January 2023

 4 January 2023  

Too warm today.  Heavy skies.  Rain and freezing rain tonight.  Canceled lunch with Elkinses in W Leb for tomorrow.  

Va's book formatted by Word-2-kindle, see if it will work.  It did.  Looks great, much better.  Two places where the margins vary as they did in the ms.  I could never figure how to correct those.  Pagination is great.  Table of Contents back.  Was able to add the final sentence Willow wanted to add.  Sending for a proof copy.  Probably have it sent to CA.  

Dinner with Heusers for Saturday. Lunch, at the Bistro.  Waiting to hear from Dave about their final flight booking.  Managed to pack a few things into the suitcase.  Looks like I will take this computer with us after all.  My ipad is a pricey toy for this year.  Use it for reading?  What else?  Maybe pass it on to Emma in a year or so.  

Reading Wolfe.  Have no memory of Can't Go Home Again and that is for the best, I'd say.  Will I really want to read all of his work just as I wanted to read all of Musil?  Or thought I did.  Didn't quite make that but did a good job on Qualities.  Wolfe's prose sounds a bit dated or am I making that up.  Not as clearly period and cultural as Houghton's British, stagey dialogue.  I can't shake the prejudice I've developed that "all" British writing takes its model from writing for the stage, that everything they produce comes out of and through the shaping forms of stage drama.  And why not?  That is their preeminence in world literature since Will.  

What to make of the description of George?  Simian and nicknamed Monk!! Could any writer do that to a character these days?  Sure indication that Wolfe carries naturalism through into his works?  he's born in 1900!!

Ah, this novel was published after his death.  Late.  

watched the movie Genius with Jude Law playing Wolfe and Firth playing Maxwell Perkins.  Had seen it years ago.  Extremely good as such things go.  You feel for Perkins more than I'd realized.  Has there been such a key figure in Am publishing since?  

Bought tix for Dave's leg from LAX to ABQ.  Trip details all set.  Nice to be futzing around the house today packing, sorting.  Glad we're not going to lunch.  Freezing rain has not shown up.  Just wet outside now.  Anne called last night with tale of Marc and Kelli and their teenagers in trip from hell over the holidays.  Prague and other places.  

6 Jan  Three Kings   Virginia likes the glass flame I bought at Simon Pearce.

Wet snow all day.  Warm.  Walked at Wally's.  Asked a question of the guy stocking the Nabisco shelves.  Thought of buying more veggie burgers but decided to wait on those.  Packed the third box.  Found the other Lands End tops, thank goodness.  Barb invited us to dinner on the 13th.  Changed the hotel room in Atlanta, paid off to phone.  The website wouldn't let me do it.  

Have not yet written anything in ink today.  Might do that now.  

9 Jan  Finished the Salinger saga last night.  Catcher published in serial form 45-46 and then fleshed out fully in 1951.  Had not realized so early.  

Hoult sure did a superb job.  Wiki says as recently as 2019 that the family still plans to publish the remaining works over ten years.  See if that happens!  

evening  Long visit from Dennis this afternoon.  Had forgotten Ashley's cancer.  He just had a vasectomy, fainted at the sight of the site and fell into the bathtub, blood spot on his nose.  Talked about his father's death when he was fifteen, he saw the four-wheeler turn over and crush him.  Depression and anxiety.  ADHD.  Recent ketamine exploratory therapy for that.  Worked at a bar in the combat zone for years in his late teens.  Acid and alcohol.  Has been sober five years.  Glad he likes Wolfe, gave him Of Time and the River and having O Lost sent to him by Friday.  Video of Ashley giving Arlo her first ski experience.  

23 January 2023 

Lamp from the main bedroom works perfectly at the left of the piano.  The used almost new Yamaha upright we bought on Friday and Alexander delivered on Saturday.  Sunday the fourteen year old boy wonder played Beethoven's Appassionata at Chatter.  Gabriel Ingliss, son of oboist Robert Ingliss, NJ symphony and Santa Fe symphony.  

Today we walked at local Wally's.  

26  terrible day at univ vw yesterday.  Now see I can shift to Fiesta VW for remainder of VW activities.  Drive out Saturday to see if they have a power charger available for a year or so from now.  

passage on beauty in Of Time—-what I've been looking for all my life!!! back to Wolfe and declare him our local born joyceproustpessoa—-

“And oh! for beauty, that wild, strange song of magic, aching beauty, the intolerable, unutterable, ungraspable glory, power, and beauty of this world, this earth, this life, that is, and is everywhere around us, that we have seen and known at ten thousand moments of our lives, that has broken our hearts, maddened our brains, and torn the sinews of our lives asunder as we have lashed and driven savagely down the kaleidoscopic fury of the years in quest of it, unresting in our frenzied hope that some day we shall find it, hold it, fix it, make it ours forever—and that now haunts us strangely, sorrowfully, with its wild song and aching ecstasy as we lean upon the sills of evening in the city. We feel the sorrow and the hush of evening in the city, the voices, quiet, casual, lonely, of the people, far cries and broken sounds, and smell the sea, the harbor, and the huge, slow breathing of deserted docks, and know that there are ships there! And beauty swells like a wild song in our heart, beauty bursting like a great grape in our throat, beauty aching, rending, wordless, and unutterable, beauty in us, all around us, never to be captured—and we know that we are dying as the river flows! Oh, then will pity come, strange, sudden pity with its shrewd knife and the asp of time to stab us with a thousand wordless, lost, forgotten, little things!”

Excerpt From

The Complete Works

Thomas Wolfe

Oh, you don't read fiction? How do you expect to be constituted as a bourgeois subject whose deep interiority replaces hereditary rank as a form of class distinction?   John Attridge--

27 Jan   Fascinating tale from the eye doctor this morning. Tina Mamdani. Father (Indian descent) from Kenya, became director of BP when Idi Amin took over, then later they fled to Vacouver, thanks to direct help from Pierre Trudeau.  She was in school with geeky Justin Trudeau, her father insisted he come for dinner at their house once a week. 

Of course Thomas Wolfe was mani-depressive.  When I read him my junior year I had never heard of such a thing.  Do I now want to read "all" of him?  Again?  the biographies and letters, the book covers, all look so familiar to me.  I must have poked through them in the libraries.  Does this guy really have the secrets to my life?  Teenager to geezer—-14 to 78.  Is this a good

idea?  Is he my de facto greatest writer ever for my view and purposes?  Does he have to be?  Three different people have written biographies!  But I am through with biographies.   Three of his books now in the Amazon cart.  Should I really buy them?  Or do I always buy all the writers' books and then lose interest in him?  

adding to my list of shouldas and if wouldas—-why did I not write a diss on Thomas Wolfe???? 

Would I have finished much faster?  Would I have been much happier about the whole process?  I was blown around on the high seas of grad school trying to stay afloat and find a skipper who knew how to keep my skiff afloat.  I could have been an architect.  I might have been a scholar critic of Thomas Wolfe.  

Instead I now own an Opel Jenkins house.  Tina the eye doctor knew about Opel Jenkins houses, I think she said her husband is in real estate. 

Day off.  First of the new year.  Lunch at Flying Star near Academy.  Full binge.  Shopping at Walmart and Trader Joes.  Looked up the house on Agate Hills Road.  Glad we didn't buy there. Stunning view from the street, not the house itself, would have been a trap.  Sort of a steep hill even for here.  Too crowded in traffic too, right off Paseo del Norte.  

Dennis W has the rowing machine, says it is a perfect complement to his stationery bike.  

Spent last night doing the taxes.  At the end of the evening I signed back onto TurboTax.  Uploaded most of the documents.  More to find of course.

Even paying for a live assistant this time.  Found the property taxes

online, brilliant as I am.  Willow deep into New Amsterdam.  After walking at Wally's this morning we went to Old Town to check out the Christmas Shop.  Bought a little nativity.  Plaza felt empty and tranquil.  Shop lady said La Placita is being divided up and revived into small shops and maybe a cafe or two.  

Waiting waiting to see how Wednesday will go with the bed exiting and the bed arriving.  No response from corporate to the eloquent complaint letter i emailed.  

On Lechusas at the corner to the left there's a water leak and construction going on to repair it.  So far no interruption for us.  I should be reading Wolfe.  Or I want to read some more.  Do I?  or do I think I do?  or think I should?  Am I afraid of him?  

Rupert says he can't read Melville!  What British writers would that be for me?  Trollope?  Carlyle?  

We are upset all afternoon and still because we can't get today's GH!!

31  Rick says he's all set to come take away the big bed tomorrow morning.  Waiting for the delivery guys to call and schedule.  If necessary we could

sleep in the guest bedroom.  Lou and Willow want to swim tomorrow too.

Bought a tiny nativity yesterday in Old Town to go under our tiny xmas tree.  Lights look super cute.  

Just found a tax document from last year, reminder to wait until 02/15 to harvest all the tax documents necessary.  

Pie says Joe is fighting a lung infection.  Gosh, he should have left that swampy Warren a few years ago.  Meanwhile, Phil has a far lefty sympathizer who backs Russia.  

"Hey you guys,

I have a friend who was in the American Communist Party, but is no longer a member.  He was also a "Senior Lecturer" on International Relations at the Univ of Denver until he retired about three years ago.   He and I became friends when we were in the Peace Corps together in Tunis.   Although now retired; he has a blog/website that allegedly provides "the View from the Left Bank."  Okay, no problem, even when he's critical of the US, but he has nothing but total condemnation of the US,  its "puppets in the west" and its mainstream media.  Recently he attributes any criticism of Russia and Putin as "hysteria" and "Russia phobia."   It's all the US's fault and Ukraine is nothing but a CIA creation.   Do either of you have a lefty friend like this?   I like the guy.  Jewish originally from Queens, but dear god, his constant excusing of Putin, Russia, and China just appalls me.... P "

No, don't know anyone quite like that.  

This is how sheltered I continue to be.  Walking out of Walmart the other day I asked a mid-age Hispanic man walking

in to explain the slogan on his T-shirt, which I had seen a number of times and never understood.  "What does

"Let's Go, Brandon" mean?" I asked him.  "That's your president, man."  We both kept walking, one of those

quick exchanges.  So I looked it up and, gosh, he was right.  It is code for "Fuck Biden."  Go figure.  In Plymouth

there was/is a truck flying the fuck Biden flag from it's back for years now.  I had never heard this Brandon thing.  

So important, all of it.  

Is your pro-Rusky friend somehow part of the pro-Russia "backing" Bumpy has been getting for years???

Bizarre times rushing forward.  Watching, binging New Amsterdam in night does not help.  

I'm waiting for the paperback of The Web and the Rock to arrive.  Have this marvelous kindle app on iPad but just can't warm to using it.  

Paid the big bills on both credit cards.  Early.  Now watching to hope that daily cash flows will handle everything for next month onward.  Does anyone live with no magical thinking?  Doubt it.  

31 January 

Called Flagship at noon while we walked in Wally.  Frank said the computer had us there for delivery tomorrow between 10 and 12.  I told him no one had given me that information.  Later today around 3:30 I get a text message saying the delivery will be between 9 and 11.   Rick is set to arrive around 8 I think.  

All packed for Va to go swimming after lunch with Lou at 11.  Everything could go well.  Called Tema.  Bed not due to arrive until May 21.  Will have to ask Eloy or Caleb to receive it and watch the setup.  

We got new keys for our postal box!! hooray.  Pile of mail.  Nothing much of note.  

Houghton book arrived.  I have no memory of ordering it.  Asked Nicholas if he did.  Probably did way back in an earlier rush of enthusiasm.  

Started great docu on Leonard Cohen last night.