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].