FEBRUARY 2015
Sunday 1st
Sunny, bright and even warmer.
VA want to prep for the recital a week from today. Good walking in Pheasant Lane yesterday along with twenty other million out for the same reasons. Just having the Santo D trip booked gives us the carrot we crave. Speaking of carrots---that involves John Oliver’s quip about the movie “Fifty Shades of Gray.” He says he saw a clip and it seems about as erotic as watching a carrot be dropped into a shopping bag.
I do blame the victim rather immediately in any situation or piece of news. My Auschwitz ramble a few days ago in last month’s entries are evidence of that. How deluded to think our “new” world characters are in any way free of the old world’s sins. Josipovici had mislead me there with his ponder that Brits are not like Continentals because not so heavily layered with centuries of guilt and shame, humiliation and remorse. Just as dangerous a line to take for Brits as for Yanks as for anyone else, I think. Invidiously comparative literary or historical cultural big thinking heavily mined with such traps.
His whole page 105 contains all of these mumblings. The Europeans hide the shame of their collaborations, first with the Nazis, then with the Communists. And maybe the whole Enlightenment
“that everybody thought would triumph over the world, with its human rights and rule of law and free markets and free spirits---perhaps that has lived its life, two hundred, two hundred and fifty years, and now it will die. --You keep saying that, she says.” And Ed, the Chechyan intruder-visitor assures her that is how Putin and the leaders of China and Iran think.
Evidence further that my argument about the whole book is on the money---a precisely, perhaps even beautifully, crafted piece of perfection that is not a work of art, after all, but a work of consummate artifice, a Faberge egg and not a Cornell box.
One show of HGTV in Provence and Willow says we should buy a house there. This couple paid 600k for a nice modern one.
Doug McLane has rectal cancer. Hope is that they caught it early. After a trip to Mexico they will do radiology five days a week in Boston, three-days there overnight. For a month? Few months?
Not sure of that.
Kirsten has a new and serious boyfriend, a faculty member named Jim. Pat and Ted have met him and like him. If he’s on the Afr-Am faculty (where she works) he’s from the upper midwest, last name Favor. If he’s in some other dept, no one has told me . . . yet. Snooping only goes so far.
here’s the review for Phil again
Now to post a review of Phil’s book. Intense, gripping, powerful and amazing. David Powell sets out to find his friend’s murderer thirty years after Vietnam. That war brought PTSD to the forefront of our vocabulary once and for all. In this novel, Jones tells a tale of layered secrets, unraveling consequences and tragic implications. Characters inscribe themselves instantly, the tensions and conflicts resonate long after the book ends. Incredibly powerful book and the 40 year olds who have just “gone through” the recent wars and who think they have nothing to learn from a remembered Vietnam, should read this as preparation for what lies ahead for our country long after hollywood sniper flicks have banked their takes. Jones’s novel takes a stand that few will want to comprehend but all will feel in the end is right and true.
Cut the last line. and probably cut out the snide reference to Am Sniper. Maybe just stop with incredibly powerful and forget all the
rant jazz from there on. Editorial swiping at contemporary idiots won’t help “sell” the book in any way.
Quest, mystery, detective, strands of these elements of good novels but something much more than a mix of them. A If I even bring that up readers will say, well what the heck which one is it and if you tell me then I’ll know not to buy it because I like none of the above. Or what you’ve not mentioned.
Intense, gripping, powerful and amazing. David Powell sets out to find his friend’s murderer thirty years after Vietnam. That war brought PTSD to the forefront of our vocabularies. In this novel, Jones tells a tale of layered secrets, unraveling consequences and tragic implications. Characters inscribe themselves instantly, the tensions and conflicts resonate long after the book ends. Incredibly powerful book full of anguishing surprises.
Just amplified my Lars Iyer review thusly:
Funny, brilliant, brilliantly hilarious, moving, beautiful. Iyer is the finest legatee in English of Thomas Bernhard--- the bitter humor and the sense of language, the rhythms of speech, the rhythms of thought, the feel for thought, the feel for language, the feel for the divagations of the soul, the wanderings of the heart, the saving warmths of delight and humor, the healing laughter of divine tears.
The portrait of the teacher, Wittgenstein Jr, superb as it is, is not quite as superb as the portrait of the students. Herein lies Iyer's genius quintessential. The Kirwin Twins, Ede, Titmuss, Doyle, Mulberry and the quiet, long-suffering Peters, our narrator as it happens, are drawn with such economy and wit, highest wit I tell you, as to rival almost the bard himself. Here are groundlings, high-brow, Oxbridge university level groundlings, of such depth and dunceiadness as to be paragons for the ages of the students that every teacher has privately railed about for aeons. This bunch are St Augustine's students in Carthage, the very reason he fled Africa and sought better working conditions in the academies of Rome. These bright wastrels are bonded into a brotherhood of brilliance aspirant that Samuel himself would smile to see, to hear, to go drinking with. These dear fellows may be the most heroic group of students ever to grace the pages of literature, heroic pages of literature, servants, are they, to the utter greatness of their calling, to be students of the master himself, WJr.
After all of this, Iyer brings the book to as sweet and beautiful and moving and end as you can imagine. Such a magnificent re-telling of life of the mind and heart at the heart of the love of learning.
Tuesday night Feb 3
A typo in the TLS
discovered accidentally in looking over reviews of Iyer’s book.
Ben Eastham “Wittgenstein’s Walks”
“Fans of Iyer's previous work will relish the comic hyperbole of these polemics, to whoch the author's barracking style is perfectly suited, but Wittgenstein Jr is distinguished from its predecessors by the possibility of redemption to be found in the relationship between teacher and student. Incorporating allusions to Wittgenstein's own writing alongside nods to sources as various as Bela Tarr and Derek Jarman, Iyer has compiled an idiosyncratic - and surprisingly tender - paean to love and learning.
Times Literary Supplement, 17th October, 2014
I don’t know Bela Tarr or Derek Jarman better look them up. Eastham does clarify for me that Peters is signaled as being gay earlier in the book---
“Foremost among his acolytes is Peters, mocked by Ede as a 'virgin gay' with 'a thing for genius. You want to be fucked by genius’.”
Both Tarr and Jarman are film directors.
and here is RandyMetcalfe.com “Transformative Explications”
“Love. All twelve are in one way or another in love with their “Wittgenstein”. Indeed, love is the recurring theme of the story. In this modern Symposium, Wittgenstein Jr stands in for Socrates (when he is not overtly functioning as a Christ figure). However, the vicissitudes of the academic year, and the extra-curricular activities (drugs and alcohol) in which the students partake, bring about a natural wastage. Until, during the Christmas vacation, only one student remains, with whom “Wittgenstein” takes some solace, though without permanent effect.
In the end, the reader might wish for more of the wit and/or farce of Iyer’s three earlier novels, less ponderous though arguably just as profound. Or perhaps I’m just less well-disposed to fictional versions of Wittgenstein than might otherwise be the case. Certainly Iyer remains fascinating in his technique, his willingness to create a novel of ideas, and his daring to face down the weight of preconceptions that get shipped with any use of “Wittgenstein”, real or imagined, in literature. Intensely readable, momentarily thought-provoking, but perhaps not lastingly memorable.”
Ede and Mulberry do leave it open to the phrase “romantically-coloured friendships.” To which Ede says, “I am as straight as a die. As to Peters, I cannot say.”
And at the end we don’t “really” know but we think it is still the romantically coloured friendship. Even with Peters lying together with Wittgenstein at the end and announcing on Facebook am Wt’s BF
here’s my rewrite---I guess I will cave and send it to Lars---I’ve been telling myself not to . . . . but here goes
EDE: “I, as it happens, am as straight as a die. As to Peters, I cannot say.”
MULBERRY: Oh, Peters will never be able to say, for himself. He will always be confused and confusing. Perhaps he is Bi-, or Tri-, or Pan- or Omni-. He may never know.
EDE: Then perhaps he wants everything, everyone, preferably all at once. Would Wittgenstein allow him to show him that?
Then at the end, Peters can be best friends, even with benefits, with both W, and with his new, other relationship, Catherine, and he, they, blossom further and prepare for W to leave. Peter and Catherine, take casseroles to W, help him wrap up his affairs. The three of them (Jules et Jim et Catherine) envision love of God and with God and in God from within their own experiences.
ME: Will you come back for us, for me?
WITTGENSTEIN: One day. One day, I would like to come to you.
I tell him we want to see him in a white horse with bright colours flying. In a white limo, waving at us through the open sunroof. I tell him to carry me into the car and drive me away.
He smiles.
Dear Lars:
You have indeed had quite a year of it. I’m glad the baby is doing fine. Our second grandchild, Eliot, will be a year in March. Same month, Emma will be three. Pure delight, especially from the grandparenting stance.
I look forward to see how you tweak Wtt a bit further. I even take so bold a move as to suggest the following---or to raise the question of it.
page 14 ff
EDE: “I, as it happens, am as straight as a die. As to Peters, I cannot say.”
MULBERRY: Oh, Peters will never be able to say, for himself. He will always be confused and confusing. Perhaps he is Bi-, or Tri-, or Pan- or Omni-. He may never know, he may be condemned to the search.
EDE: Then perhaps he wants everything, everyone, preferably all at once? Would Wittgenstein allow him to show him that?
. . . .
Then at the end, Peters can be best friends, even with benefits, with both W, and with his new, other relationship, Catherine, and he, they, blossom further and prepare for W to leave. Peters and Hart, Catherine Hart, take casseroles to W, help him wrap up his affairs. The three of them envision love of God and with God and in God from within their own experiences.
ME: Will you come back for us, for me?
WITTGENSTEIN: One day. One day, I would like to come to you.
I tell him we want to see him in a white horse with bright colours flying. In a white limo, waving at us through the open sunroof. I tell him to carry me into the car and drive me away.
He smiles.
.........
Perhaps it is a terrible suggestion, one marking my generationist, old hippie, foolishness, and crypto-homophobia.
Had you ever considered a variant like it?
Were I in my early 40s again, I would use the book in every course I taught, from “What Were the Humanities?” to “Did Gender Warfare Ever Declare a Truce?” And other such profundities of cultural confabulation.
I’m impressed that you write so fast and expect the next book to be out in September. I already love it, Nietzsche and the burbs.
What of Blanchot? Will he circle back into this New Pantheon? Or did you lay him to rest in the old life once and for all?
Why do I link you somehow with Josipovici? Blanchot references? I don’t know Blanchot at all nor J. I did just read the first book of his I’ve read, Hotel Andromeda. You take Wittgenstein and resurrect him, breathe new life into his life and work. Josipovici I thought did the opposite---took Joseph Cornell’s art, put it through the usual, clever lit-psych analysis and created around that a piece of absolutely cunning, perfect artifice. (He write dialogue as warm and smooth as butter). But he takes Cornell’s art and turns it into a Faberge egg.
You don’t do that. Your intellectual empathy works much more deeply with your emotional empathy for the thought and the thinker.
All best wishes,
Bob
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Ok, out of my system. See what he says. Some satisfaction in sending it. I’ve been composing and re-composing it all day. My day off. Drove east as far as Moultonboro, came back, lunch at the diner in Center Harbor. Terrible. Big Patriots parade on tv. Duck boats.
Thursday Started yesterday and am now into Le Grand Meaulnes. The cover photo looks so familiar, I think there is another copy floating around on the bookshelves in the alcove, so I must have bought it a few years ago.
Feeny just confirmed that in terms of Facebook lingo, Peters, in the novel, is indeed being ambivalent about his “in a relationship” with WittJr. But then the telling itself seems to pin that down a bit more, at least in terms of W’s anguish about it and the other details of domestic bliss. Still want to see what Lars says in reply to my query. If he does.
Best interview was the one in Bomb about two years ago.
In an interview with London Review Bookshop he calls it “companionship.” “My Wittgenstein eventually wants to leave behind philosophy altogether, speaking of a place and time ‘after philosophy’ – a utopia in which it would be possible simply to live. He comes to think that it is with his students, and in companionship with one student in particular, that he will find this kind of rest, this ‘Sabbath’. Alas, that dream comes to an unpleasant end (although it doesn’t do so in the early version of the novel that you’ve read…). “
Friday night Dinner at Thai Smile. Doug and Patsy came in half an hour after we did. Going to John Lloyd’s memorial tomorrow.
Don’t I feel silly now for sending Lars that last letter. Being jealous of his success it still is and neglecting whatever I think I want to do or not do with more writing or non-writing.
I’d forgotten about Iyer living among monks for seven years. I forget where. Might be in the book Dogma.
Saturday morning Feb 7
Getting ready for the memorial service. Ceremonial events.
Lars is writing next about Nietzsche and 17 yr olds in the burbs. He may well be our next great YA novelist?
note to Jess tells about our visit to John Lloyd’s memorial today in Hebron. It was really a wonderful one. All three speakers were superb. Conveyed John’s heart and spirit so well.
John’s old friend, a woman, had this great line in her talk: “Only in NH can you be a person who meditates and makes his own bullets.” Her name is Damico I think, last. Have to check the program later.
Sunday Feb 8
Colin called to make sure we knew he had canceled the Recital yesterday via messaging. I have my notifications turned off for that so missed it.
Relief because it does look pretty snowy out and calling for more.
Nancy sent photos from San Miguel. One of Bob too from 1965---did not recognize him.
Monday
Another key to Ronale Manor, Elkins Park--piece in the Times today about
the rage to build houses out of parts of English houses.
book on it Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/nyregion/buying-this-tudor-home-in-westchester-has-a-big-caveat.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0
The Croft is its name.
Built or, more accurately, assembled 101 years ago by Arthur S. Vernay, a noted British antiques dealer and adventurer, much of the house is arguably much older. Brought over in crates from England, it includes a pair of fireplaces from 1357, a 300-pound wrought-iron door and wooden timbers weighing half a ton that adorn the ceiling in the great room.
The original house, which was expanded in the 1930s, is noteworthy because it is mostly made from imported pieces, according to “Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages,” a 2007 book on the popular practice of salvaging (or pillaging) some 700 British buildings for use in America. That sets it apart from the various Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and similar estates, which simply incorporated historical pieces into larger contemporary properties.
“Every particle of material used in the structure once formed a part of some ancient English dwelling,” declared an article in the Aug. 2, 1914, edition of the New York Herald Sunday magazine.
Furthermore, preservationists argue that Teatown and the Croft are intrinsically linked, and the principles of conservation and preservation should be working in concert, not conflict.
end of quotes
so. there is Elkins Park. Whole pieces brought over, long having been done. By 1925 ? it was a little late in the game I would think. But I bought the book, so let’s see what it says and if EP gets a mention. The fame of Trumbauer might mean that it will. What has happened to Lindewood Hall?
Great photos of Nicholas, his mother, Andrei and his sister? in front of the palace. Wearing the gray top hat and morning coat and tails I think. on Facebook.
email to Ken and Carole
Hello
It's been a good while since we saw the kids so we were happy to have a good facetime visit with them today. Emma can now sing the ABC song all the way through in English and write her name. She drew a big birthday card for grandpa Rene for this week.
The snow so magnificently wraps us in the mothering care of Nature's grandeur that I am being converted to Transcendentalism. I stroll out onto Emerson Street and behold the tufts of fir laden with crystaline sweetness and I lift a pause to Ralph Waldo himself and can nearly see him skate across Fox Pond on wingéd blades in chilled, windy companionship, whilst I sip hot chocolate ensconced in a woolen laprobe gazing into the firey depths of our virtual hearth. Nay, no German burgermeister of old has ever felt such soothing gemütlichkeit so profoundly in the bones.
"NH is the only place one can be a meditator who makes his own bullets." One of the best lines by an old friend at the Memorial for Dr John Lloyd on Saturday, Hebron Church. Va had John as her doctor for about seven years, thanks to Patsy. She went with us. Two hundred mabye more people. Upstairs and downstairs (with video screen). We had not know his whole life. For twenty years he was a cabinet maker, finish carpenter [&hippie?] in Vermont. Guess he was a hunter too. His wife died young, two daughters. Suzanne with him thirty years. At age 50 he went to Vt med school and became a doctor. Died peacefully in his sleep, cause really not known. 67.
"Sound of Music" was terrific. Mother Superior Bernier especially fetching in her wimple and veil. Hundreds of campus women also robed. Leads had great voices. Rob's five minutes on stage worth the whole price of admission. He was the German admiral ordering Von Trappe into Nazi service. He caught every nuance of comic possibility in his few lines and gestures. He let his hair grow really really long, so he had this horrible comb-over and a big fluff of curly wispery on the back of his head that made herr nazi look as pretentiously ridiculous as possible.
May have seen Jim Junke in the audience, wasn't sure. Martha and John Richards. Gigi & Paul.
Doug McLane put out an update message saying he is in Boston getting radiation treatment for colo-rectal cancer. Caught early.
Va is in a piano recital with Colin and his other students, seventeen of them. It was to have been yesterday but now it is next week, Sunday, at the Gilford Cmty Church. She also sent off the scholarly paper she has been working on for a year now, part of an homage for a retiring Spanish Professor in her field. She wrote about a famous clown in Buenos Aires in 1910 who her writer saw and put into his novel about anarchy.
Naomi Kline bought a house in France at the end of the summer. Kept her place in Cambridge too. Dick and Anne H told us while we had dinner at the Mexican place in Lincoln that you told us about. Excellent meal, worth going back to. Dick on sabbatical this semester. Anne not so no travel plans.
My sister's youngest boy and his girlfriend are expecting unexpectedly so a quick wedding happening in New Orleans next week. They both teach high school. Not even family being invited, just their circle and parents. Anne was happy to find a great dress marked down at Nieman for herself. She also helped Jenn find her dress. Her mother died when she was young but her grandmother will be there with her father.
Our British friend, Nicholas, posted pics on facebk of his visit to Buckingham P with his mum and two friends, in top hat and morning suit. He now has an OBE. His work for Oxfam in Moscow. Now he works for a posh foundation in Switzerland.
We loved Happy Valley and have started The Fall. Grantchester also. We caught up ahead of time last spring in Spain on Downton. Might watch the start of Better Call Saul? Also still working through Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.
Ben Ewens did a magnificent job of snowblowing the driveway earlier this evening. It does make one grateful and feel blessed, really, that this sparkling white wonder so brings out the finest in people. We hear Brian Williams is skiing at Waterville and enjoying the great healing powers of the crosscountry trails amid the encircling peaks which so lift one up.
Sometimes I feel secretly sorry for those poor bikininnies who are forced to live in the torrid climes and know only the fierce sun and sandy wastes and never feel the embracing thrill of temperatures and winds lower than one's eyes and empower one's adrenaline glands against life's bitterness transformed by cold character-making into fortress-like strength, uprightness and rectitude, not to say moral compassing and scouting.
Sounds like someone just broke a champagne bottle on the fireplace, music is getting louder too. I'd better close and go see what needs to be done to keep the crowd high but not too high.
Oh, we bought snowmobiles the other day and are taking lessons. The pasture is a great place for us to practice so we thank you in advance for that. We'll take you for a spin if you get back in time and the snow is still as, thanks be!, wonderful as now. Some 'mobilers we've met have invited us to a nudist after party, but we're not ready for that quite yet.
cheers,
Bob & Virginia
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Tues Feb 10
Gorgeous sunshine on the snow. Dump run, first chat with David Haight in five or so years. He is 78, will teach two more years. Or is he 76 and will go three? Philosophy majors have doubled, up to 24 thanks to dynamic woman now in their department. Also a lawyer with four kids. Rumor has it GBarry angling to get the Board to give her the presidency. Yikes. That’s enough campus gossip for ten more years. Current chair of History & Philosophy Marcia Blaine, gave Phil Hart a hard time, got him to leave, Phil was bitter. Surprise there!
Va and Kathie just back from the pool. Sunshine sure helps. Rendevous is tonight.
10 pm Straightening for PEO in the morning. Where to go once I take off? Can’t decide. Talked after Rendevous with sophomore English major Brendan Hart, of the Hart’s Turkey Farm family. He is a snowboarder and tried to compete in earlier years and I think had a string of bad luck injuries that slowed down that career idea. Reads a lot, did online schooling for high school while in the boarding world. Interested in French and reads novels in French, Count of Monte Cristo right now.
Two old-style campus chats in one day. Too much. Too many echoes from back beyond. I’ll never get my novel written if I waste my time in nostalgia or back-chat.
But I’m not getting it written now either. I should take the airbook tomorrow and try being one of those guys who sits in Starbucks and writes all day. Or writes at least for two hours. Or so. Why not. Could give it a shot. But where to go?
Ken sent a witty reply to my long ramble last night:
Hi, Bob and Virginia.
Glad to see that your permits for medical marijuana have been approved. Thanks for all the news sprinkled with "streams of unconsciousness." Have alerted our security company to keep a close watch on marauding snowmobilers, especially those singing "The hills are alive" in the nude.
Ciao,
Ken
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Weds Feb 11 Starry’s Tilton. Opposite a blonde woman with bright pink scarf at the work table, both airbooks, she all spread out re-mailing some stuff, me my stuff all spread out being important. The minister guy who is always here reading is in his chosen easy chair right of the entrance, reading and underlining, as always. Two guys at a table in the back talking, one louder, who was diagnosed with cancer, can’t tell how long ago, seems to be in his mid-50s. PEO well launched before I left. Some ladies arrived earlier than Betty, who came to help set up.
Braintstorm driving here, Sanbornton exit and back roads. We should explore LA in late winter. Today it is 81 in La Jolla. We could move up and down the coast at two or three VRBO stops along the way. Or Airbnb. Lots of sites and sights, lots of flat walking neighborhoods. San Jose is sunny and two degrees warmer than Puerto Vallarta. Its not the cold, its the boredom.
Today I’m heading to Meredith, Lake House Grill and then the library to see if I can sit in one place and read one book for a few hours. Nap or no nap as it happens, but total gemutlichkeit hovering in. On the way from here I’ll go back up the road and turn up onto Lancaster Hill Road, see where that goes. It has to go basically toward Laconia/Meredith.
Watching Grantchester last week got me thinking I should/could just write novels like those. Of course they would be bad messes of such but I could just do whatever, time to enjoy myself doing something like it. Dead body, interviewing hunches, finding evidence and false evidence, moping around, getting the guilty party, chatting about former campus monsters coming back in glory as campus prezzes. Disappointed Ken has no reply and to his cool appreciation of my long, long letter. Not part of the audience for my great novels. My narrator could be a writer deluded about the importance of his work, his career. He just keeps writing because he has no idea how to do anything else. Like almost all of us. We find a niche of one sort or another and if health holds we hope not to have to give it up because without it we face only the void. Or voids. Or a void. Driving down the highway today, I thought “I could go to Pennacook” and realized that that was a way to register once more the loss of John Lloyd. So, again, we learn, slowly, quickly, how death begins to entertain us with its permutations. I saw the two children of the Judy and Dave, who both died, last year. Last name will come later. Switzer. Saw them in the store the other day and also registered again their deaths.
Finally wrote a note to Nancy but did not mention Maggie’s death. Sent it off. Hope it seems like a good if late condolence note. My theory here is that hearing that someone has you in mind because of your grief a year later is more comforting in the long run than the huge burst of sympathy you get at the first flush of feeling. That helps too, but it blows over quickly, like any cloudburst.
Now to merge my various beginnings of the novel. Maybe just line them up first and bring them together sometime later on. Hotel Courier and the Copenhagen Design are the two main ones now. Could keep CD and bring in the rest of HC later on. Don’t see how I cannot use first person. That is what I want to do. But then would trying third give me a better “exercise.” in something?
Today: I have so imagined going to Lake House for the day that when I set off I wondered if I should try to de-realize that so as to avoid the certain disappointment of how it will actually go. Disappointment of some sort certain. Isn’t that the motif? But if I go against what has been imagined, would’t that guarantee some surprise? But surprise might be built into the imagination of how the disappointment will unfold. Each conditions the other. And when I imagine what will happen and how it will get ruined, I set the stage for what I cannot know will pop up, what will catch my eye, where my responses will have ended up even after the guaranteed, but narrow, disappointment. What are some synonyms for “disappointment?”
“Let down.”
Lars replied after all. Calls me Bill but he’s got a lot on his plate. He’s a good guy after all. And now that I know that J’s work is Bernhard inspired I guess I’ll have to keep reading him. And Blanchot.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for this! I think I'll keep the characters' sexuality where it is ... the changes will come later on in the ms., if I ever get a chance to do them. This new job's really busy.
Alas, N and the Burbs should be out next year, not this one. Still haven't got a first draft, though will hopefully have one soon.
Blanchot - well, my novels are saturated with his stuff, though not in an obvious way. No plans to do a book explicitly on him, though. You could try his novel, Death Sentence. It used to be available free on the net. Madness of the Day is also very readable. The essay collections are wonderful - I recommend Friendship or The Book to Come. I haven't read Hotel Andromeda, but if you haven't read Infinity, do. With Moo Pak and The Big Glass, it completes a little trilogy of Bernhard-inspired novels. I also admire J's Goldberg:Variations, but you have to stick with it.
And thanks again for your kind words,
Lars
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2:10 After lunch at the Grill. Oysters baked with spinach and siracha panko or grilled or broiled? Pinot Grigio. Small ! cup of chicken soup. St Charles salad, beets, goat cheese, sweet pecans. Espresso chocolate cake, cream, coffee. Waitress Kristy ? looks familiar from the summer. Now in the library and indeed it is empty, fake fire going. Wee draft on the ankles. Beautiful place, bright, glorious day outside.
Found an article on the wall downstairs by the bathroom, down from it toward the spa, with Rusty’s story. Rusty McClear. Started at Notre Dame, then Villanova, finished at Windham in VT. Not clear where he grew up? Opened a restaurant. Then tried real estate and started Old Mill Properties. From there on. I guess we had heard that he had worked as a kid in hotels in the state.
Reading Meaulnes. Imagining how my novel could incorporate features. Maybe my best notion is the borrowing and stealing of lines from everywhere, like I did when writing with Rupert. This time instead of the prose poems in his style a prose narrative in “mystery/detective” style.
Got up to move chairs and saw a plane take off over the frozen lake.
The three hotels give me a geographic map and a writing-plotting triangle. A vague sense of murder investigation gives a vague possibility of forward movement. Then into that I can throw everything and anything I want to collage-mix in.
Such a beautiful day.
Friday evening Feb 13
I like Dr Fagan. Only after coming home did I realize that he reminds me perfectly of the nerdy doctor on Royal Pains, the tall, thin one, Dr Jeremiah Sacani, played by Ben Schenkman. Fagan grew up in Baltimore, college in Philly and med school in Balto. For his residency he wanted something really different and non-urban, looked around and chose Burlington. From there he set up practice in Woodsville, lived across the river in VT. Came to Mid-State he said five years ago. His wife now teaches at the nursing program at PSU. Two boys, 19 and 16. The college student is bringing home a girl friend this weekend, from Norwich Univ where he is in the cadet military program. Gabe, the 16 year old sophomore, seems the looser---on Facebook--skier and artist.
Just wrote a few paragraphs!
We swam after lunch. Gorgeous sunlight over and in the water.
Diving into Blanchot. I am late to Blanchot. Lydia Davis translated Death Sentence.
Last night looking at the astonishing scholarly work on Salvaged Rooms from English mansions put me to remembering Elkins Park again and again. So strong are those images of the house. And the visit to Compton Wynyates. I suppose it would be natural to work them into the novel in some way. Former patient who lived in one caused the therapist to go in search of the other. And of course still working on the Estate novel and that too feeds it all.
Death Sentence published in 1948. Was it the first or early instance of super-long paragraphs and unrelenting narrative I without any of the usual machinery of the novel? Even Woolf’s novels would seem old fashioned in comparison.
Saturday St Valentine’s Day 14th
Snow, noon. Supposed to get stormy this evening. 5:24 pm Waiting. Walked at Wally’s.
Sunday 15th almost noon High winds and wind chill factors. Recital canceled. Just saw the Drexels walking to church so maybe it will be ok to go out for a stroll after all.?
Otherwise, feeling hemmed in and let down because the recital is not happening. Skies look brighter, even sunshine at times, but winds do look pretty gusty and strong. Lots of snow. Not clear if the heat pumps are tranquil with it all. Seem so. Put the fan on high for the mud room blower.
5 pm Bert answered my query about the heat pumps. Keep ‘em on in all sorts of weather. If it gets too cold, they will take care of themselves.
----Bert says
It won't hurt the heat pumps to run them in any weather. If they get too cold to function (-15ish) they'll shut themselves off and resume operation when it warms up a bit.
As far as cost, they are less efficient the colder it gets outside or the warmer it gets inside. The break even point for oil at $2.50 a gallon and NHEC electricity is around -5F outside and 70F inside. Because it above -5 for the vast majority of the winter, I usually suggest setting them at a comfortable temperature and letting the boiler pick up whatever heating load they aren't able to keep up with.
The only other concern in weather like this is keeping the pipes from freezing. With the boiler running less, there is a chance water or boiler pipes could freeze without the heat in the basement from the boiler. If this is a problem you've had in the past, I would favor the boiler over the heat pumps until the winds die down.
We finished the Bollywood movie on Netflix. Just have to relax into the wind and let it swirl. Even though it sounds so terrible. Can tell now that it was good to cancel the recital.
night Blanchot’s novel is gripping in that continental way--Marías, Bernhard, Jelinek, that Spanish novel, Paris, by Geralt Torrente. They know how to launch the tale at keep it going relentlessly. The voice, rather.
MONDAY Feb 16
Crazy, bloody WIND still at it. Made it through the night with power and heat. Sunny and bright. Willow wants to go swimming this afternoon.
Discovered we had missed some of Downton after all, so there’s that to catch up with sometime. Grantchester another great episode. May look up the books. James Runcie born only in ’59 and the novels came out in 2012. Fast work to get them on to tv! Son of archbishop of Canterbury, Runcie. Nicholas probably knows him! So, he’s re-creating his father’s generation, not his grandfather’s. Going against Julian Marîas’s dictum.
Although as a media savy guy he --- no that doesn’t work either. His father born in 1921, so he’s a late son.
Text message from Anne! asking how cold it is. Wedding is this coming Saturday.
Overdid the caffeine this morning and feeling a bit dizzy, woozy. 11:02 am
Had the green tea in coconut milk and two of the usual big cups of coffee. Hmm. Need more care here.
Found an academia.edu piece on Blanchot’s novel, which is very cool but impossible. But I had already thought to myself, oh, (by page 52), this is about the narrator’s own death. So, I’m not totally clueless. Still, will read this paper. By a grad student in London. Hooray for grad students.
HOLY COW Look at this. page 54 “The next day I took a room in another hotel, though I kept this one. I lived that way as long as I had the means to, sometimes in three or four different places.”
6 pm Happy to say it was caffeine overdose and not a heart attack or anything else. We swam at 2 and no one was there even though lots of kids had been there in the morning, Sue said, and a family arrived as we were finishing getting dressed. Walked at Wally’s. Napped. Virginia looking for Sonatas by Clementina. Not found but she’s playing something else she found when sifting through the pile.
Loved finding that line in Blanchot. My man. Man after my own heart. Could give me an epigraph for the book, my book.
The Trumbauer book arrived. I think I saw an earlier copy of it somewhere once before---probably interlibrary loan? This says Revised Edition, 2011. Nice chapter on Ronaele Manor with great photos.
I could put it in the novel and Trumbauer Syndrome!
Bernard Hay Philosophy grad student University College London
“Finally, I turn to examine the relation between the act of writing and dying as it appears in Blanchot’s text arguing that, for Blanchot, writing is here a way of keeping death in sight without bringing it to the realm of experience.”
Seems he uploaded the paper 8 days ago. ?
from Phil 4 hours ago
How are you and Va doing in all this extreme weather? My cousin had to abandon her expensive house on the tip of Long Island and stay with her daughter in NYC because the house couldn't get warmer than 59 degrees and some pipes froze.
My apartment is also about 59 degrees because the weather outside here is also weird, down in the teens in the day and in the single digits at night. We also had about six inches of snow making everything here just "peachy." DC just does so well in snow. Everything closes down at the first snowflake. I'm convinced that the Donner Party stopped in a snowstorm in the Rockies because they were all from the DC metro area.
Because of my impending move, I spent the day going through TONS of paper - stuff I wrote in the '90s. Most of it was pretty bad. I threw out about 99% of it. A friend tells me that I shouldn't be embarrassed by that early stuff because I learned how to write and now produce pretty good novels. Trouble is I sent a lot of that crap to agents and publishers. I'm sure they would never remember me or my stuff. But it still rankles. I should have been more circumspect. You're too circumspect, and I'm not circumspect enough.
Finally, I've come up with a Jeopardy-style answer and question.
Answer: ISIS
Question: What is the first legitimate target for an atom bomb attack?
This beheading of Egyptian Christians is just disgusting.
Phil
---------
my reply
Yeah, seems so. Today feels balmy at 24 degrees. The roads now have that
gorgeous edging of brown, gray and sooty slush, all cars coated in similar crusts,
skies gray, more snow coming. Why are we here?
The three days of being indoors with the super high winds and sub zero temps
drove me crazy, especially the force and sound of the winds. On the plus side, the
house never felt more snug. In previous years, under those conditions, the furnace
would strain and never get the house above 62. Last spring I cashed some bonds
Dad left me and had the house covered with vinyl siding and when they do that
they put a layer of insulation under it first. Can really tell the difference.
Plus late in the summer we put two heat pumps in, one on the back sun porch and
the other around the corner in the living room. These have made a great difference
too. I remember reading about this technology thirty years ago and could not
comprehend it then still don't. But we learned that these things are now at
householder prices and uses and our local power company had a rebate program
so we got them in under that deadline and got a thousand back. They all depend
on some calculations about the price of oil and the price of electricity. Supposed
to save me about a tank of oil, so we'll see. Meanwhile under these extreme
conditions we could keep things at 64-68, which felt pretty good with that fucking
wind outside. I still look at the oil tank every day or so to see if we have any
and if we need an emergency delivery. So far ok. The heat pumps could not
heat the whole house by themselves.
We had frozen, broken pipes years ago. What a mess. Glad your cousin had
someplace to go. Yep, we're getting pretty sick of winter. Carrot: in ten days
we take off for ten days in Santo Domingo. Hurray. We've never been there,
hope it will be ok. All caribbean islands are the same in my mind. I might
have chosen Caymans, Va always thinks she will enjoy the Spanish and
Colonial "culture." Old churches, streets, forts. Markets, trinkets. But it
should be in the 80s and sunny.
ISIS could not agree more and seriously really really start believing the crappy
tv drama screenwriters (Homeland, State of Affairs etc) when they speculate
that we give these thug too much media payback and tease because they help
us keep our war machines lubed and funded. I Cannot understand why
everyone doesn't agree at once that we and the arabs and all should
carpet bomb the whole regions and wipe out everone of those fuckers now
making any kind of blip on a location app.
Your friends are right of course about the old papers. Still have two boxes of the
crap in the garage that my sister sent when they sold the house. I need to take
them to the dump and throw them in without even opening them. Mother saved
every scrap of letters and papers I wrote. Don't envy you this move. We have
so much junk tucked throughout the house. I try to weed the bookshelves and
manage to take a box or two to the dump every other week. The holes in
the shelves seem to fill up at once, like fungus out of control.
Hope you get some balmy temps too. Maybe even above freezing for a day or
so.
We watched some of the SNL special but it didn't seem all that great. We've
not watched the show for over ten years.
B
---------
Weds 18th Took car to Granite Glass, Matt brought me back, three or four hours there. Dave replied. They went to Florian’s over the weekend, but both kids sick. Ash Wednesday. We are ready for sunny travel in a week.
Still reading brit grad student on Blanchot. Not the close literary reading I was looking for, but a dense (silly?) thinking about the idea of death of one’s own versus one’s own death, etc. After Iyer it is doubly hard to read “straight” philosophical writing.
Edw St Aubyn’s thinking: “All sex was prostitution for both participants, not always in the commercial sense, but in the deeper etymological sense that they stood in for something else. The fact that this was sometimes done so effectively that there were weeks or months in which the object of desire and the person one happened to be in bed with seemed identical could not prevent the underlying model of desire from beginning to drift away, sooner or later, from its illusory home. The strangeness of Julia’s case was that she stood in for herself, as she had been twenty years ago, a pre-drift lover.” 543 The Patrick Melrose Novels
Now it occurs to me that I could plop these whole two pages into Courier by simply having x sleep with Christine and the next day after she has gone he happens to read this passage while he’s working in the lobby of the St Pytr and he can exclaim on the aptness of it and the uncanny way books can echo and more perfectly describe what has just happened to someone in their real lives. Why not? It’s my book. Novels don’t quote big passages of other books like that. Why not?
Johnny then says, quipping the famous Foucault book? I can see the cover but forget who wrote it? Derrida? A pipe is a pipe? I got Foucault right: “This Is Not A Pipe.” is the book on the Magritte painting.
Johnny: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. . . . Before you light it -- after that, it’s a symptom of unreconstructed orality.” 543
Phil’s comment yesterday “stung” a bit but of course is right. “You're too circumspect, and I'm not circumspect enough.”
Interesting that it was all about how chagrined he felt looking back at the bad writing he had sent around years ago. And I sent around none. Now I am trying to reverse that.
“Trouble is I sent a lot of that crap to agents and publishers. I'm sure they would never remember me or my stuff. But it still rankles. I should have been more circumspect. You're too circumspect, and I'm not circumspect enough.”
But I wonder if I’m getting any where with it?
I also like St Aubyn’s confession to Johnny---he is the child psychologist?
“Bad, chaotic, terrified. My emotional life seems to cascade into wordlessness in every direction, . . . internally, I feel the feebleness of everything I can control. It’s very primitive and very strong.”
The whole passage is so good, over onto the next page, page 544. My novel character could not be feeling “adulterous” but could feel that the emptiness was just the same. In fact he could claim that the three hotels, the boredom and mystery of each, were his attempt to create a measure of faux OCD as a “cure” for the endless rotation of the other items of addictive prostitution he had been experiencing. Might be all too cerebral for most readers.
Bernard Hare: 2.5 “Thus far, I have argued that the young man does not come to die a death that we could describe of as one’s own. Moreover, I have raised the question of whether any relationship to death can presuppose a subject who undergoes that relation, or whether a relation to death must precede and, at the same time end, any sense of subjectivity. This is a question I do not have the space to fully discuss here. However, even if we accept this account of death, it does not follow that one cannot hope to realize an experience of death as a subject: this is, one could become a subject in the experience of death. This is perhaps what Blanchot is alluding to when he speaks of a kind of dying which is a making possible of the experience of death. If this is the case, then speaking of dying a death that is one’s own remains valid here, even if the unity of the subject arises only in the instant of death itself.”
This is on page 13 of the 29 page essay. Why didn’t he just start the paper here? It begins to make some sense here and the earlier pages did not, they seemed to be hemming and hawing as so much of human speech and writing so often is, and does, endlessly. So even this I could paste into the story as a way to have my guy protest---I am not here to try to die in some certain way. I am not ready for that. But no one is ever, for sure. Bernard Hare “Foreign Death: A Reading of Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death.” academia.edu
Just realized, that is a way for academics to self-pubish with honor it seems. The paper doesn’t seem to have appeared anywhere else.
oops Bernard HAY. Another mistake, big mistake. The Instant of My Death
is not the same work I’ve been reading which is called “Death Sentence.” So I’m pretty much the dummy here. Just ordered the correct book! Guess I will go ahead and finish the essay---or just hold it for later!
Winter brain freeze dumbness.
Back to Patrick Melrose. Johnny hopes he is not trying to manifest his feelings that his wild animal nature is destroying him---“like a cartoon of cats fighting: a spinning blackness with exclamation marks flying off it.”
“Patrick scanned the concrete forms, the insomnia, the heavy drinking, the bouts of overeating, the constant longing for solitude which, if achieved, made him desperate for company, not to mention (or should he mention it? He felt the heavy gravitational field of confession surrounding Johnny) last night’s adulterous incident.” 544
Just put down the new-old Rya rug in the dining room. Matches the smaller one we have in the living room. Bought it from Paula who got it from the Hirschbergs, Stoneyfield yogurt family.
Before that a quick visit with Emma, Eliot and Dave on screen. They both had their hair cuts from Simon. Getting over colds. Had spent the weekend up at Florian’s. Emma enjoys seeing Solo and Latte.
amazon gives me the summary
This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II, is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism, writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit.
Blanchot: “My madness no longer arose from my uneasiness nor from my concern for Nathalie, but from an impatience which with each passing minute and which went beyond any purpose, turning me into a wanderer in search of nothing.” 65
THURSDAY FEB 19
Friday Feb 20
PT with Melinda up in Campton at 10:30. Dave and fam off to Austria today. 8-9 hour drive but on the map looks pretty direct.
Feeney on Facebook says he has some very good news. Making me phone him. Now have to phone him back. Posted it eleven hours ago. Guess that was late last night. Hope he was out celebrating.
Sunday Feb 22 Snow last night as we drove up from Nashua. Gorgeous this morning and warmer. Lovely.
Talked with Feeny shortly after his facebook message. He is cautious about whether he will go, where. If Hvd gives him more tuition break or money I suppose he will go there. Chicago gives him 15k for three years, half tuition. He was hoping to be out of rez life for good but that might be his income for a while longer. And Sarah. I do hope he does go. Hvd’s ok but his insularity wants the expansiveness of travel he’s already tasted.
this was Bob’s post on facebk
I am so excited! I got into the University of Chicago Divinity School's M.Div. program! Still waiting to hear back from some other schools, but I am over the moon right now!
he’s gotten 144 likes for it! Dare he not go now?? Will he post for Hvd’s news??
Hunnewell’s married 48 years. This will be our 46th! so they got married before we did, at a younger age!
FIP just followed Bizet’s Carmen suite with “Guadalajara” by a mariachi band ... and then two rumbas, one French, one Cuban . . . great playlists streaming on TuneIn radio app
Monday almost 5pm of Feb 23
Browsed through Kathrens’ book on Trumbauer. Superb discussion and description of Ronaele Manor. Eleanor oversaw the building of it which took more than ten years for the whole estate. Fitz Eugene Dixon Jr grew up there. Her brother and father died on the Titanic in 1912. Fitz Eugene Dixon, Sr. and wife Eleanor Widener built Ronaele. It was sold to a developer in 9172 and torn down even though in the National Historic Register. He was especially eloquent about the stairway and the collection of stained glass in the windows. They must have been there when we were there, or some of them, because the windows were notable. Now maybe many of the valuable pieces had been taken out and the surrounded decorations that provided context were still there. Also the order had created a few for the chapel and we know they had a big chapel full of them because I got contacted to give money to the La Salle chapel in Barrytown a year or so ago. Barrytown is the name of the publisher who published lots of Blanchot twenty years ago. Site of much larger Normal Institute than Ammendale was, in our day. Perhaps they were of equal size a hundred years ago.
“In the song "Barrytown" recorded by Steely Dan on the 1974 album Pretzel Logic,[2] Donald Fagen, an alumnus of nearby Bard College, refers to Barrytown.” --Wiki
Tarrytown is where Jay Gould’s mansion is.
So . . . all caught up now on nostalgic trivia. I could invent Trumbauer Syndrome---a former patient who suffered recurring flashbacks about having lived in Trumbauer great houses and estates and became overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscaping and the houses.
now this I did not know about---Camp Anglewood has provided a classic summer camping experience for children ages 4 to 12 since 1952. The camp facilities are located on Rock Lane in Elkins Park, PA in a unique Pocono-like setting with hills, a spring fed lake, woods, and a creek. ----- the building in the camp video looks just like one of the manor houses, like the tea house or what we refered to as the “butler’s house.” i.e. in the Tudor style. Whether this area had originally been part of the whole estate I don’t know but I don’t see how it could not have been.
Read Blanchot’s Instant of My Death yesterday. Very short. Longer essay on it in same volume by Derrida. “Finished” scanning Hare’s paper about it but really could make nothing out of that.
We watch Gaga’s singing on the Oscars today for lunch. She did a great job.
9 pm After all the phone calls to caremark and trying to let it all go into place, I get an email saying they are processing a refill of the two prescriptions. Yikes, what the heck??
big question is where to go tomorrow? Tuesday. Lebanon, west leb, hanover has been on my mind all day but somehow I am leery. Especially after spending the day, the afternoon, looking at the Trumbauer mansions and google earthing the property in Elkins Park. I know I’ve done that before so it feels really weird in some p t s d or some such way. So strange.
Linked to this season of the year? linked to Va’s event twelve now years ago? Or linked to what?? reading Blanchot? anticipating our trip to Santo Dom?
if not w leb maybe whole foods again? or tilton
“His playfulness had collapsed for a few days and been replaced entirely by wishing and longing and regretting.” 596 StAubyn
Tuesday almost noon Feb 25
Va changed the whole itinerary two nights ago, good move since she/we figured the in-town hotel would not be so great. Now we’re looking at places on Bavaro beach. USAir seems to have a good package but she wants to see if there is any way to find out if she can really get into and use any of the pools. It looks like they are all the big resort places like the ones we saw in Cancun years ago and the big four seasons one in Nevis.
Day off yesterday. I went to Whole Foods (and haven’t felt great since!). Ran into Barbara Lambert in the lobby-atrium of the new Alex Ray rest stop in Hooksett. Alex and Rusty McNear were there at a cafe table talking with someone.
Might be too much caffeine again?
“There’s nothing like doing God’s will to make people pig-headed.” ---StA
Apropos of the mother in Texas who thanked God for his faithfulness when she heard her son’s killer has been found guilty and sentenced to life. The great American Sniper saga. Probably ain’t over yet, somehow. Routh is not insane, but in Florida George Zimmerman waltzes free.
Lars Iyer’s genius at making philosophy funny is to show that philosophy is for pleasure and soul-entertainment, not for anything else.
Somehow a page from the Times opened up on my screen and there is Karl Ove Knausgaard writing for the Times, a trip to the US, called “My Saga.”
translated
Colin on the piano. After PT with Melinda we came home and finally booked the trip. One week, eight nights there in Punta Cana at the Melia Caribe.
Long phone call from Niki in Kansas about the Lamictal---412 $ for 90 days, brand. Noted.
We’ll see. Twilight. Time to heat some soup.
Thursday Feb 26
We had a fine swim this morning. Thought about Otters and realized that in terms of my “totem” animal, this could be it. All those hours in the country club pool. Refresh for a hair-do tweak. I looked into the remodeled and expanded Gilford Walmart.
email from Phil and my reply---
Books, books, books
J. P. Jones
3:52 PM (1 hour ago)
to me
But first, before we deal with books:
Korean Court Scraps Adultery Ban, Condom Stock Soars
Here's one way to get a rise out of a stock price. South Korea's highest court on Thursday struck down as unconstitutional a decades-old law banning adultery, triggering a surge in shares of condom makers and morning-after pills.
And now, back to books:
Finally I have all my books removed from my apartment. Some, maybe 100, I gave to DC and Montgomery County libraries. But most I just abandoned by shoving them into the empty apartment across the hall. I've decided to keep about 35-40% of my books.
To my surprise, what I chose to retain are mainly books of poetry, philosophy, and Latin (Horace, Cicero, et al literature (in translation, of course.) I also kept some fiction - mainly Updike, Roth, and Bellow - plus, of course, several dictionaries and my 1936 Encyclopedia Britannica, which I inherited from dad and which lists Adooph Hitler as a "German politician of severe personal habits." Also kept all the books about Tunisia.
I suppose I could claim that the books I've retain are mainly reference work. Did Seutonius say Claudius barked at the moon? I can look it up. What are Elizabeth Bishop's poems like? I can look it up. What did Hegel say about morality? I've got the book.
What I find odd about this is: I don't much like poetry. I think ancient philosophers are largely irrelevant to today. My opinion of Updike and two Jews has gone waaaay down recently.
So, once again, I am doing something without understanding why?
It's particularly puzzling about poetry. I simply don't find poetical thinking very interesting. Similes and metaphors really don't do it for me. Neither do rimes or rythmns. It just doesn't move me at all. In my entire life, I have memorized only one poem because I liked it. "The City" by Cavafy: "You tell yourself that you'll be gone to another city far lovelier than this ever was or ever could be...."
Otherwise...nada. My friend, Michael who loves Spanish lit, enthuses about Neruda. I am not moved in the slightest. In the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly is an article about John Berryman. I read it and the quoted passages thinking that John was right to jump off the bridge because he really had nothing to say.
I wonder how Sitter ever got interested in 18th century lit, which is mainly poetry. Pope is clever at times, but so what?! Was he heavily into poetry in his last two years at LaSalle?
Perhaps the problem is that I've always been un-religious. Therefore no riming words about deeper levels or higher consciousness can "ring my bell."
I concede that there was a time, before most people were literate, when poetry was necessary as a mnemnomic device. I also concede that there was a time when poems showed off one's knowledge and culture. But in the past hundred years, those rationalizations have largely disappeared, and...well, I don't much care for poetry even if I kept a bunch of books. (Why on earth would I keep Conrad Aiken's poems????)
How about you? Do you read a lot of poetry and have favorites?
And what about Virginia? And David? I assume that David appreciates good song lyrics, but that's a little different.
Next week I start sorting clothes. That should go much faster than the books.
Phil
PS I saw a robin yesterday so don't give up hope.
5:09 PM (0 minutes ago)
to Jones
I think Sitter got into 18thC through satire--Swift and Pope and the other wits and scourges of the age. great age of satire. ?
Poetry? my guess here is that whether one likes it or not, it is part of the cultural essence we worship by worshipping the book and writing in general. Poetry is "higher" by some weird, vague measure that book/lit people treasure whether they want to or not. Same with philosophy. I'm reading a book of contemporary philos right now, short essay, and I ask myself why the heck bother?
just kidding about gay. Saw Architectural Digest today and there is Neal P H and his husband on the cover. And NPH also is on the back page of Vanity Fair doing the Proust Questionnaire. So with the Oscars to boot, NPH and his agents certainly got him "placed" this late winter. Some thought he bombed on the oscars but we didn't watch much of it. Later watched Lady Gaga on recording and boy she can really sing. I didn't know that she had Julliard voice training on her resume.
One young brit philosopher has figured out what to do about philosophy---he's written a very funny trilogy that feature two godot-like clown academics wandering around bemoaning everything and quoting the great philosophers wildly astutely. Lars Iyer, Wittgenstein Jr, Exodus, Dogma, and Spurious, the book titles. Pick one up if you see it in a good bookstore and browse.
I managed to throw six books out at the dump on Tuesday. Many are easy to pluck off the shelf and toss, but I agree, those poetry books---. I would not save Neruda, though. I tried to go through a period of liking him and thinking yes, he was noble worthy, but like you I eventually thought, hey there's nothing for me here.
I saw Berryman once at Chicago, he and Bellow. Propped up, incredibly drunk, gave a great reading though. I wonder if such people are what we would now dismiss more readily as Aspergers whereas in earlier times we permitted them a high measure of mystery and got thrilled when they wrote something that seemed mysterious and potentially, possibly, containing something of value. I'm being pretty harsh I guess. Two centuries ago Wordsworth and Byron et al were few and far between and they did have major cultural impact for a clearly discernible reason. At least in hindsight. I'm reading a cultural history on Baudelaire right now. Never read him beyond a few lines of fleurs de mal, but the author, Italian R Calasso, is doing a great job of describing the age of Baudelaire for me (part of my new project to learn a wee more than the zero I know about French culture since I have two French grandchildren now! I can hear Edith Piaf's intonations already in Emma's ways of talking!)
I'll attach a video of her telling a story. Hope you can get it open. nope guess it is too big to even upload. oh well. strangely enough the computer tells me this little movie cannot be emailed but it can be uploaded onto facebook!
Once you land at Peg's for good, how will you go into the city and back?? Does the Metro go out that far? bus and metro or park and ride?
We booked a 12 day trip to Dominican R two weeks ago. Early this week Va wanted to change her mind so we canceled everything (some fee-age ! ) and now have booked a 7-night package and instead of being in the old colonial town we will be in a resort on the beach. Good move I think.
Did you get much snow this time? cold? Feels heavy and gray here today, we're on the northern, far edge of the system this time! hooray for us, sorry for you.
I've also picked up a book long on my shelves to take with me---a detective thriller "about psychoanalysis" says the cover blurb. Written by a therapist, Yalom. A friend had really like another of his novels so that got me curious to see what this is like.
I like your very urban disposal techniques---plopped into the empty apartment across the way!
---------------
1. Neil PH. I really don't like him. Perhaps because he always seems so damn smug. And while most gays don't bother me, somehow his "gayness" gets under my skin.
2. There was a cartoon in the Post in which one character asks another "What are you doing?" Answer: "I'm watching a bunch of really insecure people trying to convince themselves that their lives have some real meaning and worth. It's called the Academy Awards." (I didn't watch any of it.)
3. I agree about Lady Gaga. Several months ago, I saw her (on TV) singing old standards with Tony Bennett and was astonished at how good she is. Of course she was really singing, as opposed to the kind of wailing that she has to do to perform as Lady Gaga for a trillion teenaged girls. Of course she's smart enough to know that wailing in ridiculous outfits will earn her millions and maybe even billions, but singing real songs, with real melodies and lyrics, will get her an income of, say, $30,000 a year.
4. Getting into the city from Peg's place will be a problem. I can drive and pay for parking in the city or take a bus to Metro. Both will be somewhat inconvenient.
5. You wrote of French culture: My former friend, Douglas, who lives in a small village not far from Montpelier has horrid neighkbors, who are forcing him to sell his house and buy another house in a village in the Aveyron Region, which is nearer the Pyrenees. Douglas made a video of his new house and its garage and, out of the blue, sent it to me. Bragging, I guess, since this new house is much nicer than his former one. See below. Of course, he later emailed me to complain about how traditional French culture is disappearing. No doubt it is. Also, no doubt it is less grievous than he wants to believe.
6. I guess you're right about the attraction of poetry. It's just "culchah" with a capital C
7. Interesting that a shrink writes a mystery. Not a bad idea. Wish I had the background to do the same.
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Friday Feb 27 8:14 Finished the Melrose novels. What a marvelous ending, given all that they’ve been through.
“What else is there to do but read too much into things? . . . Besides, is it possible? There’s always more meaning than we can lay our hands on.”
Thomas filled the silence by jumping off his father’s knee and shouting, ‘Do nothing! Do nothing!’ as he circles the table laden with cakes and tea. “
680
Have done some packing, ironing. Wait for the rest for the morrow.
Feb 28 Saturday
Is today the date of Va’s event? Twelve years ago. Strange that we do not seem to have the date itself entered into our composite family calendar--have to double check the old red binder against the new pale blue one or they have been merged. Bright and splendid day. More ironing and packing. Found the dress we couldn’t find last night. Watched “The Fall” last night, double episodes, ready to finish it up tonight. Definitely was influenced by Fifty Shades, first volume of that came out two years before this series went on air. BBC does it better!
dinner, now to the Finale! walked at wally’s in Tilton. All packed except for toiletries.
Sunday March 1
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