February 2014

FEBRUARY 2014


Saturday night 1st  After the Souper Bowl to raise funds for Artistic Roots. Earlier various things plus some panic about getting everything ready.  After lunch we both settled down pretty much.  We each had thought sometime last night that we had forgotten to invite Annie and Renee-Paul, so Va did that this morning. 

I finished The Hare and might just read Shantytown right off to keep the Aira feel going.  Maybe I should write Copenhagen in that mode and not in Javier Marías mode.  After all.   Will I keep saying that after whatever novel I read next?  Not Hollingsworth, even if I turn out to like it. 

We have a good line-up of Visitors to Javea.  !  Now to firm up an apartment in Paris.  Patricia Bremer relieved my mind by emailing that she would refund our deposit with her agency.  No action on paypal yet but I have high hopes now for early next week.  We’re going to Nashua tomorrow to buy Cécile a new Mac.  Wow what a year for buying Macs it has been for us. 

Tuesday evening  February 4

Already.  Day off today, a Tuesday.  First time.  Big storm tonight supposedly.  May be mostly south of here. 

So driving south this morning after the dump I started thinking I had never looked around St Anselm’s campus.  Drove there, thanks to Waze (lame App).  Took photos of the chapel because it is a classic of 60s liturgical architecture.  Must have been built in, say, 1967. 

Friday evening

email to Phil following up one earlier about the name of the guy who stole the Stradivarius in Milwaukee--

Forgot to mention, kids on the block here, bit younger than Dave, (did I already tell you this?)
they have their first baby—

Named him Mobius—  Mobius McLane.

Interesting what Miller says about the history of sexuality in our time.  And probably what we expected to hear.
In the heyday of the 60s, could anyone have sense how shut-down and right-wing the place would get
just ten years later and henceforward???

Freud and Marx triumphed and the 20th C was run by the sociologists, social thinkers, social reformers and mainly
social managers.    Then Business came in and mopped up . . . a bit.

Now we have a sudden new Overlord class of Nerds Triumphant and they have no clue about any of what went before.
They have no Dalai Lama, yet, or pope, yet, or president, yet.  They have no Thinker or philosopher of any standing.
They especially have no truck with the Sociological pieties under which they were . . . sort of . . . raised.

As with all gold rushers before them, they have massive piles of money.  Saw a headline—Zuckerberg of Facebook makes
more money faster each day than any other billionaire (or? american billionaire??)

They scare all the rest of us !  ??   As Overlords should.  I mean Google—what sort of Empire would choose “Do No Evil”
as it’s corporate motto and model ?   The triumph of the Sixth Grade.   Profound essay on the twenty types
of boners on Buzzfeed the other day.

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Been a hectic sort of week/non-week with all our energy going into scanning the rental sites for another apartment.  Finally settled with the big, empty one on Croix Nivert.  Courtyard and no view but 4th floor and high ceilings and big windows.  Tub not shower.  Hope we can make it work.  Should be fine.  And Cécile and the new baby can take a bath and lots of room for Emma to run around. 

Saturday  Feb 8   Bright.  We locked in to Croix Nivert a few days ago with Lodgis.  Like the street name.   T’will be a fine, bright interior and roomy place.  Put some of the glassware back down in the basement into the mold-free (we hope) shelving. 

Night.  Finally saw episode of Miranda.  Funny, great body jokes because she is so huge.  Writes the material herself. 

Phil feeling “stabbed in the back” by a cranky review of his novel that Jim Sisk posted on Amazon.  “Poor Sisk” is how I/we always thought of him---squinching up his nose to make some nit-level complaint-point (whine) that didn’t get anyone any where.  I shudder to think what sort of lawyer he might be.  Maybe good for a certain sort of law, who knows.  Phil feeling pissed upon by someone who was supposed to be the old friend from the good old days in the good old town.  Sisk spotted the flaws in the character of the detective and the “deus ex machine” [sic] structure of the plot.  Greg stopped reading because of that and because the detective never looked for or found the murder weapon.  The guilty character comes into the tale a bit late into it and hence some readers---nit-pickers--will feel that he shows up as a deus ex machina device, one of the lowest forms of plot structure.  According to some nit-picking sorts of critics. 

Sunny day.  We went to Target to walk, very crowded.  Came home for merienda.  Decided early this morning to forego the bullfight at the Fallas with the Kigers.  They phoned last night to see if we really wanted tickets.  Hope they got our change of mind early enough this morning not to have purchased anything yet.  I shuddered to think of us trying to navigate the crowds going into the bullfight arena for the first day or days of Fallas.  We’ve seen them twice.  Not that many American travelers can say that.  Well, who cares.  That is not the point.

Missing my addict’s high for scanning apartment rental websites.  It was intense there for a few days.  Have to re-visit a few times just to kick the habit more gently. 

Sunday night Feb 9
Winter olympics have taken over our lives.  I can watch a few moments of something like the snowboarding or ice skating and then I get antsy and want to do something else.  Right now I’m on the phone hold to Ally Bank to have them make travel notes on the debit card so I can use it on the trip.

Started Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. Fits well with Downton Abbey.  Tonight I enjoyed the episode, last week I thought it was predictable and boring.  Also have Started Aira’s Shantytown. And am still in the starting phase of Seiobo--probably about page 130 and deciding I won’t have time to finish it before we go.  But then one never knows.  Loading up the kindle too.  We’re getting the apartment for 114 euros a night which seems pretty good.  That whole rush is over now.  More waiting and packing and pre-packing and fixing up things for departure.  Today we walked over in Meredith and Gilford--ice fishing derby going on at the lake. 

Tuesday night  FEb 11

Day off.  Terrible meal at the Concord India Palace but it was nearly empty and quiet for reading.  Hollinghurst.  Flaneur the Berlin magazine arrived
yesterday and I figured that was my assignment both for now and the novel so I can zero in on it for the remainder of time.  Also Tim Parks’ novel arrived so there is that. 

Mini-panic attack this morning and I sent some panicky emails to Lodgis about who to send money to and how and when.  Not really sure what provoked it---some loop in my head about Patricia Auzet being a hacker who is trying to steal my cash and not at all related to the real landlord.  Old loops about danger in foreign places?  At least it was email and not telephone ranting.  Emails can be calmly answered and then ignored or “forgotten.”  And they give us all time to cool down.  Hope I didn’t ruin the deal or embarrass us forever in the eyes of the Parisian rental agencies. 
Wednesday morning Feb Gorgeous and sunny.  Big date in Penacook at noon with Dr Lloyd---both of us--for a real medical visit and not just a catch-up visit.  We’ll see.  I now think Al Rosen just did the standard army check-up to have something to do and do the physician visit drama.  Could do it all with tests.  I can ask about hemmhoroids and viagra and what else?  nothing really.  Had my glasses adjusted yesterday in my big day off.  Not much else.  Things have settle into. 

Started Tim Parks’ novel “Sex is Forbidden” to see what his recent big change is about.  His true fans didn’t like it.  But so far it seems pretty ordinary and is starting to be funny---when our heroine, Beth, finally writes her own entry in the forbidden journal of the guy she is stalking in the meditation ashram. 

Read more of Hollinghurst yesterday and then re-read much of it last night to be sure I caught every nuance.  Am sure I did not, quite.  Have to be a Brit of his generation to catch more of it.  But he is exquisitely good, Jamesean for sure and feels more lucid because contemporary.  Downton Abbey has helped me slide into Hollinghurst---same period more or less and formality and all that.  Britishness.  As foreign as every other foreign.  Somehow the tv show demonstrates that even more than novels do.  The pacing of the dialogue, the non-sequiturs that pass for dialogue and conversation between, among, characters.  American writers would just not do it that way.  Not sure if Julian Fellowes writes every single word.  That might be how and why it is so strange.  Liturgical really.  I’ve decided that--that Masterpiece T is not theater at all but liturgy.  Worship ritual.  If you don’t go to church every sunday morning, pbs gives you a virtual liturgical fix every sunday evening. 

Weds night
Nice visit with Dr Lloyd today for both of us, me and Va.  With me he was really upbeat and checked me over slightly with the rubber hammer.  He said he trained with a neurologist and that has stayed with him more than anything else in his career.  Neurology as the basis for all examination.  Nerves and reflexes and balances.  No illness attacks both side of the body.  Something like that.  In some strange way he made me feel better about myself and my body than any doctor ever has made me feel.  He said my numbers, as he looked over my blood test from a year ago at Rosen’s, were the numbers of a thirty year old.  He actually said, “wow,” as he looked over the charts and gathered his thoughts about Talked about lots of things, ED, alcohol, politics, etc.  Much more fun to talk to than Rosen.  He is fine and I liked him, but I think I will definitely feel better with Lloyd.  There’s a sense of sympatico and I guess generation and background.  Interests and attitudes. 

Important research last night.
Oh, today is Valentine’s day, Friday the 14th.  Wrote
a fine post via email to Phil--have to paste it in for posterity.

Wonderful and beautiful snow day here in Center Central, New Hampshire.

You’ve heard of Goodreads and of course book reviews on Amazon etc.

I’m inventing Midreads or the Midway Review——reviews of books when one is about half-way in.  I’m on page 92 of 278 pages of Tim Parks “Sex is Forbidden,”
the novel about the ashram where he supposedly changes his life and changes
the kind of novel he now wants to write.   By page 92 the book is humming along
nicely.  He clearly has written lots of books and is confident in every move the
book makes.  He’s got a clever set-up, Beth the woman who works as the ashram,
the newcomer visitor she is sort of stalking and secretly reading his secret and
forbidden diary, the other characters in the ashram, both permanent and visiting, the guru himself and his main disciple, the whole scene of people coming to find ways to deal with their terrible lives.

Beth is funny and the book is bound to get funnier, we think.  She is plagued by
all the same human failings we all would have if we tried hard to get into the
devotedness of ashram life but just, finally, couldn’t.  She has tried, tries, to be
competely calm, meditative, simple, focused, mindful, charitable, in the moment.
But she can’t quite bring it off.  She hungers, again, for male relationship in spite of the ruined ones she has tried to move on from.  She loves the illicitness of reading the strange man’s diary, which she had found and keeps going back to
whenever the forbidden chance to do so presents itself.  His life as he writes it
in his diary book is a mess.  He scourges himself with remorse and confusion
about what to do next, who to try to be, who he wishes he had not been.

Beth dislikes fat Marcia but is forced to help her and be kind to her.  She is
learning a bit more about the saintly Mi Nu who lives apart in the bungalow
and not with the community proper.  Beth is not as much a mess as she thinks
she is, and we forgive her her faults more than she does so far.

After I contact my website developer in Silicon V, I will finish this brilliant
midway review.   First I will get the website up and running, with all future rights in my name alone, all profits and tie-ins will link to my financial accounts, and then everyone can sign up, a new social media site will be born and people
will relish talking to each other about the books they’ve started but not yet
finished and they will feel doubly liberated to know they need never finish the
book to enjoy all the rights and privileges of MidReads and the MidwayReview.

I might eventually sell the rights to MidwayReview to the University of Chicago since they often use Midway as one of their tags for themselves.

Tim Parks will have to keep googling his book to find out sometime in the future
just how much I liked it or not after I’ve finally finished it.

all of the above copyrighted and registered to me; all rights reserved; all legalities certified and justified.  No poaching.  Only filty lucre and praise.

---
Couldn’t get the line spacing to look right, though. 

Anyway, last night’s research before we went to sleep.  As pleased as I was with my visit with Dr Lloyd I had a nagging sense of disappointment or confusion because he did not do a Digital Rectal Exam as Dr Rosen has done for the past twelve or so years.  Something you don’t really want but which once you’ve gotten used to it, sort of, you take for granted as one of those heroic aspects of doing your duty with the annual physical check-up.  Lloyd is pretty smart, though, one reason I like him, and I figured he might have a better idea about these things, especially since he was raised in Toronto and generally critical of our health care system in all the ways that I tend to agree with.  So it didn’t take much googling to find (did I use “worthless digital rectal exams prostate” ?  something like that) to find a good website saying digital rectal examinations are pretty worthless in contemporary medicine.  So I felt better about it all and am not worrying about this main difference between my former doctor and my new doctor. 

Saturday night

Email earlier today from Dave telling us to cool it on any more emails with Cécile---she’s getting too stressed and tired now with the last two months of expecting.  We swam this morning---no one there even though it is school vacation week in Mass.  Storms keeping down the traffic.  Tom Toomey came by for a check on his siding job.  We drove to Target and walked there, coffee at Panera.  Tons of traffic coming up the highway at dusk.  Big snow down on the coast.  Nice that it is missing us pretty much again. 

Sunday night

I know my fans are waiting, so I posted a further comment on Parks’ Sex is Forbidden on my blog---

Now I am on page 192 in Sex is Forbidden by Tim Parks.  I'm through the Middle.  And I have had the feeling for the past thirty or so pages that the Middle has been too long, too much Middle.

Will Beth accept and practice all the teachings of Dasgupta Institute, Buddhist practice and that way of dealing with life, or will she not?  Same question more or less for the older guy she has been stalking by reading his diary, GH.  We don't quite know his real name yet.  We have gotten more of her story and more of his story.  Both are going back and forth, back and forth, trying to decide, trying to find out, if they can really buy into, achieve, the teachings of the Buddhist practice preached in this ten day retreat.

My experience of the book has been ruined, of course, somewhat, by the fact that I read a little bit about it before I started it.  But it was that prior attention that made me decide to give it a look in the first place.  Parks has made some new statement in his life's work, or some Turn in his interpretation, his attitude, toward what stances he wants to take towards all of these big questions in life.  But the book now feels like it is trying too hard to dramatize the back and forth of indecision, of the confusions experienced in all such retreats and meditative withdrawals from ordinary life.  What we have underscored is the fact that we are reading, after all, a sort of tract or pamphlet and not so much a novel as we want to think we enjoy novels.  We are in the midst of a teaching fable, a novel-like koan, another imitation of one of the Buddha's teaching tales, or even those of Jesus.  We are being made to think, to search for meaning just as the characters themselves are searching for meaning, but we're more clear now that they are not characters but aspects of our own minds, our own selves, of EverySelf.  Beth, GH, woman, man, lives messed up, mid-way into their own trajectories, we are deep into spiritual reading, or what is a simulacrum of such for hip contemporary readers, but as lively as the writing is, as clever and with-it the descriptions of ashram detail and as inventive the life stories are, we feel delayed and blocked with each passing page.  Was this really the best way to present all of this?  Why not have started with the new position rather than re-enact the discovery of it, the journey of it?  However Parks in real life did go through major phases, major changes of view, can he effectively capture that in the style of this kind of fictional re-telling?  I am much more skeptical than I was at the outset, and I don't think that is what he wanted from me by the time I've gotten to this stage of the book.

About seventy-five pages to go.  I will enjoy them, the book is a pleasure, but will I smile in utter admiration.  I don't think so.  Come on, Tim, surprise me.

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Slow day here but pretty nice.  Spa morning, bright and sunny.  Did some packing.  Walked at Wally’s.  Lovely video from Dave and Emma on Facebook.

Monday evening, almost time for Marketplace with Kai.  Presidents Day, the holiday that sneaks up on you announced and unannounced.  Feb 17

Finished Sex is Forbidden.  Here is a short passage on page 251:

         The liquid swirled white and brown.  Ralph was     solemn, moving the heavy motor round and round             while I kept the bowl still.  I could see the             concentration in his jaw.  There was a veil of             cocoa on his young man’s stubble.  Honey on a             razor’s edge.  The heavy mix was lifting and             falling in soft slaps.  Under cover of the noise,
    he asked: ‘Can I kiss you again, Bess?’

Ok, Park, you win.  To explain how well placed, how well poised this seemingly small, unimportant little passage is would take half a book.  With Beth saying to herself “young man’s stubble” we see without yet fully seeing how much she has grown, is growing. 

Parks brings off the final fifty pages of the book with the aplomb of a magician, master of his repertoire of tricks. The book ends with all elements balanced and counterbalanced, maddeningly delightful in a romantic sit-com sort of way.  We smile, we are charmed, all our resistance has fallen, what a wonderful story of Beth growing beyond her recent spate of bad luck and tragic suffering.  How ready she is to embrace life more fully, celebrating by changing her name from Beth to Lisa.  Her temptation for a fling, the diarist Geoff H. is entranced by the ashram and plans to stay on as the sort of Server Beth has been for the past nine months.  They flirt with each other but they don’t give in.  Beth goes to help her mother after news reaches her that her dad has finally left his unhappy wife after thirty-one years of marital less-than-bliss.  Was the Dasgupta Institute helpful to Beth in helping her find her way?  How can she know, how can we know, it was something she tried and failed at and succeeded at and she left when life took her forward. 

Parks has a great knack for this kind of novel or story-spinning. The passage I quoted above shows this--the brilliant detail of the cocoa on young Ralph’s stubble, the inventiveness of the whole mini-scene in the larger scheme of the book.  Entertainment in our contemporary modes.  The Spectator blurb on the back cover says: “eminently readable” and “teases you” to the end.  Yes, it is all true, the book is like that and as I said sort of irritatingly so.  A set of captivating tricks and the satisfaction of finding out everything you hungered to find out about, once all of the keys are struck, the effect evaporates.  Quickly.  Too quickly. To whom am I anxious to say, You’ve got to read this book?  Can’t think of anyone.  

Tuesday  Feb 18

Trying to decide whether to try to make the run to Lakeport for the hair appointment or not.  Snow coming, hard to know just how much and when.  Guess I can look up the weather map again.  Paula downstairs, now 10:30,
Kathie and Va due back from the pool in an hour.  Yep weather radar pretty clear better stay home and play it safer.  Probably cancel the book group tonight too.  So the radar projections do make a difference on how we see things, guesstimate things. 

“But the true voyagers are only those who leave just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, they never turn aside from their fatality and without knowing why they always say: Let’s go!”  --Baudelaire

from Flaneur--suitable for this last week of waiting before we fly. 

9:30 pm  Now I have read every word in the whole issue #2 of Flaneur and I’ve even seen a brief interview with the publisher, Ricarda Messner, on YouTube filmed in Montreal which issue no. 3 will feature.  And I read an interview with Fabian Saul on Magculture.com/blog. Pretty satisfying reading experience.  Learned a bit about Leipzig, of which I knew nothing.  Through the fragments we glimpse history and people.  It helped or was just fun to look up places on the street on Google street view. 

Beautiful design work throughout.  Very enjoyable.  On Facebook there is a little window for suggesting an edit.  I could suggest Avenida Menendez Pelayo in Madrid.  Or Rue Viala in Paris.  Or --- I was trying to think of a street in Boston but I can't come up with one---the ones I think of are way too major.  It will be interesting to see what they choose for Montreal.
Arapiles in Madrid could be good too.  Or Condesa de Venadito.

Yesterday Greg and I talked.  He thinks about death a lot.  Talked about Jim’s situation, prognosis.  Talked about happier things too.  Forgot he might have a wedding coming up, Annabelle, maybe this summer.  But he didn’t mention it either.  Gerri’s daughter, not his. 

We canceled everything today, so it had that snuggly snow day, day off, feel.  Book group will come on Thursday evening, hair salon on Saturday. 

Feb 22 Saturday night  about 10:20  packed most of Va’s clothes.  going to vacum seal them tomorrow. Hair at Tracy’s today.  Sunny, beautiful sky. 

Monday night Feb 24 almost 5:30

Need to post a Midway Review because I’m past midway in Hollinghurst’s novel, The Stranger’s Child.  I’m on page 240 in the 435 page Vintager paperback.  Paul the bank clerk is fantasizing about having the school teacher, Peter Rowe, as a lover.  Peter and Corinna teach at the preparatory school for boys that occupies Corley Court, which was of course the childhood home of Corinna.  Paul is helping the arriving crowd park their cars for an event taking place at the school, or are they at the town square?  We are in 1967 and we started back in 19? 1910 perhaps.  So we are in the third or fourth of the five generations who are being portrayed. Totally enjoyable book, so exquisitely well-written that I read more slowly than usual and often pause and re-read just to be sure I’m getting details.  And to enjoy them once more.  Half-way into it, I realize that the most interesting quality about it is that even by now I don’t really know what the book is about. It is about the family, the families intertwined, in some ways by the great house itself, Corley Court, and it is about the passage of time, the generations, and history but history in the proper sense is very much in the far background.  With each section or book, Five of them, there is a shift to a character around whom the rest of the story revolves.  Paul seems to be the one in Book Three we have seen the most of, so far, although Peter also seems featured and the possibility of their romance or flirtation might be what will be the central even.  But even if it is, we know that in the next two Books, the saga will move onward, and exactly how and where we don’t yet know.  The pleasure in this reading feels at once very familiar---British novel of manners, sort of, and family-historical sweep, but again, sort of.  Hollinghurst discovers in here perhaps something as new-familiar as any other writer working today.  We could even place him favorable next to his younger generation Norwegian compeer, Karl Ove Knausgaard.  But where K has taken six volumes, Hollinghurst, the older master, has found how to do his tale in one volume of five slim near-novellas, linked. Even enwebbed.  In each section we enjoy a full portrait of the family as it works within the larger community, not of the nation but of the local region.  A rich cast of characters, memorably drawn in spare lines, and a narrator’s presence as enjoyable as any novel you can recall.  Many reviewers mention James.  Yes, but I have not read James in such a long while I can say I can see why but I won’t attempt to chime in on that point.  I have not read early Hollinghurst either.  I read his Booker prize novel, The Line of Beauty.