July 2014

july 2014

Tuesday

I was ecstatic to read this “It was the voice of the writer, he insisted, that was the first and definitive thing. I had, around this time, seen a van-Gogh exhibition, paintings of his and his contemporaries discussed in his own words, and was struck by his saying, in a letter to his brother, What is alive in art, and eternally alive, is in the first place the painter and in the second place the picture.  Phelps would agree.”  344   Phelps-Salter

I came to this conviction somewhere over the past five or ten years.  I might be in fact why I came to like travel lit books over thirty years ago---without knowing why.  I liked the voice of the writer, if I did, no matter what events he described, or where she was, or what meaning the trip had for him or for me.  It is the voice we read for. 

so hot and humid not worth trying to do anything but breathe.  Va swam with Kathie this morning.  Barbara Thierry and her son-in-law to be (perhaps) Sam stopped by to look at the garden work Va would like to have done.  Kirsten Land has not been around that we know but I found one of her big tools in the grass.  Wonder what’s going on with her? 

No arrest yet in the Rumney murder.  Strange. 

Weds  night  super hot day.  Put in the air conditioner all by myself.  Don’t seem to have busted a gut.  Eye doctors in the morning for both of us. 

Can I return to Knausgaard after so much Phelps and Salter?  Have they changed my taste forever?  Ordered a bunch of Salter and Phelps and their favorites. 


I read S & P slowly because they pack in so much.  Here is S on Redford and envy:  very rare to hear someone admit to and discuss Envy. 

“One thing I admire very much about you, {Redford} I said, is how dangerously close you stay to the line between what you might have been and what you are.  That interests me, what do you mean by that? he demanded.  That’s all I can say, I told him.  Something there is in me that hates famous men.  Envy is what it is.”  (161-162) 

Hmm, still Salter was on his own way to becoming such, so what would he think some years later on ? 

Thurs late afternoon.  Guess where Sport and Pastime is set?  Atun!   And Paris, of course.  Perfect passage about Atun being nowhere and therefore of the essence.  Le Chezet looks over to Autun.  Cécile’s grandparents said they had never been there.  At least they had not been in forty or so years.  Ten miles away. 

Wonder if I read it years and years ago?  Or does it just seem so perfect and beautiful as to take your breath away?   Almost every page I want to copy out whole paragraphs.  Read most of today’s chunk at the bottom of the stairs in air conditioned comfort in the village bookstore building, between the crafts shop and the quilt shop.  Toy store now in half of the old bookstore which clerks said went through foreclosure this winter.  Other half being remodeled.  Littleton, proclaim the decorative lamp post flags in pale yellow, is Glad Town.  Be Glad! 

Also set in Nancy.  Have to look that location up.  No, by the end of 11 I know I have not read it before.  Sumptuous. 

4th  Mid-way into Salter’s novel and finished reading his Paris Review interview.  He has mentioned envy more often than any one I’ve ever noticed mentioning it before.  Interesting.  Given him enough time for now.  As much as I like the novel, do I like it as much as I want to like it?  Or as I really like it? 

The interview wasn’t as fascinating as I would have wanted.  Might have been Edward Hirsch’s fault.  Or Salter on deep guard.  Or high guard.  No interest in reading his first two novels about the war and the military.  Fighter pilot. 

well, here and we find another Hooray for Salter.  Last summer in the Aspen Sojourner he says

“When I was young, I was influenced by the American writers of the time, especially Thomas Wolfe. I’ve gone back and read him, even though he hasn’t remained popular. He also influenced Jack Kerouac [who went to Horace Mann ahead of Salter]. The world really was enlarged for me in my forties when I met Robert Phelps, who was a writer and critic with a particular level of taste. He introduced me to Colette and Isaac Babel. He brought to maturity my interest in reading.”
Wonder what they would both think of Knausgaard?  He might serve as a polar opposite to Salter in so many ways.  One or two generations apart too.  But Wolfe was for a while our Knausgaard.  Like much how Salter dismisses Hemingway in the Paris Review interview. 
Here’s another piece, this one from The Guardian---where he says he’s not at all envious of the usual material goods of fame and fortune.  Turns out the New Yorker gave him a snitty profile last year.  This is from last year, 2013

“Luckily, he is not one for envy, at least not when it comes to material things. "I was talking to my son the other day about yachts and money," he says. "We were discussing some stupendously rich man, with a crew of 10 for his boat. My son was telling me how much it cost just to fill its tank. Well, I couldn't possibly write a line on a boat like that. I'm not equipped to live in such a way. My requirements seem to be much smaller." The New Yorker accused him of nostalgia for a way of life now passed (an accusation based on the fact he once asked guests coming to a New Year's Eve dinner to wear black tie). But this is not the case at all. How could it be? "I'm not nostalgic for it because I have it," he says, waving an arm at the books on the shelf, the pictures on the wall (I meet him in Bridgehampton). His view of American culture? "It's got louder, but it's probably not any worse.”  Guardian

Reading now the New Yorker piece by the same Nick Paumgarten who’s piece on techno music in Berlin I did read a few weeks ago and got irritated by because it seemed to veer way away from the scene in Berlin and not really describe what we all wanted to read about it in the first place. 
Anyway---note:  Salter’s parents named George and Mildred ! 
And in 1951 $60,000 would be about 500k today (says Paumgarten). 
Paumgarten really does condescend in the piece---about the novel he says “It’s and odd little book.”  And  “The novel is an Alhambra of narcissism and self-erasure.” [For how long did Paumgarten long to use that image, turn of phrase, and where did he invent it? borrow it?  Is it vaguely anti-Arabic?  It sounds so derived, from somewhere/someone.] 

Having had a wee bit of experience with Saul Bellow myself, though of a much different sort, yet, still, at the same time in Bellow’s life and Salter’s, (1970-72ish) I love this detail: 
“For a while, he and Saul Bellow were close, until Salter felt that the deficit in their relative literary stature gave rise to condescension on Bellow’s part, whereupon he let the friendship die.  ‘I don’t like being a wing man,’ Salter said.” page 9 April 15 2013
Now the closing passage of the piece plays right into my observations about Salter and envy.  In fact I was going to say earlier and I wish I had, that even though he downplays the structure of Sport as just a narrative device, it is clear that
the role of the narrator is to envy Philip Dean his affair with Ann and he says explicitly at the outset that he envies the sort of guy he is long before the affair starts.  So envy for Salter is what he desires others to feel for him and here it comes---the final passage
of Paumgarten’s piece:
“ Salter once told his close friend the poet and novelist William Benton that one of the functions of a writer is to create envy in the reader---envy of the life that the writer is living.  His life and his books have been full of fine hotels and meals, entrancing women and singular men, sophisticated friendships, idle moments in marvelous weather.  He records it coolly, like a star forward who does not celebrate scoring goals:  he acts like he’s been there before.  He also conveys the knowledge that it will add up to nothing.  Everyone and everything will be forgotten.  You come away from his work wondering if you should have lived more, even if living more, in his work, often leads to ruin.”   --Paumgarten  page 10
This could well have been about Bellow by the way.  Probably the whole generation of WWII children and survivors? 

“Snitty” is the complaint I think that Salter used to complain about this profile of his life and career. 
maybe the author of the guardian piece uses that word---I can’t quite locate it in the piece

May 11, 2013 - The New Yorker, for instance, chose to call its long and rather snitty profile of him "The Last Book", which was kind of bald. "I suppose it's a fair ...    May 11, 2013 Rachel Cooke

Paumgarten makes clear he will refuse to envy Salter and lets show that he does resent him and resents having to write this profile about him.  He does this by emphasizing the way Salter “stole” the marriage of his neighbors, the Rosenthals, and stole details of their own lives.  As though no other writers in history had ever, does anything, similar.  Sure.  Poor Rosenthals.  Victims of this monstrous old, over-the-hill exploitative, crappy jet pilot wannabe writer. 

Now it is Saturday the 5th.  Just read one next paragraph in Pastime.
Wow.  Talk about the killer placement of one sentence, right in another tender description of anal intercourse: 

“. . . The orchestras of the world beat softly.  The muscle in her behind is tight.  It feels like a string around the shaft.  He pushes in slowly and then, at last, plunges, like the bottom dropping out.  Anne-Marie moans, her head buried in her arms.  After he was dead I thought often of these moments, of this one.  Perhaps it is her moan, her face pressing against the sheet.  He can feel her tight around him, like a noose.  He closes her legs and lies there contented, looking out the window, feeling the tender spasms. “
(130)

Yes, she is content, happy. 

‘I thought of this often after he was dead’ ----  ok first mention of Philip Dean being dead. 

Now I can imagine directing some grad student who is doing a dissertation on Envy in the Novels of James Salter.  Or maybe the Seven Sins, and this particular paragraph makes me say “This is straight out of Genet.  Check it out.”

The other source would be the Irwin Shaw story Salter used to write the movie “Three.”  The three-way structure also suggests the movie Jules and Jim, 1962 movie.  [based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship when young with writer Franz Hessel and Helen Grund, whom Hessel married.  Truffaut came across the book in the mid-1950s whilst browsing through some secondhand books at a bookseller along the Seine in Paris. Later he befriended the elderly Roché, who published his first novel at the age of 74. ]
More importantly, perhaps, it reminds me of Bernhard’s The Loser.  Salter might be good but he’s no Thomas Bernhard.  Maybe.  Have to finish reading the novel. 

---------
So windy all day, wake of hurricane Arthur, and glorious sunshine.

Restlessness, however, and I don’t want to stay with one book.  A few pages here, a few there, even though we walked lots and it seems suddenly there is lots of time to read and now I don’t take it, don’t take advantage of it.  I don’t want one book to overwhelm me, the remainder of the day.  Don’t want to surrender to its moods.  Want only a tasting menu, a bit of this and that.  Salter has given up gin, says one letter late in the book.  Wonder if that lasts?  Connected with his divorce or not?  Nothing much said in the letters about that, or, that I noticed, about the death of his daughter. 

That was in 1980 and the volume ends there, before that I suppose. 
With Robert’s death.  Still to finish reading that.

Most important news of the day---that the author of Jules and Jim published his first novel at age 74.  So I’ve got three and a half years to get on with it. 

-------
Sunday  6 July

Finished Sport late last night.  There is envy in the final lines:  “One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them.  And they become real through our envy, our devotion.  It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess.  And in turn they give some back.  But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. . . . “  185

why can I not “place” such a sentiment within some larger frame? 
Almost wonder, with the talk of heroes, if it is some vague West Point aesthetic?  Or WWII and Korea aftermath sentiment.  Phelps uses the quotation from Kierkegaard and his title---was that whole phrase well-known at the time by any learned reader? 

Must have been so.  Whole opening passage of Fear and Trembling

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all -- what then would life be but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw -- how empty then and comfortless life would be! But therefore it is not thus, but as God created man and woman, so too He fashioned the hero and the poet or orator. The poet cannot do what that other does, he can only admire, love and rejoice in the hero. Yet he too is happy, and not less so, for the hero is as it were his better nature, with which he is in love, rejoicing in the fact that this after all is not himself, that his love can be admiration. He is the genius of recollection, can do nothing except call to mind what has been done, do nothing but admire what has been done; he contributes nothing of his own, but is jealous of the intrusted treasure. lie follows the option of his heart, but when he has found what he sought, he wanders before every man’s door with his song and with his oration, that all may admire the hero as he does, be proud of the hero as he is. This is his achievement, his humble work, this is his faithful service in the house of the hero. If he thus remains true to his love, he strives day and night against the cunning of oblivion which would trick him out of his hero, then he has completed his work, then he is gathered to the hero, who has loved him just as faithfully, for the poet is as it were the hero’s better nature, powerless it may be as a memory is, but also transfigured as a memory is. Hence no one shall be forgotten who was great, and though time tarries long, though a cloud’s of misunderstanding takes the hero away, his lover comes nevertheless, and the longer the time that has passed, the more faithfully will he cling to him.
------------
The earlier passage, the one that sets up the whole structure, is on 33.

    “He describes it casually, without stooping to explain, but the authority of the act overwhelms me.  If I had been an underclassman he would have become my hero, the rebel who, if I had only had the courage, I might have also become.  Instead I did everything properly.  I had good marks.  I took care of my books.  My clothes were right.  Now, looking at him, I am convinced of all I missed.  I am envious.  Somehow his life seems more truthful than mine, stronger, even able to draw mine to it like the pull of a dark star.”

Remember Salter and Kerouac went to the same high school.  Holy Cow.  Julian Beck too.  Who else?  Call it the Horace Mann post-war aesthetic.  There must have been a few high school English teachers there who suggested this aesthetic to those bright kids.  Was it just in the air?  Salter’s novel of hero worship romanticism could fit perfectly not just next to Phelps’, but even next to Kerouac’s.  Dean Moriarty and Philip Dean, variants for the generation looking for what to believe in now that their fathers had blasted away the features of the previous eras.  Private prep school.  Still ranked super high.  Not a public school at all. 

Salter gives a full account of his high school days in his memoir, Burning the Days.

Could the second to last paragraph not also be read as a statement of bitter irony on the part of the older narrator?  Of course.  Salter seems to say this someone says in a review, in his memoir. 

And we are in, late ‘40s to mid ‘50s, the age of the Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, late Jung, late anthropology, the beat generation and proto-hippies.  Philip Dean could be read as a lost beatnik to be.  Oh, and throw in Knowles A Separate Peace, to round out the novels about upper classmen as heroes for the uninitiated. 

Lax exactly ten years older than Salter. 

Monday  unexpected, unpredicted heavy rain shower just now.  3:10pm

We walked earlier at Docks.  Pool was down because power out.  Lots of books arrived.  Way too many.  No more purchases.  Enough books to last two years at least.  I should hold to that just to test the hypothesis.  Except of course for the next volume, next year, of Knausgaard. 

Glenway Wescott told Salter and Phelps when they were lunching at the Russian Tea room, rather Phelps repeated one of Wescott’s statements, that literature was made up of uninventable lines.  Oh, the patience to collect and know them!” (Salter letter 1979 May page 183)

Finished Memorable Days.  Still wonder how the book came about.  Oh well. 

Salter refers in the memoir to the closing lines of Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again: 

I think these are they--from a search online---

Dear Fox, old friend, thus we have come to the end of the road that we were to go together. My tale is finished--and so farewell.
But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you:
Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:
"To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth----
"--Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, towards which the conscience of the world is tending--a wind is rising, and the rivers flow."
---------
Now the quote from Burning:  “Wolfe wrote with the envy and excitement of an outsider.  I was, though exiled, a native.”  (43)
“the closing lines, when I finally reached them, made the blood come to my face.”
Weds night July 9
Almost crossed a line and ate at Walter’s Basin today.  Instead went over to The Bob House.  No one there, not a bad fresh haddock on salad.  Recalled that the place was opened by Kate Coupe’s sister about five years ago.  Waitress said they sold it to the cook after about three years. 
Read lots more in Salter’s memoir.  All about West Point and then his chance induction into the air force and learning to fly.  Girls, love affairs, floating around.  Would never have gotten so into him were it not for the Phelps angle.  But with all of that, the book of letters, Phelps’ affection for him, one can see how he ultimately came to reject the military world and sought expansion of his powers and sensibilities in every way possible. 

Saturday afternoon  July 12
Perhaps enough Salter for a while.  Finished Part I of his memoir, Burning the Days.  Reminds me somehow of Conrad, why not sure.  Probably never thought I would read so much about flying jets during the Korean war. Someone will have to write a thesis about the military esthetic in Salter's work. Conrad, Melville, maybe it is the all-male world portrayed.  Jet pilots, sea captains, crews, military hierarchies, alpha anxieties and performances.

Lots of death.  Sudden, unexpected accidents, mistakes.  Lost friends, names. 

Bravo again to Knausgaard.  Can use almost none of these old stage sets, macho furnishings to fill in the gaps, flesh out his psyche. 

Sunday evening

Dear Welshman ersatz

I hope your back is feeling better.  Watched the last 10
minutes of the world cup and now want to claim some
Germanische glory for a few seconds.  CBS is running
on 60 minutes the swiss Gurlitt who had the huge hoard
of paintings in his flat.

Why can't Hamas just stop throwing mortar rockets?

About five or six years ago I took my sneaker heel height
in the opposite direction that you just did.  I went lower
and got enthused about natural running websites that
promoted no-heel, "zero-drop" running shoes.  I no
been running for a long time but I bought into them anyway.  Segued too fast into them and broke a metatarsal in my left foot.  Sort of break there's nothing
to do for except stay off it and wait patiently for the
body to heal.  Healed well (enough for a nearly 70 yr old
about to be) and I've stayed with barefeet as much as possible (in the house) and only zero-drop shoes ever since.  Especially the british brand of shoes called Vivobarefoot (now owned by Clarks I think).  Trying hard not to suggest you try them because once one is 70 you forego all urges to urge anyone else to follow one's advice or example.  Before the barefoot years I had foolishly worn funny looking shoes called MBTI--Masai Basic Training something---the soles
looked like thick slices of big watermelons.  You could rock back and forth on them.  They nearly threw my back out.

Virginia woke thinking she has a kidney stone so we've beeing guzzling lemon flavored water all day.

Have officially read too much James Salter.  He can be very good, especially in the second half of his memoir where he is not longer flying jets but trying to write, writing movie scripts and meeting a range of interesting people, many famous or famous later on.  What you tire of finally is a dearth of ideas and a dearth of imagination, really.  He rubbed elbows, yes, he screwed beautiful women, drank great wines, was poor, was richer, hung out with cool dudes, had lucky breaks, saw lots of memorable places, road-tripped with Redford before he was Redford, lucked into this and that and it can all be given wistful, romantic descriptions.  And yet?  So what?  Is that it?  No matter how well he can write it up, and he can, there is still something essential missing.  Maybe a sense of humor?  a sense of spirituality (those could be the same thing, in my book).  For example, he writes more than once about his ten or so years from west point to Korea, flying jets.  Nowhere does he tell us that at the Point his nickname was Horrible Horrowitz.  He tells us it was Horrowitz and changed to Salter for his debut as a writer.  But what was the story behind the "horrible" nickname?  Was it nothing, mere adolescent consonantal rhyming?  Usually in a high pressure adolescent arena like West Point or Harvard, a nickname sticks on someone for an interesting, even if humiliating, reason.  Maybe there are other such places in his stories where he misses a real chance, even though he nails quite a bit.

did you feel a little spike of rah for Germany too ?

-------

Va’s student Julie and her husband Shawn never showed.  No call.  Had made all sorts of prep and pre-visit emails.  Even to parking in our driveway.  Are they coming later this week?  Did we make a mistake?  We’ll see. 

Short shat with Micah.  He had no knowledge of the murder in Rumney.  Stays as cut off from all news as possible.  His in-laws arrived two days ago from Australia.  Two month visit.  Micah says Jon Wixson walks five miles a day now, goes out to get-togethers and even public places like restaurants more easily. 

-----
Here’s the difference between Salter and Phelps that helps explain why Salter’s work, as accomplished and charming as it can be at times, ultimately gets kind of boring in spite of itself, and why Phelps, his one novel a flawed but fascinating failure, stays interesting, no matter what he’s writing about, or however rough or perfect his prose might be at any given instance of it:

found great line by Phelps on Derek Alger’s blog Pif magazine. 


Robert Phelps: My First Guide To Writing Fiction  (by Derek Alger)
“‘Why do you think we write?’ Phelps once asked me…
“…I rambled on about truth and meaning and whatever one tries to discern out of life and the human experience.
“Phelps smiled, raised his head across the table from me, and simply said, ‘We write cause we’re scared shitless’.”

Salter would just never say it anywhere like that.  He’s the one who made the comment about writing in order to make the reader envy his life.  Gosh, I don’t think so. 
Monday  hot and sweaty day.  Penacook in the morning to check on UTI.  Panera for lunch.  Target for walking.  Nap.  Hannaford.  Julie and her family are coming on Wednesday, not yesterday.  Bastille day today.  Does our family in France give it much regard?  Don’t really know yet. 

Tuesday  Hot and sweaty again.  Two hours on my own after going to the dump.  Drove up through Groton hoping to see the windmills up closer but didn’t see a thing.  We walked at Tilton in late afternoon.  No thunderstorms yet but still promised. 

Weds  around 3:30  Visit with Julie and Shaun and their 9 yr old, Kai. 
Long chat with Davey, who is in last throes of the big move.  Pedro and family did use Viala for a week visit---rainiest weather of the summer, alas.
Kids want us to help them go to the wedding of Charlie out if the far away village of southwestern France.  in early September.  So should we, could we, end up spending two months! in France?  Could get the eight weeks for the price of six if we spent the final two weeks at their place while they vacation in Girona at least part of that time. 
Va now playing piano with Colin, have to wait to see what her thoughts are.  Have secretly emailed the rental agent on the 52 cambronne apartment to see if it would be possible. 
Friday around 11 am  Taking off, glorious, cool, breezy day.  Walk at docks.
I came into Salter through the letters with Robert Phelps and as I finished reading his memoir, “Burning the Days,” I wish Salter had had Phelps help him edit the book. 

More on Salter.

The early novel, A Sport and Pastime, seems flawless.  And like much afterwards in Salter's work.  I came into Salter through the letters with Robert Phelps and as I finished reading his memoir, Burning the Days, I wished Salter had had Phelps help him edit the book.  I will admit that it did give me me one thing I was looking for---a personal view on the whole of mid-century (20th) of our lives.  He is about twenty years older than me.  He can write passages of great beauty.  A romantic sensibility at work.  And yet a narrowness of vision and focus.  Maybe also a lack of depth and humor.  A day or so after finishing the book, I heard Leonard Cohen singing one of his classics on the Live in London album.  His spoken introduction is wonderful and funny.  He jokes about taking the full gamut of anti-depressants and says he has studied deeply in all the world's great religions.  "But cheerfulness kept breaking through."  Yeah, I thought.  Come on, James Salter, you say you want us to envy your life but you are never as funny or as charming or as deep, really, as Leonard Cohen.  "We are each of us an eventual tragedy." Salter says two pages from the end of his autobiography.  Well, ok, I see what you mean but, geez, put a bit more of a spin on it.  Shakespeare, Leonard Cohen, Beckett, even Bernhard, manage to do so.

Last installment of the pbs “Endeavour” series last night.  Really good.  Captured the sense of abuse and conspiracy around boys in an orphanage.  Old estate made over into a sort of reform school years ago.  Is it set in the 50s, the whole show?  Seems so.  The higher-ups of the local police and the school are in cahoots to take advantage of the boys in their charge.  Reminded me of Elkins Park in a vague and archetypal way, for want of a better way of putting it.  This is how men organize themselves, behave, take power unto themselves, keep it secret, use and abuse it, pass on “traditions” of abuse and victimization.  And that is how the boys would feel for years afterwards, their shame and guilt and confusion.  Nothing ever happened to me in those terms and yet my anxiety attack cum “nervous breakdown” at Elkins Park was some form of acting out of all of those feelings, feelings that perhaps catholicism as we were indoctrinated into it in those years produced in all of us in varying degrees across the spectrum.  And my “crash” was some enactment of what I felt would have happened, could have happened, had things been acted upon, brought to the surface.  The tv drama was written by someone who understood well how groups of people in concert create the drama of scapegoating for something, for some cluster of wicked behaviors that must be driven out, scourged, punished.  I could tell, at that time of youthful tenderness and probably a degree of neurotic anxiety, that I would be considered guilty of some sort of oddness if authorities “knew.”  I it might be the psychosis of the catholic invention of the confession in general.  As soon as you say you must find something to confess you create a sinner and a criminal and people will do something to fulfill that expectation.  K Burke studies all of this in his work.  The drama of order and sin and guilt and redemption.  Plays out over and over and over.  Human nature.  The crime novel genre.  Police corps, detectives, monasteries, army corps, groups and their discontents.  But especially potent when wrapped up in the mysteries and powers of religious exaltation and condemnation.  Rhetoric pushed to its extremes. 

Spanbauer talks about his catholicism in very similar terms.  “D N A fear.  Original sin.” 
So we got the 52 Cambronne apartment.  Six weeks, Sept and half of Oct.  Yeah.  Gambled and won that one.  Hope I enjoy it as much as I imagine we will.  Now it is clear I should write one novel about something and call it Paris just like the Spanish writer Giralt Torrente. 

Valeria Luiselli brings St John of the Cross into her rich mix early into the “novel.”  Good for her.  Awesome in fact.  Brilliant.  The book seems to grow steadily, slowly, even slyly, more and more astonishing. 

“That’s the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree.  It’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.”  Luiselli 35

Tuesday morning
Va off to swim with Kathie.  Gorgeous morning.  Re-thinking tomorrow’s day off jaunt.  Mtn View Grand is in first place right now.  Going to be hot and steamy.  Hotel lobbying seems the thing. 


July 23  Weds  10:18  am

Super early send-off to PEO.  Now where to go on my day off?  Hot and muggy, showers maybe tonight.  Nice breeze right now. 

One of the great small passages in Roché’s novel that could never make it into the movie, any movie: 

“Jim had a private emotional life of his own which was entirely French and which didn’t intersect the field of their friendship; Jules didn’t want to be concerned in it in any way.”  73  Jules et Jim

Roché also mentions how aspirin makes one “fey” and dizzy.  Have to copy out that passage too.

Ended up lunching at the cafe in Bethlehem.  Pretty good food and great tiramisu.  Only to arrive home and be treated to Sublime Raspberries that Va brought home from her peo luncheon. 

6pm and it is really trying to storm right now.  Hope it makes it. 

Now of course I can’t locate that strange passage about Jules taking aspirin and the effect it has on him. 

65-66 is the body awareness passage where Jim spreads depilatory cream all over Jules’s short, “compact and sturdy” body, “like a Roman legionary.”  It was fun.  You spread the cream all over his back and then after it dried peeled it off.  “Little by little, Jules’s contours emerged more sharply.”  Part of this passage is that Jules dislikes his own physical type, in contrast to the tall, thin, hairless type, “smooth slimness” that Jim, Lucie and Odile have. 

Later when the marriage is on the rocks--“Jules was writing a book, a work of real quality.  There was something of the monk about him.”  87

found it  Kate and her cousin try to shock Rachel by telling her stories “whose morality was decidedly unusual, and Rachel got really cross. Jules was collapsing with laughter and had to pretend to have a cough.  He had had a headache that evening and had taken aspirin, and was absent-minded and fey at times as a result.”  101

Jules goes to buy fruit for them all.  “As he was tired, and also because of the aspirin, he showed the woman what fruit he wanted by pointing with his forefingers from the level of his thighs, not bothering to raise his arms; and rolling his head about so as to point with his nose as well.  He was muttering away at the same time, addressing now the shopwoman, now himself and now the Almighty, all in the same tone of voice.  The others were watching him from behind a quite inadequate bush, trying to stifle their laughter.  When, laden with fruit, he rejoined them, they all kissed him, and that woke him up for a moment.”  102

Talked with Gary McCool at Chase late this afternoon.  I was having a coffee and he came over.  He’s seventy now and wondering about retirement.  What would he do with himself scares him the most.  Maybe “scare” is too big a word for Gary.  But he appreciated the chance to ask all the questions.  He can’t figure out if he wants to or not.  Lissa Zinfon was his most recent confidante about it all and she’s been retired a good while now.  Five years?  How long have I been?  three? four next spring? 

The big old building in Bethlehem finally collapsed into itself, looks like maybe two years ago.  Most likely snow and ice.  Perhaps someone helped it but it doesn’t look like it.  Some snaps. 

SATURDAY morning

Whirlwind morning of planning and changing dates.  Petie called from Abq the other day.  Willow thought she was there for Uncle Steve’s birthday party.  We just called her.  She is not.  She is there so Ricky can hang out with Emrys and have a road trip for himself.  Now we are wondering what we really want to do and not do.  Dave did email back. 

well he did email back and few times and me too and finally I went ahead and booked the flight!  we fly Aug 31, arrive Sept 1 depart Oct 23.  Now I worry that we will bug Cécile but she will go up and down with her energies as she goes back to work anyway and we will stay out of her way and not officially arrive until the week after they start--Sept 11.  They go for their week in Madrid next Monday, this Monday.  So they have that for their carrot.

Great visit with Patsy and Doug up in Randolph and lovely meal at their favorite Bistro in Gorham.  But Doug turned out to have been in pain all afternoon, all day?, and by the time we got to the restaurant he was uncomfortable and then we knew what had really been on Patsy’s mind all the time, so the meal was delicious but had a edge of distraction to it.  Then we had the late-night drive home back through the Notch.  I nearly blanked out on the exit ramp into Plymouth but we made it.  Must take the driving nap next time after a heavy meal and dessert before we get too far.  Better take some extra time than not to arrive at all. 

Pasting in Rick Milner’s new dietary guidelines for archival effect: 

Hi Bob,

There's a song out by Little Charlie and the Night Cats that sums up my diet, "If You Like it, Don't Do It!"

Two years ago I visited cousin Nancy in Seattle.  She told me my chronic fatigue was due to hypoglycemia, which mom diagnosed in 1972.  I thought I was over it, but Nancy says no, we don’t over it.  So I went back to a low-carbohydrate high protein diet.

I'd previously been tested for food allergies. I have to avoid: egg, haddock, oregano, baker's yeast, coconut, lettuce, black pepper, yogurt, coffee, lobster, black tea, crab, cow's milk, and wheat.

I trained myself to hear the word poison when I see the name of the must avoid food.

Still I would have to have my coffee con leche every morning.  Chiapas has really good coffee.

The hypo-G diet also specifies no sugar of any kind except occasional fruit.  And nothing that turns to sugar quickly in the body.  That means no rice, beer or wine.

Lately, I've been working to cut out coffee completely.  I did away with the leche first.  Now I'm using pure Stevia and non-lactose milk.  I might go to goat milk.  I'm down to half a mug about 3-5 times a week.

Before I went back to Mexico Nov 2013, I checked my weight.  It was 180.  When I checked this time back in the US, it was 154.

Vitamins I take are A, B, C, E, D3.  All high dose.  I'm having trouble with taking them without getting a stomach upset.  I have several supplements I'm taking.  No ayurvedics except a great herb from NatRelief for blood pressure that keeps mine constant at 120 over 80.  I take that, armour thyroid, and baby aspirin very morning.  Recently, I developed a hernia that I'm treating with a truss and home pathetic remedies.

Complete listing if you like.  But that’s the basics.  I am much improved and sometimes have days where I’m fully energetic.  I tend to overwork during them and them can’t do much for a couple of days.  I’m also going to try a remedy specific for chronic fatigue that’s coming in the mail.

Best,

Rick
---------

 effect: 

I was sorry I asked before the reply came.  It sounds fine and I’m glad he’s lost his 30 lbs.  But as soon as I heard the pop song intro to the aria I thought to myself, ok, here is one of the memes from overeater’s anonymous being recycled, especially in the overtones of puritanical “if it’s good, don’t do it.” 

Buyer’s remorse about the trip plans now and fear that we will bug the kids rather then enjoy seeing them, but that must be my low blood sugar talking.  Or my excess caffeine.  Or my high blood sugar.  Or worry that Tracy Marceau and her family are about to descend upon us with little prior warning. 

Va in her garden with fountain blooming and ‘setoes swarming but defended by the iron dome of deet. 

The artist in Rick likes the attention of the ayurvedic master and his palette of foods to work with.  Or the father-issue son needs the attention of the guru to direct his discernments.  Of course it is spiritual direction that we all need and want and going with food is as fine a way as any.  Brad Pilon gives me his friendly guidance to skip a meal, to fast brilliantly and that way as long appealed to me. 

-----
Good chat with Feeny last night at Fosters.  It ended with me urging him with all my professorially remembered authority to read Augustine’s Confessions post haste.  By Aug 15.  Before he writes his summer seminar paper for Don Pease at Dartmouth.  See if he does it.  He may not, of course. 

Tuesday night and I am feeling the pressure:  where to go tomorrow and what to do with All that time and open agenda.  That would be the book to write---the fantasies of day-off-ness and its discontents and disillusionments.  Usually focuses on what restaurant and of where.  But also involves imagined pleasures of landscape or lakeside or sidewalks for strolling or roads for wandering around on.  Also fantasies of walking “all day” vs driving.  Etc etc.  “What if I didn’t drive anywhere or almost anywhere and just walked around town for most of the day and read on the picnic tables in the common or on the grassy slope in front of Silver. ?  Looking for virtue and clarification in all the old places.  The wrong places?  What constitutes a “good” day off vs a usually ordinary and disillusioning day off?  Too long a drive back in late afternoon.  That party-is-over feeling, layered on top of that what-party feeling. 

Day off evening.  Drove to Hanover, parked in access slot on fraternity row in front of the Rockefeller institute or whatever.  Checked in the library and sure enough the card catalog is indeed gone and no one knows if it is anywhere else.  Oh well.  Lunch at canoe.  Joked with the owner about his twin brother at the front entrance, guy his age with equally full head of silver hair.  He was quick with his retort---no, not twins, just go to the same hair salon I go to.  Pretty good.  Did not find the Calasso book, so have to find it here.  The Vivo Porto shoes were here when I got back---wrong choice---have the bulbous clown shoe toe of the earlier pair I have, will return them for the Bannisters which have the same cut as the other pairs recently worn.  Did do a fair amount of walking all around campus.  Enjoyed that.  Took a few photos.  Copper roofing on half of the old gym.  What a huge campus.  Buildings, scale, wealth.  Pretty grand all alone on that hilltop above the river.  Home we drove to Docks and walked and then ate at Camp.  The French family from Strasbourg was eating at Docks.  Did not try to nod or acknowledge.  Chatted with the father yesterday afternoon while the family was trying the stand-up paddle boards, with good success.  He has an ankle in a splint.  Cardiologist.  His parents used to live on or near rue Cambronne. 

Thursday  A cool, silvery and for Va right now, a sleeping in day.  Wise.  No going swimming while the pool is freezing and the boiler over there being replaced.  Last day of July.  Month before we are back in Paris. 

Day in Hanover was ok.  Copper cladding on the room the big excitement of the day for me.  Light reflected.  People everywhere, groups being led around by students just like here.  High school juniors and seniors I guess, recruitment for next year. 

Last day of the month.  We facetimed with the kids while walking in Target in Concord.  They are enjoying Condesa de Venadito.  Swimming twice a day, napping, chilling in an apartment with no more moving operations like emptying boxes.  Eliot looks larger in every way and has the same basic expression still.  Emma noticed Bellita’s new glasses right off.  She has a new hair cut, was eating a Frac.  They are there until the 11th, so two weeks not one.  Wonderful. 

Doug Grant just stopped by, had a quick glass of red wine while he waited for Pete’s wife to finish dropping Brint off.  Doug says he still feels the pain in his shoulder and back.  75 minute drive back up to Randolph.  The big crowd arrives next weekend. 

I felt this nice zen tranquillity this morning when we woke up early and I lay there trying to get back to sleep and just enjoying the wait and the relaxation. 

Started a few pages into The Jardin des Plantes.  New author to possibly take on and envy and admire.  Claud Simone.  “Wrong” generation perhaps but perhaps not.  Dad’s age, born 1913.  Died 2005.  Hitchens disliked him as a “Stalinist.”  Grouped with Robbe-Grillet but he kept saying that was not so.  That’s as far as I’ve gotten in skimming around.  Probably Blanchot didn’t like him.  ?  Will see.
Now am curious to know where his apartment was located.  Pilgrimage walk one of these days next month.  What about Robbe-Grillet himself.  Could try again to read him. 

“I consider the writings of Camus and Sartre to be absolutely worthless. Sartre’s work is, above all else, dishonest and malevolent.”  Paris Review no 128

“each of us has worked through his own voice”  “I write as I can” 

genius of a publisher  Jerome Lindon  Les Editions de Minuit

pleasure  what Barthes calls recognition--“the recognition of sentiments or feelings one has experienced oneself.” and discovery---“of what one had not known about oneself.  Johnann Sebastian Bach defined this sort of pleasure as “the expected unexpected.””

ballpoint pen  Stabilo-Stylist 188   “I write with a great deal of difficulty.”