MIDNIGHT MASS AND JULIAN GREEN AND ME

      Many years ago in Paris I was telling Julian Green of being an altar boy at St. Francis De Sales Church in Patchogue and having the feeling that I was sitting on the lap of Jesus. "O, how I envy you," Green said, "I converted too late."

      Last night at Midnight Mass at St Bartholomew Church here in Milltown/East Brunswick, New Jersey I finally really understood what Green meant.  Back then I thought how could this member of the French Academy (the only foreigner and an American), this prolific author of books that would survive his own mortality, this close friend of Gide and Mauriac envy me anything?  

       As I was attending Mass last night with my wife Anna--- with whom I had earlier that morning gone to the Estonian Lutheran Church Christmas service down in Lakewood--- I thought of serving Midnight Mass in Patchogue so many years ago and I thought of other Midnight Christmas Masses I attended: in 1968 in Menasha, Wisconsin with my parents when I had come back from Ireland and Bulgaria with Lilia, in 1972 in Saugerties three days after the death of my mother,  in the tiny Catholic church in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1973 after the death of my father the previous August... and more recently over the years with my children Elizabeth and Lorcan and their mother in St. Brigid's Church on Tompkins Square and more recently for many years with Anna at Presentation on East Third Street...  

       And of course finally I really knew now why Green was envious of me:  the belief that comes both before and after reason--- he had once written a short book attacking the rationality of the French church--- which of course is the great flaw of French civilization.  

     One hopes to never lose that belief though so often it can get lost in the clutter of argument for finally argument is always a celebration of a sort of unappetizing arrogance.  

    The true grandeur of the church lies in the fragility of that memory of serving Midnight Mass at St. Francis de Sales Church in Patchogue.  

       

THE TYPING DEAD (on William Gass)

      Some years ago in reviewing a book by J. P. Donleavy for the Chicago Tribune I remarked that while prolific he like Vladimir Nabokov, equally prolific, would be remembered for one book: The Ginger Man, Lolita. 

       That is why I reject the phrase: de mortuis nil nisi bonum

      Finally a death certificate and obituary have been issued for one of the typing dead: William Gass… of course in the near future it is likely we will be seeing such announcements for others of the typing dead: Don DeLillo, Joyce Oates and Robert Coover while some of the pre-maturely typing dead: Jonathan Franzen, Ali Smith, Jonathan Safron Foer—will serve as typical of the younger typing dead.

     Gass is part of a long tradition of the typing dead… at one time in second hard bookstores you could always find examples from previous times: John Sanford,  Waldo Frank, John Hawkes,  Philip Wylie are typical  examples--- the mystery of whatever did people find in these writers that is now no longer apparent…

        William Gass, if he had fallen silent after publishing the long story In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,  would have assured his writing of a real place in the literary world, much as Tillie Olson did with her very short collection of stories Tell Me a Riddle or Hannah Green did with her one short novel The Dead of the House… but in the case of Gass with each book of fiction or non-fiction  after In the Heart of the Heart of the Country the hole he dug for himself became bigger and  deeper… in particular the books of criticism which were finally exercises in style lacking any content thus leaving a reader hard-pressed to say what the essay had been about other than to murmur, it sounded pretty good but what was he trying to say ?...  while the blobs of “fiction” were just that and you can see for yourself by  using the method suggested by Ezra Pound: choose at random say page 51 in Gass’s Middle C or in The Tunnel and compare them to the same page in say Celine’s Rigadoon or in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction.  My case is thus rested and to think both the Celine and the Bernhard are translations…

        Altogether a sad fate for a one time professor of philosophy who was promoted or demoted into  a professor of humanities while being  proclaimed a genius by his current publisher upon his death…

                                         PS

     IN THE COMING WEEKS THERE WILL BE A BATHETIC CHORUS OF CELEBRATORY LAMENTS AT THE DEATH OF GASS AND THE LOSS TO LITERATURE... BUT THANKFULLY THE AMERICAN MEMORY IS ...  AND ON WE GO

ART ON WEDNESDAY

Preface to another day of my walking  from THE WORKER by Ernst Junger (Northwestern University Press, 2017):

...And it is a comforting thought that, because of some secret correspondence, the development of more monumental means of destruction keeps step with the accumulation and conservation of so-called cultural goods.  The vicarious and derivative proliferation of these goods--- in other words, the business of art, culture, and education--- has acquired such proportions  that we can see the need to lighten our baggage, whose fundamental and comphrehensive extent is barely conceivable.  The worst is not that a circle of connoisseurs, collectors, snoopers, and curators gathers around every cast-off shell ever borne on the back of a living snail.  This has always been the case albeit to a far more modest extent..  Much more dubious is that from this bustle a set of ready-made values has emerged behind which an utter deadness is concealed.  We are dealing here with shadows of things, and advertising has been made into the central concept of a culture alienated from any primordial force.  (Written 1932---my emphasis) 

76

Wednesday walking about:  at Zurcher Gallery a painting by Matt Bollinger caught the eye in its perfect representation the perfect balance of colours and shape...  so rare today even for this painter whose works usually seem to be on a larger scale and are often with much more in the frame but here I am glad of just the steps ether going up or going down...

83

in contrast is the three floor show of "work" by MICHAEL LANDY--- now of the British Academy--which says something of that...basically scraps of political graffitti pasted to the walls... the accident of being taken up by Saatchi  that merchant museum in London...and reflecting nothing else than smart people gambling via art...  and SPERONE WESTWATER is one of the big players with their beautiful building on the Bowery--which in some way makes me long for the cheap bars that used to line that stretch pf the Bowery as this is only a slightly different sort of degridation... 

and while the owners don't foster cirrhosis of the liver, they infect the imagination or maybe they are only a  true reflection of what is the current moment of the liberal radical which demands vast amounts of money and attention but willfully without holding any sense at all of grandeur...of beauty

                                         the text:  I want you inside me.

                                i want to greet you at the door, pull down your pants, and drop to my knees.

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS  

What else do I care about

          I saw Sun and Forest by Max Ernst at MOMA in a small show of his work and realized the pity of both time and war NOT doing their fine work in cutting down the number of works by so many of what one has to call modern artists... in particular in the 20th and 21st centuries the amount of art that has survived is unbearable to any thoughtful person.  

         In the world of books  the digital sledgehammer is ever at its destruction of the world of books so that now with books--- except for a few precious ones--- there is hardly any market for used books except through extremely large warehouses or the proliferation of individual sellers on Amazon and similar sites.

        In New York City. the Strand Bookstore  continues in a fashion but it survives by being a destination store for people wanting to buy souvenirs of their visit to New York City.  The second-hand book section is assiduously combed by clerks and books no longer sit on their shelves waiting.  

            Increasingly as I will be doing books are simply put out with the trash... it is not worth one's effort to take them to the shops to sell and the shops if they are possibly interested mostly will not send a truck to collect the books as those books then have to be sorted and most of them will end up on the one and two dollar shelves for a time...   

BUT for now books, books--- a few and I start with H.G. Adler's first book, THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945, The Face of a Coerced Community.

Adler began to save notes for this book when he with his family was sent to this "show-camp" by the Nazis.  Surviving unlike his famy the subsequent deportation to Auschwitz, Adler returned to Czechoslovakia and rescued his notes and after fleeing  that country for England began this massive and really first comprehensive description of A CAMP.  
857 pages.  A book that will endure but few will read as it is very expensive and printed in a small edition by Cambridge University Press.  A book destined for the library YET  the sort of book that should be on the bedside of every thinking person because it is both a reminder of the horror of this camp--- which I trust if you are reading this blog--- are well aware was established by the Germans as a show camp to show how well they were treating the Jews contrary to the common belief  and I will repeat that: a reminder of THIS camp.  Adler concentrates on the experience of being in a camp.  He refuses every opportunity to simplify the story he tells: showing the full range of individual human response to the situation people find themselves in.  Even to site in anyway the details of those described is to needlessly limit the experience...

People avoid and are proud of their avoidance of the great big long books and I always take that this avoidance---every excuse seems so tiny, so mean as not even worth repeating--- as a pathetic need to think of the world as a simple place...Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, Death of Virgil, Parallel Lives


+++

 THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa (New Directions) Translated by Margaret Jill Costa.   Some, a few, well know Pessoa... the writer who in some way has come to be listed with Proust, Joyce, Musil... Celine when such lists are made---  of course the most obscure and for me to list him thus might seem more eccentric than called for...yet...  there have been many versions of this book done into English in the last 20 plus years...  and everyone knows the story of Pessoa who never wrote in his own name but always wrote in the voices of a myriad of the invented and then there is vast prose book discovered in a large trunk and assembled by a series of editors... each one with a different approach...I had held to Richard Zenith's version published by Penguin but Zenith has complimented Costa for the quality of her translation... and this is physically a beautiful book with no dust jacket and a starling cover...a book of moods, a book to comfort on the sure way to the grave: the consolation is bracing as the English would say:     
       ...to find people who are but a series of marginal notes in the book of life
       ...All pleasure is a vice because seeing pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does
       ...every gesture is but a dead dream
       ...intelligence, a fiction composed solely of surface and error
       ...A Homer or Milton is not more than a comet colliding with the earth
       

++++

           The house of the title is the large apartment complex in Moscow where the bureaucrats who ran the Soviet regime lived with their families during Stalin's time and after. And while it is a little wrong to compare it to War and Peace and The Gulag Archipelago--- as the blurb writers do--- there is a grandeur to it in the great length and in the detailing of the fates of true believers in Soviet Communism who with few qualms of conscience killed anyone who go in the way of the building of the communism in the Soviet Union and now in their own turn they are to be murdered by the very machinery they had created.  The genius of Slezkine is to individualize the murderers and the murdered... one is taken up by their lives and their inevitable terrible ends even for the few survivors who are  all  contaminated.

+++

ErichMaria Remarque was the second writer I came to in Patchogue after Thomas Wolfe and over the years I read all of his books that were translated into English as a result of the great success of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN  FRONT.  ---  I am ssure there are others who  followed his career:  THE BLACK OBELISK, THE ROAD BACK, THREE COMRADES...  THE PROMISED LAND did not get published in the United States ...  

AND HERE I STOP FOR NOW AS THIS TYPING HAS AWAITED POSTING TOO LONG...

PAUSED (for reason?)

A  pause in writing about books has come over me as I am struck silent, nearly, by a number of books: PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas, THE WALL by H. G. Adler, LARVA by Julian Rios, a new version of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa (New Directions) and a little aside,  a new edition of THE RUIN IS KASCH by Roberto Calasso coming from FSG in January.

Such is not unusual with a moment’s thought if we remember that in the 1920s those who really read were given THE WASTE LAND by T.S. Eliot, ULYSSES by James Joyce and the volumes by Marcel Proust that would become IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME and in the Thirties: JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT by Louis Ferdinand Celine and THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES…

One is also well aware of the masses who can not live alone in such solitude with a select few so the constant weekly announcements continue to appear of this or that masterpiece which has its moment for a week, a month, a season, a year and then… notice how forlorn THE WHITE HOTEL by D.M.Thomas looks when you see it in the Salvation Army book section or possibly a … (fill in any name you want…)

THE NECESSARY SECOND THOUGHT could be supplied with three names:

 Michel Leiris and his two newly published books that are as if passing ghosts in the US: PHANTOM AFRICA and the third book,  FIBRILS, of his memoir RULES OF THE GAME

and

H.G. ADLER    THERESIENSTADT 1941-1945

and

Fleur Jaeggy has two little books:  THESE POSSIBLE LIVES and I AM THE BROTHER OF XX

A passage from Jaeggy that concerns itself with a photograph of the mother’s audience with the Pope: 

Her daughter, who does not have the depth of the mother has always believed in the surface of things.  And so in beauty.   In appearance.  What does she care about what is inside.  Inside where?  And what is the inside? Anyway the daughter believes more in photographs than in the people portrayed.  A photograph might tell more than a person.  Perhaps.  Naturally perhaps.  No affirmation could lead her to grant total credence to the affirmation itself.

            I would be hard pressed to find any American author who one could imagine writing at this level of thinking and precision.

            To have an audience with the Pope… I imagine I was caught by this as I had been visiting in late August in London a friend  who as a young woman was sent by one of the elderly sisters of the martyred Patrick Pearse  to have a private audience with John XXIII.  The visit was arranged by the Irish ambassador to the Vatican on the orders of someone in Dublin and my friend said she did not know what to say to the Pope after being brought in alone and he could see this so he asked if I had brought anything I would like him to bless.  I had only my glass case in my hand and he  gave that his  blessing sending me on my way.

A YEAR ANNIVERSARY: ST. PATRICK'S DAY Another Day in Dublin

       A year ago my book ST. PATRICK'S DAY Another Day in Dublin appeared.  It received notices in the following places:

                            What follows is a list BUT BUT if you scroll a little beyond it you will find the reason for it as I could not figure out how to arrange this post in another way


The Dublin Review of Books:
http://www.drb.ie/essays/time-gentlemen
THE HOLLINS CRITIC: 
https://www.hollins.edu/who-we-are/news-media/hollins-critic/
RAIN TAXI:
http://www.raintaxi.com/rain-taxi-review/print-edition/
THE AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/649685
THE IRISH ECHO:
 http://irishecho.com/2016/10/portrait-of-a-young-visitor/
CALL OF THE SIREN:
https://nickowchar.com/category/thomas-mcgonigle/
ZORAN ROSKO VACUUMPLAYER:
https://zorosko.blogspot.com/2017/03/thomas-mcgonigle-rollicking-pub-crawl.html
THE MILLBROOK INDEPENDENT:
 http://www.themillbrookindependent.com/content/literary-underground-crawl

       There were also blurbs from Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Julian Rios and James McCourt.  

                                        THREE

        But truth to tell:  there is a certain masochism in the publication of this listing so that while grateful for the attention, the book did not receive any newspaper reviews or reviews in magazines that often publish reviews of books.  Also, one is aware that most of these notices  are in publications of a very limited circulation, often not fully available in a digital format.  

                                       FOUR

         The Spanish writer  Julian Rios wrote in a letter: "Most of the bookshops now, everywhere, are display places for instant books. But literature needs time, lots of time. It's better for Saint Patrick's to be in The Hollins Critic, examined in detail, than stay a week at Waterstones like a fish out of water...

But the most important, solitaire is not only a card game, it is also the exact name for the real writer and its writing."

                                  FIVE

         So, one sits  as the calendar soon will click into September, October and on and on as  the book surely moves with diminished  yet real dignity into the near pre-historic time given how the world is constructed in this day... 

          I can cling to the thin thread that keeps me in the world but there seems to be a unraveling of possibility for the other books that await publication:  EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS, NOTHING DOING, JUST LIKE THAT, FORGET THE FUTURE and HE IS ALMOST DEAD: John Wesley, painter.

        At one time editors and others of a certain literary inclination looked and even read for what had been over-looked to the purpose of seeing such into the public eye but that day is probably long gone yet it is one of the tiny strands of illusion one tries to keep in the composition of the thread tying an author to the world...

GOING TO THE MUSEUM

            I went to The Met to see this painting by Valdes Leal because in THE VIA VENETO PAPERS by Ennio Flaiano (Marlboro Press)--- who was one of the script writers for LA DOLCE VITA--- is writing that he had seen rushes of the movie and the people depicted reminded him of the putrifying preachers depicted in Leal's paintings that are in a hospital in Seville...
             
         I had never looked at the picture as it is in the same gallery as the El Grecos...but upon inspection the depiction of the wounds and the very ordinariness of the mortal corpse of the Christ...

     Long ago Eugene Lambe who shows up in my ST PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin and who had a book and poem dedicated to him by Derek Mahon told me that when going to an art museum you should look at as few paintings as possible... I try to follow this suggestion...and taking advantage of the proximity of the Met as Eugene too advantage of the National Gallery in London as he lived in Long Acre...

          I have the habit of always looking at the Poussin's "Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun"--- a painting that is mostly passed by in favor of "The Abduction of the Sabine Women"--- 

           Today, I noticed the posture of the guy standing in the clouds... some time ago I was pleased to see that Claude Simon had also noticed this painting and it appears in one of his late novels...

             And in keeping with only a few I looked before leaving at the small display of Fairfield Porter painting, tucked away in the far modern country of The Met... Union Square once upon a time...

and this moment:    
        

        So, as in the serenity of the picture of these windows:  it was a successful visit... and allowed me to even remember Julian Green who also made very brief visits to the Louvre where he learned also by looking... the going to an art museum should be very easy and disciplined in what one looks at...

        Lastly, near the Leal painting was a very large complex painting...  

 suggesting the sort of novel I would hope to write but I will save it for another visit--- I am taken by the fellow who has his arm thrown out as if to say: look... but to return to another quiet moment provided by Fragonard...similar to the one provided by Porter:

           Of course none of this would be tolerated by students going to art school... as students are encouraged to avoid going to museums... and instead are supposed to be spending their time understanding the market, understanding their careers... 

WALKING AROUND LOOKING AT ART WHILE WAITING TO HEAR ABOUT A BIOPSY

ONE OF THOSE DAYS--- as is often said--- and this is one of those days, and by the end of it the doctor never called  so it will go on..until

                                          FIVE

  I was at Betty Cuningham and having seen the Picabia show at MOMA  I was struck by how the shade of that painter--- from the time of the 1940s when he was in the south of France ignoring World War Two:  

had insinuated itself into the eye and talent of Philip Pearlstein, something I had suspected back in February and found confirmed in an article in Brooklyn Rail by Pearlstein himself...

                SEVEN

  And nearby in the ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY---- a sort of successor of Phyllis Kind---  how one misses her gallery and the pleasure of writing about Martin Ramirez and  Howard Finster and Michael Madore, all of whom had shows at her gallery in New York..and I was pleased to realize that the one painter she could not talk with was Howard as he was totally unlike all her other artists in that he really did believe and lived in a world so remote from her own...though she respected his art as she did all the artists she showed.  I will leave for another time my delicious argument with her about my long piece about Martin Rameriz whch appeared in ARTS MAGAZINE and was one of the first in a major art magazine about his work...

Michael Madore sent me to look at the work of Dommenico Zindato...  echoing Ramirez in a way, but unique detailed repetitive obsessiveness...

TEN  

the real world is ever present

 this is a very common obvious vulgar editorial aside

EIGHT


ALWAYS I STOP AT SPERONE WESTWATER, THE BEST ART GALLERY IN NEW YORK or possibly the most sophisticated both in its choice of painters and in the actual physical space...  it stands near the truly awful and useless NEW MUSEUM which is the perfect example of why Gertrude Stein once said that two words that should never be joined  together are : new and museum... but Sperone Westwater always  presents and even the current show of ALI BANISADR is of interest but is a rare show that is probably pre-mature since the Iranian painter is still too young and too obvious in being  taken over by the shades of Francis Bacon and Hieronymus and even the special pleading of the catalogue copy  telling the reader of Banisadr being a young boy had to live in a bunker during the Iran-Iraq war, which might be interesting in getting him into SVA... but reveals nothing and does note excuse his not outgrowing his influences...

But I did like very much this detail and think I would have preferred a wall of such details:

                 TWENTY

And at the corner of Second Avenue and First Street....  it can be said that art sometimes really lurches into memory and photographs alone:

Time does take away but for a moment we can yank something out of the past: one of those Picabia paintings from the 1940s-- a way to distract from the irritation of that present moment and this present moment:

AND ANOTHER ITEM RESCUED:

from JOURNAL OF SMALL THINGS by Helen Mackay
Another Winter, Thursday, October 7th
Deaths
IT is quite simple.
If it can be that the priest comes, it is very well. All that the priest does is beautiful.
The feet and hands, the eyes, the lips have
sinned, and the touch of forgiveness upon them
is exquisite. It is exquisite, that last entering
in of the Divine Body to the body that is dying.
But if for any reason no priest comes, if no one
cares or troubles to ask for him, or if there is no
time, God is most surely there and understands.
And one is comforted to find that there
is no need to fear for them, as they die. They die so quietly. I am glad to know how
quiet a thing it is to die. There was only one who was not quiet.
They bound ice about his head, and then he
did not shriek and fling himself about any more,
but lay quite quietly until he died.