SEPTEMBER 2015
TUESDAY Sept 1
Dear Bob,
Thanks for the note. We're still in Chicago recovering from our trip home from Macedonia. We leave for Middlebury Saturday morning. Meanwhile we're deep into packing. Since when did sending a child to college becoming like outfitting Admiral Peary for the North Pole?
Just shopping for Joana makes Afrodita cry.
Our address is 5621 S. Harper Ave., Chicago 60637
We spent three splendid days in Italy on our way home, two in Rome and one in Assisi. The Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi is wonderful, with lots of early frescoes by Giotto, Cimabue and others. The colors are simply magnificent. I think it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Then of course there's St. Peter's Basilica, especially Michelangelo's dome and his Pieta in one of the side chapels, and the Sistine Chapel nearby. Is there anything better anywhere? I don't think so. I think for the first time I really felt the glory and imaginative power of the Italian Renaissance. Plus, the Italians we met, from the clerks at the Lost Luggage counter to the Airbnb couple we stayed with, surprised us by being so warm and friendly. We had one really great meal in Orvieto, north of Rome, including pasta with some truffle sauce and wild boar. (Our two meals in Rome were mediocre.) The whole three days were a delight.
It's great you can spend three weeks with your family, but even an afternoon with an 18-month-old will be exhausting. Clemens, who is 10 now, is exhausting, too, but for different reasons. I suppose you and David's family travel a lot back and forth. I wish Afrodita's family was one flight closer.
My relatives met in Wisconsin on Saturday for a birthday party for my Aunt Jeannette-- her nickname is "Stubby"-- who is 98 this week. My Aunt Mary, a Franciscan nun, was there. She's 95, I think. And my Aunt Winnie, who is also in her 90s. One of my dad's cousins, who is 103, also showed up. She seemed healthy and strong and was in the best shape of the lot. The others were in wheelchairs and made me think, I really don't want to live that old. I never felt that way before.
yrs,
Dick
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At Mt Alto this morning. Paquin and his student Brandon Hart, just back from his internship in San Clemente on Snowboard mag. He’s now on staff and getting money. Sophomore or junior now? Ethan has divorced again after five or six years of giving it another shot. Kelley a workaholic. Wonder what she says about him? Sam 18, daughter 12?? and little girl 6? Having a baby to try to seal the marriage? Musta been.
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2 Sept Wednesday strange “day-off”. Insurance meet-up with Ellen for Cincinnati at Melcher’s. She wanted a full recorded statement, you’d have thought it was a 10k incident or something. I guess she was trying to show how well she does her job, every jot and tittle, but it felt like overkill, even a little invasive or uncessary to the nth degree. Maybe I should have just said, no, I do not wish to have a recording, see what she would say then. Then I drove down to Scott’s and met him. He had slept late and had to shower while I had a water in the kitchen. Two Iyer books on the table. He later said he couldn’t even look at them, no taste these days for anything academic beyond getting his classes ready. Biggest surprise was he asked if I had read Pessoa’s Disquiet. I was pleased he liked it. Said Phil liked it too. They both had read it a year? ago. We drove to campus, he ran into Rounds to drop a book with the secretary. He’s got three classes, one online. Goes in only one day a week. Hardly talks to or sees anyone. One friendly person in the dept is George Matthews. Other gossip was about the English dept. XX is sleeping with student, Ryan, who learned that X’s husband gave her clamydia. They are divorcing these days. This was during lunch. Scott had worked for some years in Flagstaff as a reporter and there had gotten involved with an older woman who taught him some stuff. Didn’t go into details. What else? Was enjoyable enough at the time. Not much talk about BU. Talk about it all being over now and being tired of the whole diss. I somehow doubt that we will chat that often from here on out. Somehow I’ve got that surrogate feeling (not just because Masters was about that this week, but it does bring such things to mind). I stood in for a BU prof, probably stood in for Phil in many ways, maybe stood in for some other figures I don’t know about. But it’s done and over now. Which is fine.
Same thing it will feel like I suspect if and when I have lunch with Paquin. Same as anyone, everyone else, from the old life on campus. Terry D and anyone else. It’s all over. Let’s move into the new things. But do I just protest too much. Part of me enjoys it of course. And there is curiosity about some of it.
Met Whitney and Sree today at Panera. 7 Sept already. Labor Day. Monday.
Two days off coming up. Wow.
Weds Sept 9 Second day off in a row this week. Lunch at Quattro with Tommy Lee.
to Phil
Just heard this guy interviewed on Npr while driving. I agree about how refreshing and enlightening his
take on all of it seems to be. Try to find the interview and listen to it. Makes me curious to read the book
even though I probably won't. Will read some good reviews of it. Snyder's whole view on how wrong it
is to destroy other states (Iraq, Afghan Lybia, Poland, Ukraine ) as part of what Hitler's strategy should
be teaching us seems so important. Where is Quaddafi when we really need him? i.e. it is so easy
for comfy Am politicians to mount a campaign against evil dictator X but once we "take out" the regime
and the whole culture and regional state structures collapse then we see what idiots we've been.
And yes Hitler's thinking about the races and the Jews was apparently much more wacko and dangerous than we had understood. Again, the evil dictator mythos might blind us too readily.
Lunch in Boston today with 40yr old former student who might be one of my richest/most successful grads. Heads up the leading marketing agency in Boston. 451Marketing. Now offices in LA and NY as well. What a different different world those guys live in.
Only one joke from them: How many ad agency people does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: hmm, well, does there really need to be a light bulb?
Also everyone dresses casual so it looks like a big college dorm or student union. Lots of young people, jeans, shirts out and the women in great numbers, young and beautiful and wearing next to nothing or outfits that look bizarre and suitable for a cocktail party of a ho-down (even though they would never have heard of a ho-down).
Talking about his trips to LA Tom says everything is far more casual and nothing seems to get done in any effective way. The new partners out there who joined them in the venture never brought what they promised, all still
good friends after the parting of the financial agreements after a year.
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Phil had read the review of Snyder’s book in NYRB.
There is an amazing article entitled "Hitler's World" in the current issue of the NY Review of Books. It is written by a guy named Snyder whose book about Hitler - "Black Earth" - was just published. If Snyder's interpretation of Hitler's thinking is correct, he has been able to extract a lot more information out of Hitler's writings than I ever did. To me Hitler was simply a former German soldier who blamed the Jews for the loss of WWI. Not so, according to Snyder. So this is a truly eye-opening article for me. I read Mein Kampf many years ago, but I really didn't see into the depth of Hitler's mind the way Snyder seems to. Again, I don't know if Snyder is right, but most of the article is verbatim quotes from Hitler's various writings. Very, very scary. Adolf had some absolutely wild reasons for hating Jews. This article is the first thing I've ever read that may explain why Hitler wanted to exterminate ALL Jews.
P
PS I still don't know how Hitler convinced most Germans to become brutes who executed women and children but there is no doubt, after reading Snyder's piece, that Hitler considered such savage brutality absolutely necessary.
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I think I got Tommy to agree to give Sree a visit and talk things over with him. His firm had an Indian some years ago, a young Brahmin. Tom asked how Sree’s English is. He has an account with Taj but he didn’t know who Tata is, or the significance of the name.
Sifting through boxed kitchen items all day. Prepping for the yard sale on Sat.
Got Sree the interview with Tommy. Wonder what will happen with it? Next week it seems. Whitney put up on Facebook that it was three years ago she packed everything up, took her savings, 2k, and set off for England and India where she did research with the mountain people of Kerala and met her future husband.
The pattern behind my effort to help Sree get a break is of course my own hiring here. Hubby of a great woman who needed someone on the hiring committee in the Engl dept to say let’s rearrange the job description to fit Garlitz. I think it was Henry Vittum but maybe it was the others too. I was too much in a state of shock-anxiety to take close notice. Years later I thought I’d have the chance to do it for Patrick but when it came to the moment of the hovering of HR didn’t allow it, nor the make-up of the committee. That HR process monitoring didn’t exist when I got hired. Maybe if it had I wouldn’t have been hired. Anyway, it feels satisfying just to have helped Sree get an interview even if nothing more comes of it. We’re liking a new detective series on netflix called The Killing. Seattle noir.
I think you and David read at least one of Wallace's novels several years ago. What's your opinion of him as a writer?
The above article by Wallace is certainly unusual, a combination of young people banality and something better than that.
Below is what a friend wrote about "Infinite Jest": I think "Miller" appeared in the NYer.
I liked Miller’s review; she’s trying to fathom this new world where with so many sources and outlets for communication we all become critics......I read the Goodreads blog just for enjoyment ---- these are sincere people, many of them students, giving books their best shot, and some of them are terrific. But Miller believes, I think, that a real (highly educated, academically qualified, classically well read, experienced) critic is needed for an accurate interpretation of something like Infinite Jest....otherwise we all just end up being subjective and self-serving; and she’s probably right. I’ve only read reviews of IJ thus far and they make it sound ever so much like Joyce’s Ulysses, which was so stylistically enigmatic that an interpretive guide (The Bloomsday Book) was created to help people get through it, full of footnotes and explanations of the esoteric references to classic and ancient Irish lit, history, mythology, Roman Catholic tradition, Latin references etc.
Wallace's book doesn't require or plea for nearly the level of annotation that Joyce's does. Ulysses invents the Norton Anthology of Literature fifty years before it got created.
And, by the by, over the years, I have grown less and less impressed and sympathetic with what Joyce does in U. Beckett demonstrated for us all, at least my generation, that Joyce blew it, drove himself into a dead end and the work interests everyone less and less and will remain a curiosity long after we stop calling it a masterpiece. Maybe like Anatomy of Melancholy or Urn Burial, two older "classics" in the British former-canon that take a lot of commitment to plough right through. Though Sitter might be aghast that I should say so since they are in his bailiwick (I think--have to run a timeline check).
But Ulysses you can get through, and it’s basically a great story --- a love story between a man and a woman, then between a man and his nation, his history, his religion, his culture, though these are all foreign to him, adopted by him --- but he appreciates. In the end, you’re emotionally quite moved and know you’ve just been touched deeply by a great mind. Can’t say the same for Finnegan’s Wake! And whether Infinite Jest has the technical and emotional power do this, remains to be seen, by me at least.
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your friend's comments are great. who is it? he/she I agree with on most points, especially the first one about needing a "real critic" in our old-fashioned way. She's right about the earnest people on Goodreads, which I stopped reading and stopped contributing to precisely because it feels just like the whole scene of online learning in the humanities. The one big skill college grads have is that they can generate text in massive bundles because they know that's how they get the grade and the
job in the new world they live in. Forget manual labor and craft, spooling words is our lifebread now and every grad can outdo dickens at a dollar a word if need be. Strange turn really in the history of the written word.
I never had quite that warm experience with Ulysses but no doubt I read it when I was way too young, too dazzled by the learning and cultural fireworks and too clueless about the love story. Strange your friend forgets to mention the friendship or bonding companionship between Bloom and Stephen?
Really I think comparing the two books is not a good idea. Way too different in so many ways, too many ways. Of course one wants to compare big, ambitious works. Same trouble everyone is having with Knausgaard as our new Proust these days. Wallace's Jest I do think is magnificent, much more than I had thought at first and very very funny in places, throughout. I remember little of it in detail now of course. But once you're "in" you settle in to enjoying this massive work and he delivers over and over. Joyce-Wallace---every fifty years or so someone, young, launches a massive work as a way to say hey I'm here too. Ambition is ambition. And I guess in that way any and every such work comes down to being a love story between the writer and his culture/world just by virtue of that desire to proclaim oneself the new king of it all in town. To get one's voice into the conversation.
Peg with you? Have a good time and give my regards to the whole wild scene.
You have quoted your friend on some books before. The last part of her comment got me thinking and I just googled the line "argues joyce's bloom is anti-semitic” and sure enough that yields a fine string of links to the whole discussion or multiple discussions about Joyce's very choice of a Jewish hero in Bloom. Is that or could it not be seen as anti-S in the very "appropriation" of Jewish identity as a strategy for working out clever stances on Irishness and anti-Irishness?
Not that I want to get into that, but for the dissertation writers of the world there seems to be quite a bibliography already on the issue. I suppose that is part of Joyce’s greatest achievements---creating a very difficult body of work that requires intense study for years to come. Maybe even for as long as possible---i.e. fame as in immortatlity in literature.
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Half a week after the success of his visit to the important person in the city, the failure of his visit began to dawn on him with some bitterness. He had not undertaken the venture to help someone who needed help. That was what he had told himself and everyone else who knew about the event. He realized only later that he had fallen into a familiar trap. He wanted to be important. He had wanted to be seen as important by everyone involved in the drama and who knew about the gesture of good will and good intention and ostensible helpfulness. He wanted to see himself as someone who is important, still important even after his public functions had ceased, his signature life’s work was officially ended. He now collected the monthly checks marking this new status, this new chapter. Not yet the final chapter but a chapter after the end of the previous and major chapters of anyone’s life. This failure of generosity, failure of selflessness cloaked in generosity had cast its pall over the event itself, a lovely luncheon at a good restaurant in the trendy heart of the city where he had wielded his supposed influence over the old friend whose decision was was quietly trying to shape. The friend had seen before he had that his ego was paramount and the pall it cast put him into the shadow even while everyone assumed that his visitor was courting his powers of decision rather than not-so-subtly imposing his own urges to dominate and control his friend’s position of power. The younger acquaintance who he was trying to have his old friend give a position to in his large firm would have no inkling of this failure until late in the interview a week later when something said, something barely noted, hinted at the irritation the employer had felt when his friend had shown up to a “day off” and lunch in the city, to see him after so many years, and revealed that he was really asking that the young person be given a job just because. The person was qualified, for sure. But was there a position just then available, or a position the firm was on the edge of wanting to create? The self-important friend from the country had not bothered to even ask these things or consider them. It was all, the friendly proposal for a get-together, the palsy chat and catching up, the bestowal of presence and diversion, not for the director with the power and position but for the visitor who was intent on cashing in a favor on a promissory note that had never been previously issued. Not really. He behaved as if it had, and in that he had behaved with presumption and blindness.
Great news yesterday. Book review in BkForum of a novel by one Martin Critchley? have to check on the name. Memory Theater. Reviewer said the magic words at one point about it being a bit like Malone but funnier and friendlier to the reader. Got me thinking: here it is the Copying project I’ve been looking for all my life. Instead of Heidegger’s theory of whatever and maybe instead of obsessing about death or whatever, just imitate the cheese and plug in whatever holes I can come up with and Voila! my own Swiss Cheese of a novel. Ordered it and am GOING TO DO IT! Line by line or however. Perfect. In place of Heid I can put Borges Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote and Pessoa. Call the book Disquiet Theater. In place of Frances Yates’ book I can use Pessoa and Borges.
Simon Critchley Memory Theater Other Press Reviewed by Clancy Martin.
What else has Critchley written? No matter. But always curious. A lot of books, mainstream brit stye philosophy, but early book on Wallace Stevens.
Martin: “In fact, Memory Theater very much reminded me of Malone Dies--if, say Beckett had written his masterpiece in a playful, lighthearted mood, with the goal of entertaining rather than demolishing his reader.”
from Phil
It strikes me that the write is too self-critical. Putting in a plug for some kid over a friendly lunch is just part of ordinary business. Unless the kid needing the job was literally promised a position before - and perhaps after - the lunch, this lunch was just standard fare: "Hey I'll talk to an old friend in that company and see if there's an opening for you." Personally I don't think the old friend had any business being annoyed at having someone suggest a possible new employee over lunch. It happens all the time. Get used to it, dude! And if the writer's motives were mixed, nothing wrong with that, either. Every retired person likes to feel that, to some degree, he or she is "still in the game, still has some clout" even though it's probably not true anymore.
I surmise that this is a description of your trip to Boston to talk to your former student who now works at a big ad agency. Yes?
------moi
no no, lifted from a novel by P D James. Have never read her. Giving her a shot.
Well, yes, c'est moi. Spate of regret and remorse because via facebook I am reminded the other day of how much the wife, the prof at psu now in history, who brought the poor kid over from India after getting preggers with his child, is a total idiot in her own right. The kid is ok. Oh well.
But I was just asking about the writing, the writing itself. Isn't it wonderful and genius! ? Wish I could write like Beckett in his early novels---the flat nothingness of stumbling cluelessness.
I am reading James for the first time. Not sure why. I guess I will like it ok. Dagliesch.
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And so here is Jim Sisk having finished his novel. Death is chasing us all into textuality. from Phil
In the current NYRB, there is an article about Elmore Leonard, whose terseness reminded me of Jim Sisk's comment about the "wordiness" of some of my characters. So I sent the article to Jim and asked how his mystery was going. He replied that he finished it in July and was looking for an agent, but might ultimately self-publish. I wished him luck. Soon afterwards, he emailed me the book and asked me to critique it. I agreed to do it.
So far I've just read two chapters, and Jim has already made a few writing errors - mainly doing too much backstory right at the very front, and his language, like most beginners, is a little too formal: "He could not do it" instead of "He couldn't do it," and a little too much picturesque adjectives. Nothing too terrible, but errors that will prevent the work from being picked up by a publisher. For example, writing "flea" instead of "flee" is a real no-no.
If you like, I'll email it to you, but you have to promise that you won't let Jim or anyone from Lasalle know I have done so.
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Pretty much guarantees I won’t show Phil a speck of my novel. If and when it ever unfolds. Having been copied or not.
Whether any of us get published for real or self---Phil’s note shows how writers like to PICK at each other’s work!!! Our insecurities appall us all.
Crime novels probably seduce more would-be writers into trying
their hand in retirement and before death more than any other
genre because they seem so easy in the sense that all you need
is a murder and an investigator. Bang. We've all by now seen
millions of dramatized variations, so that little voice tempts us
with "how hard can it be?"
Sorta what I always said when I looked at a Rothko painting and decided to buy some paint and some stretched canvases and have at it.
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Got a mirror and had it put into the old photo frame. Now hanging in the hallway. Looks terrific. Took photos of the old piece of glass that protected the photograph. The image is visible on the glass. No doubt common for photographs. Sent a photo of it to Anne and Barbara. Posted it on Facebook too. “Spirit” photography. Gave the orange ten-speed bike to Mike Rossi who runs the Raven Bike Shop down on Main Street. He’s now forty. Three years older than David. He and his wife moved back here after fifteen years away, many years out in Wyoming.
This copying of other works---Wiki tells me I’m in great company here. Never knew about Calvino’s or Thompson’s exercises, but they show that it must be a common notion. Not unique to me.
“In Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979) the character Silas Flannery tries to copy a "famous novel" to gain the energy from that text for his own writing, and finally he feels tempted to copy the entire novel Crime and Punishment. This technique was actually attempted by Hunter S. Thompson, who retyped the entirety of The Great Gatsby when he studied at Columbia University, prior to the writing of any of his major works.”
Going to Cambridge tomorrow, day already mapped out in my mind. Indian lunch at Inman Square where Mark and Scott took me to dinner, then on to the Raven Bookshop in Harvard Square, stroll around and dip into the Fogg if possible and then back home. Should be great weather day too.
Digging around on Wiki some more about Calvino makes me think now that I should go ahead and do the re-write but not allude to Borges or Calvino because that would take readers in the direction of the "playful postmodernist puzzle” and that is not what I want at all. Forget puzzle and breathtaking inventiveness. No, not what we’re after here. Disquiet still might work. Theater of Disquiet. But maybe not Theater either.
Got some boxes put up over the refrigerator. The one thing I did today.
Memory Theater be here tomorrow I think. Memory Fiction it most likely will be.
May 1910 when Frank Brown’s circus tent burned, I will have Borges, aged 11, Pessoa 22 and Valle-Inclán 34 all having been at the circus the day before, unbeknownst to one another of course, but each influence mightily by the circus and then the burning of the tent the day after.
Of course the trip to Raven Books was a total bust. They buy only books that are pristine in every possible way. Oh well, shoulda known.
Anticipation of the big project excruciating. But having tried something like it before more than once, I’m thinking I need to do something like this: treat it as a typing project only and do not on any account “read ahead.” Do not read even a page at a time. Use some blank paper and block everything except one sentence or one line until I’ve type the whole line or sentence. Inch forward. Otherwise the sense of the sentence and then the paragraph and page will overwhelm me, undermine me, take all the wind out of my sails and I will give up in disgust early on.
Already I know the opening line and have begun to rewrite it. I think it is “I am dying.” I think I got that from the review in BookForum. I might make it “I will die, but not yet. I am dying. The more accurate and philosophical variant, of course, if you want to go all philosophical right at the outset. But I don’t.” Steady production must be the primary goal. Otherwise I will bog and tire.
Phil gave Sisk deep editing advice on his novel. I skimmed and asked why winning the lottery would keep the book from being published. Phil replied and of course he’s right, I was being lazy and sloppy. Distracted.
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Well, let me turn your question back on you. Would you write a novel in which a central character had just won a huge lottery if winning of that lottery weren't the central issue of that character's story?
I think you have better sense than to do that. I very much doubt you would toss that detail into a story then not have the big money play any part in the story other than a brief mention at the start of the story, then nothing about the wealth for the rest of the story.
In particular I don't think you would put that kind of off-the-wall detail in a mystery where readers need to feel that what they are reading is a portrayal of "real life." As you mention "odds too great" for "real life."
Finally, I would never put that kind of thing in any kind of story, mystery or not, that wasn't precisely focused on what happens to someone when that person wins a $100 million lottery. But Jim doesn't do that at all. In his story it's just this weird detail tossed into the story. A real no-no, in my opinion.
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Getting ready for Nicholas’s visit.
Dinner at Lago last night. Great pinot grigio from Oregon and good food. Still cool but warmer than yesterday.
Sunday Sept 27
Nicholas has convinced us to undertake India this winter. Call Odysseys tomorrow.
McGregor’s long-awaited biography of Robert Lax yields its secrets. Young Lax read Theosophical society literature brought home by his famous uncle Henry and aunt Marie who had been to India to meet Annie Besant. McGregor says “Lax seems to have read some of the movement’s literature as well, including an early book by the movement’s protégé, J. Krishnamurti, where he saw a poem in the vertical style he would one day make his own. 57
“The only criterion for how and what to write if you’re sincere about writing so other people can read it and be happy, is to write just exactly what you please the way you want to.” Lax in 1939
Somehow Christopher’s departure has left me not even remembering my big project to copy the novel. The novel has not arrived, very slow delivery from Amazon. That has dispersed the energy too. And reading the bio of Lax, I’m blaming that too. Those guys fresh out of Columbia in 1940. Sure the war broke out but they were the elite and ready to step into leadership roles in the culture. Ad Reinhardt. etc. They had had the best of liberal arts then available. They had all their aspiration and interest in spirituality and religion. Bramachari had given them the image of the spiritual person. Joyce was the greatest writer. They all wanted to be writers and artists. They had each other and their group high spirits, confidence, talent, ambition, wit, culture, money, and promise.
See I can figure how to be envious at the drop of a hat. But there’s more. The story of Lax so far, up to the outbreak of the war, feels so familiar I suppose because I’ve already heard a few versions of it as it is told about and by Merton. He and his story dominate the beginning and I like how McGregor says right off that Merton was brilliant as a self-promoter from the outset. 1941 Lax had his breakdown. Merton went into the monastery three days after Pearl Harbor. Great timing! Dec 11 1941 McG says. He is 26. Lax went to live in Harlem and volunteer at Friendship house in the afternoons, mornings for writing. He was ashamed of his failure at the New Yorker, of the year he had written nothing there and had fretted about what the desire for success was doing to him. He wanted to practice expiation for his failure and shame. There was some sort of collapse but McGregor doesn’t try to give it any standard name. He even doesn’t seem to believe Lax when he uses the term “manic depressives” about himself and Gibney. But of course that phrase might have been commonly used by artistic types, even as it is today.
Glad for this line as a confirmation of what I was looking for--“Lax’s hesitancy to render public judgment on anyone or anything, . . .” 136
I seem to get only so far in biographies (of writers?) and then lose interest. Or my own egocentricism kicks in.
The writer of this book on Lax is twenty years younger than us, so
I start to see his "lens" on things. I was very glad to hear him say
that Merton was a brilliant self-promoter all through his career as a writer. Of course Lax's story is much in the shadow of Merton's story and always has been, so McGregor is trying to give Lax the spotlight
as much as possible.
Now that I am up to Lax at around the age of 30 my interest in his story slows down and my egocentrism kicks in and I want to keep reading but more slowly so as to see the portrait of my coming of age in the periods the biographer describes. Lax is exactly the age of my parents, all born in 1914-15. Leonard Cohen the singer is born in 1934, ten years my senior. I’m now going to kick in my love of “stereophonic” reading and continue with Lax’s biography alongside the biography of Leonard Cohen which I began reading a few years back and then put aside. Pick up with both around 1950 when I was starting school at St Mary’s in Cumberland, Maryland. The bookmark in the Cohen book corrects me and says I dropped it in 1967, so I guess I’ll read more of Lax to catch up to that date.
1947 Marseille Lax is 35.
Phil to me after my post about bio.
I read the first of a two-volume bio of Graham Greene, and never was tempted to read the second volume. I think the reader is interested in what made the writer who she or he is. So it's interesting to read about the parents and family and school and, in general, the life up to about the age of 25. Past that, it's just a history of what the writer did. In most cases that's pretty boring. He thought about things, wrote some of that down, took vacations, met people, cheated on spouse, got divorced and remarried. Hemingway knew Fizgerald: so what!
I'm intrigued by your "egotism" that is kicking in to slow or stop your interest in a bio. Please explain.
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my reply--
just pretty much what you say. You're interested in how the guy got to become a writer and then after that he just goes along like everyone else. Right after college Lax and his buddies spent summers out near buffalo. They had heard that Wm Saroyan had written a novel in five days so they had speed writing contests to see who could finish a novel first. Horsing around and eventually stepping into pretty good positions without much trouble. NY was a small town in 1947 for Columbia grads. Only 4% of the US had a college degree in those days
My egotism is just that I've answered basic questions of curiosity about the guy's background and then I don't want to know too much more and instead get back to my concerns of the moment, much more important. Including back to reading novels, which still tell us more about both ourselves and the world than bio or history or anthro etc.
Plus in a bio maybe especially of a writer you already have read and have a liking for, it seems easy to get tired of the biographer’s shortcomings as a reader and interpreter of the writer’s life and work. Even without getting specific enough, I get a grumble in some part of my mind that the biographer did all that work and dug and dug and still comes out with this or that flatfooted explanation of something in the writer’s life that no one will ever really explain.
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much later. Have read lots more. Still only up to 1960 more or less. Mc Gregor circles around and around this period--1956-1962 +/– because Lax is stuck, in his early 40s and frustrated, living in NY and working for the catholic magazine Jubilee, but not getting anywhere. And gets rheumatoid arthritis and stupidly goes on a milk only diet. Yikes. So he has his troubles and he does stay with the church and spirituality as his main focus both in and with the writing. Writing + God + solitude vs need for money and work. Living in a terrible place in Queens.
“Lax’s main attraction for Kerouac seems to have been the purity and simplicity of his spiritual pursuit.” 214
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