November 2021

 November

Tuesday Nov 2   

Realized I had read Incognito.  got to page 78 and then looked through to find all  my markings.  "The unexpected is a gift of God."  "If I love the world as it is I am already changing it:  a first fragment of the world has been changed, and that is my own heart."  455

Donald called Sunday to tell us he will be made a Knight of Malta this week in New York.  So wonderful.  So perfect for him.  His life capstone.  When I first met him I thought he should be a Monsignor.  Surely a Knight might even be higher than a Cardinal!!??

I listened to Swimming in the Dark by Thomasz Jedrowski while driving today.  

What do you know about neck pain?  Showed up in my right  neck between shoulder and ear Sunday night and noticeable worse by Monday noon.  Have been trying Advil andthose hot-cold muscle patch things. Sometimes seems to go down into my torso but not the arm itself.  Trying to guess whether it is muscular or nerve or bone, vertebrae.  Whether to see a doctor or not.  Going on with ordinary routine activities and trying to ignore it.  But also don't want it to get worse.  Ignorance not so much bliss at the moment.  Have you ever had something like this?  No memory that any specific event triggered it, like a muscle pull.  Nurse I chatted with in the drugstore the other day said to take ibupro rather than acitomin, so have been doing that.  Advil.  Advil now has a PM variant and I took that last night.  Good sleep but then most of the morning that vague drugged feel, so probably will not take that any more.  Definitely colder out now, high 40s mid day. 

That was a good chat about the Bowies.  Had always wondered how the dad made his money.  Gordon.  Wonder if the house had an architect of any note. 

we're going through closets, boxes, sorting.  Va loves doing it.  I hate it.  Build cominghere to see about moving the washer and dryer up from the basement into a hall closet.Now that I think about it maybe I carried a canvas bag of laundry to the basement that was too heavy and strained my neck and shoulder??    Hurts to type, sit at the computer, maybe it is carpel tunnel neck??

someone in nyrb  if you read Musil "but it will change your life. It will teach you patience and relish and tolerance, give you a floaty gait and a long view and a permanent half-smile, and acquaint you with a gentle and rather superior form of suspense that you’ll wonder how you ever managed without. Truly, it’s huge fun and the recent translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike is excellent.-- "    "floaty gait" is good

found a big website of links on Musil—-dare say the author is the V Garlitz of Musil studies!!  meanwhile she is looking at an article about V-I speaking at West Point in ? 1916

first box packed to ship to Barbara.  extra set of clothes to get us started the first week and the pink tablecloth for the party.  

Three Advil sleep last night seems to have knocked out the cold that was crippling my neck and shoulder.  Convinced it was an effect of the Covid booster taken too soon after the ordinary flu shot.  I'll keep my upcoming
doctor appointment to see if he agrees, to see if it returns, to ask about arthritis and knee pains.  

Back to that illusory project of . . . what?  reading only Musil for the next three years?  Why even fantasize about that?  Some vague desire to be overwhelmed, wholly absorbed, taken up into the space ship by an all-consuming project?  

Tuzzi  "It began to dawn on him that being the husband of a distinguished woman was a painful affliction that had to be carefully hidden from the world, much like an accidental castration."  362  He studied Arnheim's publications, and hated men who published their writings as the cause of his troubles."   "Writing is a particular form of chatter, and Tuzzi couldn't stand men who chatter."   "But why a man like Arnheim . . . should write so much was a problem . . .

If Musil wanted endlessness would he not have loved General Hospital?  Ongoing soap opera with no end in sight.  

Here we stand between two knighted dignitaries:  Nicholas with his MBE and Donald with his Knighthood of Malta.

Listened to opening chapters of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.  That will be enough.  No need to listen to more.  Still wonder if listening in the car is not a good idea.  Too intrusive, really.  

Musil wants beauty and excitement in the world.  Grill    

Just imagine how we can get Pessoa and Musil into conversation with each other.  A much better alignment and Proust and Musil, even with Monroe's book on them, novel as research instrument.  his book is 1978.  

Read a whole piece in today's New Yorker.  First time I've done that in a long, long while.  Benjamin Anastas, The Paper Tomb, about the famous or well-known prof at Bennington who is portrayed somewhat in The Secret History.  Donna Tart's 1992 novel.  Anastas makes me feel like I know nothing about literature, about what literary qualities are like, what qualities make a work true literature.  And he specifies clearly that Fredericks does not write well.  Convincingly.  And it sounds by the end that he regrets is two years of research at the Getty that resulted in this New Yorker piece.  Though he cannot regret two years of living in LA, can he?
He talks about the diarist's responsibility toward the people he writes about and I confess I have not idea what that is or should be.  How would my lifetime of scribblings measure up under the gaze of Anastas?   I recognized his name and took interest because I read or started to read is Diary of an Underachiever.  Did I finish it?  Would I like to read his memoir?  Would I enjoy listening in the car to even re-reading A Secret History?  Short video on amazon of him talking with the manhattan skyline behind me, 90 seconds of it, makes me think I'll pass.  This piece on Fredericks is superbly done.  Kind of haunting and moving and maybe sad.  

Hola hombre --
Beautiful day here today.  Slight touches of frost these past few nights and much colder days.  We will be in Albuquerque from Jan 6 to June 10.  Our place is on the western side of town, not far from the Petroglyphs where there is a hiking trail.  One site tells me there are twelve hiking trails in town (or close), town being stretched way over the landscape.  Our address is 3601 Ronda de Lechusas NW 87120.  We've sent out the first box to friends willing to store them in their garage until we get there.  Going crazy with anticipation but it helps that the Paris kids have booked their flight over for Christmas, so they will be here Dec 20-29! 

They live in the 15th Arr which is the old working class neighborhood to the right of the tower if you look at it from up on the Trocadero at the Palais de Chaillot.  Rue Vaugirard runs through the 15th, a street I firstlearned about when I was a member of the FSC,  frères des écoles chrétiennes, for a very short time a long time ago.  We had lunch with Virginia's French professor in Albuquerque near her place up in the 18th behind Sacre Coeur one day a few years ago.  It could be the basis of a whole educational curriculum to study the spiral map of Paris and the layout of the sections!!  So in which does your aunt live?  I looked up Beckett's house one time and was surprised how almost suburban it looked and felt for being inside the ring.
Very very interesting that you have in mind, have started, your own independent learning center.  Tell me all.  Did you pick up much in the way of strategy and organization from Jay Knower?  He bought the house right around the corner from us here a few years ago.  Big place for his tutoring school with rental apartments in the back.  Have not talked with him much.  Years ago when he first appeared in Reed house one day.Higher Ed both real and so-called will evolve quite a bit through your lifetime.  Already rumors here that psu headed for becoming a feeder stem of UNH.  World demographics apparently much bigger issue thanI had realized---recent piece on npr about that. 

We'll be back in Plymouth June to December again and no other travel plans so far.  I leased a new ev in Abq so look forward to puttering around town in that.  We've liked our hybrid toyota quite a bit.  Drove up the river and in through Landaff on one day off a few weeks ago.  Had to look up where Pike is again. 

Hope you have time to start poking around New Albany.  You can write a "Yankee Letter from Mississippi" for the New Yorker. 

abrazos,
B
——-

To some extent that prolific diarist reminded me of my Exeter classmate, Brian [Kelly], who just keeps pouring out novel after novel based on his own life.   He must be up to a dozen or so by now -  novel after novel. Even in the first novel I was put off by his attention to page after page of minute detail that didn't seem to have any importance, but it wasn't until I reviewed his third or fourth that I realized the guy had a sickness.   So I told him at that point that I was too busy to review his work any further and haven't heard from him since.   Brian went to Harvard, got into underground journalism in Boston, went to prison because cops found a couple of joints on him, moved to Russia, married a Russian woman and had a couple of kids while he took advantage of glasnost and started a business in which he televised things in Moscow for Russian TV -including a beauty contest.  At some point he started writing his novels and eventually moved back to New York city where he now lives.   Nice guy but....has a big problem - like the Bennington prof.

Phil

——-

I guess if Phil saw my blog or my notebooks he might say I have an illness.  And I suppose Benjamin Anastas would say I should not post raw emails from Phil and other friends on my blog without explicit permission.  At least he would recognize the psychosis of English majors—-that consuming so many books, writers, makes you ill, they infect you with their viruses and you want to write as they do or you can't help yourself trying to write just like they do because since you understand them so empathetically well that means you too can write as they do and they would understand you too.  The Company we keep.  Writing and reading as friendship offered and received.  Imp of the perverse wants me to read one of Brian Kelly's books to see if I think he is ill or if he is another hyper-wired English major, whereas Phil may have written five novels but he does not have a literary sensibility, or not the sort that gets intrigued and carried away with potential madness and real, or romantic, madness.  What would either of them say about the fact that I investigated more about BA to find the short piece he published on Granta's web site about the nude portrait of himself that his father had hanging in the stairway of his house?  It is such a slight piece of almost reflection that it doesn't make much of an impression.  If he wasn't going to say something more than that as a child he sided with both his father and his grandmother, who always wanted it taken down because it was lewd, in her opinion.  Musil could have included it in his work but he would have made more clear, more sharp, some more interesting possibility that the painting created in his consciousness as a child and later as a man and a writer.  I assume.  Assume might be code here for hope.  Well, as Musil would observe, Anastas makes clear that his father placed himself in some group of devotees of Freud, the complete works "arrayed, in full, on a bookshelf facing the foot of his bed."  He calls him a Sybarite too, another group membership.  And the weekend visits after a divorce are clear too.
Brother and sister as well.  Overall sense of victimhood by an abusive father.

10 Oct  
Visit to Phil and Orthotists.  Lunch at Panera.  Jim called, just as we got in the car after lunch.  His book is out, ordered it.  He told Virginia how much he enjoyed her book.  Asked me when I would come up with one.  

names:  Jeremiah Neptune, TIAA phone guy.  His mother has traced the name back to 820 AD in Scotland!!  

Hard to say if man's love of woman is like water flowing to the most acceptable spot or if love of a woman is the volcanic center of all life on earth  "A supreme degree of male vanity therefore feels more at ease in male rather than female company, . . .   415  part if the portrait of Arnheim

"the irresponsible margin of the conscious personality that breeds stories and poems"

listening to a Steve Taylor Extraordinary Awakenings podcast with Zak Kahn—the Clear Light   huge expansion, overwhelming freedom, body and identity dissolving, beyond feeling of liberation and expansion, moved but no aches or pains, no tightness, released from the body, dissolving of consciousness, on a cloud, through one cloud, onto another, inside a cocoon, in an environment without space and time, no breathing, free, no pain, no weariness, boundary line, cross, not scary darkness, really peaceful darkness, no going back yet, knowingness, if stay, won't be able to go  back, sharp voice pierces me from slumber, be careful, yes, ok, ok, I'll be mindful,
wave  of soothing compassion, embracing, wake in palm of hand of translucent light, a baby, tenderness, unconditional love seeps into the dna and rna of my being, every cell of my being, pure, untainted chemical love, know loving tenderness, weeping with gratitude, touched from inside out, knowing loved, other worldy movement of hand upwards, eventually feel pushed back into body, takes three weeks to come back into bodily consciousness, centering meditation prepares, calm and clear, surrendering to greater than self, this will unfold, reveal itself, conscious experience of death, died, death is an illusion, no longer real, belief not applicable, certainty, gift, not seeing, what given to me, what taken away, shift in perspective, new identity and boundaries, journey through, healing prayer, increase sensitivity to praying to another person, brain place of happiness, positivity, power to touch each other through prayer, never limit on that, infinite in that, going to better place, want to, comes through my heart, opportunity to be ready for it to happen, moment won't come again, infinite potential to be in this moment, precious, the shift most precious, changes way see yourself and everyone, love yourself, incredibly humbled, apart from all conditioning, knowing and not knowing, not being, differing levels,

high anxiety dream last night about today's appointment with Dr Fagan!
guilt that I was taking his time, held steady as I went for it.  As soon as he entered the room, though, it all felt good.  He is terrific.  Great visit even if my neck no longer felt as painful or difficult a case as I had thought for two days.  

"But while contemporary man has in money . . . the surest control of society, a means as tough and precise as a guillotine, it can also be as vulnerable  as an arthritic---how painfully the money market limps and aches all over at the slightest draft!--and is most delicately involved with everything it controls."   ---Musil
Finally saw the doctor today for twenty minutes.  No disc or nerve problem.  Advil if it recurs.  Has been quiet of course for a while already.  Must be my money sense ebbing and flowing arthritically.  

"Discovering the great poem of life, knowing their own part in it, restores to them the courage of the dilettante they had lost when they burned their own poems."  420

"No one really knows what life depends on." 389

Gass on Musil  in NYRB Jan 11, 1996   "The Hovering Life"

The essay is to other forms of writing as the Man Without Qualities is to other forms of men. “… An essay is…the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought.” The essayist occupies that middle ground between the scholar who says he seeks the truth, and the novelist, for instance, whose aim is to freely exercise his subjectivity. Musil’s odd novel, and Ulrich’s odd mind, reject both certainty and subjectivity, as each believes the essay does. “Nothing is more foreign” to the essay than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivism. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable.
The essayist is “a master of the inner hovering life.”
What can we say that will be adequate to Musil’s slow, meditative style, writing which is both analytic and lyrical, witty and sensuous? For it is not the novel’s situation; it is not the richly realized characters; it is not even its observations and ideas that makes The Man Without Qualities a masterpiece. In it Musil’s mind meditates on Ulrich’s mind while Ulrich’s mind is meditating on that, say, of his mistress or Paul Arnheim or Diotima. Musil thinks through, weighs and evaluates, Clarisse’s ardent consciousness while accurately rendering her more limited awareness of herself and the world. Ulrich explains Clarisse to himself while Musil explains both of them by means of Ulrich’s explanation.
In many ways, in taste, temperament, and ambition, Musil is a nineteenth-century novelist, viewing Joyce with the same distaste as Virginia Woolf did. He is vain and competitive, too, especially regarding his rival, Hermann Broch, whose generosity of character he could not match.
Yet Musil’s style is as antagonistic to narration, plot, and action as any modernist’s, and only Proust can give us an equally mentalized slow-motion world. Even if Ulrich repeatedly complains (in the manner of Hamlet) that thought inhibits action, such concern is not permitted to inhibit the slow honeyed spread of Musil’s prose.

We are now in the realm of unfinished versions, however, and critical opinion is sharply divided about what Musil intended or would have ultimately done. For what it’s worth, I favor the view that Ulrich and Agatha remain forever on the verge. Ulrich is finally able to live the intuitive, emotional, and “feminine” in himself because his “femininity” now loves him.

Oddly enough, it seems to me that the possibility of acting as a real and free self in society, of remaining whole while joining the whole, a unity which Ulrich seeks, has been present all along, because even in a narrative which is picturing the problem, there is the presence, in the prose itself, of the solution: the formal and the sensuous, the abstract and the factual, the mental and the emotional, the analytic and the mystical, brought together in lines which resolutely avoid the conventional and continually discover the strange ambiguous indefinability of things.

When the fog lifts in St. Louis, when I return home, I mean to look up Hölderlin’s epigraph to Hyperion—the Hermit in Greece because I think it may suit this matchless novel.
And I do. It does.
Non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est.
Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine.
——
letter published June 20, 1996
Next to Ulrich, Agathe is the most important character in the novel. She is the only non-caricature in the motley cast besides Ulrich himself. Her insights, her naive challenges, her active courage that draws her into “improper,” even illegal areas where Ulrich fears to tread, provide the ideal supplement and corrective to his clever but maddeningly timid ramblings. Ulrich returns the favor by introducing Agathe to a down-to-earth, responsible sense of precision that her judgments had heretofore lacked. Musil weaves their thoughts, feelings, and borderline taboo experience into a multilayered fabric unmatched in the modern literature of love.
It’s too bad we harried denizens of the Nineties have so little time for truly rewarding tasks, like reading the MWQ through to its ephemeral “end.” But since that is so, here’s a tip for impatient readers who may have bogged down in the Collateral Campaign. Rather than lay the book aside, go straight to Section III, where thanks to Agathe things really start to crackle for Ulrich and for us. Or if that still leaves too many pages to tackle, jump to the final section, i.e. Musil’s withdrawn galley proofs and other drafts translated by Burton Pike alone, and read them with their 1940-1942 “alternate draft versions” through Chapter 52. Chapters 45-48 of the galley proofs, then 49-52 of the “alternate drafts,” contain passages among the most provocative, evocative of Musil’s entire prose opus. Knopf and Burton Pike have done their part by rescuing them from sad obscurity. The rest—the reading, the savoring—is up to us.
Philip H. Beard
Professor of German
Sonoma State University
—-
J. P. Jones
jpjones33@hotmail.com
(301) 921-0440 • Work

Jim's book arrived this afternoon, and I've started reading it - and really enjoying it.   Jim is satirizing Catholic attitudes about saints, but humorously and it's obvious he has a soft spot in his heart for all those Catholics who still believe in their saints.   So thank you so much for the enjoyable book, and I really look forward to reading the rest of it.   

I forget how you know Jim.   Was he a novice Christian Bro with you?

——
So glad you are enjoying it.  He has a lovely wicked and warm sense of humor.  A friend who read it in ms said he thought it got too bitter or harsh in some places.  I've not yet read all of it. Saw a few pages about three years ago.  Jim is about 83 now, four or five years older.  My first summer at Ammendale he was the assistant novice director and director of the choir.  He tried to teach us Gregorian chant, mostly succeeded, but I remember him looking at me at one point and realizing my singing was not so great.  His second wife just died last spring.  He's had Parkinsons for about 7-10 years now.  After Anne died, I did meet her a few times but did not know his first wife, he moved into a home in Cooperstown.  He was an administrator at Anne Arundle Cmty College for most of his career. He stayed in the brothers less than ten years.  Native of Annapolis. Taught high school English and a few years of teaching at AACC before becoming a dean.  Forget why he moved to Cooperstown---maybe his first wife had family or property there.  After that first year at Ammendale we lost touch and only got back in touch thirty-five years later.   At the beginning of the internet some brother collected the addresses and emails of everyone who had ever passed through their doors and sent out xeroxed copies of the directory to everyone.  Something that today I suppose couldn't be done.  
I just finished Jim's book.  It's a bit stranger than I thought at first.  His attitude toward religion - especially Catholicism - seems  ambiguous.  Of course, he doesn't like pompous prelates, nuns, and monks, but still seems to like nuns and clergy who are trying to love god and others simply.   The book also made me go online to find out what Protestants think of saints.  They view saints quite differently from the way Catholics do.  Years ago, I read that Christianity insisted there was only one god,  then replaced all those pagan divinities with an endless list of saints who operate just like pagan gods.   It's amazing to me that people today follow a Jewish god based on a prehistoric middle eastern  ethnic tyrant, and Christians believe in that god plus a structure based on the  Roman empire.

Again, thanks for the book.  It's certainly different.

 Phil


 






That confirms my sense that it is not a book that will charm and heartwarm just anyone, and that the warmth of humor found in many places is counterbalanced by somebitterness or harshness one doesn't expect in standard piety about God and saints.  My copy arrives tomorrow so I'll read it over the weekend. 

Suffice to say I think Jim was looking back over his life and creating tales and figures who stood for events and people he could not have addressed directly or in any sortof factual or autobiographical manner.  Remember he was a dean for years so not hard to suspect that those who were in the know could figure out which saint wasfaculty member x or y or z in the college who he had to deal with, figure out what to do with.  He mentioned vaguely one time that getting rid of deadwood wasa perplexing problem for administrators.  So maybe he's settling old scores, working out in therapy for himself bugaboos and crotchets and demons of one sort or another. 

He published another short book a while back about a boy who was isolated and rejected because his skin had fur like a cat's.  Forget now how it turned out but I think there was a mother figure who saw his true value.  I didn't know what to say about it, really.  An old style Freudian lit critic would have had a field day with it is all I could come up with and I couldn't say that to him!!

The scale worldwide of Catholicism remains remarkable in terms of artistic/historical achievement.  My take now is that it encapsulates or distills the whole structure of Europe, that Europe, including England, which shaped itself by way of families, kingdoms, and wealth and the library of stories around that feature father-kings and mother-queens, salvific sons, and success success success, in various forms like promise of paradise, forgiveness of crimes, and above all membership in the winingest of teams/families—the monarchs of the West who conquered the world with force and ideas.  Fairy tales, myths.  Lukacs says somewhere that the world is now ruled by two elected monarchs and one old-style legacy monarch---the pope, the US president and Queen Elizabeth.  All in symbolic forms.  Roman C takes the Roman structures and adds in a lot ofcandy-floss monasticism and princeliness and medievalism.  Did I tell you our friend in St Louis called two weeks ago thrilled to announce that he was invited to become a Knight of Malta!!  He went through the rituals in NYC last week.  Special robe, medals, regalia, ritual.  A knightly order that was started in 1060 ad and still under the rule of the pope.  And that stuff means a lot to him. !!  Parallel to our British friend who became an OBE, order of the british empire and received his honor in the palace from Charles.I remember when Rich was in the Eagle scouts briefly and I heard about how you had to do things to get a badge on your sash and remember thinking who in the heck would want those dumb little sewn badges on your shirt?  Just wasn't born with that gene!!

——-
Self-acceptance is key, says von Lob. High sensitivity is innate, and not something to be diagnosed or “treated”, though people can learn coping mechanisms for when life becomes overwhelming. “I can’t emphasise enough how much you need unstructured downtime – plenty of sleep and rest,” says von Lob. The highly sensitive “need to pace themselves. Because they take in so much more and they have more intense emotions, they need time to process the emotions in their body, so movement can be really helpful – walks, or kickboxing or dance or yoga, whatever type of movement they enjoy. Because they’re people who are deep thinkers, they’ve got very rich inner worlds, and it’s really important for them to have those sort of meaningful, deeper connections in relationships.”
Advertisement

Time spent in nature can be helpful, she adds. “And simplifying life, so having less clutter around, less of a busy schedule. That’s why they work well with self-employment or being able to structure their own work day.” It is important, she says, not to compare yourself with other people, “because if you’re comparing yourself with the mainstream world of the non-sensitive, you’re never going to be able to do what they do, but you’ve got your unique strengths”.
Because being highly sensitive is a strength – or a “superpower”, as more than one respondent put it. “The advantages are that it makes me a really good listener, good at conversation,” says Samira. “I’m able to find underlying meanings easily, I’m very intuitive and I have a rich inner life with a strong emotional vocabulary.” Others report hearing nuances in music that the average person might miss, or being deeply empathetic with friends. Highly sensitive people tend to notice things in the environment that may pass others by, and get more from the arts.
Louise, a researcher, grew up believing it was “wrong” to be so sensitive. It was only in her 30s, when she was unhappy in her job, that she went on a sculpture holiday and reconnected with her love of art. “That holiday completely changed me – I met similarly sensitive people and for the first time realised that being sensitive was OK. The people I met there didn’t think being ‘soft’ was bad, and were comfortable discussing their own sensitivity, their ability to find joy in beautiful things, to feel deeply about the world around them,” she says. “Meeting people who embraced their quiet, joyful natures was transforming and I came back embracing my own sensitivity. I started reading and creating again and thought carefully about my career and how it failed to nurture me. I gave myself permission to be the sensitive person I really was.”

——
Just fixed a collagen green superfood drink before dinner soup.  Craziness.
The anti-vaxers are counterbalanced by the powdered supplement shakeologists

Talk with Juanita Johnson in Abq yesterday.  Hired her as tax advisor and when we meet her she will explain how to set ourselves up a wee LLC and handle our money better.  Just now reading Musil's chapter 92 on the rules governing the lives of the rich.  We are not rich.  We are, however, rich compared with what we expected of our lives fifty years ago.  I think all of our friends from the college have been feeling the same way, more or less. And none of us had a clue it would be like this fifty years ago.  What has happened, how did poor literature profs at an underfunded state college end up in the percentile in which we now find ourselves?  

Lunch at the Bistro yesterday with D & P.  Bookends, I decided this morning, with K & C.  Opposites.  Similars.  
from Ethan
Hola amigo,

Please give my thanks to Virginia for sending me a copy of her book. I've got it on the coffee table! I am eager to see whose stories get told and yes, I'm sure I'll know some of the names.

You're lucky to have a place in NM. I've hiked in the southern part of that state, near places like Ruidoso, Tularosa, and Alamogordo. I liked those towns and my hike of Lookout Mountain (11,500') is probably the windiest hike I've ever done in the US. I've actually not investigated the usual suspect types of places in NM and perhaps someday I will.

Last year I set up a skeleton for a "learning pod" but it never got off the ground for many reasons. I may resurrect it down here if and when homeschooling booms, as I suspect it might. I wouldn't call it a Knower-esque kind of thing although, sure, I'm sure my time there allowed me to see there's a market for tutoring / individualized and small group instruction / etc. Mine would be more of a homeschooling support in humanities and tutoring in humanities plus bonus classes for students interested in open dialogue about interesting topics.

I hope you are set to have a nice Thanksgiving. We'll have Christmas in NH so I'll be up and let you know I'm there.

Peace,
Ethan

——

Musil  "between trance and dream" 462  Why is it, anyway, that a man is admired and loved?  Isn't it an almost unfathomable mystery, rounded and fragile as an egg?"  457

Wish someone would randomly collect papers in the Lax archive and publish them in the spirit of Pessoa's Disquiet.  Since McCarthy focused on the Pure Act surely we could have a biography counter to that featuring Lax's life of impure thoughts or nitty gritty everyday boredom and discontent.  Too much of the merely human is left out of that biography.  

McCarthy is the wrong last name.  

"hardly anyone reads anymore today; everyone just uses the writer to work off his own excess on him, in some perverse fashion, whether by agreeing or disagreeing."  453

"why does he write at all? It boils down to the naïve question Why do professional storytellers write?  They write about something that never happened, obviously.  Does this mean that they admire life as a beggar admires the rich, whose indifference to him he never tires of describing?  Or is it a form of chewing the cud?  Or a way of stealing a little happiness by creating in imagination what cannot be attained or endured in reality?"  453

"Just as the eye does not register the ultraviolet rays of the spectrum, so this rationalist would never notice certain emotional realities of the inner life."  463

Hovering is the great key word as that reviewer noted.  " These days she normally never gave him a thought, but his peculiar remarks about wanting to abolish reality, while Arnheim overestimated it, had a mysterious overtone, a hovering note Diotima had ignored at the time, only to have it surface in her mind during these night watches of hers."  464

Diotima's night thoughts is a beautiful passage  464-465

"At night thoughts keep flowing through alternately bright and dark patches, like water in high mountains . . . .   All that was left now were the ultimate mysteries, the soul's eternal longings.  . . .  Kingdoms may be won or lost while the soul does not stir, and one can do nothing to attain one's destiny; in its own time it grows out of the depths of one's being, serene and everyday, like the music of the spheres."   . . . "Like a velvety vision, she felt her love fusing with the infinite darkness that reaches out beyond the stars, inseparable from herself . . . immune to all schemes and set purposes.  . . .
sank into the silence of unconscious being."   

"the ecstatic thirst for love that had been driven out of her . . . could have been nothing other than an incarnation . . . a manifestation in the flesh. . . a meaning, a mission, a destiny, such as is written in the stars for the elect." 481

"her body . . . all harbored the marvelous feeling that goes with love: the sense that every movement is of mysterious importance."  

"she could be said to be more inwardly present than ever, inside some deep inner space somehow contained inside the space her body occupies in the world  

"So Clarisse enjoys intimations and forebodings as other people pride themselves on their memory or on their strong stomach when they say they could eat splintered glass."  

"it was more like having that sense, split between torment and bliss, of serving as a sacrifice for something.  
"something had to be done to tear him out of himself, at any cost.  483
She would have to wrestle with him for his soul.  

26 Friday   Finished typing Va's '93 summer trip to Spain diary-letter to Daddy Dee.  Princess switch movies on.  

Night blooming cereus  and the century plant,  

Amorphophallus titanum, the titan arum, is a flowering plant in the family Araceae. It has the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world. The inflorescence of the talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera, is larger, but it is branched rather than unbranched. Amorphophallus titanum is endemic to Sumatra.

What I really wanted was to be hungry, really hungry.  Remarkably difficult to achieve.  
"a fastidious soul takes its time in making such a choice" —Musil  
the tale of Aunt Jane who marries and then is abandoned, raises the child on her own, "a life given over to passion is not an easy one, or easy to talk about."    I like how Musil has these short summaries of a life, lots of them, again, the born story teller, part gossip, part epic poet, part raconteur, stand-up comic, lie down moaner, cartwheeling performer, tranquil hermit
what if we get to CasaA and Omicron forces another semi-lockdown—-what if, what if, what if,  
Aunt Jane's love left behind "only the eternal form of love and inspiration, so that at a great remove in time her experience had become indistinguishable from a truly earthshaking kind of emotion.  497
"Aunt Jane lived on tea, black coffee, and two cups of beef bouillon a day, but no one in that little town stopped and stared after her . . . ."  there is the answer to my desire to be hungry!!
"You're jealous by nature, and you have a chip on your shoulder, you're against everything."  511  "There you go again making a mountain out of a molehill."  

Brilliant idea last night in the middle of the night:  go randomly over my blogspot blog, pull out passages, collect them into a small volume of pieces.
No rhyme or reason beyond random snippets from my own archive.  Put Evan-Lavender's book into the last box to ship to NM.  See what he has done.  But this idea or lame notion springs from my imagining what would happen if some earnest fellow went to the Lax archive in St Bonaventure's and did that with the boxes and boxes of Lax's papers—-a random selection as a way of revealing the Lax that none of us know.  
Hi, Phil.

    Well, my wise-ass reply was going to be, "All that's just your opinion, Jones."  Going to be, I say, because I would never formulate, let alone send, such a juvenile response.

    I don't assume I can fully grasp your situation, Phil, but I think I get it at least partly. For me, it's just that so much of the fiction seems so damn young.

    Did I mention my wholly unlikely non-fiction recommendation: Entangled Life? All about fungi and the "wood wide web" of natural connectedness. I know, I know. I would never have read it except for wanting to keep up with a book group I'm in, but it is truly amazing. The author's name is also unlikely, Merlin Sheldrake. A plant biologist who writes and thinks metaphorically, often meta-metaphorically.

    But I want to return to an earlier email, one from which I'm still reeling. There are blasphemies and there are blasphemies.  But questioning the superiority of Fats Domino?!? 

    I am too traumatized, too triggered, too micro-aggressed-upon to continue...

                        --Anguished in Atlanta    ———

 today is the 30th—-last day of the month  

the cancelation at Casa Alegre has been replaced by another booking

quote from Daily Musil—-“Ideas and feelings – they’re more for people who have nothing to do.” - The Man Without Qualities    

thank goodness now that I'm 513 pages in I know how to discount such a line ripped as I'm sure it is out of context—-still fun to have it though

Sitter mentioned Merlin Sheldrake and this morning on twitter Nicholas is retweeting a Guardian piece by him about fungi  

Ulrich: "I'll tell you under what conditions I might be so seraphic—seraphic is probably not too grand a term for not merely enduring another person but feeling that person if I may put it like this—-under his psychological loincloth, without a shudder."  514

October 2021

 October 1  2021

Friday   Willow gets her booster this afternoon.  

"abandon an irreplaceable part of yourself in exchange for safety."  108 in the hard back first edition copy of Knowles Indian Summer.  Some previous
reader underlined it heavily in pencil.  Theme of the book.  In hindsight and hindknowlege it is easily deconstructed according to the castle reading of later eras.  Cleet is described as a "very peculiar boy," by Reardon, the wealthy business baron.  "Victims of their own marvelous imaginations, of their towering sense . . . of glorious visions . . .  

So interesting that in this the second novel I'm reading after Separate that the themes are so clear and repetitive.  Class structure, old wealth, how to make it in a world dominated by those families, a Gatsby-Fitzgerald motif I suppose, Knowles would have read him completely and closely.  Also interesting that he describes and thinks about houses and buildings and townscape so much.  "passed on from fortune to fortune as though these very rich families all belonged to some secret confraternity, with special totems and rituals and, above all, special rights."   this goes Exactly with the email exchange I had with Phil last night, asking him why the Jane Kendalls of the world would brag about not leaving their wealth to their children.  

Cleet makes a distinction between liking and loving, these "were totally incompatible in his nature;" he liked dogs and the outdoors . . . he had loved and managed certain girls; he had never  liked them, and with a huge wave of relief at the disappearance of a fear he had not known he possessed until it evaporated, he saw clearly that he was going to like Georgia."  Neil's wife.  102   Strange passage in many ways.  But it will be repeated and amplified in the other novels, I feel certain.  

"All of this Cleet grasped unanalytically, as he grasped everything which he could grasp, all at once, through a natural gift, like perfect pitch or an ability to play the piano by ear."    All At Once   same page, long passage—-
" Most of all, the streets were haunted and saturated and electric with all the love and desire which he now saw, for the first time in his life, had obsessed every cell of his body and mind then, engulfing him . . . hypnotized by passions . . . inebriated  . . . sometimes half with dread with desire and a typhoon of emotions. . . . The very trees seemed laced with all he had felt."  His fascination with Mary Carpenter, an older girl he watched when he was eleven to fifteen, was "evidence, at least, of his power to feel and dream and to be:"  "his feeling for her had been linked to the Southern Cross and astrology and noontime in Connecticut and being eleven and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen years old and with a miracle that existed inside himself."  95   surely Knowles knew his Thomas Wolfe, too

class structure: Knowles was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, the son of James M. Knowles, a purchasing agent from Lowell, Massachusetts, and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles from Concord, New Hampshire.His father was a coal company executive,

also underlined by previous reader:  "Not only that; his feelings were so enormous that it took a deep intensity of experience for him to feel alive at all."  117  

"Cleet had to be closer to the pulse of life, to feel it pound, to be scared and ecstatic and despairing and triumphant by turns."  

Knowles fascination with big victorian houses, hudson river mansions I suppose, New England ones, wealth, what to do with wealth?  he has  brain
truster telling the Reardons they have the house and money of aristocrats yet they live like bourgeois.   Friends, will they continue to be.  Wealth.  Servants to might go beserk.  Or another character that might go beserk.  Throw in this Indian blood and character meme in Indian Summer.  Made up games like blitzball and High Farm tag around the antique plunge pool.
Where had Knowles stayed in, encountered, these mansions, like the ones
in Elkins Park that I saw?  Maybe as a child his father had been invited to some around Pittsburgh owned by the coal barons?  oh, Hartford, obviously he has in mind the Mark Twain house.  Wondering, if I'm a successful writer will I end up building such a place.  

Just look at this passage:  Cleet says he has a peculiar kind of talent that comes and goes for understanding people.   "The source of this gift was clear: his own feelings flowed in so many directions and reached such deep, artesian levels and shot up in such unpredictable geysers that he could understand man, many kinds of feelings because he once had them or had them now or could have had them at any time; he could feel the way most people he encountered felt and so understand them.  The difficulty he had in understanding Neil was that Neil's actions were not much governed by feelings."  132 Indian Summer John Knowles

"The phase of life we're ready for is always the one just past."  
 
The chapters on Catholicism after midway are amazing.  A true portrait of the times, the age.  Knowles was ten years younger than Lax and Merton.
The post-war glow of the church had become bureaucratized and Cleet and Neil are living out the absurdities through questioning.  The satire is soft even though we're told about fury.  Show don't tell hadn't been introduced
into English classes at Yale yet.   

enjoying reliving my life through the works of John Knowles more than I thought I would.  Found little to remark about in the collection of stories, Phineas.  title story must have been the initial seed story for the novel.  In
the one about the boy who gets moved out of his room so his new baby sister can have it, there is one line, Mel sees his things being moved out of his room, "evacuating his collections of stamps and matchboxes from the desk made him feel light-headed and bereft."  Bereft is such a great word there.  Oh the sharp and sad pain of it.   Paragon gives us Yale after Knowles had experienced Exeter and then less than a year of military service.  Yale
as it was for him in the 40s.  Born in '26, 20 in '46.   Morning in Antibes arrived today so I can start in to that and read it while finishing Paragon.  The last story in Phineas, the Reading of the Will, gives us travelogue, Egypt, and rivalry with the older brother in place of rivalry with the best friend.  Freeing himself from needing the love of the father and the sense of the older brother's superiority.  

7 Oct

During this past week, I was interviewed by a young financial consultant who was trying to win my business.   He first  asked me a number of questions about my economic situation and goals.   Then he asked about my expenses, and,  as  part of the latter, asked "What do you do for fun, Mr. Jones?"   To my surprise,  I was totally stumped.  Finally I admitted,   "I don't think I do anything for fun these days. Fun just doesn't seem part of my world anymore."  And now, three days later, I still can't recall having fun in the past few years. It seems fun disappeared sometime around my 70th birthday.  Yet while I'm not pleased to find myself in this situation, it doesn't bother me too much. I do enjoy things but I can't really describe those experiences as fun. Water skiing was fun, but that was 50 years ago.  Snow skiing was fun, but I haven't skied in at least 15 years.  Playing golf was never really fun.  I don't play games.  I used to jog almost daily but that was a kind of  health work.  Sailing was fun, but those days are long gone.  Meanwhile  I wonder  about the rest of you seniors.  Are any of  you having fun these days?  If so what are you doing that you find fun?.................p

Let's see.  I exchange a few emails a week with you.  I scan various apps and sites everyday.  I manage to read five or six pages in a book everyday.  Some days I get in a relaxed half hour walk.  some days I take a drive around the countryside for the hell of it, [bored usually by the same buildings and fields].  Yes, I think "fun" in the young advisor's sense of the word does seem to fade from our vocabularies between 60 and 70.  Depending.  One friend said he decided to hire some escorts to see what that would be like.  He lives in California.  It was okbut not that much fun, he found out.  Friends will rave still about good meals but that feels like a habit and hold-over.  Those who golf and play bridge and do long bike rides just live in a universe I've never wanted to live in, so if they have fun fine.  Even the heavily advertised Viking cruises I found to be another yawn, so perfectly orchestrated that you might as well stay home and surf the screens.  Unless you like having drinks with chummy strangers every day, which I don't.  Lots of drinks, for some.  I bought a really expensive bottle of French wine yesterday just to see if that would be fun.  I photographed the label which describes all the tastes and aromas that someone named Suckling thought it deserves a score of 94, soI thought I could try that and see why that gets a 94 and another one next to it gets only a 90.  I know that is a foolish quest on my part.  Maybe the only fun left is being foolish, out of view of most people, we hope.  It was fun in some way to buy a house sight unseen, online, this past year, in many strange ways, but I still won't call it fun.  It felt dangerous and risky and fascinating, so I suppose extra dopamines kicked in for a while.  But that's still not really fun, is it?  


——

8 Oct  Friday  PT & Ray set off after lunch at the Bistro today.  Arrived late last night.   For PT's Birthday!  

Phil:  i got a surprise call from Sitter this afternoon.  He just wanted to check up on me and see how I was going, which was very nice of him.

During our conversation, I mentioned that I had rediscovered some stories I wrote in the 1970s that I had totally forgotten about.  I then asked if he had ever written any fiction and he said no, which surprised me.  He said he had written a little bit of poetry in college, but nothing after that.   How about you?   I seem to recall that you wrote a couple of stores years ago.  Is that right or am I imagining things again?    P

Maybe I wrote one story in high school.  Scared myself, character's parents killed in a car accident.  I distinctly remember John saying one day he planned to write some novels.  Kids!!! braggarts.  I did publish some poetry in my 50s, or "poetry" since it was word hash collaboratively concocted with an email correspondent in England.  He publishes madly in small presses (many of which he makes up himself).  Got tired of that fast.  He's still at it.  
Pretty sure I read A Separate Peace after you left for Exeter, junior year, and I was amazed at how fiction imitated life.  I've been reading what Knowles wrote after that first big splash.  He had acomfortable life from those sales, which after a slow start, mushroomed into required reading in every high school.  So his writing after it is up and down, clearly he could write what he wanted towith, one suspects, very little serious editorial intrusion or agent interference.  Way before creative writing classes, not even sure he ever took journalism either.  Exeter two years, Yale English andthe first novel.  So in some of the novels after that you can see him experimenting or learning or entangling himself in some vague story and then worming his way out of it.  Writing is good enoughbut never quite as sparkling or primo as one hopes it would be.  Does very much evoke and conjure the feeling of the times, though.  Algerian troubles in the Riviera in the fifties in the second book.Third book is about life at Yale.  Wonder if it would match your sense of Brown twenty years later, but I think twenty years is just enough to have major changes in the culture of places and times.  
Va's sister and husband came up from Cambridge for one more overnight with us.  (suspect Ray wanted to have a good bathtub, their church-owned studio apt off Hvd Sq had a shower.  he is diabetic and pushing 300 lbs, hardly walks.  They headed home in their RV yesterday.)
Our Abq manager wrote:  our house rental has grossed 5k + for Sept and Oct, the peak season.  Balloon Fiesta winds down this weekend.  
My sister is in Stowe for two weeks.  We'll meet them for lunch next week.  
Just for the hell of it?  send your stories somewhere??

——-
Like Morning in Antibes more than I'd thought.  Started slow.  Travel writing for a while until the Algerian enters the story.  He is the whole story.  Never once believed the narrator was Russian.  The love affair with Lilianne feels contrived all the way to the last line—-love may not conquer all but it fights.  Knowles uses the Algerian-France conflict as the frame, same as the war in Peace.  In Spreading Fires it is the fires in summer, possibly set by the servant who goes beserk.  He is Canadian but an outsider like the Algerian.  Jeannot the Algerian is the character most alive, the relationship reminded me of Aciman's Harvard Square.  Which might be the point, in both cases.  Cross-cultural tensions, old country, new world, tribal-family pride and loyalty rubbing against modern freedoms and illusions.  I suspect Knowles will continue these patterns.  Now back to Paragon where he replays the schoolboy drama but this time at university, with Lou as his hero, Lou the Finny character, not the admiring sidekick.

Short visit with Davey this morning.  they were out playing hoops with a new basketball on the Champs de Mars courts.  He found a great new-used bike deal via craigslist.  Hoarse from playing a private party gig and yelling a lot on Friday.  Rock U sponsored a party for parents of the students.  One of Dave's has the last name of Villazon.  He met the parents, an opera tenor and a psychiatrist or psychologist from Mexico.  Turns out he's a pretty big star.  Va had seen him often in Manny's opera class.  Memorable eyebrows and face.  And magnificent voice.  A Fox article from 2014? said he had the horrible experience at the Met of his voice cracking.  He stopped, and then
after a few seconds or moments, sang the note and carried on.  Later he had a risky throat surgery and it came out well.  

Nicholas was the name of the main character in Antibes.  Russian.  Mention every so often of his sensitivity, strangeness, his short marriage seemed a concept or a given but had no detail to make it alive.  In Paragon Charlotte tells Lou he is enormously original, very unusual but not crazy.  He says his whole family is crazy.  

15 October   wired Eloy 5k  from banknh    set up deposits of my brokerage
deposits to tiia bank  Veronica  10:31 am.   Also got Randy at last at VWcredit and got onto that site at last.  Walking around the block with phone on robomusic waiting to get these calls and get a wee exercise.  Ken and Carole strolled by, said the pie has already been cooked.  Willow and Eliz late coming, 12:14, now they're here.  Must have had a good walk after the swim.  Warm, sunny weather for mid-October.  

Strange day off.  Lebanon for Lucky's coffee in the morning and then drive up 91 and Rt 10 through Landaff! down into North Woodstock.  Found Rob's food truck at the KOA, calls it Streat mobile.  Sandwich at Mad River
where a young woman said hello, took course with me in 2011, novel we used was Master and Margarita.  I think that was before 2011.  She taught at Campton for six years, took off during covid, traveled a bit, now wants to go into massage therapy.  Saw Doug in the morning.  He has trouble understanding Patsy's speech, says she went downward last Thanksgiving.

Big visit with Dick and Ann H yesterday, here.  Great fun.  

Trafton and I repaired the shower hose upstairs. [!]

This logic came home to me:  if I read/skimmed some of Knowles, why on earth would I not listen to Nicholas's repeated suggestion to read Dumitriu's Incognito?  Looked for the copy I have.  Couldn't find it.  Looked up buying another copy.  After fixing the shower hose, decided to look again.  Found it!!  Bravo.  

Last quote from Knowles??  on 338 of Vein of Riches, found this by astute skimming:  Lyle strolls in a park along the Potomac in Washington: "There are so many tales that aren't going to be told.  I'll never tell my father I raised a gun to him.  And he'll never know I wanted to kill myself. . . . .
Maybe not to know is the only thing that makes life work sometimes.
God, I have a lot of deep feelings, he thought.  It's something running right through me, very deeply, a vein or seam, all these feelings and caring and falling so deeply in love, it's what I've really got, what I've always really lived for, and I guess always will live for."   Lyle says he's glad to be free of his family and their coal baron wealth.  

Hello Ethan
Well, that didn't work so we'll try again some other time.  Come visit in Abq between Jan and end of June if you can.  We'll be back here July-Dec again.  Our Parisians are coming for ten days at Christmas.  Happy for that.  

Virginia has (self) published a small book of our tales and adventures.  Could I send you a copy?  You might enjoy recognizing some of the characters. 

I've always admired your expeditions and travels, hikes and mountains.  Mississippi seems a fine addition to these.  I haven't thought about Faulkner for years, not sureI could read him these days.  I'm a fair way into the huge Man Without Qualities byRobert Musil.  Liking it much more than Proust.  (I tried, I tried!)  Also starting Petru Dumitriu's Incognito.  Did you ever read John Knowles A Separate Peace?Very important book to me in high school.  Just read a few of  his other books tosee what happened after that huge hit.  Nothing as powerful, alas. 

It was good to see you both.  Ellen's face more beautiful than photos had suggested. 
Lucky guy.  Happy for you. 

Bob  /  Gar

—-"the noble curiosity every creative person feels for book collections" 321 Musil  

As for Tacitus.  I think I read him years ago, but all my books are in storage right now and I can't check up on that.  Anyway,  more recently I read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and wasn't impressed.   And over the years I've grown more and more critical of ancients such as Plato and his band of "enlightened" followers.   Recently two friends recommended recenty books about Jesus Christ.  I will dig out my reply to them and share it with you.   Both of my friends, who, like John, attended Harvard, are religious or spiritual in some way and I am not.  So one of them who later attended the Yale Divinity School, told me that I"ve always been a cynic.  I told him that I preferred the term skeptical..........Cheers, Phil



Shifting to a private line here lest I send to "all" who I don't want to send to.   Was disappointed by John forwarding us that article.  I think it was Bill Maher who said a short while back that we are a silly nation.  Did not even skim that article---just a waste of time for all concerned from the get-go.  Even kind of embarrassed for the academics who thought they were thinking about the question and doing research about it.  I hope John had just had an extra cup of coffee and hit a "forward"button without much attention.  Maybe still teaching he's still in the modes of "keeping up" and "reaching the students" and such.  No, I don't think you're a cynic at all.  Skepticism is something different, perhaps because while not going along with a position someone puts forward about x, it leaves room for other views which might be more telling, more promising for some insight as yet unseen.  Could craft a big thot notion that Cumberland fostered a middle way position of careful consideration because of geography.  In between the eastern cities and the western frontier (of mid-19thC), crossroads of the trains and later cars and trucks, (forgot the canal), in other words living there you had to look out for who was coming from the shore, from the western mountains, from the north, etc.  Big steel, big coal, big prison systems!  Churches, synagogues, well now I sound silly enough to stop.  "Our century is spreading outwards into a world of superficial and mechanical novelty, so why should events described two thousand years ago repeat themselves?  Are there constants of human behaviour pointing to an underlying problem that is no less constant?"  1964 novel by Romanian writer, Petru Dimitriu, only 13 pages in, about getting out from the Soviet bloc and heading west.  

It was the full moon two nights ago.  Woke up craving oysters and wanting to go to the coast and slurp a big plate full.  Might do that Tuesday, weather depending.  November of the soul on its way and as Melville puts it, time for Ishmael to jump on board a ship and sail away from New Bedford for some far distant sea.  

26 October
In spite of the news scares about a big storm, I drove to Portland today.  Rain off and on but nothing major.  Waterfront goes with rain, seagulls.  Eventide closed for the day so it was J's Oyster house and that was probably better.  Baker's dozen of fresh oysters with horseradish and lemon.  Perfect.
Cup of clam chowder as a chaser.  Long drive but all curvy two lane roads through farms and villages and fun to drive.  

from cousin Mike Stitcher

Bob, sorry this has taken so long. As far as I can determine: John Andrew Stitcher b: 1851 in Saxony Germany d: January 08-1921 in Cumberland. Married to Caroline Julianne Becker b. 2/07/1857 in Cumberland MD d.12/29/1937 in Cumberland. They are buried in Sts Peter and Paul cemetery    (top of the hill on the right IIRC) I think I saw him in the 1860 censes.  He had a brother Andrew Stitcher (same name as his father) nothing shows that he came to USA. Their father was Andrew Stitcher b: 1818 in Saxony, Germany, married Barbara Lochlehr Harchner b: 1825 Saxony Germany.   I will get back an go to our families..... Our grandfather, Joseph Frederick Stitcher, parents were John Andrew and Caroline Becker Stitcher.   Mike

I do not recall ever having heard any of this, so what leaps off the page for me, as a private uncanny eureka is the number of Andrews in this German family tree!!!!  yikes  When I chose Andrew as my religious name was I channeling unconsciously all of this history??

27 Oct  Dave rang us.  They are at a Gite on the island of Ré on the Atlantic coast, in search of yummy oysters.  So yesterday we were both slurping oysters on either side of the Atlantic!!!  Gite Rêve du Marais on Isle de Ré.  

——-
Hola amigo,

Yes, last month was not a good time in particular as my uncle was in his last days fighting cancer & I was trying to be there for my dad, who's now the last remaining Paquin man.
caledonianrecord.com  serge jude paquin

Uncle Serge was a really friendly guy. We used to hang out in his baseball card shop in St Jay when I was a teen. Last year my memere passed away and now my other uncle, Romeo, a dairy farmer up in Orleans, is in the home stretch of battling cancer. Not a good run for the Paquins. Anyway...

I would love to receive a copy of Virginia's book, of course.
Paquins
412 East Bankhead St
New Albany, MS 38652
I look forward to reading it. I still get some stuff from John Mingay, a poet whom I befriended years ago thanks to our connection to Rupert.

Well, I have to say, if anyone has done legitimate and adventurous traveling, it would be you. I still remember your stories about the painter of cups and bowls in Chile -- can't remember his name -- but I always thought that seemed like you, that you had ended up with the right people in the right place. You do seem like you would be a perfect retiree/expat in the high plains of, say, Ecuador. When I went there with my dad in 18 we learned of how expats need to buy into communities with good works, which seemed like a nice idea to me. I've not hiked much at all since the fall of 2020 -- 21 was a pretty tough year, with some good things happening (such as moving to a place we feel is friendlier and saner) but some really shitty things, including the above but also the fact that a mere 10 days after we closed on our home here, a floor refinisher left his hot machine in our living room overnight and it combusted. The resulting fire was minimal but the smoke damage was ridiculously extensive and we're not even out of it yet -- we gutted our kitchen and it's still not done. The sheet rockers are working through perhaps Wednesday and then we're hoping we can have Thanksgiving here. I'm also in the middle of a flux, as I'm happy to be here and have made interesting connections but am not sure of what I want to do next. I am disgusted with higher ed and my shoulder is not up to painting full time any longer, so I'm figuring out my next move.
20s--- ambitious professionalism
30s--- focus on physical achievement
40s--- ??
I am much more religious than ever, so perhaps this is the decade where everything finally clicks. I was chilling with my Greek Orthodox priest, Father Mike, at St George in MHT last year before he got ill, and learned a lot from him. My eldest daughter came here to visit last week and she's always been a very good person; she bought a silver cross necklace and that really touched me.

I've only been reading nautical books, most of which were left to me by my beloved uncle Albert, who passed in 2011. He was a sailor and had a Nauticat up in Kennebunkport, where my brother and I would weekend with them in the mid 80s to early 90s before it became the super douchey place it is today. He could grill a swordfish on a cheap hibachi perfectly. I miss him a lot and it's probably why I am reading these books...I have no history with seagoing, nor the ability or interest to actually engage in sailing, but it connects me to him and I like the idea of being away from everything (although the one time I was absolutely convinced I was going to die, the one time ever, not even when we were negotiating the down-climb from Cotopaxi's summit on an insane and icy 40 degree slope, or when I missed by one hour with my friend and guide Rafael an avalanche on the high slopes of Cayambe -- we could tell things were not right at all by the texture of the snow and the gullies made by rained-down rock and ice fall -- was when my ex wife and I were vacationing in Cabo, and took a boat out to the arco and along the shore, and it was the deepest and scariest blue water I'd ever seen and it was just so tumultuous that it looked like our vessel [small!] would be swallowed).

I'm happy that we serendipitously bumped into each other. I apologize for being so off but man, I have been drained and pulled around. I am not down in MS fully, as I do return to NH to see the kids and help out my aunt and my parents. My youngest aunt is moving (back) to Paris on 10/30, and my brother left New England in January for Florida, so our family dynamic is changing.

All the best & please write back as it feels good to actually write and to write for someone who cares.

xo
EP
——

George Steiner on Pessoa in Guardian 2001  (looking for Steiner on Musil)
The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.

more Steiner from same piece—-wow, so much better then Toibin—-

If there is a common thread, it is that of unsparing introspection. Over and over, Pessoa asks of himself and of the living mirrors which he has created, 'Who am I?', 'What makes me write?', 'To whom shall I turn?' The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. 'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.' This very scrutiny, moreover, is fraught with danger: 'To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving.' These findings arise out of a uniquely spectral yet memorable landscape: 'A firefly flashes forward at regular intervals. Around me the dark countryside is a huge lack of sound that almost smells pleasant.'
And there is Musil as I want to have him found and praised.  Just back from lunch with Helen and Ted in New London.  Helen said she found Musil boring.  

"The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. 'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.'"     

The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny"  have to remember that.   And in proper company with Pessoa!!

Throughout, Pessoa is aware of the price he pays for his heteronymity. 'To create, I've destroyed myself... I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.' He compares his soul to 'a secret orchestra' (shades of Baudelaire) whose instruments strum and bang inside him: 'I only know myself as the symphony.' At moments, suicidal despair, a 'self-nihilism', are close. 'Anything, even tedium', a finely ironising reservation, rather than 'this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!' Is there any city which cultivates sadness more lovingly than does Lisbon? Even the stars only 'feign light'.
Yet there are also epiphanies and passages of deep humour. In the 'forests of estrangements', Pessoa comes upon resplendent Oriental cities. Women are a chosen source of dreams but 'Don't ever touch them'. There are snapshots of clerical routine, of the vacant business of bureaucracy worthy of Melville's Bartleby. The sense of the comedy of the inanimate is acute: 'Over the pyjamas of my abandoned sleep...' The juxtapositions have a startling resonance: 'I'm suffering from a headache and the universe.' A sort of critical, self-mocking surrealism surfaces: 'To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.' Or that fragment of a sentence which may come close to encapsulating Pessoa's unique reckoning: '... intelligence, an errant fiction of the surface'.
This is not a book to be read quickly or, necessarily, in sequence. Wherever you dip, there are 'rich hours' and teasing depths. But it will, indeed, be a banner year if any writer, translator or publisher brings to the reader a more generous gift.
——
Hola amigo,

Thanks for your kind words. I am indeed lucky to have a large family, still. My aunt and uncle officially move to Paris again today, so I'm not sure when I'll see them again, but yeah, there's a bunch of us and we're starting to disperse from New England from our former cohesion there. I am not familiar with Colpitts but Hale's name sounds familiar. I'm from Londonderry NH -- never lived in St. J but that is where the French Canadian immigrant side of my family always lived. I did almost teach at the Academy but that didn't pan out, and that was years ago. My family consists/ed of Catholics (my dad's side), Catholic renouncers (my dad), and the Greek Orthodox (my grandmother and aunts). I have always identified as GO, attending the church with my grandmother and oldest aunt on many occasions and donating, but I have never been a "Member" as my parents didn't baptize or expose me in any way to any of the religions.

PSC was 1995-1998 for me. I was the assistant dairy department manager at the Shop n'Save (funny that both institutions have been renamed) and I also walked there from Russell Street several mornings per week to work in the grocery department. Thanks for being enamored with my heroic (?) image as shelf-stocker. That would make for a good poem or short story, perhaps. My admiration for you has also been unabated over the years; I banished Ellen's dog for destroying your painting (no worries; she now lives with her sons' uncle on the Cape).

The house remodel tale is a horror but it has revealed the strength of our marriage. We work well together in solving problems and tackling bullshit effectively. You'll be happy to know that the smoke smell is probably 95% gone, if I had to use manufactured statistical data to illustrate a point, and that's due to a number of processes and factors. The disaster recovery company we deployed did a great job of cleaning all surfaces and placing hydroxyl deorodization machines, which we ran almost nonstop for two months. And when we all bumped into each other at Market Basket and I joked that I am currently not working well, that's entirely due to the fact that I've spent June-September re-priming and re-painting literally every single repaintable interior surface in the house, sans the ceilings, which I can't handle due to my neck damage. In addition, Ellen and I scrubbed the entire exterior (brick and wood trim/fixtures) and again, we're waiting on the completion of the gutted kitchen. The replacement of our entire HVAC system (ductwork and AC units) was just completed yesterday. Ultimately, one worker's mistake cost me my summer, time with my kids and family, and ultimately, my ability to settle in and work here. In the end, we've met good people with strong work ethics and we've gotten the place to a better state that it was when we found it, but it's been exhausting and costly in every way.

My goal is to start my independent learning center, which I started planning late last spring, and offer my teaching services on an individual or small group basis. I connected with several provosts at local colleges but have ruled out a return to higher education at this point. I've also been approached with opportunities by new acquaintances, but I think I need to run 2021 out and start fresh before figuring out what makes sense.

What other plans have you both made for the near and far future? Where are you able to be found at different times of year?

Peace,
E
————-


Mrs Waddell's kindergarten class—photo—names from Bill Stakem, from Elaine Solomon's email ten years ago—-

I do have all the names from an email Elaine sent10 years ago. They are:
Back row l to r - Dave McFarland, Andy Martin, me, David Twigg, Donald Lytle, Lee Bowie, you. Front row - Sandy Abramson, Susie Wilson, Cheryl Pence, Elaine, Pattie Schmidt, Molly McAlpin, Mary Lou.  "Sitter dated the girl on the far left who looks like an orphan, Mary Lou Fridinger."

2 November  

September Year Forward 2021

 September 2021

Lignans.  Flaxseed.  

Swim and wander day today.  Casa Alegre all up and booked.  Beautiful morning today.  

Phil

Not  looking for new digs until estate is settled and this house is mine.   Likely not until next year.    Until then things are up in the air.   And I do have to empty that fucking garage full of packed boxes and deal with my own stuff in a storage locker that is costing me  $187.50 a month and will likely go up to $250.

Not anticipating a condo.   Think rental would be easier.  If something breaks or wears out, just call the landlord.   Ownership includes too many possible hassles, although I may look into condos and see if something possibly appeals.

Dining facility would be a big plus.   I don't cook; I only microwave.   So getting genuinely prepared cooked food at one meal of the day seems desirable.

This morning I was hit especially hard by the idea that Peg was once a person, but at 5:30 pm on June 4 became just a thing.  Person-to-thing thought was hard to take. 

P 

——

Toibin has Thomas Mann saying the same thing about mourning the loss of his mother.  I'm getting to enjoy more listening to books on audible.  Maybe Toibin writes good bestseller novels.  Many more than I'd realized.  This one on Mann is better than I'd expected.  Now understand that Death in Venice came earlier in his career—-the splash of a young writer's energies, way before Magic Mountain.  Which I will have no interest in re-reading even after all these years and even knowing that when I read it I had no idea what it was about.  

Super quiet Friday morning.  Willow on second swim of the week.  Cool, beautiful day.   More Toibin on Mann.  More Musil:  he has so many quotables on every page:  "Knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion.  At bottom, an impermissible mode of conduct: like diposomania, sex mania, homicidal mania, the compulsion to know forms its own character that is off-balance.  It is simply not so that the researcher pursues the truth; it pursues him." 231

By 2 pm today I hope it will be clear that Eloy has been able to drive the VW to Casa Alegre.  Will there be a hitch at the dealership?  Stay tuned.  

"[So] . . . 'until further notice you refuse to be a human being?'  . . . 'More or less.  It has an unpleasant feeling of dilettantism about it.'"  231

Sunday 

20 years since the World Trade Center attack.  Emma is now 10, so her birth divides the period perfectly.  Eliot 7.  

VW owners once more.  Nostalgia of sorts no doubt.  Car now plugged in and ensconced on the epoxy-floored garage of 3601.  Alegre rented for two whole weeks now.  Next coming and main week of the Balloons.  

stair-climber technician here.  full shot of coffee feels way too strong now.  Mudwater mushrooms ok but seem muddy and you wonder what they do in the gi tract?  Beautiful day.  Guess I'll go over to Salt Hill for lunch and walk the Lebanon green again.  Finish listening to Toibin's biography of Mann.  Now that I've looked at another biography, skimmingly, the one by Hayman, I can get a sense of why Toibin the artist wanted to do what he did.  He reads all or some of the biographies available and mainly he pores over Mann's diaries.  He had many burned when he died but some survived and have given biographers a rich horde.  Toibin can now shape the material into a new art work, correcting and elevating the raw materials of the biographies.  What better demonstration of art and life than to re-work the life as told by lower-rung scribblers and chroniclers?  And the largest question, shaped by Boswell I suppose but ancients also—-can a biography be a work of art in its own right?  Zenith's Pessoa I could propose.  Probably Ellmann's Joyce would be nominated.  

Caffeine chatter.   Email from Nancy Reed.   Aunt Zamova will be 91 on the 29th of this month.  In a memory care residence in Colorado.  Teresa wants to shower her with birthday cards and notes.  Guess we could include a recent photo of us just to add to her confusion.  Rich mentioned that he remembers things that happened to him when he was seven more clearly than what he had for dinner a day ago.  Maybe a photo of faces would spark something in Zamova's memory.  Who can tell any of these things?

Tristan the tech.  All-ways sold to a corporation NSM.  No one is happy about it.  Will that outfit close before we no longer need a technician for the Stannah?  

Why am I so susceptible to Nicholas's book suggestions?  here is the latest on Instagram:  "A Theatrical ghost story, an encounter with the anima (Jung thought Priestley his best lay interpreter) and a redeemed new life in the new reprint of Priestley’s novel."  At this moment I welcome it to shake me away from Thomas Mann and his biographers—-what a tangle of interpretation that seems to be—the biography rather than or along with the novels.  Symbolic of mid-century frustrations?  Anyway, would I like Priestley?  Have seen his name for years.  And if Jung praised him, then he is a must read !!! 

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/08/archives/there-really-was-a-super-suicide-society-there-was-a-super-suicide.html

"In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon school came into existence the day I entered it, was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left."   page one of Knowles A Separate Peace 

decided I will read all of Knowles and forget about Mann.  Profile of Toibin in the New Yorker made me respect him less.  He's an artful writer, and assigmentist! or reporter.   Musil's essayism helped too.  Did I ever know there was  a movie made of the book?  Clarifying interviews with Knowles made around the time of the movie release, '72.  His career never reached the popularity of the first book.  Indicative of what might have been, or what maybe usually happens to INFP writers who manage to write and hit it and then miss a lot (just think of how many there are—-the writer down in Keene, name now forgotten, the novelist at La Salle when I was there, no fame whatsoever that I could tell and yet a steady output over years.  Knowles born in 1926, exactly a generation before us.  He published it when he was thirty-three.  

Phil asked about Pessoa after reading the NYRB article.  

I said—It was a very gradual process.  In '82 or '86 we were in Barcelona for a while and I went to a British bookstore there often.  I bought a book of Pessoa's poetry, bi-lingual edition.  ButI took little interest in it, put off I think by the long introduction's discussion of the heteronymns.  I suppose after that I would see his name here or there.  Merton translated a fewof his poems but I learned that much later.  I think sometime in the mid-90s I saw reference to The Book of Disquiet and got interested in finding a copy of that.  That period waswhen I was consciously looking for translated books, especially Spanish and Latin American.  I started to notice the translations of a British woman, Margaret Jull Costa.  She's nowrecognized and is even famous for her translations from the Spanish and Portuguese.  So I must have made an effort to find the book of Disquiet about then.  It blew me away---a failed novel, or a novel in fragments, or not a novel but no one could say what except that it had marks of genius almost hitherto unnoticed in the larger literary world.  etc etc  Richard Zenith's translation came out in '91 in England.  In the late 90s I'd say, more and more people started talking about Pessoa, on blogs I guess.  Blogs discussing books were starting up back then.  NowI think most have faded.  In Disquiet Pessoa voices so well the late 20th C moods of anxiety, emptiness, weariness, pseudo reality, aimlessness that other writers were voicing and thefact that he did it by himself at the start of the century without any recognition made him a kind of lone wolf figure way before Kerouac etc.  Just became interesting to find out about.  

Passage that gives perspective I was looking for :   

"Musil's great novel, The Man Without Qualities, easily challenges The Magic Mountain in boldness of conception and visionary reach.  Like Mann, he is a master of the essayistic voice.  At his best, he is such a rigorous stylist that after him Kafka may appear immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious, and Walter Benjamin hermetic.  We know that he considered Mann and overrated hack, little better than Musil's countryman Stefan Zweig.  They seemed to share at most an interest in adolescent sexuality—-Musil's claim that Törless's storyline merely provided the occasion for abstract inquiry can be discounted.  

Knowles—-A Separate Peace  "“Here the road turned to the left and became dirt. It proceeded along the lower end of the playing fields, and under the pale night glow the playing fields swept away from me in slight frosty undulations which bespoke meanings upon meanings, levels of reality I had never suspected before, a kind of thronging and epic grandeur which my superficial eyes and cluttered mind had been blind to before. They unrolled away impervious to me as though I were a roaming ghost, not only tonight but always, as though I had never played on them a hundred times, as though my feet had never touched them, as though my whole life at Devon had been a dream, or rather that everything at Devon, the playing fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other buildings and all the people there were intensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”  

swoon swoon, my kind of moody writing indeed.  so hoping that it will be present in at least some of his other books.  have order copies of them all!!!

Musil has his essayism and is the greater writer, do doubt.  But someone like Knowles writes "for me" as do very few other writers.  Would I have loved to have been him, have had a writing career such as he did?  Much harder to know that. 

Did we read A Separate Peace at LaSalle before you went off to Exeter?  Or did I read it after you went?  It was published in 1959.  Just re-read it. Always paired in my memory with Agee's A Death in the Family.  I'd now say S Peace is better.   Knowles had that one magic hit, his first book.  After a slow start it caught the wave of the times and sales went out of the atmosphere.  Gave him a comfortable life with no need to work.  Six books followed but none of them ever came close to it. Career very similar in that regard to a writer here in NH.  Had a super hit on the first book thereafter not so much.  Guess there are plenty like that in lit history.  Ellison.  

Surprise visit today of Va's sister and husband from Texas.  They phone two days ago from Albany saying hey we're coming!  We grumbled to ourselves last night that we didn't feel really up to

it---still decompressing from our kids visit.  But also good to see them of course.  Cooler weather, leaves turning, pumpkins out.  

Phil confirms what I had remembered——

I know that I read SP after I had started at Exeter.  It could have even been after I graduated.   I remember that when I read it I recognized the bridge Knowles used to describe where the "accident" occurred.  However, in real life I don't think there was any tree around the bridge.  It was in the middle of soccer fields and crossed a river (the Squamscott River??) that one had to cross on the way to the school's football stadium.  

 

The only other thing I remember from the book is the unusual hat that the central character wore and that he lived in NYC.  Clothes and NYC were evidently meaningful to young Philip.  Other than that, it's a blank.   Then again, so is most of my past life these days.  I remember some unusual events but little else.   For example, I remember getting hit by a car when I was riding my bike in Lavale when I was 8 or so.  I turned in front of the car.  I was the guilty person, not the car driver.   After I got hit I remember looking up at the undercarriage of the car as I lay in the road  (old Route 40 on its way to Frostburg) and wondering if I was dead.

So you may have read SP at Lasalle, but I'm pretty sure it was well after I had left for Exeter.

One hit wonders:  They certainly exist in the music world, and  it's not hard to imagine that a lot of writers have only one thing to say that appeals to others - just like rocknroll singers/bands.  I had five things to say, but I don't think those five things interested others very much.  Your reviews were very nice.

"Hell is others."   I'm willing to bet that Sartre wrote that when he was at least in his 70s.   When one is younger, we like others a lot more than we do when we get past 70.   Yet, being totally on one's own as I am is no fun.  There is a constant feeling of emptiness in every day. 

Somewhat cooler here, but it doesn't feel or look like fall yet in this area.   Temps usually still hit the 80s at some point during the day.  The warm, muggy, sinful south!

Wonder whatever happened to Joe Boyle 

P

———

So no one could imagine the impact SP had on me.  I easily plugged myself into the narrator and Phil into Finny, especially since he had abandoned me to go off to Exeter, of all places.  I never had heard of it and then a year later he was there and I was reading all about it in Knowles novel.  Too personal and uncanny for me to take.  I found I had a vocation and took up a life of prayer.  Not much fasting, but lots of moody praying and meditating and walking.  I was abandoned and jealous-envious that Phil had gotten out!  The novel spooks me now because of all of this.  I had forgotten all about Leper's nervous breakdown.  That sort of thing must have been in the air a lot in the sense that '56 being twenty years after '46, many were experiencing PTSD long before we understood much about it, or that it got defined and studied.  The novel explores the anxiety of being readied to go off to war in those kids.  Brilliantly too.  Sensitively.  Somehow it almost seems I "ingested" the novel deeply enough to re-live it in the years at Elkins Park, a version of Devon that merged for me the memories of high school with the new experiences of college, formation, monastic militarism, and general anxious cluelessness about everything, especially my emotions, my feelings, my sense of being lost within the secure yet confining bubble of Catholic religious life.  All male.  A continuation of high school without the softening of family and town roots.  Strangers were we all and a bit older, more developed, super-pious and super charged.  

—-

Yup,  he's always "Rabbit" to me, too.

Just tried to pick some Lasallite at random?   Joe had some brains.   Did he use them?   What did he do for employment.  My interest is totally quixotic so I don't want to bother anyone who might mention my question to Joe……P

First to arrive is an old bantam paperback, yellow edges, of Knowles Spreading Fires.  next up  not bantam but Ballantine

Not surprising at all that this passage floats up, because I knew from the start in SP all that long ago that Knowles knew me:

"Even then he knew what jealousy was.  Jealousy was an expression of inadequacy:  people are envious because they are deeply frightened, frightened that they don't possess enough to survive by themselves, to flourish with no one to lean on." 17  Such a key meme in SP and I'll bet in all of Knowles's books.  

Watched the newer movie of Separate Peace on YouTube.  Some added material about the war, some rearrangement of material,

and much removal of ambiguity, of all kinds.  Could even say it has been schoolified to go with the twenty years of massive popularity on high school reading lists.  Earlier movie stayed more closely to the text.  And kept the remembered past as frame.  Later version used the mock trial as the lead-in and partial frame.  Judgment over ambivalence.  And yet I have to admit the one frame that brought me to tears in the second version was when Gene sees their empty dorm room, bare, mattresses rolled up.  Something there reminded me greatly of the bare, emptiness of dorms in general when empty, and of Anselm Hall.  The death of Finney got re-enacted for me in my abrupt departure from Anselm Hall.  Taking the train from Philly to DC and then Cumberland.  

28  Dave's birthday.  Short visit with him.  Emma drew a picture of him with two half-faces in one:  Big Daddy Fantastic and Papa.  

Short phone call to Jim.  Was on his way out to dinner, sounded like his old self.  

Phil J says his great grandfather may have helped found the KKK.

Phil H says his father used his law degree to get into the FBI.  Ran some family 5&10s with his brother, camp director organist.  

Finished Knowles Spreading Fires. 1974.  14 years after Separate.  Had I somehow read it before.  The whole plot of the crazy Canadian butler in the South of France sounds so familiar, perhaps I did.  Hyper Catholic mother controlling Brendan's sense of guilt and sexuality.  Hints at more than friendship with Xavier, the unreliable Frenchman.  Resonances pinged and then forgotten about.  Can underline passages I might have written.  Would have written.  Good descriptions of waking nightmares, anxiousness, "he knew where he was but he did not really know who he was." 114  "The aching void at the center of his self was now widening, deepening;  115  

"Madness: the most contagious disease in the world." 81 Spreading Fires, 1974

—

Story based very loosely on my grandmother who came to Cumberland from Montgomery Alabama with her new husband who had was from Florence, Alabama but had studied medicine in New York City (where he heard about a growing, thriving town named Cumberland).  So nothing Appalachian in their backgrounds.    She lost a child that she took back to Alabama, but it was her fourth (of 7) child.  Nor was she religious so the godliness vs Satanism came from something I probably heard or read somewhere.  Her father had been the adjutant to General Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Civil war. Forrest later founded the KKK and I expect my great grandfather played a role in that, too……….P

Passed down.   Because Dad's family was southern family history was important and known, traced back to 1620 or so altthough the Jones name only traced back to some clerk in the Bank of England around 1866.  Mom, who was an orphan, knew a little of her biological family's history but not much.  Her mother was from Irish-American family (O'brien)and father was from German family (Meuller) that had emigrated from Heidelburg to Philadelphia.  And that's about all mom knew.  Mom's mother died when Mom was 2. That was in 1910. Her father, Harry Meuller, who had been a peripatetic photographer, disappeared soon thereafter, and Mom never knew what happened to him.  The family that adopted her were best friends with Mom's grandmother, also dead.   They were Irish Catholic and ran a funeral home in a suburb of Philadelphia.  Mom and dad met when she took a job in a lab at the Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia.  Dad was a student at that med school. 

KKK: No one in the family ever said whether William Ford had helped found the KKK; they would only say that he had been Forrest's adjutant during the war.  He later became the postmaster in Montgomery, AL.......... P 

Knowles in Esquire 25 years after the publication:

Gene is suspected of having provoked this “accident” out of buried resentment, and sometimes he thinks so himself. One of their group meanwhile goes off to the military service and soon after creeps back to Devon, “psycho.” And then the students stage a mock trial to try Gene, and the book moves on to its climax. It is a schoolboy story and it is also an allegory about the sources of war.

A Separate Peace is one long and abject confession, a mea culpa, a tale of crime—if a crime had been committed—and of no punishment, or only interior punishment.

These responses, of course, are the greatest reward A Separate Peace can bring or ever will bring to me. The book has affected millions of lives, influenced them deeply, modified what they saw and felt in the world about them. The ultimate importance of A Separate Peace is that it has reached out to the readers who need it.  "

My short story "Annie Ford's Northern Home" was based very loosely on my grandmother.   Her name was Annie Ford and she came from Montgomery, Alabama.   She  lost a child in Cumberland, which she regarded as a northern town, and took it south for burial.   But it wasn't her first child and Annie wasn't particularly religious.    So  back in the mid-1970s where the hell did I come up with those ideas about Satan in a Pennsylvania coal town?  

I really didn't know until I got in a conversation yesterday with a guy from Italy who told me that he liked visiting American state capitol buildings.  Bingo!  In the 1970s I visited the state capitol buildings of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and I think those visits triggered my foray into god vs the devil. 

In Annapolis I was amazed at how  modest and open the capitol building was.  Dating back to 1772, the building felt very open to the public and modest in size.  Its windows were clear glass so people could look from outside the building right into the Assembly and Senate chambers.  There was a real Jeffersonian feeling to the building: a meeting place for citizen-politicians who would discuss things openly,  in full view of any interested citizens.  It was built of red brick  with a white wood dome.

In contrast to that. the feeling of modesty and openness in Annapolis, the Pennsylvania state capitol building seemed a massive stone temple that celebrated not citizen involvement, but, rather,  the wealth and power of the state when the building was begun in 1902 and opened in 1906.  The windows, even the overhead domes, were all stained glass so no one could just look inside, and the dark marble-walled chambers reeked of the state's wealth.   Light in the chambers was provided by lamps, not clear windows on all levels and it did have multiple levels.   

So I think that's where the Satan vs God aspect of my story came from.   To me, there was something Satanic and morgue-like about the huge Pennsylvania capitol building and something  fresh, open, and living about the much smaller and simpler Maryland state capitol.  I didn't think of the Maryland building as godlike when in Annapolis.  I think that connection only came later, when I went through the building in Harrisburg and felt a connection in it  to digging deep in the earth and using fire to create power over people.  But I'm pretty certain the contrast of the two buildings is what set off those religious  ideas that permeate my short story.  And I'm pretty sure I would never have remembered that without talking with the Italian guy who brought up state capitol buildings.

Phil

———

30 september Thursday  

Who should I see at MB parking lot as we were leaving around 1 pm but Ethan Paquin and his newish wife, Ellen?  He had been on my mind the past week or two!  Now living in Mississippi where she took a job, and reading books on solo ocean voyaging.  Through with all past incarnations!

Hope he will meet for a coffee or lunch but doubtful or he would have

replied to my emails from this afternoon.  Very glad to see him, though.  

Good quick talk with Jim yesterday too, or Tuesday, around 4.  

Knowles, Summer: 28  reaching.  That was all he asked for out of life, to be allowed to go toward those elements which gave it meaning and made it full of wonder.  

John Knowles, the third of four children of James Myron and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles, was born in Fairmont, West Virginia. He has an older brother and sister who are twins, and a younger sister.