HOUND OF ACCURACY, FRANZ FANON< JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN EDWARD DAHLBERG

Before the hounds of accuracy track me down: I went looking for Ezra Pound in the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
Since torn down.
What went on in the Royal Hibernian Hotel will have to wait for another time involving as it does drinking and taxis...

Out for a constitutional and so to The Strand Bookstore to look at the bound galleys.

FANON by John Edgar Wideman... you know Wideman I am sure--- or as Edward Dahlberg would have said you having heard of him and that is sufficient.
This new "novel" is not due out until next February.
I am sure it will, as they say, be talked about.
A novel celebrating a mostly forgotten guy whose message boiled down to: the most productive thing a black man could do in this life is to kill a white man.
Professor Wideman I am sure is an authority on murder. His brother is a convicted murderer and Mr Wideman's son is a convicted murderer.
Mr Wideman teaches writing--- what else--- at Brown University--- where else?--- the dumbest of the Ivy League schools and his students are probably the dumbest of the lot.
Mr Wideman's first few novels were actually interesting: A Glance Away, Hurry Home, Damballah.. but then he became a voice of something or other...

Also at the Strand the bound galleys of Joyce Carol Oates' The Journals.. when I glanced through the pages.. I have no one to talk to.. sunburn on legs....

Gore Vidal will be remembered for only one line: what are the three saddest words in the English lanaguge: Joyce Carol Oates...

Where to Begin?

For three years, out of key with his time,


He strove to resusitate the dead art


Of poetry; to maintain 'the sublime"


In the old sense. Wrong from the start---





No hardly, but seeing he had been born


In a half savage country, out of date...............





Of course I begin with Ezra Pound... having missed seeing him in early 1965 when he came over to Dublin after the memorial service for T.S.Eliot in London... how long ago all that seems: the going to the Hibernia Hotel and the asking for Mr Pound... is it even possible to imagine ever again such a moment of a seeking out in such a way...



Of course there was another time of going to the cemetery in Meudon looking for the grave of Louis Ferdinand Celine...



Of course there was visiting Julian Green in Paris in his 90th year...



Of course there was being told by Jorges Luis Borges that he himself preferred James Joyce's poetry: those other books are just so much gossip...



And then there was Francis Stuart and Ernst Junger...



But what about Anthony Burgess and Hannah Green and John Jordan and Denis Donoghue and Juan Carlos Onetti and James Liddy and Jack Spicer and T.S.Eliot and David Jones and Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard and Jean Genet and Curzio Malaparte and



you gotta start someplace or no place and that is probably where I am at the moment: finally to quote :



The enemy--- he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
---from Cold Friday by Whittaker Chambers (from the library of Father Flye, James Agee's friend)