January 2
night. Beautiful full moon right up there out this window. Much warmer today and next few days. A week ago I went over to Peterborough and had a great time and found a good massage. Today I went to Woburn. It was ok but not as good as last week. The aromatherapy was the best I’ve ever had---a lavender mist that seemed to have come through a mask over the nose, strong and moist and quite a pleasant addition. And yet the whole production was all the bells and whistles of a Boston suburban place and yet none of, or very little of, the human warmth found in Peterborough. Rafa did give me a tip on a good dermatologist in Burlington, MA, Dr Ellerin. Just looked up his site and might look into going to see him if Dr Fagan will refer.
The most amazing part of the trip today was the house itself in Wobun, right off 93. Ordinary suburban street, houses all alike. Park in the driveway and walk around to a side entrance, in through the garage, and then into a small suite with massage room. It all looked so incredibly familiar, afterwards. Driving up 93 after I became absolutely certain that I had been there before. Maybe ten or twelve years ago, a year or so after Virginia’s event. I would put money on it. Rafa says he’s only been there under two years so he has no knowledge of the history of the house. That small suite might have been a grandparents’ wing, a rental unit or whatever, but it definitely works well as a consulting space. Maybe a therapist. Lots of possible uses for it. Leaving the house I began to feel that sense that, yes, I had been there once before. Even the corner of the two streets with names of apples--Granny Smith and Cortland. All so familiar. Like a perfect dream-memory. Imagined? Liminal? Perhaps.
Decided Jim’s fable is about his Parkinsons. Twice he uses his old religious brotherhood name--Dennis Andrew. Denis Andre the woodworker and Denise the ugly bitch who Cadeau redeems at the end and gives to her her first experience of beauty that takes her out of herself. She is the ugly self-centered, egotistical, blind grabber who lives in all of us. Why Jim divides his story into a battle between true and false nuns, etc, remains a puzzle. Perhaps some French fables impressed him way back. Is he echoing something in Les Mis? etc Not sure of any of that. A teaching fable so far as grace and the monsters life invites us to live with, superb spirituality, clarity and gentle grace and gracefulness. And yet the density of the writing and the treatment of women give me pause. Who should I suggest read it? Would I? I’m really afraid it could offend people under fifty who are not familiar with Catholic spiritual and social teaching. Would the Ebner family enjoy it? Two generations of devout Catholics there. Maybe three.
Had some French culture on in the car. A bit of Modiano later. Deep into Énard’s novel and loving it. France, Paris, French everything has been thrust upon me. Slowly at first but now whole hog. I still revert to the notion of doing only Proust for a year or more, spoken, read, wallowed in. With Modiano too. French prose. Until it feels second-nature-esque, or as close as possible after a year or so.
December 4 Thursday
Big snow coming and day for making the Kings bread/cake. Pressure on.
Dec 6 Saturday evening
Fine dinner last night. News from Mexico that Rick seems quite sick. Roy going down tomorrow, thank goodness. Petie flys to London on Tuesday, Ray working on Bower House. 1726 house. “Pemberly”
Sunday 7 Dec
Temperatures are up, sunny day. Drove to Concord for Target and then lunch at Olive Garden. Dozed at the Meredith exit gas station, home by barely light on the horizon, beautiful sunset over the ridge.
note from Petr Skavaril in Prague from Dec 29 Did I already copy it out?
If not, here it is.
Dear Bob,
Hope you and Virgina are well enjoying snowy Christmas holidays. Thank you for your kind letter and the CD of your son's music. I'm very sorry to respond only now. I kept your package on my desk waiting for a quiet moment to listen to the CD. The last weeks of the year were very busy with travel and work and I finally got my quiet evening only a few days ago.
I used to spend countless evenings and late nights at jazz clubs during my studies (a lot of my friends back home are musicians) and I even used to live right next to the best jazz bar in town when I moved to Prague. I don't get to go quite as often as I used to but your son's music (which I really enjoyed) was a very pleasant reminder. It would be great to see his band play live one day. I'll let you know if/when my travels take me to Paris next!
You're right about Nicholas. I feel very fortunate to have gotten to know him. He is one of the most inspiring and kind people I get to work with and talk to. Thank you again for your generous words about our trip. I very much enjoyed it too and often remember it. The world is indeed small enough that there is a good chance we'll see each other again. I think it's actually quite likely I may go to Boston in the next year or two. I'll let you know! And, of course, if you plan a trip to Europe or even Prague, please let me know. We'd be very happy to host you and Virginia.
My wife Klara (Greta is our daughter's name but well done remembering it!) found our connection via Vivobarefoot and her unexpected role in it amusing. And I find your story to be, in fact, very encouraging! See, I've been a very passionate mountain biker since the day I could ride a bike. And I still really love that sport. I just haven't been able to ride as regularly as I'd like to (and need to, really) and I can't bring a bike with me when I travel. So I've tried running on and off and while I enjoy it, I guess I still have many more miles to run before it becomes a passion. Let's see, maybe your story and the footwear we share will make that journey a few miles shorter.
I wish you and Virginia a wonderful end of the year. May both of you carry the incredible energy and zest for life I had a chance to experience a little bit on our trip into the New Year and beyond.
Warm regards,
Petr
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recent email said he might get to Boston sometime soon.
We went to Nashua today. Biryani Pot restaurant not as good as we’d hoped. Walking was good. Back of my mind I’m composing my response letter to Aciman, send it off later in the week. Va and Petie and Roy taking care of Rick’s return to Abq and health crisis. He and Marci fly there on Saturday.
Tuesday 9 January
5pm Trip to White River Jct today. Splendid sky over and back. Skies. Changing, sun, clouds, colors, grays, blues. Fine visit with Jt and most relaxing. Some new techniques. Effective. Wonderful. Lunch at Thyme which is new name for what used to be Tip-top. Piecemeal Pies just closed for the week. Town looked snowy and grungy, brilliant whites, faded clapboard, old brick. Big new building going up though. Countryside along Rt 5 beautiful. Can see what Carole means when she says she still would rather live in VT.
Thursday night Jan 11
Sleepy start to the day. Much warmer and getting rainy. We finished watching the French tv netflix show.
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Friday morning Jan 12
Talked with Anne last night for her 68th birthday.
----to Phil
thanks a brilliant, brilliantly funny, searing, piece ---- and yet,
we can only return to our desperate wailing--how the fuck do we get
this guy into the trash bin and seal the top?
we got into watching a French crime drama on Netflix and even after it
got worse and worse we stayed until the bitter end to see how it would
end (the serial killer mom and her son finally smile and have a redemptive
hug). In one scene the monster abusive father finally gets it and we
see in the background how he goes out of the chateau into the back
yard, climbs up onto the edge of the well, takes off the heavy metal
lid and then jumps in. It has become for us now one of the funniest
things we've ever seen on bad tv/movies. Inadvertently so, I guess, or
just lots of dumb things going on in all these not-bad (terrible) shows
we're flooded with.
Petri's piece is so good---but the yahoos around the prez and "his supporters"
can't get what her piece is even about and could care less.
Arizona congressman on radio this morning defending the prez's shithole
comment. He tells things like they is.
Was there an alligator character in Al Capp's cartoon world?
Really warm today and raining like crazy. Below zero again tomorrow night!
-------------
Yes, of course. But "in common" surely misapprehends the whole situation and the whole of everything.
Asks the question that misunderstands everything about people before the question
even finishes hanging in the air. (sounds like a phrase from James or something!)
Any long-term relationship seems to move far beyond the real and imaginary bonds
that might have started it eons ago. I think aging itself moves us into these strange zones
of incomprehension. I hear it in Leonard Cohen's later songs. "How lonely does it get,
Hank Willaims hasn't answered yet" in "Tower of Song" I think. At the same time
we become more and more grateful or just resigned and accepting of having someone,
anyone, "around." Sounds like a cat or dog, maybe. But even that is ok. Beingness,
life with life, isn't this the gray gravel patterns of those famous Japanese zen gardens?
You and Peg don't "have" a bucket list or a life list of "in common" anythings. Years
of being with each other through multitude of unreal moments. Even if we want to
ask well what does even "with" mean? Let's go microwave a cup of soup!
A disturbing question: I had lunch with a guy I attended Brown with. He and I reconnected about a year ago. He is now a retired lawyer who lives in northern Virginia. During lunch he asked me what I had in common with Peg. I was hard pressed to come up with anything. Have you had any experience like this? it's sobering to say the least.
P
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Jan 12. 2018
Dear André,
Back to our most important agenda item, let’s get together. Did Dartmouth come through with the offer of a summer course on Proust? That would be ideal for me because then we could have more than one lunch. We will clearly need more since our topic will be both persons we each like least.
If Dartmouth does offer, do not sign the contract until there is a clause guaranteeing you both air conditioned housing and an air conditioned seminar or class room. In spite of appearances, Hanover can be astonishingly, miserably, hot and humid for more than a few days in the summer Quarter.
I’m glad you didn’t invite me to the Century Club and turned it down. The brother of a friend up here was president at one time (André Bernard), and what little I have heard about him would make me not so interested in that outfit.
Winter snows envelope us deeply at the moment. Getting down to the city,
your city, is not that easy for me especially in this season. Once we survive mud season and hear rumors of flowers in locales further south, travel becomes more possible. You might want to come north, too, as far as Middletown, CT, or even Boston, to wander the Gardner Museum. April 15 they hang the nasturtiums in the courtyard for Isabel’s birthday and we try to get down to see them as a ritual marker for the hope of summer.
I’m re-reading Enigma V, slowly. I should start a private glossary of those phrases and places where the prose speaks directly into my secret places no one can know about. Poisoning minds indeed. You mentioned you continue to work on the essays on misreading. Yes, I look forward to those for sure. And yet, for me, the fiction is where the teller’s inward voice entices me to admissions and unravels tangles I thought no one else could know about. Conrad’s great story, “The Secret Sharer.” Isn’t that reading in its greatest pleasures? Writing too?
I marked up heavily page after page of Eight White Nights, when I first read it and I will go back for a much more slow reading some time. Given the great success of Call Me right now I have to wonder if, even if no one ever finishes reading Eight, you say, has anyone yet bought the movie rights to it?? The book describes
glorious winter nights in the city so beautifully, I can see the images on screen.
Bob
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Telephone chat with Dick about their trip to France in April
We booked the Panama trip this morning! woo hoo
“Secrecy, love, guilt, we could glimpse their source. And if I wrote this grave and solemn text when I got back to Vienna it’s probably to record them in turn, as much as to rediscover, through prose, the presence of Sarah who had gone -- plunged into mourning, overwhelmed--to confront her sadness in Paris. What a strange sensation, rereading yourself. An aging mirror. I am attracted and repulsed by this former self as by another. A first souvenir, inserted between memory and me. A diaphanous leaf of paper that light passes through to outline other images on it. A stained-glass window. I is in the night. Being exists always in this distance, somewhere between an unfathomable self and the other in oneself. In the sensation of time. In love, which is the impossibility of fusion between self and other. In art, the experience of otherness. 357 of Compass
Nice passage. Aciman might like it.
Now we have this project to construct and execute for the spring and another for the fall.
-------letter actually sent----
Jan 12. 2018
Dear André,
Back to our most important agenda item, let’s get together. Did Dartmouth come through with the offer of a summer course on Proust? That would be ideal for me because then we could have more than one lunch. We will clearly need more since our topic will be both persons we each like least.
If Dartmouth does offer, do not sign the contract until there is a clause guaranteeing you both air conditioned housing and an air conditioned seminar or class room. In spite of appearances, Hanover can be astonishingly, miserably, hot and humid for more than a few days in the summer Quarter.
I’m glad you didn’t invite me to the Century Club and turned it down. The brother of a friend up here was president at one time (André Bernard), and what little I have heard about him would make me not so interested in that outfit.
Winter snows envelope us deeply at the moment. Getting down to the city is not that easy for me especially in this season. Once we survive mud season and hear rumors of flowers, travel becomes more possible. You might want to come north, too, as far as Middletown, CT, or even Boston, to wander the Gardner Museum. April 15 they hang the nasturtiums in the courtyard for Isabel’s birthday and we try to get down to see them as a ritual marker for the hope of summer.
I’m re-reading Enigma V, slowly. I should start a private glossary of those phrases and places where the prose speaks directly into my interior places no one could know about. Poisoning minds indeed. You mentioned you continue to work on the essays on misreading. Yes, I look forward to those for sure. And yet, for me, the fiction is where the teller’s inward voice entices me to admissions and unravels tangles I didn’t know could be revealed. Conrad’s great story, “The Secret Sharer.” Isn’t that reading in its greatest pleasures? Writing too?
I marked up page after page of Eight White Nights, when I first read it and I will go back for a much more slow reading. Has anyone bought the movie rights to it?? The book describes glorious winter nights in the city so beautifully, I can see the images on screen.
Bob
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Sunday 14 January
Roy called from Abq. Settling in. Rick needed lots of pain shots before and for the trip. What are “pain shots?”
Bright and sunny.
Monday Jan 15 MLK
“in his own impasse, in that aporia, between self and other, which is identity.” 374
Énard
or between self, other and other, which is identity--according to Aciman and Garlitz
Rupert’s essay on his poetry and life has all the authority and stance of an encyclical from the vatican. A statement of position and dogma, fragmentation as the faith of poets and writers at the turn of the millenium. And now our 45th parodies this faith a hundred times a day.
Bed in this room cleaned off at last. A new day dawns. Now that we have two cruises ahead of this year, we will sail onward with no hitches. Sunshine today looked wonderful.
Énard: “Bethege, an almost motionless traveler who knew no Arabic, no Persian, no Chinese. The original, the essence, remains between the text and his translations, in a land between languages, between worlds, somewhere in the nako-djaabad, the nowhere-place, that imagined world where music also takes its source. There is no original. Everything is in flux. Between languages. Between times, the time of Hafez and that of Hans Bethge. Translation as metaphysical practice. Translation as meditation. It’s very late to be thinking of these things. The memory of Sarah and music pushes me to these melancholies. These wide spaces of the vacuity of time.” 398
Énard born in ’72. So he is the generation after Loydell and in his work we see what has come, is here, after the dogmas of fragmentation. The new school of faith in betweenness. Aciman part of it, elder statesman for it? The apophasis of translation. Of shifting from language to language with no belief that an essence will be found and can never be carried from one to another. Flux transcends fragmentation. Flux precedes fragmentation. Flux contains all fragments. Fragmentation assumes flux. Flux subsumes fragmentation.
Tuesday 16 Jan
Hmm. Seem to have reinvented Heraclitus up there. With Énard’s prompting. Day off today and nowhere to go. Snow late this afternoon and evening but it feels like snow now. Gray, pale white skies.
The long history of French in my life that has brought me to the point of trying each day to read Proust and Modiano and Énard (perhaps) in French. When and where did I first hear about French? Probably the movies. Gigi and on television and where else? Ursuline sisters and sisters of Charity who took care of me in the hospital when I had the tonsilectomy. They wore the big sail hats from Breton. But did I even know then that they were French? I don’t think so. Did I hear them speak French? No. Somehow mother talked about the Ursuline sisters so much that I always thought her parish was a French parish, but I heard lots of Church Latin but have no clear memory of hearing anyone speak French. In high school we had German and Latin. Not until college did I start some study of French but in the novitiate at Ammendale, that was the immersion in Frenchness. The history of the order, of the founder, St LaSalle, and of the spiritual reading we were given. Old style French spiritual practices. Perhaps the most consciously “first” notion of doing some French was the book by Dechanet about Christian Yoga. I knew that it was a book translated from French and that he was a French monk who was promoting yoga and a desirable way to be both christian and a monk. As an aid to prayer and the interior life. Had I read Dickens novel about the revolution in high school? Maybe. Maybe I read it later in college. In French classes we were supposed to be able to read Camus’s L’Etranger but I felt hardly conscious at that time, those two years were traumatic years, culminating in the two short spells in the mental hospital the second year. I didn’t like trying to study French, it was like trying to study mathematics. How did I ever pass the course on beginning calculus or the two courses on French. I did purchase, however, the Jerusalem Bible, one copy in French and one in British translation. That copy I think I gave to Feeny. The French copy is still on the bookshelf downstairs! That bible was at the time the fruit of what was considered the most advanced study of the bible in light of the most advanced studies of archaeology in that post-war period. A scholar at La Salle was considered one of the leading students of biblical archaeology in Catholic circles at that time. When I got to Maryland did I buy them? Or in Chicago? Talismans of the previous monastic life and of the desire to be with it in advanced Catholic studies. Énard could have put into his novel the Orientalism of the Roman church. My experience of that was the shrine in Washington where the Eastern mosaics introduced me to the whole Orientalist world of orthodox Christianity and of Eastern art in general. Little or no comprehension of all of that at the time, but exposure.
Just opened his book at my bookmark and there the next paragraph to read on 405 is about the Catholic missionaries to the East. Orientalist scholars translate and import and missionaries translate and export. Both Orientalists creating eastern realities as they wish them to be. He calls it, this imagined fourth volume, the encyclopaedia of the decapitated. That resonates with our own local martyr of a few years back, our college dean’s grandson. Foley. Trained by the Jesuits at Marquette. The war photographer.
Opened Enigma to page 119 and there is one of Aciman’s bold passages and I see now I sort of missed it when I first read the book maybe a year ago, or more now. Such a fine scene on the terrace of the Plums, Maud and Gabi and Paolo, our narrator, in a delicate and tender and sort of violent, muted, entanglement. Just the sort Aciman loves, needs. The three way. If he is writing essays on misreading, he will need to make the three-way structure the key to all of it. The not-key. Is he conscious of the role of the trinity in Western thought? Should I even ask him that? He is not Leonard Cohen and yet growing up in Alexandria and Rome, oh, he has to have his christian theology tucked into one side of his belt.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach
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That foto is funny cuz i was trying out the timer on the camera my ex gave me, alil point and shoot thingy , but nice in its own way.
When i realized how simple it was to do a selfie i took that 2nd photo, the one on the site, and just nailed it for me anyways and others seem to agree!
i think the lighting is ironic in that its so classicall rembrandt or vermeer-esque in that it lights the volume of me fr om the side and the
opposite side is dark.
It was nice to send a mssg out into the world and get a response.
Thanks for taking a look and your comments.
Sincerely, Andy!
Andy St Martin
How many of us say that, would say that,
Finished Énard’s novel. Novel? Dissertation recast as delirious lamentation-ecstatic ejaculation. Well, longish, so nightmare-dream-hallucination. Was he taking opium? Probably meant to seem so. An opium dream.
Lunch at the new place in Bristol. Mexican. Stools only. Good tortilla soup and huge piece of tres leches cake. Good but too big. Small group of students from New Hampton dazzled by the making by hand at their table of guacamole.
Post office and then a nap. Was nice to read for a long stretch.
Alex Aciman has a piece in the Times. Kirsten sent it thinking it was André.
my comment on it---
piece seemed ehh ok. Invoking Dreyfus
seemed to me to be way out of scale. But
maybe I don’t know. Seems to me as a
30 year old raised in activist nyc jewishness
Alex wants to tell his MyStory. Not sure his
analysis of France is that clear.
Phil replying to
Thanks for sending that article. For me it really gave a back-story to Aciman's book about his family in Alexandria. It also made me realized that I should have asked myself waaaay before now why all those Jews in British-run Alexandria dreamt of Paris and not London or Vienna or Rome. Well now we know. French Jews put together a big cultural organization to attract them. And it obviously worked on families such as Aciman's. (I'm thinking it was less successful with rug merchants.) As for Alex's assessment of the present. He's probably right about some areas of France and not so right about other areas. As you say, 'eeh okay.' I think the closer one lives to the big urban areas with large ethnic slums filled with resentful third worlders the worse it will be, and if one's standard is perfectionism - "I should be able to go anywhere in this country I want and do whatever I want' that ain't ever gonna be achieved in France or, likely, anywhere else. Then again isn't the entire Jewish schtick to demand perfection of the world and then be disappointed when it's not achieved......P
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Over an hour on speaker phone with Rick Evans about the money. Skim the top of the bull market now and put plans into place for more conservative rebalancing to be safer for when it crashes.
Thurs 18th
Aciman’s reply yesterday --well it was two days ago, the 16--had not noticed his noted about typos courtesy of iPhone until now.
Dear Bob,
I'm going to disappoint you. Dartmouth was unable to offer me a summer gig; instead they offered me a semester (or almost a semester) in one of the coming two years, and I had to turn down this offer because the salary did not match a half-year salary for my title at CUNY. So the courtship is up in the air, which is a pity since I had a terrific time during my week at Montgomery House.
Now we should find a way to meet. I wanted to write an essay on Pessoa, and i have loads of notes on the subject. My problem is time. I am travelling almost all of February bad then in May I have to go to Australia, to say nothing of the Proust I need to reread for my seminar which starts in the coming two weeks! I forget everything, always have.
What you say about 8 White Nights and Enigma pleases me no end. I may have mentioned that 8WN is my favorite book, even though no one reads it. Strange, isn't it?
Write back soon.
Andre
On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Aciman, Andre
André
Typos courtesy iPhone
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So far my reply is “Well, disappointment for now, but I am sure the meeting will happen, we know not when. Much more disappointed if you publish your Pessoa essay and the title is not “Where I Place Pessoa on the Garlitz Apophasis Scale and All the Reasons Why.” Or something like that.
Lots of notes on Pessoa. Are you reading him in Portuguese, French, English, (Zenith or Jull Costa)? Or all of these?
Yes you had said both points about 8WN. Why is it your favorite? You said you wrote it for yourself and does it feel like you are having the fun with it you most enjoy writing? Why does no one finish it? That is curious. Most people probably can’t say?
Indulge me here: I harbor the notion that CMBYN sprang from a short seed passage, maybe a paragraph or two, maybe a sub-chapter, in an early draft of Egypt, and you or someone said, this experience, right here, you should take that out and save it and expand it later into its own full perfection. ? Good hunch or am I way off the mark?
Maybe something similar for Harvard Square as well? That book needs a bit more commentary, but we’ll save that for later. My first year of grad study at Chicago I lived in International House on 59th Street and I met a handful of Kalaj’s who have long stayed in my memory. Lost and wandering students and “students” who came from all over the globe. 1968
Stay busy
----
20 Jan Sat
Above not yet sent. Today we decided to go ahead with the Bali to Bankok Viking trip for 2019. 2 for 1 pricing got us. And carpe diem.
To try to visit NYC to see Aciman? earlier today I thought yes. Now not so sure. Better see Jim for his 80th this spring. ?
21 Jan Sunday night
sending off the reply to André. Now I think I will make no promises about trying to get down to the city. Could be a waste of everything.
sent
Dear André
Yes, disappointed but then did I expect anything other than that?
Much more disappointed if you publish your Pessoa essay and the title is not “Where I Place Pessoa on the Garlitz Apophasis Scale and All the Reasons Why.” Or something like that.
"Lots of notes on Pessoa." Are you reading him in Portuguese, French, English, (Zenith or Jull Costa)? Or all of these?
Yes you had said both points about 8WN. Why is it your favorite? You said you wrote it for yourself. You had most pleasure in writing it?
Why does no one finish it? That is strange. Most people probably can’t say? What is the most common reason why?
Indulge me here: I harbor the notion that CMBYN sprang from a short passage, maybe a paragraph or two, maybe a sub-chapter, in an early draft of Egypt, and you or someone said, this experience, right here, you should take that out and save it and expand it later into its own full perfection. ? Good hunch or am I way off the mark?
If I get your schedule, March and April could be open and then when you get back from Australia, late May onward? I'll be gone first two weeks of May.
More important to write back. Soon. I like that as the best way to close off, for now.
Bob
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Hi Jim---
Is Cadeau launched yet as a book between covers? Looked for it on
amazon but not up there yet.
What a pure gem it is. Enjoyed much reading the copy you sent electronically.
Now want to spread the news a bit. The three Denises must be the key--
the craftsman, the reclaimed Denise and that fellow mentioned in the author's
note after. Beautifully written, intricate and intense with lots of different kinds
of flashes---wit, humor, insight, brilliance, yearning and peace.
Am I loading it down with too many notes? Alas, I am more Salieri to your Mozart.
Bob
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I',m leaving for Toronto tomorrow morning then coming back to a full schedule of things, especial with classes starting. Then by Feb 16 I leave for Midwest and west coast for two weeks and am back possibly by March 5th. Here in NYC until very very late April ad early may, when I head out to Sydney and Melbourne. Then there's Italy in late June and possibly Brazil in August. After which I will probably meet my maker.
CMBYN started with the first page one morning when I just wanted to stop writing 8WN. It inspired me and I kept writing it.
As for why 8WN is still my favourite, with Enigma ranking second, that requires a single malt which I'd gladly offer you at the Hudson Hotel Bar when we find a moment..
André
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Two more texts to add in here and then I’m done being in the admirer entourage!
I like what he says about Proust in a piece on favorite books for a Toronto wesite---
"Marcel Proust essentially told me it was OK to keep looking into your heart and your psyche because that's where we spend most of our time anyway.”
but then about five or six years ago in an interview--
What is a distinctive habit or affectation of yours?
I tolerate lots of people I have no patience or respect for. Then, as soon as I can, I rat on them.
--------
not that I would be one of those he has no respect for---but why say that sort of thing in an interview at all---surely some other affectation or habit would have served as well for a reply and even served better. “person I like least” also gives us a clue to how impossible he might be in person even having a friendly drink or lunch.
Monday 22 January all of the above
In The Fugitive Albertine has just died. Wonderful passages. Reading very slowly, sometimes looking at the French just to see how it looks and feels.
short note from Jim about his book ---
Launched? Almost! A single block to be knocked out, and then down the ways she goes!
The one block: They’re still tinkering with the cover but are close to done. Looks like a maiden voyage next month, matey!
Don’t worry about loading me down with notes! Like you, I’m an unreformed formalist and delight the links you uncover. (Not many of us left, but too bad for the rest. I’d say “Screw ‘em!” or worse, but I’m still working at being a
Quaker.)
Thanks for your cherished encouragement, cherished friend.
J. Sam’l, aka Denis Andrew
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better to go see him in May
thing is, Paolo in Enigma has just said how he envies Manfred as he watches him from the stands on the court in front of him. “I envied you.” 143
Have not yet said to André that it is this direct admission of envy that distinguishes his work beyond any other writer I’ve ever read. And which bonds me to Paolo more closely than to any other narrator to whom I’ve felt close. Identical.
23 January Tuesday
Day off. Up and down the highway in freezing rain, near freezing rain. Heavy rain. Didn’t make it to Phillip the acupuncturist in Lawrence. Texted cancel from Hooksett. Bought a book on the paintings in Proust and the older translation of the Prisoner and Fugitive. Big breakfast at the rest stop diner and later a small salad at the Coop. Just realized I didn’t have an afternoon tea but now I think I’ll skip it, see how sleep goes. Jackfruit at Whole Foods, the taqueria stand. Vegan filler the young fellow said. We’ll see how it goes down. Also “grain free” tortilla chips! Cassava. !
Can see why Enigma is A’s second favorite book. I can envy him his books, his writing. But I could never write them even though I can imagine “I could have” or I resent that he has “stolen” the books I “should have” written. But they are beyond my capacities, beyond not capacities but willingness, daringness, neediness. They are the work of a writer much younger, much more self-assured in spite of how much he insists he is not. He may have a hidden or not-so-hidden streak of self-hatred, but he masks it and transmutes it into something acceptably public even while it feels at times like we are reading an old-style “true confessions” book---yet it is confessional in ways not usually found in American writing. Is it an almost embarassing itimacy. The narrator is not talking to his therapist or confidante but to himself in ways he would never want anyone else to know or hear. Have any reviewers talked about that? They don’t seem to have that many reviews, actually. Maybe the success of the movie will prompt some longer, more considered assessments. London Review? I will search now. Or TLS?
Last episode of The Crown. Wrecked lives. Almost tragic?
Driving all day, icy roads, ice on trees, gray. Food. A few pages of Proust every so often. No visit to the acupuncturist, disappointment there. Still raining outside, dripping. Late. Time for bed.
The word “rat” in Aciman’s vocabulary. In Enigma he uses it in the same way as in the interview. Must be a word, an American idiom, he loved learning when he was a newcomer and trying hard to master the slang of his new New York school friends. Or did he get caught or accused of ratting out his friends, or did someone rat out him? “I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don’t fly out and rat on one another’s dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves.” 162 Enigma
152 When I thought about it, it made me feel I’d infringed on something wholesome and private and ever so chaste about you, like an instance of the holy that suddenly flares before our eyes and then leaves us speechless, humbled, and shaken.”
This could describe the effect of A’s work. Why it embarrasses us, shakes us up, an instance of the holy that flares suddenly before our eyes.
24 January
TV ad for law firm uses melanoma and cialis as the hook for giving the law firm a call. May or may not be an ethical tv ad but it got me looking around again at cialis and eczema and I am now convinced the key factor is Cialis. Just realized too I could ask my nephew the urologist to see what he might or might not say here. But clearly it was less than two years ago, year or so? when Fagan and the Mid-Point pharmacy shifted the Viagra prescription to Cialis and I have been taking that exclusively for maybe a little over a year. Not that often but still. Going to stop altogether for few months and see what happens. I think the worst recent flare-up of the eczema was Monday evening, tonight is Wednesday, and I last took the pill on Sunday evening (maybe Saturday?). Anyway, it takes three days to kick-in successfully it has always seemed and it has always seemed that it kicks-in and then stays in for too long---after effects seem to last two or three days after the initial punch. And it has always felt less effective and less comfortable than Viagra. That had its unpleasant effects but they were different. That’s my theory for today. Dartmouth Hitchcock actually called today to see if I wanted an appointment with my doctor there. I sent an email to Cris to see if I could ask him
his opinion.
25 Jan
Off to take the car for maintenance. Repair guy for the dishwasher between 1 and 4. Va staying home for that. Now of course it seems silly to target Cialis. Did ask Cris on email. Could easily be the beer and wine. Yeast, fungus. Some people online say put apple cider vinegar on the nummules themselves. Try it. Had that cider vinegar mango drink yesterday, try more of that. Probiotics! Flares were all remarkably quiet last night, direct causal result of that vinegary drink no doubt. Get a case of it and see if that is the key. How we, not we but the logical brain, needs, needs, needs a single bullet cause and explanation. Did not go to yoga last night. George and Darlene sick and I would feel too conspicuous in that group without George being there. Wanted to find a group with a few more elderly guys like me but guess not. Maybe I’ll drop it altogether after one or two more stints.
158 in Engima Paolo/Paul/Pauly talks about his fantasies taking over and indeed this is what the books invite, some kind of inner wild fantasy confessional intimacy. Think of how Fitzgerald distanced all of it by having his narrator be on the frame of the supposed story in center focus. Aciman brushes aside all of that. His harkening back to the Princess de Cleve as a favorite source (and subject of his intense academic work) gives a fine antique burnish to his ways of telling and ways of knowingly asking, “Freud, what Freud, who was he and why should we care?” And the place of the father in the works? Father-son love, man to man love, man to woman love, love to love love, longing in all of its guises. Fatherness hovering behind it all, over it all. A Jewish sensibility? Egyptian/Middle Eastern?
Mediterranean? That case could certainly be made most strongly.
And at the key moment of revelation to Manfred, Pauly shows him his photo of himself as a twelve-year old. Adolescent hero worship-love-crush, directly invoked as a good reason for adults to keep going with the crush. Who would do that? What would John Cheever have had to say about that? Or even Updike? We know how much Bellow would have scoffed at it. Generationalism at its worst and best here? Is Aciman proud to be a not-grown-up eternal adolescent? Is Pauly? Has he never heard of the Peter Pan boy put-down by American thinkers, feminists? Aciman can reply to any and all such question with his universal answer---“humans are a mess.”
Twitter brings news of Aciman’s piece on the movie in Vanity Fair. Audible channel interview with Faith Salie about Enigma Variations. Vignettes, aperçus.
“We are always enigmatic to ourselves.” “What do I want?” I don’t know. Always in a condition of uncertainty when you want something.
“The book is about wanting.” Abington Square was written first.
“We should never be bitter about what people have done, what we have done.”
every molecule of feeling, the fermentation of desire,
writing makes you vulnerable and bold, everyone has thought and felt everything in this book---courage to write frank assessment of our sexuality is what I want to do---he’s in the closet, he’s polyamorous---we all are--what we do is another question. Love stories are mysteries. Always a revelation at the end (not O’Henry!!). The other person makes us love ourselves---if they make us a person we don’t want to be, we don’t love them.
Salie gives Aciman fifteen minutes almost and then switches to the British guy who gives out the bad literary sex award each year for the Literary Review. Ho hum.
So Aciman says pretty much what we know he will say. By now. I’ve got his number! Ha. But not his courage to write as he does. Nor, I guess, do I want to have it now that we think more about it. Venture to say his Eight is about his relationship with his wife, more or less. And for that reason is it much less about the sex that followed (is there any in it??), and all about the courtship tennis game stretched out many readers would say for far too many pages. He loves the book because he loved the courtship and loved recreating it and slowing it down and enjoying as a writer how much it gave him to write about, to savor and to explore. That’s what he most enjoys doing.
I should fire off one final question to him---Envy. You write about envy more fully and more delicately and more insightfully than any writer I’ve ever read. Bravo
for that, thank you for that. Why is that? Why have so few writers written about envy or have written so poorly about envy? Until you?
That’s good. I’ll fire that off and then we done with him. Back to Proust. Today in Fugitive Proust dazzled as he is supposed to do.
But didn’t I do a word search and find that the word envy does not show up that many times in Eight? Better re-check that. But even so, the query is worth it.
He brings up envy at all the most perfect moments in these relationships.
26 January
Phone chat with Rick E about funds. I like the way he talks about things, both his voice and his takes on things. His wife is an architect, from Guatemala, and they are building their first small house on Lake Sunapee. He bought some kind of saw today to rework something on the insulation that the builder had not done properly. They are using a German plan for super-insulation and lowest possible heating expenses. The thick walls will be filled with cellulose---newspaper or something similar. I told him we were going to White River Jct tomorrow for lunch and he mentioned the British place. I knew he meant Piecemeal Pie and told him it was not British, that is that the chef-owner hails from West Virginia. I forget how I found that out two years ago. Someone at the Tucker Box most likely.
Marci called again tonight, upset. Rick’s doctor in Abq says he has cancer, told him this a year ago, apparently. They will stay in Abq and Marci’s daughter will pack up Rick’s things and send them up. No clear prognosis or treatment info.
We swam and then walked at Lowes and then lunched at BurritoMe. Water was cold and have I felt chilled all day or just imagining that?
Somewhere looking around the interviews I found Aciman telling us that he uses a Waterman Charleston rollerball pen. ! Should I buy one? $150. more or less. Wait. Good passage from one site about why he likes novellas---psychological focus and tension---describes perfectly the pieces in Enigma:
“I’ve always loved novellas, namely because they exhibit a degree of concentrated psychological acuity, which novels, because they need to provide so much material devoted to plot, simply end up diluting. A novella is focused on one issue—doggedly. Space is a premium, but not time. A novella can span years, months, or days—provided there is a revelation at the end, and provided the story—or is it an elegy—is about a tremulous, forbidden desire. Best of all, and unlike a short story, a novella does not need that idiotic move called a twist at the end. Revelation is one thing; twist quite another.”
Perfect. But it does not apply to Proust very well. It could be used pretty well, however, for Modiano. His works are all short, novella length or just a little bit more. Not sure if the term works even in French. But still, and given the sense Aciman has in mind, of intensity and revelation, we can say that Modiano gets his power by using the short form but without the dogged acuity and without the revelation. A powerful sense of displacement and lostness and nothing or very little adding up to anything. A difference profound between the two writers, primarily of generation but also of geography and ultimately family. Modiano had no family, at least not compared to Aciman, who had a supremely intense family experience.
Today is now Saturday 27 January. Poor Willow slept poorly last night, worried about Rick’s cancer. Petie asked for the name of his doctor and we’re all hoping for more information and clarity of what’s next, if the doctor can say much. Watching “Nurse Jackie” now in the evenings may not be helping.
Helps to have temperatures go back to the 40s today for our big luncheon in White River.
night Fun and strange gathering. Helen coming down off of a migraine. Had been a week at the farm with her brother and older sister. Anna is moving to Kuai to take a prosecutor’s job. We were all sort of spacey, conversation disjointed into two ends of the table. Food was good. Day never that warm and sunny but ok.
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to Phil
Yes have heard of a Salt Room Spa. I think Va's brother tried it once in Mexico.
Ask them if it is supposed to help with adult/senior eczema. (Of course I know
what they will say, but still . . . .) I'm going to try some accupressure/puncture
on Tuesday to see if that does anything. Also going to look for a different
dermatologist to get another opinion. I now later up on moisturizers all over
about once or twice a day. we went swimming this morning and the pool water
really dries out my hide. one's one-track mind and mind devoured by fifty years of advertising just refuses to believe there isn't a pill one can take for this crap
and/or a causal indicator one can avoid. Stop drinking merlot and your skin will clearn up within two months. That sort of magical thinking.
Va's brother came home from Mexico, to Abq. His doctor here says he has a cancerous tumor behind one eye. Waiting to hear further prognostications on that.
Meanwhile her sister and new husband have been in England, suburban London for
three weeks. He's overseeing a remodeling of a conference center for their church.
They both find the cold and rain are not doing their asthma and overall health much good.
Photos on the news of Paris flooded but Dave says their district is ok
Hope the Salt room does help Peg.
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Found a salt cave spa right here in Salem. I’m going on Tuesday, after the acupressure session!
Monday 29 January
super special moon coming up this week.
Listening to another version of La Prisonniere read by Andre Dussollier
and like his voice a lot. Took and epsom salts bath, soak. Did it do any good? Read a short ebook about healing from eczema. Young woman.
Tuesday 30 Jan
Super moons next two nights. Gray and cloudy this morning. Off to Lawrence and acupressure treatment and then if time the salt room.
Wholistic new age, post-new age, retro-new age searches. Mineral salts bath might actually have helped last night. The flare nodules look much quieter today.
Night Splendid day of first-time adventures. Had I ever seen Lawrence? Huge mill buildings. Acupressure guy in there, urban lofts marketed I suppose to Boston commuters. North Shore includes Lawrence according to him. Great massage and overall experience. After that I found the Salt Cave in Salem, paid $20. and was the only customer in the basement chamber. Meditation music and float-back sling chairs so I had a fine nap within the forty-five minute zone. Woke up about ten minutes before the end. Some sort of salted air is blown into the chamber as well as what radiates off from the two tons of Himalayan pink salt. When did the pink salt craze begin here? Ten years ago? And why? As with the acu-ssage,
doing this just to see what it was like was delightful. Maybe like a sauna
without the heat? Can see how it would feel good for respiration problems.
Tim today confirmed and answered and embellished on so many notions and ideas I’ve had over the years. In one session. Will go back. Salt room also.
31 Jan Weds night
Fine French movie last night, “Going Away,” “Un beau dimanche” 2013.
