October 2023
1 Sunday
Dear Nicholas
Delightful to have your long update. I did see your photo of the Resurrection but I didn't know it had been recently restored.
We are doing well after a long and dreary summer. Climate change gifted us with rain endless, more than NH has ever had in the 100 years of recording the weather. No flooding just drip, drizzle, showers, light, heavy, sporadic, gray, fogs, clouds. Few sunny days. Today is sunny and bright.
Last night we watched a beautiful recent Moroccan movie on Criterion Channel called The Blue Kalifa (of the Blue of the Kalifa).
Dave and family visited in late July after spending a week at an Ur-Club Med with Cécile's family. Emma now 12 and Eliot 9, both full of more personality and splendors. They enjoyed the summer theater camp they've been going to for years here. The whole crew drove south for ten days to see friends in NYC and Philly. Lots of glimpses of other families and locales.
Dick Mertens called a few times over the past week or so. He was correcting his views on Wendell Berry's vision of neighborliness as love of the land and aligning it with Orwell's invocations of "common decency." He had passed through here in June on a short trip when he was tracking down some story idea in the White Mountains and going to the funeral of the Concord editor who had meant so much to him years ago.
I have been going deeply into Lawrence Durrell. Many times in earlier years I had started Justine and never been able to get into it. Now I think D is wonderful, so much superior to Proust. [The American craze for Proust is over I hope!] I am reading his works in strict chronological order, having started with the two earliest novels that he tried to disown. Now I am in
Prospero's Cell which is so wonderful as not to be believed. Published a year after our births. Durrell's love of the land and location within which, onto which, he finds people and their stories to make for a super book. The ancient myths and stories and histories and then the modern stories of Count D. who "proves" Corfu is the island Shakespeare visited and cast as the leading character in The Tempest. Here is the love of Greece that is missing somewhat from the biography of Lax. The preceding book, The Black Book, is Durrell breaking free from Edwardian tropes and quite exciting. If now, more a piece of history. A transitional pivot. A Flip!! Kripal could list it.
While following the timeline of the books, I am also dipping into the fat volume of letters between Henry Miller and Durrell. One ecstatic mention of Houghton's Julian Grant but after that nothing more. The two writers are in love with each other as mentor and mentee writers in the writing world. The cover photo shows them on the beach, Miller naked and Lawrence crouched off to the right, not as visible. Black and white. A book cover I remember having seen years ago in Hyde Park in my first year in graduate school. Then I had no idea who they were. If only . . . . along with so many other if onlyies. I feel now as if I'm studying Durrell as a repetitious phd dissertation project. Have the huge biography of him but will not read that until after all the sacred words, if ever. All of this may well cool on me as per usual but for now it helps create the days.
Also half through Lars Iyer's My Weill. The disappointment I expected I'm afraid, so far. He may pull something off but his earlier treatment of Nietzsche was also a let down. He's allowed his contextualizing portrait of students within which the philosopher is speaking to overwhelm the book and the philosopher herself has almost no voice. Yes the contrast should be helpful and comic, perhaps, but enough, find another formula.
The other day I visited with Dennis, my new next door neighbor here, young fellow in his early 30s who is going back to university to get a masters and licensure in psychology/therapy. Very bright and interesting but I thought afterwards that 30 year olds are sure different from 20 year olds, who I spent my lifetime trying to engage and figure out.
Dennis is all excited about a Temple of Ayahuasca. He has made nine visits to one over in NY State (around Woodstock, of course). Illegal so far as FDA goes and so under the radar. But pricey--$1300. for a 2 night weekend visit. Seemed like recycling Timothy Leary. Important book on all of it by Harvard prof Michael Pollan who seems to have been writing about food and food supply chains most of his career. Latest book How To Change Your Mind Dennis is sending to me to peruse. I sent him The Flip.
Psychotropic micro-dosing is the newest (oldest) edge of psychotherapy it seems.
Our house in Albuquerque will cease being up for rent on Airbnb and such at the end of December of this year. Our manager is getting out of the short term rental and property management business altogether after eight years of trying to make a go of it. I'm not surprised, and, so far as we're concerned, relieved. NYC figured out how to box Airbnb in with fees and regulations and the rest of the world is following that model. These two years have perhaps been a breaking even for us, probably losing some money in exchange for the convenience factor for us.
We go out there mid January and return mid May once again. I so wish we could go back out at the end of October next year, but Va says not yet. We'll see. We did meet with our Mover here and he will come this December to pack up a few pieces of furniture and pictures and paintings
and some books that Va wants to have shipped out.
Your preparation for a move back to UK will have lots of layers about shift and change for you, for sure. Why exactly do you want to move back?
You will be able to stay on top of the search for suitable retirement cottages or condos in Scotland or Wales? Perhaps you should pick up a villa in Javea for sunshine bonus side trips on the way. Virginia keeps getting emails about such properties every day, hoping against hope I suppose, that I will be won over.
What do we really want? What does one want? Why should these numbers hovering over our backs, like 61 or 80, really matter very much?
Who gives them such mysterious presence and flutterings? My writer friend/former colleague is writing his autobiography, I get a page or so a week from him. That provides an uncanny account of recent history. He published a short book in the spring about his terminal cancer diagnosis. He is now about 68 I think. One drug seems to be postponing death a bit longer than they had expected. DNA link is key somehow.
We walk slowly at Walmart every day, by days end hope the counter has gotten us to 4-6000 thousand steps. A good day. Va plays the piano, can
see the larger print notes more easily. Her friend takes her swimming once a week on my day off when I drive to Lebanon and walk around the town square and have a lunch nearby.
We're waiting for word from the kids about whether they will be able to come for Christmas this year. Last year they skipped that in favor of their first visit to Abq and that went very well for them. We'll see. School calendars getting more complex for them. Videos of Eliot playing handball today. Emma was laughing last week, aghast, that her new Spanish teacher spoke only Spanish on the first day of class, no French and no English!!
Trust Andrei gave you my oblique birthday greeting and hope he is well. I tried to subscribe to his new journal, The February Journal, but the site
never quite took my offer. Perhaps it could sense, AI being as savy as they say/fear, that my interest was curiosity and not genuine political commitment.
—-
two good lines from twitter today
"I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring" —W S Merwin born Oct 1, 1927
and from Saul Bellow "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. "
Doug bought his new EV, Toyota, now I want one too. Looks so much like our VW out west.
Shouted a hello and welcome to Sarah Barton earlier this morning across the street.
That's exactly it. We will be in the tundra soon enough. I guess it's supposed to be 80! My old friend Harvey may come along, so I'll let you know. I have a pond up there -- Coon Brook Bog -- that is one of my favorite places. I try to fish it every year. Haven't done it yet this year. I'm often the only person on the water. Lots of moose and lilly pads.
Oops, no I'm not going to your pond with you!!
Meet Harvey there.
We'll go for coffee or lunch on another day further down the road!! It will get grayer and cooler soon enough.
Maybe. Maybe climate change is indeed skewering all of it. No matter, go fishing and enjoy.
Miller Durrell letters terrific. Should start underlining and marking all of these books. Why did I ever stop doing that? Especially if I want to throw them all away after I've used them up?
What a gorgeous day once more. Two days in a row now. Apple Pie Social at The Pasture yesterday. Bright talk with Art Karen Ken and Carole about everything. Including Carole's new hearing aids, their trip today to Manoir Hovey, their considerations of the retirement villages in Lebanon near Alice Peck Day, the Baldwin in Londonderry, and A & K set on The Laconia settlement. These are Death cults I say to myself this morning. Fear of death or imagined resignation and bravery in the face of imagined illness and death. Needing assurance of being on the Correct Team, the Team that will go down in victory, the team that will carry us through, escorting us in comfort to the end as befits the winningest team. Lars Iyer's treatment of retirement villages is corrupting my youthful outlook. I need to paste in here the relevant phrases about how Ayahuasca can change your dna and your mind and soul, your key imaginative outlook on the coming resurrections and galaxial journeys ahead.
Sitter sent the link to this info on The Conversation "Psychedelics plus psychotherapy can trigger rapid changes in the brain − new research at the level of neurons is untangling how" this is a great clear passage about it all, at the end of the article of course—-In addition to being the active ingredient in ayahuasca, DMT is an endogenous molecule synthesized naturally in mammalian brains. As such, human neurons are capable of producing their own “psychedelic” molecule, although likely in tiny quantities. It’s possible the brain uses its own endogenous DMT as a tool for change – as when forming dendritic spines on neurons – to encode pivotal mental states. And it’s possible psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy uses this naturally occurring neural mechanism to facilitate healing.
6:30 esque on 3 October Finished Prospero's Cell. The Dark Labyrinth is next.
Iyer's interview for the Morning Star helps me readjust my reading and expectations for the rest of My Weill.
“Nothing of the novel is exaggerated. The language of management theory has colonised the university. Expressions like ‘best practice’ and ‘seedcorn funding,’ used without irony … No-one laughs or rolls their eyes … Everything, taken straight.”
Iyer despairs at the dominance of management processes emphasising productivity, efficiency and resourcing, and recasting students and academics as “self-initiating entrepreneurs.”
“To make it worse, this process of stripping away meaning, comradeship, a sense of the absurd is accompanied by the grotesque parodying of the same notions that the process hollows out: the university as your ‘family,’ your fellow students as potential ‘buddies.’
“My characters, in response, cultivate counter-techniques of failure and ineffectiveness, of wandering and vagueness and of displacing ends from means.
“They aim at a deliberate incompetence, in which not finishing your PhD dissertation is more of a sign of honour than completing it on time; in which failure is a better sign of scholarly integrity than system-rewarded success. And they laugh, they have fun, which is pretty much forbidden in these overserious times.”
Much of my career I found a variant of that grad school community with my undergrad students.
Matt Ritter outside this morning preparing to cut down the dead tree on the Emerson side of the property. We drove north on Rt 132 yesterday from the nail salon to glimpse where the Nielson's have moved to. Spectacle Pond, linked ponds at a "bridge" of land hence "spectacles" i.e. glasses for one's face. Seeing the map helped me get that.
Over to see neurologist Culler and then Kristen and Jim in Hanover today.
How, when, will Willow decide to lenghthen our stay in Abq?? no one knows—-
Dear PT,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY A LITTLE EARLY.
I now realize that what I was asking you to do with the Mexican dishes was way over the top. Let me explain.
Our manager, Eloy who has been so great since we moved into Casa Alegre has now decided to leave the job at the end of the year since he has found it is no longer worth it to do all the work and deal with all the new charges the govt is piling on.The profit is way down since BnB is no longer fashionable and renters are getting more and more scarce and the govt keeps piling on more charges etc.
So we have decided to stop renting the house and to start moving stuff there now before we move to Abq for good. So if you could come here for your birthday and see the leaves like you did before you could come here for your birthday and to enjoy the leaves like you did before and help me pack the dishes before the movers come in early December,that would really help.
So far we will keep the house here pretty much the same until the kids stop coming and we decide to sell the house. here. We are packing up books and paintings to go with a local mover, Let me know what you think,please.
Love, PUSS
——
Neurologist George Culler yesterday then tea with Kirsten and Jim Murphy.
Dear Bob,
Surely you can be exiled to North Dakota without internet access for questioning Proust?
Though I periodically return to Durrell as a poet - he is very good - it is a very long time since I read his prose. Like Chagall refusing to revisit his hometown in Belarus lest it not (obviously) resonate with his vision, I am wary of rereading the Alexandria Quartet because I remember how electric my feeling within it was at the time (forty years ago now)! But perhaps I should venture forth …
I also loved a very slim, late volume called A Smile in the Mind’s Eye where he recounts his encounter with a Chinese practitioner of Tai Chi and where he both exposes and hides his own spiritual intuitions.
I suppose $1300 is a cheap price for enlightenment - I suppose there is nothing that is not commercialized! When will people realize that intention (what is the context and purpose) is as (if not more) important that content. I was re-reading Lama Anagarika Govinda’s Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness where he beautifully explains this - and ahead of time (40 years) eviscerates ‘mindfulness’ and indirectly any fantasy of technique stripped of a guiding, compassionate context.
I am in Copenhagen on the fringes on an impact investing conference but mainly playing hooky and looking at art. Today an exhibition of Navajo blankets - your (half) part of the world - very beautiful!
Love, Nicholas
——-
Hi Kirsten
We enjoyed much dropping in on you and Jim yesterday. We are divided on whether we had met Jim before? If so, we can't recall where or when?? Enjoyed talking with you both and getting a deeper sense of academic life a generation or two behind us! I'd like to sign up for his course on how to live a good life!! How much the world changes and how rapidly and slowly in one lifetime.
Twenty years since Virginia's event. Earlier yesterday we checked in with our new neurologist at DHMC, George Culler, in his mid-30s and proud dad of two year old twin daughters. If you ever need a neurologist, he is absolutely wonderful.
Your dad and you were the only visitors we had when Virginia was at the Spaulding Rehab Center in Boston. Great significance and gratitude for that.
I'm suggesting that if you could, take Jeff's book of poetic songs to a cafe some day in Hanover and "mistakenly" leave it behind. Perhaps randomicity will send it on its way into the galaxies and who knows.
Surely someone somewhere has written a dissertation on the relation of Augustine's Confessions to Anna Karenina. So, there you are!! I wrote a chapter of my dissertation on the Confessions because Kenneth Burke has a chapter on it in his Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. May still be in print, his book, with UCal press.
Trip to Oxford and beyond a great carrot to help you through the coming winter months.
Please stop by here any time. Forgot to ask about Jeff Perkins but I'm sure he likes being back in NE.
Warmest wishes,
Bob and Virginia
——
Wow. Scenes that shimmer on the page. Great title for the whole sequence! Yu
guze are living the high life, the few years straight out of the tv series about the promising
young writers at the pinnacle of aspirations and expectations. Reminded me a bit of our sabbaticals in Madrid, with lots of differences.
Had not realized that Lou Ann went all the way back into the core of everything, even
Vienna. No wonder. No wonder the potential for jealousy and bitterness were there at
the outset. Terrible tough times young people find themselves into without any real
understanding of how it all came about, exactly. Best of intentions, desires, hopes.
Again. Nicely sketched, implied, evoked. Just enough and not too much, that is that shimmering scene gift in your writing.
Makes me grateful again that for us, me and Va, our careers were just distant enough---
both in literary study, but in different languages and different cultures, etc etc. Lots of
grounds for jealousy and envy, mostly on my part---she always had intense powers of
concentration and long hours of steady hard work. Me pretty flighty but comparison and
so my procrastination for years on finishing the damned dissertation---which I really pretty
much didn't want to do at all anyway.
I could say "poor Amy" but I think it is pretty clear by this point in the tale that she made herself miserable when she needed to. That portrait of her faux country club mother a few chapters earlier sets all that up. Don't fear the lawsuit. She may fume to her allies but she doesn't really have it in her. NY publishing in those days was a brutal war, maybe always
is, always has been.
Lunch with a Dartmouth poly sci prof and his younger second wife the other day over at their house. Man, are they in a narrow, narrow bubble.
Redbrick State U did well for us common man guys. Even if we had had a few days of sipping wienerschnitzle in old Vienna and Venice.
——-
Hi Ed
Would that work as a title for a review ??
Your book has a tenderly fragile clarity and beauty rooted for me in that
sense of childhood, boyhood, loneliness that comes of making only suggestions to God. Each entry after great white spaces seem all gossamer webs, weavings, barely able to hold against and with breezes-- leaf, clouds, imaginary places remembered, real places faded.
What were the Jewish gatherings in Paradise Valley? Who were the voices and the names? Were they not as well leaves, clouds, holy faces and wicked faces, eyes raised, dreams abandoned?
Gossamer, fragile and at the same time weighted with the stings of real slaps, shames, yearnings, voices never forgotten. We know your sister will never be able to give you satisfactory answers. Not that any could matter.
In terms of "form" I really like having the Cut Outs section a the end. Now I don't know if the last few pages are repetitions on purpose or a formatting error? I assume they are not!! All the better for the division of the whole book into these two parts.
How could these cut outs not belong in the whole noel? or the main collection of remembered slivers, impressions, feelings?
An album to drift back through over and over again.
——
from Joe
Went to the celebration of life thing and it was in an Episcopal church in Middlebury. Strange to hear people worship together. It seemed old and tired. The minister talked about seeing the dead person again some day. If you could step back, it was a very strange claim.
Anyway, thanks again for reading. I find I'm counting on your reaction. Interesting that you and V felt a little of this jealousy/vying for "accomplishment." I guess Amy and I mistakenly thought two of us doing the same thing was ideal...when it was actually a trap. I can see that you and V had enough distance in your fields to keep things healthy. I don't think I've ever known how you two ended up at PSU....how did you land together? I doubt within PSU there was much competition with each other. Curious about your dissertation. Have you read it in recent history? I want a copy.
I'll be around Tuesday if you're bored.
What was the bubble the poly sci person was in? Insulated?
Any recommendations for things to watch? I'm football-ed out.
Going to the NH film festival at the end of the week. Never been to anything like that. Susan suggested it. Lots of shorts and documentaries. We'll see.
Wet days.
to Joe
Virginia and I met in the Soybean Capital of the World. Decatur, IL. Small college there. Her second year of teaching after an MA in Spain program. My first teaching after a year of courses for the MA in Chicago. My plan was to go on to Berkeley for the phd but I didn't tell her that. She applied secretly to Chicago and got a full scholarship for doctoral studies. We would drive an hour to Champaign, campus of U of IL to have lunch in the caf and look at real people rather than at soybeans. We met in Sept, married in Albuquerque in June. Three months in Europe on $5 a day. Back to grad school in Chicago for doctorates. After first year I taught part-time in Purdue U in Gary, IN ("Calumet Campus") long commute couple days a week. When course work finished for each of us two years later it was "her turn" to find employment to support us both. No jobs, looked all over. Got two offers: was it in Kokomo or Kankakee? and Plymouth State College. The rest is history. Did Groucho say that?
My younger sister and her husband are up from New Orleans to lunch and leaf peep. Weather looks like it might actually hold for a few days!!
—-
day off Tuesday. Overnighted two paintings to Ed. Fingers crossed.
Finished The Dark Labyrinth. Had me gripped to the end. For a throw-away work it was darn good. Enjoyed it lots. Vaguely reminded me of reading Iris Murdoch. Why? British novel of manners transmuted into novel of ideas? Novel of Heraldic Themes. Sure am most comfortable with novel of symbolic dramas. Now on to Sappho, verse drama. And then . . . . Listened to more of Justine in the car. Do enjoy this reader and hearing the words as music, vaguely gathering the characters and their tensions. Not unlike watching French tv shows. Candice Renoir holding our attentions these days. Three more hours/episodes to go.
to stay with chronology I should read about half the book of poems to get
up to 1948 when Sappho is published. Justine not until 1957. poems and letters I suppose.
Both paintings got there safely yesterday. Lunch with Anne and Basile at Tuckerbox went well. Little to discuss but heartfelt presences.
For first time ever PT sent us a Witness Lee booklet. She may come east in November.
whatever mess the
outer world was in
it could not be
straightened except
by someone who had
straightened himself
out inwardly
& so, he felt, the
place to work
was there
——
inner & outer hd to be
straightened out at once
a little of one
a little of the other
each helping the other
the one with
objectification
the other with
insight
Robert Lax Kalymnos Jul 4 1972 from MacGregor's newsletter for Oct '23
—-
found this marvelous line this morning on X — I suppose I had seen it once before but maybe not. So perfect!!!
“He was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.” Edith Wharton
Read lots of Miller Durrell letters last night while Va watched World at War. Thought this morning I don't want to do a faux dissertation and so I don't want to read the letters. Too close to the biography. I've read too many biographies of writers. I don't want to know those details of their lives, so many details. I want only the art and artifice.
Just ordered the rest of the Quartet. Finish Sappho and plunge ahead into the Quartet and read and re-read perhaps.
Dark Labyrinth much better than Durrell seems to have thought it was. Gave the other biographer his title. All the more reason to not read him. Or the big bio either. Forget all of that.
—
Ed: I can't thank you enough. So rarely have I had such deep and beautifully written criticism. I realised (before selecting a title) that I couldn't write anything that WASN'T a self-portrait.
And what I'm calling "a life" is defined by fragle, ghostly, "things"...even the so-called pivotal events. And, alas, the last few pages ARE a formatting error...and I'm tortured by it. The founders of the Paradise Hotel and the voices of the guests are remnants of that lost Yiddish word...that is still so much a part of me. Again I am so grateful for your comments.
——
Phil called. Upset by his frustration with his laptop. Eye surgery went well, both eyes at once!
Scott Merrill sent a novel he liked, Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski.
My jaw, right one, has been hurting for about a week now. Taking some advil today to see if that helps. We got Covid boosters on Thursday. Jaw
hurt goes back before that. Not terrible but hurts to open wide and chew hard edges of toast, other pieces of food.
Sunday 15 Oct
Short visit with kids. Schools there upset by the knifing of a teacher last week in a town called Aras. Both Emma and Eliot are Reps for their classes. Eliot in a dual leadership with his best friend Artur.
Today I will begin Justine. Enough of shilly shallying.
Sappho: mid-way into it. A drinking contest and poeticizing contest. Of
course, a slam poetry contest, a faux Elizabethan comedy.
I was going to email André Aciman yesterday and say hey where's the next book and lo news arrived from somewhere that his new book comes out in April next A Gentleman from Peru. A short version, a seed novella or a portion is already on my Audible. I think I gave it a cursory listen a while back. I wonder if he works like Aho? An initial novella sketch followed by an expansive explorational production?
Phil called. Sounds much better. Bought a simple watch. Eyes adjusted. Can deal with the computer now and everything else. Has no short list of senior housing he would go to if he needed it. Regrets he and Peg never talked much, at all, about her final illnesses. Few people to see or talk with.
Read Joe's latest installment. How their life in NY ended and they landed at St Paul's and then how Amy sued for divorce after she came back from a summer actor's workshop in England. Seems symbolic that the photo of the barn in Rumney is upside down!! But also seems true and powerful how he tells about the impossible clashes within the relationship that brought it all to its end. Great line earlier about how inevitable divorce can be. Line from that writer . . . . Frustrating too how close Joe got to getting into the New Yorker as an editor of fiction. And how his novels did well but didn't do well. What to say about Joe's works and Joe? I can see why the new yorker guy(s) didn't hire him. I'll look forward to seeing him get more glory years later when his YA books do really well. There's a clue in that comment to what my thoughts are about the previous questions.
"Blanchot is an even greater waste of time than Proust" (qtd. in Smock 3). George Poulet's judgment, in Ann Smock's wry translation, gives pause to anyone who might claim contemporary literary or political relevance for the French writer, critic, and journalist. Poulet writes, "Thus, much more radically even than Proust, Maurice Blanchot appears a man of 'lost time'" (qtd. in Smock 4).1
Poulet rejected formalist approaches to literary criticism and advanced the theory that criticism requires the reader to open his or her mind to the consciousness of the author. His work has had a lasting influence on critics such as J. Hillis Miller.
In order to fully grasp an author's cogito, it is important to examine all available examples of the author's work. For Poulet, letters, journals, and unpublished manuscripts hold as much information about the author's cogito as published novels or poems (Leitch et al. 1318). He did not believe that these sources should be analyzed as objects, however. Instead, they should be used by the reader to "coexist with the author's developing grasp and formulation of his own existence" (Lawall 112). By examining an author's complete body of work, the critic begins to see patterns of expression not only in the work of one particular author but also across literary periods.
In addition to the cogito, Poulet looks for the "point of departure" in an author's body of work. The point of departure is a "structural and organizing principle" around which the author's work is centered and which defines the author's individuality (de Man 82). Poulet asserts that all narratives emerge from a preconceived world in which the author has already determined everything that will happen in the future. This static world is the point of departure for the fictional narrative. If the critic can identify the point of departure, he or she will have a key to the author's cogito.
Not Everyone Loves Proust
Crushingly dull. Rather infantile. A mental defective?
By Emily Temple
July 10, 2018
D H Lawrence is best. Susan Hill: "I tried to find one word to sum up how it seems to me. The word is “anaemic.” Ishiguro: "crushingly dull."
Monday
watched My Own Private Idaho. Thought I had never seen it but I guess I had. Willow deep into World on Fire. Anne called and chatted. Started Justine.
poor Proust, why do I need to attack one great writer to make room for one that I like for now.
Finished Smile in the Mind's Eye earlier today. Loved it so much. Short four part travel memoir about the Tao. Taoism as Durrell experienced it far back into his childhood in the shadows of the Himalayas on forward. Could pull out ten or twelve passages I really liked. His whole explanation-exploration of Taoism just on key and delightful.
Youtube interview with Lars Iyer and Brit philosopher in Manch is good-ok and helps give me a take on the book. It seems he is working through the writers who he had found years earlier when he was trying to figure out what to do with himself. He found various philosophers and in the second trio of novels, or "novels," he fleshes out his mature interests in these thinkers. After having invented his own form and style of comic meditations on their texts and lives.
"all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence means someone is creating." Justine 35
"for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made—ironic tenderness and silence." 36
Hi, Bob,
My sense that the "four seas" here are the equivalent of our seven was
confirmed when a friend here interpreted this as "wandering the world
with no purpose." I gather that it's the equivalent of "footloose and
fancy free."
Jeffrey
On 10/19/23, Jeffrey Herrick <giraffe24h@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Bob,
>
> These are old-fashioned characters, perhaps Chinese. They mean: cloud
> floating (playing over) four seas.
>
> I suppose these four seas may be like our seven, suggestion the whole
> world.
>
> Best regards,
Knew Joe would like this line from Justine—-
"Women must attack writers---and from the moment she learned I was a writer she felt disposed to make herself interesting by dissecting me."
What's this from? I like it.
—-
from the Afterword of a book I'm teaching, Regeneration, by Paul Hawken et al. :
"Regeneration is the default mode of life. You are able to read this sentence because the 30 trillion cells in your body are regenerating every nanosecond."
(And in case you're trying to remember how small a nanosecond is, it's the interval of time between when the traffic light turns green and the jerk behind you starts beeping his horn.)
John
—
Justine 78 Temples where one could outgrow the sort of inheritance she has: not these damn monasteries full of pimply little Catholic youths who have made a bicycle saddle of their sexual organs."
ouch!
Saturday rain 21 Sept
now we're thinking we will eliminate the overnight in atlanta and do the
airport connection.
Made that change yesterday and spent all night worrying about how it will go. Silly.
Hey, I'm including more of the Great Work. Hold up a white flag if it is tiring you out. If you read this section you will see the start of my time at PSC. I worry that I sound a little negative. I also wrote a little about Tess Reed's death. Do you remember that? I had just published a book about a murder on a campus and the police came and talked to me. Weird. I read online that they found the guy who did it. He lived in Rumney and had killed two more women afterward.
I also coined a new term, maybe. I said in here that the death of the fireman is a necessary step for all men and women. As little boys we hope to be a fireman, or football star etc., and in our thirties we realize we are not going to be that figure. I never heard anybody talk about this before. Am I crazy about that? You could probably cite something.
That's it from here. What a rainy weekend! Still fighting a cough. It's tiring....
responding to Joe's latest installment
Hey Now we're talking, we're into the good stuff!!
Was thinking last night in anticipation of this next section, how few good books there are
about teaching. Or maybe I don't know about them? Teaching is such a personal and in many ways intimate form of theater that it is really difficult to capture. Your whole section
at the start about Plymouth and the state college is almost SNL material or other comic
movies---and really, the whole place when we all arrived was too much in terms of podunk
and backwoods and hidden treasure of hinterlands mountaineer culture clashing. Just realized you were in the third wave of outsider immigrants. We were in the second, me and Va. Dick Sanderson and Vittum and Harold Hyde were in the first. 1950s tiny state teachers college. Guys like Sanderson came up for sports summer and winter and could teach English. Same over at Holderness school. Second wave were all the new phds brought in around 1966 (all over the country if you think of California etc) to Expand the teachers college into an all purpose almost university. Maybe you actually fell in between the cracks of the third wave and the fourth--the fourth was Theo Kalikow, women and R DeRosa et al. Strange little pocket history of a place. Microcosm.
The Reed murder was indeed a shaking experience and in hindsight the most upsetting part was how it fractured that small town/college fabric of trust with suspicion of every sort. One guy name Peter something was suspected by all the secretaries of being the killer because he worked with those newfangled computers. College paid the poor guy to leave because others wouldn't show to work with him around.
I remember you talking about Donald Fine and the "get indicted" line. So difficult to capture those times and nuances, but again you're right on the money. For my money.
I suspect that again you were between the eras in the sense that the whole NY publishing world had no idea really that the new generation of mfa smarties were self-promoting, self-publicizing, preparing the way without fully realizing it for Apps and smart phones and self-publishing via kickstart and Xlibris and all other sorts of dissolution of the old worlds.
Hard to write about your own times and lives. The whole of HIgher Ed in this country will we hope continue to descale itself and permute into a thousand new forms of brilliance and pomposity. What is an English Teacher? The secret behind the term is no one will ever know nor be able to justify!! I was pretty jealous of you because you were doing something real---writing and publishing. The only version of that on my horizon had been scholarship and it didn't take long into grad school to realize I had no real interest in that and indeed what the grad professors even at Chicago presented in their courses was all over the place. One friend thought he wanted to become a specialist in 18thC British Lit so he took a course from the most distinguished expert there in that field. Three quarters, fifteen weeks, a whole year of grad study was dedicated to the study of paper making and book making in 18th C London. That friend had the guts after that to drop out, go to NY and pretend to be a stockbroker for a few years. He called one time and said he couldn't get up for thanksgiving because he had misplaced 18 million dollars. That was in the early 80s. He left brokering, did other stuff, of late is a massage therapist in the west village!!
Writing your autobiography is just like running. One foot in front of the other, keep taking the next step!!! Have fun.
Hope you're energy is back. These morning fogs keep us tamped way down.
Death of the fireman is good. Sure you didn't steal it from that great movie Layover?? the studly fireman doesn't die but the two girls fight over him through the whole flic. Dumb fun for rainy night while awaying last night.
B
note in his reply "college students are not that interesting." so Telling as far as I'm concerned. Can see the budding, slowly emerging prize-winning YA author's outlook.
Really interesting comments, Bob. Yes, I guess there were waves at PSC. In some instances, it felt as if you PhDs were overqualified, or over concentrated on a single topic. I'll never forget our Dept meetings when someone would say, we must have a 18th Century scholar! I think Ken Bergstrom was right...the feminism of college took something away. Everything became orderly and safe. Fill in the boxes. It was impossible to push back on anything. I remember asking everyone under the sun when and how a "terminal" degree became the standard and no one ever answered the question. They saw me as a nail sticking up that needed to be hammered down. The irony is, as I mentioned, that academia prides itself on diversity and intellectual curiosity. While they denied me a faculty line, they never bothered to come into our classes to find out what we did. Strange.
Then we also had Wharton come in and scream at us. Remember? He said we needed to accept Bonnie...who had a mail order degree, by the way. And then another time Ginny Barry came in and said Dubino could be promoted even if she hadn't been there sufficient time. Maybe we were all so scared that we might lose our cushy lives that we doubled over and yielded. I still kick myself that I didn't sue the bastards right off the bat.
BTW, you know that was Barbara B who got a full professorship for writing a workbook! Astonishing. I actually liked Barbara, but she was no academic tower.
Seriously, only Mary Lou ever actively talked to me about something I had written. And Megan Birch taught one of my books in a teacher-lit course. I guess neither of us could get our faces on the magazine because they had to cover the Great Bisson!
Pie always tells me I should watch Community College, a show he says that will remind me of PSU. Maybe I will.
My old buddy, Sam Friedman, wrote Small Victories. You mentioned that there weren't many teaching books. That's one. Nonfiction. I used to point out that there were very few good college based stories, but hundreds of high school based ones. College students are not particularly interesting. Did you read Donna Tart's novel based on her experience at Bennington? I always thought that was one of the better takes on the vicissitudes of college life. Secret History.
Still can't shake this congestion. Was going to go back up to Maine for a couple days, but I'll wait until this passes. I don't want to be up there and mewing like a cat.
Okay, watching some football today. I need a nap and it's only 11:15!
——
rushed to the dentist this morning about my jaw. Monday morning. Dr Pushpinder Singh agrees with me—-it is muscular not toothly. Something irritated the closing jaw muscle, maybe night time grinding, maybe some harsh object bitten upon. Will clear up in six weeks. Now goes by Paul.
Pushpinder in Bengali/Hindu means God of flowers.
Balthazar copy arrived this morning from UK. Now I can finish Justine.
26 Oct Thursday
Finished Justine last night. Also called LibMut and got a new policy on the VW.
Did I do myself a good thing by "listening" to Justine (and Balthazar) on Audible in the car over the past few weeks. Yes and No. Had that sense that I had read many of the passages before—-had visualized them as I heard the words. In reading I imagined I had seen the words on the page.
Perhaps now I will read Balthazar with no further listening and only listen after the first reading.
Why read anyone other than Durrell? Have glimpsed into The Way of the White Clouds by Lama Anagarika Govinda. Opening tale about the Spirit of Beauty apropos. "The Spirit of Beauty has spoken the truth and his heart is sincere. And how could it be otherwise? Is not beauty the greatest messenger and servant of truth? Beauty is the revelation of harmony through forms, whether visible or audible, material or immaterial. However transient the forms may be, the harmony they express and embody belongs to the eternal realm of the spirit, the innermost law of truth, which we call Dharma. 32 . . . . "so that all who understand the language of beauty will be inspired and uplifted and be put upon the path of deliverance.'" 33
now to find Balthazar's great line about beauty, about a beautiful face —
of course not able to find it . . . news instead via Va and facebook about Meg Petersen's death, and Jim Hobart's.
passage was from Pursewarden not Balthazar—-
Meg from lung cancer, got diagnosis in the spring. Jim from massive heart attack, he was 89. Liz thinks Meg was still in her 60s.
“Pursewarden’s third volume which has just appeared in the bookshops. ‘What is astonishing’ he says ‘is that he presents a series of spiritual problems as if they were commonplaces and illustrates them with his characters. I have been thinking over the character of Parr the sensualist. He resembles me so closely. His apology for a voluptuary’s life is fantastically good—as in the passage where he says that people only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. To be so struck by a face sometimes that one wants to devour it feature by feature. Even making love to the body beneath it gives no surcease, no rest. What is to be done with people like us?’ He sighs and abruptly begins to talk about Alexandria in the old days. He speaks with a new resignation and gentleness about those far-off days across which he sees himself moving so serenely, so effortlessly as a youth and a young man. ‘I have never got to the bottom of my father. His view of things was mordant, and yet it is possible this his ironies concealed a wounded spirit. One is not an ordinary man if one can say things so pointed that they engage the attention and memory of others. As once in speaking of marriage he said “In marriage they legitimized despair,” and “Every kiss is the conquest of a repulsion.” He struck me as having a coherent view of life but madness intervened and all I have to go on is the memory of a few incidents and sayings. I wish I could leave behind as much.’ I lie awake in the narrow wooden bunk for a while thinking over what he has been saying: all is darkness now and silence save for the low rapid voice of Nessim on the balcony outside talking to the loaders. I cannot catch the words. Capodistria sits for a while in the darkness to finish his cheroot before climbing heavily into the bunk under the window. The others are already asleep to judge by the heavy snoring of Ralli. My fear has given place to resignation once more; . . . ."
The whole passage is brilliant. This line is the one I've been looking for all my life: 'To be so struck by a face sometimes that one wants to devour it feature by feature. Even making love to the body beneath it gives no surcease, no rest. What is to be done with people like us?’ This type is termed a sensualist and a voluptuary. In Balthazar's language, and Pursewarden's.
I had to call Liberty Mutual twice today to get the new auto policy put into place. Seems now to be ok.
Wish I were more excited about completing My Weil but I'm not. Same for the Fieldwork novel. Am very very excited about beginning Balthazar. Complete Sappho first?
Was some sun earlier and we walked ok. Grey most of the afternoon and now. Warmer.
27 Great news this morning from Dr Koren at Speare Surgery: colonoscopy not recommended for Virginia. Shocking news: he recommended good meat, beef, pork, chicken and vegetables and to cut back on fruits, maybe one fruit a day, because of the sugar in fruits.
Have never had a doctor so blatantly urge meats before. Is that his way of saying don't eat junk foods? as I'm munching on a luna bar after our healthy veggie burger lunch salad?
My giant oak cake came out fine, too oily, however. Too much cashew butter plus the canola sprayed on the tray. Learning curve.
Finishing Sappho feels like work, an assignment for the course and teacher. Starting Balthazar feels exciting. The Forward is by the author of the Yacoubian Building, which I used with classes years ago. Egypt's famous writer dentist. He says so well, yes Durrell is racist, orientalist, imperialist, colonialist and here are some examples. And the Quartet is a great work, each book a masterpiece, explorations of human nature and behavior of genius. Alaa Al Aswany the author.
This line in Balthazar "the thing is about Tendencies---you only realize it when you're not a hot-blooded young sprig any more." 30 The whole portrait of Scobie here could be a bit of Roger when we last saw him at his home on Ibiza.
Now we know the kids are coming for Christmas so I will laser focus read the rest of the Quartet before they get here!!
have to resist typing out neat lines "The aetiology of love and madness are identical except in degree, and this passage could serve not only for Clea but indeed for all of us.)" 31 So Clea has a nervous breakdown for love.
Well, I had a busy day yesterday. Very fun. The video ended up being quite moving. They even managed to get a few former students on there.
BTW, Tagrisso is free. I am on some kind of program. The only thing I pay for is blood thinner meds.I am prone to clotting, I guess.
Heading back up to Maine to close up the shop. Not sure what the weather is going to do.
Thanks again for taking the time to make a little video. It meant a lot to see you there.
Good chat with the kids this morning. Waved to the cousins and got to see a bit of the camper, the chicken and the backyard garden. Small town near San Raff. Eliot says they are all going to dress as zombie pirates to be with the band for the gig on the 31st.
Today Sunday the 29th
reading the first third of Balthazar I got worried, the two brothers and their mother in the great house, but then soon as the next part kicked in the brilliance restarts and in hindsight you can see how and why the earlier part was the way it was. Breathtaking. Justine is the "explosion" like The Black Book was and then the next three books are the bureaucritzation of the initial cosmic burst.
Yes, I do remember how excited I was to begin Musil. But Durrell is beyond that. This is what I was looking for. Musil gets one mention in the D bio.
Monday
Joe sent more of his ms with this note. I thought it was a terrible thing to make a child do, Willow doesn't think so. But she added she was not made to do anything. "More of the great work. Wendy steps on stage! I know I've mentioned this before, but Wendy did a lot of back and forth child care with Meg P. They had kids the same age. Wendy always said Meg's house was in constant chaos. She also said as a girl Meg had to get on her hands and knees and comb the fringes of their oriental rugs. That image always stayed in my mind whenever I had to do anything with her for school. Such a sad Cinderella story in the Governor's mansion.
Mischief night tonight. I used to love this night as a kid.
Tuesday 31 Oct
Miffed late last night as I started to read the Intro to Mountolive. Someone named William Boyd gave it a pissy intro, now dated and of its period but no longer dah dat dah dah. Never heard of Boyd. Scots born in Ghana.
Met Durrell when he was thirty and Durrell seventy.
Off today and this morning is sunny. Whoa
