now I am willing to give it more credit.  And I did agree beforehand that Pava writes beautifully no matter what he is writing.  Compellingly.  The “drama” in the middle of the book reads a bit like Beckett but not so much so that you don’t keep marveling at how well Pava keeps it going. 
News earlier of Nelson Mandela’s death today.  Lots of homage.  In one clip he is quoted as saying nonviolence is a tactic not a principle.  He used it with genius.  Wonder if Gandhi agreed?  No matter, they both elevated history. 
Caved and bought Microsoft Word for Mac.  Hope this means I can open and recover more files from the old machine.  Machines.  Computers.  They are both about to crash.  Like cars it seems.  Both still working, no one knows how many miles they will reach. 

Instead of Infatuations I would use Entanglements or Obsessions or Affections or Fixations or Ensnarements or Jumbles or Knots etc or Infatuations instead of The Infatuations? 
Take out all the literary gamesmanship---Macbeth and all that and put in what comes up.  Might end up being another variant of gamesmanship.  Can one write a book without it?
Friday noon  Paula just drove off.  A morning of frustrations over the Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar not working.  Now it is here on my new air book after all because it won’t stay working on the older Macs. 
We saw the new Giga Shane video layered onto or spliced in with Dave’s song “I Like the Way You Move.”  Strange narrative in each work.  By the end of the video I guess it does work.  Cécile and Dave on the Jersey beach. 
We dined in Concord earlier at Unos after Target and the store.  I got my Intl driver’s permit for the spring at triple A.  Now that I have the book back I will have to start in some way or at least pull out the bones and line them up as the template.  It might be an act really of critical analysis rather than novel-writing.  I mean I have to go through the book and name each segment at least to myself and decide how to imitate it, how to re-do what’s there into what I want to be there.  Or I have to plunge into the story my way at the outset and then constantly check it agains the original to see if I’m “getting” the essentials lined up correctly.  Already I have started it in my mind with “I saw Mark Kessler get killed outside the cafe, or I thought I saw it and only later did I realize he had gotten killed.  Something like that.  So I looked over the book and now I see that it starts with four or five small sections slowly building up the couple and the victim and the situation and Maria hears about the death from one of her friends and not until 28 pages in. 

Phil had noted a contradiction in the book---this passage on page 135
“Once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with.”
And a second version on page 233  “ What happened is the least of it.  It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.  What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.” 
Maria is reporting this now as something she remembers Javier having told her when she had asked what happened to Chabert back on 135 of our novel.  But now Marías has Maria add “That isn’t true, or, rather, it’s sometimes true, but one doesn’t always forget what happened, not in a novel that almost everyone knew or knows, even those who have never read it, nor in reality when what happens is actually happening to us and is going to be our story, which could end one way or another with no novelist to decide and independent of anyone else . . . “ 
But we know by now that Marías can allow his character Maria to disagree with what Javier told her about the nature of novels because by now we know that Javier’s claim is true, or rather his theory of why novels are important is by now firmly lodge in our consciousness as true and so now we can disagree with it a bit---enjoy hearing Maria disagree with it a bit as a way of emphasizing her reality to herself and her own meditations on her reality versus novelistic reality, all of which further underlines the great reality we have been giving to the novel we are still reading, whatever our own personal real lives are like. 
I looked up the idea of contradiction in The Infatuations and the first piece if found is a review in the Times by no less than Edward St Aubyn.  NYTimes August 8
He describes the novel so well and knows Marías’s work so well that I now despair of trying my own stupid re-write of it because I will produce some very poor work of envy---the very motive and emotion that the novel depicts.  St Aubyn points this out so well:
quote  Few things attract evil’s indignation more than a Perfect Couple, whether it’s Adam and Eve or Miguel and Luisa. The particular form of evil that preoccupies Marías in “The Infatuations” (as it did in “Your Face Tomorrow”) is envy turning into betrayal. The definition of “envidia,” or “envy,” in Covarrubias’s dictionary of 1611 is quoted three times in “The Infatuations” (the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form): “Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.”  unquote
He notes too how Marías conveys great empathy toward the characters and great emotional generosity. 
quote
Such a high level of reflection and digression (let’s not even get into the amount of literary allusion) might easily become too cerebral, but Marías’s powerful awareness of indecisiveness and delusion is born not only of a speculative frame of mind but of a penetrating empathy. At one point the narrator gives voice to Miguel’s bereaved possessions, the clothes hanging in his cupboard and the novel with the page turned down and the unfinished medication in the bathroom cabinet, to consider what they might make of his death. This feeling of emotional generosity tempers the literary thinking, as do the scenes of pure comedy, like the Oxford high-table dinner in Marías’s novel “All Souls,” with its Buñuel-like degeneration of absurd formality into violence and contempt.
unquote

Today we had two royal appearances.  We drove to Gilford to see Gloria at the holiday craft show.  Alainey and Keith were there, Irene Marrocco and Ed and Marilyn Wixson.  Hundreds of others too.  Then we drove across the state to Lebanon to meet Jess at Margaritas.  Nice lunch and then walking in BJs.  Home in the dark.  Virginia has been watching a re-run of the live production of The Sound of Music.  I’ve been glancing back into Personae.  Now why don’t I try a re-write of that instead?  I don’t feel any resonance with that, only cold admiration.  Great admiration especially once I got far enough in--now on 132 of a book only 201 pages long. 

Phil might have trouble fully getting into Marías’s “feeling of emotional generosity” as it “tempers the literary thinking.” 
Marías’s line about the possibilities a novel infuses us with could be the epigraph for all attempts to re-write his book(s). 
the musical style of the work he notes well too :  “the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form”
It is so good an essay-review I could just copy all of it out--one more big quotation for how it describes his style---
quote
Marías has pointed out that the Latin root of the verb “to invent,” invenire, means to discover or find out. His special gift is to bring these two processes, inquiry and narration, into a conjunction, making things up as he discovers them and discovering them as he makes them up. He never works to a plan, and so his prose stays close to the thought processes of a writer working out what to say next and responding to what he has, perhaps mistakenly, just said. “The Infatuations” goes on to explore the narrator’s relationship with the widow and with the best friend of the murdered Miguel. At first he appears to have been killed by a stray madman. The plot, several times changing our perspective on the murder, works very well as a thriller, but it is essentially a pretext for advancing the skeptical worldview embodied by the style. 
unquote
Skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  Seems a perfect characterization. 
Now we could privately debunk a bit just for the exercise.  If Marías is making fun of himself in the portrait of Garay Fontina, the obnoxious writer who is waiting to give his speech for the Nobel Prize, it could be further proof that he is, after all, one of those laureates whose whole trajectory is to win the laurels, in other words the star pupil driven to be the star-of-stars by the book and not by genuine creative brilliance.  What he provides as high entertainment for this generation of readers may not be great literature at all but high highness of entertainment---yet another variant of masterpiece theater---visible precisely in the supreme command he displays for doing the literary sort of thinking his father the philosopher would have both admired and thought not quite adequate for being not fully philosophical but a fallen literary form of philosophicalization.  Marías may have to suffer winning for literature and not philosophy because I guess there is none for philosophy. 
“Whatever else we may think is going on when we read, we are choosing to spend time in an author’s company. In Javier Marías’s case this is a good decision; his mind is insightful, witty, sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent.”   EStA
I don’t know if St Aubyn knows that the Spanish consider envy to be their trademark deadly sin.  With that in mind, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what games Marías’s novel might be offering to his countrymen.  “Yes, I might get the Nobel, so I know you envy me or will envy me for this, even though you tend to think that I’m not really a Spanish writer but more of an English writer in Spanish costume.”  “If I don’t get the prize, you will envy me nevertheless simply because of the rumors that I might win.  So here is a set of tales of infatuations, or envies, to show how well I understand our national character and how much I count myself prone to the same dominant sin as the rest of you.”  No doubt there could be much more to it than this.  I need to consult with some Spanish friends who have read the book. 
Also we must remember that Marías has written the novel to the Swedes, to give them a game while everyone waits.  “Well, if you give me the prize, I just want you to know that I’m of good humor about it and not at all as conceited or obnoxious as that terrible writer of my own creation in the novel, Garay Fontina, would be.”  “If you don’t give it to me, rest assured I will not indulge the envy we Spaniards are so prone to but will celebrate the winner with generous and intelligent goodwill.  After all in this novel I have shown how much fun we all have with even the rumors of Nobel prize-dom.” 

all of the above re-written slightly for posting on the site--
Phil had noted a contradiction in the book---this passage on page 135
“Once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with.”
And a second version on page 233  “ What happened is the least of it.  It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.  What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.”
Maria Dolz is reporting this now as something she remembers Javier having told her when she had asked what happened to Chabert back on 135 of our novel.  But now Marías has Maria add “That isn’t true, or, rather, it’s sometimes true, but one doesn’t always forget what happened, not in a novel that almost everyone knew or knows, even those who have never read it, nor in reality when what happens is actually happening to us and is going to be our story, which could end one way or another with no novelist to decide and independent of anyone else . . . “
But we know by now that Marías can allow his character Maria to disagree with what Javier told her about the nature of novels because by now we know that Javier’s claim is true, or rather his theory of why novels are important is by now firmly lodged in our consciousness as true and so now we can disagree with it a bit---enjoy hearing Maria disagree with it a bit as a way of emphasizing her reality to herself and her own meditations on her reality versus novelistic reality, all of which further underlines the great reality we have been giving to the novel we are still reading, whatever our own personal real lives are like.
I looked up the idea of contradiction in The Infatuations and the first piece it found is a review in the Times by no less than Edward St Aubyn.  NYTimes August 8
He describes the novel so well and knows Marías’s work so well that I now despair saying much about it because if I do I will produce a very poor work of envy---the very motive and emotion that the novel depicts.  St Aubyn points this out so well:
quote  Few things attract evil’s indignation more than a Perfect Couple, whether it’s Adam and Eve or Miguel and Luisa. The particular form of evil that preoccupies Marías in “The Infatuations” (as it did in “Your Face Tomorrow”) is envy turning into betrayal. The definition of “envidia,” or “envy,” in Covarrubias’s dictionary of 1611 is quoted three times in “The Infatuations” (the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form): “Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies.”  unquote
He notes too how Marías conveys great empathy toward the characters and great emotional generosity.
quote
Such a high level of reflection and digression (let’s not even get into the amount of literary allusion) might easily become too cerebral, but Marías’s powerful awareness of indecisiveness and delusion is born not only of a speculative frame of mind but of a penetrating empathy. At one point the narrator gives voice to Miguel’s bereaved possessions, the clothes hanging in his cupboard and the novel with the page turned down and the unfinished medication in the bathroom cabinet, to consider what they might make of his death. This feeling of emotional generosity tempers the literary thinking, as do the scenes of pure comedy, like the Oxford high-table dinner in Marías’s novel “All Souls,” with its Buñuel-like degeneration of absurd formality into violence and contempt.
unquote
Marías’s line about the possibilities a novel infuses us with could be the epigraph for every novel.
The musical style of the work St Aubyn notes well too :  “the reappearance of the same blocks of prose is another signature effect of Marías’s novels: prose aspiring to the condition of music, bringing back a theme, not in a vague or allusive sense, but in exactly its original form”
It is so good an essay-review I could just copy all of it out--one more big quotation for how it describes his style---
quote
Marías has pointed out that the Latin root of the verb “to invent,” invenire, means to discover or find out. His special gift is to bring these two processes, inquiry and narration, into a conjunction, making things up as he discovers them and discovering them as he makes them up. He never works to a plan, and so his prose stays close to the thought processes of a writer working out what to say next and responding to what he has, perhaps mistakenly, just said. “The Infatuations” goes on to explore the narrator’s relationship with the widow and with the best friend of the murdered Miguel. At first he appears to have been killed by a stray madman. The plot, several times changing our perspective on the murder, works very well as a thriller, but it is essentially a pretext for advancing the skeptical worldview embodied by the style.
unquote
Skeptical worldview embodied by the style.  Seems a perfect characterization.
Now we could privately debunk a bit just for the exercise.  If Marías is making fun of himself in the portrait of Garay Fontina, the obnoxious writer who is waiting to give his speech for the Nobel Prize, it could be further proof that he is, after all, one of those laureates whose whole trajectory is to win the laurels, in other words the star pupil driven to be the star-of-stars by-the-book, to win the A+ from the teacher, and not by genuine creative brilliance.  What he provides as high entertainment for this generation of readers may not be great literature at all but high-highness of entertainment---yet another variant of masterpiece theater---visible precisely in the supreme command he displays for doing the literary sort of thinking his father the philosopher would have both admired and thought not quite adequate for being not fully philosophical but a fallen literary form of philosophicalization.  Marías may have to suffer winning for literature and not philosophy because I guess there is no Nobel for philosophy.
“Whatever else we may think is going on when we read, we are choosing to spend time in an author’s company. In Javier Marías’s case this is a good decision; his mind is insightful, witty, sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent.”   StAubyn
I don’t know if St Aubyn knows that the Spanish consider envy to be their trademark deadly sin.  With that in mind, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what games Marías’s novel might be offering to his countrymen.  “Yes, I might get the Nobel, so I know you envy me or will envy me for this, even though you tend to think that I’m not really a Spanish writer but more of an English writer in Spanish costume.”  “If I don’t get the prize, you will envy me nevertheless simply because of the rumors that I might win.  So here is a set of tales of infatuations, or envies, to show how well I understand our national character and how much I count myself prone to the same dominant sin as the rest of you.”  No doubt there could be much more to it than this.  I need to consult with some Spanish friends who have read the book.  And who know the kinds of games Marías likes to play with his native readers.

Also we must remember that Marías could have written the novel to the Swedes, to give them a game while everyone waits.  “Well, if you give me the prize, I just want you to know that I’m of good humor about it and not at all as conceited or obnoxious as that terrible writer of my own creation in the novel, Garay Fontina, would be.”  “If you don’t give it to me, rest assured I will not indulge the envy we Spaniards are so prone to, but will celebrate the winner with generous and intelligent goodwill.  After all in this novel I have shown how much fun we all have with even the rumors of Nobel prize-dom.”
-----
Now I can start re-writing the novel itself.  No word from Phil or his friend Mike about my blog post on the novel.  I guess I will start tomorrow.  Maybe it is like having a dissertation topic to research and work on and, eventually, write. 
Tuesday late afternoon
What a struggle to continue reading Personae to the bitter end.  I will take M.A.Orthofer, inThe Complete Review, at his word and say, ok, give it a B+ but I haven’t had such difficulty forcing myself to finish a book since plowing on through Salvatore Scibona’s The End. 
Why did I just not finish it, then?  Personae.  I did manage to skim the last five or six pages.  But, you know, you get so far in and then you just want to keep looking at the train wreck or whatever it is you’ve got in your hands between the front and back cover.  Besides, every so often the writing flashes and clicks, just as writing.  I wondered whether I was just old enough to have never played video games.  Was that it?  They guy is not clueless or anything.  He is doing something here, but what it is interests me less and less and less as I move through the book and then, last twenty pages? not at all.  Not at all.  Please God the third book will be as super fine as the first book is--everyone must read A Naked Singularity because it is just brilliant and funny and superb and unbelievable in all the splendid ways. 

Just yesterday Scott Esposito published his review of Personae in the Washington Post.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/personae-by-sergio-de-la-pava/2013/12/10/900406fa-5d23-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html
He really likes De La Pava and gives the book as glowing a review as possible.  He manages to describe more accurately than any other review I’ve seen exactly what all is in the book: 
quote
Like its predecessor, “Personae” begins with the investigation of a crime: Detective Helen Tame arrives at a Manhattan apartment where Antonio Arce, over a century old, has died. She eventually acquires Arce’s notebook, and in due time we read the impressionistic memoir at its heart, but only after meandering through excerpts from Tame’s scholarly paper on Bach and Glenn Gould, a short story about swimming out to sea, a two-act Beckettian play, Tame’s explanation of Arce’s death and two obituaries. The book’s final 50 pages — Arce’s memoir — take us from a suicide mission in the jungles of Colombia to a love story in New York City and feature some of the finest writing of De La Pava’s burgeoning career.
Split unevenly among Tame’s section, Arce’s section and an 83-page absurdist play, “Personae,” is united more by its themes than by any one narrative. The play is the strangest and most difficult part of this book. It involves several mental patients engaged in furious conversation. A gun is introduced in Act I and fired in Act II. There’s also a spearing, a gender change, a severed head and an eerie drumbeat that may herald disaster. In spite of all that, what looms largest is the play’s obsessively recursive dialogue, which opens with several pages of argumentation about what everyone’s name is.
This challenging play is balanced by the portrayal of Tame’s and Arce’s extraordinary minds. Tame, who begins playing the piano at age 5 and gives world-class performances at 20 before quitting to become a detective, comes across as a methodical and quirky cop. Similarly, Arce, a commando of superhuman strength and an exquisite writer, is nonetheless tongue-tied at the sight of a beautiful woman.
De La Pava presents characters widely separated by time and space and then shows us how they become drawn into one another’s lives, despite the odds. Most of all, he inquires into why people fight to comprehend others they barely know.
unquote
But even a die-hard fan has to concede defeat sometimes and Esposito does:  “But “Personae” is not completely successful.”  He gives a few reasons why, but not enough. 
At the end Esposito still praises the author he helped “find:”  “De La Pava is proof that experimental literature can be devilishly entertaining.”

In a review for the November issue of The American Reader, Esposito gives a very negative review of Marías’s Infatuations. 

Did not get my “day off” today and now that the day is over I would say, yes, I did miss that.  Had a few hours after lunch when Va went to her PEO cookie meeting and a holder of splendid cookies are now in the house.  So I took a drive before they got back, down to Bristol and up Dame Hill road for a splendid view of the late afternoon sky and sunset.  Since weather will be dry tomorrow I think we will go to a mall for walking. 
Started the re-write, barely.  Have great doubts about it.  Especially now that I saw Scott Esposito’s very negative review of the book.  But I don’t think he’s ever really gotten Marías, as evidenced by the lukewarm treatment and by the glowing effort to praise De La Pava’s terrible “experiment” Personae. 
Theft raises questions of waste and inauthenticity right off the bat.  Why spend time on such a project? 
great essay by Susan Sontag on writing nyt dec 18, 2000
“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And long after you've become a writer, reading books others write -- and rereading the beloved books of the past -- constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And, yes, inspiration.”

“Is there a greater privilege than to have a consciousness expanded by, filled with, pointed to literature?
“As for whether there will continue to be readers who share this high notion of fiction, well, ''there's no future to that question,'' as Duke Ellington replied when asked why he was to be found playing morning programs at the Apollo. Best just to keep rowing along.
---------
Thursday night
email reply to Phil’s query---
I’ve long thought that what prepped me for lit theory were all the religion classes in high school and first three years of college.  Later at MD I switched from theology minor to philosophy minor.  But back in high school, maybe even late grade school, those religion classes we would try to stunp the teachers with questions that tried to trick out every contradiction we could find in religious teachings.  If God knows all, how can we have free will?  If you spend your life murdering people and on your death bed you have a conversion and receive the sacraments can you still get into heaven?  Stuff like that.  Then in college more reading in theology.  Lit crit and lit theory in grad school then seemed a slightly weaker version of such speculative big think.  In fact I nearly got into a little trouble for plagiarism in one course because I cited some stuff from Aquinas in a paper and the prof called me in to his office to ask where I had gotten the ideas and passages and wanted to be sure I really knew about such things first-hand.

I never took a course with Wayne Booth.  A friend said to me one day, let’s take an independent study with Booth next term.  Why?  I asked. I had heard of Booth but knew nothing about him and never had heard one could take an independent study with anyone.  Well, it would be different and fun, said the friend.  He went to ask Booth and later he and I and Marjorie Gerber met with Booth.  He said he would meet with us once a week and asked what we should study.  He said he was working on a book and wanted to have us study either R S Crane’s work or Kenneth Burke’s.  Isaid I’d never heard of Burke and asked him who he was.  He said he was a critic who disagreed with the Chicago School and attacked them a bit and was also a bit unusual and difficult.  I said, Let’s study him and so we did.  We read one of his books called The Philosophy of Literary Form.

Booth had been a student of R S Crane, high admired prof at Chicago who had died probably five years before I got there.  Crane led a small band of literary critics in the late ‘50s in a revival of studying Aristotle with an eye to using him to attack and correct the New Critics who held forth at Yale.  They got to be called The Chicago School.  They agreed with the New Critics in being sworn to studying only literary form (close textual analysis) and keeping off the table questions about history and biography.  Burke was “outside” all of these warring factions, partly because he was never situated at one of the big universities.  His power base had been New York where he worked free-lance for mags like The New Republis, The Nation, and earlier the very influential Dial.  Crane’s work was very dry, he was trying to make criticism be as respectable as scientific discourse.  Burke was much livelier and brought in the social sciences.  He essentially advocated subsuming the social sciences under the dominance of literary thought—a position which lost the battle over the long run.  He was definitely a literary thinker so I found it disheartening that his work was pretty much ignored by the literary world, especially as he aged, but got adopted big-time by the burgeoning social science wing of English departments at the time—Communications, which quickly broke away and became much more successful and wealthy.

Burke started college teaching in the Depression to make some money.  He had left New York to be a farmer-writer in northwest New Jersey right at the time of the crash.  He taught one term a year at Bennington.  That’s where Sontag was his student.  I’m sure he was a big influence on her but I doubt he was the most powerful shaper of her career.  She was probably enrolled in the New York Jewish intellectual elite from the time she was in denim overalls by the age of eight.  But it was unfortunate that she turned to attempting to write fiction.  I think she didn’t try it until relatively late in her career but I may be wrong.  I never read her very much but I had the impression her first and biggest success was with books on critical thought, one especially called “Against Interpretation.”

It’s amazing how susceptible we are, I was, at 22 when all this started to take place.  I did one paper for Booth and Burke that one Quarter (ten weeks).  He wrote on it—"ready to be published.”  That bowled me over and I had no idea what to do next.  It totally scared me.  I never went to him and said Tell me how to publish this, where.  I had no idea what I was doing back then.  We moved here, took ten years until I finally wrote the dissertation the year Va was pregnant with David and there was a full-time opening in English here and I had to finish the degree or be booted out.  Nothing like pressure.  At the start of grad school it was the draft, twelve years or so later it was getting a job.

Fifteen? years later Booth writes (we had been in touch off and on) and says Hey I just re-read your dissertation because I’m giving a paper at a conference on the same topic.  It is really good.  Did you ever publish it?  Gee, why didn’t you say that fifteen years ago?   In other words back in our day there was no such thing as “mentoring” —and if you were as clueless as I was, and as lacking in ambition or drive or whatever, you had no “career.”  Well, I oversimplify but that’s basically it.


On Dec 12, 2013, at 12:03 PM, J. P. Jones <jpjones33@hotmail.com> wrote:
For no particularly good reason, I pulled your book off the shelf and started re-reading.  (You have re-taught me the word "anagogic,"  but I seriously doubt that I will ever use that word in conversation.   Mysticism plays no role in my life.)

Your book is not easy reading and a few minutes ago I looked up Burke on Wikipedia, which provides a simpler reading - basically just a biography.   Do you know who wrote the Wikipedia entry?

In the wiki article I discovered that Susan Sontag studied under Burke, which, I suspect, is one reason why her novel "The Volcano Lover" is so deeply flawed.  Burke may have made her so self-conscious about writing that it's a wonder she was able to produce any fiction at all.  Criticism yes.   Fiction no.  Critics take the readers point of view.  In fact, I find it telling that, instead of writing fiction or poetry, you turn to painting to "express yourself."  As you have told me, you ignore theory and instruction about art and "just like to get into the paint."   Which is what I do when I write fiction:  I "just get into the paint."  

Finally, I wonder how you ended up writing a thesis on Burke.   Were you a great consumer of literary criticism in high school or at U of Maryland?   Is that why you went to U of Chicago?    I suspect that, once at Chicago, W Booth steered you to "The Rhetoric of Religion" because of your religious background.  Yes?  No?

P

PS.   Let me be the first this year to wish you "bah humbug.”
----------



Friday  mid-afternoon
Great swim and then a Wally walk. 
Phil asked --  You didn't mention how you chose to attend the U of Chicago.   Did some prof at U of MD or Lasalle recommend it or did you discover it on your own?

Also - excuse my curiosity - but how did Virginia end up at Chicago?  I can understand how you did.  UC is known for lit crit, but as far as I know, which is very little, it's not known for Spanish anything.   Why did she choose it?

P
-----
My junior year at Maryland I started to think about grad school.  There was a youngish professor in the philosophy department who talked a little bit about it.  He wanted me to major in philosophy in grad school and I think he was from Northwestern.  He might have suggested that I look up departments and faculty members and such to shop around.  Again, I had no idea what it was all about or how to do it.  I finally decided I couldn’t possibly do philosophy.  I enjoyed his courses in people like Plato but other courses involved contemporary language analysis, lingusitics and epistemology and I could barely understand one third of any of it and wrote bullshit papers that managed to get Bs.  I guess I looked at Northwestern and then at Chicago because Dad had once taken the whole family on the train there when he went to a grocers' convention and I had faint and happy memories of that adventure in the Windy City.  Can’t recall where else I applied nor if I was accepted anywhere.  Some memory of asking a professor and having him say, well if you got accepted at Chicago that’s the place to go.  Might have been Duquesne in Pittsburgh, the other place.  I must have vaguely known that Peace Corps was an option after college but it was fairly new and I had no first-hand urging from anyone in that direction.  Plus in my mind it would have felt too much like joining a religious order again, missionary version.


There was the clear mandate to keep a student deferment going somehow and a clear notion that I had no idea of what I wanted to do about anything.  I enjoyed the full year, four quarters, at Chicago tremendously even though I did feel like I had to run extra fast to catch up with all the bright shits from the ivies and other better colleges.  Funding ran out in some way after the year in Chicago for the masters so I looked for a teaching job and felt really lucky to get one at a small college downstate in Decatur, Illinois, Millikin University.  Miss Milner roomed next to me in a rooming house across the street from campus.  It was her second year at the college.  No clear memory of when we decided to get married, maybe late fall or early winter.  Colleagues at the college, we learned later, had a betting pool on us.  March of that year Virginia announced she had just gotten a full scholarship to go back to grad school at Chicago.  Her masters was from NYU in Spain.  I managed to complete one paper a year overdue and got my masters that spring.  But when she said she got this full fellowship I asked her why did she apply to Chicago.  I had been thinking about moving out to Berkeley—but had neglected to tell her that.  With her full funding it was Chicago we would go to.  I re-applied there for the doctoral program and managed to get a teaching job at the Calumet Campus of Purdue University, about an hour commute from south side Chicago.  First year back I taught there, then the year after I got into the doctoral program but with some partial funding so I must have borrowed some from my parents.  Two more years in Chicago and we both were at the end of university connected funding and it was Virginia’s “turn” to get a job.  New Hampshire and the rest is history.  There were zero jobs available in ’71-72.  I think she had an offer from a place in Kalamazoo or Kankakee, from a community college in the inner city of Chicago and from Plymouth State.  She had gone for the interview by herself, so I had never seen any of New England until we drove the VW bug and a U-Haul truck here.  I hated leaving Chicago because we had had a great time there.  And we really sort of told ourselves we would stay in Plymouth for two maybe three years max, have our degrees in hand and then most likely live out our days at Swarthmore or Skidmore, Oberlin or Antioch.  Some such toney liberal arts place even if we had never heard of it before then.  We didn’t want to go back to Millikin nor to any part of the midwest.  Harvard would call, surely.

Sunday night December 15

Beautiful snow but not as dangerous as media suggested it would be.  Maybe to the south of here?  Quiet here all day.  We slept until almost eleven, did the spa, leisurely lunch and afternoon.  Waiting for the night time tv shows.  Va watching a christmas movie.  Dennis called mid-afternoon to chat about the quilt for Cécile and her new baby.  She wants turquoise and sea green.  We ran into Micah and Rachel yesterday at the grocery store.  Their baby due Tuesday.  New York Times article says ADHD not as widespread or even real as thought and indeed a creation of the pharmaceutical companies. 

In short, a snowy day.  Snowed-in, sort of.  Mainly by choice and inclination and an over supply of Cambell’s trendy soups. 

Phil and I both liked the review essay by Peter Brown in the NYRB about a new book on the Roman world and world view.  It came down to the opposition between slavery-sexuality vs will-freedom with the old Roman world being on one side and the new Christian world and Church Fathers and St Paul being on the other side.  Neat and crisp and eminently clear.  So attractively so and it casts the whole story into a victory narrative.  But wouldn’t all the master story tellers of the last hundred years say, whoaa, wait a minute Mr Brown and company.  How can you historians blithely assume you can tell the true histories of the ancient world in such clear either-or divisions? 

Did not work on any writing today.  Did put holiday candles in the windows, electric ones, battery ones.  Found the garland to wrap on the front porch railing.  Fix that tomorrow.  Looked up a Tommy Bahama shirt to buy with my $50 card.  Wait until after Christmas to make it less graspy a move.  ?  Carter Peck says he will call this week.

Tuesday night
Not sure what to do.  Might watch an episode of New Girl.  Just watched an episode of How I Met Your Mother and liked it ok but not that much.  Virginia did wet therapy with Kathie in the morning.  I took books for Emma to the post office and went to the dump.  The snow has not amounted to much here---seems most of it is down in southwestern NH.  Called CreateSpace and I had neglected to hit the final “Complete Upload” button for the upload process of the ms.  Duh.  Day off again tomorrow and I’ve been thinking Lebanon since I’ve done south for a while.  Not much over there except maybe the food stores.  Oh--forgot, that’s right--I could look up that Fresh Market in Bedford instead and eat at the India Palace, now that I know where it is.  I’ll look up the Fresh Market website to take a look.  Just looked it up on google maps and street view and now have my doubts.  Not the store I thought it was---i.e. not related to Central Market in Austin.  Could be nice but it is in that area of Bedford I think of as a No Man’s Land---the old Filene’s, now Macy’s, area.  Not too exciting.  I could go to the Indian resto in Hanover, or look up something else in West Lebanon.  Weather warning popped up online and looks like the heavy snow might hit Manchester from the west, so more reason to skip going there.  Whereas Lebanon area is safe, plus there is a new Starbucks there.  How can we go wrong with that?  I thought I was going to like Rick Whitaker’s An Honest Ghost but so far I do not.  It’s like having only sherry to drink at a party that will stretch through the night.  Every line is too precious and too semi-familiar and you want to test your possible recall powers against his and you also want to keep looking back to the list of sources to say Who said that one?  Where is that neat phrase from?  And even looking at the list you catch something and say, wow, he read that and remembered it?  I thought only I would have read that book.  Two such samples---Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life---I had no idea anyone knew about that book.  And 8 Gates of Zen by John Daido Loori.  Plus he even manages to get in volume 2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s opus.  He’s read everything and he’s as up-to-date as any of you are as well. 


Weds night  Put my finger on the Whitaker disappointment.  He borrows from all these fine and great writers and brings them all in, some would say down, to his level, reduces them or compresses them into the paste of yet another boring MyStory as Phil has taught me to call them.  Just dipping in to Robert Walser this morning, his micro stories collection, and a glance at someone else, made me see this.  If only Whitaker had crafted a fictional story about someone other than himself, it might have worked a bit better.  I suppose I’ll still take a look through it.  But the allure of the idea has crumpled in the noon-day sun like the snow sliding off the pool roof the other day.  That could be a terrible analogy and image.  Also had a breakthrough of sorts of my own this morning in thinking that to avoid doing a whitaker I should take the vocation story and re-cast it as the discovery of a life and calling---maybe to be a writer or a painter. 

Day off today.  Went to West Lebanon, avoided center of Hanover altogether.  Pretty random day of nothing much but beautiful on the sunny drive over in the fresh snow.  Had the hamburger at the brew house---could not find the Five Brothers place even with Maps and Siri.  Looked around the Coop and that was about it.  One of the new blue silk shirts got shrunk badly---yikes.  I may have trusted a “delicate” dry setting.  Unfortunate. 

Thursday night
We drove to Pheasant Lane and had a find day of walking around.  Back by 5pm, perfect. 
Rupert gave me a great explanation of Knausgaard---email today
Dear Mr Nog,

good to hear. It's funny, but i think Knausgaard is playing postmodern games by deliberately returning to some idea of fiction as autobiography. the idea that "it really happened this way" is kind of irrelevant, but here we are buying into it [again].
i bought his book on angels but havent had time to read it. will get vol 2 as well i think.

we had hailstorm and floods last time we were in Paris. nice place tho. the kids loved it, we've always loved it. but very expensive and hard to find accomodation - took us yonks to find a 2 bedroom apartment for a week. and cost more than 2 weeks in italy.

done my first draft of a PhD essay to accompany my books. 'research degree by prior publication'. no idea if what ive written is any good, as they wont tutor/talk to me much til i'd done a draft. which now i have, tho i have to renumber some quotes.

R
-------
way to re-write part of the opening of the story.  “Had I been queer Father might have been more comfortable in the long run.  He didn’t know what to do with me or make of me.  He had no language for which to explain to his Baltimore street merchant friends what I kept trying to be and become.  His firstborn was a great sportsman and then surgeon,  his beautiful daughter married into a banking family in Charleston.  But his middle boy, he couldn’t say he had tried architecture but was now a writer.  Or was a writer now trying painting,  Or was a wannabe dervish flaneur and former seminarian.  Queer might not have been desirable but it would have been a safe and well-known category to cover all other divagations that need never be mentioned.  Had the doctor said, well, yes there is something I can give him to take this queerness out of him, it might have been a great relief.  A problem that can get a fix.  But to have a boy who had no idea what to do in life or about life or with life.  What was a father to do with that?  And to say to his golfing buddies, “my son, the writer,” if there was no bestseller, no contract, no advance, no publishing house that anyone had heard of, that would be as bad as queer, maybe even by some scales, worse.  For the battle here was between two permanently divided ideas of what was best for one’s children and one’s notion of what was important, meaningful, in life.  I was the battleground on which mother and father engaged each other in combat over these questions.  I was the pawn, either of the Queen or the King, but I could be so for only one.  By asking his doctor to verify whether I was queer or not, Father was asking his trusted diagnostician to assure him I really wasn’t going to be an artist, a musician or a writer.  If I was not queer, then what on earth would I be doing in the worlds of meditation, design or writing novels.  Father was all the more puzzled by my potential because he was a great reader but he had no comprehension of how books got written or of the sorts of people who wrote them.  Or if he did, he did not want his second son to be part of that world.  Better to be queer so he could be boxed in within familiar if unpleasant confines and then contained or even cured.  To be an artist, for that we could go to no doctor, there was no diagnosis or cure for such a dreadful, unspeakable destiny. 

I did not understand any of this at the time, but the event planted its seeds and the blooms took their turn to emerge but eventually they did and I discovered my passion for writing while I burned through a list of temporary enthusiasms which kept me unsettled and waiting and ready.  Finally by the time I was thirty, my first book found a publisher and some good reviews.  I sent a copy to Father and a few years later I sent him a copy of the second and then the third.  Mother read them, I knew, but I never knew if he read them.  I hoped he had even if he did not like or understand them.  They were the work of a wannabe dervish, a wandering layabout who had little to show for his life to that point.  Certainly he had no money to speak of.  Not the career in banking that Father had most desperately wanted for me.  When I entered religious life right after high school I knew somewhere in my heart that none of us really wanted that, neither Mother nor Father nor even myself, but I had nowhere else to go and that seemed to be the best way to get out and away.  I was infatuated, I guess, with the idea of living the monastic life, much in the way I had been infatuated with a string of girls throughout high school.  I loved how they smelled, how their hair felt, how they talked forever, for as long as I could muster, about ideas that intrigued me and that I thought intrigued them too but I could never really tell.  They could not tell either.  I liked how Eileen Black taught me to French kiss our sophomore year but I refused to fuck her when her father was still at his desk in the next room one night and after that she was really pissed off and refused to see much of me.  She seemed more and more disturbed.  Cindy Franklin I fell hardest for and spent the most time with.  End of sophomore year and on and off until graduation.  We wanted to be in love with each other but we knew, finally, that we were too young and that we were not.  When I told her about my plan to join the monastery instead of going to college, she said, well, that’s a thing no girl could possibly compete with.  Go give it a try but I won’t expect it to last for you.  I didn’t want to believe she could tell that about me and didn’t want to believe it would be like that.  I was too intent on burying all my confusions under the immense complexities and thrilling intricacies of life ever more deeply within the chambers of religion, the hallways and altars of the great church I had grown up within.  The seduction of believing you have a divine vocation to follow is as powerful as any one person can ever create within another person.  Love invents infinite manifestations in the heart.  The desire to find in prayer and surrender to God commands as no other command can.  But within weeks of living in the huge brick building with fifty other postulants that first summer I knew the whole project was doomed and I could not let myself admit this to anyone.   I hated it.  I hated the lack of privacy, the lack of time to myself, the worship of order and detail and rules and petty distinctions piety and morality.  Everything seemed designed to crush feeling.  We were not able to have time to talk with each other about anything of importance.  It was group life above all else.  We ran in wonderful games of rugby which I loved for the first time in my life just because we could be outdoors and get as tired as possible, physical exertion and exhaustion being a drug against the boredom of the rest of the spiritual life under the Rule and the rules.  Classes in bible study, classes in prayer, organized housework, organized walks and outings, everything timed and slotted.  I asked our choir director, the youngest member of the faculty, to teach me something about yoga,  Brother Antoninus had just begun teaching, we were his first group of students.  He must have been ten years older.  He gave me some of his books on Christian yoga, yoga and monastic practice, yoga and prayer.  I had no knowledge of this and it gave me a sense of expansion to think of giving it a try.  We got permission from the Director and in spare half hours he would show me some of the basic postures. 

Friday late afternoon  --  Enjoyed the fact that the above did appear last night.  Now to continue it in some ways.  Just moved the text to Micro Word and changed the title to “My Call.”  Not sure that will be it but for now it is ok.  We go out to dinner with the core group shortly.  Not freezing rain and sort of warmish.  My Call imitates My Struggle but that’s ok too.  Knowing no one will ever read anything frees one up, does it not, to just do whatever pleases or suits or fits the failure as it happens. 
Found the Walser quote--maybe it could be the epigraph.  Could not find it late last night and went to sleep with that driving me crazy. 
Could steal a title from Walser---“We See Too Much”  or Swine.
“I belong to the faction of humanity willing to be convinced that men are more in need of love than are women, who often enough realize that when it comes to what goes by the name of love, they are by no means living high on the hog.” 
“We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary.  We already see so much.” 
“No one has the right to act as though he knew me.” 
all from the new New Directions edition of Microscripts. 
The Imaginary Dervish,  The Dervish Flaneur, The Wastrel, From Monk to Lay-About, My Call to Order, My Call to Disorder, The Call to Disorder, The Dream of Rule; Tailor, Barber, Courier, Crazy---My Life in a Religious Order.  My Short Life in a Religious Order. 
How I Became a Nun --- such a great title.  Could steal that “How I Became a Monk.” 
Monastic Daze

Saturday night, Solstice night.  9:35 pm and we are both here on computers writing something.   Group get-together last night a great success.  Today we did a Wal-mart session in late afternoon just in time for me to get some great blue photos of Stinson valley.  Baker valley I guess it is.  Watching Hallmark movies to watch galore.  Warm and rainy weather. 
Have decided to like Rick Whitaker’s book more than I thought I did.  Or am trying to. 
Dec 24  bright morning & cold  off to walk in Nashua for the day
Christmas evening  Quiet day.  Good time singing carols with the Episcopalians last night.  Wavell and Susan real friendly.  Had a six week? trip through Ecuador, off to Mexico soon.  Also chatted with the Hunnewells, the two boys too.  Boy they are huge guys, each of them.  Must be Maine lumberjack blood on both sides of their families. 
Anne called.  Marc gets free new release movie DVDs so she’s going to see if she can send a few.  She’s excited about coming over to Spain with her friend Mimi.  She told me more about Todd’s wife leaving him, kicking him out, it seems.  He now sleeps on the sofa.  Her parents live downstairs in an apartment.  She’s been running around for at least four years.  There was even a paternity test to make sure the second baby is actually Todd’s.  I guess it is.  Shortly after the two couples were married, she made a play for Kyle.  He told Todd about it and Todd didn’t want to believe it.  Bad blood thereafter between the two formerly friendly couples.  Barbara, alas, had been against the marriage from the outset. 
Gossip turns out to be pretty boring after all.  David and Cécile are upset that Giga is leaving Rachel, or rather that the marriage is breaking up and that he was running around for two years.  What hurts everyone is the lying and behind-everyone’s back part of it all.  You can’t help but feel like the actors are playing you for a fool even though you’re in the outer circles of friends and acquaintances. 

26 December 2013  day after   snowing all morning
Came upon this tidbit in The Believer--this version lifted from a different site because it provides more of the crucial details--
“The novelist Patricia Highsmith worked in bed surrounded by cigarettes, an ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and a cup full of sugar. “According to Mason Currey, the author of the entertaining and enlightening new book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, she also liked to have a stiff drink before she settled down to write, “to reduce her energy levels, which veered toward the manic.”
“Daily Rituals chronicles the routines of genius-level artists, writers, composers, and philosophers--Beethoven, Kafka, Chuck Close, and John Cheever are among those included. Their quotidian schedules tended to be as regular as they were idiosyncratic. Currey says the most surprising ritual came from the early 20th-century writer Thomas Wolfe, who would unconsciously “fondle his genitals” while working because it “fostered such a "good male feeling" and “stoked his creative energies.”
Proof once more that women don’t know much about men.  Or Mason Currey doesn’t.  Her editor should have caught that “most surprising” and had her take that out.
---
The divine afflatus---when will it take me over and firestorm me.  Or when will it surge through like a hurricane. 
Right,  on the radio the other day,  Norman McLean’s birthday and Garrison Keillor reminded us that he wrote “River” when he was seventy years old.  Awesome.  Hope for me yet.  Always knew it. 
Pretty interesting quote from the wiki entry on Wolfe---
God's Lonely Man (undated as an essay) Excerpt:
"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”

Seems like I have found that quotation before.  Maybe I look up something on Wolfe once every eighteen months?

Just called Tiacref to withdraw some in January to get the year started off with a bang.  Gearing up for the Javea trip.  Market supposed to do really well so let’s hope it does. 

Oops, turns out Mason Currey is a man.  Just looked on Amazon

Really nice long visit with Kirsten.  I couldn’t say much clearly enough about Beckett and his similarities with Bernhard, and the differences.  We ended the afternoon by urging one another to publish. 

In the middle of the visit, Janice from across the street called to let us know that Ruth Millar died early this morning.  She declined rapidly and knew her family was visiting her about a week ago but then after that did not seem to know anything more.  Had stopped eating.  Seems there will be a memorial service soon after the new year. 

Today was Friday December 27 
Still is.  Night.  Good swim this morning.  I forgot the snorkel.  Drove back in my bathing suit and parka (and shoes) to get it.  No one there, whole workout was good.  Then I met Bob Feeney for coffee at Mt Alto.  Baby Mobius was there with his entourage.  Almost impossible to find because Micah held him in the fabric shoulder sling that looks somehow Peruvian and he was barely visible.  Hannah also there in her dreads, just back from a fast trip to Bhutan.  Maybe three week or month trip?  Feeny chatted about his res life department.  A recent job search got scuttled by HR at the last stage because of some issue that they could not tell anyone about.  Great tactics there.  After lunch and a wee nap we drove to Tilton.  Great sunset, can already feel the days getting Longer.  Found four hoodies and two pants for Va at Nike.  Last night we watched “A Woman in Berlin” the German movie based on the memoir by a journalist who survived the Russian victory over Berlin.  She and all the women got raped repeatedly.  She became special with one of the commanders and he eventually got disciplined for that, sent to Siberia in disgrace.  Her book caused a stir because Germany was not ready in the late fifties to hear all the truths about things like that.  People felt she dishonored German womanhood etc.  
Movie was very well done if bleak.  Great acting and all of that.  Pretty depressing, though. 

Bob is back into reading Dos Passos.  Wonders if he doesn’t like history more now than literature, reading about places and specific times.  Has a history of world war I.  He is part of the group going on a diplomatic mission to Benin---all expenses paid for by the king of Benin.  Not Octave but someone in the family.  Bob has applied to only one grad program in res life, at Ft Collins.  I desperately hope he gets in and goes.  He will so benefit from such a move.  He’s way too comfy here, has glimpsed the larger world with the work at Bard and put a toe into grad study at BC but then withdrew.  Not sure why.  Still casting about. 

Talking with Kirsten made me feel I should read Beckett more.  More of, more freshly, recently.  Did I really read everything?  I think I gave up on the plays. 

Saturday night now.  Read a review of Knausgaard in London review and a review of Tim Parks in NYRB.  Rupert sent the former and Phil sent the latter and I’ve written this to both. 
I hope Parks is deeply grateful for the long and very closely considered review.  I almost wonder if the review-essay is not better than the novel itself.  It is so detailed that I found myself having less and less interest in possibly ever looking at the novel itself.  And maybe it is an example of that old saw—damning with faint praise because while Walton does say (politely?) that Parks really does deserve a bigger reputation than he has had to date, he doesn’t rave about the current book in any convincing or persuasive way.  He
finds it to be strange and after each detail he adds we say to ourselves, “even more strange than you had told us.”  And then there are the moments of comic relief, at Parks expense it seems, when we get the  details about the naked bodies and the place where I chuckled out loud: the paragraph about how the publishers don’t seem to know what to make of the book: “they quote a review optimistically describing it as a ‘fast-paced comic novel,’ a phrase in which only the word “novel” feels accurate.  More appropriate
would have been the quotation from Schopenhauer that Parks used in his demolition job on Salman Rushdie: ‘The art [of the novel] lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life’—although you can understand why the sales department might have vetoed that.”

Finally, when I learned that Parks has lived in Italy since 1987 or something, I thought of your ex-pat friend who lives in France and I got off on an inner rant that goes like this:  sorry, any writer who lives the ex-pat life in some warm, picturesque or faux-toney place like Italy or Corsica or such, can no longer be considered a “serious” writer back in his native land and reviews of his work will be forbidden.  I thought too of Jonathan Carroll, American novelist who has lived in Vienna for years (after the peace corps maybe?).  Long string of novels published steadily over the years.  No one has heard of him but enough have heard of him somewhere (UK?) that he has a following, a core of readers, a publishing record.

And my point now is?  A big journal like the NYRB should play some sort of game its own power and delusions and announce a policy of randomly publishing every so many years only manuscripts from the slush pile, review only books by self-published authors, find writers who have a miniscule reputation in a specific locale.

Or some other such fantasy project.  Look up Ron Rash—for example.  North Carolina author—the voice of  Appalachia, winner of the Thomas Wolfe prize and of the biggest money prize for short stories.

I guess Tim Parks does nail it.  What the heck do we want & wouldn’t it be better if we all took up Buddhist meditation.

The review of vol 2 of Knausgaard is written by Sheila Heti.  She makes the mistake, in my mind, of building her review on a moment when she actually met Karl Ove K briefly and asked him briefly about a specific moment in the book and he replied Oh no, I made that up.  Why on earth would she believe him even if they were there in real life speaking to one another?  As a writer herself, wouldn’t she know that at any given moment, under any sort of momentary provocation an inquiry, a writer, a person, is liable to say anything for any zillion number of reasons.  Especially people in the arts, the performing arts, actors, writers, comics, poseurs, fakes, pretenders, interviewers, anchor people, spokespeople, shapers of public opinion and taste, journalists, etc.  And then for Heti to make a reviewer’s crisis-drama out of what is true, how can we trust Knausgaard in some other part of the work if he says he “made up” that poignant and telling detail about the orange peel and his father sweeping his hand through his hair.  We all really pick and choose by our own lights and moods when we want to be literalists and when we want to be mythologists and contextualizers.  And so do the writers we enjoy reading.  There is an item making the rounds on Facebook precisely about this, at least about the form of it, the form it takes, the basic trope.  A writer named Rachel Held Evans post an item on her site called “Everyone’s a Biblical Literalist Until You Bring Up Gluttony . . . ‘…Or divorce, or gossip, or slavery, or head coverings, or Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence, or the “abomination” of eating shellfish and the hell-worthy sin of calling other people idiots.  Then we need a little context.
Then we need a little grace.  Then we need a little room to disagree.”
Same holds for the literary worlds, I think, and the ever on-going hand-wringing about fiction and non-fiction, truth in fiction and truth in life and truth in memoir or re-created narrative or on and on.  Tim Parks has found that taking up Buddhist meditative practice really won’t solve these questions any more than reading novels will do so.  Vonnegut told us that reading novels was the Western form of zen meditation. 
Rick Whitaker has taken a more extreme version of this anxiety to it’s logical and admirable point of perfection.  His new novel An Honest Ghost is a total mosaic of passages from other books, other writers.  I’m only about one-third of the way into it and I’ve begun to learn how to enjoy it more fully as I keep reading.  For one thing I’ve taken to, finally, almost restrain myself from constantly turning to the back of the book where we can find exactly who said that originally, what book each phrase comes from.  There is a loose and recognizable narrative that belongs to Whitaker as the originator of the book, the collector and arranger of the quotations.  But there are two books, or a bicameral set of experiences:  the narrative as poetic assemblage and the list of sources for each chapter.  The Chord and the Arpeggio.  Since the story is much about being gay, however, I find myself wondering if Whitaker has not re-invented a new/old kind of closet for himself, or for his characters.  With a perfect mosaic of other voices, we have no narrative voice telling the whole story.  Or at least not one that is much more available to us than the thin lines of grout between the tesserae will have be necessary.  I read Whitaker’s first book some years ago and I took a look at it again to refresh my memory.  It gives the reader the real pleasure of the narrator’s voice, a memorable voice, distinctive, complex, companionable, genuine.  I wonder now why Whitaker, so successfully public as a gay writer has decided to re-closet the narrative voice he is capable of creating, even if it is behind not quite a solid door but a curtain of shifting beads.  The “second” book listing the sources is fine as a variant of the old commonplace notebook:  Whitaker has read widely and deeply and you get to be surprised at times (I thought I was the only one to have read Kenneth Burke’s only novel, or 8 Gates of Zen by John Daido Loori).
But the “first” book, the story, is too percussive as tale.  Closer to music and poetry, prose poetry, poetic sequence.  That’s how I am now trying to keep reading the book.  Not sure I will or want to finish.  It has all the curiosity factor of a strange, found object, yes, and the appeal of an Oulipo sort of game, yes.  But as with a chocolate ice cream cone, after three or nine licks, the most intense excitement dies fast and one keeps eating just because.

Sunday night
Seems warm.  Snow outside.  Wet.  Walked in Concord midday, bought a frame for Petie’s landscape.  It looks good in it.  Just realized though that it is behind glass.  Should not frame it like that.  Have to re-do it. 

The Sealed Book
The Tetralogy     both from Bernhard’s Over All the Mountain Tops
Monday night  Starbucks in Tilton the busiest I’ve ever seen it this afternoon.  But only two guys working, Zach and the older guy, gray goatee.  Both incredibly steady and patient under the relentless stream of customers.  This around 2:30.  We had napped in the car beforehand, luckily enough. 

Last night of the year.  Osvaldo Golijov Argentine composer of “Azul” played by Yo Yo Ma on special from Lincoln Center. 
Awfully good year.  We changed our slogan to CBB---Couldn’t Be Better. 
I guess Grandma Garlitz’s version was Better, each day is better.  Ella Drake Garlitz.  EDB  Each Day is Better--Ella Drake.  or every day is better.  She told me that over the phone a few months before her death, or maybe even a year or so.  Made quite an impression. 
So we’re watching tv Lincoln Center and now Times.  Yo-yo Seacrest