Proust at the half-way mark

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Black Horse Classics, (complete set) I'm at Chapter 1, Location 28243, 55%.

The Parallax View, Location 6412 55%

, The Strange Necessity, Rebecca West Location 1804 48%

Snow White, Donald Barthelme

My mother would be 110 this year, if she were still alive. She had me when she was 35.  I'll be 76 next week, on the 28th of December. I mention this as a way of calming myself after having my usual difficulty getting this Blogger account to work for me. It reminds me of when my mother tried to use the telephone answering machine. I remember hearing her first message; it was so touching. She sounded like someone trapped in an elevator and calling for help. I should hire someone to help me learn some of these computer tasks that I get stymied with over and over.

But now I'm here and I thought I'd review my reading schedule, which is very important to me, and something I approach in a sort of intuitive way. I usually read three books at a time, and that's what I'm doing now. Also, I feel that the Elves, or some unconscious drive causes me to collect three books which dovetail in interesting ways. Possibly, I arrange this approach and make it unconscious so as to amuse myself. Whatevah. But it always feels as if I stumble onto these books that are dissimilar and then find the dovetailing as I read.  

I read Swann's Way last year, and recently found the complete volumes on Kindle and so am tackling the rest. I read Girls in Flower, and now I've just started Sodom and Gomorrah, Part 1, chapter 1.  That's 55% into the whole thing, for what it's worth. No page numbers on Kindle, for you fellow old people. [Update; I'm now at 82% in Kindle terms]

Along with the above, I started reading Zizek's The Parallax View, which is so tough going that I may never finish it; I read it in dribs and drabs and go over things; it is about reality, and seems like a more subjective working of what is is than that of Chris Langan, whose Collected Works I have no right to even think I can understand, but which I insist on thinking that I can understand "All but the Math parts", that being a quote from me.  

Somewhere along the line, before I got back to Proust, I saw that a collection of Barthelme was cheap on Kindle so I bought it and read Snow White, which I felt had a soothing affect on my mind, so within a couple of weeks, I read it again, which I thought was so clever of me, and so prophylactic of what might have been reading-confusion, as in Why am I tackling Proust? ..that I did it for a third time, and now have decided to tell a friend, if I can dig one up, that reading Snow White is a thing; or perhaps a cure-all, similar to what Tumeric seems to be for a number of people. 

The Strange Necessity is a long essay by Rebecca West, which makes up more than half of a book of essays; a collection. Does it dovetail with the rest listed above? Not sure about that; it drew me in to the point where I'm reading it over more carefully. In it West insists that James Joyce is a genius but one with Bad Taste. It's hard to tell exactly where the bad taste is even though she points out what she doesn't like very carefully. It must be me. I keep thinking that she's being awfully harsh on Joyce for some ulterior motive. I will keep looking.

The essay than takes an admiring look at Pavlov and his Opus about which she made me so curious that I must look into it more carefully....at some point...........

 

A Mule in my Future?

                                                  The Mule Problem

As a child I wanted to be a cowboy. I began my reading career with horse books, particularly those by Walter Farley. Before my family became one of the first in town to have a television, I listened to  The Lone Ranger on the Radio, and when television kicked in around 1950, (I was eight years old), well, I missed the radio, because television was so boring, at least during it's early days. T.V.'s first decade of life began with the likes of Philco Playhouse and Omnibus, interesting only to a minority of Trotskyite eggheads like my parents. The real growth spurt of the medium came, finally, after we, the patient American public, had endured a few long years of that tripe, when the medium discovered the efficacy of producing its own Westerns, and from then on, it was All Westerns All the Time, at least until they discovered Cop Shows.   

And even before adolescence kicked in I had been attending the popular Western Movies that were shown at the local movie theater at the Kids Saturday Matinee, which usually consisted of numerous cartoons, followed either by one of the series; Francis The Talking Mule or a Roy Rogers or a Gene Autry movie, followed by a feature film, more than likely something that included Glen Ford or Jimmy Stewart and a female star such as Susan Hayward.

 

So needless to say, my fantasies especially in my youth were often in the Western genre. To illustrate; well into adolescence, during my second year of college, [my adolecence lasted another ten years], while I was flunking out, and in order to assuage the anxiety of that painful period, (I was in NYC)  I would go to double, and even triple feature [yes there really were triple features] Western movies, on 42st.  It was an easy trip, coming back from school there was a subway stop right by all the movie theaters. I saw all the John Wayne movies up to that date, 1962, and all the Audie Murphy movies, and many others of the somewhat lesser stars. I preferred the Murphy movies mostly because the horses were Quarter-Horses, well fed and shiny coated, and did lots of galloping up and down the sides of mountains. To this day, my favorite style of horsemanship is Western Movie Freestyle.     

The reason I bring this up is, I still fantasize, and I'm sure it's become a pathological problem. You see, for me to believe I can BECOME something or other, "when I grow up!", is ridiculous!  As of this writing, fer Crissakes, I'm 75 years Not young!  To make matters even more complicated, these days my daydreams seem most of the time to involve mules.

That's right. Mules; the reason for that is because when I discovered U-tube, a few years ago, I found a few videos of people riding mules in the rocky mesa Western Movie country and the mules were incredibly nimble, almost like Mountain Goats, which appealed to my freestyle riding self-image.  So I started researching Mules, and I came upon some videos of a lovely woman with silver grey hair  who was busy raising Donkeys and Mules, out in Tennessee.*  She had tons of video on her day-to- day work with her equines, and with her encouragement, (she turned out to be charismatic and very smart and funny), I got hooked.

I learned about the history of the American Mammoth Jackass, and how that equine is used to raise the American Mule which has done so much to assist, well.....I was going to say our country, but the truth is the Mule has been, along with it's Mama, the horse mare, the muscle behind the Proto-Indo-European, otherwise known as Western, Civilization. 

So I dream about owning a mule.  I dream about prowling the countryside on my mule, particularly up and down hills, and draws, canyons and mesas, and through deserts and forests and all-over-Hell- and-gone, and imagine that I've learned how to ride and handle my mule, much different then a horse because he, or she, is smarter, and more thoughtful and discriminating, (like me I should add), and going to Bishop Mule days, (which means I need a truck and a trailer), and, in the mean time, I go to a local farm and rent a horse, and ride through mosquito infested South Florida jungles and down the Power Lines, with a crew of nice ladies a half-century or more younger than I am, and at night before I turn on the news I spend a few minutes reading my Western Mule magazine.

I think I should add here, that all in all, I'm a quite content old man.

*Deb Kidwell

Lake Nowhere Farm

Martin, Tennessee

      

  

The Little Prince

                                                                The Little Prince

(Some months ago, on my new Kindle, I started reading Stacy Shiff's Bio of St. Exupery. (At the same time I reread The Little Prince.) During that time I went a little crazy and downloaded way too many books, too much ahead of my reading speed capacity for comfort. On that account, lately, I've put myself on a book-buying ban and am trying to catch up, concentrating on reading said Bio, and the horse book, to which I'll refer down the line; Raulff, Farewell to The Horse.)

I first became aware of The Little Prince sometime in 1961, when I saw it lying on a coffee table in the apartment of a friend. Perhaps it was when it first came out in English, in paperback. Was it a children's book? That wasn't clear to me, or perhaps to anyone. But my friend's girlfriend had bought it as a gift for him. She understood, I now know, that it was a poetic myth about love, disguised as a children's book.   

My friend, who happened to look a bit like an adult version of the book's main character, had orange-gold curly hair and blue eyes, and he had a somewhat princely demeanor. We were both about eighteen at the time. Einar, that was my friend's name, wove the book into his myth about himself, which he created every day, and which changed through the years, but which had to do with Life-Style, Mysticism, getting stoned, getting hip, and being part of a new form of Bohemianism. The book became part of the literary canon of my particular microcosmic social set as we went through the sixties in hipster mode.(The better educated hipster, particularly in 1961, had the French version of the book.)

Perhaps I should insert a book list here, but let me suffice to say that  for my small group it was the gospel according to Salinger, Kerouac, Wm. Goldman's The Temple of Gold, other books of varying import, and eventually, The Whole Earth Catalogue. ( One book in particular, though, that was noticeably absent in our clique, but present in many of the more egg-headed households and crash-pads that we visited as we slowly branched out socially, was that scary tome,Godel, Escher and Bach. I still feel bad about not being able to wrap my head around that one. )      

[Time lapse..]

 ......I've finished the St. Exupery Bio now, having begun to read it with more focus and intensity, what with all the pressure on myself, from myself, and I am perversely pleased, (I have a past), to find that St. Ex, which his friends called him, had a mistress, (well didn't everybody?), who happened to be very rich, and married, and in the 1930s had an apartment on Beekman Place, in NYC, where the great Me was conceived though not born. (My parents moved when my mother was expecting, out of respect for the other tenants who didn't want a crying baby in the building). The parents had been living there for a few years and had many friends in the neighborhood including the great "Wild Bill" Donovan, who a few years later became head of the O.S.S.

The mistress, who was married, beautiful, and rich, and, like St. Ex., an official French aristocrat, was, in the Bio, given the discrete name Mrs. B. Before going on about Mrs. B. though, I should say that St. Ex also had a wife, and in fact she was the kind of woman every cult figure that I've ever identified with over the years always seems to have been; that woman who was Henry Miller's June, Frank Sinatra's Ava Gardner, Anais Nin's, well, June, Dali's Gala, and Ad "Femme Fatale" Infinitum. In short, a Hero's Wife, as Joseph Campbell would have had it. Saint Ex's wife was named Consuela, and by halfway through the Bio I was in love with her.   

Mrs. B.'s real name was Helene, and in 1927 she had married Count Jean de Vogue, a friend of St. Ex. and fellow French Aristocrat, and thus Helene had become one of the richest women in France. Word of mouth has it that she and St. Ex. started hooking up around 1934.  

   He called her Nelly. It didn't take Consuela too long to find out about Nelly because St. Ex foolishly left some of her perfume scented love letters lying around.This led to tempestuousness on the part of the Latin Vixen, but that's sexist.Well, St. Ex. was sexist. Anyway, Consuela fooled around quite a bit too, particularly when St. Ex. was flying all over the hell-and-gone for Aeropostal and later the French Air Force.

St. Ex's circle paid little or no attention, it seems, to the ease with which Nelly crossed Nazi, Vichy, and other European borders, but in retrospect it began to seem that she might have been some sort of spy. That would have made it handy for her to have a Beekman Place Apartment and to be chummy with Wild Bill. Anyway, when I find out who's side she was really on, I'll make it a P.S.  

  

How I got into the clutches of Nelly de Vogue and Consuela de St. Exupery goes something like this.

I read Emigre New York, by Jeffrey Mehlman, which was about the French community in NYC during the Second World War.  How I came to that book was that I had been reading several books about Structuralism;  Foucault, Lacan, et. al, and at the same time a book about Surrealism, and was intrigued to find that Max Ernst had befriended Levi-Strauss during that expatriate period. I find the interest that the two shared in American Indian artifacts, among other things, interesting, and also the the ties between Structuralism and Surrealism.