Semi-Annual Report 2/19/20

Reading as usual is out of hand, but I suppose that's what I planned for this part of my life, so I should just grin and bare it. My Goodreads list contains 24 unfinished or unstarted books. On my kindle maybe ten or so. Usually, as I'm doing now, I let others lie while reading mainly two and dipping into two others occasionally, and promoting one when one of the top two are finished. Then, I'm supposed to go back to the others, in some kind of order, but what almost always happens is that I buy another, and upset the apple cart. This problem, of course, is not serious. Making a living, falling in or out of love, being sick; those are problems. 

 

I just finished reading Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, a biography by Philip Gefter, about Sam Wagstaff, an art collector.  It covers territory that I lived through, and probably would have been more observant of if I hadn't been so preoccupied with getting sober. I was and still am interested in what happened to the world of art, and the business of art in the seventies and after. As a kid and up to about 30 I was interested in what was happening in the art world although not too comfortable with being on the sidelines, and somewhat self-critical because of that. If I ever get back to work on my project referred to previously under the title Hold Still, I hope to explore that murk.  

As for the murk itself; a for instance; I've always wondered who exactly was, or is, Patty Smith. I suppose she is someone I would have known about if I hadn't stopped reading The Village Voice. 

It's not exactly as if I lost all interest in Bohemia at some point say around 1970 or so, but more that I was just lost in my own weeds. By which I mean that I was smoking too much pot, and allowing myself to be overly entertained by projects that my other pot-head friends were involved in, like young female hippies, old wooden boats, dancing to disco music while stoned on acid, and fraternizing with exceptionally cool people. I do remember that I began to read somewhere about Punk music. [Note to self; why capitalize Punk and not disco?]  But for some reason I didn't think it applied to me. I suppose that's partly because my 'urban period', which only lasted a total of about four years; two years, then a break and a couple more years, not counting San Fran; which happened in my other, sober life; was not particularly rewarding. I did, at some point, want to read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, but felt unqualified due to my dearth of Punk knowledge. I had read his earlier Rock and Roll book, Mystery Train, which I liked a whole bunch. 

Anyway, as of this moment, I still haven't listened to any of Patty's music, but at least I know she was involved with Mapplethorpe, who I know made a big impression on the art world, and that she has recently written a memoir, which is supposed to be good, though, again, I am not as yet prepared for it.   

Right now I'm reading, The Prentice Mulford Story, Life by Land and Sea, and another book by Mulford, Thoughts are Things. I'm also reading Joseph McMoneagle's Remote Viewing Secrets, and The William Saroyan Reader. And as I've said, there are several other books I've started and put aside and will get back to, part of the ten, rather than the 24, those ones are counting on my longevity.  

Mulford, I stumbled across recently while reading somewhere about New Thought, something I've been dabbling in for half a century. Turns out he was born in my hometown, and is from a family who's current generation I grew up with. Fact is, the Mulford Farm is one of the better historical points of interest available to visitors of that same hometown.  

As for remote viewing, I guess that's sort of part of an info-binge that started with Ingo Swann, about whom I have already written, and who's talent, while still not universally acknowledged, has me fascinated. The mystery of it, remote viewing, I came to with the idea, planted in my head by many over many years, that this thing called non-locality is somehow tied in with consciousness, through universal consciousness, and that if one can navigate that, the world's your oyster, as Prentice Mulford might have put it. [or, perhaps, "Bob's yer uncle!"]*  

 

*Hawkins; circa; 1979

Camp Hero Montauk, Mid-20th c.

My father was among a group of surf casters who had permits to fish the surf inside the gated area known as Camp Hero, an Army Post in Montauk, NY., during a time-frame roughly 1947 till sometime in the early 1950s. This isn't a research project, this post, just a comment, and perhaps a shot across somebody's bow, I'm not sure exactly who or why. Among the other guys were a Real Estate broker from East Hampton, and the president of a roofing company, who drove all the way from Riverhead, several times a week, to fish. They were gentleman fishermen, not rowdy, not heavy drinkers. 

To get right to the point, on many occasions they saw what they began to call flying saucers. As I remember them talking about it at our home, they were saucer shaped glowing things, about the size of a small car, that came in and out of the ocean, flew up, flew back down and under the water, and sometimes skipped along the water like a stone. There was no doubt about it from the point of the three men that I heard talking about it, (I was just a child), that these things were not flares, and not any kind of vehicle known to man. 

After talking to an officer at the camp and getting a "Don't know anything about it.", the guys decided my father, being a nationally known illustrator, should get in touch with some higher up in the government. Ray said he would, but held off, not wanting to get in trouble. Then, while at his club in the city, The Society of Illustrators, he heard from one of his friends about a writer who wrote for True Magazine; Air Force Major Donald Kehoe. Kehoe had written non-fiction and some Science Fiction for Men's magazines and such, and had recently written a book called Flying Saucers are Real which was just then about to become a break-out best seller.  

Ray wrote to Kehoe and they began to write back and forth, and eventually met, and Ray became a true believer in Flying Saucers. That went on for about a year or so, and then.....nothing. He stopped talking about it, and everyone seemed to forget.

A few years later, when I began riding horses on a neighbor's farm, the farmer's wife reported that on numerous occasions she had seen a flying saucer land in her yard and that little green men got out and walked around. The unanimous opinion was that she was sweetly, if female-hysterically, crazy. She went on with these sightings until a psychiatrist got her to begin doing ceramics, making porcelain horses, at which time she ceased seeing things. Perhaps it was the lithium in the clay.  

I have not discussed this topic, now referred to as UFO sightings, since the topic is still subject to derision, and since I am not, exactly, a true believer. I'm a doubting Thomas. 

Even though I've seen one. (Oh, Jesus, there, now I've really blown it.)  What I mean is, once, some years ago, perhaps it was around 1990, (this isn't a research paper so I'm not looking things up, if I decide to do so I'll do some editing), I saw one. 
Anyway; I was single, not seeing anyone in particular, but I had met a willing participant at a party who seemed willing to do what we called in those days Watching the Submarine Races. So we were driving towards the beach from the residence of some literary type who was renting a bungalow between East Hampton Village and Amagansett, which beach happened to be the one called Wyborgs. Information about said beach may appear at some future date in an as yet non-existent index to this blog. As we came toward the corner, called the Kazickas corner, about which same as above, we saw a string of lights low on the horizon over Hook Pond, as we faced West. 

I pulled over on the grass and we both quickly got out of the car and stood watching. It was impressive. Some of the lights were stronger than others. For a minute I thought it was an oddly lit Jumbo Jet coming in for a crash landing on the Maidstone Club Golf Course. But within a split second it started to rise up almost vertically, and took on the shape of an oval, lit all around, and then appeared to be completely circular as it reached directly over us. It was rising at it's constant speed, which didn't seem too fast because it was so big. I would have said that it was at least a couple hundred feet in diameter. Then, the interior of it began to present a light show, different colored lights flashing in abstract pattern like the northern lights. This was the part that made me think it was some sort of gadget. I wondered if it was a giant holograph being put on by a Broadway producer. One happened to live behind the hedges just over there on the other side of the road.  

The thing got smaller, the light show stopped, and the craft, or hologram, or secret weapon, now the size of a quarter, turned Southeast and cruised down along the shoreline, from it's great height, until, after about twenty minutes, it disappeared. 

My date and I were suitably freaked out, but calmed down enough to visit and shmooze with some folks at the beach who had also seen this thing. We accepted a cold drink, and decided that we were all sort of blood brothers now, having seen a UFO.  I never saw her or any of the other people again. 

                

My father, Louis, and some thoughts on spys.

My father was born the fifth of April, 1901. I was born on the 28th of December, 1942. Not being a numbers person, having been born at the very end of the year became confusing. For about 99 percent of my birth year I didn't exist.  It would have been simpler to say I was born just a little bit before 1943. And my father, well, he was "almost", the same age as the century. So, when I was five, the Old Man was almost but not quite 46.

That having been cleared up, let me explain what I'm getting at. Let's suppose we go back to when I was five. I was beginning to get glimpses of the biographies of my parents.They made the 1920s and thirties seem exciting and glamorous. (A five year old can record an amazing amount of colorized context.) Much later, I would read F. Scott Fitzgerald, and feel I was on familiar territory.  

Louis was a big part of my father's story of himself in those days and he retold his being "influenced" by Louis on numerous occasions. Louis Adamic was well known as the author of the best selling book Dynamite, a story about violence between labor and management in the U.S. from the 1890s up to the 1930s. But for my father the Adamic book he referred to most often was The Native's Return.

 

In my book The White Fence, I mention that when my father and mother first met, Ray excitedly told his future bride that he was a peasant, and that, inspired by that great Adamic book, he was going back to his birthplace,Yugoslavia, to reclaim his roots. Within the year, he in fact did that, meeting up with Adamic in Ray's home village, Muo, in the town of Kotor in the the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where a great feast was put on for the two American success stories.That feast became part of my father's myth of himself. He was an artist, after all.
I have come to believe, after having worked for years doing oral history, that everyone has a story, and that we need our stories. Life is stories. 

Louis wrote many books, but toward the end of his life he was blacklisted when he was sued for slander by Winston Churchill. He had written a book about Tito, I'm not sure it was the same one in which he mentioned Churchill, but while most people seem to have thought it was a positive, Pro-Tito book, the Dictator did not.  (It's not good to upset the Dictator.)
I was probably about ten when my father got a phone call and later announced to my mother that Louis was dead. Was it suicide? Or a political assassination? That is still not clear to this day. Also still not clear is whether Louis was a spy, [most likely yes], and if so, who's side was he on?

                                            Louis office - photo courtesy Veronika Vogler

 

 

Now we were in the 1950s and spies were big. Spies and Communists were all over the newspapers and that new media outlet, television. I was as tuned in to the whole Cold War environment as any kid, at least any kid that cared about the news. Without veering off into a historical timeline though, let me just say this about those times. Along with probably a large percentage of the population, I never expected to be alive after  the Cold War!  

There have been many unexpected turns of events that have rocked my world, but, before 9/11, the two most important were probably the evacuation of Saigon, and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. History is different today. But it is far from over. And it is important, no doubt, for the future of humanity, that the 20th century be taken very, very seriously.  

Which leads me to this. I'd like to recommend to my readers a short list of books that I've read and felt were of particular interest over the past decade or two, which concern Spies and Communists and The American Left:

First, two books with the same title; Partisans, by David Laskin, (non-fiction), and Partisans, by Peter Mathiessen, (fiction); ....The Secret History of The CIA, by Joseph Trento; ...Early Cold War Spies, by Hanes & Klehr; The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev; The Amerasia Spy Case, Klehr and Radosh...The Mighty Wurlitzer, How the CIA played America,  by Hugh Wilford;   and The Sword and The Shield, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.

 

Although there have been droves of 20th century spy books, the above I found particularly helpful in understanding the workings of modern intelligence. However, there are a couple of other standouts I want to mention. One is not a book, or not Just a book, and that is Reilly Ace of Spies. I've yet to have a chance to sit down and chat with someone who is as much a fan of this story, the television series version of it, as I am. Sam Neill is great as Sidney Reilly. (You can Google a summary of the story of Reilly, and save me paraphrasing the same.) Here's a for-instance, from a Washington Post review. [His Russian Military family were anti-Semitic] "He was 16, at school in Vienna, when his mother died and he couldn't get back in time for the funeral. His uncle remarked, 'What can you expect from a Jewish bastard?' And that's how he discovered he was illegitimate; and Jewish. ..."He faked a suicide, ran away to South America and never saw his family again."
Reilly is believed to have been the source for the fictional story of James Bond. The series is directed by Martin Campbell and Jim Goddard.

The theme music is the romance movement from The Gadfly Suite, by Dmitri Shostakovich. For fifty years, from 1929 till he died in 1970, Shostakovich was the most prolific writer of movie soundtracks in The Soviet Union. The Suite was originally written for a Soviet film titled Gadfly. Stalin liked Shostakovich so much that he refrained from killing him!
The theme is my favorite meditation. I assume for the duration the being of Sam Neill, as Sidney Reilly, seducing one beautiful Russian woman after another, meanwhile conducting layered levels of negotiations between countries and world industrial powers. (Alright, I suppose that's not exactly meditating, but it works for me.) I did something similar in the early 1960s when I thought I was Marcello Maestroiani. I have a certain taste in music. It's mine. That's all I can say, except, that I think it is similar to love. It's in the ear of the beholder.


Then there's a book that really knocked my socks off. Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers; titled simply Whittaker Chambers; by Random House; NY 1997. I read about it in the NY Times Book Review and planned to read it but then one morning while watching the Imus show on TV, a radio show that was also broadcast over The Fox Network, I heard Imus raving about the book. So I went out and bought it and read it, and then read Chamber's book Witness. Imus continued to rave on and on about it for weeks on-end to the point where his sidekick, Charles McCord, went ballistic. If it was an act it was a good one. Seemed like he was having a stroke. He was sick of hearing about Whittaker Chambers. I got the joke. Imus was OCD.
And, so was I. I did the same thing to my own audience, which consists for the most part of only one person, Martha, my Significant Other, and she was driven to read the book. All in all it was a lovely time had by all, except for poor McCord.
Now I know that Imus died recently; I also know that he wasn't to everyone's taste. I apologize for liking him. I'll try to be more tactful in the future. But after sharing Tannenhaus's book with The I-Man, I feel like we were close.   

 

 

Out-takes, thoughts, and The Outsider.

The nice thing about our apartment is that it has a nice big window that looks out on a nice flat stretch of lawn, a typical square Florida reservoir pond, a typical South Florida canal, and a rather upscale horse farm, just on the other side of the canal, not one hundred feet from our two television-watching recliners; at which farm until recently I rode a little, until I felt I was getting too old and could get hurt. From this window I watch the horses and riders, some practicing Dressage, and some of whom, both horses and riders, I know personally, and also, the birds. (Whom I like to think I know well.)

The most permanent residents are the Muscovy ducks, birds that many think are common and vulgar, but not me, I like them. [see; contrarian] 

But also, there are Ospreys, Cattle Egrets, Ibises, Black Ducks, an occasional Pin-tail, Marsh Hens, and Shore Birds including Lemkins, [sp.], (I call them Lipkins, after a former landlady), Storks, (I forget which kind), and everybody's favorite, the Roseate Spoonbill.* There's another one, a red bellied something, a small duck, I've forgotten his name. The hardest part of this blogging is remembering names. Oh, and one of my favorites, the Kingfisher. 

One day, not long after my friend Einar had died, I was telling my riding coach about old Ein, and along came a Red Headed Woodpecker who landed right in front of me not twenty feet away. [Einar had red hair before it turned white], I felt it was a visit from Ein, perhaps to tell me he had made it to the Akashic Reading Room.  

I started out with this post wanting to carve out a place to put random thoughts, thinking I had a serious need for such a place, but now I've misplaced all those thoughts. I've been visited lately by another old friend, someone who gifted me, right around the time when I found out that when a Sasquatch wants to make a friendly gesture towards a Sapien Sapien, they leave hawk feathers by their nest.  I've been Hawk-feathered. 

When I talked to my sister before my birthday she wanted to know what I wanted. I've already made it clear, for over the last seventy years or so, that I "Don't Want Nothin", my way of saying I'm not going to get you anything, but being her, she's a stubborn Virgo, (are Virgos stubborn?) By the way, actually I wish my sign was Mule, which animal by the way is not stubborn, just extremely intelligent. (Analyze That!) 

Anyway, that very day, I'd restrained myself from buying another Rebecca West book, The Court and The Castle, and so I told her she could buy me that, used, from Amazon, and it showed up a few days later. I needed it because in another post as I mentioned, that great biographer Carl Rolyson had said it was one of her best, so I'm reading that now. 

How's my book ban coming?  Well, O.K. I guess...,  this week.  So now I'm reading the West book just mentioned; and a tiny book by Sara Churchill, Tapestry something; still sort of slowly hacking away at The Haunted Wood; Ingo Swann's Secrets of Power, Vol. 1; Holism and Evolution, (hacking away at that too), by Jan Christian Smuts, still hacking away at something by Luce Irigaray, maybe I'll focus more on her later, and also, you'd think this might confuse me, but not so far, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson, something I've had on the shelf for too many years.  

     

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.