Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Bronchial Infection

I've been feeling like crap for about a week and a half. Coughing, congestion, stuffed up. I woke up a couple different mornings and thought ah it's gone but then it would come back. I read a wonderful book by the wonderful Lawrence Durrell and that made me feel better.


Then my friend Jane ... she's the wife of my buddy Jack at work ... she went to Newport and stopped along the way and picked fresh strawberries and sent some with Jack to give me. I dumped them on a pint of half-melted Haagen-Dazs vanilla. This too made me feel better.


Finally I remembered that I have a doctor. I went to see him today. "Bronchitis," he pronounced. He gave me some scripts. Now I'm not going to just feel better but am going to get better!

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Fascination

It fascinates me that after my June 13th post about a critic's cruel words concerning the suicide of the poet Hart Crane, an amazingly prolific Chinese poet name Fan Jinghua is prompted to write a warm and sympathetic poem about Crane:

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2009

Fan Jinghua: And the ship kept going...

    And the ship kept going…
              To Hart Crane

The goblet, half-emptied with wine and salty wind, was left on the rail by a lifesaver,
 marking where you fell over like a sword, and the ship kept going…
You waved a stop hand to the monolithic white building, gone and determined
 as an irretrievable wreck, but the roles you’d stopped acting are still onstage,
  your haunting lines sparkling a repertoire of players;
Now in a tipsy-topsy penthouse on a distant sea bed, you dance
 with your grandma and all the women acquaintances,
  to the gentle blue sound against the small sky roof that wakes no human voices.
                   June 18, 2009

Note: I am reminded by George's posting in his blog and write this poem. Crane has been one of my favorite poets.


      而船继续航行……
             致哈特- 克莱恩

那酒杯,半空,装着酒与咸涩的风,留在船舷上,救生圈旁,
  标注你翻身坠落之处,如一把剑,而船继续航行……
对庞大的舷上建筑挥了挥空手,你去了,就决然而去,再不会被人寻回的沉船,
  而你不再扮演的角色仍在台上,台词的阴魂刺激着一批又一批倡优的灵感;
在海床上摇摇欲坠的亭子间里,你拉着你外婆和所有相识的女眷
  跳舞,小小的天窗上蓝色的细声醉人,那绝非人类所能制造。
                  2009年6月18日

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Old Burying Ground; Jaffrey, New Hampshire

I wish I had noted dates and name(s) on this beauty ... oh, I just clicked on it to enlarge and can read:
Dorothy Caldwell 1889-1926

Monday, June 15, 2009

International Press Coverage

Above is the cover of the monthly news bulletin published in the village of Faucon, France. My brother and I made a pilgrimage to Faucon in May so that I could pay homage to one of my favorite writers, Violette Leduc. She lived in Faucon, and is buried there. An Alain Coullet, whom we took to be perhaps the mayor, was surprised that someone would still be seeking traces of Violette 37 years after her death; he took our picture and said it might, if there was room, appear in the local "journal". I asked him to mail me a copy if this happened; it was in the mailbox today, along with the dog biscuit the mail carrier always leaves for our dog Jodie. (Which reminds me that I once had a cat named Violetta, in honor of Leduc. Violetta became -- alas -- a coyote's supper.)

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Incident on Highway 401

It is the twentieth of October, 1983, a beautiful autumn Saturday. Rodney and I are making our way across Ontario on the Queen's Highway 401. It's always fun to be on the road with Rodney; we've put in many, many, many a mile. Suddenly now I hear him exclaim, "Oh, shit!" He slams down hard on the brake pedal. His 1968 Buick responds with angry whipping, screeching, and sliding. I've been reading; I look up from Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark just in time to see a tawny body meet the left front of the car and then be catapulted into the median strip.


We see that the red Buick is sadly broken. The hood and the fender and the grill are dented and smashed and crashed and dashed. The radiator is pierced.

The other victim lies limp, dead, bloodied tongue dangling from its mouth, but with otherwise no apparent injuries.

It's about 10:15am. We try to remember how far back the last exit is. Way back, we think. Rod counts out four cigarettes and walks ahead with his thumb out. I get back into the car and can't watch him as the raised hood blocks my view. I'm at an especially riveting place in the book and don't want to put it down. Plus, I am pleased to be escaped from our predicament by disappearing from reality into a book.

At 11:09am an Ontario Province Police car pulls up behind the Buick. I step out.

"Is this the car that hit the deer?"

"Yes."

"Are you alright?"

"Yes, but our radiator is leaking."

"Are you the driver ... no?"

"No, he took off on foot for help."

"And where's the deer?"

"Over there, in the median."

"Is it still alive?"

"No, it's dead."

"Okay, I'll be back with the driver shortly."

He examines the deer and then speeds off into the west; I reflect that our conversation had been Hemingway-esque.

Soon another OPP brings Rodney back. Road assistance has been summoned. By 2:00pm we've been towed, repaired, and are on our way.

We decidedly like the Canadians we've encountered.

We reach Ann Arbor in time to eat at one of our favorite restaurants.


Saturday, June 13, 2009

The Ship Kept Going: Hart Crane

Hart Crane, a poet from a well-to-do family in Cleveland (his father invented Life Savers), was thirty-three in 1932 when, returning to New York City by ship from some Guggenheim time in Mexico, he committed suicide by leaping into the Gulf of Mexico.  

Any suicide seems pitiful.  A contemporary critic, M.R. Werner, however, had no sympathy.  "He was such a faker," Werner once said of Crane, according to a letter in the 11/27/06 New Yorker which quotes the critic.  "He was always drunk, always onstage, always acting a role.  I've never believed he jumped off that boat to kill himself.  I think it was an act, and that Hart expected someone to jump in and rescue him.  It must have sobered Hart up when the ship kept going."

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Marcel Proust's Bedroom

Because of severe asthma, Proust spent much of his later years in bed; it was while abed that he wrote most of In Search of Lost Time. His bedroom furnishings (and some of the cork used to line the room's walls to keep out noise) are now housed in the Musee Carnavalet in Paris.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Two Train Stations in France

The Musee d'Orsay in Paris is in a gorgeous building that once was an abandoned train station.
The sleek "fast train" station in Avignon. The fast train can get you from Paris to Avignon, a distance of 463 miles, in 2 hours and 35 minutes. If they'd build such a track from here in Wellfleet to north-central Indiana, I could, to compare, visit my sisters tonight, and be there before bedtime! And it would stimulate the economy.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Musee Angladon

This was (is) my ticket to a fabulous museum in Avignon which houses, in what was a private residence, the art collection of a wealthy Parisian named Jacques Doucet, as well as period furnishings and objets d'art from the early 20th century.  I especially loved this Modigliani painting "The Pink Blouse" which I'd never seen before, not even in a reproduction, and I also loved the beautiful silk that covers some of the residence's various walls.  Five stars for this museum:  Exquisite.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Reading Silently, Laughing Out Loud

I love Alan Bennett's writing -- he was a member of the British comedy group called Beyond the Fringe, and has written plays, memoirs, essays ... lots of stuff. As soon as I read the paragraph below in his Untold Stories -- a collage of diary, memoir, and essay -- I phoned my brother to read it to him. We couldn't stop laughing. Every time we tried to go to another subject we failed because we just broke out anew in another round of helpless laughter.

The funeral is at a featureless crematorium in Lytham St. Annes. Afterwards we go for a lunch to a roadhouse on the outskirts. I sit next to my grandmother's niece, Cousin Florence, who keeps a boarding house in Blackpool. A down-to-earth woman, she eats a large meal of lukewarm lasagna, then puts down her fork and says, "Well, that's the first time I've dined off brown plates." Grief is not much in evidence, though with Cousin Florence it is hardly to be expected. Her husband's name was Frank, and six months before we had had a two-page letter filling us in on all her news. Halfway down the second page came the sentence: "Frank died last week, haven't we been having some weather?" Seldom can a comma have borne such a burden.

Elsewhere in Untold Stories he reports a friend saying, at the time the Idiot-in-Chief Bush was gearing up to take Baghdad: "The world has turned upside down. The best golfer in the world is black; the best rapper in the world is white; and now there is a war and ... guess what? ... Germany doesn't want to be in it."

Monday, June 1, 2009

Food, glorious food ....

It's not literary, and it's not in a graveyard, but the things you
come across on a street in Orange, France, can be mighty beautiful.