November 2014
1 Nov Saturday about 3 pm Va off to phone for the Dems for a few hours. Raining. Her hair looks glorious, visit with Tracey this morning.
Didn’t stay long. Cell phones not amenable to one-handed usage & other wrinkles not to her liking.
Sunday night Nov 2
Dinner with Jess at Canoe Club in Hanover. Nice time. She seemed so upbeat and calm I wondered later if she’s on meds! She said she told her brother he should take more than he is currently taking since he’s so depressed after moving back home. His daughters now both in college--Bates and Skidmore--55k in tuition alone for both. Empty nest for him and empty marriage too. Jess says he’s got one of the best jobs in America and can’t complain. Suck it up. As usual, her moods while pleasant this time, still amaze because you never know just quite how she will be or how she will react. Turns out she does love chocolate---I thought so---but she enjoyed getting the macarons too.
Week of jetlag last week. Now it will take a week to adjust to the end of daylight savings time.
Monday Nov 3 almost 4:30
Finished Biles book on Bataille. Answered a lot of curiosity, residual from years ago. Good dissertation book, especially in the way he links Bataille to other thinkers and artists. Revealing in a sideways way about Bataille’s cultural context and a little bit of bio and history. I ended up thinking that Bataille is a bit like Burke. Both of them on the margins of the major thinkers and producers of their periods. I can see now why someone like Jean-Luc Marion (alpha theologian devoted to the Catholic dogmatic line) would not give much attention to Bataille, if any at all. Bataille reverses all the standard dogmas of the age he came to maturity within--Hegel, Kojeve, Nietzsche, Breton, Sartre. He reverses them and undermines them by taking all their triumphant positives and turning them into negations. Burke has some slogans about the Way Up flipping over into the Way Down, that sort of thing. So Bataille with his personal problems and his security within work at the national library publishes some books that aim to be shocking and bizarre and winning fights against the various authorities of his time. And Biles tries hard in the last chapter to say this can all be transformative for the dedicated reader and student of Bataille’s works. But you can see and feel the opposite has happened to him nevertheless---while he was attracted to Bataille years before--probably as an undergrad, after he’s worked on the dissertation at a more mature age he can see Bataille’s limitations and has taken his measure a bit more. Bataille created a private lexicon of notions to upend the terms of the major thinkers, and they remain fairly private, after all. Even if Bataille has enjoyed some attention some years later over here in the States, it is a twilight efflorescence, part of the falling tailspin of Deconstruction and Lacan, part of the last French flash of influence in American universities. Not as major as Foucault or Derrida, and not as long lasting as either of them or of even Blanchot? I am now suspicious of wanting to know more about Blanchot because I think the result, for me, would be the same. Much curiosity satisfied in basic ways, and yet by the end, a good deal of disappointment or mild bemusement. “So that’s how they got some attention, and that’s what they thought they were achieving. Ok, they did to some extent, and they had their splash for a while. But now they are finished and a new Splasher will take the stage and the scene now, somewhere, in other ways. And I need not know about that too much. I am not that involved in these grad school discussions, or even in the life of the mind in the influential journals. Some book reviews in BookForum and online have been enough for me for years and that’s pretty much the way it will continue to be from here on out. Looking elsewhere, again, for major excitement of some spiritual/intellectual/emotional sort. Back to Blas de Robles I guess, back to Knausgaard, maybe give this Eric Chevilliar some time. Maybe Murakami. Back to Beckett? ! Now to Read Ed Schwartz the way I read Jim Atwell. And the book on France--Sixty Million. And there is Proust and Collette.
Wednesday almost 5pm
emails with Phil---
Finished "Lucky Jim" last night. - a Penguin edition with an into by one David Lodge, an English "satirical novelist" who claimed (in 1992) that Amis was an anti-Graham Greene author, one of England's "angry young men" of the 1950s. Lodge cites, in particular, "The Heart of the Matter" in which Scobie, an educated Englishman, marries a Catholic woman whom he no longer loves. Serving in West Africa during WWII, Scobie has an affair with another woman and, in the end, feels he has sinned against the Catholic faith and commits suicide. When I checked my notes about this novel, my first comment was that it was an "interesting story" and my last comment was: "One problem with this story is that Scobie has an unusual view of Catholicism and its requirements, and the source of his view is never explained. To some extent Scobie is a saint; to some extent he is a masochist trying to pull his crown of thorns ever tighter on his head."
Greene/Scobie is the educated, upper-middle class Englishman who thinks life requires sacrifice and good works for the downtrodden. Converting to Catholicism is one aspect of this sacrifice - lashing oneself to something rather unpleasant and even a trifle stupid. Amis/Lucky Jim, on the other hand, is a lower middle class guy who doesn't fit in to university life. He always feels uncomfortable and regards all the (Graham Greene type charactgers) arsty types and profs as doddering twits. When it becomes a question of sacrificing his own happiness for someone else's benefit, his friend tells him, "You're [doing this ] for a scuple? That's the action of a fool."
So Lodge is right to some extent. Amis is the anti-Greene in that he doesn't accept Greene's basic premise about sacrifice or admiration for those who do sacrifice themselves. However, I don't know if Amis consciously sought to be anti- Greene or just reacted against the prevailing gestalt in English universities in the late 40s and early 50s. The anti-Greene thesis, I suspect, may just be a lit prof (Lodge) proposing connections that are plausible but maybe not real. Lodge writes: "'Lucky Jim' is a comic inversion of of the tragic 'The Heart of the Matter.'" But I'm not so sure that Greene's novel is Amis's target.
At any rate, I find both Amises, pere et fils, have a very serious and not terribly funny misanthropic undercurrent in their "humorous" writing. They seem to share a basic resentment against almost everything in England: the upper classes, the educated classes, and the lumpen proletariat (Lionel Asbo and his many ludicrous low class relatives and neighbors.) There seems to be some sympathy for the middle class that is caught between all these nasty folk, but I don't think that sympathy is very deep or reliable. Indeed, I think both father and son have rather big chips on their shoulders and use snarky humor to get away with their bitter criticism that probably exaggerates the situation a great deal.
But I think there is another factor here. As I've said many times before, so many English writers have what I term "the English disease." Everything and everyone is judged "just too, too tawdry." Americans don't view the world that way, but the English, as a species, seem very inclined in that direction
P
PS. I noticed on yr facebook page multiple posts about "The Untethered Soul." I couldn't figure out why you repeated the post over and over again.
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the untethered soul thing is a mistake by the facebook "finger"---punching the "share" never flickered clearly on my iphone---quote was posted by a former student
Fascinating that you're digging back into Greene and the Amises. I think you're totally right about how they are suffering from and voicing the English disease---especially as it was felt post war. England in the early 50s must have been pretty bleak feeling to people who were between 20-40 then. We had here at Plymouth about three or four Brit expat families.
I'm reading a terrific book on France---"Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We love France but Not the French." By two Canadians, published about ten years ago. I think they changed the subtitle in later printings! They warn us not to extrapolate from what they say about France to other European countries, but you can't help doing so, at least in the general sense of saying, hey, England, Germany, etc--each of these countries is so unique and crazy, there's just no comprehending how absolutely foreign they really are to our assumptions about how things (should) work.
The chapters on WWII and the Algerian war are especially sobering and a bit scary. The French even still do not want to talk about either topic, much. The whole Vichy regime period is so complex they throw up their hands and say the French will finally say, well, there were really 40 million wars going on at that time. You probably know more about Algeria, but what a total disaster from the long view.
The world war period makes me curious to read a good similar history of the relationship between France and Germany over the centuries. But I won't because it is such a massive question. Still, you can tell that "collaboration" with the Germans, the Nazis and everyone else, was not a short-term effect of the war itself but a long, long-standing cultural back-and-forth. These are not nice people. These people have been for a long time and still are, crazy. Pretty much the basics of any and every history of any people anywhere. As the great cartoon in today's new yorker has it---two priests are leading a victim up the steps of an Aztec pyramid temple and they stop to reassure him " Except for the actual sacrifice, all this is largely symbolic."
We watched a movie you may have seen about a year ago---Words and Pictures---Clive Owen as a drunken English teacher, Juliette Binoche as a painter with arthritis. Had some good moments, some touching details about wealthy prep school life, but overall just so-so and at times pretty schmaltzy and embarassing. But maybe I'm too sensitive about dramatic portrayals of classroom behavior.
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Good dinner visit with Feeny last night. He had already been out to Chicago, loved it. Wants most to go there. Would love to see him be able to do so. Pease gave him a High Pass and told him personally that he wrote a good paper. Glad to hear that too. Cross our fingers that he can get accepted.
Called Anne. They had a good trip to Vermont. Rich sold his practice a few weeks ago. Barbara relieved. They had shown it over the past few years to thirty people. Fellow from Wisconsin bought it.
Wednesday night No--Thursday night Nov 6
email exchange with Inchausti
Yes, I think Rohr is on to something with this Jungian first half and second half life thing--Robert Bly does something similar. But there is also something not quite right about it that I can't put my finger on. Zizek is getting on in age and yet I never think of him as "eldering." It's true you get humbled by experience but you also get hipper--you don't speak as much because you're aware that so few listen and those who say, don't know and those we know, don't say... yet there is something here worthy of existential reflection.
Bought the book today. You're right in your last sentence above and I keep hoping that our best writers (novelists?) will give voice to this better than recent writers (generation before us and before them) have managed to. I am half-heartedly looking for/at works by writers over 60 to see if anyone can do this. Or over 70. Sort of puzzled by why not. But I'm probably ignorant of at least ten who have already. Any suggestions? Every so many years I resolve to read a novel by Wendell Berry but I have never managed to do so. I know Philip Roth wants desperately to get the Nobel Prize but I'm happy that he hasn't in the sense that I gather from glancing at reviews that his work of the last 10-15 years have been in the genre of rant rather than celebration and grateful meditation on the wonders of consciousness. I guess he would say I'm doddering off into Hallmarklandia but I don't think so--yet.
Really enjoyable lunch in Concord with Ryan Dawson. He’s now 32. Broke his hip and other bones in May by falling asleep at the wheel one morning around 5 am. Lucky to have had such a full and fast recovery. He’s finally found what really interests him---linguistics and language learning. Getting a masters at SNHU and hoping greatly to get into the PhD program at university of barcelona.
Bought the wrong Rohr book. A “journaling” companion exercise book to go with the big best seller. Dang. Might try to take it back. Anyway, looked at the #1 ratings on amazon and agreed with them without having to read the book. Skimmed the interview with Rohr. Can tell I would find the book irritating and wouldn’t read it. Liked these comments by one reviewer calls himself/herself Tiffanyjo:
W/ the way he's written the aforementioned, I don't get the impressions he's really willing or ready to do that. He'd have to be willing to consider multiple, thoughtful, rich options to his ideas. Be genuinely curious, Be willing to lose his way. Be willing to be alone. Be willing to give up control, because he realizes he really doesn't have control to begin w/. Be willing to really live in mystery, w/out all the comforts the Scripture, saints & rituals provide, be willing to really life his life w/ this God, who loves unconditionally.
Try letting go. Just try it. If there's one thing I really do get from the life of Jesus, it's that. How hard it is to let go, and what can happen to you when you do. To me, that's what faith is all about. That's what the second half of life is teaching me.
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Might not bother to tell Inchausti any of this.
Friday 7 Nov evening 7:30 just back from Nashua. Nice lunch at Copper Door and dinner at Unos in Concord. 7000 steps.
Before we left we got word from Josephine that she had put in the refund on the apartment. Thanks no doubt to Cécile.
emails from Phil
Ah, I knew about the 'Sciences Po" school which is considered a necessary school to be at the top in France. But I wasn't aware that there is an even higher level that one must attend after "sciences po" if one is headed to the very top of politics and civil service: ENA. I had seen the term "ENA" but thought it referred to the Sciences Po" school. So now I know better. And isn't this all so fucking French! Hierarchical in the extreme. Supposedly it's a meritocracy. And it is true that if some peasant kid comes in first in all his exams all his life, he will end up at ENA. But the odds of that happening are about 40 billion to one. My former friend, Douglas, taught English at one of these "grandes ecoles" in Toulouse. After he handed out grades based strictly on performance, he was pulled into the director's office and told (indirectly, of course) who should get top grades even if their performance didn't merit it. Of course all those he was to give grades of 19 or 20 (French grades usually range between 0 and 20, with 10 being the passing level) came from the most powerful families. If he didn't do as was "merely suggested," he was made aware but not told directly that he would be dismissed immediately and all his grades adjusted by the administration. Ah, Vive la France! As you say, it's more monarchical than England. In the US, of course, one doesn't have to attend Harvard and Yale Law School. You can go to the state U and its law school. And after you graduate, you can start running for city council and work your way up. Are the French leaders better than ours? Well, they are better educated. Still, as Sam Raeburn said of Kennedy's "best and brighest" from Harvard: "I wish some of them had run for sheriff before getting to Washington."
P
PS. Wow! That's interesting about Notre Dame being used as a factory in the 19th Century. I had no idea. I guess when France turned secular after the revolution, churches became fair game. I wonder when ND went back into service as a church. Napoleon was crowned emperor there. Maybe he returned it to religion temporarily, but after the coronation, it went back to being a factory.
my reply
not at all surprised about this anecdote of grades being manipulated for the students of the important families. Whatever rules are in place, gaming around them is the practice.
Our Spanish friend and his French friends all of whom we met at Chicago in 1969-70 were among the first generations of euros to go to places like Chicago to get MBAs. Now I realize how much they were finding ways to get out of and around the rigid systems in place in each country---like ENA and the Po's.
Pedro got great marks and about a year after he returned to Spain he got a letter from Chicago telling him he was getting an award for excellence in the MBA program. Might have been a plaque and certificate or something. He talked about it for years because he was flabbergasted that it was based on the quality of his performance in the program and on nothing else---no family name, no family connections, no "mentoring" relationship with a professor, no monetary contribution to the university, no channeling through the embassies, etc etc.
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Finished Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow. 2003 and The Jews That I Knew by Ed Schwartz, 2014. Both books superb. Ed’s very funny.
I have to ask him about his cover design. So heavy. Part of the humor? The whole set of voices and stories don’t feel as sad as the cover copy had me expecting it to be.
France is as strange as possible, from our points of view. And yet as delightful as we imagine it to be too. How could it be anything else?
Enjoyable visits with two former students this week, Dawson and Feeny. But it was backsliding, the old prof wanting reassurances from his formerly captive audience. But I overstate it to get some sympathy. Feeny asked me, as always, and wants yet another round of recommendation letters. Plus we have more a a real relationship going than Dawson and I do. And yet it was satisfying to see Ryan and pick up the threads of his story because we had parted on a sour note created largely by my grumpiness his last year on campus--2009-2010? He had hung around the office so much in his four or five years there but I could never figure out what he was looking for. He couldn’t either. One reason he took his classes part-time, slow schedule---he had no idea what he wanted, what he wanted classes to point toward. Finally he got wind of ESL, and just about that time Gaye Gould blew into town, threw her weight around and brought linguistics to the curriculum, first in the English department and then in Languages. Both departments needed it like they needed a hole in their heads. She gave him Fs in the last two or three courses he took because she claimed he didn’t get them in on time but it was really she who left town and country and blew him off. He did get the papers in on time but she neglected to get them or if she did gave him Fs anyway. He took the courses over with James Whiting. I was surprised to find out he doesn’t think much of Whiting. But he’s matured a lot---Dawson.
Nov 7 2008 6 years ago Joseph Uddo died. Not very long ago. Poor Anne and Basile and the family.
Nov 8 Saturday night. Disoriented day. Stopped at Hundelrut to see Sarah and Don and then at Shanware. Walked in Wally’s, 3000k for Willow. Yesterday it was Nashua.
Next? Found the Calasso book. Had forgotten about it but now of course I want to read it more. Time but no time. Disruption and too much tranquillity. Days getting darker and darker and shorter and colder. Will we go elsewhere?
Monday evening Nov 10
Big day.
Decided in the pool this morning to imitate Ben Lerner’s new, second novel. Reviewer in Bookforum gave it a sweet review and even said “this is a beautiful novel.” Something like that. “This is a beautiful and original novel.” Christian Lorentzen, editor of London Review of Books Decided that was the trigger my creative process was looking for. I will buy it, even in hardback, and imitate it, paragraph by paragraph, translate it, that is, “translate” it, ok, from age 35 to age 70. Why the heck not? Am looking for a winter project, a wintery project, and have always wanted to do this, to copy someone else’s novel. And I like Lerner, liked his first book a lot because he covered so much of living in Spain that I recognized and liked from my own many times of living in Spain, in Madrid. Wondered if the title is a direct echo of another book but could only come up with “Leaving the Finland Station” but just checked and the real title of Edmund Wilson’s history of socialism is “To the Finland Station.” Any way, there it is . Major writing decision, major moment in this writer’s long and storied life.
Second, the refund from Short Time Rental came through beautifully at last--$3000 on the Visa bill. And after my flurry of outraged emails to Vivobarefoot and Ralp Libonati a refund of $300 is coming soon from that outfit for the Porto shoes ordered late in July. The TempurPedic delivery happened at noon exactly and of course we missed it. But Ben was doing leaves for the Drexels so I got him to come over and help me take out the plywood sheet and carry up the TempurPedic foundation. Just took a nap on it and I think it is the solution we have been looking for. So there’s that. Too. What a day.
Problem facing me: should I buy Lerner’s book from Gibson’s? It is local. But now that I was reminded by Feeny about the Seminary Coop bookstore I thought, hey, now there’s the local-national bookstore to support and be part of as a way to get off of the Amazon track.
In popular music, a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a previously recorded, commercially released (or unreleased) song, by someone other than the original artist or composer.
Why don’t writers do covers?
Paste in here Calasso’s passage about plagiarism in writing.
Gibson’s is “local” but I don’t like Gibsons. Seminary CoOp is famous and local and I remember it with such fondness. Wonder if it buys back important old books?
I should say I know Jack Cella at the Seminary bookstore, but I didn’t. Jack Cella Cella moved to Hyde Park in 1967 to study at the Divinity School. He began to work at the Co-op in 1969, and was named general manager in 1970. - See more at: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2013/10/07/jack-cella-retire-general-manager-seminary-co-op-after-43-years#sthash.RzUdVALX.dpuf
He retired last year this October.
How strange---if I’ve given Amazon so much business in the past ten+ years why would I hestitate to shift to the Coop? And Gibsons might be here but it is not a preeminent academic bookstore. If Feeny goes to Chicago, my heart will be so happy. Though now that I see that in print it seems silly to say it that way. But what do I know?
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The entire history of literature--a secret history that no one will ever be able to write except in part, because authors are too skillful at obscuring themselves--can be seen as a sinuous garland of plagiarism. By this I do not mean functional plagiarism, due to haste and laziness such as Stendhal’s plundering of Lanzi; but the other kind, based on admiration and a process of physiological assimilation that is one of the best protected mysteries of literature. The two passages that Baudelaire took from Stendhal are perfectly in tune with his prose and come at a crucial point of his argument. Writing, like eros, is what makes the bulkheads of the ego sway and become porous. And every style is formed by successive campaigns--with squads of raiders or entire armies--in the territory of others.
--Roberto Calasso, La folie Baudelaire 2008 Trans. Alastair McEwen 2012
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Tuesday morning
So clear how the backtrack sets in within twenty-four hours. That brave announcement of intention to create even by copying gets brought down. Low.
Lorentzen also said about Lerner’s novel “But 10:04’s prime theme is regneration, biological and artistic, and it signals a new direction in American fiction, perhaps a fertile one.”
Right, I thought. Yes, if I’m finally going to try writing a novel at age seventy, I want me some of that. Imitated, translated, or otherwise.
But all the more reason to forge ahead, to just do it, just, as a daily or weekly or anytime haphazard exercise in killing time and playing with words.
Now to walk a bit on this sunny morning before Kathy and Willow return from pool-cersize.
Modiano can guide me from one side, Chevillard from the other, Lerner will stay me in the middle path.
At least this has clarified: tomorrow we get up early again to get off to PEO. So . . . Portsmouth, baby, at last. Perfect to buy the Lerner book there at Riverun and support it. Walk all over the port in the sunshine and be back in late afternoon after Colin’s piano lesson.
A little googling and I find I can call my novel 12:31. Lerner drew his title from Back to the Future, mine would come from Rain Man. Not my favorite movie but then I don’t have a favorite movie. Appointment in Samara came to mind on my walk. Can’t find a specific time in it. Ancient tale about death, though, so it would work.
Christian Marclay’s The Clock Youtube and The Guardian’s Literary Clock
Here is Loredana in Tigers “It just that I simply believe no one ever knows anything about ayone. There’s no mathematics of the human brain; it’s not an area with true or false, just masks and fancy dress.” 286 Eléazard has just told her how much better it would be if we got people to be naked in order to understand them better. “Nudity has the same effect as alcohol, it produces a state of intoxication that encourages confession, a mental and linguistic brazenness analogous to the body’s lack of modesty.”
Here! here!
Wednesday morning almost 8:43 Rainy The great day heading for the Great Bay. Tired but willing to go ahead with the plans. At least a year since I’ve been in Portsmouth, maybe even longer.
Imagination full of expectations about how wonderful it will be, this copying of Lerner’s book and using it to collage my own, willy nilly. Found some info about Salvatore---he got his damn Guggenheim, already, and a smaller grant from a New York outfit that gives $7500 for second/third novels of writers withou an agent for the second/third novel. Have to send that to Phil so he can marvel at it also. Geez, the advancement of culture in our great Metropolis. But why not.
from Wesleyan’s site
Salvatore Scibona, the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Assistant Professor of English, is the winner of this year’s Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award for his novel-in-progress Where In the World Is William Wurs?
The award is sponsored by the New York Community Trust and the Ellen Levine Fund for Writers. Members of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative nominated Scibona for the award, which comes with a $7,500 grant. Awards go an author who has previously published a print edition of one or two books of fiction, and who doesn’t currently have a publishing contract for a second or third book of fiction.
5:40 pm Weds evening Back before total sundown blackness from Portsmouth. Riverun disappointed by not having the Lerner book. Bought Murakami in hardback even though I didn’t want it in hardback just to support them. But I think they are making a set of crucial errors in bookstore theory. Too many used books mingled in with the new books and too many local self-published writers. That “builds community” and “supports local” I guess but somehow the store looks too local, like the Ceres bakery where I ate lunch. That was ok. But both give the sense of being “soup kitchens” for the former middle class. Everything else in town is Big money building and building more of what it thinks will house and care for the super-rich boomers who are going to arrive any day now. Even a big new condo smack next to the new bridge and on the water right next to Prescott park. Kinda sad I think. All that space being transformed into faux “downtown” Kentlands-style buildings.
Ok about to read the opening paragraph of Lerner’s book. Maybe I’ll try reading one at night, sleep on it, and write my version the next day.
Ha, already it feels totally impossible, so good it is, so complex and funny and true, true for Lerner and his moment of fame. But let’s sleep on it and give it a shot.
Thursday Nov 13
Looking for a clock-time title to replace 10:04. I could use Murakami, 9:32
or Knausgaard, 11:43 pm. Right now, today, November 13, 11:43 appeals most.
20:16 sixteen minutes past eight could also work but then each time you look at the Lit Clock you think it could make a great book title
Sixteen Minutes Past Eight
Friday Nov 14 Night
Lunch in Lebanon at Three Tomatoes. Yuck. Very forgettable lunch, oily pizza but a good beet salad.
Dawn had nothing much to say except Holy Cow, in spite of our best efforts to spend a lot of money this year, we are now worth one thousand dollars Over two million. Yikes. 2,001,000. Or is it 2,000,001.00? Va is now at 1,190,190.78 and I am at minus 124,674.36 $936,341.80 $811,667.44 = $2,001,858.22 so wow, we are old fashioned enough to say, that still looks like a lot of money even if it is all on paper.
Dawn suggested we could cut back our expenses for the coming year by about ten percent just to safeguard we have enough until we’re 90-95. And her second suggestion is to annuitize one-quarter of the bundle to have a guaranteed Floor on top of the social security guarantee.
What she’s “selling” here is the only thing she can really sell or suggest--“guarantee” which is to say “security” which is to say “insurance” policy. Which is the same old same old---hedging your bets against uncertainty with a very safe strategy--the old insurance policy. And yet why do that? We already have Insurance with the Guardian.
Curiosity about Lerner’s progress just had me reading the next few, long! paragraphs about his Marfan’s syndrome diagnosis and examination. He extracts the motif of younger and older, of being treated in a children’s ward for an adult prognosis that makes him older and younger than everyone else. So how do I compete with that? How do I riff on that or imitate that? Everyone is in the same situation with or without a diagnosis for a specific problem. Death is taking down someone nearby and we don’t know it, usually, often, and we get attacked by it every so often. Someone we know dies suddenly or gets a shock of a diagnosis. If I am symptom free at the moment, for the time being, it makes me delighted and even more on guard as the years add on to each other in my private spinal chord plus enclosing body which it struggles to keep erect. Hemorrhoids, new eyeglass prescription, indigestion, poor sleep every so often, anxiety attacks, nervous worries, memories of more severe breakdowns, the adolescent depressive states, the short-term hospitalization for mental or nervous problems, lowered cell count, stress-induced insomnia, stomach difficulties, poor appetite, overweight, overeating, underperforming heart rhythms, breathing difficulties, pain in the knees, arthritis that “comes with age.” Even without a specific crisis, our baggage of health imperfections keeps filling, expanding, getting heavier. If you’re conscious of time at thirty or forty, you begin a kind of zen reversal once you get past sixty, an aptitude for denial, for ignoring the progressions, for focusing only on the moment at hand and for imagining the next, the upcoming without imagining their worst possibilities. Algorithms take care of realities, our hearts look for comfort at every turn, in every breath, we become masters at being grateful whether we are really grateful or not. Our dishonesty with ourselves at what might happen now or later, turns into an unshakeable faith in what is good right now. Ironies appeal less and less, clever observations fade before the embrace not so much of resignation as of the acceptance of the comfort and security of what is, now.
I never knew if Lara understood any of this when I tried to say something of it. She didn’t know, or she did know, that I couldn’t comprehend the grip her obsessions about diagnosis, about the pronouncements of a medical authority, had on her. These visits to clinics, to doctors and medical centers, became simply entre’acts for other stage of our drama together. Interludes. You welcome, eventually, a patience for fulfilling the script at hand that much younger people don’t even have the convolutions in their souls to even imagine.
Saturday night
email from Phil and reply
J. P. Jones
11:37 AM (9 hours ago)
to me
My reaction: It seems to me that John has spent his whole life going after "awards"of one kind or another. In our class he was the most single minded about "getting ahead" and he went after whatever ladder got him another step up. (the fact that the Sitter home was up on the mountain overlooking the whole town seems to be a sign/symbol of something going on in that family's heads. Is it an accident that John has a brother who was president of Exxon? Do you think that might have helped him get into Harvard?) He was also an ace at networking and making connections with people who could help him. (Bennett, the education secretary in Reagan's cabinet, for example.) Which isn't a bad thing altogether. Ambition is fine - up to a point. What I wonder about is how his three wives fit into that picture, especially this last one who is so much younger, but works, I gather, in the university's "communciations" (i.e., p.r.) dept, which would be a good contact for an ambitious prof out to make or burnish his name. (About 15 years ago in Atlanta I talked very briefly on the phone to John's second wife after their split. She had the I-don't-want-to-hear-his-name-again tone in her voice as she told me to call the English dept at Emory to get in touch with him, then muttered "I gotta get the phone listing changed immediately.")
So I guess those are my snarky thoughts. And they could be way off base. To tell the truth, I really don't know John very well. All of the above are just guesses based on minimal evidence. (My mother was very tight lipped about everything, but admitted once that she had once kept a diary in verse, but ripped it up to stop anyone from reading what she had to say about others. Mothers! Women! Ever so much better at snark than we paltry males.)
I have a follow-up question about punk/goth girls. When they wrote essays or answered test questions or spoke in class about books you had them read, did they write or say anything different from what the non-punk girls wrote or said? How about the punk/goth guys? Any difference there other than the way they dressed?
P
What a relief! My snark looks now like generic faculty sniping--i.e. "geez, John, can't you tell they're giving you an award as a way of saying, hey old fart, it really it time for you to be moving on out of here. " Ageism I guess,
since that's on my mind these days.
Your info is Full of nuggets I never really knew about. I somehow just didn't get the drift that he was so full of ambition. But then you uttered exactly what I was going to say To tell the truth, I really don't know John very well. I had that feeling from way back and just could never figure why I couldn't get a good feel for what he was really like. Curious about the Bennet comment--don't know what you're refering to there--was he in harvard with Bennet? of did his brother contact Bennet to help get him into H?
The priceless anecdote is the phone call so well and clearly remembered with the second wife. Put that in a novel somewhere, such a vibrant line.
I never really knew him much nor about the huge family of high achievers only about his father being bed-ridden in the living room for years and years. I always assumed that had some crucial effect.
The Goth kids. No, I don't remember thinking that they had any distinctive intellectual take on much at all. Pretty ordinary kids desperate to appear radical. A few that really stood out were the guys who wore skirts. Once or twice maybe three times in thirty years there was a student around campus, in residence, who wore skirts all the time, usually ones they made themselves. I recall in particular a guy who wore this ratty denim thing usually with hunter plaid woolen shirts and jackets. Below the knee, not flowing, just long and heavy. Maybe now that I think about it they had some Scots highlander thing going on or maybe they were just exploring. None of them were noticeably gay acting in any way but then in those days very little "out" behavior was ever noticeable, even with professors who let it be know they were gay but still retained pretty standard public barriers in terms of behavior.
One Goth kid I remember very well. Very tall kid, all black clothes and a striking very long black canvas overcoat, sort of Aussie looking in cut and material, but this was long before anything Aussie was in fashion. Big black broadbrimmed hat. Very striking look, very black looks at everyone, gaunt and thin, and dangerous looking in a distinctive way. Way before Columbine. He had been around campus and probably was an Engish major so I had had him on my antenna and sure enough one semester there he was on the first day, far back in the last row, corner. So I said to myself, ok, here's what I'll do---recognize you, look at you from time to time, but never, ever seek to "include" you in the class, never call upon you, never expect you to offer an answer, demand nothing of you, etc. Bartleby you shall be and I will also "prefer not to." I did. We never spoke. Day of the final exam or final meeting he is there. After everyone has left the room, he walks up and hands me a manila envelope and leaves. I open it to find two comic books in high quality cellophane wrappers, mint condition, clearly collectors' items. Never heard of the figure, the hero but he's dressed in this long black garb the student has imitated. I ask other students and learn that the figure is called The Watchman and that indeed the books are prized and collected and maybe valuable. Here's a wiki paragraph---Watchmen was recognized in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels as one of the best English language novels published since 1923, and placed #91 on The Comics Journal's list of the top 100 comics of the 20th century.
I think I kept them a semester or two (until the guy graduated maybe?) and then gave them to some student who wanted them.
-----
At some point when he was at U Mass or Emory John spent some time (maybe just a summer or maybe a sabbatical year) in North Carolina's Research Triangle. While there he got to know Bennett who may have given John a leg up on an appointment at Princeton that, in the end, didn't work out.
You had more interesting students than you have admitted in the past.
P
I vaguely remember mention of that Triangle years ago. And I guess that is how things are done.
Indeed, over the years we have had a wide and interesting spread of students, no doubt about that. Now via Facebook etc I can see how many have done quite well for themselves in all walks of life. And I can tell/suspect that whatever we or they may have thought or mis-remembered about what took place in the classroom, I would take almost no credit for anything in any direct way. We're all cogs in the much much larger splash of everything and the luminous moments for me in teaching are most likely not the luminous moments any given student recalls. I got hauled in for "sexual harassment" once or twice when that was a hot topic on campus. A big scandal case had exploded two or three years before and after that there were some copycat minor cases. The worst case, the one I recall, was I'm sure because the woman gave a poetry reading one night either on campus or elsewhere and she was attached to me in classes and asked me to come to her reading and I didn't go. She got her revenge by reporting me for stalking her and mistreating her in some ways. At that time the whole thing was sort of new, at least on our campus, and everyone was learning how to write rules and talk to lawyers. The deans were scared shitless and so everyone tried hard to be rigid and law-abiding. I wrote a sincere apology and that was deemed by all parties to be ok and everything got dropped. Big column in today's NYT on how campuses continue to mishandle the questions surrounding rape and sex on campus.
Amazing how things we thought we were "solving" thirty years ago just don't go away. At all. !
Take a look to at the Times piece on how the elite universities are competing to go big with arts and arts complexes. I bet Brown has been there early---has long been an artsy place among the ivies I think. ?
----------
Occured to me of course that I could merge the titles into “Eleven Forty Three PM at the Hotel Courier” Too long. Eleven Forty-Three PM 11:43pm Maybe it just doesn’t feel like “my” title yet. If it ever will. Lunch with Ken and Carole yesterday. Why was I so nervous inside about it? Why did it feel so strange? We have known them for so long and yet two hours with them always feels the same: comfy at times, delightful at other moments, and yet other moments when it feels like we are in danger of dropping a priceless teacup. Always just me. Everyone else seems tranquil and enjoying everything.
Phil
I don't recall Brown doing anything recntly in that regard, but Brown is just up the hill from RISD and often relies on RISD for arts, architecture, etc. I used to spend a lot of time in RISD's museum, which had a couple of rooms devoted to Buddhist art that I found very calming and restful. I also spent a lot of time at Roger William Zoo watching the bears. Usually I did this when I should have been studying for a test.....P
PS My engineer brother used to say that reality is like a pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the other, passing thru normal at the greatest rate of speed. So it seems with rape, I think. We've gone from almost totally ignoring it (male view)to seeing it everywhere (female view).
P
--------
It's odd that I should mention my attraction to the Buddhist art at RISD just before looking at you facebook page and seeing the huffpost article about contermplative studies at Brown...P
To myself I say about Phil’s “Coincidence” odd to you maybe but not to me---standard Empathic stuff, Standard stuff for Empaths.
Monday Snow on the ground 17 Nov
So hard-working and organized today. Va did a 45 minute swim. ! Longest in a few years perhaps. Rainy day but feeling energized. Getting all the laundry caught up. Wrote the letter to Donald.
6:08pm the new title of the book, the non-book which I’m officially calling it quits on right now. Lerner’s book is too much for me, too fully realized for me to follow it as even a template. I got to page 5 of my double-spaced typescript (airbook script). What I’ve managed is dull and flat and lifeless and ridiculous. As it should be. I need to make a different sort of attempt. Maybe stay with these five pages and move forward without Lerner’s assistance. All I wanted was a push off the edge. I can just as well merge it into Hotel Courier, can’t I? Lerner is wonderful and he’s pulling off this second novel of his with all the jazz and fun of the first book. My attempt to slow it down and use it as a writing exercise is a terrible idea and a real abuse of the book itself. I have to read it for the vital wonder it is. My own lugubrious efforts to frame some other sort of tale will have it find their own way.
almost 9pm what a relief to be done with that dumb project. I attribute the whole notion to “re-entry”---that sense of coming home from the long stay away and that desire-demand to “get down too business” after all that playing around. Get back to work, tote that bale, haul that barge, get some serious stuff going and finished. Like doing the laundry and folding it all in one day rather than letting it spread over three or four days. Yeah!
Viktor Wynd’s Cabinet of Wonders -- new book from Prestel.com There’s a totally different book title with which to conjure what might happen to the desire to write a novel that will not be written. A Cabinet of Curiosities, a book of wonders. “Wynd presents a subversive celebration of curiosities, art, mess, decay, and self-indulgence, passionately arguing that the world is full of wonder.” Here here! There, instead of imitating Lerner’s supple and youthful novel, I could join forces with Viktor Wynd and argue passionately that the world is full of wonder. Great slogan for any and every blog.
Let’s write a novel that will be a cabinet of wonders. The Hotel Courier could still be it.
Tuesday evening Nov 18
What is it, however, to feel that one shoulds be writing a novel, or a book of some sort? Where does that come from? Is it the occupational psychosis or an English teacher, an English major? Is it pushed upon us by bookishness in general? Is it a variant of the work ethic, the presumed work ethic of intellectuals? armchair culture-watchers?
emailed Phil (didn’t have the guts to frame it as I had in my own mind, maybe that later after we exchange a bit more on the basic framework)
Did we meet our first semester at LaSalle? not before say at
the C country club?
Summer after the freshman year you invited me up to the lake
for a week? water skiing. you were really good. I was very
self-conscious that I would not be, not atheletic at all, I already
knew in contrast with my brother, but I did manage to get up
once or twice and have the feeling of skiing for a short time. Great
pressure on the legs.
That fall we went on the train out to Notre Dame for a football
game and visit with my brother who must have been a sophomore there then or maybe even a junior?
Did we go to the lake the next summer? or were you already
packing (secretly ! you dog) to go to Exeter?
Then did we not get together until you visited us here in Plymouth, you drove up, our first or second summer here,
about 1972 (our move) or 1973?
-------
Phil’s answer had one surprising element---a car crash he claims happened. I don’t think so. Impososible really. He’s got me compressed with someone else in his memory. As I suspected, would have suspected, he first thought of writing while in the peace corps.
If we knew each other before Lasalle I have no memory of it.
I remember having you up to the Lake, and I'm pretty sure it was between freshman and sophomore years.
I remember that trip by train out to South Bend and our stay there for the Southern Cal game. My most vivid memory is of you and me crossing the campus at night and nearly freezing to death. I don't think I've ever been that cold again.
The following summer I was involved with summer stock theater and didn't have anyone visit.
Later, when I was at Exeter you drove up and we had that disastrous collision when friends of mine ran into the back of your car.
The next time I saw you was at that college in Illinois. I was bumming around the country and stopped in for a day or possibly two before moving on, eventually to San Francisco.
The next time I was at the U o f Md (73)and drove up to New England after breaking up with my girlfriend in NYC. You were living in a house that overlooked a valley. It had a great view and late one night I played your Allman Bros record over and over and danced around enuff to make Va ask you (you were both in bed) "What the hell is he doing?" We also went jogging while I was there.
It was a nice narrow country road surrounded by a lot of trees.
Phil
PS The first time I got the idea of writing was in Tunis. Several other vol's had such pretensions, and I started to think along those lines, too. We were all very pompous about it. The guy who "wrote" the most was a grad of U of Michigan who had been friends there with Jack Kaufman, who was two years ahead of us, lived in LaVale, but went to Allegany. Very neurotic guy who has been in and out of mental institutions most of his life. His buddy, incidentally, became a sex counselor in Italy after living in India with some weirdo group for about ten years.
P
--------
My bad. What I meant to say was that, one summer after I began Exeter, you drove up to Deep Creek Lake and I was riding with you when I saw some friends from Pittsburgh and told you to stop. You did and they ran into the back of your car. So it occurred at Deep Creek Lake and we were all 17.
Jack Kaufman was a Jewish intellectual kid at Allegany"di who was two years older than us. He had a very pretty younger sister, Dale, who was a year or two behind us. No athletics that I remember but maybe you're right about tennis. Jack, however, was generally regarded as a "cool" kid by those of us who were younger.
Jack went to U of Michigan, then moved to New York where he had a nervous breakdown and has pretty much spent the rest of his life "disabled" and in and out of NY hospitals. Dale, I'm told, died several years ago. Their mother worked until recently for Ed Mullaney in his office as manager of downtown Cumberland. She was very nice - and is also dead now.
P
Nov 20 (1 day ago)
to me
I spent yesterday afternoon with John Miller. It was another instance of listening to him get totally manic about a couple of subjects. When I asked him why he was so excited he said "Because I'm a passionate person" and went right on with his manic diatribe. Recently he has been harping on how his step father attacked him when he was four. I think this has been triggered by that Viking football player's abuse of his son, which has been in the news.. I haven't asked John what "attack" means but I wouldn't be surprised if John had just been spanked. Weren't we all at one point or other!. But John is obsessed by it, doubly so now that the football player is accused of taking a switch to his 4-year-old.
It's no accident that John majored in sociology in college. Sociology is the philosophical support that allows one to blame others for everything in one's life. As I wrote earlier, one of the more depressing aspects of my diaries from when I was in my 20s was the way I blamed my parents for my frustrations and lack of a job or success. So I've done what John continues to do, but at least I eventually got past that kind of adolescent-and-young-adult attitude, although it took about ten or fifteen years. On the other hand, the sociological/blame-others attitude has been almost mandatory in the US since the 1960s. It's been the basic gestalt of the time.
Which brings me to another thought: Ever since I started writing fiction, I've mistrusted gestalts and theories and fads about fiction, and tried to avoid even thinking about them. I've wanted to dig down and find out "what I think of things and how I see them" and get away from the accepted norm or the latest lit theory or the hip attitude. Somehow I"ve sensed that paying attention to all that will kill whatever it is that produces fiction. I don't even like today's elements of style. The current aversion to adverbs is totally silly, a dumb acceptance of one of Hemingway's dicta. But these days god help you if you have an adverb in your text. All the so-called sophisticated editors will immediately pounce on it and toss your work in the trash. (Unfortunately, although I think this rule is silly, I feel I have to follow it, but it's the only "sophisticated" rule I do follow.)
P
There was some kind of "Volunteer to save Africa" program that was much discussed at Exeter. I never considered doing that, but it lodged the idea. Then the PC was created about two years later while I was at Brown. Toward graduation, I was sick of school, wanted no part of grad school, but didn't want to go to Vietnam. The PC was the only option. No one encouraged me. P
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Phil also sent a gripe column by a woman living in west texas. She says all that we would say about the foolishness of facebook and twitter and the whole mess of commentary on any topic, the patterns of stupidity they follow, invariably ----
junior high was not much fun why continue it on the web the way we do ?
Tues night Nov 25
pasting this in from Guardian from yesterday. Heard about it on the radio this morning. Wonder what to make of the whole project---or is it just too Swedish to be understood?
Among the world’s exclusive concert tickets, this might be the ultimate. A show by rock legend Bob Dylan, with an audience of just one person.
Dylan and his band on Sunday afternoon performed at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music to just one lucky fan: Swedish television personality Fredrik Wikingsson, who is working on a film series about how solitary individuals experience events designed for large crowds.
Wikingsson, a self-described huge fan of Dylan, had persisted for a long time to arrange the concert. He told Rolling Stone magazine that he was so nervous before the show that he could not eat.
“I was smiling so much it was like I was on ecstasy,” Wikingsson was quoted as saying. “My jaw hurt for hours afterwards because I couldn’t stop smiling.”
Dylan, who maintains an active touring schedule at age 73, later on Sunday played a more customary concert in Philadelphia. But the private show was atypical for Dylan, who performed covers of rock ‘n’ roll pioneers including Buddy Holly’s Heartbeat and Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill, the magazine said.
Wikingsson, who confirmed the concert on Twitter, plans to turn the experience into a 15-minute documentary to be released next month on YouTube.
A Facebook page for the Swedish project – called Experiment Ensam, meaning Experiment Alone – will examine Wikingsson’s response to seeing Dylan without the crowds.
“Will there be total euphoria or an emptiness that he cannot share the experience with someone?” it asked.
Wikingsson told Rolling Stone that he did not go to Dylan’s public concert, saying it would be “weird” and that “nothing could top” his private show.
Instead Wikingsson spent the evening at a karaoke bar. He selected Dylan songs – and sang with a crowd.
-------
Country upset by the situation in Ferguson, MO--police officer who shot Michael Brown will not, of course, be charged for any crime. Riots and burnings and protests around the country, and world. And Geo Stephanopolous gets the prize first interview for ABC. Shameful. Whatever the details, protests around the country show how enraged and frustrated people are about things.
We went walking in Concord today, Va swam with Kathie earlier. Snow expected tomorrow by noon.
Eléazard condemns Kircher in Where Tigers: KIRCHER ONLY THINKS through the intermedium of images, which comes down to saying he doesn’t think at all. He’s a meditative type, in the sense in which Walter Benjamin understood the expression: he’s at home among allegories. 457
WEDNESDAY November 26 3 pm
Snow started around noon. We strolled Main street earlier on errands. Good chats with Gail Dorval at the bank and Toby Pfenninger. Her daughter Paige in Bosnia for a year, post-grad, high school peace corps sort of program. Two pumpkin pies in the oven, one, thin, on graham crust and the other, thicker, on shortbread, both crusts from different stores, same company.
Now to cut the duck off the bones in prep for sautéing it in lemon and sage tomorrow.
Jim Atwell sent a meditative poem today---
Here ’tis, Bob:
24 Delaware Street, Cooperstown, NY 13326.
Here’s a fine thing: For Thanksgiving, Anne and I are invited back to our former digs, Stone Mill Acres, by the grand family that bought it from us.
Much love,
Jim
Map this
24 Delaware Street
Cooperstown, NY 13326
No Stopping Him
Of centuries, a hundred score and one, more or less,
Since Jesus turned up, a cheery toddler in Nazareth.
I’m guessing they had trouble keeping clothes on him.
He so loved to dance from foot to foot in the sunlight heat
and roll, over and over, in the shady embrace of tall grass.
“Grab him, Sara!” his mother would call out as he shucked
small tunic and clout and, ran giggling out of the house and under
the brilliant blue and the sailing clouds.
And sisters and aunts would pretend to cluck and scold till one of
them could crouch and scoop him up,
giggling sometimes till he wet himself.
But in synagogue the toddler was quiet, lost in the ancient chants
and preaching.
Pressed against his father’s side, Joseph’s arm over and around
him, he felt his abba’s deep voice
shake both their rib cages as he sang.
“Hear O Israel, the Lord is God! The Lord is one!”
But one Sabbath a sob choked off Joseph’s own voice
when, from next to him, so close to his heart,
a treble voice sang out the sacred words.
It was not for the very young to chant praise with the men.
But there was no stopping this boy.
---------
Similar father-son motif as in Cadeau de Dieu. Jesus this time. Wonder what is prompting Jim to write about this motif? Who is who in these re-writings? Singing is key. Is he remembering his own father, longing for a father he never had?
Nov 26 Thanksgiving midday
All that was green, gray and brown before has become white, blue and golden.
Big snow overnight. Sweet and spectacular.
I seem to have recovered from the collapse of my novel writing enterprise and I am back on the trail of the project. Lerner’s novel was the wrong choice to emulate. That became clear after less than ten pages. Now I think again of my days in Copenhagen and realize, in the black of the winter nights, that the crime noir is still what I need to give me the structure of the affair onto which I can embroider and embellish with the genius of a UPS driver the messages and packages that beg to be delivered across the maps of consciousness wherein we live and have our being.
Watching the French movie last night helped. In French it is call The time of the affair, in English “Just a Sigh.” Not sure why seeing that should have reinvigorated my novel writing project (in theory or fantasy, that is) but it has.
Nice feast. The sauteed duck with lemon and sage leaves and lemon zest on top was super. The sage leaves were sort of burnt but there was enough butter to keep them from disaster and the combo was super. Sweet potato and butter, sort of overmoist stuffing (stovetop) and duck gravy, super, and commercial oranage sauce that came with the bird, not so great, and the homemade, artisanal, cranberry sauce and orange, and the roasted asparagus, which we forgot to even serve. Then tiny bits of cheese, Va passed on the roquefort, just not a fan, and then whipped cream with touch of rum on the heavy cinnamon pumpkin pie in shortbread crust. Lots of pinot noir after the white, the chardonnay. Everything went super well.
And now we’re back to the dream of a sort of crime novel, fast, short, sweet and non-generic. Plot to drive the spine of attention, everything else will wander as I wonder. Dumb, probably, but why the heck not?
Donald called. He wanted to thank me for my two page letter. First he has received in ages. Enjoyed Ed’s book but had nothing more to say about it. Was touched that David Tracey sent him a card for the holiday saying he thinks of him often. On Bill Cosby he was funny-classic: never trusted him, agreed with his mother who always said he was a phoney and they didn’t like him. He’s thinking of going to China in the fall. Will go to Philadelphia very soon where one of his two first cousins is dying of lung cancer in her early 90s. Smoked all her life. Had never heard him mention his cousins but then I guess that is what we do as we age and have no other family left to connect with.
The crime story satisfies our addiction to order, to story as problem, question, solvable into guilt, discovery, punishment, restoration of order.
Even with the best of journalism, the huge public scandal tales, like Cosby at the moment, resist clarification and solution. The difficulty of bringing a major figure before the strictures of the criminal system make the bringing of charges in the first place nearly impossible. Greek tragedy, all over again. DeMoulas’ market basket drama, the “rape culture” at the universities of wealth and privilege, media stars who get away with murder and rape, like the power structures of the military, the corporations, the churches, they all follow the ancient playbooks and sociology has proven itself as helpless as the law courts.
I guess the internet is impossible tonight because so overloaded with shoppers and idlers and everyone imaginable, straining all connections? Plus the storm and power outages. Storm over this morning but the radio said power outages, especially around Concord.
9 pm now 9:10 we just got simultaneous phone calls on two lines---Anne from New Orleans and Rick from Albq. He left a recording, sounded good. Anne says Mark is moving out soon, they found him an apartment. Greg will go to NY with his girl friend for Christmas. Jennifer confided that she didn’t go home for Thanksgiving for the first time in her life (she’s 48, 1966) because she met a lawyer friend for the holiday, so Anne is holding her breath that she’ll stay in this relationship. She found her business trip to India exhausting even though they were in luxury digs. So far and so short.
I’m deeper into Tigers. Maybe the size of the book makes me hanker for a short and sweet crime novel?
Saturday Nov 29th
PEO event at the Bistro. Jonathan Wani and Tess Barbeto and her mom coming in as we left. Jon very friendly, gave me two hugs. I liked that, liked very much seeing him again. He’s now a researcher of some sort on marijuana, laboratory, Tess has her studio in Framingham. Tess has a power gallery agent in Provincetown, they live in Worcester. Her mother retired two years ago from high school chemistry.
exchange with Phil:
"memory is not a reliable quantity in life...it is sly
and artful ... it does everything it can to keep its host
satisfied" ---Knausgaard
stuck me as a pretty good line but then maybe too
much coffee this beautiful snowy day here. The snow
always looks so nice and magical---the first time each
year.
-------------
I also think it's a good line. And maybe the forgetfulness of old age is just one more way of keeping us satisfied. On the other hand, my inability to come up with names and words that I "know" irritates the hell out of me. But that's my absence of memory, not my memory.
We had about an inch of snow on the day before Thanksgiving and few flurries on Friday, but that's it. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, doncha know!
Finished my novel about Vietnam. It's now available on Amazon. "Long After the War" by J. P. Jones. In the end, I feel it's a story that applies to our generation and perhaps no other. Indeed, " felt my expertise ("write what you know") was my view of our generation. I also did a lot of research about the war, but I write more about the young guys who died there - and those who came back and lived for another 40 years.
So now I can look forward to Jim Sisk saying that he finds it "wordy."
Phil
Good to hear your new book is available. Great for holiday giving and I look forward to reading it.
Here's another good line ---- character in this long French novel I've been reading says to another character: "As soon as you are interested in something or someone, they become interesting. It's a truism. The converse is also true: you decide someone's a rogue and he'll become one in your eyes, as sure as eggs are eggs. It's autosuggestion, my friend. All of history is nothing but this self-hypnosis in the face of the facts." ---- They then continue the discussion with flipping quotations from [ I had to
google all of this just now---I'm sure this topic is one of those standard café themes french univ students go over so often it is in their blood] Leopold Von Ranke vs Georges Duby: "Read Duby again: the historian, he says, is a dreamer forced----"Forced by the facts not to dream, despite his propensity to do so!" "No, my friend: forced to dream in the face of the facts, too plaster over the gaps, to replace of his own accord the missing arms of a statue that only exists in his head." all of this by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles.
So if this is a standard topic in these things, you are prepared for the chatterbugs on Amazon and elsewhere to get into heated debate about your book---there will be those who will demand to know if you were ever in the war or even in Vietnam and there will be those who say that is not the issue at all, are you a member of "our" generation----and by the way there will be the question of whether "boomers" even experienced the war or did that experience "end" with Us---those born at least two years before the boomers.
From the point in the French novel where the two writers are discussing fact and imagination they move on into a discussion of plagiarism and the necessity of it to the creative process. So will some of your readers (you should be so lucky!) wrangle about where you borrowed notions about the war and about the life after the war?
Anyhoo---will you try to get a review again on the Peace corps writers site? As I recall, some young snip gave you a bad time of it with the Tunis book. Do you follow that site? Maybe you can suggest a reviewer to them? Tom Brokaw, for instance. :-)
You going to see this new movie aabout the code breakder--Alan Turing? Director just on the radio with a strange accent, turns out to be Norwegian!
Dr Euclides goes on to say “The crux of the problem is the creative act itself, the fact that one cannot conceive of it without having recourse to imitation.” 561
“It’s exactly the same whether you’re plagiarizing someone’s words or ideas. The whole history of art, and even of knowledge, consists of this assimilation, taken to greater or lesser lengths, of what others have tried out before us. No one has been able to avoid it since the beginning of time. It’s not worth commenting on, except to say that our imagination is limited, which we’ve always known, and that books are only made with other books. Pictures with other pictures. We’ve been going round and round in circles since the very beginning, round the same pot, the same mess tin.”
562
Sunday Nov 30
Doug Grant turns 72 tomorrow. Va is on the Jacquie Lawson case. We watched Peaky Blinders last night. Enjoyed it even though it seems a lot like Boardwalk Empire in superficial aspects.
Phil has a good answer ready for critics who say he can’t write about Vietnam because he wasn’t there---Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage but he didn’t fight in the Civil War either. Good answer but maybe too few people will know the reference any more.
------from Phil
Turing film: read the review in the NYer, then decide if you want to bother with this film. I decided no.
The French are the past-masters of good quotes. Other than Sam Clemens and perhaps Will Rogers, we Americans have no one to represent our American views with any style. Although Henry Ford's "History is bunk" is probably a pretty good assessment of a rather regrettable aspect of the American psyche.
An observation by a scientist to reinforce these very French observations: When asked why it took so very long to discover some biological phenomenon, the head scientist replied: "We didn't see it, even though it was right in front of us, because we weren't looking for it. When we looked for it, we saw it."
And John Updike on history: "Biographies are novels with footnotes." It's all imagination. Which leads me to my book: I have not decided what I will do to "advertize" it. I'msure many will criticize it "because you weren't there." "Neither was the author of the Red Badge of Courage" is an argument that will open the eyes of only a few people.
P
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