BEING CAUGHT UP
8--In Patchogue, growing up, in my experience, remembered, World War Two was mostly in the Pacific, being of the Class of ’44 and thus born in the last year of the war, the memory is of uncles who had been in the Navy and Marines in the Pacific, my mother’s father was a Colonel in the engineers building airfields in Burma and China,
9--Never was the adjective “good” ever attached to the noun war, that was a distortion applied long afterward as a way to make those who had served feel good as they were dying, never once did anyone ever say: it was a good war, they all knew better, the why was unspoken and in the pictures of dead American Japanese in the various blue covered picture histories that were published after the war for an audience of veterans and those who were related to them
10--Of course we all knew about the war in Europe: D-DAY, the Afrika Korps, the Battle of the Bulge, Erwin Rommel , Adolf Hitler, FDR, Eisenhower, Churchill, (I was going to add Stalin but his name was very obscure in memory)
11--What World War Two would almost solely become arrived via: Eugen Kogan’s THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, Lord Russell of Liverpool’s THE SCOURGE OF THE SWASTIKA… as now in the early 60’s along with one name: Adolf Eichmann
12--With the knowing about the camps and the killing of millions of Jews there were two disturbing elements in: the Scourge of the Swastika there are photographs of Jews about to be murdered and the pubic hair of one of the women is very evident---as everyone knows pubic hair was relentlessly persecuted in publications in the Unites States until Penthouse broke the taboo many years later—and the second detail is in memory: a short reference in Kogan’s book to a Romanian boy being sent to Buchenwald for being a compulsive masturbater as a favor to the ruler of Romania---i have not read this book now for many years and will stand corrected: though of course it is the memory I am writing about---
13—in the Coram Drive-in with my family we saw A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE. There was probably a second movie but this film has remained with me because of the ending.
13---Later, when I began to use the word film interchangeably with movie, I discovered that this was directed by Douglas Sirk ( as was another film or movie that is permanently lodged in memory TAZA SON OF COCHISE)--- I guess I was getting ready for being able to watch nearly all of the films of Fassbinder many years later---
13--- the ending, the hero of the film, played by John Gavin is on leave from the German army and at home---the love--- goes back to the war on the Eastern Front and the last thing he will see in the film is the muzzle of the rifle pointed at him by a Russian he had previously saved from being killed: that gaping abyss into which his life is being sent.
13--- never having seen in a movie in which the sympathetic lead character is killed was both incredibly upsetting though I was unable to explain why and to this day: of course being the good guy and all the rest of it, so I suppose…
---14 Princeton University Press has added to the complexity of World War Two another tiny element in the letters of a ordinary German soldier sent to the Russian front, RELUCTANT ACCOMPLICE edited by Konrad H. Jarusch, the son of the letter writer of the same name Konrad Jarusch who had been a high school teacher of religion and history and who find himself in charge of a large field kitchen behind the German lines…the very domestic tone of the letters is of real interest and the constant awareness of even as early as the latter part of 1941 with the winter arriving, there is the sense of the fatal consequences of the German invasion of Russia. Konrad will die of typhus on January 27, 1942…
---14, so Konrad served, essentially an older man, what was he to do, he served, he tried to feed the horde of Russian prisoners, he was not heroic, he didn’t place his life in front of… in order to stop any action, he knew the fate of the Jews, he knew that many of the Russia had welcomed the Germans as liberators, he saw their betrayal, a little guy without a sense of humor, another little guy doing what he had to do, but nothing bad--- really--- and he wrote these letters… “we live from that which we have brought from home, and nurture ourselves with what we hear from home. Most of us can only stand it here, because they see their time here as merely a temporary thing. But we don’t make any plans about the future…
---14 reminded that most soldiers just got through the war, to be remembered only by their relatives and when they were gone not even… the fortunate father in having a son who will become a professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, not to be forgotten, not a hero, not a victim, not a criminal, not a… just another dead soldier who wrote letters making things complex
---14 complex as when my first boss who had lost his arm in the Battle of Bulge was talking about how he had been spared the job of killing some German prisoners as the sergeant was afraid they would make a noise, and how Jim was glad he didn’t have to lead a German in to the dark and cut his throat form behind, with no bitterness at the loss of his arm, thankful he didn’t have to do that job, but for me hearing it: the complexity of the war, did Americans do such things, that wasn’t part of the story…
---15 Jarusch’s letters joins a tiny tradition of books by those who did not inwardly go along and at time publicly did not go along though remaining in Germany. DIARY OF A MAN IN DESPAIR by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen is one such book, by this Prussian aristocrat who always disdainful of the Nazis and who recounting his contact with Oswald Spengler a writer always beloved of by those who enjoy predicting the decline of the West and a stalwart of the Knopf publishing company for many years it should be remembered… anyway to get a sense of the internal emigration: (Spengler) he was truly the most humorless man I have ever met; in this respect he is surpassed only by Herr Hitler and his Nazis who have ever prospect of dying of a wretchedness compounded by their own deep-rooted humorlessness and the dreary monotony of public life which under their domination has taken on the rigidity of a corpse and is now in its fourth year of suffocating us to death (this is in May, 1936)
Reck-Malleczewen will be murdered in Dachau in February 1945.
There is a wonderful apt entry from 20 July 1944. Maria Olczewska ( an opera star) has come for a visit. We talked about Furtwangler—a subject I hardly want to touch on. There is, evidently, a way of conducting in a “blonde” manner. And the favouring of this shade, whether in fact or as a concept, is something which in itself compromises the man who does it. I can’t help it
---15 Norman Stone who writes an introduction to this book points out that one of the great failures of history was that the Prussian aristocrats did not understand that their natural allies were the ordinary Catholics who according to the most reliable research were more likely to be anti-Nazi or not susceptible to the Nazis unlike their Protestant countrymen… and it is this prejudice that proved fatal to them in the long run though it should be remembered that Von Stauffenberg was a Catholic aristocrat who almost did kill Hitler
---16 and a more obscure though more important book: JOURNAL IN THE NIGHT by Theordore Haeker who it seems was in contact with the Scholl, those young people in White Rose, the few who dared to not remain silent.
Some notes:
1940. (399)In addition to his particular knowledge the historian today needs above all to know his catechism and in addition perhaps a smattering of criminal psychology, That is much more important than a knowledge of German Idealism
1944. (698) The Germans tend by nature to the heresy of Pelagius and of Arius, by nature that is by your own ability that makes them proud and by their own pride that makes the intellectually shallow.
1940 (292) The soul of the man who only has ears for the noise of the times will soon be miserably impoverished. He will soon be found to be deaf to all reasonable language.
1940 (469) I wrote so to speak, because I am a reader and always profit by my writing. But now that you ask me, I have to admit that whoever writes wants to be read, and not only by himself.
1940 (87) It is difficult to know one’s way about in one’s own thoughts; how muh more difficult where one’s feelings are concerned.
1940 (80) To many, war is a satisfactory alibi before the world, even though not before one’s conscience or before God.
16--- the LAST LETTERS FROM STALINGRAD was a little collage of letters published in the US in 1962. It is made up of letters soldiers wrote from besieged Stalingrad when the writers knew that they were lost. Preserved by the propaganda ministry who had wanted to possibly use them as a memorial, the actual content was too sad, too human, too lacking in…
But for me when read in the context of A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE:
---Around me everything is collapsing, a while army is dying, day and night are on fire, and four men busy themselves with daily reports on temperature and cloud ceilings. I don’t know much about war. No human being has died by my hand. I have even fired live ammunition
---Don’t forget me too quickly
---I will not surrender; yesterday, after our infantry had retaken a positinm I saw four men who had been taken prisoner by the Russians. No we shall not go into captivity. When Stalingrad has fallen you'll hear and read it. And then yo;ll know that I shall not come back
---if I could have made it through this war safely, I would have understood for the first time what it means to be a man and wife in is true and deepest sense. I also know it now—now that these last lines are going to you
17---and awkwardly I cut to Wendy Lesser’s book on listening and trying to understand Dmitry Shostakovich’s string quartets, MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES. For myself who am musically illiterate Lesser’s commentary on the quartets is illuminating and foregoing the usual technical language makes accessible the structure and how the quartets work ---the 15th is my favorite, the saddest--- as individual works of art and how the quartets, all 15 of them, seem to take on a life of their own. It is helpful to read the book before and after listening to each quartet.
18---at one time one could hear people saying, the one advantage of the communist regimes was if you were a writer your work got taken seriously if only by the police who read with greater care than any garden variety editor in the West who was only looking for a way to make money. And the same was said about music and Lesser is very good on just how seriously the communist regime was interested in Shostakovich’s work and how he reciprocated that interest and how he sought to create a space to work in his own way. Lesser falters a little when she acknowledges that he was well rewarded, Three Stalin Prizes among them and all the usual materials rewards though of course he was never really free to come and go as he pleased. She tries hard to avoid dealing with what Shostakovich knew or didn’t know about the untold millions who were murdered by the regime he never publically rebuked and she is reduced to finding irony in certain of his public statement and of course his silence is seen as his way of protesting and yet and yet.
Of course if we are to be tolerant of Ezra Pound’s war time speeches, Celine’s pamphlets, Heidegger’s silence, I suppose we can accept Shostakovich into their ranks but I am well aware that this is no real answer.
Tyrants have always had their artists. And the nature of the tyrant is to be arbitrary. It takes a lot of forgetting to listen to Shostakovich just as it does to read Pound, Heidegger, Celine but they did not so thoroughly serve the tyrant and that is what Lesser avoids. Pound, Celine and Heidegger had lapses, while the whole of Shostakovich’s life was given over to support for the tyrant.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL: Roland Barthes
56---In the late 20th Century, three French intellectuals---Derrida, Foucault and Barthes destroyed--- via their eager gullible American acolytes--- most English and literature departments of American universities and when they were contemporaneously joined by the feminists, queer study folk and Marxists of various persuasions smart sensitive students departed to science and math if they wanted to preserve any real interest In the reading of literature.
33---Derrida was a huckster of the first order who in reality was your typical Gnostic adept possessed of a specialist vocabulary who initiated disciples into his supposed esoteric wisdom who in turn in a traditional Ponzi scheme recruited unsuspecting students who in turn…
89--Foucault worked the psychology side of the street and poorly read and disciplined set out to undermine supposedly received ideas about madness, incarceration and sex. His life ended in squalor after aggressively infecting young men in San Francisco and other cities with the AIDS virus while on tour in the United States.
67---Barthes launched a thousand students of signs and with the same abstruse language making common a line I heard in Dublin pubs: Who’s reading the telephone directory… the reading of telephone directories becoming equal to reading Shakespeare in many American universities since Barthes had argued that there was no real difference, there is only reading…
99---However, Barthes did create two books that will endure: Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes and A LOVER’S DISCOURSE. Finally the rubbish of what had made him in demand was cleared away and Barthes was able to write about as someone might have said. His real subject: himself.
I have been reading with great pleasure and actual anguish THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL by Barthes published by Columbia University Press. Made up of the notes for the lectures Barthes gave in the College de France in the years just before his death in 1980 they take up the question of what it means to want to write a novel.
At first I didn’t get far as I got bogged down in the prefaces but as I read the first lecture which comes with very good annotations as do all the lectures, I discovered that miraculous moment again… the reading slowed, so that I could read only a paragraph at a sitting… I was moved to the center of my being.
So the question of how to share this and Benjamin at hand: just quote what I have underlined from that lecture of December 2, 1978:
a---Each year, when beginning a new course, I think it apt to recall the pedagogical principle stated programmatically in the “Inaugural Lecture”: “I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year…
b---The subject is not to be suppressed
c---Better the illusions of subjectivity than the impostures of objectivity. Better the Imaginary of the Subject…
d---Dante:”Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Dante was thirty-five. I’m much older
e---Age is a constituent part of the subject who writes
f---I’ve gone far beyond the arithmetical middle of my life, it’s today that I’m experiencing the sensation- certainty of living out the middle-of-the- journey
g--- Having reached a certain age, “our days are numbered”
h---This reference to age is often taken the wrong way, misunderstood—it’s seen as coquetry: “but you’re not old
i---There comes a time what you’ve done , written (past labors and practices) looks like repeated material, doomed to repetition, to the lassitude of repetition
j--- The self-evident truth: “I am mortal” comes with age
k---Foreclosure of anything New (= the definition of “Doing Time”)
l---I have no time left life to try out several different lives: I have to choose my last life, my new life, Vita Nova (Dante)
m---I have to get out of this gloomy state of mind that the wearing effects of repetitive work and mourning have disposed me to, This running aground, this slow entrenching in the quicksand (which isn’t quick!) this drawn out death of staying in the same place
n---So to change, that is to give a content to the “jolt” of the middle of life
o---But to change idea is banal; it’s as natural as breathing
p---From Blanchot: There is a moment in the life of a man--- consequently, in the life of men--- when everything is completed, the books written, the universe silent ...there is left only the task of announcing it
q---Either retreat into silence, rest, retreat
r---Or to start walking in another direction, that is to battle, to invest, to plant with the well known paradox: Building a house makes sense but to start planting
s---Part of a life’s activity should always be set aside for the Ephemeral: what happens only once and vanishes, the necessary share of the Rejected Monument, and therein lies the vocation of the Course
t---The same uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness… a difficult afternoon: the afternoon … I reflect with enough intensity. The beginning of an idea, something like a literary conversion--- it’s those very old words that occur to me to enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I’d never written before to do only that
u---To want to write
v---To say that you want to write--- there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write--- not scientific discourses. This could even serve as am apposite definition of writing (of literature) as opposed to Science
w---The proof that In Search of Lost Time is the narrative of Wanting-to-Write resides in this paradox: the book is supposed to begin at the point when it’s already written
33---Derrida was a huckster of the first order who in reality was your typical Gnostic adept possessed of a specialist vocabulary who initiated disciples into his supposed esoteric wisdom who in turn in a traditional Ponzi scheme recruited unsuspecting students who in turn…
89--Foucault worked the psychology side of the street and poorly read and disciplined set out to undermine supposedly received ideas about madness, incarceration and sex. His life ended in squalor after aggressively infecting young men in San Francisco and other cities with the AIDS virus while on tour in the United States.
67---Barthes launched a thousand students of signs and with the same abstruse language making common a line I heard in Dublin pubs: Who’s reading the telephone directory… the reading of telephone directories becoming equal to reading Shakespeare in many American universities since Barthes had argued that there was no real difference, there is only reading…
99---However, Barthes did create two books that will endure: Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes and A LOVER’S DISCOURSE. Finally the rubbish of what had made him in demand was cleared away and Barthes was able to write about as someone might have said. His real subject: himself.
I have been reading with great pleasure and actual anguish THE PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL by Barthes published by Columbia University Press. Made up of the notes for the lectures Barthes gave in the College de France in the years just before his death in 1980 they take up the question of what it means to want to write a novel.
At first I didn’t get far as I got bogged down in the prefaces but as I read the first lecture which comes with very good annotations as do all the lectures, I discovered that miraculous moment again… the reading slowed, so that I could read only a paragraph at a sitting… I was moved to the center of my being.
So the question of how to share this and Benjamin at hand: just quote what I have underlined from that lecture of December 2, 1978:
a---Each year, when beginning a new course, I think it apt to recall the pedagogical principle stated programmatically in the “Inaugural Lecture”: “I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year…
b---The subject is not to be suppressed
c---Better the illusions of subjectivity than the impostures of objectivity. Better the Imaginary of the Subject…
d---Dante:”Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” Dante was thirty-five. I’m much older
e---Age is a constituent part of the subject who writes
f---I’ve gone far beyond the arithmetical middle of my life, it’s today that I’m experiencing the sensation- certainty of living out the middle-of-the- journey
g--- Having reached a certain age, “our days are numbered”
h---This reference to age is often taken the wrong way, misunderstood—it’s seen as coquetry: “but you’re not old
i---There comes a time what you’ve done , written (past labors and practices) looks like repeated material, doomed to repetition, to the lassitude of repetition
j--- The self-evident truth: “I am mortal” comes with age
k---Foreclosure of anything New (= the definition of “Doing Time”)
l---I have no time left life to try out several different lives: I have to choose my last life, my new life, Vita Nova (Dante)
m---I have to get out of this gloomy state of mind that the wearing effects of repetitive work and mourning have disposed me to, This running aground, this slow entrenching in the quicksand (which isn’t quick!) this drawn out death of staying in the same place
n---So to change, that is to give a content to the “jolt” of the middle of life
o---But to change idea is banal; it’s as natural as breathing
p---From Blanchot: There is a moment in the life of a man--- consequently, in the life of men--- when everything is completed, the books written, the universe silent ...there is left only the task of announcing it
q---Either retreat into silence, rest, retreat
r---Or to start walking in another direction, that is to battle, to invest, to plant with the well known paradox: Building a house makes sense but to start planting
s---Part of a life’s activity should always be set aside for the Ephemeral: what happens only once and vanishes, the necessary share of the Rejected Monument, and therein lies the vocation of the Course
t---The same uninterrupted sadness, a kind of listlessness… a difficult afternoon: the afternoon … I reflect with enough intensity. The beginning of an idea, something like a literary conversion--- it’s those very old words that occur to me to enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I’d never written before to do only that
u---To want to write
v---To say that you want to write--- there, in fact, you have the very material of writing; thus only literary works attest to Wanting-to-Write--- not scientific discourses. This could even serve as am apposite definition of writing (of literature) as opposed to Science
w---The proof that In Search of Lost Time is the narrative of Wanting-to-Write resides in this paradox: the book is supposed to begin at the point when it’s already written
Thursday, February 24, 2011
FROM THE WASTES OF TIME: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It
7- Today, given that too many college students in the various colleges of the City University of New York have much difficulty figuring which came first, World War One or World War Two (and I am not putting you on) it is with some trepidation that I mention that in April begins the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with the remembering of the firing upon Fort Sumter.
2--I doubt many college students could make a list of three Civil War battles or even associate Lincoln in some way with the war. These students can go on at some length about the racist nature of American society since they will be reciting in a rather rote fashion the obsessions of their professors and like students in the former Soviet Empire they know what they have to do to get ahead: never argue, never question just repeat after me.
3--I am of an age that I do remember the 100th anniversary of the Civil War as I was working at Francis Bannerman Sons out in Blue Point and that company, you might know had long before bought up 90 % of the war surplus from the Spanish American War and still had in Blue Point and up in the castle on an island in the Hudson River a vast assortment of the necessary parts and other gear to outfit those who were now collecting the various weapons and accouterments. It was a great first job for a 16 year old. (for another day)
4—My own connection to the Civil War was via a picture on a great aunt’s wall in her apartment in Brooklyn where I was told of this man: a great-great uncle who had lost his army at Gettysburg fighting on the Union side. This aunt was from my mother’s side of the family and was a Whitney which lead to the family legend that Eli Whitney was a relative and as I learned incorporated the whole of the Civil War within his biography. Having invented the cotton gin he made cotton profitable and slavery necessary in the South but being cheated out of any profit from his invention went North where he perfected the process of interchangeable parts in the manufacturing of muskets thus giving the North the reason why they would win the Civil War: industrial might of an inexhaustible magnitude. Aunt Marie had met this man and remembered only the pinned-up empty sleeve of his suit jacket.
11--On my father’s side of the family, the Irish side--- was made complex because of the Draft Riots that occurred almost around the corner from where I am typing these lines: recent Irish immigrants unable to buy their way out of Mr. Lincoln’s draft rebelled against being forced to serve in an army that represented a country that saw them as agents of the Vatican. A country where there were plenty of places: dogs and Irish not allowed--- and why should they go off to die to free the coloured people? But the history knowing came only came later since my grandfather had been sent out of Ireland as a 12 year old boy to work as best he could and this was well after the Civil War. Ireland meant, really only a place you left. If you are 12 the history of a new place does not matter.
12--When I think back to reading the 100th anniversary celebration it seems that the war was described by Bruce Catton but which now when read is the sort of official version of Union triumphalism and was blessed by Life Magazine and who was to argue with that authority, then?
15--Times change. THE CIVIL WAR , A NARRATIVE by Shelby Foote was read. Twenty years of writing 3000 pages, one man---not an academic committee, not a gang of indentured student assistants--- the masterful opening as Foote delights in the genius of Lincoln’s calculating the necessity of getting the South to fire first…
Shelby Foote is America’s Edward Gibbon and he provides the grand narrative of the Civil War. There is no need for any other, probably.
15--AND there is great news RIGHT NOW from the Library of America: they have begun to publish a series of books made up of near contemporary writings based upon a chronological account of the war. With a great breadth of sources one hears the actual voices, remembering that this was the first war in which most of the soldiers on both sides were literate and many of them wrote letters home and these letters were preserved. The Library of America book: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told by Those Who Lived it. It is edited by three academics but excusing this I do wonder why one couldn’t have done the job but that would lead to the usual discussion of the decline of education…
34--Since I am writing this toward the end of February: one hundred and fifty years ago Jefferson Davis (February 18, 1861) is giving his Inaugural Address: We have entered upon the career of independence, and it must be inflexibly pursued…As a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation, and henceforth our energies …It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart…
16--Given my own predisposition I did skip ahead and read a letter from a surgeon ( Lunsford P. Yandell Jr) writing about what he saw at the Battle of Belmont in November of 1861: “The gun had exploded into a thousand atoms. One of the men had his right arm torn to pieces, and the ribs on that side pulpified, though the skin was not broken. He breathed half an hour. The other poor fellow received a piece of iron under the chin which passed up into the brain—the blood gushing from his nose and ears. He never breathed afterward…”
"As to the variety of expression depicted upon the faces of the corpses, of which I heard so much I saw nothing of it They all looked pretty much alike---as much alike as dead men from any other cause. Some had their eyes open, some closed, some had their mouths open, and others had them closed. There is a terrible sameness in the appearance of the dead men I have ever seen.
"My friend Captain Billy Jackson was shot in the hip while led a portion of the Russell’s brigade. I think he will recover. I am afraid Jimmy Walker (James’ son) will not recover. I think he is shot through the rectum.
19-- So to Shelby Foote where you can read his eloquent description of this minor battle of the Civil War, a battle that in no way changed the war, no way either shortened it lengthen it: just a brief moment of slaughter… but seen as one of the first steppings of Grant from the obscurity which had been his fate until…
17—The selections in THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT and only my poor typing skill prevents me from making a simple list of all the contributors to this wonderful book so you probably should go to the Library of American website and see for yourself. They do quote from a poem by Hermann Melville written after the Civil War as to his premonition of what as to be come. One line holds me:
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time.
18--Of course as I type I am nearly buried by the waste of time and in that waste I remember walking , six, seven years ago was it, with my wife and son and daughter across the field which Pickett send his men in 1863 at Gettysburg and here we were walking in the hot sun of a similar July and I was asking Lorcan could he imagine what it must have been like for young men not much older than his 12 years of age or his sisters 15 years… but he had not great defining sentence.. and the daughter and wife were there only because after you promised we were then going to the wholesale outlet mall built it seems on the side of a Confederate hospital but Lorcan did mention he would have taken shelter behind the one tree that we could see and I was asking but what about the other hundreds of men would they all lie up behind him, and his silence seems to have born some fruit as he has a remarkable narrative gift when writing on historical events but that is all off the subject which in some way is the problem of the Civil War: how to talk about it, about this something that happened and still resonates in our daily life even if unacknowledged, and that silence evident in all our modern major poets and save for Faulkner all out major prose writers…
20—THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT. What a wonderful title. Maybe someone will find a way to use it in imagination, but it has the practical value of putting the reader really there back then in the waste of time.
AFTER--And I should mention that Madison Smartt Bell has written a provocative novel based on the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest which Pantheon published two years ago, DEVIL’S DREAM. So it can be said that the Civil War still is news. The provocation comes from the fact that Forrest was an early supporter of the Ku Klux Klan but on the other hand Bell is probably the single most interesting writer at the moment in the US based on his more than 2000 page trilogy based on the life of Toussant L’Ouverture and other books now too many to mention… another day, then.
2--I doubt many college students could make a list of three Civil War battles or even associate Lincoln in some way with the war. These students can go on at some length about the racist nature of American society since they will be reciting in a rather rote fashion the obsessions of their professors and like students in the former Soviet Empire they know what they have to do to get ahead: never argue, never question just repeat after me.
3--I am of an age that I do remember the 100th anniversary of the Civil War as I was working at Francis Bannerman Sons out in Blue Point and that company, you might know had long before bought up 90 % of the war surplus from the Spanish American War and still had in Blue Point and up in the castle on an island in the Hudson River a vast assortment of the necessary parts and other gear to outfit those who were now collecting the various weapons and accouterments. It was a great first job for a 16 year old. (for another day)
4—My own connection to the Civil War was via a picture on a great aunt’s wall in her apartment in Brooklyn where I was told of this man: a great-great uncle who had lost his army at Gettysburg fighting on the Union side. This aunt was from my mother’s side of the family and was a Whitney which lead to the family legend that Eli Whitney was a relative and as I learned incorporated the whole of the Civil War within his biography. Having invented the cotton gin he made cotton profitable and slavery necessary in the South but being cheated out of any profit from his invention went North where he perfected the process of interchangeable parts in the manufacturing of muskets thus giving the North the reason why they would win the Civil War: industrial might of an inexhaustible magnitude. Aunt Marie had met this man and remembered only the pinned-up empty sleeve of his suit jacket.
11--On my father’s side of the family, the Irish side--- was made complex because of the Draft Riots that occurred almost around the corner from where I am typing these lines: recent Irish immigrants unable to buy their way out of Mr. Lincoln’s draft rebelled against being forced to serve in an army that represented a country that saw them as agents of the Vatican. A country where there were plenty of places: dogs and Irish not allowed--- and why should they go off to die to free the coloured people? But the history knowing came only came later since my grandfather had been sent out of Ireland as a 12 year old boy to work as best he could and this was well after the Civil War. Ireland meant, really only a place you left. If you are 12 the history of a new place does not matter.
12--When I think back to reading the 100th anniversary celebration it seems that the war was described by Bruce Catton but which now when read is the sort of official version of Union triumphalism and was blessed by Life Magazine and who was to argue with that authority, then?
15--Times change. THE CIVIL WAR , A NARRATIVE by Shelby Foote was read. Twenty years of writing 3000 pages, one man---not an academic committee, not a gang of indentured student assistants--- the masterful opening as Foote delights in the genius of Lincoln’s calculating the necessity of getting the South to fire first…
Shelby Foote is America’s Edward Gibbon and he provides the grand narrative of the Civil War. There is no need for any other, probably.
15--AND there is great news RIGHT NOW from the Library of America: they have begun to publish a series of books made up of near contemporary writings based upon a chronological account of the war. With a great breadth of sources one hears the actual voices, remembering that this was the first war in which most of the soldiers on both sides were literate and many of them wrote letters home and these letters were preserved. The Library of America book: THE CIVIL WAR The First Year Told by Those Who Lived it. It is edited by three academics but excusing this I do wonder why one couldn’t have done the job but that would lead to the usual discussion of the decline of education…
34--Since I am writing this toward the end of February: one hundred and fifty years ago Jefferson Davis (February 18, 1861) is giving his Inaugural Address: We have entered upon the career of independence, and it must be inflexibly pursued…As a necessity, not a choice, we have resorted to the remedy of separation, and henceforth our energies …It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart…
16--Given my own predisposition I did skip ahead and read a letter from a surgeon ( Lunsford P. Yandell Jr) writing about what he saw at the Battle of Belmont in November of 1861: “The gun had exploded into a thousand atoms. One of the men had his right arm torn to pieces, and the ribs on that side pulpified, though the skin was not broken. He breathed half an hour. The other poor fellow received a piece of iron under the chin which passed up into the brain—the blood gushing from his nose and ears. He never breathed afterward…”
"As to the variety of expression depicted upon the faces of the corpses, of which I heard so much I saw nothing of it They all looked pretty much alike---as much alike as dead men from any other cause. Some had their eyes open, some closed, some had their mouths open, and others had them closed. There is a terrible sameness in the appearance of the dead men I have ever seen.
"My friend Captain Billy Jackson was shot in the hip while led a portion of the Russell’s brigade. I think he will recover. I am afraid Jimmy Walker (James’ son) will not recover. I think he is shot through the rectum.
19-- So to Shelby Foote where you can read his eloquent description of this minor battle of the Civil War, a battle that in no way changed the war, no way either shortened it lengthen it: just a brief moment of slaughter… but seen as one of the first steppings of Grant from the obscurity which had been his fate until…
17—The selections in THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT and only my poor typing skill prevents me from making a simple list of all the contributors to this wonderful book so you probably should go to the Library of American website and see for yourself. They do quote from a poem by Hermann Melville written after the Civil War as to his premonition of what as to be come. One line holds me:
The tempest bursting from the waste of Time.
18--Of course as I type I am nearly buried by the waste of time and in that waste I remember walking , six, seven years ago was it, with my wife and son and daughter across the field which Pickett send his men in 1863 at Gettysburg and here we were walking in the hot sun of a similar July and I was asking Lorcan could he imagine what it must have been like for young men not much older than his 12 years of age or his sisters 15 years… but he had not great defining sentence.. and the daughter and wife were there only because after you promised we were then going to the wholesale outlet mall built it seems on the side of a Confederate hospital but Lorcan did mention he would have taken shelter behind the one tree that we could see and I was asking but what about the other hundreds of men would they all lie up behind him, and his silence seems to have born some fruit as he has a remarkable narrative gift when writing on historical events but that is all off the subject which in some way is the problem of the Civil War: how to talk about it, about this something that happened and still resonates in our daily life even if unacknowledged, and that silence evident in all our modern major poets and save for Faulkner all out major prose writers…
20—THE CIVIL WAR THE FIRST YEAR TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT. What a wonderful title. Maybe someone will find a way to use it in imagination, but it has the practical value of putting the reader really there back then in the waste of time.
AFTER--And I should mention that Madison Smartt Bell has written a provocative novel based on the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest which Pantheon published two years ago, DEVIL’S DREAM. So it can be said that the Civil War still is news. The provocation comes from the fact that Forrest was an early supporter of the Ku Klux Klan but on the other hand Bell is probably the single most interesting writer at the moment in the US based on his more than 2000 page trilogy based on the life of Toussant L’Ouverture and other books now too many to mention… another day, then.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
GRADITUDE: Miguel de Unamuno and Elizabeth Bishop
46
At one time, even within my lifetime, all thoughtful persons would have read before they had turned twenty-one, Miguel de Unamuno’s THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE.
And once read it could be said , THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE set me on a course.
Homo sum nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright. For my part I would rather say: Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: I am a man; no other man I deem a stranger. For in my eyes the adjective humanus is no less suspect than its abstract substantive humanitas, humanity. I would choose neither “the human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantive adjective, but the concrete substantive: man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who is born, suffers and dies---above all, who does; the man who eats and drinks ad plays and sleeps and thinks and loves; the man who is seen and heard; one’s brother, the real brother.
As long as one held tightly to this paragraph one was preserved from the murderous illusions of Marxism, fascism and all the other isms that seek to replace a man in the centrality of his nervous system with fascinating plans for the future.
The University of Illinois Press has published in translation an unpublished early work of de Unamuno’s TREATISE ON LOVE OF GOD. Never really finished it prefigures what is to come in his great work and as such is of interest as are the wonderful novels and fictions which can be found in Bollingen Series years ago published by Princeton University Press: novels as innovative as the novels of Joyce Rios, or Schmidt.
The TREATISE is provocative In the best sense of that over-used word:
---Every cultured European of our days is Christian, willingly or not, knowingly or not. Among us one is born Christian and breathes Christianity, and this applies no less to those who most abominate it. The paganism of those that want to oppose Christ is a paganism that would scandalize a pre-Christian pagan, of resurrected and able t see it.
---The originality, the deep truth of Christianity has been to make God a human being, the Human Being, that suffers passion and dies. Such is the madness and the scandal of the Cross (I Corinthians I: 23)
I doubt you will be seeing this book reviewed in the New York Times.
47
Farrar Straus & Giroux have with the publication of two books this season done something that rarely happens in the world of publishing: they have demonstrated loyality, keeping faith, being true.
Both of these books are handsome, beautiful in their plainness: the brightness of the yellow cover of PROSE and the deep blue of POEMS both by Elizabeth Bishop. The poetry is well known and through the years FSG kept faith with Elizabeth Bishop. They kept all her books in print and collected them as needed. She herself avoided the feminist or women’s ghetto by refusing to allow her poetry to appear in anthologies restricted by gender, knowing that such a restriction is always demeaning even if good for the mediocre who huddle together on the basis of gender race or ethnicity in their pursuit of lifetime sinecures in those concentration camps of the intellect: our universities and colleges.
And while I respect Bishop, I personally find myself going with more excitement to the collected poems of Lorine Niedecker whose fate, life and career demonstrate the opposite of Bishop’s. And while finally a Collected Works of Niedecker is available from the University of California Press for most of her life her work appeared from small presses in small editions and they were only sporadically available. Here this woman, washing floors in a hospital in Wisconsin, while writing poetry that can be easily compared to Paul Celan and at the same time conducting correspondences with Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound, a woman who had to work for a living in isolation save for a few supporters... with no sinecures at Harvard or those monies that are always known but not talked about… how different our literary world view would be if otherwise.
In the Bishop PROSE the discovery for me is her text BRAZIL that was written to a Time Life series… and in her letters there is a reference to Nelida Pinon… but that is for another day.
To repeat: celebrate FSG for its faithfulness, a virtue rare indeed today in the world of publishing.. and a few lines from Bishop:
From “Dead” The Winter is her lover now,/A brilliant one and bold;/And sbge has gone away from me,/Estranged and white and cold.
From “Sleeping on the Ceiling” It is so peaceful on the celing!/ It is the Place de la Concorde./The little crystal chandelier/ is off, the fountain is in the dark./Not a soul is in the park./ … We must go under the wallpaper/to meet the insect gladiator,/ to battle with a net and trident,/ and leave the fountain and square./ But oh, that we would sleep up there…
At one time, even within my lifetime, all thoughtful persons would have read before they had turned twenty-one, Miguel de Unamuno’s THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE.
And once read it could be said , THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE set me on a course.
Homo sum nihil humani a me alienum puto, said the Latin playwright. For my part I would rather say: Nullum hominem a me alienum puto: I am a man; no other man I deem a stranger. For in my eyes the adjective humanus is no less suspect than its abstract substantive humanitas, humanity. I would choose neither “the human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantive adjective, but the concrete substantive: man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who is born, suffers and dies---above all, who does; the man who eats and drinks ad plays and sleeps and thinks and loves; the man who is seen and heard; one’s brother, the real brother.
As long as one held tightly to this paragraph one was preserved from the murderous illusions of Marxism, fascism and all the other isms that seek to replace a man in the centrality of his nervous system with fascinating plans for the future.
The University of Illinois Press has published in translation an unpublished early work of de Unamuno’s TREATISE ON LOVE OF GOD. Never really finished it prefigures what is to come in his great work and as such is of interest as are the wonderful novels and fictions which can be found in Bollingen Series years ago published by Princeton University Press: novels as innovative as the novels of Joyce Rios, or Schmidt.
The TREATISE is provocative In the best sense of that over-used word:
---Every cultured European of our days is Christian, willingly or not, knowingly or not. Among us one is born Christian and breathes Christianity, and this applies no less to those who most abominate it. The paganism of those that want to oppose Christ is a paganism that would scandalize a pre-Christian pagan, of resurrected and able t see it.
---The originality, the deep truth of Christianity has been to make God a human being, the Human Being, that suffers passion and dies. Such is the madness and the scandal of the Cross (I Corinthians I: 23)
I doubt you will be seeing this book reviewed in the New York Times.
47
Farrar Straus & Giroux have with the publication of two books this season done something that rarely happens in the world of publishing: they have demonstrated loyality, keeping faith, being true.
Both of these books are handsome, beautiful in their plainness: the brightness of the yellow cover of PROSE and the deep blue of POEMS both by Elizabeth Bishop. The poetry is well known and through the years FSG kept faith with Elizabeth Bishop. They kept all her books in print and collected them as needed. She herself avoided the feminist or women’s ghetto by refusing to allow her poetry to appear in anthologies restricted by gender, knowing that such a restriction is always demeaning even if good for the mediocre who huddle together on the basis of gender race or ethnicity in their pursuit of lifetime sinecures in those concentration camps of the intellect: our universities and colleges.
And while I respect Bishop, I personally find myself going with more excitement to the collected poems of Lorine Niedecker whose fate, life and career demonstrate the opposite of Bishop’s. And while finally a Collected Works of Niedecker is available from the University of California Press for most of her life her work appeared from small presses in small editions and they were only sporadically available. Here this woman, washing floors in a hospital in Wisconsin, while writing poetry that can be easily compared to Paul Celan and at the same time conducting correspondences with Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound, a woman who had to work for a living in isolation save for a few supporters... with no sinecures at Harvard or those monies that are always known but not talked about… how different our literary world view would be if otherwise.
In the Bishop PROSE the discovery for me is her text BRAZIL that was written to a Time Life series… and in her letters there is a reference to Nelida Pinon… but that is for another day.
To repeat: celebrate FSG for its faithfulness, a virtue rare indeed today in the world of publishing.. and a few lines from Bishop:
From “Dead” The Winter is her lover now,/A brilliant one and bold;/And sbge has gone away from me,/Estranged and white and cold.
From “Sleeping on the Ceiling” It is so peaceful on the celing!/ It is the Place de la Concorde./The little crystal chandelier/ is off, the fountain is in the dark./Not a soul is in the park./ … We must go under the wallpaper/to meet the insect gladiator,/ to battle with a net and trident,/ and leave the fountain and square./ But oh, that we would sleep up there…
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
GOING TO PATCHOGUE and ZUKOFSKY
Last night I was in The Strand and noticed on the new books table this fortuitous juxtaposition.
Most likely it will not be there a day later and within the week both books will no longer be "new."
Zukofsky was an early subject of this blog since he was born a few streets south of where I sit.
Zukofsky had a summer bungalow in a town across Long Island from Patchogue.
Zukofsky has gradually found readers.
GOING TO PATCHOGUE has found fewer readers. I did meet once a young man on Fifth Street who stopped me asking if I was who he thought I was and I asked him why he was stopping me: I had been looking for the blood near the police-station on Fifth Street, that you had written about.
Of course I am happy to see GOING TO PATCHOGUE again available but it is a source of an aching sadness as no one has been willing to publish what comes after: FORGET THE FUTURE, NOTHING DOING, JUST LIKE THAT (A Beginning and an End of the so-called 60s) or what I am working on now EXIT IS FINAL
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
THE LEPER'S BELL: what new and old books tell us
"There is no literature anymore, there are just single books that arrive in bookstores, just as letters, newspapers, advertising pamphlets arrive in mailboxes."
— Tõnu Õnnepalu (Border State)
PART SIXTY-TWO
For $3.30 plus postage you can buy the collected works in hardcover of Jay Cantor.
Do you remember his works: The Death of Che, Great Neck, Krazy Kat, On Giving Birth to One’s Mother, The Space Between : Literature and Politics?
I am thinking about him because like Leopold Bloom I was looking at the book carts of dollar books in front of the Strand and found GREAT NECK.
Here is a man who is a tenured professor at Tufts who runs a program in creative writing. He is also a MacArthur Fellow and as such is certified to be a genius.
He has written a comic book that is to be published in the Spring.
Great Neck is 703 pages long and published by Knopf in 2003. The copy I purchased from the Strand was unread.
I stopped reading
The leper’s bell was heard before the leper appeared. But today it seems that the leper bell has acquired multiple voices and publishers ever at the ready for the next or last thing… and of course compassion is the order of the day but what to make of LOUD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSELF Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacy Pershall… who you will be happy to know is an artist and a belly dancer living in New York City.
28 people are credited by the author for helping her being her book to market and that does not include anonymous others and beasts…
The woman got a lot of problems but her prose is very orderly: “Still, I spend a lot of time wondering if I’d have been a borderline if I’d been raised by liberal artists in New York City. In Prairie Grove, if you don’t bow your head and pray to Jesus you’re culturally transgressive. In New York, I have yet to hear anyone say grace before every meal, but my parents pray before eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger…”
A good line and sure to get a chuckle in parts of New York City but I wonder if she would get a laugh at the storefront churches down here on the lower east side of Manhattan?
But it is the orderly prose that has been carefully prepared by her publishers at Norton which is the problem…
The leper’s bell
If someone you love dies, you mourn . If you are a writer you then probably write about it. Even James Joyce did this. You might remember his beautiful little poem on the death of his father and the birth of his first grandson.
The concluding lines:
A child is sleeping:
An old man is gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
The poem is a model of what ought to be done.
If one is writing prose, Uwe Johnson’s memorial to his friend Ingeborg Bachmann, A TRIP TO KLAGENFURT In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann, is a suitable example.
80 or so pages and we feel both Johnson’s personal loss and the loss to the world at large but we are given reasons for feeling this grief. The sculptured prose, the shaping, the selection of detail and the brevity all contribute to making Johnson’s book a model memorial.
Sadly, Francisco Goldman in SAY HER NAME chose to go simply with the emotion, with the feeling and allowed the words to flow on and on…
Starting in promise with a series of quotes which sadly go down hill into banality, but the start is from Waiting for Godot:
Vladimir: Suppose we repented…
Estragon: Our being born?
Goldman’s own text also begins in promise: “Aura died on July 25, 2007. I went back to Mexico for the first anniversary because I wanted to be where it had happened at that beach on the Pacific Coast. Now, for the second time in a year I had come home again to Brooklyn without her.
Three months before she died, April 24, Aura had turned thirty. We’d been marred twenty-six days shy of two years."
There are a few more little snips and then as they say the plunge, fall, descend into a cellar of the text. Opened at random: “That first winter of Aura’s death I was fixated on not losing my gloves, my hat, or my scarf… “
350 pages and it seems Goldman has been a guest in Berlin, in Mexico and continues I guess to live and possibly teach in New York… the book comes with many blurbs…
On and on.
He is evidentialy a man of feeling but he is still able to operate in the world with some efficiency, it would seem. Goldman is a fortunate man. But now he has to carry this book around on his back. Might it not have been better to carry the memory of his love since he has replaced this love with this book, a book of 350 pages about himself, which is perfectly sterile.
PART TWENTY
Those dollar book carts also provided: THE SECRET LIFE OF OUR TIMES. New Fiction from ESQUIRE edited by Gordon Lish. Introduction by Tom Wolfe and dedicated to Lish’s son who is named Attituc. Lish mentions Captain Midnight and he became as I remember it, Captain Fiction, and charged rich people a lot of money to listen to him and to read their ”fiction” --- the bait being he was an editor at Knopf and if you kissed the magical prose orifice you got a book published but then he ran into accounting problems and what happened to Gordon Lish? which echoes a novel by Charles Simmons in which the refrain is Who the fuck is Harold Brodkey?
Tom Wolfe mentions in his intro: “ I do not detect the slightest shred of despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving.
This is in 1973.
Now, you know why something was going to go wrong. Esquire, Lish, Wolfe prided themselves on picking the best writers, writing available.
Let’s make list.
Raymond Carver (2 Stories), Don DeLillo, Joy Williams (2 stories), Bruce Jay Friedman, Joyce Carol Oates, Bernard Malamud, GABRIEL Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, A.B. Yehoshua, Richard Brautigan, John Barth, John Gardiner (2 stories) Gail Godwin, John Irving, Hilma Wolitzer, Raymond Kennedy, Earl Thompson, William Harrison (2 stories) Richard Brautigan, James Purdy, David Ohle, David Huddle, Michael Rogers, John Deck, James S. Reinbold (2 stories), Jerry Bumpus, Robert Ullian, Thomas Bontly, David Kranes, Alan V. Hewat
I have arranged the names from the familiar, the vaguely familiar to the…
Of course we are all destined to be forgotten but already some of these names are forgotten except to their few close ones… but these were thought by GL and TW to be the future or at the very least a marker of that moment 1973-7, no despair, buoyant, fun-loving.
We can see now the perils of trusting those who are : fun-loving and buoyant and not given to despair.
A page by Dahlberg, Kerouac, Burrough, Wescott, Julian Green…
I know or knew a few of the less known names in this list: William Harrison taught at the University of Arkansas for many years and had no interest in what I was writing, but he was well liked by George Garrett and Tom Whalen: he had some very popular novels but then dropped to the side… much in the way of how it happens in Hollywood: one day they stop returning your phone calls… it is not because of any great failure but something happens and the phone no longer rings and eventually: I wonder what happened to?... He wrote a novel about a suicide plot of students at the University of Chicago, IN THE WILD SANCTUARY. which should have been made into a movie but that didn’t happen… he began writing novels set in Africa, realistic novels with movie potential… and I guess he will be best known for ROLLERBALL which was made into a movie… he was incredibly handsome, movie star looks, rare in the world of writing
Robert Ullian was a friend of David Black who was one of the very few of the people I met when I came to NY who went on to great success not with his books of which there were many and still of much interest but as a TV writer and producer… so made lots of money… got awards for Law and Order. Miami Vice episodes… you can look him up in IMDB… but he is one of the few who I thought would write a great book… he read much more smartly than I did and was much more intelligent: I still remember him talking about how Nabokov did it… I even went to a freshman comp course he taught at one of the city colleges… he wrote and wrote and got awards for journalism but that real book has eluded him--- he tried with a book about his father: a detail of which I remember, the father hitting someone who was tormenting him and this person in turn permanently paralyzed--- that certain nightmare for anyone who had a relative who had polio and seeing people who were paralyzed… but it was the matter-of-fact cruelty of this moment in the book that has lingered all these years and I am sure DB has long forgotten in… but has gone across into the land of TV and movies but he has that lingering understanding that even more than the book writers: how perishable it all is…:
I forgot … Robert Ullian? I don’t know what happened to him--- Richard Elman said his family sod mattresses or something: how’s that for idle gossip?
Well, anyway, Ullian and a guy named Craig Nova and William O’Rourke were friends of David Black… Nova was married to Irini Spanindau and that ended… she became a Knopf writer… and he went off to the wilderness after writing three fierce little book sbut he quickly started writing novels that were supposed to be popular…
William O’Rourke was a disciple of Edward Dahlberg and wrote a very good firt novel MEEKNESS OF ISAAC and then some powerful essays and then seemed to move aside after some “popular” novels and ended up at Notre Dame, at least with a warm room and a place to go for some hours every week as a professor… he does political writing or commentary…
David Huddle used to invite me and David Black over to his apartment on West End Avenue where we tried to write a group porn novel inspired by both Anthony Burgess’s suggestion and the success of a novel by some Newsday writers… David had been a torturer in Vietnam.. sorry ,interrogator, in Vietnam since he had a little college.. but he got the story in this anthology published and got tenure at the University of Vermont…. He taught creative writing for 30 some years and I guess still does… he keeps writing poetry and stories and novels… but they all avoid the central event of his life: what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam, which is probably understandable…. But he is the epitome of the cheerful, the posiitve, the friendly...
PART THIRTY FOUR
“I do not detect the slightest shred of despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving.”
— Tõnu Õnnepalu (Border State)
PART SIXTY-TWO
For $3.30 plus postage you can buy the collected works in hardcover of Jay Cantor.
Do you remember his works: The Death of Che, Great Neck, Krazy Kat, On Giving Birth to One’s Mother, The Space Between : Literature and Politics?
I am thinking about him because like Leopold Bloom I was looking at the book carts of dollar books in front of the Strand and found GREAT NECK.
Here is a man who is a tenured professor at Tufts who runs a program in creative writing. He is also a MacArthur Fellow and as such is certified to be a genius.
He has written a comic book that is to be published in the Spring.
Great Neck is 703 pages long and published by Knopf in 2003. The copy I purchased from the Strand was unread.
I stopped reading
The leper’s bell was heard before the leper appeared. But today it seems that the leper bell has acquired multiple voices and publishers ever at the ready for the next or last thing… and of course compassion is the order of the day but what to make of LOUD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSELF Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacy Pershall… who you will be happy to know is an artist and a belly dancer living in New York City.
28 people are credited by the author for helping her being her book to market and that does not include anonymous others and beasts…
The woman got a lot of problems but her prose is very orderly: “Still, I spend a lot of time wondering if I’d have been a borderline if I’d been raised by liberal artists in New York City. In Prairie Grove, if you don’t bow your head and pray to Jesus you’re culturally transgressive. In New York, I have yet to hear anyone say grace before every meal, but my parents pray before eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger…”
A good line and sure to get a chuckle in parts of New York City but I wonder if she would get a laugh at the storefront churches down here on the lower east side of Manhattan?
But it is the orderly prose that has been carefully prepared by her publishers at Norton which is the problem…
The leper’s bell
If someone you love dies, you mourn . If you are a writer you then probably write about it. Even James Joyce did this. You might remember his beautiful little poem on the death of his father and the birth of his first grandson.
The concluding lines:
A child is sleeping:
An old man is gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
The poem is a model of what ought to be done.
If one is writing prose, Uwe Johnson’s memorial to his friend Ingeborg Bachmann, A TRIP TO KLAGENFURT In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann, is a suitable example.
80 or so pages and we feel both Johnson’s personal loss and the loss to the world at large but we are given reasons for feeling this grief. The sculptured prose, the shaping, the selection of detail and the brevity all contribute to making Johnson’s book a model memorial.
Sadly, Francisco Goldman in SAY HER NAME chose to go simply with the emotion, with the feeling and allowed the words to flow on and on…
Starting in promise with a series of quotes which sadly go down hill into banality, but the start is from Waiting for Godot:
Vladimir: Suppose we repented…
Estragon: Our being born?
Goldman’s own text also begins in promise: “Aura died on July 25, 2007. I went back to Mexico for the first anniversary because I wanted to be where it had happened at that beach on the Pacific Coast. Now, for the second time in a year I had come home again to Brooklyn without her.
Three months before she died, April 24, Aura had turned thirty. We’d been marred twenty-six days shy of two years."
There are a few more little snips and then as they say the plunge, fall, descend into a cellar of the text. Opened at random: “That first winter of Aura’s death I was fixated on not losing my gloves, my hat, or my scarf… “
350 pages and it seems Goldman has been a guest in Berlin, in Mexico and continues I guess to live and possibly teach in New York… the book comes with many blurbs…
On and on.
He is evidentialy a man of feeling but he is still able to operate in the world with some efficiency, it would seem. Goldman is a fortunate man. But now he has to carry this book around on his back. Might it not have been better to carry the memory of his love since he has replaced this love with this book, a book of 350 pages about himself, which is perfectly sterile.
PART TWENTY
Those dollar book carts also provided: THE SECRET LIFE OF OUR TIMES. New Fiction from ESQUIRE edited by Gordon Lish. Introduction by Tom Wolfe and dedicated to Lish’s son who is named Attituc. Lish mentions Captain Midnight and he became as I remember it, Captain Fiction, and charged rich people a lot of money to listen to him and to read their ”fiction” --- the bait being he was an editor at Knopf and if you kissed the magical prose orifice you got a book published but then he ran into accounting problems and what happened to Gordon Lish? which echoes a novel by Charles Simmons in which the refrain is Who the fuck is Harold Brodkey?
Tom Wolfe mentions in his intro: “ I do not detect the slightest shred of despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving.
This is in 1973.
Now, you know why something was going to go wrong. Esquire, Lish, Wolfe prided themselves on picking the best writers, writing available.
Let’s make list.
Raymond Carver (2 Stories), Don DeLillo, Joy Williams (2 stories), Bruce Jay Friedman, Joyce Carol Oates, Bernard Malamud, GABRIEL Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, A.B. Yehoshua, Richard Brautigan, John Barth, John Gardiner (2 stories) Gail Godwin, John Irving, Hilma Wolitzer, Raymond Kennedy, Earl Thompson, William Harrison (2 stories) Richard Brautigan, James Purdy, David Ohle, David Huddle, Michael Rogers, John Deck, James S. Reinbold (2 stories), Jerry Bumpus, Robert Ullian, Thomas Bontly, David Kranes, Alan V. Hewat
I have arranged the names from the familiar, the vaguely familiar to the…
Of course we are all destined to be forgotten but already some of these names are forgotten except to their few close ones… but these were thought by GL and TW to be the future or at the very least a marker of that moment 1973-7, no despair, buoyant, fun-loving.
We can see now the perils of trusting those who are : fun-loving and buoyant and not given to despair.
A page by Dahlberg, Kerouac, Burrough, Wescott, Julian Green…
I know or knew a few of the less known names in this list: William Harrison taught at the University of Arkansas for many years and had no interest in what I was writing, but he was well liked by George Garrett and Tom Whalen: he had some very popular novels but then dropped to the side… much in the way of how it happens in Hollywood: one day they stop returning your phone calls… it is not because of any great failure but something happens and the phone no longer rings and eventually: I wonder what happened to?... He wrote a novel about a suicide plot of students at the University of Chicago, IN THE WILD SANCTUARY. which should have been made into a movie but that didn’t happen… he began writing novels set in Africa, realistic novels with movie potential… and I guess he will be best known for ROLLERBALL which was made into a movie… he was incredibly handsome, movie star looks, rare in the world of writing
Robert Ullian was a friend of David Black who was one of the very few of the people I met when I came to NY who went on to great success not with his books of which there were many and still of much interest but as a TV writer and producer… so made lots of money… got awards for Law and Order. Miami Vice episodes… you can look him up in IMDB… but he is one of the few who I thought would write a great book… he read much more smartly than I did and was much more intelligent: I still remember him talking about how Nabokov did it… I even went to a freshman comp course he taught at one of the city colleges… he wrote and wrote and got awards for journalism but that real book has eluded him--- he tried with a book about his father: a detail of which I remember, the father hitting someone who was tormenting him and this person in turn permanently paralyzed--- that certain nightmare for anyone who had a relative who had polio and seeing people who were paralyzed… but it was the matter-of-fact cruelty of this moment in the book that has lingered all these years and I am sure DB has long forgotten in… but has gone across into the land of TV and movies but he has that lingering understanding that even more than the book writers: how perishable it all is…:
I forgot … Robert Ullian? I don’t know what happened to him--- Richard Elman said his family sod mattresses or something: how’s that for idle gossip?
Well, anyway, Ullian and a guy named Craig Nova and William O’Rourke were friends of David Black… Nova was married to Irini Spanindau and that ended… she became a Knopf writer… and he went off to the wilderness after writing three fierce little book sbut he quickly started writing novels that were supposed to be popular…
William O’Rourke was a disciple of Edward Dahlberg and wrote a very good firt novel MEEKNESS OF ISAAC and then some powerful essays and then seemed to move aside after some “popular” novels and ended up at Notre Dame, at least with a warm room and a place to go for some hours every week as a professor… he does political writing or commentary…
David Huddle used to invite me and David Black over to his apartment on West End Avenue where we tried to write a group porn novel inspired by both Anthony Burgess’s suggestion and the success of a novel by some Newsday writers… David had been a torturer in Vietnam.. sorry ,interrogator, in Vietnam since he had a little college.. but he got the story in this anthology published and got tenure at the University of Vermont…. He taught creative writing for 30 some years and I guess still does… he keeps writing poetry and stories and novels… but they all avoid the central event of his life: what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam, which is probably understandable…. But he is the epitome of the cheerful, the posiitve, the friendly...
PART THIRTY FOUR
“I do not detect the slightest shred of despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving.”
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
HAS GEORGE GARRETT BEEN FORGOTTEN or WHO IS GEORGE GARRETT?
---scanned to be available, to be part of something much longer or shorter, a life tangential, intercepted, intercepting, as a way to or from, constantly the double vision---
In a magazine looked at in the bookstore on St Marks, George Garrett is to edit an issue of Southern Writing and I'm thinking as I walk home along Second Avenue, now remembering walking home along Second Avenue because already it was last week this is happening, this walking, however it is now weeks ago and eventually when this is done, this writing, it will be months ago and then years later to be read...I know or knew George Garrett and last saw him maybe four years ago (then) in The West End Bar up on Broadway across from Columbia, in there, at the bar, standing with back to the food counter, drinking I was, soda water with slice of lime and George was knocking back a bourbon or it could have been a Scotch though I am sure it wasn't a beer or A Scots or a gin and something...The West End...I had lived around the corner from it thanks to George who got me a fellowship to Columbia, now almost twelve years ago,(then) to come up from Virginia for the two years to get away or rather to move away from The Bulgarian who was going to stay on at Hollins College and there was nothing for me to do in Virginia and George himself was leaving town to go further south, closer to the clay of Florida, no, they ain't got clay in Florida, clay is for Georgia, but I have him getting closer to THE FINISHED MAN, had to look up the title, climb on the chair because the Garrett books are up on the top shelf due to the rigor of the alphabet, that book is very rare...off the subject, as we say, okay, I'm around the corner from The West End of Kerouac fame, got to mention that, don't ask why, please, something I do know for sure, the last stop in the night after hitting The Gold Rail, now turned into a chink place with plastic lace curtains, and Forlini's, a mafia heroin in the bathroom drop, but serving maybe the best veal in New York according to this Rumanian guy who now lives in Washington, now a little to the right of The Klan...The West End was the last stop just after two in the morning and sometimes it was three in the morning, though
this last time I was seeing George it was sometime in the afternoon,maybe even as early as one and I was thinking that was about the time I was in there up front, crying, even, it was awful, in a front booth because of the available sunlight, reading, over and over the first paragraph of Issac Singer's OLD LOVES and it must have been due to Lucja or that other woman who stole my inscribed copy of Dahlberg's BECAUSE I WAS FLESH
but remember this was myself walking back from the bookstore on St. Marks with the idea of The South and how in Ireland they refer to The Republic as The South and just yesterday (repeat first paragraph for detail of time) not going into which yesterday, I was told people in The North say they are going up to Dublin even though they are in fact going south to Dublin... this had come up because this Irish poet was reading in New York and when I asked him what he was going to do next, said he was going up to Washington... I corrected him, in New York you say you are going down to Washington... though if you lived in The South you could say you were going up to Washington--- or going up North which was what George allowed me to do, go up North to Columbia and leave Lilia st Hollins, not leave her behind, just leave maybe for both our sakes, leave, no, move apart and hope time would take care of, but it don't work like, and I was just thinking, if I am going on 38, Melinda is going to be 36 and she has
this is very subjective
where is the reader's interest?
a kid and a husband with a hearing aid who the last time I saw them was then celebrating, he was, not having to pay alimony to his third wife who had just died from cancer, such an end
try to imagine Petrarch or Dante coming up with such an end to the heart burst with love, sitting those nights while my parents were in shopping and I in the car waiting and wish I was not alone and Melinda was out there...
so Dublin has been suggested, hinted at, if I would drag in popular critical language, and I am not teasing it out. too much, now, however, there has been no contact with George for years because either he originated or just picked it up when he was there, the policy of Hollins College professors to like to get letters coming but write in the newsletter that we are to keep those letters coming but they as in all the years gone by, you can't expect to get an answer, sorry, but that is just the way and they each have their individual reasons but I guess it just comes down to the waste of energy, something like reading magazines and how once began there is no end to them and you get nothing from a magazine: so much cutting, cut and cut...but I ain't about to give you the English sermon against new books as being like buying gin in a pub: always overpriced and shortshotted...while getting from Hollins to Columbia serves me up the chance to link Johnny Greene of Greene County, Alabama with John Green met in Dublin...but first Johnny Greene was up in New York at Columbia University writing and doing research on his recent past in the civil rights movement and holding up his end of The Gold Rail Bar---bar now gone into a Chinese restaurant chain...just the other day walking passed and on the spur of the moment I was walking in and sitting up at the bar to look out at the sidewalk and street and how bright the sun is in the afternoon at that bit of Broadway: Lois who stole the Dahlberg book comes in--- she had the last name of the man who wrote THE SEVEN WHO WERE HANGED and it seems she is also now but a shade on a memorial site---
and Johnny Greene walks passed to take a table at the back of the room: to be hated by the whites and blacks back home, a Greene of Greene County, Alabama, and for all the wrong reasons and he once described the role of the cousin in the sexual rites of The Deep South: having no cousins I can only listen with envy... much like all those boys who have gone to fuck in motel rooms or in the back seats of Chevys with the woman's pants hanging from the ankle because you never know, silly boy, when you're gonna have to pull trou and make a quick getaway, little kids being the worst of the lot...but better than the kids who piss from the balcony
of theatres in Dublin on the smooching couples in the stalls...you can explain away hickeys and lipstick but the smell of urine on your coat as usual, just back from the cleaners, a once a year activity.
Talking about Dublin as if you couldn't tell...and John Green drank for a time in O'Dwyer’s, there on the corner of Leeson Street and The Green and moved across the street to another pub because he was now playing Gaelic football and was said to be quite good at it and even his lessons in the Irish language were said to be going good... going WELL,dummy! if you had done more than just buy the Irish grammar book and IRISH MADE EASY...you wouldn't feel so left out, so cut off from those articles in THE IRISH TIMES (this article was transmitted in Irish and translated here in the Dublin office into English)...I don't know my grandfather's name....The McGonigle grandfather, the one who came over from Ireland, shipped over since he came as a young teenager to work...sent out to America, he was, the whole world for
his asking...and with about as much luck as the coloured guy standing down in front of the gated supermarket on Second Avenue looking up:
IT TAKES THREE DAYS TO GET TO THE MOON
but I ain't looking for the moon or even an acre of land just to bring into this room either of the Green(e) boys and I am not about to forget I did go to see Julian Green in Paris since he was the only American in the French Academy and I had liked his diary and... this gets too far from the point which is a way of saying I have gone too far from The South and am stuck with no, I am not stuck with,rather growing old with: I had been able to talk with Johnny Greene in New York about my year in The South at Hollins College and that lead to thinking that John Green in Dublin had a father who was something in the military and was living in Arlington or one of those other military suburbs around Washington--- quick change of gears--- once knew a girl now a woman at Beloit College and this is around 1964 or 65 or maybe even as late as 65 or 66 because I know I was living in North Hall and her father was a pilot for the Strategic Air Command flying around and around in circles over North Dakota... I am not about to tell you about the daughter of the Senator from North Dakota...leave it, leave it alone, please, leave it alone...her Dad was flying, she said, as we lay upon the made-up bed, around and around...the linen had just been changed for the week, waiting--- that was why it was just made up--- for the command. . .I saw no point in making up a bed, Mom always made up the beds, for well, I was also going to excuse myself for talking about this girl, but back then she was knowing this other guy, so anyway, we were lying on top of the made-up bed, the lights were out we could hear kids pass on the walk in front of the window. . . our hands were touching, warm, hot, damp, flesh, wet, don't worry no clothing is gonna come off, finger inserted under buttoned shirt, behind belted pants: it was all so uncomfortable but neither of us could just take our clothes off and jump into bed then there is a big gap looking back that is and she has gone off to Chicago with this guy and he bought her a ring in Woolworth's and they said to everybody that they had gone to Chicago and gotten engaged and had stayed at this nice hotel and then went to the museum and David wanted to look at the Crucifixion scenes, wanting to see how exact medically they were... she disappears from the story and David years later will be the one who fills out a statement saying he will guarantee Lilia's stay in the USA since he had a job and bank account and I didn’t have either, in the USA, us living in Dublin, not having seen John Green in some time
so this does tie in Hollins College and you thought I was just on a long-winded round about as a way to getting you no-where-fast. . .Johnny Greene, last I heard was back Down South on the masthead of INQUIRY (at the final typing he is off it) though I had always thought he was of some sect on The Left. . . could have been the distortion of the drink--- and as I am typing this again in something called the present--- at this moment--- Johnny Greene died of AIDS after writing something about it in PEOPLE---
but back: and my waiting to play Kit Marlowe in the back of The Gold Rail, George enters from the sun, with knife in eye socket, on the other hand, maybe, we were agreeing all along and just didn't know it about what how can I say at such a late date was it the other afternoon at Frank's Roadhouse, down the road from Hollins, I was sitting there with John Currier and Mike Mayo, I was telling George as I was raking his leaves, drinking a small Rolling Rock, this black guy, or coloured guy or negro shuffled himself into the bar through the back door. These other guys sitting on the other side see him when he finally gets himself up to the bar and yell, Hey, Rastos you got to have some money if you wants a beer. I have it, he shouts back and starts to go through his coat and eventually pulls out this woman's purse. One of the guys sees it and yells, You fool around with those women, you're gonna get knots all over your head. There's a pause. Theys don't call them knots no more, Rastos says, They call them no-you-donts.
those panties… remember those panties? hanging on the ankle of that woman will just have to wait for another time. awful trying to find your life in the alumni
magazine? or looking up biographies of writers known just to remember which ones are the enemy bang down the memory bank to Trieste and getting off the train and the rush to find the canal that gave the name of Little Venice to Trieste and couldn't find the house where Mr. Joyce lived but anyway George had written about this city last one visited before heading off to Sofia and the meeting with Lilia on Botev Boulevard which will though George never asked Lilia if she had been to Trieste maybe he wasn't interested in comparing geography lessons though he did know where Bulgaria was beyond saying it was east of the statue for the wreath for Garibaldi which is better than most Americans who I tell calmly: Bulgaria is north of Greece, east of Yugoslavia, somewhat south of Hungary and a little to the west of Romania all more or less; of course north of Turkey less more or less because Frank's Roadhouse ain't there anymore: soft music in the cocktail lounge, please, getting in ten frames of bowling before church, heavy on the whiskey, Joe, light on the ginger, while just down from the guy who is musing on the days of the journey to the moon are more guys standing in front of the liquor store who have already said as I pass
"I am tired off"
"Yes, I am tired off, too"
"Is this Nighttrain?"
"No, this is the real Thunderbird."
"Better watch out for them birds, they’ll crap all over your head.”
Which is where this should end, but BUT I didn't work in the fact, are you chewing your cabbage twice could be because when I lived around the corner from The West End where I am still standing with George, I had a Japanese room-mate who told me Japanese Moms are always telling their little children to chew each grain of the rice three times to get all the flavor: from on the first chew, nothing, to the second which is sour to the third which is sweet and how many times have I used George's line of poetry: when the heart breaks it doesn't make a sound, there it goes again. me back there in the Rialto Theatre in Patchogue watching what I later found out to be a movie written by George, THE PLAYGROUND, that clapboard house near the canals in Los Angeles how important those canals in Trieste, that canal in Trieste which is another story of waking up in the morning light not yet in the sky with a South African woman in a beach house and this Swedish guy still had a bottle of wine so we three go walking along the coast road looking for the boat to Pula... having turend from the direction of Miramar, where the widow of Maximillian...
So, still in The West End George Garrett takes a sip of that drink ice has melted a bit there was this guy from Patchogue who was telling a story and the way he was telling the story was another way of describing the guy he was telling the story to and I guess about
In a magazine looked at in the bookstore on St Marks, George Garrett is to edit an issue of Southern Writing and I'm thinking as I walk home along Second Avenue, now remembering walking home along Second Avenue because already it was last week this is happening, this walking, however it is now weeks ago and eventually when this is done, this writing, it will be months ago and then years later to be read...I know or knew George Garrett and last saw him maybe four years ago (then) in The West End Bar up on Broadway across from Columbia, in there, at the bar, standing with back to the food counter, drinking I was, soda water with slice of lime and George was knocking back a bourbon or it could have been a Scotch though I am sure it wasn't a beer or A Scots or a gin and something...The West End...I had lived around the corner from it thanks to George who got me a fellowship to Columbia, now almost twelve years ago,(then) to come up from Virginia for the two years to get away or rather to move away from The Bulgarian who was going to stay on at Hollins College and there was nothing for me to do in Virginia and George himself was leaving town to go further south, closer to the clay of Florida, no, they ain't got clay in Florida, clay is for Georgia, but I have him getting closer to THE FINISHED MAN, had to look up the title, climb on the chair because the Garrett books are up on the top shelf due to the rigor of the alphabet, that book is very rare...off the subject, as we say, okay, I'm around the corner from The West End of Kerouac fame, got to mention that, don't ask why, please, something I do know for sure, the last stop in the night after hitting The Gold Rail, now turned into a chink place with plastic lace curtains, and Forlini's, a mafia heroin in the bathroom drop, but serving maybe the best veal in New York according to this Rumanian guy who now lives in Washington, now a little to the right of The Klan...The West End was the last stop just after two in the morning and sometimes it was three in the morning, though
this last time I was seeing George it was sometime in the afternoon,maybe even as early as one and I was thinking that was about the time I was in there up front, crying, even, it was awful, in a front booth because of the available sunlight, reading, over and over the first paragraph of Issac Singer's OLD LOVES and it must have been due to Lucja or that other woman who stole my inscribed copy of Dahlberg's BECAUSE I WAS FLESH
but remember this was myself walking back from the bookstore on St. Marks with the idea of The South and how in Ireland they refer to The Republic as The South and just yesterday (repeat first paragraph for detail of time) not going into which yesterday, I was told people in The North say they are going up to Dublin even though they are in fact going south to Dublin... this had come up because this Irish poet was reading in New York and when I asked him what he was going to do next, said he was going up to Washington... I corrected him, in New York you say you are going down to Washington... though if you lived in The South you could say you were going up to Washington--- or going up North which was what George allowed me to do, go up North to Columbia and leave Lilia st Hollins, not leave her behind, just leave maybe for both our sakes, leave, no, move apart and hope time would take care of, but it don't work like, and I was just thinking, if I am going on 38, Melinda is going to be 36 and she has
this is very subjective
where is the reader's interest?
a kid and a husband with a hearing aid who the last time I saw them was then celebrating, he was, not having to pay alimony to his third wife who had just died from cancer, such an end
try to imagine Petrarch or Dante coming up with such an end to the heart burst with love, sitting those nights while my parents were in shopping and I in the car waiting and wish I was not alone and Melinda was out there...
so Dublin has been suggested, hinted at, if I would drag in popular critical language, and I am not teasing it out. too much, now, however, there has been no contact with George for years because either he originated or just picked it up when he was there, the policy of Hollins College professors to like to get letters coming but write in the newsletter that we are to keep those letters coming but they as in all the years gone by, you can't expect to get an answer, sorry, but that is just the way and they each have their individual reasons but I guess it just comes down to the waste of energy, something like reading magazines and how once began there is no end to them and you get nothing from a magazine: so much cutting, cut and cut...but I ain't about to give you the English sermon against new books as being like buying gin in a pub: always overpriced and shortshotted...while getting from Hollins to Columbia serves me up the chance to link Johnny Greene of Greene County, Alabama with John Green met in Dublin...but first Johnny Greene was up in New York at Columbia University writing and doing research on his recent past in the civil rights movement and holding up his end of The Gold Rail Bar---bar now gone into a Chinese restaurant chain...just the other day walking passed and on the spur of the moment I was walking in and sitting up at the bar to look out at the sidewalk and street and how bright the sun is in the afternoon at that bit of Broadway: Lois who stole the Dahlberg book comes in--- she had the last name of the man who wrote THE SEVEN WHO WERE HANGED and it seems she is also now but a shade on a memorial site---
and Johnny Greene walks passed to take a table at the back of the room: to be hated by the whites and blacks back home, a Greene of Greene County, Alabama, and for all the wrong reasons and he once described the role of the cousin in the sexual rites of The Deep South: having no cousins I can only listen with envy... much like all those boys who have gone to fuck in motel rooms or in the back seats of Chevys with the woman's pants hanging from the ankle because you never know, silly boy, when you're gonna have to pull trou and make a quick getaway, little kids being the worst of the lot...but better than the kids who piss from the balcony
of theatres in Dublin on the smooching couples in the stalls...you can explain away hickeys and lipstick but the smell of urine on your coat as usual, just back from the cleaners, a once a year activity.
Talking about Dublin as if you couldn't tell...and John Green drank for a time in O'Dwyer’s, there on the corner of Leeson Street and The Green and moved across the street to another pub because he was now playing Gaelic football and was said to be quite good at it and even his lessons in the Irish language were said to be going good... going WELL,dummy! if you had done more than just buy the Irish grammar book and IRISH MADE EASY...you wouldn't feel so left out, so cut off from those articles in THE IRISH TIMES (this article was transmitted in Irish and translated here in the Dublin office into English)...I don't know my grandfather's name....The McGonigle grandfather, the one who came over from Ireland, shipped over since he came as a young teenager to work...sent out to America, he was, the whole world for
his asking...and with about as much luck as the coloured guy standing down in front of the gated supermarket on Second Avenue looking up:
IT TAKES THREE DAYS TO GET TO THE MOON
but I ain't looking for the moon or even an acre of land just to bring into this room either of the Green(e) boys and I am not about to forget I did go to see Julian Green in Paris since he was the only American in the French Academy and I had liked his diary and... this gets too far from the point which is a way of saying I have gone too far from The South and am stuck with no, I am not stuck with,rather growing old with: I had been able to talk with Johnny Greene in New York about my year in The South at Hollins College and that lead to thinking that John Green in Dublin had a father who was something in the military and was living in Arlington or one of those other military suburbs around Washington--- quick change of gears--- once knew a girl now a woman at Beloit College and this is around 1964 or 65 or maybe even as late as 65 or 66 because I know I was living in North Hall and her father was a pilot for the Strategic Air Command flying around and around in circles over North Dakota... I am not about to tell you about the daughter of the Senator from North Dakota...leave it, leave it alone, please, leave it alone...her Dad was flying, she said, as we lay upon the made-up bed, around and around...the linen had just been changed for the week, waiting--- that was why it was just made up--- for the command. . .I saw no point in making up a bed, Mom always made up the beds, for well, I was also going to excuse myself for talking about this girl, but back then she was knowing this other guy, so anyway, we were lying on top of the made-up bed, the lights were out we could hear kids pass on the walk in front of the window. . . our hands were touching, warm, hot, damp, flesh, wet, don't worry no clothing is gonna come off, finger inserted under buttoned shirt, behind belted pants: it was all so uncomfortable but neither of us could just take our clothes off and jump into bed then there is a big gap looking back that is and she has gone off to Chicago with this guy and he bought her a ring in Woolworth's and they said to everybody that they had gone to Chicago and gotten engaged and had stayed at this nice hotel and then went to the museum and David wanted to look at the Crucifixion scenes, wanting to see how exact medically they were... she disappears from the story and David years later will be the one who fills out a statement saying he will guarantee Lilia's stay in the USA since he had a job and bank account and I didn’t have either, in the USA, us living in Dublin, not having seen John Green in some time
so this does tie in Hollins College and you thought I was just on a long-winded round about as a way to getting you no-where-fast. . .Johnny Greene, last I heard was back Down South on the masthead of INQUIRY (at the final typing he is off it) though I had always thought he was of some sect on The Left. . . could have been the distortion of the drink--- and as I am typing this again in something called the present--- at this moment--- Johnny Greene died of AIDS after writing something about it in PEOPLE---
but back: and my waiting to play Kit Marlowe in the back of The Gold Rail, George enters from the sun, with knife in eye socket, on the other hand, maybe, we were agreeing all along and just didn't know it about what how can I say at such a late date was it the other afternoon at Frank's Roadhouse, down the road from Hollins, I was sitting there with John Currier and Mike Mayo, I was telling George as I was raking his leaves, drinking a small Rolling Rock, this black guy, or coloured guy or negro shuffled himself into the bar through the back door. These other guys sitting on the other side see him when he finally gets himself up to the bar and yell, Hey, Rastos you got to have some money if you wants a beer. I have it, he shouts back and starts to go through his coat and eventually pulls out this woman's purse. One of the guys sees it and yells, You fool around with those women, you're gonna get knots all over your head. There's a pause. Theys don't call them knots no more, Rastos says, They call them no-you-donts.
those panties… remember those panties? hanging on the ankle of that woman will just have to wait for another time. awful trying to find your life in the alumni
magazine? or looking up biographies of writers known just to remember which ones are the enemy bang down the memory bank to Trieste and getting off the train and the rush to find the canal that gave the name of Little Venice to Trieste and couldn't find the house where Mr. Joyce lived but anyway George had written about this city last one visited before heading off to Sofia and the meeting with Lilia on Botev Boulevard which will though George never asked Lilia if she had been to Trieste maybe he wasn't interested in comparing geography lessons though he did know where Bulgaria was beyond saying it was east of the statue for the wreath for Garibaldi which is better than most Americans who I tell calmly: Bulgaria is north of Greece, east of Yugoslavia, somewhat south of Hungary and a little to the west of Romania all more or less; of course north of Turkey less more or less because Frank's Roadhouse ain't there anymore: soft music in the cocktail lounge, please, getting in ten frames of bowling before church, heavy on the whiskey, Joe, light on the ginger, while just down from the guy who is musing on the days of the journey to the moon are more guys standing in front of the liquor store who have already said as I pass
"I am tired off"
"Yes, I am tired off, too"
"Is this Nighttrain?"
"No, this is the real Thunderbird."
"Better watch out for them birds, they’ll crap all over your head.”
Which is where this should end, but BUT I didn't work in the fact, are you chewing your cabbage twice could be because when I lived around the corner from The West End where I am still standing with George, I had a Japanese room-mate who told me Japanese Moms are always telling their little children to chew each grain of the rice three times to get all the flavor: from on the first chew, nothing, to the second which is sour to the third which is sweet and how many times have I used George's line of poetry: when the heart breaks it doesn't make a sound, there it goes again. me back there in the Rialto Theatre in Patchogue watching what I later found out to be a movie written by George, THE PLAYGROUND, that clapboard house near the canals in Los Angeles how important those canals in Trieste, that canal in Trieste which is another story of waking up in the morning light not yet in the sky with a South African woman in a beach house and this Swedish guy still had a bottle of wine so we three go walking along the coast road looking for the boat to Pula... having turend from the direction of Miramar, where the widow of Maximillian...
So, still in The West End George Garrett takes a sip of that drink ice has melted a bit there was this guy from Patchogue who was telling a story and the way he was telling the story was another way of describing the guy he was telling the story to and I guess about
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