June 2024

June 30, 2024: As it turns out, American orgies as depicted by the 2022 flick Babylon (1920s period piece – the early days of the film industry) had no need to defer to their Roman counterparts as orchestrated, say, by Caligula, and would Nero have made it as a Hollywood star, he who was besotted with notions of performing on the Roman equivalent of a stage? I bailed on the movie after an hour’s worth of viewing, having no opinion good or bad on the production, and not knowing that Jack Conrad and Nellie LaRoy were going to wind up as suicides, swallowed, chewed and spat out by the beast that was and still is, I imagine, Hollywood. I have subsequently read (on-line) that the movie is considered a flop on account of its being overly indulgent and all the rest of it. I think someone somewhere was trying to make a serious film and there were enough watchable bits… Early on in the movie, one of the bit players – a jaded journalist, perhaps gossip columnist – remarked, as her eyes followed some cinematic derring-do being filmed before her and it, the filming, was not going particularly well, that once she had known Proust, Hollywood to be understood as a fall from grace. Which may be a good spot here for a segue….

But first, Egeria. Egeria? She was a nymph who counselled Numa, Rome’s second king. He worried that he lacked the authority to bring about ‘laws’ that he deemed good for the people and the 'republic', and the nymph (a nymph associated perhaps with groves and water, and with prophetic powers to boot) presumably helped the man in this regard. Machiavelli, in his discourses on Livy, brought it up. Romulus, the first king (we are talking some 700 years before the birth of Christ), did not need God, so Machiavelli wrote, he had arms, and this was sufficient to make the people (a pretty rude bunch) love him and support the notion that his rule was good for them. But can arms, alone, maintain a republic or a body-politic of any variety &c? Which is a question Numa apparently asked himself and answered in the negative. I bring this up because white-haired Numa puts me in mind of white-haired Biden, and he is in trouble, what with the recent debate debacle. He could probably use a little ‘divine’ counselling right about now. He may need to ask a few deep questions and get a few deep answers for them. For all that, I am expecting the worst, a full-blown descent into the proverbial darkness come January of next year, orgy or no orgy, cinematic transcendence ready-to-hand or not. My friend Drake will take me to task for this pessimism on my part. For my rookie mistake. Mountain men, said Machiavelli, make for the best republics as they, unlike city folk who are putatively civilized, have not been corrupted. Ah, then. So there it is. Machiavelli said a lot of things that we would find odd and off-putting but are worth considering, as they might lead to an insight or two as to the nature of our present-day dilemmas.

In any case, with Proust in his novels, one is always going to a dinner party, sitting with dinner guests, or getting out of Dodge, and I do not intend this remark as a dig at the man’s prose. There is a lot of snow in Dostoyevsky, a lot of ‘fug’ in Dickens, a lot of ‘battle’ in Tolstoy, so, ‘dinner scenes’ in Proust in which one’s worst enemy is generally oneself. One is always getting in one’s own way when it comes to one’s capacity to love or be loved. One is always tricking out one’s ego or hiding one’s depravity a la Charlus, though we, of course, ask as to whether he was depraved. Was he not just condemned to the shadows even as he was a paid-up member of the upper echelons of high society, his ‘invertedness’, for all that, frowned upon? Enroute to the latest dinner party at the Verdurin’s, in discussion with Dr Cottard on the train, Brichot had occasion to use the word ‘embourgeoised’, in reference to Swann breaking with the aristocracy only to become, indeed, embourgeoised (seeing as he had married a courtesan who wished to move in high circles?), and I confess that I had to look it up, that word. And it seems that the word signifies that one has been gentrified, which, I suppose, is a slight of sorts from a certain aristocratic point of view. And then, not too long after that, we learn that if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (to leave out of account the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature upon the rest), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed. (From Proust's Cities of the Plain.) I read the words and wondered just how many times I had had the thought myself. How many times have I sat at a banquet table and contemplated the noses of my fellow guests for what they could tell me of the fix we are in?

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar says that he is back from the hinterlands, the hinter islands of northern Scotland. He survived it, and I am otherwise not at liberty to offer any more details. Other than this: the sculpted frieze of maize in a chapel built in 1446. The coda: a stone bas-relief carving discovered in Massachusetts of a knight in full armour, sword and shield. A group of Scottish knights sailed over there, camped out with Micmac Indians and then returned in 1399. Roll over, Colombo. I'm going to bed. Unless I have gotten my timelines all wrong, I do not think anyone was eating maize anywhere in Europe at that time, at least not before Columbus brought some back from the New World, though I believe that there is a representation of corn in some Roman artwork, 1490-something. … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana is not terribly interested in corn, so far as I know. Instead, he posits: ‘Then you're missing Svengoolie's Saturday night fare, this one, Roger Corman''s 1957 "The Undead," quite promising. No it has no zombies, the title misleads. The LA Times' review: "a rather imaginative yarn ... for this type picture the acting is quite good... Corman has turned out a good product." Take that! you bigoted B-quality hater. I'm sure you remember our heroine, Allison Hayes, from her starring role in the next year's blockbuster, "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman." You're missing so, so much. (Corn by another name, asks Sibum?) European football should be banned from US TV as foreign pornography of sadistic, satanic exercises in the monotony of four scoreless hours [two 45 minutes halves], and any elementary school that persists in permitting this seditious scandal as a recess activity should have its Washington funding forthwith rescinded by a federal court — with prejudice.’ Thus hath Drake gesprachen, and the world is a better place for it.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado is presumably doing jailtime for having lifted a book from one of those establishments that exist to vend books, even if he did do an about-face and paid for the thing the next day. Guilt works in strange ways. At any rate, radar silence from his direction. Just that, sure, early days Hollywood, and the place was awash in drugs and booze, and, who knows, shex, and the artistic side of it all was kept humming along by individuals we would know as ‘alternative’ or counter-culture types, although I suspect it was not a big deal back then, not until the big studios decided they had to get respectable or have the illusion thereof bruited about. Can you not see Talking Avocado as a stunt man by day and a man about town in a dinner jacket at night, perhaps mistaking the real Lana Turner for a hooker look-alike, as did Detective Lieutenant Exley, and taking notes on his wanderings? Hey, anything is possible. And TA has written a book or two...

June 24, 2024: Myself, I do not know what to make of Göbekli-Tepe, the temple complex excavated in Anatolia, 1994 the year of the revelation. It is considered to be the world’s earliest ‘built’ holy site, the construction of which suggests that what we thought we have understood about pre-historic humankind is wrong; that agriculture did not ‘create’ temples, that it was the other way around, or that ‘city’ came before agriculture, as did our sense of the sacred. Seeing as the temple preceded by millennia the advent of farming; seeing as it would have required hundreds of workers to work the stone; seeing as this fact would have necessitated organization of some kind, logistics, a place to sleep, or so one might assume, then – once again – city, or else barracks for so-called hunter-gatherers perhaps used to a less sedentary lifestyle. In a more or less idle fashion, I follow developments in archaeology, anthropology and astrophysics for reasons I am not even sure I grasp, curiosity I suppose, and because I have always been obsessed with the ‘past’, perhaps unhealthily. What I have been noticing over the course of twenty-five years, or thereabouts, is the extent to which dates keep being pushed back on just about every front, so much so that the Americas have begun to seem almost as ‘aged’ as the Old World, older, certainly, than previously thought with respect to a human presence; that humankind was schlepping around on these two continents at a time not thought possible, the Bering Strait land bridge not yet viable. And then the big prize, greased pig that it is: was there an Atlantis in the sense that something like a civilization did exist before the last ice age, that is until some cataclysm or other wiped it away? As you may well know, fanciful theories have sprung up like mushrooms, and some of them are doozies and make money for opportunistic fabulists, but the point is: the more conventional interpretations of the data have sprung leaks.

Otherwise, otherwise… An old Vancouver friend popped out of the woodwork; have not heard from him in a while. It did not take the man long to introduce the word ‘shitshow’ into the ensuing discussion between us. 'Regarding the shitshow we are all living in I don’t have much to offer.' He cites Palestine/Israel. Russia/Ukraine. ‘The global environmental crisis’. Is there room for optimism? Only if your name is Pollyanna. The last I checked, it was not. He is happy though that I resurrected Ephemeris. He had always enjoyed it. I plug myself.

But since all things of men are in motion and cannot stay steady, they must either rise or fall; and to many things that reason does not bring you, necessity brings you. So when a republic that has been ordered so as to be capable of maintaining itself does not expand, and necessity leads it to expand, this would come to take away its foundations and make it come to ruin sooner. Machiavelli, his discourses on Livy. Perhaps Putin has it for bedside reading, though I suspect he, instead, reads Jackie Collins. Trump would not get past the notion of ‘seeds of modern political thought’ as published on the back blurb, inasmuch as ‘seedy’, in his mind, would constitute something seedy, that is, how shall I say it, pervy, he that sort of avatar. … …. For it is the desire of Protogonos “of two-fold sex, who roars like a bull, of countless orgies, memorable, unspeakable, descending, joyous, to the sacrifices of the Orgiophants … …. to which Trump is a grave insult. No cosmic egg would have him, especially at the dawn of creation. And should you wish to know, the italics immediately above are ascribable to Proust, to his Cities of the Plain, volume four of his extended series of novels entitled À la recherche du temps perdu. What, you have not heard of it? You should get a life.

In any case, yes, I have been wandering about in Proust’s volumes at a meander’s pace. As I ambled through one passage in which the young Marcel figured, I was put in mind of a friend I had in high school, a precocious sod who lived for his pleasures and how he might increase said pleasures, a problem to which he applied all his logic. He was an amiable fellow, but it was best to realize that, while he could muster up affection for another human being, love was a bridge too far, love necessitating, at times, the sacrifice of one’s comfort zone. If he loved anyone, it would have had to be someone sympathetic to his lonely endeavours that he envisioned as a quest. He was exceptionably bright, and while he was a resident of a mental ward for a year or so (he had had a violent episode), he managed to obtain, through legitimate study, degrees in the Italian language and Italy’s history, even as he maintained his interest in physics. Dress him up for the period, and he would have fit right in (in Proust’s narrative), even to the point of dispensing worldly-wise counsel a la Swann to, say, the young Marcel just starting out, the waters perilous, lots of submerged reefs and such that could sink one’s little ship of well-being. As for Proust and his ‘narrative’, narrative another word that has been spoiled because fetishized by those whose ears get wiggy when they are referred to as critics and pundits, and in some instances, artists, now and then I get vertigo as I read. I undergo a kind of Stendhal Syndrome whereby one has taken in too much art at a go and has begun to feel ‘faint’; that I feel myself ‘pushed around’ by the narrative and I am not getting anywhere, but that when I do feel I have gotten somewhere, I am ill-prepared for the being there…. Look, a minor complaint. Not enough to put me off my feed and the task I set myself: to reread the entire opus as one Proust-Montcrieff wrote it, even as the world out there seems to get more and more unhinged, and it is tick season.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar, on whichever island it is [Scots] he has got himself to now, says that… well, here he is saying as much: ‘It's hellish, the coldest June ever, more winter winds blowing through. My fear now is being stuck on the island, no boats. I did go to see someone today and it confirms that this is the hub of the supernatural. Second sight, apparitions, balls of pale light falling on the houses of those about to die. It is one thing to read about these things but when most of the people you speak [to] take it for granted ... as a part of daily existence. I wonder if there is anywhere on the [European] continent as packed with this kind of stuff. Well, I suppose the Sami in Lapland. Whether it is true or not is, ultimately, neither here nor there. My chest is bad. I just hope the antibiotic is not too late to stop it developing into pneumonia.’ I am expecting from the man something on the order of Doughty in Arabia or Byron’s (Robert) The Road to Oxiana.

Postscript III: Early sci-fi came up in a back and forth with Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana. I tease him a great deal on this; the teasing takes on the tone of something like banter. And now and then he resorts to reason as a reply, as if to demonstrate that I am insufficiently in possession of the quality: ‘Ah, therein lies possible confusion. It's the antique, almost always B&W sci-fi films that appeal. Just about all from early 60s on ain't my style, don't watch. Haven't seen Howard the Duck nor would I want to after reading a few reviews. You have however inspired me to seek Howard's original manifestation in comic books. One reviewer: "Howard the Duck is a "cantankerous, stogie-chomping, nattily dressed" antihero with an "acerbic wit, irascible personality and down-and-dirty street smarts." He likened Howard to "Donald Duck cross-bred with Groucho Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre." The New Yorker wrote Howard is "mainstream social Darwinism" and "a web-footed Eric Hoffer." Should I ever rank [rate] a 100-word obit, I'd like to go down with those 47 included, "PM" in place of "Howard."’ Alright then. I have been dealt with. Summarily. I am laid out for the count.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Don’t ask me why, but for some reason, some odd whim—are not all whims odd—I stole, yes stole, a copy of Richler’s The Apprenticeship of D Kravitz from the local bookstore … …. It’s one of those old penguins, 1967, and I couldn’t resist, I mean the scent—not an odour, not a stink, certainly not a stench or a pong—the scent beguiled me, made me lose my sense of order, rationality, responsibility, and just like that it was under my arm and I drifted casually away, with a studied though I hope a convincingly natural nonchalance. Now I’m halfway through reading it. I seem to recall you mentioning having been a regular at the same bar Richler frequented’ … …. (Sibum: I was not, in fact, a regular; I had only stumbled across the crime scene, not once, but a number of times, and I was not privy to any conversation then in progress.) Talking Avocado had more to say on the following day: ‘First of all I should mention that I fessed up to the vendor and paid the four dollars owed for the Richler novel. Conscience unburdened… …. The Apprenticeship of Duddy K is, for me, at its best when describing gatherings of people, as in one scene about a high school graduation and another about a parade in downtown Montreal, full of potted mini bios. (Did I already mention this? Apologies if I have.) But the dialogue. Yikes. Dreadful. It's like bad TV dialogue. Okay, we're in the 1940s, but still, Greene (as in Graham) has novels set earlier and the dialogue is fresh and idiosyncratic. The book (the Duddy book) often reads as if the author is fleshing out an outline and doing it at breakneck speed. Or alternatively, he reads like a yarn spinner, a guy in a bar telling anecdotes. All well and good as far as it goes, and fascinating from a socio-cultural p.o.v. about a segment of society. In the end, however, I have to rate Greene the superior artist. As a character, Duddy is thin, small, and self-obsessed and difficult to like or care for. Hell, there are a lot of characters who I dislike but find fascinating and can't take my eyes off. …. I like this business of a pre-ice age culture. I too have watched with fascination these docs [documentaries] exploring ancient architecture and such. Who can fail to find it imaginatively captivating? It expands everything and gives it another dimension.’ … …. And here the signal went weak… Talking Avocado must be just a little under the weather. Hey buddy, your diction. Perhaps it was the Richler Effect. Perhaps the man needs to get off his island more. Perhaps we are all of us getting spongy in the brains, some debate coming up that would pit against each other two last white hopes of an elderly kind, the one hope a decided conduit to hell, the other hope one that might get us there anyway, if not on purpose. I refer to the presidential bake-off imminent this Thursday coming, for which I will supply no blow-by-blow live feed. It might make me a journalist.

June 15, 2024: Deglutition is a word. It truly is. I found it whilst on a read of Cities of the Plain, volume four of À la recherche du temps perdu. All that Proust-Montcrieff. I had been reading like someone walking along a beach on the lookout for an interesting shell or pebble or bit of driftwood to stuff in a pocket. Deglutition. It has to do with the act of swallowing. Aerophagia is another one of those words that has to do with swallowing, the ingestion, in this case, of air so as to induce a belch. Trumpian air is perhaps aerophagic. In any case, that I have read the bible front to back is neither here nor there, but that I had intended to open this post with a query: which of its two parts is the most compelling – Old Testament or New? The answer usually tips in favour of the Old, what with all the mayhem and the sex and the jealous, punitive God. But with what, nine months of Gaza, and I will take the New Testament any day and that passive figure on the cross, and the bread and wine miracles that put the figure there. And if Trump, as per dance for me Marjorie T Greene, is Jesus, where then is his Golgotha, his transport to heaven?

And: All imperial business was recorded in a special journal (commentarii) kept by an official styled a commentariis... …. That was Rostovtzeff in the course of his history of Rome. You might want to keep the quote in mind the next time you read the commentary of P M Carpenter, a link to which is below….

And: One, by instinct, does not like fingerwaggers, thou-shalt-not-ers, but… I have had things building up in me to say about Gaza, and yet I do not care to rant or to be even remotely perceived as doing such. (This is the wrap-around effect of talking to oneself on an hourly basis year after year.) Every now and then one comes across the old saw that every now and then one is ashamed to be a part of humankind, any part. As if one were humankind’s designated driver… Is a crow proud to be a crow just because it can fly and count to six and so, get a motion passed in the House? Proust going on about Albertine, lying to her face about his real motives with respect to her – was Proust proud to be a Proustian cad? He going on about Debussy and Chopin, about Monet the painter, Proust a man for whom great art is a matter for gossip, gossip seemingly the final arbiter of what is excellent – did this make Proust as pleased as punch to be Proust-Montcrieff? For all that, it now and then astonishes me the extent to which this writer apparently lives every moment as it hangs suspended between a living person (himself) and the page (as if every moment is theatre-in-the-round) and reports on each of them, every single damn one of them and makes you like it, nothing too little to be beneath notice, even that which is deeply embarrassing, some unforgivable social faux pas, some spittle in the corner of an aging mouth….

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar, up in Scotland somewhere, by of non-sequiturs: ‘To borrow a nautical term, I'm not a little unmoored.’ … …. ‘Saw some good paintings in Glasgow, a wonderful Chardin of a woman drinking a cup of tea which was explained as imperialism!!!!’ … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake in Champaign-Urbana, and by way of his own special brand of non-sequiturs: ‘My body is an assortment of physical wonders. They've been plaguing me. So then: And another MD, a sleep specialist, added a stimulant to my stimulant. So for the first time in YEARS I'm a stimulated guy.’ … …. ‘The problem is that even a monkey can pull the trigger on a highly complicated machine gun. Of course we're no different by and large from our ancient ancestors. Why would we be? after only 2,000 or 5,000 years? Evolution is slower than Pentagon bureaucracy. What keeps you in Canada? It can’t be Justin. Are OAS checks not forwardable to Italy? Lots of Americans retire in low-cost-of-living European countries.’ … …. To which I respond: ‘In the matter of who makes a good republic, there is this: “The desires of free peoples are rarely pernicious to freedom because they arise either from being oppressed or from suspicion that they may be oppressed. If these opinions are false, there is for them the remedy of assemblies, where some good man gets up who in orating demonstrates to them how they deceive themselves; and though peoples, as Tully says, are ignorant, they are capable of truth and easily yield when the truth is told them by a man worthy of faith.” It would seem these words have not yet met the 118th Congress. It would seem these words have not yet gripped the clammy palms of one D Trump. Perhaps they will, perhaps they will not hold out against the machinations of the likes of Regina Giddens (Bette Davis) in The Little Foxes (1941) or her brothers bent on extracting the wealth of a sickly patriarch so as to take the money and run… But I am overloading a metaphor here just a tad. It will need an eighteen-wheeler by which to get around. I mean, can we really be talking about American Tarquins?’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘I don’t know why you never warmed to Bellows, Updike, Roth et al. Genetic causes? I confess to not having read a huge amount of these stalwarts [myself]. I did enjoy Updike's novel about the young basketball player. Harry Angstrom? But that was back in my teens when I fancied myself a hoopster. You and me, we could’ve shot hoops, seeing as you once knew your way around a basketball court. Bellows? I read Henderson the Rain King, or some such, set in Africa. No recollections whatsoever beyond that. Roth? Well, Portnoy of course, but no more, though I've always intended to read more. (Does that count?) Again, as for how you'd get on with them--having read so little I can't venture to say… …. I'm rereading Greene, and have to say that overall, I prefer his "entertainments" because he indulges his sense of humour more, and he has a good one when he lets it romp. His serious works are very unrompy. This raises the issue of humour in high litratchure. Humour equals triviality in many minds. Alright, so Proust could’ve done stand-up comedy. Are you going to throw Machiavelli at me too, you masquerader? The Livy discourses, yes?’

Disappointed in a Book Department: And the item is, envelope please, After Ovid, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994. Edited by Michael Hoffman and James Lasdun. Riffs on Ovid. Cogitated gibberish. Though I have yet to read the entirety of the book… I may well yet be pleasantly surprised. Because you never know. &c.

June 5, 2024: Rostovtzeff wrote: The power exercised by the successors of Augustus was merely personal, and their manner of life more than questionable; the atmosphere of their court reeked of intrigue and crime and foul scandals. How quaint that word ‘foul’, especially when applied to ‘scandal’. Still, back in the 1920s when our historian of Rome put the word on paper, it may have packed some clout. Now it would barely attract attention, the news currently feverish with ‘convicted felon’ (Trump) and all the delicious reprisals with which Republicans dream of inflicting on liberals, dance for me, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then again, I ought to point out: P M Carpenter, sagaciously astute commentator, employed the word today (June 4th) in his post for similar work. He would characterize rotten behaviour. (See link below.) There is, of course, Yeats’ foul rag and bone shop of the heart. And the use of foul is all over the place in Shakespeare, murder most foul, or, but this most foul, strange and unnatural &c.

Otherwise, apart from the wooden acting of Victor Mature and Linda Darnell (Henry Fonda was good and Walter Brennan was suitably menacing as the bad old rancher) I quite enjoyed a recent viewing of My Darling Clemetine (1946). I had not seen it before. I said, "What the hell, why not?" And I might have been watching some 17th century theatre performed for the court at Versailles, loads of perspective in those stage settings. The framing of the scenes, the camera work won me over, no matter the artificiality of the world presented. It was, consciously or not, a stand against the chaos that always dogs us, not just some narrow-minded sense of law and order. I was moved, even as I said to myself, "Steady on, boy, it's just a damn movie, and a western at that", but somebody had cared to do something well, even if some of the acting had been mailed in, even as a number of scenes were dismissable as sexist, racist, what have you, this against a backdrop of our depravity as are the lawyers and bumboys of the moment, the enabling cheerleaders with their hissing pompoms, all the sordid cast – Trump’s retainers, as they keep grabbing hold of a nation’s mind so as to squeeze it as they would a dish rag. John Ford’s Tombstone may have been entirely mythical (were there ever any good guys?), as was the Thebes Oedipus ruled over for a while, but it was real enough in the poetic sense. And if one wanted to take things further, I am sure that if one scratched the surface of the western town in which Earp brandished his tin star, one could find a syndrome or two as would exercise the mind of a Freud, if not Sophocles himself.

And I was going to say that if one reads only a bit of Proust, the Proust to read are the pages in which he treats with the young Marcel’s grandmother (in Cities of the Plain, volume four of À la recherche du temps perdu). Marcel has returned to Balbec for another season (summer) to pursue an erotic liaison with a maid and to enjoy the favours of one Albertine, just that he is waylaid, as it were, but a recurring grief for his dead grandmother who appears to him in both waking and dream moments. These passages to do with his grandmother are intense, as if he is aware of the likelihood that it is the only love he will ever feel for another human being, no matter that his own needs are always front and centre at the expense of the needs of others. (Grandmama would have preferred, to the products of a thousand geniuses, a single defect of her grandson.) In any case, the grief. It passes. Now Marcel wants to have sex with Albertine, to resume the old pleasures he had in the past enjoyed with her. I have not got that far yet, but I know that, soon enough, I am to be deposited into a strangely lit world which some critics call the Sodom and Gomorrah aspects of Sodom and Gomorrah– homosexuality, lesbianism, all the rest of it, but that the hell of sexual jealousy (and anyone can spend a season there, even the retired straight doorman, even a twelve year old Girl Scout) is the true driver of the action and so, impossible to say what pages are best to read should you wish to be acquainted with the ‘quintessential Proust’. I am sorry I even brought it up.

John Cheever, when young, admired the writing of Henry James. Then something changed, and ‘high-flown speeches delivered at dusk’ no longer intoxicated. … …. I could not imagine why he had spent so much time rigging the scenery, arranging the flowers and brewing the tea. I could hear his heavy breathing behind the walls of all those so wonderfully beautiful rooms. I felt as if were caught at some unsuitable occupation such as embroidery. (My sort of novelist walks boldly onstage, belches, picks his teeth with a match stick and sneaks a drink of whisky from the bottle hidden in the fireplace.) But the work seemed to have so little moral capacity, so little ardor that I gave up at volume five. This is heresy here and if I said as much at my club I would be dropped… …. From a letter Cheevers wrote to a Russian friend name of Tanya, 1968. Goodness, I wonder what he made of Proust? I set my investigator hat upon my head and commenced to comb the index to no avail. I took myself to the internet, surfed a bit, and gave up, as I could not get through a paragraph without some ‘window’ popping up wanting this, that, and the other thing from me. Whatever happened to hoofing it to the library, anyway?

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar would slap us all on the back and maybe buy the house a drink: ‘This is what troubles me, the fact there is no call for people like you, like me, who live by a creed for which nobody even remembers the words. The idea of a writer as something other than self-promoter…’ Then he goes on to cook for an international cast of villains, house guests, one of whom plays the mandolin and another sculpts and still another quotes endlessly Cormac McCarthy. Could be that the yuppies of the 1980s and their smugness paved a way through the wilderness for, and you will need hangtime for this, and, voilà: Trump. Could be Lunar goes a little too far with the compliment, perhaps as far as Glasgow or Yuma, even, but we will shout out, we acolytes of the fine arts bar-stooling it at the bar: ‘Roger that.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana being somewhat sanguine, but no way in the sense that all is hunkydory: ‘I'm sure there are some Proud Boy types who might go berserk violently, but I'm decidedly unsure accountants and housewives will start shooting up the town square. And all those J6ers sitting in prison might cause even the wackos to think for the first time in their lives that M-16s just might not be the answer. Then again, your average MAGA guy can be unpredictable and some would pass once again on thinking.’ … …. Could be Mr Drake, too, is in need of a drink, and who would not be, the Republican brand of politics smelling like an old peep show on every street.

Postscript IV: James Sutherland-Smith the poet sent me a brace of poems, the first stanza of one of them (Taking the Waters Again) I will cite here, rhymes and all, its antecedent Tennyson and the poem he wrote in 1840-something or Locksley Hall, and by way of a song set to Bach – about a shepherd and his sheeps:

What has changed in thirty years?
A belief in progress has become our fear
that disintegration is almost upon us,
that my gift was never more than fuss
over a formal shape and a way of talking
to myself instead of shedding tears.

(Make of it what you will. If it does not strike a chord, it may signal a grace note or beat on a cymbal or sound an air raid siren. But even pulled from context you have got a whiff of centrifugal force, the kind that accompanies four-wheel drift, half the planet trying to power its way out of the drift. Best I say no more. The poet in question has reach, and may not care for what I see in the verse.)

Postscript V: Talking Avocado: ‘Hoofing it to the library… hey, Sibum, you need to get out more. Me, I picked up my old banjo-uke which I haven’t touched in 15 years. My fingers were play dough. Had at “Hickory Wind”. Forget it, eh. Found floating belly up at the recycling depot an old copy of Hobbes’s Thucydides, that ancient warhorse. To wit: For even such of them as were worse than the rest, do nevertheless deserve, that for their valour shown in the wars for defence of their country they should be preferred before the rest. For having by their good actions abolished the memory of their evil, they have profited the state thereby more than they have hurt it by their private behaviour. … …. The latest Republican National Committee chair having himself an oration as well as some copious libation? Pericles in drag? A post-Oscar's wrap-up party? I’d ask you where all this headed, but I don’t wish to give you an excuse to indulge yourself. I can’t get through the Book of Revelations without giggling. That tells you something, doesn’t it? What’s going to happen to an entire country when all of it has to, for some reason other, forego its meds? I might dig me that bunker, after all. I apologized to my banjo-uke. Certainly, it can do better than one such as me. But who is this Drake fellow, by the way, whom you always bring on? And Champaign-Urbana? On the lee side of any tornadic action that happens to blow by? Tell me you just like the sound of it, otherwise you wouldn't bother.... Now if there were such a thing as a literary kaleidoscope that I could shake up so as to rearrange the patterns within, how often would the name John Steinbeck turn up? Was Dreiser a colossal bore? What musical instrument, if any, did Proust play? Isn't this a malaise of sorts: people going about like they and their deeds are invisible to everyone else? But people on this island don't take the tube. They walk their dogs. Roger that.’