Last Day of 2019

 Not a Chinook!

caption

100 Marines have been deployed to Baghdad, to the U.S. embassy there, transported in Chinook* helicopters, not the safest mode of transportation on the planet. I don't know what this troop movement portends anymore than what this new year will bring. I wonder if I am more preoccupied with death this New Year's Eve, or not. I suppose I am. Saturday was my 77th Birthday. I didn't use it as a time to look back on my life, since I do that all the time. In fact I could say, I almost must say, that my life is about being pre-occupied with the ridiculous paralysis concerning my attempt to write about those last few years of the 1960s, when I was  25, 26, 27 years old. It is a shameful preoccupation I know, but I'm just one old man among billions, waiting for the end, as someone once said. Who was it? Was it Morris Dickstein? Can't remember. Should I stop here and Google it?  Yeah, why not. This is just between you and me after all. 

There it is. Dickstein's book, the one I'm referring to here, was The Gates of Eden, which was about the sixties, not just Lit. but the culture. Fiedler's was Waiting for the End, about the fifties. I read both books, during the appropriate decades, but insufficiently armed with the appropriate literary erudition.
Nevertheless, I soldier on. I get a certain libidinal satisfaction in knowing that the population in which I tread water is made up of mostly human beings who seem to have somehow either missed, or blocked, or have not ever been exposed to The Twentieth Century. The Dominant Culture has deemed it so. Ole Twenty C. was just too bloody, too racist, too Jim Crow, too capitalistic, too sexist. That is why Michelle Obama is so popular. She is the Queen of Historical Revisionism.
Somewhere in the above I will trust you to figure out how I have sublimated the aforesaid problem into a happy life of brow-beating who ever will listen to the glory of looking back on that 100 year period, which incorporated the beautuful rumble of the V-8 Ford, the Wright Brothers, The Saturday Evening Post, (which, granted, was already old in 1900,) Look Magazine, Radio, (Amos and Andy, Gabriel Heater), Television, (The Hit Parade, American Bandstand, Omnibus), Communism, Fascism, Stalin, Mao, Two World Wars, and most important of all, Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss!

How I approach December: Back in my drinking days, I considered the week between Christmas and The New Year, with my birthday in the middle, December 28th, to be a time when I could drink more or less guilt free. I treasured getting a "Birthday Drink", a free bottle of beer, at Sam's in East Hampton.
Although those days are long gone, this past having been my 46th sober birthday, I still consider it kind of vacation week. This end-of-December I finished up reading Carl Rollyson's bio of Rebecca West, and, at Carl's suggestion, read her The Birds Fall Down.  I read Birds obsessively, all the while thinking of Tom Wolfe's famous war with America's deep-think novelists. I wish I had had a chance to talk to Wolfe about that. To me I always think he is pulling our leg; that he isn't really that conservative. I'm conservative, but I don't throw the baby out, I just add criticism to the various sub-sects of the Left. Ya know what-I-mean?

Needless to say, Tom was important to me, but so is Rebecca. And everything she wrote, except for some of her shorter newspaper columns, was Think Piece. Birds is a re-worked novel, a version of it is part of her Trilogy....., and in some ways it is a distillation of her philosophy of Western Man, (not Western Woman), which permeates Black Lamb Grey Falcon.  The Rollyson book is purely a literary biography, as he makes clear in his bio, so I was able to reference his discussion of Birds while reading it.  This is how I spent December, up and through my illustrious birthday, almost four days ago.


*This was a mistake but it was a mistake in the press, wherever I read it, so I'm just noting it. Pictures appear to show that they were transported by Ospreys. Hope they've gotten the kinks out of those suckers after all the years of trouble they had with them.
 



 

Making Peace With the Establishment*

The deleted post, (I accidentally deleted it, just now), was titled Infinity and that's what it was about. I think about infinity often, mostly because I associate it in some way with God, which is also something I think about sometimes. I don't consider that abnormal. It would though, I think, be abnormal to discuss my deleted post, because it is so gone. So not there. It's kind of a mini-trauma, and I've had dozens of mini-traumas having to do with my PC over the years to the point where I wonder if we all shouldn't have just stayed with the typewriter. That of course is a pointless thought; much more pointless as far as I can see, than thinking about infinity. 

   So. Dealing with this mini-trauma. I feel like I just can't go on with my life as it has been in the context of this Blog, going from one obsession to another, without putting some sort of period to the latest aforementioned Life Crisis.  

   I'm going to change the subject to Consciousness, and if I somehow unconsciously, Freudianly, self-destructively, delete the blog on Consciousness, titled, 'Making Peace with the Establisment', then I may engage in self-harm. Don't say I didn't warn you.    

 

Consciousness is in me. it's my perspective. It's also, reportedly, in you and everybody, and to some extent in other sentient beings, and depending on your perspective, also in rocks. It is also, according to some of the highest ranking Physicist-Cosmologist thinkers, such as Wheeler*, Everywhere. It is what turns the wave into a photon. 

Would that include the Primal Wave and Photon coming together? That I think would be a whole other subject except to say that it would include all waves and all photons from as far as the light years can be thought of as having extended, in all the directions of the global compass. 

This of course we all understand is coming from someone who flunked elementary Algebra two times in High School, and was, finally, given all the answers by the teacher, who, I suppose I could say, was playing God. 

Consciousness is then, a part, that is to say at the very least a part; of the structure of the Universe. But more importantly, for me at least, it is also, or at least appears to be; inside my own head; my ego; my superego*, myself, my (pause) Self, my attitude, my perspective, in some contexts even, my voice, feelings, and if I am an artist, my work.     

....................

*Just the other day I finished reading Edmund Bergler's book Super-ego. A fascinating book. I think reading him has clarified the whole situation of the self-destructive neurosis more than anything else I've ever read, which is very satisfying to me, even if at this late date it's probably too late for me to become a less neurotic person and I'll just have to love myself as I am, which would be completely impossible if I didn't have my immediate family, God bless them.  

*The Establishment being Blogger, or Google or both. I'm trying to transcend my anger. Below was posted under the title ......FUCK,   ....which I changed to Making Peace Etc. I said,   
"This is a rant. I just spent an hour writing a post and accidentally deleted it! Now I've spent another hour trying to retrieve it. Is there any way I can express how sadistic I think the people at Blogger are for letting us be so screwed for making a mistake that any normal human could and I'm sure would make, does make, any time any day?  May the Bird of Paradise fly up your nose! And, bless your little hearts."     

*for Wheeler, see Wikipedia.

Princess Cassamasima and what she dragged in.

 

 

 

It might well have turned out if I had been in analysis with Edmund Bergler that he might have gotten me to confront why I always seem to be reading, along with my usual several books at a time, something by someone who is so way smarter than I am that I have to struggle, stop, do research, struggle more, and slog through for months at a time. At least that's what seems to happen with me, repeatedly, even without the help of Psychoanalysis. (Bergler would probably have said that I need a bully in my life.) Which is why I am still slogging through Slavoj Zizek's Parallax View. About which more if I ever finish reading it; but in the mean time, for whatever reason Zizek was discussing Henry James and mentioned James's novel Princess Cassamasima and intrigued, I snapped it up on Kindle and had trouble putting it down till I finished it, it being seductive as hell. My ever youthful persona had no trouble at all identifying with the main character, a young man by the name of Hyacinth. Unusual name for a boy, I thought, but I guess not so, during the time of this story. What was that time?  I'll just have to guess, so for now let's say 1880s. 

   The young man is a bastard; son of an aristocrat and a working class woman who has killed the aristocrat and is dying of consumption in a London jail. The young man is beautifully drawn and though I am not a bastard I had complete identification with him. I see myself as sweet, small, blond and precocious, even though I'm a glum portly averaged height grey-haired 76 year old.

Let me just say here that I don't seem to have much ambition towards book reviewing, something I've noticed just recently while perusing some of the reviews on Goodreads. (I've done a few Goodreads reviews myself but more on that later.) There are many awful ones and some great ones and some that are partly good. I read one just now about "Cassamasima" which I liked and which lets the reader know how good the descriptive parts are. I'll just agree with that reviewer. What I'm more interested in here is why I am drawn to the story, which is, pure and simply, the seduction. Hyacinth is seduced by an impossibly beautiful aristocrat who is the wife of an Italian, [is he Italian?] Prince, whom she has abandoned, for I guess, matters of mental cruelty or something. Our boy has recently been drawn in to a small circle of radical leftists who believe that The Revolution is at hand. And so I guess you could say that Hyacinth "stumbles" across this wealthy aristocrat who also happens to be a believer in this Just Cause.

Like Hyacinth, over the course of my long and arduous life I have stumbled across, and found quite seductive, more than one, perhaps I could say several women who in the culture in which I have lived could be considered each in her own way aristocrats; members of the privileged upper class. Like any culture of any size, like say 19th c. England or France, my 20th Century America had many kinds of upper class. Those included the Catholic, the Jewish, the WASP, the Progressive Left Wing cultural elite; all of which had their own Country Clubs, except the Left Wing, which had PEN as its international club, and included for community The New School in NYC, the Guild Hall, in East Hampton, and a long list of other appurtenances. I have been writing about these adventures in an as yet uncompleted manuscript with working title Hold On, for a decade or two, and expect to have said manuscript cremated along with my remains when it comes to that. 


On a related front, Anthony West has become my new best friend. I suppose it doesn't hurt that he's dead. He's unlikely to become a pest. But there's no doubt I didn't stumble across him by accident. I read his mother's great book about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb Grey Falcon some thirty years ago, partly because I was reacting emotionally to my father's recent death, and partly because I had evolved into a sort of connoisseur of especially good non-fiction. And once I had read that very long book I sort of realized that I was in a committed relationship with Rebecca West, to the point where I'd begun calling her Rebecca. (Her really close friends called her Cicily.)  

I've written briefly about Rebecca and Anthony's lifelong love-hate relationship with each other in another post on this blog and I would like to add that I'm unaware of any book that does justice to that long battle. It would have to be someone with the attitude of a conscientious and fair referee. Anthony was no slouch; he didn't just ride along on the coattails of his famous parents. Like his parents he didn't go to college. Unlike either parent, he started with a non-literary career, cattle farming. Eventually, though, with the help of what I expect was an autodidactic impulse, he began writing. And, eventually, he ended up in the U.S., writing reviews for The New Yorker, where he stayed for the rest of his life, living not far from this writer, on Fisher's Island, and later Stonington, Connecticut.  
O. K., let me not get away from my attachment to mother and son.  I've confessed to being in love with Rebecca, in the only way that one can be with someone who is in the Spirit World, and I've admitted a similar attachment to the son, also long gone from the material world; his being my new best friend. Therefore, I must insist that I am not conflicted on this cause. I can handle it.

I've examined at some length over my lifetime my own neurotic baggage from a childhood of having been raised by two narcissistic artists who, in laying their personalities and their relationship fireworks on me caused unavoidable covert incest [psychological, not literal] damage to be inflicted on my over-sensitive pre-adolescent psyche. (About which I hasten to add I am not whining or even complaining. My own observation about life trauma leads me to firmly believe that such trauma is the norm rather than the exception. Bergler, I believe, is supportive of this contention.)
   

Anthony West could probably have easily squeezed  Princess Cassamasima into his Mortal Wounds, which book I've just now finished reading. The first half of MW concentrates on Madame de Stael, a woman I knew something about having some years ago read a biography of her by J. Christopher Herold, (first published in the U.S. by Bobbs-Merrill, and later re-released by Time-Life books; which book I found in a used bookstore.....). 

Mortal Wounds looks at its three main subjects, (and several others in the postscript), with the help of Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis. (If that seems at first glance somewhat "middlebrow", well, chew that around on your own, my thinking is that T.A. has been well vetted.) Half of the book is taken up by Madame de Stael, the other half devoted to Madame de Charriere and then George Sand, with a Postscript that looks at D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Proust through the same lens. That all the subjects have life scripts and play roles and do transactions I won't dispute, but I would say that laying the blueprint of T.A. over the twists and turns of any novel, as helpful as it might be, and I found it to be enlightening and entertaining, and I still am impressed with Anthony West, I think that the finished work of art, novel, short story in the same way as sculpture and painting, has to submit to more than that one critique, even if you do leave out Structuralist, Deconstruction and all that French stuff. Content in itself is endless, not to mention the poetic, the spiritual, the philosophical, (he does get into Bergson where he kind of barks up the wrong tree),  ......I'm sure that while writing this book Mom's work was never far from his mind, and I'm sure that he dug around and found pathology in all of her work, being one of her toughest critics. But there's no mention of Mom here.

Note to self:  You are on a book-ban until you finish at least half of the twenty unfinished books you've bought recently; that's as of  6Nov19.  Signed, Me.
  Confession- I have violated the book-ban 3 times, Father; bless me for I have sinned. Felt compelled to buy a Kindle version of Philistines at the Hedge-Row, to re-read; as well as Lisa Chaney's bio of J.M. Barrie, Hide and Seek with Angels.  Still, the ban is still in effect, or is it affect, although tainted.
   Continuing to break the book-ban...latest is Birds Fall Down, (by R.W.), which I HAD to buy because it was recommended by Carl Rollyson who's The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West was another book-ban casualty... Which brings us to today, 12/23/19. By the way, Merry Christmas!

  

    

Semi-Annual Update, 9/25/2019

Martha and I are planning to go to the movies today to see Downton Abbey. We haven't been to the movies in at least ten years, because we have informally been boycotting the Hollywood Left Wing Black-listing Cabal. We did, though, make an exception for the movie, based on the book of the same name, The Eighty Dollar Champion, a movie about the great horseman Harry de Leyer and his champion jumper, Snowman.
Some years ago, actually in mid-summer of 1960, I sold Harry my horse, an Albino Gelding who was a not bad jumper. Harry bought the the horse for his wife. So the movie had a personal aspect for me, and therefore for Martha, who finds everything about me interesting. No surprise there, right?
As to the perennial question What am I reading? Here's the list; re-reading I'm OK You're OK, for research purposes, reading Kristina Oxenberg's book Dynasty, because she's an FB friend and I am part Montenegren Serb, by way of my Grandmother, Anastasia Ilic Prohaska; and reading my new discovery, someone I should have known about many years ago because of my purported interest in Psychoanalysis; Edmund Bergler.* I'm starting with his book The Super-Ego, because it was recommended by Ingo Swann, or at least it was in one of his bibliographies, forget which.
The above is all post Kentucky trip, where I engaged in a clinic in which I rode and learned about Icelandic Horses, and we bombed around eating at Southern Restaurants, an important hobby of ours.  

*Bergler seems to be the missing link in Psychoanalysis, about which I hope to say more as I digest his very important and well expressed body of work.The main drift of it as I see it so far has to do with his assertion of the importance of the infant's early development of masochism as a result of frustration in his oral drives, which he divides into libidinal and aggressive. So far I find his work convincing, and I suppose exciting, since I am at heart a Psycho-analyst Manque, among other monkey business.

Before letting go of this for the time being; note to Self:
Bergler's assertions are of course dependent upon the idea, (wish, hope,?); that the post-exit-of-the-birth-canal newborn is the possessor of an awareness of subjective being; which would open the door for a subject-object relationship, the object being the nipple or bottle. I'll leave it there for now; except to say that Mr. Swann had a very interesting, and potentially Jungian take on this consciousness syntax.  

 

    

On the Origin of Connecting the Dots

Excuse me for breathing. Yeah, I'm in that kind of mood. But I'm having an emotional hangover from the bad day I had yesterday. My sister called to see if I knew the origin of a couple of lithographs that she had come across and it happened that I did know; they were used in a book about Swordfish, which I happened to have right here, in my vast library. So of course I couldn't find the book and that set off a day-long battle with OCD, about which I trust you to do your own homework.

And today, when I wanted to make a note about something I'd been reading about, which note would be only vaguely related to the main subject then on my mind, I recalled that I had somewhere written about the origin of my usage of the gimmick known as connecting the dots. I know I've referred to connecting said dots, but the origin! It's important. Why it's important is because it is sort of a Meme-Trop Hobby-horse of my own human being, as it were.

It's like this. Way back when I was a little kid and lived in a house to which was attached a big studio used by my father who cranked out illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, McCall's Redbook and all the rest, (read my book),  I would on occasion when he wasn't busy wander around the studio, and what most appealed to me were the things he tacked onto his walls, which included notes to himself, sketches, letters from people, pictures, pages from magazines, photographs, and, usually near the wall phone were newspaper clippings, including one which stayed up for years which was a column written by his friend Bob Sylvester*, who had a regular column in the New York Daily News which was mostly about Broadway and movie people and occasionally about Montauk and his favorite sport, which he enjoyed along with my father, Surf-casting. I don't remember what this particular column was about but it was written in his usual style, which was to write a sentence or two about something, and then go directly to something completely unrelated, without the use of a paragraph, using instead a series of dots. Dot, dot, dot, like so. ......(Like that.)

   Well, I thought Sylvester, (That's what everyone called him, not Bob), was very cool, and I thought his use of the dot dot dots was also very cool. In retrospect one reason for my appreciation of the gimmick is that I, being attention deficit from birth could really have used that gimmick in my speech, in order to appease those who tried to listen to me converse. Well, it didn't work as speech, so eventually I started writing. Too bad I never got to have a column.

  

 O.K., so now that we're straight on that, I want to go on to the expanded use of dots about which I've already spoken in a previous blog, which is connecting the dots where there is, rather than isn't some sort of related meaning, but the writer is assuming, if not jumping to the conclusion, that there is some relativity to the two subjects, which calls for the usage of the term "Connecting the Dots", as a metaphor.

   This metaphorical usage can be an important tool for any writer, but it also happens to be an important tool for crazy people, who use it to calm their mania, schizophrenia, homicidal rage, or other symtom. [Lacan; symtome] And I, who am certifiably sane, get sometimes uncomfortable when I dabble in what is for me ordinarily a very pleasurable occupation. (Writing in the dot-dot format.)

Which leads me back to the ever hovering present. While reading Ingo Swann's book Psychic Sexuality, just now, he mentions Sinclair Lewis's book Mental Radio, which is about his, Lewis's, wife's psychic abilities; so I quickly add that to my Kindle, and now, as I happen to read more than two books during the same now period, I'm also, now, re-reading Rebecca West's biography, by Victoria Glendenning, and I'm at the point, p. 162, where she mentions her friend Dorothy Thomson, who, it turns out, was the second wife, after the Mental Radio wife, of Sinclair Lewis, and I think, well, now that is cool; or, something like "well that sort of connects some dots!" [And no, I didn't even think of referring to Ms. Thomson as Dot.]  ..........Jouissance.

*See photo above.  

 

 

Tooth Update

You might want to play Intermission Riff as background music to this. #18 molar removed last Wednesday. Took a Vicodan when I got home and another upon waking in the middle of the night. After that only Tylenol as needed. And it's still as needed almost a week later. It's not such pain but just a nagging soreness that is too close to my brain and my eye nerves and makes me feel like I am suffering from Neuralgia, a term I associate with my mother. One of her words. Don't ask.

It doesn't take much for my serenity to degrade into a common Melanie Kleinish depression, an Aginbite of Inwit with residue of Impending Doom. Ah, Residue. I remember you, my lovely.

I remember sleeping on your couch and having to pee and holding it in all night, unable to sleep but afraid of waking you in your princess bedroom and finally giving in and tiptoeing past your open door to the john and peeing and then letting myself out into the Upper West Side dawn. The night you became a Goddess.

 

Now I'm wondering about Egon Shiele and did he influence Freud. Why am I worried? Don't I think that someone has figured it all out by now? I mean, all!

Reality Boxes. Tony Bennett is a terrible painter. Sinatra wasn't much better. Bob Dylan does knock-offs of snapshots with a Magic Lantern. Ingo Swann, as a painter? Well, not part of the Modernist canon. Sam Butera did it right. One hit song and a string of hits with Louis Prima. I must be having a Tylenol buzz.

Update on the Update:  9/17/19
Just came back from the Oral Surgeon where the lady of the house, Mrs. K., had a badly abscessed tooth removed. She had to be put unconscious, for which we were both grateful. I dropped her off at  home and went to Pollo Tropical and got myself a barbeque sandwich and for her a bowl of Carribean Chicken Soup which I pulverized in the blender for three seconds and she slurped it up from a Chinese bowl and was happy.

   

Anthony West

Just finished reading Heritage, a novel by Anthony West, the son of Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. An autobiographical novel, it seems to me though that there is more than enough cover for the real-life story that is its foundation. I enjoyed reading it and thought it was very good writing, with, contrary to most critical opinion, enough love given to each of the parent figures, though the mother character gets the worst of it.

Having read just about everything that Mom wrote, starting for aforementioned reasons with her magnum opus, Black Lamb Grey Falcon,  I put off reading Anthony's book for years in order to avoid having my love for Rebecca destroyed. From her photographs, I knew that she was "My Type", which is to say beautiful and brilliant.

Rebecca was apoplectic upon reading the manuscript of Heritage and threatened to sue if it was published. (It was and she did.) She continued to harp at him about it for the rest of their lives.That's not the picture I wanted to have of my Rebecca, of course. So, in Googling around, I discovered a novel of hers I hadn't read, Sunflower, a book one reviewer said is her most autobiographical, (even though the main character is "stupid", according to herself), kind of a ditz; in more modern parlance. So I had to read it and have just started; more to come, as they say in the trade......*
I sympathized with the Anthony character in his very transparent autobiographical novel. I see resentment concerning what had to be covert incest, at least, in the mother-son relationship. No reason that I can see to doubt that it was felt and reacted upon and ground up in ego, ego ideal and superego machinations by the two of them.  Also, of course, it helps  explain the overly ego-idealized picture of H.G. Wells.(I know I'm not discovering the wheel here..)  So for Anthony it was too hard to idealize Mom and too easy to idealize Dad.

*      *      *     *

*Now it's a month later and I've just finished reading Sunflower. I had a hard time putting it down, once I started. We go inside of the mind of a beautiful woman who is very conscious of her beauty and the effect that it has on her audience, (she's a famous stage actress). Why she made Sunflower someone who thought herself stupid is probably connected to her criticism of H.G., who she felt sniped at her intelligence. (He is Sunflower's lover, the Essington character in this book.)
His sniping is often directed at what he feels is her fatal weakness; that as she ages and looses her looks she won't have enough talent to fall back on. She wants to have faith in herself, sees promise in her work; works hard to get better parts; struggles with her work like any good artist. And yet he gives her no quarter. He's a prick.
 

Now, having grown up with two artist parents; including a beautiful mother who was an artist and a model who felt she wasn't taken seriously enough, Sunflower's plight strikes a chord. I tend to give women their due as artists; poets, painters, novelists.* That even though I grew up in an environment where testicles seemed to be a part of what made artists great. Well, that was stupid then and stupid still, and not everybody paid attention to it.
 

In her long essay The Strange Necessity, she had some sharp criticisms as well as a heaping spoonful of praise for James Joyce's Molly Bloom. In fact she loves and hates Ulysses and Joyce himself. (That she hated Henry Miller is a more visceral and black and white reaction.)  

*About my own identification with women I suppose that comes directly from my access to the thinking of my mother, a woman artist who thought a great deal about creativity as a process, and was a fan of such as Stanislavsky and Nicolaides. I suppose I'll have more to say about this...and...Oh yes!  Mirror Neurons...!


I'm slowly listening to a talk on U-Tube by Ingo Swann about ESP sensitivities, and about three quarters of the way into this talk he waves a copy of the N.Y.Times which has in it an article, (2006, I think June), about Mirror Neurons, which, he says, are connected to mind reading.  Good ole Ingo.  

Connecting the Dots

  I’ve referred before to a woman friend who’s therapist  cautioned her, “No, dear, no connecting the dots. Not for you, no no no!”  I thought it was funny because I saw how true it was for her, that she could so easily be led so far astray that she couldn’t find her own way back. But I also know that the same could probably also apply to me.  And yet I am compelled to do it. Or something like it, which is that idea of the six degrees of separation. Perhaps I kid myself that playing six degrees of separation is a safer form of being master of all you survey than connecting the dots. It’s probably just another form of ego-mania. Anyway, that being so, I still intend to comfort myself with the knowledge that whenever I walk into a room and notice how many people are there, I know that there are that many egos in that room. 

I got on this subject while reading a book that I came to because it is in the bibliography of another book I’m reading. While reading the latter, I Googled the author and found that her home address was in the same building in which my sister and her late husband lived for many years. Which of course makes the connection all about me! (That’s the humorous part.)  The author’s name is Edith Jacobson, M.D., she’s a Psychoanalyst, or was, and the book, The Self and the Object World, is fifty years old, so, I don’t know her status.

I should probably say that for my connecting the dots I often have to rely on my sister for my starter connection, though not always and not always completely. As in the following: 

My significant other, when I met her 23 years ago, was the widow of a filmmaker by the name of Konstantine Kalser.  Konny, as he was called, was the son of two German Jewish immigrants who came to America as part of the same wave of immigration in which Albert Einstein arrived. Konny's father was an actor, Irwin Kalser, who played the part of the Red Cross Inspector in the movie Stalag Seventeen. Konny's mother, Irmgard von Cube, was a screenwriter who had to her credit among others the film Johnny Belinda. And Irmgard, during her travels around Hollywood, had at some moment in time an affair with Alexander Korda, who those in an ancient age bracket even ahead of mine might have known as a famous director and producer of movies in The U.K., and the United States. And Alexander’s son, Michael, a very big cheese in the publishing industry, had an affair with Margaret, the wife of my late brother-in-law, Burton Glinn, who, because Michael was also Burt’s good pal and all, divorced said wife, and later married my sister. Michael and Margaret continue to age gracefully in the horse country north of NYC.* 

Now, if I post the above, I will be leaving it to you, fellow web-surfer, to determine whether this sort of stuff is anything more than obscene titillation.

I suppose I could add at this point that I have a million of them and that they are part of what floats my boat.  

*Correction: Margaret Korda passed away April, 2017.

 

    

July, 2019, Too Hot to Ride

I've had a one half-hour riding lesson on my schedule every week for about the last ten years, but this year, after having "my own horse", that is a leased one, for several months, and after taking a few weeks off and doing nothing but reading and writing, I took a lesson this morning and found it too hot. So I've quit again.* I'll need to take a couple of lessons before I go on a planned "Clinic", at an Icelandic Horse Camp in Tennessee on Labor Day Weekend, but until then I'm sequestered at my desk in the air conditioning of South Florida Summer. I need to do the best I can under what are, at least for the time being, for a deep thinking bookworm such as me, almost ideal circumstances. The future is in the hands of God.

 I'm still reading the de Kooning bio. Seems I've been picking at it for months, but I'm enjoying being able to go back to it in small doses. For me, thinking about my misspent youth is emotionally taxing. I'm now at the point in the book where John McMahon and Michael Wright came on board, and they were part of the group that I drank with, (which to some extent added color and meaning to my otherwise grim life), and also, Lisa is growing and becoming the wild child she was. 

Also still reading Robert Kaplan's book about Romania, In Europe's Shadow. It's a bit tough getting hold of the Eastern European history of the last few centuries, but Kaplan is such a great writer that he makes it palatable even for a non-scholar like me. He rightly calls himself both a travel writer and a political journalist because that is what he is. His book Balkan Ghosts paid homage to Rebecca West's Black Lamb Grey Falcon, which book inspired me to write about my father who was born  one hundred and eighteen years ago in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.  

Also still reading Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, by Jane M. Ford, a book I was steered to by something someone said somewhere, I've forgotten where, having to do with the author's Lacanian leanings. I've been leaning on Lacan for a couple of years now, and in some way I might have deKooning to blame for that because he was always quoting Wittgenstein, about whom I'm not sure how much he knew, and about whom I haven't learned much of anything, except that he helped to start the fire which became Structuralism which is mired in Linguistics, into which I've done some peering. 

In the aforementioned incest book the author refers to James Joyce's character Stephen Daedelus doing some theorizing about Shakespeare. In Ulysses Chapter Nine, in the Library, Stephen and his cronies are talking about Shakespeare's traumatic life with his seductive and cuckolding older woman wife and his relationships with his daughters and sons as they reach a certain age and said certain age's relationship to the wife and children of Joyce himself. So I went back and read chapter nine in Ulysses,* no easy trick because there are no chapter headings in the Kindle version and I can't find the book. I can never find the book I want though others jump off the shelves at me with regularity.    

Amazon books is the biggest Library* the world has ever known, and I'll accept that it is a gift from God. In a regular library, you can just ignore the genres. Go straight to what you're looking for. But with Amazon the temptation is too great to see what all the other freaks are up to. My God! There are so many genres! I mean there are people who spend their whole lives reading about seventh graders who have super powers!

But, getting back to me, and how I, me personally that is, get Me side-tracked, let me say that from semiotics to Chris Langan is only a short distance from Ingo Swann, about whom I've been hearing things for years...

Having read Physics of The Non-Physical, by John Joseph Petrovic, just for a treat, along the lines of way back when, reading The Tao of Physics, which was intellectual candy; a sugar-free sugar-rush, and wow, Petrovic can do that thing, delivering the sub-atomic Universe to the Unwashed, (that's me), better than anybody, at least so far, and since he goes into some depth about Ingo Swann's career as a Remote Viewer for the National Security apparatus, amazing stuff, I figured I'd read one of Swann's books and it turns out he's a terrific writer and I've gobbled up several more of his books in the past few weeks.

The point being, that in Swann's explanation of how the psychic facility works he gets into the importance of visualizing pictures, instead of, or in addition to, words; and the importance of things like symbols and pictographs.

And so that has led me to order a print book, (it's not available on Kindle), Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology of the Creative Eye, by Robert Arnheim, which, if you've been following me, brings me right back to square one. Keep in touch, love 'ya.

*O.K., technically it's a bookstore.  

*If you're wondering why I have such a half-baked routine of horsemanship, it's just that I never got to be a really good horseman, I was too busy with other things until I got too old to be involved in anything really sporty, and besides you really need money to get going in the horse world, either money or extreme ambition, and I was lacking in both. Money is a touchy subject with me, so, I'll get back to you on that. The reason I take lessons, instead of just going on a trail ride, is because, one, the stable right next to my apartment is a teaching stable, oriented toward Hunter-Jumpers and Dressage, and two, a lesson is better exercise, and the only kind of exercise I'm willing to do, is riding. Period.  

*For those of you in Rio Linda, the only way to read Ulysses is with the help of Cliff's notes.That is unless you are a brilliant scholar of The Whole of Western Civilization, in which case, well, excuse me! (Me, I whipped out my Cliff's and turned to Chapter Nine.)  [I said Help of, not instead of].  

    

RJP/RIP

 My father was eighty years old when he died of a heart attack. It was early morning, Oct. 7, 1981, he was sitting by the side of his bed, having just woke up, he was dressed, with one shoe on and one shoe off, when he fell over into his bed. All that week I had been in Manhattan,  staying at my sister's apartment, working for a friend on the renovation of an Upper East Side town house. At 5:am I woke up suddenly as if jolted by an electric shock, and sat bolt upright in bed. Without a thought in my head, I got up, walked to a window that looked south on 78th St. from the fifth floor and watched as across the street on the same floor a young attractive brunette woman stood in front of her bathroom mirror, her robe open, breasts exposed, and washed her face. 

After she dried her face with a towel she began, slowly, with the concentration of an artist working on a canvas, to put on her makeup. She rubbed a cream into her face with upward strokes and strained across the sink to look closely at herself. She could have been in her mid thirties or early forties. Carefully, she worked on her eyes, brushing her brows, drawing in eye liner and adding mascara. She sponged on a base and patted on powder, and lined her lips with a lip liner; then she filled in the drawn space with lipstick. She looked at herself with what could have been a seductive look and disappeared into the faded yellow background of the rest of her apartment. I went back to sleep.  

When the phone rang, at seven, it was my mother. "Hi, I'm not sure, I think Dad is dead," she said. She had had the presence of mind to call the police. A cop got on the line. "Hi Tony, It's officer Segelkin, your mother's a little confused. I'm sorry. Your father is dead. It looks like he's been dead for a couple of hours. I'm just waiting for the coroner." I knew, immediately, that I had been awakened by my father. I felt, before I had a chance to think about it, that the woman across the street had been involved with us in some kind of synchronicity. It was a comfort.

Still, I was in somewhat stunned state as I walked to the crosstown bus to be with my sister who was staying with her soon-to-be husband. She had unnerved me on the phone, going straight into a bawling fit of grief. I however remained numb and cool. Between Madison and Fifth I saw in slow motion a cinder lofting toward me on a breeze. It landed like a meteor on the globe of my eye. The pain kept me focused until my future brother-in-law could extract it with a Q-tip. My sister, hysterical when I got there, was distracted by my eye problem and began to rearrange furniture in anticipation of moving in.

Helping her move an antique high-boy in the hallway, I felt my back go out as I lifted my end. It felt like ripping flesh but didn't become paralyzing pain until my days chores were done; driving my sister out to the East End, and comforting her and my mother. 

                                                                                  

I was home alone when the Funeral Director called to say my father's ashes were ready; mother and sister were out shopping for groceries. I became too anxious to wait, and dragged my still spasming back off the couch, walked down the gravel driveway through the scrub oak woods to the highway and started walking into town. I was picked up by a guy I went to High School with, a stocky, bristle-cutted carpenter, who I'd never really gotten to know real well, and who turned out to be a soft spoken, nicely sympathetic man. I explained my mission, he dropped me off in front of the Funeral Home, and I was welcomed into the office of Mr. Yardley, the owner of the business, and given a small cardboard box, the size of a pet rock, the old man's ashes, and his Bulova watch, a new model, thin, with a blond leather strap. For a second, I felt lucky, like it was unexpectedly Christmas.  A watch.  I'd inherited something.  

   

Just to the South of Montauk light, at a fishing spot he loved called Caswell's, while my mother and sister stood on the shore weeping and throwing wild rose petals into the air, I stood in pain, on a slippery rock, and shook the old man's ashes from the little box into a tidal pool. The energy it took to cope with the pain in my back worked better than the strongest mental straight-jacket tranquilizer to keep me from feeling much emotion. I could only focus on my task at hand, and guess at what my feelings might be. I felt like a soldier. I felt like I was doing something heroic just being there.

    

The old man had been born in a seaside hamlet in Yugoslavia, to a Roman Catholic Croat father and an Orthodox mother. Though not religious, he considered himself a spiritual man who had been blessed with certain special dispensations because of his being an artist.
When I had gone off to college in my late teens, my mother called to say she had talked the old man into getting married in the church. (Catholic.) I was surprised by this sudden concern with religion, I expected it came mostly from my mother, who had intermitant bouts of religiosity, and I was doubtful that he would go through with it.

  

He did, but when the priest told him he would have to attend Confession and Communion, he said matter-of-factly that he had no sins, and the priest accepted his proclamation. He charmed his way straight to Communion and a quick ceremony and was back in his studio in a couple of hours.

From:  Hold Still, a memoir in progress, by me. 

Annual Report, 6/21/2019

For the record:  I'm six months into my 76th year.  My sister, who is three years younger than me, broke her little toe last week. She plans to travel to London in a few days so I hope her toe will be alright. My significant other, Martha, continues to divest herself. This is slightly unnerving to me.

On a lighter note, we have a nice selection of birds in our yard; that is our yard we share with other condominium residents. We have Muscovys, Herons of various types, Egyptian Geese, Black Ducks, Whistling Ducks, Mud Hens, a nesting Thrush family, an Osprey, and other's I can't think of. Also, looking out the window I can see the Riding Stable where until recently I was half-leasing a Missouri Foxtrotter named Spirit. It's gotten too hot, so I've taken a sabbatical, after which I'll ride one half-hour a week just to keep my seat so that I can go to a week-end "Horse-camp", on the way up North Labor Day Weekend.

The reading list is as follows; still reading, very slowly, a bio of DeKooning, titled DeKooning*, which puts me into a state of fascination with the Bill centered life the pleasure of which I can only stand for short bursts. DeK. was something in the way of a combination Rock Star and stuffed animal, mixed with a stand-up act. He was the center of gravity in the world that I, as a mostly silent observer, lived in from pre-adolescence into middle age. I'll probably still be picking at it all through this hot Florida Summer.

My excuse for stopping the horse lease had to do with wanting to build up some energy toward doing some writing. We'll have to see where that goes.

I'm reading what used to be known as a dirty book. Mandingo. It's about slavery. In the mid-sixties, while living in Manhattan, it seemed to be what everyone was reading on the subway and on buses. I probably would have been ashamed to read it at the time, it having to do with what seemed to me to be a taboo subject, but its appeal back then seemed to be mostly prurient. I wasn't in to prurient at the time, being focused on romantic drinking. Now I'm reading it to see what I missed. I'm sure confessing to reading it brands me a racist. Luckily, it doesn't matter because I'm not famous. And I'm not rascist. And if you still have doubts, then I'll say I'm a Lacanian.

    I'm still reading The Portable Chris Langan, re-reading Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, a fascinating book, first-reading Robert D. Kaplan's In Europe's Shadow, his book about Romania; I'm picking through Balzac's Droll Stories, Picking at Sizek's The Parallax View, quite difficult going, re-reading John Petrovic's Physics of the Non Physical, wonderful book, just finished Ingo Swann's Penetration, (loved it), am now half way through his book Reality Boxes, which finds me sort of hooked on the late Mr. Swann, and that's about it.

In the car, while doing errands, I listen to Legends Radio, out of Palm Beach, and I'm hooked on that, the American Songbook, because I love Keeley, and Ella, and Tony Bennett, (though not his painting), and Louis Prima and a cast of thousands.

I also spend a few minutes each day watching old clips of Rodeo footage on something called The Cowboy Channel, which I don't know why Comcast gives me, but for which I'm grateful.That's about it; right now I'm watching the Royal Ascot with the sound off. On behalf of Equines everywhere, I should say God Bless the Queen.

*7/23/2019  Finished reading the de Kooning book. I very much enjoyed it, and think it's one of the better artist's biographies I've read. During all his days living in East Hampton his charisma as well as the power and beauty of his work were a key ingredient of the Zietgiest that was Springs in those days. I knew many of the people in his circle and had a knowledge of his earlier life that I learned both through reading and by listening to various artists and art-world people including my parents. Of the women in his life that I knew I especially liked Elaine and Susan Brockman. I had coffee and/or breakfast on many occasions with Elaine at Eddies Luncheonette in East Hampton Village. I knew Susan through a small group of friends that often gathered at the home of Dick Schuste. The group included Carlos Anduze, Carlo Grossman, Dick's daughter Toby, and Neil Noland, and perhaps one or two others that I can't recall. It was around that time that Dick became ill with lung cancer and died.    

   

Politics

I think the entire political left has foundered like a leaky old boat. It's just an unfortunate mixture of the failure of Socialism as a way to construct society and the runaway success of the disease of Pathological Altruism. It's not more complicated than that, and it is very reasonable to assume that, because they cannot be cured and continue to propagate and find new dupes, there is nothing that can be done; that the U.S. is doomed to collapse into Venezuelanism.
But perhaps not! Something is holding us together, and that something is the populism that Donald Trump seems to have created on the fly, out of his enthusiasm for building something, anything, as long as it's well built and he can be proud of it.What's gluing this leaky old tub together is that a group of deplorable working-class wage slaves have pitched in and given this unlikely ship captain a deck to stand on. What it's done for me is given me enough faith to wait and see what happens next, to not think I have to re-discover the wheel with every new set-back or challenge, to let someone else drive the car or ride the horse or pick the metaphor; I don't feel I have to flap my wings anymore to keep the plane in the air, the way I did while Obama was so cavalierly carrying out his Western Marxism game-plan.

Prior to writing the above, like, five minutes ago, I had posted a crappy poem I'd written in the hope that I could bait someone to criticize it, in order to get some attention. I deleted it. The above  probably has a better chance of getting a rise out of someone.     

Affect vs. Effect; Gibran not Kayyam.

Affect is an important word among the burgeoning world of the DSM4, (or is it 5?).  Whatever it is, one needs to be proficient. Affect is a verb, effect, usually, the noun. Though effect can be a verb, as in "if you are unable to effect a surprise it won't be a very good surprise party",  (I looked it up).  How it came up was that I was reading a little piece in a book about NYC and it's old buildings that were the scene of death and haunting and there was a chapter on The Tenth Street Studios, where my father had his studio during the years of my birth and early childhood, and where, across the street, at 14 West 10th, our little family then lived. And as I perused the short article and looked at the two pictures of the aforementioned buildings, I thought of the effect on my affect that that early location might have had on my bright little blank slate of a mind.

The book is Ghosts and Murders of Manhattan, part of the series Images of America published by Arcadia Publishing and written by Elise Gainer. The building 51 West 10th was built in 1857 by Richard Morris Hunt who had an architecture school there. Frederic Church and Winslow Homer showed paintings there. John LaFarge, painter, muralist and stained glass designer worked there, and his ghost was often seen walking through its walls after his death in 1910. In spite of LaFarge's frequent hauntings, in the 1940s a group of early modernists called the Bombshell Artists had their meetings there; Kahlil Gibran lived there from 1911 to 1931, and during my father's tenure, 1942 until some time in the 1950s, Phillip Guston had a studio there.

And across the street was my first home on this earth. Here the author of "Ghosts and Murders" refers to another author, Jan Bryant Bartell who wrote a book about that side of the street:

 

Author and actress Bartell wrote the book Spindrift: Spray From A Psychic Sea, detailing her many strange experiences while living on the beloved Tenth Street. Plagued by oppressive shadows, footsteps, the sound of breaking china, and repeated visits by the ghost she came to call "The Lady in White," Bartell left the [14 W..] neighborhood, only to return three and a half years later, moving into the house next door to where the frightening activity had occurred. Peace eluded her there as well when she became convinced the house was cursed after death had visited nine of the 10 families living there."

 

 

Bartell died shortly after leaving. Twenty years later, five year-old Lisa Steinberg died from physical abuse committed by her father,  Joel Steinberg and her mother Hedda Nusbaum, while living at 14 W. 10th.  I am, frankly, glad to have survived. 

  My mother, who never informed me about the ghosts, (unless I have forgotten), did tell me that there was a plaque on the front of the house saying that Mark Twain had lived there. Twain left after only one year, complaining that his wife couldn't keep up with all the housework. He did though confess that he'd once seen firewood moving around in the storage room of its own accord. As for myself, I have seen, or heard, or felt many creepy things, both flying through the air, and making strange noises after dark. All sorts of things have effected me to the point where I often appear to have a "flat affect".  

Martin Amis

First I read his father, Kingsley Amis; his book Lucky Jim. I don't really remember what it was about it that I liked, in fact nothing about it, except that I was living in London at the time, being a relatively happy and content young alcoholic; living with my mother, father, and sister in a nice flat in Hampstead. It was a very civilized respite for me from a life that had gone a bit off the rails do to my hanging out with a bunch of barflies and subjecting my sensitive brain to a variety of drugs in addition to too much beer and too many rum and cokes.

I was twenty years old. My sister was sixteen. Grown men were persuing her. No one was persuing me because I was painfully shy though I hid it behind a kind of don't-bother-me-I'm-busy-thinking persona. I may have fooled someone; anything's possible.    

I had just come back from a hitchhiking trip through the U.S. South and Mexico which was in plain fact a rum and pot binge. I had been notified that I was going to be drafted within the year. The idea of being drafted struck fear into my heart. I couldn't think of anything positive about it, other than I might get killed. (I had a melodramatic side.)  The day after I got back from Mexico J.F.K. was shot. The country came to a standstill. The little village of Amagansett, N.Y., which I still considered home, though I'd grown up enough to have been to two years of college and done some bumming around, likewise ground to a halt. People didn't say, "What the Fuck" yet, but that's what everyone was thinking.

My father was in London, trying to form a company that would sell second-rights of American illustrators to European Magazines. He had two British partners who were wining and dining him prior to squeezing him out. Pa, as I called him, was living on a $10,000 nest-egg. When he heard the news, he called home. He said that London was in mourning. They loved JFK. Pa said he was very depressed and he needed us, all three of us, to come to London.

We needed to be needed; by him. So, we bought three cheap tickets on The Queen Mary. Mine was the cheapest, D Level, right next to the engine room. I shared the room with two middle-weight boxers, cockney or some other lower level Englishmen, with whom I made myself scarce. My drinking aboard ship was a little excessive but I would like to share that for a separate blog post, or I'll never get to Martin, which was my original intent. (I approach this blogging thing with the idea that there is an established aesthetic which goes throw it out and see if it sticks.) 

We landed in Southampton around the first of December 1963 after a very rough crossing; swells breaking over the bow of the old Q.M. all the way. I remember seeing a hatch cover flying eastward like a bird, to the north of us, while to the south, in the middle of the Atlantic, The France passed us steaming West with the wind.

Almost as soon as we made it to Hampstead, I signed up for National Health and managed to get  a scrip for Miltown for my daily consumption. Combined with a temperate use of the Watney's Pale Ale that my father had discovered could be bought in gallon jugs that had a spigot so you could just go to the fridge and grab a cuppa, I managed to keep myself in the most tranquil state I had ever been in, in my whole life, (which is probably why I remember London so fondly), for as long as we were in the U.K., which was until sometime in the spring of '64.        

While in London I adopted the air of a cultured young Anglophilic American.  I read Penguin books; I went to the British Museum and The Tate Gallery with my father and let him share with me his enthusiasm for, in particular, Turner, and Titian. I fell in love with the Elgin Marbles, possibly with the help of that Miltown buzz....We went to the Whitechapel Gallery to see a Jasper Johns show, and I was able to follow Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orolovsky around and eves-drop on them as they raved and gesticulated over Johns's work. (That show re-kindled for awhile my desire to be an artist, which I later gave up, again.)  With my mother, I went to the ballet and saw Nuryaev[sp.] and Fontaine in Swan Lake and to the theater where we saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe with the original cast.

I read Kingsley Amis. I dug deeper into D.H. Lawrence,  re-read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; read the Scandal Magazines, kept up with The Beatles through the Telly, though we never got a record player while there, discovered a pub on Hampstead Heath, The Bull and Bush, where a very posh group of young Jewish kids hung out, though I felt too shy and inferior to make much of an impression on any of them. They really were extremely worldly, well educated and glamorous, and my timidity probably had some wisdom in it.

All of which is to say that I have a bit of London in my history, and since in my sunset years I have become a respectable reader, I knew I had to catch up with Martin, someone I'd neglected.  ...So, I read his Experience, and his book about Stalin, Koba the Dread.  I Googled him. (I Google everybody, even you..), ...I began to compare his Oedipal Resolution with mine. O.K., I suppose that's something I do reflexively and should be ashamed of...., and then I read him someplace flapping his gums about Late Capitalism, something which he greatly abhors, along with anything right of center having to do with The Western World, and I began to think I needed to get to the bottom of that; so I read Money. Gawd! It should have been called Booze!  I mean, O.K., the guy in it drinks exactly the way I did, when I was an active Dipso, except that he had more money to drink with! And he is big and fat, bigger than me or Martin, and so he won more fights. But after reading through five or ten drunks I wanted to give up on it, yes it is stylish writing, the guy is a walking Star Turn after all, but I was ready to give up, except that I figured I should keep going, see if I could find the key to, the Rosetta Stone of, the syntactical meta-language of, Late Capitalism.

Did I mention that among all the fictional characters, and the fictional names for late Capitalism's modes of transportation which is to say automobiles, and for the Hollywood Stars that his primary character comes in to contact with, there is one real character, Martin Amis, who makes an appearance! And that Martin ends up being very wise and also very good at Chess? It's nice to see that as good as he is, he's also no slouch at self-promotion.

Self-defeating Rats

                                                     Self-Defeating Rats

Pavlov's experiments with dogs, Roger Williams' experiments with rats, Freud's journey from Catharsis to the Repetition Compulsion and the popular excitement for B.F. Skinner's Behaviorism during the sixties; these are the subjects we have come together to discuss today.  Or, to put it another way, this is my second attempt to write about my father, the first attempt having been deleted, after being left up over-night. As I have often said, "Thank God nobody reads this Blog!"

There I go being too negative again. The thing is, see, that it can't be done. The Poor Me thing, that is.  It won't work. You can't talk about your neurosis and how it led you down a consistently bleak road with no happy ending. At least I can't. Maybe if I was Louis Ferdinand Celine.

I can tell you though, there were times when I was growing up that I felt like a rat undergoing some sort of experimentation.

Let me jump forward in time. I'm now in my advanced years, and am being asked to discuss my relationship with my father. By whom? By myself. Here's the cliche appropriate to that; "Self!, say a few words!"

......

Well hell yeah!  One of the people who read my book and had some nice things to say about it, and who I trust because she is a professional editor and a good poet besides, said something to me that I was surprised, and pleased, to hear, and that was that she could tell that I loved my father very much.

And that is the real point. Though indeed my father was difficult to live with, being occasionally hurtful, even violently so, there were also long periods of time when he was fascinating and fun to be around. Watching him paint, I was often transfixed. Watching him sort of tune himself up listening to Jazz, was instructive. Fishing with him was like bird-watching with Audubon. It was 3-D color poetic fishing.

And then I grew up. The book I wrote successfully if I do say so myself illustrates the community and the environment that I grew up in, and could, I think, supply an introduction to the story of my adult life.

The raison d'etre of such a second volume of  historical memoir, working title My Adult Life, would be three-fold; that I became an alcoholic and an abuser of drugs; that at some point I got into recovery and stayed for a ridiculously long time, perhaps even unto death, and that as the son of an artist I was confronted with particular problems along the lines of Living in the Shadow of the Great Man", which adds the confessional genre to the mix.

I am leaving aside the question of whether my father was a great man in historical terms, with confidence that there is enough truth in it for my purposes. I'm trusting my self, in other words, a good sign that I'm not stuck in the muck.

You could say that I killed the pain of being a self-defeating rat with alcohol and a variety of chemical accessories, including occasional illegally possessed barbiturates, benzodiazapan type pills, Miltown, and types of amphetamine such as the all-time favorite, Dexamil, (patent pending), chrystal meth, not to mention more marijuana than is recreationally advisable.    

The long period of sobriety came next, and lasted from May Day, 1974 up to and including and perhaps in continuance, to the same day, 1 May, 2019, which is tomorrow, Wednesday.  I'll have 45 years of clean and sober life. That's a certain kind of success, though one wedded to an anonymous fellowship and which I would be unwise to flaunt to the lay public, for a variety of clinical and ethical reasons. Anywayz, as I like to say, that brings me to the next subject.

P.S.  The "next subject", implies both a sequence and a goal, neither of which apply at this time.