January 2015
Almost 11:30 am and I can see why I won’t stay with this font now that I know how lovely it is and suitable for making manuscript looking medievalist documents. Goes with Britten’s Ceremony of Carols which is playing now on Youtube thanks to Isei’s email.
Mongonlian Baiti --- now there is a name I’ve not seen often.
Waiting waiting waiting for Paul J---- and his daughters to arrive. Sunny day, not cold not warm.
Dwight Garner in today's NYT
10:04 by Ben Lerner (Faber and Faber). This is an intimate yet oddly grand novel of New York City, . . . The novel’s narrator, a writer, says he hopes to compose a book that is, on some level, “a long list of things that quicken the heart.” Mr. Lerner has written this sort of book.
The almost offhand intensity of Mr. Knausgaard’s prose is a secular sort of miracle. on vol 3, Boyhood Island
"a memorable portrait of a man caught between two societies." Maybe I will have to read this Teju Cole after all. Did like Open City so much.
Paul and Elizabeth came in to say hello. They all took off about 1.
Rich and Barb called about two hours ago. They’re going to Lapland this July. Relieved to have Todd’s wife out of the family after eight years. Happy to have sold his practice to a dentist in his thirties but still going in to help and transition.
So just after 11 am and I can feel how anxious I was all morning without quite knowing how anxious I was---the empath’s situation over and over? Or just my own whatever processes. Up early to get Willow to PEO initiation, white turtleneck etc. Snow started and that helped nudge Petie and Rick out earlier than they had thought plus she double-checked the departure info and it was earlier than she had thought. Rick seemed sullen and disappointed both last night and moreso this morning and I can’t blame him. But Petie, in the kitchen, in the midst of dancing around each other to fix breakfasts and coffees and teas, she perches on the stool at one point and gives me her finest, sweetest, saved-again beam and asks me “so, Bob, have you taken Jesus Christ as your savior.”
I looked her in the eye and tried not to show my anger and said I won’t talk to you about these things now. Meaning in such a context and mood. Driving Willow over to Holderness in the snow I was able to chat through it and Willlow suggested that the whole thing was like an ambush. Yes. That’s a good word for it. There used to be a phrase--was it love-bombing?
Yep, here’s the first paragraph of the Wiki entry for the phrase
“Love bombing is an attempt to influence a person by lavish demonstrations of attention and affection. The phrase can be used in different ways. Critics of cults and churches use the phrase with the implication that the "love" is feigned by cults and churches and that the practice is manipulative of vulnerable individuals, particularly teenagers and young adults, who may have been emotionally rejected by partners, parents, siblings, peers or who have other developmental problems and that love bombing is also utilized by the leadership of cults and churches to both silence internal dissent and further control members within group settings by directing the withholding attention and affection from individuals within the group.[1]”
Back home I relaxed a bit and just showered. Time to slick the house a bit for Jessica’s visit tomorrow and have a wee lunch. I will actually, I think, use the Swiffer!
Monday Jan 5
Night. Getting super cold now, this week. Three Kings event yesterday, nice small group, fun too. Good swim this morning. Re-worked the cassoulet (it even got mentioned on the lousy abc show with tim daly and tea leoni---madam secretary). We both signed up for new doctors today.
Tuesday Jan 6
Tuesday seems like the day when Phil and I post back and forth for a day or so mid-week.
Just back from the weekly trip to the town dump and indeed I could feel our moral fiber being reconstituted by both the sub-arctic blast and the personal, artisanal delivery of house-pre-sectioned clear glass bottles from colored glass bottles, washed cans, and nearly pristine plastics ready for Ugandan recycling villages.
Well, never got into the book collecting thing at least not in any serious way. Can't help but mumble, oh, there's first edition, first printing of the Arcade paperback of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, surely that will bring over five hundred bucks these days as one looks around old bookshelves, either in-house of what used to be bookstores. Every five years now on the internet I look up Sherman Adams autobiography because I have a first-edition inscribed to my aunt Dot and with a letter from him on White House ! stationery to her inserted in the crumbling pages (hardback) but each time I look it is worth apparently the same 21.50.
Same with the Communists and lefties. I think hanging around the Catholics for too long innoculated me against that. It woulda/coulda been that had I fallen seriously in with a crowd of artsy-druggies I might have keeled over one day when young with too much booze and alcohol, or had I tried to join a commune in seattle or new mexico as I deeply envied a friend in those days who did for a year or two, then I might have gotten stung in some serious ways. But I was pretty much a cautious, cowardly goody-two shoes sort, the humble, reclusive scholar or deludedly wannabe scholar. (We were wondering aloud the other day where the "two-shoes" came from in that old phrase----haven't looked it up yet, and is it gender-specific or was it, in its day?
I did fetishize notebooks and pens and papers and such at various times. Could always fall for fancy bindings but always on new books and never on old books. Book collecting must be like relic collecting. I forget my Freud here but isn't about he noumenous being manifest in the physical object/relic.
The search for significance really is remarkable. One former student told me some years ago that while here he became fascinated with Rimbaud. This kid was an English major and went on to work in tv news production. He never stuck me as much of a literary type, whatever that is, but who knows. Anyway, ten or so years after college he gets married and for his honeymoon he takes his new bride out to the edge of east africa where Rimbaud became a gun runner after he fled Paris and gave up the literary life. !
well, why not?
I can see the guy at Liverwright giving you the sem-sacred book, though, the token of approval from the distinguished, small but influential old new york publishing house, valued and value-conferring, just like a holy card from the nuns with a tiny cellophane window containing a nostril hair from Blessed Bonifacio de Cinqueterra.
I still have the fantasy that here on our shelves there must be some special books of value someday and I dream of making a list of them so David won't just toss them out when it comes time to call the dumpster---what we call here in noble new england---estate sales, auctions and yard sales.
Chuckle wickedly to see how much needlely Sisk got under your skin with his barb. I hate that sort of detective dialogue too---so clichéd by now its not even worth complaining about, but genre readers really want their genre experiences to be iron-clad or so I gather.
After the holidays it all starts to feel pretty flat and gray. Friends from Portland coming over this next weekend---she uses a service dog (crippled with polio from years ago) and they have now two other dogs, so it is a menage visit. Our cats freak out, maybe we do too!
Phil’s prompt---
Have you ever gotten into collecting rare books? It has never tempted me. I am interested in the ideas and couldn't care less about actual books. However I do have one "rare" book - a 4th printing of a 1928 book published by Horace Liveright "Dreiser on Russia." It was given to me by the owner of Liveright and the New Republic in 1970 - Gil Harrison - as a Christmas gift. I don't think I was very impressed but I hope I was polite and thanked him (even though I don't remember doing that) since it was a thoughtful gift because I was very "political" in those days - a quasi communist. But I've changed. Now I l look at the book and shake my head. Dreiser was such a 1920s modernist who tended to look at the Soviet regime thru rose-colored glasses. Stalin had not yet emerged as the blood thirsty tyrant and there were a lot of folks who were still trying to make the place into a worker's paradise, complete with new methods of education and "enlightened" laws and attitudes concerning sex.
What got me thinking about all this was a e-book that Peg bought me for Christmas: "The Forgers" by Bradford Morrow. She bought it because it was highly praised by Michael Dirda, a book critic for the Wash Post, who is a bibliomane of the highest order. The guy has read almost every edition of every book that was ever written. Truly, the man must do nothing but read all day and all night, and he loves old and rare books.
And therein lies the problem: He loves books about books and book collecting. I don't. Furthermore this is a mystery, and I'm not overly fond of mysteries. I may write novels that employ some of the traits of mysteries, but I'm never interested in the who-done-it aspect. Instead I concentrate on the settings of my stories and, of course, the interplay of the characters. I merely use the plot to describe settings and characters, which is what I told Jim Sisk. He had described my works as "wordy." I asked him what he meant - was the book too long or what? No, he replied, thriller authors had partial conversations where sentences were never finished. Aha, I told Jim, I don't try to write "thrillers" and I consciously avoid that kind of snappy-tv-cop-show-dialog. Haven't heard from Jim since then. I intended to shut him up, but I also meant what I said.
Anyway I didn't much care for this novel although I finished it, then pulled out the Dreiser book and paged thru it. I wonder what Dreiser thought in the 1930s, when Stalin went on such a killing spree, first in the Ukraine, then in the communist Party, then the generals and higher officers of his armies, and finally everyone.
So do you have any rare books? And a related question: did you ever get "radical" back in the day? Quote chairman Mao? Read Trotsky?
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abe.books listed his Dreiser for 42.50
main question--how much would your copy bring at a good
book auction! ?? how could you not have inquired into
that issue---there is the crux! have to get to bed now,
more on the morrow. bad tv has erased all mental
functioning--let's hope sleep restores a modicum - --
big winds and super cold outside too--
---------
back to Mongolian Baiti font ! must be a name given by a silicon valley backpacker
sent a few more emails to Phil --- and half-watched GH. Someone going to shoot Jerome.
What is the strange back-burner process of the mind involved so that late today I’ve decided to buy one or two pairs of Lems shoes and announce to the world, ahem, that I am hereby tweaking my barefoot, zero-drop shoe lifestyle away from Vivobarefoot and toward Lems? I’ve been looking over shoe websites, running blogs, reviews the past few days and today in Wallys while strolling and skimming stuff on the iphone I decided Lems deserves a second chance, a second try. I did wear out a pair of the original Stems and watched at a distance as the company went through becoming Lemmings and then Lems. Bio of the founder and his friends reminded me a little of Josh Walker and his Bern buddies. And the West coast, Portland/Seattle origin of Lems, out of the brain of a guy who knew nothing about making shoes, not unlike a little bit the guy in UK who first invented Vivo, all of that somehow coheres at last into a buying decision. Oh, if only the Algorithms could be privy to our inner ways of unknowing! Almost as if the process is a kind of
relaxation therapy for what is going on on the front burners of the mind and of life in general. Now, will I actually order these shoes? I do have a hefty pile of shoes right now, enough to wear out, if need be, over the next five years at minimum. So there is a obsessive component in the mix here. And maybe a mid-winter, post holiday factor, a sunlight deprivation factor. Who knows how many other factors? And not only is there this mental stuff going on but now I’m actually spending time on writing about it, getting it out and down as though it could be really important to someone else, somewhere, somehow. But I doubt that I will post this on the blog or send it to Phil. Who else? It would seem
too weird. Sort of like a private world of tech-talk, nerdy behavior, talking stats and hyper-detail junk about baseball teams or car engines, torque design and microbit transducers, or such.
Maybe it replaces writing a poem or painting. I am also thinking more too about the Copenhagen novel. Both the ongoing reading and the projected re-writing. Peters book is just dumb and worthless. Even if she has some minor-minor place in the roll-call of mystery writers.
Like trying to chat with the new young manager at Wally’s today, this Lems thing could be mid-winter loneliness too---a consumerish variant of “social media” and wanting to have some relationship with someone, even if with simply a small, winsome company with its heart in the right place with a narrow range of shoe design theory and politics I hold dear.
Now how sad is that?
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Well, I guess I can forego the continued criticism of your moral worth, which went into high gear this morning as I shoveled the walk in front of our building and dug out my car. But now, seeing as you separated your clear glass from the colored glass and cleaned your plastics, I may allow you to get into heaven someday.
Am truly impressed with your Aunt Dot's book and letter. Where did your aunt live - DC? Did she work for Adams? What's the story there? (Amazing how well I remember the entire Adams saga, For example he was from New Hampshire. But I can't remember the names of so many other people. I'm really getting bad and since Mom had Alzheimers, it worries me.)
Two shoes: I have some dim idea of a character in a book for and about young girls.
Catholics: Today is the feast of the epiphany. A woman who was in the Tunisia PC with me and some guys I regularly join for dinner has pushed her way into our little male group. In Tunisia she taught in a nursery school and came back to DC where she spent the rest of her life teaching English in DC high schools. For the latter I applaud her, although I think anyone who would spend a lifetime in the DC school system has to be (if black) incredibly lazy or (if white) nuts. She's white. She's also boringly feminist, boringly "literary" and boringly Catholic. Because today is the epiphany, she emailed our little group of males two poems on the subject: one by Yeats and one by Eliot. The Yeats poem was okay but the Eliot verse was typically depressing. When I replied "There's old Tom. Always cheerful. Always upbeat," she sent me a sanctimonious defense of him. She has also gotten bent out of shape when a guy in our group re-posted a study that showed religious people where more inclined to back Cheney and waterboarding than are secular people. She replied with a long email about some letter put out by the Catholic bishops. Before that, she asked me what was wrong with Dave, one of the guys in our group, who she felt is seriously mysogynistic. He isn't at all, but she sees fire where there is no smoke and loves the Catholic church, especially nuns. I wish we could keep her away from our dinners because she spoils them, but it appears we have to put up with her. And it's the Catholicism that bothers me the most. Years and years ago, when i read that Christ would spit someone out if that person was lukewarm, I knew that JC and I would never get along. I'm skeptical and lukewarm about almost everything.
So....Aunt Dot?
Bob <robert.garlitz@gmail.com>
4:31 PM (36 minutes ago)
to Jones
Man, I envy you your little dinner party group of guys and geez, I hope you can get ride of that gal who screws it all up with her intrusive whacko energy. Recognize clearly the
whole catholic schtick---esp as the babe among the guys---we had a campus minister
nun here years back who was exactly this sort of anti-guy catholic girl with lots of anti-authority guy problems just under the polite and friendly surfaces.
Dot worked for years as high level secretary--admin asst--would be the title these days
to the Chair of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Had worked her way up
after the war. Devout Republican and Catholic--the Blue Army. She and Ed Costello
lived in a small one-level apartment in the semi-circular brick house developments
in College Park, on the right just down the long slope down before Rt 1 rises up to
the UM main campus.
Last years of Ike she was dying to work in the white house and I guess cashed in some of her loyalty chips with her network of friends in govt service and got taken onto Sherman's staff. I think she was actually in the wh for a year, not much more, maybe even less, until the administration ended. She was a real charmer, life of the party, out-going and funny, our own "auntie mame" sort.
Just back from the weekly trip to the town dump and indeed I could feel our moral fiber being reconstituted by both the sub-arctic blast and the personal, artisanal delivery of house-pre-sectioned clear glass bottles from colored glass bottles, washed cans, and nearly pristine plastics ready for Ugandan recycling villages.
Well, never got into the book collecting thing at least not in any serious way. Can't help but mumble, oh, there's first edition, first printing of the Arcade paperback of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, surely that will bring over five hundred bucks these days as one looks around old bookshelves, either in-house of what used to be bookstores. Every five years now on the internet I look up Sherman Adams autobiography because I have a first-edition inscribed to my aunt Dot and with a letter from him on White House ! stationery to her inserted in the crumbling pages (hardback) but each time I look it is worth apparently the same 21.50.
Same with the Communists and lefties. I think hanging around the Catholics for too long innoculated me against that. It woulda/coulda been that had I fallen seriously in with a crowd of artsy-druggies I might have keeled over one day when young with too much booze and alcohol, or had I tried to join a commune in seattle or new mexico as I deeply envied a friend in those days who did for a year or two, then I might have gotten stung in some serious ways. But I was pretty much a cautious, cowardly goody-two shoes sort, the humble, reclusive scholar or deludedly wannabe scholar. (We were wondering aloud the other day where the "two-shoes" came from in that old phrase----haven't looked it up yet, and is it gender-specific or was it, in its day?
I did fetishize notebooks and pens and papers and such at various times. Could always fall for fancy bindings but always on new books and never on old books. Book collecting must be like relic collecting. I forget my Freud here but isn't about he noumenous being manifest in the physical object/relic.
The search for significance really is remarkable. One former student told me some years ago that while here he became fascinated with Rimbaud. This kid was an English major and went on to work in tv news production. He never stuck me as much of a literary type, whatever that is, but who knows. Anyway, ten or so years after college he gets married and for his honeymoon he takes his new bride out to the edge of east africa where Rimbaud became a gun runner after he fled Paris and gave up the literary life. !
well, why not?
I can see the guy at Liverwright giving you the sem-sacred book, though, the token of approval from the distinguished, small but influential old new york publishing house, valued and value-conferring, just like a holy card from the nuns with a tiny cellophane window containing a nostril hair from Blessed Bonifacio de Cinqueterra.
I still have the fantasy that here on our shelves there must be some special books of value someday and I dream of making a list of them so David won't just toss them out when it comes time to call the dumpster---what we call here in noble new england---estate sales, auctions and yard sales.
Chuckle wickedly to see how much needlely Sisk got under your skin with his barb. I hate that sort of detective dialogue too---so clichéd by now its not even worth complaining about, but genre readers really want their genre experiences to be iron-clad or so I gather.
After the holidays it all starts to feel pretty flat and gray. Friends from Portland coming over this next weekend---she uses a service dog (crippled with polio from years ago) and they have now two other dogs, so it is a menage visit. Our cats freak out, maybe we do too!
----
Great show by Paula Poundstone last Saturday night here at the Flying Monkey in Plymouth, NH. In her honor the final paragraph of Eric Chévillard’s wonderful book of meditations, The Crab Nebula:
And then Crab sank into silence, slowly, inexorably, vertically, he sank in and eventually disappeared from the gaze of the audience. There was some confusion among the spectators, a moment of uncertainty, of incomprehension, but they quickly settled on the only credible hypothesis: a trapdoor had opened beneath Crab’s feet--of course, there was a trapdoor concealed in the stage--and by common agreement, this symbolic burial of the character, replacing the fall of the curtain or the sudden blackout that traditionally signifies the end of a show, was in itself worth the price of admission; with one blow it erased the long days of boredom that had preceded it. (Applause.)
Weds Jan 7 3:40 Colin and Va on the piano. Day off. Chipotle (pretty good lime cilantro sauce). Josivipici novel arrived. Maybe a better copy base than poor Eliz Peters? No specs in yet at Vision Shoppe. Lindberg takes off whole month. Everything is Fedex from Denmark. Who is the Sales Rep though? Concord has a street remodeling coming up---gross, a federal grant for it. NH Primary lobby group I suspect.
Massacre in Paris this morning at the satire magazine office.
Chuckled at this on Kate Binder’s Facebook post---what happens when Myers-Briggs types make a new year’s resolution---
INFP
I resolve to stop falling in love with the idea of people and being disappointed when their reality does not match up.
Outcome: Explains this resolution in a heartfelt letter to their love interest, who they just know will understand.
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carmine • 5 days ago
I'm INFP, and I *just* (like a few weeks ago) wrote a heartfelt letter to a romantic interest who, in reality, fell short of the idea I had of him. I don't know whether to be happy I'm not the only one who does this, or freaked out by how accurate this is.
17 • Reply•Share ›
Avatar
Annisa carmine • 4 days ago
Caught me redhanded as well. In fact, I just did this few days ago. Both shocked and embarassed by the accuracy... at least I know I'm not alone!
3 • Reply•Share ›
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BrynChagrin carmine • 4 days ago
Dead-on. Embarrassing and hilarious. You're not the only lovelorn INFP out there!
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Avatar
Lucy carmine • 5 days ago
I'm an INFP too and did the exact same thing about a year ago! I can't help but laugh at how weird this is. What a somewhat disturbing but hilarious truth.
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today in the Copenhagen Post --
Welcome to Drunkenhagen!
One in five Copenhageners has an alcohol dependency problem
So much for Happy Happy Denmark !
Thurday deep twilight 5:15 pm
Email from Dave earlier saying school was not canceled, all normal. City quiet and tense.
We did a southern tour to get five degrees of warmer weather and walk in Target in Concord, lunch at Panera, and Target again in Hooksett.
-12 degrees this morning when we woke! Furnace holding up. Feels warmer now, maybe 16 outside. Heat pumps seemed to work too--high winds last night.
Monday night Jan 12
Asked Dave if Emma sensed anything about the events in Paris this week. Charlie Hebdo and huge march on Sunday. Wait to see what he says.
emails
to Jess
fine surprise to get your package today. Neither of
us guessed what it would be. Marmalade! Thanks
for it.
Visitors Sat and Sunday, friends from Portland and
their three ! huge dogs. Lab, Labrapoodle and Golden
Retriever. Two of them are service dogs for Barbara,
Va's childhood friend who got polio when she was
about 12. Therapist in the prisons. Her 71st birthday
and we got her to go swimming over at the pool we
use and she enjoyed it.
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from Phil
What? You want our exquisite leaders to give up their weekend? It may have snowed here in DC earlier in the week but the course had been cleared and Sunday tee times had been set. I mean, Bob, what were you thinking? What are your priorities?
Yeah, I think the New Rep is fucked.
No, aint heading for College Park. Am planning to move into Peg's house and then, with luck, we will buy a larger house where we can live more separate lives. (It's women who are always yapping about "sharing." I can't recall any guy enthusing about "sharing" or even mentioning it. And why do women want to "share"? They don't. They want to hear what a male says, then criticize it. Remember the saying you sent to me years ago? "If a man says something where no woman can hear him, is he still wrong?" I now have a tee shirt with that saying on it.
BTW. I am going back through my diaries from past years and found another good comment that you sent me in December of 2005. It is from an Austrian writer named Karl Knaus (1874-1936) who wrote: "Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work."
We both got a good laugh out of that one.
---------
Yesterday after B & E left (lunch at CMan in Ashland, quite good) we went to the Divine Siren concert at Congr Ch. Dan Perkins group. Not thrilled by it this time. May have been too tired.
Slack Monday. Last of xmas decorations put away.
Even slacker Wednesday. Day off. Ate at El Charro in Lincoln to check it out. Going there Friday with Dick and Anne H. Walked through the sad old mill building, even more derelict than ever before. Came home by 2 and napped. Woke with sense that maybe I have a touch of flu. Probably the Melatonin I took last night. Not a good idea after all. Never has been before, either. Barb takes it and Greg takes it---two therapists who live in Portland. Colin and Va playing downstairs now.
Finished the Copenhagen Connection mystery novel by Elizabeth Peters. Such a silly waste of reading time. And yet I continued on, wondering all the while if I could really try to imitate it or somehow use it. A love story is the real heart of it--as dumb as any tv show.
Slack Thursday Jan 15 Early. An extra hour before going to the Refresh. Ended the cheap thriller novel and should dig--dig, dig, dig and plow into phil’s book about vietnam but why am I pausing?? It is dense and heavy---I am calling him in private my friend Joseph Conrad. Who writes novels like this these days?
I’ve started Hotel Andromeda because I like the title so much and have been curious a good while about this big british star of my generation that no one here has heard of--Gabriel Josipovici. Not sure if anyone here has heard of him. Should ask Phil. For some reason I associate him with Lars Iyer. Must be via the lit blogs and probably Blanchot.
And Wittgenstein. Have not bought Iyer’s last in the trilogy, W Jr because I tired of being envious of his so very clever philosophico-schtick.
Another reason I should “copy” the Copenhagen thriller---I don’t envy it and don’t admire it. Wonder if anyone on Goodreads still does? Sure enough. Fans be fans forever and I wonder if now all the more so since the web can keep everything alive for so much longer but that is no doubt another misconception fostered by this illusory immediacy.
Phil’s detail is really quite amazing. I haven’t read any Vietnam novels so I’m easily impressed but it sounds real and convincing and impressive for both the accuracy and the felt sense of what it must have been like. I guess I’m still puzzled as to why he wrote it, but remember his one work history I know about is the lobbyist for county governments, whatever that was, so there must be some node in his personality that likes giving a full and complete report on things and figuring things out, puzzling out the web of connections that make up a whole tale. Plus the detective investigation into the covered-up crime. If any of that had any personal relevance for him, I don’t really know about it. I did finally wonder if I am portrayed in the book in any slight way? Just wondered that. Slow learner. Or Sitter?
Glad I just found this on Iyer’s site---
melancholy, the contemplation of the movement of misfortune, has nothing in common with the wish to die. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so at the level of art, where it is anything but reactive or reactionary. When, with rigid gaze, [melancholy] goes over again just how things could have happened, it becomes clear that the dynamic of inconsolability and that of knowledge are identical in their execution. The description of misfortune includes within itself the possibility of its own overcoming.
Sebald, untranslated foreword to a volume of his own essays
January 15, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
also news of the day--Randall Hoytt left UConn and is now on the media arts faculty of Keen State College. Twelve years in Connecticut. Holy Cow, what a strange and fascinating bit of news.
also from Iyer, from Nietzsche --maybe there is hope for me! ha
The best author. - The best author will be he who is ashamed to become a writer. ----Nietzsche, from Human All Too Human
But he might not approve of merely copying another book as a version of “writing.”
Not that we’ve done that yet.
Dinner with Dick and Anne Hunnewell this evening at El Charro.
Anne showed me that our tv does have Amazon video! who knew. Now
watching about to Murdoch’s Mysteries.
Saturday 17th night
Walking at the Target in Hooksett, lunch in Concord, walking in Lowe’s.
6000 steps on V’s pedometer. TV couple buy a place in San Miguel. Nancy and Bob are there now. Printing out photo of the kids to put in the new frames we bought.
Sunday almost 4 pm official snow day here--no going out to walk. Freezing rain and rain, streets look quite slushy and icy. Fingers crossed on power. Big tv night. Tempted to watch Budapest Hotel on the airbook but could/should dig into Phil’s novel more. Carrot on a stick approach maybe.
Monday Jan 19th
MLK day. We were late to the pool, 10:15 but had it to ourselves and just as we left a bunch of people arrived, families from CT and MA.
Driveway a solid sheet of ice. Warmer today but not enough to loosen the ice that much. Walked a bit too.
Girls disappointing last night but Grantchester on Masterpiece Mystery is very good. Robson Green and James Norton---older-younger detective team, like the older Inspector Lewis team. This time Norton is really a priest. Retro in being just after WWII and everyone is recoverying. At the same time this weekend we began to watch Happy Valley in which Norton plays the really bad guy, hardened criminal who raped the sister of the heroine-star who is the cop.
Just emailed Phil this genius post---
How much has the incidence of fragging dropped between Vietnam and now, our two recent wars? I assume a lot since I've not heard of it lately. And I assume it is the difference between the draft and the "professional" military. But I wonder.
Your novel has me thinking dangerously big thoughts again. Vietnam is the last patriarchist war---end of the five thousand year era.
I think of Conrad and Melville in the sense of men in group behavior and men in war. I had not thought of heart of darkness at first but of course that is logica. It was at first more just that sense of the inner psychology of men working things out together---"patriarachist" projects in effect---whaling, sailing, corporate capitalism, war.
Vietnam was the end of it all. Your novel, all novels about this written by guys our age are the last of this era.
Iraq and Afghanistan are the First Feminist Wars--i.e. after late 20thC American Feminism has its rise to power. Hope I don't sound like a St Louis bishop, but seriously, the soldiers in these two ten+ years of post-9/11 wars were raised by mothers who are feminist and post-feminist.
So in these two wars, I and A, the enemy is the burqa. The West is most fearful that women will be re-wrapped in the old patriarchist "protections." And the rights of girls to education from birth onward has been consciously invoked by the West in Afgh and, after Charlie Hebdo, we can see it symbolizes, the rights of women, the whole Western legacy of the Enlightenment.
The lost young men in today's West who have no where to go can be recruited into jihad squads because they fear the "loss of the burqa" even more than women fear it being imposed.
Your phrase "chain of command" is the key here. Everyone hungers most for a secure identity within a secure structure of order.
Why didn't the Jews of Europe fight back against the maneuvers at the beginning of the Nazi pogroms and transportations, laws etc? Fear and trauma of course, disbelief and powerlessness. Are these the answers given?? But at the heart is the preference for being secure within the identity structure, being true to the core values of the group. So the Nazis succeeded so well and so quickly, like any genocide I guess, because like the Hutus and the Tutsis, the pitch between the two groups is so perfectly defined for each.
Did you see new pbs mystery last night? Grantchester. Pretty good.
I finally watched by myself the whole of Grand Budapest Hotel. I hope it sweeps the Oscars, it is brilliant. Makes me curious to read one of Zweig's books.
Monday night
Penned an opening two pages.
Today is MLK fifty years on & I’m reading about King in ’68 in Phil’s novel--page 151 not yet 50 yrs -- 46 Maybe Selma is 50?
Tuesday night
great quotes from Cesar Pavese, journals, posted on Spurious
Love is the cheapest of religions.
In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life.
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery. “
He has others that I posted to Larry Inchausti and he liked them. Much better than Zizek (for heaven’s sake!).
Pavese comments on suicide. Ethan Paquin’s friend just killed himself and I thought I could send these words to him but it would be intrusive. Don’t know him much these days, nor the friend at all.
WEDS night Jan 21
Realized that I demonstrated well how poorly even I practice what I preach. I thought my brilliant tweet would be seconded by lots of influential people on Twitter---K Rove’s gang behind the attack on Cosby. Because ---- it vaguely follows the pattern of the attack on Clinton of twenty years ago.
At Phil’s prompting I read the new yorker article about the book on gay life in late 19th C Germany and emailed him that the final paragraph of the article is the most important. Alex Ross praises the work of doctor Magnus Hirschfeld. Whereas Freud had taken the road of abstract, general theory, “grandly systematic in his thinking,” Hirschfeld was “messily empirical.” Freud had the greater impact, for a long while, but Hirschfeld “insisted on the idiosyncrasy of sexual identity, resisting any attempt to press men and women into fixed categories. To Hirschfeld, gender [and why not identity in general?] was an unstable, fluctuating entity; the male and the female were “abstractions, invented extremes.”
So, a person like Hirschfeld would say to my great tweet today---well, you love finding real and imaginary analogies, but as with all other instances of human behavior, the situation around Cosby today has nothing to do with Clinton in years past.
But . . . . true as that may be, how on earth do we ever manage to write history at all?? A truly or radically empiricist thinker would never really be capable of writing a convincing history of anything, not even of her own life or the life of someone else. ?
second note after this one above to Phil
So Ross's piece and the book he reviews do sound fascinating and one could only wish the Hirschfelds of the world could be as influential as the Freuds. Freud had the unfair advantage of being a pretty good writer, apart from the status of his quality of thought.
Lots of this has been a thread of discussion in literary analysis over the last thirty years. In fact I've thought that your novel could be fodder for a certain kind of narrow minded grad student of about twenty years ago when the dogmas of the moment were holding great sway. Studies on writers went through a gay phase twenty years ago when the queer studies people were having their fifteen minutes of "influence" (mainly in obscure grad school publications) and proving that many, nay hundreds, of dead male writers were "really" gay or near-gay. Freud and the sociologists did promote that whole style of liberal thought whereby suspicion of what was said was the main objective and ferreting out the underlying, unconscious, subconscious etc etc drives and motives and myths was the main work of all analysis. Psycho, literary, historical, sociological. I think it was reading Lukacs years after college that really helped me get farther and farther away from all that, including Burke himself, because Lukacs is the real historian, full of his own pet topics and sometimes crazy interpretations and yet not at all prone to endorse or follow any grand schemes of systematic thought. But again, I'm sure he did, in the sense that schools of how to do history are as inevitable as in every other form of thought. Assumptions, tones, styles of sensibility, etc etc.
Which means again that the details indeed of the book Ross reviews are incredibly fascinating in the turns and counter-turns found in the minutiae of acts and events and approaches.
And how quickly and completely whole eras and moments in history are forgotten, erased, reshaped.
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can’t resist sending to Feeny, note to read the article. He had just told me to look at the Teju Cole piece so I know he gets the magazine.
Day in Concord today. New Danish glasses. Wonderful to see without any halo or haze or reflection glare---lenscrafter’s “melted” my other pair a wee and ruined the surface of the lens. Also this is the new prescription. And Virginia liked the new look right away. Very happy she did.
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Phil replies
I really like your question "and why not identity in general?" That goes to the heart of the matter.
To answer your final question: I'm a 90% relativist. There are objective facts. Hitler led Germany for 13 years. A bullet can kill people. My parents are dead. But most of what we think and say is just opinion although "thinkers" tend to elevate their opinions to the level of fact. (And Peg found that students at Hood College had absolutely no ability to see the difference between a fact and an opinion. She asked one class to come up with a fact. "It's hot outside," said one student. "No," Peg had to say. "That's an opinion. Someone from Saudi Arabia might not think it's hot at all.) Anyway, back to your question, I suppose there needs to be a lot of different histories written before we get a handle on...not exactly what happened but how and why it happened. However, as this book reveals, sometimes we also need new histories just to unearth the facts - what the hell happened. The facts are that Hirchfield lived and had an effect, but we will need more histories to get a handle on the how and why and the dimensions of his effect. And still more histories to know find out about all the other things that went on in Germany over those hundred-plus years that had no damn bearing on major politics nor led to Hitler, but involved Germans. And the danger is that most histories, as you point out, will just follow popular ideas. Which is why most post WWII histories of Germany are, in some way, built upon Hitler rather than, say, Hirschfield.
As for Germans "inventing" homosexuality my opinion is that the activism for defendinghomosexuals got started in Germany because of the effect of Luther who had to nail up his 99 theses. That tradition certainly didn't exist in France or Italy or Russia. At least as far as I know. But I think the need to publicize one's beliefs came with Lutheranism.
So much for my opinions.
BTW, I recommended the book and review to a gay friend and he's going to suggest it to his book group in Baltimore.
P
PS. Have you seen the flim "Birdman"? One thing it does it point out the stupidity of internet celebrity. Mindless! And probably dangerous at some point.
PPS You should feel good about trying to nail Karl Rove. He deserves it
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I still have Chevillard’s The Crab Nebula on the desk. Reminds me of how much seems to have happened since I finished reading it. Feels like ages ago. Before Christmas I suppose. Am reading Phil’s book and Patrick Melrose back and forth this evening. The big party scene with Princess Margaret in St. Aubyn. Have not added anything to my ms but of course the new glasses demonstrate without hesitation that the character should be named not Rosenberg but Lindberg. Now instead of “Margaret” what should I use? Christine is in place of Christian, so far.
And “Margaret” is of course Julien.
Thursday night
Alex Ross’s piece in the new yorker prompts further thought as to how someone like Burke could take the range of opinions and positions on the topic and spread out a late 19th C spectrum of thought study, what happened to German Romanticism and Idealism a century after the first efflorescence and use it to study what has happened since, there and elsewhere, in later periods (the 60s in the US and West). Rather than Beachy’s history of a “modern identity” one wishes the book had been about Hirschfeld and his open and complex approach to the fluidity of identity. Beachy works within the confines of his generation’s doctrines and perhaps Ross tries to hint this with his closing paragraph.
Spurious is posting worthy items nearly every day now. Makes me want to see the next book.
“He felt the usual panic about needing to be elsewhere, . . . .” 416
in St Aubyn’s Some Hope (in the big edition, pink spine).
Amazing set of reflections 414ff. Upsetting in their way even though in a novel. St Aubyn nails so many things about “the maze” of family feelings. Would go with Teddy Thompson’s new song.
Lindberg glasses featured in the new issue of Wallpaper that arrived today. Another prize. But mine don’t quite feel comfortable yet. Not sure why. As light as they could possibly be and seem perfectly perfect. Just don’t rest on both ears and nose quite right. Adjustment period or sinus/skin sensitivities? Or just “newness” as something to worry about?
Still on Phil’s novel. At a good place but something fishy going on with David Powell’s family life all of a sudden front and center. Christmas holidays and suspicious cheer and warmth.
Friday morning Jan 23
Phil’s novel quite intense last night. Killer of an ending. Strains credibility, maybe, but really just intensifies our uncertainties and doubts and opens up vistas of dismay. Painful and troubling and you wonder if this is indeed art and great tragedy in its ways. Death of a Salesman’s got nuttin’ on this. Want to give it a day or two to get some space and distance on it before trying to write and post a review on Amazon.
“This is a story in which secrets operate as engines of ecstasy.” wow
what a great line. George Prochnik in his Intro to Zweig’s Confusion. He says the German might better be translated as Emotional Maelstrom.
Tempted to use the line to kick off a review of Phil’s book but I think I’ll wait. Feeling dizzy right now and wondering if I’m overdoing coffee these days. Zweig’s novel about the professor sounds like one I might have known about years ago but maybe am bettering off knowing about now that I’m out of the whole game.
“Empathetic confusion suffuses his work.” Another powerful line.
In the book itself, Zweig begins by talking about the the “secret experienced along” and cites Stendahl on the topic. Now this is exactly, more or less, what I was going to have my narrator in Hotel Courier, or whatever I want to call it, talk about. My narrator has retired from being a therapist and wants nothing more to do with human storytelling, he wants only to be a Courier, because what people want more than confession is to hold on to their secrets, or to not really ever know what their secrets are, to experience that impossibility---“No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.” 10
Am I dizzy from taking P’au D’Arco for the first time in a good while? Maybe. I used to take it and as I recall it does, can, produce this sort of dizziness. Yes--just looked up side effects and now I recall that I stopped taking it years ago precisely because the safety of it is not fully known. So here it is---dumbo that I be---replicating earlier states of self-treatment for nothing (anxiety about being--about “the impenetrability in every human life of the true core of being”) and am sure it combines with aspirin and St John’s Wort to give me this strange reaction. Time for a chunk of cheese to bottom out the blood stream. St Johns W, Pau, caffeine, and aspirin. Oops.
No wonder.
Another note of wonder: I found that Zweig had arrived yesterday but I hadn’t realized it, along with another book by Josipovici, and
damn, right on the back cover of the NYRB reprint of Zweig is a quote by Gabriel J saying this is the quintessential book about the heart of teaching!
“I’ve always been a lover of silence, and this love is bound up with my passion for books. The writer Stefan Zweig once defined a book as a “handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.” --Prochnik on the Amazon page for his book on Zweig.
Saturday night Claude Senninger finally got in touch today. Va just finished talking with her.
Last night on campus The Sound of Music. Quite good. Wonderful lead singers, cast of thousands but this time mostly campus women as nuns and boy were they loving that. Julier Bernier gave Va a special hello and we had to do a doubletake to see who it was. This was beforehand when we went back toward the elevator to find the bathroom.
great email from Inchausti -- on Friday
OK, Bob, after much reflection on retirement, death, Pussy Riot, my course on Beat Generation Writers (largely attended by future Christian engineers upset to find out Allen Ginsgerg was a homosexual!), the birth of my Grandchild et al, I think I have finally arrived at the narrative I have to tell--it could be fiction or non-fiction--trending toward non-fiction--- but novelistic, episodic, confessional, and reflective.
Let me know what you think: My first thought was to collected all the fragments of the avant-garde postmodern Christians I admire--Latour, Girard, Illich, Lingis, Zizek, maybe even sneak Sloterdijk into the mix, and put together a series of their best quotes followed by my own interpretation and linking--sort of what Norman O. Brown did in Love's Body and Adorno does in Moralia Minima, Merton in Conjectures,--or Kierkegaard in his Fragments.
Then it hit me: why not tell the story of my own personal journey from a student taken by the cultural/intellectual revolution of the late sixties a retired professor wanting to write such a book as ta way of rescuing--if only for himself-- a life in and if IDEAS. In other words, the story of a Teacher/Professor who got into higher education in its wonder years and has watched over the course of a lifetime its tragic fall into a corporate information distribution system and labour training facility--along the way I could tell the stories of all my friends who also lived through this decline--with various results. I would begin with the story of my neighbor James Culbertson who worked for the Rand Corporation. His entire career was dedicated to figuring out how to get computers--not only to think but--to possess awareness! He wanted to engineer computers with the capacity for boredom! And believed he had discovered the way!
Now all my bored students want to turn themselves into computers without awareness--or rather--the educational system is now re-designing itself to accomplish this goal--and we are all helpless in the face of it. Intellectual decline in academe CONTINUES as culture migrates to the fringes--EXPRESSED in the lives of intellectual nomads like Zizek and retirees like Bob Garlitz! I may make you THE Neal Cassady in my army of Neal Cassady's-- wandering thinkers and spiritual aspirants incapable of assimilating into either the system nor the new candy coated new age.
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moi ! as Neal Cassady---I am flattered of course and amused! Ha!
Phil wanted to know more about him. Nicholas replies today that culture is always on the fringe--yes. Feeny is inspired.
A prophet. This is my truth. I feel so much better about life right now. I do not want to be useful. I want to be inspirational.
Bob
Sent from my iPhone
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Dear Bob,
I expect genuine culture has always been at the fringes - think of Lao Tzu riding on his oxen over the border or Confucius futilely trying to persuade rulers to listen to him - yet their products (however distorted) filter in and through, leavening reality sufficiently, so we can keep on keeping on - and, again at the fringes, probably under the trees or sipping cappuccino at the roadside cafe or dancing samba in a late night dive, have moments of zestful, fun, searing illumination!
Best wishes, Nicholas
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email to Donald and Phil
I now take time from
my busy schedule to give you the following passage for your delight this snowy weekend:
"Patrick walked down towards the first floor, the hubub of the party growing louder as he descended past portraits by Lely and Lawrence and even a pair, dominating the first-floor landing, by Reynolds. The prodigious complacency which the Gravesend genes had carried from generation to generation, without the usual interludes of madness, diffidence or distinction, had defied the skills of all these painters, and, despite their celebrity, none of them had been able to make anything appealing out of the drooping eyelids and idiotically arrogant expressions of their sitters."
---Edward St Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels, 422.
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Have gone a few pages more too into Zweig’s Confusion. By page 30 the first passionate rapture about Shakespeare and his age as an erruption of sublime energy has filled the young narrator with his first spiritual awakening. Similar really to my experience with Meyer Abrams talking about Wordsworth that first fall at LaSalle when they took us for that lecture out to Haverford College.
Wow, he is still alive at now 102, 100 in 2012. Professor at Cornell so he must have been visiting Haverford. This would have been in 1963, fall. I was spellbound listening to him and he was I think silver-haired then. Born in 1912, he was fifty-one. I always thought Mirror and Lamp was dissertation--yes, it was, his harvard senior thesis also got published before that. This is all on the cornell website.
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email to Larry I
Larry
Full encouragement to steam right ahead with your project. It is no doubt the highest honor of my career to be grouped into your corral, no your army, of Cassady's! I think you're right onto the necessary and most desirable notion there of weaving the telling quotations within your own tale of awakening and wandering.
My British friend Nicholas reminds me that true culture has always seemed a fringe activity and achievement. Probably he is right but he's never been inside the contemporary university as a professor who has to go from adulation through mild attention and on into that good night of the farewell chocolate sheetcake with whiter than white icing inscribed by the baker's decorating cone with "Good Luck in Your Retirement." Coffee was free too, no doubt, California is not one to skrimp when it comes to sending admired profs into the higher pasteurs.
M H Abrams is still going! at, now, 102. Found a site on Cornell that he celebrated 100 two years ago and published a new volume of essays. Wow.
Had forgotten that Zizek is nearly your contemporary in age! Where does he live these days and teach? Switzerland? Four or five Operas have been commissioned in London I think based on is works! Operas! (wikipedia the source)
Lars Iyer's book you should look at for your opus. Wittengenstein Jr. Have you read any of him? What about Gabriel Josipovici?
He's got a quote on the back of this book by S Zweig saying it is the quintessential account of the heart of teaching. Zweig's Confused. I can see what he means but I'll spoiler it for you by saying that the tale of the student's awakening into intellectual pursuit is entwined with a very 1927 account of the very closeted gay professor. So that qualifies it somewhat for our times. But it raises the similar question---has Zizek opined on the erotics of teaching? Has anyone, memorably, in our time without any strand remaining from the old fashioned closeted and uncloseted politics? Iyer is very funny on all of this, indirectly, and he captures the voices of every one of your grad students as they talked about you in their coffee shops. Take a look at him. "Witt Jr" is the name they give their philosophy prof.
His books are all about the decay and decline of all things higher ed, too. In UK but here as well.
1700 private jets landed in Davos last week, says John Stewart. Why can't each trillionaire adopt a small nation, fund a new university of humanists only?
Bob
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Va’s got acold, canceled going to book group.
Tuesday night Jan 27
Grateful for the snow day, a day of light, fine snow, maybe six inches, maybe less. Worcester and Boston got socked. Not NY.
Found this line in a review at Quarterly C by Jordan Anderson of Le Tellier’s Enough About Love. “In the end, they combine to make a promising but frustrating reading experience. “ I had made it to page 35 and after I found that review from 2011 I said, ok, that’s it, enough already with Enough. Oulipo he explained is a group of mathematician-writers. Aaarrgghh. Why had I never quite realized that----even when I sat through those boring meetings with the student who was keen on the group a few years back---the great poet’s brother-in-law.
Speaking of, the other former poet, Ethan P, posts photos of his trek up the mountains in Ecuador. His climbing partner took sick and went home early---and killed himself! Poor guy. Don’t know how they knew each other, how much. E posts only cryptic lines on facebook, today’s for instance and they creep me out somehow and I don’t want to pursue the “chat” any further on such a location.
His comment “ Bob my partner went home ill, so I continued on with two Basque climbers with whom I became close - despite none of us knowing the others' languages, heh.” “became close” means what exactly in mountain climber lingo? and on websites what does it mean to say “heh”? An emphasis marker like “gee” I suppose. Further confirms my long-held antipathy towards mountain climbers and former poets. As much as I want to stay tuned to Ethan’s world, but then maybe I don’t. It has always been way beyond my ken.
Simple google search finds that Helman had a website devoted to climbing High points, county by county. Obsessive for sure. PhD in the sciences and note that both his parents are “observant Jews” and that this has influenced his ethical and moral outlook on life.
So sad. His friend Scott Surgent posted a memorial on that site and this is part of it.
Adam's claim to fame was being the second person ever to hike, climb and visit every single one of the county highpoints of the Western United States. This project consumed him for over 12 years, completing it in 2012. He authored two books: on Prominence and of his county highpointing project. I own copies of both, and they are a fantastic memento to remember him by. For a man who stood about 5-3 and weighed about 110 pounds, he was truly larger than life.
Happy trails, "up there"!
Speaking of, Rupert has a new book out and I will buy a copy.
Guardian had a good piece debunking Denmark and all of Scandinavia the other day. Debunking one of those fine old words.
Auschwitz on the evening news. Survivors visiting. A completely European form of horror. Elsewhere it is done in the usual savage, warfare-primitive ways. Europe perfected itself according to the codes of bourgeois class structure, everyone wants to stay in line, do what they are told, fit into where they are meant to fit. No wild west, no frontier, no rugged individualism, no white whales to fight, no fist-shaking at the cosmic order of things, no open road, no on the road, no re-inventions over and over, no mississippi con men, no epic civil war, no racist slave struggle for freedom, no freedom, no human rights written in the written constitution, no origin myth about democracy. No Emancipation rhetoric, no new world. Landscape full of ruins, memories long, horrors of wars that reach way back, distrust of every neighbor, ancient wrongs, oppressions, hierarchy enforced as heavily as possible. You do what you are told, you are lucky to have this, to be where you are and have what you have. Forget wanting that or this.
Finished St Aubyn’s Some Hope. Beautiful closing image of the swans on the pewter lake in the snowy, night fog.
Wednesday morning Jan 28 Nice dawn this morning. Now about 11:30. Finished turbotax maybe. Owe about 6k. Could put in mortgage but don’t think it will do anything. Waiting to see if govt sends a form to file on those HH bonds. If not, woo hoo the niceities of money. Mysteries. We cashed those out and they paid for the house siding and two big trips to Spain and France last year. I think. We’ll see. Va seems more over her cold. Goes to new doctor after lunch. Arsenault.
Michelmore essay on Josipovici’s modernism novel. “The literary novel has itself become a genre and the room for manoeuvre pitifully limited.” Hence Iyer calling his dialogues “novels.” etc I guess. Note to self, google Michelmore on Knausgaard to see what he says there. But I can guess.
Meanwhile, the slogan that seems to be the take away from Michelmore on Josipovici is that fiction now seeks to, can provide us with, revealing “loss without nostalgia and potential without self-deceit.”
Hmm. Ok. If you say so. Is that it? Abrams new book is about poems, The Fourth Dimension. Forward by Bloom. Suppose I should buy it just because. Hmmm.
End of the month Achievement: just did second 5 min rowing in one day. A “resolution” that has been bouncing around in the brain pan for a good while now. Whoopee
Could also write a book pretty much like the one Inchausti imagines himself writing. Except where he wants to layer in tons of quotations from the thinkers he’s keen on, would I layer in similar but other stuff too, all the responses to buildings and places. And deeper now into Hotel Andromeda I wonder if I imitated that novel or used it as a very easy template, what would I put in place of Cornell? Thoughts on architecture, even on the photos that show up on the sites each day of new buildings all over the world. Architectural photography as an escape and virtual fantasy of life as it will be in the stunning emptiness of these future photos.
THURSDAY early night Day off that was nice because of bright sunshine on the high white snow piles in Concord and all over the landscape. Got my new glasses better fitted and the car freshly washed and oiled. Tires were indeed down to 29 psi and they should have been 36. Not called Idiot Lights for nothing. Ate at the Live Juice place. Took lots of selfies. Didn’t find copy of Grandes Meaulnes which I found out about last night in Andromeda and thought I had to get it at once and read it at once because among other things it is about this Lost estate, this grand lost house and probably a high modernist landmark work in French literature. Discovery another literature is exciting and I realize how much has been blocked out, ignored, sheer ignorance of the English major. Philosophy wannabe. Iyer’s WJr keeping me going in that realm. Josipovici’s novel mentioned it or maybe essay about him by Michelmore.
Lowiss Alexa confirmed my suspicion that Randy Hoyt must have had some sort of crash to have left UConn and come up to Keene.
Her wording is worth noting--on facebk.
Well I don't know the details really. He sort of decompensated and things fell apart in his life in a big way and he needed to re-locate. You can message him on Facebook. I'm sure he would be open to u about it. Are u FB friends with him? Friend him.
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Iyer’s WJr Inchausti loved it. I’m still in it. At Doyle, the supernumerary nipple.
Friday almost 3. We’ve booked the Sto Domingo trip.
Jim called late this morning. Couldn’t get his email to get to me, it was smelling like an old mackerel, wouldn’t be bitch slapped by it anymore. Reponse it is to my post about being named an honorary Neal Cassady by Larry.
Hey, Bob,
Neal Cassaday redux! No, I can’t say that; your lifespans have overlapped too much for you to be an avatar of Neal. But it’s a great way to think about you, old friend. And I will.
And of course I’m wondering if I ought to be examining my life (we know what one unexamined is worth), wondering what role or namesake would be apt for me in your friend’s fascinating proposal. Errant, carousing, Chaucerian monk? (Nope, not enough colourful (a respectful nod to your buddy) a past for that. And these days, days my sails are too ragged and hull too leaky (alas!) for any posturing as a a retired buccaneer. And burnt-out writer won’t do, at least until I get a couple more publications.
So, maybe I shouldn’t try for a role. Though maybe as a wannabe hermit-monk, albeit with a taste for vodka matinins? Better let you assign me one, friend. You know me well.
I’m thinking that you’re a droll bodhisattva, equipped to move beyond the temporal sphere, but still too in love with humans' vagaries to tear yourself away. And so you’re hanging around, doing good, making people deeper and dearer and more at ease.
Wait! have I blown your cover? But of course you won’t admit it. Real bodhisattvas never would! Though admitting it with a laugh would be just as good a cover—I’d think you too proudful to have achieved samadhi.
But I’m not fooled! I’ll carefully protect your cover, however, even while knowing the truth. You’re just too valuable to all of us, and I want you at least to outlast me.
So hang on, bodhi, and keep on blessing us who are still crawling up the slope.
Has Virginia figured out that she’s sharing life with an Eastern saint?
Much love,
Jim
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"Well hello aging Bob this is angie(?). Gimme a call on this end who's been trying to respond to that most interesting Email you sent me repeatedly I've tried for oh gosh I guess a week or so and better and it keeps flapping back right into my face like a last few times and-stuff(?) like a that-macro-slapping-the-across-the-face(?). So enough of this [...] slapping. I know I've been sending it to Robert GUEZ at Delphia dot net. If that is wrong old to please correct my friend because I wanna get this thing away from me and I'm sick of this Macro taste in my mouth. commission(?) a broken tooth too. So hope to hear from you one way or the other(?). If you like your phone that's fine of course and that is area code 607."
... more. Please listen to your voicemail for the remainder of this message.
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It was fun talking with him. Suggested we find a way to visit this spring
Phil and Va exchanged about the crime story in Nykr about Albuquerque.
Hi Virginia,
I don't know if you're still connected to A'que but, if so, the current NYer mag has a really hair raising story about how trigger happy the city's police are. Really scary. You get the feeling that jaywalking may get you shot.
By the way, I'm not sure if I ever told you that, when I was about 20, I did a little acting at a summer stock theater at Deep Creek Lake in the county west of Cumberland. The theater was owned and run by the head of the drama department at the U of New Mexico. His name was Gene Yell, and every summer he brought some drama students east with him and also lured some professionals from New York and finally hired a few local folks, including me for parts of three summers.
Cheers,
Phil
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me to Phil
Hi
Friend near Albany has a manuscript to place somewhere
and he told me his ploy for getting past the guardians at the
gate which seems to have had some effect, so far.
He found the phone number on the website of the exec in
charge of mss submissions and phone on a Saturday in order
to get voice message. He gave his spiel even bringing in
his age, 76, and his Parkinsons and his fond hope to have
a clear mind such as you dear editor see the book into
print and that he had earlier sent a ms that had gotten lost
etc. Four or five min message, maybe less?
Monday morning he gets a phone call from a woman at the editorial house (Paulist, Catholic, but old and good). She
says nothing about the message but treats him as already
"onboard" and tells him who to send the ms to so it gets
proper attention. He did, waiting to hear.
Whether it is as clever and successful as he is hoping remains to be seen. But we agreed that writers need to be utterly
shameless in these things.
He also accused me of having been a wannabe hermit-monk, albeit with a taste for vodka matininis. We were at LaSalle C years ago.
Snow not so bad today. Seems stopped now. Went to the dump as usual
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Hey since Lerner used a clock time for a title. I could use a Font! Courier 12pt
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Now we will barrel through the “storm” outside and go walk at Wally’s.
posted this review of WittJr even before I am finished----on amazon
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.
Sat Morning Off to Pheasant Lane
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.
Just wrote it. Sounds great right now. Five second wonder. Out the door now.
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