chromenos: Cuttings and Pastings 2021 January to May 31

2021

"The earth is a Paradise. We don't have to make it a Paradise - it is one. We only have to make ourselves fit to inhabit it." Henry Miller.

Kudos to Nicholas for posting this one today. January 1, 2021

“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?” David Foster Wallace, tweeted by Sven Birkerts 3 Jan 2021

“Sad Day for all of us with the passing of Sam. A couple of fond memories of Sam. Sam and Carl Rowe delivered what I termed the backup ball at the Savoy during the winter and spring bowling league. I never thought the balls would get there, but Sam and Carl bowled some 200 games and tore up those duckpins. A lot of fun! My mom was an avid basketball as well as a football supporter as some of us remember. During the basketball season the 1958 Ford Station Wagon would fill up with classmates, and off we would go up the creek to Mt. Savage, Lonaconing, Frostburg, and Altoona. Sam being a South ender was one of the passengers. My mom loved him dearly. Can't forget after the Fort Hill game Sam hosted a get-together at his parent's camp down at the Potomac. And yes, some of the opposition was there. Loved Sam with his warm smile, outlook on life, and kidding gestures. Rest in peace Sam and I will see you at the bowling alley in Heaven. Warmly, Dick Thanks Bill for letting us know.” Dick Stegmaier

——

Got a response from Bill. He doesn't have the details but thinks Covid was the cause, but Sam was having other problems, too.

Noticed that the author of the Sontag bio went to Brown. Also a "nice Jewish boy" who, like Sontag, didn't grow up in NYC. Greenspan did. Greenspan, Friedman, and Larry Summers. Three Jewish kids from in or near NYC who, early on, were good with numbers and grew up to dominate the country's economics. What strikes me as ironic is that Greenspan was the poor Jewish kid from NYC who got into NYC schools, NYU and Columbia, and Julliard while Mallaby, the author of his bio, is the Oxford grad with a First history and the son of a British admiral-diplomat. Talk about role reversals. Shouldn't Mallaby be the intenational political-economic bigwig and Greenspan be the lowly reporter writing the bigwig's bio! Not any more. The Victoiran era is looooong gone! P

and another example of Depends on who is hungrier----for fame, achievement, etc Also raises that strange strange question---who decides

they want to be someone else's biographer??? one long cold winter in Madrid all I could find to read somehow in English was Boswell's Life of

Johnson. Big book. Talk about OCD or plain obsession ----Boswell made Johnson and himself by writing the biography.

Still time for you to write Miller's!! That he did so well with his calling and avoided any of feminisms' backlashes, speaks volumes I suppose

about his skills and charms. Or if not charms, focus, discernment. Finding the right collaborators. Maybe as a social worker he has uncanny

insights about reading people. And as a sex worker/artist, great powers of discernment. I tell you, there is a profound Lacanian tale to

be told here!

—-

I’m both a prisoner and an escaped prisoner.

—Thomas Merton

someone tweeted this with a photo of Merton. reliable quote?

6 Jan Three Kings & day the red hats trashed the capitol building

10 Jan Visit with the kids. First they were walking in the Luxembourg Gardens, later back at home. Emma said after soup for dinner they would get to have some kings cake and see if anyone got the figure. Eliot will run on the track tomorrow at school in his blue shoes. Pain du roi? Practiced Zoom with Ken and Natalie.

13th Second impeachment. January thaw. New TV.

14 Jan Historic Zoom cocktail party a success. Differing accounts of the origin of the name cocktail.

Try this on the Bio. Read one full paragraph on only the odd numbered pages (right had side of the book when open), flip the page and read the next full paragraph onthe next right hand side page. I bet it works. I've ordered a new 1000 page bio of the poet Pessoa and plan to use this method. Have the Sontag and can try it on that one now.

Boredom with these police dramas. Well, yes, and we've all now watched more in a year than in a lifetime in the olden days!! We are in a French series called Spiral---Engreganges--and it started in 2005, six or seven series. Feels much like The Wire, gritty Paris, everyone is corrupt in one way or another. Took us a season to figure out the Frenchjudicial structure. Either the structure or the culture of police behavior seems entirely focused not on gathering evidence so much as using rough techniques to force a confessionout of the suspect. Finally in Season three the police overdo it and nearly execute an innocent man just because they are so sure he's guilty but of course he is not.

I think it is on Prime. Found a whole channel Mhz that gives only foreign police dramas---get out of the English legal system!!---series from France, Italy and Germany, maybe others too. Not that this will yield all that much. Script writers around the world are pretty narrow bunch I guess, and confined by the legal systems and the character types who drive it. Still, I'm happy to be out of the masterpiece theater-esque style of things. Netflix now has a new French drama also called Lupin, nicely done.

Covid boredom might be what we call it after it is over or evolves. Short zoom visit with friends here in town the other night. One couple said they have figured out how to stayin different ends of the house for hours at a time so as to avoid each other for long stretches!! It was a joke but it gave us all a laugh and pause! Any signs of razor-wire on fences in Gaithersburg? Fingers crossed. Been noticing to myself---no word about the Clintons in all of this. Good.

——-

Now that you ask a second time, yes I think I was required to take an Econ at LaSalle, first or second year. Have no memory of it, however. Except maybe that the prof didn't dress in rumpled academic style like my other teachers but had tailored suits and notable ties. Everything shades of tan and brown---including his speaking style as well!!

Va watches Hallmark etc etc all the time too. Took me ages to get us to cut the cable---we now use only wi-fi and apps --- app for YouTubeTVgives us news channels and can RECORD a show and watch it later and Speed Through the Ads. !!!! Va's not in a rocking chair but a wingbackand there all day more or less, after we go to Walmart for a once or twice around of walking. She's now watching her 3rd episode of PBS's All Things Great and Small---veterinarians in Yorkshire, a real thrilling Yawn.

I do remember when I realized that someone had reawakened the younger generation in Atlas Shrugged---so it was Greenspan and his buds. Another thread in the neo-con tapestry that gave us the entertaining Masque last week and this week in DC.

——-

Bob, if you and I haven't walked down the exact same path in life, we have certainly walked down closely parallel paths.

All Creatures Great and Small: When I worked in NYC, I lived with one girlfriend, but had a pretty steamy relationship with another woman who worked for another publisher. One day this other woman gave me a copy of a book her company was about to publish. It was - you guessed it - All Creatures Great and Small. She described it as "terrific," and a week later asked if I had read it. I had made an attempt, but, like you, found it a huge, British yawn. But I really, really liked sex with this woman so, of course, I agreed that it was a terrific novel that was bound to become a best seller. Consequently, the sex with her lasted for quite a while after that, but we eventually parted ways……P

A marvel of some sort that this book title launched a thousand orgasms for you, if not for me!!! The coincidences of names, the resonances of memory, these covid daysare surely rewiring our brains in ways we have no clue, even if we have never gotten the thing. More might be said, but some secrets must remain secrets, n'est pas?

Giving Jeffrey some space in my Chromenos Pages—-lifting phrases from his new poems left and right. “Of space as the face no grace/Saves, the grave waive . . .” His intense rhyming yield fun and power in every line as meaning and theme sit in the back seat holding on for the joy ride.

He cites Yeats—-The captive’s journeys to and fro were writ—-The Wanderings of Oisin

17 Sunday Visit with the family. Emma told us lots that she is doing, showed us her drawings in color of the Cobra Fantastic band.

Hi Virginia,

You are absolutely right. Tunisia and Morocco are very similar in sooo many ways, although I think Moroccan recipes tend to be a little more interesting than Tunisian recipes. Not hugely different, but often some added spice or other ingredient. Ethnically the two countries are also a bit different. Tunisia is about 10-15% Berber and the rest Arab. Algeria is about 40% Berber and Morocco is over 50%. (The farther west, the fewer Arabs, who invaded North Africa from the east around 630 AD.)

Vccines: Here in Maryland, I will be eligible to get a Covid vaccine starting tomorrow, and Peg will be eligible on Jan 25, but we have no idea when the vaccines will actually be available. Luckily, so far both Peg and I have avoided Covid. Meanwhile, Peg goes to physical rehab twice a week to try to get her endurance and strength up. I gather from Bob you're walking to keep yr strength up. And yr truly goes jogging three mornings a week.

Trump begone! That's all I can think about that idiot at the moment. Just go way, Donald. And don't ever come back.

Your article sounds interesting. Once you finish it, if possible, send me a copy. As for the book you mention, I have several others to read at the moment, but after that, may give Tirano Banderas a shot because most current writing is, in my view, pretty boring. And afterwards I may get back to you about the book that explains the story.

Finally, do you know a Katherine Jones in Plymouth. If so, tell her that her letter to the editor was published in the Washington Post today. Her letter was short: "The president is gone, long live the presidency."

Cheers,

Phil

20 January

News from Del Marshall this morning that Kenna died yesterday afternoon.

Dear Virginia and Bob,

Sad news today. Our dear friend and companion Kenna passed away peacefully late this afternoon. She had been in the hospital for about a day and a half, following a quiet, nearly unnoticeable heart attack some time last week. I am ok, except for a tendency to burst into tears at times.

Please inform the other Bon Chats for me.

Thanks,

This morning Va on the phone with Roger in Ibiza. He has pulmonary fibrosis, can’t do much, Isi doing everything.

Yesterday I found André’s Acknowledgement. Calling it the pinnacle of my career:

André Aciman in his new book of essays ---

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sigrid Rausing at Granta, Sudip Bose at The American Scholar, the editors of The Paris Review, Andrew Chan at the Criterion Collection, PEN America for hosting me at the Cavafy evening, Laura Martineau at Coda Quarterly, Robert Martin for including my piece in The Place of Music (Bard College), Whitney Dangerfield at The New York Times, my former student Leah Anderst for including me in The Films of Eric Rohmer: French New Wave to Old Master, Michaelyn Mitchell at the Frick Collection, Robert Garlitz for introducing me to the work of Fernando Pessoa, Youssef Nabil for allowing me to reprint his stunning picture on the jacket of this book, and the Corporation of Yaddo for a wonderful and productive stay. I particularly want to thank Jonathan Galassi and Katharine Liptak at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and last but certainly not least, my agent, Lynn Nesbit.”

—-

Biden inauguration in progress now.

Very slight, only a fanboy reader. About four years ago I discovered one of his novels, read it and a few more. In the midst of my enthusiasm I looked up his email at CCNY and emailed him about one novel, Eight White Nights, which focuses on 8 days of romance on the upper west side. In the email I said, something like, I wish you would write an essay on Pessoa. Aciman has one or two essay collections too. He said he didn't know about this writer, who was he, etc?

I was a bit dumbfounded---and do still love the ironies. Forty years ago I would have skimmed the Acknowledgments of a book and mumble oh, those NYC literati, stroking one another's backs and writing reviews for each other, etc etc.

Not long after, a friend, emailed and said, hey, your new writer is giving a reading and talk at Dartmouth in two months. So I did drive over there, I think it was mid or late May. Small gathering in the English dept sherry lounge, and I went up after and shook his hand. We exchanged pleasantries and that was it. He said, come to NY and we should have coffee. About a year or more later is when his career took off and a movie was made of one novel.

The ironies----he came to NY at about age 14, Sephardic Jewish family kicked out

of Egypt twenty years earlier. His mother tongue is French. Reads and speaks four or five languages, plus Latin and Greek too. Very Cosmopolitan, a few years in Italy before they got to NYC. He was denied tenure at Princeton and so took teaching position at City C. Had a big series of review essays in the NYRB on the then new translations being published of Proust---he blasted them with all the scholarly finesse and arrogance of a French-Alexandrian!! But it takes a faux redneck from almost-West Virginia to tell him that he's missed a major 20th writer---Pessoa!! Can imagine the French saying, Portugal? what has ever come out of Portugal?? About a year ago I got a short email from him saying he would mention me in the forthcoming book of essays. I sent the Acknowledgements passage to a friend and former student whose brother directs

the Guggenheim foundation and said, send it to him and tell him I want a big grant!!!

How did you like the young black poet at the Inauguration? Amanda Gorman She killed it!! We got a text from our friend in Madrid saying that young woman studied in Madrid years ago and lived with one of her friends. Small worlds indeed.

We're sad about Kenna's passing. Hope you are all well. We may get a vaccine

in a week or two.

Bob

from Marga

Sabes que la poetisa vestida de bandera rojigualda y de nombre AMANDA, ha estado 2 CURSOS, cuando tenia 18 años, viviendo en casa de mi amiga Marucha Iruretagoyena, como estudiante de un programa de intercambio de su Universidad? Parece que está bien posiciónada en el partido Democrata y... habla un magnífico español

Cuando era más joven decía que aspira a ser presidenta de los Estados Unidos

nice note from André this afternoon—-after the LRB interview on a podcast with Brian Dillon Was pleased to see your name. Stay well. You do know that it's because of you that I have sitting on my dining table 800+ pages of Pessoa's forthcoming biography. I wouldn't have even thought of Pessoa had it not been for you. So the gratitude lasts for as long as the book stays in print... and then some. Stay well. ANd one day that cup of coffee.

André

Dear Bob,

Yes, I can imagine the relief. I am delighted you are now graced with a President who has had the rare privilege of being in the same room as me! I am sure it was a transformative experience. He even had the opportunity to exchange a few pleasantries. (50th Aniversary dinner for the Atlantic Council in D.C. when he was Vice-President and I was accompanying a friend (because her husband disliked these things and I fitted into his tuxedo). My one and only rubber chicken event (it was) and I remember politely asking the person sitting next to me what they did and he smiled and said, 'I run Iraq'! A fascinating conversation ensued. My friend had been the youngest ever U.S. Ambassador (Armenia) and on the National Security Council before traveling to the 'dark side' - the private sector!

My favorite Eliot novel is Eliot's favorite Eliot novel - and the atypical one - Romola - atypical because it is set in Renaissance Italy and has historical 'real' characters as well as fictional ones including a very sympathetic portrayal of Savranola. It is historically compelling, captures that sense of turning from a religious world to a secular one, has digressions on art and the central story carries all Eliot's moral and psychological acuity. I had been thinking about it again recently and thought I might re-read it. Never know how to answer the question of whether a person will like it - but it is a fine example of her brilliant self!

Love and best wishes, Nicholas

——-

You have an early copy of it? I've pre-ordered it. Am looking forward to it.

Have you read any George Eliot? her Romola?

much of Melville? H James?

we are all legions. always disappointment.

honored to have brought you the message about

Pessoa. my Hermes incarnation

Yes, I owe you BIG time. To disappoint you: I'm not a Henry James or George Eliot fan. There is something sterile in both, never been able to stand. I remember feeling not much different vis-a-vis Conrad.

André

No disappointment. Clarifies well what I've felt and not quite put my finger on. Thanks once more.

So, between Nicholas and André am afraid the decision goes to André. Might not have used the word “sterile,” myself. Cerebral I would have used, using Myers-Briggs.

Could I read Dostoyevsky these days? Not so sure.

——-

Any way you & your clout could get me a copy of Zenith's book now or soon??

I'm speaking to them next week about a blurb. Only then will I muster the guts to ask them. Be patient. This thing is massive.

André

Here are two videos about a silk mill in Lonaconing. I never knew about this. Did either of you? Please note that the young lady who heads a historical preservation association is named Something DeArcangeles.

“What we’re looking for, what we’re trying to grasp, is not there, will never be there; yet looking for just that thing is what makes us turn to art. As we attempt to understand our lives, ourselves, and the world around us, art is not about things but about the interrogation, the remembrance, the interpretation, perhaps even the distortion of things, just as it is not about time but about the inflection of time. Art sees footprints, not feet, luster, not light, hears resonance, not sound. Art is about our love of things when we know it’s not the things themselves we love.”

— Homo Irrealis: Essays by André Aciman

“And yet, much as the passage of time changes almost everything—the stores, the clothes people wear, the kind of vehicles parked alongside the curb—some things remain constant. It is never clear whether it is permanence or change in these contrasting pairs of photographs that I long to grasp. If part of me longs to live at the beginning of the twentieth century, another is grateful I’m stuck in the twenty-first. If part of me loves the present, another yearns for the past. I am confused, but I can’t let go of these double images. I am constantly looking for the right coordinates in time and place. The more I stare and flip back and forth between centuries, the more I realize that I don’t really know where the real me lives, in 1921 or in 2021, or is there some ideal point forever hovering between the two that is my true spot, except that I never seem to find it. Nothing corresponds to what I think I want. I am a free-floating prisoner of endless double takes.”

— Homo Irrealis: Essays by André Aciman

“I’ll return, but this time with someone I love, and only then will the film matter and be real. This, after all, is how I went out on dates, answered job ads, picked my courses, made travel plans, found friends, sought out the new: with enthusiasm, a touch of panic, reluctance, and sloth—the whole occasionally bottled up in a brine of incipient resentment, perhaps disdain. I am almost hoping to be disappointed by the film. I am simply going through the motions of testing a film everyone has been raving about and which I’ve finally acquiesced to see, because this is its last run in New York.”

“But watching Jean-Louis evade Maud’s advances, all the while leading her on, reminded me that what comes spontaneously to some is not necessarily impulse but deliberation, and that every spark of desire has a hiccup, a moment of deflection, a reflux of gêne, which cannot be dismissed, not just because some people are thinking in the heat of passion but because passion is itself a way of thinking. It is never blind. Watching the two think aloud about themselves and speak ever so eloquently about love on their one snowbound night together, I was reminded that thinking is at its very core erotic, almost prurient, because thinking is always thinking about Eros, because thinking is libidinous.”

this passage by Aciman shows me that it is not that I always fall for a conspiracy theory but that I'm a Shifty Layerist

I remember saying this line to John Sitter one day when we were sitting in my gray vw in Cumberland. Maybe summer of junior year in college?

“the way everything about Rohmer had to come back to me as well, but in an oblique and ethereal manner, because multiple removes kept reminding me that I too liked lifting the veil and looking under things, denuding one alleged truth after the other, layer after layer, deceit after deceit, because unless something wears a veil, I will not see it, because what I loved above everything else was not necessarily the truth but its surrogate, insight—insight into people, into things, into the machinations of life itself—because insight goes after the deeper truth, because insight is insidious and steals into the soul of things, because I myself was made of multiple removes and had more slippages than a mere, straightforward presence, because I also liked to see that the world was made up like me, in shifty layers and tiers that flirt and then give you the slip, that ask to be excavated but never hold still, because I and Rohmer and his characters were like drifters with many forwarding addresses but never a home, many selves folded together—selves we’d sloughed off, some we couldn’t outgrow, others we still longed to be—but never one, firm, identifiable self. I liked watching Rohmer uncoil his characters’ secrets; I was all whorled up myself and kept assuming that, contrary to what everyone claimed, others were as well. It was good to watch someone practice what I’d been tinkering with, sneaking into people’s private thoughts and intuiting their shameful little motives. People were two-faced, triple-faced. Nothing was as it seemed. I was not as I seemed. That evening I was confronted by the possibility that perhaps the truest thing about me was a coiled identity, my irrealis self, a might-have-been self that never really was but wasn’t unreal for not being and might still be real, though I feared it never would.”

“The love of design is the love of God transposed to aesthetics.” “Thinking is libidinous.”

Loved seeing the picture of your mantle. Nice to see a painting of mine someplace besides under the table. The music was Alex Heffes' score for Hope Gap. A movie I thought was well done but I don't mention because it moves slowly with few characters (Annette Bening & Bill Nighy). The score is lovely.

I've been watching a youtube channel from a Canadian antique dealer who was cleaning out a hoarder house. I have to go a long way to get that bad.

Stay warm. Stay healthy.

Love

——

“My mother would sometimes drop by to remind me that the weather hadn’t turned out as badly as she feared, so why not think of heading to the beach. But being reclusive by nature, I preferred to stay home. The boys and the girls my age at the beach left me feeling very anxious; I liked home better. Hiding—that’s what it’s called, my father said. Perhaps he was right. I was always slipping away, always belonging elsewhere. The real world with its real people who lived here-and-now lives weren’t really for me. I was like the moody, solitary Laura in Claire’s Knee.” . . . “But the film was also about me, except that I couldn’t tell this to my friends, because I wasn’t sure it was or that I was entirely grasping this myself. It was about the me I might have become had I continued to live in that house on a hill a few steps from the beach. I was seeing who I’d have been in the person of the actor Jean-Claude Brialy, and the best way for me to understand what was happening between him and me was to see myself as versions of him, the me I might have been but hadn’t become and wasn’t going to become but wasn’t unreal for not being and still hoped to be, though I feared I never would. The irrealis me. I’d been groping around this for years. If I liked Rohmer’s contrarian insights and counterfactual view of the world, it’s because neither he nor I was ever quite at home in what everyone else called the real, factual world. We were making up another world with what was good about the world we knew. I was making mine up with driftwood from his.” . . . “Once, on the quays, the title of a book caught my eye: The Time of Encounters. For me, too, there had been a time of encounters, in a long-distant past. I was prone back then to a fear of nothingness, like a kind of vertigo. I never felt it when alone, only with certain individuals whom I had in fact just encountered. I’d reassure myself that, when the time was right, I could steal away unnoticed. You never knew where some of those people might lead you. It was a slippery slope. I could start by talking about Sunday evenings. They filled me with dread, as they do anyone who has had to return to boarding school on late winter afternoons, at sunset. That dread pursues them in their dreams, sometimes for the rest of their lives. On Sunday evenings years later, a few people would gather in the apartment of Martine Hayward, and I happened to be among them. I was twenty and felt out of place. Guilt took hold of me again, as if I were still a boarder: as if, instead of going back to school, I had run away. Must I really start by talking about Martine Hayward and the various individuals surrounding her on those evenings? Or should I follow chronological order? I just don’t know. At around age fourteen, I got used to walking the streets on my own, on my days off from school, after the bus dropped us at Porte d’Orléans. My parents were out, my father absorbed in his deals, my mother acting in a play in Pigalle. That year, 1959, I discovered the Pigalle neighborhood, on Saturday evenings while my mother was onstage, and I often returned there in the decade that followed. I’ll provide some more details if I can work up the courage.”

— Sleep of Memory (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Patrick Modiano

I’ve merged the last passage from Modiano onto the two earlier passages by Aciman. Neither writer would appreciate this I suppose. But both writers awake in me the notion that I might continue their thoughts in a similar even identical voice. Is it the voice of confessing to a close confidante, a dear friend, things one can tell just anyone, only someone who will really understand? If I were to have a coffee with André or Patrick, I could discuss things I’m writing about or thinking of writing about, and they would nod and say, yes, of course that’s how it was for you, for the likes of us. Ordering a cocktail in a dark-paneled English pub restaurant in DC and being served, even though I was only sixteen at the time. Mr Reinhardt, Professor Schauman, Grandma G, The Barclay Hotel dinner.

pasting in too much from A “he says figure eight, I always said Moebius Loop”

“Still, even when they are totally deluded, the ability of men and women to speak the most elusive, awkward, bare truths to each other is never an act of confrontation, which is antisocial—and Rohmer’s universe is far too placid and tactful to be anything remotely antisocial. Instead, it is an act of penetration. Pénétration, which is the French word for insight, not only flatters everyone’s intelligence but frequently sees things through a prism that is slightly paradoxical or anti-doxological and is best suited to explain our behavior and our desires to ourselves and others. It is a medium not of seduction but of exposure. If the word pénétration harbors another meaning, perhaps this is not entirely coincidental: it suggests that the pleasure of reading or intercepting or spying into one’s own or someone else’s psyche is itself irreducibly erotic and libidinal. It may explain why the pleasures of insight and exposure in Rohmer almost always deflect those of the flesh. It also explains why candor can be so clever and so sexy.”

a few years back was I not wondering why no writers talked about jealousy and envy?

“We continue to want something from those we have long since ceased to want anything from. We could be driven by “the simple love of truth” (par simple amour de la vérité) to wish to resolve old doubts, but love of truth, in such instances, is nothing more than the mask worn by the green-eyed monster himself. As Madame de La Fayette showed, jealousy does not necessarily die when the cause of jealousy is removed. The truth is that we continue to want without knowing what we want; the wanting has simply latched on to someone, and that someone, we are convinced, needs to be possessed. On”

amazing he brings in Wordsworth —- ?

“This is the signature Proustian time zone. Wordsworth, whose sensibility is not dissimilar to Proust’s, had long awaited the subliminal moment when, crossing the Simplon Pass in the Alps, he would finally find himself with one foot in France and the other in Italy. When he asked a local peasant when that desired moment would occur, the man simply told him that he had already crossed the Alps. The anticipated moment had occurred without his seizing it. This failure to experience whatever he had expected to feel when crossing the pass into Italy comes almost like an oversight. There was a future, then that future became a past, but there was no present. And yet, given that very failure to feel a spiritual revelation, Wordsworth pens one of the most eloquent hymns to the imagination, flashes of which “have shown to us / The invisible world.” Error, loss, oversight, and failure to grasp experience in the present may be deemed a minus to armchair Freudians, but to Proust, writing about this minus becomes a plus.”

— Homo Irrealis: Essays by André Aciman

“Every attempt to disprove this privative piece of information is subsequently repudiated as a more insidious form of ignorance. The desire to resolve mysteries about the world becomes Proust’s characteristic way of narrating the world and Marcel’s characteristic way of being in the world. Marcel does not act; nor does the Proustian text narrate acts. They reflect, interpret, remember, and speculate. Irony, which is the shadow partner of why-didn’t-I-know-at-the-time-that-so-and-so-was-such-and-such, always takes away what might have been straightforward, good-enough truths. Consummation is always stymied. The Proustian lover, like the Proustian narrator, has come to define his being-in-the-world as a series of acts of insight and compulsive speculation. His way of being, of acting, is to speculate—to write—to write speculatively. As a jealous narrator, he is proscribed from the world of action, of plot, of trust, of love and derogated to the role of observer and interpreter. In writing the way he does, he has already established his demotion from the role of active participant to passive observer, from beloved to jealous lover, from zealous lover to indifferent lover. Writing itself now is embroiled in the intricacies of jealousy. Proustian writing reflects a sensibility that is thwarted in both the world and the present. It says, Any tense but the present! The Proustian narrator, like the Proustian lover, avoids truth and resolution for the very reason that resolution invites deeds, actions, certainty, and decisions and might, therefore, wrench him out of his safe and private epistemophilic cocoon where writing and speculating have acquired the status of life and promise and may indeed confer rewards and satisfactions that rival those of life. This is exactly how the Proustian search manages to perpetuate itself: by giving to written life the status of life, to literary time the status of real time. But because a consciousness capable of such an intellectual ploy must be conscious of this fundamental inauthenticity vis-à-vis life and time, it must constantly show that it is unsatisfied with the answers that writing provides: this not only allows it to keep searching, to keep writing, but also prevents it from losing sight of the fact that it should never presume to displace the primacy of lived life.”

so I am pasting in much too much of Homo Irrealis —-

“Thus Proustian writing perpetuates its search not only because it finds its raison d’être in writing, but, paradoxically, because it knows that it should not find its raison d’être in writing and wants to show that it knows this. Error—say, the knocking at the wrong window in an access of jealousy—not only reflects the demotion the jealous narrator feels he deserves in his role as a bungling speculator lost in a world where men act and cheat on other men, where men of insight are always resourceless, where writing turns against men of writing and makes fun of their attempts to substitute literature for life, but also serves as a reminder that the world of writing, of fiction, in which the jealous narrator sought refuge, is, paradoxically again, no fictitious realm at all: it is so real that it can be as merciless and cruel with the jealous lover as is the very world he flees.”

“Everything from his narrative to his style is about abeyance, retrospection, and, of course, anticipated retrospection.”

why then have I not totally fallen in love with Proust? I read a lot —once through the whole and then backwards through a few maybe half of the volumes—-even some in French—-so as much as Aciman makes the case over and over for why we both should be devoted to him, since we are so similar in type on so many points, why did I not become a devoted fan? urging him on to everyone, returning over and over. He never hit me like Thomas Wolfe did, or even Thomas Bernhard!!!

Perhaps because French is not my mother tongue and I don’t speak or write it.

I wish A had not said P’s style is the perfect machine—-why did he not choose “instrument” with all of the resonances of musical, medical and scientific finesse?

Machine feels way too Dos Passos-ian.

Aciman: “I am an almost writer. Almost is almost a useless word. . . . it casts a long shadow and perhaps is just that: all shadow. Almost is a shadow word. A quick and random sweep through a few of my manuscripts reveals the following uses of almost: almost never, almost always, almost certainly, almost ready, almost willing, almost impulsively, almost as though, almost immediately, almost everywhere, almost kind, almost cruel, almost exciting, almost home, almost asleep, almost dead. She said to him: “Don’t even try” almost before his lips touched hers. Did they kiss? We don’t know. Indeed, in Goethe’s Elective Affinities we have this: “The kiss her friend had given her and which she had almost returned brought Charlotte to herself.” (Translation: R. J. Hollingdale.) We know what almost means. Dictionaries, however vaguely they define the word, agree on this: that almost means something between “short of” and “sort of.” Almost is an adverb, but it is also a stringer, a filler. . . . “By using almost,” says the writer, “I’m saying there is ‘less than’; but what I mean to suggest is that there is possibly ‘more than.’” Yes, but did they kiss? Hard to tell. Almost. “We were almost naked” says we weren’t quite without clothes but couldn’t wait to be, which might easily mean “we couldn’t believe we were almost naked.” Almost naked is more charged, more erotic, more prurient than totally naked. Almost is all about gradations and nuance, about suggestion and shades. . . . Almost is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. Almost is about revelation to come but not entirely promised—i.e., almost promised. Almost mollifies certainty. In butchers’ language, it tenderizes certainty. It is anti-conviction and—by definition, therefore—anti-omniscience. Fiction authors use almost to avoid stating an outright fact, as though there were something blunt, crass, too direct in qualifying anything as definitely this or that. It is how novelists—as well as their characters—open up a space for speculation or retraction or for suggesting something that may not be but that poisons the mind of the jury. Almost reminds the fiction writer that he is just that: writing fiction, not journalism. How can he know for certain whether X was really in love with Y? One could almost guess that he was. But who is to know? “That night, X caught himself almost thinking of Y without her clothes on.” Did he actually think of her naked, or is the writer trying to make the reader consider something that may never have been thought of at all?. . . . Almost teases. It is not a yes or a no; it is almost always a maybe. Almost withholds definitive knowledge of things and suggests the provisional nature of everything found in a narrative, including, of course, the narrator’s own knowledge of the facts he’s been narrating. A cautious narrator uses almost almost as a way of vouchsafing his honest attempt to capture a particular essence on paper. Almost guarantees him an out. Almost not only allows an author to suggest that he might at any moment withdraw or revoke anything he’s put on paper, but it is also an elusive loophole that doesn’t always want to be noticed. Almost is not the favorite word of all authors. One can imagine—though no one’s counting—that Hemingway was not a friend of almost. It’s not a word alpha males are disposed to use. It suggests timidity, not assertion; recession, not dominance. But then there are writers who with an almost, or a presque in French, can suddenly illuminate a reader’s universe. Here is a sentence from La Princesse de Clèves: “She asked herself why she had done something so perilous, and she concluded that she had embarked on it almost without thinking.” Had she really not thought of it, or had she thought of it but didn’t want to admit it? The author, Madame de La Fayette, herself doesn’t seem to know or want to know. She wants her character to seem a touch more guileless than might seem appropriate. After all, the Princesse de Clèves is a model of virtue. But there is something else happening with the use of the word. It reflects a worldview where nothing is certain and where all things written can be rescinded or taken to mean the very opposite, or almost the very opposite. I am an almost writer. I like the ambiguity, I like the fluidity between hard fact and speculation, and I may like interpretation more than action, which might explain why I prefer a psychological novel to a straightforward page-turner. One leaves things perpetually insoluble; the other is an open-and-shut case. Think of Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Ovid, Svevo, Proust. I turn to the word almost because it allows me to think more, to open more doors, to steer boldly and yet safely, to keep excavating and interpreting, to fathom the very recesses of the human mind, of the human heart, and of human desire. . . . It is my way of undoing what I write, of casting doubt on anything I write, of remaining uncertain, untethered, unmoored, unaligned, because I have no boundaries. Sometimes I think I am all shadow. And perhaps I almost don’t know what the word almost really means.”

— Homo Irrealis: Essays by André Aciman

So you might have named your book Shadow Man, or Almost Man, rather than Irrealils. And since I use the word perhaps more often than almost, I will ask Google the difference just to see. But using irrealis sounds much more impressive, learned, exotic, and since it is rooted in a real linguistic mood functioning in a number of languages, real and certain!! Just what you say you want to avoid???

Suppose we place almost and perhaps on a Moebius Loop —- that should do it.

Hi Good news, glad you got the shots. We have an appointment at the Armory Feb 20, fingers crossed. Days are getting longer. One of Va's dearest friends from childhood died a week ago in Illinois, near Chicago. She had been in India for years, came home about two years ago, health declining, so was not a surprise, really. Not Covid. Kids are doing fine in Paris. Evening curfew but that doesn't affect them and they have school as usual. Lots of tv but nothing to rave about. Cousin sent a book of family recipes so I tried to make the peanut butter candy I loved as a kid. Made a big mess and settled for a peanut butter sandwich with heaps of confectioners sugar----sort of replicated the taste so I had a memory burst. Bought another painting by the abstract artist in Philadelphia. Now finished doing that. Not much else. Our TIAA advisor called for a phone chat, yearly thing now. All's well. Expect ups and downs and don't worry. Hate this weather but

glad it's not 20 below. Trying to tune out all political chatter. Enough with all that. Happy with Biden and still hugely relieved. Va's working on an article, has been brewing it for a year or more. About a con artist who traveled around South America in 1900s posing as an occultist and paranormal teacher. He became the source for a main character in her writer's novel about political upheaval in S America named Tirano Banderas, Tyrant Bandit. It's all Spanish to me but it sounds like the more things change the more they stay the same. I think that's an old Bulgarian proverb, or one of those little countries over there. Too lazy to look it up!!! Winter blahs and boredoms. Am sure you're missing Florida. Do you watch any youtube videos about your favorite places?

——

Bob,

Love the video and comments. One of my hopes that the entire Trump real estate/golf empire will go bankrupt. Schaadenfreude—what a base reaction. I’m ashamed of you. (Yippee!—oops, that slipped out.). So glad you’re scheduled for the vaccine. There’s considerable emotional relief when one gets it. We’re continuing to use Hannaford to-go. Am concerned on just hearing that my nephew who is 56 was just notified that he has prostate cancer. Will be talking with him today. Have you seen the latest USNH board minutes? If not, I can send them to you. I get a sense that more system consolidation is in the future. Thank goodness we’re retired. Looks like at least 400 took the recent buy-out within the system. Our best news yet, we bought a new toaster, retiring the one we received as an engagement present. The old one works perfectly but wasn’t design for the newer large bread. This email qualifies as an official stream-of-consciousness....

Ciao,

Ken

——

Eating a plant-based diet may offer some relief from GERD, the medical term for frequent acid reflux occurring more than twice a week. A plant-based diet, including vegetarian or vegan diets, and even the plant-centric Mediterranean diet, has been shown to reduce laryngopharyngeal reflux, commonly known as acid reflux.Aug 15, 2020 sharonpalmer.com

Dorothy Bastien, mother’s friend who was an artist, drew a large charcoal sketch of me sitting (slumped?!) in a chair on a raised dias in her studio. I was in a basketball uniform, must have been eighth grade, when I made a basket for the other team in the SSP&P basement gym. The sketch on large newprint paper or drawing paper, mother had covered with plastic and hung it on the side of a wardrobe wall in the basement. I always disliked seeing it. My head looked too small and the lines too smudgy. Was D’s arthritis already giving her trouble? And I looked fat. Eighth grade I was. D’s son Glenn maybe five years older than Rich, ten years older than me, was very handsome, a country club tennis player. Mother doted on him. Got in touch with him years after Dorothy had died. Mother visited

her often in her last few years of illness. Wonder if the name had been Bastienne ?

What her husband did I wasn’t sure. Executive at the Celanese?

When did I read the first few pages of Gemini by Michel Tournier? I underlined some phrases, Up to page 87. Now I pick it up again, a few years later, this sunny Sunday morning. Ready to give it another look. Who was/is Michel Tournier? Born in 24. So in 44 he was 20. Inspired by Bachelard! So maybe he will explain the poetics of space and the poetics of reverie as I read this novel.

Michel Tournier was a French writer. He won awards such as the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1967 for Friday, or, The Other Island and the Prix Goncourt for The Erl-King in 1970. His inspirations included traditional German culture, Catholicism and the philosophies of Gaston Bachelard. Died in 2016 He wished to teach philosophy at high-school but, like his father, failed to obtain the French agrégation. “In 1975 there appeared Les Météores (Gemini), a baroque treatment of the myth of Castor and Pollux, which could be read as a contemporary version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Beginning from Crusoe, Tournier's men are often solitary characters; he sees that the the natural antagonism of male and female is the major source of problems for human beings. In Gemini Thomas Koussek argues that "the heterosexual wants to lead the free, unattached life of the homosexual nobility. But the more he breaks out, the more firmly he is recalled to his proletarian condition.” Blurb on the back cover by Jean Genet “An Exceptional, Incomparable Novel.” Genet!

His childhood, he said, was “wretched”. He was an “execrable” pupil and attended a dozen schools, including a grim Catholic establishment for boys which is remembered without affection in several of his books. . . .In 1954, he moved to the popular radio station Europe No 1 and shortly afterwards abandoned Paris, which he hated, for an old presbytery he had bought at Choisel, near Versailles. It was to be his home until his death. [so he would be counter-Modiano and a generation older] Guardian Obituary Tournier, a private, even outsiderly, man, was impervious to literary trends and intellectual fashions. He saw himself as a professional artisan, with an old-fashioned notion of the writer’s duty to entertain and question received values.” Michel Édouard Tournier, writer, born 19 December 1924; died 18 January 2016

——

Rilke

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming
a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

Sent you both books. No cost, used my amzn credits. Hart told me about them. I listened to one in the car on thurs, my day off. I drive up and down 93, stop and read orthat day listening to the audio book. go into a grocery store or a lowes to pee, then drive some more! these times. still one day to do nothing is helpful. We watch somuch tv I hardly read much any more. still prefer books. snow days make us all feel more housebound than usual. We got a reservation for vaccine in 15 days, not clearif we can both get it or just one. Big mess signing up. Nice to have Biden on the news, I can tune him out and relax. no need to like these books, pass 'em on or sell themcan't believe the list prices---book pubs know they won't even sell a copy to univ libraries any more. we see no one, lucky if we chat with the paris crew once a week.Va has a book group that uses zoom once a month. otherwise, squirrels and birds out the windows.

Tournier has what to call kind of style? unlike anyone else’s of course. And . . .

the novel reads somewhat like a private journal, sometimes like an essay, other times like a novel but a novel by whom? Alexandre writes a P. S. to his dead lover, Dani but we had no idea the previous passages were a “letter” to him, they read as narrative of how he had found the body in the hellish entanglement of wires in the refuse hole on the beach. A passage then on his face, how only Dani knew that “the hard, tense, unfeeling face I show to other people is not my real face.” 219

The face when naked with desire, a kind of madness, brought on by exile,” and the face of happiness which glows and burns with light and colored pictures. Both of these secrets died with Dani. 219

David Gascoigne cites Tournier’s distinction between two types of writers: “the compulsive writer who is unconcerned by access to a public, as opposed to the artisan, who writes essentially to be published.” Dang—-Tournier’s has both his number and my number. found in Le Vol du vampire.

In an interview he frames his distinction in slightly different terms: authors who draw substance from their private lives—diaries, memoirs, confessions. Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Gide. Novelists invent characters who do not resemble him and have adventures he has not had. Balzac, Flaubert, Zola.

“The book is a bloodless vampire craving blood and human warmth, and it alights on a reader in order to gorge itself on his humanity and inventiveness. . . . a reader is responsible for the book he is reading, because it is to a certain extent a work of his own making.”

“One sure indication of the beginnings of a vocation is when a child copies into a notebook the pages or passages that they most admire in their favourite books. This is certainly not so that they can learn them by heart, nor is it in order to create some sort of personal anthology. Rather, it is an act of jealousy and attempted appropriation, as if saying: ‘This page is so good, so very much to my way of thinking that I cannot accept that someone else should have written it instead of me. By copying it out, I am making amends for the wrongs done to me, and I am incorporating it into my own body of work . . . .’ I have two such notebooks, the first of which I must have begun in my eleventh year , . . . .”

“making amends for the wrongs done to me” —- amazing that he puts his fingers so squarely onto this. I suppose it is the essence of jealousy.

Did I ever do anything like this? certainly not at age eleven. But perhaps that “research paper” I wrote in high school on Wright might be a variant? Every sentence was taken from a source, various books and articles I found about Wright. It was a masterpiece of plagiarist pastiche—-and yet wholly dismissed by the history teacher who could not see what profound poetic constructivism it was.

“A work of art is always a failed imitation.” Tournier

But it does not matter at what age one copies passages in this act of jealousy. In fact one can well be this child or this person all one’s life. “ I cannot accept that someone else should have written it instead of me.” Bingo!

Tournier holds War and Peace to be the greatest novel. Should I cave in and read it after all? Or can I still refuse? It may be, but that need not mean that I need to read it.

“Every reader chooses the book that he wants and reads it when he wants. If it is a work of fiction, a novel, a fairy-tale, a realist short story or a play, the reader finds ready-drawn in it only a small part of the world that is being evoked. The rest he has to draw out of himself, thereby becoming the co-author of the work he is reading. The book is a bloodless vampire craving blood and human warmth, and it alights on a reader in order to gorge itself on his humanity and inventiveness. From this meeting of book and reader is born the work—and this work will be different for each individual reader. But the reader is more than free, he is responsible for the book he is reading, because it is to a certain extent a work of his own making.” (195)

Love that quote! I started copying passages into my journal as a teen and have never stopped. I definitely recognize the feelings of jealousy and appropriation! The feeling that I should have or could have written that! How dare they write it first and better!

The latest book I’ve been copying from is Die, My Love, a novel by Ariana Harwicz. Highly recommended!

Yep that is the part I love most & responded to most!!! love seeing someone else pinpoint it so well. "the feelings of jealousy and appropriation! The feeling that I should have or could have written that! How dare they write it first and better!”

I have managed two of these - Ghosh's Hungry Tide and Powers' The Overstory (and have the second Ghosh one somewhere waiting) - I enjoyed both (if ecological breakdown can claim that emotion) but do tend to think they lack imagination of the possible. They remain realistic chronicles but realism is rarely a full response to initiating change (moral, imaginative, or practical). It always reminds me that probably the most influential Russian novel of the nineteenth century was Chernyshevsky's What is to be done? that generated the climate for action that revolution demanded (much more influential than Marx I think). This does not preserve it from being a dreary book (to this contemporary reader) but that is another question but though it is 'realism' (at one level) when it was written it was being prospectively fabulous!

Best wishes, Nicholas

“i found Tournier's motives for "copying" strange. He seems more like a shoplifter. Anyhow, I never did have a notebook, or a journal, or a diary. When I found some writing that really thrilled me (often from newspaper sports columns) I would just read it over and over again....and I would try to write something in the same style. Once Willard Mullen (a sports writer) wrote a parody on Noel Coward's song MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN, which was all about the Brooklyn Dodgers. I, then, wrote countless parodies of my own...using the same rhyme scheme. If I read something from a play that I loved (e,g. "To be or not to be....!") I would speak it out loud over and over again. What about you?

I too would never move back to my hometown...but sometimes feel that I never left it.”

——

Tournier is re-educating me. First he convinces me I am a Hunter, something I’d never thought of. Now with the cover of another book that just arrived, holy card image of St Teresa the Holy Flower, he shows me I will realize that I’m a Fetishist. Another term I had never considered.

Having given up on learning to read Proust in French and Modiano in French (although I got closer there), I’m now thinking of starting to read Tournier in French.

“Like a sponge or pumice, I soak up the foreign environment and emerge from it utterly transformed. For me, every important trip initiates profound changes. Alain Bosquet sensed this when he wrote that in my case autobiology takes precedence over autobiography. I am a haruspex who reads past, present, and future by opening my belly and examining my own entrails.” 230

Looking backward through Tournier’s lens, structuralism seems to have been a uniquely French sort of inebriating brew, binary oppositions, paradoxes, contradictions femented into a heady blend, now a convenient marker of the period before deconstruction arrived to blow off all the foam and drain the flute to welcome in the new century. moi

“The present lingers on eternally in a divine improvidence and amnesia.” Tournier happy to be in his garden.

He feels himself a king when in a crowd of people he sees a beautiful face, “and my gaze rests on it as it would on a bird on a branch in bloom.”

“We must proceed toward an atomization of the absolute. . . . In order to rediscover the absolute we have only to cut those ties and regard each face and each tree without reference to any other thing, as though it were the only thing that existed in the world, as though it were ‘useless yet indispensable,’ as Cocteau once said of poetry.”

“Puritanism conspires with its wayward daughters Prostitution and Pornography to perfect our isolation.” Something about this is too neat, a slogan in place of an argument. A quip without nuance.

Antunes: Handwriting is a little like embroidering each letter...writing is a continuous work of rewriting, an attempt to take away anything unnecessary, to distill. The objective is to obtain maximum efficacy. a very familiar quote, next, Tournier said the same thing just the other day Antunes: A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written. again this could be Tournier or Aciman or all of them. Antunes: I have always written. Writing is what I know. After the first two books, which were outlined, I now simply start writing without worrying about where it will lead. Rail: How early did you start feeling like a writer? Antunes: I was just a kid. I do not know why the human animal has such a need to narrate. In my case I could not imagine my life without writing. “I think we all have the age we were born with. Some of us are born young, others are born middle aged, still others are old from the start. “ Time to stop reading writers. They are all alike, have much less to say or show us than we think. An addiction like everything else we invent to fill imagined lacunae. “Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.” Kierkegaard Had forgotten already how Tournier ended his Fetishist tale—-nurses leading him off for shock treatment, black panties in his hand as a pirate’s black flag. Not that hard to do some amateur freudian sleuthing there, is it Michel? On 315 of Twins for the second time, nice that Jean is traveling or is it Paul, and Venice is interesting for all tourists, but now the book slogs and I remember why I want to read five or six books at once. Time to start one or both of these new arrivals by Antunes. “Having broken with twinship, Jean is looking for a father.” Don Sheehan, twin, embracing after long journey, Russian Orthodoxy? “geminate vision which enables us to see things simultaneously from within and from without.” “There’s nothing like heartburn to dissolve fear or, if you prefer, to transform one’s egotism into a state of impetuous agitation, . . .” Antunes

Charles K Bellinger “Burke’s overall project is to articulate the complexity of human motivational derailments as a failure to synthesize grammar, symbolism, and rhetoric in an ethical way. Girard’s overall project is to show how human beings fail to find true selfhood when they are swept up in the social dynamics of mimetic desire and scapegoating. “ “Neither Burke nor Girard include in their published writings a lengthy commentary on the abortion debate. It is possible that a person could study their writings thoroughly and then affirm either a pro-choice or a pro-life stance.” transformngviolence.nd.edu

“The first point of criticism directed at Girard is that he is too ambitious. His initial plausible interpretations of mimetic psychology and anthropology are eventually transformed into a grandiose theoretical system that attempts to explain every aspect of human nature.

Consequently, in such a manner, his methods have been questioned. His theories regarding mimetic desire are derived, not from a careful study of subjects and the implementation of tests, but rather, from the reading of works of fiction. The fact that his theory seems to coincide with what many neuroscientists are informing us about mirror neurons is immaterial: his was just a lucky guess.

The same critique may be extended to his work on the origins of culture. Again, his scapegoating thesis may be plausible, in as much as it is easy to find many examples of scapegoating processes in human culture. But, to claim that all human culture ultimately relies on scapegoating, and that the fundamental cultural institutions (myths, rituals, hunting, domestication of animals, and so forth), are ultimately derived from an original murder, is perhaps too much. “ iep.utm.edu/girard/3SH6a

“But, in such a case, the empirically-minded philosopher may argue that Girard’s work is not falsifiable in Popper’s sense. There seems to be no possibility of a counter-example that will refute Girard’s thesis. If a violent myth or ritual is considered, Girard will argue that this piece of evidence confirms his hypotheses. If, on the other hand, a non-violent myth or ritual is considered, Girard will once again argue that this piece of evidence confirms his evidence, because it proves that cultures erase tracks of violence in myths and rituals. Thus, Girard is open to the same Popperian objection leveled against Freud: both sexual and non-sexual dreams confirm psychoanalytic theory; therefore, there is no possible way to refute it, and in such a manner, it becomes a meaningless theory.” Internet ency of philos Univ of Tennessee at Martin ! no entry on K Burke

——

it arrived

Massive. Does remind me at once of when I first saw Ellman's Joyce in a bookstore in Hyde Park. What works these are.

Nice blurb! how many drafts did you do before settling on this one?

Thank you again.

Ha. Actually it was immediate.Usually it can take me half a day. If it weren’t for you I would never have read him. So thank you thank you thank you.

André

——-

Our shared pleasure!

———

just to be complete --

When is your next novel/novella due out ?

Proust, Joyce, Musil, Pessoa [Valle-Inclán]

I think I mentioned Valle-Inclán but I don't know if it registered in our excitement about Pessoa. I think V-I will never get into English---impossible to read, impossible to translate. A few attempts have been made but once you start into them you see quickly . . . . My wife's scholarship was key forty years ago . . . . UChicago diss ’78 link to her book

———

Thanks for the email. I will get Valle-Inclan. Your advice always priceless here!

I have a novella out on Audible since September; the next one out is due end of this month, also on Audible. No books foreseen so far.

All best,

Andre

———-

skimmed over the final pages of Gemini in frustration and ended up googling—how does the novel end? Lucky to find this review by Hollinghurst. An absolutely perfect review—-names precisely all of my responses to Tournier, now, after I now admit I over-invested in him. Lots of books to throw out now. And this review proves how good Hollinghurst is in his own right. It is in the LRB November 1981 under the title Jean Paul —-

Michel Tournier’s Gemini was published in France six years ago under the title of Les Météores, but it arrives in this country, in Anne Carter’s convincing and sometimes virtuosic translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An exceptional, incomparable novel’. Le Roi des Aulnes is the only novel to have won the Prix Goncourt by unanimous decision, but Les Météores has enjoyed less acclaim, and it is not hard to see why: it is the work of a mind expanding under the apparent beneficence of praise, performing with both an obligation to grandeur and a licence to self-indulgence. The grandeur is frequently impressive, the project kept up with remarkable stamina: but the self-indulgence, as well as weakening the structure, also undermines the confidence of the reader. Tournier is not a man to make a point once if he can make it a dozen times, or to use one word if he can use a thousand. Subjected to this immense performance of reiterative loquacity the reader increasingly responds with both ‘I know ...’ and ‘What, really, does it mean?’

The novel’s meaning emerges from its study of twinship. Jean and Paul Surin are twins so identical that even their father cannot tell them apart: their physical similarity is coupled with an emotional and psychological identification, not of sympathetic reactions but of a shared geminate intuition – a phrase always printed, like Johnson’s Choice of Life, in italics. In childhood and adolescence, Jean-Paul (as they are corporately known) do everything together, and communicate in an Aeolian language in which silence is more important than words. They sleep with their heads tucked between each other’s thighs, reconstituting themselves in a single and unviolated ovoid formation, a unity after which all other kinds of intimacy must seem a ‘disgusting promiscuity’. Our understanding of this comes from those sections written by Paul, and it is he who suffers when Jean falls in love with Sophie, the beginning of a separation which, for the rest of the novel, leads Paul in a world-wide search for his other half.

Tournier’s technique is to refract this geminate experience through the lives of others who are striving for its perfect reciprocity without the advantage of twinship. Jean and Paul are outsiders in the quality of their sensitivity and they celebrate themselves in a number of fantastic theories – for instance, about their congenital innocence, all single children having murdered their notional twin in a prenatal enactment of Cain’s fratricide. The novel’s form, in which several different persons expound their theories, creates the semblance of a free expression of autonomous personalities, though we rapidly come to see that the novelistic circumstance is a mere pretext for an orchestration of ideas in which all the speakers (the twins, their Uncle Alexandre – ‘the prince of refuse’ – Sophie and other characters) sound exactly the same. The novel is about identity without being about, or even much bothering with, the fictional machinery of character. Certainly, the people represent different intellectual positions, but subjected to the figurative counterpoint of the structure, none of them has access to our sympathies. The more the separation of Jean-Paul becomes the excuse for an abstract or pseudo-philosophical argument, the less the dogmatic geminate intuition and the alienating light of a non-twin’s reaction can register at a human level. Unlike Johnson’s italics, Tournier’s are not finally ironic, although there are properties which link Gemini with the tradition of Rasselas, Shandeian encyclopedic fantasies such as Jean’s ‘concrete calendar’ of twinned months, as well as digressions and mythological sanctifications of experience more in the manner of Proust. Whatever its fantasy, and however amusing (or unamusing) its laborious jokes, its aim is a serious and psychological one. But there is something unsettling and unconvincing in its mode of asseveration, for where Proust reveals his verities through a playing of the imagination on society, Tournier strives for his in a hypnotic reiteration of premises and positions unsupported by naturalism or even common sense: hence the wearisome feeling of familiarity with the ideas, and a lack of transmitted conviction in their meaning. The most rationally convincing parts are those closest to social history, the descriptions of the twins’ father and his search for heroism in the Resistance; this realism is identified with the morality and normality of the world which the principal narrators leave behind them – the twins in their odyssey and Alexandre in his life among the great rubbish-tips of France and Morocco and his pursuit of boys. In the twins self-interest has an inevitable ambiguity, but Alexandre is a tyrannical egotist who, for Tournier, poses the problem of the interesting presentation of an irremediable bore. His twinship theories about same-sex love are as unimpressive as his eulogies of rubbish and Genet-like rejection of the ‘heterosexual desert’ are monotonous; his philosophy and sociology of homosexuality dissipate their wayward and essentially epigrammatic cleverness in Tournier’s besetting overkill.

The novel works by massive rhymes and juxtapositions, and the later wanderings bring into play the metaphorical attributes of a multitude of places, sometimes, as in the evocation of Venice, no more than the sum of their clichés. It is here that character is least relevant and that the opportunism of a kind of symbolic picaresque dominates: its climax comes as Paul tunnels under the Berlin Wall to join Jean, and is badly injured. The new Berlin becomes a symbol of the new existence of Paul, his legs amputated, his own person split in two. His earlier physical ubiquity is replaced by free-ranging imagination and minute perception: in his immobility he contemplates life as if it were a miniature Zen garden in which only the eyes may walk. Like Cain and Romulus founding cities after their fratricides, Paul’s eventual achievement of singleness is accompanied by the sublimation of his physical self into a new state of identification with the natural world, with the meteors – manifestations of a sublime logic independent of humanity. Whether all this means anything, or is simply an overblown caprice, may depend on the susceptibilities of the reader.

——such a joy to find an accurate review!!! in contrast this from the unnamed author of a website hosting his private reviews “The Modern Novel” “This is definitely my favourite of Tournier’s novels, not only because it is brilliantly written but also because of the originality of how he treats its theme. The story starts with the twins Jean and Paul Surin, . . . “ Well, he’s just mistaken and wrong. No need to consult his reviews further on any other novels.

Crisis: do I want to find out if Hollinghurst has reviewed Musil before I set out? Could assume that Joel Agee’s translation of Musil is all the encouragement I need to find out for myself. After all I wasted enough time reading Gemini twice! just because I though the motif important enough. Deluded once again.

google reminded me of the Gardner intelligence types this morning—-

moi 7. Intrapersonal intelligence

Sensitivity to one's own feelings, goals and anxieties, and the capacity to plan and act in light of one's own traits. Intrapersonal intelligence is not particular to specific careers; rather, it is a goal for every individual in a complex modern society, where one has to make consequential decisions for oneself.

Potential career choices:

Therapist
Counselor
Psychologist
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
Theorist

looks indeed like I’m in the wrong track. I was misplaced into 4. Linguistic intelligence

Sometimes called "language intelligence," this involves sensitivity to the meaning of words, the order among words, and the sound, rhythms, inflections and meter of words. Those who score high in this category are typically good at writing stories, memorizing information and reading.

Potential career choices:

Poet
Novelist
Journalist
Editor
Lawyer
English professor

reading check but not memorizing and not story telling

oh well, after fifty years what can one do?

“Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me.” Pessoa 41

Fits perfectly Barbara’s mothers last five years of her life. Fits Patrick White’s final novel. Could even point to Woolf’s Waves. A century on is Pessoa not teaching us how to be, how to achieve peaceful coexistence within the small humanity, a fluid kaleidoscope.

And each one of my phases—-give each one a name of a character and we have the kaleidoscopic drama which could be poetry, theater and novels and stories, a whole life’s work, even an “oeuvre”!!! Frederick the painter, Albert the overeater, Chad the runner, Margaret the religious zealot, etc etc

Dazzled by Musil’s Young Törvald—-and it took a day for me to realize of course both he and Basini are moi! the whole tale evokes Anselm Hall.

Now this is Mark Haber on Lit Hub—-“In fact, I’d made that declaration to myself in the 11th grade and with all the perverse audacity of the young, felt I was “destined” to be a writer, which sounds pretentious now, but looking back, necessary. If you don’t feel destined to do something (something seen by many as absurd and irrational) how will you survive the long years of struggle and indifference? The years of searching for something ineffable: your voice, your vision, whatever you want to call it? Much to my parent’s chagrin this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life; whenever I read books, fiction in particular, I felt a sense of elation, an elusive voice urging me to tell stories.”

This did not happen to me. Never once did I say I wanted to tell stories. I did write one for Gerry probably in sophomore year but doing so scared me. The character goes to the door and a policeman informs him that his parents have been killed in a car wreck. He read it aloud to the class and everyone liked it. Written in spare language. It didn’t feel like anything I wanted to do again. Too much psychodrama and not enough distanced observer fiction? The real story was in wanting to please the teacher and I was never sure the story had done that. Did it make us both, everyone, uneasy?

Musil: “A thought—-it may have passed through our brain a long time previously—only comes alive when it is joined by something that is no longer thinking, no longer logical, so that we feel its truth, beyond all justification, like an anchor that is dropped from it into our living flesh throbbing with blood . . . A great insight is only half achieved in the light of the brain, the other half is completed in the dark ground of our innermost being, and it is above all a mental state at the extreme edge of which the thought sits, just like a flower.” Törless 161

Countless passages in this novel and I marked and would extract and say yes yes yes. He writes unlike any other writer.

Just when I thought I was through with twins the Introduction by Joel Agee to the “distilled” novel The Forgotten Sister says there is a twin motif at work there as well.

“Musil explores what it is to lead an authentic life, even if that means contravening social norms. This exploration has an explicitly mystical character.” —-Joel Agee on The Forgotten Sister

Musil’s gift for aphorism is as evident here as anywhere in his writings, and caustic observations about his contemporaries co-exist alongside brilliant insights into the writings of his most important literary predecessors. A sentence like, “ ‘He is the greatest creative writer alive today!’ They ought to say: ‘The greatest I can understand!’ ”, is as finely honed as anything in “The Man Without Qualities,” as is the more wistful, yearning tone of insights like, “Who among us does not spend the greater part of his life in the shadow of an event that has not yet taken place?”. At one point, he crystallizes the uncanny mixture of irony and longing that is the hallmark of both his prose and temperament: “Irony has to contain an element of suffering in it. (Otherwise it is the attitude of a know-it-all.) Enmity and sympathy.” Irony and suffering are the direct emotional and stylistic correlates of Musil’s demand for precision and soul, and if “The Man Without Qualities” shows how potent that amalgam is on the page, the “Diaries” trace the personal struggle required to sustain it. Musil placed extraordinary, indeed impossible demands on himself as a writer and thinker, but he understood better than almost anyone else how much still remained to be done before we can achieve a way to talk about what matters most to us without relying on outworn premises and discredited conventions. For Musil, everything, including the shape and rhythm of our own sentences, should have the freshness of a new discovery. His definition of good writing in the “Diaries” has a generosity of responsiveness to the specific moment that is almost profligate in its refusal to keep anything back: “Something is well-written if, after some time, it strikes one as alien--one would be incapable of writing it that way a second time. Such an idea (expression) did not come from the fund that is available for daily expenditure.” To read Musil is to encounter both the risks and the sheer excitement of that kind of writing.”

“Rationalism . . .dreary as a languid gogeousness, like that of Faerie Queene, which not even Edmund Spenser ever dared to read through in all the entirety there is of it. Pessoa

Eduardo Lança is the first name Pessoa invents to whom he gives a biography. Lança’s parents die before he can take a degree showing that Pessoa/Lança wanted to be free of his parents in order to live a life of his own. So my adolescent story about the death of the character’s parents was not as scary as I’d feared, simply a normal fantasy for someone that age of becoming independent and free overnight.

The full Sturm und Drang of buying a house blew through here yesterday. Now we wait and see if we are chosen and then what will happen. Have to get used to pronouncing Lechuzas if so.

Daddy D died Jan 6, 1994—-age 82, his 83rd would have been Feb 10. Owl House on Lechusas was built in 1994.

I’ve never been so focused and competitive. Began with deciding to have Kim stream only houses around Ladera after the burglar’s house showed up and we saw how much we liked it.

“I would like to thank Sigrid Rausing at Granta, . . . Michaelyn Mitchell at the Frick Collection, Robert Garlitz for introducing me to the work of Fernando Pessoa, Youssef Nabil. . . .” @aaciman #homoirrealis

If I post this once a week on twitter will it be in really bad taste? Once a month?

sent this to Dave and Donald. Dave laughed and said, maybe every two weeks would be ok. Donald said Yes—-it would be in bad taste. Ha.

Must be craving a daily update from the house buying arena.

And the what ifs are on replay. If there are covenants and codes that prohibit us from renting short-term through vmgrentals? I would not care. We are buying the house and we will go there and live there 6 and 6 and beyond that for the rest. I want to die in Albuquerque. mis-typed “buy” but there you have it the assonance says it all.

What if the deal somehow falls apart from an angle we didn’t expect? well, back to looking for another place and now we know how to bid and win! Never have I been in such a competitive mood, so focused and sure. Will I regret that? Prone in the past by buyers’ remorse. Why not now, with the biggest single purchase in our lives ever? Don’t care. If it happens, it will pass.

Are these covid “lessons” or thoughts? might be but I won’t say so. I think they’re wise thoughts.

——

terrible note from Phil —

Last night Peg had a kind of George Floyd moment. I'm not sure what time it started but at some point Peg felt she couldn't breathe and was extremely hot and sweaty. She summoned a nurse who told her that there was no problem, that Peg was sweating a normal amount and that she should just try to sleep. That proved impossible so Peg summoned the nurse again with the same complaint. Same response from the nurse. When it happened a third time, the nurse supervisor was finally summoned, and she determined that Peg's canula was not attached to the oxygen source. Peg had been getting no oxygen at all.

This is terrible, but I think I think a similar episode happened the first night Peg was on the Covid ward. Peg, however, can get confused and can't remember if that's true, but she thinks it highly possible.

In my opionion what happened last night was awful. ( I hate the expression "It is unacceptable." I think it's stupid.) Today, I told Peg that I wanted to contact the head of nursing about what happened. She told me not to. She apparently is afraid she will be labelled "a difficult patient." I thought her approach was wrong-headed, but went along with it. But then she added that this morning, when her doctor asked her how her night was, Peg told her about incident. Okay, at least someone in supposed authority knows about the incident. Who knows if the doctor will do anything about it. I hope so. But this incident just adds to Peg's depression about the care she is getting from the nurses. She is really down about it all and won't cheer up at all.

When I asked Peg if she is still scheduled for a heart exam on Monday, she said no, all that was done this past week. The only thing she knows about for Monday is the insertion of the picc tube. So, I asked if there was any intention of releasing her on Monday. She didn't know. At that point she summoned the nurse to help her get to the bathroom, but the nurse didn't show, so Peg went to the bathroom on her own. She commented that the nurses take forever to respond.

I had wanted to ask the nurse about possible testing of organs offered for transplant. Are they tested for CMV Virus before transplanting them? How about later blood transfusions into people with transplanted organs? Is the blood tested for CMV Virus? I would assume so, but I don't know so. Well, the nurse didn't show and there was no one else around this weekend, so eventually I left with no answers. So that's why I'm including LAURA in this email. Laura, this may not be yr area of expertise, but I can't find the answers to my questions online. Do you have any idea if organs and blood transfusions are tested for CMV Virus?

The Mayo Clinic website says that the virus is most dangerous for babies and people with suppressed immune systems ie, those with a transplanted organ. It is also stated that the virus cannot be transferred between humans with just casual contact. It must be via liquids: sweat, saliva, urine, or semen. Well, ever since Peg was diagnosed with IPF four so so years ago, the only physical contact I have had with her is holding her hand when she is trying to walk outside or an occasional hug when she is feeling down. The Mayo clinic also notes that people who catch mono often end up with CMV Virus, and Peg had mono in her late teens or early twenties so maybe that's the culprit. The virus will stay in a person for the rest of his or her life. Anyway, let's hope Peg's long ago mono is the source of the virus, and it didn't come from me over the past many years or from a new lung or a recent blood transfusion.

Finally, I told Peg that I won't visit her tomorrow (I don't seem able to do her any good during my visits) but I will be there Monday afternoon in case the hospital decides to release her then.

Phil

PS. Thanks for your suggestion of Cancell, Eilert, but Peg takes about 30 medicines and the interactions among them are not completely understood although it is believed that some interaction of her meds is causing her diarrhea and her constant and severe tremors. So adding Cancell into the mix probably isn't a good thing to do.

——-

summer weather today, high 60s but it feels like 80s it has been so long . . . . .

12 April

call from Eloy around noon. He and Denisa doing a look over of the house today and meeting Kim. He just reviewed that he has nothing to do with the purchase process. Told him we could take none of the furniture so he has blank slate to work with and he liked hearing that. Also he'll help get the necessary city permits for short term renting. The city is still working all of that out. Everything seems fine and go. -- we were at Refresh sense of dread activated but as soon as we started talking it all felt ok. The inspection is going on now.

Now we have three. Found my copy of Jakob Von Gunten easily this morning. A sign. So now we have Pessoa, Musil and Walser. A perfect trinity for these times.

16 April Seem to have finished Adventures and Stories. Will order copies as soon as available.

great quote from Garcia Marquez on twitter (for his birthday) People have three lives, the public, the private and the secret. Gabriel García Marquez — 'Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life.’

guess I had better keep a paper trail on the whole Albuquerque house project—you never know

20 April today—-Nicholas’s birthday

message from Eloy

Hi Bob,

Quick update on things…

We are busy already setting up early appointments with contractors to provide you with estimates for bathroom improvements and replacement of heating and air units. My goal is to engage with contractors as quickly as possible after the closing. It is difficult, if not impossible to get a commitment and on their calendars without first seeing the property to determine the scope of work. I can’t even get a rough estimate before they actually look at the place!

We are also busy looking for someone interested in the carport. The challenge is getting someone that will also disassemble it but I’m sure we’ll find someone. If we can get information about the hot tub such as make and model and maybe even some specs then I can start to work on pricing so we’re ready to put it on the market immediately after closing.

We are working on putting something together to give you an idea of the design and colors we have in mind for you. We are also folding in all the information you have provided us about your likes and dislikes as well as comments of things you liked about the Bearhouse. One thing I forgot to check in with you about last week was if you were okay with the budget we proposed for the decorating and furnishing. We think it’s a good start based on other projects we’ve done.

That’s it for now!

Eloy

———-

Hi Eloy

Very glad for the update. There seems to be a chance for an earlier closing. It was mentioned. For now, however, I will not ask yet about that. Formally we are at the point of wiring Earnest money tomorrow morning. Seller is doing the slight repairs.

Yes the figure you mentioned, $30k is fine with us.

We're anxious to see your ideas. I mailed you the signed and notarized agreement a few days ago, to Manager at VMG. Let me know when you receive it. Do you also sign it and send it back to me?

I'll ask Kim if we can ask about brand, make and model on the hot tub.

Keep us posted.

Bob

———-

Zenith: “It is not that Pessoa felt less than other people; he felt more. But whatever he felt became an instant object of reflection and analysis, as well as potential subject matter for his writing.” 275 Pessoa “ the chasm existing between him and love begins as a chasm existing between him and his own self.” 274

photos Va is going through from years past. photos of the painting studio, of paintings in progress, painted over, searches, that faith in process preached by the book on writing the daily journal, etc. Century after Pessoa everyone told how to be an artist, be a writer, be creative, be being-ly.

From the former prez, through Covid, to today’s guilty finding in Minnesota.

Earnest money sent, wired, this morning. 21 April

Pessoa now 20-21, has burned through his whole inheritance in less than a year setting up Ibis publishing house.

VIII

How many masks wear we, and undermasks,

Upon our countenance of soul, and when,

If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,

Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?

The true mask feels no inside to the mask

But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.

Whatever consciousness begins the task

The task’s accepted use to sleepness ties.

Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,

Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,

Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces

And get a whole world on their forgot causing;

And, when a thought would unmask our soul’s masking,

Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.

perfect for Burke—-Dramatism is all. But I can’t recall that Burke suggested or thought that the I itself, the individual is a stage, “where he or she is forever pretending, especially to his or her own self.” —-Zenith 287 and yet as soon as we see Pessoa saying it we wonder why the heck not? why did Burke not bring it down into himself? Or did he and I forget?

in 1910 he is 22 years old—-

I am a stage upon which they pretend to themselves and to me that they are me and that I am them, pretending, in the unending drama, that our stage itself is no pretense as well.

“a spiritual quester who tirelessly traveled from truth to truth, a man who felt intensely yet with paradoxical detachment . . . .” Zenith 295

Edward scored two magnificent financial achievements today. He wired the Escape money, no, the Earnest money, to the Old Republic Title company. And he phoned the Meredith Bay Colony Club and discovered the correct way to ask for a refund of the $1000.00 paid a few years ago to get our names on the waiting list. Bravo Edward!!! Late afternoon onward stormy cold and dreary. Winds rain.

Day off full of snow squalls. Ditched going west, south instead. Read lots of pages of Zenith, up to 376. Enjoying it immensely. Zenith writes it all so well. Command of his subject and then some.

And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand. Samuel Beckett my current enthusiasm for Pessoa

Dear Phil & Bob,

Thanks, Phil, for the review. Menand is very sharp, I think, and the review is provocative.

Nostalgia is often hazardous--see "Make America Great Again"--and often self-indulgent, as I can testify from melancholy experience. But Ithink it has its legitimate attractions, too. In environmental circles, the coinage "solastalgia" has taken hold, meaning roughly a sense of ongoing and anticipated loss of one's familiar world, the experience of "homesickness without leaving home."

In Wallace Shawn's indefinitely futuristic 3-person play, The Designated Mourner (1996), the main character soliloquizes about cultural change:

" I went out--it was a black afternoon--and I wandered through the streets, oppressed, somehow, by a terrible sadness. I had an awful feeling of something left undone. Everywhere I went, the leaves had turned--traitors! I mean, had they no shame? Oh well, that had been going on, you know, for quite some time. One noted the usual golds and oranges and browns amidst the green. I went into the park, sat on a bench--I seemed to have developed some variety of what I believe is sometimes called "hysterical" coughing--and then it suddenly hit me that everyone on earth who could read John Donne was now dead. They were all dead. And as I turned this odd fragment of information around in my brain, I realized that I was the only one left who would even be aware of the passing of this peculiar group, this group which was so special, at least in their own eyes, and my mind went back to the book I'd read when I was very young about a boy who belonged to an ancient tribe in a distant land. And in the [99] course of describing all the customs of the tribe, the book explained that, within the tribe, there were many sub-groups or clans, and that whenever the last surviving member of one of these clans would die, there would naturally be no one from their family around to mourn for them, so then someone who in one way or another had known that last survivor--and if no one was left who had known them well, then it should simply be someone who had known them a little--would be appointed to mourn, publicly, in a sacred spot, the passing of that whole extinguished clan--the designated mourner."

It's a pretty remarkable moment, which you can see at around the 55-minute mark in this reading of the second half of the play (which is helpfully contextualized at around the 10-minute mark):

youtube Lannan Foundation

In place of John Donne I could insert the names of many other authors dear to me, or the more difficult parts of some of those, like Swift, who remain partly accessible.

--John

———

Eloy nixed Owl House as the name. Connotations for Mexicans and Natives might impair rentals! Now we look for a new name. He and Danesa look. I’ll take what they come up with. Privately and later on we can call it what we want to call it.

He didn’t respond to Rose House, Casa Rosa, Glyph House or any others we tried.

vertiginism: “The impossibility of explaining it explains it. It cannot be defined—and that is its definition.” Pessoa in 1915 on Raul Leal

called Plymouth Furniture yesterday, dryer now in place today 12:21 pm April 27 Feels like a miracle, like magic. Everything feels in sync these days. Last night’s full moon or the night before. High. Surfing the moonwaves.

Moon House? Circle House? Casa Luna I think there is already one in Abq.

30 April

to Phil

Most definitely glad I don't have your daily stress routine. I would be in panic mode full time. And your info might help me see more clearly the flaws in our/my big gamble.I'm not a gambler either. You/Peg gambled on this lung transplant.

Our house purchase might be my biggest gamble. I think in a small city I'll be able to better keep/take care of Va than here, full year, as she/we slowly decline. Here everythingis 45-65 minutes away, as soon as you need something that's not a block away. In Abq "everything" is 20-30 minutes away and I'm more attuned to dry climate and the socialculture of hispanics and anglos mixed than I am with the boston-irish culture of this region. I plan to die in Abq. Just got a $1000. refund from the local nursing resort for takingour names off of their waiting list. What sort of assistance will we need? No way to know any of it. Can we afford to maintain the two houses? NH for summer with the Parisiansfor a few more years, NM for most of the year? Parisians are planning to come over this summer. Glad about that. Great line from Dylan. What will happen? I used to care.Delusions in every direction.

That in mind I like Biden's tone so far. He might prove to be better in substantial ways than Obama, who after all pulled off a winning celebrity presidency. Hilary wrecked theDem party, or Obama and Hilary did. Tormp torpedoed the hollow Repub balsa boat. Biden's the old salt who knows survival from inside.

——

Ks now have Va on their newsletter feed —-

Escape to the Land of Enchantment

#5 Circling Back to Amarillo

Tonight are staying in an Air B&B, in Amarillo, TX. The B&B is a 1940’s duplex on Route 66. We have been enjoying the little fenced in patio. It has worked out well for our final days Escaping to the Land of Enchantment. We have been able to prepare Rinky Dink for storage without trying to do it at a campsite or from a hotel room.

This morning we put the camper back in the same storage unit where he has been for the last two years. Backing him into the unit is tricky as there is about 5” of clearance on either side of the door frame and the location of the unit is not a matter of a straight shot, but at an angle. David did the honors on the first try.

We spent the afternoon at Palo Duro Canyon which is just south of Amarillo. We did a nice hike along the stream that runs through the canyon and along the base of cliffs of red rocks. We didn’t see much in the way of birds – a flock of Cedar Waxwings, a Golden-fronted Woodpecker and a small flycatcher. As we exited the park, we stopped to visit the resident longhorn steer.

When we left our readers at episode 4, it was a snowy Sunday in Mountainair. The next day was one of those days when things just didn’t work out. We had decided to go to Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque, to visit the Coronado Historic Site and the Kuava Pueblo. The Tiwa people of this pueblo helped the members of Coronado’s expedition survive in the valley when they arrived in 1540. The pueblo is known for the murals that were painted on the wall of the kiva and are purported to be some of the best examples of pre-Columbian art. We drove over the mountains and down into the Rio Grande Valley. The excursion was Widge’s idea as she had researched the site. She was careful to be sure that it was open since with COVID you can never be sure. However, when we arrived, we learned that although it was open, it was only open from Thursday to Sunday. The only saving grace was that either a Cooper or a Sharp-shinned Hawk flew into the tree near where we were parked.

Adding to the frustration of the day was our attempt to find the outdoor restaurant that we enjoyed when we stayed in ABQ with the McDermands several years ago. We even called them in California to see if they remembered the name of the place. We never found it and settled for a container of yogurt and crackers by the side of the road.

On the East Coast, George Washington is the historical figure that many places tout as having a relationship with their town - the often used “George Washington slept here.” In New Mexico it is Coronado and Billy the Kid. You see signs: Billy the Kid visited here, Billy the Kid had family here, Billy the Kid was born here and several times, Billy the Kid is buried here. With Coronado, it is Coronado’s expedition came here. There is even a Coronado Trail where you can retrace his path.

Tuesday we returned to Caballo SP. It was nice being at a lower elevation where it was warmer. We were back in shorts and T shirts. And the best news: the showers were open! Finally the NM powers-that-be decided that it was safe to shower. The Rio Grande continued to be nearly dry, but we noticed EBID (Elephant Butte Irrigation District) trucks near the dams at Caballo and just south at Percha. The agricultural fields and the pistachio orchards were all tilled and ready for irrigation, so we guessed that soon they were going to open the dams and let some water flow into the river.

While at Caballo, we enjoyed watching a killdeer family on the sandy banks of the river. Mr. and Mrs. had four chicks that they were trying to keep safe from predators. They were perfectly camouflaged making them hard to see. A small herd of white-tailed deer visited the campground as the nearly full moon was rising. One evening on the way to restroom, Widge had a close, but thankfully not too close, encounter with a skunk.

One of our days at Caballo, we visited the Gila Mountains and the Cliff Dwellings. We had been there several years ago and remembered the beautiful drive over Emory Pass (elevation over 8,000 feet) and along the Mimbres and Gila River to the dwellings. They are called cliff dwellings, but in actuality they are cave dwellings. They are much bigger and deeper than many of the other shelters we have visited. The Mogollon people built walls to close the entrances to the caves requiring access by ladders. On the hike into the dwellings, we spotted the most exciting bird of our adventures – a Painted Redstart!

We came yesterday from another few days at Bottomless Lakes SP near Roswell. The temperature was in the 90s with a wind that felt like a blast furnace. The good news was that the temperature dropped once the sun went down. We had gorgeous sunsets in one direction and equally pretty moon risings in the opposite direction. Because of the weather and the weekend, the day use at the park was high with local folks coming to enjoy the lake. We took advantage of a bike trail in Roswell and rode through the neighborhoods to MacDonalds for iced drinks. Everything in Roswell is about aliens. There are green men on every corner. They even have painted alien eyes on the globes of their street lights.

Another interesting thing about Roswell was the number of airplanes overhead. Roswell is not big enough for a big, busy airport so it was curious. Several times flying low over the state park were huge planes with 777X painted on the side. They circled around as if they weren’t on a flight plan to another destination. We learned that Roswell had a big SAC Air Station that is now de-commissioned and used by several big airlines to test new commercial planes, as well as, train pilots. The facility is also used to store planes not in use. Consequently, it has been busy as planes were parked there during the pandemic.

On the trip between Caballo and Bottomless Lakes a family of mountain goats – two adults with two kids - crossed the highway in front of us. Once we stopped to watch and take pictures, we saw the whole herd of goats in a nearby open space. Likewise, yesterday on the trip between Roswell and Amarillo we saw a herd of pronghorns. When we stopped, they all looked up and watched us watching them. As we started to drive off, it spooked them and the whole herd ran parallel to us keeping up with our speed.

We are packed and ready to leave tomorrow morning for NH. We should be home by the weekend.

From the Road,

———-

hoping for decor images from Eloy for CASA ALEGRE

Michael McGregor

Apr 29, 2021, 8:12 PM (14 hours ago)

to me

Hi Bob,

I hope you're well. I was looking at my website the other day and found a message from you I somehow never answered--about a posting I made on my time on Patmos and the novel I wrote there. I'm so sorry! Thank you for your nice words about the piece. I hope you didn't do too much looking for the novel--it was never published.

Those Pendo books are gems. I might be willing to buy a few from you. I think I have most of them but maybe not all. I could also run something in my Lax Newsletter about them. When you decide whether you truly want to let go of them and what you might want to sell them for if you do, maybe let me know and we can figure something out. I think there's still quite a bit of interest in Lax's smaller books, those that are out of print, like the Pendo books. And the opera will probably generate new interest too.

Where are you moving from and to?

I'm looking forward to the opera too! I'm working on a short bio of Lax that will be published by the Malmo Opera people to coincide with the show. It should be a great performance.

Blessings,

Michael

Hi Michael

Somehow you did send that answer way back about your novel.

Less than three minutes after I sent my query I looked at the bookshelves again and thought, no way can I sell those, or even worry about getting them into the "right hands" after we're gone. Have to let go of those worries (what about the whole hoard of all of this stuff and the 2-3000? other books?). Our son and grandchildren (7&10) live in Paris, come over in the summers.

We've lived here in central NH (Plymouth) for over forty years. We just bought a house in Albuquerque, where Virginia was born and raised. We were there last year for the covid spring, 5 months. Plan now is to do 6 months back and forth for a few more years, see how that works. And then see. Etc "As we grow less young . . . "

Thanks to André Aciman I have a pre-pub copy of Richard Zenith's new biography of Fernando Pessoa. Am on page 515 of 937 pages. Magnificent work. If you take a look at it you will have a special appreciation from the inside of what both of you achieved in writing the lives of these poets. I want to say they are as opposite as conceivable. Even your title Pure Act is as antithetical to Pessoa and his heteronymns as possible. And yet . . . . wonderful to have them side-by-side now.

Speculate for me: fifty to seventy-five years from now, how much more of the Lax archive might the world have seen by then?

See you at the Opera!! Enjoy.

Bob

——-

now on 683 in Zenith and getting antsy about getting to the end. Tempted to skim and skip. Have to slow it down. Monday “get things done and check off the list” psychosis. Took the urine sample to the hospital in the morning, why hasn’t that worked?

now on 770 5 May day off starting as day in, rainy, but now off for day In Town!!!!! ??? can it be done????? will Groton be permitted?

Actually stayed within 03264 all day! Rain and clouds as low as possible. On the ground. Walked. and Ta Da finished Zenith’s book. Confession—-skimmed the last one hundred pages, skimmed with great sensitivity and intelligence and I know even Zenith & Pessoa himself would

approve!!!!!

What a magnificent book. An astounding achievement. One of the great biographies of our

era, perhaps of the last two hundred years??? or more ??? !! So sensitive and loving,

nuanced and finessed.

Now that I’ve finished with Zenith, next day, I feel lost without him. Sunny day and windy. Eloy accepts our suggestions on the bed frame and mattress. Funny how I worry about his approval when he’s working for us! We decided this morning to go with the Costco level

mattresses to get started. If in a few years we don’t like our bed there we can upgrade to something like the Saatva that we had originally started to go for, last night. Because of one

ad video on youtube from mattressnerd. Cleverly done ad and convincing about the structure of the saatva hybrid. Which gets high reviews in the Times but is three times, or twice, as expensive as the Novaform.

Just booked our Jan trip! Jan 5 and 6 overnight in ATL.

May 7 we both admitted this morning that we’re a bit afraid of the house. Of the purchase. Of staying there. Of owning it. Of moving there. Wondering how it has come to pass. On the other hand all we have to do is say we rented a place in Abq for next spring. Eloy manages it. It will look and feel like one of his rentals. We will love it. And then we’ll say, what a nice place, we should ask him if we could buy it from him. And lo and behold he can say, yes, but of course you already own it!!!! It will be easy to sell it to you.

Drove the ID.4 in Lebanon this afternoon. Va liked how it felt, ease of entering and exiting, roomy feel. I liked it super fine. I’m IN.

Exhausted pleasantly from two drives in two days!! Yesterday to drive the new VW and today to Deeper Roots to buy a lemon tree. Invitation to memorial for Gloria Marquez-Sterling Tanner to be held in June. Contribute to the scholarship fund in her name. Really hoping for that orange carpet in the new living room. Still want to gloss the Pessoa words and get further into Musil’s works.

No genius for figures here, but calculations this morning suggest all is well and plans are well. Bright super bright sunny morning. Mothers Day and we have visitors dropping in.

A tangled tale, indeed. I read "Orientialism" and for me that defined Said, and I knew nothing more about him. Obviously I missed quite a lot and, I must say, misuderstood his purpose in writing that book. I just took too simple a view of it all, but in my defense so did most readers, I think. And why is that? Because most readers, including myself, fall into the stupid intelligent class. We are intelligent but when it comes to certain matters, uninformed and ultimately, stupid.

Reading this, I was reminded of a saying of my brother: reality is like a pendulum, it goes from one extreme to the other, passing through the optimal at the greatest rate of speed. Said occupied an optimal point, which most of us passed right through heading for another extreme while the rest stayed put in one simpliesti extreme or another. However, it needs to be said that Said's position is, indeed, the optimum, but it's also unrealistic as the curent Arab-Israeli fighting shows. The two sides will likely never get along in the way Said wants them to.

—-

Doug Grant crafted a fine tale from our pop-up dinner get-together at the Bistro on Thursday evening.

It was one of those potentially boring evenings, as Professor Entwell felt he ought to go to a mandatory Faculty meeting. Something about redundant faculty members...Anyway, that did not particularly please me as I had deliberately chosen to wear my most enticing and glamorous black silk undergarments. I decided to be adventurous that evening and walked down to a very special neighborhood gathering place, “Chez Spirits.” I had heard that there was a gathering of enthusiasts tonight. Enthusiasts for what, I did not know, but I am always attracted to enthusiasm. When I arrived, the place was packed and the bouncer directed me to a small table near the stage, which was already occupied by a very large man with a pierced ear as well as a pierced nose.

My early training in manners permitted me to strike up a conversation with Bobo, my table companion. Suddenly the stage show began. A group of spirited ecdysiasts were modeling the most attractive black silk undergarments with fetching modesty. Bobo turned to me and said, “Can I share something with you?”

It turned out that Bobo was an enthusiast of motorized 3-wheelers, a type of transportation I was unfamiliar with. He also an enthusiast of black silk. Upon hearing of my lack of familiarity with this style of travel, he turned to me and said, “What really turns me on about these vehicles is the smooth way the seat rubs against my black silk undergarments. If only I could meet someone who shared my interest in black silk, I would instantly offer that person a very special ride on my vehicle.”

What to do? Was my black silk slip showing? Would it be impolite to decline?

—-

“When you are older the pneuma will guide you. . . . My pneumatic pneuma is a comfort floating through the seas and forests of dreams.” 35 Hanging Gardens

Michael Lowenthal in his interview at LA reviewbooks: connect with Nicholas’s reading of Somerset Maugham’s biography right now. “So I can play around with letting people misread me in certain situations, which can make me feel thrillingly like a spy. It allows me to see and hear certain things that I otherwise might not.” . . . “But I find it equally relieving sometimes not to identify as queer, which is an identity that should offer me a tiny bit of progressive street cred (thank goodness). I can’t get past my hope — and maybe it’s a pollyannaish or privileged hope — that we all might sometimes step outside of our lanes, or challenge the whole concept of lanes, and just join in solidarity to do the important work we all need to do as citizens and humans.

“So, to bring it back to the idea of passing, it’s not that I’m suggesting anyone should pass as something they’re not, but I think if we could all “pass” as humans — if we could occasionally identify less by our specific identity categories and more by our commonality — we might be able to heal some of the fractures in our society.”

interview on brooklyn1 “Sexuality is, in some sense, the most human activity. It’s at the core of our being, and it’s obviously literally the most necessary thing for the continuation of our species. Yet it can also be this thing that seems to completely override the other most human thing about us, which is our rational consciousness. So I’m in awe of the power of sexuality to do that. I’m terrified of it. Thrilled by it. Glad that it’s there. Personally, I can be so much of a type-A over-thinker, so I love that sexuality is one of the few things that can knock me over like a wave and delete all that upper-brain stuff. You know, it is. And this story ends up in a particularly dark place. I wanted to write about an instance of people being painfully tied together. In a lot of the other stories, I write some about painful aloneness in the book, but this was a painful togetherness that I wanted to explore.”

provincetownindependent interview: “Even so, it’s a painful fact that “intimacy can often go hand in hand with — and can even provoke — profound loneliness,” Lowenthal says. “The longer I live, the more I’m struck by the inescapable fact that no matter how much we bare our souls to one another, no matter how passionately we insert our body parts into one another, we can never, never, never know how it feels to be another person. And even if we could really know other people, maybe we’d have much less drive to get intimate with them. That would be the truly sad thing.”

LARB “So the ending isn’t all puppies and rainbows, but it points toward a kind of discovery and self-truth — and I’d like to think that that qualifies as a kind of honesty, which should be cause for happiness. And that’s the note I wanted the collection to end on.

In life… well, I would say I’m as happy now as I’ve ever been. And although I hope I’m not quite yet at my own ending, I guess my own experience makes me believe in happy endings.

Michael is not Aciman. Too brainy, cerebral, precise. As insightful as the stories can be, there is an absence of feeling and the flexibility or unsettledness of feeling. I think he would not give Homo Irrealis a great review. Not sure I want to read any more of the stories.

But I did. We watched the Netflix series about Halston, well done. And his story prepares for Lowenthal’s collection in the sense of generations. Halston dies of AIDS, driving up and down the California coast for eighteen months until he dies in SF. Michael is the generation after, he gave his valedictory speech at Dartmouth about being gay. Since then “queer” seems to be back in fashion, that’s what he uses in his interviews. So his stories span the past thirty years. So interesting that he is in a generation so secure and comfortable that he confesses that in his travels he enjoys sometimes “passing” to see what he can observe. In other words he goes back into the closet for a short stint of traveling as if just to see what that might be like. Like a spy and a counter-spy.

Pessoa lines from Antinous —- have to recall that he wrote this poem in his imitative Elizabethan English —- it is quite amazing

“Now he is something anyone can be./ O white negation of the thing it is!

26 May Wednesday Bought the house. Closing went through.

27 May Official closing day and transfer of keys. Looks like I overpaid by 941.58 so we’ll see if Trust sends me a check. Official sale price 276,975.36. I paid 277,916.94. Now curious to see how quickly it will show up on Zillow. Why? curiosity finds whatever it can find . . . .

29 May We have the house. Now to see what magic Eloy and Denesa work upon it.

from Nicholas —- one of the most private anecdotes he’s ever told, must be aging gracefully or something.

Dear Bob,

I am delighted the house is in your possession. Now whenever I see one I like (as I did last week), I wonder if I have the courage to do a "Garlitz" and see it without personal, physical inspection and decide not. This may be a good proxy indicator for thinking whether I like the given house sufficiently: Can I do a Garlitz?

In fact, I am not seeing the Lax opera until next Friday so I will expect you to keep your powder dry instead. All the ingredients appear to be there for success but you never know. I have actually been to a Glass opera - Satyaghara - and loved it.

Absolutely no idea who writes about gay/spirituality well - I tend to run and hide when spirituality is prefixed with an identity thinking of it as more of a loosening up of identity rather than a fastening down. But I kind of have that disposition towards gayness more broadly. I remember being invited to dinner by my friend, James Roose-Evans, who had founded the Hampstead Theatre and Bleddfa the art/spirituality centre I ran, at his London flat to discover we were all eight, gay, men (mixture of couples and singles) and, however, pleasurable the actual company, I immediately felt 'claustrophobic' - as if this identity was sufficiently cohesive to bring people together convivially, rather than simply instrumentally (because of the hostility of the 'world'). But then I realize, belatedly perhaps, that, in this incarnation at least, I am not a joiner! I cannot say whether I have the same feeling about gay clubs since all clubs feel like I have landed in some alien universe from which I hope liberation will quickly come!

I did, however, greatly enjoy Christopher Isherwood's 'My Guru and His Disciple' (when I read it aeons ago) but mainly I think because of the humor and close observation of his failure to make a Vedantic monk of himself because of the draws of the flesh (however important Vedanta remained to him throughout his life)!

Love and best wishes, Nicholas

———

Dear Nicholas--

Well understand we were extremely lucky to have three, even four, trusted friends there in Albuquerque to be our eyes and feet for us. Extremely. Thanks to them when they walked through the

house with the live video or zoom on we could ask questions and have their answers unfiltered by real estate-ese. That made all the difference. And having been there in town last year for

longer than we had expected was important too. We got a much better taste of what sorts of places were available in all different parts of town even without consciously looking at the time.

Your solution I suppose will require you to take short hops over to have a look yourself. Now that travel slowly returns I hope that will be easier and easier for you. The most important of our

trusted friends was Kim, the real estate broker. Fifty years ago we bought this house by going to the local bank in town and signing a few papers. These days, the process is extremely intricate,

it seemed to us, and a sort of arcane initiation into bizarre mysteries. Kim's expertise in all of it and saintly patience was incredible. Paying cash cuts through lots of it, something a year ago i

did not think we would have even considered. But once you get the overview and realize you can after all transform assets from zeros on a screen into a building one can walk into, it gets

easier and immensely practical. Of course once we get there we may come to change our minds completely!! Who knows. I found the process of focusing and deciding invigorating. Virginia still

"says" she'd rather buy a place in Javea, but I long ago decided against that idea.

One reason I so enjoyed Zenith's biography of Pessoa is how successful he is at avoiding the traps of every sort of available tribalism. He gives us a literary biography of the writer as writer and person, private person above all, public person secondarily. No placing of the person into any sorts of boxes pre-fabricated or newly invented. Something contemporary writers really seem to find impossible, especially

gay or queer fiction writers. I had thought I could find one who would not be that way but am giving up that fruitless search.

A copy of Nicholl's book arrived today. I had not heard of it, look forward to it.

On to the opera.

Love and best wishes,

—————————-

I look at photos of the house over and over, as if that might make it appear before us. And to imagine over and over how much it will be wonderful. A clear bright place in the high desert.

The home town and the town of our marriage. The town of our later years and perhaps death. Nothing certain about any of it. A bright uncertainty, a blinding light of unknowing.

“Into practical amelioration and adventuring in the unknown.” “He did not notice the ‘maybes’ in his speech; they seemed only natural to him.” Musil Sister 119

Nicholas clarifies about Whitman and, I think, himself—-

Dear Bob,

I hope you enjoy the Nicholl book. It wobbles a little in its last chapter partly because the subject is impossible - suffering - and partly because his wide ecumenism narrows somewhat onto his core Catholicism. I have always been sorry not to have met him - he was a friend of my own soul friend, Wendy Robinson, and his widow, Dorothy, is a long-time supporter of Prison Phoenix.

My exemplary writing on avoiding our modern tribalism and retrospective projection, I recall, is Michael Robertson's Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. It focuses on the fact that many of Whitman’s earliest and most ardent readers saw him as more prophet than a poet, the initiator of a new spirituality that might (and in their case) did transform them (and the way they saw the world). In the case of R. M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter, this took the form of initiating and shaping their understanding of their life-changing mystical experience that they saw as elevating them to a new dimension of existence that Bucke was to call in his famous book of that name ‘cosmic consciousness’ (a phrase given to him by Carpenter). It reminds us aptly how one's reception can change over time - losing and finding dimensions in the process.

But it, also, contains a highly intelligent discussion of Whitman’s sexual identity, rescuing him from being simply a ‘gay’ poet by showing that though he was that (seen through a narrowing modern lens) he was more than that; and, that ‘more’ is radically more unsettling to our understanding of same-sex/other-sex relationships because Whitman wanted us to see (and celebrate) the erotic dimension to all relationships. He is nothing if not an abidingly sensual poet in which the erotic plays across the texture of the whole world.

Best wishes, Nicholas

——

terrible news from Phil this morning, Sunday

About Peg I have some bad news. On Wednesday, she was admitted to the hospital with a very painful, distended abdomen and an inability to urinate. On Thursday, the hospital drained 4 liters of mysterious liquid out of the abdomen and put a catheter in her non-functioning bladder. Yesterday, she was told that she had many tiny tumors in her abdomen that would require chemotherapy and the growth in her uterus had doubled in size and likely is cancerous and would require surgery. This morning she was told that surgery would be too dangerous on the big growth and that chemotherapy would only slow, not eradicate, the small tumors. In other words, this "doctor of medicine" said the is terminal. However, it's not 100% certain yet. That will be determined by several teams of doctors on Tuesday, but it looks very probable.

Peg seems to be holding up rather well despite being in constant pain. I think we're both a little too shocked by this morning's message to really come to grips with it.

—-

Hi Bob,

I'm woefully slow at responding to emails sometimes. I'm glad I answered you way back then! Glad to hear you're hanging onto your Lax books too. They're gems. Every one of them.

Albuquerque and NH sound like two good places to split the year. NM is one of just two states I've never been to (the other is OK). My wife and I keep talking about making a trip down there. Maybe this fall.

Thank you for the tip on the new Pessoa biography. I will look for it.

50-75 years from now...Lax's reputation is on a rising trajectory these days and the Glass opera should keep it heading that direction. As you know, it takes some effort, though, to get to Olean and poke through those stacks of papers. I felt after watching the opera on Saturday that there will be many more books on Lax and books of his poetry in the future. That makes me smile.

I hope you enjoy(ed) the show!

Michael

chromenos

Monday, May 31, 2021

Cuttings and Pastings 2021 January to May 31

No comments: