March 2015

Sunday  March 1 

WHEN we get back I have to spend a day saving and blogging all the months I can find as a backing up move.

So even BBC let us down last night.  The close of The Fall just not as good as the opening.  There might be a season Three so of course they fudged it all and put in delays rather than good drama.  As I’ve always said, these actors and script writers enjoy a great scene most of all.  The arc of the tale they learn to hold in abeyance and that, finally, ruins everything.  The great scene was going to have been between the killer, Peter, and the hunter, Stella, and it fell as flat as possible.  Peter spouted boilerplate neo-nietschean superman stuff, Stella seemed helpless to unravel him or pin him down or cut the flesh off his bones.  After that it was just dragging along and having the abusive husband plot give us the temporary shooting with which to suspend and negotiate for a new season. 

All the usual sociological dreck dragged in to motivate everything and everyone.  Same old police procedural stuff of main stream tv after all. 

oh well

reading Yalom, Lying on the Couch

strangely pleasant to be off for a very short trip.  Not sure why.  Walked in Concord at Tarjay and then back home while snow starting to flurry lightly.  Snow tonight but over by morning.  That’s the way we like it.  Finale of Downton coming up.  50,000 marched in Moscow over death of the dissident, Boris Y. Nemtsov, who was fatally shot on Friday.

Sat night March 7

Punta Cana  Four or more days with no screens, do I really want to start again?  Why not make it the Whole vacation trip?    turns out we have WiFi here in the room and I didn’t realize it.  Just as well. 

Damned Irvin Yalom novel.  Read it before, probably in Cozumel or even Cancun, somewhere similar, beach vacation.   Moment of certainty is when Marshall goes to find Macondo (yes, garcia marquez, so clever, Irvin) at the Pacific Union Club and the maitre’d clues him in to the fraud.  Michael Caine Scoundrel wannabe plotline. 

Now reading Chevillard and Blanchot. 

Scott Merrill wrote asking me to be second reader on his diss for Boston U.  !  holy cow.  Patrick Armstrong is applying for a lecturship at coastal college of georgia.  second holy cow.  no direct message from him on that. 

Davey sounds anxious and down in his email today.  Fight with Annie and Cecile about baby sitting and other stuff. ? 

March 8

Sunday mid-afternoon  Gorgeous and breezy and breeze is lighter in humidity than yesterday and this morning.  Nice swim and lunch at Agora, walked half-way and got a ride.  Showers.  Va finished her Olmstead book already and now reading Irvin Yalom.  Be interesting to hear her take on it. 

In honor of Chevillard’s novel, I had cauliflower for lunch.  Not gratiné in perfection but close enough to join the spirit and essence of the narrative. 

March 9  Monday  5:34 pm 

Strange day but nice too.  Spa morning.  Then we finally connected with Davey for Facetime about 1:30.  Late lunch.  The Shopping Mall---all brand stores, nice building but souless unless you went to the Hard Rock pub.  Va reading Yalom.  

Blanchot published his book on waiting a good nine years after Beckett.  Can’t see how it is not a sort of reply to Godot.  Well, not reply I’m sure but a response-variant.  Beckett born 1906 Blanchot born 1907 but did not die until 2003 !  at age 96

wiki  Right to death
Two kinds of death (the first death is the actual event, situated within history; the second death is the pure form of the event, which never happens)

Douglas Johnson Guardian Obituary  Saturday 1 March 2003
The French writer Maurice Blanchot, who has died aged 95, was not so much a private person, it was almost as if he was perpetually absent.

In May 1968, Blanchot again left his solitude to join the street demonstrations of the student protest movement, on one of which he met the philosopher Jacques Derrida. They had both researched the work of Mallarmé, who had fulfilled Blanchot's belief that the hold on language was the supreme test of a writer, and, last week, Derrida was to give the speech at Blanchot's funeral.

After 1968, Blanchot retired from the scene, although he continued to publish. Sometimes, he offered to return to public activity - as with his suggestion that he could mediate between Salman Rushdie and his Islamic enemies - but usually he acted as if he were already dead, and said that his books were posthumous. ---Johnson

Tuesday pm  March 10
mostly packed, fly tomorrow
day in the capital today

Sunday night March 15

Chevillard has a great passage about being the solitary child.  “The shy child is not as helpless as people believe.  He learns to know himself before he becomes mixed up with others.”  “This little creature, evasive, apathetic, laconic, whose discomfort unsettles, who quickly discourages every attempt to approach and to tame him, is in fact full of a disdain and a haughtiness he’s wise enough never to put to the test of reality.  His solitude is a kingdom.  He rules over it without rival, and with good reason.  He has only to blush a little to keep others at a distance---his blood is boiling oil, molten lead, pitch, his entire head a red-hot cannonball.  Then he will one day have to leave this scarlet paradise of childish self-love.  A whole other story.  Not easy.  Habits have been formed, the habit of writing very possibly among them.”  Footnote 29 pages 114-115  The Author and Me. trans Justin Stump

“What’s happening to literature is what happened to painting: no one gives a damn.”  Great long passage on the end of literature and reading as Blanchot and Mallarmé read.    On page 116. 

Monday

exchange about various with Phil including this--

your friend's writing group !
"A bunch of women! "

today at the 5 pm matinee it was about 98
percent women and I made a mental note
to self:  if you end up in a home some day,
you will look for one with a men only wing
or even a home for gays rather than get along
with a crowd like this for the remaining five
years or so of your life!

Grandma G in her retirement home never
left her room, refused to dine with the group,
had her highball every evening.  lived to 103-4 sharp til the end and relaxed and funny too

doubt I can be that chill but the notion is there



when you find that nursing home, let me know...P 
earlier he said----
No, I blow off all lists that appear on the internet or in magazines. They're just fillers to take up space and give the illusion of information.  Moreover there is no way I'm going to re-settle in some country just because it costs less than the US.   There are a whole lot of things here in the US that make this place pleasant.  And Medicare is one of those things.  The only reason I considered retiring to the US Virgin Islands was because I figgered it was still part of the US, so Medicare and lots of other things might be available.   Then I got there and looked around.  No way.  As for all the other countries:  "Nice place to visit but..."

BTW:  I just finished Cetenich's novel.   At the end, he thanked his writing group for all their help.  A bunch of women!  And that confirmed for me the value of writing groups.  Zero.  And less than zero if you are a male writer.   His novel is very poorly written with long boring passages that get the story nowhere and amazingly dumb  expressions such as "that room was  filled to the gills."   Of course, I emailed him that it was an interesting story.   It could have been.  But it wasn't.   I'm just praying that he doesn't ask me to write a review on Amazon.

-------

the kids had a wonderful birthday day for Emma---we got a bucket of photos and videos from the day ---  Eliot ready to jump into the fray ---

Chevillard has me saying all through his book, see, just sit down and write the shit as it comes no matter what.  He’s doing it and look how you are glued to his pages.  Well, even if not glued, happy to be along for the ride. 
That’s it, that’s enough. 

---------

comment by Stendhal in Calasso  “It is as if Ingres were telling us that his secret was a secret to himself first of all.  In a letter, he remarked on the “incomprehensible sensations” that set him against all that surrounded him.  In the unexpected manner of their utterance, these words recall the moments in Stendhal’s Italian travel journal when, writing about an ordinary day, he pauses to says brusquely, “These secrets are part of the interior doctrine that must never be communicated.”  Calasso 81


explicated on goodreads by Intro to R&B in UK (from Madge)
‘From my Introduction to R&B: (Raffels trans)

'[Stendhal, whose real name was Beyle,] developed a doctrine he called he called "egotism" or "Beylism." and later wrote of this doctrine in detail in a series of works not published until long after his death. The doctrine, the name of which is deceptive to speakers of English, urges a deliberate following of self-interest and views the external world solely as a theatre for personal energies. The "will to glory" is no more than the doctrine's external manifestation. Its essence is inward, an intense study of the self in order to give to the fleeting moments of life all the density of which they are capable. Although this is an admittedly elitist doctrine, Stendhal excused and justified it by his total sincerity. It ultimately proposes self-knowledge, not self-interest, to enhance the cult of the will, and it proposes the energy to develop an ever present sense of what one owes to oneself. To Stendhal, Italy and Napoleon were the supreme models of his doctrine. He proposed them to the "Happy Few" as guides, for he believed that the elite alone possess sufficient independence of judgment and strength of will to dare to be themselves. They alone may seek the supreme goal— happiness and the complete conscious realization of self— through self-analysis leading to self-knowledge and an awareness of how all others also seek their own ends; through a conscious hypocrisy to conceal their own goals; and through an unabating honesty with self.’

---------


funny thing  I get sort of excited about going to Sarasota but then as soon as I look up places Ken suggests on google maps and street view--especially street view---my excitement wanes pretty quickly.  Do I really want to go there?? 

Maybe Savannah first?  Wait and see, Time will tell, unless money speaks first.  Davey! 

Weds late afternoon  High winds still.  Great long lunch with Scott.  He may be a true wandering monk.  Trip to Nepal a few years ago.  Works at landscaping and brickwork in the summers.  Teaching philosophy as a long-term part-timer.  For years he hung around harvard divinity and b u taking courses of every ilk.  We agree he would put more pressure on his newly retired diss adviser to get the degree finished.  He was going to wait until mid-July but I think I persuaded him to tell the guy he is coming down in early June soon as he’s back from Florida. 

Great reality check on my notions and flawed memories of the time he was a student.  97 must have been the year Phil and I taught the sex and death class for the last time and Scott was close to being a senior and grad. 

Finished Chevillard’s book.  His uncle was assassinated. 

“This past weekend, the Algerian city of Tizi-Ouzou commemorated on Saturday, December 27 to observe the 20th anniversary of the tragic death of Father Alain Dieulangard Charles Dikers, Christian Chessel, and Jean Chevillard. These missionaries were victims of an attack perpetrated on December 27, 1994, by a terrorist group within their chapel located at the center of Tizi-Ouzou.”  this from a Catholic online magazine, 2014

Chevillard is indeed also the name for a special kind of butcher.  “wholesale butcher” is one translation but another is a butcher who processes the fat on meat in a certain way.   “Boucher” is ordinary butcher. 

Night  Do I want to read another Chevillard right away?? 

Talking with Scott was a good reality check.  He was defensive about Phil when I mentioned how Phil liked to tease and provoke people and said he has learned how to defend himself and not let it get to him.  They took two road trips to Mexico, one in ’97 and another a few years later.  Phil had a bumpy exit from campus and from elsewhere---he had been named director of Camp Mowglis when his father died---and that was around ’97 which I never quite realized.  Scott really didn’t have an answer about why Bev left him.  Tom StM helped him move over to Newport but he never expected to get stuck there.  Andy StM is/was an alcholic---in recovery now I guess.  Long phone calls to Phil at times. 

Thursday evening---Email from Scott’s adviser puts me in the official loop for this diss and defense, sometime in June or July.  Already “nervous” about it, can’t find my copy of J Biles book on Bataille, which I will take with me as my Crib! 

of course now, late Sat night March 20 I’ve ordered three more books on Bataille in my anxious rush to be taken seriously by the gangsters at BU as “the Bataille expert.” 


And in the pool today, my otter pool, I thought that of course the novel, after Chevillard, et al, will be a novel of Beginnings.  The author will be in Copenhagen to forget his previous life and work, to start up a new courier service and to write a rambling novel of beginnings and only beginnings.  Endings no longer interest us at all, as Marías posited and as the web has proven to us each day. 

SUNDAY  MARCH 22

after the opera and dinner in Hanover yesterday

hmm fast google detective work sure enough small percentage of men over 60 experience weight gain when using cialis and viagra and aspirin

but of course totally unreliable results as visible when yahoo vs google used for queries --  emed site seems especially sketchy because the studies are anecdotal it looks like --- chat reports from people  eHealthMe.com ---
seems a money site rather than scientific 

and “weight gain” one of those topics you could google search with any other topic and get positive results  ---

still  noticeable flush and wee dizziness this morning after great spa morning---cialis and viagra together though

Virginia told me the last Outlander volume includes this bawdy gaelic poem, Ode to My Excellent Penis

The poem Àdhamh read was “Tha ball-ratha sìnte riut” by Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. Many thanks to Dr. Michael Newton for permission to use his copyrighted English translation of the poem, which appears in his book The Naughty Little Book of Gaelic. (Do check out Dr. Newton’s own blog, The Virtual Gael.)

There is a lucky limb stretched against you

That has made a thousand conquests:

An excellent penis that is leathery, well-equipped,

Sharp-pointed, piercing, firm,

Lubricated, sinewy, chanter-like,

Strong, durable, long-enduring,

Vigorous, powerful, joyous,

That would not jilt either soft or hard (body).

---------

Can’t help but note that in terms of ambivalence in gender history that last line could suggest multiple meanings.  And the history of practices ancient and medieval across all cultural boundaries.  According to

MONDAY  March 23 

Found Biles book on Bataille.  Now ready to become the premier Bataille expert in New England.  Listed on Scott’s application as Reader Number Two, of Four.  woo hoo

Great facey visit with Dave Emma and Eliot.  Eliot looks real happy and Emma entertains-teases him royally. 

digging into the bataille books that arrived today.  3 of them!


Weds March 25  English pub in Manchester.  Day off lunch with laptop.  Reading Scott’s thesis and email.  Walking around gingerly.  Will my legs ever feel normal again?? Started last weekend at the outing to the opera broadcast in Hanover.  Too much sitting?  Harsh chair legs, cialis overload, infection, inflammation?  something more?  worried and not worried.  Hoping all will stretch out with more walking in the spring sunshine. 

Thurs night   rainy outside 

we walked and shopped at Lowes in mid-day.  I felt sick, food poisoning or just junky food from the day before at the bloody british beer house.  And/or Va does have a UTI and has started the cipro for a 5-day run. 

Grim sounding news from Nancy--

Hi,
I think most of you know that Bob has been having trouble walking, keeping balanced. Working with the neurologist, we don't know the exact cause but he has a serious narrowing of the spine (spinal stenosis) in his lower back and she said that can cause foot/lower leg problems. He has had neuropathy from his toes to his knees for the last two years but only since January did the serious walking issues start. He says at times if feels like he has forgotten how to walk and has to focus on lifting each foot. His neuropathy does not cause pain in his feet or legs.

He was dealing with this and we had just scheduled physical therapy when he took a VERY BAD fall on Tuesday night this week. He caught his foot and crashed his side on the kitchen granite counter top. It was a really hard fall.

We spent Wednesday first at the local Minor injury clinic where they took an XRay to check for broken ribs. But, in the exam, the doctor's probing found major pain in his spleen area so we had to go to the main hospital for Ultra Sound (to check for internal bleeding) and a CAT scan to check for spleen damage. From 2:00PM to 9:00PM we were in medical facilities--Ugh. The Results were no internal blood showing on the Ultra Sound (always a concern since he is on blood thinners); The CAT scan showed: spleen ok, but a HUGE, deep bruise (which I understood is on a facia wall that sheaths some internal organs -- I am not able to clearly describe what I think I understand.) AND, to be investigated later, what the ER doc explained was a "bubble" on the outside of his pancreas (syst) which was not showing in past scans--so soon he will have a more detailed scan of this later.

The current pain status: when at complete rest, next to no or negligible pain. But, with Any movement, excruciating pain that makes him cry out. Getting up, down, lying down--all horribly painful. He is on a 4-hour med schedule. He can barely walk and just drags his feet/shuffles so as not to cause the sharp pains. This is all compounded by the fact that for the last couple years he can't get up without using his hands/arms--so now not being able to get up plus the pain is so much more difficult.

We know it takes rest and time and can just with the pain to be more manageable.
That's it--send him good thoughts,
Nancy

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Friday  night   Concord for walking today.  Legs and feet slowly feeling better.  ready to try some different shoes though too.  Gasp.  Heresy.  But some of them will still be zero-drop but more padded. 

Sat 2 pm  Jason from Lowe’s came at 11.  Va likes him better than AlanMann. 

Woke from a nap.  Doctoring myself I would say if Va has a UTI (yes) then I have one too that goes from my belly down through my legs---that the leg-aches are linked with the groin-belly inflammation-infection.  All low-level and kept at bay bay aspirin and advil every so often.  What if I were to take an Advil cold and sinus this afternoon or evening?  What if it is almost a cold-allergy combo of some sort?  Va takes Zyrtec.  Could I take one of those and get some relief in my legs? 


Sunday March 29   Carried away with the remodeling ideas now that we consider covering over the backdoor with counter and cabinets and having a bigger window over the sink. 

Sunny and bright if cool.  Took a walk early but now my legs are really bugging me.  Hmmm?  arthritis, neuropathy?