Sunday 16 August

big day  Emma at earring workshop with Cordelia friend and Suzan at Artistic Roots

Dave and Eliot off to sunspot for arcade games

Dinner at Farmhouse slated for 4:30

we all slept late, bela until 10!  

nice breakfast table talk about their night visiting Pete and Erin O'Donnell in Lyme; they have clean gray rats as pets now in the house, beautiful new kitchen, hundreds of beautiful plants and flowers throughout

leftovers from Polly's 

apple photo reminded me eleven years ago today I was with Scott Merrill in Boston getting him, helping him get, his doctorate at BU  

really fun forty minute talk with Eric yesterday at Mountain Mermaid; he dropped off a few mushroom pieces this morning; will I try them?  hmmm possible not but we'll see   His visit with Dawson in BCN was his first time in Europe.  He noticed everything correctly and perfectly.  That was the core of the fun talk.  I had imagined the visit would go along scenario X but of course from the instant of recognized presence of the other person the visit goes along scenario of  P, S and onward.  Am I vaguely quoting Virginia Woolf here?  He got about a hundred pages into Schattenfroh and then put it down.  I apologized for having sent it.  His wife seems to be younger, more than five years younger, works in real estate, just got arrested for dui!  His daughters sweet and shy still at 16 and 14 or 12?  

back to finish up Milosz  why is it so difficult to read?  circular, spiral, clunky translation? dense; over wrought?  under realized, unfamiliar mode?  

now we have a buccaneer and the hanged man!  maybe there is a genre of erotica-exotica known as "tarot fiction"  

Cécile wants to talk to me, get me on her side, have me get Dave to see, etc etc  I walk away from her, twice now.  I must stay out completely and protect my own tranquility in all of this.  It is their drama, not ours.  

tarot fiction   Of course, Charles Williams---I read this years ago and probably got nothing much out of it---The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams: Written in 1932 by a member of the Inklings, this fantasy book features the Major Arcana as active, moving, 3D mystical forces central to a battle of magic

and Gemini also lists a book by Italo Calvino, Crossed Destinies  

134  Beauty and Adoration  . . .  Sorrow and Pity  

paroxysms  136  that is the governing mode of this tale  "I felt in my secret flesh and soul a kind of dark and strange pleasure . . . titillating anguish and gnawing delight  . .  . comparing it to the mysterious and appalling emissions of the hanged."  whoa  that is an image and a comparison 

then a perfect description of the psychology of a stalker 

page 137  extraordinary   applies to our moments here and how  have to copy out some later  great

clarity about love and betrayal---keys to the whole book