December 2015

December 2015

Tuesday Dec 1

6 pm back from Rockingham Mall.  First freezing rain of the season but didn’t freeze before we got home about half an hour ago. 

Taylor Goldsmith’s lyric in “The Way You Laugh” (in “Nothing is Wrong”)   True lovers always end up lonely/because they know how good it could be

This may be  the essence of Sehnsucht and/or of Saudade

Have to study the texts before I can decide. 
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Tim Sacco passed this info via facebook

Prison Book Program
United First Parish Church
(use basement door at the back near the traffic light)
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Weds night dec 2   New book of Bukowski on Cats in Gibsons!  

Day off, touchstone drive, the flanêur on the highway. 

Thurs  Dec 3 

pasting in Meyers’ claim again

“Mann’s elegant style, penetrating irony, subtle wit, artistic brilliance, probing intelligence, depth of meaning, insight into the malaise of European culture and half-century of creative genius make him the greatest novelist of all time.”

will I really like and enjoy Mann even though some things interest me, given Esposito’s endorsement!  two phrases from
the one piece by Evelyn Juers (AU “The Age” site) turn me off completely---“haute-bourgeois elegance and arrogance.”  Mann’s overwhelming literary aspirations: he yearns for “the eroticism of fame”, and admits that sometimes “my stomach churns with ambition.”  In his favor might be his “power of appropriation” and his preference for finding over inventing.
And his sense of the mask:  “he seldom stepped into his fiction without wearing a mask” He believed that “the secret and almost noiseless adventures in life are the greatest.” 

Maybe I will like his arrogance and ambition because I can let him stand in for me.  Or give me a virtual sense of what it might have been like to have been so born into those realms.  Of gold. 

For now I am a Tournier-o-phile.  Very much a school days memory book, so far.  Blustery rainy day.  Furnace guy called to clarify the water problem in the basement.  Paula here. 
Va proposed we plot a day in Cambridge tomorrow while the weather is good. 

Copying Tournier, why not make the book be a journal of my days in Copenhagen exploring the new life.  Pretty logical at that and “easier” to write, to merge with this journal, to transform this journal into that higher one?  Almost fictionalizing like Kraus did in her first book. 

Friday night

Third furnace repairman here when we got home around 5.  Tom, from Bristol out of the Concord office.  Says it should be all set.  Again.  Stayed up last night to meet Sean the young guy who came around 12:30, put in a new expansion tank.  All set.  But in the morning the water was on the floor and the bucket overflowing.  See what happens tonight.  Planned trip to Cambridge now tomorrow.  Hope it is sunny.  Today was not at all sunny in Concord.  First stroll in the old mall there in one or two years.  Food court gone completely.  Otherwise it looks clean and neat.  Empty. 

Saturday night

Visit to the Fogg went well.  Love what Renzo Piano did with it. 

Got my Ancestry.com results.  Huge surprise---not one iota of German DNA.  What’s in a name?? 

Here is the percentage line-up:

Europe 100%

Great Britain 71%
Italy/Greece 8%
Ireland 5%

Trace Regions 16%
Because both the estimated amount and the range of the estimate are small, it is possible that these regions appear by chance and are not actually part of your genetic ethnicity.
Iberian Peninsula 5%
Scandinavia 4%
Finland/Northwest Russia 3%
European Jewish 2%
Europe East 1%
Europe West < 1%

These are ethnicity “estimates.” 

ok, enough already with that.  But it does squelch fantasies of “being so German” whatever that was meaning in my imaginarium. 

Sunday night
Finally read the Columbia College magazine on Ed Rice.  What a crackerjack of a life compared to Lax’s.  And it contextualizes the difficulty of “getting” Lax.  None of his first friends in the Columbia days ever did, could. 

Michael Woods review of the Mann biography in LRB “Impossible Wishes” is supremely intelligent and generous to Kurzke, given what others have said so negatively about the book.  Mann distinguished rigorously--schizophrenically, we may feel--between sexuality and eroticism, where the first was all practice and the second all dream.” . . .  Mann is telling us  [in his diary for 1950] that the deepest, most life-justifying experience of a person might be a scarcely reciprocated gaze, or at least the intense feelings that come with the gaze.”  . . .  the German word Entbehrung . . .  “means ‘missing’ or ‘going without.’  But ‘renunciation’ is closer to the important meaning.  Mann wasn’t deprived of what he wished for.  He courted his impossible wishes, and he gave them up.  He simultaneously gazed on and went without what most of us would call life.  He enormously increased the difficulties of  being in love and these are not unrelated to the difficulties of being a novelist.”  “Mann may or may not have thought [ that difficulty itself is a value beyond good and evil] this himself, but he certainly felt that the pursuit of difficulty renewed the passions, and he knew that for him it was inseparable from ‘this phenomenon of life’.  6 Feb 2003 LRB

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Marga wrote about meeting Nicholas but Nicholas has not written about meeting Marga nor about his week in Madrid. 

Mis-interpreting I’m sure.  He did post a piece about Velazquez’s paintings of the dwarfs.  On Golgonooza.  But I don’t think he understood that the dwarves were then highly placed and highly regarded. 

Thanks to Tom Garlitz I learned the new word “haplotype” today.  His extensive family history I will paste in here, or soon. 

Dear Bob and Jan,

I understand Heinrich Peter Garlitz emigrated from Dudelsheim, Hesse, Germany (about 10 miles from Frankfurt) in the mid 1700s.  He is often incorrectly called Christian Garlitz.  He had a son named Henry who in turn had a son named Christian who married Sarah McKenzie.  The McKenzies were/are Scots Irish.

George Washington Garlitz (a grandson of Christian and Sarah) and Mary Newman were third cousins.  Her grandparents were John Newman and Elizabeth Hare.  Elizabeth’s parents were Philip Hare, Jr. and Maria Magdalena Garlitz.  Maria Magdalena was a daughter of Heinrich Peter Garlitz.  The Hares were German.

I understand the Newmans were Irish, but I can’t identify any of John Newman’s ancestors.  I suspect his parents or perhaps uncle and aunt were George Newman and Margaret Youler, but I can’t find any proof of that relation. Mary Newman’s mother was named Barbara Schrock.  The Schrocks were Amish and came from Switzerland.

A Drake DNA study conducted about five years ago (and still on-going) found two lines of English Drakes.  One line has a haplotype of Rib which is the most common western European haplotype.  They include the Drakes who were the Lords of Ashe.  The other line has a haplotype of R1a1 which is Norse.  They include our line of Drakes which are most commonly called the New Jersey Drakes. One person tested was a grandson of Bona’s uncle Adolfus. That might explain the Scandinavian, Finnish and Russian connections shown in Bob’s DNA test.

The first of the New Jersey Drakes was a Francis Drake who settled first in New Hampshire and then moved to Piscataway, NJ with his son Rev. John Drake, a Baptist minister.  The Church of England and the Baptists did not get along well.  As far as I know, our Drakes have no connection to Gengis Khan.

We do have Greek, Italian, Eastern European and Spanish ancestors so I am not surprised to find those connections.  I don’t understand why there is no German connection.

Tom
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Esposito I take a pass on today---he lists a recent book by Francis Fukuyama so I looked at Wiki to find out about who he is and thanks but no thanks.  I don’t like the company he keeps, has kept.  One of those stellar careers, super high-level achieving economist/political scientist who swerved from the study of literature because he ran into deconstruction in his early adulthood (even from the horses’ mouths in Paris) and went all the way to the other end and created fodder for the neo-c’s arround the Bushes.  Then he tried to bail from them and disavow them once the Iraq war took off.  Sorry, Francis, if you did not stay away from those guys from the very beginning it shows you have no judge of character and were too ambitious and egotistical to have taken sound action and made sound judgments. 

News today that the new hot water tank will arrive and get installed early tomorrow morning.  Fingers crossed. 

Great screen visit with Dave and the kids today.  Emma was giving papa a hair cut. 

Tuesday Dec 8 

Boiler guy is finishing the installation of the new hot water tank. 11:38 am  Let’s hope that is the fix.  Sunny and warm, low 30s but psychologically it feels much warmer.  Strange.  Downloaded cookie recipes.  Ready to make sandtarts and oatmeal&coconut drops.  Maybe add crystals for color? 

Big news is I located the Destroy Nisard book.  It was lost for a few days.  Stuck behind Willow’s front seat cushion. 

Wednesday night  9 December

Lunch with Greg in Conway at the Maple Cafe.  REally nice visit.  He said Jim is still posting a column on the Crier every so often.  Also expects further word from the Paulist Press.  We think that’s delusory.  We talked about our reading but I forget exactly what Greg is reading these days.  oh, right, Samuel Adams’ novel, Democracy, 1870s? about presidential corruption, $100,000 bribe.  A lot of money in those days.  The wrong man is presumed guilty and shunned. 

Greg called today while we were driving to Tilton.  He’s sent me a copy of the most recent book by Patrick Leigh Fermor.  I hadn’t heard about it.  Maybe it is the long-awaited completion of the trilogy?  We’ll see. 

New Epson printer set up.  Feels like a toy compared to the Canon. 

Devastating news via facebook.  Bob Sprankle died Tuesday at age of 53.  Poor Bob.  Such a terrible story of the ordinary surgery with chronic pain and then the fight for disability rights in Maine. 

I should have gone to see him but I didn’t.  A few skype visits last year.  My chance chat with Jody at the Ceres bakery, was that about a year ago?  or in the spring?  Forget exactly.  Feels so grotesque to post anything on facebook or twitter. 

 Friday morning  now 1:30pm  Dec 11

Splendid brunch visit to Ken and Carole’s to see the decorations.  Ted and Pat.  Felt so good, gemülichkeit at it’s finest.  Is that how to spell it?  No wavy red line.  Sent paypals to the nephews and kids. 


Looks like Robert Tisdale’s mother died yesterday, another facebook news item.  She was only 76?? 

Reading Aira’s Dinner.  Not keen on the walking dead so much but still enjoy his writing.  And his writing seems to always make me think I could do it and want to do it more at least while I’m reading him.  Not every other writer has that effect.  Finished Demolishing Nissard.  Ends sweetly in a way I hadn’t seen coming. 

Monica Carter on Goodreads adds this to my understanding--and I should have seen all of this but I took so long to read the book I’m afraid lots of it escaped me.  Another argument against reading too many books at once?

“Stylistically and thematically, there is heavy hat-tipping to Celine, de Sade, and Bataille. There is the non-stop ranting of Celine, the daring of de Sade and the food-sex combo of Bataille. These influences enhance the work as like-minded ghostly compatriots of the narrator's objective. Definitely, this is a fun novel. Even though there is intense emotion in this novel, high levels of manic anger, it's not an emotional novel. It's cerebral, a modern antidote to the mainstream, intended for readers who don't look to the bestseller list for the next read.”

Monday Dec 14

Dentist Paul Singh is from Kashmir.  Said hello today.  “Singh” wiki tells me is the name of the Rajah who bought the country from the British after they defeated the Sikh rulers at the beginning of the 20th century.  Sometime in the past fifty years it became a contested area, three countries trying to reclaim it.  Ladakh one name part of its history. 

Screen visit with the kids at noon.  Emma cutting Papa’s hair again.  Their last week of classes.  Off to ski next week and then the week after at Chezet for Christmas. 


Obituary for Bob in the Herald online yesterday.  Private funeral arrangements.  Just as well. 

Tues  15th  wind outside bringing colder air back.  High as 64 today in Concord.  Car serviced.  Lunch, walk on Main.  Coffee at Starbucks, groceries at Hannaford.  Beautiful sky driving home and up through Bristol this time, Overlook Drive, to see where Ethan P has bought a place.  Va has said nothing about doing holiday decorations so I will bring it up tomorrow.  !  ??  Trying to stay low stress for the trip?  Put emphasis on getting ourselves in shape.  Letter from Odysseys the other day being careful to have us not expect much handicap access availability etc. 

Wednesday Dec 16 

Buddenbrooks and Kurzke’s big biography arrived.  Now my life can begin.  Hope I like Thomas Mann. 

Swim this morning and then a walk on Main Street, up and back, with Va.  Seems about 3000 steps.  I guess I should have gone out for a faster version, but, hey, I dug into the office and put up the little Christmas tree on the piano and the window lights and even a mesh of lights on one of the hedges outside.  A bit sloppy out there but in the absence of snow, a little bit of everything goes a long way. 

nice long note from Phil and look at his suggestion for my novel:

Hi,

For the past few days I've been battling flu and have, therefore, spent a lot of hours in bed, unable to do much more than think.  One of the things I thought about is a story you could write as either non-fiction or fiction.

My life makes for a rather boring story, but places I've been and people I've met have provided material for four and soon five novels.   None of these stories could never have been non-fiction for they didn't involve me, but with some perseverance and imagination I fashioned them into fiction.

Yet you have something in your life that could be molded into a story, either as fiction or non-fiction, that has an almost built-in audience.   I would call this work "Faith" because that's what the story is built around:  how a young man had faith that intensifies to the point that he takes the first steps into making a career out of the faith, then the unraveling of that commitment and finally the abandonment of the faith itself.   A key difficulty is where to begin and end this story, but a key aspect of the story is that it is written by a man who is ilooking  back from his 60s or 70s  and, therefore, can view the whole episode in his youth with the perspective of age and the experiences that have followed from that event in his nonage.   However,  the story must focus primarily on his thoughts and feelings from those few years in his youth, and if done even reasonably well, this story should quickly find an agent and publisher because there are a lot of people who want to read about the travails of believing, then no longer believing.

Anyway, you always seem to be casting around for something to write about, and I think this is your white whale story. Also, you're often diffident about subjects and this may give you an opportunity to lose that diffidence, plus it will keep you out of the room with the TV and, therefore, lift your mood.
---------

my reply

wow  you have taken a lot of Nyquil ! 

Sorry you've had the flu.   We did get flu shots this year although I am technically
against them, based on what I've read in the blogs of doctors I "follow." 

Now we're taking a four-day typhoid vaccine, a pill every other day.  Just the name
gives me the willies but so far have felt no twitches or twinges unusual. 

Your suggestion is indeed well made and I suppose it is my basic "my story" that keeps
spinning around in my noggin willy-nilly.  It is strange indeed how memories and issues
from so far back start to take up more brain time and energy as we age.  I guess
the standard explanation is we are constantly self-editing our sense of who we
were, are, as we get closer to death because we want to know what the heck it has all
been about. 

That former student friend I told you about a few months ago, surgical mesh, chronic pain, no disability payments in the state of Maine, etc.  He died a week ago last week at 53.  Been
on my mind.  I've seen him maybe ten twelve times in the last thirty years, we went to
his wedding twenty years ago.  Nice guy.  Private funeral, not that I would go (down on
the seacoast in Portsmouth). 

Privately I'm wondering if the family will eventually do anything like sue the surgeon
or the hospital or the mesh manufacturer, and I wonder how he died, the cause of the
pain or an overdose of painkiller and then accidental or on purpose etc etc.  Probably
will never hear on any of these topics.  Not close enough to his wife to ever be able
to ask any of this but I did have a good talk with her by chance late last spring when I was down there just to walk around town. 

Anyway---this novel.  I have five or six "false starts" on my desktop and have thought of putting them all into a small printout entitled "False Starts." 

I had not thought of it, to make it, faith, the dive into it, the loss of it, the aftermath but that does make a lot of sense, especially since you can see it from afar and distance.  It certainly could easily have that shape to it.   Worth pondering and I thank you for the suggestion.  I think during tonight's Hallmark drama I will pray to have the revelation happen that will push me upstairs to the keyboard.  Maybe it will be when the handsome former boyfriend finally shows up outside the pretty girl's house and brings her the tree he cut down with his own hands on his forested estate into her house and opens the box with the gigantic diamond ring that's when I'll see that this is the novel I most want to write and can do ! 

Speaking of  take a look at this movie  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4061010/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_5   Written by a friend of our good friend over in Vermont.  This is Castle Freeman's first novel, I think.  He's our age.  A drunk according to our friend but she
has decided she doesn't like him and his wealthy wife any longer.  As soon as he published the novel five years back (Go With Me) she knew it had been bought for a "big" movie. 

Reinforced my conspiracy mind-tick that there are indeed circles of influence we don't have access to---never quite sure what it is here, a network of Vermont artsy and letters people
with friends with money and so forth.  The book is super-lean prose noir detective sort of story with lots of vermont local-color stuff.  Vaguely reminds you of Deliverance--in the
sense that new yorkers are always suckers for "backwoods" of a certain sort. 

Hope you flush out that flu faster now. 

Bob    

and right after sending this

I have to read your note a few more times but I really like your sense of conviction about some points, for example here

"However,  the story must focus primarily on his thoughts and feelings from those few years in his youth,

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signs and omens everywhere this evening

looking at website for Hermann Kurzke and these two items are under “Events”

The devout Thomas. Faith and language in Thomas Mann

Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 19:30 clock
Academic Forum Albertus Magnus
Obermünster Platz 7
93047 Regensburg


The importance of the biography of our (self-) understanding past and present

Paper presented at the seminar "Remembering - Judge - Act" Thursday, June 11, 2015, 13:30 clock Fridtjof Nansen Academy Wilhelm-Leuschner-Straße 61 55218 Ingelheim
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Before dinner I had opened his biography, or rather allowed the book to open on my lap, it is big and crisp (Princeton press) and it opened---of its own accord ! :-) to page 281 visually a bit past halfway and the heading is Loneliness.  The essayistic summation of Mann’s sense of loneliness is wonderful.  “he had no real friends.”  And at the bottom the famous item about his ridiculous suffering over the size of underpants.  From there it goes into his having been a father of six.  I don’t have six children. 

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more encouragement from Phil --

Your description of the inane Hallmark story and how it drives you to writing cracked me up.  Haven't had such a good laugh in weeks.

So there it is!  You have  a good writerly touch and I think the story of "Faith" has a story-arc that will attract thousands of readers so that, using your royalties you can build a vacation home in south Florida or southern Spain and I can visit you in Januaries.   (More and more this project is making sense to me.)

More seriously, think about it.  You really could put together a good story.  Put "False Starts" aside and work on this story about your life back then.

Sorry to hear about your friend.   Some people seem born under unlucky stars.   I hesitate to call his death a tragedy, but it's not normal by any means and, in many ways, is a cruel fate.  So many assholes live to a ripe old age.

Why the typhoid vaccine?  Just a general precaution or preparation for India?

Glad you agree and, as I said, one difficult decision will be picking where to begin the story and where - and how - to finish it.  I suspect, though, that you might already intuitively sense where the end points are...P
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Kurzke’s topic “the importance of the biography of our self-understanding” is So germane it hurts.  wow.  I’m even going to email him to see if I could get a copy. 

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I’ve been thinking I would swerve Hotel Courier into this new direction.  But perhaps I should put that aside completely and dive into the remembered/reconstructed main tale--Faith and its discontents---Faith and losing it. 

TODAY, this evening, Thurs, I’ve had a day for all the doubts to settle into place, rainy rainy day too.  Much less sanguine about Phil’s suggestion(s).  What does he know?  Don’t I always dislike having someone, anyone, tell me, suggest, what I should do in an artwork?  painting or writing?  Have I not been here before?  Isn’t this the “me too, Alypius” syndrome.  Over and over? 

Read one whole section on Kurzke’s biography of Mann.  So interesting how at once you feel you are in a different country, language, reality, form of thought and feeling--German.  Not Spanish, not Latin American, not French.  And neither American or English.  I’ve read such little German literature. 

Mann’s lines about the inner reality of life---that is what I might make the center of some story.  The loss of faith meant the falling away of all that had been given as the nature of faith and what then emerged to take it’s place, what came forth was the true, lifelong sense of the loneliness of mind vs life.  Those are the phrases, the line, I have to copy out of that chapter. 

Friday  Dec 18

“After you’ve lost your faith, life becomes one endless pilgrimmage, whether you admit that to yourself or not. ”

sent as test email to Phil

line in this novel by Tournier I'm reading.  Tempted to steal it as my opening line !

“After you’ve lost your faith, life becomes one endless pilgrimage, whether you admit that to yourself or not. ”

But why keep teasing myself?  It sounds like an opening line to me, for now.  Paste it onto Hotel Courier and go.  Reading in Mann’s biography has been salutary.  His sensibility and mine seem to chime in good enough ways.  And last evening on Buzzfeed another omen from the algorithms:  19 Problems All Polysexual People Know To Be True  “Polysexual? Isn’t that just pansexual?” *bangs forehead against wall* posted on Dec. 16, 2015, at 11:36 a.m. Julia Pugachevsky Julia Pugachevsky
BuzzFeed Staff

She reminds us Panromantics exist, pansexuals, polysexuals, polyamorous and on it goes.  So, as Burke would say, let’s pause for a moment:  we’ve gone from the closet as it got constructed in the late 19thC and is reflected in Mann’s secret code words to himself (“My God!”) through Eve Sedgwick’s landmark analysis and deconstruction of said closet to today’s online celebration of everything LBGT and a new one for me “cis.”  What is cis?  Wait a minute I will Google that term.

part of a long article on the question in the Advocate that would warm the cockles of all English professors and Burke from the 50s--when analysis of words reigned supreme or seemed to to uninitiates like me. 

"In the past few years, 'cisgender' has gone from being a relatively specialized word to one which is commonly used in mainstream publications without any comment, and is a notable addition to the general vocabulary of English," Martin explains to The Advocate, noting that she was a member of the editing team that finalized the additions.
The word first appeared on the editor's radar in 2010, when it was flagged by a reader participating in the OED's reading program, which asks "people around the world [to] read books and periodicals and gather citations from them for emerging vocabulary," Martin says.

"One of our readers submitted a citation for 'cisgender' in 2010, so it has officially been in our files since then. … An entry was added to our online dictionary of current English … in May 2013," she explains. "The historical OED typically waits until words have been established for some time before adding them, but by this year it was clear that 'cisgender' had entered the general vocabulary of English."

Asked whether she or other OED editors have faced pushback on the word's inclusion in the ever-expanding lexicography reference, Martin is blunt. "No," she says. "We add and define words based on the evidence of their use, and 'cisgender' easily met our criteria for inclusion."

It's worth noting that the word "transgender" was officially added to the OED in 2003. 

To help dispel myths that adding new words to the dictionary "involves intense debate amongst a cabal of ancient, bearded lexicographers, with winners and losers for the honor of being included," Martin offers the following summary of the OED's formal process for consideration of new terminology:
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seriously  the way such analysis has been made easier is amazing.  That the whole OED is now online and under continual revision.  Etc. 

Turning back to Mann might be turning ahead to my search for the grandfather.   

Guess I won’t tell him, out of temporary politeness, but Phil stepped right onto my trap and I have him writhing between in the claws.  He responded to my fake quoted line

“I'll admit that it's a good and pertinent line, but in my opinion you have to stop your old habit of  using other people's words in place of your own.  It's not a good habit.  For a story like "Faith" you gotta dig into yourself.   Which doesn't mean you can't cite other authors, but you gotta do it in your own voice.  You can cite  some inspirational text - indeed I think you should - but then you must give your (real or fictional) reaction to that text.  In a sense, you have to come out from behind all the authors you've read.  At least that's how I see it.   If you don't bring Bob Garlitz  or a fictional Bob to the foreground I don't think you will have much of a story. “

Guess all of this is pretty clear by now not just to me but to my oldest and bestest? friend.  Probably so.  Who else is there?  Greg and Jim but the connections are not the same at all. 

-----------

Sat night  Scottish Revels in Hanover today and sure enough---snow flurries on the way over.  Light but the second of the year.  Helen and Ted got waylaid in a heavier snow burst down their way and arrived only at intermission.  Revels did Scotland in 2009 too.  Dinner at Margarita’s felt perfect except for the seating, booth plus chair for Willow. 

Thought about the book and worried about which narrative voice even though I only want to do first-person.  Started Felix Krull and yes that sounds perfect.  “Story of my loss of faith by FK, con artist.”

Seems suitable to include the anecdote of making a basket for the wrong team as my first panic attack of note, after the 2nd grade birthday party, that is.  Panic attack, anxiety attack, freezing at the crucial moment. 

Mann has Krull describ actor Müller-Rosé:  he “dispensed the job of life--if that phrase can be used to describe the precious and painful feeling, compounded of envy, yearning, hope, and love, that the sight of beauty and lighthearted perfection kindles in the souls of men.”  26

now that is perfect--that compound of feelings that make up the feeling felt at the sight of beauty and lighthearted perfection -- 


Monday morning Dec 21  Solstice officially tomorrow.  Jessica keeping me up to date on that.  Beautiful Burne-Jones painting and poem by R S Thomas from Nicholas. 

Short walk.  Gray like there might be snow but not.  Va swimming with Kathie. 

Strangest tale of the past year is definitely Scott’s doctorate in philosophy from BU.  How if snagged both me and Phil further into its spiral, differing roles, and then as soon as our young pilgrim gets the star of certification, knighthood? (Burne-Jones here on the desk), he gets scooped up into the arms of the enchantress herself, KK, for a romantic whirlwind far beyond his expectations.  Then there’s Ethan’s second divorce and his son giving birth to a daughter.  And Bob’s death.  The saints and sinners among us. 

The spiral on the church steeple merged with my new remembering of my experience of faith as an adolescent.  We were born into a Catholic family so we had no choice but to be pulled up into the spiral of devotional practices, weekly mass, confession, and eight years of instruction by the Ursuline nuns and the parish priests.  There was all the mystery and mystification of the love of ritual.  Learning to serve at the altar gave us that early sense of being chosen.  My mother was more incessantly devout than my father and it was she who volunteered me for early mass service on a daily basis once I was old enough to go back and forth on my own.  Fifth or sixth grade?  She would wake me in the black of pre-dawn, I would dress quickly and then walk through the gray cold three or four blocks to the big brick church.  If the priest did not unlock the doors by 6:35 or so I had to walk over to the rectory the next door and knock loudly to rouse both the housekeeper, an old woman who looked like a grandmother, and then she would wake the priest.  He would come out looking tired and sometimes smelling of whiskey.  I would walk him over to church, help him get robed and set up the mass and then we would enact it to an empty church with perhaps one or two older women trying to sing the Latin responses by themselves.  The last few years of grade school it seemed the nuns had us gather before classes began in the church for a mass for the dead at 8 am.  Here would be a black coffin in the center aisle, with three large candles standing on either side.  One of us would light those.  The priest always wore black and would stop at the right moment and come down from the altar and bless the empty coffin with heavy clouds of incense.  The coffin we knew was a stand-in prop, a heavy wooden frame over which we would help the sister drape a heavy black satin cover.  Then it looked like a coffin.  Major feasts were big productions.  Christmas especially featured tons of pointsettias all over the sanctuary and altars and every altar boy in the parish dressed in red cassocks and white surplices.  Hundreds of candles which took forever to get lighted properly.  Incense and organ music, singing and chanting most of it in Latin.  The priests wore special vestments for the feasts, heavily embroidered stoles and robes and head pieces and chasubles and copes, lots of gold, lots of lace trim, starched and ironed linen robes. 

     A Catholic childhood meant initiation upward through the mysteries of a wonderously dramatic sense of what human life as it connected with the divine revelations of the Church entailed.  We took it for granted, like the air we breathed.   Later as we grew up we could mock it, find holes in it, begin to analyze it. 

Tuesday Dec 22  Super rainy, steady, long day of rain.  Dump run.  Already 1pm.  Slept late.  Va worried about her knee.  She and Kathie overdid it yesterday, water walkers too.  Don’t approve of those things except maybe for sixteen year olds. 

Turns out Tournier’s Ogre was a John Malkovich movie in 1996!  Little lower on the register now, alas.  Just another Nazi novel and movie, ho hum.  Oh well.  It’s well enough done, higher brow bestseller, sort of. Maybe. Finish it and see.  Felix Krull may not be Mann’s best either but it writes large all of his themes, I think. 

Oh and some new translations out of some lesser Bernhard tales. 

Weds Dec 23  first day of winter, the solstice turn was last night
and tonight at 9:28 pm I have just read this in Tournier’s novel The Ogre:  They are celebrating the Sun Child, “risen from his ashes at the winter solstice.  The sun’s trajectory had reached its lowest level and the day was the shortest of the year: the death of the sun god was therefore lamented as an impending cosmic fatality.  Funeral chants celebrating the woe of the earth and the inhospitableness of the sky praised the dead luminary’s virtues and begged him to return among men.  And the lament was answered, for from then on every day would gain on the night, at first imperceptibly but soon with triumphant ease.”  page 264

A few moments later Isei’s Christmas greeting from Japan arrives in my Inbox online, sent an hour earlier.   

24 Dec  Thurs  4 pm  Earlier two face times with the family in La Plagne.  Emma totally excited, in her red dress from last year and showing up her Elsa doll (Bela sent it ! ).  Her photo arrived in the mail as we went out for a short walk.  Yesterday was a big walking day, 8k for Va.  Main street in Concord, Target.  Very warm again today. 

Christmas Day

Sunny this morning, more silvery now at 1:30.  Eggs and bacon and orange juice and cinnamon rolls.  Strange dinner with Patsy and Doug last evening.  Too foggy to drive to the Inn, turned around at the traffic circle.  Made green chile stew.  Forgot to put in tomatoes.  Had wine.  Doug ran over and brought back cheese and crackers.  Patsy and I enjoyed the key lime pie.  Cookies from the Ebners, cardomom bread from Janice.  She came in to see the kitchen and oohed at every touch properly.  They are planning a big 9 month sabbatical wander starting next fall.  Eye on Guadalupe for the cold months.  Also Reunion and other former colonial places.  Jeff’s son Lars had been to Senegal, doesn’t recommend it.  No idea how old Lars might be.  They have a big gathering of the younger children and her dad (from New Jersey) now. 

Short phone chat with Anne and Basile.  Exceptionally hot and humid down there. 


Finished The Ogre, 9:40 pm.  rushed to get it over with, distracted and not much interested in the last five pages. 

from The Complete Review

"Tournier ever longs to entrap in the single event, in the single thought or word, both the elemental and cultured, historical and perverse, anarchic and fascistic. So it is with The Mirror of Ideas" - James Sallis, Review of Contemporary Fiction

"The Mirror of Ideas is hardly a skeleton key to Tournier's fiction or biography. Only occasionally do we guess that Tournier may be talking about himself." - Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

"This volume displays Tournier at his finest, which is to say his most outrageous. The style is as fluent as ever, but the content, depending upon whether one is a feminist, a philosopher, an atheist or a cat-lover, will either annoy, exasperate, provoke or amuse." - William Cloonan, South Atlantic Review



Barcode for sample sent into 23andMe  78-2915-0904-5050

Sunday the 27th  we thought it was Saturday for about half an hour at first and then realized it is Sunday. 

Bjorn Eriksson

On Tournier I liked Cloonan’s comment:  will either annoy, exasperate, provoke or amuse." - William Cloonan, South Atlantic Review

that’s what he does in The Ogre and apparently in all of his books. 

Now on to a better read, somewhere.  Rainy today.  After Christmas.  Swam and walked lots yesterday.  Thinking about the story/novella about my loss of faith.  The phrase doesn’t really cover it. 

Nice meeting by surprise in Panera yesterday with Helen Frink and her younger daughter, Laura.  She is the architect in Washington, now pregnant and due in early March.  Had a great time throwing too many architecture and cultural questions at her.  She just visited Fallingwater in the Spring.  She confirmed quickly a number of long-held assumptions about architecture study:  when you are in high school no one knows well how to get you where to go for the career.  (Keene a small town, granted.) And there is little agreement on “best” schools.  Harvard’s program is know for molding people into clone-chitects of Harvard’s idea of best style-practice.  The one she went to in Back Bay, BAC, is a collaborative of some sort and not thought that highly of for reasons I didn’t get.  Yes a good deal of math is necessary but mostly algebra.  So---I was wise not to pursue it after all.  Even algebra I never really took to or got.  Pedru struggled with the math part.  Maybe I would have struggle with the math and been a great visionary.  Anyway it was fun to see her.  Va remembers seeing her when she was a baby in diapers at the McDowell colony and she and Anna somehow got into the fountain to cool off and Laura pooped in her diaper.  Too bad we didn’t share that with her!  We walked Main street again in Concord and it was really pleasant.  Sunny in the cool air, low 40s.  Lunch at Panera was a zoo. 

“will either annoy, exasperate, provoke or amuse." - William Cloonan, South Atlantic Review

liked this comment about Tournier on Complete Review.  Seems that’s what he does in all of his novels, so that was The Ogre.  A stew of interesting stuff, a deconstruction of the male war machines, the Nazis as well as today’s Isis, although strangely missing is adult homoeroticism, replaced by the pedaphilia, all of it drawn from Goethe’s Erl-King, which I think our American reader of myths, Robert Bly, must have used in his work.  It seems that in his next novel, Gemini, he treats that topic. 

Since I was so fascinated by twins years back (is it something one likes in one’s fifties?, I might read this Gemini--my star sign after all, too.  Tournier is irritating and yet I guess he provides a unique sort of entertainment, reading experience. 

Fred Astaire blackface movie on tv. 

Phil and I complaining away the afternoon. 
we met the young architect daughter of our NH friends yesterday for a quick chat.  She went to Georgetown and now practices architecture over in Alexandria village.
She and her husband are the ones who paid a fortune for that recently flipped duplex in your neighborhood, block or two north of where you were. 

How much are you missing your old 'hood?  We're watching fred astaire on tv after a morning of packing our suitcases---Va feels so frustrated she can do so little for herself anymore.  It helps when she has a list and can check things off as I do them.  I'd say we're "all packed" now, but of course in her mind we made some progress but have a long way to go! 

Doing nothing for new years.  You all?  I imagine your place full of baked goods for the holiday?  I would gain 20 lbs in two days so luckily we no longer bake.  Neighbor kids bring by a small bag of cookies. 

Finished reading a very strange novel called The Ogre by Michel Tournier.  Turns out it was a John Malkovich movie in 1996.  Analysis of Nazisim through use of German mythology about St Chrisopher (the Erl King) and pedaphilia. !  Some brainy stuff throughout but "not recommended" is my review.  Shoulda been an essay, a book, i.e. dissertation. 

Read the whole of that Foreign Affairs essay and I found it less than powerful---seems like an analysis using stats easily gleaned and observed, plus some state department-esque info and water cooler talk, but it felt too easy in some way I can't specify. 

he replies

Bob, you and I gotta stop channeling each other's thoughts.  It's gettin' downright eerie.  I just picked a few quotes from that Foreign Affaires article because, like you, I thought the article, as a whole, was very weak.  it bitched about a minor cutback in gov't funding, plus a few other bitches tossed into the mix.   The sum of that article was infinitely weaker than a few of its parts so I didn't email out the whole bloated thing to the Friends of Tunisia. 

Doing absolutely nothing for new year's just as we did absolutely nothing for Christmas.  I insist on no presents, and Peg has a trillion allergies so no trees or anything in the house.  Peg usually gets a bottle of champagne for new year's eve but I don't even like that - and the programs on TV, other than the Times Square dropping ball, are as bad as Macy's parade on Thanksgiving day.  And....um...yes I am turning into an old, complaining curmudgeon.  Why did you ask?

Not missing the hood very much because gangs of black kids are robbing houses and beating up whites who take the nearby bike-path to work, and robbing people at the local metro stop.  Much of this is new, caused by the gentrification of the area.   Suddenly black kids are seeing a lot more whites who, in their eyes, are just pigeons to be robbed, beaten, etc.   Little to none of this makes the local press or Wash Post because it just isn't PC to report this stuff.

But increasingly I view inner city black youth as a frankinstein that liberal America has produced with all the best intentions of the world.  People pretend that it's poverty driving these kids to crime.  Nope.   They are all lower middle class or middle class.   But they have "attitude" which I believe they learn from TV and in school and, most of all, from each other.  It's a wolf pack out there.

However, I haven't totally escaped the problem by moving to the suburbs. There are some thuggish blacks who hang out on the street where Peg and I live.   They are not as bad as the gangs roaming the streets around my old neighborhood, but I just heard a rumor that some black guys in the next block have been flashing guns at their neighbors.  Again, none of this gets into the press, and if it does, there is an instant chorus in the paper about how we need to provide these black kids with more  recreation, recognition, etc. etc.  Nobody, but nobody says they are a bunch of bullying creeps who should be locked away.

I'm afraid that the young couple (architect & hubby) you mention have a house that is near the most crime ridden area (an open field near a school) in the entire Brookland neighborhood.  People in that area are constantly complaining about gunshots in the night and houses being burglarized.  Also, the young couple sound exactly like the kind of "pigeons" that black kids are targeting.  I hope they will not end up victims, and I do believe that, as that area continues to gentrify, the problem with black kids will decrease.   So, in the long run, their house is a good investment.  In the LONG run.

Gee, did John Malkovich appeared in a film based on a strange novel.   Will wonders never cease!  Because John never gets weird on camera, does he?

-------
Phil’s reports about DC give me the idea of what Obama will try to do with the remainder of his career.  Consider Rahm Emmanuel’s terrible stint as mayor of Chicago.  And Ferguson, MO.  And all the other shootings this past year.  Obama or Henry Louis Gates, or someone, in the black community, has to step up and articulate this sort of malaise for the black communities of this country.  I’m supposing those communities are miles apart in their ideas.  Think of the west coast “intellectual” Cornell West.  Consider how “disappointed” everyone has been with Obama.  (Not me).  But as you say, the press won’t touch any of this reverse gentrification/ghettoization cluster of issues.  It shows up at universities, consider the flap and flack at Brown and other campuses.  Whining students, hyper-sensitive, microagressiveness.  They’ve all learned slogans of response to politics and power and police brutality and class oppression that are outdated and out of touch with reality.  Maybe the Screening of American has put us all out of touch with reality and with one another more than ever before in our history.  Trump is the only one out to smash people away from the Polite Screen life of Niceness before thought and Niceness over any thought. 

7pm so, yes, I ordered Tournier’s Gemini  published in 1975

Les Météores (Gemini, 1975)  So Jean Genet gave it highest praise ten years before he died.  So did Rushdie and others. 

An exceptional, incomparable novel.

(Jean Genet)

The most extraordinary piece of writing for years... 'Gemini' is about a pair of identical twins, collectively known as Jean-Paul. Saying this, however, is a bit like saying that 'Ulysses' is about a man walking around Dublin, because Tournier uses the theme of twinship to explore a near infinity of dualities. In addition to playing with such traditional oppositions as heterosexuality and homosexuality, city and countryside, heaven and hell, Tournier elaborates ingeniously on the profound opposition of chronology and meteorology―the fixed, regulated march of the hours on the one hand, and the wild, unpredictable fluctuation of the seasons on the other.

(Salman Rushdie)

Astonishing; an El Dorado of ideas.

(New Statesman)

------

Lots of discussion online about the worthlessness of the DNA testing.  Misleading ads five years ago and since then rival outfits and claims.  Still---we confuse it all.  The family history info that Tom Garlitz provided sounds authoritative and well researched. 

Monday evening Dec 28 

Is Va coming down with a cold?  Swam this morning.  Good session.  Then we had lunch at Consuelos, scrumptuous and dessert at Dancing Lion.  Super cocoa but next time we want the item with milk in it.  Only water feels weak even though it is strong on cocoa.  Then we forged on to Pheasant Lane and walked the Target circles.  Home in the black night.  Everyone out prepping for SNOW tomorrow.  Tapering to freezing rain it seems.  Should be good for the ski slopes. 

Relief on the drive time alone and thought to agree that I will not try to complete my story about my loss of Faith.  As I felt at the start, it was an “assignment” from Phil and I didn’t really have my heart in it.  I could funnel what I’ve got into a short conclusion about how trying to embrace the religious life led to a constrictive, claustrophobic stultification, a stunting of development and growth, that I’ve spent the rest of my life growing out of, away from.  Probably a dumb overstatement, another variant of “poor me” which is a flawed habit of thought for anyone, everyone. 

Tuesday  29th  Snow this morning.  Slushy though.

Tournier’s work intrigues, alas.  Someone commented that his work deals only with men and what’s that about?  The Gemini did indeed occupy my imagination a while back so why not investigate.  Have to calculate but that was twenty years ago.  So how old was Tournier when he wrote his novels?  He has a memoir too and I’ll look up sites today, snow day, for more info.  Am afraid The King of Alders, the Erl-King, The Ogre, has stayed with me more than I would have wanted it to as I read it.  I thought I was irritated by it but of course irritation a fine line away from fascination.  And I realize his place in the late 20thC geist about deconstructin and multiple-voicing everything.  So wouldn’t I had I been in his career.  Plus his re-writing of Crusoe is perfect for my Copenhagen.  Crusoe in Copenhagen I could even call it.  The man alone after a shipwreck.  I’ve never read Crusoe and the Tom Hanks movie, not seen, put me off ever wanting to.  But it is the model for the philosophical novel in English. 

Found the put-down of the day, an anonymous Kirkus reviewer from 1984  “And the best stories here are, in fact, the most straightforward, conventional dramatizations of Tournier's mythic preoccupations: ""The Lily of the Valley Rest Area"" reveals the epicureanism of two French long-haul truck drivers; and ""The Fetishist"" is the expected monologue about women's frilly underwear. Inventive, tingly curosities at best, then--but far too often Tournier seems like no more than a cerebral Joyce Carol Oates, lazily toying with dark urges and forbidden pleasures.
Pub Date: Sept. 14th, 1984

ouch, that hurts.  Can only hope the reviewer is wrong. 

Dreary day.  Wet snow, rainy, short excursion to the dump and that was it.  Day off tomorrow.  Or half a day.  Kathie will do pool work with Willow in the morning.  No appointment with Feeney.  Nothing from Paquin.  Or Scott or anybody else.  Doug came in for a glass of wine while Ben plowed the driveway.  Invited himself in and asked for a wine.  ! 

A better article by John Yargo appeared this year on The Rumpus.
A good line from it is “The ultimate destination of a spiritual journey, Tournier reminds us, has to be obscure.”

That’s good.  So Tournier liked Bachelard and studied philosophy. 

Weds night Dec 30

Great visit with Bob Feeny this afternoon at 4:30, here.  He’s doing fine, super, liking Chicago and the Div school as much as I’d hoped he would. 

Earlier I day-offed by eating early at the Barley House---fish and chips and beer.  Felt like such a huge meal.  Walked down to the Coop, messy sidewalks, gray drizzle.  Headed home early and glad I did because the highway was very close to freezing rain even at 2 pm.  We got take-out from Thai Smile.  Two beers in one day, one with Feeny.  Sarah picked him up so we gave her a big hug too. 

Tournier’s Gemini arrived, started it.  Read mostly Lurid & Cute earlier.  Like it. 

Final Itinerary arrived too.  Only 23 in the group, hooray.  Mainly women.  Four or five couples?  Nice geographic spread. 

31 Dec  New Year’s Eve  5pm

$9686.00  in the Black for the year on the cgsb site.  In that slim sense we almost made it through the expenses of everything without the equity line.  Or at least half of it.   Now to see if next year we can do it.  (well, 4000. due on Chase for next month).  so technically 5k “ahead.” 

Nice talk with Rich last night.  Barb and he called.  They are voyaging to Tahiti next month.  He said with Odysseys but I think he’s mistaken.  We can’t find that trip listed.  And the trip to Lapland was with a group of 90 on a small boat.  He’s still seeing some patients until he finishes them up.  Anxious about what to do next, in retirement.  We laughed about Pickle Ball, popular in The Villages. 

40 pages into Gemini and Tournier has me hooked.  Delicious and pointed and sharply intelligent and more.  Me and Genet agree here.  Or will do. 

Va found great info website for India travel by Asher Fergusson.

November 2015

NOVEMBER 2015

Sunday 1st

Shortened Halloween last night because we got back about 5:30 from Manchester but Doña Catrina showed up and enjoyed the children and their costumes until 7:30.  Lunch was at Republic with chocolate at Dancing Lion. 

Now we are in November.  Read eight pages of Lipsey’s book on Merton and his abbot.  Can’t handle any more of it.  Lipsey must be the true detective-scholar to have even undertaken the project.  And maybe a true cradle Catholic?  Can’t find any bio about him.
Will stay with his book on Delphi for now. 

Modiano is terrific though.  His Pedigree belongs with Bernhard’s memoir about what it was like to grow up just after the war.  How privileged and free Lax and Merton and all the Americans of that same period versus Mariano’s generation of semi-abandoned children. And us too, my generation, even more spoiled and carefree. 

reply to Phil’s query--

A while ago, I asked about the roots of your artistic sense/eye.   However, even as I asked that question, I admitted that I should have asked it years ago.  Now, after reading "After the Circus" I have a follow-up question, and once again, I find that I am looking at something about you that I should have raised a question about years ago.

Your taste in literature is quite European.   Now, I know that you didn't pick that up in Cumberland.   Therefore,  (1) where or when did this inclination start?  Any explanation for why? And (2) since Valle-Inclan fits into that European mold very well, is this taste for European fiction something that brought you and Va together?   Or did it develop after you two had met and married?  Or is Va's interest in Valle-Inclan and your taste for writers such as Thomas Bernhard and Patrick M simply a coincidence?

1  Not sure when it started.  I did take one or two? years of French at LaSalle and the teacher claimed we had read L'Etranger but sure as heck didn't feel like I had read it or comprehended anything about it.  Grad school was all American and British lit and early years of teaching were too. But K Burke himself was such a model of really wide and deep reading in the classics and european classics.   I think after years of teaching I got tired of Am and Brit lit, especially since I almost never had Upper level classes in any of it but mostly because I get bored easily and/or just always look for something new and different.

2  When we met I wasn't into euro lit at all, at least not that I recall.  I think it was Va taking me to Spain many times that opened my eyes to it and I tried to read Sp stuff in translation, never really trying to get good enough to read the original.  Would never be as good at it as she was so better not to try. 

So gradually I guess I got more curious to see what could be found outside the American, boring, contemporary modes.  Around '98 while we were in S America I began to consciously think that Translators would have to have their own distinctive styles as translators and I began to imagine I could develop an ear for the sorts of English that translation forced or required translators to create.  From then on I decided this was an interest worth keeping up with.  Once we had the internet and blogs it was easier and easier to find places where translated stuff showed up and got talked about.  Conversational Reading for example gave me lots of material for a number of years.  conversationalreading.com   Kid from UC Berkeley who wanted to make a special point of looking at foreign writers. 

Plus my one steady course I enjoyed teaching, two really, were World Lit and Travel Lit.  In both I would have juniors and seniors and could give them more complicated books.  Like anything it becomes over time a habit and the illusion that one is getting a different angle on things. 

Forgot to add.  “Different angle on things” became the watchword.  I found in foreign writers ways of writing that you couldn’t find in contemporary American writing, which has been dominated by the creative writing classes for a good while now.  After you start to read writers from other countries for a while, you can really see and feel the differences.  However these writers became successful it was not through the creative writing channels that dominate work published here.  Murakami, for instance, the Japanese writer, does things in his work that just don’t get done in American works.  Same for Aira in Chile and Vila-Matas in Spain.  Also Marías in Spain.  And Lispector in Brazil.  Rich Moody, Jonathan Franzen, other such American writers, they all write the same sorts of stories, more or less.  If Paul Auster tries really hard to write different and super cool stories, they still sound too ordinary in an indie super cool American way of trying too hard to be “that offbeat New York writer.” 

Monday  

Pulled the two blogs into one of those print-on-demand books.  Writer today must be his own archivist as well as publisher and business manager. 

Dream late this morning, in the final sleeping module, unusual for me and unusual to recall it so clearly----highway, high speed, huge tractor trailer truck veers into my lane, me in a small car, truck huge, pushes me over the railing and I plunge down into space in my car, a vast ravine of some sort.  Wake up. 

Tuesday 

weird night but beautiful morning.  woke early and felt very hot.  Back to Lurid & Cupid by the young brit wonder.  Oh and email and call from Carter Peck after many years. Had been wondering about him.  Like Kessler he’s packed on fifty or more pounds.  Married to a cancer nurse with baby 18 weeks in.  Daughter. 

We walked at Docks this afternoon, super warm, 78, !, and beautiful.  Mouton Farms to pick up lasagna for Sunday’s party.  Lunch at Havarni or whatever the new name is of Kara’s Cafe on Main Street in Meredith. 

Going crazy with the differences in the Evo Pure between 45 and 46.  Want to use one of them for The Trip but the 46s now feel so big and flappy and the 45s arrived today feel wee snug.  Should I wear 45 in the morning and 46 in the afternoons?  Could easily take both and rotate, and in fact that is precisely what I may do.  As with the nylon clothes, I should wear them for two weeks back and forth, these shoes, and then decide.  Then one pair can be for street and the other for house slippers.  Also have new 46s Lems as alternate.  Three shoes would be too many! 

note to Phil

I feel lucky that I read his "memoir" first, "Pedigree" only in the sense that I "get" what he does,
and he says so somewhere in fact----all of his books are one big book over the years,
bits and pieces of his basic life story (if Pedigree is to be believed, and it has the ring of
true anguish). 

His parents semi-abandoned him--put him into boarding schools and neglected him.  His mother
he portrays as hardhearted, a wandering actress.  His father was Jewish (mother not) and
he had to flee at various times to escape capture.  But mainly his father both during and
after the war was a petty criminal---black marketeer, shady deals, Patrick really never
knew wtf was going on with him.  And Patrick lived pretty hand-to-mouth at various times,
real poverty, malnutrition. 

So when he started writing I think editors said, "oh, this is noir."  He kept his mouth shut
thinking I don't know what that means, this is, was, my life and I was scared shitless and
bored to death but if you like it and its noir ok. 

If I will read any more it will be with this sense in mind---that the narrator's tone and
sense of things is really a kind of shock---I guess now we would call it PTSD---he has
survived and he doesn't know why or what really just happened. 

The Nobel would be for the cumulative life's work---and I assume part of europe being
ready to finally look back and admit a lot of shit it has tried hard to forget.  Collaboration
etc in France.  Remember the Nobels gave it to France about four years earlier---Le Clezio
? who also no one had ever heard of.  But I think he did have the higher class education.
Modiano clearly did not.

He did, however, have one astonishing stroke of luck---well, after a lot of bad schooling
he did get put into one good school in Paris and there his Math tutor was Raymond Queneau.
Who edited either then or later for Gallimard.  So at 22 Modiano can take his first
novel to Queneau and bingo it gets published by Gallimard.  Wonder if Queneau was
Jewish?  I feel terrible for asking. 

Still---the algorithms are watching.  Today I got in the mail I believe for the first time
ever (usually it is catholic charities) a request for money for poor, aged Jewish people
from IntL Fellowship of Christians and Jews in Washington, DC  Rabbi Eckstein.  Never
have gotten this before.  "Feed the Poor."  Maybe they know I also just read the bio
of Robert Lax! 

British poet friend told me the bio I read was poorly written.  He's right.  Relief to hear
someone say so. 

---------
repeating this because I told myself again today that I like it so much I have to post it somewhere

Tuesday afternoon Oct 20



found this terrific link between Burke’s novel and Beckett’s Unnamable--in the Believer from 2006 

Towards a Better Life is the longest piece in this collection, a sort of one-sided epistolary novel with a flamboyantly solipsistic narrator. Ostensibly, the story is about the narrator’s relationship with the ex-friend to whom the epistles are addressed, but the discourse seldom escapes the confines of his own mind; instead of relying upon external images or events to explain his emotional state, the narrator writes in carefully balanced aphorism and analysis, something like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable from the point of view of Jane Austen.    by a Dan Johnson who seems no longer around ??

--------

night
where to go tomorrow?  what to do? 

relieved Rupert found the bio to be badly written.  Realized that Lipsey’s books on Merton must be part of the much larger strategy to get Merton canonized.  Must already be some funded pacs at work on it.  Vatican politics and American exceptionalism, American Catholicism, triumphalist “spirituality,” group pride, go team. 

Don’t have to be a devout Freudian Kenneth Burkean to see some symbolism in my shoe anxieties in anticipation of foreign travel.  The travailles of pitiful paul in exotic lands. 

Now into page 82 in Thirlwell’s Lurid & Cute and I want my book to be like this.  Sort of.  Maybe.  But I’m not working on my book.  Yet.  Maybe after tomorrow. 

Should I visit the Radisson or the Hampton in Tilton?  Sit and read in the lobby as research for my book?

“. . . I know that on the outside it creates some difficult appearances, a possible carelessness about the feelings of other people -- when in fact I think the opposite is true, I think too much about other people.  If I can make anyone happy, I want to do that, however complicated the consequences, however much it leads to a way of thinking that expands itself in waves, or like the way the bees arrange themselves, inside their vibrating hives.” (92) Lurid & Cute  This explains further why I decided to take Andrew Campion’s offer of a new life as a hotel courier in Copenhagen.  Rather than try to help others in my old ways, of thinking too much about too many, I would be under charge, under orders, as it were, to think only about the next person, the next necessary person, the one with the right valise who might approach in the lobby of one of our three ritual hotels.  And when that person did find me, I had no need to hear their story, to know anything and no worry about helping them beyond the designated, the contracted or pre-arranged mission to take the valise to the addressee in one of the other two hotels.  Simplicity itself. 

The ways this novel kept writing my novel were amazing, incredible even.  There was that earlier passage, and it was pretty much on the money of what I was saying.  And now, just a few more pages on, that novel does it again.  Just look at this: “The new identity is a shock, definitely, and in some ways a humiliation, [yes, hotel lobbyist, courier] but also it means that as you walk through the streets [of Copenhagen I could add in here] you do feel that you are walking in disguise, with all the hidden powers that a disguise might confer.”  Exactly, that is so true of how you do feel when you’ve done this.  “You suddenly see meaning leaking everywhere -- the way you might come back to some glamorous hotel in the late morning to see the used towels and sheets in formless damp piles in the otherwise perfect corridors.”  Wow, you really do get it and now you can see why I would want to stay in three hotels at once or in seriality together so that the powers of disguise might be amplified and trilaterally resonant within each other, and how the leakage of meaning gets amplified as well.  Hotels ooze meaning, the constant ebb and flow of travelers guarantees they all feel this within and among themselves. 





Katherine Anne Porter took a few copies of Burke’s new novel to Paris to have Sylvia Beach sell them in Shakespeare and Company.  Beckett bought a copy there perhaps five or so years later. 

“I started compiling a list, with approximate dates, of all these lost faces and places, of all those abandoned projects, like the time I decided to enroll at the faculty of medicine, but I didn’t see it through.  My attempts to catalogue all those plans which never saw the light of day and which remained forever on hold, a way of searching for a breach, for vanishing points.  Because I’m reaching the age at which, little by little, life begins to close in on itself.”  I felt this acutely that week just before Andrew Campion appeared in my office.  I looked back at the five or ten years before with new eyes and I saw how often I threw over things I had begun, or dropped old friends, or wandered without interest in places I had taken the trouble to visit but almost instantly found disappointing. 

In the streets at night, I had the impression I was living another life, a more captivating one, or quite simply, that I wa dreaming another life.  28 Paris Nocturne  For years I had done this, especially in the years after Celia.  I began to use that phrase rather than “after Celia left” or “after Celia’s disappearance.”  “After Celia” became enough.  Then, later, just “after.”  Bernard accused me once of having forgotten her name or even of having unconsciously repressed it.  Anyway, I had wandered at night for years.  Once I felt comfortable in Copenhagen I though it might be interesting to reverse the procedure.  I rose earlier and earlier and wandered the city in the morning. 

In Boston it would happen the same way as it happened again here.  “You can meet the same person several times and often in places where it would seem most unlikely: in the metro, on the boulevards. . . Once, twice, three times, you could almost say that fate--or chance--had a hand in it, and was willing a certain meeting or steering your life in a new direction, but you seldom heed its call.  You let the face go, and it remains forever unknown, and you feel relief, but also remorse.” (30)


“I was gripped by vertigo. . . . I was saddened. . . . I was embarrassed.” I didn’t know what to say. . . I ended up smiling. . . . I asked, a little abruptly, the name of . . . . 35

“I remember at that time, there were other skulls like his, a few gurus and sages, and sects in which people my age searched for a political doctrine, a strict dogma, or some great helmsman to whom they could devote themselves body and soul.  I don’t know why I managed to escape these dangers.  I was just as vulnerable as the rest.  Nothing really distinguished me from all the other disorientated listeners who congregated around Bouvière.  I, too, needed some certainties.  How on earth had I avoided his trap?  Thanks goodness for my laziness and indifference.  And perhaps I also owe it to my matter-of-fact nature, my connection to concrete details.  That man wore a pink tie.  And this woman’s perfume smelled like tuberose.  Avenue Carnot is on an incline.  Have you noticed that on certain streets in the late afternoon, the sun is in your eyes?  They took me for a fool.” (41)




5 NOVEMBER THURSDAY  night  Finally checked the accounts and after the big summer splurge (kitchen) it seems we’re still doing ok.  Whew.  Opera Finale last night.  Dennis is visiting this weekend.  Still super warm weather.  Dr Larson today.  Picked up new sunglasses.  Bought backpack. 
Should I attempt a visit to the Fogg?  Showing Pop 1955-1975 and photography.  Better to visit Huntington avenue galleries?
Take the bus down and back?  I smell a trap.  November blues.

I have now remembered how I have given over art museums and galleries, much as I gave over churches, temples, retreat centers, monasteries and palaces years before. Now I practice sitting in hotel lobbies. 

------

Phil sent a great Aria drawn from his favorite line from catch-22 about Klevenger being thought a jerk by everyone.

While on my morning walk this morning, I was musing about your comment that so many people in Plymouth are giddy about Bernie Sanders "and should know better."   I may be wrong, but I"m betting that all those folks so excited about Bernie have some relation to the college.   I'll bet the local farmers, insurance agents, and shop owners,  are much more attuned to Trump (unless all their business depends on customers from the college).

And that's when it hit me.   Jesus, Bob is wrong about staying away from groups since leaving the Christian Brothers.  In fact, he has fallen into a giant group called Academia, and 98% of the members of that group are absolutely giddy about the whole idea of socialism.   And, as in most groups, the members really don't know much about the details supporting the group's standard opinions - for example, socialism - but they "know" that whatever the group's standard opinions are, they are The Truth.  

So Academia is virtually identical to the Christian Brothers. In fact, I'll bet you can dot the i's and cross the t's on that statement because you have been a member of both groups.  And your present group is a big fan of living on someone else's dime.   Capitalism, individual initiative, and pay based on performance are big no-nos in Academia.   Viva socialism! 

Yet if socialism is the salvation of a society, most of the world's third-world countries would now be prosperous.  Conversely, if capitalism cured society's problems, then most of the world's third-world countries would be prosperous.  But it seems that most of those third-world countries have tried both systems and failed miserably at both.   Becoming prosperous is far more complex than just adopting socialism or capitalism.  But don't tell that to the groups that advocate for either economic system.  Because they will think you are a fool.   Yet I suspect that even confiscating ALL the assets of ALLl American billionaires' assets would only give a couple thousand bucks to most families - and then?  Back to the same old shit, folks!   Bernie's solutions are paper thin.   And, looking at the other side of the coin, an  economics writer has recently pointed out that no one in the private sector made the initial discoveries that have produced computer science, biological science - that is, most of our curent prosperity.  In every case it was government research that made the initial big discovery.   Gates,  Jobs, and Zuckerberg et al just capitalized on those initial government-funded discoveries.     Their accomplishments in developing the technology are not inconsequential, but let's not get giddy about capitalism.  It's accomplishments are far more limited than its proponents want to believe.  The same is true of socialism, including "democratic socialism."

Time again to quote  my  favorite passage in literature.   It's from "Catch 22."   "Clevinger defended his rightist friends to his leftist friends and his leftist friends to his rightist friends.  Therefore everyone thought Clevinger was a jerk."

In other words, Clevinger was not a member of any group and therefore all groups thought him a fool.  

-------
my reply

As Arias go, this is inimitable and brilliant.  I'm so glad I prompted it, somewhat.  I did quietly opine
as I posed the question to you, yes, of course Phil has been taken to be a fool more than once by
various groups.  Takes one to know one. 

And, yes, being in Academia is a big group-membership I cannot escape.  I didn't live by scraping by
on the streets or making up a new way to earn income every five years.   Reading the bio or R Lax
has prompted much of this musing over the past two weeks because it does seem he really did
just live on the bare edge of income.  I had always thought a family member had given him a bequest
or inheritance or some annual handout, but no, apparently not.  So he made a tiny bit of money
from writing and other odd things that fell his way but he didn't do much to earn a living, more
just lived as poorly as possible----in a sunny clime like Greece.  However even as I write this I
remain skeptical and suspect the biographer of covering some tracks. 

Anyway,  I did burrow deep into academia but, once there, I joined none of the factions!  Does that
count for anything??  Also I did nothing.  And I long ago ordered that my tombstone have
this inscription on it:  "He never once spoke on the floor of a faculty meeting."  (The college-wide
meetings, once a month.)

But wait a minute---you worked as a lobbyist now that is being on a team!  You wore the uniform,
reported to the office three days out of five, stalked the halls of congress and drank kool-aid and
slurped martinis with armies of staffers! 

This morning on our swim I came up with another question for you.  Next email. 

and my “I should have been an architect” tale

Composed an alternative life story for myself this morning, more on that later.

Question for you is:  how far back in your memory, consciousness, can you find any trace of the first notion of wanting to be a writer, write a novel?  I think I've asked you this before and if so, apologies for not remembering your answer.

My interior rap this morning what "I shoulda been an architect but when that notion formed in me, no one I knew knew how to help me move in the direction of realizing that idea.  I had a vague sense that a college architecture program was part of an engineering course, like at Carnegie Mellon, one university I had heard of.  But I hated math and was terrible at it and so I figured that study of architecture couldn't be for me.  Fifty years later I realized that at least in today's programs I don't think math is all that important.  As a program of study an architectural focus would be mainly aesthetics and design and social study and theory.  Engineering the creation is still up to the real engineers, who are not architects because they don't have the vision architects try to have.

Like all such regret and remorse scenarios that 70 yr olds make up this is a small fictional nubbin that I can rub my thumb over again and again, like a worry bead those Greeks and Turks use.

Bead #2 could be "I should have been a writer."  Etc etc

Bead # Catch-22 is the one we all live with:  you are the asshole you were supposed to have become.  Deal with it.
--------
Phil
You're absolutely right.   When I worked at Liveright and the National Association of Counties I was part of a group.  And I had to edit books or write papers that reflected that group's thinking and politics.   And when I quit NACo, it was because I had decided that I would never again do anything that required me to have any other politics other than my own.

Therefore, all subsequent jobs were just jobs. I no more identified with my employer than I did with Brown U or Exeter.  Indeed, I tended to think of schools and employers like Calculon and Boeing as, if not quite "the enemy," then something close to that.

I like your tombstone.
----------

Soon as I read Phil’s answer to the new main question I recalled that I had heard it before, a longer version---

“I think it started in the Peace Corps because I met others there who thought of themselves as writers.  So I did, too.  And did some desultory writing until computers came along.   At that point I decided to take a few years off and write a novel.  It just stretched into many more years as I found that I really liked writing.

Math is the boogey man in so many lives.”
------

Have I ever discovered that I really like writing?  I have been writing all my life, these journals.  I never tried writing journalism.  I never took a writing course.  Phil did do both.  Does that make him more of a writer?  He had also written and published these four or five novels.  That does make him more of a writer.  If, by writer, you mean a publisher of novels you have written.  But what if by writer you mean someone who has spent a lifetime writing?  Is he a writer too?  He had not published much at all of the writing he has done.  It lies
buried in boxes in the attic except for a few selections, a few things available. 

Is he not also a writer?  So if he is, may he not proceed to write a whole book and publish said book if he wants to?  Does he need to ask anyone else to tell him if he is a writer?  That would be like Clevenger asking one set of friends to tell him if he is conservative and the other set if he is liberal.  Rightist or leftist.  Not either, just a jerk.  But as a jerk he is then in a perfect position to be a writer. 
Searching for the book one is wanting to write is not unlike searching for the perfect pair of shoes to wear on the upcoming trip to India.  There is no perfect pair of shoes.  Only question is do you like them a little too loose or a little too tight?  That has been the main question stretching back over your life.  

“So I did, too.” 

So we are alike on that.  The “I did too.”  thing.  Doing something someone else likes to do.  To want to do what x is doing.  Most common thing ever. 

Do I enjoy writing?  Do I enjoy it as much as I enjoy painting?  More, even?  I have been doing it for much longer.  Do I enjoy it or do I do it nervously, anxiously, out of a compulsion to record the trivia, the minutiae, of the day.  Is it a sop to nervousness, a petty technique for filling time and calming a mind obsessed with needless details, worrisome flotsam. 

Saturday
Later going to the train station to pick up Dennis. 

Gray day, colder. 

Monday  Super visit with Dennis and the old crowd over the weekend. 

the other day Phil gave me what might be the fullest account of his life so far as long trajectory goes--- Nov 7

I continue to muse about "groups," and it has led me to consider the difference between taking a job and joining a group.

When I applied for a job at Liveright, all I was doing was trying to get a job and a paycheck.  However, once I was working at Liveright as an editor, I found that I was part of a community - a group, if you will.   I was part of the New Republic world of liberal to old fashioned lefty politics.   I even lived with another editor there - my girlfriend for two years.    Everyone in that community basically thought alike - and it wasn't too different from my own thoughts so I fit in without too  much strain.

However, I wanted to go back to Europe so I quit and lived in Italy for several months.

Back in the US, I apllied for a job at NACo, where I found myself part of two communities: (1)  those who supported services for the elderly and all liberal-lefty politics in general.   This group was much like the New Republic world.   (2) Those who supported county government. These people were not as lefty as the NR/elderly services group.

After about four years, I got tired of writing congressional testimony and "research" papers to support both 1 and 2, and decided to quit and get away from politics and jobs that required group-think.

I studied computer science and math at U of Maryland night school, then my next two jobs were technical:   first, tech writer on computers & telecom for Calculon which had a contract with the Department of Energy, then and service manager for Boeing for telecom at  NASA.   I had to know technology;  other than that, I was free to think whatever I wanted.  A small amount of group-think lurked in the offices, but was very ignorable.  It was just a job that provided a paycheck and was somewhat interesting.

However, if I had either job at certain geographic locations, I would have been part of community.   Why?  Both the Department of Energy and NASA have some isolated installations where it's a "company town."   Nearly everyone in that town works for DOE or NASA.   In those cases, I think everyone eventually adopts group-think.   You don't live at Cape Kennedy and not get into NASA group-think, even if your job is just technical writing.   If you live in Renton, Washington and work for Boeing, everything in your life is related to Boeing.   You are a member of a group/community and, likely, share its group-think.

This "company town" phenomenon also applies, I think, to military-base towns,  state capitals, DC, and college towns. 
If you live in these places and work for the "company" you are in a group.   Most of the people you know are probably members of the group.  They are your neighbors.  They, like you, swim in the company pool, participate in company activities, etc. etc. etc.   (You seem able to step back from the world around you.  But how many people in the Plymouth colllege community really do step away from group-think as you do???  Not many, I'll bet.)

Anyway, I eventually got bored with technology and quit so I could write novels. 

Why write novels?   Because I am very opinionated and my ideas don't fit well with any group's thinking.  (Clevinger!)  So I write about the world in a way to illustrate the world that I see.   When I began writing, I very much wanted to write about people, places, and events that I thought no one else was writing about.  In essence I write because I disagree to some degree with everyone and feel a deep need to express my opinions.   My father was always politic and agreed with everyone.   When I was in my late adolescence I decided that I would never do that. I wouldn't argue with people - at least not very much -  but I would ALWAYS state my opinion.  And, after 40 years in the DC metro area I hate Fed gov't employees who, if they have any opinions (which usually don't), seem incapable of expressing them.   They are all around me and seem to live and die while making no difference whatsoever in this world.  That would drive me crazy.  Thousands and thousands of little nebbishes, commuting to their jobs, eating lunch in the cafeteria, and going home in grid-locked traffic.
--------
He writes to show the world he sees.  Would Modiano say that?  I don’t think so.  Have to find some interviews. 

ok, here.  compare this with Phil’s experience of meeting other would-be writers in the peace corps (and relatively late? )

What made you become a writer?

Patrick Modiano: I think I became a writer because I didn't know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me. I remember reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans when I was only six years old, and I didn't understand much of it, but I still finished it. Possibly that reading obsession influenced me so much that later in life I became a writer. When I was older, after I had studied a while, I even tried to enroll to study medicine but failed a science exam. I started writing as it was the only thing I knew. And it just continued, I was launched and ... it was like a snowball effect.   Nobelprize.org

I’ll send him the rest of the questions! 

How do you work? How does an novel originate?

Patrick Modiano: I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in, because the water is to cold. Once you get started you have to write every day, otherwise you lose the momentum. When I was younger I just put of the writing until later in the day, but now I write early every morning, to get it done. I can only write for a few hours at a time, after that my attention fades.

Do you know the end of your novel when you start writing?

Patrick Modiano: To know the end is always difficult. That is why I have always envied some crime writers who can foresee the end. Not knowing the end is hard, because you are obliged to continue without knowing where you are heading, though towards the end you do get a feeling for in which direction you're going. Knowing when and where to end is always a delicate matter; you have to find the exact moment in which to cut, to stop yourself.

Who or what is your source of inspiration?

Patrick Modiano: I have to see an exact, real life, place in front of me. A realistic place, a street, a building where it is all happening and from which I can then continue dreaming. One of my books start in the tube with a girl believing she sees her mother whom she hasn't seen for a long time, and then follows her.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Patrick Modiano: At my time I improvised, so it is difficult to give specific advice. Best advices are the mundane ones, not to precise ones, rather indications. Encourage aspiring writers to continue writing when things are going against them, when it feels hard. Explain the typical obstacles that occur and encourage and reassure them to continue, never to give up

What were you doing when you heard you had been awarded the Nobel Prize?

Patrick Modiano: It is a bit strange, but I was walking in rue d'Assas very close to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris when my daughter called me and told me the news. Rue d'Assas happens to be the street where August Strindberg* lived when he was in Paris. So, I don't know, but it is a curious coincidence with this Swedish connection.

-----
and here in the novel, Paris Nocturne, are some more questions

Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape?  Contemplate a beautiful landscape.  Which do you prefer?  The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness?  The lightness of happiness.  Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony.  Rediscover a lost harmony.  These two words were the stuff of dreams, but what could a lost harmony really consist of?  In the room at the Hôtel Fremiet, I asked myself if I wasn’t trying to discover, despite the obscurity of my origins and the chaos of my childhood, a fixed point, something reassuring, a landscape even, that would help me to regain my footing.  There was perhaps a whole section of my life that I didn’t know about, a solid foundation beneath the shifting sands.  And I was relying on the sea-green Fiat and its driver to help me discover it.  116-117

----------
Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape?

Which do you prefer?  The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness?

Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony.

What could a lost harmony really consist of? 
--------

What made you become a writer?


I think I began writing to find a place of solitude.  I craved silence where I could be away from the battles I felt were going on all around me, and the war, the great war, that had ended as I was born and which no one talked about but which I could sense was still in the bodies and minds of the adults in my life.  My parents had various silent battle going on between them and with their other family members.  I felt in the middle of them all in ways I could not name and could not comprehend.   I remember reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans when I was ten years old, and I didn't understand much of it, but I still finished it.  I remember reading Hudson’s Green Mansions and being enthralled by the mysteriousness of it, even while, again, I understood little of it.  In my father’s store when I would go into the large meat locker, turn out the light and stand in the black super cold air for as long as I could among the hanging carcasses of beef.  Then when I turned the lights on I would see the slabs of fat, bone, red flesh and muscle, very dark pearls of dried blood, those cows had been cut in half and I could see inside their rib cages as they hung upside down by legs tied together and hung over big metal hooks from the ceiling. 


Leo Robson in new statesman
“The ultimate Modiano sentence can be found in Missing Person, in which an out-of-work private eye investigates his own forgotten past: “And in this labyrinthine maze of buildings, staircases and lifts, among these hundreds of cubbyholes, I found a man who perhaps. . . ” Worst case scenario of the quest for closure and salvation is realised in Un Cirque Passe (1992), not yet translated, when the narrator writes: “It was at number 14 du la rue Raffet. But the topographical details had a peculiar effect on me: far from bringing images of the past closer and clearer, they brought a heartbreaking sensation of broken ties and emptiness.” Directories and documents are often invoked in his novels, recorded fact being memory made stable–or promising to be.”

good article in guardian by Euan Cameron, who translated . .

“Like all those born in 1945,” Modiano said in his speech to the Swedish Academy in December 2014 after being awarded the Nobel prize in literature, “I am a child of the war, and more specifically, since I was born in Paris, a child who owed his birth to the Paris of the occupation.” These were years brushed aside and quickly forgotten by many of his parents’ generation, and few French writers have explored the realities of the occupation and immediate postwar years quite so poignantly.”


Like everyone born in 1944. I am a child of WWII.  We could feel that “something had just happened” although no one would or could talk about.  Later, when we were about thirteen, we saw photos of the concentration camps in Life magazine.  I can still see those black and white images of bodies piled high.  Only many years after that did I see Goya’s whole series on the horrors of war from an earlier century.

now how would I rewrite these answers to the main questions?

How do you work?

I work by stealing any chance I can find to sit and write more on what I’ve started.  But starting is difficult because it is so easy to imagine what you want to create but not so easy to find the right way into it.  After I feel started, what comes next plays on my mind all the time and I need to get it down when and as soon as I can.  If I have a big stretch of time for writing I will try to write steadily but this may involve stretches of pausing, even long stretches, to feel my way into what needs to come next.  I often also write things that I hope I might be able to patch in to the work later on after I get a sense of how the whole is shaping up.  There then is a back and forth effort in drafting and redrafting.  I never can write for more than a few hours at a time because my attention fades.

Patrick Modiano: I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in, because the water is to cold. Once you get started you have to write every day, otherwise you lose the momentum. When I was younger I just put of the writing until later in the day, but now I write early every morning, to get it done. I can only write for a few hours at a time, after that my attention fades.

Do you know the end of your novel when you start writing?

I know only the beginning.  Or an image of a person in a specific location.  From there I wonder about the situation and how it might unfold.   I just start writing to see where it will take me.  I have often wanted to use a murder story as a framework for finding what I really want to have develop.   It gives people gravitas that they, otherwise, might not have. I’ve not yet done this but the notion appeals to me.  I never know the end until I’ve reached it.  But finding that point can be a tricky question.  Knowing how to cut yourself off becomes crucial. 

To know the end is always difficult. That is why I have always envied some crime writers who can foresee the end. Not knowing the end is hard, because you are obliged to continue without knowing where you are heading, though towards the end you do get a feeling for in which direction you're going. Knowing when and where to end is always a delicate matter; you have to find the exact moment in which to cut, to stop yourself.




What inspires you?  Who or what is your source of inspiration?

I have to see a place in front of me. A place I imagine or remember from which I can then continue dreaming. One of my stories starts with the memory of a time I was in Buenos Aires and the hotel room has stayed clearly in my mind.  The room, the lobby and the street.  From there I imagine my character engaging in an action that sets the story going. 


Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Everyone makes it up, so advice is difficult to give.  Write what you want to write, how you want to write it.  Use anything that helps you find this.  Use everything, use nothing, find whatever keeps you going.  There are lots of difficult moments that are typical for all writers so you need encouragement to keep going.  Ultimately your work becomes so precisely yours that no advice is helpful. 

I improvised, so it is difficult to give specific advice. Best advices are the mundane ones, not to precise ones, rather indications. Encourage aspiring writers to continue writing when things are going against them, when it feels hard. Explain the typical obstacles that occur and encourage and reassure them to continue, never to give up

Patrick Modiano: I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in, because the water is to cold. Once you get started you have to write every day, otherwise you lose the momentum. When I was younger I just put of the writing until later in the day, but now I write early every morning, to get it done. I can only write for a few hours at a time, after that my attention fades.


What made you become a writer?


I think I began writing to find a place of solitude.  I craved silence where I could be away from the battles I felt were going on all around me, and the war, the great war, that had ended as I was born and which no one talked about but which I could sense was still in the bodies and minds of the adults in my life.  My parents had various silent battles going on between them and with their other family members.  I felt in the middle of them all in ways I could not name and could not comprehend.   I remember reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans when I was ten years old, and I didn't understand much of it, but I still finished it.  I remember reading Hudson’s Green Mansions and being enthralled by the mysteriousness of it, even while, again, I understood little of it.  In my father’s store when I would go into the large meat locker, turn out the light and stand in the black super cold air for as long as I could among the hanging carcasses of beef.  Then when I turned the lights on I would see the slabs of fat, bone, red flesh and muscle, very dark pearls of dried blood, those cows had been cut in half and I could see inside their rib cages as they hung upside down by legs tied together and hung over big metal hooks from the ceiling.

What made you become a writer?


I think I began writing to find a place of solitude.  I craved silence where I could be away from the battles I felt were going on all around me, and the war, the great war, that had ended as I was born and which no one talked about but which I could sense was still in the bodies and minds of the adults in my life.  My parents fought various silent battles with other family members.  I felt in the middle in ways I could not name and could not comprehend.   I remember reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans when I was ten years old, and I didn't understand much of it, but I still finished it.  I remember reading Hudson’s Green Mansions and being enthralled by the mysteriousness of it, even while, again, I understood little of it.  In my father’s store when I would go into the large meat locker, turn out the light and stand in the black super cold air for as long as I could among the hanging carcasses of beef.  Then when I turned the lights on I would see the slabs of fat, bone, red flesh and muscle, very dark pearls of dried blood, those cows had been cut in half and I could see inside their rib cages as they hung upside down by legs tied together and hung over big metal hooks from the ceiling.

Like everyone born in 1944. I am a child of WWII.  We could feel that “something had just happened” although no one would or could talk about.  Later, when we were about thirteen, we saw photos of the concentration camps in Life magazine.  I can still see those black and white images of bodies piled high.  Only many years after that did I see Goya’s whole series on the horrors of war from an earlier century.

Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape?
​ 
         Always I have wanted most to contemplate a beautiful landscape.  ​The revolutions seem interesting enough but from a great distance, great enough to see the landscape that frames them, either the fields or the perspective of history.


Which do you prefer?  The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness?

​         In my earlier years I thought I preferred the depth of torment but that was a mistake I learned to see through and correct and now I know that the lightness of happiness is what I prefer and have always, really, wanted to prefer.  ​


Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony.

​   Again, there has been an arc or trajectory over the years, from the illusion of wanting to change, through the experiences of what that entailed and how those attempts never quite panned out, to the sense that the ever elusive lost harmony continues to pull me forward into some unknown.  ​


What could a lost harmony really consist of?

​     Not knowing this is what makes the loss so appealing and the harmony so meaningless and meaningful, as if both possibilities could somehow co-exist in a paradise of paradoxes.  ​


J. P. Jones
   
6:25 PM (2 hours ago)
       
to me
good answers.  
----------------------

Va back from French group at Fosters.  Ran into the boy and girl from Docks and Ekal while I waited.  Both gingers.  Showed them Teddy Thompson on iTunes.  Earlier on the drive out I nearly ran into a guy on a bike, just before the bridge on the narrowest part of the road, tiny little red reflector on the back and all in dark clothes.  Few minutes later he was at the entrance to the Inn and I yelled at him for having no visibility and nearly getting killed.  I think it was the student from Quebec and he was going to go to the Rendevous but later he didn’t show there and I guess I made him embarassed and upset.  I apologized for getting angry with him, in the lobby, but I think may have felt terrible or pissed with me. 

Sent this to Brendan Hart on Facebook in an attempt to get an apology to the kid. 

Tomorrow Veterans Day holiday.  What will be open?  Should I try to get my glasses adjusted or is it my head and face that feel slightly bruised?  Are the glasses out of whack or is it my sinuses and facial sensitivities?  Apart from that, where should I go on this day off?  Maybe stay home.  Willow needs a ride to PEO in Campton and she might need a ride home.  Lots of people are not showing up. 

Could stay home.  Could even stay home and Write now that I’ve written up my own Interview with Writer Robert Garlitz. 

“I felt a sensation of emptiness with which I was familiar and which I had forgotten for a few days, thanks to the calming effect of reading The Wonders of the Heavens.”  123

Weds  Nov 11 

Remembered Rupert sent bunch of downloads I need to look at.  Or see if I want to.  Ok, have done.  Not interested enough to send back a comment.  Rupert sounds to me to be a bit stuck in a tone of whiny resignation, hey-ho, things are crappy and that’s where we are sort of mid-life, growing old blues.  Ehh, who needs that?  Similar to a review just skimmed earlier of new novel by Rick Moody.  Ends with a good line, something like, ok, fear growing old but find something more interesting to fear because this is not working much magic here. 

Thurs  11:35 am  Va re-writing her lost PEO minutes.  Paula has not shown.  I wrote some.  Raining and dreary.  Cold.  I am reading Modiano’s “so you don’t get lost in the neighborhood.” 

“A few hours earlier, when Torstel had been driving along the banks of the Marne and then crossed the Vincennes woods, he really had felt affected by autumn: the mist, the smell of damp earth, the paths strewn with dead leaves.  The word “Tremblay” would always be associated for him now with that particular autumn.”  42

Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier  2014 Paris Gallimard


“No, he was too old, he preferred to float along calmly.”  68

This is why Andrew Campion’s offer of boredom and banal events caught my attention.  It would be a perfect life for the “next chapter,” this devotion to floating calmly along the surfaces of life.  No more tales, no confessions, no life stories, no telling anecdotes.  He would become free of these hooks into his soul which tethered him to unnecessary anguish.  His own anguish sufficed, had sufficed, for years.  Perhaps he was ready to stroll free from it.  To float in comfortable routine, effortless boredom beyond and through which he could find if not true peace then suspended animation. 

Friday night  13th November
News of terrorist attacks in Paris.  Called Annie to find out that the kids are ok.  Stayed home because Eliot was sick. 

Michel Tournier’s novel The Ogre arrived.  Looking up stuff about him.  On a site called Books and Writers by Bamber Gascoigne this passage about one of Tournier’s novels---

 “In 1975 there appeared Les Météores (Gemini), a baroque treatment of the myth of Castor and Pollux, which could be read as a contemporary version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Beginning from Crusoe, Tournier's men are often solitary characters; he sees that the the natural antagonism of male and female is the major source of problems for human beings. In Gemini Thomas Koussek argues that "the heterosexual wants to lead the free, unattached life of the homosexual nobility. But the more he breaks out, the more firmly he is recalled to his proletarian condition." “  This
alignment of sexual identity with class structure is something no one would make in this country but it is pretty interesting, especially if male-female is the source of all human problems.  Again, these days, no one dare make that claim. 

Another hooray for Modiano again.  “The prospect of taking refuge in two different places put his mind at ease.” 102


WEds Nov 18  Been a while.  Paris attacks sucked up too much energy around the world.  “you will not have my hatred”
letter of defiance on the sites and news. 

Ethan P crushed by the death of student Jake Nawn, body found late last week in the Pemi.  Suicide we suppose.  Whole English Dept must be stunned.  Still note the generational differences--E posted a moving tribute on Facebook.  Would I have done that?  I suppose it is simply part of his generation.  But I don’t think I would have. 

Took the Branly book on tattoos to Leif this morning.  Then did the day off run to C and M.  India Palace.  Nice guy named Eddie at Staples in Concord talked me out of buying the HP printer right now.  Used a great line after we debated whether it would really be ready to work with the new Mac operating system.  “If you were my dad, I’d tell you to wait a few weeks.”  I thanked him a second time for “my dad” instead of “my grandad” and he laughed and said, “brother,” then.  A few weeks more will give both Mac and HP time to configure the machines and systems more carefully to make sure they work together.  The stock in the stores now for Black Friday etc will have to be stock manufactured at least 4-6 weeks ago and when did Mac release El Capitan?  Sept 30, so only six weeks ago.  Need more catch-up time.  I half-jokingly offered Eddie a cash tip of $20. and he firmly rejected that idea. 

Half-way into Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick.  Noticed that former student Robbie B, now librarian at New Hampton, had read it (Goodreads notification? which I never look at) and then it turned up on the back shelves as I was rearranging back there in the alcove.  Book first published in 1997.  Way back then.  From now (Paris attacks, Daesh, etc) doesn’t it feel even more dated.  Those heady days of Deleuze and Bataille.  Even refers to the Bataille Boys a couple of times.  I thought I could tell Scott (and Paul H) to read it, that it would plug onto his disseration as perfectly as a Lego.  And since it is from that far back, how did I manage to miss it?  And would anyone who didn’t know much about all that theory be that interested in it?  Would Paul read it?  I don’t think so---as removed from his world as possible and far too self-enclosed, like a hothouse, a small academic coffee house gossipy closet drama. 

Friday Nov 20 

After Kraus I should change my character’s name from Andrew to Andrea Campéon, or Angela.  Would that do anything of value to it? 

Kraus just praised my method---reading lots of books and writing around the edges of them.  Quote coming.  In spite of that I’m really ready for this book to end and really tired of it, tired of her brilliant, brainy and clever whining about all of it, her love for Dick just isn’t as wonderful and she wants it to be and the rest is, finally, pretty tiresome.  I’ll give the New Yorker writer from this past April, Leslie Jamison, the public and last word and then privately I’ll disagree.  I guess my disagreement will be proof positive of Kraus’s great success. 

“How I like to dip into other people’s books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own.  Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley.  It’s better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill--getting larger cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.”  207  You’d think Goodreads or somewhere would inscribe that over their lintel. 

Now at 227 & heck, Kraus has turned it all up and around and I love the book again, can’t stop reading it, don’t want it to end.  The best.  What a book. 

“You said: ‘I’m sick of your emotional blackmail.’” 232

whole book is that.  A cabinet of curiosities.  

After Kraus instead of making Andrew into Andrea, better to just take that character out all together. 

Maybe I am mildly schizophrenic?  Have I ever wondered that?  see page 232 ff  Now I am really really tired of the book, so ready to have it over, trying not to rush it.  Too much.  But enough already, let’s put this unexquisite corpse into the grave. 

Finished the book around 1 pm.  Sigh of relief, impatient relief.  Lunch.  After lunch, in the mail, issue of Parabola, Winter issue on Free Will and Destiny.  Kraus’s book has a Foreward and an Afterword.  Isn’t that some sort of warning?  I liked it in the Foreward where Eileen Myles pays Kraus a huge compliment: “Chris knows (like Bruce Chatwin knew) how to edit.”  15.  I wonder.  Maybe in a line-by-line way, maybe, as Myles explains, in a drummer’s pacing way, knowing how to go everywhere and “make it move.”  But maybe not so much in a don’t tire the reader too much way.  Chatwin would have, I’m absolutely positive, shortened Kraus’s 260 page book by at least thirty to fifity pages.  Minimum.  Now that Parabola is here, like a godsend, I can read it cover-to-cover as the perfect antidote to having spent the past week on Kraus’s Dick.  I mean Kraus’s Love.  Well, Kraus’s I.  There it is:  what if she had called the book, from the first, Dick Loves Me.  Would it have been a better book, a better feminist book, much less a period frozen in amber-time and much more of a timeless work?  Or is my very suggestion a sure backslide on my part into the leaden sludge of patriarchist helpfulness?  It is a fascinating cabinet of curiosities, a narrative collection of odd people, trendy oddities, topical themes and obsessions from the 90s, as these floated around in various currents and eddies of the academic and artsy worlds Kraus herself floated around in. 
It seems so dated now.  This is what some parts of those worlds really did feel like back then.  A fragile time-capsule. 
I do like the way Leslie Jamison ends her terrific essay on Kraus. 

“A story that flashes “back and sideways” keeps its emotional pulse live: “To organize events sequentially is to take away their power,” Kraus writes. “Emotion’s not at all like that. Better to hold onto memories in fragments, better to stop and circle back each time you feel the lump rise in your throat.” Taken together, Kraus’s books summon these “contradictory, multiple perspectives” on an even broader level: they approach a recurring consciousness from different angles, dip into the trajectory of a life at different moments. They preserve a certain electricity by refusing to resolve these life materials into a single, coherent narrative. They are all windows to the same exhibit, all doorways to the same club under the same full moon, all promising and winking and opening their legs at once. They are all committed to the live wire of feeling (Ahhh, feelings), committed to circling back to what makes the lump rise in the throat, what makes the heart beat faster; committed to keeping emotions forceful by refusing to slot their evocations neatly into any genre, refusing the divide between authenticity and artifice, refusing to distinguish between reality and performance. It’s all lumpy. It’s all performed. It’s all real.”

Lines from Kraus

Schizophrenics aren’t sunk into themselves.  Associatively, they’re hyperactive.  The world gets creamy like a library. 231

Anyone who feels too much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.  227

“Schizophrenia,” Géza Róhreim wrote, “is the magical psychosis.”  A search for proof.  An orgy of coincidences.) 226

Capitalism’s ethics are completely schizophrenic; i.e., they’re contradictory and duplicitous.  Buy Cheap, Sell Dear.  Psychiatry tries its hardest to conceal this, tracing all disturbances back to the Holy Triangle of Mommy-Daddy-Me.  “ The unconscious needs to be created,” Félix wrote in Mary Barnes’ Trip. A brilliant model.  226

If art’s a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become a subject too.  217

How I like to dip into other people’s books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own.  Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley.  It’s better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill--getting larger cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.  207

the ideal reader is one who is in love with the writer & combs the text for clues about that person & how they think--- 132

The rest was history, or, Chris had gotten one thing right: beneath his reputation at the Mudd Club as the philosopher of kinky sex, Sylvère was a closet humanist.  Guilt and duty more than S&M propelled his life.  109

To initiate something is to play the fool. I really came off the fool with you, sending the fax, etcetera.  Oh well.   I feel so sorry we were never able to communicate, Dick.  Signals through the flames.  Not waving but drowning.  91

Accepting contradictions means not believing anymore in the primacy of “true feelings.”  Everything is true and simultaneously.  87

The Bataille Boys saw beatitude in the victim’s agonized expression as the executioner sawed off his last remaining limb.  33

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick.  Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997, 2006.

Sunday  Nov 22 

Ok, rainy Sunday, master chorale concert at 3.  Back to The Ogre and other delights. 

Monday evening Nov 23

Today in Wally’s Ken B told me he thinks Va’s event saved my soul, saved my spiritual destiny.  Also told me Henry V showed him some of his poetry around the time Mark C was here (that one year) and that he, Ken, didn’t know how to respond because it was so personal, everything I, I, I.  Also told me he went to St Olaf’s, raised Lutheran.  Not sure when he became super Catholic, Roman C, maybe fifteen years ago?  Don’t know the circumstances either.  Joan B reads or has read a bit of Bataille, finds him intriguing.  America has no intellectual life another motif.  Told him about my chat with Bernard the driver to Chenonceaux.  At the church here, St Matthews, they are doing the spritual renewal program called Alpha something.  Very good, maybe even evangelical? 

How do I feel about being told our event saved my spiritual soul?  I had become cynical, dark, negative, etc.  I’m sure he means the shock of it woke me up and all of that.  Still, should he have told me this?  He meant well of course and I think it fits somehow into his working on the Alpha program (or am I imagining that?).  But I wonder if it was good.  I myself would do something like that to someone else.  Just told Leif A that I now understood the spirituality of his whole work and art and I designated him as a spritual teacher/practitioner.  But would I say to someone who had suffered a major trauma of this personal a nature years later that in my humble opinion it saved his inner life, the life of his soul?  At one level it is just a truism, a fancy way of saying you have survived and you seem to be taking joy in life once again.  But it seems a dangerous bit of possible presumption, to think it is given to you to know these things about someone else’s soul and spiritual well-being, and that it is given to you to tell them this.  Ken means it as a blessing, a handshake and brotherly embrace in all good will. 



Tuesday  Blood tests for Va early.  Now she is sending her paper for the V-I Lampara centenary annuario.  Fingers crossed they don’t diss her for sending a re-worked earlier piece. 

Colder but sunny and super quiet.  The hollow week.  Swam yesterday, visitors arriving.  One dad and his five year old son, another dad with a twelve year old daughter, older lady.  Va canceled Kathie today.  I do still get to go to the dump.  No luck at face-timing yesterday.


Thursday  Nov 26  Thanksgiving evening  Dinner at Newfound Inn.  Delicious really.  Sweet short visit with Dave and Eliot.  Emma asleep in her new blouse on the sofa, Cécile asleep in the bedroom.  Eliot mastering the sounds of animals, cow, dog, cat. 

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Coincidental adventures in reading:

“You said: ‘I’m sick of your emotional blackmail.’” 232  Kraus, I Love Dick


“How many men do you know who’ve been forced into marriage they didn’t really want because the woman’s will was stronger than theirs?  Or because they couldn’t stand all the fuss, the tears, recriminations, the emotional blackmail?  300-301  Devices and Desire by P D James

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Friday

“False Starts, True Stops”  A short collection of fragments and novel seedlings. 

Sat

commentary in LRB  seems informed and astute but is really same sort of detailed cleverness any journalist can turn out who is up on things and has read the commentaries of the week before closely enough to counter-think them out loud---

finally the insight is not much more than any one of us has on our own.  Reading the signs of the times has never been foolproof or as easy as journalists like to pretend it to be. 
Last slow pages of Devices and Desires and last night I began to look up the masterpiece dramatization and will look at the final episode just to see how it was re-enacted.  It is so comfortably boring and boringly comfortable it beggars description.  Trying to sound British there.  Did I make it? 

P D James---the splenodours of the casuistical imagination.
Thinking of Donald here---he recommended this to me.   She was so popular and so she appealed to the dominating types--the Ts and the Js.  Ns like Donald because her gift for S- thinking gave her a command for niggly detail that imitates what reading public figures police work must involve. Pre-CSI detective novel.  Donald would have liked the small gay plot buried deed in the story and I assume liked the layers of story upon story upon story.  The world as Onion. 

In my quick reading of the book in “feminist” terms, James was most fearful of women/men getting caught in marriages that resulted from emotional blackmail by the woman to trap the man.  “She could have held that knowledge over his head until the end of his life.  And what would that life have been, tied to a woman who had blackmailed him into marriage, a woman he didn’t want, whome he coud neither respect nor love?” 447-448  the murderer, Alice Mair, speaking, justifying her defense of her brother against the emasculating victim, Hilary Robarts.   

Dalgleish the calmly logical Sherlock, alone, private, poet, he also appeals to Donald I assume.  The isolated thinker, superior to the world, alone able to solve and ponder. 


Meg saves Dalgleish in some respects, cradles him after the fire.  She also returns to live in Martyrs Cottage, a long line of heroic women who have given themselves to the great history of the headlands.  The closing chord of noble tradition and landscape. 

A N Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy got in there---sign of those times---the early 90s. 

Sunday  Nov 29 

Just checked.  On the official psu website I retired in 2011,
four years ago this past spring, not five.  Feels like ten years ago now. 

via Conversational Reading’s list of best books of 2015--

by Alex Ross  The Rest is Noise blog -- 
“His stories are always stories of love, what Whitman called the sweet hell within. He lets his readers see, if they wish to see, the degree and kind of his love. But he does not put a name to it—perhaps because it has never belonged to him, he thinks he has no honest right to it. Or perhaps because the names look weak next to the grandeur of his feelings, arrogantly set out before the world. In the words of "The Magic Mountain," he has already achieved "perfect clarity in ambiguity": "Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay....In God's good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved!" It must be unresolved, so it can be learned again, in the pages of his books.”

May 02, 2004 | Permalink

Esposito names Mann’s Joseph as his favorite book of the year! 
30 Nov Monday   Just had good visit with the kids.  Swim earlier. 

I am not a novelist nor am I meant to be. But I will publish my False Starts and True Stops  or False Stops and True Starts.

learned a crucial new word thanks to Jeffrey Meyers superb review “The Good German” March 2003 in The New Criterion of Kurzke’s biography. 

Sehnsucht (German pronunciation: [ˈzeːnzʊxt]) is a German noun translated as "longing", "pining", "yearning", or "craving",[1] or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing". However, Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately and describes a deep emotional state. Its meaning is somewhat similar to the Portuguese word saudade, or the Romanian word dor. Sehnsucht is a compound word, originating from an ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and a long or lingering illness (das Siechtum).[2] However, these words do not adequately encapsulate the full meaning of their resulting compound, even when considered together.[3]

Sehnsucht represents thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. It has been referred to as “life’s longings”; or an individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes.[4] Such feelings are usually profound, and tend to be accompanied by both positive and negative feelings. This produces what has often been described as an ambiguous emotional occurrence.[citation needed]

It is sometimes felt as a longing for a far-off country, but not a particular earthly land which we can identify. Furthermore there is something in the experience which suggests this far-off country is very familiar and indicative of what we might otherwise call "home". In this sense it is a type of nostalgia, in the original sense of that word. At other times it may seem as a longing for a someone or even a something. But the majority of people who experience it are not conscious of what or who the longed for object may be, and the longing is of such profundity and intensity that the subject may immediately be only aware of the emotion itself and not cognizant that there is a something longed for. The experience is one of such significance that ordinary reality may pale in comparison, as in Walt Whitman's closing lines to "Song of the Universal":[citation needed]

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and a double bravo for this entry on a website called noweverthen.com

all of the below makes me wonder if this term is not The key to Pessoa, although no one seems to mention this yet -- but a google search of the two terms together yields a lot of results--clearly disquiet relates to saudade

Wikipedia:

Saudade (singular) or saudades ... a [Galician and Portuguese] word for a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return. [I]n his book In Portugal of 1912, A. F. G Bell writes: "The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness." (1) Saudade is different from nostalgia; in nostalgia (a word that also exists in Portuguese), one has a mixed happy and sad feeling, a memory of happiness but a sadness for its impossible return and sole existence in the past. Saudade is like nostalgia but with the hope that what is being longed for might return, even if that return is unlikely or so distant in the future to be almost of no consequence to the present.

Peter V My comment:  Peter V Lucia on noweverthen


While saudade can be felt at any time (when confronted by a sunset, for example), I have always loved it in the sound -- or, for me, a particular sound -- of music; and this is why I've always adored some forms Brazilian popular music, most particularly the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto. Take as an example the well-known tune "The Girl From Ipanema." A light and reflective wistfulness is everywhere in this number. There's that sweet and sour sound that is so common in Jobim and Gilberto's work. How remarkable, too, is Brazilian Portuguese, which can have that slightly soulful "out of tune" twang about it that fits the music perfectly. What a remarkable marriage!

For me, something far-reaching is present in the saudade sentiment, pleasant but a little painful, an idea that speaks of a basic character -- perhaps the basic character -- of life

Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, as I see it, is saudade with grand philosophy present. You can get a "B.A.", so to speak, in saudade, but "Ph.d." must be in Sehnsucht. It is far reaching also; but it is far beyond daily life and the wistful, muse-worthy self-absorption with the personal patterns of life and death and impossibility. Sehnsucht contains within it (one feels) the meaning of the universe and a huge and painfully unrequited yeaning to find and touch the mystery, to resolve it by becoming one with it. Though painful and haunting (like saudade, because it is unrequited), it is extremely alluring, even rapturous, possibly because the heightened yearning or longing itself brings a sense of closeness to whatever it is that seems to be calling, calling from afar.

From Wikipedia:

Sehnsucht is a German word that literally means "longing". However, Sehnsucht is almost impossible to translate adequately. The stage director and author Georg Tabori called Sehnsucht one of those quasi-mystical terms in German for which there is no satisfactory corresponding term in another language.(1) It is this close relationship (encapsulated in one word) between ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht ) that lurks behind each longing... (2)

My comment:  Peter V Lucia on noweverthen


While different people can emphasize and interpret different shades of Sehnsucht, my own is very close to that C.S. Lewis. Again cited by Wikipedia:

The key ingredient of the experience, as Lewis treats it, is that this longing -- never fulfilled -- is itself sweeter than the fulfillment of any other human desire. Another feature is that it is so deeply personal that it does not occur to the one feeling it that others would have similar experiences and so is rarely communicated verbally. For most people it is something which cannot be put into words. Indeed the present description of Sehnsucht is itself inadequate and is only suggestive of it. Yet, though difficult to define, Lewis maintained that this is a universal experience. In "The Weight of Glory" Lewis says...

"In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you -- the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things -- the beauty, the memory of our own past -- are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." Again, Lewis, writing in "The Problem of Pain": "All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want . . . which we shall still desire on our deathbeds . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."

My comment:  Peter V Lucia on noweverthen

While under the right circumstances I can encounter snatches of Sehnsucht in everyday life (as in the sound of ocean waves that Lewis mentions), it is music, in my case, that has always been the primary provider. But unlike the "basking" poignancy of saudade in the Brazilian song, Sehnsucht hits all of a sudden with delightful transport, not usually lasting for more than a few seconds. It shows up almost exclusively in "classical" music. Among major composers, I find such brief "ecstasies" most often in the orchestral works of Mahler or Ravel and sometimes peeking through in Copland -- when suddenly "all heaven breaks loose." These modern composers had a greater pallet of harmonies at their disposal than older composers had; but the sheer overall brilliance of Bach (the very marvelous fact of his music) or of Beethoven can inspire in the Sehnsucht direction.



"Frightfully wonderful" works like Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" might be more properly called "numinous," which is another word worth an essay. Both Saudade and Sehnsucht are frequently found in poetry and attempted in painting (think of light, late-afternoon light, the end of summer, the first chill of autumn -- my personal favorites). I have always been trying to write or compose about both experiences in one way or another.

I have pursued the experience down many avenues -- the sense of time passing, of ages passing, being one of the strongest. I feel that the secret of life, love, death, life's paths taken or not taken -- the Universe itself -- is somehow embraced in its achingly beautiful promise.



For more about Saudade and Sehnsucht, use these links:
wikipedia for each word

References:

(1) Bell, A.F. (1912) In Portugal. London and New York: The Bodley Head. Quoted in Emmons, Shirlee and Wilbur Watkins Lewis (2006) Researching the Song: A Lexicon. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p. 402.

(2) "When Sehnsucht (desire) leads you up the garden path." Speech by Federal Councillor Christoph Blocher at the Ninth International Woodcarvers Symposium in Brienz on the theme of Sehnsucht (desire) on 10 July 2006
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this is the best line in Meyers piece --
“His bisexual Sehnsucht gave him penetrating insight into human nature and enabled him to create some of the most interesting characters in modern literature. “ 


and
Kurzke’s reductive method demeans the power of Mann’s imagination and diminishes his struggle to sublimate the forbidden desires that were essential to his fiction. Mann gloried in the irony of his own self-abasement before the beautiful and beloved but shallow and selfish creatures. In the doomed love of the suspect and anti-social pederast, Gustave von Aschenbach, Mann found the perfect pattern for the artist’s desperate struggle to recapture the ideal form of sensual beauty, to unite passion with thought, grace with wisdom, the real with the ideal.

this may be too much

“Mann’s elegant style, penetrating irony, subtle wit, artistic brilliance, probing intelligence, depth of meaning, insight into the malaise of European culture and half-century of creative genius make him the greatest novelist of all time.”

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Mann successfully fused art and life, enjoyed a long and fruitful marriage, had the intelligence to recognize the errors of his early reactionary opinions and the courage to change them (most German nationalists in the Great War became supporters of the Nazi party), adapted to an exile that cost him nearly all his German readers, became the leading spokesman for the anti-Nazi writers, had a triumphant career in the United States, worked selflessly for the benefit of the European exiles, bravely opposed the anti-Communist hysteria in America, and, despite political upheavals and endless distractions, remained dedicated to his literary vocation. He was a man of magnanimity and intelligence whose mind, harnessing the threatening demons of his time, remained creative and alert until the final hour.

Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

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here is Alex Ross in the New Yorker
“he liked to quote Nietzsche to the effect that "the degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach to the highest peaks of his intellect." Sexuality is not at the center of Thomas Mann's work, but it is near the center, and it deserves a more accurate and knowing treatment than it has received in the past. The more we discover about this Sphinxlike writer, the more tricks and wonders we find in his gloriously egotistical prose.”

thing is, will I enjoy reading him?  Esposito admires Booth’s books and has excellent taste in so many thing.  And his taste matures.  His choice of Joseph surprises me but then that is why his blog is always so interesting.  And his #3 choice today are the two novels of Chris Kraus after her first.  Most interesting.  Let’s see what the rest of his list looks like.