DOUBLE VISION by GEORGE GARRETT

                                                                                                                                                                 

I have known Tom Whalen for more than 40 years.  He is one of our best fiction writers, poets and a perceptive and authoritative critic of both literature and movies...  We both miss George Garrett and were recently exchanging notes about his work.  Tom, some years ago, published this review of Garrett's last novel that was sadly not much reviewed.  I hope  this essay will send people to one of those important novels that can change how you think about novel writing and the act of criticism.  In the novel Garrett's quotes from a Thomas McGonigle's article  "A Writer's Life" that Garrett commissioned for the Dictionary of Literary Biography and which is available at the Notre Dame Review website.Whalen has written other essays on Garrett which I will hope to reprint.  

                                                                                                          

             Review of Double Vision by George Garrett

University of Alabama Press, 2004

By Tom Whalen    (whalen.t@gmail.com

            The epigraphs for George Garrett's Double Vision underscore immediately the title's implied dialectical shiftings between fact and fiction: "Anything processed by memory is fiction," says Wright Morris, to which Garrett opposes Naipaul's "I would prefer fact." 

            In the novel's first paragraph we encounter the author, in all but flesh, speaking to us straight up as one George Garrett, recently having undergone an MRI and suffering from myastsemia gravis, a disease characterized by "double vision, drooping eyelids, muscle weakness and fatigue, occasional problems maintaining balance"—in general the body does a sort of slow fade.  Our narrator is at the kitchen window looking for a crow he has heard caw: "most likely a handsome fellow [. . .], a glossy shard of darkness, at this moment far from the fellowship of his black caucus . . ."  There is the sound of the crow, its "[r]eedy, repetitive caw."  There are the nutbrown facts of its location: "He is out there high and all alone in the budding branches of the sweetgum tree next door.  Peter Taylor's sweetgum tree, close by the toothpick fence marking the line between his place and mine."  But we can't see the crow, only hear it, "he is long gone."  As is, the next paragraph tells us, Peter Taylor, to which depends the paragraph (complete): "Death is much on my mind these days." 

            But look again at the novel's apparent straightforwardness and casual clarity, for beneath them lie, as behind any mask, a wealth of deceptive shiftings.  Double Vision is the tale of a writer/professor (retired) named George Garrett writing about, in part, his late next door neighbor, the writer Peter Taylor, their similarities and differences (that divide "between his place and mine") while at the same time in superimposition (double vision) writing about his fictional counterpart, novelist and retired professor Frank Toomer's relationship with his famous-writer neighbor Aubrey Carver.  Both Garrett and Toomer have been given an assignment to write a review of a biography of their respective neighbors.         

            As in his Elizabethan trilogy Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun and his novels set in contemporary time, most recently The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You, Garrett explores the relationship of truth to the "liar's craft" of fiction and the treacheries fame can effect on the self.  Double Vision, besides being a testament to old age and disease ("the crummy and depressing little radiology waiting room full of sweat smell and sad humanity"), is a meditation on fame and its close cousin oblivion.  In it, memory merges with fiction, fact with fantasy, and behind the elegiac tone lies a ghostly, welcoming laughter. 

            The novel's third epigraph comes from Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life and concerns that "Patriarch of shifters," the Elizabethan (and short-lived, 1558-92) "university wit," poet, pamphleteer, playwright, drunkard and poseur Robert Greene: "With Greene we cannot always separate fact from fiction in the fantasies he composed on autobiographical themes, or the legend made of him by his contemporaries."  The crow that caws to the narrator and reader at the beginning and off and on throughout the book, besides a real crow on the page and in the air, wears the feather of allusion.  The first reference to Shakespeare in print can be found in  Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte (1592), when he tweaks that jack-of-all-trades, "upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, [. . .] the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."

            George Garrett's Double Vision is a brilliant, post-modern/Elizabethan marvel, a clear-eyed take on the writing life and its practitioners living and dead.  It's also a tribute to Peter Taylor, a diatribe against America's historical amnesia, a self-interview, a book review ("In a larger sense, I suppose, we can therefore consider this whole piece, fact and fiction tangled together, as a kind of an extended book review."), yet another academic novel ("The 'academic novel' has been kicking around for more than half a century, a well-explored and well-exploited genre, good ones and bad ones and (surprise surprise) mostly mediocre . . ."), a sifting and sorting of the past ("Feeling stronger than I have been, feeling a little more energy, I have decided to try to straighten up my attic office, years out of control."), cultural commentary ("public events, in their edited versions and repeated images, seem to possess the demonic power to trivialize what is best about us and to bring out the worst in almost everybody."), a satire ("Consider: if Jonathan Swift was right, that happiness is 'a state of being well-deceived,' then what do you make of a whole nation and its people being dedicated to 'the pursuit of happiness'?"), a postcard to the world:

Though I have loved you and lost you, times beyond counting, still I write again upon this instant, being in receipt of all your ordinary music, to inform you that I can't live without you.  I intend, by God and hell or high water, rain and sleet and snow and the wild spins of the wheel of fortune, to come back for more of the same.

            Double Vision may seem to have, as Garrett says of his house in Charlottesville, Virginia, a "sense of being all casually cobbled together," but in its structure, development, doubling motifs and bright connections it is anything but casual.  Double Vision gradually shifts from George Garrett reflecting on his life and the lives (and deaths) of other writers (Greene, Taylor, Larry Levis), to his fictional Frank Toomer writing about Aubrey Carver and realizing he cannot write the review of Carver's biography, but instead must think again about writing a novel on Robert Greene.  Then, in a masterful dissolve, we're in the 1590's at the moment Greene is tossed out of the Fighting Cock into a muddy street of London. 

            Damn the rain and the mud and the coarse laughter of strangers at this antic man in his cloak of goose-turd green rising up now from the mud as if he had been buried there and were rising again from among the dead intending to frighten folks out of their wits.  The cloak is all besplattered, his long hair and his pointy beard, naturally red enough to play the part of Judas Iscariot without any color or cosmetic, are covered with the mud and his face as dark as any African Moor's.

            The writer puts on the mask of a writer writing about writing, but the mask finally dissolves, vanishes, and all that's left is fiction, words on the page as present as the "cloud of presences" Garrett felt around him one night.  "I felt the presence and nearness of all my dead, close kinfolk and others too, friends and lovers of long ago and most mostly lost to memory by now."

            Neither we nor Garrett knows what that "something" is that the crow "calls out [. . .] loud and clear."  "A lone crow, a fragment of the night perched up high in a huge old tree, has called out something, a message I cannot decode or translate, and then flown away."  The important thing is that it called us to the window and, though we can't see it, we know it was there. 

                                                                                                -- Tom Whalen

First published in The Texas Review Vol. XXV, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2004.

ANOTHER MODEL BOOK SECTION: the best and

Here is an example of what a typical issue of a book section of a newspaper or magazine or whatever you want to call it should contain in this last week of May, 2011.  It is seriously lacking  in books dealing with aspects of the various physical sciences and mathematics.

15- reviews

16- announcements

  17- just  telling

 18- selecting

 19- sheer freedom of it all

 20- but as one man, with no gold in the pocket, so can’t commission a few paragraphs about what I am going to list

21- would people like to follow up with little paragraphs

22- last week before Memorial  Day weekend

(have myself been laid up)

23- Summer reading suggestions are always crap…

24- The cover announcement--- if this was a review section relic---:: two more volumes of Paul Valery’s CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS ( 4,5) are now available from Peter Lang. 

25- I do guarantee you not a single newspaper, not even the TLS has written about this.  1300 more pages of Valery available in English joining the 1800 pages previously translated.  Of course everyone thinks…who knows if they do or not… but the prose is more accessible than the poetry in many ways  so for those who live within the fortress of American English… skeptical of all translation after reading a very disturbing book by Jordan Stump, THE OTHER BOOK, which while not really in any way an attack on the idea of translation does  fit into my head a very real impediment when thinking about all the translated books I have read or will read… but I have the feeling Stump didn’t intend this though I know it is a real issue  and most people are skeptical of translations…

26- Anyway:  Paul Valery: 

27- Of death and the afterlife.     — Scarcely any though has been given to the afterlife, of a dog or a hen.  It’s dead it’s dead.  And yet the dog was trained, he had a memory and a kind of intelligence and an education. By common consent the dog’s memory is allowed to perish but not a man’s. 

29- The superiority of  man is due to his useless thoughts.  

30-The age of why. Children ask, “why?” So we send them to school which cures them of this instinct and conquers curiosity with boredom.

31-Could have picked a hundred more:  the sections in these volumes: language, bios, mathematics, science, time, homo, history-politics, education, system, philosophy, consciousness, theta…

32- Just that listing shows the range:  why I am reluctant to even contemplate reading an American writer,,,

33-THE OTHER BOOK by Jordan Stump. University of Nebraska Press.  A description of different versions of Raymond Queneau’s  Le Chiendent: a copy, the manuscript, a translation, a critical edition.  The same translation existing with two titles, two publishers but same translator, Barbara Wright… Either:  Witch Grass or The Bark Tree. 

34- Stump discusses a few of the sentences Wright just did not translate.  Nothing seems to have been lost, nothing has been gained.  The sentence just did not get into English and as a result you can begin to see the problems or as the subtitle has it “Bewildermets of Fiction.” 

35- So when I read The Bark Tree and when I am thinking about reading the Witch Grass… am I reading Raymond Queneau’s Le Chiendent?

36- That question becomes the impediment.  One understands why publishers hide even for a writer like W G Sebald the fact that Austerlitz was a translation… was something missing from the dust jacket of the hardcover edition.  If it had said on the dust jacket that would have been a discouragement in the view of the chain stores… and Random House wanted to protect its investment: translation hurts that investment.

37- ROBERTO BOLANO   is at the moment really part of the imagination of Americans who read… I won’t list all the little books that New Directions published that established him and upon which Farrar Straus & Giroux was able to launch his two “big” book THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2066. 

38-Of the New Directions books I like NAZI LITERATURE IN AMERICA the best.  Because of the great success of all of these books by Bolano we are now at toward the end of his works and in no way is there a falling off:  BETWEEN PARENTHESES a large collection of his essays, articles and speeches deserves more than a glancing read:  I was taken by a tiny review of two books, Experience by Martin Amis and My Dark Places by James Ellroy:  “Amis’s book ends with children.  It ends with peace and love.  Ellroy’s book ends with tears and shit.  It ends with a man alone, standing tall.  It ends with blood.  In other words, it never ends.”

39- I wanted very much,  I wanted and hoped  A THOUSAND DARKNESSES by Ruth Franklin was going to be something more than a collection of reprinted revised essays that  had appeared in magazines.  That it is still mostly is rather sad.  I had wanted her to begin the nudging over of Roberto Calasso--- there is a hint that maybe she is of that fine a sensibility--- who sits in my mind as the best literary critic writing today.  The adjective literary seems not to do justice, and the word critic seems to need some sort of adjective and  I cannot tell you why.  Calasso of course ranges across the world and while he has not yet gotten to China I can imagine in his old age, China is his destination. 

40-Ruth Franklin’s book is a collection of essay about books about the Holocaust.  She divides the book into witnesses and Those Who Came after which concludes with an ominous phrase:  The Third Generation.  Of course living in New York City we know all about survivors, then the children of survivors and now we have the grandchildren on and on into…  Individually each essay is fine enough, a book is reviewed the author’s whole career is rehashed and on to the next one.  But that is all the book is.  I wanted for Franklin to have maybe forgotten those original reviews, called up what remained from them in her own memory and now to see what remains… at  the end of the book, she is reduced to writing about a kid’s book by Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak, BRUNDIBAR.  She ends with one of those near impenetrably vague but probably profound lines by Elie Wiesel, ”’A novel about Auschwitz is not a novel, or else it is not about Auschwitz.”  For a novel about Auschwitz can never only be a novel about Auschwitz: it is a novel also about Armenia, about Siberia, about Cambodia, about Bosnia, about Darfur, “Though I go, I won’t go far…I’ll be back. Love. Brundibar.”    

41- That is a line which either Franklin will soon realize is a line to be embarrassed about or a line to be ruthlessly subjected to thinking and to an understand that such lines have nothing to do with the putting words on a page… and while she writes wonderfully about Imre Kertesz she might have learned that such a line is not worthy of her intelligence.

42- One reason to read criticism to find out more about authors we have liked and in particular about books of theirs that have not been translated.  I have read everything that is available in English by Michel Leiris…

43- I am sure my readers know who Leiris is:  MANHOOD, RULES OF THE GAME… one of those singular French writers who shaped much of one aspect of my mind… JOHN CULBERT in PARALYSES writes about Michel Leiris’s travel book, though that is such an approximation as to be almost insulting, about his report on a ethnographic voyage into Africa called L’Afrique fantome… why no one has translated this book is beyond me.  As well written as any of Leiris’s books I have been assured by those who have read it in French and about a part of the world that is so poorly represented in world literature and in the world’s imagination and to have a book written by a writer like Leiris…  just beyond my simple comprehension…  Culbert makes this book temporarily available as I am reading his description of L’Afrique fantom.

44-University of Nebraska has a very good line of history books devoted to the West of the United States.  THE JOAQUIN BAND by Lori Lee Wilson is no exception to this.  Telling the complex story of an early outlaw band lead by Joaquin Murrieta which operated in California during the time of the Gold Rush leads her deep into the our now much more complex understanding of the West and much of our current understanding of the complexity is due to of course a refined interest in how many different groups, interests etc.  were involved. 

45- Usually the movies are accused of catering to a narrow stereotyped view of the West but as those who have actually seen a great number of Westerns well know this is not the case.  TV might have presented an often simple minded view of the West but the actual movies were always much more interesting and a very good book along those lines was recently out from YALE  HOLLYWOOD WESTERNS AND AMERICAN MYTH by Robert B. Pippin.. and once I got beyond the horde of people he owes debts to and the fact that he seemed to have had every breath of his life subsidized by some academic slush fund or another Pippen has actually written a fine book, fine in that he has actually watched for instance THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and THE SEARCHERS and saw how in so many ways these are genuine American masterpieces that like each new reading King Lear reveals something new.. and as a result remain ever new…

46- But THE JOAQUIN BAND invites the reader into the heart of the complexity of what actually did happen… she provides, guides but ultimately allows the reader to try to make sense of the material…  the complex story of robbery, murder, hangings, lynchings, prejudice and hatred on all sides… this withholding is a genuine departure from most history writing, where the author is so concerned with sorting out and revealing THE truth that error always has to creep in when the final verdict comes down from the authorial high. 

47- But do not think this is some dry theoretical academic exercise in linguistic torture:    “One of his (newspaper) staff members covered the hangings.   The young fugitive “ spoke a few words asking for forgiveness and confessing that he had committed crimes.”  He died hard because his hands had not been tied lightly due to his wrist wound.  His good hand instinctively yanked free and grabbed the noose. For ten minutes he struggled. Finally the executioner stepped forward and pried his hand out of the noose so that he could expire.

48- THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD  by Antonio Lobo Antunes…   W.W. NORTON is finally making available in a newly translated version and one only has to compare the new version to the one published so confidently many years ago by Random House as being shocking, revelatory of the terrible wars in the Portuguese colonies in Africa…  modeled  I am sure on Albert Camus’ THE FALL, a man is telling of his experiences as a  doctor in these wars…with the new version the book grows, longer, more complex and one has a real sense of what Antunes was all about….

49- Again the problem of translation.  Which book today published in translation and well received is going to be revealed as being only half done and that half done poorly done… 

50- I had reviewed a later book by Antunes which of course makes me grateful this new version of his first book as it goes some distance to explain the style of Antunes and that he did not evolve from a rather ordinary realistic writer of short declarative sentences as that first incompetent version had allowed for…

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jan/26/books/bk-mcgonigle26

51- Never do reviewers or writers ever admit defeat or failure or incompetence or inability but I stand before you in all of those aspects of shame when trying to describe the experience of attempting to read: IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA by  Raymond Roussel and NEW IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA by Raymond Roussel

52- The IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA is translated by Mark Polzzotti and looks and is surely prose.   Polizzotti quotes Harry Mathews as saying that Roussel’s language taught him how “writing could provide me with the means of so radically outwitting myself that I could bring my hidden experience, my unadmitted self into view.”

53- The NEW IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA is translated by Mark Ford and looks like poetry with the French on one side and the English on the other. The book is illustrated and one can see that the French poetry rhymes while the English does not.  John Ashbery says, “Poets especially will be in Mark Ford’s debt and it is a “valuable resource for contemporary English-speaking readers.”

54-Summer travel.

55- Well, as awful as any other time but good for any season:  ENGINEERS OF THE SOUL by Frank Westerman… the reader gets a chance to follow Westerman as he uses some books by Russian writers to visit the sites of some of great projects--- during which hundreds of thousands of men women and children were murdered--- that Stalin launched in the building of the communism or socialism in the Soviet Union  and guided by the books that a variety of communist writers wrote about these projects Westerman travels to see the consequences, walking in the footsteps of these engineers of the soul, which in itself is such a wonderful  knot of words within the atheist world of Soviet communism… such writers, Gorky, Babel, Pilynik, Paustovsky…

56-But for another version of travel: here fiction leads to a so-called non-fiction book.

57- As I mentioned in another post THE SLY COMPANY OF PEOPLE WHO CARE by Rahul Bhattacharya  from FSG was one of the nicest reads these past few months--- about a young man finding himself in and trying to get about in Guyana…well, that leads to the accident of a book Knopf sent over: WILD COAST ,Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge,  by John Gimlette who is one of those English writers, a lawyer in another life, who goes off to places, writes about them and people buy the books instead of going there and like Paul Theroux and a myriad of other travel writers.. one always wonders how it happens… how these writers like the magnet and iron filings…the finding  of the characters, the weaving in of some history but all the interesting stuff, not the boring stuff and then how do they remember all of this stuff?

58- I open the book see the photograps--- the little collage as film script---: Devil’s Island, then the Dutch part with strange murders, the Guyana bit with Jim Jones…

59- But will I go on with the reading?...  A Bulgarian friend, a writer was saying to me once that he was astonished that I or anyone in the US would be interested in Bulgaria!

60- One of those comments, said probably just in passing but it does contain  the nub of the whole matter: how do we become interested in places, the other place, one’s own place…

61- So toward the end

62- As there is no real end and within theto be continued: DARK DESIRES AND THE OTHERS by Luisa Valenzuela.  She was an early Dalkey Archive author with HE WHO SEARCHES while being published by the so-called big publishers who now in the present moment have allowed all her books to go out of print.  This new book which set out to describe through indirection the ten years she lived in New York City, a woman with no city other than academic appointments.. on the speech making circuit and gradually fading away so I was surprised by this book appearing… for all these years I have read a short story of hers with students THE VERB TO KILL and it continues to be of interest, all those readings, good bad ,indifferent ,required have not dulled the story…

63- DARK DESIRES AND THE OTHERS is neither journal nor collection of essays but more a pile of paragraphs some connected, others  just that, a paragraph followed by another paragraph.. notebooks are indicated by cover color, with the possible echo of Kafka… but ten years of a person’s life.  I might be the only person who can say: I want my paragraphs to be so published…

64- How to decide if you want to be inside the mind of LV:

A== and working alongside international  human-rights organizations

B==The Guggenheim grant that I’ve always dreamed of and have now pocketed is burning a hole in my pocket

C== Badly written notebooks, like the result of someone “getting rid of lice,”as Cortazar put it

D==  writer in residence at the Center for Inter-American Relations, at NYU and Columbia

E== I confess that I have lives, said the other; I confess that I have fucked.  I say and what luck.  The odor coming to me now from between my legs is mixed, it is my gift and the other’s too, rather acrid, sharp, not entirely pleasant, but the best you can ask for on this earth.

So much sperm!  I love it when I go to the bathroom and I loosen my muscles and it comes out of me as if it was mine.  A white gush, something with a life of it own.  Though not all of them give it to me.  And not all of them have so much.  But this one does,,.

65- And truly to be continued:::::  THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE WIND  by Cesar Aira.

66-Again, startled by,”.. (Aira is)one of the most prolific writers in Argentina having published  more than eighty books.

67- Another way to try to close:  shall we proclaim this THE SUMMER OF DAVID STACTON as the New York Review Books is issuing his THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT which is centered upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth who was the brother of then much more famous Edwin Booth who was considered by many of the time as the greatest actor alive and in particular for his performance as Hamlet.

68- David Stacton (1923-68) was a prolific novelist given to writing novels usually based within history.  When you look at old issues of book reviews his name is a constant presence  and then he died.  He wrote novels set in feudal Japan ancient Egypt, Europe during the 30 Years war, and he wrote genre westerns, mysteries and even soft-core gay porn… 

69- Who could resist a novel such as THE JUDGES OF THE SECRET COURT where the last page reads:  It was Julia Ward Howe who once asked Charles Sumner if he had  heard of young Booth yet.“Why no, Madam,” said Sumner, I long since ceased to take any interest in individuals.” “You have made great progress, sir,” Julia told him.  “God has not yet gone so far---at least according to the last accounts.”  Tucson November 1959- April 1960

70- I was thinking the New York Review Books  is dedicated to making available the background to the literary history of the United States of the late Twentieth Century which could be said to have two mountain peaks: Saul Bellow on one hand and on the other, Jack Kerouac and off to himself William Gaddis.  Of course I am disregarding Faulkner, Hemingway and Dos Passos but they are there in the moment before what we call the late Twentieth Century…  all the other scribblers find themselves in the shade or shadow or sunbeam or moonbeam of these guys.

71- THE BIRTH OF DEATH AND OTHER COMEDIES The Novels of Russell H. Greenan by TOM WHALEN.  From Dalkey Archive.  While it probably helps to have read the novels of Russell Greenan---IT HAPPENED IN BOSTON, THE SECRET LIFE OF ALGERNON PENDELTON, THE BRIC-A-BAC MAN, among others---  Whalen’s book is an introduction to an American writer who probably few have read though all his books were well published, well reviewed and continue to remain in print in France where a few of his books have appeared even though they are not available in their original English versions… you might think of Whalen’s book as an invitation to read the books of Greenan’s as he makes them into compelling temptations… but of course you wonder who, who.  Well, www.tomwhalen.com takes care of the author and I’d suggest reading any of the available essays if you want to know why this book is to be read but more importantly you might want to read the fiction and then the poetry and  while you can see the hundreds of stories, poems and their publication information it continues to be one of those dreary and typical mysteries: why… start with the story End of Term.”  This is for one of Whalen’s best stories and captures perfectly the impossibility of the teaching profession…

72- So that is a good way to end: go to www.tomwhalen.com and report back to me what you have discovered.  You don’t have to write a thousand word essay.

On into the future:  PARALLEL STORIES by PETER NADAS. THE DEVIL’S CAPTAIN Ernst Junger in Nazi Paris 1941-1944 by Allan Mitchell. HAMLET OR HECUBA by Carl Schmitt. FROM THE OBSERVATORY by JULIO CORTAZAR

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.