Priestly

 "which means, I take it, that I am essentially a romantic." 155 sent Dave his 500  he sent, paid a dollar? to send a Pretty Please kitty gif!

72  "fell in love with all three at once.  This is possible at eighteen, when love is magic rather than revealed desire, when it rises in us like a tide on which the mind can float, when it can be exquisite and poignant and yet entirely unfocussed, arched above a whole company like a rainbow."   He is good!! 

Thursday morning after the night of debauchery at Yamas with the Spanish-speaking group formed partly by Rosa and partly by Rob(inson)(from New Hampton school, whose mother spoke Spanish, and who knows Tom and Dottie Diehl but has no memory of Rbt Tisdale).  Total of 15 at the table? To my left the husband of John and Heidi Allen's oldest daughter, she taught at InterLakes grade school for 31 years, she and Timo now retired at 65-66.  John now 92 along with George, Heidi about 88.  Bela complimented me on my Spanish this morning, so it seems I spoke some.  Five or six young Hispanic women, teachers in their 30s.  One from Peru.  We didn't really  get to chat with each one.  Will, a young forest ranger in White Mtn Forest service who spent years in South America working in the bosques.  Had been to Patagonia, Argentina, elsewhere but didn't get the details.  Just before we ordered our meals he took out a syringe and injected himself in his stomach.  Had never seen that before.  Diabetic or weight-loss; wanted to ask him but didn't.  

New of a Swiss writer via X this morning; a now famous suicide, alas, but look at this passage from Wiki--"When he was young and wanted to build his style of writing, he did copy passages out of literature (e.g. by Thomas Mann) and filled their syntax with new content. The protagonists of his novels and narrations try to describe the situation of their lives in a way that is linguistically virtuosic and in love with details. Those protagonists mostly are diseased, and the receiver of their texts is very often a higher authority, e.g. the "Inspektorenkonferenz" (inspector's conference) in "Schilten" (1976).

Remember how often in the past I thought of doing this or something like it.  That one summer when I read two novels by a Stanford writer and tried to copy-insert my own content into the shapes or emptied forms of his story telling.  Or copy passages and use the syntax---brilliant but I never did exactly that.  but had very similar impulses.  And of course in the few years in the painting studio I did just that from photos of paintings, over and over again, giving myself a short course in mid-century abstract expressionism.  That painting that Dick Mertens has in Hyde Park (which some have even admired) is perhaps one of my best direct copies of a painter named???  Jenkins?  have forgotten.  Have never told Dick it is a copy!  He may have even bought it from me for a token figure.  He called yesterday spinning and spinning again over the works of Wendell Berry and wondering why he, Dick, had never gotten a career as a writer with as much coherence and success as Berry had.  The father:  Berry had a father who loved him and loved the land and Berry flourished under the rich blessings of his father's successes and loves of the land and of farming (even while his father had been mainly a lawyer, yes, with a love of the land and of farming but still, not so much a farmer as a lawyer).

the whole pattern, seems to me, part of the larger tale of the South's losses of the war, of slavery, of how they treated the land and farming when they had slaves to help them work it so richly.  A small farmer in Kentucky did not have a plantation (system) under him but he would have had a few slaves.  So the whole "Agrarianism" of Southern poets and writers was this long, delicate lament for loss of every sort, loss and nostalgia, moaning and suffering under the guise of nobility of aspiration and purity of intention.  Allen Tate, John Crow Ransom, Faulkner himself, Toni Morrison, et al.  

Would I like this depressed Swiss, Hermann Berger---in line with Bernhard and Kafka?  Maybe so.  This morning J B Priestley seems more clear:  so bright and brilliant.  "Brilliant" the word became or continued to be the highest praise the Brits seem to use now for every thing.  If the novel did not have the narrator on his journey I would be much less satisfied with it because then it would just be Dickens all over again.  Characters in their idiosyncracies being as british as possible.  The empire was created and ruled, then, by the thin layer of really gifted Ts, brainers, who worked the capitalist dream as perfectly as possible, executed, their schemes, by the happy muddlers below who filled out the pyramid of bureaucrats doing the slog.  Muddling through was the motto of the raj but Priestly's genius looking back shows us the brainy brilliance of the few who knew how to manage the muddled masses in the offices.  

I could easily stop the novel here and would not miss it, am on page 83.  I still suspect once more that in fact I did do that years ago, because I think there is a repetition at work---Nicholas praising it, linking it to Jung's praise of it and my trying to like it as much as they each did, and, failing.  More Beckett, myself, than either of them were, are.  

The Puckrups  page 83 ff in Priestly   How fundamental for the Brits is theater, after all, performance, on stage, off stage, the music hall.  They might write decent novels, some of them, but at heart it is all about theater, theatricality, nothing more, nothing less.  An endless cast of characters waiting in the wings, ready to be hooked off as soon as applause dies,  the great chain of being on-call and off-call.  Life as the endless audition for a better part.  

He decries the ancient mustiness of the now gone Christmas, the ancient relatives, family histories, but loves describing it all, the great Christmas set-piece, the scene, the atmosphere, the sets, the food, the food, the sweets, the drinks, whist on Boxing Day 

3:30  we canceled the pt this afternoon, about an hour and a half ago.  Good move, Bela now sleeping some more after GH.  Last night, out, did us in; neither of us slept well enough on such a full stomach and "late" night socializing with a crew of strangers.  Too taxing!  

Just after the pantomime scene and liking the book much better now that I keyed in once more on the main feature of what it portrays so well---the young initiate outsider who longs to belong to the chosen inner circle of those who seem magical and blessed beyond belief, the adoration of another family so much more gifted and elevated than one's own.  What is our narrator's name?  And how he discovers his desire to write and his ability to write as the chief way he can sustain his membership in the new inner circle of the blessed family which has taken him in, taken a liking to him, begun to reveal themselves to him so he can enjoy their bliss and begin to turn their hidden fractures into observations which will feed his discovery of writing.  

"some inner aloffness he always seemed the long distance traveller halted for a brief space." 99  (Chatwin will become this writer a generation after Priestley, Patagonia even invoked). 

You're a queer young boy, Gregory.  96  this seemed a queer topic 99  the sister's second sight

Gregory Dawson.  a pang of envy, jealous of Ben,   Life needs magic, his long talk with Jock

Jock warns him not to see them as magical, the desire for which comes from within him

I feel like the dutiful English major reading the british novel on assignment 

now on 120  in the present with Elizabeth Earl and George Adony and it all sounds exactly, exactly like a 1942 movie in crisp black and white and in sharp dialogue.  Such a period piece through and through,  1946 this book appeared first, we were two years old, dad was driving that black pontiac.  The dialogue here is almost hard-boiled detective prose--maybe in '46 all good writing was heavily film affected, noir derivative, the speech of the geist.  

now about 5:15  Bela has been dozing in her white chair for half an hour; I was dozing here at the table earlier in my wooden chair for half an hour.  Rain outside dripping.  The asphalters still moving their machines in the distance but the brand new sidewalk looks super out the window.