September 2024

September 29, 2024: ‘The rich always look guilty’. The best line, perhaps, from a mediocre neo-noir no-name flick that, otherwise, has no stunning revelations to offer with respect to human character. We are scumbags, all of us, with a weakness for plot twists and trick endings. Which might well have led to the subsequent dream I had.

And in it, the only well-heeled poet I have ever known, who put up a good front but who never entirely managed to mask his unease to do with his wealth, and who, in a long ago era, would have been a ‘pamphleteer’ (and he did have plenty to say, some of it ‘enlightened’ and 'happening'), walks into my house. The thing is, that I had a house in the first place, never having been able to afford one, was quite the novelty. My guest was bemused by my change of fortune, I who had always been just one step ahead of homelessness. Even so, his ‘unease’ was all the more marked as he endeavoured to make conversation with me.

Which brings me to Proust and the creep factor in his ‘novels’ (there being seven volumes to his À la recherche du temps perdu opus-madness in which creepiness as such might find accommodation). Not that there is such a condition in the volumes, but that, more than once, I have heard said that there is. In the post previous to this one, I believe I went on about the I-I-I Me-Me-Me aspect of the young Marcel’s narration, especially as such an ego in its triplicates figured in his sex life, and that it now and then grated on my sped-up, stripped down sensibility, meaning that the young Marcel’s ‘I’ sometimes takes a long time to spill the beans. But what I should also have said, and I am saying it now, is that, on occasion, the I-I-I Me-Me-Me profusions on the young Marcel’s part are what make the world go round. It is as if ‘subjective truth’ and ‘objective truth’, through some alchemical process, exchange of virtues, merge into a third category of reason and is transcendent, Holy Ghost-like, even Plotinian, and one begins to have a god’s eye view of what in hell gives with us humans.

And continuing with Proust and his The Captive, volume number five in the above-mentioned opus, the use of the word ‘florilegium’ is an innocuous springboard for the softening up of M. de Charlus for the coming ‘kill’. The word may refer to a collection of flowers or an anthology of literary tracts. So then, ancient texts were cited so as to flatter the old baron’s ‘outlook on life’ (all this in the course of one of Mme Verdurin’s Wednesday evening salons). And she, a bit of a twit and certainly a snob of the worst sort (as she would believe herself to be innocent of the charge), finds a new capacity within herself, that of an assassin. She is going to turn the baron’s weakness for flattery against himself, as well as his infatuation with Morel the violinist (his protégée, as opposed to the fact that she, Mme Verdurin, with her infallible taste in all things artistic, would want the world to know she ‘discovered’ the musical phenom, and she has already turned Morel against the baron soon-to-be-pathetic). At any rate, well, it is the kind of cruelty that goes on every minute of every day all over the world, as it has done since humankind had a shadow on this earth, and the baron himself, quite adept at destroying reputations and all manner of egoisms lesser to himself, highly intelligent, deeply literate, elitist to the core, of an aristocratic bloodline, has it done him. He is gutted. Hook, line, and sinker. Do not take my word for it; read the book.

Last night, the Comptroller of the Universe and I were on the roof of our building. To take in the light and the onset of autumn and to have a 360 degree view of our part of NDG, which it is a Montreal enclave of indigenous and expatriate souls along French-English lines and whatever other languages might contribute to the mix. And then we were joined by four beautiful women, two of them fellow tenants, two ex-tenants. Wine and gin and tonics were put to good use. And so, tanked up, the conversation hummed along. It was a bit like loners or solitaries meet loners or solitaries; there is attraction; there is consummation in some form or other; there is gratitude, and where it will go next is anyone’s guess, just that I believe I was first to pause the proceedings so as to ask, “Has anyone noticed how intently we’re at it, as if we’ve been starved of this sort of conversation for years?”

And sure, we were talking X,Y and Z through all the ABCs of current news and the various malaises affecting the world in which we find ourselves, and then someone said something about ‘community’, and for once, the word did not cloy from a surplus of feel-good mush on the loose. Gaza then, Lebanon, Ukraine. And America, as if in a game of Charades, doing some grotesque imitation of the Ottoman Empire... Cell phones. Google Maps. And what, besides our patter, did we have in common, six people on a rooftop? That we were all ex-pats of one sort or another – hailing from the Middle East, South America, the US, Ukraine, Europe. I look forward to future meetings-up of ‘Traymoreans’, as has been decided we would dub ourselves, seeing as four of us reside in the Traymore, and not to mention that The Traymore Rooms is a novel I wrote almost in another lifetime now, and that the novel has in it some high-level talk and confabulation.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar in London is sore that a ten year-old girl whipped him at chess which it is a manly game. And this: ‘I got into conversation with a smart woman about Israel and Gaza and Lebanon and what frightened me, yet again, was how uncritical she was on the subject of October 7th, putting much of it down to misinformation. She couldn't even countenance the fact Israeli women were brutally raped, saying she has heard about such cases but never from a woman. Well, I have. I was reminded of those intellectuals who said much the same during Stalin's purges. What we did agree on is the corruption (already!!!) in the Labour Party, the accepting of "gifts" etc. [Oh, and by the way,] the painter Francis Bacon left a huge amount of money in his will [for a poetry press], saying in effect that it was unfair that a painting could sell for thousands and a poem for nothing. [But don’t get your hopes up. Women, you say? How is it you rate?]’ Beats me. Just one of those things. Maybe something's up in the House of Libra.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, turn left at Sirius: ‘I'm booking a flight, packing a bag and inquiring about a vacant room at [the] Traymore, upper floor a must. Start talking me up to this gang — in other words, lie to 'em by telling them what a prince of manly man I am. But really, Sibum, why do you get to have all these goodies when you already have a woman and I sit here typing in my underwear, downing orange Lifesavers and deciding between a peanut butter and grilled cheese sandwich for dinner at midnight? You're deththpicable.’ Beats me. Just one of those things. Maybe something's up in the Libran sphere of things.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘The long and short of it is: I had two ladies – accomplished painters – at my place. And when they saw the Comptroller of the Universe’s painting of the bowl of cutlery and heap of elastic bands they were gobsmacked. Had to wrestle them away from it lest they grab it and run. They demanded to know details and vowed to search out the [pertinent] website. Just thought TCU would like to know. Other than that, had an MRI a couple of weeks ago. Have a slightly protruding disc in the lower back which accounts for the recurrent pain, the cramping in my right hamstring, and occasional numbness in my right foot. The physiatrist, yes, that's the word, physiatrist, recommended … a nerve medication which has the side effects of causing drowsiness, swelling of the legs, and erectile dysfunction. Will endure the pain for the nonce. Otherwise, literary? What do I know from “literary”? What did you say it was? Bumper car ride concession? Seems a little lame.’

Postscript V: As per the rooftop conversations referenced above: Moreover, even if Rome is primarily meant, Dio’s attack does not imply a desire for the city’s fall. As On His Exile and On Wealth showed, he finds nothing inconsistent in deploring Roman decadence and desiring the preservation of Roman rule. From The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom by CP Jones, Harvard University Press, 1978. Which is to say, as much as the combined grip of the ghosts of Kissinger, McNamara, and Rumsfeld on the controls of American foreign policy does not seem to have relaxed all that much, the tsunami effect of the coming undone might well engulf the world &c.

September 20, 2024: Dream: A voice, one ostensibly mine, addresses a mystery guest. He or she may or may not represent the whole of western civilization as is still literate. Here is what was argued: that poets have difficulty justifying themselves even to themselves. Could be frauds, you know. The odds are good. Even frantic attempts to recapture formalism, what I lazily call neo-formalism, does not rid a poet of the problem. A perfect sonnet might very well get you yet more dead space on a page. It has to have something in it, what Plato once called divine madness which, in our times, need not be as grand as all that, but still…. And now we are saved by the bell: the dream ends. Or it morphs into another dream the gist of which is this: to escape Trump, embark on a cross-country motorcycle tour. Have a care though in west Texas, America’s spiritual heartland with party-down bar. There may be a price for a hell-rider in leather to pay when passing through.

Otherwise, while reading Proust’s The Captive, I came across, in the same sentence, no, in the same semi-clause, mention of Kant and sauerkraut. Hints of moral imperative and peppercorn. And so, already a red-letter morning shy of six. Not that I have anything against Kant or sauerkraut, I am fine with both. Vaguely remember struggling with Kant whilst I was deep into the music of John Fahey, John Mayall, Miles Davis, and Dvorak. Roundabout that time I decided to stop forthwith the reading of fiction, would only read history and related items, including natural history, and some unnatural, as per 'meemwars', and poetry was suspect…. 50 years later, and I read in Balzac that love is just a ruse for the getting oneself some social advancement, and it is not as if I say in response: “Where were you when I needed to read this”, it is: “Jeepers creepers, compared to you, Proust is a romantic.” … …. Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling. From Balzac’s Pere Goriot. Perhaps the only feel-good utterance in the book. But one of those kind-of-sums-it-all-up sentences.

Whereas Trump, had he a female side, might well come it a Mme Verdurin, one of Proust’s duelling hostesses: who to invite, who not to invite, and it is on the order of Rome’s Social Wars – the competition between hostesses for celebrities. The Social Wars had nothing to do with salon maintenance and yet, they were plenty lethal. Each hostess had a stable, so to speak, of ‘regulars’ (now and then a shaking up was required), and it was a bit as it is with presses these days: who or who not to publish as best complements the décor and the canapes? And then along comes Cornelius W Drake to say that Biden has battered wife syndrome, given who he has to deal with in the Middle East. Do you think Drake could get this remark squirrelled away in the Post or the Times? Well, his name is not Dowd, Friedman or Brooks. And what with his table manners – it is not looking good.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar on Northumberland pipes, now that he is on the home end of yet another trek: ‘[They’re] played from the bellows rather than the mouth, very distinct from Scottish, with violin and a whole array of other instruments. … …. [H]ow does one have a bagpipe museum? If a bullet hit Trump it would bounce off his skin is so thick.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana who would not know Northumberland from LumberLand but who is a dear, anyway: ‘Jazz? I stopped following it around the 1970s and stayed with its classic era of early century to about when LBJ had had enough. I mostly followed Buddy Rich and his band, being the drummer and drumming enthusiast that I was. But all others as well, Ellington to Herman. My first shock was when I attended Rich's performance at Kansas City's annual Jazz Fest at the city's huge auditorium. After listening to and worshipping Buddy, I stuck around for maybe 10 minutes. Sort of a Jazz-Rock fusion group came on; not only was the music heretical and repugnant, the speakers they used were at deafening volume — a painful volume, my ears were rending as though they were being subjected to a cabin-pressurized flight landing times 10. I never went back to the group's mushrooming kin, recorded or otherwise, figuratively and literally. [As for Trump and his thick skin], I see it [said skin] as tissue-paper thin. He's still hurting from what he believes was his mistreatment as a child. And he has more grudges stemming from long-ago insults or diminutions of his greatness [that] he's planning on tossing all the offenders in prison, [including me. My sensibility? Are you sure? Shakespeare and 50’s sci-fi. Might get me on the list for an Oxford lecture. What do you think? Aha! I’m seeing a thumbs-down emoji. Man, you’re brutal’]

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘I read [your prose piece] on my cellphone and it looked like verse. [A thousand pardons.] No, not wearing a pager. Though my right sock has a hole in the heel. [Otherwise]: … …. At the same time, I've been rereading some of my own books in an attempt to spot my flaws and habits and perhaps strengths, and proceed accordingly with current manuscripts. I won't deny that rereading myself has been a humbling and occasionally distressing process. Oh, why had I not done one, just one more revision... Was I so impatient, such an amateur? And where were the editors in all of this? I don't know. I don't know much. I think of the title of a book, or is it an essay, can't recall which, by my one-time hero Thomas Pynchon, called Slow Lerner, (the a handwritten in above the e and r). Meanwhile I continue to reread Graham Greene and admire his sentences, their tone, their length, their shape, and the sense of the absurd that never threatens to trivialize a scene. A fine balance and mighty achievement. I once read that Greene would work on two manuscripts simultaneously, one in the morning, then after lunch take some sort of upper and proceed with the other book. [Albeit] I'm discovering a loathing of bookstores and magazines, be they [fill in the blanks]. Okay, it's mostly my own insignificance looming up so large like a shadow on a wall. Yet the mass of all these books, the sheer tonnage of essays, articles, reviews, reports adding to the mudslide threatening to smother us is enough to make one go permanently mute. There's a guy from Corpus Christi Texas who visits every summer for the fishing. Nice guy. A doctor in the air force or something. He comes into the recycling depot and I ask if he's voting for Kamala. He glares and says no. I ask why. "Because I'm not an idiot." At which point I let the subject drop. [I suppose I’m sounding earnest.] Have you seen this movie Civil War? Imagine America as Bosnia. Americans being so earnest they’re shooting each other – in earnest, and rather creepily.’

Postscript V: General Principles Department: from John Donne of long ago in whose measures there was nothing slick:

Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day,
Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow?
Or say that now
We are not just those persons, which we were?

Postscript VI: Three Random Sentences in Four Wheel Drift Department:

1: From the way it looks, Israel is looking to run the table.
2: Civil War (2024) is not great cinema, but it is a serious movie, or it is trying to be.
3: Party time, party’s over – it is all the same for the engineers of capitalism, otherwise I do not know Keynes from Key West, or ‘supply side’ from fantasy baseball, though price gouging makes my neck hairs bristle.

If Not Received, Then Smuggled out of the Place Department: Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank, Princeton University Press, 2020. Plus: The Libertine, DVD with Johnny Depp, perhaps the best movie about a poet ever made. These two items were found stuffed in a flight bag on display in the local Sally Ann charity shop. I had had no plans for going anywhere.

September 15, 2024: Early this morning, I read in an on-line posting that, if we take a look back over the past five years (and why not ten or twenty?), it has been breath-taking, what we have lived through. I will not itemize all the events that have made for serial craziness, but it has had the feel of living life inside a film being fast-forwarded and frog-marched, to boot, and to what end? Will the reel come flying off its spool? The other day, I walked into my local bookstore. In the speakers was the sound of a trumpet: one discrete note after the other. Right. Miles Davis, I thought to myself, a few bars of something I had not heard in years. What was the album? Something to do with Spain?

It stopped me in my proverbial tracks, that trumpet. It stopped time, everyone and everything around me in slow-motion. And I feel more affinity for strings than I do brass. I went home. Over the course of the next day or so, and with the word ‘Homeric’ banging away in my head with respect to something unrelated to the music just heard (or was it, after all, related?), I listened to ‘Sketches of Spain’, read some literature treating with the album. As if I were the last person to know of it, I read that the Canadian Gil Evans was behind all the orchestration, and that he died in Cuernavaca which is certainly not Toronto in January. I also read review-ese that, to my mind at least, had nothing to do with the music in question. It was all about people showing that they had a grasp of what they evidently had no grasp of. But then, it was the internet. Cloaca. And this post shows that I have yet to walk away from that. If not the internet, into what does one place one’s faith? Faith. Is that not one of those words that has been, by way of ‘discourse’, absolutely discredited, if not obliterated, and expunged from the language of the 21st century?

Speaking of which … words: spindleshanks. I believe I have never before encountered ‘spindleshanks' until Proust-Moncrieff put it on the page for me to wonder at in The Captive, volume number five in Proust’s seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu. Daddy longlegs then. Close on its heels – ‘phizog’, an expression that one reads on a face, presumably a human face. As when Harris baited, and Trump did not just bite, he chomped. He swallowed whole, and there was phizogging all across the nation. I read the word phizog and thought: "There it is: Proust-Moncrieff fooling around." And then I read, as if set up for it: … …. ignoring the greetings of late-comers so indelicate as not to realize that it was now the time for High Art. Oh, ain’t it ever thus?

And I thought, well, a 'straight' man goes and critiques a woman and consequently cops a charge that he is sexist. A not so straight man critiques a woman and demonstrates superior understanding. Is the difference in the follow-through? Is it all in the times in which we live? No doubt, for the ‘straight man’, sex and romantic love are impediments to understanding any damn thing, let alone the female psyche, but sometimes Albertine, though she is ‘present’ enough on Proust’s pages, seems but a foil to the young Marcel, hardly a woman in her own right, although she has more life to her than were she conceptualized in a screen treatment for a police procedural, and she is directed to go and buck against the thought-patterns of the male bastion of the force. A young friend wrote to tell me that Genet adored Proust whom he read in prison, but that, in my friend’s opinion, what exercises my friend’s generation is not sorrow but shame. Shame over what? The inability to feel sorrow? And as of this moment, you would be right: this has nothing to do with Genet reading Proust in prison. Nothing to do with female empowerment. With cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, where, apparently, immigrants are eating them à la mode… I have walked into at least three shops (stationary store, poor man’s super-mart, the corner depanneur) in the past twenty-four hours wherein I was asked if I have pets. I answered: ‘squirrels and house sparrows, a few sentient succulents, but otherwise, no, no pets’. Not even a goldfish? No, ma’am. None, sir.

On occasion, I curse myself for setting myself the task of re-reading the whole of Proust. It sometimes sits heavy on one, the I-I-I-Me-Me-Me of the never-ending disquisition on X,Y and Z, but then, at times, one is rewarded for hanging in. A long, long passage on music and aesthetics in general… has nothing whatsoever to do with a plot line… Even so, I could care less about a plot, Vinteuil’s septet a vehicle for how love gets to be love or some facsimile thereof, but that if Proust's young Marcel is going to speculate non-stop about how M. de Charlus views the curl athwart Charlie Morel’s brow (as he tucks his violin into a passage of Vinteuil), therein, by way of hyper-awareness on the young Marcel’s part, is a high road to discombobulation. Music then, and a couple of generalities: emotion moves faster than thought. Music is so much more profound, cuts so much more deeply than mere logic, than reams of analysis, recognizes more connections, picks out more patterns more quickly and more completely… It is nothing that I have not known before, but to have it written down as Proust wrote it down, this does not happen every Friday night, and never twice on Sundays. Lunar, writing me, referred to Miles Davis’ trumpet as a ghost trumpet.

I had thought to compare Proust and Balzac when it comes to writing on money and its effect on the various social classes, but perhaps, another time. At least in Pere Goriot, Balzac does not linger on anything much except perhaps when it comes to brutality of the psychological kind (he almost seems to revel in it, as when he buries Goriot in humiliation after humiliation, Goriot nonplused: he has his reasons). What would Balzac have made of Trump? Perhaps the answer is a nugget to be found in one of his 90 plus novels, to be traded in for a bunch of Shakespeare.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar has been rambling around in the northernmost reaches of England. The Northumberland coast. Romanesque cathedrals. Castle ruins. Hadrian’s Wall. ‘The first known letter written by one woman to another in all of Europe, basically a "Come to my party" invite. … …. [plus] a lot of nasty stuff on both sides between the Scots and the English but…’ And he writes: ‘Laura Loomer is a new voice to me and from what I have just seen I think keep her in - she may destroy Trump.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, which it is a command post on some stretch of an invisible defensive wall, speaking of L Loomer: ‘One comparison is William McKinley and Mark Hanna, as you can gather from the attachment. Another is George W. and his "brain" Karl Rove. Bill Clinton's Dick Morris. POTUS rarely made a move without consulting him and his polling. I recall that in George Stephanopoulos' book about his years in the Clinton WH he wrote that no one had more power over the prez than Morris, whom Stephanopoulos hated so much he recounted having waited impatiently to meet him at a D.C. restaurant, thinking, "Where IS that cocksucker" — a line I'll never forget…. …. And Trump? Whomever he talked with last. [As for the Trump-Harris debate and the fallout from it], only a "soupcon of schadenfreude" [on your part]? Mine was bountiful.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Homeric? Are you serious? So then, you must mean Homeric as memorable, or that the poems (the Iliad-Odyssey tandem) existed to serve memory, not TV ratings, not linguistic bravado. And so, were simple when simplicity sufficed, and complex when complexity was needed, you know, to make sense of a morass. Don’t mind me, I’m in another mood. Loomer-Trump? Braun-Hitler? Do we feel repelled by the latter couple for the fact that they were an item, given what had been going on? Do we feel even a hint of sympathy for a pair of fantasists who probably held hands and were full of regrets in their last moments? Is there another sit-com in the offing? Does Melania get the chinaware? I read somewhere that the carpet stank in Trump’s office. Surely, it was one of those gaslighting things. Homeric, eh? Alright then, when do we rumble? The ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ (composed by Rodrigo, a blind man, in 1939)… it was the music Miles Davis bobbed and weaved through with his trumpet in 1960. You being a guitar player, I went and looked up Ana Vidovic (and yes, there ought to be a diacritic mark over the 'c'). She played a solo version of that music on her guitar. Her phizog was all bemused smile as she played it through without a hitch. As if she were born to play the piece. Whether she meant it or not, whether she was terrified or not, I read serenity on her face. And that’s all you’ll get from me for the nonce. It’s currently 18 celsius on the island, and it’s clouding up for showers. Later.’

September 7, 2024: If a person sidles up to me and tells me they are a house sparrow, then house sparrow it is. Hands down. I could exhaust all the philosophers in my attempt to ratify the judgement call, but all the logic I need is this: I spent too many years driving and dispatching taxicabs to argue or ever wish to argue with the customer. Dead-ends in communication occur. How best get from A to B? It is the only ethical and moral consideration there is in a universe without godly or moral suasion. And yet, should the likes of a Trump cross my path in some slithering fashion, and he tell me that he is a polished speaker and a man of intellectual refinement who has lost his way, I would direct him to the nearest porta-potty, and all home truth, say, “There’s your niche.” (Of a sudden, I have the Piazzale Lareto, Milan, April 29, 1945 in mind, and which notable (along with some members of his fan club) was hung there by the ankles while, on the same day, Dachau was being liberated. But then, at this point in time, there is a certain prime minister and his snipers and a problem he has got called Gaza. In any case, haunting imagery all around.)

And I am reading along in Proust. Without benefit of a transitional paragraph, young Marcel’s jealousies with respect to Albertine fall away. M. de Charlus, tragic buffoon, takes over in The Captive, is centre stage. For a moment, I am annoyed. But then Charlus would not be one of the great characters in literature without being tragically and comically what he is: frustrated gay man with high intelligence and a command of arts and culture. So, house sparrow it is, if with noble pedigree and a chamber pot for a hat. I will even put up with Proust lecturing me as to what a strange world the world of Charlus is, and what strange laws govern it. And what Virgil has to do with it, and Theocritus, and Plato too, and any directory of the titled and entitled nobility. Still, it is as if he were writing of a long extinct animal’s behaviour based on a pile of old bones and dodgy DNA, when he writes of Charlus. (Even so, the use of the word concatenation five or six times over the course of three or so baronial pages – Charlus being a baron, this is a bone I would pick with Proust, or with Proust-Montcrieff, seeing as Montcrieff was one of Proust’s early translators, and his is the translation I am keeping to and swearing by.

Otherwise, continuing to read Proust is tantamount to wearing an old work shirt for comfort, though there is nothing plebian in Proust’s writing, not even when he is on about maids and midinettes and chauffeurs and waiters and such. He was what he was – a snob, even if an amiable one who had no wish to think ill of anyone though he had his catty side. (I say this, knowing little of the man’s life, and not wanting to know more; just that it is the picture of an author that I piece together after four volumes read thus far and working on the fifth, À la recherche du temps perdu topping out at seven volumes.) I am not reading Proust to be wowed by verbal bravura. I have come to, and am holding to, the following considerations: the man had something to say. He honoured the notion that literature is a conversation. He had a sense of humour. What else would I need? Whom else? William Burroughs? Celine? Cormac McCarthy? Padded shoulders? Dickens and plaid?

… …. for there is no one we appreciate more than a person who combines with other great virtues that of placing those virtues wholeheartedly at the service of our vices.

There may or may not be such things as universal truths, but the words just quoted above (from Proust’s The Captive) do come close to such entities. At any rate, Charlus, the young Marcel, and Brichot have been on the approach to the house of the Verdurins (where a cultured evening and a concert are to be obtained), and this being Proust, the approach is taking forever. But perhaps, and were the book a movie, it would be a suitable opportunity for some extended flashback, and Proust, stealing thunder from Balzac, does take the bull by the horns so as to say that there is in Paris a sort of spoken newspaper more terrible than its printed rivals, and would that include social media? Say what, you guys inside-the-Beltway? If the human heart (with or without the brain) is the acme of evolution, then at the heart of the human heart is gossip, innuendo its glide path, and all else is a side dish, and you can feed the leftovers to the servants. So then evolution: either an endless vista of prairie grass or Balzac’s empire of love populated by social climbers, as when, 1990s, and Pink Pedal-Pushers, seated at a bar on Westmount’s (Montreal) high street, used to declaim to mildly alarmed lawyers that social-climbing is the only legitimate human activity there is, so, once more unto the breach, dear friends, and again and again and again….

Old-fashioned girl? What is an old-fashioned girl? Lunar, in his heart of hearts, believes such a creature still exists. But first:

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: And Lunar will not give me any satisfaction today ‘with respect to the moral universe or its absence.’ He does not care to ‘sound fusty’. A book he is writing has already taken him 15 rounds and beyond, and he has barely gotten past the opening bell. ‘A pretty Turkish-American girl shot dead by Israeli forces, just one of many pretty girls and children that have been killed by them, but nevertheless my blood boils and I am trying hard to resist prejudice.’ Words like ‘aggressive attitude’, ‘ersatz form of strength born of arrogance’, ‘being fed all the hardware they can use by other countries with their own guilt complexes’, period, end stop, no doubt... One's bona fides will be checked. That pretty girl, though, she haunts me. Trump and his fellow creeps and their female sidekicks – I do not see from the photos that the faces of those women shine with freedom’s afterglow.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana and affiliated stations: ‘You raise an interesting point and one I have long struggled with: the tension between stream of consciousness and ego insertion.’ We had been talking novel-writing. Or was it the writing of essays? Or… feuilletons which were the printed (newspaper) page’s equivalent of a little night music… Or CNN… Dana Bash interviews? But are truth and prime time compatible items? Right. Prime time. What was I thinking?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Hey, I was in a bookstore off-island recently and in it, in addition to all the books, I came across a revolving display of reading glasses. It really threw me for a loop. For a moment my brain froze. Then the inevitable drop of the penny. Books. Reading. Eyes. Reading glasses. Ah, my brain was still viable. Could still discern connections between notions. I went up to the owner at her desk. She knew what was coming, but I said anyway, “Who would’ve thunk it? Did you thunk it?” She blushed. It’s been a while since I paid for a book as I get quite a few of them gratis from the Recycling Depot on my island, but in honour of a woman having thunk it, I shelled out ten bucks for a used copy of Solzhenitsyn’s August, 1914. Why that book? Well, I was afraid you’d ask. Something to do with all the Proust you’ve been going on about day and night. Needed a change. Hark, the revolution. Prose poems in the midst of stream of consciousness and ego insertion. Will I read the thing? Buying the book was a sort of gesture one makes in the face of dark days and the indifference to any kindness that are those days, no matter what flies or doesn’t by way of, what, ideation. Later, on the ferry, a woman told me she was an old-fashioned girl. Was raised that way and had no regrets. What was an old-fashioned girl to her? Someone who has a care for the community in which she finds herself. But she didn’t elaborate lest she drown in a dam-burst of pieties.’

September 4 , 2024: The Scottish poet George Mackay Brown figures large in recent communications I have had with a couple of people. A book he authored some time ago in collaboration with the photographer Gunnie Moberg inspired an old friend of mine (a balladeer) to transport herself and her family from Vancouver, B.C. to the Orkneys where she lived for quite a while until moving to Wales. This was half a century ago. The aforementioned poet also figures in a book another friend of mine is writing on the Scottish islands. My balladeer friend (I have known her since the 60s) died in her sleep the other night, and in the wake of her death, hitherto unsuspected connections between her and other people in my life have come to light. Life sometimes works like that. More on this later.

Otherwise, the young Marcel (in Proust’s The Captive, fifth volume of his seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu) at last refers to himself as a voluptuary. As I read this bit of news, a voice in me, in a spate of sarcasm, was then audible to my ears: “Oh my God, he nailed it.” Soon after the word ‘midinette’ occurred which is not a word one hears these days, a word that signifies ‘shop girl’ or ‘a fashionable but vacuous young woman’. You see, the young Marcel and his Albertine both lusted after young women, and as we speak, the young Marcel is still contemplating breaking off with her, his jealousy of her desires wearing him down. He wants to devote himself to Art. Devotion to Art requires… well, apparently it requires solitude. The thing is, he is beginning to suspect that Art and the apparent transcendence Art engenders in the soul is all one vast, gross mirage. He may or may not have a change of heart on this in pages to come. He already suspects that the author-publisher-editor nexus is a swindle – usually at the expense of the author.

And then we are brought around to Vermeer’s View of Delft. One of Proust’s characters – the novelist Bergotte – has always admired the painting and believes he knows it by heart, as it were. He comes to see it one last time and realizes there are parts of the painting he has never quite noticed, in particular a ‘yellow patch of wall’. Of a sudden he visualizes a ‘celestial pair of scales’. In the one pan is his life; in the other that yellow patch of wall. It symbolizes what he ought to have written. It tells him that no matter what he writes, he will always feel there is this something else that he should have written. He then dies of a stroke. Need I paint some moral out of this? From there I switched to Balzac. I read that ‘living the patriarchal life requires slaves’. These words were put into the mouth of a proper, contrarian villain (who might have been lifted from Dumas). I then began to compare the savour of Balzac opera box scenes with those of Proust. With the one man you get near metaphysical disquisitions on wealth, station, personality, dress apparel, beauty all filtered through effusions of scent and whatever poetry is hanging about in the air. With the other ‘it is all in your face’. I will leave you to sort between the two. … …. “Gladly,” she said. ”If you really feel drawn to her so quickly, your love affairs look very promising. There’s Monsieur de Marsay in Princess Galation’s box. Madame de Nucingen is on the rack, she’s heartbroken. There’s no better moment to tackle a woman—especially a banker’s wife. Those ladies from from the Chaussée d’Antin all love revenge.” … …. With a patch or two of dialogue like this, who needs HBO?

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: ‘Let's not talk about what is happening in Germany. And let's not talk about the fate of those six Israeli hostages. There is too much hatred in the air to be able to breathe normally.’ And then, Lunar continuing: ‘clairsentience’ as opposed to clairvoyance. [Yes? No?] The Battle of Culloden, 1746. Attached to which is the story of three women. … …. ‘A grandmother, daughter and granddaughter fleeing from the slaughter after the battle. I have been struggling ever since because I have some distant memory of this kind of thing, shared historical memory linked to the ability to identify extremely distant relatives, but all my searches on the internet for what this might be have led nowhere except into the realms of New Age junk thinking. I can't remember why the story seems familiar. Gypsies are supposed to have this clairvoyance though some of it is fake. Presumably Travellers too. Any ideas?’ No, sorry, I have none. But that the only part of Jungian theory I still take seriously is the notion of the collective unconscious which is a form of memory, which brings this post back to my friend who just died. Her balladeering was serious memory-work, and I see her in a somewhat Homeric light, that she had committed to memory 300 ballads, and with a little prompting, she could whip out 300 more….. Lunar again: ‘Have you ever known any hobos? I am struggling with my memories of one who showed up at my parents' place. I can just about "see" him and I think he appeared a few seasons running. He did some work, was fed and paid although it was when we didn't have money. I seem to remember him as abiding by a strict code, i.e. yes, he would take food but not a bed in the house. Not all hobos were as honourable of course, just as not all people are, but I have been trying to draw connections between this man and the Highland Travellers who also travelled about doing seasonal work. I don't [know]what to make of the Kamala interview in that she seems to be speaking from both sides of her mouth about Israel. When is somebody going to have the courage to say enough's enough to them.’ … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana: ‘While eating my 1:30pm breakfast of black cherry yogurt and cinnamon-drenched instant oatmeal, I watched "Death Takes a Holiday," 1934. After two days on earth as a mortal Death remarks to a character that people seem to lead their lives in "futile and empty" ways. That hurt.’ No comment. Some words speak just fine for themselves without need of add-ons.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado. ‘Right. “The Great Silkie”. I used to play a guitar arrangement of the melody though I can’t sing worth a damn. It meant something to me, maybe because I’ve lived on this island for a century or so. So it seems. Anyway, what you’re saying is that your friend had ingenious ways of making chords on her Washburn, as her hands were messed up due to thalidomide poisoning. Which was a scandal of the medical kind. Had a beer the other night. It really left me tipsy. Must be losing my tolerance... Hmmmm.’ Yes, that is what I am saying. And I never heard anyone make more out of the standard approaches (bass notes) to the G chord or C chord or any of the other first position chords….

Postscript V: Rowan Hill, balladeer: A link to the only album she ever made, as she refused to go commercial for fear of losing her voice (her soul). People would say she was exceedingly silly in this. Perhaps. Perhaps not. What you will hear she recorded in her 70s when her voice had lost some of its clarity, but even so, there is still quite a voice at work here.

Rowan Hill