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.