July 2015

JULY 2015

MONDAY  6 July

Alan Mann and crew (3) here to tear apart the kitchen.

Tuesday 7 July

Almost 8 am.  We are up super early now.  Alan arrives at 7 sharp. Called last night for updating.  Now the electricians are here and today is supposed to be for the plumber.  They are moving the big main drain pipe from upstairs bathroom so as to eliminate the cut

in the counter next to the sink.  

Va will go with Kathie to the pool later.  Then we will go for lunch somewhere and on down to Gilford to buy a sink and faucet.  F W Webb Kitchen and Bath.  If we were working full-time how would you do this?  So far Alan has been indeed really clean and neat.  When we got home there was a sense of dust and old wood.  I took photos of the kitchen.  Desolate now empty of all of its veneers.  

Alan is huge, maybe 6’ 3” and how many pounds? Must be 250 at least but “all muscle” as guys like to say.  Not saggy belly just huge and full and definitely more in shape and healthy-trim than Torbin Pil, the Danish builder who put in our front walk.  Alan’s son, Tyler, must be about 23?  Other guys seem same age plus or minus five years.  Papa Bear and his cubs for sure.  He wears reading glasses hanging down on the end of his nose all the time, wears his hair long, mixed-grays.  Just heard him on his truck phone “doing a little kitchen remodel over here in Plymouth.”  So this is a little job for him.  Maybe he’s done mostly work around the lakes?  

Finished Calasso’s book last night.  Breathtaking is my main response.  Had to tell someone so I asked Hans if he had heard of it.  He said quickly back that he had just and I didn’t know if that meant from me or from someone else.  He might read it in French.  

Eavesdropping on the guys working in the kitchen.  Plumber guy just introduced himself as Brian to Tyler.  Talked about work details, mixed in talk about one of their mothers who worked for someone.  

Not used to having visitors.  Byron Richer always seemed to work alone, a few helpers but only every now and then.  Thank goodness we didn’t go with Lowes though.  

Calasso.  Va is starting to read it now.  I’m sorry now that I let myself stretch the early part too slowly over a long period of time because of course I didn’t retain much of it.  But the last fifty or so pages I sped through with great care, reading and re-reading slowly so as to marvel at each detail and nuance.  

Mann has his junior team at work here.  The young plumber is teaching Tyler what he’s doing.  Initiation and interning, on the job training and work bonding.  Reminds me of Elkins Park.  Brian the plumber just came in---he’s much older than I’d thought, so not so junior.  Middle aged.  White hair, balding.  

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here’s the message Scott sent from his BU advisor---email, alas, has permitted us all to be instantaneous and forego any editing of our thoughts---I told Scott it was great news and he should go with that.  

This is better news I guess..

From: "ldhm" <ldhm@bu.edu>

To: "Scott Merrill" <samerrill1@mail.plymouth.edu>

Sent: Saturday, July 4, 2015 5:48:19 PM

Subject: Re: scott's dis

I’ve read the complete text and am at a loss for words…. I guess that’s the proper stunned response.  However, if I can return to my criticial self, I think the text has an argument that makes sense and is powerful.  It suffers from your usual faults – it tends to be repetitive and choppy.  It sometimes presents just a synopsis of a text instead of an argument, and is occasionally incoherent and sloppy.  But it picks up strength as it moves along and is much, much better than what I’ve read from you before.  I wasn’t sure you could do it, but you have succeeded in getting at the authority of the transgressive through Bataille’s writing, and convincingly pointed out the weaknesses of edgework sociology (at least in my opinion).  I do wonder if you couldn’t move chapter ten, which is a bit of a letdown after nine.  Perhaps it could come earlier – but I’m not adamant about that.  Also, I don’t think you need to give more examples of your writing and art in an appendix to make your case, though for publication you might want to.  As it stands, it is enough – do we want excess?  But again, it’s up to you.

As you’ll see, some of my critiques are enclosed in the text as comments.  Most are minor.  I also did edits and cuts, some of them are fairly big – though not eviscerating.  In fact, it could be cut more to make the argument more pointed.  I also did some minor proofreading.  When you work the thesis over again, begin with the version I’m sending you, deal with the comments and edits as you wish – you can accept and rework, or argue, or simply ignore, or whatever you want.  It’s up to you.  Then just send the whole manuscript out as a clean text to the other readers, and to me.  I don’t think this should take you very long.  A week, as you said.  Then we can get the orals scheduled for early August or late July.

Scott, I’m really happy to see you work through this and make something strong out of it.  Congratulations.

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Wednesday  late afternoon  July 8th  3:30

We went to Church Landing Inn last night.  Upgraded to even fancier room. Good sleep because we were dead tired.  I was anyway.  Dinner was here, the spanish omelet.  This morning we walk the docks even though we had showered and changed.  By then the weather had shifted, gotten drier, cooler and windier.  Nice breeze now.  Gorgeous again.  Alan here preparing to sheetrock tomorrow.  We walked over the details.  Price on the granite is 3500.  He had budgeted 3.  Next we have to choose the paint color.  Yesterday in the heat we went to Concord to F W Webb kitchen but the guy there was filling in and sent us back to the showroom in Gilford.  That guy was more helpful, we chose a sink and a faucet and paid.  No word yet from CGSB so I wonder how that will go.  Oh, and at Panera yesterday a young high school girl backed into our car as we had just backed out---that darned Panera parking lot---so we waited for a policeman to arrive and file the report.  Luckily for everyone it is a perfect corner bump.  Everything works and it can go to Jersey for three weeks with Ian Miller as planned.  Meg comes tomorrow to pick it up.  Va is out at PEO now.  Susan Berry picked her up at 3 and told me PEO stands for Pop Eats Out.  Forty years and it took that long to hear that one.  Which is so perfect.  I’ll go down to burritome shortly and get a burrito.  For lunch we went to the Holy Grail in Laconia across from the beautiful romanesque revival train station.  Irish motif and the redecoration of the church is much much better than I had expected.  Huge place though so I hope they can fill it before and after motorcycle week and fall foliage.  And presidential campaigns.  

Started reading Hotel Living, new novel by Iannos Pappos, which caught my eye because of the title, so close to mine.  Wanted to see what he does with it.  Of course the publicity for it talked about the anomie of hotel life as one moves around the high flying hedge fund wild world.  Didn’t mention it is a gay love story.  Or is so far.  Also compared to Gatsby and Bright Lights Big City on the back cover, so who knows how it will keep going.  Very good so far, pointed and fun and acutely observed.  Called the Trollope of the moment.  Of the mba and banking worlds today.  

Nicholas on Facebook “Culture always trumps process. A currency is both but the former is more important than the latter, so should always reflect a shared politics, which the euro does not, so as the article says the drama continues, and the pain redoubles.”

Feeny canceled for tonight.  

I wonder if Nicholas would permit “culture” to be replaced by “history and national character”?  Of course “culture” as a term no doubt assumes both without specifying a political, ideological position on the meaning of those terms.  

Alan doesn’t have any children.  “Never wanted any.”  Saw Rachel, Moby and Micah at BurritoMe downtown.  

Friday morning around 11.  Enjoying Pappos’s novel.  He had first-class editing on it and he writes super-well.  No workers this morning and it is not Nascar race weekend at Loudon.  Not until the 19th.  F W Webb just delivered the sink and faucet.  Guess Monday will be taping and plastering.  

Never paid much attention to games of course but playing with the bank balances and waiting for the word on the equity line (not until July 20 Flora says now and may have to lower amount if house doesn’t come up to 180k value.  Why doesn’t the bank use the value on the tax bill?  Why won’t the IMF talk to Greece?  Anyhoo, today we meet Anne and Bill for lunch, their first time at the Squam Lakes Inn.  So I take out autopay 50 every month to the Ally account.  Now it occurs that I could match that with 50 back into the brokerage account and after a few months I would have a wee game with results to compare of savings vs market. !  Where did this little devil notion come from ??  Besides the Ally account is not even savings is it but checking? 

Could swap it maybe and get ride of the atm feature.  

Pappos’ book has that rushed, wild feel that makes it a “great read” if that term is still used.  Makes you feel you of all people do not know what the latest and coolest terms are and you never will.  Someone’s business card is in lower case Calibri so of course I have to stop to see if I have Calibri on here and what it looks like lowercase.  I am in Optima now.  Now I am in Calibri.  Here is all lower case calibri.  looks like the Gill sans I used to fancy.  

Here is Calibri.  Here is Gill sans and here is Gill MT.  Line there for my novel:  He couldn’t tell Calibri from Gill sans or Gill MT.  

6pm  Nice lunch with Dick and Anne.  They will travel with the Otises in October but Dick will still teach one class in the fall for the dead art history minor.  Naomi didn’t buy her house in France.  They went over to see the village and got a whiff of potentially nasty anti-Semitism.  They enjoyed the Squam Lakes Inn and the key lime pie.  We swam on the way home, felt super good even if it wasn’t more than 15-20 minutes.  Lots of people there.  

Sunday evening April 12

Relaxed and pleasant visit to Helen and Ted in Acworth, NH.  Only one overnight but it felt like a weekend.  Dinner last night at the Common Man in Claremont.  Visit to two of the gardens on the Acworth garden tour.  Lunch at Helen’s, all fresh from her garden.  Or most of it.  Good conversing about everything we could think about.  Ted watches too much Fox news Helen told us in a moment to ourselves.  He stayed home to weed the garden and Helen took us to the gardens.  The first is the work of an old friend of hers from college, Kris, who studied German at UNH.  I’ll fill in the details about him later if I can remember them clearly.  

Acworth sure feels like another of those other countries.  

Bank approved our line, pending final house valuation.  4% at least and not 6 that the tiaa-cref scoundrels threw on us.  

13 July Monday evening

Noticed this morning that the kitchen has only two outlets on either side of the counter space under the large window.   Freaked.  Finally called Alan a while later and left two messages asking if this couldn’t be fixed.  While we were walking in Baby Lowes he called back and we had a good chat.  About an hour later he called while we drove home and said the electrician would be here tomorrow to rectify the situation.  Felt good about having made the complaint and having it be taken care of.  Macho Man!

Macho Man II  Mid-morning I finally managed to CHANGE THE HOUSEHOLD WATER FILTER in the basement.  Looked up a few youtube videos on the subject until I chanced upon the info I really needed---“Tightey Rightey, Loosey Lefty.”  Or was it Rightey Tightey, Loosey Leftey?  Either way I used it and gently and firmly turned and turned until I felt the unit creak a wee bit.  Then I pushed some more and lo it slowly moved and it opened.  After that, piece of cake.  Wooza

14 July  night

Dinner with the Rendevous group at Foster’s.  

15th  I stayed and enjoyed the evening with Lance, a woman and her young neice who spoke four languages, Armageddon, who was nice, and Daphne Warn, Quebecois wife of policeman Christopher Warn who Randy Hoyt bashed up years ago and who later took a class or two with me and who now has cancer of some kind.  Daphne is not here name.  Have to look at Fbk to get the correct one.  Diamate or something.  She talked the most.  Later Va told me that her accent is extremely Canadian-Q, from New Brunswick.  Her name is Daintre.  

Feenster and I took the day and drove north.  Neither of us really as Up for it as we should have been, would have wanted to be, but it was ok and good.  Atheneum didn’t open until 2 but at least we strolled hot StJ’s and he saw how weird a town it is.  Poverty big time, guys standing in doorways.  Heroin do doubt around a few corners.  Bookstore still looks ok and the manager says he expresso book machine has paid for itself and gets good use.  Feeny is reading Reza Aslan, curious about everything, anxious about the move, hovering in nowhere land in between everything right now.  

late afternoon   we ate at Docks for the first time this summer and did a quick facetime visit with the kids.  They were in the park, all packed, ready to fly tomorrow morning around 10.  Now it is simply a gorgeous afternoon.  

Thurs mid-afternoon.  Just finished Pappos’s Hotel Living.  Damn him!  Amazing finish and doesn’t he just pull if off rather brilliantly!  I went through the longeurs of boredom with the drugs and hollywood, Teresa and Ray and LA, just as he wanted me to, just as he made me do, that Pappos, that Trollope!   The one key blurb on the cover says if Trollope were here he would want to write this book.  Pretty great compliment.  The book is So good that now I have to look up some reviews and get everyone to explain it to me and agree with me.  

Astonishingly beautiful day. Va out by the fountain.  Lunch and walk at Docks, saw Natalie and her friend.  We ate at the deli in the house at the other end.  Two big circular sculptures are gone, probably sold.  New dragonfly in rusty old parts.  ok but not great.  

Flora called from the bank.   Appraiser can’t file the final ok because there is no kitchen in the house.  Flora didn’t know we were already under construction.  Finally we agree that if we wait two weeks Tom from Loon appraisal can come back again and see for himself and for the housing loan regulators that there is a kitchen.  She says it is the regulator level of the process that doesn’t like using Zillow etc--well it’s new federal regulations.  

Cabinets are stacked in the dining room.  6:42 pm  Tyler, Alan and Warren came and carried them in.  

Friday night July 17  

Kitchen floor in, some cabinets in place.  Wow.  Strange feeling of regret and remorse too, or being somehow unworthy, like out house is not up to the grade of upgrade we are having done or something.  What a strange response to it all?  Strangers examining our lives and we’re not up to the level.  Making up some mythos that Alan and crew are more used to working for all the Rusty McLears of the lake district, the Hirschfields and such and we are not meant to be in the company.  Strange notions, where did they come from?  

Some leftover response from Ioannis Pappos’s novel.  I am Stathis and all that.  Can’t find that many reviews of it.??  

Dream the other night.  I had painted a big painting, five vertical panels divided by straight lines, all one canvas.  Very satisfying gray on gray somehow, minimalist, texture with surface on top of texture.  Probably the granite piece we chose now that I think about it, but this was a lovely painting I had done.  Next scene is the gallery and the anxiety about the fact that the painting had been left out of the show, or left somewhere else, not there, not where it should have been.  Sense of loss.  Anxiety.  And pleasure that the painting was so good.  

Feeny by the way said nothing about the painting I gave him.  Not a visual guy.  

Today lunch at Norwich Inn after a fine early morning swim.  Then look at the Montshire museum and speculation on how much Emma would enjoy it.  Eliot too.  Overdrawn at the bank so came home and call generic tiaa and requested fast withdrawal.  Not here until Tues.  Just the call makes me feel clandestine and dirty somehow.  I did ask Charlie in Dallas, on the line, if this kind of call was the most popular request they get.  Yes, of course.  Nothing unique there.  

Sunday almost gouté time.  Sleepy muggy day and late risings.  

email to Phil

Couldn't help but hear Eggers' piece with two ears:  one his voice on Hollister, the other your voice in a similar piece on C-land.  You could easily do a five-part series for the Nykr "Letters from Western Maryland." 

Eggers has the whole brand-name thing going for him plus the romance of California and the west.  All the more reason you could do a piece (even sadder or even more important/regional) because all the "romance" of

Pittsburg-Cumberland-Morgantown has long ago been drained out of the place by historical forces of rise and decline.  Re-enacting the French and Indian war and such can bring out the dramatists but heroice tales of the great flood of 1933 probably will not, nor the mines, nor the rail yards, nor the grandeur of the Washington Street mansions. 

Our country and the landscape simply has to age and rot and reawaken and rot again like the other parts of the globe. 

German movie last night:  "Remembrance" on netflix.  True story at the core, Polish soldier thrown into Auschwitz at 19 who survived and saved the Jewish woman he had fallen in love with there.  They lose touch and re-find each other forty years later.  End.  Very German even though no one dies !  They are admitting the war and the hatred of Jews, but this film written and directed by women, makes sure there are not really any heroes in the tale, other than the surviving woman.  Not the Russians, not the Polish guy, not his evil Polish mother, and not even the American husband of the woman in NYC at the end.  Seems very German in not telling us Anything about how the Jewish woman got out of Berlin and over to NYC, educated?? and/but at least a good marriage to a successful NY lawyer or professor of some means and a good life in NY.  Last image, the two former lovers walk toward each other once she steps off the bus in his town.  Bam!  That would have been the start of the movie for Americans, brief flashbacks to sum up the tale and then forty more minutes at least of emotion, love-making, nostalgia, longing, triumph, congratulations, smiling and happy images of families and grandchildren and promises via cell-phone to get together once every year and to send gifts and make plans for joint vacations in St Maarten. 

oh well.  Our summer symphony is struggling to keep its audience and funding so Thurs they featured Dvorzak's New World Symphony but the first half was given oven to a slide-show with historical commentary that educated us on the social and historical and musical roots of the piece.  Of course D stole the primary melodic line from the great Negro spiritual and then he threw in bird calls and bells to quote the Indians, and what else?  Ok, source study.  But what about what the fuck he did ! to the music so that our ears would be experiencing This at this moment and then that at the next moment?  What about that??  well, hard to talk in academic terminology about such stuff of course.  But we can show more slides of 19th landscape paintings and photocollages from bad early movies about Indians and we can show the words of the Song of Hiawatha on which D based the structure of his piece. 

Like so much, as we know, on the one had all well and good and ok, yeah; on the other hand, Yikes and God help us.  

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Phil

"Like so much, as we know, on the one hand all well and good and ok, yeah; on the other hand, Yikes and God help us. "

I'm going to start a file named "Great Bob Sentences."   I've neglected to store earlier ones, but this one is definitely going in.

Cities and towns:

Peg points out that no architectural school is likely considering how to plan small towns.   All the profs and students are focused on building in NYC, LA, DC because that's where the money is.  I think she's right.   No one is likely thinking about how to design small towns where "nuthin' much is goin' on."

Years ago I wrote some short stories based on elegaic memories of Cumberland.  I've got them on a "stick" somewhere.  You're making me want to go back and review them.  Big houses.  Decent art.  Fancy old cars.   Slowly sinking into the mud.  Architectural Digest might as well be called "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."

In the 1850s Cumberland had an opera house.  It was long gone by the 1950s.  No longer supported.   Replaced, I'll bet, by movie theaters.  Why see an opera if you can see the latest by Abbott and Costello?  Dvorak has to contend with the latest summer pop song - a battle D will likely enventually lose. You're right that the US has to go through the stages that the rest of the wold has.   Sad process, though.  And democratization seems to hasten the decline of nearly everything.  

German stuff:

Peg's sister-in-law grew up  in Germany.  The SIL's father fought as German soldier in WWII in Italy, was captured, and spent much of the war as POW in this country.  About ten years after the war he  took a job at a chemical plant in South Carolina.  Ergo Claudia, from the age of about ten, was "American."   Yet, in her mind, she has always been German, and Hitler and Nazis is never far from her thinking.  Likewise, the wife of an old friend.  He was a GI assigned to Germany in the mid-60s,  met Elizabeth, and married her.   She also is constantly dealing with feelings of "guilty German."  

With both women, I'm very much - probably too much  - an American: "Ah, you had nothing to do with that.  Forget it."   They seem absolutely incapable of doing that.   The past has rivets in their minds in a way that I find nearly impossible to understand.  This film "remembrance" - strikes me a bit the same way.   What lurks in the minds of young German women is the past and it is not necessarily redeemed by anything in the present.  No happy endings.   I'll bet none of the women writing or directing this film have any direct memories of the Hitler period.   Yet that is what they write and think about. 

P

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tweeted and blogged about Pappso.  

Reading some of Pappos's short pieces on his blog site made me realize how addicted he is to the either/or.  Does he ever experience a maybe both/and?  Or isn't the whole game of wall street and corporate management based wholly on the "or"--you win or you lose.  Markets are up or down.  Products sell or they don't.  His piece on the bankrupt pride of the Greek soul is perfect for this.  Wonder if he's ever heard of the DeMoulas saga, Greek tragedy, around Boston, especially last summer's climactic battle?  

Reading experiences frame one another, as with all of living.  Coming to Pappos right on the heels of finishing Calasso on Baudelaire shapes my sense of what Pappos may or may not have pulled-off.  Calasso is so slow and nuanced, magisterial, breathtaking.  Pappos is nuanced enough but in that high-speed rush way that is not breathtaking even though it may at times take your breath away.  

I envy it of course but by the end I wanted most of all to now write a novel that would be as opposite Hotel Living as possible.  Nugget of great disappointment from my expectations as set up by the title.  I wanted a novel that was really about hotel living, a sort of Pico Iyer thing but much better than he's been doing of late.  I don't think this title is really that good for this novel.  Have to laugh at library and publishing cataloging---in that string of tags they list 2. Single-occupancy hotels.  That sure will mislead some researchers someday.  When he gets a movie out of this book, and it could of course happen, it will have a much better title.  Hotel Jerk or whatever.  Hotel Innovation.  

One of his best effects is to use the fog of corporate and management jargon with his command of trendy idiom to obscure and advance what people are saying and doing all at the same time.  Maybe even something Nabokovian to give him high marks in that class of immigrant writers who master the language and add something to it, to the literature.  

If Hotel Living is literature.  Might be a fine trendy read.  White and Cunningham give him great blurb jobs, of course.  But no one will say as was blurbed on Calasso's book "one had thought they didn't write books like this anymore."  

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why did I do that?  Pappos is good and funny.  His piece on Greek pride is terrific and the either or is about fucking and his gay identity vs faggotry.  Nikos, his island friend, gives him the opening either-or and the closing either-or.  “But I never forgot Nikos’ paradox. I never got over that phallic pride and anal shame that ruled sexuality and gender roles in rural Greece. Straight or gay, masculine or feminine, fucking vs. getting fucked was the qualifier during my beginnings.”  

“Or” really does run through his writings now that I consider it.  And it seems key to all of the high-rolling stuff he loves to wallow it---stars, celebrities, money, drugs, vanity fair all the way.  Especially his sense of failure and pride in his bankruptcy.  

Obama on Daily Show.  Ken and Carole went to Newport wedding of their grand niece to a walmart connected heir.  Grandson of former ceo.  ??

Alan fixed the refrigerator door bump against the wall molding, had his tall apprentice do it---the one who looks at his iphone all the time.  Micro seems hooked up.  Freezer & fridge working fine.  Waiting for the Countertop.  

Sudden trip down to see Michelle and choose the sink cut again on a second stone---this morning during that cut on the first stone it broke.  

Waiting for Granite would have been a better title if only Beckett had known that.  

Sleepy Sunday  Foggy and misty.  De-mantling the bathroom “kitchen” and fixing up our temporary bedroom the big two projects.  

Eric Johnson walking by outside as I went out to cut some Canterbury Bells for Willow.  Page is 4 and Riley is 2.  Playdate might not be impossible.  He is dying to go teach around Europe, special ed, special needs.  Dawson is set to go to Barcelona on Labor Day to pursue his doctorate in linguistics.  

Curious about the Inspector Morse series.  Could use the pair as a model for my Copenhagen caper.  Way to give the speaker someone to talk to.  One a courier the other a freelance detective.  Uncanny similarities. Differences.  

28 July Tues  Kids called last night at 10:30 from Middletown, decided to drive on.  Arrived sometime around 1 but we were sound asleep.  Heard Emma cry once during the terrific thunder and lightning storm.  Lightning felt like it was across the street.  Yesterday morning after our swim we saw a bear run across the road.  Out at the fountain later in the afternoon a humming bird in the nasturtiums.  

Thursday almost noon.  Fam went for morning swim with McLane’s at their private beach.