Literary Crushes/Grave Matters

Great Weekend

2012-01-30T20:09:00.003-05:00

Returning to Cape Cod from a nearly 900-mile long weekend in Vermont and New Hampshire, the main purpose of which was to watch my godson play in an 8th grade basketball game, I stopped at Proctor Cemetery in Andover, New Hampshire, to visit the grave of one of my favorite poets.

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

-- Jane Kenyon

Yup, I'm Gonna Miss Congressman Barney Frank

2012-01-24T20:37:00.001-05:00

Interviewer: You've long argued for the decriminalization of marijuana. Do you smoke weed?

Barney Frank: No

Interviewer: Why not?

Barney Frank: Why do you ask a question then act surprised when I give an answer? Do you think I lie to people?

Interviewer: I thought you might explain why you support decriminalizing it but don't smoke it.

Barney Frank: Do you think I've ever had an abortion?

A Snapshot & Haiku

2012-01-18T20:26:00.002-05:00

My cyberfriend Joan, whose home is in Australia, was recently touring Italy for a really enviable number of weeks with her man Sieg. She posted hundreds of photos on Flickr and invited me to pick my favorite and she would make it the subject of a haiku. I love this photo ... I am nostalgia every day for the old days of a real letter in the mailbox, and maybe a letter with an exotic stamp from a faraway place. Joan says this photo is of a display in a window of an antiquarian book shop near La Scala (where I saw "Queen of Spades" in 1960!) in Milan. And I'm going to matt & frame it where I can look it everyday. Nostalgia food.

So it came to pass
stamps and email had a fight
evolutionary ....
-- Joan Kunze

U.S. Army Hospital Muenchweiler (Germany) - 1960

2012-01-12T20:47:00.000-05:00

The main gate of the post, the ever-manned gate through which you could not exit without a pass issued by an officer or certain NCO's. The unauthorized hole in the fence that led to Viktor's Gasthaus (mentioned in my previous post) would have been to the right, down about 1/2 mile. If you left the main gate the road led you to the village of Muenchweiler, pictured on the postcard below.

Happy Birthday Simone de Beauvoir - 01/09/08 - 04/14/86

2012-01-09T20:05:00.283-05:00

Brad Coons

On an autumn evening in 1960 I was sitting in the small comfortable library on the small Muenchweiler Army Post (500 or-so troops)in Germany. At some point I looked up from whatever I was reading and noticed someone I'd not seen on post before. I was struck by his good looks. He looked different. He was the embodiment of clean-cut. Blond neatly clipped hair, just long enough to allow a part. Tall. Blue eyes. His complexion seemed to glow, as if radiating wholesomeness. Even his attire was out of the ordinary: a pair of tan wide-wale corduroy trousers, a brown narrow-waled corduroy sports coat, a crew-necked dark grey sweater, and, peeking above the neck of that sweater, I could see the collar of a dress shirt; this last touch looked priestly. None of us dressed like this.

As the library's nine o'clock closing-time rolled near I found myself standing behind the stranger in the line of us few guys waiting for Herr Bibliothekar to check out the books we'd wanted to take out. The wholesome-looking newcomer turned around. We small-talked. Then, once his books were checked out, he waited for me. We walked together from the library to the barracks, a stack of books nestled in the akimbo of one of each of our arms. We walked past the chapel, catercornered across the unlit baseball field, and finally up a paved road to the barracks area, chatting all the way. He was, I learned, Brad Coons. Actually -- as I was to learn later -- he was Henry Bradbury Coons III. He said he was from Texas. I’d been stationed in Texas; Brad Coons had no Texan drawl. I said, “You don’t sound like a Texan.” He said, “My family is actually from Virginia but my dad moved us to Texas because he’s in the oil business there.”

As we neared my barracks he asked if I'd like to go out for a beer after chow the following evening.

***

The first snow fell on that next day. Brad and I used the west hole in the chain-link fence that lined the perimeter of the base; it that had been broken through by GIs to shorten the route to Viktor’s, a gasthaus that stood in the woods; the path was about half of gentle grade at the foot of one of the mountains closely surrounded Muenchweiler. (This hole was convenient also because if you left the post you were supposed to have a pass; there was no guard, naturally, at the hole to check your pass, so you were saved the bother of acquiring one. And, speaking of unauthorized exits, the Germans who worked on the post, mostly in the Mess Hall, had broken a hole through on the opposite side of the base, thus cutting short their walk to their homes in the village of Muenchweiler, and also making it easier for, as I once witnessed, a certain stout frau to leave the base with a few dressed chickens hanging from a waist-rope beneath her skirt.)

***

We took a table in the back at Viktor's. The waitress approached. “Zwei biere, bitte!” Brad ordered. I heard the waitress shout what sounded like, “Zwei looven!” to the bartender. It took months and months before I figured out that looven was short for Löwenbräu, the favorite local brew ... a beer which I of course pronounced Low-en-brow.

“Do you belong to any religion?” Brad eventually asked as we talked.

“No. I was raised Catholic but I don't believe that stuff anymore.” I’d read Phllip Wylie. I'd read Aldous Huxley. I'd read a number of free-thinkers, and had fallen under their influence with delight. I saw myself as having finally learned to think.

“Good! I don’t see how anyone with any intelligence could fall for any of that crap. I’ve been reading about existentialism … do you know about it?”

No, I didn’t, and I said so, afraid that he’d be dismayed at my lack.

“It’s a philosophy,” he said. “The basic premise is existence comes before essence … we created god … no god created us. There is no pre-ordained meaning to life. So existence comes first and any meaning to life follows.”

“Is there a book I can get to read about it?”

“Read Nausea by a guy named Sartre … Jean-Paul Sartre. I’ve been reading a book by a woman named Simone de Beauvoir. She’s his lover. They’ve been lovers since back in the thirties but they don’t believe in marriage. The book I’m reading is called Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. She writes a lot about Sartre. I want to go to Paris because she even mentions the cafés they like to hang out in. It’d really be cool to walk in a café and see Jean-Paul Sartre sitting there!”

Simone de Beauvoir! Id caught the name of Sartre’s lover phonetically. It seemed to have rolled so beautifully off Brad’s lips. When he later used the restroom I practiced saying it: Simone de Beauvoir … Simone de Beauvoir.

***

I did read Nausea. I liked it but was sure there was a lot in it that I didn't really understand. I wasn't enchanted, but did like to say now that I had read it ... it was, if only in my opinion, an impressive notch on my literary belt.

Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, was soon my favorite writer. I read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter from the library and when I returned it the librarian told me that a second volume of her memoirs, The Prime of Life, had just recently arrived. I read her novels: She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, The Mandarins. Everything about her fascinated me. I stared at the pictures of her on the backs of her books. I loved her. I thought she had the most perfect life imaginable! I wished to live life just as she was living life ... unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to do that; for starters, I couldn't figure out how to write a novel.

Today, in this country, Simone de Beauvoir is probably best known for her ground-breaking book on feminism, The Second Sex.

***

In 1990, I visited her and Jean-Paul Sartre's grave in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

***

My two closest buddies, Eddie from Miami, and Robert from Jersey City, had just recently returned to the States; they'd done their time and were now civilians. I wanted almost desperately for Brad to become my friend. He did. I took the above picture of him on the roof of the cathedral in Milan during a twenty-day leave we took together; we visited Basel, Zurich, Milan, Florence, Venice, and Rome.

It occurs to me now that the clothes he's wearing in the picture could be the very same ones he was wearing the night I met him in the library! None of us had many civilian clothes ... some of us couldn't afford many ... and anyhow we all had an extremely small amount of wall- and foot-locker space.

And so this post is as much about Brad Coons as it is about Simone de Beauvoir. That's okay. He introduced me to a writer with whom I fell in love. Though she fell out of fashion long ago, I still love her. Thus, I owe Brad a lot.

***

Matt Taibbi

2012-01-03T07:03:00.000-05:00

Matt Taibbi is my favorite political writer/commentator!

He uses colorful language and similes.

A Couple Favorite Birthday Cards

2012-01-02T15:24:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T11:08:00.001-05:00

May everyone's 2012 be of Godiva quality.

Twelve Best & Two Worst Books of 2011

2011-12-31T19:45:00.005-05:00

Top Twelve Best Reads or Re-Reads of 2011

  1. Nabokov: Vol I The American Years;
   Vol II The Russian Years - Brian Boyd

  2. Hitch-22 - Christopher Hitchens

  3. Townie - Andre Dubus III

  4. Thoughts Without Cigarettes - Oscar Hijueles

  5. The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst

  6. Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse

  7. Humiliation - Wayne Koestenbaum

  8. Interviews and Encounters with Stanley
   Kunitz - ed. Stanley Moss

  9. How Fiction Works - James Wood

10. Lytton Strachey - Michael Holyoyd

11. A Widow's Story - Joyce Carol Oates

12. Elizabeth Bishop and The New
   Yorker - ed. Joelle Biele

Worst Two Books Read or Re-read in 2011

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Sempre Susan - Sigrid Nunez

Gifts

2011-12-24T21:33:00.002-05:00

Beautifully wrapped Godiva bar! Great graphics! Great bow! Thanks, Lisa!

If asked, I couldn't have thought of anything I wanted, but Morgan & Chris did ... I get the next eight books published by McSweeney's! When I unscrolled the scroll I was like ... uh ... well ... uh ... like wow!

Xmas Archive Item

2011-12-24T21:14:00.001-05:00

After I read the excellent John Weiner biography of John Lennon in 1984 I wrote Yoko Ono a letter asking her to open a museum in New York dedicated to Lennon so that we who loved him could see things he owned. I guess that's why she sent me a Christmas card.

Kool Xmas Decor

2011-12-24T12:05:00.002-05:00

Photo swiped from Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish"

Favorite Christmas Cards

2011-12-19T18:51:00.002-05:00

My favorite Xmas card so far this year.

Outer Cape Chorale

2011-12-10T11:00:00.002-05:00

Another fabulous concert; the Chorale does two each year; one at Christmas-time, and one in the spring. I think Jon Arterton, the conductor, should be awarded one of those generous MacArthur genius grants.

Unexpected Thrills

2011-12-09T17:52:00.007-05:00

In 1983, while living in Provincetown, Mark and I drove out to Truro. Our friends Dennis and Madeline had a new baby, and we were going for our introduction to Morgan.

Because of the way life goes, the baby grew up. Four years ago she -- absolutely gorgeous and with honey-colored and tightly curled hair-- and a good looking young man named Chris fell in love.

A week ago I got an email from Madeline. Was I still officially a member of the clergy? If so, was I available to marry two people in Provincetown on the 9th? Before I could respond to the email Morgan's dad, a co-worker, walked into headquarters where I work. He asked the same questions, and wondered if I would like to officiate at the marriage of his daughter and her boyfriend Chris. I said that I would love to do that but needed first to check at home to make sure I still had my official identification as a Minister of Universal Life Church. "Okay," he said, "because Morgan's going to be coming in here in about ten minutes to ask if you'll officiate at their wedding."

Shortly, in walks the beautiful and gorgeous young woman whom I had held in my arms a week or so after her birth; a young woman who's now just a dissertation away from a doctorate. Her title of "Doctor" will have cost considerably more than the five dollars I paid back in the sixties to become a minister -- the five bucks that afforded me a cheap right to have the title "Reverend" put on my driver license (which I've always wanted to do but never remembered to do).

My identification was just where I thought it would be.

Thus, at the far end of a railed pier that extends out from an upscale cocktail lounge in Provincetown, a pier that reaches out into Cape Cod Bay, I stood before the bride and groom with a crowd of about fifty guests behind them, and -- beneath a nearly full moon -- had the extremely high honor of intoning the lovely words Morgan and Chris had written for the ceremony.

Life, as it did tonight, occasionally presents an unexpected thrill.

RIP: John Lennon - Oct 9, 1940 - Dec 8, 1980

2011-12-08T20:29:00.004-05:00

God

God is a Concept by which

we measure our pain

I'll say it again

God is a Concept by which

we measure our pain

I don't believe in magic

I don't believe in I-ching

I don't believe in Bible

I don't believe in Tarot

I don't believe in Hitler

I don't believe in Jesus

I don't believe in Kennedy

I don't believe in Buddha

I don't believe in Mantra

I don't believe in Gita

I don't believe in Yoga

I don't believe in Kings

I don't believe in Elvis

I don't believe in Zimmerman

I don't believe in Beatles

I just believe in me...and that reality

The dream is over

What can I say?

the Dream is Over

Yesterday

I was the Dreamweaver

But now I'm reborn

I was the Walrus

But now I'm John

and so dear friends

you'll just have to carry on

The Dream is over

RIP: Jay Moran Dec. 5, 1944 - Oct. 28, 1990

2011-12-05T20:11:00.004-05:00

Among the best of best friends. I met Jay in Ann Arbor in 1968. He was working on getting a Doctorate degree in Theater at the University of Michigan; his dissertation was to be called "Hamlet Was A Lady" -- about the many times the character had been played by a female. Jay was a sweet -- no one could be sweeter -- and innocent soul from Wilkes-Barre, arriving in Ann Arbor with sixteen years of Catholic schooling behind him. He was easy to shock with a blast of blasphemy, easily appalled by the antics of some of the crowd we ran with. Having come across the jaded likes of me and a guy named Bill Haushalter, who was completing his doctoral thesis on Gertrude Stein's lecture tour of America in the thirties, and my friend, Rodney, Jay learned a lot in a short time.

He had dreams of becoming a professional actor. That did not work out, though he was always associated with theater in one way or another -- working backstage for the Seattle Opera Company for a few years, and then getting a job as a Union Rep with Actors Equity in San Francisco. He used to like to tell me of the various demands made by stars before they'd step foot on this or that stage.

I remember one winter when Rodney and I drove from Provincetown to New York City and spent a night with Jay in his Lower East Side apartment; we were enroute to Michigan. And twice Jay came from wherever he was living to visit us in Provincetown. Wonderful times. As he was leaving after an early-eighties visit he gave me a gift for putting him up -- a small pewter box containing a polished sea shell; I've treasured that beautifully made box all these years:

Jay died in San Francisco in 1990, only 45 years of age. Even when someone I love dies I still never stop hoping that there will be yet another letter or phone call from him or her in my mailbox someday.

Barney Frank Hits 'Em Out of the Park

2011-12-04T17:22:00.001-05:00

I don't like to put much politics on my blog ... I'm a bleeding heart liberal, and not that articulate defending my positions and such ... but Barney Frank says such great things that I can't resist re-posting from the excellent blog called "Crooks & Liars". Okay, let 'em have it, Barney:

"I look at the Republican debate -- I've been casting 'The Wizard of Oz,'" Frank told ABC's Christiane Amanpour. "Obviously, Mitt Romney is the tin woodman without a heart, and Rick Perry is clearly the scarecrow."

"Let me just say about Rick Perry: He illustrates the point that what's scary about some people is not what they don't know, but what they know that isn't true. I just heard this ad which he said, some liberals say faith is a sign of weakness. That is just bizarrely delusional."

He continued: "Newt [Gingrich] is the Wizard of Oz. I just think Newt, there's nothing there."

"I think he's ginned up this whole big thing, but when people focus on him, as opposed to him being the not-Romney, this is a man who served as speaker, was a relative insider, he was twice reprimanded by House -- by the way, I was reprimanded by the House, one of the reasons I wouldn't run for president. There was a problem with the marriages. There is this incredible hypocrisy of criticizing Chris Dodd and me because we weren't doing anything about Freddie Mac when we were in the minority. We did when we were in the majority. And he was taking money from them when the Republicans were in the majority to make sure that nothing happened. I just think that he is an obvious weak candidate."

At a press conference announcing his retirement last week, Frank said he welcomed Gingrich's rise to Republican frontrunner.

"I did not think I had lived a good enough life to be rewarded by Newt Gingrich being the Republican nominee," Frank told reporters. "I look forward to debating — to take one important example — the Defense of Marriage Act with Mr. Gingrich. I think he is an ideal opponent for us when we talk about just who it is that is threatening the sanctity of marriage."

Gingrich, who supports the Defense of Marriage Act and opposes same sex marriage, has been married three times himself.

"He would be the best thing to happen to the Democratic Party since Barry Goldwater," Frank concluded.

Thanks Barney!

Great Christmas Cards #1

2011-12-03T09:24:00.003-05:00

Fabulous early eighties Xmas card from actress Mink Stole. It's 8-1/2 by 11 inch paper. The faded green writing in lower right says, "Have a fabulous holiday! Love, Mink" This was done pre-color printers, so the green eye shadow and red lips are hand colored, and the pasted-on gold star is a large version of what a teacher might have applied to some of your homework in grade school. It's a treasure.

Healthy Religion

2011-11-29T15:26:00.000-05:00

I copied a reader's commentary from Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish" because I like the ideas expressed and because I couldn't figure out how to link to it directly.

I sit with those who as of this moment cannot believe. When I was 20 I had a perhaps-mushroom-influenced mental breakdown around the belief I had discovered the nature of God - core to my discovery being that no single path is better than another, as the son of a now agnostic Christian-American and a spiritually Hindu Indian immigrant, it was clear to me there was no one right way.

As I descended (or ascended?) back into rationalism I sit with an increased sensation that we as humans must make deep efforts on one another's behalf, because we may be all we have. Articles like The Aquarium and experiences like the Japan tsunami, the Haitian earthquake, and 9/11 all inspire me to believe that what we have in fact is each other, that there is no nihilism in that, and that empathy for others borne of the lack of surety that there will be some other accounting, later, is in fact required.

Said differently, the notion that the universe loves us, that all will be okay, might diminish our incentives to live this life with a healthy respect for it's randomness, with the humility that there may be only one shot, with a deep appreciation for empathy as the cornerstone of our humanity without requiring religious underpinning, and a belief that no further belief system is required, with its concomitant anti-intellectual and non-empirical remnants, to influence that sheer love of each other.

At the same time, I support and personally feel belief in the mystery of it all, recognizing that we don't know what we don't know; and I have a strong sense that the teachings of Buddha, of karma, of Judaism, of Mohammed, and of Christ have a great deal to offer - that these world views all are directionally healthy if interpreted without literalism, that they all imply reasons for gratitude and that they all help build social fabric as shared belief systems, and that those things are good things which probably outweigh the obvious downsides of groupthink and the devastating divisions they also cause with humans who otherwise have so much in common.

For lack of a better term I call this world-view Gratheism, aka Grateful Atheism, and believe it's a needed antidote to the condescending atheism of writers whose bravery I admire, like Hitchens and Dawkins, but who are - I don't think - building much social fabric, and who I suspect are not winning any converts.

Ticks

2011-11-28T20:41:00.001-05:00

We have lots of ticks here. I've pulled a couple hundred dog ticks off me. I always heard you needn't worry unless the much smaller deer tick embedded itself in you. How do you know? Well, a deer tick makes a rash that looks like a bull's eye, they said. So you're always casually examining ... does that look like a bull's eye, does this look like a bull's eye? Well, once you've seen one, there's no mistaking it. The picture shows what I found on the side of my thigh yesterday, after I'd removed the tick, piece by piece, with the tiny tweezer that comes in a Swiss Army knife. The doctor said it was unlikely it'd been there for over 24 hours, so I didn't need to worry about Lyme's Disease, or the other things deer ticks can transmit to you. But antibiotics just in case. "And keep your eye on it," she said. So I'm keeping my one good eye on the bull's eye.

Droughts/Foul Language

2011-11-26T11:43:00.000-05:00

When the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, their first in 86 years, people in these parts were pretty excited. Not me though. I didn't care. Sports-wise I care about only college basketball.

November 1963

2011-11-22T20:44:00.005-05:00

In 1960 (I was a soldier in Germany and not quite old enough to vote for Kennedy) I thought my country was all set. We'd have President John F. Kennedy until 1968; then we'd have President Robert F. Kennedy until 1976; and then we'd have President Edward M. Kennedy until 1984, by which time maybe one of the Kennedy grandchildren would be old enough to be President. I could be proud forever and more.

On November 22, 1963, I was working in a small two-man (as we'd say then) Western Union office way up in the small town of Cadillac, Michigan. I was filling in for the manager while he vacationed ... my job was going from town to town, filling in for other people. In Cadillac my co-worker liked to take her lunch from noon to one; and I'd go from one to two. When she returned from lunch she told me that it'd just come on the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. We turned on the radio. Strange names and places ... Dealey Plaza, Parkland Hospital, Texas Book Depository, Oswald, grassy knoll, Tibbets.

In an instant the future I'd supposed would come about was blasted to smithereens. I walked around in disbelief for days.

Things Tucked in Books

2011-11-20T16:02:00.003-05:00

Someone in Liverpool bought a book in a car-boot (yard) sale and found tucked in it a 1960 letter from Paul McCartney offering someone a job as drummer for a group called The Beatles; it was auctioned off this week at Christie's for over $55,000! I was looking through some old books at a friend's recently deceased father's house but all I found was this card with its beseeching for an apostolic blessing from Pope Paul VI; it's possibly from the mid-sixties. All offers will be considered.

Day of the Dead - RIP Thomas Hardy

2011-11-02T20:37:00.003-04:00

Thomas Hardy wrote great novels and then, tired of novel writing, became a great poet. At his death some in his family and some of his friends wanted him buried with his first wife, Emma, in St. Michael's Churchyard in Stinsford in Dorset; the Executor of his estate, however, demanded that he be honored by burial in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. A compromise was reached: Hardy's heart was removed and buried with Emma; the rest of him was cremated and put to rest with his fellow poets in Westminster Abbey.

I have a thousand or so favorite lines of poems; one would be the last line of "During Wind and Rain". I can't imagine walking in a cemetery on any day -- rainy or sunny -- without thinking of it.

Thomas Hardy - 1840 - 1928

During Wind and Rain

They sing their dearest songs—

He, she, all of them—yea,

Treble and tenor and bass,

And one to play;

With the candles mooning each face. . . .

Ah, no; the years O!

How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss—

Elders and juniors—aye,

Making the pathways neat

And the garden gay;

And they build a shady seat. . . .

Ah, no; the years, the years,

See, the white storm-birds wing across.

They are blithely breakfasting all—

Men and maidens—yea,

Under the summer tree,

With a glimpse of the bay,

While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .

Ah, no; the years O!

And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,

He, she, all of them—aye,

Clocks and carpets and chairs

On the lawn all day,

And brightest things that are theirs. . . .

Ah, no; the years, the years

Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

-- Thomas Hardy

Hardy grave; down his scripted name raindrops, like tears, plough.

St. Michael's Church; Stinsford, England

All Saints Day

2011-11-01T20:44:00.002-04:00

A Navy SEAL from Iowa, Jon T. Tumilson, was one of the 30 American troops killed August 6 when the Taliban downed their helicopter with a RPG. At Tumilson's funeral, his dog Hawkeye paid his last respects, walking up to the casket and lying down in front of it.

All Hallow's Eve - RIP Jack Kerouac (Died Oct 21,1969)

2011-10-31T19:26:00.002-04:00

After my last post's events in Worcester on Dead Poets Remembrance Day I intended to go on to Author's Ridge in Concord (grave of Louisa May Alcott among others), and then come straight home. But the thought of it being the weekend of "Lowell Celebrates Kerouac" drew me back to that city on the Merrimac; I found a motel room in Westford, some ten miles south of Lowell. A sweet "associate" at a Hampton Inn gave me a small toothbrush, a razor, and sample sizes of toothpaste and shaving cream.

Jack Kerouac's photo upon enlistment in US Navy. He lasted about 80 days, being discharged "by reason of Unsuitability for the Naval Service".

On Saturday morning I drove into Lowell, parked at Lowell National Park, and walked to the Kerouac Memorial.

Lots of people were there. Blue skies and warm sun.

Steve Dalachinsky, described as a New York "downtown" poet, read some of his own poems. I'd not heard of him. He was excellent.

This is David Amram; he plays music every year at the festival. I think it was an oboe he used but I wasn't sure. I asked if I could take his picture but would have felt foolish to ask what kind of instrument he'd used.

We then got on a city bus, chartered, that took us to various Kerouac sites in town. Above is the house he was born in on March 12, 1922.

A plaque adorns the house's front.

Falls on the Merrimac River. From Dr. Sax: "The thunderous husher of our sleep at night ... I could hear it rise from the rocks in a groaning wush ululating with the water, sprawish, sprawish, oom, oom, zoooo, all night long the river says zooo, zooo, the stars are fixed in rooftops like ink. Merrimac, dark name ... Merrimac comes swooping from a north of eternities, falls pissing over locks, cracks and froths on rocks, bloth, and rolls frawing to the kale, calmed in dewpile stone holes slaty sharp ... by moonlight I see the mighty Merrimac foaming in a thousand white horses upon the tragic plains below."

I guess this is thanking Mme. Archambault, who probably was of the family which owned the Archambault Funeral Home across Pawtucket Street, for a skating rink for the orphans (housed nearby at the time).

This is an outdoors Stations of the Cross which leads to a crucifix above a grotto (both pictured below). There's a wonderful passage somewhere in Kerouac about a time he came here as a boy with his mother at night; it was ghostly and frightening, especially as a prominent funeral home was just across the street.

Close-up of one of the stations.

After the Stations of the Cross you could, if truly penitent, ascend to the Crucifix on your knees, pausing on each of some twenty shallow steps to recite three prayers: The Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be. Catholics in the old days did not have football-damaged knees, but kneeling-damaged knees.

Descending then from the crucifix down the left side you entered the grotto and prayed to The Blessed Virgin Mary. There were votive candles. One could, for a price, light a candle as a signal of prayer. In November of 1975 the famous Bob Dylan-led Rolling Thunder Revue performed in Lowell; many in the group, including Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, visited this grotto as well as Kerouac's grave and Memorial.

The Archimbault Funeral Home, which is situated across the street from the foot of the Stations of the Cross. Jack Kerouac, dead from an alcohol-drenched liver at the age of forty-seven, was waked here in October of 1969.

RIP: Divine (Glenn Milstead) - Oct 19 1945/March 7, 1988

2011-10-19T21:00:00.003-04:00

I loved his acting, and, from what I saw of him off-camera, he was a sweet guy. He knew how to be a star when that was appropriate and then be just a regular guy sitting across the room or across the table telling funny stories when that was appropriate. In one interview he said "My favorite part of drag is getting out of it. Drag is my work clothes. I only put it on when someone pays me to."

Heart attack. Forty-two. Missed by many friends and and many fans.

High School Graduation

At World Premier of "Female Trouble" in NYC; February 1975

Prospect Hill Cemetery; Towson, Maryland

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part III (Stanley Kunitz)

2011-10-11T06:41:00.487-04:00

Mount Hope Cemetery; Worcester, Massachusetts

And so, after the round-robin recitations of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems at her grave in Worcester's Hope Cemetery, and then going to a far corner of that cemetery to see the gravestone of the mother and stepfather of the great poet Stanley Kunitz, as well as the grave of his father, we got into our cars and made our amazingly many-turns way to what was the boyhood home of Kunitz during his formative years.

The house has a beautiful story. In 1979 a couple named Carol and Greg were looking for a home to buy. They found a stucco house which, despite its run-down condition, appealed to them. They bought it. They planned and began the necessary repairs and updates. Then, on an autumn day in 1985, returning home from a day of apple-picking, they saw a few people standing out front staring up at the house. They recognized one of them to the the city's favorite-poet son ... Carol or Greg had attended a couple readings Kunitz had given in Worcester ... not that they were "poetry lovers" but more, rather, out of a general support of culture.

Kunitz had made a few earlier efforts to find his boyhood home but had not been successful; what with whole neighborhoods having been razed to make room for all those Interstate-Somethings now criss-crossing Worcester, he, already nearing eighty, was unable to get his bearings; further, he had to consider that perhaps his old home simply did not exist anymore, had been in one of those neighborhoods bulldozed and hauled to a landfill.

Greg and Carol invited Stanley, his wife, and their companions into their home. Stanley immediately confirmed that it was indeed the house he, along with his mother, his stepfather, and his two older sisters, had moved into in 1919, when the house was newly built. The visit must have flooded his mind with memories but none seems to have been more poignant than that which came when he stepped out back and saw a thriving pear tree. He and his mother -- she directing, he digging and lifting -- had, some sixty-five-or-so years earlier, planted that very tree.

When that fall's pears were harvested Greg and Carol sent a package to Stanley at his winter home in Greenwich Village; they were to do so every autumn for the remainder of Stanley's life.

My Mother's Pears

Plump, green-gold, Worcester's pride,

transported through autumn skies

in a box marked HANDLE WITH CARE

sleep eighteen Bartlett pears,

hand-picked and polished and packed

for deposit at my door,

each in its crinkled nest

with a stub of stem attached

and a single bright leaf like a flag.

A smaller than usual crop,

but still enough to share with me,

as always at harvest time.

These strangers are my friends

whose kindness blesses the house

my mother built at the edge of town

beyond the last trolley-stop

when the century was young, and she

proposed, for her children's sake,

to marry again, not knowing how soon

the windows would grow dark

and the velvet drapes come down.

Rubble accumulates in the yard,

workmen are hammering on the roof,

I am standing knee-deep in dirt

with a shovel in my hand.

Mother has wrapped a kerchief round her head,

her glasses glint in the sun.

When my sisters appear on the scene,

gangly and softly tittering,

she waves them back into the house

to fetch us pails of water,

and they slip out of our sight

in their matching middy blouses.

I summon up all my strength

to set the pear tree in the ground,

unwinding its burlap shroud.

It is taller than I. "Make room

for the roots!" my mother cries,

"Dig the hole deeper."

***

When Walter Skold (founder and head of Dead Poets Society) and I, along with three wonderfully knowledgeable members of the Worcester Poetry Society, step into the living room of Stanley Kunitz's boyhood home I feel immediately awash in a particular spirituality which I am not accustomed to; I am by no means certain that I can enclose it within the usual mundanity of my existence, don't know if I can come up with a comfortable fit. "I lack the art to decipher it," as Kunitz wrote (about a different subject) in a line in his poem "The Layers".

When introduced to Carol, our hostess, I see in her eyes a soulful dance of warmth and welcome; it is clear that she is pleased to share with us poetry-lovers the part of Stanley Kunitz which resides in her history and which resides in her heart. Through her, I can feel the presence of Stanley Kunitz, and I recognize that it is that which is the particular spirituality I am feeling; and now, recognizing it for what it is, I am comfortable with it. It is extremely moving. We pilgrims, en route, had just passed the very ballpark of "The Testing-Tree" where I could never hope to play. (Small for his age -- and, indeed, a tiny man -- he's implying that he'd never be chosen for a team.) Further, we were just blocks from the park where, some six weeks before the poet's birth, his father had committed suicide (there's no certainty of why he ended his life, though "a business setback" is sometimes mentioned, but, really, no one today knows.)

I never met Stanley Kunitz -- I saw him here and there in Provincetown when I lived there for twelve years, and where he had a summer home with its famous terraced garden, but I did not then know his poems and his biography. Later, enchanted with his poems, I imagined that I could see in his eyes a terrible far away look that had the tint of sadness; it was as if he were pondering the sort of question that will never be answered: How could you not have wished to stick around for another six weeks or so in order that you could meet me, your first-born son? I've also imagined that this is the very sort of question that could impel one to become a poet.

Stanley Kunitz

(This isn't an exactly fair sentiment on my part; there are a thousand pictures of Kunitz with eyes expressful of joy and other appealing connotations.)

Stanley's mother, Yetta, married again; her new husband, Mark Dine (related, I forget just how, to the pop-artist Jim Dine) was a good and kind-hearted stepfather to Stanley. Shortly after the family had moved into the house we are visiting, Mark Dine died of a massive heart attack while hanging drapes at the front window .. velvet drapes one can imagine from the image in "My Mother's Pears".

Glancing around, I think, too, that I have never seen such a beautifully appointed and beautifully furnished home; it turns out that once Greg and Carol learned that this had once been Kunitz's boyhood home they decided to furbish and furnish it to accord with that era. There are the hardwood floors and the woodwork, glistening -- when the light hits them just so -- with high varnish; there are leaded and patterned window panes; there are arches; there is a set of sumptuously upholstered throne-like chairs; there is a baby grand piano which Greg and Carol found in Newport once they'd learned (perhaps from Kunitz's poem "Three Floors" in which 'a sister ... played Warum on the baby grand') that Yetta Dine had a piano -- and, Carol says, when they were castoring theirs about the room, wondering what would be the best place for it to be put, Stanley happened to telephone and told them exactly where his mother had placed her baby grand; and in the kitchen, where we were served coffee and cookies, an exquisite collection of antique baskets hangs here, there, and everywhere; and over there in that corner is Stanley Kunitz's very own white-painted high chair, discovered in the basement, and gleefully confirmed by Kunitz himself to have been his very own; throughout the house the walls are adorned with handsomely framed photos of Kunitz and other family members, as well as certain of his poems, including an early typewritten draft, slightly different from the final version, of "My Mother's Pears"; there's even a framed letter or two written to Carol and Greg in the poet's hand.

But it was out back that, for the third time since entering the house, my eyes welled with tears. I asked to be permitted to touch the famous tree. I reached out and cradled some low leafs within my palm; I meant this as a gesture of sympathy to a tree that had loved Stanley as much as he had treasured it. And now here comes a fact: in 2006, the year of Stanley Kunitz's May death, this tree wept. One by one it dropped, like tears, its immature fruits, to the ground. Trees know.

There would be no autumn harvest that year.

***

So, yes, Carol and Greg, in a labor of love -- often excruciating labor, stripping layers and layers of paint from an eternity of surfaces -- yes, they turned the house into a museum dedicated to Stanley Kunitz. It is said that once the two had met Stanley, they adopted him, and he adopted them. Kunitz was eighty when they met; who would have imagined that twenty years of friendship would ensue .. who would suppose that there would be twenty parcels of pears transported through autumn skies .. and, who could possibly have imagined, even with tears and joy being, as they are, the yin and yang of life, who could possibly have imagined that Greg, who loved performing as the docent of this museum, and who, according to a magazine article I read, was "blessed with the gift of gab and a unique sense of humor" .. yes, who could have imagined that he would die from a massive heart attack himself, at the age of just fifty-eight, two and a half years after the death of Kunitz at one hundred and one, and a hundred and two years after the massive heart attack which killed, in the same house, Stanley's kind and good stepfather?

How can such tragedy and heartache be borne? We are merely humans. Carol, a young widow, merely a human .. yes, how does one go on?

"I can't go on. I must go on," says a Samuel Beckett character. When Carol had seen through the shock and the grief and the tears and learned to bear the pall woven of terrible heartache, she said, in essence, that the house felt sad and that she couldn't allow that it remain so. With assistance from the Worcester County Poetry Association, a docent program was developed; there now are close to ten docents, any one of whom may lead small groups through the house at certain advertised times of the year.

***

Provincetown Cemetery; Provincetown, Mass.

***

So it was an immensely rich series of events to celebrate Dead Poets Remembrance Day. Thanks Walter Skold. Thanks Raffael de Gruttola for addressing the crowd and reciting Kerouac haiku at his grave in Lowell. Thanks to those members of the Worcester County Poets Association who were so informative at Mount Hope Cemetery and also were such excellent co-docents at the boyhood home of Stanley Kunitz. And last, but in no way least, thanks Carol -- your soul, and that of Greg, have enriched my own beyond measure.

May all be richly blessed!

***

Ephemera #1: At birth, Stanley was given the name of his father, Solomon; it was changed to Stanley when he was five or six; inasmuch as Yetta seems to have had only bitter memories of Stanley's father, it is easy to imagine why the name was changed, but not easy to know why.

***

Ephemera #2: The Worcester County Poetry Association keeps a wonderful website, a page of which has many pictures of Stanley Kunitz, his boyhood home, and associated information. Check it out at: http://wcpa.homestead.com/2011_KUNITZ_STOCKMAL_HOUSE.html

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part II (Elizabeth Bishop)

2011-10-10T09:52:00.053-04:00

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester; her father died when she was eight months old; her mother shortly thereafter was institutionalized (some reasons for institutionalization in those days can provoke horror; the slightest of aberrations could be looked upon harshly; even what we call depression could be deemed ‘crazy’).

Essentially orphaned, the adult Bishop, in a bit of autobiography, wrote: “My relatives all felt so sorry for this child that they tried to do their very best. And I think they did. I lived with my grandparents in Nova Scotia, then with the ones in Worcester, in Massachusetts, very briefly and got terrible sick [with asthma]. This was when I was six or seven .... Then I lived with my mother’s older sister in Boston, she was devoted to me -- she had no children. My relationship with my relatives -- I was always sort of a guest, and I think I’ve always felt like that.”

Her poetry seems to be universally esteemed; almost any of her poems has been described by one or another respectable critic as ‘perfect’. Despite a scant output -- biographers have insinuated that it was difficult for her to force herself to sit down and write (but to write ‘perfectly’ has to have been grueling) -- yes, with but a scant output she won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award, a Pulitzer prize, the National Books Crtics Circle Award, and was the first woman (and the first American) to win the Books Abroad/Neustadt Prize for Literature. She was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, and was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for the 1949-50 term (the position is now, thanks to a rise of common sense, called Poet Laureate of the United States).

At Hope Cemetery in Worcester we were met at Elizabeth Bishop’s grave by three representatives of The Worcester County Poetry Association, an organization “dedicated to keeping poetry in all its forms alive for the people of Worcester” and which publishes the nationally recognized and respected literary journal with the matching capital “W’s” in its name: The Worcester RevieW. These three were warm, charming, and full of interesting details and trivia.

Three of Bishop’s poems were recited by the six of us in an out-of-the-ordinary way-- one person read a sentence, then the person to his/her right read the next sentence, and so on, round-robin style, until the poem was finished; in the case of “Letter from N.Y.” we each read one stanza.

Poetry lovers at grave of Elizabeth Bishop

(I was told that while we were driving from Lowell to Worcester, had I been tuned in to NPR, I would have heard Terry Gross interviewing humorist David Rakoff (winner of the 2011 Thurber Award) and that, in the course of the interview Rakoff recited “Letter from N.Y.” calling it one of his favorite poems. I have since “streamed” that interview. Of the poem, Rakoff says, “In my life I will never achieve anything that beautiful.”)

In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

The Bight

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

Letter To N.Y.

For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

And then we moved to the far corner of the cemetery, to a cluster of Hebrew-inscribed stones, among which we found the stone of the mother and the stepfather of the great poet Stanley Kunitz, as well as the stone of his father. To be continued in Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part III.

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part I (Jack Kerouac)

2011-10-09T09:11:00.011-04:00

I didn’t expect that last year’s Dead Poets Remembrance Day -- a stroll in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery with stops and recitations (and a few songs) at the graves of a number of poets along the way -- each stop a dollop of spiritual richness and vast pleasure -- in a beautiful setting, and with Mother Nature blessing us congregants with that true blue sky mentioned by e e cummings, and with a warm sun, and with a perfect October crispness -- so, no, I didn’t expect -- for that would be asking for too much -- I didn’t expect, two years in a row, an equal measure of richness.

It was achieved nevertheless. This year’s Day of Remembrance took place day before yesterday, a Friday, and, as it turned out, was another perfect day.

Not a stroll this year, but an ambitious drive, starting at nine in the morning at John Whittier’s grave in Amesbury, followed by a visit to his homestead; then on to the North Andover Burying Ground to see the Anne Bradstreet Memorial; this followed with a stop at Edson Cemetery in Lowell to celebrate the haiku of Jack Kerouac, that city’s great son; then some fifty miles down I-190 to Worcester’s Hope Cemetery to visit the grave of Elizabeth Bishop as well as the graves of Stanley Kunitz’s father, mother, and stepfather, followed by a visit to the boyhood home of Kunitz. Finally, Dead Poets Day was to end at sunset on Author’s Ridge in Concord at the grave of Louisa May Alcott.

Dedgar the Poemobile

Living about 130 miles from the first stops I didn’t want to rise god-awful early so I slept in a bit and met up with Walter Skold (the founder of Dead Poets Society) when he pulled Dedgar, his white van (the Poemobile) along the grass in Lowell’s Edson Cemetery near ‘Ti Jean’ Kerouac’s grave; we were among a crowd of close to fifty.

Raffael de Gruttola, of the Boston Haiku Society, addressed the crowd, speaking about haiku in general, citing especially admiringly the haiku of Nick Virgilio, a Camden, New Jersey poet fairly considered one of our country’s most accomplished composers of haiku.(When one of your haiku is admired by an Emporor of Japan -- as one of Virgilio’s was -- then you may automatically be considered one of this country’s most accomplished haiku artists.)

Raffael de Gruttola

de Gruttola’s opinion is that Kerouac, with his love of words in general, and his spiritual penchant for mixing his Catholic mysticism with Oriental religions, was, when it came to haiku, a natural, and he admires Kerouac’s haiku tremendously. He recited several, saying each one twice, as if the first recitation was for our ears while the reiteration was for our hearts.

de Gruttola, perhaps out of an admirable modesty in the circumstances, did not recite any of his own haiku, but I’ve dug one up which is marvelous:

   bumper to bumper
   the monarch changes lanes
   uncontested

After de Gruttola’s presentation Walter Skold fetched from Dedgar a cold six pack of some variety of Sierra Nevada beer and two 24-packs of plastic shot glasses. I helped pass out the Mini Party

Cups (each would hold about an ounce) and felt bohemian-beatnik-hippie rebellious when handing a few of them to youngsters who were probably no more than fifteen or sixteen. “Salut!” exclaimed a man who’d once taught French at the Lowell High School, and we raised and downed a San Franciscan beer in a toast to Jean-Louis “Jack” Lebris de Kerouac. (So, doing the math, there were 72 ounces of beer, and containers enough to hold only 48 ounces; I was one of the lucky ones who ended up not with a plastic container but with a bottle containing perhaps four ounces of an excellent cool beer.)

And then, a schedule to be kept, we Dead Poet Society followers separated ourselves from the many who happened to be at the gravesite as part of Lowell's annual autumn celebration of its beloved son. Ours was a tiny caravan of three vehicles, heading for Worcester, some fifty miles down Interstate 190.

Up tomorrow: "Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part II".

Fernando Sor - 1773 - 1839 - Cimetiere Montmartre; Paris

2011-10-01T20:28:00.005-04:00

Photo by Steven Baldwin, from FindAGrave.com

Until I came upon Fernando Sor's grave in Cimetiere Montmartre in Paris I don't think I'd ever heard the name. Later I googled and wikipedia-ed and learned just who it was who'd earned this beautiful sculpture which marks his resting place.

Sor was born in Barcelona. Though he excelled early in musical studies he was expected to become -- as a long line of his forefathers had become -- a soldier in the Spanish Army. He became a captain soon after Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain in 1808. When it seemed that Spain would be defeated Sor accepted a post in the occupying government, earning the label of afrancesado -- one of those who abandoned the defense of Spain and supported the ideas of the French Revolution. When, however, the French were eventually driven out of Spain in 1813, Sor and the other afrancesados fled the homeland they had betrayed. Sor initially went to Paris, but later became famous throughout Europe as a classical guitarist and composer. A Belgian musicologist/critic of the period called Sor "le Beethoven de la guitare"

The brief biography on FindAGrave.com, written by Robert Edwards, reports that Sor's "last years were unhappy. His wife and daughter died suddenly within months of each other, his own health declined and he died after a long bout with tongue cancer. His grave at Montmartre Cemetery was unmarked until 1934."

Detail on Sor's Marker

----------------------------------------------------------------

I recently read Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir by Oscar Hijuelos, an excellent writer who earlier had won the 1990 Pulitzer prize for fiction for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. The memoir was of growing up in Manhattan as the son of Cuban immigrants; his struggles with schools and illness and assimilation and ... lo! ... ending up at City University where he discovers a love for reading. He writes a sketch for a class, realizes he enjoys writing sketches, so writes a bunch of them over the years. They are eventually shown to an editor. "You have a book here!" Hijuelos is informed.

One incident recounted in the memoir was that his mother, who pretty much declined to learn English, was not immensely impressed to have a son with a published novel ... it wasn't in Spanish, so where was the value? He was invited to do a book signing appearance at a bookstore not far from the apartment where his (now-widowed) mother lived. He went to it. There was a multitude of copies of his novel displayed in pyramids in both large windows. After the event he thought he'd fetch his mother to see the display; surely seeing her son's name and book displayed so prominently would impress her. He went to get her and escorted her to the bookstore only to see that the double-windowed display of his book had been dismantled; featured now were copies of a book written by an author who would be coming for the next signing!

It was a passage in Thoughts Without Cigarettes that impelled me to dig out the pictures I'd taken of Fernando Sor's grave in Paris (and to then nab one from the Internet when one of mine turned out to be not a good one): speaking of a neighbor in his apartment building, Hijuelos writes:

I learned that he too played the guitar, but in

the classical style, with sheet music for studies

by Tarrega, Fernando Sor, and others lying in

stacks on a table by a stand in his living room.

RIP: Francoise Sagan - 21 June 1935 – 24 September 2004

2011-09-24T21:11:00.002-04:00

I graduated from high school when I was seventeen years and five months old; it was hard to get a good job unless you were eighteen. I even went to Dalton Foundry, a place where the jobs were so horrible that it was said that they'd hire anyone, but a man in an office there told me, "Come back when you're not so green behind the ears."

I wanted to join the Army. You could join at seventeen if a parent signed his/her permission. I asked my mother if she'd sign for me. She said no. "I didn't do it for any of the other boys and I won't do it for you ... if anything happened to you I wouldn't want to have to think it might not have if I hadn't signed for you."

Finally I got a job at Western Union Telegraph Company as a teletype operator in Fort Wayne but they wouldn't let me start until I was eighteen. I already had plans to join the Army on January 2nd, the day after my eighteenth birthday, but thought I'd give Western Union a try ... for one thing, an employer was, in those days, obliged to give you your job back once you'd completed your service, and, having had such a tough time landing a job, this "security" seemed like a deal.

Francoise Sagan

I rented a room on Washington Street for $7.00 a week from a Mrs. White. I ate glazed doughnuts for breakfast at a tiny dinner; the waitress, Lois, was very sweet to me. I usually went out the back door of Western Union to have my lunch at a hamburger joint that was across the alley and down on the corner of Jefferson Street. For supper I usually went to a Walgreen's Drugstore, sitting at the counter. One evening there I stopped to look at a rack of paperbacks. I spent 35-cents for a novel called Bonjour Tristesse by one Francoise Sagan. I'd read an article about her in Life magazine a few years back. Not that I was much of a reader; prior to Bonjour Tristesse I had read just one novel -- I think it was Penrod by Booth Tarkington; it had painfully bored me. Back in my room I read the first sentences of my new purchase:

   A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate
   to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea
   of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am
   almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known
   boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never
   sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervat-
   ing and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

Somehow the phrases 'strange melancholy' and 'grave and beautiful name of sorrow' and 'the idea of sorry has always appealed to me' made a great impression on me. Thus a French girl who'd had a novel published at eighteen, a slim novel which had sold over half a million copies in its first year, became my first literary crush. (Some fifty years later, walking with my dear friend Ellen on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, there was a perfect vintage paperback copy of Bonjour Tristesse on a street vendor's table; I had Ellen open it and I recited that opening paragraph from memory; I made one mistake, inserting the word 'today' after 'pervades me' which, of course, comes alarmingly close to splitting an infinitive.)

My love for Francoise Sagan has not faded in the least.

One of my most treasured possessions is a 1965 gift from my friend Richard English, an 8-1/2 X 11 edition of a diary, illustrated by Bernard Buffet, which Sagan kept while institutionalized to de-toxify herself from morphine, to which she had become addicted while recuperating from an accident in her glamourous Aston Martin convertible:

Age never slowed her fast living. She indulged in whiskey, cigarettes, drugs, and affairs. In her sixties she was asked by a journalist if she still used cocaine. "If it comes along, yes," she answered. Her health was poor; still, she had no regrets.

She died at sixty-nine and is buried in the town of her birth, Cajarc, in southwestern France

Anton Webern - December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945 - Part V

2011-09-21T18:20:00.003-04:00

A couple more photos I found relating to Anton von Webern. The stunningly designed marker above seems to commemorate a meeting near Mittersill, Austria, of Webern and Cesar Bresgen; the latter was one of Hitler's favorite composers, making him seem an unlikely friend of Webern.

I guess the words are in a Viennese dialect; I remember a hundred words of the German language at most, and even with the help of Babelfish (an online translation service) the best version I can come up with is: "In the sunny mountain the more that is known - the more that is loved." I'm sure it is more beautifully expressed than I've managed; perhaps a German or an Austrian will read this and correct and improve my effort.

Below is the rear of Webern's tombstone. A stab, again, at translation: "Through your eyes the light goes to your heart and comes gently back as joy."

Anton Webern - December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945 - Part IV

2011-09-15T18:41:00.163-04:00

On last December 3rd I blogged a piece about the Austrian composer Anton von Webern, and wished that I could find a picture of his gravestone. On January 12 a man in the Philippines sent me the following picture, which I took to be of Webern's grave marker.

A subsequent Google search by another reader led to a picture of what was much more certainly Webern's grave in Mittersill, Austria; a post with the picture mentioned it being a group of students visiting Webern's grave in Mittersill.

Webern, a disciple of Schoenberg, usually composed short works. Schoenberg said of his disciple's work: "Think of the concision which expression in such brief form demands. Every glance is a poem, every sigh a novel." Stravinsky wrote of Webern: "Doomed to a total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge."

Webern lived in Vienna. Though Catholic he was suspected of being Jewish and was required to prove that his blood was pure Aryan. Still, though he was certainly not an anti-Semite, he supported the Nazi party, hoping probably that this would keep him and his family safe. Then, because his compositions were avante garde, Webern was deemed degenerate; this led to his being sacked from his conducting job. His one son, a soldier, was killed on the Eastern front. Some seven months later, the war now over, Anton Webern, despite a curfew, stepped outside his home to smoke a cigar. In a careless situation of mistaken identity, Webern was shot dead by an American soldier whose unit was investigating a case of black marketing.

It's been reported that the soldier who shot Webern lived with deep remorse. Tragedy begot tragedy; that soldier died some ten years later from the effects of alcoholism.

***

I was left to wonder then what the original picture was, the five-way palindrome, sent to me from the man in the Phillipine, whose words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS can be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left. I have a brother who is very good with languages but he was unsuccessful in translating those five words in any way that made complete sense.

I wrote to the Burgermeister of Mittersill. He kindly responded, saying that this is a plaque attached to the house in Mittersill in which Webern lived, and that it was a gift of Anna Mahler, the daughter of the another famous Viennese composer Gustav Mahler.

***

The palindrome, I learn, is renowned; it is called Sator Square, and its earliest known appearance was found in the ruins of Pompeii. There are numerous legends as to the meaning of the words, including one which claims that the words are "mystical names" for the nails pulled from Christ's body. Others have deemed the Sator Square to be magical ... it was believed by some that the devil would become confused by the repetition of the letters; keeping a palindrome near you, so it went, kept the devil away. Further claims: the Sator Square will put out fires; the Sator Square will remove jinxes; the Sator Square will remove fevers; the Sator Square will protect against witchcraft. If you bring a Sator Square along while traveling it will help prevent fatigue. I think I'll tuck one into my wallet.

Otherwise, I'll leave it at that ... and let's hope Dan Brown never comes across the very idea lest it inspire him to write another novel as dreadful as The Da Vinci Code.

Day of Remembrance

2011-09-11T19:39:00.000-04:00

This is one of my favorite views in Cape Cod National Seashore, looking across Salt Pond and Nauset Marsh to the Atlantic from behind the Salt Pond Visitor Center. Each year beginning in 2002 a certain man has come at about 9AM on 9/11 and, looking out upon this view, played taps on his bagpipes. I don't know that he ever identified himself; there was a rumor that he was a retired NYC policeman.

I wanted to see him. I went there this morning and sat on a bench waiting. He did not show. That was okay; it was nice to ponder 9/11 there on the bench. Then two great people I know showed up and it turned out to be a time of great chatting fun.

Happy Birthday (Hallmark-style) to Gerald

2011-09-04T19:09:00.001-04:00

Today’s the day

I wish to herald

a beloved brother

whose name is Gerald!

308 West Jackson; Mentone, Indiana; April 1953

Happy Birthday John Betjeman: Aug 28, 1906 - May 19 1984

2011-08-28T23:05:00.094-04:00

John Betjeman was Poet Laureate of England from 1972 to 1984, and a very popular laureate. Many Brits who did not care for poetry learned to love it because Betjeman's work was so accessible and so excellent. I'd never read him until recently when, at the library, I browsed upon a Collected Poems published in 1976; it had an introduction by one of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin, who was Betjeman's friend. There were about three hundred pages of poems; I read every single one. Betjeman was a meticulous observer; you could see exactly what he was seeing. I wanted to pick out one single favorite poem to put in this blogpost. I narrowed it down to five, but couldn't eliminate any single one of those five.

A Subaltern's Love Song

Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father's euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hillman is waiting, the light's in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing's the light on your hair.

By roads 'not adopted', by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o'clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surry twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The other four finalists: "The Town Clerk's Views" - "Saint Cadoc" - Monody on the Death of a Platonist Bank Clerk" -- ah, now that I think of it, this would be my favorite, but I cannot find it online, and I long ago returned the book to the library -- and, lastly, "In Willesden Churchyard"

As a Poet Laureate, Betjeman had the right to be buried in Westminster Abbey; he chose instead to have just a memorial floor stone there; he's buried in the yard of St. Enodoc's, a "chapel of ease" he loved in Trebetherick, Cornwall.

St. Enodoc's has an interesting history. Some of it can be traced to the 12th century, but over the years it was nearly buried in the shifting dunes of sand. Restoration was accomplished in 1863-4. According to the record of a vicar's son, "the sands had blown higher than the eastern gable, the wet came in freely, the high pews were mouldy-green and worm-eaten and bats flew about, living in the belfry .... While the building was restored, the walls were partly rebuilt, on good foundations, the sand removed and the little churchyard cleared and fenced with a stout wall. The roof was renewed and new seats provided. It all cost about 650 pounds and I remember the pains and energy my father spent to raise the money. These works were done by the masons and workmen of the parish with loving care and nothing was destroyed needlessly or removed if it was of use or interest."

A "chapel of ease" is a small church within the area served by a larger parish church, and would be built so that those who cannot reach the larger church with ease would have a nearer-by place to stop and pray. I can't find the reference now, but I read somewhere that when St. Enodoc's was inundated in sand, locals would climb through the roof to get in to pray, for if it became abandoned of prayer the parish could end the stipend paid for its upkeep.

Betjeman wrote a poem about St. Enodoc:

Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall

Come on! Come on! This hillock hides the spire.
Now that one and now none. As winds about
The burnished path through lady's-finger, thyme,
And bright varieties of saxifrage,
So grows the tinny tenor faint or loud
All all things draw toward St. Enodoc.
Come on! Come on! and it is five to three.

Still, Come on! come on!
The tinny tenor. Hover-flies remain
More than a moment on a ragwort bunch,
And people's passing shadows don't disturb
Red Admirals basking with the wings apart.
A mile of sunny, empty sand away,
a mile of shallow pools and lugworm casts.
Safe, faint and surfy, laps the lowest tide.

Happy Birthday Christopher Isherwood - Aug. 26, 1904 to Jan. 4, 1986

2011-08-26T18:01:00.033-04:00

Christopher Isherwood had an amazing ability to live a chunk of life and then, working up the best characters and situations he'd experienced, write a novel about that particular chunk. Everything seems authentic -- presumably because it was. It seems like it would be easy to write like Christopher Isherwood, but it's not. I guess you have to be a Christopher Isherwood to write like Christopher Isherwood.

Not long ago I came across some serious praise someone had written about one of Isherwood's novels. I thought it was the most beautiful thing ever said about any novel, and, thinking I would use it on a blogpost about Isherwood when his birthday rolled around, I copied it down. But I can't find it. I've looked everywhere I know to look. I'm bummed.

His most famous character is Sally Bowles, from The Berlin Stories. She's based on someone he hung out with when he lived in Berlin from early 1929 until early 1933. Her story was adapted for the stage; the title was changed to I Am A Camera and Julie Harris played Sally Bowles; this stage play was later worked up into a musical and the name was changed to Cabaret. Liza with a Z Minelli got to play Sally.

Isherwood's body was donated to science. What became of his remains I don't know. In lieu of a picture of a tombstone, here's a plaque that was place on the Berlin house he lived in:

Standing Up!

2011-08-21T20:35:00.000-04:00

I first read anything about this guy Hatuey in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a wonderful novel by Junot Diaz which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

In the Sixteenth Century, Hatuey, a Chief on Hispaniola, fought the invading Spaniards; he eventually fled to Cuba, warning the natives there about the Spaniards. Showing them a basket of gold and jewels, he said, "Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea ... they tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break."

He was eventually captured by Spaniards and burned at the stake. Before he was burned a priest asked him if he wanted to accept Jesus, thus assuring himself of a place in heaven. Junot Diaz reports Hatuey saying on the pyre: "Are there whites in heaven? Then I'd rather go to hell."

Considered Cuba's first national hero, the monument to him is in Baracoa, Cuba.

Lost Pictures

2011-08-19T20:17:00.007-04:00

I checked out Victoria Glendinning's 1978 biography of Elizabeth Bowen at the Orleans Library today; tucked inside was the above snapshot; "1998" is stamped in red on the back. Maybe someone somewhere has wondered what happened to this photo of a handsome man and his beautiful wife and their two loving daughters? I hope they are happy somewhere and that there is perhaps a grandchild or two by now.

There should be a website "Found Pictures" where you can go and look for pictures you've lost. I'm way too low-tech to start up such a site.

RIP: Elvis Presley - January 8, 1935/August 16, 1977

2011-08-16T19:44:00.004-04:00

The center of life for me in a small town in Indiana in the mid-fifties was often the jukebox at Pete's Restaurant up on Main Street. The mesmerizing swirls of soft Wurlitzer colors ... the faithful mechanism that slid back and forth, stopping at your selected five cents and three minutes worth of Elvis Presley heaven ... removing it from the crowded row of vertical 45s and moving it to horizontal and laying it gently and precisely on the turntable.

I had a job mopping the floor of Pete's after its 10pm closing so that I could have, for an hour or so, the jukebox all to myself. I knew how to turn the volume to blast; it seemed a perfect antidote for all the hormones crashing around within me ... not that I knew what it was that was making my blood run fast and me hyper-active.
---
I have thanked fate for rock-n-roll every day of my life since those I first felt it. You can't imagine how much less boring life was once you'd heard Elvis Presley, Little Richard, or Jerry Lee Lewis.
---
In the Army I was sent to Fort Hood, Texas, in early 1959. It so happened that Elvis was also there but, according to rumor, was supposed to leave for Germany a couple days after I got there. Still, by chance, I was marching with my company one cold morning. Don't remember where we were going or why. Probably nowhere and for no reason -- such was the Army. Parked along the pavement ahead was a white Cadillac. As we neared the place someone said it was the Dental Clinic, and, sure enough, no less than Elvis Presley and a retinue of three or four others came out of the clinic, got into the Cadillac and drove off. I was a little disappointed that the Cadillac was white, not pink. And he did leave for Germany soon after.
---
Gave me something to write home about.

Graphics

2011-08-06T21:08:00.006-04:00

Sometimes I just like the graphics of something, such as of this flyer handed to me on an Avignon street a couple years back.

Favorite Snapshots: #1

2011-08-01T20:39:00.003-04:00

A dear friend and a dear brother at Swan Lake Iris Garden,
Sumter, South Carolina; 1992.

Historical Setting

2011-07-31T14:01:00.005-04:00

In 2005 my job sent me to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, for a week of training; the classes were held in the beautiful building pictured above; it once had been the main building of Storer College (1865-1955), one of the first institutions of higher learning for black people. I can't say I learned much in my classes but it was an honor to spend time in such an historical setting, and I love the classic photo below, taken in 1906, of progressive men sitting outside the building and in its windows.

(Click on photo to enlarge it)

RIP: Amy Jade Winehouse - 9/14/83 - 7/23/11

2011-07-23T16:52:00.002-04:00

Amazingly original. Now -- like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin,
Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, and Jim Morrison -- dead at twenty-seven.

Happy Birthday to my nephew, Mike!

2011-07-22T06:24:00.000-04:00

Mentone, Indiana; 1972; bell-bottomed corduroys

My Friend Janet

2011-07-16T19:34:00.003-04:00

She paints these really charming, always small, much-detailed themed scenes. Now in her seventies she gets to have an opening in a real gallery! Come one, come all! Or send her a card! (Her lines are sharp but my scanner blurred them.)

Ireland

The Beach

Halloween

Cathedrals & Aspirations & Lytton Strachey

2011-07-15T21:23:00.059-04:00

Lytton Strachey portrait by Vanessa Bell,
sister of Virginia Woolf.

I just finished Michael Holyrod's way-too-long and way-too-heavy 1994 biography of Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), the eminent author of Eminent Victorians . I liked it but, jeez, it could have been half as long and still be just as good.

When Lytton Strachey visited the cathedral at Chartres, he wrote to a friend: “It was wonderful coming into it yesterday in the dark, only able at first to discern dim shapes of pillars and those astonishing blazes of stained glass. Gradually, as our pupils expanded, we saw more & more - all the glorious proportions at last, and the full sublimity. Oh, my dearest creature, I wished so much for you to be with me as I stood at that most impassioned point - the junction of the transept & the nave, where the pillars suddenly soar and rush upwards to an unbelievable height, and one is aware of the whole structure in its power and its splendor. The christian religion itself positively almost justified!

Unmatched spires of 13th
century Chartres Cathedral

I have experienced that awe-in-a-cathedral feeling often; I recall attending Mass at Notre Dame in Paris on a Sunday morning in 1991. Notre Dame is stupendously gigantic. The organ, soaring heavenward, drenches one's soul. The choir is so heavenly that it hurts. One's passion for ritual and beauty could not be better fed; I felt sodden with the richness of an aesthetic exhilaration which, in my case -- as in Strachey's case -- was not enjoined by faith, making it all seem oddly barren, so that I stood there marveling at what, flooding my senses, man had wrought in his reach for a majesty that he refers to as God.

(I like the hint of blue in the sky on the day I photographed those spires.)

North windows of Chartres Cathedral

Happy Birthday Marcel Proust - Born July 10, 1871

2011-07-10T13:49:00.105-04:00

There are plenty of great writers but Proust's In Search of Lost Time is what I'd want with me if I found myself stranded on some island.

Proust's ideas stretch across my own thoughts as the sky stretches across the earth; I ponder something and I am led to Proust; I look at the sky and I think of Proust; I take a hard fall on a patch of ice and, bedridden, think of Proust's asthmatic confinement to his cork-lined bedroom. He is not a guide, but a beacon -- I am within a moment; a moment is immediately swallowed by the past; the past is rich. Proust discovered that the past can be returned to involuntarily; and then recognized that it could be returned to voluntarily -- it was possible to dwell within that past.

In reading Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time, a study of Proust by one Roger Shattuck, published in 2000 (there seems to be at least one new study of Proust each year), it illuminated for me that when, for instance, I, along with a couple of friends, was a pilgrim in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac, marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road; it occurred to me that, once back home, it would be fun to write up an account of the the events I was experiencing in Lowell but I felt that nothing was happening which would lend itself to narrative.

I did not feel, in Lowell, that I was living a story. Certainly it was a great fun day, but there was nothing really that I could see as story; nothing, as it were, that would lend itself to my favorite past-time of letter- or journal-writing. And yet, after I returned home, I wrote a lengthy account of my day in Lowell.

I wondered about this; I wondered how it would have been good to expect that I was going to write about the day; it would have been good to have made some notes along the way. And why wouldn't the account sort of compose itself on the run, so to speak, in the present? When, for instance, I stood at the foot of Kerouac's gravestone, why didn't I recognize that it was an experience that I would be transforming into words? (What had happened to my self-identification with Virginia Woolf when she said, "My mind runs hither and thither with its veil of words for everything"?)

In Shattuck's Proust's Way I came across the answer in one of his quotes from In Search of Lost Time:

   How many times in the course of my life had reality
   disappointed me because at the time I was observing
   it, my imagination, the only organ with which I could
   enjoy beauty, was unable to function, by virtue of the
   inexorable law which decrees that only what is absent
   can be imagined.

That does not, as I see it, say that I did not enjoy or appreciate those things happening in Lowell on that gorgeous October day ... I was in no way disappointed ... but that to write of them must involve imagination of them. There is reality, and then there is imagined reality. How brilliant Proust is! He is like Dylan's Louise in "Visions of Johanna" who makes it "all .. precise and .. clear".

(And I might wonder, too, since Shattuck is quoting directly from Proust's novel, and I have read that novel three times ... why it was only in a study of Proust that the passage struck me as so relevant?)

In some other year I read Henri Peyre's short essay on Proust, from the series called Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, in which Peyre comments:

   For [Proust] the past alone is laden with density and
   reality. The present is thin and poor; imagination,
   working its magic over the past, endows it with intensity
   and with depth.

I noted somewhere else a Proust remark: "Let us leave pretty women to men who have no imagination!"

In an essay by Robert Frost, called "The Figure A Poem Makes," I guessed he was expressing the same idea, but in a denser fashion:

   For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering
   something I didn't know I knew. I am in a place, in a
   situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out
   of the ground. There is a special recognition of the long
   lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of
   unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most
   useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware
   of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the
   conclusion is come to that like giants we are always
   hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future
   against the day when we may want to strike a line of
   purpose across it.

In creating the past, Marcel created not just the past, but, as if miraculously, guidance for the man a boy born in 1940 in Indiana would become.

Marcel Proust's bedroom furnishings and cork-lined walls
preserved in Musee Carnavalet in Paris.

Don't Mess with Greene

2011-07-09T18:31:00.002-04:00

When an editor at Simon & Shuster asked the British author Graham Greene (1904-1991) to change the title of his Travels with My Aunt for the U.S. edition, Graham replied by cable: EASIER TO CHANGE PUBLISHER THAN TITLE.

RIP: Jim Morrison, Rock Angel/Rock Poet: 12-8-43 - 7-3-71

2011-07-03T18:03:00.000-04:00

Patterns/Nureyev/Carpets

2011-07-01T21:42:00.003-04:00

And on Google Images I found a picture of Nureyev wrapped in one of his "beloved" oriental kilim carpets; one which could have been the pattern for the mosaic of his gravemarker shown in yesterday's post.

Traveling in the Past

2011-06-30T17:24:00.347-04:00

Alice B. Toklas once said something like: "I don't travel anymore ... except in the past." That's what I'll do today, inspired by someone's sending me a picture of Rudolf Nureyev's grave.

It was 1999. Mark and I went to St. Maartens. I got crushes on four different Jamaican girls who worked at various jobs on the island. There was Dorothy, and there was Ruth, and then there was Albertha. Not Alberta -- Albertha. Later in the week there was Princess Ferron. First name, middle name. I forget what Princess Ferron's last name was. Or maybe I didn't ask. I just said, "Princess .. what a beautiful name!"

Princess Ferron seemed to like my name quite as much as I liked hers. It is her father's name too. "George is a very strong name," she said.

She liked Mark's name as well. "From the gospels! Are you gentle?" she asked Mark, and then, turning to me, asked, "Is he gentle?"

"Yes," I said, and then, recalling a few incidents of a swiftly risen temper within Mark, said, "Well .. not always!" Princess Ferron rewarded me with a beautiful dark-skinned white-toothed musical laughter.

I was always swooning listening to the lovely lilting English of these Jamaican girls. It was music. I thought that I should perhaps go to Jamaica and hear it all the time all around me, but when I asked Princess why she was on St. Maartens instead of at home in Jamaica she said, "Because it is so quiet here and you don't hear shots ring out in the night."

We sailed across the blue sea for an hour and three-quarters on a catamaran to the island of Saint Barthélemy. Eighty degrees. Hot sun.

We buy a van tour of the island. Ten bucks.

On a high cliff on the western tip of the island is a wonderfully cozy house snuggled close to the edge of a cliff that descends sheerly to the sea. The house is close to the road and the view from it is magnificent. Its situation between the road and the sea intensifies its cozy esthetic. I long to move into it. The driver slows down a bit. "This house," he announces, "belonged to Rudolph Nureyev, you know, the dancer." My insides start jumping around. I stare at the house for as long as possible. Carved into the wooden gate, in a lovely script, and in idiosyncratic spelling, I read: Roody Nooreyev.

Looking back I see there is a quote carved into a wall of the house. It's in French. I call out to the driver, "Can you translate what that says on the house?" He is busy chatting with the attractive woman he's placed next to him up front. "No, I can't," he lies.

I want to yell, "Why the fuck not?" because the woman next to him is French; she and the driver have been chatting away in French since the tour began.

It's just the way I am but I felt it was imperative that I know what the great dancer had had inscribed on his house. I felt cheated. I didn't want to be, as I was, just a tourist driving past, but rather to have time reversed and to be with Nureyev in that house, to gaze with him at the stupendous view. I recall those news items from those sixties jet-set days and who Rudy's pals were. I wondered if Princess Margaret had come to party in this house. Margot Fonteyn? Me?

No. And today Rudy is six years dead and I am in a rickety van on a bumpy road on a tiny Caribbean island, and I am without the chutzpah to demand that the van be stopped and I be let out so that I can copy the quote for myself and have my brother translate it for me later.

We are, after all, a van load of international tourists. For a novelist, we probably could be the framework of a mini-version of Porter's Ship of Fools. None of us can be in that big of a rush. It occurs to me anyhow that I haven't even brought a pen or pencil. The van picks up speed. The house disappears when we round a curve.

[By now of course, twelve years later, Google has been devised. It takes me seconds to pull up a picture of that house and read: Je ne suis pas fait pour vivre en societe: c'est artificiel. It takes me another few seconds for Babelfish to translate: "I am not made to live in society: it is artificial."]

After the tour ends we walk into the little town. We eat at a restaurant Jimmy Buffet opened here, the legend being that because when he'd initially docked at the island he was irritated because there was no place to buy a cheeseburger. Another patron informed us that Buffet "wrote a song about it."

Could be a good song but the cheeseburgers we were served were lousy. Dumb tourists we are. We walk around the town afterwards and run across three or four other places that all look perfectly inviting and non-tourist-trappy. We go in an adorable little place that serves coffee and ice cream. While we're waiting for our treats a couple who had sailed over on the catamaran with us comes in. We see there are no free tables so gesture that they may sit with us.

They are Germans. She looks perhaps 30, he perhaps 40. I had spoken to the man on the boat; our bit of conversation had been about the recent move of the Federal Government from Bonn to Berlin. "Much money," the German had said. "Did they move into old buildings?" I asked. "No! Much new! Much money!" "Probably about as much as my government is spending in trying to impeach our president," I said.

Now in the sweet cafe the man sits next to Mark. His woman sits next to me. They are absolutely warm and lovely and speak pretty good English. Introductions are made. I didn't catch the man's name so I imagine him as Wolfgang. I think all German males should be named Wolfgang. His girlfriend's name is Dagmar. I had noticed on the boat that she was pretty. Now as she turns her face to me I am stunned; I see that she is not simply pretty but totally drop-dead gorgeous, refulgent, luminous, one of the most perfectly-featured women I've ever laid eyes on. One hundred percent Aryan-looking. Blonde hair; blue eyes. He too is good looking, blond, blue-eyed. Hitler would so have admired their looks.

President Clinton is brought up again -- all foreigners, I assume, are appalled that a public man's private life is grist for the mill of character assassination. To ignore another's private peccadillos is part of sophistication.

We learn that this couple has been living three months on his sailboat, which he keeps at St. Thomas.

When Wolfgang says what town they are from and mentions upon what sea he learned to sail, I immediately grab the slight opening to introduce literature into the conversation. "Oh," I chime, "that's where Thomas Mann grew up!"

They looked at one another. "Sometimes .. yes," Wolfgang says hesitatingly.

Wolfgang is absolutely correct with his 'sometimes' -- the Mann family spent summers there. Wolf & Dag do not seem comfortable with the mention of Thomas Mann. Is he recalled as a traitor? Not taught in der schulen? He did abandon Germany and was then to pronounce judgments about the German character that were not flattering, and for which he was publicly chastised by even his brother, also a novelist, though nowhere near a novelist of the stature of Thomas Mann.

And, too, Thomas Mann had a streak of perversion; as an old man he had stared at a young boy on the beach off Venice and then wrote a novella about it, a novella which so masterfully portrays a certain type of longing that Death in Venice will be read as long as books are read. The story seems too authentic to be anything but what the author himself experienced. Is it for this presumed perversion that half those sitting at our table seem uncomfortable with his name?

And, too, after all, Mann's wife was Jewish. I am curious now to know if Mann is on any syllabus in all of das Vaterland.

Our companions are, if not enthusiastic to speak about Mann, comfortable in speaking about Hermann Hesse. "I loved Steppenwolf!" I say. They both loved Siddartha but the one Hesse book that they really love and which they urge that I must read is .. what? .. they don't know how to say it in English.

We work at it and work at it, but I cannot understand. Exasperation is approaching when finally Dagmar reaches into her bag for pen and paper and writes Narziss und Goldmund.

"Oh, Narcissus and Goldmund!" I exclaim happily as if we have at last solved the puzzle of the origin of the universe. I try to show that I am clever by explaining in mime that, yes, Narcissus was a Greek god who .. yes .. I wave my hands in circles over the table, saying "this is a lake" and I bend over and peer into this lake, but apparently only I am imagining the lake for Wolfgang and Dagmar are peering at me as if I have gone off some deep end.

But it has been such a pleasant lunch all in all and I am feeling such liebe for our companions; I promise to read Narcissus and Goldmund. Then I remember that I have also read Hesse's great masterpiece called variously Glockenspiel or The Glass Bead Game. It is a beautiful story, complicated but beautifully written, and I can't get the title across to the Germans. I write Glockenspiel on Dagmar's paper but they seem not be be familiar with it. They enthuse again about Siddartha. In trying to praise The Glass Bead Game I demonstrate with my fingers that Siddartha is only this thick" while The Glass Bead Game is a good two inches thick -- as if greatness is measured by breadth!

And so, yes, all this comes back because my cyberspace friend sent me a picture of Rudolf Nureyev's grave -- thanks, Joan -- and it struck me as the most spectacular of spectacular markers, and prompted me to recall passing by his home on St. Bart's:

On the website it says "This mosaic memorial resembles
one of the oriental kilim rugs that Nureyev loved so much."

Beautiful Sculpturing in Australia

2011-06-22T17:23:00.003-04:00

Detail from marker in Point Frederick Cemetery; New South Wales; Australia

Thanks Joan, my cemetery-loving soul-mate, for this picture. I love it.

Samuel Beckett's Graveyard-Loving Character

2011-06-19T17:04:00.002-04:00

Dublin-born Samuel Beckett

In a Samuel Beckett short story called "First Love" the narrator speaks of what attracts him to graveyards: The smell of the corpses, distinctly perceptible under those of grass and humus mingled, I do not find unpleasant, a trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit ... And when my father's remains join in, however modestly, I can almost shed a tear. The living wash in vain, in vain perfume themselves, they stink. Yes, as a place for an outing, when out I must, leave me my graveyards and keep -- you -- to your public parks and beauty spots. My sandwich, my banana, tastes sweeter when I'm sitting on a tomb, and when the time comes to piss again, as it so often does, I have my pick.

Happy Birthday to Joyce Carol Oates, born on this day in 1938

2011-06-16T16:58:00.362-04:00

I've read only four or five of her novels. (A witty friend of mine back in the late sixties said "you could read her first book and you will have read them all.") I'm more fascinated by her than I am by her fiction. The writer astonishes! She's published some eighty works of fiction. Eight plays. Up to twenty books of essays and memoirs. Ten books of poetry.

President presents Oates with National
Humanities Medal, March 3, 2011

As for her fiction, she seems to take on other and different characters, and relates to these characters as people who borrow her body, so to speak, and take over her mind. Further, when she sits down for an interview she may assume herself to be the character who "wrote" one or another of her novels; thus, in all the interviews she's given, none was necessarily with the authentic Joyce Carol Oates!

"What is the compulsion to disguise oneself?" she asks of herself in her journal. "Perhaps it is true, as Jung says or seems to say, that the establishing of a 'mask' is a built-in instinct in man, an archetype. Not one mask but many. Therefore it is not hypocritical but wise, natural, and valuable -- and moral -- to create a persona for various contexts. Certainly my own experience leads me to confirm this hypothesis. It is the presentation of an utterly frank, open, trusting, naive, genuine self that strikes me as being in a way perverse and hypocritical .... The value, then, of knowing a number of people who are substantially different from oneself and from one another: in each context one is forced to create a different persona.

There was a rumor in 1993 that the next Nobel Prize for Literature was going to be awarded to an American female. Gambling and guessing, Playboy quickly arranged an interview with Joyce Carol Oates; it would come out in the month the prize winner was announced.

That year's prize went to Toni Morrison!

Playboy lost. I won, though. I loved the typically excellent and in-depth interview that Playboy is famous for. In this one, which struck me as an interview with the authentic author, JCO bemoaned what she called her need to write -- she said it was a compulsion, not a pleasure. She said that she often wishes that she did not have to write but that she cannot stop herself. It actually made me feel sort of sorry for her. I had noticed that there seemed to be, in photographs of her, a tinge of some sort of genius in her strikingly beautiful eyes. Earlier I might have used 'madness' in the previous sentence in place of 'genius'.

Ms. Oates does not consider herself insane. "Also yesterday, at the end of an hour's generally congenial and rewarding interview, with Bill Richardson of the Miami Herald Bill asked me to respond to the fact that virtually everyone he knew in Miami believed I was insane. I asked him to repeat the statement; stared, blinked; must have looked uncommonly baffled, and murmured something about that being rather ... well, rather ... odd, surely? ... since I have been teaching at universities since 1961 ... and have published so many books ... and ... well ... surely ... 'It's like being asked if you're syphilitic,' I said, feeling both hurt and angered, or what you think about the 'fact' that people imagine you're cross-eyed ...." Bill apologized at once; wondered if he'd actually phrased the statement correctly; people wanted to know, it seems, whether I was sane."

So while it was a shock to her to think that anyone might think her insane, it was, as she discloses later in the journals, a "dim shock" for her to realize "that others think of me as 'successful.'"

Writing over a hundred books is not success?

Here's one of my favorite anecdotes about Joyce Carol Oates. Her friend, Alicia Ostricker, a poet, said to her, "I can't imagine what it's like to be you." Ms. Oates replied, "I can't either."

I was thrilled when, in 2007, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982 was published. Frankly, I'd rather read about authors than read most of the fiction they produce. This book of over-500-pages was made up of excerpts from 4000-some pages of the single-spaced typewritten original! Good lord! She'd written all those books and had, additionally, kept a massive journal!

Some books you really do hate to have to put down -- you have to go to work, or you have to go to sleep -- and this was certainly one that I could hardly put down even while I lament that the quicker you finish a compelling book the quicker your pleasure will have come to an end.

She was a friend and correspondent of Anne Sexton, one of my favorite poets. I loved JCO's kind thoughts about suicides written after Sexton, in 1974, drove her car into her garage, went into the house to don her mother's mink coat, returned to her garage, shut the door, shut the car's windows, started the engine, and waited for death: "For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five seems to me an achievement, a triumph," wrote JCO. "Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their hving lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted -- made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world -- as did Anne Sexton -- as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can't be very important ... society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission."

At another point, she writes: "Unless Virginia Woolf weighed a certain amount, she said, she would see visions and hear voices. Which suggests the powerful link between 'madness' and one's chemical equilibrium; and perhaps the link between fasting and the visions of the saints ... fasting and meditation certainly bring about an alteration of consciousness."

A madonna-like Ms. Oates

There is in the journals an unusual take on the character of Jesus: "Studying St. Matthew," she writes. "[Am] rather discouraged by the fundamental silliness of the Christ story: Christ's intolerance (threatening people with hell who merely don't listen to his disciples), his predeliction for flattery (it's because Peter says 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God' that Peter is given the keys to the kingdom of heaven), his ruthless sense of his own righeousness ('He that is not with me is against me.'), his childlike insistence upon the identity of wish and action ('Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath comitted adultery with her already in his heart' -- etc. -- a psychologically invalid theory, to say the least), his general obnoxious zeal, his intemperance re: giving advice ('Take therefore no thought for the morrow ...') that will only cause trouble for others. Again and again whole cities are threatened with destruction, with being 'brought down to hell.' The tenderness, the faith-hope-charity, etc., forgiveness of enemies, are really quite subordinate to this dictatorial person, who says at one point that he comes not to destroy but to fulfill, and then says, at another, that he brings not peace but a sword: 'For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother ...' Such is Christ's unchristliness that one is forced to interpret everything as symbolic, as pointing toward meanings other than the literal. But it seems clear that he really wished his 'enemies' (those who don't care to follow him) in hell, where they would suffer terribly; he lusted after complete dominion over men's minds."

So, after calling him childish, self-righteous, obnoxious, dictatorial, and schizophrenic, Ms. Oates concludes that "Christ isn't very different from any inspired hypermaniacal bully ...."

"All this is distasteful, and disappointing," she reflects. "It wasn't my intention -- it never has been -- to ridicule beliefs that others take seriously. So long as anyone believes anything, that belief should be respected."

Six months later, returning to Bible reading, she writes, "The Bible as poetry is haunting, and heartbreakingly beautiful. The Bible as a guide for moral conduct, or (god save us!) as history: almost worthless. For it's jumbled, scrambled, rather demented, a cacophony. When I finish this novel [in which she was attempting to base a character on the Devil] I doubt that I'll even glance at [the Bible] again for many many years."

Ms. Oates seems removed from politics. She wouldn't have gone around spouting, as I did, if only in my mind, "Yes We Can" during the last Presidential campaign. You'll come across her almost single political musings in the journals on page 240: "Where more than a few people are gathered together the seed of corruption, or selfishness, always flowers ... I don't know why -- haven't any idea. But egotism asserts itself, inevitably, in any relationship that isn't tempered by mutual regard and affection."

***

With husband, Raymond Smith

One thing that struck me as I read the journals was how seemingly perfect was her marriage to a man named Raymond Smith. They admired one another, cared for one another, and it occurred to me that possibly she couldn't live without him, so it was a shock in late February of 2008 when I read in The New York Times that "Raymond J. Smith, a founder and the longtime editor of The Ontario Review, a noted literary Journal, died on Feb. 18 in Princeton, N.J. He was 77 and lived in Princeton. The cause was complications of pneumonia .... With his wife, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, Mr. Smith founded The Ontario Review in 1974. Until his death, he was its editor; Ms. Oates was the associate editor. The journal, which appears twice yearly, has published the work of established writers -- including Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver, Nadine Gordimer, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Philip Roth, John Updike and Robert Penn Warren -- as well as that of young writers. Raymond Joseph Smith was born in Milwaukee on March 12, 1930. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, followed by a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1960. He later taught at the University of Windsor in Ontario and at New York University before becoming a full-time editor and publisher. In addition to Ms. Oates, whom he married in 1961, Mr. Smith is survived by a sister, Mary."

In February of this year Joyce Carol Oates published A Widow's Story, an account of her husband's death and the approximately six to eight months following it, a period of despair, grief, nightmares, insomnia ... on and on ... and the idea of suicide came often to the widow's mind. "Do not think," she writes, "if you are healthy-minded, and the thought of suicide is abhorrent to you ... that suicide is, for others, a negative thought -- not at all. Suicide's in fact a consoling thought. Suicide is the secret door by which you can exit the world at any time -- it's wholly up to you."

Elsewhere in the memoir: "It's a sad comfort -- far more sad than comforting -- to know that one's books are being translated, sold, and presumably read in many countries, even as one's life lies in tatters; and what a mocking sort of 'good news' it is to be informed, via email, on the eve of Ray's birthday last week, that a long-anticipated exhibit of a collection of my books owned by the writer/interviewer Larry Grobel in Los Angeles has just been mounted in the Powell Library at UCLA under the title JOYCE CAROL OATES - THE WONDER WOMAN OF AMERICAN LITERATURE."

"Though the rest of my life is in ruins ... I am determined not to be an addict," she writes as she comes perilously close to addiction to this or that pain and/or sleeping pill .... I have come to feel enormous sympathy for drug addicts of all kinds, as for alcoholics, the walking wounded who surround us .... Their spiritual malaise is such, only powerful medication can assuage it. Otherwise, there is suicide .... What astonishes me is that there are so many who don't succumb. So many people who have not killed themselves."

With Charles Gross in Stockholm

No sooner had one finished this harrowing account of widowhood than one learned that Joyce Carol Oates had, eleven months after her beloved husband's death, become happily engaged to a professor of neuroscience, whom she has since married.

For not having mentioned this new love in A Widow's Story, she was lacerated -- most notably and most visciously by Janet Maslin, the nasty book reviewer for The New York Times.

Please! Miss Oates no doubt had the book written in her mind, if not on her word processor, before she met her second husband; and had every right -- every right -- to complete it as planned.

Breaking Haiku Rules

2011-06-15T20:26:00.020-04:00

When I set out to write 14 haiku about hiking with my dog in the woods I aimed to practice the classical form of "three lines containing 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively". It was fun, word-puzzle-like fun, but taking too much time. So I threw formalism away; my task was done in no time. A few weeks later I came across wonderful justification for what I'd done in Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr, who is a poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review.

   ... here is former poet laureate Robert
   Hass translating one of Kohayashi Issa's
   haiku:

   Don't worry, spiders,
   I keep house
   casually

   It's not even close to 5-7-5! But it's
   lovely, and it sure seems like a haiku,
   doesn't it? The question, then, is if we
   should reject what is probably our initial
   notion -- This is a haiku -- because of the
   failure of the poem to adhere to the syllable
   count we've been told is necessary. On one
   hand, 5-7-5 seems like a clear standard that
   plainly hasn't been met. On the other hand,
   again, Hass's poem certainly looks like a
   haiku -- and since an English syllable isn't
   actually the equivalent of the sound unit
   used to compose Japanese haiku, the 5-7-5
   count can be no better than an approximation
   of the original version (on top of that, the
   haiku is one vertical line in Japanese, not
   three horizontal lines). So because the
   haiku is a relatively young form taken from
   another culture, it seems reasonable to
   assume its "rules," if that's what they are,
   can still be contested.

So, yes, in composing my haiku I threw away formalism thinking that since the haiku is a relatively young form taken from another culture, it was a reasonable thing to do.

What Dogs Might Know

2011-06-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

I know my dog loves me .. I'm sure my dog loves me .. but I like the idea in this poem that sometimes we humans must seem sickening to dogs, and we may not know them as well as we think we do.

The Revenant - Billy Collins

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair to eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all of my strength
not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner--

that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

Normandy

2011-06-06T20:07:00.002-04:00

Last year my brother and I took a four hour tour along the Normandy coast where the D-Day operations and battles took place; it was awesome; amazingly moving; for the most part you are just speechless as you learn at such close-hand of the intricate planning involved, of the bravery, and of the horrors that took place along that beautiful coast.

Hiking Haiku

2011-06-04T21:08:00.196-04:00

Fourteen Hiking Haiku

for Joan Kunze

Step into Wellfleet woods

unleash dog

freedom

Life's simple today

blue jeans t-shirt leather boots

warm sun

Hiking within

e e cummings' leafy

green spirits

As fourteen white fluffs

punctuate his true

blue sky

Butterfly careens, dashes

darts, flutters, mindless of

meter

Mushrooms, born overnight,
fully formed, festoon path

honoring Plath

Residue of bonfire

in clearing; strewn empty

containers

Come upon calm clear pure

Spectacle Pond

Narcissus

Kerouac's juju beads in mind

his knees cold

mine creaky

Maelstrom of earthly scents

scintillated dog

dead vole

Breathe in, yoga man,

'72 hitch-hiker recalled,

breathe out

Counting syllables

measuring meter

seeking rhyme

Aimless steps

going anyhere

no sense of time

Toward dusk, homeward bound,

reflecting: Lou Reed:

perfect day

Another Jane Kenyon poem ...

2011-06-03T21:34:00.006-04:00

Someone I like has said more than once that she usually doesn't enjoy reading poetry. And then, on May 23, I observed Jane Kenyon's birthday by using her poem "Let Evening Come" in a post. Later that someone who'd said she usually didn't enjoy poetry said she had really liked "Let Evening Come". I really liked it that she really liked it. This got me to thinking how beautiful but also how accessible .. how user friendly .. Jane Kenyon's poems are, and how this achievement of simplicity is an art in itself, and Kenyon was especially adept at it. And so here's another Kenyon poem, typed out for Lisa.(I think this poem has a touch of Anne Sexton to it, but I can't quite pick it out without going back to Sexton's poems; I can't spare the time to do that; otherwise I would.)

   OTHERWISE

   I got out of bed
   on two strong legs.
   It might have been
   otherwise. I ate
   cereal, sweet
   milk, ripe, flawless
   peach. It might
   have been otherwise.
   I took the dog uphill
   to the birch wood.
   All morning I did
   the work I love.
   At noon I lay down
   with my mate. It might
   have been otherwise.
   We ate dinner together
   at a table with silver
   candlesticks. It might
   have been otherwise.
   I slept in a bed
   in a room with paintings
   on the walls, and
   planned another day
   just like this day.
   But one day, I know,
   it will be otherwise.

Happy Birthday to My Friend Jim Rann

2011-06-02T18:01:00.002-04:00

Jim Rann, circa 1970, sitting in Dennis Little's apartment; 105 North Pennsylvania Ave.; Lansing, Michigan.

Happy Birthday to Marilyn Monroe (RIP) - 6/1/26 - 8/5/62

2011-06-01T19:50:00.002-04:00

A real person who lived the life of flesh and blood but also existed in millions and millions ... and by now billions I suppose ... of dreams. I was working in the Western Union Telegraph office in Alpena, Michigan, on a Sunday morning, when the ticker tape transmitted the news of her death. Some twenty years later my friends Drew and Will gave me the above piece of art Drew had done, nicely matted and framed. I loved Marilyn Monroe. I loved the idea of her. I love this depiction of her.

R.I.P. Jacqueline Onassis: July 28, 1929 - May 19, 1994

2011-05-19T17:11:00.002-04:00

Hard to believe the Queen of the World has been gone seventeen years! Here's a great tribute to her, "Jackie Onassis" by Boston punkers Human Sexual Response.

Music

2011-05-15T20:02:00.004-04:00

Cape Cod is often said to be one of the world's most beautiful places. It also has The Outer Cape Chorale. Today it performed Leonard Bernstein's intricate "Mass". The performance was beyond fabulous.

Leonard Bernstein

Jon Arterton, the conductor, always gives a little background about the pieces his group performs. Today he mentioned that "Mass" had been commissioned for the opening of the Kennedy Center Opera House, and premiered on September 8, 1971. It was generally expected that the President would attend the opening of this "cultural palace on the Potomac". Below I paraphrase and expand a bit on Arterton's comments.

When Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, first mentioned that it would be Bernstein's "Mass" that would be performed, Nixon said, "Oh, shit." (It's on tape!) Bernstein had done plenty to earn a place on Nixon's famous "enemies list" -- among other things, he supported the Black Panthers; he was vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War; and he had associated with the radical anti-war priests, brothers Phillip and Daniel Berrigan.

Haldeman suggested that Nixon should not attend "Mass" but instead mark the opening of The Kennedy Center by going to The National Symphony's debut the following night for a performance of a program under the direction of its music director, Antal Dorati. This Nixon did.

Jon Arterton

On the day after "Mass" Haldeman reported "absolutely sickening" conduct on Bernstein's part ... the composer, Haldeman said, had shed tears during the ovation, had hugged some members of the cast, bestowed kisses on some, even on some men, "including [a] big black guy!" This big black guy happened to be Alvin Ailey, the founder of the world-esteemed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Ah, beloved radicalism! Thanks Jon Arterton. Thanks Leonard Bernstein. Thanks Richard Nixon for tape-recording your howlers. I had a great day.

Mother's Day 2011

2011-05-08T12:56:00.000-04:00

My grandfather, Albert Aldorado Luckenbill (1875-1968), flanked by his two daughters; on his left, his youngest child, Floris Juanita (1921-1998); on his right, Iris Charlotte (1907-1989), his oldest child, and my mother. This picture probably taken on one of Grandpa's last birthdays.

Jane Kenyon - May 23, 1947 - April 22, 1995

2011-04-22T20:15:00.005-04:00

Jane Kenyon didn't live a long life and she did not write a great number of poems but many of those she did write are exceptionally beautiful and lovely. A friend of mine, Mary Ann, died back in January. "Let Evening Come," a favorite of mine, and, though I had not known it, also a favorite of Mary Ann's, was included in the eulogy.

Let Evening Come

BY JANE KENYON

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

Stephen Tennant - April 21 1906 - Feb. 28, 1987

2011-04-21T21:02:00.056-04:00

Stephen Tennant was a dandy, a dilettante, aesthetic. He wanted to be a novelist but never finished Lascar, his only attempt. Or, some said, he never really started it - unless you counted the countless lavish illustrations he designed for the cover. He nevertheless made himself literarily historical for the friendships he made. Some of those whom he enter-tained with witticisms and outrageousness were the painter Rex Whistler (felled at Normandy), the photographer Cecil Beaton, all the poetic Sitwells, and the five delightful Mitford sisters. Tennant is considered to be the model for the wonderful character of Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, as well as the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh when Waugh was drawing the character of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Despite his lack of concrete accomplishments his friendships and character warranted a lengthy 1992 biography by Philip Hoare.

He was vain. Once, anticipating a group picture that was to be taken of him and some friends, he wrote, "My tongue is already flickering like an adder, lest one iota of foreground is denied me."

The novelist Rosamond Lehmann reports that Stephen invited her to visit him one weekend at the seaside where he was summering. She turned up at his home to find no one in. She sat down on the steps and awaited Stephen's return. Soon she heard his distinct tip-tapping footsteps approaching. "Rosamond, dear! What are you doing here?" "You invited me for the weekend, Stephen, don't you remember?" "But how could you be so cruelly literal, darling?"

Along with the Hoare biography, along with the many references to him in the biographies of his contemporaries, along with his having served as inspiration for characters in the novels of great writers, Stephen Tennant also holds an especially odd niche in literary history: When he had become elderly he rented the cottage on his family estate to a novelist by the name of V.S. Naipaul; the latter immortalized Tennant as a character in The Enigma of Arrival -- a roman a clef which, for its being perfectly and simply written, happens to be one of my favorite novels.

Time Out

2011-04-14T17:11:00.000-04:00

Break-time.

College basketball season is over.

My taxes are done.

Going to Washington DC tomorrow.

Five nights in Takoma Park, Md.

Three nights in Ashton, Md.

Two nights on N Street Southwest.

Return 4/26.

Waiter Nightmares

2011-04-02T23:17:00.007-04:00

It's a syndrome. Waitrons often have nightmares .. their stations expand, they can't find their checkbook, they are totally lost, their food orders never come out of the kitchen. A waitress in Provincetown once told me a funny story ... not about a nightmare, but a day-mare: "I was waiting tables at the Post Office Cafe. It was the Fourth of July weekend. I was a horrible waitress .. just never got the hang of it. Before every shift I got so nervous, butterflies in my stomach, and would feel like I was going to throw up. Going to work felt like stepping into a nightmare which I had to face and live through. On the 4th I was so afraid of going to work that M.B. [a well-known hostess at another restaurant] handed me a pill and said, 'Here .. take this .. it'll help you get through the day.' It was a blue valium. I popped it, took a sip of my coffee, and set off for work. A half-hour later I was wandering up and down amongst the tables, my arms full of plates of eggs, crying, asking people if any of this belonged to them!"

I haven't waited tables for something like 25 years but I still will have a waiter nightmare about once a year.