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.

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.

  

Recursion

                                                                 

Last October during a visit to my sister's place, I was intrigued by a new coffee-table sized art book,  Stuart Davis, In Full Swing. It was prominent on top of a pile of other impressive books, drawings and photographs. Elena is good friends with Davis's son Earl and had gotten the book as a gift. Having decided I had to have a copy, and rather than trying to wheedle one for free, (hateful practice), I did the right thing. I bought it on Amazon. One gold star for me, and another buck-fifty for Jeff Bezos.

 What strikes me having gotten a little into the text, (there's lots of text even with the multitude of reproductions), is the importance of recursion in his work. This, I take it, from the history given in the first chapter, could well have been at least influenced by his reading in philosophy, which was urged on him by his teacher, Robert Henri. Recursion, the repetition of patterns, is important in the thinking of Kant and Hegel, two philosophers I've been slowly learning more about as I  make my way through Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics and Morals.

 Henri, an Ashcan School painter, insisted that his students read philosophy and history, A good idea it seems to me, and obvious, once I see it in print, but not so, before. Thank you, writer of said chapter, Harry Cooper.

Recursion; thought for the day?  Idea of the month?  We'll have to see.

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

Next day, while eating a bowl of chili for lunch, I'm leafing through a book of Saul Steinberg's, The Inspector. The first dozen or so drawings are recursive; line drawings of Steinberg characters marching with their two dimensional selves repeated with lines repeating back toward, but not to, infinity. Infinity is a separate subject, and I don't see Steinberg grappling with that. Maybe I just haven't seen it yet.

Seeing is what it's all about, as far as that goes; recursion is something that is perceived. It's a big part of what reality is made up of. You can see that at Lego Land!

Should I say that for the past year I've been sneak-peaking at Chris Langan's CTMU?  No? Too risky?

 

What am I Reading?

12/24/2017

Well I've been re-reading Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology and his Prometheus Rising.  Really kind of Intellectual candy, from my perspective. Even though he comes down on the Wrong side, politically. Anyway, he's dead, I think, so I'm not hurting his feelings.

Also, a translation of Mayakovsky poems entitled Backbone Flute.....and The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig..., Introducing Logic, a Graphic Guide, by Cryan, Shatil and Mayblin;  Saint-Exupery, by Stacy Schiff....The Book of Mules, by Donna Campbell Smith;  Algebra for The Terrified, by Kenneth Williams, (and also by Kenneth Williams, his How to Really Calculate in Your Head, which improved my calculating ability so much I can hardly believe it and for which I am grateful to Mr. Williams), and a few other things that are either too quirky or too low-brow to admit to, since I'm so vain. (I suppose everything I read or do could be thought of as quirky and low-brow, but that's for another discussion..)

Also, in recent history I've read several books by Libbie Hawker, including Mercer Girls, Tidewater, and Baptism for the Dead.  Hawker is someone I discovered while trying to veer away from the NY literary Mafia.

Oh, and The Bohemians, by Ben Tarnoff, a nice book.

To Be Continued:...............

Ranting about Artists; June 23, 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know pretty much what my personal problem with artists is, which is envy mixed with anger; it started with the Oedipus complex, but then it also has to do with my general make-up which is low Chutzpah, minimal draftsmanship ability, and general Avoidance Personality Disorder, all of which are motivation for my major annoyance at the Art World..

But my main complaint concerning said World today is that I'm really unable to create new friendships with artists or to keep old ones going. And that's frustrating because I've been fascinated with the process of making art all my life, and have studied artists with fascination since, when? Day one! [ That's true, absolutely. ]

My fascination started with a dialogue with my mother, under the heading of What Makes Dad Tick.  Which is to say that it is a discourse going back before time began. It starts with having a certain awe, combined with the love of a paternalistic God. But the text was always there, to paraphrase Lacan, et. al. including Heidegger. This of course I've written about in my one book, [see; Anton Prohaska ] and will attempt to delve into in #2, should I live so long; and was best wrapped up in a nutshell by a book by the noted Psychiatrist and Analyst and friend of Artists, Dr. Daniel Schnieder, in his book Psychoanalysis and The Artist, which I perused when it was new and I was young, and re-perused, read and read again. If I'd been rich, and older, I could have gone to Schniedz, as he was called by his in-crowd of clever and fortunate and in some cases famous patients; and if such a thing had come to be, I would now be someone too successful for words, rather than this person who seems content to be Blogging about himself to an audience of three.

Of course then during the early days of my protracted adolescence, which lasted in to my early thirties, I fell in love with Henry Miller, and read everything he wrote, so that I felt I was partly him, and then of course had to read all of Anais Nin, which was all entwined with Otto Rank who was her therapist and lover, and the one who took artists apart in the most intricate and convincing way of anyone before or since; so that when I fell in love with a lady artist and quickly made a mess of it and had to leave for The Coast, where I planned to "get myself together", (it was the early seventies), the first thing I felt compelled to do after checking into a piss-in-the-sink hotel in Chinatown in San Francisco and after having a good Northern Italian meal in North Beach, was to find a good used bookstore and get a copy of Rank's Art and Artist; which meant that I needed to allow for an extended sabbatical on limited funds, and also meant that I would have to start taking notes.

And in those days, and up to that time in my life, I'd had not much trouble finding artists as friends, not just because I lived in an artist colony, but because I was a good drinking buddy. And when I got to San Francisco, while there weren't many painters around, I fell in with a group of poets, and a few Jazz musicians, without even trying. They just appeared. By the time I was in San Francisco for a month, I was being mistaken for a local. (I also became friends with a whole tribe of third generation Irish cops, firemen and Civil Service workers, but that's another story.)

My point here is, see; I changed. California, not my friends, but the larger context, began to give me the creeps. A creepy Smiley Face Fascism was rolling in like the fog. If you were sad or depressed you had to go underground. I began to be homesick for New York, and more especially, my home in Eastern Long Island. And back home, where the world was bleak, and Jimmy Carter had become President, and a new generation of artists were getting rich, I was able to bottom out on my own personal pain, while scraping by as a house painter, and at night reading Celine, and Pynchon, and going to a confused child psychologist for therapy to the point where it began to dawn on me that I didn't really like the response I got when I began to question the political motivation of the local intelligentsia. 

And so my reading became more critical; I discovered the incestuous relationship between the KGB and the CIA's Anti-Stalinist Left, and the existence of a small group of non-Communist non-Liberal sane people, who courageously were standing up to the biggest, richest Liberal cabal in history. And when I began to voice new opinions, I also began to discover, and make peace with, being a complete outcast.  And  now I live in Florida, I have very few friends, and I am as happy as a long-neck clam when the tide comes in, but I do allow myself to hate. Why shouldn't I! I mean do I have to be more saintly than the people I left back home in East Hampton who foam at the mouth with any mention of the Bush family, and are, as we speak, having some sort of a group Stroke over Trump? Wouldn't being holier than thou towards them just be some sort of hubris?  I won't bother.

Let me just say that they should take note; not one of them, not the whole insider-trading bunch of the "Arts" crowd in the "Hamptons" and Manhattan actually need their beloved "Old Left", that which seems to be their only source of nostalgia or romantic feeling, nor do they need the factitious New Left or Pelosi-Schumer and Co. Let me say it loud and clear, "You don't need it!" It's just a big blemish on your otherwise lovely mug.  xxoo

  

Murdoch and Influence

I suppose I need to say that I loved Peter J. Conradi's book, Iris Murdoch, A Life. Conradi is not completely uncritical, but he loved Iris as I do, and was her good friend for many years, and he observed her closely. He has much to say about who and what she put into her books. For instance; he mentioned that she liked those books of her youth called boy's books or young men's books, particularly those by Robert Lewis Stevenson. He points out, that in The Black Prince, Bradley says at one point well along in the story that he wishes he had written Treasure Island.* I finished re-reading it, (T.I.), yesterday.....and, for some odd reason, I've started re-reading W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions.  Now, I would say that Green Mansions is a boy's book.  If I'm wrong I'm wrong. The original came out in 1916 but the edition I have, published in 1944, was illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer, and amounts to a great collection of period book illustration.  Kauffer, an American who lived and worked for many years in London,  [and was a friend of my father's] is more well known for his posters, a fact I just learned through Google. 

I was jogged into re-reading Hudson's book for the unlikely reason that it had some resonance for me with the Pearson character in Black Prince, in the fanciful take the two characters in each book have on young womanhood. 

I've also been working my way through A History of Structuralism, by Francois Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman.  I've mentioned that Iris gives a nod here and there to her structuralist neighbors; she was a frequent visitor of Paris.  One such nod, I thought, was when Bradley's mistress's mother refers to him as cold, more in a historical way, ie Levi Strauss, then in an emotional way. TKTK Does she mean literally relating to L.-S. ?}  

*Treasure Island was a favorite book of mine too. My father gave me a copy that had been illustrated by his friend and mentor, N.C. Wyeth. 

The Black Prince

I decided to re-read The Black Prince for what I thought must be at least the third time. I don't doubt that I'm right about third time, but, oddly, I couldn't remember a damn thing about the book. I couldn't quite put it down to my old-age short-term memory loss either. It didn't occur to me until I started reading it though, that I was blocking it. But I certainly was.

I was given the book by a girlfriend, some 40 odd, (very odd), years ago.  I was new to the world of living sober, a subject I prefer to avoid, but here, some context is needed.  It was the first of several influential books, (influential to me), that she gave to me over our one, two, or three year relationship depending how you look at relationship.

She was a sort of a big cheese in the Art World and I was a sort of relative of a small cheese and a hanger-about in that world due to not having gone anywhere on my own and having been born there; in this particular artist's community.

I did remember that I fell in love with the book, and then with Iris, partly I suppose because I felt as though the book was about me, and partly because I was in love with the girlfriend.

The book is in a male voice, Iris's usual way, and is about two writers. The narrator is Bradley Pearson and his friend is the very successful Arnold Baffin. (Bradley is relatively unsuccessful, having published only one book.)  Bradley in fact might be a little nuts but you have the whole novel to make your decision on that. My own nutsiness, in this context, is part of my identification with Brad, and starts with this; that Bradley was my maternal grandmother's maiden name, and Pierson was my mother's maiden name. So in fact I am part Bradley and part Pierson. Not spelled the same way, but, over the years, her Pierson family have been somewhat free with the spelling of the last name. Mostly Pierson, but some went to Pearson and a few went to Peirson.

Bradley is a tortured soul and that has partly to due with the thought that he might be, as it has been intimated by some, a failed artist. (Here, we are using the term artist for novelist. This is normal for Iris. In all her novels writing equals art.)

I, until my mellowed old-age, was a tortured soul who felt that he was a failed artist. And like Bradley, that melodrama was all wrapped up in heroic fantasies of being an oh, so very serious artist, too serious to make it in this crass world; ugh. It was painful to think about but I thought about it all the time. That's why I had blocked what the book was about, and why it began to be painful re-reading the book; unwrapping the bad news one page at a time, almost afraid to go on, unblocking the block. 

The story goes from unrealistic bliss to nightmare horror and humiliation, something like life, at least as I knew it as a young man. The investment that Bradley* put into love was not dissimilar to the investment I had put in my girlfriend, the giver of the gift. Was it a gift? Or a road map of the way in which I was being caught in her flytrap? The postscripts, by several of the main characters, untie the Gordion Knot but without giving a clear diagnosis of Bradley's nutsiness, or showing any synchronic, or causal evidence.

I say synchronic I suppose to flag that I've been reading in and around Structuralism; Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes and etc. and also to say that it appears, from the way she has structured the book, that she had been watching the goings on in Paris over the decade leading up to the writing of B.P. and some of what they were up to might have rubbed off. 

P.S.  Perhaps I should add that I sound like Bradley Pierson when I write.  Wouldn't that be reason enough for someone who was way ahead of me in analysis of the Murdochian text to want to kill me?

*And Perhaps I should also add that I spent two semesters at Bradley University back in the early 1960s. 

Iris Murdoch

It wasn't a shot in the dark.  Coming to read Iris was sort of Murdochian.  Her characters just have things come at them, fatefully, and she lets you know what they are thinking while it's happening, and you don't think of it as too coincidental because you are drawn in, partly by the nakedness of her situations. You see through everyone's masks and defenses to their odd irrelevant, selfish often perverse thoughts and of course you understand that each person has his private anxiety and that all together they create, to kill two metaphors with one stone, a cluster-fuck that inevitably drives itself off a cliff.

I picked up her The Book and the Brotherhood because someone mentioned it and I took it as a cue; and of course now I can't remember where or whom; it was perhaps a blog, but anyway I let the mention direct me to send off for a used copy on Amazon.  I'm sort of addicted to doing that. The book "Hums with energy and implications."  Time Magazine said.  It came out in 1987.

Before it came in the mail I was aware that I was going to use the book as medicine for my fragile state caused by the political war between Trump and Hillary. I have over-personalized the whole thing and of course I think that Hillary is part of a Communist conspiracy but don't you dare snigger you swine.

The plot goes like this; a group of Oxford friends have established a fund, a stipend to support a friend who's a Marxist and is writing a book, a long book that's taking forever. The friends have grown paranoid and resentful over the years and at last they confront the Commie bastard. Of course the sentimentality here is mine; I'm not an Oxford type.

But I love being in Murdoch world and that's why I've read all her books now, including this one, at least once.  (The Black Prince three times.)  I was given a copy of Prince when it was new, by someone who read it and loved it and she and I were both also swayed by the knowledge that someone of great social import, (a cultural ikon) loved Iris. Was I suggestible? Sure.  And all of that and more. Or you could say I had willfully cast myself adrift in this sea of influences all of my own making and was floating in the middle of a large collection of flotsam that had once been stinking in my very own garbage can.   

I should say by way of some sort of explanation that in 1963, [I was twenty], just a couple of weeks after JFK's assassination, I had sailed through a hurricane on the old Queen Mary to London with my mother and sister, to be with my father who was lonely and depressed there due to the assassination and also due to his being swindled by a couple of sharks.  I was twenty years old and waiting to be drafted into the Army, and my family including me had agreed that my impending military service was a fearful enough specter that I needed a sabbatical. And that's what I got. Living with my family in Hampstead, taking Miltown on the National Health, washed down with Watney's Pale Ale in gallon cans kept handy in the refrigerator, with a spigot so you didn't have to remove the can; taking trips to the Tate and the British Museum with my father, smoking English Ovals, eating chops and chips, drinking tea, walking up to Hampstead High Street and stopping at Kay Kendall's grave to admire the flowers that Rex Harrison left there every day, drinking at the Bull and Bush, and reading; Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, lots of Huxley, the London Times, and whatever was trendy in London that fall and winter.

Ad. 12/17/16   Reading Iris, by John Bayley..., (her husband). 

   

A Ship of Fools

This morning I woke up feeling like a passenger on The Ship of Fools.  This trip's passenger list is made up of people who have written self-published memoirs. No, no romance novels, no porn, no BDSM, no theories on various conspiracies, just memoirs, and just those that the New York publishing world wouldn't touch.

O.K., up here on deck, what are we supposed to do? I suppose mingle. I suppose be civil. I suppose in some cases we could take ourselves seriously, perhaps engage in seminars, round table discussions, or in my case, hide in a corner and cringe, or engage in compulsive eating.

What brought on this conniption fit is that I started reading on Kindle one of Those memoirs, by a former girlfriend, someone who was reluctant to buy my book, wanting a free copy, and who I just don't feel that close to anymore, that I would want to be that generous, seeing as how my goal with my book has been to pay for it's printing.   

Her book is fine. She has had a successful career as model, actress, photographer, and she had remained beautiful, which puts her in a special category of its own. I hesitate, well, more than hesitate, to critique her fine book, only because I would feel too deeply my own embarrassment about being self-published, which is of course, my problem.   

That's not what this is about. It's about having to actually live in, and with, the feeling of failure. Which is as uncomfortable now as it was getting fired from a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by the head librarian, Bernard Karpel, in 1967, after a year of putting books back on the shelves and inserting Kurt Valentine's paper-work into cellophane binders for his archive. I was fired for being "hung-over and stinking of booze all the time."  It was a bad feeling, and one I couldn't digest. I felt it for a day or so, and then drank and rationalized it away with Beatnik attitude. Mr. Karpel had been so kind about it; he reiterated that he'd never had to do anything like it, that it hadn't ever occurred to him that he would be faced with such an agonizing chore, and that I was a nice guy and all that, but that it was not possible for me to continue; the dignity of the institution being at stake.

Some of that hollow, low self-esteem empty feeling lurks in my soul, a soul that is for the most part healed, and happy and grateful for a life that allows me to read, and ride horseback, and stroll the countryside like a Lord of the Manor in my old age. It lurks in my soul in the sense that I'm allowed to feel that old feeling of hollowness, helplessness, for what it was, real.

 Because reading, (perusing), her book, I was faced with the character that I was when I was 27 years old, as seen by a healthy, sane young woman, seven years my junior, that I was involved with, in fact lived with on and off for a year or more, while I was a dry drunk, on the wagon and using the Marijuana Maintenance Program.

   For those in Rio Linda, the M.M. isn't an actual institution but a common hipster "cure" for alcoholism, which makes an alcoholic less prone to dangerous, noisy, and disagreeable behavior, while at the same time allowing him to avoid real, homeostatic reaction to stimuli.   

I don't come off too badly in the book, that is up to as far as I've read, but I'm not the main character, after all; she is. The character I play is close enough to the real me to be quite recognizable. He has a cover-story. He doesn't wear his feeling of failure on his sleeve, in fact he has those feelings tucked away somewhat, but he hasn't much strength of character. He is an artist manque with all of the sad clown appeal of that term.

And I'm not the love interest; it's understood that the real love of her life is out there, always just out of reach, because he is an International Playboy who doesn't have to worry about reaching some measurable degree of socio-economic equanimity, because he has a trust-fund. 

My life hasn't been heroic, and it hasn't been a mystery solved, it's been struggle and small successes. The struggles mostly have had to do with self-acceptance. So in some sense, her story as it relates to me really is the story of my life.