FRANZ KLINE NAPKINS from THE POSTHUMOUS CLICHE

 

                       FRANZ KLINE NAPKINS

from               THE POSTHUMOUS CLICHE

                                      knowing Jack(John) WESLE

....but he is saying here I am in this apartment and it is very nice and I don’t know why I am here:  I think I must be getting away with something: I’m getting away with something he says again and I am confessing in some way in response to the silence--- which is a too grand of a word I say--- but it feels like it, when certain names are used when sometimes talking about  art:  I have never understood Picasso or Braque’s work--- and Jack says I don’t know--- people are always talking about them so I guess they knew what they were doing or people were saying they knew what they were doing but I never talked about them because no one ever asked me about them but it could have been because of the people I knew and I say the only painter I ever heard you talk about was Franz Kline and he says I don’t remember and I said it had nothing to do with the white and black paintings or how Kline thought the white part was the most important part but no one ever talked about the white part and only saw the black parts of his paintings which he never understood but you were telling me about being in the Cedar Tavern and he gave you some napkins and even signed them… he had been marking then up with a pen or something and it was just the two of you that night because most times he was always surrounded by all these people and you didn’t know what to talk about and here he was by himself and you  were sitting next to him and he pushed these across to you and then he took them back and scrawled his name on them but didn’t say why he was doing this and you shoved them into your pocket and then sometime in the 60s you needed money so you had to sell them as you didn’t have any need for napkins signed by Franz Kline… so he was the only painter I ever heard you talk about, and Jack is saying if you say so and Rudy is in the room as it is probably time for me to be going and Jack is not wanting to stand up and I am saying you can change your t-shirt  now and I am saying Piret my wife is always telling me I dribble all the time and that is what men do they dribble all the time here there and everywhere and on anything but always always on their clean white t-shirts for sure their t-shirts, it’s something women learn to put up with, she says, if they want to be around a man while Jack is saying there’s another number I’m really afraid of: six, it’s such an incomplete sort of number and then in the movies they are always deep-sixing something or other while Rudy is tapping the back of Jack’s chair, you have to take a piss Jack, he says and then the exercise person is coming, this is a busy day and Jack is saying, I have to take a piss and while it is hard for him to get out of the chair he still saying, six and getting deep-sixed, that is what I am afraid of : they’re going to put an 86 on my forehead and then deep-sixing me out the window or into the toilet--- Jack, you’re so funny, Rudy says and I watch Jack grab the walker—as he is pushing himself up from the chair and he begins to walk saying  they were always deep-sixing things in the Navy movies during the war and I am always scared of being deep-sixed as you say and you never know when they are going to put an 86 on your head and then deep-six you out the window but I don’t  think they would put me down the toilet as it would be better to put me out the window… at the door to the toilet Jack takes his hand off the walker and I shake it and we have a lot to talk about the next time I am saying and he is saying I am glad you came to visit…I hope you will come again…

MY DEAD OF IRELAND

 

This evening I was wondering why Dublin does not come to mind more frequently.  I was in the basement and picked up GIRL ON A BICYCLE a novel by Leland Bardwell.  I had not read it as it was badly printed on paper that turned brown though I  had acquired it from the memory of meeting her in Dublin.  But more vivid in mind was Fintan MacLachlan her companion, boyfriend or what not, now  finally only known as the father of three of her children but when I knew him he was a taxi driver and as a "toucher."  

There is never reason for how names appear in mind, as they simply do...we are always almost unanchored to the present moment

SO to make a list of the dead--- does that account for how Dublin seems to have gone somewhere yet my ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin remains in print in the world--though the National Library of Ireland does not have it in its collection, while University College, Dublin's library has it... 

James Liddy, 

Philip Casey, 

Eugene Lambe, 

Derek Mahon, 

Patrick Kavanagh, 

John Jordan, 

Francis Stuart, 

Liam O'Flaherty, 

Dickie Riordain, 

Dermot Healy, 

John Montague, 

Leland Bardwell, 

J. P. Donleavy,  

Christine Keeler,

Pearse Hutchinson, 

Austin Clarke, 

Jonathan Bardon, 

Ian Whitcomb, 

Tommy Smith, 

Philip Hobsbaum, 

Brian Higgins, 

Michael Hartnett, 

Tim Tollekson, 

Willie and Beatrice Opperman, 

Brian Moore, 

Desmond O'Grady, 

Roger McHugh, 

Jeremiah Hogan, 

Garech Browne, 

Paddy O'Hanlon, 

Jan Kaminski, 

Justin O'Mahony, 

Jim Fitzgerald, 

Stephen and Kathleen Behan, 

Mary Lavin,

But of course Grafton Street remains and St Stephen's Green... I will walk by Ely Place where last I lived...continue on and think of teaching at the Dublin Tuition Center or living in Grosvenor Square...and and and... but no longer tonight

PATRICK MODIANO AND DEREK MAHON: TO BE MISSING

 

PATRICK MODIANO AND DEREK MAHON....

I had just read INVISIBLE INK, the newly translated novel by Patrick Modiano (Yale University Press, 2020) when news came of the death of the Irish poet Derek Mahon. 

                             SUGGESTION: some have suggested the plague will last  for another year  so a wonderful time to read TWO Modiano novels a month and by the end of the year there will be a new one from Yale....

        I have read now 25 of Patrick Modiano's short novels and the coincidence of these two readerly events seem to me to point to the genius of Modiano which could be too easily summed up in Gertrude Stein's famous remark: There is no such thing as repetition.  Only Insistence.

       INVISIBLE INK--- a man remembering a moment when he went looking for a person--- is in so many ways a sort of description of every one of Modiano's novels, novels that hint often overtly  at autobiography or rather at the truthful necessary element that is in every so-called fiction, whether that fiction be by Joyce or Tolstoy or Proust of Celine or or or.. 

       All of Modiano's novels are searches for something or someone who is lost to the narrator, or misplaced for poorly remembered... but then in the so-called real life are we not all accidents and our meetings with others, accidents.

       All of the novels end in some sort of defeat, something found missing or just that phrase found missing and so the only next step is another book... 

      As to Mahon I met him on Dublin in 1965 and again in 66 and in other years but always in some way associated with a certain another: Eugene Lambe

                                 

       (AN ASIDE)What a perfect gift to give to a loved one: a two year subscription and each month they would receive a Modiano novel... I know of only one other author like this: Cesar Aira who is also the author of many many short novels which instead of being searches for are rather concerned with the telling about something or other, a telling... my review from the LA Times of one of Aira's

novels will fill you in on this author:  https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-mar-01-ca-cesar-aira1-story.html. 

Here are the last two lines:

     A final reviewer’s sigh: the charm (if that word is still meaningful) of this scene -- so refreshing. And what a gift: to look forward to reading a new Aira novel from New Directions every year for the rest of one’s life. 

          Sadly, no one will pay me to write a review of Modiano's novel... so I write this post... but as with INVISIBLE INK: "There are blanks in this life, white spaces you can detect if you open the "case file": a single sheet in sky-blue folder that has faded with time. That ancient sky blue has itself turned almost white.  And the words "case file" are written across the middle of the folder.  In black ink.  This is my only remnant of the Hutte Detective Agency, the only trace of my passage in that old..."

         Modiano's words invited me to open pages found when I was into my apartment in Manhattan, pages still held together by a metal spindle minus the covers.... there are some pages of prose in ink and then a list of names some with addresses but others without addresses:

Teddy Disterduck

Brian Mooney

Clive Burland

Gary Seaman

Michael J. Peters 

11357 35th Ave NE  

Seattle

But I've already written about Michael J. Peters and copied out the three letters I had saved from him:  which you can read if you goto July 28, 2015 abcofreading.blogspot.com.

I know why the names are there. Michael J. Peters was the last American I talked to Zagreb--we had met in Trieste--- before I took the train to Istanbul though I got off in Sofia (that began my Bulgarian life) and Michael was on his way to see the Cedars of Lebanon

        Gary Seaman was met in Berlin, Spring 1965) and speaking German took me to East Berlin and then as guests of the FDJ we went to the DDR...he re-appeared in JUST LIKE THAT my novel of a beginning of the Sixties of the last century...

       As to the other and even with these two names I wonder and will only wonder and not having won a Nobel prize and not having published now 25 novels in English translation...no one is lining up to get my whatever might result...and I know because of Modiano there is some value in looking back, though looking back is much frowned upon by the present moment unless one is engaged in some vulgar political polemic...

       Finally I admire the novels of Modiano and I admire ever more to the point of jealousy of his having a reading public in France that has an appetite for such books.  One must remember that in say 1920 just before the moments that will give the USA: Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, the population was 106 million and the average sale of a real literary book was a couple thousand copies while a century later with a population of 331 million a couple of thousand copies is still all that a very good literary author can hope for... 

HERE ARE THE LETTERS FROM MICHAEL J. PETERS AND A REPLY:

                              ONE

                         10.18.68

Dear Tom

          The fault of not continuing our, at best, broken line of correspondences is entirely mine.  Your letter written in Dublin arrived here some months back.  I shall pledge myself to more discipline in the future and hopefully purge myself of my shortcomings.  Please forgive this horrible red [the letter is written in red ink] but it’s all I have.  Perhaps it’s symbolic of many things--- but that would really be too heavy to write about!!

          I haven’t written anyone since last spring when I wrote a Syrian girl about her body and how much her armpit had meant to me while suffering the adversities of Oriental life.  In that particular letter I overextended myself, totally exceeding my fondest expectations and proving what I’ve always suspected; that words are nearer to me than pubic stubble.  So anyway my letters comes someplace between Theŕeśe’s smooth belly and just plain words

          My family forwarded your letter (I spent the first two months of summer north of Seattle) but I didn’t receive it until after your proposed induction date of 1 June.  However I can vaguely recall being terribly drunk at about that date so I must have communed with you somehow.  I’m confident that you did avoid the messy business in some manner--- hopefully it will end soon and civilization can redeem her soul.

          ‘Merkan’ intelligence is beautifully characterized by Wallace, Nixon, and to a lesser extent H.H.H.  The idea of a national political platform essentially based on beating Black-Americans into submission and giving young people haircuts is particularly appalling in the face the real issues: poverty, capitalist economy , etc. (Before I forget--- I’ve a stack of back issues to the ‘Helix’ Seattle’s underground.  It’s established and heads above most such papers.  Drop a card with your new address and I’ll forward them immediately!!)

          A close friend wrote a few weeks ago from Big Sur about living and dying and he idea of somehow reaching a decision as to the validity of life.  It was really quite abstract.  Implicit was the suggestion that he might die soon by his own hand.  I mention it only because I think about it at times and I’m sure you also do.

          I’ve been reading a lot of late, mostly heavy academic books but some Gíde, Hesse and Greek tragedy too.  In an attempt to make myself more comfortable I’ve change majors again--- transferring to the NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES & LITERATURE DEPT.  was easy. It seems to be more a challenge.  I think my field may eventually be Islamic art

          At any rate, Tom—write me of your condition and of your wife.  As I proposed--- a simple card with your address would be adequate.  In return I promise a stack of ‘underground’ sheets’ as well as long coherent “think letter.”

                                                          Michael.

                                                 TWO

                  SEATTLE                                                            November 68

Thomas-

I must say how pleasant it was to receive your letter.  My blatant procrastination had left me worried that Elbie J. and the boys had grabbed you in London and somehow thrust you into the War Machine.  Like all Crusades, ours kills, rapes, pillages and sloganizes in the name Good.  If it weren’t so sad we could chuckle until the piss runs down our legs.  But alas it is most serious and profitable!!  By the way—did you see Chicago (Pig City, USA)??  A totally beautiful and predictable exercise in ‘Merikan’ democracy. Ah, for the good old days when pigs were pigs and not cops.

I’m glad to see you have returned to the States if for no other reason than to fill your belly with unescapable crud of ‘Merikan” civilization and your nostrils with the stench of our hypocrisy.  Beware!!  The spirit of 76 corrupts.

Can your believe Nixon??  Absolutely disgusting!!  The man is a Turkey!!  The imagination can easily see a new era of Brown Shirts and Black Boots.   By the way—did the good people of Wisconsin erect a monument to good old Joe Mc.  They must have; it would be only proper to have done so.

University continues--- it drones on and on with the rhythm of a palpitating whore.  It’s a game that I’ve to pay for a while.  Still I look for the warm lady dressed in brown, cloaked in darkness, but that’s a game I play with myself and hardly as significant as the scholarly thing with books.  A friend who sits on the fence and gets despondent over things like spring mornings at the [Big] Sur and Leningrad snows wrote that but I had to destroy his letter because it caused me to think about things and that’s somewhere near the end.  I like the idea of making love on dirty sheets in your Venetian slum house.  I beg to be your guest paying or otherwise.  Venice is good to those who know her.,  Where else the ecstasy of days measured in the downy armpits and the dry rasps of rending spirits.  Which reminds me--- did you see the latest issue of NOVA? (It’s an English (British) mag.  Of doubtful quality).  It has an etching of Twiggy with an arm extended to God doing her toilette with a trusty Gillette super blue blade.  God was it laughable!!!!  They must have invented that splendid cover for me--- an exclusive thing designed solely to evoke a licentious chuckle from those who care about such trivia.

The sky never seems to be more than pale green, an opaque continuum that leaves some doubt about the exact moment when heaven meets mother earth.  The November sky is for those who think about  communion and black flags and tortured genius of sensitive people—

I hope you find some value in the copies of Helix---it’s our ersatz journalism draped in the filigree of OP-POP culture.

Well at least they try.

About your letters and things--- a catholic school.  Really, Thomas!!  A  bastion of radical, irrational dogma.  Can you make it??  I had hoped you could find something in Europe away from all the hassle of concerned parents.  I’m looking closely at teaching in Roberts College, Istanbul my next trip over. However with an M.A. in NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES & LITERATURE  it is will be a tight fit to meet their requirements.  I understand they prefer English M.A.’s with teaching experience.

Of course I remain interested in your writing, anxiously awaiting an opportunity to read your work.  What are the chances of publication??  If things get too slow, I could work for a printing at this end. If you’re truly satisfied with your novel, now in London, and assuming it is turned down, you might try Grove Press in NYC or Lighthouse Books in San Francisco.

I’ll shortly begin working for the Post Office in an attempt to work off my indebtedness--- I was forced to buy a car… V.W. and will in the next month rent a beach cottage on the Sound.  I’ve to get away from my family they are stunting my personality.  It will be limited freedom allowing me to be more eccentric in my existence.  Somehow I’ll manage to keep up my studies at [University of] Washington while working.  You should strongly consider visiting me or moving out here.  We have the mountains and the sea and a radical political climate. (We were the only western state to tell Nixon to get screwed).  Because of certain regrettable obligations I can’t truly consider Mexico this spring.  But I’m sure you would find the Northwest rather enjoyable and my cottage would be yours and your wife’s   We are provincial, but nevertheless very good people. The music is sweet as is the beer and the grass is abundant in the children’s pipes.  I can confidently say there would be good times for all.  Consider it, Tom.  We could open a commune in the wastes of eastern Washington or in the nearby mountains.

I couldn’t find the issue of the Evergreen Review that you requested but I did meet an interesting cunt that led me to several café-au-lait in the district and a near fuck.  I’ll keep looking!

When I gather my wits I’ll write you a long ‘think’ letter… Should be around the New Year.  Let me know of your plans, Tom, I want to share conversation and beer with you before time passes and things are lost. As for God’s blessing--- I’m sure he would if he could.,

                                                          MICHAEL

                                                THREE

                                                                             29/11/68 [29/12/68]

Thomas McGonigle:

My bed has been empty for weeks and it’s cold.  God it’s cold—the frost is fixed on the window till well past noon and my feet stay bare through it all  like Ransom’s frozen parsnips in the snow.  The hot bath at 2:00 brings me back; things focus much better with lemon scented suds soaking my crotch. Tom, I’m glad you have at least tenatively agreed to share the northern wilderness this summer—It’ll be good for both of us.  My disordered mind needs company and you need inspiration before returning to ‘academia.’

Through the ordeal of autumn with the death and all I managed to rise above it all be placed on the “President’s List of Scholars” at the University.  Janet said is showed how well adjusted and established I was--- I grabbed her tits in front of her mother, she cried, and now in their minds I’m not nearly as well adjusted as they had contemplated.  An unfortunate outburst for all concerned but it was the easiest way to make my point.  Anyway it’s all returned to the back of  my foggy consciousness and it’ll not return until  I rattle.

I read Donleavy’s Saddest Summer of Samuel S. last evening--- it was naturally impressive but not the same magnitude as The Ginger Man.  Also have a short story copied ifn the bourgeois anti-sexuality monthly Playboy--- The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthasar B. but it is the same Dublin/Trinity thing and it will probably be bit as well received as the others. It seem better suited to those of us for whom the divine light of perversion has long since descended and dimmed.  Anyway my shadow seems larger and my body-mind more lustful.  Read this morning where a G-man (FBI) gunned down a hippie in Istanbul.  Seems be less safe than before.  It all sounds ultra-somthing.

They’ve taken all the plastic Christmas to the rubbish heap thank God.  It becomes unbearable after a while.  I’m always suspicious of prophets and apocalyptic visions anyway, it strikes me as a business man’s hoax.  Can you imagine your wife telling you that your child was conceived in heaven let alone the Immaculate Conception---but I mustn’t offend the R.C.s and the lessers.   Skepticism is my cross!  To bear it on my slightly stopped shoulders for the sake…….?

I don’t feel like continuing , Tom.  An inspiration is about to send me to the Conservatory to look at the tropical flora captive behind steamy windows.   The idea of brightly blooming  things behind and forced birth while even the worms are frozen in their slime is curious.  I’ll post this then write within a few days, enclose any journals I’ve accumulated since the last and if you like talk about Phédra or send some of Doneavys that you’ve not read.

A prosperous new year full of goodies

MICHAEL

                                            [I have no further letters from Michael]

POST  POST SOMETNING

In September, 1967 I was in Trieste staying at a youth hostel on the Adriatic with the Castle of Miramare to the right and the city to the left… I met Michael J. Peters there. I remember a drunken evening and being forced to stay during a heavy rainstorm in a seaside cabana with him and two South African girls as we were locked out of hostel which closed at 10PM.  The next day Michael and I went to a hotel in the Via Diaz in Trieste, thinking of Joyce writing Ulysses in this city now hollowed out and no longer important… we took a ferry along to Pula in what was then Yugoslavia and then by  train to Zagreb where I last saw Michael as he was leaving for Athens and on to look at the Cedars of Lebanon as he said while I was going to Belgrade and eventually to Sofia where my life changed when I walked up in the dark Hristo Botev Boulevard to eventually marry Lilia, the first girl I talked to, who was then minding her mother’s kiosk.  We left Sofia just before Easter, 1968 for Dublin by way of Venice, Paris and London.  In October we went to Menasha, Wisconsin where my parents were living in exile from Patchogue.

I have a carbon of a letter I must have sent to Michael during this time written on the back of a mimeo of a history quiz I had given in the 7th grade class I was teaching at St. John’s Polish Catholic School in Menasha, Wisconsin.  I began teaching in November after Lilia and I came from Dublin at the end of October.  The teacher had quit and they needed someone desperately. I was a lousy letter writer but… 

Michael:      Thank you ever so much for the Helixs they are a piece of food in this cold night that is lived through with little sign of the morn… could you send more if possible in fact any you don’t need?

The reverse is a test… it is all arbitrary and that but I had to find out if they knew any facts at all…these poor students already their minds are warped by the American death, they talk with glib fascination of the Vietnam death,, about the orgasm of killing  (we have had deer hunting the last two weeks) have you this great festival?  About the refined brutality of death that is American football American style…the previous teacher used to give them no homework if the Green Bay Packers won also no homework on days they might play. 

About Joe McC  his spirit was exorcised by Allen the G last year…the RCs have a mass over his grave each year hoping to bring back his body from the worms.

From the newspapers I could imagine that you should be able to find some nice pair of breasts to bury your nose in, I wouldn’t want the armpit of American civilization for the stubs might spear your tender,,,

The RCs quite good compared to other places and quite progressive  very little control over what I do no outside exams in the 7th grade  the religion is opening their eyes at least that is what it will be for me…  I also teach American history. Monday they debate  resolved THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE WAS NOT JUSTIFIED  perhaps we could go on IT WAS ALL A WASTE OF TIME

You must realize these kids have never seen a slum, they have never seen a Black.  I was going to write negro but that is taboo and I only use the b in class.

Are you able to work and study full time.  I am going to back for night courses at the u in languages as anything serious up here would be a waste of time  I just want the basics and any idiot can teach that

Are you developing the Lowery bit?

I think we will come in June if it is at all possible.  I will get paid for that month and but won’t have to work

Spring in Mexico is impossible anyway there is no holiday given for that

The near fucks  (Evergreen search)  deserve head split open

In fact as I write this letter I have made my mind definite to come  up on the hill with the beautiful  long haired women all mingling and gentle   no news now on novel  but sent it to Hollins College in Virginia in the hopes of a full fellowship to do an MA in creative writing  a nice gentle way of spending a year

Hollins is a girls undergraduate school with an integrated sexually grad school of 30.  The main thing I just do is over awe that them with talent suck’em down socially and then I can sit and type to my heart’s content for a year.

Washington state radical even with Boeing?

You have a nice hand writing  the symbol of good breeding  that is more important in this world gone to seed,  now or a few seconds I shall turn my upper class properly aristocratic

  I might mention in this context  that Mr Donleavy has a new book out

Roberts should not be difficult if you could pick up a methods course in teaching eng. as a foreign language  what about the place in Beirut  also there is an American college for some religion in Alexandria  also working for the oil companies  also the British Council  has good jobs in Saudi Arabia  $7600 plus travel insurance cheap housing etc etc  you would save 5 at least

If you ever want anything from this place I will try and comply  I will send the Milwaukee rad sheet if I can get some copies  a trip to Mil is more than 100 miles

Swimming through the vomit is bad enough

Let me end there

Christmas we realize is coming,,,

I hope you find nice things in stocking but remember it’s what between that counts

And god bless your undertaking to introduce a note of necrophilia into this…

         

                                      FINALLY

Michael J. Peters is alive in your reading of his letters.  Or have I lurched too far from the example of William's trusting in his red wheelbarrow?  Am I supposed to tell you what I make of Michael J. Peters in these letters.  One last detail  we exchanged books in Zagreb.  I do not  remember which book I gave him but I still have the small Grove Press paperback version of Alain Robbe-Grillet's THE VOYEUR

                                                  

MEI SAVAGE BRADY

          BY ACCIDENT more than 3 years after I had written this post and had not publish it, I have now published it. It lingered in the written but not published. Awaiting a day when I opened THE ADVENTUROUS HEART by Ernst Junger where I had put a printed out version of this post.  Today I had taken down Junger's book as I had been reading in Blanchot's THE BOOK TO COME since in a new novel by Patrick Modiano he quotes a passage from Blanchot on Diary and Story where Junger's book was mentioned.

        To be arrogant: I learned about art by looking at it in galleries, in museums, in books, on walls of friends' houses, from gossip, from who knows where: just like Baudelaire I will claim.  

        I have never sat in art history classes which are nothing more than slide shows with an exam at the end testing your ability to ID pictures, worse than a police line up you could say.

       ... and so I have come to writing about John Wesley, Andy Warhol, Pati Hill Martin Rameriz, Michael Madore, Howard Finster, Jeff Adams... 

       So, I have come to the art of Mei Savage Brady: 

                                                                           (a detail)
photographed badly, framed badly yet given the ability now to present a picture captured by a cellphone I am willing to state these two pictures are Mei Savage Brady's claim to not be forgotten...

NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN

but most likely to be as she did not really scratch the earth beyond my rescuing these pictures, beyond the memory of an aging daughter and in turn two grand children who... but in the available sources all the soil fully necessary to fill in her grave out there again and again on Long Island but before I get to the burial---these paintings, water colour... as if bandages across a still leaking wound... she was almost guilt ridden sending them to be as they did not look at all like her other work: realistic, commercial, well- executed, entered into "juried shows", these abstractions of  a life that she did not lead, comfortable because of a successful husband (over-head garage doors, of all things, a nice guy..and she had unlimited money for materials, a grand studio, collection of books...and yet these pictures, send off to me, rolled up and never to be in handsome frames... how afflicted she was by classic allusions and then these bindings across the wound of her life--- that began as her family worked in a duck farm on Long Island and the language of Belorussia, not even Russian, but the overlooked center of both the whole of World War II and the Holocaust for good measure... but finally  these two pictures with the signature of the artist as a sort of talesman: this student of Philip Evergood, who at one time lived in Patchogue before burning to death in Connecticut--what  a fate for a teacher... but Mei was the only person I ever knew in Patchogue to describe herself as an artist but very quietly and she the mother of the girl who would have the mis-fortune to be my muse, Melinda, to be found looking into a locker on the second Floor of Patchogue High School in 1961-62--- so now you have the whole story, again... these corpse wrappings disguised as paintings...


The shovelfuls:           one

Mei Savage BradyNoted North Fork artist and sculptor Mei Savage Brady diedFriday,  Oct. 8, at her home in Mattituck. She was 78 years old.  Ms. Brady's works were exhibited widely on Long Island and in New York City over the past 50 years. She was honored for her work by the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, the Hecksher Museum in Huntington, Guild Hall in East Hampton, the East End Arts Council in Riverhead and the Smithtown Arts Council. Several of her pieces are in the permanent collection of the Islip Art Museum.  Muts. Brady was born Jan. 1, 1921, to Anthony and Mary (Choprowski) Savage in the hamlet of Brookhaven on one of Long Island's first duck farms. She graduated from Bellport High School in 1938 and studied painting and drawing in New York City in the early 1940s. In the 1950s, artist Philip Evergood of East Patchogue became her mentor. She painted throughout her adult life, and her most recent work currently is on exhibit at the Clayton & Libertore Gallery in Bridgehampton.  A spokesperson at the gallery described the Brady exhibit as a "new phase" of "semi-abstract" black and white paintings that had been completed since March of this year.  Ms. Brady also was an active environmentalist. She was instrumental in the founding of the North Fork Preservation Society in the late 1960s and, later, the creation of the North Fork Environmental Council.  A statement released by family members said: "All who knew and loved Mei Savage Brady will miss her endless energy, talent and generosity of spirit and mind."
Surviving are Ms. Brady's husband, Warren; her daughter, Melinda Munford Jaques of Water Mill; two sisters, Veronica Bergin of Westhampton and Helen Adams of Center Moriches; her brother, Benjamin Savage of Brookhaven; two granddaughters; and a stepgrandson. She was preceded in death by a brother, Frank Savage of Center Moriches.
A funeral mass was celebrated Monday morning at Our Lady of Good Counsel R.C. Church in Mattituck with Father Peter Allen officiating. Burial followed at Cutchogue Cemetery. Arrangements were made by the F.J. McLaughlin Funeral Home of Riverhead.


                                twoMei Brady painted and sculpted for sixty years. Her work is in permanent collection of Islip Art Museum, Long Island. She exhibited her work at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Hecksher Art Museum, Huntington;  and Guild Hall, East Hampton.   She received an award in a juried show by Henry Geldzahler, former Curator, American Art at Metropoitan Museum of Art in NYC.   Submitted by Melinda Jacques, who houses the collection of her mother.

                                three
Goddess of the Sound.  This is the weekend that Teima, goddess of Long Island Sound, will take to the seas. For the last five months Teima has been waiting to get her feet wet in the Mattituck studio of Mei Savage Brady, an artist. Ms. Brady created Teima, a figurehead, from a six-foot-long piece of bass wood  It was her husband, Warren's, idea that a figurehead was what his 43-foot Island Trader ketch Arabesque needed. "It's part of the lure of the sea," Mr. Brady said. So are mermaids, and figurehead carvers, it turned out, are just as elusive.

"My husband looked for three years," Ms. Brady said. "He couldn't find anyone to make the figurehead. So finally I decided to do it."  Ms. Brady has painted, sculptured and carved, so making a figurehead combined her talents, she said. And because she displayed her work in East End galleries, why not also on East End waterways? Five extra coats of varnish were the only concession she made to Teima's marine backdrop.  Teima, goddess of Long Island Sound -- "the name just came to me," Ms. Brady said -- appears as a young blond woman in a multicolored short skirt. "Most figureheads are just the bust of a woman," Ms. Brady said. She decided to give her husband the whole body. But with a bit of excitement.  The finished figurehead is bare-breasted. "I didn't intend it to be nude," Ms. Brady said. "I was working on the anatomy and I got so involved with it I thought it would be a shame to destroy it by covering it up."  Mr. Brady said that was just fine with him.

                               four

Art; SURPRISES AT PARRISH SHOW By HELEN A. HARRISON  Published: December 13, 1981...  to the consternation of some artists, no firstplace award was made. The juror, Dore Ashton, a well-known writer on modern art who is a professor of art history at Cooper Union, instead picked seven artists for special mention, and the museum has opted for a group exhibition of their work next fall.
Mei Savage Brady's ''Shut the Mountain Door'' is also powerful, but makes its impact with ambiguity, appearing to alternate between two and three dimensions and even seeming to radiate an inner light from beneath its Lucite surface.

                          REBUTTAL  

Fully accepting the verdict of disappearance while this person possessed of his eyes and his typing these sentences the ability to urge other eyes, other words remains for a moment, but for not that long as soon enough, soon enough

 

THE BULGARIAN PSYCHIATRIST (pages)

 

For many years I have been writing a book about four men I contained in a book NOTHING DOING.  These are some pages...

George has been drinking again and I have been listening to him in The Grass Roots.    One of those nights when no one we knew came it.  

It had been a long day with my patients.  I am old fashioned. They become part of my life even though I have them out there as I am supposed to.  But how to remain human, isn't that all anyone can ask for…

       Once one of them, even back in Bulgaria, you know who I mean, became human for a moment and said to me, very quickly as we walked near Sveta Nedelya : just leave, or maybe it would be better to catch it exactly: just go away, he said

This man didn't have to say anything more.  It was all he was capable of.  I had helped him with his son who was very sick.  I won't tell you who he was.  It doesn’t matter but I knew that he was speaking for them.  I had had helped some of them when they had no one else to turn to:  for some reason they understood that nothing else worked.

George is talking about Bulgaria, a Bulgaria that no longer exists and even then it did not exist or at least people did not see it or even know it might exist. 

I am still sometimes in Bulgaria.  You can not take a language out of the brain.  A new language does not replace the old language. Bulgaria under the communism:  people look at me when I say that:  none of that exists except in books.

But in my head, I want to say and I know they are holding back from saying: poor man. 

45

I should tell you--- like I told George--- about going into The Guardian office in London having come back from Sofia and trying to talk about the Freedom Village that was set up in front of the Communist Party building in the summer of 1990.  I did not know how to make it vivid to these English people.  They had a man in Bulgaria.  They did not want another voice.  One voice was enough and he had his two or three inches somewhere in the paper.  No one that summer, that hottest summer on record in England, wanted to know about a Freedom Village in Bulgaria. It sounded like an American resort filled with people waving Bibles and shotguns, Clare told me and everybody in England knew enough about Bulgaria.  I had known Clare for twenty years.  That didn’t help.  At all.  She thought I was making it up and I wasn't trained to look at things like their man in Bulgaria.

And George embarrassed me by saying, you understand this Bulgaria, all these Bulgarias, without speaking the language.  You are as powerless as all this implies and is understood.  No one in the West will care what you have to say.  No one in Bulgaria will understand what you are saying.

45

If they find you still in Bulgaria, this man was telling me, you would be sent to the psychotic ward, George was saying.  That is how I was to understand this man's words: just go away.    I understood what they meant:  just go away.  They didn’t need to say anything more.  If I did not understand what they were saying they had a place for me in one of their hospitals…

45

To try to understand driving across the Air Force range--- I should have looked carefully at the map, the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range--- with a road like a wire bisecting it on the way to Barstow---  this time--- and  George nudging aside the man in Ajo who I see walking into a diner in a small strip mall just outside… 

though George is going to talk about violent death also: torture, beatings, and how a man put on a dead man's clothes as if he always belonged in that clothing:  without the slightest twinge of guilt: something that is not in his or their vocabulary… but this man in Ajo… where has he gotten to?  

Can I pretend I knocked on the door where he was staying or can I write, his car was not there in the morning?  Probably on his way up to Phoenix and then to get the lead out as he had to be in Chloride before it got dark.  His wife was waiting for him and the child was going to need a lot of love, and he would curl his lip as if anyone knew what the phrase:  she will need a lot of love.

45

Forget the local colour, George is saying.  You are not some guy stuck in a pig hole in the countryside.  I want you to move me about in your mind.  I want not to be fixed like some dead bug tacked to an exhibit wall.  I was happy, every day I was happy to see the new buildings going up in New York--- do you remember where we lived in Brooklyn?  None of it is there anymore.   The landlord moved to Florida.  The building was torn down and no one knows what it looked like.  That is not something to mourn, at all.  A person can always go to Paris to see things that stay the way they were.  Every city is different.  People get confused when they try to criticize a city with the standards of another city.  It is a way to go crazy.  You have to see what is in front of your face, first.    You go crazy if you can not look and see what is really there…   never forget that.

45

So throw in the picture from that cemetery.  A moment before the plastic flowers get blown apart to become burial rubbish against the barbed wire fence.  Make sure you mention the birthday candles arranged in the earth but not lit.  To be lit by lightning, you can suppose…memorial rubbish for someone going to a shop, buying, carrying, leaving behind, blown away… idle sentimentality, poor man.

 You told me once of walking around in Dublin and wanting to almost cry because it was all so painful… to have admitted that is sufficient.  No one walks around in New York talking:  do you remember when… the city is a wonderful drug wiping itself clear and wipes away those thoughts from the people who find themselves living here.  And it’s something to be proud of, not scorned like some pretend.  When I go Upstate Katya's sister has a photo book of OLDE NEW YORK.  She bought it because she thought she would impress me with her new found interest in history.  I wanted to tell her what Ed said in the Grass Roots:  Francis Bacon liked old photographs of masses of people because all the people in the photographs were dead, now, and I am alive looking at them. 

45

While George did not know the novels of Gerhard Roth--- it is a permanent regret  we were not able to talk about them--- George did tell me he had read two books by Max Frisch:  Man in the Holocene and I'm not Stiller.   

He did not want to forget his German.  While no longer having a desire to go to Germany the language allowed him to think, he said.  Only if you know German could you know what I am trying to say.  It is not that German is better than English but English is the language of the streets, of this bar, of the television, the language my patients speak to me, the language my children use and which I talk to them in.  German is my other language.  The language took me out of Bulgaria even during the Communism.  I have told you all of that and even in East Germany the language, though damaged by the communism, could not have been hurt at its center which even resisted the Nazis contrary to what some would have you believe.  People do not lose everything and yet rebuilt everything if there is nothing at the center.  That is a mystery, George would say.  I wonder if everything was wiped out in the United States if it could all be re-built.  To think of the United States broken into pieces and then divided into two competing systems and then re-united!  Americans do not know what it is means to lose.  Bulgarians only know about loss and it is nothing to be proud of, nothing is gained from the experience.  Germany is different, in some way, and it drives some people crazy but they can't do anything about it.

IN SOFIA, BULGARIA SUMMER 1990

 30 years ago I was living in Summertown, Oxford, England with Ruth and our daughter Elizabeth who was two and half.  Ruth's mother came for a visit and I went to Sofia for a week.

BEFORE.  

A PREFACE: 

                              reality always tempers 

I had been in Bulgaria six years before when the fortieth anniversary of 9 September 1944 was being prepared to be celebrated.  Of course I knew that things had changed in the previous year and I wanted to see what was going on.






In the weeks before going to Sofia I had been reading in the near medieval quiet of the Duke Humfrey's library of the Bodleian, the little pocket journals of James Thomson BV as I was wanting to imagine  his life--- the life of the man who had written "The City of Dreadful Night" the single greatest poem to come out of Victorian England--- I noted in a journal:  Dr. Karl Marx and his address as both men sat in the same room in the British Library... it is known that Marx approved of Thomson's translations of Heine... but  that is all... James Thomson has been on my mind now for more than 50 years... i have a long book about him FORGET THE FUTURE: a section was published in BOMB https://bombmagazine.org/articles/an-ending/ 








I went by way of Zurich and arrived at Sofia airport which was dark inside even though it was the afternoon... no real passport control...a brief glance at the passport and waved on through...so unlike previous times... and many people yelling taxi taxi taxi... the first change from 1984, and the last time I will mention that word, change.






I was met by Philip Dimitrov and his wife Ellie.  In 1984 I had brought the collected works of Freud to Philip as a gift from his friend George Kamen, who was then living in exile in New York.  Back in 1984 Philip was a young lawyer and doing group therapy inspired by the work of George who had introduced the idea to Bulgaria and then was forced to flee Bulgaria... it was said he had treated the child of someone on the central committee who was seriously mentally unwell: talk therapy was taboo and George was told it would be wise if he ... as if  such a treatment became known to other members of ....  there were always these pauses...but this report is not about George but about this moment in Sofia in July... I stayed in the apartment of Philip's parents in one of the housing complexes not distant from the centre:

People took pride in the interiors of their apartments, it was said, 

but all the public spaces about the buildings were haphazardly cared for, as they were public property and rarely would foreign people venture into such housing complexes...people freely getting together to improve a public space was unheard of and in fact it was inconceivable.

The week went away very quickly.  Between the archeology museum and the great imposing building of the Communist Party. 





was a broad avenue and an open space--- on the other side of the mausoleum and the national bank building, was a space filled with tents and each tent seemed to represent a particular political party, religious group or interest group or...

                                           

TALK                   TALK                               TALK                                                             TALK



The strangest aspect was the appearance of buttons  with photographs of Simeon on them--- the now grown-up former Tsar who had been exiled by the communists after 1944.  He had been educated in America and lived in Spain. I  saw people wearing buttons with his image and the image of his father, Boris.

STUFF 

                 STUFF 

                                STUFF 

                                          MADE VISIBLE

Memory is too often just a bag of stuff...people were playing guitars, looking at screens of one sort or another: conversation and people moved from one tent area to the next... people knew Philip and he was constantly being approached; constant brief conversations... all of this was in no way how it had been even 6 years before...  




Behind our back if we are looking at the encampment is what was the mausoleum:



but of course before the recent events other sorts of gatherings... at one time school children were brought to the mausoleum to view the embalmed  body of Georgi Dimitrov and I too had been there a number of times...wonderful air-conditioning and if you lingered you would feel the finger of a guard in the center of your back to move you along... of course I had seen other bodies on display in funeral parolors, including my own parents...
                                                                               

Before, no one went willingly to see the corpse of Dimitrov... one paraded by on official occasions with one's group--though it was NOT REQUIRED but expected..... and if you wanted something or needed a signature an absence might be noted or not noted...

Another day a tent had been set up and it is being watched by a man in uniform.

And heaps of stuff... and conversation....  normally---well, when I was here in 1984 and so long ago as 1967 and later in the 70s. no one lingered... one walked quickly in this area...

TALK

Here I should insert a photograph from the once upon a time when the leadership of The Peaople's Republic of Bulgaria stood on this perch waving to the crowds marching by

A Bulgarian of a certain age could recite the string of adjectives and nouns that would be pressed into service to describe the person whose hand wrote these letters.  And a person familiar with the movies of Eisenstein might appreciate the lettering on this shop front

Here I need only one word

(Bread)

 the end or an end

an end

or the way it was

 to be more---- 2020--- just heaps of photos... time...1984... 1993...

one wonders what this guy is doing 36 years later...

Across the way from the talking talking talking was another sort of talking: the club of the Bulgarian Socialist party formrly the Bulgarian Communist Party

and of course people strolling by, by by, by...

I WAS GOING TO END THERE BUT OF COURSE THAT WOULD BE CHEATING, 

only Petkov's grave remains...

-  

6- So to see for myself what was going on.  I won't rehearse the political/historical narrative.  It was a busy week with an over-night trip to Veliko Tarnovo and Targovishte. 

7- what remains: a tent city by the archeology museum across from the former communist party headquarters, people playing guitars..while the communists blasted heavy metal music from their club in the former headquarters... 

8- I made lists.  Everything seemed to be uncertain. Of course I could not follow much of it....talking always to mayself and the sheer shock at being in a place in whuich everythig that seemed to be eternal when I first was in Sofia in 1967 was while still there was in a sense not there though hysically still present.