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Showing posts from June, 2016

Modiano's "Pedigree: A Memoir"

Contemporary Proust? Who knows. Post-Nobel, more and more of Modiano is coming out. Someone's making $$$. Lots on Kindle now. When I first read him (a year or so ago), there was hardly anything. * From Pedigree :      Over the following months, my father had to resign himself to my finally leaving the dormitories where I'd lived since age eleven. He made appointments to see me in cafes. And he trotted out his standard grievances against my mother and against me. I could never establish a bond between us. At each meeting, I was reduced to begging him for a fifty-franc bill, which he would give me very grudgingly and which I'd bring home to my mother. On certain days, I brought nothing home, which provoked furious outbursts from her. Soon -- around the time I turned eighteen and in the years following -- I started to find her, on my own, some of those miserable fifty-franc bills bearing the likeness of Jean Racine. But nothing softened the coldness and hostility she had

Just Checkin'

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Point Mugu [6.15.16]

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Long drive up the 405. Even worse coming back. But we decided to meet beyond Point Dume and do a little hiking. Beautiful day. You felt like you'd left civilization behind (according to T-Mobile, I was off the map!).  A celebration. Old friends. Can't do any better than that. Only problems: being old and a couple gonzo mountain bikers. Afterwards & afterwords: some reasonably priced seafood at Neptune's Net. *                            

Bartleby

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville , first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine , and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. A Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who—after an initial bout of hard work—refuses to make copy and any other task required of him, with the words "I would prefer not to". The lawyer cannot bring himself to remove Bartleby from his premises, and decides instead to move his office, but the new proprietor removes Bartleby to prison, where he perishes. Numerous essays have been published on what, according to scholar Robert Milder, "is unquestionably the masterpiece of the short fiction" in the Melville canon. [From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener ]

On Your Mark ...

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Sleep Or Ride (Long Beach, CA)

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Walking [6.11.16]

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Palindrome: 61116. June gloom (my fave) and a little drizzle. *     

Spreading the News (ROE)

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Protecting My Turf

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Reading

Bouncing around (why ask why): Herbert (drank from the same glass as Eliot), Roth (him on him -- so-so), J. F. Powers (found via Roth -- also so-so, but I'll keep trying), Macbeth (because I want to revisit Leskov's Lady). Also, just finished my second Penelope Fitzgerald novel (about spring and Russia; not as good as Blue Flower). Anyway, from Zbigniew Herbert: To Ryszard Krynicki -- A Letter    Not much will remain Ryszard in truth not much of the poetry of our mad century Rilke Eliot sure a few other worthy shamans who knew the secret of word spells time-resistant forms without which no phrase deserves memory and speech is like sand   our school notebooks subjected to earnest torture with their traces of sweat tears and blood will be to the eternal proofreader a song without a score nobly righteous and all too self-evident   we came too easily to believe beauty does not save that it leads wantons from dream to dream to death none of us was able t