A TRANSIENT GOLGOTHA :Edward Dahlberg Does Not Leave Me

                        Memorial Day in four days. 

One.    How appropriate to read in a forth-coming Notre Dame Review a letter from Edward Dahlberg to William O’Rourke, “I shall soon be forgot although never remembered.

Two.    I think it is probably better to know this as young as possible rather than on the eve of one’s death.  I think I remember Dahlberg saying he had been posthumous for a generation even in 1971…

Three.   Now he is… who else can say they met Edward, were entertained and wined and fed by him and then of course found wanting, probably deservedly so?

Four.  I thought of Dahlberg and his BECAUSE I WAS FLESH while in the car on the way to Washington our guest said that her father had been inmate of the Jewish orphanage in Cleveland.  She did not know BECAUSE OF MY FLESH though she was educated at Oberlin and was a lawyer speaking Russian.  So not that unusual. 

FIVE.   “In April 1912, when he was eleven the boy became an inmate of the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland, the Forest City.  No Spartan ordinances could have been more austere than the rules for orphans.  The regime was martial; Scipio, who compelled his troops to eat uncooked food standing up, would have been satisfied with these waifs who rose every morning at 5:30 as though they were making ready for a forced march.”

SIX.  Only BECAUSE I WAS FLESH seems immediately available of his great books.  It is a model of how to remember and of his situation: a mother who was lady barber, a prostitute, a… but if you do not understand the demanding power of the opening lines you would be better off never to pick up a book, never to have picked up a book… though I well understand the foolishness of this thought as you who are reading these words are already so fortunately isolated, so separated from the trivial world represented by --- their names are too well known to be repeated---:  “Kansas City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses; the maple, the alder, elm and cherry trees with which the town abounds are songs of desire, and only the almonds of ancient Palestine can awaken the hungry pores more deeply.  It is a wild concupiscent city, and few there are troubled about death until they age or are sick.  Only those who know the ocean ponder death as they behold it, whereas those bound closely to the ground are more sensual.  Kansas City was my Tarsus; the Kaw and the Missouri Rivers were the washpots of joyous Dianas from St. Joseph and Joplin.  It was a young, seminal town and the seed of its men was strong…

                                                My mother and I were luckless souls. She strove fiercely for her angels and was wretched most of her days in the earth.  Moreover, if failed, who hasn’t?  If she prayed for what she thought  was her good and none heeded her that had to be too.  Each one carries his own sack of woe on his back, and though he supplicate heaven to ease him, who hears him except his own sepulcher?

                                                My mother had two miserable afflictions, neither of which was she ever to overcome: her flesh--- which is my own--- and the world, that curses both of us.  “Let me, O Lord, be most ungrateful to the world, “ comes from the mouth of Teresa, the Jewess of Avila.”  

SEVEN SEVEN SEVEN

I thought to go down to the second to the last residence of Dahlberg in New York City, 64 Rivington Street,  and what better description than his own of this city:  "There are five trash town in greater New York, five garbage heaps of Tofeth. A foul, thick wafer of iron and cement covers primeval America, beneath which cry the ghosts of cranes, the mallard, the gray and white brants, the elk and the fallow deer.  A broken obelisk at Crocodopolis has stood in one position for thousands of years, but the United States is a transient Golgotha."

        64 Rivington Street no longer exists.  It must have been torn down and it was replaced with a larger building.

  SMILE AMERICA dental clinic would be thought an invention if read in a novel or an exaggeration if read in a book by Dahlberg.

"A TRANSIENT GOLGOTHA"

ARE THEY DEAD YET or is there...

Last night--- though it could be any night--- I had my second taste of the posthumous at St Marks Bookstore when I looked into Dalkey Archive’s publication of Charles Newman’s last novel, IN PARTIAL DISGRACE.  At the back of every Dalkey Archive book is a listing of their books in print and my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had disappeared.  The night before I had also been in the bookstore and looked into Peter Dimock’s new novel GEORGE ANDERSON as I had only read the advance bound galleys and there I had my first taste of the posthumous as my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had not been listed in the back of the book.  In the most recent Dalkey Archive book that I received from them, MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY SWISS POETRY, my name and GOING TO PATCHOGUE had been listed.

Something happened.

The first paragraph is of course mired in vanity, but I hope it is not personal vanity as I well know that there are fewer years in front of me than behind.  It is from a concern for GOING TO PATCHOGUE which had originally been published in hardcover in 1992.  To the publisher’s chagrin (a nice old word) he had to reprint the book as it received very good reviews and unexpected attention.  A full page in the Chicago Tribune and in The Village Voice, good reviews in  The New York Times, Newsday and in the Los Angeles Times.  Both Newsday and The New York Times ran articles about the book and the Newsday profile went on from the cover to two full pages with very flattering photographs of my younger self.

There were discussions of the book is several academic books and then and then… I awaited a paperback version which finally appeared in 2010 from Dalkey Archive.   18 years before and earlier Dalkey usually published their books in hardcover as that was the fashion and expected. 

So GOING TO PATCHOGUE exists and this time there were oonly reviews in the local newspapers on Long Island and follow up on the websites of the papers.  The major newspapers no longer think it newsworthy when a book appears in paperback reprint and even the Los Angeles Times for whom I have written a great deal did not find space on their blog Jacket Copy for a paragraph of mention.

My concern is not for myself but for the sake of GOING TO PATCHOGUE and for my other books.  In 1987, Dalkey Archive published THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV which received a startlingly good review from Andre Codrescu in The New York Times.  After the fall of the communism in Bulgaria the book appeared in translation in the best “thick” journal in Bulgaria, Svremenik and in 2000 Northwestern University Press did a paperback version of the book.  Both the paperback and hardcover editions remain in print.

You will notice that I do not write about the content of these books or what I make of them.  That is not my concern as I know I have not read these books before and I have not read them since…  for my purpose was not t write a book that had been or would have already been read many more times since most of the vast number of books in the world are imitations, echoes, fakes of…

AND I know that next year Dalkey Archive is supposed to be contractually publishing ST. PATRICK‘S DAY Dublin 1974 and my dread, the foreboding as its success might allow for more books to appear--- the one thing every publisher fears…more books from…  but JUST LIKE THAT, NOTHING DOING, EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS, FORGET THE FUTURE…

HOWEVER.

HOWEVER, the word posthumous arrived via hearing it from Edward Dahlberg in 1970 when he was able to say he had been living posthumously for generation. 

While known in Dublin and to a very few discerning…  Dahlberg’s fate always weighs upon me. 

I open his THE CONFESSIONS OF EDWARD DAHLBERG and read the inscription, FOR THOMAS, WHOM I LIKE VERY MUCH AND WHO, I HOPE, WILL BE MY FRIEND.  EDWARD DAHLBERG DEC., 21. ’70 N.Y.C.  The book will be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times by Anthony Burgess and in 1972 Dutton will publish Dahlberg’s anthology of travels, myths and legends of the New World, THE GOLD OF OPHIR.  A few books will appear from some small presses and in 1976 Thomas Crowell (Established 1834) will publish two books THE OLIVE OF MINERVA OR THE COMEDY OF A CUCKOLD and BOTTOM DOGS, FROM FLUSHUBG TO CALVARY, THOSE WHO PERISH AND HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED AND UNCOLLECTED WORKS. 

Both books will be buried, dumped into the grave with hardly any public mention.  Edward himself will soon join those books in the earth.

TED Klein told me of hearing from Leslie Gardiner--- who has gone on to be a powerful agent in London--- of her having seen a memo from within Crowell that nothing was to be done with these books.  They had to be printed and that was it. Dahlberg had been a difficult writer and…

Something had happened.

And most people would find it unbelievable that a publisher would pay for and actually print two books and then as they say, do nothing. 

I too would have joined in that idea except I had known of the case of Michael Breslow who had published with Viking in 1978 a novel LIFE LINE which had wonderful blurbs from both Hannah Green and Anthony Burgess.  Burgess went on to pay a sort of homage to Breslow by naming a character after Michael in the novel EARTHLY POWERS…

Paperback rights had been sold to Bantam and Michael rejected a garish dumb cover and he was told we are going to doom—that is the word they used doom--- your book with a tasteful cover which will only have typeface and no illustration.  Good luck…

So while the posthumous always awaits us, we cling to the dumb hope the books will outlast… though  Lawrence Durrell told me in New York in the spring of 1970 when I asked him if  he ever thought of the future of his books, No, what has posterity done for me?...

When was the last time you read in Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet or that great monument THE AVIGNON QUINTET?

   
Everyday my eye passes from The AVIGNON QUINTET, to THE DEATH OF VERGIL to ULYSSES to ON THE ROAD… and so from Broch inside Vergil:  “He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time an harassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world a lodger in his own life…

AFTER:  my first thought  for  the title of this post: AM I DEAD YET...

BOOKS ARE RELICS

.Books are relics.

.In no way is this disturbing or sad or a cause for the usual dismay.

.Most of my life was spent in the time of typewriters but now the use of the typewriter is as common and as interesting as man bites dog.

.The owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop--- the great literary bookshop within walking distance and heir to the 8th Street Bookstore of memory--- was telling me a few weeks ago: there is no longer a book culture. No one waits for a new book as of old by certain authors. They had a midnight opening for the new Thomas Pynchon novel but it had the feel of something from the past… and even smelled of the fake world of publicity more associated now with sexy vampire books.

.I suppose I could tease out analogies with the culture of the relic in the middle ages… and fabrication of, the trade in, the veneration of, the function of… but that would take us into areas of theology…

.I suppose, I began to see the book as a relic as I was driving around in southern Arizona last January. Except for Tombstone, book stores are few and very far apart. But I did notice in places like Ajo, AZ and Rodeo, New Mexico and in particular in the latter place secondhand shops that also sold books. In the small grocery store, junk shop and café in Rodeo were a couple of cases of books for sale. Most of them were mass market paperbacks that I surmised had been left behind by people using the trailer parks in the area… people are reluctant to throw away books… so they pile up in Rodeo in Ajo and in many of the little towns that one stops at… I guess I should have asked if anyone ever buys a book…

.I had celebrated Tombstone as a town full of books but they were of local interest, < the Gunfight at the OK Corral> some published by university and NY publishers but many by very small publishers locally… there was one bookstore owned by a prolific western themed books writer who published his own books… you see the staged gun fight and want to know more and you think a book: but in actuality all the information is on the computer right now and you can watch on You Tube various versions of the recreated gunfight you saw and you have yourself probably like I did made a littler movie… but did I buy a book?... yes, a reprint of an article about the surrender of Geronimo complete with the original photographs but then all those picture are on the computer and… but I had the feeling I was doing this more as memorial to my previous habit and this was underlined when I did buy in the Tombstone courthouse bookstore A TENDERFOOT IN TOMBSTONE The Private Journal of Geore Whitwell Parsons: The Turbulent Years: 1880-82.. I bought it because in the index it revealed the name: Endicott Peabody who had established the first Episcopal church in Tombstone and who later would go back East and establish the Groton School which my son was at that moment a student. IS it possible that anyone under the age of forty who would have done what I had done in the courthouse?

.A friend who doing the revisions of his book on a writer who originally well published in the United States in English now finds that only the French are interested in his books and are even prepared to translate his unpublished English language books. A new book by this author had appeared on the internet in an English version and my friend wrote that he was not really prepared to re-write the whole manuscript of his book unless someone was prepared to pay him to do it and since as he is subsidizing the publication of his own book he didn’t see much reason because in reality how many people will actually read a book about an author who now only has one book in print in the United States and even though it is published by a major NY publisher…

.This is a long roundabout way of getting to the idea that it is only very recently really in the course of human history that writers expect or are known for living off the books they write…. I won’t rehearse the whole history of authorship but we all well know those dedications to patrons, protectors that introduce books of poetry and prose that used to introduce the book before they were replaced with long lists of people that the author lists as helpers, friends etc ,etc, an incredible display of narcissistic anxiety. Did Horace, Catullus or Virgil have agents and receive royalty statements?

.So now that books are relics: what to do with this impulse to write… and to have read what one writes: now you are reading these words which cost you nothing and cost me nothing…

.Is it reasonable anymore to expect to receive money for what one writes?

.Of course: how is the writer to live?

.There are those relic embellishers: foundation prizes or fellowships, welfare grants from the government, teaching sinecures for those creating aspirant relic makers by passing on “tips” of how it is done.

.A POSITIVE NOTE. Denis Donoghue wrote an essay about how Ezra Pound through the writing of The Cantos was trying to urge into existence an ideal prince patron. I would do so also but well know that any prince patron who came along would quickly be ensnared in making sure the patronage would be distributed in the correct proportions along ethnic, racial sexual lines of retreat from any true excellence if there was any public hint of such largess.

.Now, I have been writing for some time a much longer thing for lack of a better word and soon it will be finished and it will be about 300 pages. I received no money in advance for writing this thing but I would like it to be read.

.In the old days two of my things--- THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE were made into books and that is that..

.Since then I have written many things but they have not been made into books because editors like the late Richard Seaver for instance once said he could not make any money off of it as did Robert Weil etc…and a young guy at Harper Collins and Overlook…

.I suppose I could have gone down the list but some years ago after those two books were “published” and widely and well reviewed I had approached an agent who was honest enough to say, I cannot eat lunch off of you.

.And that is really what Richard Seaver, Robert Weil and the kid at Harper Collins were really saying: they could not eat lunch off of me or it… At the moment Weill is sitting pretty, someone said because he published a book of cartoons by R Crumb based on the first books of the Bible--- though Norton’s sales are off 25% last year--- what a fall off from the days of ZAP, for Crumb... but that is publishing : digging up the almost dead and seeing if you can make some money off of them if you teach teach them some sort of trick.

.In the mail the other day, a truly pathetic book by Patti Smith writing about her “relationship” with Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith once tried to convince people she was in the incarnation of Rimbaud but now she is wrinkled, long of tooth and should have remembered Rimbaud was finished with this stuff by the age of 21: and a memoir of a man whose claim upon posterity is the picture of himself with a bull whip shoved up his rectum…

.Of course publishers know they are a dying breed, both physically and metaphorically. No young person of a right mind would go into publishing unless possessed of a large trust fund and needed something to do to avoid the drug habit. That is the great fear stalking publishing: they know it is dying industry as they like to fashion themselves.. but are all hoping there are a few more years in the old way of doing things…

.But you are thinking of those electronic gadgets that are now appearing in the hands of people on the subway: Kindle, Sony readers and the awaited Nook? On the weekend I was in the Barnes and Noble on Union Square and asked the kid to demonstrate the Nook for me. I asked to see if Ulysses was available. HE tried to find the free sample but something happened and he couldn’t find it. He said this doesn’t usually happen but there are still some glitches… I can well imagine that these things are the future and people will learn to read “books” on their cell phones. The kid offered that while he didn’t use these electronic readers he also did not read books much anymore though he thought there would always be people interested in big old important books. The kid was Asian and I am sure he was trying to show some sort of respect for my obviously aged face…

.Just before Christmas the Los Angeles Times saw the book page staff reduced to two people… I expect it will soon be one person who will produce a page much like the page in the Newark Star Ledger…: it will mostly be a page of announcements… a telling of readers where to go and find out about new written things and where to read about these new written things or it will be… who really knows.

.Nowhere in the country is anyone adding staff to the book pages. In my short experience I have seen the Washington Post, Newsday and now the Los Angeles Times fade and fade

.HOWEVER, once again I turn when I finish this little thing to:::: NOTHING DOING because I am interested in recording these lives I met on the page: Herbert T. Lange, Al Wells, George Kamenov, Sean Patrick, the voice which has gone looking for its own grave and how it all began when once in The National Gallery, London standing in front of Nicholas Poussin’s LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING…

PS. I am a relic collector, a relic producer and from the mail as I am typing this: four equisite books: THE OTHER SLEEP by Julian Green, CHATEAU d'Argol by Julien Gracq, A JOURNEY TO MOUNT ATHOS amd THE SORCERER"S APPRENTICE both by Francois Augieras... 6 1/2 inches by 4 7/8 inches, paperback with flaps...books of a voice indifferent to time, without insidious reference to the present moment, consolations for aging flesh encasing minds that do not fade,... published by Pushkin Press in London, the only publisher ALIVE in London at the moment.

.Why am I not dead so that Pushkin Press or _____________ might think to publish my words?... (Edward Dahlberg told me in 1971 that he had been writing posthumously for most of his life. I now know what he means, maybe.)

LIBRARY OF AMERICA and LIEBLING and CELINE and DAHLBERG and a SAD LUNCH and a NOT SO SAD LUNCH

28---

The publicity people for the Library of America must have missed sending me a copy of A.J. Liebling that just came out. An editor at a newspaper sent me a copy as they were not going to review the book.

I always look forward to the Library of America books and in the Fall they have some interesting ones: the second William Maxwell, a Philip Roth and a book of poetry by Ashbery. I hope I will not be over-looked as the bound galleys should be coming shortly. In the summer they are doing a second book by Philip Dick which I will talk about one of these days.

But to the Liebling. If this editor had not sent the book to me I would not have discovered this meeting with Louis Ferdinand Celine:

For myself, I shall always remember him as a big-shouldered man, unexpectedly rugged and tweedy for a Frenchman, sitting in the dining room of the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York in 1934, eating strawberry ice cream after rare roast beef and at intervals pausing between enormous mouthfuls and great, grasping swallows to shout obscene regret for the Middle Ages, when the Church assured the common people that they would go to hell after death and be miserable in the meantime. "Then, at least, there were no false hopes," he said.

So, while I might have been skeptical of why the LOA was doing Liebling, I have been won over. The book is a compilation of all his writings during the Second World War and while it is a little marred with the fakery of having a celebrity editor whose name I will not mention it is a real book.

Many of us are waiting for the LOA to do the collected poetry of Melville, the books of Sherwood Anderson, the work of T.S. Eliot and of course: Where is Hemingway? Where is Glenway Wescott? Edward Dahlberg? William Carlos Williams?

29---

In THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, the trade journal of the creative writing business there was an announcement of the PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL. "Over 200 members of the publishing industry attended a reception for the festival in March, boarding the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 to celebrate the upcoming event"--- hours waiting in a vast storage facility to board, searched as if getting on a plane, a thousand waiting to sail... lines like entering a detention camp--- "the on-board luncheon featured readings"---before the food people were ordered into a stadium seating theater to hear speeches about how the Cunard lines (remember they gave us the Titanic: the ship that God couldn't sink, as they say but as Julian Green once told me, "As they were saying that the iceberg was making its way..." were in favor of crossings, communication... And then there was a pathetic rock band with dragooned "writers" singing anti-George W Bush lyrics; I kid you not, and then the President of PEN was going on about the impending dawn of fascism in the US as witnessed by the denial of entry to a convicted criminal writer at Newark airport. The decor of the boat is down-market Las Vegas. "was hosted by Salman Rushdie, the festival chair"--- no, he did not show up as he had more important things to do: he was in London shilling for another of his unreadable novels.

Two writers by chance this week asked me if I had received the brochure for the PEN conference. Did you do what we did: throw them out? I did not ask why they had thrown them out but can only guess---

If anyone remembers Georgi Markov, the exiled Bulgarian writer who was murdered in London by agents of the Communist regime in Bulgaria they might remember his wonderful exposition of why the Communist regimes loved writers conferences, readings, writers visiting factories, writers retreats: the regime always dreaded the appearance of another book and the inevitable task of having to read it so why not find agreeable and progressive ways to hinder the writing of books and maybe even hinder the reading of books for probably the best way to discourage reading is to have writers read their own works in public along with colleagues, one of which always goes on for too long

30---

I went to a sad lunch for Dirk Wittenborn at The Museum, a restaurant connected to that dreary junk shop MOMA. The dining room was large for the one round table so it seems that they had at one time expected more people. Never having met Wittenborn, never having read a word he has written or seen the film he wrote THE FIERCE PEOPLE--- like most people, as it seems to have gone direct to DVD, or seen another documentary he produced about the hard lives of rich kids and will I be going to see a new film he wrote that is due in the summer The Lucky Ones, something about Iraq War and I am sure it is not celebrating the American effort there---

These lunches happen all the time. They are designed to get word of mouth going... the occasion for this is the publication in August of PHARMAKON.. murder, drugs, rich people, fathers, children, privilege, cover-ups, pain, anger, sex...

Why write a novel instead of a screen play, I asked Dirk. "In a novel you can show thinking," Dirk replied

At the actual lunch of course the question who will write the screenplay and I was wondering, again, why bother with the novel as only then did people at the table seem animated: the movies are the reel world. Why do writers set themselves up like this? Well, money of course and the rich are as grubby as the next person and probably even more so...

Dirk was talking about his three therapists and I could hear them as they alternatively moved through his little talk: the one who dealt with his father/son issues, the next one who dealt with his intimacy/women issues and the last with the issues of drugs...

The pork loin was dried out and without flavour.

PHARMAKON has an opening line that the author is proud of: I was born because a man came to kill my father.

31--- I was reading THE WAGES OF EXPECTATION the biography of Edward Dahlberg by Charles DeFanti... DeFanti quotes as his concluding lines the epitaph that William O'Rourke had written for Dahlberg, For whatever Dear Readers there are now, or are to come Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend."

In a Village Voice review of this biography also written by O'Rourke:

"Dahlberg's bile was in direct proportion to the neglect he felt, which of course was enormous. Even if you produce a master work--- which Because I was Flesh surely is--- you can be ignored because literature plays little role int he life of the commonwealth."

And:

"Dahlberg led his life seemingly enunciating one state above all, that of the writer as pariah, the glorious nay-sayer unsullied by commerce, fashion and vain success."

And:
Dahlberg was payed the wages of his own expectations: rejection, isolation, and the curse of superfluity."

O'Rourke's review appeared in the Village Voice on April 16, 1979.

Can anyone imagine such writing in the newspaper that goes by that name today in the year 2008?

32 PS---

We were in Enzo's (Second Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets) for pizza this afternoon.

The guy from the funeral parlor across the street was in for a slice.

After he left I mentioned to Mike that I usually see him standing in front of the parlor waiting for a delivery.

If you shake hands with him watch his eyes. They start from your eyes and go down. He's measuring you. If you've shaken hands with him scratch your balls three times that'll keep him away for now.

As I was leaving Mike was looking in the Village Voice at a profile of Philip Glass. Enzo's is mentioned. Glass is a nice guy, Mike says. He comes here.

I tell Mike I see Glass around, sometimes up at the Domincans' bodega.

GORKY, TOM WHALEN, EDWARD DAHLBERG along with old complaints

---morning---

In New York City if you have a car you have to move it twice a week for street cleaning. On the street where I live that means sitting in the car from 9-10:30AM two mornings. This morning I was reading in a new book from Yale University Press: GORKY'S TOLSTOY & OTHER REMINISCENCES edited by Donald Fanger. GORKY'S TOLSTOY is a new annotated edition of a book that I have carried with me and read for more than 35 years. I have had different editions of it: one a Viking Compass edition and another from an English language publisher in Russia that dropped the chapter on Andreyev.

My knowing and having read this book was one of the frail foundations for being able to have conversations with Edward Dahlberg as it was one of the few modern books that Dahlberg approved of. It was also a book that was close to the heart of Hannah Green... and Nina Berberova.

Of course in Bulgaria when I mentioned the name of Gorky it was because of this book and then the first volumes of his autobiography but for Lilia, Gorky was synonymous with the dread and required novel MOTHER, a model of what Socialist writing was supposed to be and which she was required to admire in secondary school...

Now as I was again reading Gorky's book I was trying to remember what had caught me so and what continues to hold me. I think it has something to do with how Gorky in this book--- which details in a frank and fragmented way his friendships with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sulerzhitsky, Andreyev and Blok--- the creation of that special country where writing is the center of the universe, where books are living presences and the whole world revolves around them and their creation... but in no way was this some sort of world removed from the actuality of living human beings in all their messy particularity, perversity and just being different. It was a world where friendship did not demand complete agreement in all matters but where there was a complex mutual understanding of the resilient frailty of the individual.

In a more perfect world I would suggest that all of the so-called creative writing courses require this book as a central text... of course you, patient reader, understand how radical this suggestion is because you know that these courses are now training courses in the stalking of success and have very little to do with literature, with the real living presence of a book...

---Mourning---

Yesterday as I was waiting to send my son back to The Groton School where he in the Fifth Form and the dread college application process has slowly begun I was talking with him about vocation as opposed to jobs--- education as opposed to training--- but mostly I was talking about vocation and about how rare it is and why colleges and the world at large talks very little about it. I was talking, maybe too much, about how hard it is to know if you have a vocation and how hard it is to live it out if it does happen.

Of course I reminded him of Baudelaire's thought of there are only three beings worthy of respect, the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create... and I mentioned that when I wrote about Ernst Junger I suggested that he was the only complete person in the 20th Century but you had to substitute his scientific work for the fact that he had not been a priest...

My son knows the quality of Junger about which I spoke through STORM OF STEEL. You always have to give a writer's credentials: his actual books, not his opinions.

I suggested to my son to watch how the future will be presented to you by these dread colleges and universities which are mostly training camps for a job that you would not do if they did not pay you money... and to ask questions to see if these colleges are communities of scholars as Paul Goodman suggests in the very title of his book on the university COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS or are they just another step in postponing as in when you are in kindergarten they tell you it really begins in school and then they tell you it begins in high school and then in college and then in graduate school and then in post-graduate school and then it begins after you retire and and and...

---morning---

In the mail from Obscure Publications number 57 in an edition of 70: "What an Edifice of Artifice!" Russell H. Greenan's It Happened in Boston?by TOM WHALEN. In 61 pages Whalen describes a novel by Russell H. Greenan that while recently reprinted has not become a central text of world literature. However I am not really concerned with that at this moment but with the fact that Tom Whalen does not have a book of his own stories in print from one of the major publishing houses in spite of publishing hundreds and hundreds of stories and poems in nearly every magazine in the United States

I remember back in 1970/71Richard M. Elman pronouncing that there are no undiscovered geniuses in the United States. It was always unclear to me whether he was mimicking what publishers believed about themselves or if Richard believed this himself. I am sure publishers do believe this and the evidence is all about us and this why there are so few interesting books being published. Publishers mostly no longer know how to read or have the time to read... it is after all a business and it is not based upon reading but upon the creation of copyrights of intellectual properties that can be... enough of this...

For 12 academic years which translates into 24 semesters and with two classes of Freshman composition I have read Tom Whalen's story End of Term now 48 times and each time I have read that story new nuance have shown themselves and each time the story stands revealed as one of the very very few stories that actually describes the powerlessness of a teacher in trying to explain why a student has not done as well as she might have and in turn the story becomes a meditation on what to do with the most awful information that is always coming our way...

In the current THE LITERARY REVIEW Vol 51/2 there is a new story by Whalen, The Effect which is a meditation on a sentence the narrator's wife says as she leaves him for work one morning, "Good luck with your work today." If only Blanchot was alive today to do justice to this story which is able within seven pages to suggest the vulnerable foundation upon which all story resides and in turn all of human life...

---mourning---

The obscurity of Whalen will be held against him. I can not imagine-- though by writing this I of course hope I am wrong-- any editor or other so-called powerful person reading these words and seeking out the story or going to www.tomwhalen.com.

But this afternoon I can go again at random to read Gorky on Tolstoy, "And I see how much life the man embraced, how inhumanly intelligent he was, and how awful." Or an exchange with Suler, to whom he says, "You know how to love all right. But you don't know how to choose and you'll fritter away your energy on trifles." "Isn't everybody like that?" "Everybody?" L.N. repeated. "No, not everybody."

---mourning---

As I have mentioned previously I have been awaiting word myself from a publisher, now revealed, Europa Editions. Day 11 and no word.

a PS. On Friday an email. Manuscript received. Now day 13.