a brit rave

 from Insta  Patricknessbooks  UK  "

patricknessbooks

Finally finished the Booker long list and yes, I’m afraid THE DISAPPEARERS really is that good. Best book on the shortlist by miles. It won’t win - that NY Times rave did it zero favors - but it terms of ambition, execution, polyphony, history, guts, heart, sex and life, nothing else on the list touches it. And WHAT a tonic to read a masterpiece about gay men by an actual gay man, and not someone else using us as therapy sex puppets. What a writer, what a novel. Not for the faint hearted, but real art never is."  

return to normal and ordinary in Stasiuk's travel essays

indigo and cacao;  my ceremonial beverages and current obsession with indigo pants from India, Industry of all Nations--

Rick and friend were in a tiny tent up on Aconcagua in a blizzard for three days; never made it quite to the top of the mountain -- 

Stasiuk's essay on Albania.  Holy cow.  A country gone insane and on into anarchy--in 1997 no less.   I had read someone else's travel account about Hoxa's huge palace before.  

Rupert sent a reply note from my reply to his note earlier ----  he must be in his mid-late 60s by now --- 

"

we're good.

i do 2 days a week for exeter uni, one to one tutorials helping with
academic writing.
sue is 0.5 art at a 6th form college

hope Virginia is ok. say hi.

do you think there will be a blue bigteback re. trump?
wont he fight if he loses?

from here it all seems crazy, but i guess boris was the same.
without guns of course.

feeling old and tired and cold but otherwise fine.

R

------

Stasiuk describes men driving around town in circles to kill time.   Makes me think of my days off---go to White RvrJct to have rotisserie lamb at Tuckerbox?  Or stay here and wander through walmart, m basket and main street?  One may be coming up on Tuesday, so decide soon!!!

now we can get back to alternating among various books.  Done with big tomes for a while. 

oops  by chance  "His father, Samuel Ray Delany Sr. (1906–1960), ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home on 7th Avenue in Harlem, from 1938 until his death in 1960. "

"source" of Jordan Brown maybe--?  line is from wiki on Samuel R Delany 

ok finished

 8 pm  Bela finishing her book also.  Just finished my book.  Eddy and Matt Chin reunite.  Mattachin society.  clever clever clever  allegory after all, all of it   allegorical history memoir by imagination

"under the weight of so much shock and sorrow."  final words  opening "So this boy just walks in smelling of Lip Smacker . . . "

have to sleep on it and say more tomorrow  

Sat morning

Ayad Akhtar, new American writer to me.  Noticed also a new Spanish one; Carlos Maleno. Who shall I read next?  Akhtar would be new---first Am pakistani I would have read.  Highly praised, eight years older than David.  No, I did read that Afghan-Am writer some years ago,  Hoseini?  Kites?  

What to say about James?  Our Jamaican Dickens.  Choral director: huge cast of characters, wide screen opera, multiple voices, queer compendium to answer H Ellis, etc etc.  Gives us a big menu from which to choose.  Bothered? by the ending---are we to imagine that Eddy and Matt live together happily ever after?  If not, why the "full circle" effect; survivors meeting at last, come circle of history making for a satisfying if not conclusion then at least "circle"? of affection, attraction, interest? trauma history meaning?  they "see" one another, at least.  Knowing rather than unknowing.  

Evasive because as much admiration I miss the personal, warmth, voice, presence, companionship of Aciman or Handke, all my fave sorts of wandering observers. James as director is way too sure of himself, in total control, queen over it all.  May he reign supreme.  (gee, no kings marches everywhere again today) could it be charged with being a queer fascist survivor tale in some twisted way?  Titus the kingly director of the play that calls forth the demonic destructions, the horrors of british-jamaican other hatred.  Queers not Jews as scapegoats for supreme order.  Oh, Zelensky yesterday on tv gave a sublime chuckle response to journo question if he is Tp's scapegoat.  

I want to read Zadie Smith's review of the novel.  Or Pete Buttegeig's.  Has there been a LRVB piece already?  

Mars-Jones  : "Mars-Jones praises the raw, polyphonic energy, violent visceral impact, and distinct character perspectives throughout the novel.  He criticizes the Oxford-set framing letter section as unconvincing. He notes that the introduction of the fictional reggae star Streggeh Don functions as an unexamined caricature of pure evil, which slightly compromises the novel's overall realistic truthfulness." 

would agree with all three nits  ---  sure to be others from other readers.  Has anyone done a theory of the unreliable reader who dances with the unreliable narrators in post-modernist lit experiences?  I think of myself here---how I willfully focus in on and pull out from the text any sub-text I wish to find there no matter what the text-director says are the only words on the page.  The author does not control how I may mis-read as I wish.   Sure, plenty of critics have done that.  Bloom even?  Sontag.  others I've forgotten about.  

he's not even close to being as good as Patrick White or Peter Handke or Michael Lentz!  The Oxford stuff was as clichéd as possible, and boring.  Same for many passages throughout, one's interest went up and down, in and out.  Ok, I got all of the subtext I was hoping for; it is a compendium fully educational in that sense.  Will it help any younger people down the road?  Doubt it, really.  The fears and frights still seem local and personal, no matter how fully re-imagined and spread out into many characters.  His ear for voices and dialects is incredible and masterful.  Especially in the mob scene, especially in most of the ostensible interviews.  

I wanted to be up on the latest, biggest nyc book buzz and now I am.  Was it worth the slog?  I'll let Dennis guide me on that one, but in many ways I think not.  I am not saying omg I must go forward and read every single thing he has published.  Perhaps I will go back and do that with Patrick White, but no, I've read his best and one at least of his worst.  

Bela has created a social for tomorrow, cookies and visits.  

note from Phil  --  

I was having lunch with an old (79 years old)  lady-friend when she said she thought she was having a stroke.  Then she “froze” for a minute and could not respond.  I immediately paid our bill and got her back into my car and drove her home to her house in Va.  I then struggled to get her back in her house, then called 911.  An ambulance came in about ten minutes and took her to a nearby hospital, where she remains because whatever happened to her has totally destroyed her short term memory.   Five minutes after a conversation she has no memory of having that conversation.  Doctors are trying to figure out what happened to her and what can be done about it.

 

Which scares me because my memory is declining (although nothing like what just happened to my lady-friend), and I have no nearby family…..The  80s aint fun.

 

Hope you guys are okay…………I was having lunch with an old (79 years old)  lady-friend when she said she thought she was having a stroke.  Then she “froze” for a minute and could not respond.  I immediately paid our bill and got her back into my car and drove her home to her house in Va.  I then struggled to get her back in her house, then called 911.  An ambulance came in about ten minutes and took her to a nearby hospital, where she remains because whatever happened to her has totally destroyed her short term memory.   Five minutes after a conversation she has no memory of having that conversation.  Doctors are trying to figure out what happened to her and what can be done about it.

 

Which scares me because my memory is declining (although nothing like what just happened to my lady-friend), and I have no nearby family…..The  80s aint fun.

 

Hope you guys are okay…………

Friday

 Rick brought Claudia Cardona --    his wife.  Beautiful and delightful.  We enjoyed chatting with her.  She went off to Marshalls and we went over a few things with Rick.  

have not read any today.  About forty pages to go.  Fictional history, historical fiction.  Documentary drama.  I'm so unused to reading this kind of novel of late.  

Rick gave me an A for my computer skills, navigating the document box, dropping in files from tiaa.  Yay.  Made my earlier school anxiety dreams worthwhile, I guess.  I enjoyed the fact that he really enjoyed the embue ceremonial cacao and took home the bag I gave him.  He told us about his wandering around Argentina and Patagonia and Chile when he was 24.  Ended up with a group of nine travelers from all over.   One of them became a famous mathematician who just went through a big crisis with the founder of ChatGPT.  The AI system tried to steal the guy's solution to a huge math problem.  

Rick was in Argentina in 2008 when he was twenty-four.  Two years after college at UVA. Now he's 44.  Looked up some records about his grandmother, in her will she left her one cow to her free slave, provided he stay on the property with it.  The huge shift in personal wealth over the past hundred years.  We are part of an experimental generation in the history of wealth management.  No one knows if it will last, how it will evolve.  Rick loves reading about all of it.  

here it is---popped right up in easy search --  "But hours before OpenAI’s formal announcement came an explosive claim from the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who had been working on the problem for years before OpenAI got involved, and was close to publishing his own solution. "  memorable name---Tristan Buckmaster,

yes, I haven't decided yet what to make of "Havelock Titus.  had to check because I was going to say Havelock Ellis---is that the source of the name?  of course--why not?  "Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) was an English physician and pioneer sexologist who co-wrote Sexual Inversion in 1897 with John Addington Symonds, marking the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality." 

guess I just got my second A+ of the day!!  Titus sounds more roman emperor.  

the book goes on for too long.  I'm missing the personal warmth of a companion narrator as in Handke.   

page 554  16 of the month  here today is the 16th of October   this long crazed rant by Jorden with Streggeh Don tied up is gratuitous, too long, even boring  ---   

finished that part  Part 2 next   for tomorrow   skimmed ahead in the acknowledgments  Salman Rushdie

and Mary Karr   I remember her name, her memoir-novel about shit that happened to her, forget exactly what, 40 years ago?  she had blip of fame for it ---  still waiting curious to see what Dennis will say about it, too bad Phil couldn't have opined either   --- he might say it be too gentle, after all  not bataille enough, not genet enough    bomboclat  

446

 Thursday 15 Oct

now on 446  back to being dumbfoundedly admiring of this monster of a book; a grandest of operas by great diva queen of queens writer who, yes, is getting himself into the pantheon of the books he has read, he has read them all, Genet, well, gee, no mention of either Gide or Bataille, so . . . hmm  Now in the second to last section, covering fifty years of the main guy's life through letters to his friend and pimp? Mark.  surely pimp is metaphorical, mm  

gorgeous day, sun and golden leaves in breeze.  day after, no two days after our trip to cmc for the cat scan

going to meet Gigi for lunch at yamas, both of us looking forward to the dry lamb kebab pita 

still a gorgeous afternoon   great lunch, Gigi in fine form.  Paul was 22nd member of his family to attend Bowdoin College---something like that.  On his father's side a shoe factory, on his mother's side a textile mill.  Maine aristocracy.  Who knew?  

Nice sense of relief in the book to finally have Havelock Titus telling us the full story in his best queen british jamaican letter writing prose.  Did James "get that" from Antunes?  No.  Faulkner?  anyone else; sometime others have done it but no matter.  James at the peak of his powers and in full command of the work of genius coming forth from his loins.  

made it

down to cmc and back yesterday in the rain and fog; place looked so empty and quiet.  Woman talking loudly in the hallway to friend on her phone filled me in.  cmc bought a year ago by hca, largest chain of hospitals in the world; hdqtrs in Nashville.   Bela inside about half an hour and they took her early.  Valet parking worked fine.  All smooth.  Back for lunch by 2 or so.  Still---strong ptsd depression reaction in me.  Wanted to be in dhmc instead, snobbery for sure.  Probably would have had same reactions.  Hospitals anywhere everywhere.  Whole process.  I texted Sarah that if it were moi I would shift the process to dhmc; snobbery no doubt but the patient must be comfortable.  Ok, when will Gilani telephone us with results and his suggestions and recommendations?  Week?  Will there be a procedure at all?  When?  Meanwhile?  

Spent twenty minutes figuring out again, each month, how to pag nm gas bill.  That co also just bought; will it change the online payment and terrible web site?  

Nothing scheduled today.  Hooray.  Launder sheets; wear cool new vest from 32 bar blues.  Mail in the absentee ballots.  Read more of Disappearers.  Trying not to react against it.  Meaning I'm about two-thirds through; do I always tire of a big book at this point?  Is my admiration for it still as strong as at the start?  It is remarkable and amazing and as so many have said "visceral" as well as much else.  Dissertation wars will figure the queers against the post-colonialists, all about Jamaica and the Brits, the native and the empire.  We watched a few episodes of The Jewel in the Crown.  Jamaica was never the jewel but it must have been a good cash cow for a good while.  Could look up a quick history.  Richest island in the Caribe?  

the hardback book just too heavy, give me neck ache gotta get it over with on page 375  yes tired of Jordan Brown and the book; it be too long, gonna say it, neh matta how uncool that be to say such shit when new yorker said it equal to ulysses or some'n like dat 

no not Ellison, James makes clear enough, Toni Morrison, so then, Ellison through Morrison, 

students ever

 Bela wrote about two French movies we loved the other night:  Etudiante and Marguarite's Theorem, even though it was about higher math.  "These films reminded Bob and me of our work on our doctoral dissertations:    Countless hours of work:reading ;researching;discussions with advisors;writing and endless rewriting of texts;  FIniSHING dissertations;defending them and then publishing papers. We wrote on our favorite subjects, Bob on the work of KennethBurke and I on the work of Spanish author; Valle-Inclán.  The reward for all our work has been recognition by scholars in our fields and some published papers .

  Both movies have happy endings in which the characters end up with their true loves. The big difference for us was we did not wait until the end to find our true loves. since they were there all along and our still are while we write the rest of our lives.

va

James makes the reader feel like a student in beyond higher ed.  By 295 how much we have learned we cannot even list.  "... I am fooling myself that I can murder anybody.  I am a faggot, and playing roles is what faggots do.  Eighty percent of the time I've screwed men I wasn't even me."  A book to study over and over because the language hides-reveals continuous looping.  A book you feel you have read before, more than once, and have never read.  

bingo   they just escaped by running through the sewers flowing with shit and water, meet a tall guy in cut off shorts and bathing suit, long rose red hair.  Now I get it---have not had such a reading experience since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.  The Disappearers  Bingo !!  now I can start writing my review though I'm only on page 325 

Syracuse last night

crowds booed him.  He turned up, yikes, in one of my dreams.  Sat next to me in our circle of friends at someone's house.  I held by body tightly away from him, guarded my gaze from straying toward his area of the room.  Pale golden coiffure and blue suit.  Ugh  

other dreams were better.  Theta wave music so nice about 4 am.  Bright breezy day; heading to see Art and Karen at Gustos.  Sarah says Don has recovered his trip to the er in concord.  Was having trouble breathing.  Somehow he needed to get ride of five plus pounds of water, diarhetic did it.  Is retention part of heart disease?  

On 218 in James  Awfully good.  Curious whether I will look at any Anne Carson later on?  James is so rich with detail.  Can hear discussions of it with so many people from over the years.  Jim, Phil, many others.  

219 "reading books was the first time I could feel something loving me "  

He puts John Rechy in as source and honorable predecessor and theologian with whom he can agree, disagree, debate.  224 "and because only when another man holds your cock does arousal make sense, and because he fucking can, and because he is queer"

big book, sense of encyclopedia?  bringing all into Anglo world from carib depths 

nightmares common to gays the world over---micro macro 

there is no word for the floating

 there is no word for the "floating" gender in which we would all like to rest.  you don't feel neuter you just feel wrong and  wrong vis-a-vis the gender you're supposed to be in and wrong with the other one and so what what are you?  

gender-wise you are "liminal" 

now we have a great Counter statement from someone named Mario Sundar

I respect Anne Carson, who was just given the

for Literature. Her essays on Catullus and Cy Twombly were essential to me when writing about grief. But her praise of the “solitary, hermetic autodidact” and the “desert saints who sit on columns” points to the exact dead end of modern literature, awarding literature’s highest honor to a philologist.

he goes on for longer, check it out, makes a nice argument for dirt and grit vs the mind

her comment about the going to church re-makes his case---she says a kind of thinking takes place in church as in no where else

got the absentee ballots -- only took two drives downtown. I got mine, clerk must mail Va's to her.

jon ossoff the next president

george told me ken and carole got their 90 each from bump

no document from Rick except those two handouts can hear him and claudia laughing on the plane to guatemala with all of our financials and infos in their pockets, on his tablet lenovo brand I'm not familiar with is lenovo equal to apple ?