December 2014

DECEMBER  2014

Monday  Dec 1 

Luminari font  Never used.  Won’t stay with it, cool as it is.  Ran off the party invites for the second time.  Great swim this morning and created a  scene for the Courier piece.  Or part of a scene?

Marion  font.  Sounds French, huh?  This is 14pt, seems a wee small but blowing up the page makes it work ok. 

PD James novel arrived, but too fat looking an old, old-style paperback.  Burgo suggested it, Devices and Desires.  1989  The paper looks as old as 1949. 


1. Poetry: Have you ever taught a course on poetry?   If so, what kind of poetry - 20th century or what?

2.  I just sent you a review of the latest novel by Ben Lerner, the author of "Leaving Atochka Station" and a grad of the Brown U MFA program.   I have such a hard time believing that anyone would publish his kind of "post modern" diffident self-absorption.   The reviewer even admits that there is no story.  It's just a collection of vignettes of slightly fictionalized events in Lerner's life.  But then the reviewer, "a senior editor at Harper's" calls Lerner's writing brilliant and not to be missed.   I'm left thinking that Lerner and this reviewer are two NYC Jews whose families are related.  

The review reminds me of the NYer review of the Turing film.  After panning the script, the NYer reviewer says one should see it for the "acting."   Oh please!!!!   In films, the casting director and director always select "actors" who fit the role, so that the actor does very little, if any, acting.

So going to a film because of the acting or reading a novel because the author tosses out a few similes is, to me, scraping the bottom of the barrel for reasons to like the work.

Brown is s;omething very different from when I attended.  I'm not saying I liked Brown back then, but ever since it got to be ultra politically correct and produced writers like Lerner, it has become an embarrassment, I think, to anyone who is truly serious.

Anyway, did you ever teach a poetry class?

1. Well, as Clinton and many other guilty parties would say, depends what you mean by "taught," depends what you mean by "poetry," depends what you mean by "a course."

Am afraid my years of trying to be hip with the kids have found me guilty here.  But its a long and complicated tale, too.  Forty years ago I would have tried to teach "the canon:" Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley.  Then the tacit underpinning was "we're struggling with this stuff because the anthology says it is great stuff and the anthology knows."   Later we threw all that out in the name of relevance, which by the way eventually became, the term itself, in student usage 'hey, why don't we read something thats if "relatable.'" as in "to which I am able to relate."

Thirty years ago I got into a phase of trying to figure out contemporary poetry, so I read me up on some of those guys like Ashbery et al.  After Pound and Eliot all hell broke loose in the poetry world and Multi-cultural victimage and politics and otherness and all the other trendy topics took over and it was every poet for herself and who or what determined taste or judgment or standard of quality got thrown up into the air and everyone published everyone else's friends and there was money in the universities so who the heck cared whether anyone could understand it or tell if it was good or not.

But no, I never did teach creative writing per se.  Edged around it in various ways because I had to teach different sorts of writing courses along with the lit.

All that said, I liked this review of Lerner's book and I agree with the writer, Harvey, that Lerner has earned himself a place in some yardstick.  Remember twenty years ago the great white 35 year old writers where the American Psycho guy and such.  Cocaine and wild nights in the city.  I really liked Lerner's first book and I've actually read the first ten or so pages of this new one.

Why?  He's distinguished himself from the run-of-the-mill products of the creative writing schools of his generation.  Franzen is now 45, even close to 50?  So Lerner is younger and you have to allow him those things we allow the kids.  He's so much better than other recents writers of his age group.  I think because of what Nab said about Gogol---Gogol, Nabokov says that Gogol’s plots are unimportant: “The real plot…lies in the style."  Nowadays I think we like to say because of the voice.  Lerner breaks all the so-called rules of the creative writing classes and trusts his voice, the voice he knows he's making up, as voice.

By the way I've never read Gogol.  Yikes.  I would much rather read Lerner than try to plow through a new novel by Franzen.  I think spending a lot of time with ol' K Burke warped me in these ways too because his books are offbeat and ultra-capacious, he can throw almost the kitchen sink into his later books and has this habit of stopping after one thought seems finished and saying in print to his reader "So, where are we then?" Sort of like "what shall we do next to pass the time?"  Beckett-like, all of this.

I did stop trying to be excited by contemporary poetry after a while, though, and went back to prose and novels.  The poets seem to go for instant dazzle as shamelessly as French theorists do.  I'd almost say that Leonard Cohen is the best poet of his/our generation.  Forget Ashbery---he's simply at the top of his coterie, or was.  Coterie politics, that's what so much of what we have been fed as "culture" seems to come down to.

Could well be that Lerner has been "tapped" by friends of his family in some vein of the publicity biz, but I have enjoyed what I've read so far.  It's fresher than what fills the young writers magazines, as far as I can tell.  By the way, have to send you our friend, Ed's, book, "Jews that I knew."  Createspace and very short and fast read.  Catskills humor from his childhood growing up there.  Best section are some Shakespeare plays re-told in yiddishesque dialogues.

P S  Also
I liked teaching poetry because it was such an easy and good way to fill up the time----you had to read the poem aloud of course and that you could ham up over and over for a while.  And then you had to puzzle out the knots and twists, sort of like sherlock holmes.

Trouble with teaching novels is you had to have one or two in the class who had read as much of it as you had and you all had to remember the details well.

Basic problem of all teaching of lit, writing, is what the heck are you supposed to say about any of it.  Just read, it for god's sake and forget all that fancy analysis.  !  use all the adverbs you want to, too.

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 I'm not familiar with any young writer but Lerner.  So I'll take your word for it that Lerner is better than other writers of his generation. But to me that's a sad statement.  On the other hand, I'm always absorbed by story and character and care very little for other aspects of novels.   I'll also admit that not everyone has to share my view of novels/lit.

I often say that I write because I don't find that other writers are addressing the parts of the world that interest me, nor share my views of the world.  If they did, why would I bother writing anything?  
I like your descriptions of "teaching" poetry.   Sitter is lucky to be concentrating on the 18th century.  I wonder if he has ever attempted more modern stuff.   Well, I'm sure he has, and it might be funny listening to him trying to deal with someone like Ashberry.

Marion font.  There’s a question for my brother---why is his middle name Marion?  One of the great mysteries of our lives. 

4:31  deep twilight.  The perfect book for stealing arrived in today’s mail.  Second contender after P D James Devices and Desires was found to be too long and too quasi-familiar.  It involves Inspector Daglisch and I’ve seen him portrayed too often on PBS series.  The one today is by Elizabeth Peters from 1982, The Copenhagen Connection.  Blurb on the back says it is a “classic romp” with nonstop action, hectic romance and constantly surprising humor”  --Mystery News
Ok, I can cut out the action and use it as the spine for my collagial fish, or whatever beast or monster it will be.  And locations will be in Copenhagen, I bought it for that title alone, but I can make all the locations be different hotels in the city.  Hence hotel courier and hotel obsession as part of the gameyness of the theft itself.  But what of the main character?  Who will “Elizabeth Jones” become in my crafty hands?  I’ve been assuming my narrator will be first person. 

well, having read a few paragraphs, I once again have second thoughts.  This is a romance novel more than it is a mystery.  What else have I ordered?  What is coming next from Amazon.  Perhaps that other novel by the French noir author.  I could still read on in Peters to see what the actual plot is. 

here’s the summary on Amazon
A strange twist of fate brings Elizabeth Jones face to face with her idol, the brilliant, eccentric historian Margaret Rosenberg, at the Copenhagen Airport. An even stranger accident makes Elizabeth the esteemed scholar's new private assistant. But luck can go from good to bad in an instant -- and less than twenty-four hours later, the great lady is kidnapped by persons unknown. Suddenly desperate in a foreign land, Elizabeth must cast her lot with Rosenberg's handsome, insufferable son Christian in hopes of finding her vanished benefactor. On a trail that leads from modern wonders to ancient mystery, a determined young woman and an arrogant "prince" must uncover shocking secrets carefully guarded in the beautiful Danish city. And they must survive a mysterious affair that is turning darker and deadlier by the hour.





here’s the one of Manchette’s Three to Kill
Businessman Georges Gerfaut witnesses a murder—and is pursued by the killers. His conventional life knocked off the rails, Gerfaut turns the tables and sets out to track down his pursuers. Along the way, he learns a thing or two about himself.... Manchette—masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic—limns the cramped lives of professionals in a neo-conservative world.


and here’s the one of Manchette’s The Prone Gunman
Martin Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game—so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart. After all, that’s why he took up this profession! But the Organization won't let him go: they have other plans. Once again, the gunman must assume the prone shooting position. A tour de force, this violent tale shatters as many illusions about life and politics as bodies.

At this point, the Three to Kill seems most suitable for what I have in mind---a pursued-pursuer plot appeals at this point.  The princess-lover core plot of Peters’ book doesn’t appeal for now but the wandering around the city does.  And being a killer as in Prone Gunman, well, that might work, depending. 

You have to choose, Bob, and stick to your decision!  Stay with Peter for a while and see what happens.  A kidnapping of an admired mentor, hmmm.  And a romance with his daughter?  Hmmm. 

well---here is the James summary--and maybe I could/should reconsider it---
From Publishers Weekly
James ( A Taste for Death ) sets her 11th novel on Larksoken, a remote windswept headland in Norfolk, where the presence of a huge nuclear energy plant serves as a metaphor for the power of the past to rule over her characters. Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, in Larsoken to settle an estate left him at the death of a relative, is drawn into the investigation of a serial killer, the Whistler. Dalgliesh's neighbors include the power station's director, Alex Mair; his elegant sister Alice, a cookbook author; acting administrator--and Alex's former lover--Hilary Robarts; and anti-nuclear activist Neil Pascoe. The next signature killing , of the widely disliked Robarts, turns out to have occurred hours after a young man who firmly establishes his identity as the Whistler commits suicide. The question of who murdered Robarts, then, centers around motive. This intricate, layered mystery may be read as parable: we can escape the consequences of our choices, political and personal, no more than we can shed our private histories. This is dark James, plotted with a slight unevenness but utterly faithful to her deeply and sympathetically plumbed characters. 175,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB main selections.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

But, no, as soon as I re-read this summary I think, no, too many aspects and details in here I don’t want to engage at all.  What about something totally different?  “Enough About Love”   ehhh, nope

And yet, taking the woman’s romance novel as the source has the post-feminist-feministic appeal of turning the tables of genre conventions, reworking borrowed elements from “forbidden” sources. 

But the witness to a murder who then pursues fits rather well the pre-invented motif of acting as courier---a very private courier, the “package” now being a dead body and a forbidden witnessing, and then the courier’s activity of delivering, receiving, transporting, delivering gets perfected upward into the more sublime business of crime-noir pursuit and capture or pursuit and execution. 


The kidnapping plot means a Quest to Find. 

reading along in this long French novel, scene of anthropologists
in the Brazilian jungle, conversation turns to
ta da   a tale by H P Lovecraft called "The Statement of
Randall Carter."

wonder if Lovecraft appeals to anthropologists in general?
tales of secret tombs and crypts etc

sent that to Phil at 8:29  Earlier today he’d sent me part of the nyrb article on Lovecraft.  Yikes. 
Phil replying to piece on Villiers---
Nope.  But thank you for sending me this.  Very, very  interesting.   David Ignatius, a reporter who covers international affairs for the Wash Post while also writing novels about international intrigue,  is the closest the US has to de Villiers.  But Ignatius is very tame and not nearly as well connected as the Frenchman.  Needless to say, his accounts of sex are...well we Americans remain puritans and naifs compared to the rest of the world, which is cheerfully corrupt, venal, sensual, sadistic, and more.  As a young guy In Tunisia I was shocked at the brutality of sex by Arab males.   My "sophistication" was really shallow.

P

Now Thursday evening --  Peter Pan on, live, but we’re going to switch to something else.  Whole Foods let us down today.  None of those cool norwegian pines with xmas decorations packaged with them. 

Friday evening Dec  5

The three Manchette novels arrived.  Also started reading on kindle the Villiers Kabul novel---competing with Phil who said he was downloading it today.  Good swim this morning.  Wally walk in the afternoon.  Totally Vegan day for me.  Wow. 

That was half and hour ago.  Just broke that perfectionism by eating one sand tart---egg, butter, sugar, milk.  Oh well. 

Villiers is my new hero.  Want to knock out four novels a year. 

3 to Kill will be the first.  Nice and short looking.  23 chapters.  1976.


Sunday evening  Dec 7

This is the date Joseph Uddo died in 2008.  Six years ago. 

Lunch with Helen and Ted yesterday at the Bavarian German restaurant in Hooksett.  Since I’m reading kabul in chaos non-stop I decided this restaurant and the “enclave” it fronts (a non-gated development that somehow looks gated, up on top of a nice hill/rise behind the small shopping mall that houses the restaurant) is a retirement colony of CIA agents and Nazis or their associates.  A tiny German enclave north of Manchester.  Really good meal.  Helen gave us advance copies of her book about her grandfather, the whaler.  Beautifully produced book by a small publisher in Portsmouth, Peter Randall.  She might know him.  She went to Portsmouth high school and did an English major at UNH.  Intro to the book really well written.  Her voice exactly.  Ted pointed out that the James W Foley beheaded by ISIS a few months back was the grandson of our John Foley, the dean and former basketball ? coach who hired both of us.  Yikes.  I had been so critical of this young journalist, blaming the victim, and had even looked up his family background, but nowhere was Plymouth mentioned and I just didn’t think of the possible connection.  Sure enough on the memorial website there is now mention of his grandparents.  Marilyn and John Foley, Plymouth, NH. 

His father must be their first son.  The youngest son, the lawyer, I remember a bit.  He had an office in town for a little while. 

-----
Devoting such focus to the Kabul thriller took too much energy out of me.  I forget where I am.  I guess I spent four or five days, since Friday? getting that book read and all in a silly, imaginary competition with Phil.  He is still reading it.  I was fascinated with it, though.  Compelling read and all that.  But my fantasy of copying a detective novel to write something has somehow vanished.  Maybe too it has been putting all my energy into getting the house decorated.  Virginia’s party at the Inn has fallen apart and she was very down about that last night.  I worry that I am getting addicted to thrillers, though, because now I want to read Copenhagen Connection to see how it compares.  Maybe I will become a best-seller slut.  Give up literary pretensions altogether. 

Weds night  this font looks “muddy”

to me now  Dec 10
Shifting to Cochin

email to Phil---he had asked this question about the influence of Mother and Dad---

Dave got me listening to the Gist guy, Mike Pesca, and I've gotten
to enjoy his take on the daily news.  Gives a good idea of how journalists' minds work on current topics.

Dad was all about golf and the club and, through Rich, the other sports, though he was never one to show up to see Rich's games.  And books, he read.  But it was not really for literature,  but his hunger for information and understanding.  And readers digest bestsellers.

Mother had me taking piano lessons in late grade school.  Sometime in 8th I said I didn't want to continue, disliked practicing.  She had bought a small, used grand piano and after I stopped, sold it.  Around the same phase, she got me taking drawing classes with Glenn Bastien's mother, Dorothy.  Lovely woman and I sort of enjoyed it, but it somehow didn't "take."  I remember working on this face of Abraham Lincoln (sharp contrasts was I think the idea, darks, lights) and I didn't enjoy it, never happy with the results.  Late in mid-life when I started taking or sitting in on a few art classes at the college and studying more about actual artists, especially the whole AbEx generation, I found out that drawing is one of those Knack-skills that not all artists like or were that good at.  Of course those who were dominate art history.  We just saw some DaVinci etchings in Paris that are simply incredible.  So my drawing lessons didn't go anywhere either.

I suppose it was the buildings on Washington street, the library, the mansions, and the churches around town, that first gave me without my consciously realizing it, a sense of architecture.  I was deeply saddened when the city tore down the huge Queen City Hotel on the B&O railroad tracks.  I used to walk back and forth past that building the four years of high school.  By then it was on the verge of being abandoned, but it was so powerful and evocative.  Huge porches, wrought iron grillwork all over, old red brick, high windows,  beautiful wooden floors, details, late 19th C design, and on a grand scale.

I found Wright through his books in the library, which meant at first his gorgeous drawings.  He could make his projects look so dramatic and beautiful.
--------

Finished Where Tigers are at Home.  The crippled kid kills the governor at the end. And is killed. Wish I could remember who Uncle Zé was. He feels the closing rage and fury at “the absurdity beneath which the criminal stupidity of men generally hides” is the last phrase---in translation.  Had forgotten the catchy opening line---“Man’s swelling his pointed dick! squaaawk.”  The parrot Heidegger.  Elaine died peacefully on top of the monadnock in the jungle, a garden of eden analogue, with some bitter overtones.  David Coward’s TLS blurb on the back cover uses “exuberant.”  And indeed, almost miraculously, the book is, the reading of it is, that experience and more.  Could be a gloss on La plus c’est change, la plus c’est la même chose.  An expansive gloss. 

----------
Phil

Well, there's another thing we share: piano lessons that didn't go anywhere.  I took piano from about sixth grade up thru Lasalle.   I never got any good and gave up.  Also had two years of guitar while at Lasalle.  Same result.  Nada.

Interesting that you seem to have developed a taste for architecture on your own.   I was completely different in that regard.  I didn't care for the old (dirty) buildings in Cumberland and never understood why people cared so much for the B&O station.  (Remember the poem in the NYer about that station, written by a guy who had gone to Fort Hill and became a poet in Italy.  Smith, I think his name was.

Today I like Cumberland's old buildings but that is due, in large part, to the way they have been cleaned up.  Especially on Washington Street.  If my memory is correct, I thought all those houses and buildings were just dark, soot-covered industrial red brick "mausoleums" in the 50s and even 60s.   Sometime in the mid-70s, as I recall, America woke up to its urban landscape and began to fix it up.  I think if people with a better eye than mine had never done that, I would still find all those old buildings completely uninteresting.  My bad!  Or, perhaps a more accurate description, my blindness!

Reader's Digest Condensed Novels:   In our house, it was my mother who read those.  I did, too, and it was due to one of those condensed novels that I decided going to a prep school would be "a cool thing."  I had never thought of doing that before reading that novel about a kid who goes to a prep school and "grows up." Since Dad had attended both Mercerburg and Exeter and much preferred the latter, I told my parents that I wanted to attend Exeter.  I think I  surprised them, but they agreed, and I got in because my father and two uncles had attended Exeter.

Most of my youth was very aimless.  I never dreamed of a writing career until I met several people in the Peace Corps who were aiming in that direction.   Before then I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do.   My parents kept asking me what I wanted to do and my response was always "I don't know."  

Dad, by the way, read classics like Plutarch's Lives .  He also read the bible from cover to cover but with no religious intention.  His parents weren't religious and neither was he.  They were nominal Episcopalians, but only because that was the socially correct thing to be in Cumberland.  Before coming to Cumberland from Alabama they had been Methodists because that was the "upper crust" in Florence, Alabama.  Mother was the Catholic in the extended family and went to church every Sunday and put me in Catholic schools but, as my brother once said, "didn't have religious bone in her body."  Being an orphan she was big on having a positive self-image.  "If you don't think well of yourself, no one else will, either, Phil."  Listening to her one day when she was in her 70s, I said, "You know, mom, it sounds as if you think Jesus Christ, by turning the other cheek, got what he deserved."   She agreed that he did!!!!     From that I concluded that being an orphan was a tough row to hoe for mom when she was young.

--------
Ｂｏｂ，

I used all for myself the blanket in the bed, none for you, and you fell down from the bed to the foor, sleeing there.

Yes, your aunt and uncle were proud of their jobs.    Happy memory !

                                  Isei

Hi Isei

No, I don't really remember that.  But their apartment in College Park
was very small, so I guess we had to.  Both Dot and Uncle Eddy worked
in the government.  Near the end of her career, Dot worked for a
year in the White House, on the staff of Sherman Adams, under
President Eisenhower.  She was always thrilled about that and always
a staunch Republican.

-------
My very dear under-bed-dog,

It must have been Winter, after top-bed dog having eaten the super delicious mimi-made turkey in Cumberland on Christmas !   Thank you for driving top-bed-dog to airport, when it was going to leave the States for Japan, in 1967.
                                                          Sincerely yours,  top-bed-dog.

---------

[ oh dear!    Terminology could raise eyebrows in hindsight joking on Colbert or such.  Let’s hope the Sony hackers don’t use this to create a media furor.   :-) ]  

Thursday   Dec 11 




Monday evening Dec 15

We discovered the next book group meeting is this Wednesday so Willow is hitting the book to make the deadline.  Yesterday the party went off most successfully.  Today we shopped at tanger for the babes, no luck at finding the hat we saw on another babe the other day, but luck in Concord at getting Petie her slippers and robe.  Lunch at the faux Albuquerque El Rodeo and then walking at Target. 

Enjoyed ordering a bike with seat for baby doll for Emma--being sent to Chezet.
So strange, memory and the mind.  Chat with Doug Grant about these things yesterday.  Is that what stirred up topics reconsidered and reconfigured?  That and asking Maureen Ebner about her years at Notre Dame? etc?  whatever, thinking this morning about Bob Gronquist of all people.  Musician, choir director, here years ago.  Choral director.  Long before Dan Perkins I guess.  How this memory got replayed and why? 



On Virginia’s advice I am excising this wonderful note from the rec letter I’m penning for Feeny.  !  sigh 

*Personal note regarding Chicago:  I cannot help but be especially pleased that Bob Feeny wants to go to Chicago.  My wife and I did our doctorates there, she in Spanish under George Haley.  I did my dissertation under Wayne Booth on Kenneth Burke’s study, The Rhetoric of Religion.   One of our oldest friends from those days in Hyde Park is Prof Donald Burgo, former student of, and friend of David Tracey, and now professor emeritus from Fontbonne University in St Louis.   This fall I read the work by much more recent divinity school graduate, Jeremy Biles’ book on Bataille, Ecce Monstrum.   I’ve mentioned these things and many more associations with these topics with Bob Feeny in our conversations over the past few years. 

Also   we both just agreed that these days these rec letters should be shorter rather than longer.  Right now the one I’m re-writing is too long. 

Tuesday evening   ----  baked a small batch of cookies for the book group tomorrow night.  Now I seem to have no interest, not to say ambition, to write any sort of novel, let alone a copy of Echenoz or anyone else. 

almost 9   Sense of being at loose ends, now.  Va reading her book for the meeting tomorrow night.  Might take a short time off tomorrow after we walk in the morning, or push it to another day.  Not sure what to do or where.  Not sure just how to get “back” into a decent groove now.  Week until Christmas, Petie and Rick arriving the 24th. 

Harmony was established at last, and only one straggler continues to disrupt it with his anxieties, his shames, his endlessly reiterated adolescences.  Only man was unable to do away with his consciousness.   Chevillard, The Crab Nebula 101
The book has such good lines every page or so.  Nearing the end now. 

Sunday  PEO shindig shortly.  Dec 21  Lunch in Hanover yesterday with Frinks and Jessica.  Pleasant enough and great driving weather.  Few days to clear the bedroom and get ready for Petie and Rick and a week later for her new beau. 
Hope it will work for her.  Would be wonderful.  Great German movie last night I had read about and Dennis reminded me of.  We get to finish it this evening. 
Very funny.  So hard to explain humor.  Schussmacher.  Break Up Manager. 

Sunday night  we even watched a second of his movies--the red baron and started a third before giving up.  Talented and cute young German actor Mattias Schweighöfer.   Beer with Feeny at Fosters.  His GRE scores are nice and high--96 percentile.  He’s ready to get out of here and on to grad school full-time. 

Dec 24  4:21 pm  Just did a short Facetime with the kids.  Almost bedtime there, they were tired.  Did Christmas yesterday because everyone else off skiing.  There until Friday.   Here the house is ready for Petie and Ricky’s arrival.  With luck they are landing at MHT about now.  Heavy rains everywhere and worse storms in the midwest.  Nice to have them coming, nice to have someone coming.  Waiting and preparing for Arrival. 

Dec 25  Short screen visit with Dave and Emma.  Willow and Petie on the piano earlier.  Gifts.  Watching old videos of past christmas visit.  Big egg and bacon breakfast.  Subscribed to Dr McDougall’s plant diet newsletter because he likes Dr Klempner’s old rice diet approach.  Surprise last night at the Inn waiting for  Petie and Rick to arrive was nice chat with Jack Armstrong (NH Colonials) and Dana Zak Armstrong.  Jack has five sons.  Didn’t know that.  Now 85 or 86.  Same age as Dick Sanderson was when he died two years ago.  Old friends and fellow Squam Lake inhabitant next to ?  Hilde and Dick.  Jack went to Holderness and then to UNH where he was an English major, which he really loved being and now wants to talk more about even while now he’s reading more philosophy.  Might call him for a lunch??
Probably not.  Today feast on the carry-in turkey and Petie’s great pecan fruit cake.  Cake from Gethsemani pretty disappointing but from the trappist monks in oregon quite good. 
Article on one website, huff?, about how holidays make you revert to adolescent behavior.  But at 70 years old?  Yep, they even mentioned that too. 
Am I liking Lerner’s second novel as much as I had liked his first?  Don’t think so but that could be because he has matured and grown up more, both the person and the writer. 
Jack Armstrong.  Fifteen years my senior.  Fascinating in his own right and yet also that appeal of the much older.  Not quite fatherly, too young for that, and yet much older than brotherly.  Senior, authoritative, experienced, wiser than one’s peers or near-peers.  The charm of the older maybe paragon of something or other.  At the same time, responses that still seem very young---the eternal student with his professor, English majors in the grad student lounge. 
Lerner puts into his novel the story he published in the new yorker after he talked about how it came about.  Cool and yet it gives us the differences in voice and tone and purpose.  Further deepens all the themes he’s already got going.  He is good. 

Sunday night  Dec 28 
Here’s the version I sent to a few about “our drama:” 
Virginia's sister, Marilyn (Petie) and her son, Ricky, are here for the week.  And---straight out of Flannery O'Connor-- they are both hoping to meet marriage partners this week---or at least start down that path.  Recall the special born-again church (with no name) so important for them.  (They went to a service in Lowell earlier today).   Their minister in Arkansas ( Randy Pastor, DO, Osteopath) has found a widower in Boston, wife died six years ago, with a twenty-something daughter who is also aspergers syndrome (like Ricky, 23), and suggested they all meet to explore the possibility of dating.  Petie and Paul have "met" via online chat and two Skype events. Paul and Catherine will arrive here on Wednesday for an overnight visit.  We suggested they stay at an inn in the area.

Va and I are not quite sure what our roles are expected to be, but we are hoping to be as far off stage as humanly--and spiritually---possible.  All the while wishing the main players in the drama, of course, all the best and all blessings. 
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actually I first wrote it to Nicholas.  He kindly invited us to his party Feb 6 in London after he receives his honour at Buckingham Palace.   Seems so sweet that he invited us to join him. 
Fam watching “Total Recall” now.  Willow and I walked in Tilton, Lowes and Walls.  I did take a real walk earlier, down to and through campus.  After posting my negative review about the Vivo Bannisters on Zappo’s site.  I wore those shoes all day yesterday in Boston to the Museum of Science and my feet really were hurting when we got back.  In the holidays my feet have swollen as per every year and so the shoes are tighter, but from the beginning they just were not as comfy and so many other Vivos have been and the two recent reviews on Zappos nailed why they are not. 

1:34 Monday A longed-for day off of sorts and now I don’t know what to do with myself so I will write and be glad while I’m not currently as famous as the young literary lion of Kansas and Manhattan I am glad I am not.  About two-thirds through his 10:04.  He is now in Marfa, has been there a week or maybe two.  He is over thirty but he is young still and spooked still by his success with New York publishers and agents and the lure of more money than he’d expected to have by this age--two hundred and seventy thousand dollars after fees and stuff.  Probably a 300k advance which maybe has been standard for a while in new york for promising writers of his first and second book stature.  Poor Salvatore had to be glad to get that measly little check from the writer’s union second or third book fund, was it $7500. ?  And earlier one of his acquaintances from Iowa, she had gotten the big 300k advance for her first book and where is she now?  A name I’ve not heard anything of since, since her story was in the New Yorker and her advance was news for five minutes among her Iowa peers back in, was it 2005, or 06 or 07?  How quickly the famous pass through the veils of fame back into quietude like the rest.  I think of Jamaica Kincaid, the bright light of a few years back, New Yorker family connections and all.  Where have we heard of her of late? 
Now at this juncture, would I, should I, put this passage into my so-called novel, even the very very bad one I hope to write in vague imitation of Lerner’s new book?  Remember how excited I was two months ago to get it?  How much I needed to have it at once just to see it and start it and use it as my essential prompt and template for getting my own work started and finishes.  Now that I am two-thirds through the very book itself I can pause and stand back and wonder what was I thinking?  A kind of mania in and of itself that covers over, stands in for, the absence of genuine motivation, of a genuine pressure of creativity. 
Now the sunshine is super-bright out in the early afternoon backyard.  I’ve caught up on the laundry.  Rick and I took a short walk earlier before lunch.  Heated up fajitas from last night for lunch.  Bad apple pie, for me, but at least not pecan cake or fruit cake.  Believe it or not I am fruit-caked up.  Excess never lets you down.  The palace of wisdom beckons as reliably. 
Sweet emails from Nicholas inviting us to be part of his honour at Buckingham Palace on February 6.  Part at the Sloane Club after the palace.  Not sure whether this is his private party or if the palace also throws a number of parites around town to round off the day for everyone.  Have to ask. 
Petie took Willow off swimming early and they planned to go on to Tilton to the Paris nail salon on main street for their beautification rituals centered around the shell-like growths humans have at the ends of their upper and lower extremies.  Nails they call them, as in “as hard as”  those devices they make and use to fasten together pieces of material used to build things, houses, furniture, roof tiles. 
I give a kudo to Lerner for this phrase on page 182 where he enters into a building or house in Marfa where a party is taking place:  “There was a sense of incoherent opulence.”  Yes.  That’s Texas and any art scene therein. 
Page 183 Lerner uses the word “dissect.”  He’s used the word or a variant too many times now, in the whole book.  If he uses it once more in the remaining forty pages I’ll have to take him off all my lists. 
Now 3:16  Nice nap.  Feel sort of sorry for Lerner.  Nervous for him, at this point, as though I’m watching to see if he will complete his assignment(s) or not?  As though we are watching the normally unreported, inside process of someone who is writing a dissertation in order to gain the doctorate. I can guess where that comes from in my own experience analogically, since I wrote such a thing so many years ago and felt the pressures of having to do so.  But all this is there in Lerner’s book and I guess he knows it and has decided to make all of that the book itself.  Now I probably will go back and look at the piece in the NYRB that Phil sent some months ago that had prompted him to rant a bit against Lerner and against which rant I defended Lerner based only on my enjoyment of his first book, a surprise enjoyment, maybe like everyone who had read Lerner’s first book and which skyrocketed him out of the middle of his generation’s first writers into instant stardom within the tiny worlds of big success poets (where is Campbell McGrath when we need him? huh?) when they are young.  Double-checking here---the internet yet another instrument of cruelty in our hands.  On Goodreads, McGrath’s 1996 book had 92 ratings.  Peak, there.  His 2012 book got forty-one ratings. 
But it is time for goute, almost 3:30 and perhaps I’m being harsh on both Ben Lerner and other writers. 
Still, what a luxury it is to be home and nothing much to do but nap, wake slightly, and nap a bit more again.  Winter. 
Tuesday  Dec 30  Rick found a Northeastern Huskies mug at the dump which has become his prize souvenir.  Agenda for this bright day is to see the Hobbit movie in Imax 3D at 3:30 in Hooksett. 
Finished Lerner last night and yes I guess if I were reviewing it for a major publication I would give it all the glow it has already gotten and that it deserves.  Lerner let me down by repeating “dissect” yet again and another variant in the remaining third but of course he is doing so on purpose as part of his poetic constructivist license.  Main thing is that by the final few pages you do feel the joy of his having pulled it all off after all.  I picked a few more nits before we got there.  Some phrases that grated on me, but I suspect I was being generationist there and not allowing the youngsters their new vocabularies for old things.
10:04 risks having the “concept” or concepts overpower everything, all the stuff about time past and future and present and it risks being too clever by half and too precious and too young and too savy---it risks these things and almost loses it as a high-wire act but yes at last it does pull it all together and it is the achievement few manage in their second important literary work.  It does not read as lightly and as exuberantly as Atocha did.  That was just unexpected pleasure.  This is self-conscious and anxious and careful and risky---all those things but not a great pleasure, somehow.  Enjoyable pretty much, but you’re too aware that the book is too aware that so much is at stake here and we’d better not blow it.  The Marfa scenes could have been elided a bit more.  The wacked out college student in his office might have been cut altogether--but both went too well with Whitman and the wounded soldiers to have lost them.  Still, they almost don’t work and maybe one of them doesn’t.  It’s that sort of book.  But after a debut like Atocha how can you do a next.  Now Lerner has to keep it going.  Or invent something further.  Now I can return to vol. 3 of Knausgaard and relax again and enjoy a work that does not raise all these temporary nervousnesses but which carries us through with the desperate confidence of a forty-year old master rather than a thirty year old wannabe who is, for sure, pretty much there already too. 
First began to discuss Lerner on the first of this month.  Fred sent me a query from DC about it, and a link to the review in the New York Review of Books.
I replied at length.  First Fred and then me in what I paste in below:
1. Poetry: Have you ever taught a course on poetry?   If so, what kind of poetry - 20th century or what?

2.  I just sent you a review of the latest novel by Ben Lerner, the author of "Leaving Atochka Station" and a grad of the Brown U MFA program.   I have such a hard time believing that anyone would publish his kind of "post modern" diffident self-absorption.   The reviewer even admits that there is no story.  It's just a collection of vignettes of slightly fictionalized events in Lerner's life.  But then the reviewer, "a senior editor at Harper's" calls Lerner's writing brilliant and not to be missed.   I'm left thinking that Lerner and this reviewer are two NYC Jews whose families are related.  

The review reminds me of the NYer review of the Turing film.  After panning the script, the NYer reviewer says one should see it for the "acting."   Oh please!!!!   In films, the casting director and director always select "actors" who fit the role, so that the actor does very little, if any, acting. 

So going to a film because of the acting or reading a novel because the author tosses out a few similes is, to me, scraping the bottom of the barrel for reasons to like the work.

Brown is s;omething very different from when I attended.  I'm not saying I liked Brown back then, but ever since it got to be ultra politically correct and produced writers like Lerner, it has become an embarrassment, I think, to anyone who is truly serious.

Anyway, did you ever teach a poetry class?


Bob <robert.garlitz@gmail.com>
Dec 1

to Jones
1. Well, as Clinton and many other guilty parties would say, depends what you mean by "taught," depends what you mean by "poetry," depends what you mean by "a course." 

Am afraid my years of trying to be hip with the kids have found me guilty here.  But its a long and complicated tale, too.  Forty years ago I would have tried to teach "the canon:" Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley.  Then the tacit underpinning was "we're struggling with this stuff because the anthology says it is great stuff and the anthology knows."   Later we threw all that out in the name of relevance, which by the way eventually became, the term itself, in student usage 'hey, why don't we read something thats if "relatable.'" as in "to which I am able to relate."

Thirty years ago I got into a phase of trying to figure out contemporary poetry, so I read me up on some of those guys like Ashbery et al.  After Pound and Eliot all hell broke loose in the poetry world and Multi-cultural victimage and politics and otherness and all the other trendy topics took over and it was every poet for herself and who or what determined taste or judgment or standard of quality got thrown up into the air and everyone published everyone else's friends and there was money in the universities so who the heck cared whether anyone could understand it or tell if it was good or not. 

But no, I never did teach creative writing per se.  Edged around it in various ways because I had to teach different sorts of writing courses along with the lit. 

All that said, I liked this review of Lerner's book and I agree with the writer, Harvey, that Lerner has earned himself a place in some yardstick.  Remember twenty years ago the great white 35 year old writers where the American Psycho guy and such.  Cocaine and wild nights in the city.  I really liked Lerner's first book and I've actually read the first ten or so pages of this new one. 

Why?  He's distinguished himself from the run-of-the-mill products of the creative writing schools of his generation.  Franzen is now 45, even close to 50?  So Lerner is younger and you have to allow him those things we allow the kids.  He's so much better than other recents writers of his age group.  I think because of what Nab said about Gogol---Gogol, Nabokov says that Gogol’s plots are unimportant: “The real plot…lies in the style."  Nowadays I think we like to say because of the voice.  Lerner breaks all the so-called rules of the creative writing classes and trusts his voice, the voice he knows he's making up, as voice. 

By the way I've never read Gogol.  Yikes.  I would much rather read Lerner than try to plow through a new novel by Franzen.  I think spending a lot of time with ol' K Burke warped me in these ways too because his books are offbeat and ultra-capacious, he can throw almost the kitchen sink into his later books and has this habit of stopping after one thought seems finished and saying in print to his reader "So, where are we then?" Sort of like "what shall we do next to pass the time?"  Beckett-like, all of this. 

I did stop trying to be excited by contemporary poetry after a while, though, and went back to prose and novels.  The poets seem to go for instant dazzle as shamelessly as French theorists do.  I'd almost say that Leonard Cohen is the best poet of his/our generation.  Forget Ashbery---he's simply at the top of his coterie, or was.  Coterie politics, that's what so much of what we have been fed as "culture" seems to come down to. 

Could well be that Lerner has been "tapped" by friends of his family in some vein of the publicity biz, but I have enjoyed what I've read so far.  It's fresher than what fills the young writers magazines, as far as I can tell.  By the way, have to send you our friend, Ed Schwartz's, book, "Jews that I knew."  Createspace and very short and fast read.  Catskills humor from his childhood growing up there.  Best section are some Shakespeare plays re-told in yiddishesque dialogues. 
--------
Shock today, about an hour ago.  Va told me Dr Lloyd died two days ago, 29th.
She learned about it on Facebook! via Suzanne’s page.  Earlier she and Petie went swimming.  I showered and went shopping.  There I saw Ken and Carole.  Chatted briefly.  Then I parked on main street and walk all the way! from Silver to the Peppercorn.  Bought some beans and sweets for tonight or morrow.  Came home.  Dr Lloyd was only 67!  born in ’37.  What a shame.  Must have been the illness recurring that he picked up last summer or summer before in his stressful knee replacement and hospitalization afterward.  Really will miss him.  We had both just gone to him as our doctor. 
Guess I will go back to Al Rosen or someone else at Boulder Point. 
We did a quick face time with Dave and Emma and Eliot.  They are going out to a new years party where there will be lots of kids.  Barrio del este group we think.  Willow phoned Memé and got through. 
Sunny and pretty cold here, breeze picked up.  I took out some stuff on my blog post on Lerner. 
Petie called Copper door and got the last table for tomorrow night for her and Paul. 

After goûter I wasted the afternoon looking at shoe reviews online.  Should be reading something but seems I’m not.  Did Willow and Petie go walking anywhere?  No one playing the piano anymore.  May be watching GH?  Nope, everyone reading at the table downstairs.  Just put the table lamp out to give them better light. 
end of the year    So sad to have John Lloyd gone. 

8:20 pm  Ladies have begun watching Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  Text from Paul said the tooth extraction did not take place after all.  He plans to get here around 11:30.  I said why not meet in Manchester or Concord?  “I want him to come all the way here.”  Petie said emphatically.  Oh.  Ok.  Hmmmm.
There it is, then. 
(We are not part of anyone’s consideration, it would seem.)
Now I am further into Elizabeth Peters lame mystery set in Copenhagen after all. 
Read the piece about Matthew Barney in Wallpaper.   Hmmm, again.  I do like the cover he did for it, but the massive art performance he did in Detroit using the old auto iron furnaces didn’t grab me.  But what do I know.  After his huge event at the Guggenheim years ago, what else is he to do? 

The Peters murder novel---Queen Margaret of Sweden shows up early on and dang if she wasn’t a rather larger character in Blas de Robles’ novel, so of course I should continue with this novel.   oops, guess now---Christina of Sweden. 
Margaret is queen of denmark or england?  better doublecheck 
time to go see the Scoundrels.