June 2014

JUNE  2014


Bob <robert.garlitz@gmail.com>
Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 2:54 PM
To: "J. P. Jones" <jpjones33@hotmail.com>
well for the reader it was not depressing at all.  If that is any consolation.  In fact I enjoyed it
a lot because it is in a strain of thought I've been having of late---how hard it is to "hang on" to
experience.  I'm not sure what I mean by that---just a vague sense that "it" is now all going
too fast and that urge to take out a diary---I assume you use pen on paper for that---that
urge to carefully write down certain things, feels stronger than ever.  As a Vancouver artist
has put it --- "I miss my pre-internet brain."  Whether this sense of speed or thinness
is the internet or aging or both, no one knows.

For this reason and others I started reading Jung's memoir---Memories, Dreams and Reflections--
a few weeks back because I wanted to read a book written by an 85 year old man.

Worrying about the slipping away of knowledge from the age of five or so is indeed interesting.

But back to Aristotle.  Why the heck did he focus on pity and fear?  And what could those
two words have possibly signified to them back then and to us over the centuries and now?

Saw an ad today for an academic book "Against World Literature" and "Again Translation"---
some young hot shots trying to make names for themselves.

Meanwhile we have a sunny and almost truly hot day today.  Open house across the street
later to meet our new next door neighbors.  We're relieved they seem a worthy couple---the
old lady who had lived next to us for thirty-six years died early in the spring.  After a nasty
but short (relatively) spell of dementia/alzheimers.  She was a real sweetheart, David's
second grade teacher.  About 85 I think.

Maybe I'll go write a page in longhand just for the thrill of it.

B
------------------------ 

Deposit

Jung  at Location 839  “I was but the sum of my emotions, and the Other in me was the timeless imperishable stone.” 

JUNE 3  TUESDAY

Feels like summer now.  Yesterday long walk on Docks and lunch there.  Coffee in Concord. 

Tuesday evening

Started St Aubyn’s long book.  Just.  Time to fix dinner.  Mistake to have taken that Zyrtec last night.  We watched the premier of a new series on HBO that has beautiful people and could be promising.

c

Simplistic distinction making, perhaps, and yet one wonders.  The piece about St Aubyn in the New Yorker seems to make clear that sadism is the main attraction in the Melrose novels.  I’ve read only one chapter and can see what is meant.  Or start to see. 

Thursday almost noon

First swim in months.  Silvery cool day.  Nice dinner with the 9 last night in Woodstock. 

Via Facebook we learned that Cécile had a scare yesterday.  Just called David for details.  Emma passed out for about ten minutes.  She had been having a fever for a few days.  Cécile panicked (I would have too) and called the medic teams and they rushed them to Hospital Necker.  All’s well and this is supposed to be common among children this age.  They use the word “seizure” and that sets off bells for us, but hoping now it is not quite the same thing. 

Ben is clearing the yard using that darned buzzing leaf blower thing, driving me crazy.  Folding laundry reminds me of my plan to sort and wait and do it in larger batches for each item.  Maybe spread over two weeks, the intervals. 

Such excitement, the laundry, yet even that made me think how I could use in in “the novel.”  Whatever keeps you happy. 

Lunch with Greg yesterday in Cornish, at Phat Boys, a pretty decent diner that might just replace Krista’s in our book since they were closed.   Greg looked good.  He mentioned that he and Gerri took out long-term care insurance policies.  We had discussed Jim’s situation too.  Had me worried about getting that policy, but this morning while swimming I pooh-poohed it yet again.  Gerri wants to have money to be left to Annabelle after she is gone which made me wonder if maybe she has some, more than Greg has, from her parents, and wants to make sure health care doesn’t eat that away, care for Greg maybe even more than for her.  Or both of course.  Maybe I should look into it again.  Maybe it would be wiser. 

One chat with Carole dispelled all this illusion.  She reminded me that the insurance (Mutual of O) was expensive--$5000 a year and that they had taken it out when they were 62 and so had already paid more than 40 thousand dollars.  It was kind of a boast, really, and it said sort of “remember, you don’t really have this kind of money to spend now” and “now that you are 70 it is bound to be more expensive.”  Later after the phone call, I remembered that this is a little cycle of anxiety I have played over and over before, even this asking about Mutual of O and going online to look at the site and seeing if I could afford it.  You can’t find out, of course, without speaking with an agent.  Scratch that.

As much pleasure as there was in having lunch with Greg yesterday, I think this evening that I should work harder to keep my days off totally to myself.  Practice real selfishness here, maybe not even do or combine other errands, like taking the car for a check-up or whatever.  Keep the day as my day to be off fully.  Go read somewhere, go write somewhere.  Where did I see that some writer went to a series of cafes over the mornings of a week.  It might have been that piece on St Aubyn.  

message from Phil
this morning--Friday

My friend from the Peace Corps, NIck, didn't get to finish his message (he is a very busy stock broker now), but the direction of his response is evident.  Since I think it is an interesting comment on journalism and fiction today, I figger this might interest you.....P


Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2014 04:41:35 -0700
From: ncruffin06@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: Source material
To: jpjones33@hotmail.com

Phil, your observation about research giving you a viewpoint from which you develop a story, which foresees actual events is very interesting. As news reporting has become more and more a manipulation of reality, fiction has become a more reliable

Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPad


From: J. P. Jones <jpjones33@hotmail.com>;
To: Nick Ruffin <ncruffin06@yahoo.com>;
Subject: Source material
Sent: Thu, Jun 5, 2014 4:08:13 AM

Nick,

You asked about sources for the story in "Convictions."   As I told you, most of the info came from research (reading), driving around Anacostia and Benning Road, a few conversations with cops, and inquiries to a good public information officer at the police department who has since retired.  (Unfortunately I can't even remember his name now.  I must have it written down somewhere, but I ain't gonna go digging for it.)  I should also have added that when I finished the first draft, I gave the manuscript to a DC detective to read and critique.   He was the husband of a friend of Eileen Davis.  But he was totally useless.  His wife, Eileen's friend, was a much more astute reader.  He was just kinda dumb.  (Please don't tell Eileen any of this. She got upset when I told her I wasn't going to acknowledge this couple's help in the book.  My reason: they really didn't help other than catch a few typos, which is not why I gave them the manuscript.)

One funny thing about writing fiction is that if you do a good enough job of backgrounding yourself, you can then make up stuff which turns out to actually have happened or sometimes you can even predict reality.  To me it's not very mysterious.  It's just confirmation that you have tapped into some reality in a valid way.  I think "Convictions" taps into a reality that people in DC don't think is possible.  But I'm pretty sure they're wrong.

Finally, just fyi: thru talking with people around where I live I came across some really disgusting stories about police brutality back in the '60s and early '70s,  but I didn't include those stories in  "Convictions."



Phil
----------
Just read good piece in BookForum about True Detectives and the noir detective genre. 

Just read good piece in BookForum about True Detectives and the noir detective genre.  Germane to your comments to Nic.  Putting the paper in
the post today.

Your experience seems to have taken you into the heart of the fiction/fact moebius loop in all the historic ways.

Seems there is a famous anecdote about "The Big Sleep" involving Howard Hawks, Wm Faulkner and Raymond Chandler.  Ever hear of it?  I never
did.  Goes well with all of the above.  I'll keep you in  suspense until you get the mail.  Altho AutoCorrect in it's damned infinite wisdom tried to keep you in suspect.  Can never figure out exactly how to turn off that damn thing.
Maybe if I get out of google and gmail altogether.

In other words, no real surprise that inventing the police word gets into the truths of much of it.  Imagination still has powers.  Yea.  Powers beyond procedure and rules and observation.  Wish the physicists were more articulate in ordinary language about how and why they talk the way they do about what they claim to be finding out.

Jung ascribes to "uncanny powers" his ability to tell stories about people he met every so often that were true before he had ever learned any facts about them.  Wish I had read his book years ago---but that might become yet another tiresome thing post-70 yr old people start muttering.

--------

Waiting for a call from the auto body shop but it is not coming. 

Saturday night the 7th!  Great birthday.  Hot as summertime. 


Monday   Feel all hung-over from the heavy anxiety-emotion of yesterday in Hanover.  Trying to meet Helen and Ted at Canoe Club and missing them.  Town packed for graduation.  We ate with Jess and I saw H & T at the window outside as we were finishing our meal.  Went out but could not see them in the crowd.  We then drove to Gilford for Colin’s students recital.  Back home we get Helen’s phone message that they had been in the restaurant at 1:30---had reserved the table under our name ! ?  had eaten and totally missed us.  How bizarre. 

Va wants now to go back to Paris in October.  Waiting to see what D & C think of that. 

After thinking more about Jess and her family (we learned yesterday that she had been engaged for a few years around 18 to a guy who became a writer, David Ross?  not sure of the name.  Andre just delivered a Guggenheim award to the guy who has been neglected for years.  No one knew he had had a terrible motorcycle accident.  His wife at the time had told him to get rid of the bike.  He said just one more ride.  Crashed and broke his back and became a paraplegic.  She divorced him.  After all these years someone looked him up, found he had continued to write. 

Writers, schmiters.  They are not saints, for gods’ sake.  Pondering Jess and her family yesterday and then picking up St Aubyn’s novel again, I thought
well her father could certainly have been a model for David in the novels.  I mean would we be surprised, really, if Jess some day actually told one of us that her father had raped or abused her, or her mother, or someone?  Yesterday, looking back over the way she pops things out and uses her revelations, if she lies, makes things up, wholly or partially. 

She and Ted get along because they are both sadists and understand that world from the inside.  Handy theory to have.  Too much energy spent on them. 

TUESDAY  JUNE 10

No, June 10.  Long chat with Bobby Dockrill.  My hunches were pretty right on, still, good to have them corroborated. 

long email from Phil last night
I gave one answer and now to give others.

I just got the article about "True Detective" and what caught my eye was the story about Raymond Chandler not knowing if a character died or not.  I'm not sure what went on there, but in my story "Convictions" I'm not really sure if Tommy Baker went after Stewart Cotter because he was a successful black or if he thought Cotter was a genuine serial killer who might come after his daughter. I know that Tommy believes it's the latter reason.   But maybe Tommy doesn't understand Tommy completely.  Because there is enough ambiguity in the ending that either possibility could be true.  And, as I said, I made it that way, and, like Chandler, even I don't know the answer

So, yes, indeed, as the article states, "the story that fits the facts is of less interest, and lesser truth, than the story that creates them."  To that point:  In "A Sense of Loss" I tried to make it obvious that, in many police investigations, a case that hasn't been truly solved is often declared solved  - "administratively closed."   And how much of life is "administratively closed?"

Another theme in "Loss" is that the prosperity of the big factory world is gone and isn't coming back.  The kind of economy that is replacing it is puny and it's just a matter of time before the whole ball of wax in the US melts.   See the non-fiction article below by the novelist Kunstler for similar ideas.

Well, I keep saying that I've finished the Vietnam book, then deciding that I haven't really.  The latest alteration is a change of title that reflects a change in the story's emphasis.  The new title is "Aftermath of a War" and, although the story includes large sections about Vietnam (contained in letters the dead lieutenant wrote his friend) I will stress the friend's search in 2005 to find out if the lieutenant was, unlike official reports, actually killed by other Americans.  The reason for the change: I went online and found that there is a boatload of books that tell "what it was like" in Vietnam.  Among all these books is one that I was forced to edit at Liveright - and detested.   I couldn't believe that that book is now back in print and a few readers actually like it.   Moreover, to my immense surprise, the author was hired to write a novel based on the film script of a 1987 movie about a battle in Vietnam.  The movie was "Hamburger Hill."   Anyway, I decided that I had to put the emphasis on the search for justice and the subject not treated in all those accounts of the Vietnam war:  the killing of an American officer by other Americans.   I guess I'll find out if that attracts any attention.  I may even send out a few inquiries to publishers to see if they nibble.  If not, I'll just self publish again.

Getting back to the article you sent, there was one sentence that I didn't follow:  "Here the broader implications of the narrative impulse driving the hard boiled genre - which is to say, of the tensions that arise via the positing and following of clues on the path toward meaning - become unusually clear, if only by the virtue of the detective story's inherently baseless character."

What the hell does he mean by "baseless character"?  Since I can't understand that term, the whole sentence is reduced to art-world gibberish for me.

Finally, I watched some of True Detectives early on, but dropped it because I felt the philosophical musings of the McConaughey character was completely unrealistic, and the grittier than gritty feel of the background was just Hollywood being Hollywood rather than attempting to provide a genuine portrayal of two cops after a serial killer in Louisiana.   In other words, I suppose I'm hopelessly tied to what I consider to be real and rather intolerant of anything that violates that outlook.

Be sure to read this essay below about a rust belt city that is much larger, but not much different from, Bartonsbug, West Virginia.

P

By the novelist, James Howard Kunstler.

That Was Then, This is Now

I was in Buffalo, New York, over the weekend at the annual conclave of New Urbanists — a movement started in the 1990s to rescue American towns and cities. The scale of desolation of that city is not as spectacular or vast as Detroit’s, but the visible symptoms of the illness are the same. One of the events was a bicycle tour of Buffalo’s neglected East Side, where maybe 80 percent of the houses are gone and the few that remain stand amid spring wildflower meadows and the human density per acre appears too low even for successful drug-selling.

last night’s reply
Wow, chunky--substantial---and depressing email.  You had a productive weekend of pondering.

Kuntsler's piece first.  So right on and depressing as hell.  However, he is four years younger and raised in
New York.

Makes me wonder this---has anyone already published this novel?   What to call it?  Towering Decline, not bad.
Around 1985, an inner group of brilliant members, small circle, of the Trilateral Commission, the Hoover
Institute and Stanford (probably Bush's old CIA gang too, select members) look at the situation ahead (the
future) and concoct the 911 plot.  They foresaw that their children and grandchildren needed to
have one last grab at wealth in order to survive the coming collapse once the baby boom retires.

Once the towers would fall, wars would be initiated and dragged out.  Casualities over the ten or fifteen
year span would soften the unemployment disaster facing the country somewhat.  Without those
wars the decline would be precipitous, gangs and private armies would wreak havoc, civil war,
local wars, would tear apart our nation.  A foreign enemy and enemies, war in Iraq and Afghanistan
took our minds over there so the internal hollowing out of our major eastern cities and industries
and the hollowing out of the middle class and their bank accounts would go more unnoticed.
Meanwhile bread and circuses would be invented.

By 2014 people like Kunstler would write lots of essays like this one, and novels, but by then the
grandchildren of the elite would have their retirement funds in place and the decline could take hold
and no one will stop it.  Civil wars might still come about, but maybe in thirty years or fifty, not
five or ten, if we are lucky.

I'll stop to have some cheesecake if I can sneak it past Virginia before we watch half an hour of
junk tv and then go to bed and try not to dream about Buffalo and Detroit, Cumber and the bleak
future facing our worlds!  Yikes.

Saw your favorite Georgetown bookstore on tv this evening.  People chatting about Hilary's new book.

Like what you say about how you're reshaping your novel.  More on that on the morrow.

Oh, five minutes before I read your email I had just watched (on the computer) the last 20 minutes
of that True Detective series.  Ehhh.  More on that too.  As that essayist said, the first 20
minutes of that whole series might have been interesting---the rest of the eight episodes
belonged to the set designers.

Another reply

Your authorial uncertainty about your own novels does put you into good company here.  And gives higher quality readers what they are looking for as opposed to those who want the next bestseller.  Which is what True Detective turned out to be.  I was interested because I had "discovered" the author when he published his first novel.  Used it in a course or two.  So it was interesting to see that he had found a way to get out to hollywood and get in and get a big start.  Unfortunately his youthfulness shows in the series, after all.  The story of the two detectives being the real story rather than the grisly redneck southern murders must have struck some HBO junior exec as really cutting edge.  So we got some decent scenes between the two lead actors.  But it fizzled out fast because as the final 10 minutes of the whole series shows, we still ain't got nothing there but poetic replays of black vs white, deep thought vs easy existentialism.  All over again.

I like the way you talk about redoing the Vietnam novel.  Especially with Bergdahl's story, today publishers might take a look at an "aftermath" of war story.  The so-called scandal about the VA and health care, etc.  Cleaning up after these cowboy ventures is long and no fun.  And questions of justice have a way of hooking into people and hanging on.

. . . if only by the virtue of the detective story's inherently baseless character."

This is an interesting crux---I guess it could mean that the genre by definition of being "genre" and not literature/art can never hope to produce lasting quality because it is more interested in following the rules of the genre trade than it is about examining human life and story with a real artistic commitment.

or it could indeed be art gibberish

After a good night's sleep (more or less) I'm ready to advise Kuntsler to get out of New York a bit more often and not just to Buffalo.  I mean I suppose his books are ok and readable, but as with True detective his line about American big factory era is all too clear and true but from that to doom and dystopia is way too easy.  He needs to study more about the Napoleonic wars, the end of the fabric mills in New England, the departure of Britain from India, the Mongolian wars, etc whatever.  His take is too shallow and too narrow.  After all.

Here's another novel plot that will re-make Buffalo.  Nepal's new government in 2032 uses the discovery of titanium and other minerals to bring an end to climbing and trekking up Mt Everest.  The income from that sad, outmoded "sport" has been fully replaced by many other conduits of money.  As a result, cold-extreme athletes of all sorts look around for a place to practice their ice-based games and Buffalo NY uses its weather patterns to become to outdoor winter extreme sports what South Dakota has been for tracking---a new gold rush.  blah blah blah

Who knows?  History lurches from surprise to surprise.  Maybe the CEO of Eastern Mountain Sports will take over the gangs of Buffalo and declare himself the first Emperor of Erie, start a dynasty and launch a movement in history that dismantles the former USA and creates untold wealth out of snow and micro-cellular ice-based medical longevity.

-----

Got my ParisAttitude fix.  Found two apartments right on Cambronne in what I think is the building next to the kids’ new place.  “Meant to be” -- goes along with Va’s dream of last night or night before:  she is holding the baby while the kids are in the shower together.  No reply from Dave yet, so wonder how they are thinking about the idea. 

Weds night
Day off.  Lunch around 1:30 at the Mexican place right across from the Verizon Wireless arena in Manchvegas.  Really good, really Mexican.  Walked around the park there before the rain started.  Glanced into N’Awlins to see what it looks like.  Whole area within the sphere of the Radisson.  Remembered walking around there a few years ago when Va was at a brain meeting or stroke survivor conference and reading, trying to like reading, Scibona’s novel.  Earlier spent too long in Gibson’s browsing.  Forgot how hypnotic it gets to be and how the pressure builds to finally buy something interesting.  Finally bought Dave Eggers new novel about internet craziness and privacy and an unknown author, Tom Spanbauer.  Going to suggest to Phil that he find or create a small press publisher to publish his next novel. Spanbauer is published, very handsomely, by an outfit in Portland, OR. 

On these days, driving around, I get convinced I can and will write a book of some sort.  Read more of St Aubyn’s novel.  Strange indeed and wonder if I want to keep going.  Sadism unfolded exqusitely and bitterly.  Read a small bit of Karl Ove.  Two stops at Starbucks to use the new App gizmo and stay wired.  Short nap in the car outside the Concord store.  Manchvegas felt properly grungy and weird, as it usually does.  Kind of like it though.  Our big city.  Not big enough to count in any real way and so the dreamlike quality of it deepens with familiarity.  Javea used on an HG show about an American ice skater who wants to retire on the Costa Blanca from Redondo Beach, CA.  Someone doing exactly what I wondered about---trying to lure American dollars over to that part of Spain.  They never identify Javea and use those shots to make the whole coastline look empty and beautiful.  Place he finally buys is overlooking, from the hills way back behind it, Calpe, or the town just north of Calpe.  Pays 200k dollars, so it ain’t that cheap for what he got.  Dave did email this morning that Cécile is thinking of going to Gerona if she can get Tamara’s parents’ place for the October vacation.  Va said we could stay in their place after they have gone.   I’ll wait a long time before trying to find an apartment.  Or just keep looking over the summer, in no rush to book.  Place I liked best on Attitude is not availalbe after all of course.  Right on Cambronne at their place and with a nice balcony.  Looking for something interesting to read felt a bit desperate.  So many nice looking books and yet we are imprisoned by the taste of the bookstore buyers and the publishing industry’s buyers, by the whole structure of the tastemakers.  The explosion of Knausgaard into the scene is a bit like the upset of Eric Cantor:  people are hungry for what is genuinely surprising.  A write for Slate says Knausgaard has something “feral” about him.  Maybe he is the first barbaric yawp in western literature since, say, Ginsberg’s Howl? 

Friday night

The word “feral.”  Yikes.  Read it a few days ago in Slate and mentioned that above.  Heard it on the radio today.  Just read it in Spanbauer’s novel.  Creepy.

Saturday  14th

45th A

Sunday night   Now I’m really counting on getting this apartment on rue Cambronne.  Fingers crossed.  Looks out in both directions, balcony and terrace.  Right next door to the kids. 

Monday  Bright and gorgeous.  Kirsten came by to water the new plants.  Willow decided that is her anniversary gift to me/us.  Gave her the jewelry last night.  She worried this morning that she had gotten me nothing but then the plants seemed the thing.  She is anxious about Jack Findlay coming at 11 to have her help him with a Spanish comic book of some sort.  He was at New Hampton I gather so I wonder if he remembers Robert.  He was at the French group last week. 

I think we have the apartment.  Will hear again later today or tomorrow.  Love it.  So excited to be up on the 11th floor again and looking out over the city.  Finished with 19th C buildings.  If we go to Barça with the kids, Girona, fine, it still will require coming back to the city for a few days before we fly back.  So the apartment booked is itself an insurance policy against minor changes within that timeframe.  Kids will love having the apartment so close to them.  It will all work perfectly.  Just looked at Kayak.  Even a booking wholesale site.  Crazy options and competitive offers.  Will take time to look around.  Never believe any real deals are possible.  Also read the TIAA pamphlet on distributions.  Seems clear enough.  Send Davey some more of his emergency funds.  Funds for moving house. 

About this novel, found a good passage in Bookforum from a French writer (unknown over here):

“It is perhaps preferable to circle around the idea of the novel, to dream it, like in Gide’s Marshlands, and to botch it rather than succeed, since the successful novel is perhaps a very banal form of writing.”  Hervé Guibert, Koestenbaum, Bookforum, June 2014. 

Wonder if Koestenbaum finds himself marginalized more and more these days?  Or if the styles and modes of being gay he swims within does?  Even people like Donald don’t, to my knowledge, subscribe to the stream of “gay culture” that K does.  And now that so many have moved on into suburban/urban married success and comfort, the new hedge-fund managers and foundation administrators, like Nicholas, has this whole art-literary mode of gayness also been turned into museum artifacts as well?  Who could say?  Jeff Perkins or Michael Lowenthal?  Koestenbaum in Bookforum, the partnership there, is mainstream so far as this mode is concerned.  How to label it?  “sex-death”?  Genet’s name always there.  Along with Wilde etc.  But surely, looking back, we now see more clearly how cultural it all was, as created and manipulated as a cultural phenomenon as Zionism or any other -Ism of the 20th Century. 

News these days of Iraq falling apart signal to us, who have poured our treasury and some of our young men, into sustaining an illusory notion of how that area of landscape should be organized, how fractured human social order insists upon being.  So Koestenbaum’s review essay already sounds dated and old-fashioned when set against Knausgaard.  Knausgaard is post-everything that we have been taking for granted in western culture for the past fifty years.  Past post-war (II) ironies.  I won’t say there is no irony in Knausgaard---doesn’t even he say one can’t write without invoking ironic distances of myriad sorts---but his attack on everything is so different than we have gotten used to and that is why people are responding to him so widely and deeply. 

Jack Findlay seems not to be showing up. 

Walked at docks after early lunch.  Super hot---even may have hit 90.  That docks location really gets the direct sun between 2 and 4.  Super hot.  We cooled down with lemonade and then root beer float! 

Fed my Paris Attitude Addiction.  Over the summer I can keep checking the site to see if something BETTER shows up and then I can enjoy PAttRemorse. 
There is a cancellation insurance available and the risk insurance of course. 
See what they run.  Feels good to have decided and on Street View it looks so good. 

Ridiculous anticipatory.  Anticipation syndrome.  Wednesday looks like it will be as warm as today.  Thinking maybe north.  Gypsy or one of the grand hotels or Miller’s in Littleton.  Or west?  Claremont?  But it would be crazy to go there.  North seems beckoning.  Oh, did just check Lodgis for the 15th Arr and sure enough that one apartment I had found before is there.  Might be a back-up if necessary.  Looks very very similar. 

Tuesday evening  June 17

Just put two of our old Polaroids up on Facebook.  Why on earth did I do that?
Vanity and delight?  Needing attention?  Willing to share memories and age. 
News that Dick Church died in May at age 82.  Just remembered that his son had died in his teen years.  Cancer of some sort?  Forget exactly.  Dick a fiersome runner and I ran with him a few times but he was too fast, small and wiry.  He was the one who surprised me by saying he drank about ten to fifteen cups of coffee a day.  Well, a lot.  A lot more than I had thought at the time one was supposed to drink. 

Novel by a younger Spanish writer who writes in the Marías mode.  Esposito recommended him.  Giralt Torrente.  I had mistakenly thought he was French. 
Jull Costa translates. 

Wednesday night  June 18

This was the day the water burst all over the basement.  Luckily I was here.  Luckily Ben came right away and fixed everything up.  I drove on up to Bretton Woods, lunch, strolled, read, napped, strolled, drove home.  Then we went to Lago and ate and walked in a beautiful evening, gorgeous big cloud mix sunset. 

Friday night the 20th

Secrecy.  This is what couriers understand.  Power, money and secrecy make up the trinity ruling the world.  Power and money discover they are slave to secrecy.  People need to keep secrets and to tell them in some safe way to some safe person.  The church realized this centuries ago and the sacred secrecy of the confessional became one pole of the church’s great power over people.  Therapists know this too.  Godot is the patron saint of couriers.  He did not deliver the message.  He short circuited the mission but lived to keep telling someone about it.  In secret. The courier does not wait like Didi and Gogo.  The courier knows the secret, the next secret, will find him and demand to be conveyed.  If Godot had the message, we don’t know.  Ok this is not making the sense I thought it did earlier today.

We swam two days in a row.  Walked too.  Today we walked in Tilton, had salad for lunch, drove to Concord to have coffee there and walk some more. 

Monday  June 23   More glorious weather.  Lunch at last yesterday with Helen, Ted and Jessica at the dreary Common Man in Claremont but outside on the big rock ledge on the river.  Mediocre food but great to chat with Ted and Helen at last.  Jessica off to Seattle end of this week, her big summer break away for July.  So glad she has it with her surrogate French mother, Françoise, whom she met at the Farmer’s Market in either Windsor or elsewhere some years ago.  It always feels like such a long drive over and back.  Even in this wonderful air and light.  Best summer equinox in recent memory.  Saturday we went to the Feeny wedding at CM here and left early to meet Ken and Carole for the Voo Doo Daddy concert.  Great band but a narrow range of music that felt after a while a bit unrelenting.  Not enough range.  The group has been together for twenty-one years.  Amazing and or scary or sad or just remarkable these days.  Like any long-term relationship.  Feeny wedding was sweet.  Youngsters at our table, couples in their thirties.  Res life crew.  Camp counselors they are, cheerleaders for the student-life element of campus life. 

Monday
This and that.  Va at book group down in New Hampton.  It felt hot this afternoon when we walked at the docks. 

Tuesday  june 24

Found out that Vivo does have the two leather shoes available.  Hmm.  Can’t reisist those since the feature of those Skoras I liked best was the leather craftsmanship. 

Called Will Truitt to get the piano tuned.  We lunched at the little cafe in Rumney, after Va’s dental appointment.  Tried to go to Dotty’s bistro in Ashland but it was closed.  Feels like it wants to rain and cannot get to it. 

“You are lazy, passive, concave, restless,” I would assure myself.  “Darcy’s astrology is right.  You are all water.  You have no earth and no fire, no ballast and no leap.  You just eddy and swirl and drip, seeking the lowest level, the minimum requirement.  Unless someone pushes you, or channels you, you’ll come to nothing.”   Robert Phelps, Heroes and Orators 54

How many moods the days have.  Evening does not it always feel most comfortable? 

I came late to Paris.  I went to Copenhagen to have some relief from Paris.  Being in Paris made me remember Madrid, where we had spent so many years.  Paris overwhelms each time you visit, even if you can bury yourself in the mundane neighborhoods of the 15th or the 13th.  Copenhagen gave me its smaller scale, brick palaces and courtyards.  Neighborhoods blank with glass and steel and stucco. 

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


Robert Phelps: My First Guide To Writing Fiction
“‘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’.”

--------
Copenhagen

Good book review on Salon today of a book by a historian named Hanne Blank, called Straight, the history of heterosexuality.  Invented in 1869.  Confirms Marjorie Garber’s book, of course, mentions George Chauncy’s famous book --

In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?
Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.

This is an interview about the book by columnist Thomas Rogers.  Just in time for reading more about Robert Phelps.  One example, poor guy, of millions who suffered under the mistakes of the 20th Century about all of these things.  I wonder if in the collection of letters with Salter they will discuss the Stonewall riots at all and the politicization of all of it.  Blank says so well and so clearly that people love having some basis for beating up one another rather than endorse human dignity plain and simple: 
“Well, you know, minority politics has been a lot easier to sell than to just say, “Being human ought to get you human dignity,” full stop. If you can pin down the difference, if you can make the difference the salient issue, it somehow makes it easier for people to stomach the fact that they can’t go out and just beat people over the head.  I don’t know why that is.  I find it intensely frustrating.”

It really is that simple but we just cannot live with that somehow.  I stooped to send it to one P Armstrong, for instance, in a moment of weakness and surprisingly strong irritation. 

Took a really good photo at Target today and Casey Bisson of all people just Liked it on FB.  Grids and geometry are such an easy sell---just like the need for difference and identity politics.  Everyone is so uneasy under all the surfaces. 
Found two lit sites with the Phelps & Salter searches---Elegant Variation which I think I had seen before and Pif---located out in Washington and edited by the guy who wrote a lovely memoir about Phelps. 
In the novel our narrator does mention his secret sex life in the context of the Fish, the bar for Misfits.  But even then the portrait, self-portrait, perfectly fits the pansexual/bisexual as much as it might the pre-stonewall gay.  And he’s described well for us his attraction to the women in the story, including the mysterious and strange young Elizabeth.  So we know his desires go all around the mulberry bush. 
Another thing I learned in H Blank’s interview---much or all? of what women do together is not considered sex by many people.  “Every queer woman I know — and I’m a queer woman — understands intuitively that a lot of people don’t consider what two women do together sexually as sex.  It’s a whole lot easier to fly under the radar when what you’re doing is not something that a lot of people are even going to consider as sex.” 
Well, hmm.  I never knew that.  Now I have to Google the meaning of “queer” all over again.  I do like the fact that Blank says she will never buy the notion of physical or genetic proof of anything---and she goes back to the body as clearly and simply as Kenneth Burke would have done---and she says look this is all social construction, sure.  But all these social constructions are indeed how we make and give meaning to everything so they are inescapable and invaluable.  But things can return to more fluidity, as the term “bromance” is lately suggesting, no matter how tamely. 
Narrator mentions a painter named Schulyer.  page 172.  Surely that is the same one I read up about over five years ago. 

Great passage a few pages on about how he and Darcy are the child parents-to-be---feeling so young because they are about to give birth.  In other words, uncertain of his identity in every way---as one is at 25 or so.  The explicit template of the story is Tristan and Isolde, which I don’t know well at all.  Is there not the Fisher-King in there too?  Or are they linked in the old tales? 
Anyway, Phelps has his hero be as in-between everyone else in the story as possible.  The Bildungsroman out of the handbook for first-novelists. 
“I felt outside of whatever was about to go on, only a follower who could not stop following.”    202
This is Phelps’ primary motif.  What drives the whole story. 

back on 191  “Margot’s house was still dark, and as I entered my own, a few minutes later, I felt a distinct pall of aloneness.  Or at least that was what I called it at first.   . . . What I really felt was exposure.  For the first time in four years I was without props.  The image of myself I used even privately--boy husband and child bride baffled at imminence of baby--was suddenly not available.  I did not know who I was, but as surely as though a cold draft had intercepted me, I knew that whoever I might be had now only my familiar skin to hide behind.  191

243-244  But a congestion of motives forestalled me . . . and I did nothing. Or rather I looked across at Gib’s purposefully smoking profile, and let my humiliation and nervous exhaustion blame him for the whole thing. 

266  wishes he could be brother to Al and Jack--the “The shy, undemonstrative tenor of their manliness moved me, . . . . “
“Elizabeth’s mere smell would sooner or later make me behave like a fool. “ 268 “I kept a genial face, guarding my confusion . . . .”

277  “Like myself, he had been weak, self-absorbed, and quickly inclined to self-pity, and when he shot himself . . . “ 
“I crossed the creek at Sulky’s bridge, and wondered how it must feel to be just a rock at the bottom of a shallow, swift mountain stream, altogether passive, flowed over and around.”  283
“Beauty, I thought, is like wealth or a perfect soprano:  not only a gift, but a condition which must be actively earned by the possessor; a discipline, even, as rigorous in its way as a monastic habit; and more dangerous, more ruinous, for the very reason that it can appear only a privilege.”  300

Last day of June  Patsy’s birthday
Swam.  Getting hotter and more humid. 
Phelps wrote on July 20, 1972 how delighted he was to have for the first time in his life a room of his own.  “For the first time in my life I have a place where my books, mss., imagi, totems, and that soft, furtive furry little something I call my psyche can come together.  Montaigne: ‘Miserable, to my mind, is he who has not in his home a place to himself, where he may give all his attention to himself; where he may hide!’  I came across this sentence the first week I was here and I intend to transcribe it over the door  Day after day I simply gloat; browse; read a half a dozen different books; listen to Stravinsky; scribble; nap; wake up and goat again.  How I have ever lived otherwise I can’t say.  (90)
He was born in ’23 so when he writes this he is 49.  Salter is 47. 
Will Truitt downstairs tuning the piano.  Forgot he was coming today. 

We’ll have to call it The Javean Connection.  British friend Nicholas visited us over Easter weekend in Javea.  A month later news arrives that Nicholas will later this year be honored with a visit to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen and receive the Order of the British Empire (Member).  A week before Nicholas had visited Javea, we had three friends from Madrid visit.  Today we have word that one of those friends, Maimen, has been honored in Madrid with the Encomienda de Dama Isabel La Catolica. 
Phil
Mike is the guy who lived in Barcelona and loves Spanish lit.

Today is June 30 and as I recall your birthday is sometime in June.  Therefore, I guess you already are the big 70.   I have about 30 days to go.   Does it feel any different now?  I must confess that I really don't like this birthday.  60 wasn't terrific, but, as I recall, didn't bother nearly as much as this one does.

Yes, I agree with you that reaching 70 gets one looking back a lot, and part of that is trying to figure out what the fuck was really going on when we were young and thought we weren't naive.  There is also the thought: "Whatever my life is, it's in the past now."  Which ain't a comforting thought.

Good letters:  I agree they seem to be disappearing.  On the other hand, my mother saved all the letters I wrote from Tunisia, and I can just barely stand reading a few before I want to throw up.  What a young punk I was, especially after reading a few books on Marxism and Buddhism.  I thought I really understood just about everything worth understanding!  If I had been my parents, I would have disowned me.   My distaste for today's youth can always be tempered by reading of few of those letters from Tunisia.   Kids today are often hard to take, but so was I.

Updike:  I just finished reading Rabbit Redux.  I then skimmed the other three Rabbit novels.  And I find them all really so completely sex-obsessed that one really has to question U's mental health.

Rabbit Runs -  Rabbit runs away from his wife and shacks up with another woman
Rabbit Redux - Rabbit's wife runs away and shacks up with a car salesman.  Rabbit takes in an 18-year-old runaway and fucks her until she burns up in a fire.
Rabbit is Rich - Rabbit and his friends wife swap.
Rabbit At Rest - Rabbit fucks his daughter in law.

In every one of these books, the subject of nearly every page is sex, usually a discussion of a woman's crotch, always loving referred to a "cunt."  Indeed most of the women are just "cunts" that Rabbit describes endlessly.  I suppose U would claim that he is simply presenting Rabbit's point of view, but so much of what happens in these stories is a fictionalized account of U's own life that such a defense just doesn't wash.  I think this guy was genuinely diseased.  And I still don't like his use of odd adjectives and adverbs, and off-the-wall metaphors.  It is just the opposite of what I try to do in my writing:  make the language fade into the background so only the story remains.  Yet, ironically, I'm have trouble these days with the concept of story.  There are so many that, after reading them, I wonder "what's the point of this?  Entertainment?   Well, what is entertainment?"  The irony is that I'm working like a beaver on finishing up "Long after the War."  At least I think my story has a point.

Back to Updike: Mailer and Roth weren't much different.   Which gets back to your question:  Aren't we looking back now in order to re-assess what was going on in the 50s-60s-70s-and even '80s?  And what has me wondering is how on earth the literary world took Updike, Roth, and Mailer seriously at all.  Why didn't we, the reading public,  see that something was seriously wrong with these guys and Henry Miller and a few others.  Now they all remind me of John Miller's compulsion to visit strip clubs and buy porn.  (Thank god, he has finally stopped the strip clubs in the past year or so.  I'm not so sure what the porn situation is.  I got a year's subsciprtion to Playboy and found it totally sunk in 1959.  I just feel embarrassed for all those girls)

Much heat in DC.  Much humidity.  In fact so much rain that it seems as if one is living in a jungle.  The trees, bushes, and wees are incredibly thick along roads, so much so that as one drives it feels as if one is somewhere in the Amazon region.  A power outage at Peg's house over the weekend forced us to use some of her points to stay at that Marriott in Gaithersburg (near a pond) that you and Va once stayed at.  It was nice - and dliciously cool - and the mattress was great, but just standard Marriott.  The power went back onat Peg's on Sunday.

my reply

had to laugh when I read this--
On the other hand, my mother saved all the letters I wrote from Tunisia, and I can just barely stand reading a few before I want to throw up.  What a young punk I was, especially after reading a few books on Marxism and Buddhism.  I thought I really understood just about everything worth understanding!  If I had been my parents, I would have disowned me.   My distaste for today's youth can always

 this--  my mother saved all of my letters.  My sister sent
me a box, two boxes, of them.  They have been in the
garage since they arrived.  I don't want to even look at
them and one day I'll take the boxes to the dump and
throw them in.

I remember that stay at that Marriott still with gratitude
to Peg and her points.

Murder hereabouts on Sunday evening.  Little lake about
ten miles away.  Two guys arguing about their boat dock,
one guy shoots the other in the head.  48 year old chiropractor.  Didn't know him.  Waiting for more details
about the shooter.

Well we could pretend to be big French thinkers and say Yeaass, after the most destructive century in history, the West became obsessed with sex and it permeated the arts and culture for fifty years in all sorts of ways.  etc etc

Phelps only novel, 1958, tries to have lots of sex in it but he was too young and shy to write about it directly and so it
comes off seeming like a weaker east coast, hudson river variant on Kerouac.  Lots of driving around and  emotion but no sex as Updike does it.  Suppose the readers and Updike could have thought this was what Freud had wanted us all to be "liberated" about.

Oh--"Patrician"  been meaning to bring up that word.  The old style republicans that Buckely could remember would have seen themselves in that light.  From Geo Bush (senior) and Reagan onward, no Repubs would even know to what that term tried to refer.

Started into the Paris review interview with Salter.  I think these interviews have been a big mistake in the long run.  The Author gets to sound so smug about himself even if he tries not to.  Write the novel and have people read it and let actors do the interviews.  Still---we assume they are a permanent part of all that we do now.

Too humid to think straight.

Read Salter’s section on Phelps in his memoir.  Incredibly beautiful.  And 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

Have to add too that Salter’s recounting the story of Phelps’ grandfather and father explain to me more fully than I could figure from having read the novel, the inner story his novel was trying to tell.  You could almost say that now, in the hindsight of all of that clarity, you can see that Phelps’ inability to tell the story more strongly had nothing to do with the sexual identity ambiguity of the narrator, Roger, at all.  In fact you could even argue that all of that was invented almost to help the narrator explain why he couldn’t figure what else he really felt about the father, grandfather, step-daughter relationship.  Phelps’ father took his step-daughter as his mistress and then later married her.  Phelps later refused to see his father again, even on his deathbed.  So the trauma of the household was what Phelps took into himself and tried to live out somehow and that got expressed in a strange way by his anxieties about his own identity.  Salter implies all of this in the most amazing way and yet he also explains it too, by the time we have finished hearing him tell it. 

The original form of storytelling, Phelps said, is someone saying I was there and this is what I beheld.  “Now we are coming back to that again.  ‘Think about what I ‘ve said,” he advised.’ “  How perfectly this foretells Knausgaard and his sudden and great popularity at the moment. 

Before telling us the tale of Phelps’ grandfather and father, Salter weaves in the gossip about Andrew Sinclair and the sexual life of the Duke of Windsor.  After that he tells about Phelps’ father, the grandfather’s suicide, the mother he was attached to, his impossible place at age 8 or 9 in the middle of all of this.  For two years he served as his father’s go-between in secret with the older step-sister now lover.  So there is the character of Elizabeth in the novel.  Margot is the figure of his mother whom Roger loves and betrays.  Etc.  Phelps tried to mold it, remold it, the story, into a variant on Tristan and Isolde.  And he wove in his own love of the older man who died suddenly, Mark.  He tried to reconfigure, recomplicate, his own story.  It didn’t work very well.  Or it worked for about three-fourths of the book.  Then, it seems to me, it fell apart.  He brings in almost in passing the grandfather’s suicide and the shame of his being weak in relation to Roger’s own weakness which he aligns with his hidden sexual identity.  But it is his family’s school of humiliation and shame, grandfather and father, that “Roger” has taken upon himself and grafted onto the perversity of forbidden desire.