AS I WROTE
EARLIER TODAY ON FACEBOOK: TODAY, ST.
PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin is officially published by the
University of Notre Dame Press. 50 years ago today, on the Feast of the
Assumption as my sister Mary Ann McGonigle reminded me, I broke my knee during
the Peace Corps training at Occidental College to go to Turkey to teach
English. My life really changed back then. Later today on the blog abcofreading.blogspot.com I will try to tease out the connections
between today then and now shadowed as today is by knowing that the woman who
went to Turkey a few weeks from today 50 years ago and who was probably the
best volunteer in the project is dying in a hospice uptown from where I am
sitting on East First Street in Manhattan.
As I was writing these lines I felt very important, very much in
the present moment and filled with whatever it is that allows me to sum up the
world in a few sentences with my own individual experiences at the center of
that place.
The reality is quite different as beyond a few people no one in
the billions of inhabitants are aware of these two moments.
The publication of ST. PATRICK’S DAY another day in Dublin
has gone un-mentioned in the usual organs of review: Publisher’s Weekly,
Library Journal and Kirkus. This is not unusual as the book has been published
by a university press and as such is a bit away from the something or
other… the press has done what it can:
copies have been sent to a list of suggested possible reviewers, been sent to
the usual newspapers but it is likely these copies are on its way to The Strand Book Store or an
equivalent where it will be sold to that shop for few pennies on the dollar…
An August 15 book is simply old news to the newspapers and as
such has a SELL BY stamp as prominent as the A in The Scarlet Letter. The remaining two weeks of August
will confirm my supposition or…
It is probably no accident that these lines are beginning to
echo the man in Krapp’s Last Tape.
Additionally at the moment there has been no definite news from
any of the individuals or magazines as to what may result… but according to the
publicity person three small journals have expressed some interest in seeing
copies of the book but now most of these
journals have large digital adjunct to the printed version and I am agnostic as
to what it means to be published digitally… being “dated” as I am: it is print I crave… but how old-fashion of
me! A relic
OF COURSE I am echoing the Pascalian fearful silences of the empty spaces. But more immediately I am echoing the narrator who is often
confused with the author in George Garett’s POISON PEN where in
talking about the job of a creative writing professor is to prepare students
for bad reviews but for what is more likely: the Silence.
However in this writing I
am now in the afternoon and in a few hours I will be on the playing field
opposite the swimming pool at Occidental College. The Turkish languge classes have finished for
the day …maybe there was a lecture on Turkish history …it is possible I looked
at a page in the ARTUAD ANTHOLOGY which
City Lights had published and which I bought at the suggestion of Jim Kari who
had heard about it as UCLA and who lived down the hall in the dorm and came
from Hermosa Beach …duplicating that moment I opened the book and these
lines: THERE’S AN ANGUISH There’s an acid and turbid anguish---powerful
as a knife---whose quartering is as heavy as earth….(my eye skipped down to the
bottom of the page): It consumes only
what belongs to it, it is born of if its own asphyxiation.
I don’t think I would have looked again at LIFE AGAINST
DEATH…remember that? by Norman O.
Brown… an attempt against the living
death then being sold in America at the moment and of course it was very very popular
and now forgotten… the Artaud lead me
many years later to David Rattray who had translated some of the Artaud texts
and who helped a piece of my writing FORGET THE FUTURE into BOMB… http://bombmagazine.org/article/1375/an-ending.
Of course for the sake of “my” book I hope this credit will
allow BOMB to note ST PATRICK’S DAY another day in Dublin arrival though I will
believe it when I see it. Mention of Artaud and how long ago was their
publishing: an ancient, I do believe!
TO
CUT TO… I am sitting on the edge of the pool with my leg in the water… I must
have fainted for a moment when someone stepped on my foot to block my passing the ball on the soccer field and now it hurts and hurts and that night it will
swell up and a day later there will be surgery and recovery in Northern Wisconsin
where my parents are living in exile from New York… at the end of October I
will go to Dublin and in the spring I will visit those from the Peace Corps who
are now teaching in Istanbul, Ankara, Bafra, Eskisehir and I will look for them
again in the fall after having been in Bulgaria though some will have been
thrown out Turkey for drugs and I will go back to Sofia and marry Lilia and
eventually she and I will return to Dublin where I will continues to see the
surgeon about my knee now mostly healed .and have to go over to London, to the
American airbase at Ruislip to get a physical for the draft. A Scottish boy is
also waiting for his physical and hoping he will not be rejected, as he so
wants to leave Scotland…
The
Peace Corps volunteer I saw in Eskisehir is now dying in a hospice where the
pain is controlled, mostly, as she told
me last.
If
I remember correctly, Artaud went mad on one of his voyages to/from Mexico and
was taken off the ship to be institutionalized in Ireland for a while.
I
thought of Artaud years later when in Rodez to take the train for Paris after
visiting Hannah Green and John Wesley in Conques… but all of that is for
another time …now there is the waiting for the silence
5 comments:
Your book, ordered today, will arrive to join the previous two. I Will not sign up with the peace corps over play soccer except with my grandchildren and I may never travel to Bulgaria. But I do look forward to reading your book.
Better soccer than tennis as tennis is the WASP revenge--- I once saw a little book which was made of clippings from newspapers about Jewish men dying while playing tennis..I forgot to bring in the palm trees that decorated the Occidental campus.... and then I always associate LA with Hermosa Beach and meeting Jim Kari's cousin who was a blond with a TR3 sports car... my son has taken to the west and I can well imagine that his children will be westerners...
Did you realize that a classmate of ours, Lois More, from Beloit is editing the letters of Samuel Beckett; it is three volumes. This is being done at Emory University where she has also taught. I don't know if you recall Lois, who was tall and a bit awkward in gait. She married Jim Overbeck and I wrote to her after the second volume came out. I said, "Lois, you are the last person on earth I would ever think of as having any interest in Samuel Beckett." She a devout Christian with her husband. She had no defense. She is still the last--and if you recall her at all--person SamuelBeckettwise. I lived next door to her in Mueller House and she was certainly a very intelligent woman. Not to be confused with my other friend, Gail Moore, in Arkansas.
I remember Lois and I have tried to contact her but the email at the Emory site didn't work... Gail Moore is also someone I remember fondly from Beloit and often wonder what happened to her... they and Elliott Anderson were along with Gunda Korsts the literary people at Beloit...there was a guy from Texas but his name slips my memory at the moment... I published my third story in the Beloit literary magazine Satyre... based on an incident in Patchogue
To Thomas McGonigle: Nice to be remembered, but now I'm wondering at all the other points of possible connection for our separate decades since Beloit College. -- Did you ever come across the Artaud Project, performed in Chicago in 1980? My sister Anda Korsts was involved in that, and thanks to coming across this blog today I've found archive video at mediaburn.org ... including a rehearsal with my sister at her house. She died 25 years ago, and the house later burned down, so it was a rare treat to revisit the once familiar surroundings, even on grainy old video, and to hear again her voice and her laugh. A gift, indeed. -- And did I see Estonia in your places of interest? I'm from Latvia (thus my Google identity as Sveika), but am also much in love with our neighbor to the north.
... I'd be pleased to hear from you. For e-mail, take my initials as username and my surname for the dotcom domain. NB: Gunda still feels friendly, but in the 1970s I resumed my formal name, Gundega.
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