Before there were blogs, pt. 1

I think I mentioned that I have been scanning old journal entries.  This is actually a very backward way to do things, since these were Word documents to begin with, though I am not entirely sure I can find the originals.  That is a project for next summer, I think.  Anyway, it is somewhat perverse to have to take the printed output, which fortunately I did save, and then scan it back in and ultimately translate it back into a text file.  This doesn't work quite as well as I would like for some of the ones where everything was single spaced.  It is just a massive block of text that I need to clean up.

While I don't have any intention of putting everything up, it has been most interesting peeking back into my thoughts from over 20 years ago.  I was stressed over work (not much has changed) and taking in a lot of culture and staying up too late and then paying for it the next day at work.  The only main difference is then I was staying up reading poetry and novels, and now I am staying up to catch up with work, though to be fair I do some blogging and putzing around on the internet.  I'm slowly getting better, particularly after using LeechBlock to lock myself out of some of the worst time-wasters.  If I ever do complete the Toronto novel (which I think I shall do) and there is call for the sequel (which is pretty unlikely), I can definitely switch the chronology around just a bit and have the protagonist, after his departure from Toronto, living a very lonely life (with just a small dog for company) in Newark's East Side (also called the Ironbound).  (One minor joke is that the main character is allergic to cats, so would have a dog instead, whereas I am not a dog person by any measure.)  He won't read nearly as much as I do (or did back then), but a lot of the other bits of daily life that are in the journal (or are sparked by reading the journal) can make their way into the book.   Things like the very peculiar nature of the Ironbound where tenants are responsible for buying their own refrigerator (no joke -- that's how it was 20 years ago).

I've added just a few comments in brackets {} where appropriate.

This journal entry is from 1992 when the internet was still in its infancy.  We had limited email, and I mostly was writing letters to classmates from university.  There were no browsers (Lynx rolled out six months later, though I didn't see it until late 1993) and blogs as such didn't exist.  If I do post more material from the Dark Ages, I'll generally try to keep to posts that have useful reviews that I still agree with (to the extent I even remember the book I am discussing...).

Jan. 5 1992

Waiting for the PATH again. Should be about 10 more minutes. There we go. I finally got the pen to work. This is the first time I try to go to New York in ’92. I guess there’s something comforting about the routine. Now walking about in New York after dark (in some sections) is comparable to walking about in the Ironbound. I just realized that I don’t even have my maps of New York today. I plan on seeing if the Strand is open and getting that M.C. Escher calendar. Then I’ll check out Tower Records and Mercer St Books. I’d rather not buy anything as I can’t exactly afford it (though I can) though I expect that I’ll probably get music, especially if that Talking Heads CD is in. {Probably Sand in the Vaseline.}

Todd was being an asshole today again. I guess I’d hoped for more after last week and his repeated avowals to pay more attention to friends. … So I went to New York after all and didn’t bother to call Todd. There is no point; I’m too dependent on him anyway.

On the way to the station, I was stopped twice. A “homeless” man asked for some change. I was somewhat irritated, but I gave it to him. I think whenever one gets into a conversation or even a partial conversation with a mendicant, one is lost. I really don’t remember what he said. If I don’t want to give money I can’t stop. I have to act like in my poem where I wrenched myself away from two or three men. (I actually did that in Ann Arbor. I’m not sure I would dare in New York.)
 
Then I got stopped by some canvassing environmentalists. They weren’t linked with NJPirg but were pushing for some kind of clean water bill going through Trenton. They asked me if I spoke English – Yes. Unfortunately for them I don’t speak Portuguese. They wanted to know the Portuguese word for water - I have no idea. I could tell them that it is agua in Spanish, which I think they already knew, and in French l’eau (though I had to think much harder that I would have wanted to come up with that).

Well the trip went as planned. I got the calendar and only two other books: the last ones I needed to complete Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence. I am really not sure how interested I even am in the series, but I am so compulsive that I had to finish {buying} it. I imagine that I will find it fascinating once I start it, whenever that is, just like I got drawn to The Diary of Jane Somers and The Golden Notebook. I ended up getting the Traffic set; I didn’t ask about the Talking Heads, as I didn’t like the looks of the guy standing behind the information desk. Finally, at Mercer St Books, I restrained myself and only got a book by Julio Cortazar.

{I can't believe that I owned this whole set and then must have given it up to prepare for my move to Toronto without even cracking the spine of Martha Quest. Eliot's books has a decent price for the first four, and -- assuming I can clear out a few books -- I may succumb. At any rate, I returned to the theme of books at the end of the month (Jan 27) with a vengeance. I had read 97(!) books in five months while starting my job as a teacher in Newark, which naturally led to me not being able to remember many of them, even then and certainly today over 20 years later. Here are some of the more interesting remarks I made back then about the literature I wanted to fix in my memory (apparently not that successfully…).}

Revolutionary Letters. Diane DiPrima. Reasonably childish & terribly strident. Still a good example of the poetry coming out of the 60s. Revolutionaries are unfortunately not very poetic and take things too far. I had always wondered why she had left most of these out of her Selected Poems and I think I understand now. I especially didn’t appreciate it when she said that all teachers must be done away with along with anything vaguely mechanical. She was writing like one of those survivalist freaks, but unlike Gary Snyder, I don’t think she ever actually withdrew from society. I xeroxed one poem just because it was too much: Free all political prisoners/All prisoners are political prisoners… She goes on for quite some time like that about how murderers and even rapists are political prisoners. Poems like that offend even me {with my leftist leanings}. Her poetry then strikes me as very bad Ginsberg and not terribly compelling, though she of course did write a few good poems in the bunch, particularly the one about Newark. (She was linked with Amiri Baraka for a while in the 60s.) Enough about her.

In Memory of Fire (Origins, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind). Eduardo Galleano This I liked quite a bit. I’m hoping I can finally find it used or maybe they will combine all three volumes. This was the series that Jenny Van Valey (Ann Arbor campus radical and family friend) kept urging me to read. I really did enjoy it. Galleano would take little bits of history, primarily of Latin and South America, and put them together in a montage. It is all factual, though occasionally dramatized like the mini portraits of Lincoln or Rockefeller. It was easier for me to read the second two volumes, for I really was a follower of news in South America for a while (El Salvador and Nicaragua, etc.) and had a fair idea of what we the US has done. … Also, I remembered a bit about Father Hidalgo and Bolivar from middle school. Finally I read a good deal of South American literature that points out the deadly absurdity of life under rotating political regimes (I still haven’t read Garcia Marquez’s The General in His Labyrinth yet though {I finally did in 2014!}). The first volume was largely Genesis myths and the coming of the conquistadors. All in all it was masterful, though certainly very leftist. Perhaps the best was Galleano’s way of writing about some of the “little people” and their reactions and struggle for survival. It’s called history from the bottom or Marxist history, and I’ve rarely seen it so mixed in with the major figures of history.

Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. Alice Fulton Pretty good. I’d get a copy if I found it used. Fulton is a pretty complicated poet, whose schemes go beyond the poem to organizing the book into certain sections. Sometimes I like the fact that her poems are not easy; sometimes I don’t. I didn’t particularly care for her second book, but I also read over it very quickly because I own it. She seems a poet that will take many rereadings and having been taught by Ken {Mikolowski}, I generally don’t value that. I do remember that the poems about her mother and other relatives were pretty good. I actually met her. She was poet in residence at Michigan and Angela took one of her classes. Angela was very much taken by her, but I thought it was a bit galling to assign one of your own books in a poetry course. I met her at the book signing at Shaman Drum, where Angela (gracefully?) explained I was one of her fellow poets. As to her third book, Powers of Congress, it looks pretty good but I just wasn’t up to reading it then. The title poem is very good, however. Whenever I feel ready, I’ll read that and reread Palladium, which I’ll surely like better with time. An example of her complicated style is in one very long poem in Powers (which I personally did not care for) that had comments written in the margins. It is hard to say exactly what they are. Angela says that Alice did not write them all herself. Ostensibly they are the notes that people made while the poem was being read at a workshop. There were all varieties of feedback ranging from hostile and somewhat chauvinistic to readers who liked the poem because some of the lines reminded her (?) of spending time with a brother … Anyway, I’ll write about Fulton again when I read Fulton again.

Paradise. Donald Barthelme. Humorous, implausible plot about three lingerie models who come to stay with an older architect. A good example of Barthelme’s style extended to novel length. The bizzare conversations between characters who may not be named. One of the highlights was the obligatory Q/A session, this time with a psychiatrist who became quite assertive and started talking about his own problems instead of Simon’s. Some of the language was very poetic, especially when discussing architecture. I’m sure I’ll talk more about Barthelme when I contrast the Barthelme brothers (in Nov.). {I don’t think I did ever read any Frederick Barthelme.}

{Nothing too serious, but some SPOILERS coming up.}

The Alexandria Quartet. Laurence Durrell Fantastic. Probably one of the best things I have ever read and certainly the best this fall. I imagine I’ll be writing more about it later, so I can hold off for a while. It has finally faded, but for nearly two months I could remember the setting better than whatever book I was reading at the time. It is quite post-modern. The writer of the notes, who really is not identified until Mountolive, flips around between the past and present, which is not so different from The Good Soldier, which I also loved. However, he is writing of his relationship with Justine and he has in his possession a book written by her former husband who also was writing about her though under a false name. So within Justine are generous sections of the other book. That does not do justice to the many other characters who are extremely vivid, especially Scobie, an old Englishman who occasionally gives in to transvestism.

Where the scheme gets complicated is in the second book. The author of the notes sends his book to Balthazar, a homosexual and leader of a Cabbalistic discussion group is the best way to put it. He sends back the book with many notes and emendations and basically says that nothing in Justine was actually that way. Justine had an affair with him because she was actually in love with another novelist, but nobody could tell him at the time. The enormous upheavals and reversals are highly reminiscent of The Good Soldier. The author by this time is on an island with the child of his mistress by the husband of Justine (his mistress had died in childbirth). He rethinks the past with this new information and writes a great deal more about the other author, who was mostly a minor figure in Justine.

The third book, Mountolive, is much more about political intrigue then passion and mutual destruction. The author of the other books is much less important. Justine has different motives for loving both authors than either the author or Balthazar suspect. She actually loves her husband because of his scheme to send arms to Palestine to try to found a Jewish state (Justine is Jewish) in order that the Muslims of Egypt pay more attention to outsiders than persecuting the Coptic Christians. Justine is mostly entranced by the scope of his vision. The other author commits suicide for a variety of reasons (most think because he feels he is betraying Justine and her husband by finally reporting their plans to David Mountolive, the British Ambassador) but mostly because he is terribly in love with his sister, who will finally become Mountolive’s wife.

It is certainly a complicated series and one of its distinguishing features is that the first three books basically occur simultaneously. They are different perspectives of various events all occurring at the same chronological time. Justine and Balthazar are the two most closely linked. The last book is in some ways a sequel to the others. The author returns from the island and learns the story of Clea, who was an artist also in love with Justine. Both have grown and Clea accepts the author into her life as a lover. Justine we find is in Israel. I think it is in this final book that there is a fantastic description of St. Scobie’s shrine -- it is his bathtub.

... The one other book I was thinking about as I read Justine was Waiting for the End of the World by Madison Smartt Bell. I’m not exactly sure why, perhaps the slightly spooky atmosphere and the self-destructive nature of many of the characters. That was one of the best books I read over the summer, so it’s natural I should want to find some connections {to other things I’ve read}.

{Just a few final thoughts. I certainly had a fairly rigorous reading program, and it got more regimented in my second year in Newark where I read Pym, Greene and Bellow, though I failed at adding Dickens into the mix. The few books that really made a big impression on me -- The Alexandria Quartet, The Good Soldier and Waiting for the End of the World -- do remain major favourites of mine, and which I still hold out hope of rereading some day.}