----High Road---
1.
At the beginning of February a woman from Harper Collins asked me if I would like to join a group of writers in Lisbon, all expenses paid for a long weekend, to hear about a novel, meet the author and tour the sites associated with the book, Codex 632, which seeks to prove that as a result of a long and complicated conspiracy the fact that Columbus was a Portuguese Jew had been suppressed. The bound galleys were sent to me and I should have refused as the book is a clunky mechanical effort hoping to duplicate the success, if that book can be seen as a success, The DaVinci Code.
But I did accept and began to read again in Pessoa because I realized I could finally see the city of this most wonderful of writers.
I re-read but did not act on Pessoa's words:
Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the streets and squares, over people's faces and gestures, always the same and always different, just like scenery.
If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel.
2
I watched IN THE WHITE CITY a film by Alain Tanner which walks Bruno Ganz about the hilly streets and by the shore front of Lisbon as he makes little movies showing what he sees and which he sends to a woman back home as a way to remind himself that he is away.
Because it is not on VHS or DVD I was not able to re-watch Tanner's RETOUR D'AFRIQUE... and the great lesson of that film that sometimes it is better to just think about going away and then not go away... though when I re-read a review by Vincent Canby which was not at all kind about a movie I remember liking very much because it reflected so well my own boredom and vicissitude in 1973..."It is never strong enough to prevent the boredom and futility experienced by Vincent and Francoise from seeping into the experience of watching the film."
Well, I had admired the film for so well depicting my desperate situation of living in the Earle Hotel in a room over-looking Washington Square--- the same room according to Richard M. Elman, that Lenny Bruce had lived in, behind aluminum foil covered windows... but that is all another story...
3
I had asked the guys at Dalkey Archive if they knew how to get in touch with Antonio Lobo Antunes whose new novel they were publishing, KNOWLEDGE OF HELL. I had written about two of his previous novels and he is the best living Portuguese writer. Dalkey Archive did not know how to get in touch with him. He didn't answer his mail.
So now I was confronted by the reason for why should I go to Lisbon?
To sit in the cafe Pessoa sat in?... to see some pretty buildings?... to note the downward spiral that was sure to be on display from the 1920s when Albert Jay Nock was in Lisbon and noted that they had the best bookshops in Europe because Portugal had the lowest rate of literacy in Europe and as a result the country was also free for the most part of billboards...
4.
I tried to watch another movie LISBON STORY by Wim Wenders but it was nearly unwatchable. Ugly people in ugly places celebrating EUROPE... would probably be an unfair summary of the film but it put me in a very dark mood to think again about having been in Lisbon.
---the low road---
1
The e-tickets were long in coming but the details of the first class hotel, the meals to be eaten, the places to be seen and the description of the fellow travelers--- free lancers: one wrote for the Boston Globe, a few wrote for Jewish newspapers and one did something for SHELF AWARENESS... and myself...
I had already gone to Lisbon... if there was a financial incentive I could describe the whole weekend...
5.
The e-ticket finally arrived and it was for tourist class courtesy of the Portuguese airlines and the land arrangements were from the Lisbon or Portuguese tourist office... so the journey was not sponsored by Harper Collins... and my excuse for not going finally was I could not see myself for 14 hours to and fro crammed into a tourist seat on a plane for three nights in Lisbon..
A low reason, I guess, and I did have second thoughts but still that crammed in sitting and the basic cheapness of the airline--- how was one to enjoy the sights, the meals after such a flight and then the coming back to a week of recovering...
6.
I could never figure out why me? though a friend said I guess they know you write about foreign books with a real appetite but I knew deep down it was my connection to the LA Times that really interested them... and that connection is real and so this was really business and so finally on that low road I was surprised that they had offered me a tourist class seat on the plane-- but to be fair the nice woman at Harper Collins did say there was the possibility of an up-grade but the dice had been rolled and that up-grade should have been from Business to First to have any real meaning.
7.
All through these last few weeks I was remembering Michael Oldfield, the former editor of Melody Maker, saying when I told him of this trip or junket as it might reasonably be described, "Everybody hates people who go on junkets."
I do not know if Oldfield is really correct though hearing of someone's good luck is never totally free of envy and begrudgery...
8.
Jewish people in New York to whom I mentioned this voyage told me that they had long heard that Columbus was a Jew. I looked at Morrison's great definitive biography of Columbus and he argued that there is no real solid evidence for this rumour which has been about for centuries. A friend of Anna's was here from Barcelona and she said everyone there knows that Columbus was Catalan. Elizabeth Frank suggested to me that of course Columbus has to be a Jew now that generally in liberal circles Columbus is seen as a greedy Indian killing monster.. and such a book I added, to Elizabeth's insight, by suggesting that it was another little scratch of the resurgent European antisemitism that is a very real characteristic of the European left...
and so, a little sad--- I didn't get to ask my question though I had anticipated a certain real pleasure in seeing what would have happened if I had asked that question...
9.
Did I learn anything?
Friday, March 7, 2008
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
ROBERT PINGET, RICHARD PRICE AND SO WHY BOTHER?
----how----
George K a psychoanalyst friend used to say that the most intractable problem his patients had to face was that they had ruined their lives by making decisions based upon bad information about the world and about themselves. I often think that is why people read such crap books: that is all they have been exposed to. It begins in school when students by and large now are forced to read what is the correct political and ethnic flavour of the month. Quickly, smart kids understand that the vast majority of novels they read will be focused upon some problem one of the protected ethnic minorities are said to be uniquely faced with... and you are never to question the teacher as to why we are reading this crap instead of say Don Quixote.
The reason for this thinking was that I became aware of SHELF AWARENESS an on-line mechanism for, keeping booksellers and libraries aware of the very best crap publishers have on offer and this in turn lead to ALL OVER THE MAP the first episode of something called TITLEPAGE TV hosted--- as the announcers always say-- by your host Daniel Menaker. This episode featured (don't you like the language--- Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi and Charles Bock...) It seems that Mr Bock's claim to fame is that he was born in Las Vegas and has a book that sells a lot. Susan Choi is--- I guess, as they say on SOUTH PARK, the token--- she is going on about some Chinese guy who was in the newspapers and is now in her novel. Colin Harrison writes about violence from the newspapers or something or other: he's married to a woman who wrote a novel about fucking her father for I guess fun and obviously later profit, and that leaves Richard Price who has written a novel about something that happened in the newspapers.
I have known Price for more than 30 years. I remember when he got into a fierce polemic with Richard M. Elman and again with Johnny Green of Green County, Alabama.. and I was aware of him as a fierce Sullivanian shuffling midst the beds of the Upper West Side and out on Long Island though most recently I ran into him some years ago when our daughters were playing softball: his daughter was on the Friends School team and my daughter was on the team from the school of The Convent of the Sacred Heart.
I watched a little of the show as Price recited the plot summary of his novel and it was as if he was reading the New York Post: could this have been his ironic celebration of Mayor Fiorello Laguardia reading the comic strips to distraught New Yorkers during a news paper strike-- for that is what newspapers really are these days: comic strips without the distracting drawings.
And that is where I stopped.
I had made that mistake my friend Eugene warned me against: you have to curb curiosity, you have to always be on guard as to what is out there wanting to get into your head. All of the above--- no matter what I have written--- love the attention: as long as I spell the names right they chalk it up to the idea: all publicity is good publicity... and i have given them some of my time...
I do wonder why Price bothers to write "novels." He writes good mainstream movie scripts that get made into movies so why all this typing up of novels... that are scripts in disguise?
Maybe only in Hollywood are novels still seen as being something real?
That's enough.
All the books by the people I have just mentioned as being on that show are already forgotten. I am sure you can hear them being boxed up to be sent to the remainder bookstores on the New Jersey shore.
----how----
Here are three pieces from TRACES OF INK by Robert Pinget that survived his death and will long survive all our deaths:
To know the hour of our death would be to deprive ourselves of our power of imagination.
To forget your own nothingness concentrate on that of someone else.
The only future is in the idea we have of the past.
TRACES OF INK was MONSIEUR SONGE'S last notebook. Pinget's books are available from Red Dust and Dalkey Archive.
George K a psychoanalyst friend used to say that the most intractable problem his patients had to face was that they had ruined their lives by making decisions based upon bad information about the world and about themselves. I often think that is why people read such crap books: that is all they have been exposed to. It begins in school when students by and large now are forced to read what is the correct political and ethnic flavour of the month. Quickly, smart kids understand that the vast majority of novels they read will be focused upon some problem one of the protected ethnic minorities are said to be uniquely faced with... and you are never to question the teacher as to why we are reading this crap instead of say Don Quixote.
The reason for this thinking was that I became aware of SHELF AWARENESS an on-line mechanism for, keeping booksellers and libraries aware of the very best crap publishers have on offer and this in turn lead to ALL OVER THE MAP the first episode of something called TITLEPAGE TV hosted--- as the announcers always say-- by your host Daniel Menaker. This episode featured (don't you like the language--- Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi and Charles Bock...) It seems that Mr Bock's claim to fame is that he was born in Las Vegas and has a book that sells a lot. Susan Choi is--- I guess, as they say on SOUTH PARK, the token--- she is going on about some Chinese guy who was in the newspapers and is now in her novel. Colin Harrison writes about violence from the newspapers or something or other: he's married to a woman who wrote a novel about fucking her father for I guess fun and obviously later profit, and that leaves Richard Price who has written a novel about something that happened in the newspapers.
I have known Price for more than 30 years. I remember when he got into a fierce polemic with Richard M. Elman and again with Johnny Green of Green County, Alabama.. and I was aware of him as a fierce Sullivanian shuffling midst the beds of the Upper West Side and out on Long Island though most recently I ran into him some years ago when our daughters were playing softball: his daughter was on the Friends School team and my daughter was on the team from the school of The Convent of the Sacred Heart.
I watched a little of the show as Price recited the plot summary of his novel and it was as if he was reading the New York Post: could this have been his ironic celebration of Mayor Fiorello Laguardia reading the comic strips to distraught New Yorkers during a news paper strike-- for that is what newspapers really are these days: comic strips without the distracting drawings.
And that is where I stopped.
I had made that mistake my friend Eugene warned me against: you have to curb curiosity, you have to always be on guard as to what is out there wanting to get into your head. All of the above--- no matter what I have written--- love the attention: as long as I spell the names right they chalk it up to the idea: all publicity is good publicity... and i have given them some of my time...
I do wonder why Price bothers to write "novels." He writes good mainstream movie scripts that get made into movies so why all this typing up of novels... that are scripts in disguise?
Maybe only in Hollywood are novels still seen as being something real?
That's enough.
All the books by the people I have just mentioned as being on that show are already forgotten. I am sure you can hear them being boxed up to be sent to the remainder bookstores on the New Jersey shore.
----how----
Here are three pieces from TRACES OF INK by Robert Pinget that survived his death and will long survive all our deaths:
To know the hour of our death would be to deprive ourselves of our power of imagination.
To forget your own nothingness concentrate on that of someone else.
The only future is in the idea we have of the past.
TRACES OF INK was MONSIEUR SONGE'S last notebook. Pinget's books are available from Red Dust and Dalkey Archive.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
MUSEUMS ARE GARBAGE DUMPS: JACQUES RIGAUT, EUGENE LAMBE, PIERRE DRIEU la ROCHELLE, NICOLAS POUSSIN
---what---
Museums are garbage dumps. They are a little better organized than the rubbish pits beloved of archaeologists...
Of course the claim is made that they contain the best that remains of bygone eras... an assertion rather than the total truth.
A modern art museum is of course an absurdity and always to be avoided.
If anything, a museum is supposed to contain the distant past otherwise I find it hard to distinguish between The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, The Guggenheim and a department store like Macy's or K-Mart.
Of course, how dare you?
Am I the only one to remember that the Guggenheim gave itself over to displaying the work of that "great" modern artist Georgio Armani?
---what---
The only modern art museum I think that can be defended as such was the overcoat that Jacques Rigaut wore when he came to New York in the 1920s. In the pockets of that coat he had match-boxes and inside each of them were the art he declared to be the best modern art.
Rigaut was a poet and prose writer who wrote "Lord Patchogue." He, myself, Henry David Thoreau are the only major writers to have been in Patchogue and to have written about it.
Rigaut is the subject for Louis Malle's film THE FIRE WITHIN based on the novel by one the third, fourth--- but who is counting?--- most important French writers of the 20th Century, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.
Drieu came to a sad end in 1944 along with Robert Brasillach but both Paul Morand and Louis Ferdinand Celine escaped.
All that is another story.
One can only hope that someday their antagonist that dreary little toad Jean Paul Sartre--- clinging all the the time to his Aryan certification---, will have truly disappeared. Vladimir Nabokov, as you might remember, joins me in loathing every aspect of this stool.
---what---
I had gone up to the Met to see the Poussin show. I had gone with the hopes of seeing his "Landscape with Travellers Resting." I have always looked at that painting in the National Gallery in London in January. Having gone to Arizona, south of Tombstone, this January I did not see that picture. It was not in New York. I got a lesson in how to read an art show catalogue. Under the details of the picture's size in small type, Bilbao... the painting was there in another version of the show but is not in New York.
The Met tries to be all things to all people but I do go there because one can easily avoid the modern rubbish, all that stuff from after the French Revolution.
These temporary shows of course are probably a mistake. A museum is supposed to have some aspect of permanence to it. These shows undermine that... this constant shipping around of the merchandise--- and you tell me these museums are not like department stores?
---what---
Eugene Lambe who is now mostly no longer remembered beyond appearing in my book ST PATRICK'S DAY, DUBLIN 1974 and as a dedicatee of a poem by Derek Mahon used to always tell people from his attic apartment in Longacre in London that when going to an art museum to always know ahead of time what you are going to look at.
There is no way that something once seen can then be erased from the mind. You have to be careful what you look at.
Eugene well understood that it probably did no harm to people who toured through the museums, as if they were cattle being prodded on by minders and their own need to see everything because they remembered nothing of what they saw. These tours prepared people to go to department stores where everything was for sale unlike museums that still placed some things above sale, temporarily.
One of Eugene's favorite books was a book that described all the so-called works of art that were destroyed during World War One and Two. On a dull day it was the only book that could lift Eugene's spirits. The language of regret in which the book was written could make a sane man laugh out loud, Eugene maintained.
I will write more about Eugene Lambe but for now I can well imagine from beyond there in the grave, he would have been merciless with me, if I had recounted my visit to the Met last Friday. Of course you prepared yourself correctly: to see that one painting and of course it would not be there and I am sure you have found another painting that you did see and please, I don't want to hear about it unless it is the one with that wonderful inscription that Dr. Johnson got wrong, Et in Arcadia Ego.
Museums are garbage dumps. They are a little better organized than the rubbish pits beloved of archaeologists...
Of course the claim is made that they contain the best that remains of bygone eras... an assertion rather than the total truth.
A modern art museum is of course an absurdity and always to be avoided.
If anything, a museum is supposed to contain the distant past otherwise I find it hard to distinguish between The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, The Guggenheim and a department store like Macy's or K-Mart.
Of course, how dare you?
Am I the only one to remember that the Guggenheim gave itself over to displaying the work of that "great" modern artist Georgio Armani?
---what---
The only modern art museum I think that can be defended as such was the overcoat that Jacques Rigaut wore when he came to New York in the 1920s. In the pockets of that coat he had match-boxes and inside each of them were the art he declared to be the best modern art.
Rigaut was a poet and prose writer who wrote "Lord Patchogue." He, myself, Henry David Thoreau are the only major writers to have been in Patchogue and to have written about it.
Rigaut is the subject for Louis Malle's film THE FIRE WITHIN based on the novel by one the third, fourth--- but who is counting?--- most important French writers of the 20th Century, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.
Drieu came to a sad end in 1944 along with Robert Brasillach but both Paul Morand and Louis Ferdinand Celine escaped.
All that is another story.
One can only hope that someday their antagonist that dreary little toad Jean Paul Sartre--- clinging all the the time to his Aryan certification---, will have truly disappeared. Vladimir Nabokov, as you might remember, joins me in loathing every aspect of this stool.
---what---
I had gone up to the Met to see the Poussin show. I had gone with the hopes of seeing his "Landscape with Travellers Resting." I have always looked at that painting in the National Gallery in London in January. Having gone to Arizona, south of Tombstone, this January I did not see that picture. It was not in New York. I got a lesson in how to read an art show catalogue. Under the details of the picture's size in small type, Bilbao... the painting was there in another version of the show but is not in New York.
The Met tries to be all things to all people but I do go there because one can easily avoid the modern rubbish, all that stuff from after the French Revolution.
These temporary shows of course are probably a mistake. A museum is supposed to have some aspect of permanence to it. These shows undermine that... this constant shipping around of the merchandise--- and you tell me these museums are not like department stores?
---what---
Eugene Lambe who is now mostly no longer remembered beyond appearing in my book ST PATRICK'S DAY, DUBLIN 1974 and as a dedicatee of a poem by Derek Mahon used to always tell people from his attic apartment in Longacre in London that when going to an art museum to always know ahead of time what you are going to look at.
There is no way that something once seen can then be erased from the mind. You have to be careful what you look at.
Eugene well understood that it probably did no harm to people who toured through the museums, as if they were cattle being prodded on by minders and their own need to see everything because they remembered nothing of what they saw. These tours prepared people to go to department stores where everything was for sale unlike museums that still placed some things above sale, temporarily.
One of Eugene's favorite books was a book that described all the so-called works of art that were destroyed during World War One and Two. On a dull day it was the only book that could lift Eugene's spirits. The language of regret in which the book was written could make a sane man laugh out loud, Eugene maintained.
I will write more about Eugene Lambe but for now I can well imagine from beyond there in the grave, he would have been merciless with me, if I had recounted my visit to the Met last Friday. Of course you prepared yourself correctly: to see that one painting and of course it would not be there and I am sure you have found another painting that you did see and please, I don't want to hear about it unless it is the one with that wonderful inscription that Dr. Johnson got wrong, Et in Arcadia Ego.
Monday, February 25, 2008
NICOLAS POUSSIN, ERWIN PANOFSKY , MARY ENGELBREIT and E.M. CIORAN
--WHY--
Around noon on Sunday I was reading Erwin Panofsky's ET IN ARCADIA EGO: Poussin and The Elegiac Tradition because I am going up to see the Poussin exhibit at the Metropolitan next Friday.
In the essay Panofsky traces the way that Latin phrase has been translated down through the years. He begins with Sir Joshua Reynolds showing a new painting to his friend Dr Johnson in which the Latin phrase appears inscribed on a tombstone. Johnson thinks it is nonsensical: "I am in Arcadia." However,Reynolds tells him that it is far from nonsensical and King George III who had seen the painting the day before said, "ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia."
AN ASIDE: those of us who were in Dublin in the early 1960s learned to always understand Dr. Johnson, with Patrick Kavanagh's dismissal, "that English bore."
Panofsky's essay could serve as a wonderful outline for a course of readings... and I will not belabor that or any other aspect of it.
I was taken by the way that Panofsky in clear crisp sentences takes his reader through an understanding of the word Arcady and how this place, "in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born--- a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss. But no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is."
Eventually, Panofsky will get to the two paintings by Poussin that include this inscription. At the Met only the first of these will be on exhibit as the latter one was too fragile to travel from Paris.
In the painting at the Met we will be reminded as Panofsky writes, "The phrase Et in Arcadia ego can still be understood to be voiced by Death personified, and can still be translated as "even in Arcady I, Death hold sway," without being out of harmony with what is visible in the painting itself."
But, when next in Paris there will be the chance to see the second painting and there see the truth embodied in a very beautiful paragraph by Panofsky, "Thus Poussin himself, while making no verbal change in the inscription, invites, almost compels, the beholder to mis-translate it by relating the ego to a dead person instead of to the tomb, by connecting the et with ego instead of with Arcadia, and by supplying the missing verb in the form of a vixi or fui instead of a sum. The development of his pictorial vision had outgrown the significance of the literary formula, and we may say that those who under the impact of the Louvre picture, decided to render the phrase Et in Arcadia ego as "I, too, lived in Arcady," rather than as "Even in Arcady, there am I," did violence to Latin grammar but justice to the new meaning of Poussin's composition."
And the result, "Poussin's Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment."
Panofsky it should also be mentioned will sweep the reader through Waugh, Fragonard, Diderot, Goethe...
--WHY--
The one painting I am looking forward to seeing is LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING which is usually in the National Gallery in London and which I look at every January. It depicts three men on a road: one walking, one resting and another fixing his sandal.
For more than a year I have been writing about those three men. It is the only thing that still holds my interest in European things. I can not imagine such a painting taking place in Arizona, say, south of Tombstone. I have not discovered how to make vivid a tall dark man striding at the end of day towards Tombstone by the side of the road dressed in shredded rags because I can not stop him to pause to adjust the rope that binds his waist.
--WHY--
Later on Sunday, I was waiting in a Walgreen parking lot and read Mary Engelbreit's editorial in MARY ENGELBREIT'S HOME COMPANION magazine. On the cover readers were invited to: HEARTFELT & HANDMADE 47 Ways to put a little love in your rooms
and WOW! our annual artist's studios tour.
The editorial was occasioned by those artist tours, "It's always been one of my favorite quotes: "I don't believe in art," avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp once said. "I believe in artists."
So do we. The idea of "art" itself can all too easily turn into a frozen, abstract, past-tense concept. Art with a capital "A," a fossil that's now safely on ice in a museum, viewed maybe once a year by a bus load of school kids.
Art is kind of like marriage. It loses its zing without a steady infusion of fresh renewable energy from everyone involved. It's energy, supplied by the audience as much as the artist, that can keep a work of art alive long after the museums have crumbled to dust. And it's this energy that we pay tribute to in our annual artists' studios issue."
--WHY--
Yesterday, today, tomorrow--- these are servants' categories. For the idle man, sumptuously settled in the Inconsolable, and whom, every moment torments, past, present, and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease, identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation and monotonous in its persistence.
from A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY by E. M. Cioran
Around noon on Sunday I was reading Erwin Panofsky's ET IN ARCADIA EGO: Poussin and The Elegiac Tradition because I am going up to see the Poussin exhibit at the Metropolitan next Friday.
In the essay Panofsky traces the way that Latin phrase has been translated down through the years. He begins with Sir Joshua Reynolds showing a new painting to his friend Dr Johnson in which the Latin phrase appears inscribed on a tombstone. Johnson thinks it is nonsensical: "I am in Arcadia." However,Reynolds tells him that it is far from nonsensical and King George III who had seen the painting the day before said, "ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia."
AN ASIDE: those of us who were in Dublin in the early 1960s learned to always understand Dr. Johnson, with Patrick Kavanagh's dismissal, "that English bore."
Panofsky's essay could serve as a wonderful outline for a course of readings... and I will not belabor that or any other aspect of it.
I was taken by the way that Panofsky in clear crisp sentences takes his reader through an understanding of the word Arcady and how this place, "in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born--- a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss. But no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of human life as it is."
Eventually, Panofsky will get to the two paintings by Poussin that include this inscription. At the Met only the first of these will be on exhibit as the latter one was too fragile to travel from Paris.
In the painting at the Met we will be reminded as Panofsky writes, "The phrase Et in Arcadia ego can still be understood to be voiced by Death personified, and can still be translated as "even in Arcady I, Death hold sway," without being out of harmony with what is visible in the painting itself."
But, when next in Paris there will be the chance to see the second painting and there see the truth embodied in a very beautiful paragraph by Panofsky, "Thus Poussin himself, while making no verbal change in the inscription, invites, almost compels, the beholder to mis-translate it by relating the ego to a dead person instead of to the tomb, by connecting the et with ego instead of with Arcadia, and by supplying the missing verb in the form of a vixi or fui instead of a sum. The development of his pictorial vision had outgrown the significance of the literary formula, and we may say that those who under the impact of the Louvre picture, decided to render the phrase Et in Arcadia ego as "I, too, lived in Arcady," rather than as "Even in Arcady, there am I," did violence to Latin grammar but justice to the new meaning of Poussin's composition."
And the result, "Poussin's Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegiac sentiment."
Panofsky it should also be mentioned will sweep the reader through Waugh, Fragonard, Diderot, Goethe...
--WHY--
The one painting I am looking forward to seeing is LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELLERS RESTING which is usually in the National Gallery in London and which I look at every January. It depicts three men on a road: one walking, one resting and another fixing his sandal.
For more than a year I have been writing about those three men. It is the only thing that still holds my interest in European things. I can not imagine such a painting taking place in Arizona, say, south of Tombstone. I have not discovered how to make vivid a tall dark man striding at the end of day towards Tombstone by the side of the road dressed in shredded rags because I can not stop him to pause to adjust the rope that binds his waist.
--WHY--
Later on Sunday, I was waiting in a Walgreen parking lot and read Mary Engelbreit's editorial in MARY ENGELBREIT'S HOME COMPANION magazine. On the cover readers were invited to: HEARTFELT & HANDMADE 47 Ways to put a little love in your rooms
and WOW! our annual artist's studios tour.
The editorial was occasioned by those artist tours, "It's always been one of my favorite quotes: "I don't believe in art," avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp once said. "I believe in artists."
So do we. The idea of "art" itself can all too easily turn into a frozen, abstract, past-tense concept. Art with a capital "A," a fossil that's now safely on ice in a museum, viewed maybe once a year by a bus load of school kids.
Art is kind of like marriage. It loses its zing without a steady infusion of fresh renewable energy from everyone involved. It's energy, supplied by the audience as much as the artist, that can keep a work of art alive long after the museums have crumbled to dust. And it's this energy that we pay tribute to in our annual artists' studios issue."
--WHY--
Yesterday, today, tomorrow--- these are servants' categories. For the idle man, sumptuously settled in the Inconsolable, and whom, every moment torments, past, present, and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease, identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation and monotonous in its persistence.
from A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY by E. M. Cioran
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET EST MORT AND THE LIFE OF RILEY
ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET EST MORT.
The headline and front page on the two major French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro.
*
Five years ago I interviewed Robbe-Grillet in Paris. I brought along my friend David Powis who has been living in Paris for almost thirty years and who in his spare time has been translating Celine's great comic BAGATELLES POUR UN MASSACRE for people like myself who do not have a full access to this great literary work, this one book that will never be published (who really knows) in English because it is more shocking, more scandalous than anything that De Sade ever wrote and at one time De Sade was the standard against which all such books were measured. I am not going to tell you what makes Celine's great book unpublishable... but it is equal to Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal...
*
You can read my interview in Bookforum (Spring 2003). I was criticized for supposedly mis-spelling Julian Green's name though it was the copy editors at Bookforum who added an e to his surname, and for mentioning the fact that my daughter was studying at a Sacred Heart boarding school in Nantes... for reasons of space the editors at Bookforum cut the complete exchange with Robbe-Grillet which had elaborated on my experience of taking my daughter out to the boarding school in Nantes and how the conversation with the head-mistress of the school had turned to Mr Robbe-Grillet and though she herself had never read Robbe-Grillet she was sure his books were in the school library, where indeed they were, with their pages un-cut and as innocent then of grubby fingers as on the day they arrived at the school, their purchase subsidized by the French state.
*
Much more of the conversation with Robbe-Grillet was taken up with the simple fact that while his name is known he does not exist as a read author but as name on a list of modern novelists and without the academics he would have no audience... Robbe-Grillet both understood this but was still proud of the moneyhis books earned in the over-seas markets and was doubly pleased with the chateau where his papers were being stored and how he had gotten the French state to set up this permanent reminder of his stalking the planet.
*
The interview had a ritualistic sneer from Robbe-Grillet against Chirac and Bush--- but that is almost required-- he probably imagined, if you wanted to maintain a revenue stream from American academics... and Robbe-Grillet was no dummy when it came to cultivating American revenue streams as he had long watched hucksters like Derrida, Kristeva and all those other French intellectuals con American academics out of big bucks for doing very little actual work... as do the Irish poets and novelists... it is always a delight to hear them go on about the sinking American dollar and how they grub about to be paid in Euros
*
Also, the interview as published couldn't go into the detailed pleasure that Robbe-Grillet took in his sharing of the young girls who has wife would bring back to their luxurious house to satisfy her sexual needs and then as part of the marriage bargain she would pass them along to her husband... and while he was telling this--- I thought this the height of French... do I dare use the word sophistication--- he was also leafing through the pages of novels by the Argentinian novelist Juan Jose Saer to show us how Saer had marked certain passages that were written in homage to the style of Robbe-Grillet and Robbe-Grillet had slipped into talking about himself in the third person which is a particular gift.
*
Some months later, Robbe-Grillet showed up at NYU and my wife went along to a public talk and after, she went up to him and a little flustered introduced herself in English and Robbe-Grillet brushed her aside claiming he would not speak English at which point Anna switched to her very good French and was talking about her husband who had just interviewed you in Paris but she was quickly cut off by, as Anna said, "this stocky old cunt who must have been his NYU handler." By chance she had touched Robbe-Grillet's elbow and Anna said,it reminded her of a skinny chicken bone with loose skin...
*
I tried to console Anna by reminding her that the French department at NYU used to be or for all I know was still run by a guy who named his dog Beckett and who fancies himself a reader of modern literature. That department at NYU is a genuine killing field of literature, of sensitivity, of culture: I once suggested to this guy that they offer a course on the two great mountains of modern French literature Proust and Celine.. and the howl of derision was satisfying--- the only department more fraudulent than the French department might be the German Department or could it be the Dance Department... the choices are endless when it comes to NYU.
*
The most controversial part of the interview was Robbe-Grillet's dismissal of Richard Howard as a translator because of his homosexuality and as a result of how awful are his translations of Baudelaire and other French writers.
I have long suspected that Richard Howard is not that good of a translator and one only has to compare his translation of IN THE LABYRINTH with Christine Brooke- Rose's to see the difference or one can compare Howard's translations of Claude Simon with Helen Lane's versions--- Howard from Cincinnati has a provincial's understanding of French... and while he has been prolific he does not have access to the whole orchestra of the French language... one would almost say he has a limited vocabulary or at least he has access to a smaller vocabulary than did Helen Lane or Christine Brooke-Rose.
However he has been hard working and we have to be grateful in some way for even his imperfect versions of so many French works of literature but it must also be remarked that his very presence--- coupled with publisher's laziness--- discouraged others from competing for the work and of course he had personal financial resources not available to many another translator
*
I shall think of Alain Robbe-Grillet when later today I watch his LA BELLE CAPTIVE. It is truly awful and does feature artwork by Magritte which was on display in his house when David and I went to see him now five years ago.
*
NO, I will not watch the movie. I looked at the trailer... it is too awful... wooden acting, even in those seconds: splattered blood, young female breasts, leering old men, a girl on a motorcycle...
What a revolting development, as Riley would say.
The headline and front page on the two major French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro.
*
Five years ago I interviewed Robbe-Grillet in Paris. I brought along my friend David Powis who has been living in Paris for almost thirty years and who in his spare time has been translating Celine's great comic BAGATELLES POUR UN MASSACRE for people like myself who do not have a full access to this great literary work, this one book that will never be published (who really knows) in English because it is more shocking, more scandalous than anything that De Sade ever wrote and at one time De Sade was the standard against which all such books were measured. I am not going to tell you what makes Celine's great book unpublishable... but it is equal to Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal...
*
You can read my interview in Bookforum (Spring 2003). I was criticized for supposedly mis-spelling Julian Green's name though it was the copy editors at Bookforum who added an e to his surname, and for mentioning the fact that my daughter was studying at a Sacred Heart boarding school in Nantes... for reasons of space the editors at Bookforum cut the complete exchange with Robbe-Grillet which had elaborated on my experience of taking my daughter out to the boarding school in Nantes and how the conversation with the head-mistress of the school had turned to Mr Robbe-Grillet and though she herself had never read Robbe-Grillet she was sure his books were in the school library, where indeed they were, with their pages un-cut and as innocent then of grubby fingers as on the day they arrived at the school, their purchase subsidized by the French state.
*
Much more of the conversation with Robbe-Grillet was taken up with the simple fact that while his name is known he does not exist as a read author but as name on a list of modern novelists and without the academics he would have no audience... Robbe-Grillet both understood this but was still proud of the moneyhis books earned in the over-seas markets and was doubly pleased with the chateau where his papers were being stored and how he had gotten the French state to set up this permanent reminder of his stalking the planet.
*
The interview had a ritualistic sneer from Robbe-Grillet against Chirac and Bush--- but that is almost required-- he probably imagined, if you wanted to maintain a revenue stream from American academics... and Robbe-Grillet was no dummy when it came to cultivating American revenue streams as he had long watched hucksters like Derrida, Kristeva and all those other French intellectuals con American academics out of big bucks for doing very little actual work... as do the Irish poets and novelists... it is always a delight to hear them go on about the sinking American dollar and how they grub about to be paid in Euros
*
Also, the interview as published couldn't go into the detailed pleasure that Robbe-Grillet took in his sharing of the young girls who has wife would bring back to their luxurious house to satisfy her sexual needs and then as part of the marriage bargain she would pass them along to her husband... and while he was telling this--- I thought this the height of French... do I dare use the word sophistication--- he was also leafing through the pages of novels by the Argentinian novelist Juan Jose Saer to show us how Saer had marked certain passages that were written in homage to the style of Robbe-Grillet and Robbe-Grillet had slipped into talking about himself in the third person which is a particular gift.
*
Some months later, Robbe-Grillet showed up at NYU and my wife went along to a public talk and after, she went up to him and a little flustered introduced herself in English and Robbe-Grillet brushed her aside claiming he would not speak English at which point Anna switched to her very good French and was talking about her husband who had just interviewed you in Paris but she was quickly cut off by, as Anna said, "this stocky old cunt who must have been his NYU handler." By chance she had touched Robbe-Grillet's elbow and Anna said,it reminded her of a skinny chicken bone with loose skin...
*
I tried to console Anna by reminding her that the French department at NYU used to be or for all I know was still run by a guy who named his dog Beckett and who fancies himself a reader of modern literature. That department at NYU is a genuine killing field of literature, of sensitivity, of culture: I once suggested to this guy that they offer a course on the two great mountains of modern French literature Proust and Celine.. and the howl of derision was satisfying--- the only department more fraudulent than the French department might be the German Department or could it be the Dance Department... the choices are endless when it comes to NYU.
*
The most controversial part of the interview was Robbe-Grillet's dismissal of Richard Howard as a translator because of his homosexuality and as a result of how awful are his translations of Baudelaire and other French writers.
I have long suspected that Richard Howard is not that good of a translator and one only has to compare his translation of IN THE LABYRINTH with Christine Brooke- Rose's to see the difference or one can compare Howard's translations of Claude Simon with Helen Lane's versions--- Howard from Cincinnati has a provincial's understanding of French... and while he has been prolific he does not have access to the whole orchestra of the French language... one would almost say he has a limited vocabulary or at least he has access to a smaller vocabulary than did Helen Lane or Christine Brooke-Rose.
However he has been hard working and we have to be grateful in some way for even his imperfect versions of so many French works of literature but it must also be remarked that his very presence--- coupled with publisher's laziness--- discouraged others from competing for the work and of course he had personal financial resources not available to many another translator
*
I shall think of Alain Robbe-Grillet when later today I watch his LA BELLE CAPTIVE. It is truly awful and does feature artwork by Magritte which was on display in his house when David and I went to see him now five years ago.
*
NO, I will not watch the movie. I looked at the trailer... it is too awful... wooden acting, even in those seconds: splattered blood, young female breasts, leering old men, a girl on a motorcycle...
What a revolting development, as Riley would say.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
MY FAUST by PAUL VALERY, HARALD WEINRICH, NICOLAS POUSSIN, FERNANDO PESSOA
another
"Whereas before Kant morality was still expressed in terms of virtues (and immorality in terms of vices), Giovanni Della Casa, the Italian author of a conduct manual titled Galateo (1558), translated into French under the title Galatee (1562), had already speculated about the moral status of politeness. Is it proper to count politeness among the classical (theological, cardinal) virtues, and can one brave the authority of Aristotle and Saint Thomas so as to open the canonical catalogue to a new category of virtues that we might today call sociable or even social?" This is the opening of an essay Politeness and Sincerity in a collection of essays by Harald Weinrich entitled THE LINGUISTICS OF LYING. I had come to this book of Weinrich's by way of his LETHE The Art and Critique of Forgetting.
And another
Being in bed after the minor surgery of a few days ago I was struck by how unprepared I am for such a sentence. Like all Americans I did not study philosophy in high school unlike French lycee students who are required to study philosophy through their entire secondary education. Of course in my primary school education at St Francis de Sales School in Patchogue I had religion classes and while they were not formally philosophical they could be seen as my introduction to the discipline of theology and as such can serve as an introduction to all that it is not immediately available. Such classes are looked down upon by many but now they seem to have been the most lasting as they were finally concerned with what philosophy has always been concerned with: what and why.
Weinrich's essay then went on to a discussion of MY FAUST by Paul Valery and that is what I have been reading. Written in 1940 midst the French collapse it is a humourous version of Faust and one in which both Faust and Mephisto are aware of all the previous versions of their appearances on the world's stage and one might suggest they are aware of the versions to come... in this version Faust wants to write a book to end all books: the book in the sense Mallarme used, in the only sense that really matters--- a book that has not been written before and which ends the need to write another book.
but another
If only writers would ask themselves: does anyone really need to read the book I am about to write, hasn't this book been written before, how many books will the book I am writing replace or shove to the side.
In the mail a summer catalogue: celebrity and journalistic efforts by Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Martin Amis, Rick Bragg, David Price, Robert Kagan, David Gutterson, Bill Clinton and Linn Ullmann. And A NOVEL: already an enormous success, an astonishing invention of stunning economy in the most confounding precincts of the human heart returning to the fairways stunningly inventive debut from the slums of Columbia to the still mysterious 1988 plane crash back with a razor sharp novel opens eleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in eight months into the fragmented lives of two sisters a wannabe Texas princess, the fiercely intelligent ambitious MI5 officer in a crowded residential suburb that wreaks havoc widespread havoc of that awful summer and its ultimately unavoidable dangers
and another
I turned from the review in the NY SUN of the new Poussin show at the Met where Lance Esplund reports of a nymph, "In her orgasmic shudder, she rises off the ground to their gaze, as if she were a floating cloud. The satyre's nipple burns red hot..."
to the actual catalogue of the show published by Yale University Press and look again at my favorite Poussin, last seen in the National Gallery in London, LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELERS RESTING--- those three men who I have been writing about while trying to imagine a further place for them in the world
while another
"I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me."
(262 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa)
"Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
(451 Pessoa)
"Whereas before Kant morality was still expressed in terms of virtues (and immorality in terms of vices), Giovanni Della Casa, the Italian author of a conduct manual titled Galateo (1558), translated into French under the title Galatee (1562), had already speculated about the moral status of politeness. Is it proper to count politeness among the classical (theological, cardinal) virtues, and can one brave the authority of Aristotle and Saint Thomas so as to open the canonical catalogue to a new category of virtues that we might today call sociable or even social?" This is the opening of an essay Politeness and Sincerity in a collection of essays by Harald Weinrich entitled THE LINGUISTICS OF LYING. I had come to this book of Weinrich's by way of his LETHE The Art and Critique of Forgetting.
And another
Being in bed after the minor surgery of a few days ago I was struck by how unprepared I am for such a sentence. Like all Americans I did not study philosophy in high school unlike French lycee students who are required to study philosophy through their entire secondary education. Of course in my primary school education at St Francis de Sales School in Patchogue I had religion classes and while they were not formally philosophical they could be seen as my introduction to the discipline of theology and as such can serve as an introduction to all that it is not immediately available. Such classes are looked down upon by many but now they seem to have been the most lasting as they were finally concerned with what philosophy has always been concerned with: what and why.
Weinrich's essay then went on to a discussion of MY FAUST by Paul Valery and that is what I have been reading. Written in 1940 midst the French collapse it is a humourous version of Faust and one in which both Faust and Mephisto are aware of all the previous versions of their appearances on the world's stage and one might suggest they are aware of the versions to come... in this version Faust wants to write a book to end all books: the book in the sense Mallarme used, in the only sense that really matters--- a book that has not been written before and which ends the need to write another book.
but another
If only writers would ask themselves: does anyone really need to read the book I am about to write, hasn't this book been written before, how many books will the book I am writing replace or shove to the side.
In the mail a summer catalogue: celebrity and journalistic efforts by Barbara Walters, Arianna Huffington, Martin Amis, Rick Bragg, David Price, Robert Kagan, David Gutterson, Bill Clinton and Linn Ullmann. And A NOVEL: already an enormous success, an astonishing invention of stunning economy in the most confounding precincts of the human heart returning to the fairways stunningly inventive debut from the slums of Columbia to the still mysterious 1988 plane crash back with a razor sharp novel opens eleven year old Isabelle hasn't spoken in eight months into the fragmented lives of two sisters a wannabe Texas princess, the fiercely intelligent ambitious MI5 officer in a crowded residential suburb that wreaks havoc widespread havoc of that awful summer and its ultimately unavoidable dangers
and another
I turned from the review in the NY SUN of the new Poussin show at the Met where Lance Esplund reports of a nymph, "In her orgasmic shudder, she rises off the ground to their gaze, as if she were a floating cloud. The satyre's nipple burns red hot..."
to the actual catalogue of the show published by Yale University Press and look again at my favorite Poussin, last seen in the National Gallery in London, LANDSCAPE WITH TRAVELERS RESTING--- those three men who I have been writing about while trying to imagine a further place for them in the world
while another
"I'm the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn't know how to complete me."
(262 The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa)
"Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are."
(451 Pessoa)
Monday, February 11, 2008
GLENWAY WESCOTT, LARRY WOIWODE, WILLIAM MAXWELL ...THE PERIL OF ... A LONGING FOR CERTAINTY... AN OPERATION... ROBERT PINGET, JULIAN GREEN
FIRST OF TWO PARTS.
I have been reading A STEP FROM DEATH by Larry Woiwode in preparation for a review.
Already I know I will not be allowed to go on about THE GRANDMOTHERS by Glenway Wescott and possibly THE DEATH OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green because there are space considerations which I understand and accept.
For the longest time I have believed that if I had to pick one modern American novel as the best American novel I would say it is THE GRANDMOTHERS. The novel is basically about a Wisconsin family and its dispersal across the country and overseas. The novel is made of a number of voices and the prose is poised and eloquent.
Edward Dahlberg, the severest and most stringent of critics, held Wescott in high esteem and was one of Wescott's few supporters as a literary artist in the long teasing out of his public life...
Wescott did write one more significant novel THE PILGRIM HAWK but his whole career revolved around THE GRANDMOTHERS and the title story for GOODBYE WISCONSIN.
I have mentioned him before as he is cited in the Julian Green's diaries. I remember talking with Green about Wescott who Green still vividly remembered fifty years after they had met for the first time. We talked of Hemingway's great hatred of Wescott which was a dreary mixture of jealousy, envy and sexual incompleteness on Hemingway's part.
All of Wescott's career revolved around the great success of THE GRANDMOTHERS. And it is this sort of success and burden that Larry Woiwode also shares: all of his books both before and after are planets revolving about the great sun of his BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL. Woiwode has not to date been able to find his THE PILGRIM HAWK as he has made other choices in his life.
In my little garden Woiwode nudges Wescott over a little bit...
In A STEP FROM DEATH Woiwode again takes up the decisive role that William Maxwell played in his life. And I would like eventually to write about Maxwell but the Library of America as foolishly published the first of two volumes devoted to Maxwell but are forcing us to wait until September for the second volume.
Hannah Green and I went to the memorial service for Glenway Wescott and we talked with William Maxwell. He too joined us in understanding just how important THE GRANDMOTHERS was to all of us and he shared our dismay thatit seemed to have fallen into a sort of obscurity...
Wescott was a public figure. He was president of one of the American academies... he was "distinguished"... but is as far as I know, in this country at least, the exception to the rule: such figures are usually deeply rotten at the literary core...
SECOND OF TWO PARTS.
In two days I have to have an operation.
One of those walk in walk out things but still I am to be put to sleep for a time.
Do you all remember FERNWOOD TONIGHT when Martin Mull had on the guy with the DRIVE -IN DO IT YOURSELF SURGICAL CLINIC?
It is unclear how many days or weeks of pain afterward.
The sort of operation called routine.
The beginning of old age or just another sure step like a broken tooth--- and I got one of those for tomorrow...
One thinks of not waking up.
Edward Dahlberg thought it normal to think of suicide at least once a day.
Maybe the wife will hit the medical malpractice jackpot.
She won't have to throw out by herself all the literary rubbish I leave behind...
I have to call it that: what else to call unpublished books?
To echo what Lawrence Durrell once told me in 1970 in New York City on West 110th Street: What has posterity ever done for me?
Of course these unpublished books are not rubbish but they will be treated as rubbish...
Enough of me.
Here is a nice bit from THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET (translated by Barbara Wright):
When you think of all the work that must have gone into getting all those papers together, classifying them, numbering them, and the fiddling about with them and rewriting from beginning to end that shatteringly incoherent narrative, those cries of distress, maniac's visions, expressions of anguish, premonitions...
This never-ending old age, while the days are dawning anew, it was no use marking the pages it doesn't apply any more, a book it's impossible to read without suffering disaster.
I have been reading A STEP FROM DEATH by Larry Woiwode in preparation for a review.
Already I know I will not be allowed to go on about THE GRANDMOTHERS by Glenway Wescott and possibly THE DEATH OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green because there are space considerations which I understand and accept.
For the longest time I have believed that if I had to pick one modern American novel as the best American novel I would say it is THE GRANDMOTHERS. The novel is basically about a Wisconsin family and its dispersal across the country and overseas. The novel is made of a number of voices and the prose is poised and eloquent.
Edward Dahlberg, the severest and most stringent of critics, held Wescott in high esteem and was one of Wescott's few supporters as a literary artist in the long teasing out of his public life...
Wescott did write one more significant novel THE PILGRIM HAWK but his whole career revolved around THE GRANDMOTHERS and the title story for GOODBYE WISCONSIN.
I have mentioned him before as he is cited in the Julian Green's diaries. I remember talking with Green about Wescott who Green still vividly remembered fifty years after they had met for the first time. We talked of Hemingway's great hatred of Wescott which was a dreary mixture of jealousy, envy and sexual incompleteness on Hemingway's part.
All of Wescott's career revolved around the great success of THE GRANDMOTHERS. And it is this sort of success and burden that Larry Woiwode also shares: all of his books both before and after are planets revolving about the great sun of his BEYOND THE BEDROOM WALL. Woiwode has not to date been able to find his THE PILGRIM HAWK as he has made other choices in his life.
In my little garden Woiwode nudges Wescott over a little bit...
In A STEP FROM DEATH Woiwode again takes up the decisive role that William Maxwell played in his life. And I would like eventually to write about Maxwell but the Library of America as foolishly published the first of two volumes devoted to Maxwell but are forcing us to wait until September for the second volume.
Hannah Green and I went to the memorial service for Glenway Wescott and we talked with William Maxwell. He too joined us in understanding just how important THE GRANDMOTHERS was to all of us and he shared our dismay thatit seemed to have fallen into a sort of obscurity...
Wescott was a public figure. He was president of one of the American academies... he was "distinguished"... but is as far as I know, in this country at least, the exception to the rule: such figures are usually deeply rotten at the literary core...
SECOND OF TWO PARTS.
In two days I have to have an operation.
One of those walk in walk out things but still I am to be put to sleep for a time.
Do you all remember FERNWOOD TONIGHT when Martin Mull had on the guy with the DRIVE -IN DO IT YOURSELF SURGICAL CLINIC?
It is unclear how many days or weeks of pain afterward.
The sort of operation called routine.
The beginning of old age or just another sure step like a broken tooth--- and I got one of those for tomorrow...
One thinks of not waking up.
Edward Dahlberg thought it normal to think of suicide at least once a day.
Maybe the wife will hit the medical malpractice jackpot.
She won't have to throw out by herself all the literary rubbish I leave behind...
I have to call it that: what else to call unpublished books?
To echo what Lawrence Durrell once told me in 1970 in New York City on West 110th Street: What has posterity ever done for me?
Of course these unpublished books are not rubbish but they will be treated as rubbish...
Enough of me.
Here is a nice bit from THE APOCRYPHA by ROBERT PINGET (translated by Barbara Wright):
When you think of all the work that must have gone into getting all those papers together, classifying them, numbering them, and the fiddling about with them and rewriting from beginning to end that shatteringly incoherent narrative, those cries of distress, maniac's visions, expressions of anguish, premonitions...
This never-ending old age, while the days are dawning anew, it was no use marking the pages it doesn't apply any more, a book it's impossible to read without suffering disaster.
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