TO READ: PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR and WITOLD GOMBROWICZ AND...

I decided to preface these reminders of books read, to be read and reread with this first poem  published in The Patchogue Advance in 1962.

I

                                                  SEVEN

             I might even think this is the beginning of a long memorial address that will go for many pages, in the voice of Johannes Freumbichler--- the grandfather of Thomas Bernhard who encourage his grandson in words and as Bernhard writes in A CHILD: "I can still hear my grandfather saying Everything one writes is nonsense.  So how could he think of writing a thousand pages of nonsense?    He always had the most incredible ideas, but he always felt that these ideas were the cause of his failure.  We all fail, he said time and again.  That is the thought that most occupies my mind too.  Naturally, I had no idea what failure  was, what it meant, what it could mean though I myself was already going through the process of failure, non-stop failure; at school I failed everything with incredible consistency.'

                                                                        NINE

      Of course the very copying of these sentences reveal me as...

                                                            FOURTEEN

      Could one imagine Joyce Carol Oates [the three saddest words in the English language (Gore Vidal)] or Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth or Toni Morrison or Paul Auster or any of our well-known bad writers---to use Edward Dahlberg's phrase to which he always added:  I have heard of them and that is sufficient--- stepping back.. except as a strategic marketing move...but they can’t do that... and find themselves within the sentences of a Thomas Bernhard?

                                                TWENTYONE

      From Emerson’s Quotation and Originality: "A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good."

                                                            SIXTEEN

            Here it is a book from the grave of Patrick Leigh Fermor:  THE BROKEN ROAD (New York Review Books)... having set out to walk across Europe, Fermor published in his lifetime two books---A TIME OF GIFTS and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER--- but it is from the grave that we get to Bulgaria. 

            Having set out in 1933 on his walk it is now the fall of 1934 and how I wish the Bulgaria he describes was still available in Bulgaria though reading Fermor’s version of Bulgaria still reminds me of what I find attractive in Bulgaria…

      “A twist in the valley and a leaf-fringed glance through a  clearing brought my destination into sight.  This was a fortress-like building,  almost a small towered city, embedded in fold after fold of beech trees and pine  The southern ramparts sank into the gorge, and the five tall walls and tiled roofs formed a lopsided pentagon round the deep well of a courtyard, lined within by many ascending tiers of a slender-pillard gallery hoisted on semicircular arches…” 

      Of course, Fermor has come to Rila Monastery as did I so many years later. 

             

      But driving with a former prime minister of Bulgaria a few years ago form Rila did not sadly take us through what Fermor saw:  “The way back to Sofia lay through the western foothills of the Rilska Planina:  rolling dun-coloured country that turned red at sunset with prehistoric wooden ploughs drawn by buffalos or oxen.  In the village, the houses were looped with festoons of tobacco leaves drying in the sun, the size colour and shape of kippers.  I slept in a rick, the first night, reached the little town of Dupnitza on the next and got to Radomir the following dusk.  I was drinking a lonely slivo and feeling tired and a bit depressed when a bus stopped opposite with София inscribed across the top, and a roof laden with a host of roped baskets and bundles.  Inside it was a Noah’s ark indeed, for, in every inch, not occupied by my kerchiefed and kalpacked fellow passengers, were trussed chickens and ducks, a turkey and two full-grown lambs that bleated shrilly form time to time.  We rocked and clanked through the darkness.  The half a dozen passengers next to me sang quietly all the away: sad fluttering patterns of sound in the minor mode, quite different from the robust strains I had heard so often lately. I listened entranced. I asked for a particular one  over and over again---Zashto to se sirdish liube? (Why are you angry with me, my love?) The first line ran--- and determined to try and master it later.”

            45 years of the communism and the long disastrous hangover from that blight changed all of this and it goes without saying not for the better.

            Yet, yet I would go to Bulgaria at the drop of a plane ticket as the connection, at least in my mind is there through THE COPRSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV (one of the first American books to be translated after the fall of the communism but not reprinted in book form since as the fear has returned to Bulgaria:  to actually remember is now disputed in Bulgaria which intellectually is still under the heavy thumb of the old nomenkultura of the previous regime---richer now than ever before, more mediocre--- and the middle section of GOING TO PATCHOGUE and when it is published and I hope before I am dead, EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS:  this last book pursues the violent  awful death of Linda Nelson while happening in Upstate New York began in Bulgaria…

                                                            FORTY

            How can I convince you that THE BROKEN ROAD is one of the  best travel books --- right there with ALBERTO Savinio’s SPEAKING TO CLIO and D.H. Lawrence’s ETRUSCAN PLACES and MORNINGS IN MEXICO---  they are not up to date, they are not  modern, they are not looking for bargains, not looking for the very best, not playing that insider’s card of knowing A SECRET… they know what they are writing about and that knowing is not designed to put you the reader under their thumb of some sort of superior connoisseurship, but the knowing is also edged with a certain felt experience of how fragile all such memories are and as a reader you know it, whatever  it was will not be there when you get there BUT you might, just might find some tiny reminder of…

                                                          
  SEVENTEEN

            A second version of TRANS-ATLANTYK  by Witold Gombrowicz has been published by Yale University Press. replacing an earlier version that had been introduced by Stanisław Barańczak--- a once important critic and poet but now  sadly sidelined by illness. 

            I do not read Polish but I do read Gombrowicz and Yale along with minor contributions by Dalkey Archive, Grove Press and Archipelago have seen to it that almost all of Gombrowicz is available in English. 

            One can think of TRANS-ATLANTYK as the book that gets us from the Poland of FERDYDURKE , PORNOGRAFIA and  COSMOS to the Argentina  of the great DIARY also available in an essential version from Yale as who can forget the memorable opening of that diary of his exile in Argentina that begins:  1953 I  Monday Me.  Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me.  Thursday Me.  Friday Josefa Radzyminska has magnanimously provided me with a dozen or so issues of….get my hands on several issues of various Polish newspapers…I read these Polish newspaers as if I were reading a story about someone whom I knew intimately and well who suddenly leaves for Australia, for example, and there experiences rather strange adventures which are no longer real because they concern someone different and strange, who can only be loosely identified with ther person we once knew…”

                                                            THIRTY

            I would hold that to be well read a person needs on their shelf the collected works of E. M. Cioran, Witold Gombrowisz, Thomas Bernhard, Edward Dahlberg, Ernst Junger, Julian Green. MIguel de Unamuno

            All of these writers have two basic concerns summed up by Unamuno:

            ONE   “I would choose neither “the human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor the substantivized adjective but the concrete substantive:  man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who is born, suffers, and dies--- above all the man who dies; the man who eats and drinks an plays and sleeps and thinks and loves; the man who is seen and heard...  

            TWO     “Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of collective personality of a people.  We live in memory and by memory and our spiritual life is simple the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

            Or, maybe it is all summed up in the titles of two of Cioran’s books  THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN,  THE SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY.

                                                          
                                                                                             FORTY-ONE

             Now I have said it and quoted it.
             SO BE IT, again.

                                                                         ***

                                                             
                                                      WHAT IS LEFT OUT  

            I should have written that Patrick Leigh Fermor in THE BROKEN ROAD also goes to Romania, Greece and Turkey but Iwas stopped by his being in Bulgaria.  I also provided no plot summary of TRANS-ATLANTYK but here is the opening sentence:  “I feel the need to convey to my Family, to my kin and friends, this the beginning of my adventures, now ten years long, in the….’

            I do not know what is a wellrread  reader.  I could have added some more     writers who I live with on a daily basis, Celine, Mandelstam, Broch, Handke, David Jones, James Joyce, Beckett, Leopardi, James Thomson, Eliot, Bitov, Nadas… Tom Whalen, George Garrett, Lee Titus Elliott…

 

STEPS TO LITERARY INHUMATION

      Freumbichler writes, what you are about to read is an attempt probably futile to escape the fate explained by the title, but as it would seem the author of this blog is teetering as is often said on the edge of passing into another state though readers of the books of Thomas Bernhard are familiar to similar situations and Freumbichler writing--- as he addresses himself in this manner--- is no accident and while dying in 1949 it is true that  is still no reason not to hear from him since such shadows remain forever within the village limits of Patchogue.

                  
4                                        
 In 1962  my mother typed my first story WAS IT WORTH IT? since she knew how to type and I sent the story off to the Saturday Evening Post, the only magazine other than SIGN MAGAZINE  my family subscribed to.  Of course the story came back with a little printed rejection slip. 

                   5
IN 1970 I asked Lawrence Durrell if he ever thought about his future reputation and he replied, "What has posterity ever done for me?"  
      
                  6
Dalkey Archive Published two of my books: THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  Northwestern University Press did PETKOV in paperback.  
Dalkey Archive two years ago contracted to publish ST. PATRICK'S DAY Dublin 1974 but have told me it has been postponed.  So one can say it forthcoming... I hope, still.

                   7  
Over the years Richard Seaver, Sam Vaughan Daniel Halpern have all said nice things about manuscripts I have shown them but sadly they are not prepared to predict sufficient sales to convince whoever it is... but I have learned this is all really a matter of accident and whim and these men have not been prepared to give into my sentences in fortune telling as they have been able to do for others.  This is called spilt milk.

8
It is not unusual for writers to talk and write about being posthumous as I first heard of this from Edward Dahlberg now more than 4o years ago and have always known--- in that place--- but I have tried to hold to Durrell's comment even as he has mostly disappeared from the public world of reading...

so, here I am showing you what the backhoe reads like when it comes for the steps a writer takes to self-inhumation in the form of two letters to editors who I thought possibly powerful, possibly might be interested.  They are self-explanatory and to date come with no replies.  I did sent them by that most unconventional means possible today: the United State Postal Service so of course both letters might have been lost in the mail---though Freumbichler writes: no way can you descend to that level of stupidity

                                                                      *****

3 MARCH, 2014

Dear Kate Medina,

                   Toward the end of June 1972 you wrote me a little note after reading “A Son’s Father’s Day” in the Village Voice.  You had asked if I had anything I might show you and I think I did send along something and nothing happened as it was probably not meant to be.  Possibly, Harriet Wasserman who I had met  through Hannah Green and Sam Vaughan,  had been in touch later with you but all of that is so long ago though your little note was very important to me as a writer back then.

          You might know Dalkey Archive published two of my books: THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  PETKOV appeared and is still in paper from Northwestern University Press and PATCHOGUE was eventually finally done in paper by DA two years ago.  They have another novel ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 under contract but I have been told by John O’Brien that he has to postpone it into some dim future time.

          Both books were well reviewed in the New York Times (they even found Andrei Codrescu to review PETKOV) and reviews of PATCHOGUE appeared in Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, The Voice and the LA Times.  I well know that this was all another time and have seen the changes as I have reviewed and written with some frequency for all of the major newspapers here in the US and in The Guardian in London.

          The manuscript I am writing you about is JUST LIKE THAT and I have in mind a long subtitle:  A book from the Sixties of the last century: a beginning to that moment and the end with no distinction between truth and fiction.  The book concludes in the year after you wrote to me.

          The first section, a beginning, has a young man going from Dublin in the Spring of 1965 to the DDR.  The opening of the book finds two young men in bed together in Leipzig  and the question asked by the German, “Are you Jewish?” 

          Of course the place, the question and a poster noted:  HÄNDE WEG VON VIETNAM

          Barbara Probst Solomon, who I am sure you know, published the opening and concluding parts of this section in subsequent issues of her journal THE READING ROOM (2002). 

          The second part of the book:  the end of the Sixties is located on the Upper West Side and is held in place by the death of the narrator’s father Upstate while he is living on 114^th Street. 

          A long section from this part was published by William O’Rourke in the Notre Dame Review in 2012 and is centered on the narrator’s relationship [what a terrible word] with Anthony Burgess and others in the bars near Columbia along with the theatrical recreations of the life and times of Charlie Manson and  the intense racial and sexual goings-on inside the Sullivanian world of those large apartments on Riverside Drive are not missed as is the nightly pilgrimage between The Gold Rail, The West End and Forlini’s along there on Broadway.  (The piece in the Notre Dame Review was listed as a notable essay in The Best Essays of 2013)

          Now the reason for this actual letter:  the manuscript exists as a manuscript.  It was typed on Word Star.  I held on to that program for the longest time.  I have partial versions in more contemporary e-forms but the complete manuscript exists as just that.

          Of late, I did have the pleasure, obscure as all such things are, of discovering that Nadine Gordimer in the 1990s had read my reviews in the LA Times and who remembered I had been in her class at Columbia and she was pleasantly surprised that I had survived my former existence.

          All of this is possibly irrelevant to the actual reading of JUST LIKE THAT.  And my most recent post at abcofreading.blogspot.com (of course the homage to Pound in the name) can serve as a sort of immediate calling card:    http://www.abcofreading.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-remains.html

          Finally, I am enclosing a photocopy of an article George Garrett asked me to do for the last yearbook of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “A Writer’s Life.”

                                                All the best,

                                               

                                                Thomas McGonigle

                                            

                                                                     *****

5 February 2014

Dear Geraldy Howard,

At the end of 2013 we exchanged notes about Malcolm Cowley and I was pleasantly surprised to learn  you also knew him.  When I looked at the notes we exchanged I realized I had misspelled your first name and the ghost of Cowley was there again:  I was a terrible proofreader of my own work which Cowley had read down at Hollins College and he was telling me of why the first editions of Fitzgerald’s books are riddled with spelling error.  Max Perkins believed  an author knew best when it came to his own text, but he did not realize Fitzgerald was a lousy speller and contrary to what people thought  the errors in those early editions were not Scribner’s fault.

But the occasion for this letter which I am sending as a real letter is about my own work and my hope that you might be interested in reading one of my manuscripts.  I prevail upon the fact of having known of you since we were introduced or was  it only that Angela Carter at Keshkerrigan Bookstore told me of you so many years ago at her shop down there in the wilds near Chambers Street? 

You might know Dalkey Archive published two of my books  THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE.  PETKOV appeared also in paper from Northwestern University Press and PATCHOGUE was eventually finally done in paper by DA two years ago.  They have another novel under contract ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 but I have been told by John O’Brien that he has to postpone it in spite of a contract into some dim future date.

Angela must have introduced us as I published--- to this date--- the only Irish and Irish American literary journal ADRIFT and thought you had shared an interest in such and possibly in particular William Trevor... and while I was interested in Trevor Francis Stuart held my interest as did Ralph Cusack's CADENZA which lead to Gil Sorrentino and Jack O'Brien.  The small world.

          The book is JUST LIKE THAT and I have in mind a long subtitle:  A book from the so-called Sixties of the last century: a beginning to that moment and the end with no distinction between truth and fiction. 

          The first section, a beginning has a young man going from Dublin in the Spring of 1965 to the DDR.  The opening of the book finds two young men in bed together in Leipzig  and the question asked by the German, “Are you Jewish?” 

          Of course the place, the question and a poster noted:  HÄNDE WEG VON VIETNAM

          Barbara Probst Solomon published the opening and the concluding parts of this section in subsequent issues of her journal THE READING ROOM. 

          The second part of the book:  the end of the so-called Sixties is centered on the Upper  West Side and is held in place by the death of the narrator’s father Upstate while he is living on 114^th Street. 

          A long section from this part was published by William O’Rourke in the Notre Dame Review in 2012 and is centered on the  narrator’s relationship [what a terrible word] with Anthony Burgess and others in the bars near Columbia along with the theatrical recreations of the life and times of Charlie Manson, the particular racial and sexual views of Johnny Green of Green County Alabama---  Green will subsequently die of AIDS, but that is another story.  Of course the Sullivanian world of those large aopartments on Riverside Drive are not missed as is the nightly pilgrimage between The Gold Rail, The West End and Forlini’s

          And now the reason for this actual letter.  The manuscript exists as a manuscript.  It was typed on Word Star.  I held on to that for the longest time.  I have partial versions in more contemporary e-forms but the complete manuscript exists as just that.

          Two editors/publishers have read versions of the manuscript, Richard Seaver and Daniel Halpern.  They both decided that they could not make money on it.  Of course I heard a version of that comment when after GOING TO PATCHOGUE came out and even with full page reviews in the Voice, in the Chicago Tribune and long articles in Newsday and the NY Times.. I was told by an agent, I can’t eat lunch off of you. 

          Of course years ago through Hannah Green I had Harriet Wasserman as an back in the early 70s when two little pieces appeared in the Village Voice, Goodbye W. H, Auden and A Son’s Father’s Day.

          So I court that terrible knife edge of age--- I remember that I even had a note from Kate Medina and Sam Vaughan…  though I hope this note is not an elaborate necrologue but as one gets older as I am sure you know…

          I used to review for Newsday, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and for the LaTimes until that paper ran finally out of money.

          Of late, I did have the pleasure, obscure as all such things are, of discovering that Nadine Gordimer had read my reviews in the LA Timea and remembered I had been in a class with her at Columbia.

          All of this is possibly irrelevant to the actual reading of JUST LIKE THAT. And my most recent post at abcofreading  (of course the name form {Pound)  can serve as a sort of immediate calling card:    http://www.abcofreading.blogspot.com/2014/01/what-remains.html

          Finally I am enclosing a photocopy of an article George Garrett asked me to do for the last yearbook of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “A Writer’s Life.”

                                                All the best, 
                                                 Thomas McGonigle

                                              

WHAT REMAINS

What remains of a January voyage--- 2014--- about in the West of the United States.  I had meant to insert some photographs but lethargy and the possible call of one's bleeding wrists/  Please silently fix my harried errors of grammar and all the rest

EIGHT

This afternoon between two and three o'clock between Olancha and Panamint Springs on route 190 which is a long descending approach to Death Valley I was aware of something along the lines of the constant possibility of self-extinction with the mistaken slight movement of the steering wheel, while at the same time I felt all of my lifelong fascination with Europe and things European disappearing...

And on re-reading in the morning after the careful composition of this paragraph…  I had repeated the word between.      

ELEVEN

Edward Dahlberg had pointed out this flaw of repeating a word  to me once before back in 1970 when I had dared to show him a page of my prose and he discovered I had repeated a word.  Why do you reveal your impoverished vocabulary?  There is never a reason to repeat a word and you do so within a sentence.  Go back to your desk and read decent books.

                                           SIX

The trip is to the west since it is January. 

I am not an adventurer.

          FOURTEEN

Life as an oasis---

death as the desert all around---

What makes me think that?

   (from DRAFTS FOR A THIRD SKETCHBOOK by Max Frisch written in the early 80s when he lived in New York and I knew him ever so briefly.  His remaining 10 years would be consumed by cancer)

TWENTY

           IN THE DESERT REGIONS: 

The nature does not disappoint

I do not have sentences or vocabulary for what I see.

It is entering a wordless state where no words come to mind, not even cliches.  

Thornton Wilder might be perfectly right:  “grandeur of the ride an hour into the Book of Genesis…”

Though there is plant life...  but my ignorance:  I can identify a maple tree, a pine tree, a tulip, Lily of the Valley, a bleeding heart bush, a weeping willow and now I am reaching…

Near Death Valley there is more stone so much less vegetation but around here along the border in southern New Mexico and Arizona…

THIRTEEN

From  SPEAKING TO CLIO by Alberto Savinio:

History collects our actions and gradually deposits them in the past.  History gradually frees us from the past.  A perfect organization of life would ensure all our actions, even the least and most insignificant, become history so as to relieve us of them.

As to washing our face in the morning, we do it to cleanse it of our dreams, those “actions” of sleep, those nocturnal “sins.”

The ills of the world, its slowness, its obstacles, its stupidity, can be attributed to this incomplete functioning of history.  The past festers on some men and rots. 

This constant throwing of the past over one’s shoulder, this constant “self-purification.”

So does life have an end?  In the last gaze coming from our eyes, the last light from our intelligence, that gaze, that light, will not be directed to the past, placed for good behind the closed door, but to the future.  And the future, as you will have understood, ladies and gentlemen, is dark, inaction par excellence and supreme purity.

Works that enter into history--- works that enter into the ghost of history.

Memories, too, slowly but inexorably fade.

 THREE

Yesterday coming over from Columbus, New Mexico two freshly squashed animals... The brightness, near glistening, of the redness of the blood in contrast to black pavement and tan tall grass along both sides of road

                                             TWENTYTHREE

“Selling books doesn’t pay the bills,” owner of TOMBSTONE OLD WEST BOOKS.  When I was first going to Tombstone this was a shop packed with books.  Over these last years the titles have diminished, the real estate ads got bigger and now the making of holsters and belts have come to be the businesses around three bookcases of books and most of them second-third-fourth hand.

                                                  FIFTYONE

Worn out, aching, mostly impotent,  I HE found my/himself in a bookshop in Deming N.M… and after buying two post cards of the Bataan Corregidor monument that was out side next to the museum and after looking at a locally published history relying on memories of the survivors of that terrible time at the beginning for the Americans in  World War Two:  many of the men at Corregidor had been from the nationalized New Mexico National Guard---I saw another book… 

And this is where as I picked  it up I felt  heckled by the book that this was not going to be ...and thinking though it is hard to credit so much was going on… I also thought of being now married for twenty years for the third time and she more than 20 years younger and deeply distressed as to what she is going to do with her life and being away from her back there in New Jersey as she was not living in our room on East First Street in Manhattan during the weeks of my being away but out in her child home commuting into the city and having to deal with a mother going on 93 still living independent but increasingly frail and with a husband who lusted after her yet she felt awful about her physical shape and craved for some sort of deliverance or possibility of change and here I was picking up a book that was either reduced in price or who knows but it cost $5.00 and had the title:

The VilIista Prisoners of 1916-1917 by James W. Hurst...

But I was so caught and knowing:  I was nobody, no agent, having two published books--- both well reviewed in the NY Times though my third was now postponed by the publisher.

Do I even start to read this book... The picture on cover of seven men without hats and two guys with hats…

The book was published in 2000

So, of course only if you have been to Columbus, New Mexico do you remember that Pancho Villa and a group of his men attacked Columbus on March 9,1916 and the men on the cover are the guys subsequently captured by the Pershing Punitive Expedition into Mexico and everyone always mentioned two things:  George S. Patton got his so-called baptism of fire in this mission and it was all a dress rehearsal for the sending of the American Expeditionary Force to Europe in 1917...

One word Guantanamo should bring into focus...

So of course this is a cliché and I had at first thought I was writing a short proposal of a movie of novel about these captives and the how to find out about them and of course  the buying of  the book.. does it even have to be shown.. just the title really or maybe it could start with the man looking at the two cells from the Deming jail  that are on display in the history museum.. and then the book and realizing that it is possible that these men were held in these cells before they were lead out to be hanged and there is a photograph of Deming citizen posing about the gallows wearing hats and staring into the camera with that pride of conviction and knowing what is right.

7 Mexicans from Villa’s raid were tried and hanged. 

16 Mexicans from Villa’s raid were sentenced to life in prison in New Mexico after being brought back from Mexico and put on trial.

Other Mexicans were captured during this punitive expedition but were freed after a period of time without trial.

Who are we to trust?

How does one show research?

Does that make a movie?

A raid happens.  People are killed.  The raiders retreat and the chase is on…

Shock.  Funerals.  A demand for action.

Mexicans are not supposed to attack the United States.

Why did Villa attack the US?.

Was it an arms deal gone bad?  He got the guns but not the ammunition.

When I was at the Slaughter Ranch outside Douglas a story on display about how the Villa soldiers were stealing and killing Slaughter cattle.  Slaughter protested to Villa and was given a saddlebag of gold coins.

A civil war going on in Mexico.

WWI going on in Europe.

The idea that the Germans were cultivating the Mexicans. 

Now why would Mexicans think kindly of the Germans?

Why would American be worried about these Mexicans?

In almost all of the westerns and film noirs set in the west there is always talk of running away to Mexico. 

Even in Ray Wylie Hubbard’s song Dallas After Midnight

“we had such plans after we got to Mexico”, as the guy who got caught for robbing a liquor store sings.

                                      Fortyone

I drove 2476 miles according to the receipt from Alamo Car Rental.   It is hard to list what I have become detached from but I am aware of becoming detached.  For the moment, maybe, before the city closes in upon me and I am once again in the forest.  That is what New York City is: the forest.  And nothing good lurks in the forest.  Out of the forests came the barbarians who sacked Rome. Or rather, the barbarians sacked a city already mentally sacked.

                             

 FORTYTHREE

I put the following found obituary from the local Deming newspaper.  A life, like so many and if read here on East First Street in Manhattan in the year 2014 as if from another planet.

William Homer Young Jr., 85, Silver City resident passed to his eternal home Sunday Dec. 22, 2013 at Anna Kassman Hospice Center in Albuquerque. 
The Memorial Service will be held Saturday, January 25, 2014 at 11 o'clock in the morning at the Special Events Center in Deming at the corner of Country Club Road and Pine Street. 
Homer was the fifth of six sons born to William Homer and Beulah Jane Horn Young in Phoenix, AZ on the 16th of June 1928 and in the early 1930's moved with his family to New Mexico where he grew up on the family farm in the Sunshine District south of Deming. He married his high school sweetheart, Joann Munson, at the First Christian Church in Deming on the 16 of July 1948. Four children were born to this union: James Munson (1949), Ida Belle (1952), Susan Gale (1957) and Patricia Jane (1958). They continued in the family farming business in Wilcox, AZ until 1950 when he went to work for the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation in Morenci, AZ. In 1959 the family moved to Toquepala, Peru, S.A. where Homer was mill repair foreman for Southern Peru Copper Corporation. They resided in Peru until 1967 when they returned to the States to manage a farm for his mother in Eastland, Texas. When the farm sold they were able to return to New Mexico and became employed at the newly opened Phelps Dodge Copper Mine at Tyrone. He retired in 1992 and became an avid golfer and world traveler, but, dancing to the Forrest Delk Bank was his favorite pastime and his three girls will always recall learning to dance while standing on their daddy's boot toes! 
He was raised a Master Mason in Coronado Lodge #8 F&AM Clifton, AZ in 1954 and joined, along with wife Joann, Clifton's Century Chapter #10 in 1955 where he is a Past Patron and Past Rainbow Dad of The International Order of the Rainbow for Girls. Homer was a charter member and past master of Toquepala Lodge #60 AF&AM Toquepala, Peru. When they returned to New Mexico he affiliated with Georgetown Chapter #4 OES and Mimbres Lodge #10 AF&AM at Mimbres where is a past patron and past master. He served New Mexico Grand Chapter as Worthy Grand Patron with sister Adele Durnell in 1978-79. He was named ambassador to Peru 2000-2003, Jurisprudence Committee 1989-1991 and Ambassador to Mexico 2011-2013 for General Grand Chapter OES. He is Past Grand Chaplain and Past District Deputy Grand Master for the Grand Lodge of New Mexico AF&AM. In 2004 New Mexico Grand Lodge named him "Mason of the Year" and accorded him the prestigious "Kit Carson Award". Homer was raised a 33 degree Scottish Rite Mason in 2005 and served on the advisory board for the Silver City Order of DeMolay, was Rainbow Dad for the Tyrone Assembly Organization and Rainbow Dad for the newly instituted Rainbow Assembly in Silver City. 
Homer is survived by his wife, Joann; 3 daughters and their families, Ida Belle and John Walsh, Susan and Don Wallin, Patricia Young and dear friend Linda Miller; 5 grandchildren and their families, Jennifer Mary (Walsh) and husband David James Hare, Elizabeth Ann (Walsh) and husband David James Gilroy, William Trevor and wife Amber Wallin, Steven Shane and wife Jenae Wallin, Lisa Jean (Wallin) and husband William Curtis Lents,; 5 great-grandchildren, Maya Sophia and Dylan James Hare, Jonah Finn and Nina Magdalena Gilroy, and William Augustus Wallin; 
2 brothers, J. W. and Marvin and wife Wilma Young; 2 very dear sisters-n-law, Catherine Munson Smith and Sabra Munson Humphrey and husband Robert and their families,; numerous nieces and nephews and a very special nephews, Roy Young and wife Mildred; many cousins and a host of loving world-wide friends. 
He was preceded in death by his parents, 3 brothers, Jim, Oral and Buford and his only son, James who died in 1970. 
He felt very privileged and very blest to have had the opportunity to play golf at the "Old Course" in Scotland and to have walked the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, but, most of all to have shared 65 years of love with his wife and children, to have developed very special ties with each of his 5 grandchildren and to have held the small hands of each of his 5 great-grandchildren. 
He was a good husband, a good father, a good grandfather and great-grandfather, a good friend to all... He was a good man. 
Homer will be remembered for his pride in, and love for , his family, his kind and generous ways, his love and appreciation for our beautiful earth and his favorite figure of speech, "Oh How Nice!" 
Memorial donations may be made to: Rite Care Childhood Language Program, New Mexico Scottish Rite Foundation, P. O. Box 2024, Santa Fe, N. M. 87504-2024 or a Charity of Choice. 

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